Codename Edith

Edith Suschitzky merits only one mention in Ben MacIntyre’s masterful biography of double agent Kim Philby. ‘Philby’s introduction to Deutsch appears to have been arranged by Edith Tudor-Hart … Edith married an English doctor and fellow communist called Alexander Tudor-Hart, and moved to England in 1930, where she worked as a photographer and part-time talent-scout for the NKVD, under the remarkably unimaginative codename ‘Edith’. She had been under MI5 surveillance since 1931 but not, fatefully, on the day she led Philby to meet Deutsch in Regent’s Park.’

Philby learned communism at university. Just before he left Cambridge, he asked his supervisor, economist Maurice Dobb, ‘how best to devote my life to the Communist cause’ and Dobb put him in touch with a Paris agent of the Comintern named Louis Gibarti. Gibarti sent Philby to Vienna, where he fell in love with a Viennese communist named Litzi. Edith was one of her best friends, the daughter of a social democratic publisher. Then came the purge. ‘Prisoners march through silent streets as they are led towards the camps that will become their graves, Europe dithering in the months following Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss’s disbanding of parliament. Across the city of Vienna, a fire takes hold.’

Litzi’s name was on one of Dollfuss’s hit lists, so she married Philby and fled to London, and a little while later Edith Suschitzky led him to the meeting in the park that would make him a spy. We see little of Philby in this novel, and no great loss. He pops up now and again: at Cambridge (‘Trinity College appeared to bask beneath its own golden halo, those first weeks flying past, the clinking of champagne flutes along the banks of the River Cam’) in Spain (‘Taking a step on to the pavement, the dust scattering around his polished brogues and linen suit – the perfect attire for a bright young Times journalist poised to report the Civil War from Franco’s side’) and outwitting the local cops by throwing his wallet on the floor during interrogation. Oh, he’s such a card. Letters from Russia intersperse the narrative. In them he talks about the weather, his dacha in the countryside, his attempts at cultivating vegetables. Charlotte Philby, who is his grand daughter, wrote the letters based on Philby’s own correspondence: ‘Some sections are lifted verbatim; additional paragraphs I have invented based on his interviews, his autobiography, anecdotes, family folklore, and my imagination.’

Edith was the greater mystery. Growing up, she saw her father’s bookshop regularly trashed and raided by the nationalist right, yet he never fought back: ‘Edith’s father had felt himself stand taller. A self-proclaimed pacifist, he hadn’t lashed out.’ As a young woman she shouts at the old man: ‘You have dedicated your life to ideas and theories that you claim will change the world. But you’re a hypocrite! Just out there, beyond the bookshop, Europe is imploding, and you do nothing.’ As an activist she’ll do anything the Party asks of her, and defend its most shocking crimes. ‘So, my daughter doesn’t condemn it,’ says Edith’s mother in 1939, ‘a pact between the Nazis and the Soviet Union. And so you must condone it, this agreement between your leader and the same man who forced us from our homes, who stole our country – the men who are responsible for Papa’s death?’ 

To betray you must first belong, Philby tells her. Philby was a son of privilege whose life was a succession of exclusive clubs. Edith was an immigrant artist under constant state suspicion. Edith is interesting because she didn’t belong – her personal life was nowhere as linear as her doctrinaire views. After letting go of the dullard doctor she married, Edith had a succession of affairs with various dynamic Soviet agents. The real focus in life was her son – she loves Tommy more than anything in the world, but his condition and stalled development (likely PTSD from the Blitz) makes him a threat to himself and others. Edith takes the boy to a child psychiatrist who starts an affair with her, while the kid is packed off to a succession of remote residential homes. The dullard doctor signs off on a transfer to a brutal asylum without Edith’s knowledge or consent. The child psychiatrist drops her a line to say ‘I think you would like to know from me that I have remarried.’

The last third or so of the novel is a heartbreaking read as, twitchy and ageing, Edith deteriorates fast. At this stage the typewritten police reports that were always an occasional presence in the text begin to take it over – officialdom overwhelming humanity, like the Soviet years. She burns her negatives, suffers a nervous breakdown and is herself institutionalised. It’s at this point that Philby’s letters, always the most interesting aspect of his presence here, take on a poignancy. Under the careful insouciance of Philby’s style you could always make out self-doubt and isolation that crept in. (Macintyre writes ‘At times he sounded like a retired civil servant put out to grass (which, in a way, he was) harrumphing at the vulgarity of modern life… he grumbled about ‘the ghastly din of modern music’ and ‘hooligans inflamed by bourgeois rock music.’) ‘Is it wrong to say that I envied you your freedom?’ he writes to Edith. ‘You got to live your life exactly as you ought; you never had to play a part.’ 

Edith and Kim becomes a sad song, and a meditation on the psychology of betrayal. There is always doubt, and memory, even in the club of one or a mind dedicated to the cause. In his biography of Guy Burgess, Andrew Lownie writes about the house on Bentinck Street where Burgess used to crash sometimes – ‘it had a bomb shelter in the basement, there were always plenty of overnight visitors stranded by air raids or late night duties.’ In August 1940 Burgess wrote to a friend: ‘the bed problem when I sleep there in the basement is complex. Varied also are the names people murmur in their sleep.’

American Fortunes

(Spoiler alert for entire series of Ozark)

In Carl Hiaasen’s Lucky You there is a mob accountant called Bernard Squires. His ‘livelihood, and in all probability his very life, depended on his talent for assembling investment portfolios in which vast sums could plausibly disappear.’ He is in rural Florida to build a shopping mall on forest land – only the shopping centre is never meant to get built, it’s simply a vehicle to launder millions for the Tarbone crime family. Squires does everything right, but is ultimately beaten out of the land by the novel’s heroes, and ends up fleeing to South America.

Running away is never an option for Marty Byrde, the wealth manager in Ozark. Marty is very good at his job – if, for Gale Boetticher, the magic was in the lab, for Marty that magic is in the balance sheets. Cartel representatives come to his firm in Chicago and hire him to launder their drug money. The cartel is impressed with Marty because – out of the hundred-odd wealth managers its representatives interviewed for the role – Marty was the only one who had the balls to point out that their current financial advisor is ripping them off. All goes well for ten years, until the cartel discovers that Marty’s business partner is also skimming, and that Marty – distracted by his wife Wendy’s affair – has missed this. Marty has to watch his business partner and contractors gunned down in front of him, and only wins his own life by offering a radical new proposition – relocate to rural Missouri and launder more money far from federal eyes. The enforcer agrees to give Marty a second chance, and he uproots himself to Ozark. 

Ozark is a show about class, not crime. This is illustrated to high comedy in the early episodes. Marty arrives in Osage Beach offering tons of money to buy up small businesses, and is surprised when the locals get suspicious and ask questions. For all Marty’s business brain, he doesn’t anticipate that Missourians might actually know what money laundering is – or that he might be blundering into established operations. At least in the beginning, Marty is a white collar Yankee who underestimates the South. Once the family has settled in, and learned to fit in to some extent, we can see the dividing lines. Rich northern families visit every year to enjoy the lakes. Marty’s fifteen year old daughter Charlotte sleeps with one of the rich boys. When he blanks her, Charlotte realises that she is now on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon: to the elites stopping in from Manhattan or Long Beach she is no longer someone to be taken seriously, just a local girl to fool about with. (A New York hipster declines to take part in local hustler Ruth Langmore’s drug operation because, he says, he came from a place like Ozark and doesn’t want to go back there.)

Getting the Byrdes back across the line is the ambition of Wendy Byrde, Marty’s errant wife. A brilliant political campaigner, who was forced out by the Democrat machine in Chicago, Wendy sees in Ozark her last and best chance. While Marty launders the Byrde money, Wendy launders the Byrde reputation. She uses her long-dormant networking skills to buy up much of the Missourian elite and to build a Byrde family foundation, her goal to establish the foundation as a Chicago philanthropic machine that has outgrown the cartel. Her and Marty’s conflicting business aims, and their increasingly volatile marriage, dominate much of the storyline and there are lethal consequences for anyone caught in their crossfire. Wendy’s threats, her manipulations, her willingness to take life and even sacrifice her own brother to the cartel, all of it makes her a terrifying criminal operator in her own right. But it’s rare to find pure evil in the Ozarks. When Wendy’s father comes to the lakes (to find his ‘missing’ son) he ends up trying to take Charlotte and the son Jonah into his guardianship. Outwardly an upright Christian man, Ruth gets him drunk and makes him tell her who he really is: a mean drunk who hits his children. Ruth concludes that, as bad as the Byrde parents are, their kids are safer with them. 

‘When Ozark first appeared,’ writes Barbara Ellen, ‘it was dismissed by some as a mere Breaking Bad rehash. Give over. Ozark is its own beast: a chilling, slow-churning opera of frayed loyalties, burnt bridges and familial decay.’ Marty Byrde is fascinating because he’s not Walter White. Walt dragged his wife and kids into the gutter with him but for the Byrdes, money laundering is very much a family affair, the kids know what their dad does, there is no conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. And while Walter became desensitised to violence scarily quickly, Marty seeks a diplomatic solution to all problems. ‘We’re here to do a deal, not kill people.’ That is Marty.

Of course, in a criminal environment with cartel hitmen and local mafias, the diplomatic solution isn’t always on offer. ‘You keep trying to please everyone,’ says the Byrdes’ tenant Buddy Small, identifying the problem. But Marty has a temper, kept carefully in check. The only backstory we get for him is in series three when, languishing in a cartel dungeon, he remembers his childhood. In this bleak flashback Marty’s father is dying in hospital. Told to leave the room, Marty wanders about and finds a games machine. He watches the machine for a while and figures out that the game is rigged. The injustice of it all motivates Marty to rig the game in his favour, and it also gives him a furious temper, which he mostly keeps under careful control. But under the escalating tensions of the last series, Marty finally loses his cool. When a man cuts him up in traffic, Marty beats the motorist to a bloody pulp.

For all its nuance and style, Breaking Bad had a kind of homespun morality to it. With tragic exceptions, the characters get what they deserve. Breaking Bad is like a desert town, where the sun’s shining bright and you can see everything up ahead. Ozark is more like a trek through a forest at night, with the ground slippery underfoot and the air full of strange creatures hooting and swinging and brushing against you. It’s a murky world a long way away from the primary colours of Vince Gilligan’s Albuquerque.

Ozark is the scarier show because of its indifference and amorality, the sense that anything could happen. When cartel boss Omar Navarro tries to retire from the business and wind up his criminal organisation, the FBI won’t let him because it wants the drug money from seized trucks. In an agreement of outstanding cynicism, the feds and Byrdes arrange for the cartel to stay in business – providing the authorities get a cut from border crossings. ‘It ain’t illegal, it’s the feds doing it,’ Ruth crows. In the end, legal and illegal interests form a monopoly that guarantees money and status for those fortunate enough to be part of the magic circle. 

And bad luck if you’re not. Ruth Langmore was Marty’s first lieutenant in his Ozark operation, a small time criminal from the local bad element. Marty recognises her brilliant mind, gives her a job and responsibilities and encourages her to excel… but ultimately, when she has finally outlived her usefulness, Marty chooses not to protect her. Ruth leads a stalled life, propelled forward by her talents and drive but held back by her family history: not smart enough to get out of Ozark, she reflects, but smart enough to know what she’s missing. In the final episode she sees the ghosts of her murdered family hanging out in the trailer park – a criminal family destroyed by more sophisticated criminals. By then Ruth has an inheritance and a business in her name and an expunged record – ‘first clean Langmore in five generations’ – but the machine was never going to let her get away with it. As they say: once a Langmore.

Tony Soprano, justifying the American-Italian mafia, tells Dr Melfi that ‘when the Americans opened the floodgates, let all us Italians in, the Conaughtys, the Rockefellers, they didn’t do that out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because they needed us… and those fucks, the JP Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was business. The American way.’ The private detective in Ozark tells Wendy Byrde that ‘You want to become the Kochs, the Kennedys, whatever kind of royalty you think you are? The world doesn’t work like that.’

‘Since when?’ Wendy snaps back.