The Trinity Six
Gaddis wished that he had brought his props. At UCL, his annual lecture on the siege of Leningrad was a must-see sellout, one of the very few events that every student in the Russian history programme felt both obliged and enthused to attend. Gaddis always began by standing behind a table on which he had placed a third of a loaf of sliced white bread, a pound of minced beef, a bowl of bran flakes, a small cup of sunflower oil and three digestive biscuits.
‘This,’ he tells the packed auditorium, ‘is all that you get to eat for the next thirty days. This is all that an adult citizen of Leningrad could claim on their ration cards in the early years of World War II. Kind of puts the January detox in perspective, doesn’t it?’ The lecture takes place in the early weeks of the New Year, so the joke always whips up a satisfying gale of nervous laughter. ‘But enjoy it while you can.’ Confused looks in the front row. Plate by plate, bowl by bowl, Dr Gaddis now tips the food on to the floor until all that remains on the table in front of him are ten slices of stale white bread. ‘By the time the siege really starts to bite, bread is more or less the only form of sustenance you’re going to get, and its nutritional value is nil. The people of Leningrad don’t have access to Hovis or Mother’s Pride. This bread’ – he picks up a piece and tears it into tiny pieces, like a child feeding ducks – ‘is made mostly from sawdust, from sweepings on the floor. If you’re lucky enough to have a job in a factory, you get 250 grams of it every week. How much is 250 grams?’ Gaddis now picks up six slices of the bread and hands them to a student in the front row. ‘That’s about how much it is. But if you don’t work in a factory’ – three of the slices come back – ‘you get only 125 grams.’
‘And I warn you not to be young,’ he continues, channelling Neil Kinnock now, a politician from yesteryear whom most of his students are too young to remember. ‘I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to grow old in the Leningrad of 1942. Because if you do’ – at this point, he gets hold of the final three slices of bread, tossing them to the floor – ‘if you do, you’ll most likely starve to death.’ He lets that one settle in before delivering the coup de grâce. ‘And don’t be an academic, either. Don’t be an intellectual.’ Another gale of nervous laughter. ‘Comrade Stalin doesn’t like people like us. As far as he’s concerned, academics and intellectuals can starve to death.’
The beautiful woman in the knee-high boots was staring at him intently. At UCL, Gaddis usually picked out a volunteer at this stage and asked them to take off their shoes, which he then placed on a table at the front of the lecture hall. He liked to pull grass clippings and pieces of bark from the pockets of his jacket. Christ, if Health and Safety had allowed it, he’d have brought a dead rat and a dog in, as well. That, after all, was what the citizens of Leningrad survived on as the Germans tightened the noose: grasses and bark; leather shoes boiled down for sustenance; the flesh of vermin and dogs. Cannibalism was also rife. Children would disappear. Limbs would mysteriously be removed from corpses left to freeze in the street. The meat pies on sale in the markets of war-torn Leningrad could contain anything from horse flesh to human being.
But tonight he kept things simple. Tonight Dr Gaddis spoke about Platov’s aunt and first cousin surviving three years in a German concentration camp in the Baltics. He related how, on one occasion, Platov’s mother had passed out from hunger only to wake up while she was being taken to a cemetery by men who had assumed she was dead. Towards eight o’clock, he read a short extract from the new book about Platov’s early years in the KGB and, by eight fifteen, people were applauding and he was taking questions from the floor, trying to make the case that Russia was reverting to totalitarianism and all the time wondering how to persuade the girl in the knee-high boots to join his party for dinner.
In the end, he didn’t need to. As the launch was beginning to thin out, she approached him at the makeshift bar and held out her hand.
‘Holly Levette.’
‘Sam.’ Her hand was slim and warm and had rings all over it. She was about twenty-eight with huge blue eyes. ‘You were the one who was late.’
A smile of what looked like genuine embarrassment. Her right cheek had a little scar on the bone which he liked. ‘Sorry, I was held up on the Tube. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.’
They moved away from the bar.
‘Not at all.’ He was trying to work out what she did for a living. Something in the arts, something creative. ‘Have we met before?’
‘No, no. I just read your article in the Guardian and knew that you were speaking tonight. I have something that I thought you might be interested in.’
They had found themselves in a small clearing in the Travel section. In his peripheral vision, Gaddis could sense somebody trying to catch his eye.
‘What kind of something?’
‘Well, my mother has just died.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
It didn’t look as though Holly Levette needed much comforting.
‘Her name was Katya Levette. Before her death she was working on a book about the history of the KGB. A lot of her information came from sources in British and Russian intelligence. I don’t want her papers to go to waste. All that hard work, all those interviews. I wondered whether you might like to have a look at her research, see if there’s any value in it?’
It could have been a trap, of course. A mischievous source in MI6 or the Russian FSB looking to use a mid-level British historian for purposes of propaganda. After all, why come all the way to the bookshop? Why not just phone him at UCL or send an email to his website? But the chances of a honey-trap were slim. If the spooks wanted a scandal, if they wanted headlines, they would have gone for Beevor or Sebag Montefiore, for Andrew or West. Besides, Gaddis would be able to tell in five minutes if the documents were genuine. He’d spent half his life in the museums of London, Moscow and St Petersburg. He was a citizen of the historical archive.
‘Sure, I could take a look at them. You’re kind to think of me. Where are the papers?’
‘At my flat in Chelsea.’
And suddenly the tone of the conversation shifted. Suddenly Holly Levette was looking at Dr Sam Gaddis in the way that mischievous female students sometimes look at attractive, fortysomething bachelor academics when they are up to no good. As if her flat in Chelsea promised more than just dust-gathering notebooks on the KGB.
‘Your flat in Chelsea,’ Sam repeated. He caught the smell of her perfume as he drank more wine. ‘I should probably take your number.’
She was smiling, enjoying the game, promising him something with those huge blue eyes. From the hip pocket of her slim jeans, Holly Levette produced a card which she pressed into his hand. ‘Why don’t you ring me when you’re not so busy?’ she suggested. ‘Why don’t you call and we can arrange for you to come and pick them up?’
‘It’s a good idea.’ Gaddis looked at the card. There was nothing on it except a name and a telephone number. ‘And you say your mother was researching the history of Soviet intelligence?’
‘The KGB, yes.’
A pause. There were so many questions to ask that he could say nothing; if he started, they would never stop. A male colleague from UCL materialized beside Gaddis and stared, with abandon, deep into Holly’s cleavage. Gaddis didn’t bother introducing them.
‘I should go,’ she said, touching his arm as she took a step backwards. ‘It was so lovely to meet you. Your talk was fantastic.’
He shook her hand again, the one with all the rings. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘And I’ll definitely take you up on that offer.’
‘What offer?’ asked the colleague.
‘Oh, the best kind,’ replied Holly Levette. ‘The best kind.’
Chapter 3
Two days later, on a rain-drenched Saturday morning in August, Gaddis rang the number on the card and arranged to go to Chelsea to pick up the boxes. Five minutes after walking through the door of her flat on Tite Street, he was in bed with Holly Levette. He did not leave until eight o’clock the following evening, the boot of his car sagging under the weight of the boxes, his head and body aching from the sweet carnal impact of a woman who remained, even after all that they had shared, something of a stranger to him, an enigma.
Her flat had been a bombsite, a deep litter field of newspapers, books, back issues of the New Yorker, half-finished glasses of wine and ashtrays overflowing with old joints and crushed cigarette packets. The kitchen had three days of washing up piled at the sink, the bedroom more rugs and more clothes strewn over more chairs than Gaddis had ever seen in his life. It reminded him of his own house which, in the years since Natasha had left him, had become a bachelor’s labyrinth of paperbacks, take-away menus and DVD box sets. He had a Belarussian cleaning lady, but she was near-arthritic and spent most her time chatting to him in the kitchen about life in post-Communist Minsk.
Holly’s search for the KGB material had taken them downstairs, to the basement of the apartment block, where Katya Levette had filled a storage cupboard to capacity with dozens of unmarked boxes. It had taken them both more than an hour to locate the files and to carry them outside to Gaddis’s car. Even then, Holly said that she could not be sure that he had taken everything with him.
‘But it’s a start, right?’ she said. ‘It’s something to be getting on with.’
‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ he asked.
The sheer volume of material in the basement suggested that Katya Levette had either been extremely well connected in the intelligence firmament or an inveterate hoarder of useless, second-hand information. Gaddis had Googled her, but most of the articles available under her name were either book reviews or hagiographic profiles of middle-ranking business figures in the UK and United States. At no point had she been a staff writer on any recognized publication.
‘Mum was friendly with a lot of Russian ex-pats in London,’ Holly explained. ‘Oligarchs, ex-KGB. You probably know most of them.’
‘Not socially.’
‘And she had a boyfriend once upon a time. Someone in MI6. I think a lot of the stuff may have come from him.’
‘You mean he leaked it?’
Holly nodded and looked away. She was concealing something, but Gaddis did not feel that he knew her well enough to push for more information. There had already been hints of a fraught relationship between mother and daughter; the truth would come out in good time.
He had driven home and put the boxes – fifteen of them – on the floor of Min’s bedroom, making a silent promise to get to them within a few days. And he would have called Holly again almost immediately had it not been for the grim surprise of Monday’s post.
* * *
There were two letters.
The first came in an ominous brown envelope marked HM
REVENUE & CUSTOMS / PRIVATE and was a demand for late payment of tax. A demand for £21,248, to be exact, which was about £21,248 more than Gaddis had in the bank. Failure to pay the sum in full by mid-October, the letter stated, would result in legal action. In the meantime, interest on the debt was accumulating at a rate of 6.5 per cent.
The second letter bore the unmistakable handwriting of his ex-wife, complete with a Spanish postmark and a stain in the left-hand corner which he put down to a wayward cup of café con leche.
The letter was typed.
Dear Sam
I’m sorry to have to write like this, rather than phone, but Sergio and Nick have advised me that it’s best to do these things on a formal basis.
Sergio was the lawyer. Nick was the Barcelona-based boyfriend. Gaddis wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about either of them.
The situation is that N and I are desperately short of money because of the restaurant and I need more help with the school fees. I know you’ve already been more than generous, but I can’t meet my half of the payments for this term or the next. Is there any possible way you could help? Min loves the school and is already incredibly good at Catalan and Spanish. The last thing either of us wants is to take her out and separate her from all the friends she’s made. The other school is miles away and awful, for all sorts of reasons that are too depressing to go into. (I’ve heard reports of bullying, of racism against an Indian child, even an accident in the playground that was covered up by staff.) You get the picture.
Will you write and let me know what you think? I’m sorry to have to ask you to help with this because we always agreed to go fifty/fifty. But I don’t see that I have any choice. The figure we’re talking about is in the region of €5000. When the restaurant starts turning a profit, I promise to pay you back.
I hope everything is OK in London/at UCL etc. Give my love to everybody –
Hasta luego
Natasha x
Sam Gaddis wasn’t the sort of man who panicked, but equally he wasn’t the sort of man who had twenty-five thousand quid lying around for random tax bills and school fees. He’d already taken out two separate £20,000 loans to pay off debts accumulated by his divorce; the monthly interest repayments alone amounted to £800, on top of a £190,000 mortgage.
He took the tube to UCL and arranged to meet his literary agent for lunch. It was the only solution. He would have to work his way out of the crisis. He would have to write.
They met, two days later, at a small, exorbitantly expensive restaurant on High Street Kensington where the only other clientele were bored Holland Park housewives with lovers half their age and an elderly Greek businessman who took almost an hour to eat a single bowl of risotto.
Robert Paterson, UK director of Dippel, Gordon and Kahla, Literary Agents since 1968, had more important clients than Dr Samuel Gaddis – soap stars, for example, who brought in 15 per cent commissions on six-figure autobiography deals – but none with whom he would rather have spent three hours in an overpriced London restaurant.
‘You mentioned that you had money worries?’ he said as they ordered a second bottle of wine. Paterson was three years off retirement and the sole surviving member of the generation which still believed in the dignity of the three-Martini lunch. ‘Tax?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Always is, this time of year.’ Paterson nodded knowingly as he rounded off a veal cutlet. ‘Most of my clients have less idea how to manage their finances than Champion the Wonder Horse. I get three telephone calls a week from some of them. “Where’s my foreign rights deal? Where’s the cash from the paperback?” I’m not a literary agent any more. I’m a personal financial adviser.’
Gaddis smiled a crooked smile. ‘And what financial advice would you give me?’
‘Depends how much you need.’
‘Twenty-one grand for Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue, payable last Tuesday. Four grand for Min’s school fees. Likely to rise to ten or twenty in the next couple of years unless Natasha’s boyfriend suddenly figures out that being the manager of a successful restaurant in Barcelona doesn’t involve spending three days a week working on his offpiste skiing in the Pyrenees. They’re chucking euros into the Mediterranean.’
‘And UCL can’t help?’
Gaddis thanked the waiter, who had poured more wine into his glass. ‘I’m forty-three. My salary won’t go much higher unless I get Chair. The mortgage alone is costing me a third of what I earn. Short of stealing first editions of Pride and Prejudice from the London Library, I’m not looking at raising the money any time soon.’
‘So you need a new deal?’ Paterson dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin.
‘I need a new deal, Bob.’
‘What did I get you last time?’
‘South of five grand.’
Paterson looked mildly embarrassed to have brokered such a meagre contract. He was a huge man, requiring a two-foot gap between his chair and the table. He folded his arms so that they were resting on the summit of his voluminous belly. A Buddha tailored by Savile Row.
‘So we’re talking what? Thirty thousand pounds as a signature advance?’
A small droplet of gravy had appeared at the edge of Paterson’s shirt. Gaddis nodded and his agent produced a stagey sigh.
‘Well, if you want that sort of money quickly, you’ll have to write a strictly commercial book, almost certainly within twelve months and probably under a pseudonym, so that you have the impact of a debut writer. That’s the only way I can get you a serious cheque in today’s market. A historical comparison between Sergei Platov and Peter the Great, God bless you, isn’t going to cut it. With the best will in the world, Sam, nobody really cares about journalists getting bumped off in Russia. Your average punter doesn’t have a clue who Peter the Great is. Does he play for Liverpool? Was he knocked out in the final of Britain’s Got Talent? Do you see the problem?’
Gaddis was nodding. He saw the problem. The trouble was, he had no aptitude for forging commercial bestsellers which he could write in twelve months. There were lectures he had given at UCL which had taken him more than a year to research and prepare. For an astonishing moment, during which Paterson was putting on a pair of half-moon spectacles and scanning the pudding menu, he reflected on the very real possibility that he would have to moonlight as a cab driver in order to raise the cash.
Then he remembered Holly Levette.
‘What about the KGB?’
‘What about it?’ Paterson looked up from the menu and did a comic double-take around the restaurant. ‘Are they here?’
Gaddis smiled at the joke. A small boy walked past the table and disappeared towards the downstairs bathroom. ‘What about a history of Soviet and Russian intelligence?’ he said. ‘Something with spies in it?’
‘As a series of novels?’
‘If you like.’
Paterson peered over the spectacles, a father suddenly sceptical of a wayward son. ‘I don’t really see you as a novelist, Sam,’ he said. ‘Fiction isn’t your thing. It would take you far too long to complete a manuscript. You should be thinking along the lines of a non-fiction title which can spin off into a TV series, a documentary with you in front of the camera. If you’re serious about making money, you need to start being serious about your image. No future in being a fusty old academic these days. Look at Schama. You have to multi-task. I’ve always said you’d be a natural for television.’
Gaddis hid a thought behind his glass of wine. Maybe it was time. Min was in Barcelona. He was completely broke. What did he have to lose by getting his face on television?
‘Go on, then. Give me the inside take.’
Paterson duly obliged. ‘Well, when it comes to books about Russia, Chechnya is a no-no. Nobody gives a monkey’s.’ He broke off to order ‘just a smidgen of tiramisu, just a smidgen’ from the waiter. ‘Ditto Yeltsin, ditto Gorbachev, ditto His Rampaging Egoness, the late lamented Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Done to death. You’ve written about Platov, Chernobyl is old hat, so – yes – you might as well stick to spies. But we’d need poisoned umbrellas, secret KGB plots to knock off Reagan or Thatcher, irrefutable evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lovechild of Rudolf Nureyev and Svetlana Stalin. I’m talking cover of the Daily Mail. I’m talking scoop.’
The Greek businessman had finally conceded defeat at the hands of his risotto. Gaddis was at once flattered and bemused that Paterson should consider him capable of unearthing a story on that scale. He was also concerned that Holly Levette’s boxes would contain nothing but second-hand, irrelevant dross from dubious sources in the Russian underworld. Right now, though, those boxes were all that he had to go on.
‘I’ll work on it,’ he said.
‘Good.’ Paterson observed the arrival of his tiramisu with a whistle of anticipation. ‘Now. Is there any way I can interest you in a coffee?’
Chapter 4
Eight hours later, Gaddis went for supper at the Hampstead house of Charlotte Berg. Berg had been his flatmate at Cambridge and his girlfriend – briefly – before he had been married. She was a former war correspondent who hid the scars of Bosnia, of Rwanda and the West Bank beneath a veneer of bonhomie and slightly fading glamour. Over roast chicken prepared by her husband, Paul, Charlotte began to share details of her latest piece, a freelance story to be sold to the Sunday Times which she claimed would be the biggest political scandal of the decade.
‘I’m sitting on a scoop,’ she said.
Gaddis reflected that it was the second time that day that he had heard the word.
‘What kind of scoop?’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be a scoop if I told you, would it?’
This was a game they played. Charlotte and Sam were rivals, in the way that close friends often keep a quiet, competitive eye on one another. The rivalry was professional, it was intellectual and it was almost never taken too seriously.
‘What do you remember about Melita Norwood?’ she asked. Sam looked over at Paul, who was concentratedly mopping up gravy with a hunk of French bread. Norwood was the so-called ‘Granny Spy’, exposed in 1999, who had passed British nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1940s and 50s.
‘I remember that she was swept under the carpet. Spied for Stalin, sped up his nuclear programme by about five years, but was allowed to die peacefully in her bed by a British government who didn’t want the negative publicity of trying an eighty-year-old woman for treason. Why?’
Charlotte pushed her plate to one side. She was a gestural, free-spirited woman of vast appetites: for cigarettes, for drink, for information. Paul was the only man she had ever been with who had been able to tolerate her many contradictions. ‘Fuck Melita Norwood,’ she said suddenly, grabbing Sam’s glass of wine by mistake and swallowing most of it.
‘If you say so.’
‘What about Roger Hollis?’ she asked quickly.
‘What about him?’
‘Do you think he was a traitor?’
Sir Roger Hollis was a grey area in the history of British intelligence. In 1981, the journalist Chapman Pincher had published a bestselling book, Their Trade is Treachery, in which it was alleged that Hollis, a former head of MI5, had been a KGB spy. Gaddis had read the book as a teenager. He remembered the bright red cover with the shadow of a sickle falling across it; his father asking to borrow it on a seaside holiday in Sussex.
‘To be honest, I haven’t thought about Hollis for a long time,’ he said. ‘Pincher’s allegations were never proved. Is that what you’re working on? Is that the scoop? Is there some kind of connection between Hollis and Norwood? She was associated with a KGB spy codenamed “HUNT” who was never identified. Was HUNT Hollis?’
Charlotte laughed. She was enjoying tapping into Gaddis’s reserves of expertise.
‘Fuck Hollis,’ she said, with the same abrasive glee with which she had dismissed Norwood. Gaddis was bemused.
‘Why do you keep saying that?’
‘Because they were small potatoes. Bit-part players. Minnows compared to what I’ve stumbled on.’
‘Which is …?’ Paul asked.
Charlotte finished off what must have been her ninth or tenth glass of wine. ‘What if I told you there was a sixth Cambridge spy who had never been unmasked? A contemporary of Burgess and Maclean, of Blunt, Philby and Cairncross, who is still alive today?’
At first, Gaddis couldn’t untangle precisely what Charlotte was telling him. He, too, had drunk at least a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Hollis a Cambridge spy? Norwood a sixth member of the Ring of Five? Surely she wasn’t working on a crackpot theory like that? But he was a guest in her house, enjoying her hospitality, so he kept his doubts to himself.
‘I’d tell you that you were sitting on a fortune.’
‘This isn’t about money, Sam.’ There was no admonishment in Charlotte’s tone, just the bluntness for which she was renowned. ‘This is about history. I’m talking about a legendary KGB spy, codenamed ATTILA, who matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. A man every bit as dangerous and as influential as Maclean and Philby. A mole at the heart of Britain’s political and intelligence infrastructure whose treason has been deliberately covered up by the British government for more than fifty years.’