“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Philby lit a cigarette and, tucking one hand underneath his armpit, smoked briskly. A ten-shilling note protruded from the none-too-clean handkerchief in his breast pocket. “But we have our moments of inspiration.”
The tea arrived. Philby glanced at his pocket watch, busied himself sorting out the chipped cups and saucers, and then, removing the lid, glanced inside the great brown enamelware pot, like the Mad Hatter looking for the dormouse. Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, I said to myself, how I wonder what you’re at.
“I’m investigating the Katyn Forest massacre,” I said. “For President Roosevelt. And I was wondering if you had any insight as to what might happen now that the Russians are in possession of that region again.”
Philby shrugged and poured the tea. “I expect the Supreme Council will appoint some sort of extraordinary state commission to investigate crimes committed by the German Fascist invaders, or some nonsense like that. To prove it was all a dastardly plot cooked up by the Jerries to disturb the harmonious unity of the Allies.” He picked a piece of tobacco off his lip. “Which is no more than our own foreign secretary, Mr. Eden, said in the House of Commons a while back.”
“Saying it is one thing. Believing it is quite another.”
“Well, you’d probably know more about that than me, old boy.” He stirred his tea thoughtfully, like a man mixing paint. “But let’s see, now. The Ivans will appoint a bunch of academicians and authors to the commission. Someone from the Smolensk Regional Executive. A People’s Commissar for this or that. Someone from the Russian Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Medical chap from the Red Army, probably. That kind of thing.”
I sipped the tea and found it too strong to be palatable. When they took away the pot, they’d probably use the dregs to paint a wooden fence. “Do you think the Soviets will invite anyone independent to join such a commission as you describe?”
“You put your finger right on it, Willard old boy. Independent. How is that independence to be guaranteed? The Germans have got their report. Roosevelt is going to have his. And now I expect the Russians will want theirs. I suppose people will have to make up their minds about what to believe. If you think in terms of global struggle, this kind of thing is inevitable. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, the Russians are still our allies and we will have to learn to work with them if we are going to win this war.”
He seemed to have finished his analysis, and I stood up and thanked him for his time.
“Anything for our American cousins.”
Pearson added his thanks, and Philby said to me, “Norman is notable for being the least bewildered fellow in Grosvenor Square.” He’d brightened noticeably now that I’d said I was leaving. “We do our best not to be too dry or intimidating for you American chaps, but we cannot know how we seem. That we have survived unconquered thus far is because we have let nothing affect us. Not ration cards, not German bombs, no, not even the English weather-eh, Norman?”
Leaving Pearson at Broadway Buildings, I walked back across the park, pondering the renewal of my acquaintance with Kim Philby. I had known Harold “Kim” Philby for a brief period before the war. In late 1933, just down from Cambridge, Philby had arrived in Vienna on a motorcycle. Four years younger than me and the son of a famous British explorer, Philby had thrown himself into working for Vienna’s left-wing resistance, with little thought for his own safety. After nine Socialist leaders had been lynched by the Heimwehr, Austria’s right-wing, pro-Nazi militia, he and I had helped to hide wanted leftists until they could be smuggled out of the country to Czechoslovakia.
While Philby and I had remained in Vienna, Otto Deutsch, a Ph. D. working for the sexologist Wilhelm Reich, not to mention the NKVD, had made several attempts to recruit the two of us to the Russian Secret Service. It was an invitation I had resisted at the time. I didn’t know about Philby himself, who had returned to England with Litzi in May 1934, so that she might escape the clutches of the Heimwehr, for she had been more openly active than Kim. I had always assumed that, like myself, Philby had resisted Deutsch’s invitation to join the NKVD in Vienna. But seeing him again, working for the SIS in the Russian counterintelligence section and apparently nervous at the renewal of our acquaintance, made me wonder.
Of course I could say nothing about this without drawing attention to my own background. Not that I thought it really mattered very much. If the British were, as was generally supposed by the OSS, breaking the German codes and not passing on relevant information to the Russians for fear of being asked to share all decoded German material, then, doubtless, Philby would see it as his duty to remedy such perfidious behavior toward an ally. I might even have applauded such so-called treachery. I would not have done it myself, but I might almost have approved of it being done by someone else.
Back in my hotel room, I made some notes for my Katyn report, had another tepid bath, and put on a tuxedo. By six-thirty I was in the bar at the Ritz ordering a second martini even as I was finishing my first. Saying the right thing, saying a lot less than people wanted to know, saying not very much at all, just listening-it had been a long day, and I was desperate to relax. Rosamond was just the woman to pull out the pins.
I had not seen her since the war began, and I was a little surprised that her once brown wavy hair was now gray, with a blue rinse; and yet she had lost none of her voluptuous allure. She kissed and hugged me.
“Darling,” she cooed, in her soft, breathy voice. “How wonderful to see you.”
“You’re still as gorgeous as you always were.”
“It’s very sweet of you, Will, but I’m not.” She touched her hair self-consciously.
I judged her to be in her early forties by now, but more beautiful than ever. She always reminded me a little of Vivien Leigh, only more womanly and sensuous. Less impetuous and much more thoughtful. Tall, pale-skinned, with a magnificent figure that belonged on a chaise longue in some artist’s studio, she wore a long, silvery skirt and a purple chiffon blouse that outlined her full figure.
“I brought you some stockings,” I told her. “Gold Stripe. Only I’m afraid I left them in my room at Claridge’s.”
“On purpose, of course. To make sure I’d come back to your hotel.”
Ros was used to men throwing themselves at her feet, and she almost expected it as the price of being so beautiful, even as she did her best to play that down. This was an almost impossible task; most of the time, and wherever she was, Ros always stood out like a woman wearing a Balenciaga cocktail dress to a Sunday school picnic in Nebraska.
“Of course.” I grinned.
She fingered the string of pearls around her creamy white neck as I ordered a bottle of champagne.
I offered her a cigarette and she squeezed it into a little black holder.
“You’re living with a poet these days, is that right?” I leaned forward to light her cigarette and caught a whiff of some perfume that reached right down into my trouser pocket, and then some.
“That’s right,” she puffed. “He’s gone off to visit his wife and children.”
“Is he any good? As a poet, I mean?”
“Oh, yes. And terribly good-looking, too. Just like you, darling. Only I don’t want to talk about him, because I’m cross with him.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s gone off to visit his wife and children instead of staying here in London with me, of course.”
“Of course. But what happened to Wogan?”
Wogan Philipps, the Second Baron Milford, was the husband Ros had left to be with her poet.
“He’s getting married again. To a fellow Communist. At least he is as soon as I’ve divorced him.”
“I didn’t know Wogan was a Communist.”
“My dear, he’s positively riddled with it.”
“But you’re not a Communist, are you?”
“Lord, no. I am not and never have been a political animal. Romantically inclined toward the left, but not actively. And I expect men to make me their abiding cause, not Hitler or Stalin. Just as I have made men mine.”
“Then here’s to you, sweetheart,” I said. “You get my vote, every time.”
After a flirtatious dinner, we walked around the corner to St. James’s Place, where Victor Rothschild had a top-floor flat. A servant gave us a message that His Lordship had gone to a drinks party in Chesterfield Gardens and we should join him there.
“Shall we go?” I asked Rosamond.
