The third visitor from London seemed to belong at the Villa Mauresque in a way Sinclair and Reilly could never have done. Obviously homosexual, Anthony Blunt was about fifty, tall, as thin as a Giacometti bronze figure, with a shock of boyishly combed gray hair and the look of a man who had just tasted a rather indifferently blended sherry. He wore an open-necked white shirt with short sleeves as, unlike the other two, he had removed his jacket since it was a very warm evening. The deep laugh lines around his slit of a mouth were in frequent use. His dry sense of humor was deployed often and he struck me as a man both charming and highly intelligent, albeit deeply untrustworthy. The idea that this man had ever been a spy in MI5 seemed preposterous, but he didn’t look like a blackmailer and I quickly discounted the idea that he might be in cahoots with Hebel to extort money from Maugham. I doubt he could have demanded his morning newspaper with any real menace. He, too, was making copious notes, and when we’d finished listening to the tape for the first time it was Blunt who spoke. His voice was probably as familiar to the English Queen as her own, and I assumed it was probably the way she herself spoke.

“I think the answer to the most obvious question right now—is this Guy Burgess speaking on the tape?—is categorically yes; in my opinion, it is. The details and dates he gives of his early life are, of course, accurate. As is the code name of the Swiss source he was running for MI5 back in nineteen forty-four: Orange. Only Guy and one or two others, including myself, would have known that name. Known, too, that poor Orange did indeed meet a sticky end with the Gestapo in Trier. That’s one thing in favor of this tape’s authenticity. And here’s another, which is paradoxically confirmation by way of a perverse delusion, it being Guy’s perverse delusion, of course.