The Other Side of Silence

“I expect Hebel thinks you are best placed to pay the blackmail money yourself and then persuade-not to say blackmail-the British to pay you that money back. There’s Hebel’s security to think about, too. It’s one thing blackmailing the British down here on the French Riviera. It would be something else to try it in London.”

“Could the Russians really be in it for the money? Nothing else?”

“I don’t know. Look, this isn’t supposed to be a joke, but the opportunities for the USSR to trade with capitalist countries for some much needed foreign currency are limited. It just might be that extortion is their best export right now.”

“And who better to extort money from than the British security services?” said Maugham. “It’s like something out of a novel by John Buchan. Yes. I may not be in the security service loop anymore, but undeniably the last few years have been an intelligence disaster for my country. Richard Hannay may save the day for queen and country, but there are plenty of others who have managed to comprehensively fuck it up: Alan May, Burgess and Maclean, and the fellow now serving fourteen years in prison for handing all our atomic secrets over to the Russians-Klaus Fuchs. By all accounts, the American FBI thinks the British security services are a contradiction in terms, a laughingstock, and they’re probably not wrong. A lot has changed since my own service in nineteen seventeen. We were good then. Formidable. Back then boys went up to Cambridge from their public schools to learn how to be lawyers and civil servants, not Russian spies. Undoubtedly the British government would indeed prefer to keep all of this very quiet. Especially now there’s a possibility of our two countries renewing their cooperation on atomic research. And while there’s no danger of any of the British newspapers being permitted to publish any of these revelations, American papers are a lot harder to control. Two hundred thousand is probably cheap next to the price of what it’s costing Britain to develop an atomic bomb on its own account. Having said that, two hundred thousand is a lot of money for me. A hell of a lot.” He sighed. “Suppose I stump up the cash and the British refuse to reimburse me? What then? Some of these Whitehall people are very tight with money, you know. I mean, really stingy.”

“Then you send it to the New York Times yourself.”

“Would that make me a traitor? I don’t know.”

“I’d say a good lawyer might convincingly argue that you bought the tape to protect the interests of your country. But that your country let you down.”

“Yes, there is that argument, I suppose.”

I shrugged. “Wait and hear the tape. Who knows? Maybe you’ll think it’s someone else’s problem after you’ve listened to it.”

“Tell me about this man, Harold Heinz Hebel. What else do you know about him?”

“He’s a rat who’s giving rats a bad name.”

“You already told me how he blackmailed that poor German captain, von Frisch, in nineteen thirty-eight. But you also said that you met him again, during the war.”

“That’s right. It was East Prussia. The winter of nineteen forty-four to forty-five. And that was the last time I spoke to him until this morning at the Grand Hotel.”

“I think that before we go any further you’re going to have to tell me about that. In fact, you need to tell me all you know about our friend Harold Hebel. If I’m going to contact my friends in MI6 to ask for their help here, they will certainly need to know everything you know about this awful man.”

“He’s an opportunistic survivor who lives near humans and needs to be exterminated because he carries disease. He’s a rat. A rat that deserves to be drowned in a bucket. Now, let me explain why. Let me tell you about what happened in Konigsberg.”

FIFTEEN

KONIGSBERG

1944-1945