Read The Spy Game for Free Online Page A

time when they arrived in England in 1955, they had acquired the skills to
     run their own spy cell, learnt radio operation and the making of microdots, learnt to set up a convincing cover as antiquarian
     booksellers, learnt to be the Krogers.
    How did it feel to do that? Perhaps it was easier than it seemed. Perhaps you simply took up the role and smiled in it. You
     walked out and went to the shops in it, and gradually you became it or it became you.
    Or you wake in a hotel room in a distant city and shake off the sleep and remember, this is who you will be, and dress and
     go down the stairs and make yourself whoever it is as you eat your foreign breakfast.
    Perhaps it began to happen with the first response from the outside, the trust of a stranger, the first making of a friend.
     And what then? After a day, a week, a year, a life set up as someone else? Who were you then? Who were the Cohens, or Krogers,
     when they were alone? Who were they to each other? Was Peter Kroger the same man all through as Morris Cohen, the Bronx boy
     who won a sports scholarship to the University of Mississippi? He had kept Cohen's fitness and physique, an enthusiasm for
     sport that had transmuted into a love of cricket, and presumably Cohen had shared the same easy charm, though his hair had
     not been such a distinguished grey. And Helen? When the case was over it was known that Helen was Lona but that was even harder
     for those who had thought them-selves their friends to accept, for Helen had seemed so convincingly and warmly herself. Perhaps
     the different passports stood for nothing and she was one person after all, and a friend of Leontina Petka as she had been,
     the daughter of Polish immigrants to America, would be equally a friend of Helen the New Zealand housewife?
    I put down room key and guidebook on a table and go and dither before the hotel buffet. Other guests nod to me as I pass.
     Perhaps they guess that I am English. I can be whatever woman they see. I nod back, knowing they know nothing of who I am
     inside.
    There was a suggestion that the deception was hard for Helen. It came out in the course of the trial that people remembered
     her from the time when the Krogers had lived in Catford, before they moved to the bungalow at Ruislip. Women neighbours saw
     that she used to cry a lot. She would cry alone in the house and when she came out her eyes would show it. They assumed, knowing
     (as they thought) the sort of person she was, that the sadness in her life was that the couple had no children. It was a flaw
     in the Helen Kroger story, the thing that neighbours noted, and talked about, and pitied her for: the lack of the thing that
     rooted a woman, gave her purpose in that suburban daytime world.
    Yet why did she have no children? Was that too a part of the job?
    The woman who spoke in court never once appeared to diverge from character. She may have converted the bathroom in the Ruislip
     bungalow into a temporary dark-room for the developing of photographs and the making of microdots, but when she spoke she
     spoke as a housewife, so normal, so true to type, that other women who heard her could not help feeling that she was one of
     them. She liked the man Lonsdale, she said, Lonsdale who was arrested two hours before her at Waterloo, because he was helpful
     in the house. He brought in coal and helped her with the washing up, and sometimes he helped her with her hobby of photography.
     It rang true. Peter Kroger, by the sound of him, probably spent his Sundays doing the crossword or watching the cricket or
     deep in his books. Who wouldn't have appreciated a charming younger man like that as a weekend guest? It made spying such
     a homely sort of a thing.
    Then there was the moment of her arrest, when Helen had asked one favour before leaving the house: 'As I am going out for
     some time may I go and stoke the boiler in the kitchen?' She spoke in character, even then, and the only oddity of it was
     that she