The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [51]
Now it was Gaddis’s turn to come forward in his chair. He felt as though he was involved in a piece of high theatre. Once or twice, in the dead of night, he had considered the possibility that Thomas Neame was nothing but a fraud, a mischievous, elderly conman spinning tall tales about a man called Eddie Crane who had never existed. That thought was not far away at this moment.
‘The truth is, we lost touch with one another.’ Neame looked depressed. ‘Eddie went to Italy in ’47 and the next few years are a blank. We didn’t see one another, we didn’t write. I even wondered if he had been killed.’
Gaddis nodded. Where was this going? What part of the story was he attempting to spin? Two elderly ladies sat down at the next-door table and popped their napkins.
‘I think there was a boyfriend,’ Neame added, a remark which took Gaddis completely by surprise. ‘In fact, I’m sure that there was a boyfriend.’ So Crane’s sexuality was no longer a delicate subject? In the cathedral, Neame had baulked at any mention of a male lover, yet here he was, happily outing Crane at the first opportunity. Perhaps he had decided that he could trust Gaddis with even the most delicate details of his friend’s story. That was now the best-case scenario. ‘What we do know is that Guy and Donald defected, yes? A ferry to France in ’51 and the Cambridge Ring gradually exposed.’
Gaddis nodded. He could feel his nerves quicken again at the hands of this master manipulator. Neame instinctively reached beside him for his walking stick, but his hand was shaking, like a man fumbling in the dark.
‘There’s a background to all this,’ he said. ‘To the breakdown. If you ask me, Eddie had never properly come to terms with the Pact.’
‘The Hitler–Stalin Pact?’ Gaddis looked down at the bowl of soup, which was giving off a vapour of curry powder. He wished that the landlady would take it away. ‘Seems odd that you would think that. The Pact was in ’39, more than ten years earlier.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Neame appeared to be aware of the contradiction. Crane, after all, had continued working for the Soviets long after Stalin had allied himself to Nazi Germany. ‘The others, you see – Guy, Anthony, Kim, Donald, John – all of them had been reconciled to the treaty. But Eddie never found the justification for it. It completely shook his faith in the Soviet system. He wasn’t programmatic, he wasn’t intellectual in the way that, say, Guy and Anthony were. He didn’t see a deal with Hitler as a necessary evil. He saw it as opportunistic, as a complete rebuttal of Marx.’
‘He wasn’t alone in feeling that way.’
‘No.’ Neame seized on this, meeting Gaddis’s eye, like a traveller who has at last found a sympathetic ear. ‘Eddie came deeply to regret his association with the Soviets. He was proud of some of the things that he had achieved, some of the things that we have touched on today’ – he indicated the papers on the table in front of them, and suddenly the purpose of the notes made sense to Gaddis – ‘but he saw the direction Stalin was taking and realized that he had backed the wrong horse.’
‘So why did he keep going?’ Gaddis asked. ‘Why did he carry on working for the Russians throughout his career?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Eddie was a double, Sam. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you. ATTILA was the greatest post-war coup in the history of the SIS and only a few men on the face of this Earth know about it. Eddie Crane spent thirty years convincing Moscow he was working for the KGB, but in all that time, he was secretly working for us. Isn’t that marvellous? It was an epic of disinformation. And that’s why I want the world to know his story.’
Chapter 18
Tanya Acocella had never laid eyes on Sam Gaddis, but she felt as though she knew him intimately.
She knew, for example, that he owed the Inland Revenue more than £20,000 and was in debt to the tune of £33,459 on two separate £20,000 bank loans secured against the value of his house. Gaddis had also submitted an application for a further loan of £20,000 which had recently been approved by Nat West.
She knew,