The Other Side of Silence

“If this is just an attempt to raise a bit of extra money, then it’s rather clever,” said Reilly. “Willie pays the blackmailer-and pays quickly-to avoid personal embarrassment. We pay him-though rather more slowly, as is typical of government departments-to avoid placing Willie in the invidious position of wondering how to recover his money. And Walter is right, I think. These tapes have been keenly priced. Two hundred thousand is just enough to make it worth their while but not too much to stop Willie from buying them.”

TWENTY-THREE

We listened to the tape recording again, and this time, when it was finished, we left the whitewashed drawing room and stepped onto the terrace and had champagne and a cold lobster supper under the stars. Later on, Sir John Sinclair excused himself and went to make a telephone call to “the friends” in London, he said, to set in motion the laborious process of raising Maugham’s money from the cash-strapped British government. Robin Maugham continued to stay away from the Villa Mauresque, which suited his uncle, and, bored I think, Alan Searle drove off somewhere in his car, leaving Reilly, Blunt, Maugham, and me still talking over cigarettes and brandy. Then, with arms folded across his chest like an Egyptian mummy, and glasses perched on the end of his long, beaky nose, Blunt excused himself and set about surveying the old queen’s pictures. From time to time we could hear him utter some adjective to punctuate his breathless appreciation of Maugham’s collection, which, later on, he declared to be “as good as any he had ever seen in private hands,” pleasing the writer to no end. He himself was again in a good mood; the prospect of risking a large sum of money with no guarantee of reimbursement had been troubling him a great deal.

“Well, that’s a relief, I must say. About the money. I was thinking I might have to postpone the purchase of a nice little painting I’ve found by Stanislas Lepine. It is rather expensive. Icing on the cake, as it were. Or perhaps even the cherry. At my time of life, it’s a little hard to tell. By the way, the money will be available from Hottingers, my bankers in Nice, tomorrow morning at eleven.”

“You were quite right to call us, Willie,” said Reilly. “Thank you. Thank you so much. There’s absolutely no question we have to stop these tapes from falling into the wrong hands. And if Mr. Wolf is agreeable, we’ll ask him to handle the exchange, I think. We wouldn’t like to spook this fellow Hebel by introducing anyone new to the proceedings at this late stage. Having said that, perhaps our chaps from Fort Monckton could ride shotgun with you for some of the time and help keep an eye on the money.”

“That’s up to Walter,” said Maugham. “He and Robin are the only ones who’ve met this fellow Hebel.”

“The roads being what they are, the exchange is to take place on a boat,” I told Reilly. “In Menton. It’s my guess he’s planning to make a quick getaway as soon as he’s counted the money. I’ll drive straight to Menton from Nice.”

“Why Menton?” asked Reilly.

“Because it’s on the Italian border,” said Maugham. “He can be at one of those joke banks in Ventimiglia within an hour of receiving the money.”

“Of course,” said Reilly, “there’s no real guarantee that we’re going to put a stop to any of this by paying up. Once we’ve bought one job lot of tapes featuring the Cambridge Two, there’s potentially no end to it. This is how blackmail works, of course. In no time at all, we could find ourselves obliged to buy more compromising material. In fact, I should go so far as to say it’s a cast-iron certainty. Donald Maclean was based in Washington for four years, from nineteen forty-four to nineteen forty-eight, after which he was a key official in our Cairo embassy. It goes without saying he can make things very difficult with the Americans. Right now, J. Edgar Hoover regards us as a very leaky ship indeed. He looks at Burgess and Maclean and the state of MI6 and asks, what’s the point of sharing any more secrets with the Brits? But the trouble Maclean could make for us with the gyppos while this Suez business is going on doesn’t bear thinking of. I mean, he could really put the cat among the pigeons. We’ve been propping up King Farouk and allowing U.S. planes to land and refuel in the Canal Zone on their way to practice bombing missions over the Soviet Union. All of which makes General Nasser’s demands look pretty damn reasonable. So you see we really do have to buy what they’re selling or risk enormous embarrassment.”

“Yes, I do see,” said Maugham. “As soon as I listened to the tape I knew how damaging it was. Not just for me, but also for Her Majesty’s Government. To my mind it’s not just the English laws against homosexuality that provide a blackmailer’s charter; it’s the Official Secrets Act, as well. With anything where one places a premium on privacy there’s always the possibility that people are going to take financial advantage of that.”