Document Z

by Andrew Croome

  The flat on the seventh floor had a minimum of furniture. Petrov assumed there were microphones in the walls.

  ‘Drink?’ Howley asked. He was holding a fresh bottle of scotch.

  ‘Yes, alright.’

  There was no ice. They sat on a lounge and Howley handed Petrov a soft leather bag.

  ‘Five thousand pounds,’ said the ASIO man. ‘I would suggest you put four thousand in the safe at the house where we will be staying, and that you keep one thousand to purchase clothes or other personal things.’

  ‘This is for when I come?’

  ‘For the moment you break from the Soviet Union.’

  ‘You have that letter?’

  ‘I’ll be carrying it at all times.’

  ‘I return to Canberra tonight.’

  ‘Alright. I’ll come with you. I’ll stay there until you defect.’

  No. He didn’t want them on him. ‘It will be alright,’ he said. ‘I’ll come to you in Sydney. April third.’

  ‘If your embassy becomes suspicious . . .’

  ‘It will be alright. I can manage.’

  ‘Won’t you need a quick way out?’

  ‘No. They are idiots at the embassy. I will get what documents I can and then I will be done.’

  The man refilled their glasses. It was Bell’s Special, Petrov saw. Howley pressed him again about the spies. He asked whether Petrov was prepared to say anything now.

  ‘Yes, I will tell you something general,’ he said.

  ‘Can you tell me two things?’ Howley said. ‘Who are the persons in Australia who give secret information to the Soviet government? Will you be able to show me copies of the reports?’

  The man’s face was compelling. Petrov felt the need to confess; a divulging force taking hold in the room, microphones in the walls, an honest face wanting to know. He could see himself now. Months of this. Years. Men questioning him in solemn and eager tones, alert to the utterances and the inferences that lay behind. How long would it take them to unravel him—a life that was his life but also one of secrets that they dearly wanted to hear? He would need to form some kind of strategy for the way he would play along.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do not have the names of all of them. I know some of them. I will get copies of the reports.’

  ‘Tell me. Who are they? Where do they work?’

  ‘Later. Details later.’

  ‘Are they in government departments?’

  ‘Some,’ Petrov said. ‘I would say that during the war there was a very serious situation for you in the Department of External Affairs.’

  ‘External Affairs men giving reports to the Soviets?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are they still doing it?’

  ‘Not much now. They are very frightened.’

  ‘They are still there?’

  ‘One is there.’

  ‘You know who he is? You know what he was doing in the war?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘You know the Soviet official who received the reports?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Was the local Communist Party active in this?’

  Petrov paused. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You know the Party members involved?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Howley’s face remained bland. Petrov wondered whether this was news to the Australian, or did they have their own sources and so already knew? Parts of the Communist Party were Security and vice versa. The organisations leaked into one another. Unknowable. Impenetrable.

  It occurred to him to ask just how many men in Security knew of his plans. Howley said it was himself and his boss, the organisation’s head and a few trusted men.

  ‘Alright,’ said Petrov.

  He looked at his watch, wondering if he should get an earlier flight. The other world. There was a second-hand car in Acton that Generalov was insisting he buy. He stood to go.

  ‘My wife,’ he said on his way to the door. ‘If she does not stay, there can be no publicity for my story. Not until she has left Australia. They might kill her here if it is published.’

  Howley hadn’t moved. Was watching him from the chair.

  ‘Do you think there will be a war soon?’ he asked.

  Petrov smiled slowly and opened the door.

  ‘No, not yet,’ he said, and made his exit for the hall.

  17

  She crossed the park between the Melbourne and Sydney buildings, Civic noticeably unpeopled, green expanses, dirt expanses, commerce in stasis, and she walked towards J.B. Young’s. It was the beginning of March and the idea of home was taking on physical dimensions. Moscow. A hammered-out feeling in her stomach. She tried to picture the new apartment where her family had moved: Varsanofievsky Pereulok, dom 6, kvartira 6. Two rooms, Persian carpets on the floors. The old furniture that would be unfamiliar now, pulled from the arrangements and zones that identified it, given new and strange existence. She was bracing herself in a way. Preparing for this inconsequential shock in preference to contemplating her and Volodya’s fate—a thing so arbitrary, she’d decided, it could be anything from death by vanishing to a promotion and letter of congratulations.

  She stood looking at the kitchen utensils. Peelers, cutters, articles for washing up. She was putting together a chest of these items. Gifts for the most part, but also a supply of their own.

  She thought about unlucky friends and colleagues, the state they’d fallen into once ejected from the Party and the rul-ing systems, the squalor that beset them, the manual jobs, the queuing and the struggling for basic things—shoes and eggs and an hour to sit down. Was she really going back?

  She sat in the front passenger seat of Volodya’s new car.

  ‘What about Jack?’ she said.

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘What will we do with Jack?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You could give him away. Give him to a boy on the street.’

  They were crossing the river, bending a way through Parkes.

  ‘You don’t seem worried,’ she said. ‘Don’t you care what will happen to your dog?’

  King George Terrace, parliament going by. ‘Yes, I am worried for Jack,’ he said. ‘Jack is the most innocent victim of all.’

  She looked at his hands on the wheel and the gearshift, the nervous grip she thought she saw there, the concentration etched on his face. ‘Maybe you could give Kislitsyn the dog,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll ask him.’

  ‘That is what Jack needs. He’s a dog for a man. It is in his breeding and demeanour. The way he thinks. How his impulses are wired. Philip will make him have more respect for things than you.’

  ‘I’ll ask.’

  ‘He’ll take him.’

  ‘He may refuse. If he won’t take him, we’ll just set him free.’

  She laughed. ‘Set him free! We’re not talking about a wolf. You think he can fend for himself?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Impossible. If you drop him in the bush, he finds his way home. If you disappear without warning, he just waits at the house until he dies.’

  That night she burned her magazines. It was a bonfire of Home Beautiful, the plastic smell of the thin film, wasting. The first magazine flamed and went out. She tore pages from the next, gave the flames air and they took off. Two dozen editions of Australian Women’s Weekly. Lift-outs she’d saved from the papers. All burning between four bricks, dark and oily smoke staining the sky. She had intended to take them home, a kind of record or a history of the country over three years. But it wasn’t worth the risk now, transporting contraband literature. Not much point compounding the trouble they were in.

  Inside, Volodya was drinking beer, listening to the radio. She opened each of the drawers in the kitchen, trying to recall what was the ministry’s property and what was theirs.

  ‘Furniture,’ she said.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Should we sell the furniture? The things we own.’

  ‘Give them to the Golovan
ovs.’

  He was right. Ivan and Masha deserved everything that could be gifted. She made the list in biro.

  Wool hearth rug

  Small mahogany coffee table

  Blue lined curtain and rod

  Two-bar electric radiator

  Cork tablemats

  Condiments set

  Brass dish and red glass dish

  Pewter teapot Waffle iron Two asbestos mats

  Stove towel

  Glass nutcracker

  Bed rug

  Table lamp and shade

  Clothes basket

  Axe

  Hand axe

  ‘The things in the garage?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The stepladder. The pick. The shovel. The rake.’

  ‘Those things aren’t ours.’

  ‘The hurricane lamp. The box of tiles.’

  ‘Box of tiles?’

  ‘The wheelbarrow and the garden hose.’

  ‘Not ours.’

  ‘A hand fork and a pair of shears.’

  ‘Isn’t there a catalogue? A manifest?’

  ‘The fuel bin. Pieces of wood.’

  They went to sleep late. Or she went and he stayed listening to the radio. She woke when he came to bed, the mattress sinking away, pale light like the moon on the walls. She put her hand in his but he removed it. She listened to his breath and her own breath. It was hot under the sheets and he tossed them away. The darkness was a half-darkness. The room was the same as it had always been, but the night felt weathered and unordinary. Patterns in language and in the world.

  ‘Volodya,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You know we will turn out like the Rosenbergs if we stay.’

  Sunday. He stood on the landing in the secret section, listening for sound. Nothing. He walked to his office, unlocked the door, stood there. He went to Prudnikov’s office and opened the door. The man was there, seated at his desk, staring at the mouthpiece of his telephone.

  ‘Vladimir,’ said Prudnikov.

  ‘Hello, Petr.’

  Prudnikov waved the telephone receiver. He put his finger to his lips and they walked into the hall.

  ‘The phone,’ he said. ‘I have become suspicious of it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It drops volume at unexpected times. On other occasions, I’ll be sitting there working and I swear the receiver emits a low humming tone.’

  ‘Bugged?’

  ‘What can we do? Can we test it?’

  ‘Tomorrow, we’ll take it to pieces carefully.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Meanwhile, don’t have conversations in your office. If it is bugged, it is more useful not to let them know we know.’

  ‘Good, Vladimir. This is what we will do.’

  The MVD chief nodded. Then he asked Prudnikov to fetch the safe key. The man went into his office and came back. Petrov told him he might be some time. Why didn’t the cypher clerk enjoy the afternoon, not sit here locked up like the damned?

  In his office, Petrov worked for twenty minutes before he opened the safe. The 1952 letters were kept in a marked paper sleeve. He took them to the desk and flipped through them as if looking for something. Names. Instructions. Plots and para-noias. He weighed the pages in his hand, went to a drawer, drew out a notebook and removed the covers and the spiral. He took the pages from the notebook and sat them inside the paper sleeve. He took the 1952 letters and put them in an envelope. Then he put the sleeve in the safe and locked it.

  He was relieved at how calm he could be. Now you are spying, he thought. Death right here in front of you and yet your hands have stopped their shaking.

  He put the envelope in the strongbox. Shoved it at the very bottom, underneath everything else in there.

  This is what it means to get your life back. Documents in the wrong safe. Proof of the old life for a new life. Five thousand pounds. What was that? A farm, a car, appliances and a little left over to live.

  In part, he knew it wouldn’t be that simple. In part, he was certain it would be the simplest of things.

  He closed the strongbox and returned its key to his pocket. Prudnikov came out from the back room looking groggy. The clerk resealed the safe key, the two men standing in silence, saying nothing for the sake of the phone.

  He woke late the next day and had a shower, feeling lighter. He went to the back porch to dry himself and took a huge, comforting breath of garden air. It felt good to stand there naked. He sat in the chair and smoked a cigarette. He’d bought a packet of Turf, trying a new brand: ‘The REAL smoke with the true tobacco taste’.

  Generalov called him to his office just after 10 a.m. The man was affecting his commander’s look, standing in the centre of the room, serious and domineering, as if a battalion of lives rested on his shoulders, maps of the battlefield and theatre of action on the walls.

  ‘Comrade,’ the ambassador said.

  Petrov stood there silent. Soon—perhaps just a week from now—he wouldn’t have to listen to this prick.

  ‘I have received some information,’ the ambassador went on.

  ‘Information?’

  ‘It concerns you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. A matter of security.’

  A wave of blood suddenly crossed his body.

  ‘Someone has written to me,’ said the ambassador. ‘It’s a note in Russian. Here. Read it.’ Generalov passed the letter over.

  Parts of your maps or plans are being known or disclosed, it said. Zalivin is a very big foolish man. For this I congratulate you. With regards, KH.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ asked the ambassador.

  Petrov read it again. Zalivin, big and foolish? He had a sudden sense that it might be a code—a reference, perhaps, to him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Do you know this KH?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said the ambassador. ‘I think it is an anti-Soviet letter. It concerns me. I think perhaps it is related to you.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Maps and plans. What does that mean?’

  ‘I would be guessing.’

  ‘It sounds like something to do with you. Things to do with your secret work.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘The congratulations wouldn’t make sense.’

  ‘You must take it as anti-Soviet. I think the sentence means to be ironic.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘More evidence of ineptitude.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maps and plans. I think your intrigues are a laughing stock, widely known.’

  Petrov said nothing.

  ‘Tell me,’ said the ambassador. ‘Who are the MVD’s contacts in this country?’

  ‘Who says we have any?’

  ‘Let’s not be rude.’

  ‘I won’t tell you.’

  ‘You are trying again to be difficult. This is the function of you and your wife. Tell me who the contacts are. I may be a long time here. It is important that I know.’

  ‘You want me to help you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Yet you sack my wife and turn everyone against us.’

  ‘They turn against you by free will. Tell me the names. I can make things a step more difficult.’

  ‘I won’t tell you. The MVD is not that cowed yet.’

  The argument actually relaxed him, banishing thoughts of discovery. Generalov was staring. He had one hand splayed on the table and the other behind his back. An odd position, crooked and tilting forward.

  ‘That’s all,’ he said suddenly.

  By the tone, Petrov knew the man was surprised. He had expected to win. He had expected Petrov to betray the names. He left the office feeling victorious. And the bastard’s biggest surprise was yet to come.

  He was sitting with Kislitsyn at the bar of the Kingston Hotel when he saw Michael Howley and another man come into the room. The Security men took seats on the far side of the bar and Petrov glanced at them while K
islitsyn spoke about an article he was reading on the Russification of Latvia. The two men were careful watching him, cautious about where they looked. His impulse was to join the two tables, introduce the rival services and get everyone a drink. When Kislitsyn went to the toilet, Howley gave a direct glance. Petrov acknowledged him, bought a bottle of wine from the bar, and when Kislitsyn returned he left. It was hot out, darkness coming.

  Evdokia was in the lounge room with Masha, reading aloud a letter from Masha’s daughter.

  He opened the wine and drank.

  ‘I’m taking Jack for a walk,’ he said.

  He got the dog and lit a cigarette. He walked along Lockyer, saw the man at the wheel of a car, walked up Lefroy. When the car pulled alongside, he opened the back door and Jack leaped in.

  They took Blaxland Street, crossed Captain Cook Crescent and then took La Perouse.

  ‘The outskirts,’ said Petrov, joking.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Howley.

  Jack’s huge nose sniffing at their ears.

  ‘You’re visiting Canberra?’ said Petrov.

  ‘We’re worried about you. We’ve taken a room at the Kingston, number eight.’

  ‘Close by.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who is the second man?’

  ‘That’s Mr Carter.’

  ‘Carter should stay away. I want to be near you only.’

  ‘Alright.’

  They turned onto Carnegie, a projected road, the dirt somewhat flattened and gravelly, shifting beneath the tyres.

  ‘How’s our confidence?’ asked Howley.

  ‘I’ve prepared things.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yes, but there is one problem.’

  Petrov told him about Generalov’s letter. He saw Howley stiffen.

  ‘Let’s get you out now,’ the man said. ‘I have the request for asylum and the money in the car.’

  ‘No, we wait for Sydney in one week.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ve told no one of your plans?’

  ‘Beckett. Yourself. The doctor.’

  ‘What about your wife?’

  Jack’s breath smelled of rot. Petrov didn’t answer.

  ‘I’ll drop you back,’ said Howley.

  ‘Room eight,’ said Petrov.