CHAPTER SIXTEEN

            Katie and David looked at each other in amazement.
            “What do you mean he’s not dead?” asked Katie. “He died eleven years ago in Moscow.”
            Lentov was still smiling. “And who told you that?”
            David, bewildered and a little flushed, stuttered, “Why, why all the, y’ know, newspapers back then. All the obituaries.”
            “Ah, yes,” said Lentov. “But did you ever see a report in the Russian newspapers or media about Philby dying?”
            Katie and David said they didn’t know one way or the other.
            “If you look back at what happened,” said Lentov, finishing the last of his pint, “you’ll find that the western press heard—from supposedly reliable sources—that Philby had passed away. They didn’t know when or how or where, and it was days before the Russians acknowledged the report was true.”
            “So, you’re saying the Russians are hiding the fact he is still alive?” asked David.
            “Well, they certainly never reported any details on his purported death. And my own sources—I still have a few—tell me that Kim is still alive, not too well, still living in that wretched flat in Moscow. I don’t doubt it for a moment.”
            “But why would the Russians lie about his death?” asked Katie.
            Lentov rose from the banquette, buttoned his jacket and said, “I have to assume it was easier to finally put the old man to rest, so to speak, and not to have to explain what had happened to him, where he was, etcetera. He had been so long out of the spotlight, the Cold War was over, he’d published his memoirs and MI6 certainly had no interest in bringing him back to England and stirring up all the old embarrassments to the service. Better forgotten for everyone concerned. Philby probably agreed to the dodge. He was probably deliriously happy about fooling everyone one last time.”
            The old Russian walked slowly to the door of the pub, with Katie and David speechless behind him. The sky had gone gray, threatening the kind of cold drizzle that Lentov hated more than a good soaking. The cold was nothing to a Russian but the drizzle got into his bones.
            Katie looked at David as if to say, what do we do now? David spoke first. “Mr. Lentov, do you think there is any possible way we could get to see Philby for an interview?”
            Lentov had expected the question, saying, “It might have been easier right after the Soviet Union collapsed. There was a sense of euphoria, even if it was based on the false hopes of those who didn’t know Russian history. Without a strong man at the top, Russians have no history of nation building. Yeltsin is a pig and a fool and a drunk.  But in those first days, there might have been an opportunity for a journalist to enter Russia quite freely and poke his nose around.  Now, it might not be so easy.”
            “Why not?” asked Katie.
            “The whole country is collapsing, so the government needs to hide the deep corruption that has allowed former bureaucrats and K.G.B. operatives to become stinking rich. Philby may be forgotten, but he will not be allowed an endgame.  Getting to him would be difficult.”
            Lentov ran through recent Russian history, saying there had been a great deal of power shifting at the top. With his support foundering and the economy in disarray, President Yeltsin needed to consolidate his position, and after a disastrous crop failure in 1998, he fired Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov (once head of Russian intelligence) and installed Sergei Stepashin (also a former head of the K.G.B.’s replacement, the F.S.B.) as prime minister, then fired him two months later.  In Stepashin’s place Yeltsin nominated an up-and-coming politician named Vladimir Putin (another former head of the F.S.B.), declaring that one day Putin would succeed him as President of Russia. 
The name Putin rang a loud bell in Katie and David’s heads, for during their Vermeer investigations Putin had been suspected of having been involved in the attempted assassination of a Russian oligarch.
            “I never knew Putin,” said Lentov. “After my time. But my friends tell me he is extremely devious and very dangerous. Let us take a walk to the park before it rains.”
            Southall Park was nearby. The three of them walked slowly, Lentov continuing to talk. He explained that when Russia opened up to the world in 1991, the new regime had encouraged foreign journalists to cover their achievements and to see how free their country had become. Even the Communist propaganda paper Pravda had broken into two entities, one free of party control. Not for the first time in its history, Russia turned West, believing its culture shared more with Europe than Asia.
            But before long the goals of the new regime led by Yeltsin disintegrated along with the economy and Russia’s military, which was bankrupt and unable to keep up with the advances in the West. Parity with the United States was neither achievable nor even advisable.      
    “The old oligarchs and the new oligarchs are the same people,” said Lentov, “all the old K.G.B. clan who knew where all the bodies were buried and what was still in all the old files. They used it all to become wealthy, more and more from gas, oil and minerals, especially Putin. He is that strong man Russians always embrace to salvage a shred of dignity.”
            Katie and David saw that Lentov had strayed from the topic of Philby in favor of sounding prophetic, as if his opinions still mattered to anyone outside of Southall. David tried to get him back on track, saying, “So, you don’t think there is any way for us to get to Philby, now that the regime has changed?”
            Lentov tilted his head this way and that.
            “Well, getting into Russia is not the problem these days,” he said. “And, unless Philby is living somewhere else, I do have his old address.”
            The openness of Lentov to tell Katie and David such astonishing information—barely an hour after they’d met—was more than puzzling. How could this former Soviet agent, now living in disgrace, simply blurt out a statement that contradicted everything that had ever been written about the Philby case? And now he was giving them the man’s address?
            David nodded to Katie, to say “You ask him.”
            Katie, not hiding her skepticism, asked, “Mr. Lentov, why are you willing to tell us all this? Are you saying you never shared this information with MI6 or anyone in the British government and that you, and you alone, knew that Philby was still alive.”
            Lentov put his arm around Katie’s shoulder, but she drew away.
          “I hear from my friend Southey that you are both very good investigators,” said the Russian. “And I’m well aware, David, you would never accept anything I say at face value.”
            David stood there stone-faced.
            “Why should you?” Lentov continued. “Once a liar always a liar, eh? It was my profession. Obfuscation. Disinformation. Betraying confidences. Surely you ran across men like me in the Mafia. I won’t go into the moral differences between the Mafia and intelligence agents, but there is a point—you know this, David—when some men become sick of the game and need to escape the pit of lies they live in. It was not at all difficult for me to go over to the British. My career was ending, my life would be uneventful but somewhat secure, even in Southall. As Moscow is to Philby.”
            Katie and David were becoming impatient, hearing Lentov’s explanation as little more than a defense of his treason.
            “You haven’t answered my question,” said Katie. “If you felt you needed some kind of . . . redemption, why didn’t you report what you knew about Philby to the authorities?”
            “Ah, redemption!,” said the old Russian, raising his hands to the skies in mock ecstasy. “I assume from your Italian name, Katie, you are a Catholic, and you, too, David. Or raised as ones. So, all your lives you have feared your sins will plunge you into a hell of fire and eternal torment. No matter how far you have fallen from religion, you can’t escape that fear, can you? I was born Russian Orthodox—though I could never practice it under communism. Still, we Russians share the same sense of sin and guilt. But, when we die, the good and the bad both enter into the presence of God for eternity. The good enjoy everlasting awe and are consumed by God’s love. But the bad will suffer eternally from the absence of God’s love. No fire, no devils, no pitchforks.”
            Katie’s mind was now racing with all she knew about Graham Greene’s conflicted views of guilt, sin and Catholicism, so much of them imbedded in his fictional characters.
            David knew the Russian was drifting again, and said, “Lentov, just tell us why you are giving us this information. It can’t be as simple as saying nobody ever asked you.”
            Lentov laughed. “That’s part of it. I was not the only one who knew about Philby, and many others suspected it. I am not telling you anything MI6 hasn’t known for years. Like so much that is kept classified years after it ceases to matter, Philby’s life-after-death was swept into a file and stored somewhere. The current generation at MI6 couldn’t care less. Journalists might, but MI6 sees Philby as only a scab on their honor that they don’t want to see ripped off to bleed again. Can you understand that?”
            David consented that he did, having himself seen many cases in New York that were closed not for lack of evidence but for fear of exposing certain powerful people to scrutiny. The more years that passed the safer such people felt, and detectives up to their asses in current caseloads couldn’t have cared less.
            The three came to a park bench and Lentov sat down, looking at the increasingly dark sky.
            “My joints will ache tonight.”
            Katie and David had no time or place to confer with one another, so, knowing that a person being interrogated yet desperate to tell a tale cannot bear silence, they both simply waited for Lentov to speak.
            “So,” he said, “If you want Philby’s address, you can do with it whatever you wish. I have no way to contact him. Maybe he is dead by now. He would be in his eighties. MI6 has no interest in my corroborating what they already know. But as someone not treated as I expected to be by my handlers on either side, I would be very happy if Philby’s story had an endgame in which he achieves at least a draw.”
            Katie said, “All right, Mr. Lentov. I’m not saying I believe everything you’ve told us, or the reasons you did, but if you want to give us that address, we will follow up as best we can.”
            Lentov, feeling the first drops of rain on his eyelashes, said, “Good, let’s go back to my flat and I shall give you the address and phone number. I myself would like to know once and for all if Kim Philby is alive or dead.”
            The three of them walked back to Lentov’s flat, three rooms, barely furnished, smelling faintly like the pub—beer and curry—one wall full of books in English, French and Russian. Some poor, murky prints of Degas’s ballerinas were propped on the shelves.
            Lentov went to his bedroom and came back with a slip of paper on which he’d just written an address and phone number.
            “Memorize this, then destroy it,” he said, amused that he sounded like the spy he once was. “Oh, you don’t have to eat and swallow it.”
            Katie and David thanked the man for his time and promised to report back to him whatever they found, one way or the other.
            “As I mentioned,” Lentov said at the doorway, “You can still get into Moscow fairly easily, but watch your step after that.”
            Katie asked, “You think we’d be in some danger then?”
            Lentov answered, “I don’t know the new Russia, or how the F.S.B. looks upon journalists searching for dead English spies. You tell me when you return.”
            Katie and David’s train ride back to London was spent largely in silence, both of them running everything they’d heard through their heads, waiting to get somewhere away from people where they could talk.
            “So what’s our next step?” asked David.
            “I'll call Alan. If Kim Philby’s alive, he will send us anywhere we need to go, even if he doesn’t care anything about Harry Lime.”