The Other Side of Silence

I shook my head. “It isn’t like that at all, Mr. Maugham. It isn’t something simply mechanistic, as you put it. Love and hate, human feelings and emotion, they’re all the same God-given illusion. It’s what convinces us that we’re here and that we count for something in this universe. When we don’t. Not for a second. Everything we feel and that we think-it’s all the same cosmic joke. You should know that more than most people, Mr. Maugham. You’ve been playing God and inflicting cosmic jokes on your characters for sixty years.”

“I’d no idea you were a philosopher, Mr. Wolf.”

“I’m a German, Mr. Maugham. For us, philosophy is a way of life.”

I’d finished my dinner and now I asked him to show me the garden, and he took his pipe and I my cigarettes down to the grotto by the swimming pool, where there was a large Chinese bronze gong that sounded once a day to announce the cocktail hour. I’d missed that, of course, but Maugham had thoughtfully asked Ernest to prepare me a jug of cold gimlets and while we sat there, we talked and I drank myself into a slightly better mood. Or so I thought.

“One of the disadvantages to playing G-God,” said Maugham, “is that I notice much more than most people. God is merely all-seeing. But I have other senses, too, and while my hearing may not be as good as it was, I can still detect a certain weltschmerz in your voice and manner that was not there before. Which is saying something, I can tell you. At the best of times you’re just bone dry. But tonight you make Heinrich Heine sound positively full of the joys of spring. So then. It’s not over, is it? With this man Hebel, I mean. It was kind of you to pretend it was, but there’s something else he’s got for sale. Something bigger than that photograph, I can tell.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you for sparing the boys,” he said. “That was decent of you. They do worry so. But I think you’d better tell me now, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” I lit another cigarette. “It has to do with your friend Guy Burgess, again.”

“He’s not my friend, let’s make that quite clear now, shall we? The man is an absolute scoundrel.”

“Clear. Well, it seems that after he and his fellow spy, Donald Maclean, escaped from England in nineteen fifty-one, they traveled by boat to Saint-Malo, where they were met by KGB officers and then driven south to Bordeaux. There they boarded a Soviet freighter bound for Leningrad. According to Hebel, that’s a voyage of several days, during which time they were debriefed, at length and separately, by KGB case officers as there was still some suspicion that the British had been complicit in the escape of these two traitors. Anyway, that debriefing was recorded on tape and it’s one of these tapes that Hebel’s now offering for sale. The unexpurgated confessions of Guy Burgess, is how Hebel described it to me. This is just one tape, but there are others being offered as part of the deal.”

“Good God,” said Maugham. “Dynamite, in other words. Absolute dynamite. The man was a Russian spy at the heart of MI5 for two decades. There’s no telling what he knows.”

“I think that’s the point of the tape. He is telling. All of it. I haven’t heard the tape but I’m to bring a copy here to you tomorrow, after it comes into my possession. He’s even lending you the tape recorder to play it on.”

“But what’s this tape got to do with me, Walter? I haven’t seen Guy Burgess in almost twenty years.”

“Look, this is as much as I know about it, sir. Apparently, Guy Burgess is a drunk and his conversation on the tape-which was described to me as uncensored and wide ranging-includes the allegations that the British suspected he was a spy for years but let him go in order not to compromise relations with the Americans; that he was here for an orgy at the Villa Mauresque, in nineteen thirty-seven. And that immediately following this, Burgess joined the BBC and then MI6. It seems as if the photograph was just the lure to get you to bite. As a way of involving you.”

“If any of this is true, how on earth did Hebel come to be in possession of this tape? And what the fuck does he want me to do about it? I’m not in the service anymore.”

“Look, without hearing the tape, my opinion is this: The whole thing has been cooked up by the Russians to blackmail the British secret service using Burgess and you as cutouts. You’re the back door to MI6 and MI5.”

“Story of my life,” muttered Maugham.

“Harold Heinz Hebel is possibly working for Soviet intelligence. The GRU. The KGB. Who knows which service? But it has to be a strong possibility that he came by this tape because the Russians gave it to him. He tells me he wants money for the tape or else he’ll send it to the New York Times.”

“How much money does he want?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Jesus Christ.”