“What I think,” Burgess said softly, examining a silk necktie, “is that poor old Digby needs a little holiday, somewhere quiet. Somewhere he can’t be found. Do you understand me?”
“I understand my husband’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown, if he’s not there already. No thanks to you, I might add.”
“Well, that’s a matter of opinion, my dear. What do you think of this necktie?”
“Garish. Look, I really don’t require your advice on the matter of my husband. I’m going to check him into a drying-out hospital of some kind, as soon as possible, and I’d very much appreciate you and your little friends staying as far away from him as possible. Good day, Mr. Burgess.”
She started to turn away, but he snared her wrist under the edge of the counter. “And here I thought you were a nice little mouse,” he said caressingly.
“Maybe your judgment isn’t as sound as you think.”
“Just remember to keep your mouth shut about all this, all right? You don’t want your husband to end up like poor old Nedda. Do you understand me? That new lover of yours, especially. No pillow talk.”
The funny thing about Burgess, he was really rather handsome beneath the bloat and the livery color. Iris imagined that when he was younger—at university, maybe—he was really attractive. Though the whites of his eyes had yellowed to ecru, they were alive with brains and charm—a man who might have been somebody.
“I understand perfectly,” she replied.
“Excellent.” He released her wrist and held up another necktie. “Too green?”
“Too shiny.”
Iris turned and walked out of Gentlemen’s Furnishings, down the escalator and out the revolving door to the busy street, where she hailed a taxi to take her home.
But when she climbed inside, the cab wasn’t empty. A man in a dark suit and fedora sat on the other end of the seat, newspaper folded on his lap. He took off his hat and said, in a distinct courtly American accent, “Hello, Mrs. Digby. I don’t know if you remember me, but I gave you my card at a party not long ago. Sumner Fox.”
Naturally Iris reached for the door handle, but it was locked. The taxi moved off down Oxford Street toward Marble Arch. Iris turned to Mr. Fox and said recklessly, “Would you mind telling me what the hell’s going on? Are you trying to kidnap me?”
“Not at all. Just seeing you safely back to Oakwood Court. London seems to have become a little more dangerous over the past twenty-four hours.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Fox looked at his watch and looked out the taxi window. He leaned forward and rapped on the glass separation; the driver opened the window and they exchanged a few words Iris couldn’t hear. He sat back in his seat and said, in a kind voice, “Mrs. Digby, I work for a counterintelligence bureau of the US government. You know what that means?”
“Of course I do. You look for spies.”
“In a nutshell. Now, I know you’ve been living overseas for some time, but I’m thinking you might perhaps have heard of what’s going on in Washington right now? The hearings and whatnot?”
“I’ve heard something about it, yes.”
“Earlier this summer, a woman named Elizabeth Bentley testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miss Bentley, if you haven’t heard, used to run a network of intelligence agents on behalf of the Soviet Union.”
“Yes, I know all that. I can’t think why you’ve kidnapped a perfect stranger in a London taxi to bring her up to date on all the stateside news. Unless you think I’m connected to this woman in some way? A housewife who hasn’t spent more than two months in America since the war started?”
Fox made a reflective noise. Iris thought this was the moment he’d take a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and light one up, but he didn’t. He fiddled with the hat on his knee and said, in his beautiful baritone drawl, “Miss Bentley first contacted authorities in November of 1945. Couple of months before that, a cipher clerk operating under illegal cover in the Soviet embassy in Ottowa put himself under the protection of Canadian officials and provided us with a great deal of additional information. As you know, agents are run under code names to protect their true identities. So it takes some legwork, you see, some investigation to follow all the clues and identify the possible suspects.”
“Sounds absolutely fascinating.”
“Oh, it’s boring as can be, most of the time. Spending hours cross-checking lists of embassy employees and dates of arrival and departure, that kind of thing. But every so often, you experience what we call a breakthrough.”
Iris curled her palms around the edge of the cloth seat to dry them. “Indeed.”
“I won’t bore you with the particulars, but a few months ago we were able to connect one of the code names provided by Miss Bentley with a fellow carrying out operations for us in Turkey at the end of 1944.”
“Anyone I know?”
He smoothed the felt on his fedora. “Your husband, Cornelius Digby.”
“That’s impossible. My husband is a loyal American.”
“And you’re a loyal wife. I can respect that, Mrs. Digby, believe me. That’s why there’s a law that says spouses can refuse to say anything to incriminate each other. But I want to assure you that my intention is not to arrest your husband. For one thing—I’ll lay my cards out—we don’t have enough evidence, and what we’ve got we can’t reveal in a court of law. For another thing, we’ve got reason to believe that the American intelligence service is honeycombed with men like your husband, fellow travelers as they call each other, who climbed on board the Soviet service in the 1930s when communism was all the rage. We also believe that one or two of those men sit at the very top, because every time we piece together a code name and connect that Soviet agent to an actual human being in our service, why—he slips the noose. Somebody tips him off. Or the other side of the coin—we send in an operative somewhere, maybe recruit a local agent—and within a month he disappears.”
“So why are you here?”
“Mrs. Digby, you know what happened to Nedda Fischer. You know she was his handler. She ran him for years, until Bentley compromised the network and the Soviets dropped contact. That was in early 1946. Now the Soviets are cleaning house. Sometimes they just eliminate a cold agent, nice and clean, like they used to do before the war. But the more useful ones, the more important ones, they can arrange a defection.”
“Defection? You mean to the Soviet Union? To live there?”
“That’s what I mean. From what we understand, that’s what they offered to Miss Fischer. They approached her through Burgess, who’s still connected to Moscow Centre, with some kind of plan to get her to Russia. But she said no. Seems she didn’t like the idea of actually living under communism. She told them no, so they eliminated her, rather than take a chance she’d get picked up by our service, or the British, and reveal what she knew.”
“Look, Mr. Fox, this is a very exciting story you’re telling me. I think it would make a swell spy novel. But it’s fiction, it’s just not true. My husband—”
“Mrs. Digby, we’re headed down Notting Hill Gate. We haven’t got much time. The Soviets approached Miss Fischer, and it’s dollars to doughnuts your husband is next, if they haven’t already made the offer. He’s got one chance to make this right, do you see? We need a man in Moscow. We need to find out the name of the fellow or fellows they’ve got on our inside. And we’ve got to do it outside the service itself, or the operation is compromised before it even begins.”
“I don’t have the least idea what you’re talking about. If all this is true, why don’t you speak to my husband?”