by Craig Thomas
He stood in the doorway of the cafe, watching the street, and the few parked cars, and the turning into Sverdlov Square. Then be headed for the nearest Metro station.
From where he stood, sipping coffee he had poured from a flask into the plastic beaker that was its screw-top, Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko could see, at the other end of Red Square, the hideous bulk of St Basil's Cathedral. A slight shift in his stance at the tiny, dirt-coated window and he was able to see the towers and pinnacles of the Kremlin. Should he care to, to alleviate the tense, wearing boredom that must at some time assail him, he could recite the names of each.tower. For the moment, he stared over the high walls, seeing some distant parts of the gardens. The bare trees, the ordered borders of now bare earth, the patches of thawing snow on the grass, the straight, rulered walks.
What was it Ivan the Terrible had done to the architects of St Basil's he wondered as he shifted his gaze. Bunded them so they couldn't build another? Something of the sort.
He sipped noisily, the coffee wetting, the upper lip and the thick moustache. Far below him, the lunchtime crowds huddled along the square, the trolleys sparked and flashed, and shoppers hurried in and out of GUM. The serpentine queue outside the Lenin Mausoleum, all of whom appeared to be dressed in black, or dark-brown, waited patiently for admission.
A few people sat on the benches in that corner of the Alexandrovski Gardens that he could see from his high window.
The waiting was, he admitted, taking its toll. His eyes wandered over Red Square endlessly, like those of a drunken man lying on his back, not daring to focus for too long in case the room began to spin. Yes, like that. As if he could not look at any one thing out there for too long, in case his moral surroundings began to lurch sideways. He could not even look over the walls of the Kremlin for very long — he could not see Khamovkhin's office from where he stood — despite the hatred that it caused in his breast, hot, fiery like a cardiac pain.
Yet he had to go on looking out over the square, down at the tiny figures bustling — seeming to be blown by the wind that whistled at the grimy window. If he did not, then the megalomania assailed him — that or the fury of rage at still waiting, at the distant threat of Dzerzhinsky Street and his adopted son.
It was strange, he thought, that megalomania, a word in history books or psychologists' reports, was palpable like this. A mounting feeling like phlegm in the back of the throat, or extra air filling the lungs so that the chest strained out. A lightness in the loins. No mirrors, but the eyes seeing from just behind the head, shaping the figure consciously from that angle. He did not enjoy the feeling. In fact, he was ashamed of it, and feared it. If anything, he wished for the purer megalomania that might have been more readily available to a religious man. He was not. His purity of motive had to do with ideology, with politics — and they were not visionary like a religious faith, however desperately he had dung to them over the years.
But the megalomania — the strange sensations, the brimming — no, swelling of the brain in its case of bone — did not come when he looked down at the tiny, insignificant people, or even at St Basil's, or the Kremlin. It came when he did not look at them. When all he had was the perspective of the small, bare dusty room full of unopened crates and a small table on which resided a dust-free telephone whose wire ran across the bare boards to the wall-socket that had been fined for him — when that was his only perspective, then it was no bigger than himself. He inflated, weirdly, to fill the room, like a balloon.
The people, the buildings, in the street, gave him scale, perspective. And he had to have scale — otherwise he had no sense of anything outside himself, nothing but ambition, greed, love of cold power.
He had never thought himself like that, having those qualities. Only in a little way. He had tried, and succeeded, to think of himself as a servant, a conscience-keeper, an acolyte of his own ideology.
Was that a more dangerous megalomania, masked in humility? That would be a religious megalomania, perhaps? Sainthood, willed and purposed. Was that what he was?
He shuddered, and concentrated his gaze downwards, watching one old — man or woman? He couldn't tell from that angle, in those swaddling lumps of clothing. One old being, walking slowly and with difficulty, the wind plucking at coat-tails. He tried, very hard, to say — for you. For you. It did not work.
He looked, instead, at the serpent before the gates of bronze — he smiled at the vivid rhetoric. The queue of the faithful waiting to look on the mummified remains of V. I. Lenin in their glass box; too luridly lit, he had always considered. There were hundreds of them, even in winter. Nearly sixty years on.
For you, he said to himself. For you. There were more of them, a bulk of people, representative.
For you.
It seemed to ease the constriction in his chest, to free his breathing. He inhaled the dusty, prickling air and almost sneezed. He swallowed the last of his coffee, and looked over his shoulder at the telephone. There was a renewal of purpose. The destructive sense of his own motives had gone like a bout of nausea. But he felt stronger now, not weaker.
One telephone call. He could do it with one telephone call, at six the next morning. Valenkov, who had been a close friend of Kyril Vorontsyev — and who had been with him, as a junior officer, from Stalingrad to the outskirts of Berlin — he would answer the telephone, and receive the command, and in his turn issue the commands to the Moscow Garrison…
One telephone call and — he looked across the Kremlin walls — he would start again. It would start again. The new beginning.
He closed his eyes in satisfaction, and was alarmed when an image jumped at him out of the red-spotted darkness behind his lids. Of Alexei Vorontsyev, as a child, holding his hand. The boy had bright red plastic boots, and was kicking up gouts of snow, and laughing.
He shook his head to dear it, and opened his eyes. The image retreated obediently.
Where was he? Where was Alexei now?
The apartment was in a block of Vosstaniya flats on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, near the Ukraina Hotel, an elaborate wedding-cake, and the Comecon building a modern grey slab, hard-edged against the pale blue of the sky. The apartments had been built during the time of Stalin, when Anna Dostoyevna had been Minister of Culture and had had much to do with the design of the new city centre. She had chosen to live in one of the apartments in the Vosstaniya because her ministry had been connected with their design. When she had been allowed to resign quietly from the Politburo after losing Stalin's favour, she had remained in the apartment.
Vorontsyev remembered her from his childhood — a big, powerful woman with a deep voice, who frightened him. And he disliked her, too, because she seemed to occupy a place in Mihail Pyotravich's private world that should have belonged to his adoptive mother. He sensed, rather than knew, that Anna Dostoyevna was not Gorochenko's mistress in the conventional sense. Rather, she possessed an ideological bond with him, shared an intellectual community from which Goro chenko's wife was excluded.
Vorontsyev had found her name in the files, and remembered the intellectual intimacy that had once bound the two of them. And he had felt he might have found the answer.
He had digested the information in the files, as well as he could, in the washroom at the Komsomolskaia Metro Station, locked in a chilly cubicle, hearing the footsteps across the chequered riles outside, the whistling, the splashing of water.
When he had reduced the file to a list of possibilities, he had torn each sheet into shreds, then the file itself into scraps of blue card, and flushed them away. It had been a setting free of Gorochenko rather than a dismissal.
He had travelled on the Metro all afternoon, moving from station to station, making only one, or at most two, calls from any one place. Slowly, he had crossed through all the names on the list, all the places Gorochenko might be, until he had come to the apartment on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt.
Because it was the last name, and he was dog-tired now, and crazed with futility, he was certain t
hat Gorochenko would be there; yet knowing that he would not be with anyone whose name was in the file under 'Known Associates'. Yet, caught as he now was in the pattern of this action, from file to contacts to the elimination of possibilities — he was unable to envisage other possibilities, other patterns.
He did not even know, he realised, what Gorochenko was any more. He was a collection of facts and observations that led nowhere. His Surveillance Log was impeccable — he simply could not be, without additional information, the man Kutuzov. Further back, in the thirties and forties, he was a natural survivor, along with Molotov and Gromyko, in a Politburo periodically purged and decimated by Stalin's psychotic suspicions. When had he changed, when achieved another, and radical, view of the Revolution?
Vorontsyev had abandoned the attempt to understand Gorochenko.
He pressed the doorbell of the apartment. Would she explain his father to him? Would she know where he was?
Vorontsyev realised that the former question had become more pressing — that the afternoon had left him barren of investigatory technique or desire. He only wanted to understand.
He was dangerously in sympathy with Gorochenko now, he perceived; it might prevent him ever finding the man.
She was shrunken, but perhaps he had expected the child's perspective, to have to look up into the strong face. She was perhaps five feet ten, dressed in a sweater and cardigan and a drab start of thick wool. Her stockings were thick and dark, and her shoes stout. She looked like a schoolteacher. Her eyes behind the wire-framed spectacles were sharp with a glistening suspicion.
He showed her the ID card, and she involuntarily backed half a step, and her hand gripped the edge of the door so that the ringers whitened. He said, 'Comrade Dostoyevna — might I speak with you?' She was suspicious of the careful neutrality of tone, the implication that she possessed choice.
'What is it, Comrade Major?' An old inflection, one she must have used many times during the years when Stalin let her live on in anonymity. 'What do you want?'
Involuntarily, as if without will, she had opened the door a little more. He stepped forward, and she seemed to retreat silently from the door, spectrally backing towards the lounge. He closed the door behind him, looking at her all the while as at an old film. Cheka, NKVD, MVD, KGB — they were all the same, her posture informed him.
The lounge was sparse yet comfortable. A great many books, one or two blunt, square pieces of statuary and furniture that was old but which had been carefully repaired and recovered. She had never married, he knew. On one low table near the sagging sofa there was a big metal ashtray such as might have come from a bar or restaurant, full of stubs and ash. And one smoking cigarette she picked up with a quick, swooping gesture as if he might have appropriated it.
'What is it?' she said, standing in front of a packed bookcase of dog-eared Russian paperbacks. It lent her solidity, and he suspected that she knew it. Her mind had always been for midable; the books were an assurance of her personality and her past. She was nervous, but seemed calmed to some degree by his quiescence.
'May I sit down?3 She gestured to an armchair recently recovered in a floral pattern of browns and golds. A threadbare patch of carpet seemed to have slid out from beneath it. He said, 'I want to talk to you about — my father…' It was the only way to inject a sincerity, a lack of officialdom which would cause her to close like a shell, into the room. 'Not Kyril — Mihail Pyotravich.'
'What — is the matter with him V It was a selfish question, he saw. Her hands brushed her body, as if admitting its age, as if only illness and infirmity could involve someone she had known a long time ago.
'He is not ill,' he said. She seemed to resent it, and puffed at her cigarette. He noticed that the cardboard tube of the cigarette had been flattened by the pressure of anxiety. 'No — I have to find him, Anna Ilyevna.' He recalled patronymic from the files. 'I have to find him very urgently.'
'To do with your job? You're SID.' Suddenly, the idea seemed to seize her. 'Your own father? 'Please understand,' he began, realising he was being rushed, was losing control of the conversation. 'It is not official. Yes, they are looking for him. I — want to help him.' He hated the cliches. She was evidently suspicious now.
'Help?' She was younger, an old habitual scorn came back to her face and voice.
'Yes!' he blurted out, feeling himself younger also — too young. He had, suddenly, to commit himself. 'Look, I don't know how often you see him, or speak with him, but he — he's into something very dangerous. And they know he is, and they want him very badly! I have to get to him before they do!' There was a plaintive note in his voice, and he was sure his habitual identification with Gorochenko, used with emphasis in that way, had damaged his argument. It would appear to her, little other than a transparent deceit.
She looked at his face, then lifted her stretched, dry skin in a look of scorn. She puffed at the cigarette again, and he noticed that now it was held delicately in her fingers.
'He was always fond of you,' she said, staring at the ceiling. Then the face seemed to subside into its stiff, wrinkled lines again, and the eyes were dark points.
'And I of him!' he said. 'You must know that if you know anything.'
'Perhaps.'
He realised she had taken control of the situation; he thought she must believe him to some degree, otherwise she would not have had the temerity to seize the initiative.
'Do you know where he is?'
She was silent. She paced the worn carpet, circling the furniture, as if she had ambushed the room and its occupant. He saw the power of the mind and will in the frame, and sensed the kind of magnetism such a complementary nature must have had for Gorochenko. Then she looked at him, emphasising her words with little stabs of the cardboard tube.
'I have not seen Mihail Pyotravich for almost two years.' His stomach seemed heavy and his breath constricted. He knew she was telling the truth.
'What has happened to him?'
'In what way?' Interrogative, sharp.
'He — he's organised a coup!' Her eyes sharpened, gleamed with some inner knowledge. 'He's on the point of success or failure. I have to find him before — before…' Weakly: 'Before they do.'
'But will they find him?' She was amused now, and allied with Gorochenko. He wondered how much she had been his mentor.
'Yes, they will!'
'I wonder.'
He saw the mind shut like a handbag, almost heard the metallic dick of the clasp. She had retreated from him again. He was a stupid policeman and his quarry was Gorochenko. The muddle of his own motives, no doubt plain to her, did not justify answers. She would not help him.
'Don't you see,' he said. 'I have to stop.him. He has to be stopped.'
'Why?' The challenge was almost sexual, and she might have been a young woman; but even as he looked at her she became ancient and decayed, and delighting merely in the strength of impotence. Someone she knew, her age and experience — not put out to grass as she had been. Affecting things. Breaking things.
'Because it will not work any more. Everyone who has helped him has been put aside. There's only him.'
'No. You would not be worried if he was alone.'
He admitted the truth by dropping his eyes.
'Yes.' He felt stupid and childish now. And futile.
'Then he will do it!' she whispered.
'You — you persuaded him!' he cried.
She looked at him with contempt, moving a step closer to his chair, her presence more powerful now. Sitting, she loomed over him in the perspective he had anticipated when she opened the door.
'I did nothing, you stupid adolescent. Once I quarrelled with him — quarrelled all the time because he seemed to accept Stalin and Beria and the NKVD and all the filth that went with it!' Her eyes gleamed fiercely. He saw a dab of spittle at one corner of the mouth. The dentures moved in an approximation of speech, but seemed not to diminish the force of her words.
'But he did not accept!' She clasped her han
ds to her heavy bosom like a young girl. 'All the time — all the time…' She seemed unable to make her feelings coherent.
'But you — you fell from favour with Stalin. He didn't. He was loyal to Stalin, until his death. Then to Kruschev, and to Brezhnev.' He couldn't understand anything, he decided. He was in the KGB — Mihail Pyotravich had made sure of that, even getting him transferred to SID. Now this old woman was talking as if all the time Gorochenko was a traitor to the Soviet Union, had always been.
'All the time it was a game,' she said. 'It must have been a game to him! Waiting his chance.' Then, with regret, she added: 'I had little or nothing to do with it — ' Finally, shame. 'I accused him of toadying to save his skin. Long ago I did that. I didn't understand him, I suppose.'
She sat down, and seemed to resolve everything into silence, as if her mind was dying away like her words. It was as if she had indulged in some physical exercise belonging to her youth, and it had tired her to the extent that now she felt very old. She had relived some of her political life, some of the intellectual passion with which she had loved Gorochenko, and now it had passed, and she was spent.
'Tell me where he is?'
Vorontsyev asked quietly. When she looked up at him, her eyes were vague. She had retreated almost as if he had interrogated her. She shook her head like a stubborn child. He did not know whether she was refusing, or admitting ignorance. Suddenly, he was tired of this cat-and-mouse game with an untidy old woman. He was bone-weary, at the end of his patience.
'Tell me where he is!' he ordered, and her eyes snapped shut, then opened attentively. A voice had spoken from thirty years before — the voice of command and terror.
'I don't know where he is.' Her voice almost whined as it pleaded with him.
'But you can guess — you know him better than I do. Where would he go? To whom would he turn? Where would he hide?' She mistrusted him again. 'I have to help him — I have to be with him — don't you understand that?' Now, she was confused by the smeared emotions, the apparent contradictions, as if he had taken on a multiple personality. 'I want to be with him, Anna. I'm his son,' He saw intolerable pressure in her eyes. She was lonely, she was guilty towards Gorochenko, wanted to do something for him, make some gesture of atonement for the years in which she had despised him.