“Comrade Grekov,” he says. “I am Colonel Kaverin.”
Kaverin shakes his hand and offers a smile that lasts a fraction of a second, before walking Sergey along another corridor. The agents walk ahead, while Kaverin stays behind him. Sergey waits for the feeling of cold metal against his nape. This is how it’s done. A long walk down a corridor and a bullet in the back of the neck. It must be sudden. The prisoner probably wouldn’t know what had happened. No wonder the place smells so strongly of disinfectant.
He’s taken to an interview room. No windows. In one corner, a wash basin; in the other, a toolbox. In the centre of the room is a small brown desk and two wooden chairs, and Kaverin and Sergey sit either side while the agents remain at the door. Kaverin offers Sergey a cigarette and pours some water from a tin jug into a cup, pushing it gently across the desk.
“Please, drink.”
Sergey gulps most of it down in one.
“I think there’s been a mistake,” he says.
“Do you know,” says Kaverin, “I’ve literally lost count of how many people I’ve interviewed in this room. There have been so many. And they all say the same thing. ‘There’s been some sort of mistake.’”
“But I don’t know why I’m here.”
“Is that so?”
Kaverin reaches beneath the desk and lifts a black leather briefcase onto his lap. He opens it, releasing the twin locks with a double-barrelled thud, and from it produces the sheaf of letters taken by Merkulov, and a handful of photographs.
“Here,” he says, pointing to one of the images. “This was taken in April, yes? At the Kirov?”
Sergey nods.
“This is you. And these are… who are these people?”
“Our guests.”
“Guests of whom? The Kirov?”
“The state.”
“Guests of the state. I see. You seem very friendly with these ‘Guests of the state’.”
“They came to my ballet.”
“Ah, yes. The one based on the novel by Lermontov. Not the most Soviet of subjects…”
“I know that,” says Sergey. “I realise that now. It was a mistake. I shouldn’t have written it.”
“And on the opening night of this ballet there were guests. American guests?”
“American. British. Some from France.”
“Spies.”
Sergey laughs nervously. “I’m sorry?”
“You heard me. Your guests were spies.”
“They weren’t my guests, comrade. They were guests of the state. They were as much your guests as they were mine.”
“My guests? I didn’t meet any of these people.” Kaverin waves his hand over the photographs. “I put it to you that they were your guests. And that you stayed in contact with them, passing across classified information, in order to undermine the power of the workers’ and peasants’ Soviets.”
“That’s ridiculous,” says Sergey.
“Is it?”
Kaverin moves the photographs to one side. He takes one of the letters and lays it out on the desk. It’s not one of those that Merkulov found in Sergey’s rooms; it’s one that Sergey wrote himself, and posted months ago. Now he understands why there was no reply. Intercepted and kept on file. Not even censored with black ink and sent on.
“This is your handwriting, yes?”
Sergey nods.
“And written in English. Now, I don’t read English myself, but we’ve had it translated.”
“They’re just letters to a friend.”
“A friend?”
“Yes.”
“Comrade Grekov. You need to understand the seriousness of your situation. We know that you have been working to undermine the workers’ Soviets. We believe you may have been doing this in collaboration with outside forces. Americans, and perhaps the British. The sooner you confess, the more understanding the court will be.”
He feels the anger welling inside him. He leans forward, his hands gripping the edge of the desk.
“I have nothing to confess,” he says, his face only inches from Kaverin’s.
In a second, one of the agents crosses the room and strikes Sergey across the face, hard enough to knock him to the floor. Seconds are lost. When he comes around he is back in his chair. He can taste blood.
“Comrade Grekov,” says Kaverin. “We would rather not do things this way, but if you insist on being so stubborn, you’ll give us no choice. Here…” He opens his briefcase again and produces a single page of typescript. “Your confession.”
“I’ve confessed nothing.”
“These things are a formality. One confession is as good as the next. Will you sign?”
“How can I sign if it isn’t true?”
He’s been here before. Another piece of paper, waiting for his signature. Above that empty line, a lengthy denunciation of his father and brother, written by someone else. He signed it then. He won’t do it a second time.
Kaverin sighs, massaging the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. To the agents, he says, “Take him away. He isn’t to be fed.”
They return Sergey to his cell. Time dissolves. Minutes. Hours. He’s hungry and thirsty. Sign the confession, and they would feed him, give him water. But then what? No-one gets out of this. Not right away. But he won’t put his name on that line.
They come back for him, cuffing his wrists and nudging him in the ribs with a baton, and they march him back to the interrogation room. Kaverin is waiting for them. He looks bored, as if he wants to be here no more than Sergey. As if this is all so very tiresome.
“Again,” he says, turning the page so that Sergey can read it. “Your confession. Will you sign?”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“What’s the difference? I can’t sign it, so I won’t.”
Kaverin gestures to the agents with a nod, and one of them steps forward and holds Sergey in a bear grip, pinning down his left hand by the wrist. The other takes his truncheon and slams it against Sergey’s knuckles. The pain is incredible, passing through his body in waves. They know what they’re doing, going for his left hand. They know he plays the violin.
“I’ll ask again,” says Kaverin. “Will you sign it?”
Sergey shakes his head. The pain is beginning to subside. What more can they do to him but this? Sign the confession and he’ll be guilty, and they can do anything to him then.
Kaverin nods again to the agents, and again Sergey’s hand is held against the desk and the truncheon smashes down, this time breaking through the skin. Dark blood pours from his knuckles. Sergey cries out and the first agent puts his arm around his throat, squeezing till he can no longer make a sound. Kaverin holds up the confession and a pen.
“Will you sign?”
Another choice. Give them names. From the Kirov. From the union. But whose? Every person he named would end up in a room like this, and perhaps that person would give names, and those names would give names, spreading out like a pandemic. This is how the world ends.
“Really, comrade,” Kaverin sighs. “You’re only causing more trouble for yourself.”
He gestures to the second agent, who crosses over to the toolbox in the corner.
“Pliers, I think,” says Kaverin. “He may have lost the feeling in his hand, so start with his toenails.”
Chapter 12:
MANHATTAN, OCTOBER 2001
Pavel stepped into the house and scraped his shoes against the frayed doormat. He took a look around, his mouth gaping, as if he was standing in a cathedral or a vast cave.
“This place. Incredible.”
She knew exactly how he felt. There couldn’t be many houses still like this on the Upper East Side. Hallways and staircases lined with mahogany; heavy, brass-handled doors as old as the house itself. Most of these places had been swept through by interior decorators in the ’80s and ’90s. All that dark, old stuff torn out and walls and even floors knocked through to make them feel like warehou
ses. Sol’s was certainly the only old-fashioned brownstone Natalie had ever set foot in. But there was so much space for one person; too much even when you factored in each day’s visitors. There were rooms he used solely for storage and other, sparsely decorated rooms he didn’t use at all.
When she began making plans to study at NYU, Natalie pictured herself living in a place like this. Not even a whole house, just an apartment, but one which looked exactly the same. She envisioned autumn leaves falling in the street outside. Walking down the stoop in a matching hat, gloves and scarf. A brisk morning trip to the Met to spend a moment looking at the Caillebotte painting of Paris in the rain. Good grief, it was all so much bullshit; a fantasy cobbled together from TV shows and fashion spreads. Yet still, a part of her held on to it, because in this house she saw that it was still possible, that New York could still be the place she imagined it might be. She held on to the hope that Sol would one day ask her to move in.
At the top of the house was a roof terrace with mossy furniture and fading pots of dry earth and dead twigs. Natalie and Sol had spent some time up there over the summer. Even though it was only a few storeys up, the view was magnificent. Rooftops and water towers. In the south, beyond the park’s green wedge, the skyscrapers of Midtown. She hadn’t gone up there in over a month. Not that you could see Lower Manhattan from there, but the skyline still had a hazy, smoky quality, and just sitting beneath a wide open sky was suddenly oppressive.
Sol once told her that he’d passed this house many times as a boy. His father had customers who lived nearby, a well-to-do doctor and his wife, who wouldn’t dream of sending even a servant down to Houston Street to collect. Each Friday, before Shabbat, his father would drive up to make the delivery, and during school breaks he would take Sol with him.
“And these streets,” Sol said. “They seemed so much wider, so much cleaner than ours. On our street, there were crates and wagons and even horses – people still had horses in those days – which meant horse-crap everywhere. But we’d come down this street, on our way to Doctor Lowe’s, and I remember thinking, couldn’t have been any older than ten, but I remember looking at these houses and thinking, ‘One day I’m gonna live in one of these.’”
She understood completely, and Pavel, like everyone else who saw the house, was impressed.
“I think you could fit my whole apartment in just one room,” he said.
From the study they heard Sol stirring, his backside squeaking against the chair’s leather as he peered out into the hallway.
“Who is that? Angie? Do we have visitors?”
“It’s Natalie, Mr Conrad. And yes. Just a friend of mine. You can meet him in a moment.”
What had she done? A mistake to invite Pavel here. At least before now he hadn’t known the address. He could keep phoning, but that didn’t mean anyone had to answer. They could even change the number if they had to. But now he was inside the house, and Sol was only a few rooms away. What had she done?
Pavel stared in through the study’s open door.
“I want to speak with him.”
“And you will. In a moment.”
They went to the kitchen, where Natalie made them both coffee and went once more over the ground rules. If he’s upset, we leave. If he’s confused, we leave. If he knows nothing, we leave. Don’t shout at him. Don’t make fun of him. Don’t talk down to him, as if he was a child. Pavel leaned against the work surface and drummed his fingertips against the cupboard door beneath. She tried to read his expression. Almost a smile. He looked impatient, but not bored. She was trying to delay the meeting, and he must have known it, but he no longer seemed to mind.
“Your English is excellent,” she said. If they could talk a while it might give her time to think.
“I learned from movies,” said Pavel. “They started showing American movies on television when I was a boy. Not on any official channels. This was before the end of Communism. Sometimes, a man would dub them. Just one man, doing all the voices, even the women. And sometimes they wouldn’t be dubbed, so you had to work out what everyone was saying. I watched Robocop and Die Hard and I think there was one called Planes and Trains. There is a fat man and a man with grey hair and they are on a journey and everything goes wrong. It is very funny.”
Natalie laughed, placing her hand over her mouth as if to hide her smile. If he was a con artist then charm was bound to be one of his tools. Fall for that, and you’ll fall for anything. She couldn’t look him in the eye. Each time she did she felt something waking up inside her.
“We should go in,” she said.
Get this over with. Like wax strips. Like sticking plasters. Brief pain, and then it’s finished, done.
She took him through to Sol’s study and turned down the music. Sol stirred and shifted in his chair till he was sitting straight.
“Mr Conrad, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. His name is Pavel. He’s from Russia.”
Sol looked up and smiled. He went to ease himself out of his chair, but Pavel leaned over, offering him his hand.
“A pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said, flashing Natalie a sideways glance. “I am a very big fan of your work.”
“Oh, yes?” said Sol. He turned to Natalie, eyes wide, and in a stage whisper he said, “He’s handsome, don’t you think?”
Natalie blushed. She knew Pavel was looking at her but she wouldn’t look back.
“And you’re from Russia?” Sol asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Pavel’s grandfather was a composer,” said Natalie, gesturing to Pavel that he should take up the footstool, while she rested on the windowsill, her back against the cool glass.
“Is that so?” said Sol.
“Yes, sir,” said Pavel. “You may have heard of him.”
Sol nodded, shook his head, and nodded again.
“What was his… what… his name? What was his name?”
“Sergey Grekov.”
“Say again?”
“Grekov. Sergey Grekov.”
“No, I… I don’t know. Natalie?”
The same voice he used whenever he was helpless. I spilled a drink. I dropped something on the floor. I wet myself. Natalie? She had to stop this.
“It’s alright, Mr Conrad. This was all a very long time ago.”
“I… I don’t recall…” he said, his voice reduced to an almost inaudible croak.
“He wrote a ballet,” said Pavel. “Geroy Nashego Vremeni. A Hero of Our Time. There is a novel…”
Sol lowered his chin till it was touching his chest and he shook his head.
“I don’t…” he said. “It doesn’t…”
“That’s okay, Mr Conrad,” said Natalie, turning his music back up. “We’ll leave you in peace. Call me if you need anything.”
They left the study, Pavel glancing back at the open door as they walked along the hall. In the kitchen he began pacing back and forth, his hands restless at his sides. What had he hoped for? What was it he wanted? If she could only summon up the nerve to ask him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I did warn you.”
“I want to speak with him again. I want to ask him if he went to Russia.”
“And I’m telling you he didn’t. When was your grandfather’s ballet performed?”
“April 1938. At the Kirov. It’s called the Mariinsky now.”
“Okay. 1938. Well, that year he spent four months in hospital. A sanatorium down in Florida. I don’t recall the exact dates, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have been well enough to travel…”
“How do you know this?”
“He told me the story a thousand times,” she said. “And it came up at his hearing.”
She felt something click into place, an almost physical sensation. The hearing. Sol’s testimony. She got up with a start, the feet of her chair scraping noisily against the kitchen floor.
“What is it?” Pavel asked.
She was already out of the kitchen and half way down the hall. Pave
l followed, past the study and into Sol’s library. Her mind raced. The hearing. Ronald Bernard.
“What are you doing?”
She didn’t answer him, but began searching every bookcase, shelf and alcove. He asked again.
“His teacher at Juilliard,” she said. “He was a composer. Ronald Bernard. I think he visited Russia. I can’t remember the details. But there was something mentioned at a hearing, like a court case, years later…”
There was, or had been, a biography of Ronald Bernard somewhere in this room. She’d read it not long after she began working for Sol. She knew of their relationship. Everyone now knew. It was no longer referred to as a “friendship” or “companionship”. They were lovers. By reading this book she’d thought perhaps she might get to know Sol a little better, and – to a certain extent – she had.
She scanned each corner of the library, but found nothing. Maybe someone had borrowed it or Sol had given it away. When had she last seen it? She couldn’t remember. And why was she even looking for it in the first place? She could end this now. Tell Pavel she couldn’t find the book, that it was only a fancy, a half-baked idea she’d had. Sorry I couldn’t help you. Goodnight and good luck. But she wouldn’t. Now that he was here, now that it seemed they might have found some truth beneath time’s clutter, she needed to know more.
They went to the study, where Sol was still listening to his music. Pavel waited in the doorway while Natalie logged in to the computer. Sol leaned to one side so that he could see the screen.
“Say. What’re you doing there?”
“Just checking your emails. It won’t take very long.”
The modem coughed and spluttered and squealed its way online.
“Damn thing makes a hell of a racket.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. I’ll only be five minutes. I promise.”
It was running slowly. Everything took an age to load. A short biography of Bernard on some music student’s personal website and a few paragraphs on Wikipedia. Neither mentioned the events of 1938.
“Well?” Pavel said.
“Nothing. We need to get a copy of that book.”
“A bookshop?”
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