Document Z

by Andrew Croome

  Document

  Z

  Lies, deception and betrayal

  —a masterful story of

  espionage and intrigue

  Document

  Z

  Andrew Croome

  First published in 2009

  Copyright © Andrew Croome 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74175 743 9

  Set in 11/15 pt Fairfield by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my parents

  Contents

  19 April 1954, Mascot Aerodrome

  1951

  1 Canberra

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  1961-1996

  25

  26

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgements

  19 April 1954, Mascot

  Aerodrome

  The car was so long it had the look of a hearse. The crowd watched it arrive via the slip road, an American car of all things, a colossal black Cadillac limousine, hard-tailed and polished. Not quite speeding but not going slow.

  The man who stood before it made a lonely figure in a long coat. He raised a hand into the light from its nearing headlamps and set one foot forward. The crowd waited to see. The Cadillac showed no indication of slowing. For a moment it looked as if man and machine would meet. Then quickly the car veered, tossing up some gravel on the roadside, shooting past the man who turned and shouted something about a sign. Something about an insignia. And before the Cadillac quite reached them, the crowd had flooded its path. They were night breath; forty or fifty people in suits, coats and hats. The car stopped and they surrounded it, peered into its dark windows, a strange feeling overcoming them: acidic and tightening, as if this week’s newsprint had entered their bodies and formed there a second blood.

  Somebody swore that they could see her. People began trying the handles on the doors.

  Staring out the window of the Cadillac, Evdokia knew this crowd was here for her. They were hunting her. They were here to prevent her escaping through the terminal, onto the plane.

  The driver, Sanko, high-beamed the lights and revved the limousine hard. The crowd was tapping on the window glass. Evdokia could see angry, desperate expressions on those nearby. Moscow’s courier, a man named Karpinsky, turned from the front passenger seat and announced a plan to rush the terminal. Madness, Evdokia thought, though it was madness too not to move. Beside her, Zharkov thrust the door open. She stepped out and was immediately grateful for the man’s girth. People everywhere. A silence and then a rising. Just close your eyes, she thought. Keep your feet marching like the Pioneer Youth. In front of her, Karpinsky threw a man to the ground. She heard the click of his skull on concrete, and in the next moment the crowd’s voice erupted. The shoving began. She kept an arm on Zharkov and the crowd was targeting him, targeting her, or both.

  This might be it, Evdokia realised. A chaos building, a climbing potential. Her escorts had revolvers in their jackets. If it was Moscow’s instruction, they’d do away with her here, deliver a misdirected shot amongst these scrambling bodies. Defector’s Wife Dies in Airport Riot.

  They weren’t going to reach the terminal. She and Zharkov were being pushed sideways, heading along the building’s edge. She thought maybe there was blood on her gloves, a light red mist. Zharkov locked his arm to hers as they hurried through a gap in a fence and found themselves suddenly on the open tarmac.

  An ocean of protesters here. She could not believe it, the number of people, the lights and the shadows. The plane stood distant at a hundred metres. They passed two lone A-frame barriers, overturned, and then three policemen suddenly joined them. They formed a group, a tight, triangular formation: Evdokia between Zharkov and Sanko, Karpinsky with the police in front.

  How many people on the apron? One thousand? Two? The protesters roared when they saw the group. The people began to swamp towards them, to push and snarl. Evdokia wanted to stop. She wanted to stop and turn and run. Zharkov at her elbow, insisting otherwise. The crowd’s ferocity exponential.

  A man with a microphone jogged at their side. ‘You can undoubtedly hear the noise going on. Press photographers’ bulbs are flashing. People are screaming all around me. Does Mrs Petrov want to go? “Don’t let her go,” the people are yelling. “She doesn’t want to go!” ’

  She tried to increase her pace and lost a shoe. It came off and her toes scraped against the tarmac. No way to stop. She looked behind to see the shoe held aloft, following like a trophy for the brave.

  The plane loomed, an enormous cylinder in the darkness. One of the policemen was swinging his cudgel like a machete in a rainforest, leading them straight for the aircraft’s stairs.

  ‘Why don’t you stay in Australia? In Moscow, they’ll kill you!’

  It was a surprise to find her foot on the first step. The staircase rocked as she climbed, and people’s hands reached up from beneath the railings, ferociously trying to grab her. There was a terrific shudder when the stairs were pulled free of their moorings, suddenly shifting on their wheels. She heard shouts and screams. Below, the police were beating a man who held the stair’s controls in his hands and was refusing to let go. He absorbed the blows like someone being flogged, bending as if shackled to the levers.

  Evdokia continued to climb. An official from the plane had come to her side and they were ascending together, a metre from the top, when the stairs finally rolled back into place. Evdokia looked up to see Philip Kislitsyn, the embassy’s second secretary, holding the railings with arms outstretched, trying to make the staircase stay flush against the plane.

  On the last step, she lurched over a slight air-gap, finding herself inside the plane and its pale, passive light.

  When the door was closed, the noise outside fell strangely dead. Zharkov and Karpinsky stood, wiped their foreheads. She could see the shock still on Philip Kislitsyn’s face. He brought her a glass of brandy that tasted like fuel.

  Karpinksy said the crowd was retreating. Zharkov looked through a window and said they were regrouping to attack the plane.

  Evdokia sat and awaited whichever. The minutes passed and she fell into a quiet trance, thinking of her husband, herself, her sister. Everything he had betrayed.

  1951

  1

  Canberr
a

  Lockyer Street was as wide as the streets in a Hollywood dream. The house was a bungalow with bricked pathways and a raised landing, and it sat snugly on its block, hedged by low bushes and a cypress tree. They arrived late in summer. She was expecting palm trees but there was only incandescent heat.

  They called it a suburb. Pines and pin oaks. The houses were square bodies with triangular roofs and white window frames, driveways and edged lawns and paths to their front doors. Afternoons, a group of boys would seize the street, gaming with a bat and ball, their shouts punching off the asphalt.

  It was a strange town where the roads were curved by design. It was a place for sweeping around in cars.

  Their backyard was enormous. A clothes line of strung steel sat alone at the centre like some antennaed monument. Their kitchen was enormous. The oven was new and all its fixtures were bakelite. The bedrooms and the lounge provided enough space for five Moscow families. Evdokia sat on the back porch and imagined she was Mary Pickford in a breakfast robe.

  On the way to Manuka was a large white chest called the Capitol Theatre. She walked there, hoping to find a schedule of theatrical performances. The building was a picture house. Nearby, the Forrest Newsagency sold magazines. She bought Australian Women’s Weekly for the article ‘How to be a Woman’. Act dumb, it read. Don’t talk about politics, economics, or your theories of relativity.

  The weather was knife-blue skies.

  Milk was delivered to people’s front doors.

  She lay awake beside Volodya, wondering if it was possible to be unhappy in a country such as this, where the shopping centres were white-stone temples, where fruit stores sold their produce in the open air, peaches and strawberries in huge boxes.

  And the children were so healthy. If there was to be a diffi-culty living here, it would be their rhapsodic brightness and its propensity to break her heart. They came tumbling from the schools, little girls in high white socks and pleated skirts. It was the kind of pain that couldn’t be helped, Mothercraft Centres everywhere you looked.

  She imagined Irina with her now. Irina on Lockyer Street in a blue skirt, skipping. Irina leaping into Volodya’s arms.

  Wear silly shoes, said the magazine. Sensible shoes may be more comfortable, but they are just not feminine.

  The Soviet embassy was a double-storeyed lodge. The staff called it Little Moscow, and it sat on a block so large that the gardeners kept an orchard. Nikolai Kovaliev, the commercial attaché, arranged a welcome for the newcomers. Evdokia wore her Stockholm dress with the abstract pattern and her smallest black hat. The other wives were drab. Lifanova, the ambassador’s wife, wore a thick tan dress with a hole in it. She had a citation pinned to her chest: the civilians’ medal for the defence of Moscow. Almost everyone from the city had received this medal. It made her look like a pantomime scout.

  The ambassador, Lifanov, was a man of somewhat crumpled physique with an incredible amount of silver in his teeth. From morning to mid-afternoon, Evdokia was to work as his personal secretary and the embassy accountant. She was assigned a heavy and very formal desk in his antechamber. To make it her own, she cut out a picture of a dog playing a piano and put it under the glass.

  Her downstairs duties complete, she was to move each afternoon to the secret section where she carried out her work for the MVD—the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The MVD’s traffic was hidden inside the embassy’s regular diplomatic cables, identified by a four-digit flag. Evdokia helped her husband decrypt the spy organ’s messages using a one-time pad. The matrices were laborious but the job was somehow fulfilling. The results were plain text messages, most littered with secret words. Many of the codes were obvious. ‘Fraternal’ was the Australian Communist Party. ‘The Competitors’ were ASIO, Australia’s security organisation. ‘Voron’ was the MVD’s agent and so was ‘Yakka’. There were other codes that only Volodya understood. Evdokia knew better than to ask.

  The third MVD officer at the embassy was Philip Kislitsyn, an impossibly tall man who walked with a stoop. He arrived a week after the Petrovs. He had a daughter, Tatiana, and a wife, Anna. They all came to dinner, neatly dressed.

  ‘You spent the war in London?’ Volodya asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Kislitsyn. ‘Five years at the embassy there.’

  ‘Were you bombed?’

  Kislitsyn shrugged. ‘When we arrived it was sporadic.’

  ‘We were in Sweden.’

  Volodya produced the photo album of Stockholm: the Grand Hotel and the Royal Palace, a picture of Evdokia eating strawberries in Gamla Stan. Kislitsyn asked what conditions were like.

  ‘Terrible,’ said Volodya. ‘In capitalist countries, goods will rot on the docks if the people cannot pay.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Kislitsyn. ‘England was just as bad, though perhaps they had an excuse with the war. It is difficult to know.’

  Evdokia told the story of their voyage from Archangel, how their ship had been torpedoed by a pig-shaped German submarine.

  ‘It surfaced?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Right by the lifeboats. We thought we were all about to die.’

  Anna looked impressed. Evdokia told her of the three days in the lifeboat; how, as the ship was holed and sinking, a child slipped from the ropes and disappeared. Volodya said they owed their lives to the radio operator who had stayed on board, signalling SOS.

  ‘Next time you will be saved by television,’ said Kislitsyn. ‘This is going to replace radio. I saw it at the BBC.’

  The next morning, Kislitsyn came to Evdokia’s desk wanting to know if she had any contacts in the Australian business community.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘People who can get people jobs. Captains of industry, they are called.’

  He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, quite an attractive pair. She gave him the embassy rolodex and he flipped through it hungrily, hovering over certain names.

  ‘How can I tell who these people are?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s mostly the ambassador’s list.’

  He groaned.

  ‘Which of us needs a job?’ she joked.

  He looked at her quietly. She realised now that she’d seen him before, recalling a figure in the Special Cypher Department in Moscow who had usually sat alone in the canteen. Yes, he’d been in the building for a few months, not much more, then he’d disappeared. Purged, she’d thought then, but evidently not so.

  ‘These are our only records?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no. There are other lists too. The film nights, for example.’

  He looked on eagerly as she began reaching for the files.

  She met the Australian prime minister. Ambassador Lifanov came to her desk one afternoon and asked if she wouldn’t mind. It was a diplomatic dinner for the Europeans, and he needed staff who spoke English and were suitable. The parliament building was white and, she thought, rather beautiful. Its lights were on, the grasslands around dark black.

  ‘Robert Menzies,’ said the prime minister.

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  He had silver hair and black bushy eyebrows. He was a fascist, or at least had fascist tendencies. He was unfailingly polite. He asked them to a cricket match he was organising, a charity game to raise funds for Legacy. They didn’t know what Legacy was.

  There was roast turkey, the huge bird sitting fatly on a plate. At dinner, Evdokia engaged in small talk with Zizka, the Czech trade consul, a slight-framed man who she thought worked for Czech intelligence. Afterwards, there were drinks in a room with a fireplace. Men stuck to one side, women the other. Prime Minister Menzies made a toast. Evdokia watched Kovaliev, the commercial attaché, the way he seemed to hang from Ambassador Lifanov’s coat-tails, his equine features making him look like the man’s mule.

  Lifanova seemed awkward and out of place. Evdokia presumed it was her lack of English. She thought the wife of the Soviet ambassador shouldn’t be someone who stood alone and so she went to her, to help by bei
ng there to translate. The only people who approached them came to compliment Evdokia on her outfit. The wife of a French diplomat suggested that she investigate a store named Kosky Brothers in Melbourne. No one said anything to Lifanova. She stood at the edge of the conversations, reduced to nodding along.

  Evdokia woke the next day feeling enthused. She smoked a cigarette in the backyard and penned a long letter to Tamara, her fourteen-year-old sister. This is a koala, she wrote. Here is where we live. This card shows the Harbour Bridge and this one the Blue Mountains. She concluded by imploring her sister to study hard, to take up languages and to read each day Pravda’s notes on international affairs. She promised that she would organise Tamara’s membership of the Komsomol. She promised that by hard work and struggle Tamara too could go abroad. Capitalism wraps its women in tissue paper, she wrote, but you and I, we are not the beneficiaries but the very benefit of the Great October Revolution.

  She had photographs of Irina and Tamara playing with woodblocks on the floor, her daughter and her mother’s daughter, born so close together under the same stars.

  She took Tamara’s letter to the embassy to post it. She hadn’t been there five minutes when Volodya came to her desk with an instruction from Moscow. It had come by telegraph, he said. It was truly the strangest thing. Please update your records and use the following in correspondence. The centre had changed her codename. They wanted her to be known as ‘Tamara’.

  She re-read the telegraph, feeling somewhat confused. It might have been a coincidence, but they knew her whole history, as they knew everyone’s, so what were they trying to convey?

  She pondered as she worked and by lunchtime couldn’t avoid the conclusion that it was some form of threat. Her sister would be their retaliation should anything go awry.

  2

  ‘Benson’s Games & Goods.’ Closed, said a sign on the door. Vladimir Petrov tried it anyway, setting off a small bell on its far side.

  ‘We’re shut,’ said a voice. ‘It’s Sunday.’ A man’s face appeared at the glass. Near to white hair.