‘Get out of the car.’ The barrel of a revolver reflects the light from the street lamp above them. ‘Do as I tell you. Now.’
Andropov steps over her and gets out. Dazed and bleeding, he leans against the battered body of the Zil.
‘And you.’ He pulls her roughly to her feet. She stares into the horrified face of Pavel Lykowski.
‘Ruth.’ The expression on his face registers the shock of betrayal. ‘You, here, with him?’ He recoils from her as if she were contaminated. ‘You were in it together? No. It’s not possible. No, no.’
‘Pavel.’ I can explain everything, she wants to say, but he is not in a mood to listen.
‘Keep away,’ he cried. ‘Don’t come near me.’
He is beyond her reach now. She knows she cannot alter what will happen. Will she die now amid the broken glass and twisted metal of a state Zil? Is this her fate? She is surprised at the sense of reconciliation she experiences. Is this what remains for her, an ignominious death at the hands of Lykowski? Why doesn’t something inside her protest? Why can’t she believe in the possibility of her own death in a few seconds’ time?
‘What are you doing with this man? He’s a murderer. He ordered the deaths of seventy people.’
She wants to defend her association with Andropov, to deny Pavel’s accusations, to tell him that but for her association with Andropov, he would probably be dead by now. But she knows he won’t listen to her. The time for explaining is long past in his young life. He is trapped in the grip of obsession, deafened by the pounding in his ears. He can only deal with what he sees, and he has found her in the same car as his prey. She is condemned by association as a traitor to the cause, and she knows there is nothing she can do about it.
Pavel is shouting at her, tears streaming down his cheeks.
‘I knew there was someone, Ruth. There had to be someone. Otherwise we would never have survived. I never believed for one moment it would be you. How could you betray us like that? How could you bring yourself to do that?’
The first shot misses her. She hears it ricochet off a wall somewhere behind her and spin off harmlessly into the darkness. She hears the second shot too, but less distinctly, because in the split-second interval between the two shots Andropov has thrown himself across her. He takes the full force of the bullet in his chest. She feels the jarring impact as he is thrown back into her arms, a movement so strong she has difficulty keeping on her feet. For an instant she holds him in her arms, a parody of affection, then Andropov’s body goes weak as the life flows out of him. She hears him gurgle something as he slides out of her grasp.
There is no third shot. Lykowski is running away, his feet echoing in the empty street, as she kneels beside Andropov and closes his eyes. She pulls his jacket straight, puts a hand through his hair, honouring in death the vanity she knew was part of his life.
In that instant she asks herself no questions. Her mind is empty, blank with horror and shock. Andropov has saved her life. Is she aware of that? Was his action instinctive? An act of self-sacrifice? Or an act of redemption by a executioner who knows he must die for the people he has killed? As the blood seeps across his uniform, she knows those questions will never be answered.
Behind her the Zil explodes, a burst of red flame and then a column of black smoke floating upwards like a funeral pyre. Then she screams, her cries echoing against the soot-grained walls of the buildings and vanishing into the desolate silence of the night.
17
DANNY
Charlie Faulkner was asleep when I arrived at his bedside, a pale diminished figure, the illness slowly stealing from him what little life remained. Beryl, on duty to the last, sat with her hands tightly clasped, staring at him as if the slightest movement was a signal of the end. As I came into the room she looked up, exhausted from her long vigil, and managed a brief smile.
‘He sleeps most of the time,’ she explained. ‘When he wakes he talks about getting back to work, but the doctors say he hasn’t got long now. I want it to be over, for his sake. He’d hate to see himself in this condition. Poor man. Life can be so cruel sometimes, can’t it?’
Charlie stirred in his sleep, muttered something incomprehensible and sighed deeply. His eyelids flickered and Beryl got to her feet. She put a wet sponge to his lips and adjusted his pillow.
‘They give him morphine, so he’s not in any pain. That’s something to be thankful for, isn’t it?’
It had all happened so unexpectedly, she told me, about a week after I had left for Finland. She’d taken dictation after lunch and Charlie had seemed tired but there was nothing unusual in that. Then about four, just when she was in the kitchen making his afternoon tea, she heard a noise in his room. She rushed in to find him out of his wheelchair and lying on the floor. She called an ambulance and he was rushed to hospital in a coma. He’d regained consciousness a few hours later and had shown brief signs of recovery. Then he’d suffered a relapse and the final process had set in.
Was Eccleston Street closed because Charlie was taken ill? I asked.
‘That was Mr Watson-Jones’s decision,’ she said, nervously checking that the sleeping figure on the bed wasn’t listening in on our conversation. ‘Charlie knows nothing about it. He mustn’t know. It would break his heart.’
Three weeks before, when I left so hurriedly for Helsinki, the organization had been flourishing. Now it was gone and Charlie was dying. I was taken aback by the speed of the close-down. There had to be more to it than Beryl’s selective account.
‘What happened?’ I asked, guessing she had edited her version of Charlie’s collapse. There was something to add, but I couldn’t persuade her to be as forthcoming as I wanted.
‘Charlie found out what Mr Watson-Jones had done and confronted him. There was a terrible row and Mr Watson-Jones stormed out. Charlie was very upset. I tried to get him to go home at lunchtime, but he said he didn’t want to eat, he wanted to work. So I came in with my pad and we did a lot of letters. At four o’clock, he said: “I could do with a cuppa, Beryl.”’ She brushed away a tear. ‘That was the last time he called me Beryl.’
I waited for her to recover her composure. Then I asked what Charlie had found out.
‘Mr Watson-Jones had been working behind his back. I knew Charlie suspected that, but there’s a big difference between suspicion and proof, isn’t there?’
I waited for her to tell me what Simon had done, or what proof Charlie had found.
‘He meddled where he shouldn’t have done, he upset a lot of powerful people. If Charlie had known about it, he would have stopped it at once. That’s why Mr Watson-Jones did it behind his back. He knew, Charlie would disapprove but he still went ahead.’
It was as much as Beryl would tell me without Charlie’s sanction, and she was never going to get that now. She talked on about Charlie for half an hour or so, recreating in her mind the man she remembered that would outlast the image of the shrunken figure in the bed. I felt sorry for her and the long, painful farewell she was bidding to the man who had occupied so much of her life. I promised I’d return the following day. But early the next morning Beryl rang me to say that Charlie had died soon after six, peacefully and in his sleep.
‘He’d been very restless around midnight,’ she said, ‘and I joined his sons at his bedside. Then he turned over, mumbled something and seemed to settle into a peaceful sleep. He never moved again. Quite suddenly the life in him just stopped, no fuss, just like that, and Charlie was gone. I was glad it was light when he died, I don’t think he would have been happy dying in the dark.’
I was surprised at how upset I was. We’d met only seven months before, yet in that short time he had become an important part of my life. How I wished I’d known him longer. How much more I might have learned.
*
The funeral was private, for Charlie’s family and close friends. Beryl insisted I accompany her.
‘He always had a soft spot for you,’ she said on the telephone. ‘He’d be plea
sed if he knew you’d seen him off.’
I went up to Manchester by train and stayed the night with Beryl’s mother. Beryl came by after supper and we sat in the small garden as the sun went down and she talked about Charlie.
‘After the row the strength seemed to go out of him,’ she said. ‘It was a sad moment, seeing him buckling under the weight of it all. Nothing like that had ever happened before. I knew it was all over then.’
‘Did he make it up with Simon before he died?’
Beryl smiled. ‘You don’t make up with Mr Watson-Jones. You win or you lose. This time, we lost.’
‘You never liked Watson-Jones, did you?’
‘He exploited Charlie’s good nature and I could never forgive him for that. Charlie was an innocent, a man who wore his heart on his sleeve. There was no subtlety to him, he had no guile, but he was fearless too, he always said what he thought. He never deceived anyone in his life, he never sold anyone short, he was the same to everyone he met, it didn’t matter who you were. When Watson-Jones came along, I begged him to say no, he’d done enough. It was time to call it a day. But he wouldn’t. He saw some purpose to it that I didn’t understand and he couldn’t resist the temptation.
‘“This is the last one, Beryl, I promise,” he said. “Then we’ll shut up shop.”’
‘He was right about that. It was the last one. There’ll be no more causes now.’
On a beautifully warm and clear July afternoon I helped to carry Charlie’s mortal remains to their last resting place in a churchyard in the village where he was born. As we lowered him into his grave in the shadow of an ancient stone wall, I heard doves cooing in the trees above. Then the birds, disturbed by our presence, clattered their way into the sky. Charlie had truly gone.
*
Unfinished business can be very unsettling. I needed to get to the bottom of what had happened in Eccleston Street before I could concentrate on rebuilding my life. With Charlie gone, Beryl silent and Watson-Jones unreachable (he was in America), my only available sources were Sylvia, Meredith Watson-Jones and Monty. Each knew something. I hoped that by piecing together their stories I would reach some understanding of the truth.
I discovered that Simon had got hold of damaging evidence against my father. Probably his American contacts had told him that a secret intelligence source in Moscow had named my father as a traitor. It was an opportunity too good for Watson-Jones to pass up, but one he knew Charlie would never sanction (Charlie the great upholder of the status quo). Simon had written to the Minister, asking what actions had been taken by the British authorities to investigate the accusations against my father, secure in the knowledge that nothing had been done. No explanation was forthcoming, just the usual platitudes ministerial departments are trained to deliver.
Simon’s reaction had been one of fury. He took this reply as a sign that the socialists were soft on the Soviets, in his book a major crime. If he had harboured any doubts about the wisdom of what he was doing, the ministerial response would have banished them. I could see him, full of righteous anger, blind and deaf to any warnings of caution, threatening the Minister that he would reveal what he knew if he did not receive a satisfactory answer this time.
Gaydon and his advisers, Glover and Corless (their names reminded me of a partnership of shady solicitors), were thrown into panic. Not only was there accumulated evidence of a growing opposition to the manufacture of the Soviet nuclear bomb by the scientists at the Moscow Institute of Nuclear Research, but there were also signs (mostly unconfirmed) that this position was supported by an anti-nuclear group within the military led by a senior Russian general. At worst, this might be the start of a serious opposition to Stalin, at best the basis of a coup.
Politically, this unexpected development in the Soviet Union was seen as a gift from heaven, an escape route for a government at a loss to know how to build a nuclear bomb without the resources. A secret policy was agreed. Because the stakes were so high, the movement inside the Soviet Union had to be given time to grow. Nothing was to be allowed to upset this possibility until we knew whether or not the opposition forces were successful. All decisions on nuclear matters were to be shelved while the West, holding its collective breath, watched anxiously for signs of change inside the Soviet Union.
Watson-Jones knew nothing of this. It didn’t take much to imagine the furore that his intervention caused when everyone else was treading on eggshells. Corless was instructed by Glover to get Watson-Jones off the case as fast as possible. There was too much at stake to leave him alone. Corless had to agree. He had no choice. When he was out of the room, Glover telephoned Iredale.
In the end, it wasn’t Corless or Iredale who stopped Watson-Jones, it was Charlie. His dogged detection got him copies of Simon’s letters to the Ministry. Faced with this damning evidence, Corless told him as much as he could about the delicacy of the political situation, and Charlie saw what he was meant to see. Surely it was better for Charlie to stop him than Iredale?
Charlie confronted Watson-Jones after his interview with Corless. I never discovered what Charlie said to make Simon change his mind, nor what kind of a hold he had over him. (Beryl knew but I was sure, however hard I tried, she wouldn’t tell me, and she never did.) I imagined Charlie had found some weakness in the Watson-Jones armour, he had used his knowledge and he had won. The threat must have been formidable because within hours Simon had withdrawn his letter from the Minister and agreed to keep his mouth shut. But the effort killed Charlie.
Within days of my father’s return from Moscow, I heard that the Soviet anti-nuclear faction had collapsed and any whispers of a possible coup against Stalin dried up, never to be heard of again. Ironically, in the months that followed the international anti-nuclear outcry in the West, created by my father’s appearance in Moscow, was to make my father into a kind of folk hero, the ‘scientist who repented’, as one of the popular papers put it.
*
‘There are some mysteries,’ Monty said philosophically, filling my glass with claret, ‘which never get resolved.’
We were dining at his suggestion ‘downstairs’, in the restaurant in his block of flats. It was the first time I had been back there since my meeting with Krasov, months before.
‘What kind of mysteries?’ I asked.
‘Who wins, who loses. Where the truth lies. In our business you resign yourself to the probability that you will often know far less than you want to.’
‘It’s pretty clear in this case,’ I replied. ‘We lost and the Soviets won.’
‘We may have lost the battle,’ Monty said, ‘but the war’s not over yet. In fact, it’s only just begun. We’re in for a long haul.’
It was all too oblique for me and I said so. Surely, I argued, the Soviets had successfully slowed down our nuclear weapons programme and bought themselves much needed time, created a platform of doubt about the need for nuclear power that wouldn’t go away and ruined one man’s reputation so that he would never contribute to the our bomb. If that wasn’t a victory, what was?
‘The real winner in this affair is Watson-Jones.’
‘How do you work that out?’ I asked incredulously.
‘His vision has won the day. The Soviets have played into his hands, declared themselves as unscrupulous villains, never to be trusted on anything. Watson-Jones and that awful newsletter you worked on, what was it called? Front Line. They’re vindicated. That’s got the Soviet threat to the top of the agenda now. That may be where Watson-Jones wanted them to be but it’s bad news for the rest of us.’
I asked him why. Our lives are now pledged to a cold war, he said. For a time, perhaps, we had had a chance to push Watson-Jones to one side, take the signs of a softening of line in the Soviet Union (and perhaps it was more than that, who will ever know?) to push the creation of nuclear weapons down the agenda. Whatever the immediate gains to the Soviets, the events of the past few months had proved Watson-Jones right. We were on our guard now. What kind of country would w
e build now, if the post-war world was to be dedicated to an undeclared war with the Soviet Union?
‘The end of the war gave us a chance to remake our society,’ he said. ‘That’s why we worked so hard on the possibility that maybe there was a revolt in the Soviet Union. That’s why we tried to discredit Watson-Jones. We wanted to keep that chance alive. Now we have had to jettison that idea. It’ll be a struggle from now on, years of trying to get up steam and never quite succeeding. If only …’
‘If only what?’ I asked.
If only, was all he would say, keeping the mystery intact.
News report from The Times dated 3 August 1947
The Soviet news agency Tass reported, today that an Ilyushin military aircraft crashed soon after take-off in Tashkent. There were no survivors. Among the casualties were General A. Kosintzev and members of his staff.
Watson-Jones wasn’t at Charlie’s funeral (‘In the circumstances, Charlie wouldn’t have wanted him there, dear,’ Beryl told me). But four weeks later he gave the address at Charlie’s memorial service in a crowded St Clement Dane’s. His voice echoed around the church as he recreated for us his image of the man he had done so much to destroy.
‘Charlie Faulkner was one of those rare creatures who grace our lives from time to time, a man without pride, powerful in his goodness. From his early beginnings in Manchester to the triumph of the war years in Whitehall, his life was about service to others. His reward was to see those he had helped succeed. Perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay to Charlie’s life is to ask how many of us would be here today, sitting in this beautiful chapel, were it not for Charlie’s influence, Charlie’s benevolence and above all, Charlie’s friendship. I count myself lucky to be among that select band.’
I felt an uncontrollable anger sweep through me. Here was public hypocrisy on a scale I hadn’t met before, brazen posturing that lifted Watson-Jones out of the common ruck into a select band that Charlie had chosen. For a while I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sit through what he had to say. I calmed myself by thinking of what Charlie would have done. He’d have looked puzzled, agitated, he’d have fidgeted in his wheelchair, but he’d have said nothing and when it was over, he’d have gone on as if nothing had been said, the only sign of his discomfort a demand for Beryl to bring him a large gin and tonic.
Making Enemies Page 44