Archangel

by Gerald Seymour

  'I'm not going to be able to help you, Mr Millet. Yes, I was aware of him, but I never managed to lassoo him. He never attended worship, he never came to the Youth Hall. I thought he might have had a place at the Youth, it seemed to me that he might have been a leader if he'd had the encouragement. I tried and I failed, Mr Millet. It was a disappointment to me. Well, you're always sorry if you let slip someone you think might be a leader. How did I know he was leadership stuff? You can tell, Mr Millet, it's not something that can be hidden. All I can say is that I failed, and in this particular case I regret that failure.'

  He took a train back to London, and a taxi over to Charing Cross. Then another train towards the Kent commuter belt, and Dartford. Off the train before its route reached the suburbs. At the station he asked for directions to the industrial estate, and walked it in a quarter of an hour.

  Letterworth Engineering and Manufacturing Company, the sign said. Mark Letterworth was a tall man with the weight of the recession hanging heavy on his face and shoulders.

  'I tell you this, Mr Millet, two or three years ago I wouldn't have had the time to sit down and chatter about a chap I haven't seen for more than a year. That I've got the time is a bloody disaster. I've the bank breathing at me, and forty-two wage packets to fill on Friday morning, and the phone isn't ringing with customers. I'll tell you this so that you know I've problems too. Not problems like young Michael's, but I've enough to be going on with. I'll tell you this too, and this is for nothing, somebody dumped that boy right in the shit, somebody dropped him in the shit from a great old height. You see I never believe in smoke without fire, and when our man is nicked on a spying charge then I say to myself that somebody got at him, somebody asked a favour of him, somebody got round him. I don't know whether you've ever been to Russia, Mr Millet, I have. I was regular there. Right? It's not the easiest of places, but business works there, and business is money, and money is wages, and wages are what keeps my work-force happy.

  Understand me, Mr Millet? What I know of Moscow is that you keep your nose clean and do the work you've set out to achieve, and that way there's no hassle. I'll tell you this .. .

  three times before he went, Michael asked me for time to go up to London and said he was having problems with his visa. Three trips up to London. I've never had to have more than one trip to the Consulate for any visa of mine. Somebody lined him up, and that somebody is no friend of mine, Mr Millet. I don't know what productivity you have to show in your job, in mine it's the order book. I needed that custom out of the Soviet Union, I needed it bloody badly.

  We've been frozen out there, and that order was worth a couple of million sterling, and that adds up to a hefty pile of wage packets. You asked me what he was like, Mr Millet. . .

  I was going to make him a director, bloody good young man, tough and fair and straight. Nobody walked over him, not me, not the customer, not the work-force. It's a bloody tragedy he's where he is, and that's the truth. The place is the poorer without him . . . that what you want to know, Mr Millet? The only thing that didn't work for him was his marriage, perhaps his wife will give, you a different s i d e . . .

  don't tell me that you didn't know he was married and separated, Mr Millet . . . bit bloody thin on the ground-work, aren't you?'

  Before he reached the small block of a dozen bed-sitter flats, Alan Millet knew this would be his last call.

  Still the rain, all week it had rained, and his coat was barely dried out from the previous evening and his shoes were still wet and had rejected the polish he had attempted over his breakfast. This would be the last call, and after that the heat of the office at Century that he shared with two others. One more visit and the picture of the man who had taken the package to Moscow would be fuller and acceptable as a memorandum to the Deputy Under Secretary.

  There had been no difficulty in finding her. A marriage certificate in London and the telephone book had done the work for him. He hadn't rung to make an appointment, better to turn up at the door and press the bell like any other cheapskate private detective. Well, he wasn't much more, was he? Padding the streets and prying into the window of a man's life, and the trail turned him towards the second-floor flat of Mrs Angela Holly (nee Wells), two miles from the home of her former husband and parents-in-law. Eight o'clock in the morning, and if she went to work then he hoped still to be in time to catch her before she locked the front door and shut out the intrusion of a man from the Service.

  A radio played inside the flat, the bell tinkled under his finger.

  She was very pretty.

  Straight blonde hair, slender-faced and with a wide mouth of expectancy as if everything that happened that was a surprise was excitement and welcomed. A green sweater that flattered and a knitted skirt that matched. A pretty girl and one that should be with a man, not a girl who should have sat beside a solicitor in a High Street divorce court.

  Millet had played the images game on the pavement outside, had anticipated a tousled woman who wore badges of failure.

  And the girl was lovely, lovely and fresh and anticipating.

  'Yes . . . ?'

  'I'm Alan Millet, Foreign and Commonwealth ..

  'Yes . .

  'Can I come in, please?"

  ' 'Course you can, but you'll be sitting on your own all day

  - I'm on my way out.'

  'Where do you go?'

  'Town . . . off the Strand. Boring old Building Society.'

  'I'd like to come with you.'

  'Please yourself . . . bring the milk in, can you? . . . I'm hell's late and that's usual.'

  He picked up from beside his feet two cartons of milk and a plastic box of half a dozen eggs. At the end of the corridor leading from the front door was the kitchen, where he found the fridge. He heard her whistling to the radio beyond the half-closed door of what he presumed was her bedroom, and there was another door that could have led to the living-room. A dwelling unit, nothing more, something that was right for a girl that was alone, right for a girl who lived without a man. She blustered out of the bedroom, and swept up a coat from a chair in the corridor. Millet grinned and stepped out onto the landing and behind him the door slammed cheerfully. He took his cue from her and they half ran and half walked the couple of hundred yards to the station, and she led and he followed. He had no ticket and she had a Season, and while he stood in line at the window they missed one train and she rolled her head and her eyes and seemed to think it a joke and when the train came there was one thought only in Millet's mind. How in God's name did this go wrong?

  A commuter train, a stop at each station, all seats taken by the grey-suited men who hid from each other behind their newspapers and the film of cigarette and pipe smoke.

  So they stood and their hands clasped at the baggage rack above their heads, and Millet saw the eyes of a fellow traveller flit to the girl's features as if they were staring at those magazines on the high shelf behind the newsagent's counter. How could Michael Holly and this girl have broken ?

  'I want to talk to you about Michael.'

  A frown creased her forehead, it's three years since I've seen him, long before all this business. Did you say Foreign Office?. . . I've not seen him since the split.'

  it's confidential really - but we were hoping to get him back. It hasn't worked out.'

  i didn't know.'

  Lunatic. A train swaying between Kingston and Norbiton and New Maiden, and a member of the permanent staff of the Service talking with a stranger about a freelance recruit who had been snaffled. They'd have his balls at Century for it.

  'The Soviets have now transferred him to a Labour Camp.'

  'They're ghastly?'

  'Pretty dreadful.'

  i don't know how I can help you. I told you, it's been a long time . . .'

  He felt a pig, a bore. He was ashamed of himself, and he leant towards her, and the scent she had dabbed at her neck in the bedroom played at his nostrils.

  'What broke it, Mrs Holly?'

 
'Foreign Office, you said? That's the business of the Foreign Office?'

  For the first time he saw a nervousness from her, the hesitation of the little girl lost. He was playing the bastard because that way the inner door opened.

  'I said Foreign Office, Mrs Holly. Why did it break?'

  Her laugh showed a stain of fear, and the man whose elbow was lodged in Alan Millet's rib turned to the girl. She smiled and looked bravely into Alan Millet's face.

  'I'll talk to you for all the time we're on this train. You don't come to the office, you don't come again to my home . . .'

  'Agreed,' Millet said quietly. 'You have my word, Mrs Holly.'

  'I think I love him still, I think I'll love him all my life. I've never fallen out of love with him, not when he went home, not when we were in the courts, not now after three years.

  He's a man that a woman wants to love. You feel very proud when you're with him. He's perfect, you see, Mr Millet.

  What's the silly bitch saying, that's what you're asking, isn't it? He's punctual, I'm late. He's tidy, I drop everything anywhere. He speaks when he has something to say, I'll talk about anything with anyone. He has a patience and a calmness, I lose my temper and shout and scream. I never had a chance to bitch at him . . . do you know what that means? Can you imagine what that's l i k e . . . I can't express it properly. He was like a kind of martyr, it was as if all my failings were stones that were thrown at him and which he never complained of. If he'd yelled at me then I'd have been delirious, then I could have lived with him . . . He didn't need a wife, can you believe that? He didn't need me, or anyone else. He's an entity on his own . . . '

  'I said it would be pretty dreadful where he is now, how will he cope there?'

  She giggled shrilly and swayed against him as the train lurched on the points on the approach to Waterloo.

  'I don't have to answer that, do I? I mean, well, it's pretty obvious from what I've said . . . I told you that I loved him, that's God's truth, I love him and I tell you they might have made such a place just for him.'

  The train had stopped.

  i said you shouldn't come back to me, Mr Millet, and you agreed.'

  'I gave my word, Mrs Holly, thank you.'

  Millet and the girl were pushed towards the door, dis-gorged from the carriage.

  The smile swept her face and she patted his hand, and then she had spun on her heel and the swing was in her hips as she walked away into the hurrying crowds.

  Chapter 7

  Holly worked on alone at the lathe that fashioned the chairs' legs.

  Around him the other machines were silent, closed down.

  The saws and planes and chisels and hammers were abandoned. The benches were deserted. Only Holly was at his place. His back was to the window and he did not turn to spare a glance at the crush of the zeks who squirmed against the grime of the windows. There was no expression on his face, just the blank skin facade of hunger and tiredness.

  At first the civilian foremen who came to the Factory each morning from Barashevo village had shouted that the men should stay at their work, but their protests had made a battle that he could not win. The trusties of Internal Order had added their voices and they, too, were ignored. The two wings of authority had accepted defeat and then joined the workforce at the windows. Beyond the glass there was a sporadically placed ring of guards and dogs who seemed uncertain as to whether to stare back at the distorted press of faces at the glass panes, or whether to watch instead the spiral column of smoke and the flames that played at its heels. Only the roof of the Commandant's hut was visible over the high wooden fence that was the boundary of the Factory compound, but the fire was high and the smoke higher. There was much for everyone to see. Like children the prisoners revelled in the spectacle, and their enjoyment was spurred by the noise of sirens and shouting and the crackle of old wood in the fire.

  Holly heard above the drone of his lathe motor the scenario of sound that the fire carried, and heard too the happiness of the men who had left their benches.

  'All the files, all the bastard case files, all there to burn, all gone.'

  'They'll only have the sand buckets, they won't have a water supply. I saw the hoses last week, they hadn't been drained, they're frozen solid in their coils.'

  'Did you see the pig Kypov? He came in running like a fat sow, his uniform's half burned off his fucking back.'

  'How could a fire start there?'

  'The speed it spread, that's not electrical, it spread like tart's clap.'

  'Shit how it started, it did. Bugger how it started.'

  Holly knew.

  Holly could have answered the babble over his shoulder.

  He picked at another piece of raw wood that had been crudely cut in the workshop across the compound in preparation for the finishing work of the lathes.

  The wood shavings and dust reached up in an awkward mess from the floor beside his legs. A great mound close to him, but the daily norm that was so precious to the administration of the camp would be found wanting that day.

  Bloody dangerous, this lathe, Holly thought. Wouldn't have wormed through any Factory Safety Act passed in Britain in the last fifty years, open and unshielded parts, and half of the men who used them wore the scars on their hands to prove the danger. There should have been gloves and protective goggles and face masks to field the resin and varnish dust. And the men worked without these essentials because work was food, and food was life.

  Holly knew how the fire had started in the office of Major Vasily Kypov.

  In his mind that was guarded by grey, disinterested eyes and his sallow tight-drawn forehead, Holly could picture the process of how a match lit in innocence had tumbled upon an incendiary device. He had looked for a loophole in their guard, he had found that crevice at the first time of asking. Smug, weren't they? Believing in their authority so totally that they could not envisage a mere prisoner, a mere item of scum, daring to kick back. Kick back with interest.

  And the interest was prime rate high, and the flames were falling now because little was left for them to feed from.

  The foremen called again for the men to return to their work. They came when the fire had dipped below the level of the high fence. There was a rumble across the workshop floor as the motors of the machinery sluggishly coughed back to life.

  The old thief, Chernayev, from Hut 2. was beside Holly. A grizzled gnome of a man with a face as white as office paper and a pepper speckle of beard growth across his jowls and chin.

  'You weren't interested? You've been here three weeks -1

  tell you, when it is three years you will run to the window with the rest of us.'

  Holly did not look away from his work.

  'How long have you been here?'

  'This camp five years, before that twelve years in Perm.

  They call me Chernayev the thief. I have not been a thief for seventeen years, chance would be a thing. I did twelve years in Perm, and I was stupid . . . I had a tattoo done . . .

  imbecile . . . Brezhnev is a parasite, that was the tattoo on my arm. You know they could have shot me for that.

  Self-defacement, inciting anti-Soviet attitudes, it's all in the penal code. Four words and they could have shot me, that's in the book. I have four more to go • • • See this .. .' He held out his arm and pushed back the sleeve of his overall and there was a rectangle of puckered ruddy skin. 'They had to get rid of the offensive literature, they couldn't burn it, so they scraped it off and grafted back some skin from my arse

  . . . You understand why I laugh when Kypov's hut goes down?'

  Holly seemed to look at him as if the matter of a fire that destroyed the office of the Commandant was neither of occasion nor note.

  'I understand why you laugh.'

  The foreman was behind them peering between their shoulders, and there was a sniff of impatience.

  it's not a wives' meeting, it's a workshop .. . and you're behind, Chernayev . . .'

  It had been ver
y simple once he had absorbed the mechanics of the attack.

  A juvenile could have done it. They were so flabby. They believed so completely in the strength of their discipline and the spider net of submission that it secreted.

  The screws that they used in the workshop came in plastic bags a few inches square. Holly had picked a discarded one from the floor. The lathes were serviced with a light oil film, draped in it as if to give them an overcoat protection that would ensure their survival against age and wear. Holly had filled the plastic bag with oil and twisted the neck tight and fastened it with a snip of wire. The bag and the oil had nestled behind his testicles, held in place by his underpants, as he had walked from the Factory to Hut z, evaded the evening search. Feldstein had given Holly a magazine and said he wanted it no longer. In his iron mug, on the privacy of his bunk, Holly had manufactured the pulp of papier-mache as he had been taught to by his mother when he was a small boy. He made a rough shape that was neither a cube nor a sphere, but a wet and hollow lump. In the night when the hut was quiet apart from the coughing and the bed creaks and the whimpering of men in despair, he had gone to the stove and heated his shape until it was dried and firm.

  The bag that was filled with oil sat inside its carton. He had smeared the shape with coal dust.

  Each morning there was a rota of men designated to fill the coal containers for the day - buckets for the Administration offices and the Guard Room and the barracks, sacks for the huts - from the central heap of fuel beside the compound gate. The perimeter path was beside the coal mountain. On Exercise that morning he had tossed his offering the few inches from his pocket to a waiting bucket. From the far side of the perimeter path he had watched the detail at their work as they scraped the overnight snow from the coal mountain, then shovelled the buckets and sacks full. He did not know which building he would raze . .. but one would go. One was doomed when a bucket of coal was tipped on to a blazing fire and the flames eroded the dust covering, ate at the brittle papier-mache, flickered at the softness of the plastic bag. Really it had been very simple. Simple and anonymous. The covert attack of the unseen guerilla. And no one for them to strike back against. Simple and anonymous and safe. And a beginning, Holly, only a beginning.