The Secret Servant

 
11
The motel had once been yet another famous old coaching inn; perhaps all coaching inns had once been famous. This one had had two rows of stables facing each other across a coach-yard at the back; now one row had become bedrooms, the other lock-up garages. Maxim and Zuzana sat each on a bed and looked at each other.
He felt nervous. It might be his puritan streak, or the memory of Jenny or just that it was a situation forced on him rather than chosen. He had a growing feeling that Zuzana would just as happily have taken a double-bedded room.
Towards the end of his Ј50 he had bought a half-bottle of Scotch and Zuzana seemed willing to share it. All the expenditure – suitcases, whisky, toothbrushes, nightgown – it was going to look Highly Irregular on his Form 1771, and he hoped to hell he'd find somebody prepared to sign it.
They clinked glasses. Maxim sipped, then asked casually: "Was there any particular reason why you chose today – last night – to come over?"
"I had become disgusted with a regime which represses its own citizens but does nothing to eliminate the abuse of power among its leaders." The statement had a rehearsed ring to it, and it didn't answer Maxim's question, but Zuzana seemed to relax once she'd got it said, "Were you going to tell us something about the bears' contact insecurity?"
"You are sure I will be safe?"
"If you keep telling the truth, yes. You know why they caught us back there?"
"I know, I know." She flopped back flat on the bed, spilling some of her drink, and talked at the ceiling. "I will tell you about my work. Mostly I did research and keeping the files on your people. They were not so important people, but perhaps they would become important, you understand. They all had animal names: Lisбk, Lasicka, Krtek, Veverka."
"A real animal farm."
She didn't get the joke. "Veverka means squirrel. But his real name was Professor John White Tyler."
"I see." Maxim made two long words of them.
She turned her head on the pillow and smiled at him mischievously. "You know him. You went to Warminster with him, but we did not find out why yet."
"I see," Maxim said again, feeling a twinge of discomfort. "And you kept the file on him?"
"Yes. I read his books, I cut all the pieces from the newspapers, I read the lectures – oh Mother, how I tried to understand about atomic wars and how they could happen in a thousand ways… And I knew all about the wives and the girls."
She went back to staring at the rough-plastered ceiling. The whole room was like that, not a straight line or an even surface anywhere, and all painted white that looked grey as the light died outside. Maxim guessed that she felt safer in the gloom.
"He had the first wife when he was still in your Army, after the end of the war. It went only six years, when he went back to Cambridge to work for his doctor of philosophy degree, I think it was. It is in the file. She went to work at the Pye factory while he read his books, she typed his… his thesis. She did everything for him."
"Did you talk to her?" It seemed very unlikely.
"No. no. For that we had this American boy, he was trying to be a journalist in London, one of our good friends in Italy was pretending to be a publisher, he asked the American to research your Tyler and two others for a book that will be published in Italy. And he was well paid, and of course, he does not read any Italian."
"Of course," Maxim agreed softly.
"The second wife, she was an American, she could have been his daughter." Zuzana sounded rather disgusted. Mrs Tyler Mark II – the one Brock had remembered – had married him at Princeton. Tyler had originally gone over for a sabbatical year, then earned a research grant and stayed on. There he was caught up in that glorious crusade when the academics, led by Herman Kahn and the Rand Corporation, stormed the seedy bastille of nuclear war theory and transformed it into a Camelot of soaring intellectual complexity, all politicians and military men please use the back door only. Those two years changed Tyler's life, but not his habits. That marriage lasted only five years.
And all the time, during, between and after the marriages, there had been the girls. Virtually as a reflex, the STB had tossed a few of its own sisters in his path, but whether he snapped them up or not hardly mattered. You could no more blackmail Tyler for his sex life than you could next door's tomcat, because he was no more secretive about it. And as women don't usually read military studies, you couldn't even accuse him of seducing his own students, not that Cambridge would have cared anyway. Zuzana was distinctly shocked to learn that.
"So I had all that in the file. And then, then Mother Bear said to work harder on Veverka."
"When was this?" Maxim offered her the whisky but she shook her head on the pillow.
"It was last year. Before Christmas."
"Did they say why?"
She looked at him, eyes wide. Silly question: Mother Bear never says why.
"Sorry: but did you know if something had happened about Veverka?"
"He was to become chairman of the defence policy review committee."
"And you knew this when? Can you remember?"
"It was… about the middle of November."
That was well before any public announcement.
"And then…?"
"Then they said to work just on Veverka. Just him."
"You in charge and others working for you?"
She couldn't hide a quick proud smile.
"Your first real command?" Maxim asked. She didn't answer, so he rambled on, provoking her to interrupt. "I remember my first command, out in Malaysia – it was still Malaya then. Just twenty-two of them, almost half the platoon was off sick or skiving, and every one of them hadn't shaved or had got something wrong with his equipment, just to see how I'd take it. You're told to rely on your sergeant, but-"
"So I worked on Veverka. I worked and worked. I read again all the books, The Gates of the Grave – have you read that? I tried to find the people who were in that, if they are still alive." She suddenly sat up. "I will have a drink."
Maxim poured it. They sat facing each other, knees almost touching. "Did you ever meet Tyler himself?"
"I heard him at a lecture in London one time. But they would never let me try to meet him." She went quiet again, perhaps imagining – Maxim certainly was – the likeliest result of her meeting Tyler. A car's brakes squeaked in the stableyard, and doors slammed. They listened in secret as new arrivals clumped in next door.
Maxim whispered: "And so you worked on Veverka."
"It is funny. You say Veverka, I say Veverka, and all the time I know it is Tyler, but when I hear Tyler I think Veverka."
"Codenames actually work. Sometimes. So…?"
"I tried to find the bears something, to find them anything." For years Moscow had just dismissed Tyler – publicly – as a normal fascist warmonger. But now they really wanted to nail a handle on him, and Zuzana did her best to find one that would fit. She tried everything, even getting long and contradictory opinions from the best Czech psychiatrists about what made the English 'Doctor X' bed as many young girls as they did themselves. It didn't help. Nothing did. The accounts grew longer but the sum at the bottom stayed a stubborn zero, while Mother Bear got more and more impatient.
"Then one of them, he sent for me and he told me. all the work I had done, I had done nothing. He said nothing. All that work, NOTHING!"
The noises in the next room stopped abruptly. Their secret cocoon shattered, Maxim and Zuzana listened to others listening to what had seemed an empty room.
After a time, somebody beyond the wall moved something cautiously. Life had to go on.
"When was this?" Maxim asked softly.
"It was two days before yesterday. He said they would control the Veverka file themselves now, I would just work for them, a waitress, a messenger, tah."