The Russia House Read Online Free Page B

He can start a war but cannot continue one and cannot win one. Believe me.’
    Landau looked no further. A sense of respect, mingled with a strong instinct for self-preservation, advised him that he had disturbed the tomb enough. Taking up the elastic band he put the three notebooks together and snapped it back over them. That’s it, he thought. From here on I mind my business and do my duty. Which is to take the manuscript to my adopted England and give it immediately to Mr. Bartholomew alias Barley Scott Blair.
    Barley Blair, he thought in amazement as he opened his wardrobe and hauled out the large aluminium hand-case where he kept his samples. Well, well. We often wondered whether we were nurturing a spy in our midst and now we know.
    Landau’s calm was absolute, he assured me. The Englishman had once more taken command of the Pole. ‘If Barley could do it, I could, Harry, that’s what I said to myself.’ And it was what he said to me too, when for a short spell he appointed me his confessor. People do that to me sometimes. They sense the unrealised part of me and talk to it as if it were the reality.
    Lifting the case on to the bed he snapped the locks and drew out two audio-visual kits that the Soviet officials had ordered him to remove from his display – one pictorial history of the twentieth century with spoken commentary which they had arbitrarily ruled to be anti-Soviet, one handbook of the human body with action photographs and a keep-fit exercise cassette, which, after gazing longingly at the pliant young goddess in the leotard, the officials had decided was pornographic.
    The history kit was a glossy affair, built as a coffee-table book and containing a quantity of interior pockets for cassettes, parallel texts, progressive vocabulary cards and students’ notes. Having emptied the pockets of their contents, Landau offered the notebooks to each in turn but found none large enough. He decided to convert two pockets into one. He fetched a pair of nail scissors from his sponge bag and set to work with steady hands, easing the steel staples out of the centre divide.
    Barley Blair, he thought again as he inserted the point of the nail scissors. I should have guessed, if only because you were the one it couldn’t possibly be. Mr. Bartholomew Scott Blair, surviving scion of Abercrombie & Blair – spy. The first staple had come loose. He gingerly extracted it. Barley Blair, who couldn’t sell hay to a rich horse to save his dying mother on her birthday, we used to say: spy. He began prising the second staple. Whose principal claim to fame was that two years ago at the Belgrade book fair he had drunk Spikey Morgan under the table on straight vodkas, then played tenor sax with the band so beautifully that even the police were clapping. Spy. Gentleman spy. Well, here’s a letter from your lady, as they say in the nursery rhyme.
    Landau picked up the notebooks and offered them to the space he had prepared but it was still not big enough. He would have to make one pocket out of three.
    Playing the drunk, thought Landau, his mind still on Barley. Playing the fool and fooling us. Burning up the last of your family money, running the old firm deeper into the ground. Oh yes. Except that somehow or another you always managed to find one of those smart City banking houses to bail you out in the nick of time, didn’t you? And what about your chess-playing then? That should have been a clue, if Landau had only had eyes for it! How does a man who’s drunk himself silly beat all comers at chess then, Harry – straight games – if he isn’t a trained spy?
    The three pockets had become one pocket, the notebooks fitted more or less inside, the printed indication above them still read ‘Student Notes’.
    ‘Notes,’ Landau explained in his mind to the inquisitive young customs officer at Sheremetyevo airport. ‘Notes, you see, son, like it says. Student’s notes. That’s why there’s a pocket here for notes. And these