“They’re not whores. They’re cruel because the world we live in has made them that way. Women choose to be whores because it’s just easier to take money from a man than to make some themselves.”

I shrugged. “Who can you trust? Not anyone, maybe. Not the British, that’s for sure. Certainly none of those characters downstairs. And especially not Sir Lancelot and his squire.” Momentarily I thought of Anne and felt better knowing that at least there was a sense of trust building between us.

“All right, what else did those bastards say?” he asked.

“Right now they seem to think that Guy Burgess may have accidentally revealed the existence of a spy at the very top of MI5—one they didn’t know about.”

“You’re joking.”

I told him all I’d heard about Roger Hollis at MI5 and how Reilly and Sinclair suspected that, like Guy Burgess, he, too, had been recruited by the Russians in the thirties.

“Roger Hollis? Never heard of him,” said Maugham.

“In my experience, it’s no good being a spy if people know your name.”

“I take your point. Although I am the living proof of the opposite argument. On and off I’ve been a British spy for as long as I’ve been a writer. And the more famous I’ve become the more effective a spy I’ve been.”

He came around the desk, sat down beside me on the sofa, and patted me on the knee. Not that I minded. He meant it kindly.

“Another spy, eh?” he said. “If this gets out the British can say good-bye to the ‘special relationship.’ Burgess and Maclean were one thing. But this is something much worse. A spy at the top of MI5 is nothing short of a catastrophe. Hoover would have a heart attack at the very idea.”

“That was certainly the tenor of the conversation I just overheard.”

“They’d have to purge everyone in the British intelligence community. MI5 and MI6, from top to bottom. If it’s true. You said it’s only suspected that this chap Hollis is a spy.”

“Look, I was certainly convinced even if Patrick Reilly wasn’t. Not that either man impressed me as particularly good at his job. In my opinion, civil servants make the worst kind of spies. To people like Sinclair and Reilly, it’s just a schoolboy game. A way of moving up the Whitehall ladder and getting a knighthood. But you can’t win that way. The British are at war with the Russians but they don’t know the Russians at all. Not as a people. That’s bad. They think the Russians are just an ideology. But they’re much more than that. I know. I spent almost two years of my life in a Soviet labor camp.”