‘A b-beautiful city, d-don’t you think?’
‘Well, it’s different, certainly.’
‘It’s not your f-first visit, then?’
‘I was here once before — two years ago for one of those abortive disarmament conferences.’
‘It’s a city that takes a b-bit of getting used to,’ said Philby, and refilled their glasses. ‘Not everyone’s cup of tea, no doubt. But not all of us in life have the choice.’
‘A lot of people would say that you’d had more of a choice than most of us, Mr Philby.’
Philby took a sip of vodka and laid his glass carefully down in front of him. His face had tightened: there was a set downward expression about the jaw and the corners of his mouth that was hard, almost brutal. ‘You’re not English, are you, Cayle?’
‘Australian.’
‘Ah.’ Philby sat rubbing his broad fleshy nose. ‘At first I thought you might be one of those bloody Yanks! They’re always over here, trying to get me into a corner and screw me. It’s a funny thing,’ he added, taking a gulp of vodka, ‘but the British have never seemed to mind me so much. It’s the Yanks who’ve always hated me. You spend your life running rings round the good old British Establishment, and afterwards the blighters just don’t want to know. But take a crack at the Great Western Alliance, and you’re a marked man for life.’
‘Have you any idea why Whitehall washed their hands of you so easily?’ said Cayle.
Philby was about to speak when he was interrupted by another burst of gurgling and groaning from behind the wails. While it was still going on, Cayle said, almost in a shout: ‘I suppose this place is bugged?’
‘You suppose right, Mr Cayle. And I’ll tell you something else — I’m the man who edits the tapes.’
‘So we can talk freely?’
‘That depends what about. About you, for instance. Your background, interests, how you got into this r-racket in the first place.’
‘You mean, journalism?’
Philby gave a loose laugh. ‘Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that Whitehall or the CIA have used innocent newspaper men as errand boys.’
‘Hence the gun?’
Philby drained his glass. A quarter of the bottle had already disappeared. ‘Does it make you n-nervous? I should have thought a fellow like you had seen plenty of guns in his time.’
‘I’d feel happier if you didn’t have those two goons waiting outside. They look as though they’ve been seeing too many James Cagney films. You always go around with them?’
‘I’m a careful man, Cayle. As an officer in the Security Forces, it would be rather foolish if I n-neglected to look after my own security. But you haven’t answered my question. Tell me about yourself.’
Cayle took a stiff drink, glanced round the bare walls, then launched into his curriculum vitae, very much as he had done a couple of days ago for Hennison, though this time with more leisure and in more detail. Philby listened without interrupting, all the while chain-smoking cheap Russian cigarettes with hollow cardboard stems which he pinched into a filter.
Occasionally he smiled, even laughed, such as when Cayle described his debacle on the Solo Transatlantic race, or when he’d threatened a Red Army colonel in Prague in 1968 by telling the man that ‘if one hair of my head is touched, every Russian correspondent in London will be hanging in Hyde Park tomorrow morning!’
For the next two hours, while the level of the Osoboya sank inch by inch, Kim Philby and Barry Cayle sat up in this bare grubby room high above Moscow and got agreeably drunk together. Apart from the periodic explosions of the plumbing, there were no obstacles; and the only condition that Philby made was that Cayle took no notes, and that no mention was made of Philby’s work. From time to time the conversation foundered temporarily on matters of politics, but here Philby was quick to display all the arts of the dialectical gymnast: he was by turns bland, evasive, subtle and yielding; never dogmatic, never aggressive, but also never defensive, even when Cayle touched on such uncomfortable topics as the Soviet treatment of Jews and dissident intellectuals.
Cayle soon began to like Philby; and with his judgement dimmed by vodka, he found it preposterous to imagine this urbane, boozy, somewhat bedraggled English gent as the Spy of the Century, with a special place in the ranks of Western demonology. Even in this eccentric setting, with the guards outside and the gun in the briefcase, Kim Philby managed to seem such an ordinary fellow. He and Cayle shared many of the same interests, including cricket, cooking and classical music, as well as having a number of mutual friends who had been Philby’s colleagues in the newspaper world. They even had the same birthday — January the first — and drank a toast to the ‘stubborn and determined’ characteristics of Capricorn, while Philby lamented the woes of getting all one’s Christmas and birthday presents on the same day — not to mention hangovers.
They finally drained the last of the vodka, and Philby held up the empty bottle against the feeble light from the window. ‘I suppose you’ll go and write that I’m still up to my bad old habits? Back in the Lebanon I used to have a nickname for this stuff — any stuff, providing it was alcohol. Used to call it “snakebite”. Only difference was that back there they could mix a decent cocktail. But out here it’s rough. One day it’s
