“Why not? It beats going home to an empty flat in Kensington. And it’s been simply ages since I went to a party.”
Tomas Harris and his wife, Hilda, were a wealthy couple whose hospitality was exceeded only by their self- evident good taste. Harris was an art dealer, and many of the walls of the house in Chesterfield Gardens displayed paintings and drawings by the likes of El Greco and Goya.
“You must be Victor’s American,” he said, greeting me warmly. “And you must be Lady Milford. I’ve read all of your novels. Dusty Answer is one of my favorite books.”
“I’ve just finished reading Invitation to the Waltz, ” said Hilda Harris. “I was so excited when Tom told me you might be coming. Come on, let me introduce you to some people.” She took Rosamond by the elbow. “Do you know Guy Burgess?”
“Yes. Is he here?”
“Willard!”
A dark-haired and stocky but handsome man came over and greeted me, exuding an air that was part rabbinical, part tycoon, part Bolshevik, and part aristocrat. Victor Rothschild was a prophet crying in a wilderness of privilege and position. We shared a love of jazz and a mutually rosy view of science, which was easier for Victor, given that he was actually a scientist. Victor couldn’t have made himself more scientific if he’d slept on a Petri dish.
“Willard, good to see you,” he said, shaking my hand furiously. “Tell me, you didn’t bring your saxophone, did you? Will plays a pretty mean sax, Tom.”
“I didn’t think it was appropriate,” I said. “When you’re the president’s special envoy, traveling with a saxophone is a little like bringing your pool cue to an audience with the Pope.”
“President’s special envoy, eh? That is impressive.”
“I think it sounds more impressive than it is. And what about you, Victor? What are you up to?”
“MI5. I run a little antisabotage outfit, X-raying Winston’s cigars, that kind of thing. Technical stuff.” Rothschild wagged his finger at me. “Introduce him to someone, Tom. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
Watching Rothschild disappear out the drawing room door, Harris said, “He’s too modest by half. From what I hear he’s involved in bomb disposal. Tackling the latest German fuses and detonators. It’s dangerous work.” Glancing over my shoulder, Harris waved a tall, rather limp-looking man of the lean and hungry kind over toward us. “Tony, this is Willard Mayer. Willard, this is Anthony Blunt.”
The man who came over had hands that more properly belonged on a delicate girl and the sort of fastidious, well-bred mouth that looked as if he’d been weaned on lemons and limes. He had an odd way of speaking that I didn’t like.
“Oh, yes,” said Blunt, “Kim’s been telling me all about you. ” He pronounced the last word with an indecent amount of emphasis, as if affecting a kind of disapproval.
“Will?”
I turned to find Kim Philby standing behind me.
“Fancy that. I was just talking about you, Will.”
“Be my guest. I’m fully insured.”
“He’s a friend of Victor’s,” Harris told Philby, moving away to greet yet another guest.
“Listen,” said Philby, “thanks awfully for not dropping me in it this afternoon. For not mentioning exactly what we got up to in Vienna.”
“I couldn’t very well have done that. Not without dropping myself in it, too. Besides”-I flicked a match against my thumbnail and lit a cigarette-“Vienna was more than ten years ago. Things are different now. Russia is our ally, for a start.”
“True,” said Philby. “Although there are times when you wouldn’t think so, the way we run this war.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m not running anything except the length and breadth of the odd tennis court. Pretty much I do what I’m told.”
“What I meant was that sometimes, when you look at the Red Army’s casualties, it seems as if the Soviet Union is the only country fighting Germany. But for the existence of the eastern front, the very idea of the British and the Americans being able to mount a landing in Europe would seem preposterous.”
“I was speaking to some guy in my hotel who told me that there were just five people killed in Britain during the whole of September. Can that really be true? Or was he just trying to convince me that I could leave my umbrella at home?”
“Oh, yes,” said Philby, “that’s perfectly true. And meanwhile the Russians are dying at a rate of something like seventy thousand a month. I’ve seen intelligence reports that estimate total Russian casualties at over two million. So you can see why they’re so worried that we’ll negotiate a separate peace and they’ll end up fighting Hitler on their own. It’s a fear that will hardly be assuaged by the knowledge that your president is now scrutinizing those murders in the Katyn Forest.”
“I believe it’s still common practice for murder to be scrutinized,” I said. “It’s one of the things that helps to give us the illusion that we’re living in a civilized world.”
“Oh, surely. But Stalin could hardly be blamed if he suspects that the Western allies might use Katyn as an excuse to postpone an invasion of Europe, at least until the Wehrmacht and the Red Army have destroyed each other.”
“You seem to know a lot about what Stalin suspects, Kim.”
Philby shook his head. “Intelligent guesswork. That’s what this lark is all about. Thing about the Russians is, they’re not hard to second-guess. Unlike Churchill. There’s no telling what’s going on in that man’s devious mind.”
“From what I gather, Churchill hasn’t paid much attention to Katyn. He doesn’t behave like a man who’s preparing to use it as an excuse to postpone a second front.”
“Perhaps not,” admitted Blunt. “But there are plenty of others who would, you know? The Jew-hating brigade who think we’re at war with the wrong enemy.” He grabbed a glass off a passing tray and swallowed the contents in one greedy parabola. “What about Roosevelt? Do you think he would countenance it?”
Blunt smiled warmly, but I still didn’t like his mouth.
Catching my frown, Philby said, “It’s all right, Willard. Anthony is one of us.”
“And what might that be?” I said, bristling. The proposition that Anthony Blunt was “one of us” seemed almost as offensive to me as its corollary, that I might be one of them.
“MI5. In fact, Anthony might be just the man you need to speak to about your Polish thing. The Allied governments in exile, neutral countries with diplomatic missions in London, Anthony keeps an eye on all of them, don’t you, Tony?”
“If you say so, Kim,” smiled Blunt.
“Well, it’s no great secret,” grumbled Philby.
“I can tell you this,” said Blunt. “The Poles would dearly like to get their hands on a Russian who’s an attache at the Soviet embassy in Washington. Fellow named Vasily Zubilin. In 1940 he was a major in the People’s Commissariat on Internal Affairs and commanded one of the execution battalions at Katyn. It seems that the Russians sent him to Washington as a reward for a good job. And to get him out of the neighborhood. And because they know he’s never likely to defect. If he did, they’d simply tell your government what he did at Katyn. And then some Pole would very likely want to have him charged as a war criminal. Whatever that is.
“So, how do you know Victor?” Blunt asked abruptly, changing the subject.
“We share a similarly perfunctory attitude to our Jewishness,” I said. “Or, in my case, and to be more accurate, my half-Jewishness. I went to his wedding to Barbara. And you?”
“Oh. Cambridge,” said Blunt. “And Rosamond. You came with her, didn’t you? How do you know Rosie?”
“Do stop interrogating him, Anthony,” said Philby.
“It’s all right,” I said, although I didn’t answer Blunt’s question and, hearing Rosamond’s distinctive laugh, I glanced around and saw her listening with much amusement as a disheveled figure held forth loudly about some boy he was trying to seduce. I was beginning to suspect that almost everyone invited to the party had been to Cambridge and was either a spy, a Communist, or a homosexual-in Anthony Blunt’s case very probably all three.
Rothschild came back into the room carrying a saxophone triumphantly aloft.
“Victor.” I laughed. “I think you’re very probably the only man I know who could track down a spare
