The Other Side of Silence

“So then. Has it occurred to you that Blunt and Hebel might be in this together? After all, Blunt could hardly threaten to send the picture to the newspapers himself. Your uncle would never believe he would risk doing that. But he would believe someone else was capable of it. Someone like Hebel, with nothing to lose. This might also explain how Hebel came to be in possession of this tape recording of Guy Burgess. Perhaps the friendship between Blunt and Burgess extended to more than just sharing a flat. We don’t know for sure that it was recorded on this Russian ship and not at a flat in London.”

“Yes, I suppose it’s possible. I can see Blunt using a picture in the way you describe. But this tape is something else again. My uncle will only buy it if the secret service is prepared to underwrite the cost of the purchase. And they won’t buy it without listening to it themselves. Which still leaves Blunt in the shit because of the photograph, I’d have thought.”

“Not really. Your uncle has the photograph now.”

“Yes, he does, doesn’t he?”

“So, unless Anthony Blunt’s name is on that tape, he’s in the clear. More or less.”

“Anthony Blunt?” Somerset Maugham came into the room and helped himself to some coffee. “What’s Anthony got to do with any of this?”

Robin Maugham blushed again, this time to the roots of his dyed hair, and stammered an answer. “I was just telling Walter that Blunt used to share a flat with Guy Burgess in London. And that now and then you had him bid for pictures at art auctions in London. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s right. Old Masters are his special thing. Poussin, Titian, not really my cup of tea. And too damned expensive. But over the years he’s spotted a couple of good buys for me. Impressionists, mainly. He has a good eye, Anthony.”

“And yet he didn’t seem to notice he was sharing a flat with a Russian spy,” I said.

“You didn’t know Guy Burgess,” said Maugham. “He was a very charming rogue and a most unlikely spy. Everyone thought so.”

“That’s the thing about the English,” I said. “You think charm excuses almost anything, including treachery and treason.”

“Yes,” said Maugham, lighting a pipe. “That’s quite true. It’s a failing of ours, to find excuses for people. Of course, charm only works for Germans when it seems to have been divinely conferred.”

“When was the last time you saw Guy Burgess?” I asked.

Maugham paused for a moment. “Probably Tangier in nineteen forty-nine. Got himself into a bit of a scrape in Gibraltar beforehand, I seem to recall. But that was the thing about Guy; he was always getting into scrapes. Frankly, his behavior made him a most improbable spy. Often drunk and outrageously homosexual-when he defected, nobody could quite believe how he managed to pull it off for so long. I suppose you might say it was the perfect cover, to seem so indiscreet that people couldn’t possibly think you might be a spy.”

Maugham set his coffee cup down and moved to a chair.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“As I’ll ever be.”

I stood up and walked over to the Grundig. In its green Tolex carry case, the tape machine resembled the forgotten layer of an old wedding cake. I twisted the gold switch and slowly the two reels began to turn.

EIGHTEEN

Like most Englishmen of my recent acquaintance-at the Grand Hotel and the Villa Mauresque-Guy Burgess spoke with a plummy, nasal voice that seemed to contain a slight speech impediment, although that might just as easily have been the effect of too much alcohol. What else is there to do on a three-day voyage to Leningrad but get drunk? Suave, reptilian, and dripping with disdain, as if the whole business of being debriefed by his Russian handlers were beneath him, the voice reminded me of an English movie actor I’d once seen called Henry Daniell, who had seemed to me to be the screen personification of the sardonic, well-bred villain. As I listened to Burgess, it was as if the man were with us in Maugham’s drawing room, searching his memory and perhaps his conscience for the best interpretation of his actions-indeed, he seemed every bit as mannered as Somerset Maugham and as full of whinging self-justification as the great writer’s nephew. The recording was a good one, and occasionally, in the silences, you could even hear the dull, rhythmic throb of what might have been the ship’s engines but could as easily have been the slow breathing of some unseen leviathan.

“My name is Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess and I was born in Devonport, England, on the sixteenth of April nineteen eleven. For the purposes of verification, in nineteen forty-four I was running a Swiss source for MI5, code named Orange, who, I’m afraid to say, met with a sticky end in Trier. MI5 is, of course, Britain’s domestic secret intelligence service. My father was a naval officer and I myself attended the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth before going on to Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge.