Document Z

by Andrew Croome

  ‘Your friend’s a strange man,’ Lucinda said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He tells Dorothy he’s Polish. Later he’s Bulgarian. He says he’s a bonds trader, then an importer and exporter of antiques.’

  ‘He said he was Polish? He may have been drunk.’

  They heard giggling from the guest room.

  A few hours later he drove both women home. The front door to the terrace was wide open and unattended, light spilling onto the street. He suggested checking the house for intruders, but Lucinda said the door often willed itself ajar, some broken impulse in the lock.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said.

  Outside Lydia’s flat, he was shocked to find an Essex tourer against the kerb. He stood in the dark, watching. He knew the car’s plate. It was driven by Claude Watts, a young man from the club. There was no light on in the flat. Why Lydia was doing this he didn’t know. He considered breaking his way through her front door, confronting them; the lover, jilted. But that would be Claude’s win. Best to challenge the bitch alone.

  Gleaming wounds. He found a rock and gashed the paintwork on the tourer, a coarse squeaking and a long mark, pale in the lamplight, on the driver’s side. He kept the rock in his hand and lowered his Holden’s window and drove past the car and released the rock. Loud crack on the windshield.

  10

  Vasili Sanko gave the horn a half-toot, bringing the staff running. They stood on the lawn at the front to watch the ambassador arrive. Nikolai Ivanovich Generalov wanted his door opened. He got out of the car and looked into the waiting faces. He was larger than Lifanov, with a definite military build, silver hair over his ears and a receding scalp-line. Generalova was more solid, taller than her husband and broader. Not too awful a dress, Evdokia thought, for someone straight from Russia.

  The new ambassador took a tour. The grounds first, the tennis court and orchard. Evdokia went to her desk to work and so she was there when he came in.

  ‘Ah. My office?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ answered Kovaliev, behind him.

  The men waited, without a word of greeting, while Evdokia retrieved the official envelope in which the key had been sealed. Generalov broke it open, and the two men went inside. She stayed in the antechamber listening to Kovaliev point things out—the telephone, the lighting board, the combination cabinet with the embassy’s top-secret files.

  ‘Evdokia Alexeyevna,’ said Generalov’s voice. She went into the room to find his hand pointing at a vase. ‘These flowers have died,’ he said. She awaited further instruction until she realised he simply wanted them removed. Kovaliev was staring at her. She collected the vase and was on her way out when the ambassador spoke again.

  ‘Comrade, various reports of your behaviour have found their way to Moscow. I will warn you once. I am not a man as gracious and lenient as Lifanov. You will not be permitted to be a disruptive influence on my staff.’

  She glanced at the commercial attaché. ‘Ambassador,’ she said, ‘I can assure you that any reports you have read have been slander. A campaign has been made against my husband and me, the result of petty jealousies.’

  ‘Yes, you remind me,’ he said. ‘Please tell your husband that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has ordered that he no longer bring his dog into the precincts of our embassy.’

  She poured the flower water down a drain, feeling angry and a little panicked. As it happened, there was little time to marvel at the ambassador’s words. When she came back to the antechamber, the unimaginable had occurred. Kovaliev was standing with the embassy’s external phone in his hand. ‘Evdokia,’ he said. ‘Talk to this man.’

  She picked up. It was a journalist from the Argus wanting to confirm that Stalin had died.

  Generalov became sickly pale. After the Argus came the Sydney Morning Herald, the Courier, and the ABC. They didn’t know what to tell them.

  The senior staff huddled around Sanko who was trying to repair the broken radio set that received news broadcasts from Moscow.

  2CA were knocking at the embassy’s front door. ‘We’re not sure,’ Evdokia told them. ‘Please go away.’

  The rest of the embassy got word of the happenings, the children, in quiet awe, creeping along the corridors of the ground floor, looking for out-of-the-way vantage points where the cross-legged might disappear.

  ‘We can call Auckland,’ she suggested to the ambassador. ‘We can ask the legation in New Zealand.’

  The operator booked the trunk call for quarter past the hour. Each time the ringer went it was a journalist not an operator. Eventually, it was Sanko’s radio that brought the Soviet outpost their news.

  The Supreme Leader had passed at 11.32 p.m. Moscow time. Stroke.

  Generalov agreed to speak first with the ABC. He gave a heartfelt eulogy, saying that he spoke for a shocked nation, a nation that had lost a great revolutionary equal to Lenin and Kirov.

  The ABC journalist wanted to know who would lead the USSR now. The Party would decide, said the ambassador, but the people, as ever, would continue to be well served.

  What had been Stalin’s legacy? The Generalissimo’s bringing about of the Soviet Union as a world power. His showing of the way forward after Marx and Lenin.

  Would the ruler’s death encourage dissidents in the USSR to find a greater voice? No one was opposed to the regime. Why would they be when it took care of their every need?

  Was Stalin the greatest dictator the world would ever see? The Generalissimo opposed dictatorial rule. He was a man for the people, even if the west could not bring itself to understand this fact.

  Were they sure he died of natural causes?

  Generalov permitted no further questions. He created a statement, which Evdokia read aloud to the newspapers, and made no further comment. On Pakhomov’s advice, the only other journalist given audience with the ambassador was Rupert Lockwood for the Tribune, whose enquiries were bound to be less embarrassing.

  Late that night, Evdokia left for home. On her way out, Generalov gave her an unexpected appreciative nod. She called in at the embassy kitchen and collected two servings from a hot soup that was sitting on the stove.

  At Lockyer Street, Volodya was on the back porch, smoking. ‘Well,’ he said.

  ‘Stalin dies.’

  ‘Seventy-four years old.’

  ‘Is this a good thing? I don’t know.’

  ‘Chaos, you think?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Here we have a power vacuum with yet-to-be-felt destabilising effects.’

  ‘If they say he is dead tonight, probably he has been dead for weeks.’

  ‘There will be a succession plan in place.’

  ‘Several plans, I would think.’

  ‘Now moves the mercury of terror.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Did you know that Karasev has a portrait of Molotov in his living room?’

  ‘Yes, but it is not his. The house rents it from the embassy.’ She transferred the soup into bowls. They sat in the lounge room by the wireless, listening to 2CA report the news.

  Bialoguski lost his job with the orchestra. He should have seen it coming. It was the fault of the ABC, who, with the Musicians’ Union, had decided that nine in ten members of the symphony be Australian-born and not New. It didn’t matter that he was a naturalised subject, only that once he’d been a Pole. The unfairness grated. He suspected that Goossens was behind the move. They’d booted six foreign players but kept nine, which meant they’d conspired to put him out. Had he got wind of it earlier, he could have mounted some kind of defence.

  He wrote Goossens a death threat that he knew he wouldn’t send, typing it out on the Poynters’ Hanimex, wearing gloves and redrafting twice.

  On the telephone, Lydia refused his dinner invitation. ‘This was a busy week, Michael. Perhaps another time.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he demanded. ‘Are you certain that busyness is your best excuse?’

  ‘What are you ta
lking about?’

  ‘You’re not a very good liar, Lydia. It’s not an appealing quality, being easy to see straight through.’

  He jammed the phone into its cradle, and then rang Howley in a mood. The man’s voice was distant, disappearing into static. Noises and scratches meant only one thing.

  ‘This handset is bugged,’ Bialoguski said.

  ‘Come again,’ said the Security man.

  ‘This line or this handset. Your voice is vanishing in the feedback.’

  A pause. ‘Well, it’s not us,’ said Howley. ‘You’re our agent. If we’d bugged you, we’d say.’

  Bialoguski thought hard. ‘What if there are two files?’ he said. ‘In one file I’m Crane, but in the other I’m a regular com-munist, Michael Bialoguski. My cover but a real file.’

  ‘We don’t double-keep.’

  ‘Are you sure? Perhaps a colleague hears about me, starts a file on me, a communist falling under notice. What stops him tapping my phone and ordering surveillance?’

  ‘Are you under surveillance?’

  ‘Men follow me all the time.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘What’s it called? Banter.’

  The voice was strained. ‘Followed or not?’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘From my practice, certainly. Last month perhaps. There’s a feeling you have, an awareness. You think, what do I look like? Where do I think I’m going? What does my left arm usually do as I walk—in fact, how do I walk at all?’

  ‘Did you see who it was?’

  ‘I didn’t want to look in case he disappeared.’

  The voice slowed. ‘Well, it wasn’t us. The Russians, maybe. Might have been the communists too.’

  ‘They follow people, the communists?’

  ‘The ones who are serious about things, yes.’

  The doctor tried to picture the room where Howley was.

  There was nothing to hear in the background. Perhaps it was the background that was the foreground, noise falling apart, vanishing. He thought the man would be sitting on a chair.

  ‘I see you’ve written me a letter,’ Howley said.

  ‘That’s right. Just some grievances I have.’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘It’s a ridiculous system, this keeping of receipts. What kind of spy keeps an ice-cream container of papers and tabulates his expenses? Petrov is here all the time. What do I say if he finds them?’

  ‘You want a flat twenty-five pounds a week.’

  ‘That’s right. It’s an average expense. I’ve learnt that the well-equipped agent needs cash on hand to satisfy contingencies when they occur.’

  ‘It can’t be done.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Other people’s money.’

  They were silent for a moment.

  The doctor said, ‘Should I buy a gun, do you think?’

  ‘A gun?’

  ‘If it’s the communists following me. Aren’t they men of intent? Aren’t they capable of violence?’

  ‘No gun.’

  The Argus form guide was on the floor beside him, race listings covered in scribble. On an intellectual level he knew his own writing but that didn’t stop a sudden, instinctive sense that someone else had circled the bets. Certain marks were definitely his, the small crosses and the slant lines under the jockeys. But the diving verticals? He’d never noticed himself making those before.

  ‘I think I might resign,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is it worth it? I should be doctoring, concentrating on building my practice. Presumably you haven’t read the Polish News? Here it is, the front-page story: “Doctor Bialo-guski Petitions for the Rosenbergs!” How do you think that will run with my patients, the majority being New Australians well known for their conservative views?’

  ‘Petrov is important to us.’

  ‘Yes, and a flat retainer is all I ask.’

  ‘Michael, it’s been denied by those above. I can register disappointment, not much more.’

  ‘Fine tactics. You’re like the branch manager at my bank. Whenever he’s tugging at my overdraft he pretends it’s head office on the strings.’

  ‘Where’s Petrov right now?’

  ‘I don’t know. But listen. A flat retainer. I’m demanding it or I quit.’

  He thought there would be a note about the Generalissimo on the MVD channel, not a mourning necessarily but at least a resolute statement. Stalin is dead. Long live the Union. But there was nothing, not a breath of stasis. The work went on and the regular messages came out.

  The processes described by Arkady Wassilieff for the production of hard-wearing aviation bearings are already known to Soviet industry. Permission for a visit to Russia cannot be granted at this time.

  Kislitsyn thought Beria destined to take control. They’d each met the man, Petrov twice. ‘An administrator of the highest order,’ said Kislitsyn. ‘Watch him unite the Ministries of State Security and Internal Affairs.’

  Stalin, dead. Still it wasn’t quite believable. The mourning at the embassy was becoming high farce. Koukharenko had a room set up with the Georgian’s picture, and staff were going in there, coming out with wet faces. It was show, completely. No one in their right mind was sad to see the author of the Yezhovshchina pass.

  Four days went by before Generalov called him into his office to hand him the rebuke. A single line from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union commanding Vladimir Petrov not to bring his dog to work. Generalov added nothing to the missive. Petrov had known it was coming but the forewarning didn’t prevent him feeling ill.

  The following evening, he was carrying a crate of Bell’s Special from the car to the garage in darkness when he saw a figure standing at the end of the drive. He froze at the sight: a woodcutter’s body looming in a long coat, scarf and hat; a terrible Russian face in shadow, blunt, idiotic, belonging to the kind of man who might answer favourably to the questioner from the Directorate of Special Tasks: ‘Comrade, you look like someone of unusual strength. Do you think you could break a skull with one blow using this iron bar?’

  The figure watched him for a moment longer then walked. Petrov skipped the car and went straight for the house. Had he really seen it? The odd-job assassin? The one-time clean-skin— favoured method of disposal abroad? It made sense. Someone had broken the street lamp. That would be standard procedure.

  Evdokia was sleeping. He went to the sideboard in the hallway and made sure the Nagant was loaded. The bullets and their dull sheen. The thought suddenly occurred to him that someone might have changed them; switched them for duds. He tapped the six shells into his hand, then reloaded using the box behind the cereals in the kitchen.

  Outside once more, he crept along the southern fence. There was a gap in the hedge here, and he crawled across the neighbour’s yard, behind the house, until he was in the bushes on the edge of Lefroy Street.

  Footfalls? He was listening. He expected to smell cigarettes. He expected to see discarded Soviet cigarette butts strewn over the ground. Nothing. The cars here he knew: the two dark Holdens, the white Dodge.

  He shouldn’t have come here. This bloody country. He knew some secrets. Perhaps some eagle-eyed fourth-floor analyst, spurred by Lifanov, had figured that out. The killing of the Chinese governor in Sinkiang was enough by itself. Frinovsky and Voitenkov, two of the operation’s chiefs, had long been purged.

  He knew Moscow had killed Trotsky. He had seen the file in the reading room of the Committee of Information. There were photographs of the Mexican villa from their agent inside, photographs of Trotsky’s beard, Trotsky’s bedclothes, Trotsky’s dog. There was a photograph of the assassin, Mornard; detailed and labyrinthine plans for putting cyanide in the villa’s water and for setting explosives in the floor.

  He knew that they’d disposed of their own ambassador in Tehran. He knew the identities of Soviet agents in America, Sweden, Japan,
Britain, Egypt, Spain. He knew that the cellars of 11 Dzerzhinsky Street were the killing rooms. That the weapon used was an eight-shot Tokarev. That the resident executioner lived always at 5 Komsomolsky Lane.

  Back indoors, he opened the refrigerator door, reached above the back shelf and twisted the light globe until it went off. He opened and closed the door a few times. He turned towards the figure in the hall.

  ‘Why are you carrying your gun in the dark?’ Evdokia said.

  ‘I’m going to put some bullets in a block of butter. Hide them in the fridge here, in the door.’

  She stepped forward. ‘Where’s Jack?’

  ‘Outside where he’ll bark.’

  ‘Is something happening?’

  ‘We’re being watched, I think, by a Russian.’

  She walked quietly to the window, looking out. ‘You’re scaring me. Put the gun away.’

  ‘It was a Russian man in a wretched-looking coat. I can recognise these things.’

  ‘Maybe an émigré,’ Evdokia said.

  ‘No. I know every Russian in Canberra and this man tonight was not one of them.’

  ‘It’s Generalov. Making you paranoid.’

  ‘Paranoid!’ He laughed.

  ‘Well, afraid then. Hysterical.’

  He let her take the Nagant, watching as she opened the latch. ‘I can’t sleep in there with you out here,’ she said. ‘It’s like living with a nervous wreck.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Do bullets that have been in butter even shoot?’

  Two days passed and still no word from Security. Howley probably thought that Bialoguski wasn’t serious about leaving. Well, he’d demonstrate. He was fed up with haggling over money. Fed up with Security’s incompetence, their general weakness. He had Petrov drunk, compromised on a growing number of fronts and ready to burn. No action. ASIO simply stood by, limp. What he needed was a serious client. An agency with nerve.