Document Z

by Andrew Croome

  ‘That is true,’ said Petrov. ‘Moscow has the best hospitals.’

  Bialoguski asked about the world’s most expensive painting, Raphael’s Alba Madonna, which both America and the USSR claimed to have. Petrov joked that either the Americans’ was a fraud or the master had painted two. They had whisky, embassy shout. It felt good to buy and better to drink. Bialoguski talked about horses, a system he was developing to make money from the races. Petrov said he’d loved horses since he was born.

  ‘What do you know about Lydia Mokras?’asked Petrov.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Her history . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘This uncle in the Cheka.’

  Laughter.

  ‘She says her family is rich. In Prague they have an electrical shop, a house and two motor cars.’

  ‘She says she is Czech and she says she is Russian. She can’t decide.’

  ‘I know she is trying to cancel the certification of her marriage.’

  ‘I’ve heard it said she is an agent of Security. Have you noticed her head is fishbowl-round?’

  They drank on. At about half past five came the rush. It was a long bar and they sat at its end, the room dense with smoke, the ceiling fan churning a slow current, voices carpeting one side of the room to the other, men in suits, and a gang of them playing crib, and boys not sixteen offering a small commission on trips to the bar. The diplomat and the doctor ate sandwiches standing up.

  ‘What do you think of Australian women?’

  ‘Yes, they are alright.’

  ‘I want to see Bondi Beach.’

  ‘The coast is better. What shall we do now?’

  Petrov said he knew a place. He took them both to the club he’d found. There was a girl on stage. The stage was small and the girl danced in a bathing suit. They stood there watching. They bought Swans from the bar and sat on two stools either side of a high table. He saw that Bialoguski was staring at the drinks waitress’s enormous breasts. She lit cigarettes for them. They smoked and watched the girl on stage and she watched them back as she moved. Enlivened, Petrov decided to see what kind of source this man might turn out to be.

  ‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘do you know a man, a Russian, named Efim?’

  It was someone Moscow was searching for; a possible escapee to Australia sometime before the war.

  ‘Efim?’ Bialoguski asked.

  ‘Through your practice perhaps?’

  The girl produced a parasol. She sat its stem in one hand and spun it with the other, her hips cocked to one side.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the doctor.

  ‘We are looking for a man by this name, should you meet him.’

  There was a screen of frosted glass by the girl. She disappeared behind it then stuck her leg out. Petrov clapped and cheered. He asked Bialoguski what he knew about passports. He asked what papers were necessary for migrants to enter the country.

  The doctor looked from Petrov to the girl and then to Petrov again. He was drinking rum now. ‘I can get the papers for you,’ he said. ‘I can get them from the department.’

  ‘What about passport blanks?’ Petrov asked. Procuring these would win him a reprieve from Moscow’s scoldings.

  Bialoguski seemed to take the question in his stride. ‘I think that would be very difficult. There are likely security measures that prevent the distribution of such things.’

  The girl held the bathing suit at arm’s length, twirling it. She was hard to see through the glass. The music on the gramophone was melancholy but had punch. The girl put her breasts on the glass and moved her hips round and round, and the men in the room clapped for the two white and lonely circles and for the hips below them that moved.

  They went to the Metropole Hotel for gin. Bialoguski was becoming certain that this man was MVD; all this probing about passports and names. They listened to 2UW on the bar’s radio while Petrov chained three cigarettes. The place was empty except for themselves. Sinatra came on and Petrov said, ‘Who is this?’ and Bialoguski said Sinatra.

  The Russian began tapping his pockets.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Bialoguski.

  ‘Keys. I’ve dropped the Oriental’s keys somewhere.’

  ‘The keys to your hotel room?’

  ‘I’ll have to leave early,’ said Petrov. ‘While the doorman is still on.’

  Bialoguski thought. ‘Forget the Oriental,’ he said slowly. ‘Why not stay at my flat? It has a magnitude of space.’

  He was mostly being polite. He presumed that Russian diplomats had strict rules against staying with locals. Petrov looked across and said, ‘Okay.’

  Inspired, Bialoguski decided it was time for a small stunt. ‘Pakhomov asks about you,’ he said. ‘At the club. He wants to know, have I seen you? Have you been in town? I get the impression he’s keeping tabs.’

  Petrov peered up at the wireless. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘Nothing.’ The doctor shrugged. ‘I say that I haven’t seen you. I make jokes about how he’s your countryman and how on earth would I know where you are.’

  Silence. Petrov began to toy with the flame of his lighter.

  ‘Leave the club,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. It attracts too much interest from Security.’

  The doctor didn’t reply. He reached over the bar for the ice spade. Petrov looked pensive now and Bialoguski wondered what he’d done.

  That night, Bialoguski lay awake, the flat quiet except for the dull hum of rain. He was tossing an idea slowly in his mind. It was to do with listening. He thought that sounds had surfaces, and he wanted to penetrate that plane and listen deeply to whatever lay underneath. He thought that there, in noise just as in music, maybe he would hear the truth.

  He sat up breathlessly and listened, using all the training he could muster. Between the master bedroom and the guest room was a bathroom, and between the bathroom and the guest room was a line of creaking boards. He listened like somebody superhuman, like a comic-book hero using a secret force. He was certain that Petrov was sleeping.

  He got up and began to move. At the bathroom, he opened the door slightly and switched on a light and stood listening to the Soviet’s breath. He didn’t think it possible to step over the creaking boards and into Petrov’s room without making a noise. He put one foot where he knew the boards would creak, and they did creak and he listened. No change to the Soviet. He raised his foot and set it down again, one hand on the bathroom doorframe, preparing to yank him towards an excuse.

  He went carefully into the room. Petrov was turned towards him, his glasses on the night table. If he woke, they’d be staring at each other. His coat was on the door knob. Bialo-guski put his fingers in the inner right-hand pocket. Nothing. He checked the outer right-hand pocket. Nothing. In the inner left he felt a booklet. He memorised its position with his hand: spirals facing out, the thread pointed down. The master spy at work. He took the booklet to his bedroom and turned on a lamp. The book was names and numbers, a mixture of scribble and Cyrillic. Bialoguski copied each page. He copied not only the numerals but also the layout, just in case the layout was a secret in itself. There were twelve pages and forty-two names. It took him the best part of an hour.

  He replaced the book. Petrov looked whale-ish rugged up in his blankets. In the next pocket was the Russian’s wallet, and in its cash fold the beginnings of a letter, unaddressed. It was a request for a meeting. Petrov’s cursive was horrific and hard to read. At points Bialoguski was reduced to copying simply the shape and clash of the scrawl.

  The remainder of the wallet was identification, business cards and scrap. Bialoguski copied each item with an artist’s precision. He thought that the true facts of the wallet would ionise around the smaller, literal details—the slant of a phone number or the fade in the circumference of an official stamp. He drew a diagram mapping the wallet and the position of each item. By the time he’d finished, the sun was coming up. A wide white yawn beyond the hill t
hat broke the light.

  Petrov’s flight back to Canberra rattled in the morning sun. Golden light belting the crests and valleys below, working on the palette of paddocks.

  He was trying to read the newspaper when he realised there were blurry spots in his vision. He rubbed his eyes and looked west. The spots didn’t move. They were unlike anything he’d known. He read on, hoping they would disappear.

  That night, he and Evdokia lay together in the dark.

  ‘My eyes,’ he said.

  ‘Your eyes?’

  ‘I have spots.’

  ‘Spots. Do you mean flecks?’

  ‘I mean spots are clouding my vision, like small warpings in glass.’

  ‘Is it dust?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It hurts?’

  ‘Painless.’

  ‘Did you do something?’

  ‘Why are they there? I don’t know.’

  ‘Tell your doctor friend.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘You sound worried.’

  ‘Are you worried?’

  ‘About your eyes?’

  ‘No . . .’

  Evdokia rolled towards him and the mattress sank a little.

  He said, ‘I think the ambassador will relax. He will decide we are no threat.’

  Silence.

  ‘You don’t?’ he asked.

  ‘I think we will be recalled.’

  ‘If we are recalled . . .’

  ‘Ten years.’

  ‘No, not prison.’

  ‘Death then.’

  ‘Not death.’

  ‘Poverty and nothingness.’

  ‘Perhaps expulsion.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  They lay awake for a time. It was so dark he thought maybe someone had broken the streetlight. He put his hand on her belly. They lay listening and not moving. He didn’t tell her about the Security service’s interest in her and the fact that Pakhomov would report it. He wondered instead whether he were going blind. In so much darkness his eyes were okay. He wondered if the blind man saw the world in darkness or in light, or in some nothing state beyond both that only blind men knew. He took his hand back and rolled over. He reached for his Omega on the bedside table and wound it five or six times and put it back. He lay there listening to its tick. It was the only noise in the quiet room and quiet house and darkened street.

  8

  A sign said, ‘Cake Needs’. Bialoguski sat in his car in the parking area of a food and liquor store in Willoughby. It was midnight; the store was closed and nobody was there. He watched the way the light fell from the street across the car park as he sat in the Holden and smoked through the driver’s window.

  A few moments past the hour, Michael Howley appeared. He came from nowhere, from the darkness beyond the yard like some spirit of the moor, and he stood beside the car with his hat pulled tightly on his head. Bialoguski leaned across to unlock the door. The man got in, Bialoguski pointed the Holden onto the road, and they drove for ten or so minutes, the car breathing heat into the winter air, the men silent beyond Howley’s occasional low instruction to turn.

  The wind on the coast was biting. They pulled up on a gravel circle on a cliff. Bialoguski left the engine on to run the heater.

  ‘He’s left you?’ asked the ASIO man.

  As Bialoguski went to reply, he was wondering how he could make some money from the things he was about to say. ‘That’s right. He stayed at Cliveden. The extra room. He said he’d lost his hotel keys but I think that was a lie.’

  Howley had a minifon. The doctor could see it strapped over his shirt. He thought: I’m important enough that they’re recording my every word.

  ‘Yesterday he went to Redfern,’ he said. ‘He told me where and I found the address for him on a map. He’s recruiting me, I’m sure.’

  ‘You think he’ll stay with you again?’

  ‘He finds Cliveden useful. He knows I’ll be there to support him. I think he’s decided to use it as a base.’

  The ASIO man was watching him talk, sitting turned slightly towards him, spectating from close range.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ Bialoguski said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. I’m struggling to keep up with the Cliveden payments. The rent is very high. I may have to move and it will likely be somewhere less convenient.’

  Howley didn’t respond.

  Bialoguski reached into the back for a satchel. He dragged it forward and tossed the flap open. ‘It would be better for everyone if I managed to keep my flat,’ he said. ‘Here, for example, are the contents of Petrov’s pockets.’

  He revelled in his description of the previous evening’s hunt. He narrated the position and precise content of the items copied and handed the copies over. He was the masterful secret agent, the Queen’s trusted spy. Howley examined everything but showed him emotionally next to nothing. Bialo-guski knew that this was very much part of the game.

  ‘Did he spot you doing this?’ Howley asked.

  ‘No. He was snoring like a pig.’ The doctor pointed to the address list. ‘This is very good for you. Here. These names, they are Australian names.’

  ‘Yes, I see them.’

  ‘You know these men?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘You can turn these men. Doublecross. You can feed them false information, false documents. You can control what the Soviets know. Petrov is MVD. Positive. He is recruiting me non-stop.’

  The ASIO man had a small electric lamp, which he ran over Bialoguski’s schematics.

  Bialoguski said, ‘These are his agents. No doubt.’

  ‘No doubt?’

  ‘Positive. This is treasure for you. This is as good as it gets.’

  Howley produced an envelope—cash for the doctor’s retainer. Seeing this, Bialoguski reached into his satchel for an envelope of his own. Inside:

  EXPENSES INCURRED IN THE FORTNIGHT: CRANE

  (Report) Car 15 0

  (Report) Transport 12 0

  (Report) Incidentals 8 0

  Transport 3 0

  (Lunch) Car 10 0

  (With Petrov) Chocolates, cigs 1 5 0

  (Report) Car 15 0

  (Peace Council Donation Meeting) ‘to Stalin’s

  Memorial Fund’ 1 0 0

  (Petrov) Dinner at Adria 2 10 0

  Entertainment at home 10 0

  Camera film 10 6

  Food 15 0

  Wine 1 10 1

  Car 15 0

  (Report) Car 15 0

  TOTAL: £13 13s 6d

  ‘All legitimate,’ said Bialoguski.

  Howley read the list by the lamplight. There was a noise outside in the wind, a sudden scrape. The lamp was turned off and both men looked. The wind whipped around the Holden. They peered. There was nothing but darkness and nothing, the cliff edge and the black, crashing sea.

  Howley flicked the lamp back on. ‘You want us to fund Stalin?’

  ‘I am at the coalface. That is what sympathy costs.’

  The man was quiet for a moment. Then he gave Bialoguski the list and put his hands to the heater. ‘You’d best add the date. I think you can’t be too careful where money’s concerned and it doesn’t belong to you.’

  Bialoguski got out a pencil. ‘Agreed,’ he said. ‘And the rent on my flat? You will talk to someone? You will talk to Colonel Spry?’

  Howley told him that they’d see. ‘Don’t use your codename for the finances,’ he said. ‘Use a natural-looking pseudonym. Jack Baker.’

  Ocean spray was misting on the windshield. An extended silence meant the meeting was over. Bialoguski put the car into gear and returned them to the car park. Howley said goodnight and disappeared the way he’d come.

  The doctor had a cigarette and felt ecstatic. He wondered whether Howley knew that he was sitting the flat for free. Even if he did, that might be better. They would understand each other that way. And he wouldn’t call his bluff when Bialoguski was adding so much information to the pot.


  He put the car on the road. He decided to go and find Lydia.

  B2 looked again at the monochrome photographs, grainy samples shot at odd angles, only the moderate suggestion of depth. Petrov with briefcase and double-breasted suit. Petrov in crowd in grey-tone hat, shorter than those around, staring, waiting. There was a business card in elegant cursive: Vladimir Petrov, Third Secretary of the Embassy of the USSR, Canberra. B2 looked at these things, searching for some form of meaning. All he could find was sadness.

  He got up to make tea. What did Petrov think he was doing? B2 was almost certain now that they had enough material to burn him. A well-delivered threat about his drunkenness and weakness for prostitutes; spy for us, or go home in Russian handcuffs. Probably they’d never do it. They couldn’t be too reckless while their organisation was still on trial. But the point was that Petrov was leaving himself open. He knew they were following him and still he visited houses of poor repute. This was the mystery that B2 couldn’t reconcile. Was Petrov baiting them? Was the whole thing a Soviet dare? He thought hard. If it was possible, it was only possible because everything was possible.

  Petrov bears a striking physical resemblance to Mr Harold Holt, Minister for Immigration; could be described as slightly shorter, thicker-set, slightly fatter edition of Holt. He has longish hair, turning prematurely grey, like Holt’s, brushed straight back, also like Holt.

  B2 shovelled the tea leaves quickly, digging deep into the box. He set the pot and waited, rereading the account of Crane’s latest report. B2 never met personally with agents. His job was to provide the vision, to be the omniscient paragon who rearranged the puzzle pieces of counterespionage so that they joined and found coherence. He thought Crane was a compulsive liar and completely out of control. But concerning Petrov’s strained relations with the other Russians, perhaps the doctor had a point.

  He went to a filing cabinet and pulled on a drawer. There was a program in here somewhere: Operation Cabin 12, detailing the preparations to protect a hunted defector. B2 liked the name, one of his own concoctions, a certain ring to it, the suggestion of shelter and branding. He opened the file on his desk. It was a plan and nothing more. Wired safe houses in Sydney and Melbourne, body swaps and speedy rendezvous on the Wombeyan Caves Road. The Riley was to be used, its dashboard fitted with sound recorders. There were shopping lists for the safe houses, whisky at the top. Two officers were to be resident at all times, and then two men from Special Branch with guns. B2 saw that someone had selected opportune suburbs, even possible streets.