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                                                                                     By John Mariani

Photos by Seth Kaplan

          “How many English language papers could there be in Bangkok?” David asked Katie.
         “I can’t imagine many,” she said. “I could ask Boyer or Spollen.”
         A quick phone call revealed that there were only two possible Bangkok newspapers Pogue might be writing for—the Nation and The Bangkok Post; the latter had by far the larger circulation with more widespread coverage of everything from business to books. Katie checked the time difference between Bangkok and London. London was seven hours behind. It was then two p.m. in London, so Katie thought it would be better to call the paper the next morning at about seven or eight.
   

    “What exactly do you think this guy Pogue can tell you?” asked David over dinner.
    "I hope more than we know about Toth," she said. “I’m hoping he’ll reveal something useful to us, something he might know about Philby that we don’t and will help me convince Alan to approve our going to Hungary.”
         “Don’t we already know all we need to know about Philby?” asked David, thinking that they should be preparing to track down Harold Neame.  Get a good night’s sleep. I’ll call the paper in the morning and let you know what, if anything, I find out.”

         Katie got a direct contact number of an editor from Tom Spollen for the news desk at the Bangkok Post. Her first two attempts got her a recording, both in English and Thai. Third time, at about two o’clock Bangkok time, she reached an editor named Horn, who told her that Pogue was a writer for the paper but didn’t have a desk there.
         “He usually checks in a few times a week,” said Horn. “I can have him call you if you give me a number. Can I tell him what this is about?”
         Katie explained she was a journalist for McClure’s on a story Pogue might be able to help her with. Horn said he’d pass on the message.
         Katie hoped that Pogue could reach her cell phone anywhere but worried that the international connections might be iffy in Budapest. She’d much prefer to have more ammo for Alan Dobell.
         In the meantime, while David checked out flights and hotels in Budapest, Katie was trying to decide how she’d get her boss into paying for the trip.  She’d already gotten a message from him asking why she was still in London. When she got no word from Pogue by that evening Katie began thinking of packing and planning her next move.
         Then, the next morning her phone rang, a voice saying, “Hello, this is Jonathan Pogue. I’m trying to reach Katie Cavuto of McClure’s magazine.”
         With David in the room, Katie put her phone on speaker and responded, thanking Pogue for calling back and asked if he wanted her to call him back on her phone bill.
e said in British accent that seemed  dulled by years away from England. “Just tell me what this is all about. I’ve got to be on a plane in three hours.”
         Katie had told her story so many times by then that she had it down to a brief patter, edited for the specific person she was speaking to.  She told Pogue her own background and how David and she had been trying to research the Harry Lime story, got to interview the Philbys and were booted out of Moscow.
         “You got off bloody easy,” said Pogue. “That little caper cost me five years of my life in a fuckin’ freezing Soviet gulag. I never did try to connect Philby with Lime. Too farfetched. But before I answer any more of your questions, I have several for you."
         Pogue wanted to know how Katie and David had found out Philby was still alive and living in Moscow, how they got in to see him, and if they were sure the people in the apartment were really the Philbys.  Katie answered his questions—leaving out Lentov—and insisting that she was sure they’d seen the Philbys. She then described the circumstances of how she and David were escorted out of Russia, but she withheld the information about meeting the MI6 men in London.
   “And just how did you find me?” he asked. “After I got out of prison I thought I’d been pretty good keeping out of sight until the last few years here in Bangkok.”
        "I was able to get in touch with your ex-fiancée, Peggy.”
         There was a long silence on the line, Katie thinking the connection had broken up, then Pogue said, “How is Peggy, if you know?”
         “She’s fine. She got married, has two kids. She believes you are dead.”
         “And did you tell her otherwise?”
         “Not yet. I thought if you and I spoke, you’d tell me if you want me to or not.”
         “Peggy was a great girl, love of my life and all that. But even if I hadn’t been arrested by the Russians, I doubt it would have worked out, with me flying all over the world.  Typical of our profession, eh? You married, Cavuto?"
         “No, and I understand what you’re saying.”
         David chimed in on the speaker phone. “Mr. Pogue, this is David Greco. I’m helping Katie with her investigation. What I wanted to ask you was why you never went back to London when you got out of, I think it was Perm 36?”
         Pogue exploded. “How the bloody hell do you know all this about me? Where’d you get all your information? Did Philby tell you?”
         “No, Katie and I never heard of you until we got back to London.”
         Katie said, “I think you might know the two journalists I spoke with—Christopher Boyer at the Times and Thomas Spollen at The Guardian? They recalled you wrote for their papers on occasion.”
         “Boyer and Thomas, eh? I suppose they’re still sitting on their fat arses at their desks? So they knew about my going off to Moscow?”
         “No,” said Katie, “they just had some info in their files that you had disappeared without any more contact. Apparently Peggy’s phone number was in your file.”
         “Well, my Philby story would have blown the fuckin’ roof off both those papers, but they didn’t see fit to assign me. Said unless I had a source or two that confirmed my belief that Philby was still alive, then fuck me. I went off on my own.”
         “So you didn’t have a source to back up your hunch?”
         “No, but the announcement of Philby’s death seemed to me much too pat. The Soviets did it all the time. Someone no one had given a bloody thought to in a while suddenly shows up dead, thanks to the Soviets. In the case of Philby, after he’d written those phony memoirs, he was better off dead, at least to the world, so the Russians took their time announcing he had died, and that was that. I suspected otherwise. I used some contacts to get into Russia and went from there. The Philbys’ address was not a secret by then. Kim was said to be buried in a plot in the graveyard, but that meant nothing. Probably an empty grave or they tossed in some murdered dissident. There's a big marble slab with Philby's name on it. Ha, it’s the only part of the Philby-Lime stories that have anything in common.”
         David asked, “So you just knocked on their door and got in?”
         “I had a bigger set of balls back then,” said Pogue. “But the labor camp diet whittled them down a good deal. Now I just cover local news for the English-speaking readers in Bangkok. I’ve even managed to stay clear of writing about the royal family, which could get me fucking arrested just as easily as my snooping around Moscow.” 
      “So you knocked on the door and . . .”
      “The landlady came down and tried to shoo me off, but then Philby’s wife appeared. The fact I was a Brit somehow softened her up. She said her husband would enjoy speaking to a fellow countryman after so many years. She took me upstairs, and there he was, big as life, and acting very, very British indeed.”
        “You say acting?” asked Katie.
        “Meaning he was trying to sound like the old Cambridge graduate he had once been. Slipped right into the sound of it."
         “So you don’t have any reason to believe you were actually interviewing two actors, then?”
         “Oh, that pile of horseshit! After I was arrested—it happened the next day as I was planning to get my arse out of Moscow—I was told I had stupidly interviewed two actors who were living in the Philbys’ flat. They said I’d fallen for their ruse. Of course, I knew it was bollocks.”
    "So they arrested you but didn’t extradite you back to London, as they did with David and me?”
     “No, Miss Cavuto, they did not. Remember, this was a year before the fuckin’ Soviet Union blew up in their faces. They probably knew it was coming, so they were already covering tracks in case glasnost really came to Old Mother Russia. They could hardly allow me to fly back to London and spill the Philby story to the world. So, they tried me in a Soviet court—the trial lasted one afternoon—and threw my arse in jail with the rest of their political prisoners.”
         “And the British embassy didn’t try to get you out?” asked David.
         “I have to assume the fuckers did their absolute least to do so. At first they probably didn’t know where the fuck I was, but after the Soviet Union disintegrated they must have known.”
        "Actually,” said David, “they did.”
         “Fuckers. And you ask me why I didn’t return to England after they left me to rot in that hellhole of a prison? Right now I wish I had been a spy and been turned by the Russians. But I had nothing to give them. They just wanted me out of sight and mind, and when I got out they asked me where I’d like a one-way ticket to.”
         “Where’d you go?” asked Katie.
        "I wanted somewhere there was no post-colonial British presence. So I chose Bangkok, and inside of a month, I started freelancing for the Post here.  Turned into steady work. I’m a man without a country and bloody happy to be one."
         “And you never tried to publish the Philby story?”
         “On the basis of what? A one-hour interview with two old fuckers in the Philbys’ flat? Who was going to pick up on that idea? No, I guess I’ll have to leave that scoop to you two Americans. Hope you blow the Brits’ bloody doors off. Create a big scandal! Roll some of their fuckin’ heads right down Downing Street.”
         “I don’t suppose you have any of your notes from the Philby interview?” asked Katie.
         “Christ, no. They took everything off me, even went up my arse. More than once.”
          Katie had pretty much run out of questions. She felt wholly emboldened by what Pogue had corroborated and asked if she could use his story in McClure’s.
        "Sure, and flash it under Boyer’s and Spollen’s noses. Tell them they could have had the story ten years ago.”
         “Last question,” said David. “Did Kim Philby ever mention the name Harold Neame to you?”
         Pogue thought for a moment, then said, “No, not Philby.  But I do recall hearing about a Brit named Neame who somehow became a big drug czar in, I think, Hungary.”
         Katie and David looked at each other, their mouths open.
         “Where did you hear about Neame and what did you hear?”
         “You hear a lotta horseshit in prison, but there was an English-speaking Hungarian prisoner—came in a year or two before I got there—who was apparently arrested for trying to expose or sue a guy he said was a partner in a drug company, a Brit named Neame, who had screwed him out of millions of dollars or whatever the fuck they use in Hungary. I recall him saying Neame dropped that name years ago and had taken on a Hungarian alias. That’s all I remember hearing.”
         “So this guy was put in a Soviet prison in connection with trying to sue Harold Neame?” asked David. “Do you know what happened to him?”
         “Yeah. He died in that cesspool of a prison. Pneumonia, I think. Medical care was almost non-existent in there. Barely had any penicillin.”
         “Before or after the USSR crumbled?”
        “Well, let’s see, I think it was just around the time the whole bloody thing cracked apart. But he died before they started releasing anyone like me from Perm 36. So how do you two know Neame and what’s the connection?”
         Katie told Pogue how Philby wanted to once and for all distance his name from Harry Lime’s and all that drug selling business, leaving Katie and David a clue as to who really inspired Greene to invent Lime.
         “We suspect it’s Harold Neame, now named Gorgo Toth, one of the biggest pharmaceutical magnates in Eastern Europe.”
         “Well, that is feasible, I suppose,” said Pogue. “Since I wasn’t hunting for Harry Lime the subject never came up when I met with Philby.  But good luck with your work, Cavuto.  Let me know how it comes out. I’ve got to catch a plane to Chiang Mai to do a story on fish farming. Quite a departure from interviewing Kim Philby.”
             Katie and David were thinking the same thing.
             “So, Pogue,” said Katie, sounding more familiar, “Do you want me to contact Peggy for you? What would you want me to tell her?”  
            Pogue said, “Nah, but you’ve made me think I do owe her a call, let her know I’m alive and happy for her."
             After hanging up, David asked, “Well, you think that’ll convince Dobell to send us to Budapest?”
             Katie shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ll make the strongest case for it. I think this interview with Pogue will fit nicely into our story, which will give me some leverage with Alan. I’ll call him soon as he gets into the office.”
             Dobell listened carefully to Katie’s update and said, “It sounds like you’ve gone on one wild goose chase after another on this story. Hell, I’m not even sure what the story is anymore. Philby alive. Harry Lime not found. Hungarian drug millionaire—who apparently has nothing to do with Philby—may be Harry Lime. This has become a crap shoot, Katie.”
          “Yeah, Alan, but so far the dice have rolled pretty much in our favor.”
         There was a pause on the line, then an audible sigh, then, “Ah, what the hell, go to Budapest, but on one condition: You have an interview with this Neame guy all set up, day and hour, before you going flying off to Hungary. Deal?”
         “Deal. And if I can’t get that, David and I will pay our own way, and if it works out to be a story, you can re-emburse us.”
         “Just get a confirmed appointment to see Neame, then call me. This is getting expensive.”
         “I understand, but just so I can move on this as quickly as possible, can you overnight a McClure’s letter of assignment requesting an interview with Toth to him and one to me? Just say McClure’s wants to interview him as a captain  of his industry for a special issue of the magazine about Eastern Europe. Make it vague.”
         Dobell agreed, and Katie gave him the address of Toth’s company.  She then changed the subject by talking about Boyer and Spollen sending their regards.  She didn’t mention the price of the lunch at Wilton’s.

Audarya Camminera Vermentino di Sardegna 2020 : (3 stars). Sardinia, Italy, $24. "The overall impression is texture, as if the evening breeze off the Mediterranean caressed your cheek with its breath of salt and limestone, whispering a memory of the peach you ate earlier in the day, ripe and juicy with summer’s warmth."—Dave McIntyre, "Perspective," WAPO (7/23/23)