Young Philby Read Free Page A

a wealth of true information.”
    “Obviously he sent true information. Penetration agents are obliged to supply true information in order to establish their credibility and make you swallow the false information that they slip into their reports. You, an Abwehr agent, supplied the Centre with true information on the German order of battle and its armament priorities in order to make us swallow a certain amount of false information.”
    “I defy you to cite a single example of false information I provided.”
    I shrugged. The conversation was going nowhere. “You stood surety for the Englishman and passed on as true information what he wrote in his reports to you.”
    I gathered up the index cards on which I had written out questions. The prisoner noticed the gesture. “Don’t go, for God’s sake,” he rasped. “I must talk to you as long as possible.”
    “I was given half an hour—”
    He produced a book of matches from the pocket of his suit jacket. “I have written out a short note to Comrade Stalin on the inside cover. It is not too late for me if you can get this to him. He will surely remember Teodor Stepanovich Maly, he will recall my loyal service to the party during the revolution, my devotion to the state since. He will instruct the judges to reconsider their verdict.”
    “Pencils are forbidden to prisoners,” I felt it was necessary to remind him. “This is a grave breach of rules and could have serious consequences for you.”
    I saw the condemned man holding out the book of matches as he shuffled toward me in his ankle irons. “You are my only hope,” he whispered.
    I am embarrassed to say I found myself stumbling across the room toward the door. I have a vague memory of rapping my knuckles on it. With relief I heard the key turn in the lock. The door opened. I filled my lungs with the stale air of the corridor. Senior Lieutenant Gusakov stood there with the comrades who had come up from the crypt, thickset men wearing stained leather aprons over their NKVD uniforms and smoking fat hand-rolled cigarettes. The sight of a female emerging from the room took them by surprise.
    “Take her away,” one of them muttered. “This is no place for a woman.”
    Another comrade, a short man with a shaven skull, said with a snicker, “Unless of course she is the one sentenced to the highest measure of punishment.” The other comrades looked away in discomfiture.
    Senior Lieutenant Gusakov gestured with a snap of his head and started toward the elevator. “Was Maly able to shed light on the inconsistencies in your predecessor’s précis?” he demanded as I fell in alongside him. He stopped in his tracks. “The Englishman—whose side is he on?”
    “The evidence I have seen so far points to his being a British agent,” I replied. “The condemned prisoner Maly said nothing to persuade me otherwise.”

 
    1: VIENNA, LATE SUMMER 1933
    Where an Englishman Wanders into the Wrong Century
    The Englishman came from another planet looking, no doubt, for adventure, a cause to believe in, comradeship, affection, love, sex. His luck, he found someone who dyed her hair so often she was no longer sure of the original color: me. We were roughly the same age—he was twenty-one and fresh from university when he made his way to my flat in the center of the city—but any resemblance between our life lines ended there. I was half Jewess and half not, with the two parts of my identity in constant conflict; I’d been a Zionist fighting for a distant Jewish homeland before I joined the Communists fighting for Austrian workers nearer to hand. I’d been married and divorced (when I discovered that my husband preferred to sleep in Palestine than with me). Once I’d even been thrown into an Austrian jail for two weeks for my Communist activities that came to the attention of the police; I’d been caught letting my spare room to a certain Josip Broz, who turned out to be a Croatian Communist wanted in half a dozen