Greshko’s face emerged from the shadows. Once, it had been large and round, reminding Epishev of an angry sun. Now, changed by terminal illness, the skin was transparent and the eyes, still brightly piercing, were the only things that suggested any of Greshko’s former fire. Angular and terrible, the features appeared to draw definition from the shallow pools of light in the small room. When he spoke, Greshko’s voice was no longer the harsh commanding thing it had been before, a dictatorial instrument, imperious and thrilling. The cancer had spread to his throat and when he said anything he did so laboriously, barely able to raise his voice above a rasping whisper. A length of plastic tubing ran from Greshko’s body to a point under the bed. It was transparent and would fill now and then with brown liquid, the wastes of Greshko’s stomach. Or what was left of it.
Epishev moved nearer the bed. He tried to ignore the smell of death that hung around the old man. He concentrated on the dreadful music, as if that might help. A man with a nasal condition was singing.
As I walk along beside her up the golden stair,
I know they’ll never take her love from me.
“Poor Viktor,” Greshko said. “You never liked my music, did you? You made passable attempts at trying, didn’t you?”
Epishev was held by Greshko’s eyes, as he’d been trapped so many times in the old days. If Epishev had ever had a true friend in a life that was almost entirely solitary, it had to be Vladimir Greshko. Only Greshko’s patronage and protection had spared Epishev the whimsical wrath of Stalin, at a time when Stalin was launched on still another crazed purge of Soviet society and Epishev had been a young man of twenty-two, barely at the start of his career. His youthful ambition, so far as he’d ever been able to comprehend, had been his only ‘crime’. And Greshko’s intervention with The Great Leader had saved Epishev the long one-way trip to Siberia. Epishev remembered this with a gratitude that would never diminish. He had repaid the debt with years of unquestioning loyalty to Greshko.
Greshko made a small gesture with one thin white hand. “Come closer.”
Epishev sat on the edge of the bed. This close to Greshko, he thought he could see death, as though it were a shadow that fell across Greshko’s face. “Listen a moment,” the old man said. And his hand, a claw of bone, dropped over Epishev’s wrist. “Listen to the music.”
Epishev shut his eyes and pretended to concentrate.
If tonight the sun should set
On all my hopes and cares
Greshko said, “Do you hear it, Viktor?”
Epishev looked into the old man’s eyes. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to hear.
“Ach,” Greshko said impatiently. “You’re too young. Too young.”
It was an odd thing how Epishev at the age of fifty-five always felt young and inexperienced in Greshko’s presence, always the neophyte in the presence of the old master. Nobody knew Greshko’s real age, which was somewhere between eighty and eighty-five.
“You never knew what it was like to build the railways in the 1920s, how could you? The great spaces. The sky, Viktor. That endless sky.”
Epishev couldn’t see the connections here, couldn’t tell which way the old man was going. Since his sickness and removal from office, Greshko had increasingly rambled in directions that were hard to follow at times. Epishev had heard how, as a young man caught up in that first dizzying outbreak of Bolshevik success, Greshko had gone into the wilderness beyond Sverdlosk to lay railway tracks. It was a period of his life the old man reminisced about frequently.
“That’s the sound of it all,” Greshko said. “In that music, there’s the sound of the endless sky. And the wind across the plains, Viktor. That’s what I always hear. I don’t understand all the words, but the feelings – always the feelings. Why does it take an American to capture something so plaintive?”
Epishev glanced at Volovich, thin and motionless and uncomfortable in the doorway. To Volovich’s right was a stack of record albums, perhaps a hundred or so in some disarray. Epishev, who had an excellent command of English, could read the names of certain singers. Hank Williams. Johnny Cash. Bill Monroe. Smiling men in cowboy hats. He wondered how they could smile so, when they produced such miserable sounds.
The music came to an end and there was a silence in the bedroom, broken only by the sucking noise created by the plastic tube.
“What has Birthmark Billy been doing recently, Viktor?” Birthmark Billy was the derogatory way Greshko referred to the new General Secretary of the Party, a man he loathed so much he could never bring himself to use the proper name. “Tell me the latest news. Has he been tearing things apart again?”
“He had the Director of the KGB in Krasnoyarsk arrested on a charge of corruption.”
“Krasnoyarsk? That would be Belenko. Belenko was one of my own.”
“Yes,” Epishev said.
Greshko was suddenly restless. His hands fluttered in the air. “Soon there won’t be a single institution, a single law, a single custom he hasn’t attacked and changed. This whole society will have been altered beyond recognition. Don’t doubt this, Viktor, but one day in the very near future these changes are going to affect you as well. You’ll go into your office as usual and you’ll find the furniture has been moved around and a total stranger is sitting where you used to sit. And they’ll send you to Gorki where, if you’re lucky, you’ll find yourself directing traffic. And if you’re unlucky, Colonel Epishev …” Greshko’s hands dropped to his side and something – some spark of life – seemed to subside inside him. He lay very still.
Epishev had heard this speech before in one form or another, and now he waited for the fire to build in Greshko again, as he knew it would. He was also puzzled why he and Volovich had been ordered to come to this place at such an hour, but he couldn’t hurry Greshko, who never volunteered information until he was ready to do so. The old man sighed and turned his face toward the lamp and Epishev could see the scar on his throat where the surgeon had gone in with a knife.
“God damn him,” Greshko said quietly. “God damn him and his cronies.” The old man stared at Volovich. “Close the door, Dimitri.”
Volovich did so. With the door closed, the air in the room was charged with the electricity of conspiracy.
Greshko said, “The Russian people need the whip of authority. They don’t need some quack who comes along and drops tantalising hints about how there are going to be some new freedoms. Elections! A free press! More consumer goods in stores! You don’t find the Russian spirit in democracy and better nylon stockings and finer toothbrushes and imported French wines! The people don’t understand these things. They don’t want them because they don’t know how to use them. And even if they deceive themselves into thinking they do want these things, they’re not ready for them.” Greshko paused. His breathing was becoming harsh and laboured.
The strange voice was subdued now, almost inaudible. “What the new crowd fails to understand is that the Russian people need a little fear in their lives. They need emotional austerity. Stalin understood it. Brezhnev, who was a lazy bastard in many ways, also understood it. And I understood it when I ran the KGB. But this new gang! This new gang thinks they have a magic wand and they can wave it and everything will change overnight. They fail to realise this isn’t the West. Democracy isn’t our historic destiny. Adversity is the glue that has always held Russia together.”
Greshko raised himself up once more with an amazing effort of will and looked towards Volovich.
“Put something on the turntable, Dimitri,” he said.
Volovich found an album and played it. It was a man singing about his life in a place called Folsom Prison and it was very maudlin. Epishev wanted to get up from the place where he sat and put a little distance between himself and the wretched plastic tube, but he didn’t move. Even as he lay dying, there was a magnetism about Greshko, perhaps less well-defined these days but still a force Epishev knew he couldn’t resist.
Greshko licked his dark lips, st
ared up at the ceiling, seemed to be listening less to the sounds from the speakers than to some inner melody of his own. He moved his face slowly back to Epishev and said, “Romanenko is dead.”
So that was the reason for this midnight summons! For a moment Epishev didn’t speak. Greshko’s sentence, so baldly stated, floated through his mind.
“Dead? How?”
“Shot by a gunman in a railway station in Edinburgh about six hours ago.”
“A gunman? Who?”
“I have no more information,” Greshko said. “I only learned about the assassination less than two hours ago,” and he twisted his neck to peer at the bedside telephone, as if he expected it to ring immediately with more news. So far as Greshko was concerned the phone was both a blessing and a threat. His various contacts and sympathisers around the country could always keep in touch with him, but at the same time they always had to be circumspect when they called, because they were afraid of tapped lines and tape-recorders, and so a curious kind of code had evolved, a sub-language of unfinished sentences, half-phrases, substitutions, a terminology whose caution Greshko disliked. He had always preferred forthright speech and down-to-earth images and now it seemed to him that more than his exalted position had been stripped from him – they’d taken his language away from him too.
Epishev asked, “How does this affect us?”
Greshko smiled, a weird little expression, lopsided, like that of a man recovering from a severe stroke. And then suddenly he looked bright, more like the Greshko of old, the one who had regarded the delegation of authority as a fatal weakness. This was Greshko the ringmaster, the man who guarded the computer access codes of the State Security organs with all the jealousy of an alchemist protecting his recipe for gold, a man as cold as the tundra and whose only love – and it was love – was for his precious KGB, which was slowly having the life sucked out of it by the new vampires of the Kremlin. Epishev imagined he could hear the brain working now, whirring and ticking, then taking flight.
Greshko said, “Our main concern is whether Romanenko’s message has fallen into the wrong hands or whether it reached its intended goal. If it was intercepted, then by whom? And what did the message mean to the interceptor? The problem we have is that we were never able fully to ascertain the content of the message. The only way we might have done that would have aroused Romanenko’s suspicions, and that wasn’t worth the risk …” Greshko drew the cuff of his pyjama sleeve across his mouth and went on, “We know Romanenko had planned to pass it along in Edinburgh to his collaborators, we also know the message was an indication that all the elements of the scheme were successfully in place – but we don’t know the extent of the information it contained. Was it some vaguely-worded thing? Or was it more specific? Could a total stranger read it and understand exactly what events are planned inside the Soviet Union a few days from now? Was it written in some kind of code? You see the threat, of course, Viktor. In the wrong hands, this information could be disastrous for all of us.”
Epishev was silent. From his long association with Greshko, he knew that the old man’s questions were not intended to be simply rhetorical. Greshko had no time for verbal sophistry. When he asked questions, he wanted answers. The correct answers. It was really that simple. Romanenko had gone to Edinburgh to deliver a message. Greshko needed to know what had happened to it. A great deal depended on finding out. Epishev placed his palms together, rubbed them. There must have been a look of some uncertainty on his face because Greshko said, “You still haven’t overcome your fear, have you, Viktor? You’re still unconvinced, aren’t you?”
Greshko reached for a small bottle on the bedside table. He opened it and held it up to his mouth. It contained Brezhnev’s old remedy for all illnesses, valerian root and vodka flavoured with zubravka grass. Greshko was convinced that it was the only thing that kept him alive.
“I’m not afraid, General,” Epishev replied. But he wasn’t absolutely sure.
“Everybody feels fear at some time or other, Viktor. There’s no shame in saying so. I know you, Viktor, and I know what runs through your mind. Romanenko was an enemy of the State. He was involved in a conspiracy against our beloved country. Right? And since you are being asked to take part in this same conspiracy against a State you’ve served so faithfully for most of your life, the words treachery and sedition pop into your mind, don’t they, Viktor? But that’s muddled thinking! The State you served no longer exists, Colonel. The Russia you love is being dismantled in front of our eyes – and if something isn’t done quickly, it will cease to exist in any recognisable way.” Greshko paused and snatched a couple of deep breaths, his shrunken lungs filling to their inadequate capacity.
“Viktor,” Greshko said, and his hand went out once more to touch the back of Epishev’s wrist, a chill connection of flesh that made Epishev want to shudder. “Any major blow against this new regime has a damned good chance of destroying it and that should be a cause for rejoicing. Romanenko’s conspiracy can only hasten the end of those charlatans who’ve seized power. They’ve encouraged certain freedoms. They’ve told those ethnic minorities that their rights are to be respected, haven’t they? They’ve manufactured a climate in which every dissident moron feels it his duty to argue and squabble with the State. So let them suffer the consequences of what they’ve created in this country. The quicker they’re booted out of office, the better. The means don’t matter a damn.”
Greshko paused a moment. “And the beauty of it is that there are no files on Romanenko in any KGB office! There’s nothing on any of the computers! There’s absolutely no trace of Romanenko’s association with this conspiracy! We’ve been watching Romanenko for years, and we’ve known what he’s been planning because he lived in our damned pockets and never suspected a thing because we were always careful …” And he laughed, because his own foresight delighted him. When he’d seen the changes coming after the death of Brezhnev, and then later the demise of the hapless Chernenko, he’d taken the trouble to remove all kinds of information from the KGB, knowing a day would come when it would be useful to him. And that day, Epishev thought, had arrived with a vengeance.
“Are you with me, Viktor? Are you still loyal to me?”
Epishev replied, “I’ve never been disloyal to you, have I?”
“There’s a first time for everything, Colonel.”
“Not where you and I are concerned, General.” The idea of disloyalty would never have entered Epishev’s mind. It was more than just the fact of his gratitude to the old man and the years of their alliance, it was a question of shared beliefs. Like Greshko, Epishev thought that the Soviet Union was heading hurriedly toward disintegration. As if it were some massive star whose course has been suddenly changed, the republic was doomed to explode from internal pressure. Those fresh winds everyone said were blowing through the country were as poisonous as radioactive clouds. And Epishev, like Greshko, had absolutely no desire to breathe them.
“Then we’re agreed, Viktor. Romanenko’s plan must be carried through to the end. Regardless. We may not like the idea, but we have no choice except to go along with it if we want to see our country restored to what it was. In other words – the plan must succeed.”
Epishev knew what was coming now. He had known it ever since Greshko had announced Romanenko’s murder.
“When you go back to Moscow tonight, you’ll see the Printer,” Greshko said.
It might have been routine, except for the fact that Greshko had absolutely no authority any more, save for what he bestowed on himself. It might have been standard operating procedure. But it wasn’t. Greshko though, like a great actor, was able to create the illusion of all his old power.
“When the Printer has your papers ready, you leave the country.” Greshko was buzzing now, barely able to keep his hands still. “You have that authority. You don’t need a written order. You’ll find out what has happened to Romanenko’s message. If it fell into the right hands, then we have nothing to worry about. If it’s
in the possession of the wrong party, and the outcome of the whole scheme is threatened, you will eliminate that threat. It’s simple, Viktor. There are no ambiguities.”
Eliminate that threat. Epishev wondered if he still had the heart for that kind of task. When he was younger, it had come easily to him. Now, even though he enjoyed such tasks as interrogation, even if he didn’t object to rubber-stamping papers that condemned people to imprisonment or death, he wasn’t sure about killing somebody directly, somebody whose breathing you could hear, whose eyes you could look into, whose fear you could smell. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Perhaps Romanenko’s paper had arrived at the appropriate destination. Perhaps everything was already in its rightful place and Greshko’s precautions were, although understandable, nevertheless unnecessary.
He stood up, stepped away from the bed. He looked a moment at Volovich, but it was impossible to tell what Dimitri was thinking. After all the years together, he still couldn’t read Volovich with any ease. Was Dimitri going along with this? Greshko, with all his old arrogance, had obviously assumed so, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so open. Dimitri hadn’t been made privy to everything because Greshko had insisted on limiting the Lieutenant’s knowledge as a matter of routine security, but he knew enough to understand what he was involved in.
“We’re not alone, you know,” Greshko said. “There are hundreds of us, Viktor. Thousands. I’m in daily contact with men, some of them in positions of great authority, who feel exactly as we do. And these men are ready to take over the reins of power at a moment’s notice. Some of these men are known to you by name. Some of them you can call on for help overseas. You know who I mean. Others prefer to remain anonymously in the background. I mention all this to make you feel less … solitary, shall we say? We’re all dedicated to the same thing. We’re all patriots.”
Jig Page 60