скачать книгу бесплатно
‘It’s quite dead,’ said Jay. I could see it was a difficult job. ‘I just can’t bear killing things,’ he told me. He’d finished getting the lobster on the spit. ‘You know, I have to get the fish merchant to kill it for me.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Some people are like that, I know.’
‘A little more champagne,’ he said. ‘I only need half a bottle for this recipe, and I don’t like to drink too much.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and I meant it. It was hot in that kitchen.
He poured the remainder of the bottle into a metal tray and threw a little salt into it. ‘You’re a cool young man,’ he said. ‘Don’t you care about your friend Cavendish?’ He added a large piece of butter to the champagne. I don’t know why, but I didn’t expect that the butter would float. I remember watching and thinking ‘It only does that because Jay put it in.’ I sipped my champagne again.
Jay picked up his champagne and drank some – he watched me intently through his tiny little eyes. ‘I run a very big business.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, but Jay waved his big red hand.
‘Bigger,’ he said. ‘Bigger than you know.’ I said nothing. Jay had a jar down from the shelf and sprinkled a few peppercorns into the champagne. He carefully carried the tray and limping across the tiny kitchen clipped it into the radiant heat vertical grill. He picked up the lobster that he couldn’t bear to kill and waved it at me.
‘The fishmonger sells fish. Right?’ he said, and fixed it to the grill. ‘The wine merchant sells champagne. The French don’t protest at the idea of their champagne leaving France. Right?’
‘Right,’ I said. I was beginning to recognize my cue.
‘You.’ I wondered what I sold. Jay switched on the grill and the lobster, lit bright red on one side by the electric element, began to revolve very very slowly. ‘You,’ said Jay again, ‘sell loyalty.’ He stared at me. ‘I don’t do that: I wouldn’t do it.’ For a moment I thought even Jay thinks I have changed sides, but I realized that it was Jay’s way of talking. He went on, ‘I sell people.’
‘Like Eichmann?’ I asked.
‘I don’t like that sort of joke,’ said Jay like a Sunday-school teacher at the Folies Bergères. Then his face cracked into a little grin. ‘More like Eichelhauer let’s say.’ That was the German name for Jay. Jay, I thought. Garrulus glandarius rufitergum. Jay: egg thief, bully of birds and raider of crops, lurking, cautious Jay who flies in clumsy undulating hops. ‘I deal in talented men exchanging employment of their own free will.’
‘You’re a talent scout from the Kremlin?’ I said.
Jay began to baste the lobster that he didn’t like to kill with the champagne that he didn’t like to drink. He was thinking about what I said. I could see why Jay was such a big success. He took everything at its face value. I still don’t know if Jay thought he was a talent scout from the Kremlin because the wall phone rang in the kitchen. Jay stopped basting long enough to wipe his hands. He listened on the phone. ‘Put him through.’ A pause. ‘Then say I am at home.’ He moved round and fixed me with that basilisk’s stare that people holding phones have. He suddenly said to me, ‘We don’t smoke in the kitchen,’ then, uncupping the phone, ‘This is Maximilian speaking. My dear Henry.’ His face split open in a big smile. ‘I won’t say a word, my dear friend, just carry on. Yes, very well.’ I saw Jay push the ‘scramble’ button. Jay just listened, but his face was like Gielgud doing ‘The Seven Ages of Man’. Finally Jay said, ‘Thanks,’ and he hung up the phone thoughtfully, and began to baste the lobster again.
I puffed my cigarette. Jay watched me but said nothing. I decided the initiative in this conversation had passed to me. ‘Is it time to talk about the head-shrinking factory at Wood Green?’ I asked.
‘Head shrinking?’ Jay asked.
‘Brain Washing Incorporated: the place I jumped out of. Isn’t that what we’re leading up to?’
‘You think that I’m something to do with that?’ his face was 11 A.M. November 11th.
There was a knock on the door and Maurice brought a slip of paper to Jay. I tried to read it, but it was impossible. There may have been about fifty typewritten words there. Maurice left. Then I followed Jay across the big sitting-room. Near the radio and TV was a small machine like a typewriter carriage. It was a paper shredder. Jay fed the sheet in and pressed a button. It disappeared. Jay sat down.
‘Did they treat you badly at Wood Green?’ he said.
‘I was getting to like it,’ I said, ‘but I just couldn’t keep the payments up.’
‘You think it’s terrible.’ It was neither a question nor a statement.
‘I don’t think about it. I get paid to encounter all manner of things. I suppose some of them are terrible.’
‘In the Middle Ages,’ Jay went on as though he hadn’t heard, ‘they thought the cross-bow was the most terrible thing.’
‘That wasn’t because of the weapon itself, but because it threatened their system.’
‘That’s right,’ Jay said. ‘So we let them use the terrible weapon, but only upon Moslems. Right?’
‘That’s right,’ I said; now I was using his lines.
‘What you might call a policy of limited war upon subversive elements,’ Jay told me. ‘Yes, and now we have another terrible weapon; more terrible than nuclear explosions, more terrible than nerve gas, more terrible than the anti-matter bomb. But with this terrible weapon no one gets hurt; is that so terrible?’
‘Weapons aren’t terrible,’ I said. ‘Aeroplanes full of passengers to Paris, bombs full of insecticide, cannons with a man inside at a circus – these aren’t terrible. But a vase of roses in the hands of a man of evil intent is a murder weapon.’
‘My boy,’ said Jay, ‘if brain-washing had come to the world before the trial of Joan of Arc she would have lived to a happy old age.’
I said, ‘Yes, and France would still be full of mercenary soldiers.’
‘I thought you’d like that,’ said Jay. ‘You’re the English patriot.’
I was silent. Jay leaned forward from where he was sitting in the big black-leather armchair. ‘You can’t really believe that the Communist countries are going to collapse, and that this strange capitalist system will march proudly on.’ He tapped my knee. ‘We are both sensible, objective men, with, I think I might say, wide political experience. Neither of us could deny the comfort of it all,’ he stroked the rich leather, ‘but what has capitalism to offer? Its colonies that once were the goose that laid the golden egg, they are vanishing. The goose has found out where to sell the egg. The few places where a reactionary government has suppressed the socialist movement, why, in those places those governments are merely propped up by Fascist force, paid for in Western gold.’
Behind Jay’s voice I could hear the radio playing very quietly. An English jazz singer was even now Gee Whizzing, Waa Waa and Boop boop booping in an unparalleled plethora of idiocy. He noticed that I was listening, and his attack veered. What of the capitalist countries themselves? What of them then, racked with strikes, with mental illness, with insular disregard for their fellow men. On the brink of anarchy, their police beset by bribes, and by roving bands of overfed cowards seeking an outlet for the sadism that is endemic to capitalism, which is in any case licensed selfishness. Who do they pay their big rewards to? Musicians, aviators, poets, mathematicians? No! Degenerate young men who gain fame by not understanding music or having talent for singing. He’d timed his speech well, or he had luck, for he switched the radio across to the Home Service. It was time for the news. He went on talking, but I didn’t hear him. I could only hear the announcer saying. ‘The police are anxious to interview a man seen near the scene of the crime.’ There followed a fairly good description of me.
‘Cut out all this,’ I said to Jay. ‘Who killed Charlie Cavendish?’
Jay got up from his chair and went to look out of the window. He beckoned to me and I went to look out. There were two taxis parked across the street. At the bottom of the street was a single-decker bus. Jay switched on the FM radio, and tuned it to the police wave-length. A police walkietalkie outside the Victoria and Albert Museum was co-ordinating the movements.
‘We all did,’ said Jay. ‘You, me and them.’
One of the three men across the street leaned into the taxi-cab and we heard his voice saying, ‘I’m going across there now – pay particular attention to the back and the roofs. Street blocks! Hold everyone until further notice.’ It was Ross’s voice. The three men came across the road.
Jay turned to me. ‘One of these days, brainwashing will be the acknowledged method of dealing with anti-social elements. Criminals can be brain-washed. I’ve proved it. Nearly 300 people I’ve processed. It’s the greatest step forward of the century.’ He picked up the phone. ‘Maurice, we have callers.’ Jay gave me a broad calm smile. ‘Show them up, but tell them that I am already in custody.’ And I remembered other things about garrulus glandarius rufitergum – alert, tireless, excitable, vociferous, pairs for life, sociable in the spring but solitary at all other times.
Maurice let Ross and the two policemen in, and everyone shook hands with everyone. I’d never been pleased to see Ross before. They were taking no chances and the street blocks were kept in position for another hour. Ross was pretty cool with Jay, and he was searched and taken off to Carshalton, which was a house that Ross’s department owned for purposes unknown. When Jay came in to say good-bye, I noticed he had changed into a very fine grey-green mohair. I was mildly surprised to notice that he had a nuclear disarmament badge in his lapel. He saw me looking at it and removed it and pressed it into my hand without saying a word. Considering the place he was going, he could have given me the TV.
When all the commotion had faded, Ross said, a little patronizingly I thought, ‘And now I suppose you’ve got something that can’t wait another moment.’
I said, ‘I have, if you like homard à la broche,’ and I took him to the kitchen to show him.
Ross made a joke then. He said, ‘Do you come here often?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I know the chef.’
31 (#ulink_b2ae9dfb-7f41-5c89-8521-e9daa38b1a42)
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Joyful renewal of old acquaintance. Throw yourself wholeheartedly into your work.]
It was midnight when I got to Charlotte Street. The whole place was a hive of activity. Alice wore green lisle stockings and asked my permission to use the IBM. Jean wore a new round-necked, sleeveless, button-through tailored dress in tangerine linen, one small gold ear-ring, the one she hadn’t lost, and a centre parting. I gave Alice a list of names, and when she went away I smudged Jean’s lipstick.
All the people arrested were being taken down to Carshalton, and at 3.30 A.M. they were bursting at the seams, so Alice told Ross, and he fixed an alternative detention centre because it was so important to keep all the detainees separate.* (#litres_trial_promo) The IBM went on buzzing and clattering, and at 6 A.M. there was a meeting at Scotland Yard. The police were very worried, but Ross had got one of the 4th Secretaries from the Home Office along there, and then they were even more worried. By 8 o’clock the worst part was over. At 8.9 A.M. Murray, who had arrested Dalby shortly after being hit on the head, phoned from Liphook to say he was holding a man named Swainson, and would I send a car. Swainson, it seemed, was K.K.’s real name. I sent the car and had it drop Jean and myself off for breakfast.
‘A plan to brain-wash the entire framework of a nation,’ said Jean, over the coffee and croissants. ‘It’s hardly credible.’
‘It’s credible all right,’ I told her, ‘and we haven’t entirely eradicated it! I don’t know which was more surprising even now; Dalby working for the other side, or Ross master-minding the whole operation that netted him.’
‘Did Ross know what was happening when he transferred you to WOOC(P)?’ asked Jean.
I said, ‘He half guessed. That was why he put Murray in to spy out the land. When he heard the news of my near arrest in the strip club he let Dalby understand that he was suspicious of him. A very dangerous thing to do. In this case it paid off, for, to prove his loyalty, Dalby did a very efficient job in Lebanon. I remember seeing Ross at the airport when he returned from Beirut after seeing Dalby.
‘To what extent Dalby’s action in the Lebanon was against Jay’s wishes we shall never know, for Dalby made a point of shooting all the people in the car with Raven, you remember.’
Jean said, ‘So Carswell wasn’t such a fool?’
‘He wasn’t,’ I said. ‘Even to the “concens” having fever and Right-wing views – both being conducive to Communist thought reform. Of course, at first, the fact that Carswell’s statistics began to show up the whole plot was a pure coincidence. But as soon as possible, Ross had Carswell hidden away. That was why I could find no trace that he had ever existed through Charlie at C-SICH. Ross was frightened for Carswell’s safety.’
Jean added, ‘To say nothing of the fact that, as things are right now, if Jay says nothing, Carswell might provide the only guide to the extent of operation IPCRESS. By the way is IPCRESS a figure from Greek mythology, the allusion to which I should immediately catch?’
I said, ‘No, it’s a distorted word that one of Ross’s men invented from the words “Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress”, which is a clinical description of what they did in the haunted house.’
‘And what they started to do to you at Wood Green,’ said Jean.
‘Exactly. They had three basic systems. The “haunted house” system, for want of a better word, depended on mental isolation. They used phoney ambassadors to convince the subject that he was completely alone, or phoney policemen (but they dropped the policeman idea after we got the fellow at Shoreditch by accident) – civilian clothes were safer. At Wood Green they even had radiant heating and cooling systems to alter the temperature as often as they wished. Switched lights on and off to give a one-hour-long day or a thirty-six-hour-long night. It was all to throw the mind off balance, and as Pavlov discovered, this is much easier to do to someone physically weak.’
‘What would they have done to you if you hadn’t escaped?’ asked Jean. It was nice to know someone had been worried.
‘Escaped is too strong a word,’ I said. ‘Luckily I had enough information about their methods to make an informed guess. Most of the previous inmates never dreamed that they were still in England. There was no point in getting out of the house only to find yourself thousands of miles behind the Iron Curtain. As to the next stages; the beginning is this severing of connections, a feeling of isolation and physical and mental fatigue and uncertainty; that’s what they started with me. Tension and an uncertainty; about what will please and what won’t please. Any sort of humour is dangerous to the technique. You’ll notice how the American treatment after my arrest on Tokwe, had these same basic characteristics. Well, had I stayed at Wood Green the next stage would most likely have been the memorizing of long passages of dialect. Probably they would have told me to memorize that long document about my trial.’
Jean poured out some more coffee. I was very tired, and just talking about how near I had come to being converted made my throat nervously dry. ‘After that?’ Jean said. She lit a Gauloise and passed it across to me.
‘Group therapy. We know they had five others there at the same time as me. Maybe even more. The tape recordings of moans and groans and talking in sleep in a foreign language must have worked everyone up to a fever pitch, but since it was identical to the tape that Keightley had found, it only encouraged me. Soon there would be group meetings, and we would be allowed to discover that one is an informer, to increase the tension. Then there is the confession and autobiography stage. This is detailed. Things like why you smoked, had love affairs, drank, mixed with certain people.’
‘Had love affairs?’ said Jean.
‘I escaped before that part,’ I said.
‘Now I know why,’ said Jean. ‘It was very sweet of you.’
I drank my coffee. The sun shone brightly in the Soho street below. Large blocks of ice stood outside restaurants and melted into the gutter. A man in a straw boater arranged a large Severn salmon across a wet marble slab. Around it he carefully placed soles and turbot and scallops and flat oysters and portugaises that looked like pieces of rock, and herrings and mackerel, and a fountain of water played over it, and Jean was talking to me. I turned and gave her my full attention.
‘What happened after the mutual confession stage?’
‘You don’t have an ulterior motive?’ I asked.
‘Oh, every woman understands brain-washing. It’s letting a husband get furious about a new hat and then knowing when to ask him to pay for it. Just when he starts to feel guilty.’
‘You don’t know how right you are,’ I said. ‘The whole process is one of discovering weaknesses; preferably the subjects find their own. Self-criticism, etc. Then the third phase is using the information so far gained to create what is technically called “abreaction”. This is caused by intense mental work, indoctrination by meetings. In fact by overwork and stress, and is the culmination of all brain-washing. Abreaction is the point of no return.’
‘How do you know when you’ve reached it?’ asked Jean.
‘You know all right – it’s a complete nervous collapse. Dilated pupils, rigid body, the skin goes clammy with perspiration. You feel you can’t get your breath, you breathe in and out very quickly, but not deeply at all. That’s just the beginning; after that, there’s continuous sobbing hysterics, complete loss of control. In World War One it was called “shell shock”, in World War Two, “battle fatigue”. As soon as abreaction hits one of your group, the others soon topple – one after the other they are hooked.’
‘You said there were three basic systems,’ said Jean. ‘You’ve told me only one.’
I said, ‘Oh, did I? I didn’t mean that the systems were different – only the way the one system was applied. The haunted house was the first sort. Then Jay thought of using small private nursing homes – less conspicuous, you see, and no need for all the building work – or the conversion back to normal before they moved out again. It was the nursing home aspect that Carswell found with his “concens”; do you remember the description he gave us? The fever rate was high because that is the best physical debility to prepare one for brain-washing.’
‘You mean that they were deliberately given fever, then whipped into one of these nursing homes?’ Jean said.
‘The other way round,’ I told her. ‘They were brought in, then given fever.’
‘Injected with it?’ Jean asked.
‘Apparently medical science still uses mosquitoes. They strap a glass cup on the skin and the mosquitoes bite. That’s when it’s needed to give a patient fever; it’s pretty rare nowadays.’ Jean didn’t wrinkle her nose or say ‘how awful’ when I got to the mosquito bit and I appreciated that.
‘The fever speeded things up,’ Jean said.
I agreed, ‘It certainly did, which led to the third system. This was to create this breakdown …’
‘Abreaction?’
‘Yes, this abreaction. To create it by drugs alone; what doctors call a pharmacological shock. It’s done by injecting lots of insulin into the blood stream; this lowers the sugar in the blood, and very soon you have the same twitches and convulsions that one sees in abreaction – shouting and sobbing and finally collapse into a deep coma. Later they gave intravenous sugar.’
‘Why didn’t they do that to you?’ asked Jean. ‘Why didn’t you go to one of their nursing homes?’
‘I do believe you still have doubts about me.’ Jean laughed nervously, but it went home. ‘That was my big worry, I can tell you, but it’s tricky; they needed the man who had experience, but he was deeply involved at the place in Scotland. Luckily he couldn’t be in two places at once. Plus the fact that the older system is more thorough, and I was considered difficult.’
‘You can say difficult again,’ said Jean. ‘But I’m still not sure if I understand even now. You mean, after this brain-washing, these people, these “concens”, went back to work but were really working as Russian agents, their convictions totally reversed?’
I said, ‘No. It’s far more complex than that. Everything revolves round Jay, really; to understand IPCRESS you must understand Jay. Jay has spent his life amidst changing political scenes. Here in England it’s easy for us to have allegiance to a government that has stayed pretty constant since the Stuart restoration; but Jay has seen governments come and go too often to place too much reliance on them. He remembers the Tsars; government by ignorance; Paderewski, government by gentle pianist; Pilsudski, the general who won the brilliant battle of Warsaw in 1920, and smashed the new Soviet Armies under Voroshilov. He remembers the dictator who seized power by shouting “This is a whorehouse, all get out!” to Parliament. He remembers the government who followed Hitler’s example in 1938 by grabbing a piece of Czechoslovakia by force. He remembers the Nazis, and then, after the war, the protégés of London and Moscow fighting each other for power. Jay has come through all these changes like a plastic duck going over Niagara – by floating along with the current. He has sold information. Information from Klaus Fuchs in Britain, Alan Nunn May in Canada, and the Rosenbergs in the US. Then he graduated to kidnapping and arranging that Otto John from West Germany, the Italian physicist, Bruno Pontecorvo, and Burgess and Maclean should travel eastward. But always for money. He would have sent them equally willingly to anyone who named the right price. Then one day, perhaps while he was shaving, an idea hit him; he would brain-wash a network of well-placed men, and all of them would clear their information through Jay. They would be loyal to Jay personally. Jay knew enough about psychiatry to know that it was possible (and let’s not forget that it’s been working very well for nearly a year), and he knew that it would make us all “trigger happy”, suspicious of everyone once we got on to it.’
I ordered some more coffee and phoned Charlotte Street to see if there were any cables for me, but there was nothing fresh. I went back to Jean.
‘What was that water tank that you mentioned in the “haunted house” report?’ she asked.
‘Yes, the water tank. I should have perhaps said four ways because that was for another system. You mask the subject’s eyes and fit him with breathing apparatus, then suspend him face down in a tank of blood-heat water. At first he sleeps; when he awakes he is completely disorientated and subject to anxiety and hallucination. You choose the right moment and begin to feed him information …’
‘Hence the tape recorder.’
‘Exactly …’
‘It’s a quick way of brain-washing then?’
‘It is, but they discontinued it, so it probably wasn’t so sensational.’
‘And they didn’t use TAP* (#litres_trial_promo) either,’ Jean said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘and I didn’t know you’d read that report.’
‘Yes, Alice gave it to me to read last night. There were some mentions in a Norwegian medical journal which I translated for her.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that’s all right then.’
‘Alice said you’d say that.’ Before I could say anything, Jean continued, ‘This brain-washing …’
