The Bearpit

by Brian Freemantle

  It was not until he got to the copies of the correspondence between the girl and her family – and then not until, according to the date, he was halfway through the first letter that Levin had been allowed – that Yuri thought he’d found something. He stopped and went back to the beginning and then read steadily through in the order in which they had been written and replied to, building up the points in his mind, his reaction a mix of curiosity and bewilderment. Illogic upon illogic, he thought: if he resolved the doubts about these letters would he get any nearer to discovering what Kazin intended? A possible route, maybe; at the moment the only route. He wished there were more clearly marked signposts.

  Accustomed always because of his father’s position to the accommodation of the Soviet elite, Yuri was repelled by the concrete forest estate at Mytishchi. Apart from the absence of any spray-canned graffiti, it could easily have been one of those worn-down, worn-away parts of Manhattan he’d found it so easy to criticize when he’d first arrived in New York. How much his thinking and his attitudes about everything had changed: how much everything had changed.

  The blocks were identical and unmarked, so it took him thirty minutes to locate the section where Natalia Levin’s apartment was listed. He waited a further five minutes for the lift to arrive and when it didn’t climbed the stairs instead: there were puddles on a lot of the steps and tiny lakes on two of the intervening landings, where the roofs leaked. The pervading odour was of cabbage and paraffin and maybe urine and Yuri decided some of the landing wet was not all rainwater. On the wall at the second level someone had crayoned ‘Raisa for Minister of Fashion’ and Yuri decided the similarity with America was complete: American graffiti-writers had just served a longer and wittier apprenticeship.

  There was no immediate response to his knock but Yuri detected a sound, a shuffling movement, beyond the door and so he knocked again. When it opened it was only by a crack. The apartment was dark, so that Yuri had difficulty in seeing: an old lady, a babushka, heavily shawled, all in black.

  ‘I want Natalia Yevgennova Levin,’ he said.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti,’ Yuri announced formally. He found the effect startling. The old woman jerked back, as if she had been physically slapped, and despite the gloom the fear was immediately visible, not just in her face but in her eyes. It was the first time Yuri had witnessed the reaction of an ordinary Russian to the KGB. It was unsettling.

  ‘I knew you’d come. Said so,’ stammered the woman. ‘Knew it would happen.’

  ‘Natalia Yevgennova?’ repeated Yuri.

  The old lady stood back, saying nothing more, and Yuri walked past her into the apartment: the outside smells seemed to follow him in. The girl whose features he had earlier studied stood in the middle of the main room, hand up to her face, knuckles against her teeth. The spectacles appeared thinner-lensed than in the photograph and her eyes were red beyond, but she was not squinting.

  ‘What is going to happen to me?’ Natalia said. Her voice was cracked, difficult to hear from behind her hand.

  While Yuri was searching for some response, the old woman’s voice came from behind. She said: ‘When do we have to get out?’ and Yuri partially understood their apprehension.

  He said: ‘I am not here about the apartment.’ It was minimally but comfortably furnished, he saw, and the impression of the outside smells had been mistaken. It was clean and there were flowers, in two separate vases. On a side table and a ledge that ran the length of one wall there were four separate photographs of Yevgennie and Galina Levin – in one of which they appeared dressed as he’d so recently seen his parents dressed, for the ceremony at the Hall of Weddings – and two of the boy, Petr. In both of them Petr was wearing American-style clothes and was clearly older than the official file picture.

  ‘We’re not being expelled?’ It was the old woman again, distrustful and suspicious.

  ‘Not by me,’ assured Yuri. Why hadn’t they been? he wondered, focusing on their concern. Yevgennie Levin was a traitor who had betrayed his country. Basic though it was, this was still a favoured apartment – and unshared, so therefore further favoured – and Yuri would have expected the privilege to have been withdrawn.

  ‘When?’ persisted the woman.

  Yuri realized the supposed positions were reversed: he was being interrogated instead of interrogating. He remembered the reaction at the door and decided he did not want to be cast as an interrogator. These two had done nothing wrong. Ignoring the question, he said to Natalia: ‘I want to talk about your father.’

  ‘I am being allowed to go to America!’ The girl’s hand came away from her face, abruptly relaxing into a tentative, hopeful smile.

  Levin’s apparently confident hope and Natalia’s seeming expectation to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union had been one of the first points to register with Yuri when he read the letters. Wanting to move the exchange on to his terms, he avoided the direct answer and said: ‘It is under consideration. We have to talk first.’

  ‘What about?’ asked the girl, the smile leaking away.

  ‘I want to know what it was like when you were in New York.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Where did you live?’ asked Yuri, who knew anyway but wanted to conceal the real question. ‘What did you do? What friends did you have?’

  Natalia frowned and Yuri hoped she was as confused as he wanted her to be. She said: ‘We lived at Riverdale, of course. Everyone does.’

  ‘You went to school there?’

  The girl shook her head. ‘The Soviet mission academy.’

  ‘What about friends?’

  ‘Of course I had friends.’

  ‘What sort of friends? Russian friends? Or other friends?’

  ‘Russian friends.’

  ‘Only Russian?’

  ‘Yes: that’s the way it is. The way it has to be.’

  ‘No others? American perhaps?’ Natalia’s face had closed against him in uncertain suspicion, Yuri saw.

  ‘No others,’ said the girl.

  The old woman came by him at last, going supportively to the girl’s side. Uninvited Yuri sat in the chair he guessed to be the old woman’s because it was in the dominant place in the room, a place he needed now to occupy. ‘Sit down,’ he said to both of them, an order rather than an invitation. He was not enjoying the part of a bully, either. They hesitated and then did as they were told. Yuri said: ‘What about your parents? What sort of friends did they have?’

  Yuri saw a further tightening of her face and guessed she had not been confused at all. ‘The same,’ she said.

  ‘No Americans?’

  ‘No.’

  He would have to bully further, Yuri realized uncomfortably. He said: ‘You realize, don’t you, that the possibility of your being allowed to go to America… your being allowed to remain here, in this apartment, depends upon you cooperating?’

  Natalia’s eyes filmed and Yuri thought she was going to cry, and gripped his hands against her doing so. She didn’t but he knew it had been close. Natalia said: ‘Yes, I realize that.’

  ‘You never saw your father with an American?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Overheard any conversation, between your mother and your father about any Americans?’

  ‘No.’

  The conversation had gone into a cul-de-sac, Yuri accepted. He said: ‘Tell me about your operation.’

  The girl hesitated, unsure how to respond. Then she said: ‘I had a cornea deformation, from the time I was born. The specialists said it could be corrected when I was old enough.’

  This could be a useful direction, gauged Malik. He said: ‘So it was planned, for a long time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To be carried out now? Or was the date suddenly given to you from the Moscow clinic?’

  ‘There was about six weeks’ notice,’ said the girl.

  ‘What did your father say?’

  Natalia looked quizzically at hi
m. ‘That I had to have it done: that it was what we had been waiting for!’

  ‘He was anxious for you to have it done?’

  ‘Very anxious.’

  Yuri was reluctant to ask the question but knew it was necessary. Prepared for her reaction from what he’d read in the letters, he said: ‘Your father loves you?’

  This time she did start to cry, tears building up and then bursting by her glasses. Very carefully she removed them, tried to dry her eyes and then just as gently replaced them. Unevenly she said: ‘Of course he loves me.’

  ‘What did you think, when you learned he had defected?’

  ‘I couldn’t understand it. I still can’t understand it.’

  Neither could he, decided Yuri. He didn’t doubt the affection in the letters or what she had just said, about love. Which made it inconceivable that Levin would have moved with her out of the country, beyond reach. So six weeks prior to the provable date of her operation, the man had not intended to cross. Yuri wondered if it had any significance. ‘What have you come to think since?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ mumbled Natalia. Her lips quivered. She made a determined effort at control and said: ‘Will I be able to join them?’

  Another imponderable, isolated Yuri: like their being allowed to maintain this apartment. And the constant references in the letters to their being reunited, which this girl clearly expected. What made Levin imagine it could – or would – happen? Unable to answer the girl’s question, Yuri said: ‘That is being decided.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Yuri. Before there was the chance of another demand from her, he said: ‘Did you like America?’

  ‘It was different,’ said Natalia, imagining he had the power of letting her leave or not and anxious against any offence.

  ‘What about your father?’

  Her struggle for the right reply was pitifully obvious and Yuri felt a further wash of pity. Natalia said: ‘It was his job to be there.’

  ‘Were you able to travel at all?’

  ‘Once,’ she said. To Disney World, in Florida.’

  ‘Did your father like it?’

  ‘He said it was for us,’ she avoided.

  ‘Sometimes your father went away without you, didn’t he?’

  ‘For his job at the United Nations,’ she insisted defensively.

  ‘Did he ever talk about it?’

  ‘That would not have been correct.’

  ‘Did he ever talk about a particular part of America: somewhere he preferred more than anywhere else?’

  ‘No,’ she said again.

  Another cul-de-sac, accepted Yuri. It was hardly likely anyway that already the FBI would have settled Levin under a new identity in a location of his choice. At this stage there would be interrogations far harder than this, bleeding the man of everything he knew.

  ‘When she goes will I be able to go too?’ demanded the old lady. ‘I’m Galina’s mother. I’ve got no one else.’

  Another confident expectation, thought Yuri. Improvising, he said: ‘There’ll have to be the proper application.’ It was the first time he’d known she was a grandmother. Which made incomplete the dossier Kazin had provided. What other more important things had been omitted, to entrap him?

  ‘Why are you asking all these questions?’ blurted Natalia, abruptly and with forced braveness.

  Yuri momentarily hesitated, seeking an answer. Then he said: ‘You can’t understand why your father defected and neither can we: it could be that he was forced, in some way.’ The reply was not as good as he would have liked it to have been but Yuri thought it was adequate. He didn’t anticipate the development from it.

  ‘The letters don’t indicate he is being forced to do anything he doesn’t want to,’ said the girl.

  Which was true, Yuri accepted, another shapeless, unformed image from the correspondence hardening into a positive shape. Yevgennie Pavlovich Levin was a senior KGB officer with twenty-five years’ service to his country. He had defected to a country regarded as the Soviet Union’s chief enemy, subjecting himself, his wife and a son to a lifetime of false indentities in hideaway homes. And by so doing abandoned a daughter he unquestionably loved. Yet apart from Natalia, the letters showed no uncertainty or regret. Surely there would have been? If not uncertainty or regret, then at least an effort at justification or attempted explanation: I have taken the decision which makes me a traitor because… But there was nothing. Yuri made the decision to study them again, for that specific detail, but he was sure he was correct. It was, of course, an exaggeration but rather than the outpourings of a man who had taken the most momentous decision of his life, the tone of the letters could equally come from the back of a ‘wish you were here’ holiday postcard.

  Before Yuri could speak further the grandmother said: ‘I have read in Pravda and Izvestia of defectors being tried in absentia’

  ‘I am not involved in such things,’ said Yuri.

  ‘What will happen if he is tried?’ asked Natalia.

  ‘That is a matter for the courts.’

  ‘I meant to me?’

  ‘That is not my decision either,’ said Yuri, avoiding again.

  At the possibility of some action against her father, Natalia’s defiance leaked away as abruptly as it had come. Blinking against a fresh outburst of tears, she said desperately: ‘I want to be with my mother and father.’

  Yuri recognized he had lost control of the encounter by feeling sympathy when he should have shown sternness. But this was not the sort of intelligence for which he’d been trained and was proud to perform: this was brutality and he had no stomach for it. Not against innocents like these anyway. What about other people in other environments? His father’s words intruded into his mind – I think I could kill someone who tried to kill me. And someone had. So would he be able to consider killing, by proxy? Striving for the attitude he’d so far failed to achieve, Yuri said: ‘Your difficulties are of your father’s creation, no one else’s.’

  ‘He loves me!’

  For the first time since he’d entered the neat apartment, Yuri detected an indecisiveness in the insistence. Illogically Yuri thought of Caroline, in a New York which seemed at that moment to be part of another planet. The Caroline whose sympathy had obviously been sincere when he said he was having to go away because of his father’s death (the least danger is in the least lies) and told him to get back as soon as he could and that she’d ache for him until he did. He searched for a comparison between the two, knowing there was not one. Not physically, at least. Natalia was reasonably pretty, despite the glasses, but the dark hair was untrained and a figure that one day might be desirable still bubbled with puppy fat. Wasn’t there a possible connection, though? Levin had abandoned Natalia. Shouldn’t he abandon Caroline? Too tenuous. No way comparable, either. He said: ‘Don’t tell your father in letters of this visit.’

  Natalia seemed about to respond but then closed her mouth tightly. If she did write about it Yuri knew he could intercept and prevent the letter.

  ‘What else must I do?’ she asked obediently.

  ‘Tell him it’s cold here.’

  The girl looked blankly at him. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There’s no reason why you should,’ rejected Yuri. ‘And write frequently. I want there to be a lot of letters from you.’

  As he splashed down the odorous steps Yuri tried to sift in his mind what he had achieved by the encounter. A lot, he decided. But still not sufficient to warn him where Kazin was setting his trap.

  The questions routed to him from Paris, requiring the confirmation that Washington sought, was the signal to Victor Kazin that Levin was being debriefed by the CIA. Kazin felt dizzy at the immediate realization, passingly worried that he often felt dizzy lately and that thoughts seemed to wriggle away before he could grasp them. But then his head cleared, becoming clearer than it had been for longer than he could remember.

  It had worked!

  Now, at last, it was t
ime fully to brief Comrade Chairman Chebrikov on his brilliant concept. There was too little remaining of Vladislav Belov’s proposal for any shared credit. And as the unassailable head of the First Chief Directorate the credit was deservedly his anyway, as a matter of right.

  Kazin prepared graphs and progress sheets for a formal presentation and felt the dizziness again at Chebrikov’s ecstatic endorsement of everything that had been done. Not even Kazin anticipated that the KGB chairman would recommend he be awarded the Order of Lenin and when Chebrikov announced his intention Kazin relented and disclosed Belov’s minimal involvement.

  The Director of the American division learned from a memorandum of praise from the KGB chairman, congratulating him upon his ‘help and assistance’, how the idea that had taken years to formulate had been stolen from him. Briefly Belov came close to physical collapse, slumped over his desk like a man suffering a stroke or a seizure: for a while his vision was actually hazy and blurred.

  He’d been robbed, Belov acknowledged: robbed after five long, wearisome, jigsaw carving years of the recognition he had been sure would rocket him through the promotion ranks to at least the leadership of a Chief Directorate.

  The next immediate awareness was worse. He knew that, trapped beneath Victor Kazin, there was nothing whatsoever he could do about it.

  28

  Yevgennie Levin was disturbed by the tightened security, some of the men in the guardhouse visibly having guns and clattering helicopters frequently overhead, but was glad it had not interfered with the altered system for Petr’s tuition. Professionally the Russian felt an enormous satisfaction at having apparently succeeded, but there was an equal relief at Petr’s adjustment. Straight As in every subject, without exception, and a completely changed demeanour, too: polite and respectful, both to him and Galina, actually ready to laugh, which had been impossible for them all, for too long. He seemed anxious, as well, to make friends with the FBI and CIA protective personnel whose now increased presence was almost claustrophobic. Only about Natalia did there remain a difficulty and even here there was no longer from the boy the resentful, hostile attitude of the early weeks. He talked of when, not if, she would be able to join them, actually boasting of what he would show her in that part of Connecticut he was getting to know, now that he was going daily into Litchfield to school.