I hadn’t expected it to be quite so easy, but Maugham had not exaggerated. The fireplace was like a large microphone and already I could hear the plummy sound of Guy Burgess speaking on tape. I didn’t know it yet, but by sending me up there Maugham had effectively saved my life.

TWENTY-FIVE

The Paris Bureau of the Comintern introduced me to all sorts of interesting people, many of them sympathetic Englishmen, such as Claud Cockburn and John Cairncross. Meanwhile, Arnold Deutsch took me out to dinner with all sorts of strange folk, not all of them obvious recruitment material. People who had no languages. People who hadn’t even been to university. Some of them were downright dull. Not to say stupid. I remember a very uninspiring young English salesman recently returned from China, where he’d been working for a tobacco company. I mean, this chap hadn’t even been to university, let alone Cambridge. All he could talk about was tobacco and the Chinese and about some awful bloody girl he’d married back in Somerset. And I remember thinking, what’s the point of trying to recruit a chap to the cause who’s going to be happily married and selling cigarettes? Are the Russians so desperate for spies that we’re willing to fund the local tobacconists? Not that he took Arnold’s ruble, so to speak. Anyway, ours not to reason why and all that rot.”

Then someone—Sinclair, I assumed—turned off the tape and walked around for a moment. His stout English shoes on the stone flags sounded almost military, which they probably were.

“Well?” said Reilly. “Why all the flap? I must say you are looking very excited about something all of a sudden.”

“I am,” said Sinclair. “I’ve had this itch after I heard that remark Burgess made about China. So I scratched it.”

“And, what?”

“I called the office and had one of my chaps telephone someone at MI5 who owes us a favor. And he did some deep checking in the personnel files at Leconfield House. Formerly the Ardath Tobacco Company, British American Tobacco’s most popular brand in China was State Express 555. In June nineteen thirty-seven, prior to his wedding in July the same year, and at Wells Cathedral no less, BAT appointed a new assistant foreign manager to sell State Express to the chinks. But almost as soon as he arrived in Shanghai, in August nineteen thirty-seven, the Japanese army invaded the city and BAT’s new assistant foreign manager was obliged to abandon his nice new villa in the Bund and skedaddle home to London, via Paris.” Sinclair paused for dramatic effect. “That man was none other than our own dear friend Roger Hollis.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Reilly. “You’re not serious.”