Two days later he heard from a contact at the embassy that a Soviet pilot had been killed on a test flight of a new fighter. The plane had gone through the sound barrier and then had suddenly spiralled out of control before crashing into the ground and exploding. The name of the pilot had been withheld. In a small way Pountney had his first scoop.
*
The snow was falling heavily. Pountney, muffled against the cold as much as to hide his identity, stood beside a gravestone and watched as the coffin was lowered into the ground by four members of what he presumed was Kyrill Radin’s squadron. They were too far away for him to make out the insignia on the shoulders of their greatcoats. Towering above them was the formidable figure of Marshal Gerasimov. He saw the grieving family staring down into the grave, the man he now knew was Radin with his arm round a weeping young woman he guessed was his daughter. A few paces away, an older woman stood by herself, presumably Radin’s wife – estranged wife? As far as he could tell she did not appear to be crying. Perhaps this was one tragedy too many in a life full of sorrows. Perhaps she had no more tears left to cry.
The daughter threw the white flowers she had been carrying onto the coffin and turned away. Radin was searching for something in his pocket. He appeared increasingly agitated at his failure to find what he was looking for. His daughter spoke to him, taking his hand in hers, and put her face into her father’s chest. He held her tightly. At first Pountney thought the father was supporting the daughter. But as they walked slowly away from the graveside, he saw that it was the Either who was crying openly and the daughter who provided comfort. His wife, if it was his wife, a stiff, upright figure, followed a few paces behind.
If Pountney stayed where he was, the grieving family would have to pass directly in front of him. The temptation, despite the numbness in his feet and hands, was too great to resist. He remained fixed to the spot, a solitary mourner in a field of the dead.
The group was a few feet away when Radin stopped. He pulled off his glove and put his hand into his overcoat pocket. Clumsily he drew out a large white handkerchief and put it to his eyes. As he did so, his scarred and broken fingers lost their grip and the handkerchief fell to the ground at Pountney’s feet. Pountney picked it up and returned it to Radin. For an instant their eyes met, and he saw the expression of inconsolable grief in the Russian’s face. He knew unequivocally that Radin’s heart was broken, and he found himself touched by his sorrow.
He followed them at a distance out of the cemetery. Radin shook hands with the officers who’d attended his son’s funeral, and spoke for a few moments to Marshal Gerasimov, before walking towards an official car. How terrible, Pountney thought, to lose your only son, for the child to die before its parent.
‘Wait. Wait, please. I must speak to you.’
He turned. An old woman, dressed in black, was hobbling towards him. She was holding out her hand.
‘You dropped this back there. I saw you do it. Please. This is yours.’
He held out his hand towards her. She gave him something metallic. He thanked her. Then he opened his hand. He was holding Kyrill Radin’s cap badge.
*
This is madness, Pountney tells himself again, freezing to death to do something I don’t have to do. He has repeated the same phrase a hundred times, but it makes no difference. He doesn’t have to do this but he can’t give up. Some nagging part of his conscience won’t allow him to keep the cap badge. He must return it to its rightful owner.
The street lights gleam dimly in the dark. Pountney shivers. It wasn’t difficult to find out where Radin lived. He followed father and daughter home after the funeral. But it took him a week to build up the courage to call on them. How to get into the apartment building? The entrance hall is under the watchful eye of an ancient witch who seems never to sleep. He’s got no chance of slipping past her on his way to the lift. His only hope is to attach himself to a small group of two or three people as they enter the building, and trust that he can get into the lift before his presence is noticed. That demands patience. Well, being patient is what he’s good at.
He looks at his watch. He has been waiting in the shadows for more than two hours. He stamps his feet to keep the circulation going. Twenty minutes later three men approach the building. One presses a bell and pushes the main door open. Pountney pulls his hat down over his face, slips out of the shadows and quickly follows them in. He crosses the hall as one of them nods in greeting to the witch. They wait at the lift, agonising seconds while it slowly completes its grumbling descent to the ground floor. Pountney is the last to enter. He pulls the iron grille of a door tightly shut. Someone stabs the button for the fourth floor. He touches six. The lift begins its slow ascent. So far so good.
He gets out at the sixth floor and waits. The lift descends at once in answer to a summons from below. The uncarpeted landing and corridors are deserted. Pountney walks quietly down the stairs to floor five. Radin’s apartment is number 14. The sign indicates that 14 to 18 are to his left. He hears the mechanical grunts and growls as the lift ascends once more. He retreats up the stairs to avoid being seen. The lift stops at Radin’s floor. A man gets out, walks the few paces to number 14, rings the bell. The door opens. Pountney hears an exchange in Russian. The door closes. Radin has a visitor. Damn.
He can’t stay where he is. He must find somewhere to hide. He walks down the corridor, past number 14, looking for a door without numbers – a janitor’s room, a store cupboard, anything. He finds an unlocked room and goes in. He sees a large lagged water heater with a stopcock. If he keeps the door ajar, he can watch the entrance to Radin’s flat at the end of the corridor. He waits. An hour passes. It is warm in the cupboard, and feeling slowly returns to his frozen body.
It is well after ten when he hears Radin’s door open. He listens. There are hushed voices. The man emerges – he wears the uniform of an air-force officer – and waits by the lift, repeatedly pressing the bell. It doesn’t come, and after a time he decides to take the stairs. Pountney waits five minutes. Then he steps out of his hiding place and knocks on Radin’s door. Mr Weasel – Professor Weasel – answers.
‘Professor Radin?’
‘Who are you?’
Radin looks up at him, realises he has never seen Pountney before, and immediately moves back into his apartment, trying to push the door shut with his feet as he does so.
‘Please. I am not what you think. I would like to speak to you. Please.’
‘I do not wish to speak to anyone.’
In that instant he sees the desperation in Radin’s eyes. He is still lost in grief at the death of his son. Pountney feels an overwhelming compassion for the man.
‘I have something for you.’
The door shuts. He hears bolts snap tight. Somewhere deep in the building an alarm sounds. Moments later the security forces arrive. Pountney has just enough time to conceal Kyrill Radin’s cap badge in the lining of his coat before he is arrested.
*
Pountney’s career as Moscow correspondent for his newspaper was seven months old when it was brought to an abrupt and unexpected end with his arrest on charges of spying. For four desperate days he was held in a Soviet prison, half starved, hardly allowed to sleep between interrogations, set upon by his fellow inmates on one occasion and beaten up, afraid that any trial would make a mockery even of Soviet lip-service to the idea of a judicial process, that he would be found guilty, as his jailers jeeringly told him, and either shot as a spy or sentenced to a lengthy period of imprisonment in a Siberian camp.
During the days of his incarceration, a deal was brokered in London between Gennady Koliakov and Hugh Hart, who had got to know Koliakov in Budapest shortly before the Hungarian uprising. In return for concessions to the Russians that were never revealed, charges of spying against Pountney were dropped. He was found guilty of the lesser charge of actions incompatible with his status as a journalist and expelled. By agreement the Soviet authorities let it be known that Pountney been arres
ted travelling without official permission outside the cordon sanitaire that limited the free movement of all non-Soviet personnel to within a narrow radius of Moscow. It was a lie Pountney was more than willing to support in exchange for his freedom. Twenty-four hours later, he was back in London, the news of his return a brief headline in his own paper. It had been, he admitted breathlessly to Hart, ‘too close a call’. He’d done Moscow. He was never going back.
*
‘Have a look at this and tell me if you recognise anyone.’
Hugh Hart nods at the waiter. He should go ahead and pour. Looking at the label on the bottle – a ’58 Sancerre – Pountney knows the lunch isn’t for old times’ sake. Hart doesn’t order wine like this usually. He’s after something, all right. He produces a large brown envelope from his briefcase, and extracts from it a black and white print which he hands to Pountney.
‘Be prepared. It may bring back unhappy memories.’
The photograph has been taken from a distance with a long-range lens, and judging from the angle probably from a first-floor window. It must have been magnified a number of times before the print was made, which explains the grainy tones and lack of definition in some of the detail. Despite that, the centre of the image is clear. An old man is sitting hunched in a wheelchair, a rug over his legs, shaded by the overhanging branches of an oak tree. He has a cigarette clamped tightly between his lips. His hands, Pountney notices, are tucked out of sight under the rug.
‘It’s Radin all right,’ Pountney says. ‘No question.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘What about the other man? Recognise him?’
Jacket off and sleeves rolled up, a tall man, many years Radin’s junior, is lying on the grass beside the wheelchair, propping himself up on one elbow. He too is smoking.
‘Yes,’ Pountney says. ‘Strangely enough, I do. I met him at a concert in Moscow once. Annabel Leigh was draped all over him. We had a talk in the interval. Intelligent man. Spoke very good English. I liked him.’
‘Who is he?’
‘His name is Andrei Berlin. Am I right?’
‘You’re the one who’s talked to him, Gerry. I’ve never seen him before.’
‘He is a historian. Teaches at the university in Moscow. Annabel told me so.’
‘This Annabel Leigh woman – can she be trusted to get things like that right?’
‘Where men are concerned. Annabel never gets details wrong.’
The photograph, he is sure, has been taken in one of the secure clinics outside Moscow. Berlin must have been visiting Radin. Pountney is impressed. Hart’s sources are much better than he imagined. Perhaps the rumours of incompetence in Merton House were merely a smokescreen to fool the Russians. Or was that what they wanted him to believe?
‘Radin looks in bad shape,’ Pountney says.
‘Our understanding is that he died a few days after this photograph was taken.’
‘When was that?’
‘About three weeks ago.’
‘Are you sure?’ Pountney asks.
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’ Hart sounds less certain than he wants to be.
‘There’s been nothing on the wire service about Radin dying.’ No photographs either, no adulatory articles in the Soviet press, no ceremony in Moscow, no procession of Politburo members following the garlanded photograph of the dead man into the cemetery.
‘There’s been no official announcement, I agree. But we’ve had a report from a usually reliable source that Radin is dead. If it’s true, it could be of considerable importance.’
‘Why does knowing whether Radin is alive or dead matter so much?’
‘There’s a lot at stake right now, Gerry. In the arms race, in space, wherever we turn, the Soviets are leading us by the nose. They got a man into orbit before we did, they’ve got an armoury of missiles many times larger than anything we have, and huge numbers of men under arms. Now they’re threatening us with a satellite that will be able to aim nuclear bombs at any city in the West. Last of all and far from least, they want us out of West Berlin. A wrong political move now – particularly one based on false assumptions about the Soviets’ military capability – could put us on a collision course that within hours could lead to war.’
‘What’s Radin got to do with all this?’
‘If he’s dead, then it’s more probable that the First Secretary’s threats about a new armoury of space weapons are bluff, which means time is on our side and we can play a longer game. We’re pretty sure the Soviets have got no successors of Radin’s calibre. Without him the space programme is likely to be less adventurous and slower to move off the drawing board, which gives us time to catch up with them. In that case it’s a reasonable bet that this crisis over West Berlin won’t end in a giant nuclear explosion.’
‘And if Radin’s still alive?’
‘It’s very worrying. The chances are that the Soviets may well miscalculate over West Berlin and push too hard. If they do that, then there’s a huge risk we might all go up in smoke.’ Hart paused for a moment and fiddled with his napkin. ‘If we’re to make the right decisions and have a hope of coming out of this one alive, we need to know what the Soviets are up to. Their threat with Radin is very much greater than their threat without him. That’s why we have to know if he’s alive or dead.’
5
The letter explained what was expected of him. He was to give three lectures over a period of eight days, each of an hour in length, on a theme of his choice, before an audience of members of the university, both academics and students. Could he let them know the titles of his lectures, so that suitable announcements could be made in advance of his arrival? The Blake-Thomas tradition, the letter continued, was that each lecture was presented at a different location, beginning at the University Church – Great St Mary’s, he knew that without having to look it up. This was a secular occasion. There would be no religious ceremony. How thoughtful of Dr Blackwell, secretary of the Blake-Thomas committee, to reassure him. The second would be at the lecture theatre in the Engineering Faculty. He racked his brain – where Fen Causeway joined Trumpington Street, opposite the Leys School, was that correct? – and the third in Mill Lane. That was easy, it was near the Anchor Inn, where Tolley’s beer was served.
And Dr Blackwell? Who was she? A historian like himself, that much he knew. The rest was speculation. She would be a spinster in her sixties, probably, with glasses, hair on her chin and a shapeless dress concealing an equally shapeless body. Why did beauty and brains so seldom go together? Was that why he haunted the student canteens, patrolled the corridors of the lecture theatres, even forced himself to turn up at student parties? Was he searching for a beauty he would never find? Whatever Dr Blackwell was like – and he was sure his image was correct – he was deeply grateful to her. He would thank her properly when they met, and try to ignore the whiskers on her chin.
The invitation included a short historical biography of Norman Blake-Thomas and the endowment he had given the university so many years before. His expenses, he read, would be fully covered by the Trust. A list of previous speakers, in whose company Berlin was happy to be numbered, was also enclosed, and a message relayed from his publishers saying that they would be delighted to look after him while he was in London. A copy of the letter had been forwarded to the Home Office in London as a preliminary to obtaining his visa.
Dr Blackwell ended by saying how eagerly she and other members of the committee looked forward to welcoming him to Cambridge in a few weeks’ time.
He had never been to Cambridge, yet it was present in his mind as if he had lived there all his life, a mysterious and ancient city that drew him to its heart. Since his first trip outside the Soviet Union more than ten years before, he had bought books on Cambridge and read them avidly, absorbing their details into his memory. He had only to take one down from his shelves and his dreams would be fired at once. He would travel in his imagination (by bicycle, of course) al
ong the Backs, down Silver Street, then left along King’s Parade, turning right in front of the Trinity Street exit towards Market Square, with Bowes & Bowes on his left, the English editions of his books displayed in the window, and beyond W. H. Smith, the market to his right and the famous David’s bookstall where on Saturday you bought second-hand copies, Marshall’s, Eaden Lilley, Joshua Taylor, and opposite, Heffer’s the stationers. He had reached a point where he was sure he knew the topography almost as well as someone who lived there but an air of unreality clung to his images. In his mind, he had created a mystic city where some part of his destiny waited to claim him. Until that moment, his life would be unfulfilled and incomplete.
Now it was here, in his hand: the invitation to visit the city of his mind, to walk in its narrow streets, to be surrounded by its ancient buildings, to meet the destiny that awaited him. To his surprise, he felt little excitement. It was inevitable that he should be invited, inevitable too that he should go. A missing piece of the puzzle of his life was about to be fitted into place. A mysterious force was drawing him there and he could do nothing to resist it.
Cambridge. City of dreams set deep in the fenland of East Anglia. At last it had claimed him, as he had always known it would.
PART TWO
Late Summer 1961
6
1
Words are not necessary. The images on the television screen tell the story with convincing eloquence. East German workmen under armed guard lay the foundations of a massive barricade whose purpose is to isolate their people from the rest of the world. Protesting crowds in the streets of West Berlin angrily condemn the enforced separation from their families caught on the wrong side of a wall that, overnight and without warning, has sprung up between them. Elderly East Germans stare despairingly at ground that yesterday they could walk across but which today has become a dangerous no man’s land, the pain in their faces a potent statement of their misery. Young American soldiers, machine-guns at the ready, look nervously across the artificial divide at young men like themselves, only yards from where they stand, equally armed, equally nervous.
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