Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  ‘Yes. But it’s everything at once. My past. The Forest. And you too, of course, Finn.’

  ‘What about Nana?’

  ‘She’ll understand. It’s what she’d want.’

  ‘I’m very happy,’ he says, and we hug each other.

  ‘Me, too.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me you love me, by the way,’ he says, and grins.

  ‘Well, I do,’ I reply. ‘I love you, Finn.’

  He gets up and draws with his ski pole in the snow the words ‘I love you, Anna’.

  I hold his arm and look down into the snow, unseeing.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he says.

  And we ski the several kilometres of the long glacier run and return by taxi when the light has faded into black, and the mountains glow a dull grey-blue in the moonlight.

  We spend three days at the Bären Inn. On the fourth day, two things happen that shatter the brief illusion. Finn had gone downstairs to fetch the newspapers as he always did when he got out of bed. While he was gone I checked my e-mails and saw that I was being summoned to Moscow. On the ‘next plane’. It was not a friendly message and it was the first time in four years I’d been summoned at all.

  Finn came back with the newspapers. He threw them one by one on to the bed and I saw they all contained the same story. The headline on the front page of one of them, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, summed up the story in all of them. ‘Bank President Shot Dead in Geneva Apartment,’ it read, and there was a wire-service picture of Clement Naider–head and shoulders only-taken on a better day than the day of his death.

  Naider had been found dressed in a white towelling dressing gown in the bedroom at his expensive duplex bachelor apartment inside the walls of a converted medieval building up in Geneva’s old town. He’d been shot three times, in the stomach, the shoulder and in the head, to finish him off. It was an execution Russian-style, but who else knows our methods nowadays? The stomach and shoulder shots were his punishment, the rest his death. One of the stories in a Swiss paper claimed that he had been tortured, and then his still-living body had been rolled around the walls of the bedroom, which were covered in blood. This story added that the body was then tossed over an internal balcony on to a white rug in the living room below. This may have been a sensational and untrue addition to the truth, but I doubted it.

  The police were following several leads into the identity of the killer and were looking over the appointments Naider had made in the previous weeks. They had a letter written by Naider which, it was evident to me at any rate, had been extracted by the killer before Naider’s death and deliberately left for the police to find. But the police were not divulging the contents of the letter to the press, not yet.

  When we had finished reading it all, Finn said, ‘They’re getting very close, Anna, your people.’

  ‘Naider must have cracked,’ I replied. ‘He thought that if he told them what happened, they’d give him credit for it.’

  ‘Why torture him?’

  ‘They probably thought he could tell them more about Robinson than he had,’ I said. ‘And he couldn’t.’

  I put my hand on Finn’s shoulder.

  ‘I’ve been called to Moscow,’ I said.

  Finn looked up from the chair to where I was standing behind him. There was a frown on his face.

  ‘This?’ he asked, turning back to the papers.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘If you do go back,’ Finn said slowly, ‘what will you do if they don’t let you out again?’

  ‘I’ll find a way.’

  ‘Maybe. You know what I want most of all,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘They’ll go over you with a fine-toothed comb,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Do what you feel is right, Anna.’

  ‘I must say goodbye to Nana.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand that.’

  ‘Will you tell me something?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When this is finished, will we be free?’

  ‘Yes, we’ll be free,’ he said.

  We left the Bären Inn after breakfast and took the train to Basle, where Finn was to change for a train to north Germany. Finn carried my bag across the platform for me to board a train for Zurich and the flight to Moscow. When he’d put the bag down, he kissed me and wished me luck. Neither of us wanted to be the first to let go, until we each became conscious of the other’s thoughts. Then we laughed.

  Finn threw my bag into the open door of the train as the whistle blew.

  ‘Don’t be a stranger,’ he said.

  I didn’t reply, just watched him as the train pulled away from the platform.

  29

  THE PLANE LANDED at Scheremetyevo airport north of Moscow at five o’clock in the morning. It was the first time I’d been in Russia for four years.

  At the foot of the steps two thugs from the Forest took me in a car, its blue light flashing with unnecessary urgency through to a side entrance of the airport. Within a few minutes of landing, we were on Moscow’s ring road.

  They didn’t speak, even to one another; we just raced at high speed towards the centre of the city. We weren’t heading in the direction of Balashiha and the Forest, and I didn’t know where they were taking me–the Lubyanka, perhaps, or a Forest apartment, or somewhere else. The fear they were hoping to generate by the speed of the drive served only to wake me up and make me more alert.

  After half an hour of this breakneck journey, the car pulled up outside the Savoy Hotel, just around the corner from the Lubyanka. One of the men opened the door for me, more like a policeman than a doorman, and they walked on either side as we entered the hotel and headed for the small downstairs bar.

  The hotel was as I remembered it, a faded, scuffed reminder of its former empire glory before the 1917 Revolution, untouched by Moscow’s real-estate boom. Upstairs above the bar there was the tiny casino where Finn claimed to have won so much, so long ago, it seemed now.

  The bar downstairs was empty apart from one man. I don’t know why I was surprised, but it was Vladimir. It put my mind at ease, a dangerous thing. But he was a welcome anticlimax compared to the reception I’d been expecting.

  Vladimir kissed me four times in the formal Russian way and there was no attempt in here to remind me of our intimacy of four years before. He was now a colonel in the SVR, he said, but it seemed to me he had lost none of his old directness, simplicity, humanity even.

  ‘You and I have much in common,’ he said as he poured coffee. ‘They need people like us,’ he added, ‘if Russia is ever going to change.’

  He was effusive, asking me genuinely innocent questions about my time away, what I liked about Western Europe, if I’d ever like to settle there for good.

  He wanted to know about the Russian scene in the ski resorts and on the beaches over there. What was London like? And Geneva? And Paris? Meeting Vladimir was like coming home to a brother who has never left home. And for all I knew Vladimir had never been anywhere but Moscow and the Cape Verde Islands. I was aware, however, that the men with the car, whom he’d told peremptorily to wait outside, could in a moment take me elsewhere, to a place where the welcome wasn’t so warm.

  Vladimir ordered breakfast for us both. At one point a hotel guest entered the bar and Vladimir sharply told the barman to tell him the bar was closed. On the television, screwed to the ceiling above the bar counter, a violent Russian gangster film played out, the Russian hotel equivalent of the wallpaper classical music in a Western hotel.

  When breakfast and coffee had arrived, Vladimir switched the conversation to the reasons for my return.

  ‘They feel the British have stepped over the line,’ he said. ‘This death has made everyone very angry.’

  I was relieved that they seemed to believe the British were still involved, rather than just Finn, but I f
elt uneasy that there would now be a change in their approach to Finn.

  ‘But you are truly the returning hero,’ he said. ‘I’m told Patrushev is pleased with the way things have gone.’

  His use of the past tense–‘the way things have gone’–sent a shiver through me. Was it over? Was I not required any more, would I not be ordered to return to Finn?

  ‘It’s good to see you, Anna. I’ve missed you.’

  I kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Are you married yet?’ I said.

  ‘No.’ He grinned, and returned my kiss.

  Vladimir said that I had an unscheduled meeting with Patrushev before I was to be debriefed at the Forest. The men in the car are FSB, he said, not SVR. Then I would be taken to the Forest and Vladimir would meet me there and we’d begin work together.

  But first he had thoughtfully booked me a room in which to bathe and change. Half an hour later I rejoined him in the bar where we had another cup of coffee and talked about the quiet things, an apartment he was hoping to find with his newly elevated rank, and the latest movies coming out of Russia that never made it to the West. I was grateful to Vladimir. He had made what he called my homecoming more comfortable than I had imagined it would be.

  As we left the bar and walked into the foyer, I picked up a copy of the day’s edition of Novaya Gazeta which was being delivered as we waited for my coat. On an inside page there was a story about a leading Swiss banker, brutally murdered in his home. The police, it said, wanted to interview a man called Robinson in connection with the murder of Clement Naider.

  I was driven the hundred yards or so to the Lubyanka and was then escorted through its forbidding entrance.

  Patrushev’s office was at the top of the building and, once again, the view from inside the KGB’s fortress made me forget where I was. The Kremlin’s towers and the onion domes of St Peter’s Church–the fairy tale of Russia’s greatness–shone in the early morning light.

  Patrushev welcomed me in his customary grey suit and red tie, and he smiled his thin, purse-lipped smile that was more a recognition of another’s presence than friendliness. Yuri was back, no doubt with a new promotion and a more expensive watch. He glowered in a chair to the side of Patrushev’s desk.

  ‘Welcome home, Colonel,’ Patrushev said.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, four years is not so bad,’ Patrushev said, never taking his eyes off me. ‘You’re hoping to go to Barvikha tonight?’

  ‘If that’s possible,’ I replied.

  ‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ he said, and I felt that Yuri sneered at my hopes.

  Patrushev spoke about the reports I’d made in general terms, praising their ‘level-headedness’, and told me I was a valued officer and more would be needed ‘…if I was capable,’ as he put it. ‘You must be getting tired,’ he said.

  I told him I was tired, but I would do whatever was required of me.

  ‘Of course. Finn hasn’t told you what we need,’ he stated, and looked at me, apparently for confirmation.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘For your sake, perhaps, for his own sake, and for the sake of Mikhail himself.’

  ‘That’s exactly what he tells me,’ I agreed.

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’m getting too far inside his mind,’ Patrushev said. I didn’t follow his meaning.

  ‘Four years. He’s difficult to nail down, isn’t he?’ Patrushev said. I watched Yuri’s face and could imagine, in a picture of horror, Yuri actually nailing down Finn.

  ‘He may have seen Mikhail,’ I said. ‘On maybe one or two occasions. But I don’t know. They obviously have a way of communicating without meeting.’

  ‘You gave us the dates of these supposed meetings, but we haven’t been able to match them with any movements of senior figures here,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t be sure that he actually met Mikhail on those dates either,’ I said, ‘rather than simply picked up a communication from him.’

  ‘And his meetings with Adrian in London?’ Patrushev said. ‘Are there any more of them than you’ve reported?’

  ‘No. You have them all in my reports,’ I replied.

  ‘They meet often. Is this an attempt to make us believe that they are now just social friends? That Finn has left the Service?’

  ‘In my opinion, the job he does at the commercial investigation company in Mayfair is just cover,’ I said. ‘It’s very easy for him to meet with government officers behind the closed doors of this company, Adrian included. So, yes, I think Adrian hopes that we are picking up on their frequent lunches together in order to impress us that they are now just friends who meet in public from time to time and that Finn no longer works for MI6.’

  Patrushev paused and watched me coldly.

  ‘He’s difficult to nail down in other ways, we’ve found,’ he said at last, ignoring my explanation. ‘There is the question of his childhood, for example,’ he went on and threw a closed file across the desk to me without suggesting I open it.

  ‘His story, the one he told you and the one we had from our other sources, does not seem to be correct. How well do you really know him, I wonder?’

  I didn’t understand what he meant, but he clearly wanted me to listen to him rather than to look into the file.

  ‘You can look at it later. At your leisure,’ he added. ‘It seems Finn went to an English boarding school called Bedales, and was not brought up in a commune in Ireland after all. His parents lived in Berkshire, near London. His father was in the civil service, something to do with the coal industry, and his mother was a nurse. Two ordinary, middle-class parents, apparently. It’s all in the file. From this new evidence, Ireland seems to be a fiction. Is Finn a fantasist?’

  This, at first, seemed a small point.

  ‘One of them’s fiction, evidently,’ I said. ‘Maybe this second version is his fiction,’ I continued cautiously. ‘His fiction made for him by MI6. I don’t think he’s a fantasist, no.’

  ‘But he was so convincing when he told you all about his Irish background out at Lake Baikal, wasn’t he? This was his story as told to you, the woman he loves.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Yes, he was convincing.’

  ‘If the story of his Irish upbringing isn’t true, I wonder what else he has convinced you of that isn’t true.’

  He paused dismissively, as if this was a minor issue but I felt the walls were closing around me.

  I reminded myself of what Finn had said years before, as we sailed on Bride of the Wind back to England. ‘They will do anything over the months, maybe years, to drive a wedge between us. That is what we must be most careful of.’

  And these words of Finn’s were also exactly what he would say if he were lying to me.

  I was dismissed after nearly an hour, but as it turned out only from Patrushev’s office.

  Walking down two floors with Yuri in front of me, all I could think of was the file in my hands. This fiction, if it were fiction, was something so unimportant, so obscure, that I couldn’t understand why Finn would have lied about it, to me at any rate. So it must be the file that lied, I thought. But I found that I couldn’t keep that certainty in my head.

  In an office below Patrushev’s, there were two men I hadn’t met, and Vladimir. But it was Yuri who was clearly in charge. The large desk was covered in documents illuminated by the one light in the room, a desk lamp that flooded the mess of paperwork. The four of us sat around the desk with Yuri in an old wooden swinging chair behind it. He lit a cigarette from one of several half-empty packets strewn across the desk and exhaled loudly and stared at me.

  I placed the file of Finn’s supposed deceit on a mess of ash and screwed-up sweet wrappers- where it belonged, I thought.

  Yuri continued staring at me. Then he looked away, affecting boredom.

  He addressed one of the men I didn’t know. ‘Let’s start with the photographs,’ he said. The atmosphere was unfrie
ndly, threatening even.

  The man picked up a document case from under his chair and unzipped it. He withdrew a brown envelope, extracted a fistful of photographs from it, and gave them to Yuri. Yuri made a play of looking at them one by one, raising an eyebrow now and again, exhaling smoke, clicking his teeth. I wondered with a sinking feeling who the subjects of the pictures were. Finn and me, perhaps? I doubted it. The one thing we were careful of was our own, personal privacy. But this performance of Yuri’s was designed to unnerve.

  He picked them out one by one and placed them in turn on the desk in front of me. The first photograph was a shot of Finn and me boarding a train.

  ‘Where’s that?’ Yuri said.

  ‘Bourg-en-Bresse in France,’ I said.

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Finn was meeting a contact. Then we changed trains for Geneva.’

  ‘Who was the contact?’

  ‘I didn’t meet him. Or her,’ I added.

  It wasn’t the start I was hoping for and Yuri made a great play of allowing an expression of deep doubt in my story to settle on his face.

  The pictures came in quick succession, sometimes pausing over one for further examination and extrapolation from me. They were external shots of Finn and me, travelling, until we came to a picture of Finn, Frank and me, sitting in a café in Luxembourg.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Yuri demanded, pointing at Frank.

  ‘His name’s Frank. He’s in my reports.’

  ‘Frank what?’ Yuri said, implying I was withholding information.

  ‘I don’t know. I was introduced to him as Frank. If you have a picture of him, presumably you know.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Yuri snapped, ignoring me.

  ‘He’s a private investigator. Specialising in banking, particularly in his home town in Luxembourg. He seems to be an old contact of Finn’s. More than that. A friend. Finn admires him a great deal. There’s a bond between them.’

  There were two pictures of Willy, taken perhaps on a trip to Marseilles which the three of us had gone on, but these seemed to be the only pictures they had of us together. Then we came to pictures from the day before.