Kate’s innocence touched him. He knew she had committed herself and that he held her happiness in his power. Knowing that, how could he risk everything by bringing her to this city on the border between the two ideologies that divided the world? A more prudent man would have recognised the dangers and left her behind. He shivered. How could he have been so irresponsible? He was racked by guilt at what he had done, yet he was unable to imagine sleeping in this room without her.
He got back into bed. The girl stirred and sat up. He lay still, watching her. She went to the basin to pour herself a glass of water. On her way back to bed, she too saw the transformation outside. She walked to the window and looked out. The blue light fell over her naked body, transforming her pale skin into shimmering marble. She became in that moment a being of infinite beauty, delicate and mysterious, hardly of this world. Once more he felt overwhelming desire for her.
*
The lecture was due to start at five-thirty. Despite the cold he decided to walk. He left Kate at the hotel. She was tired, she told him, and wanted to rest. She had not asked where he was going nor whether she could come with him. He was struck by her sensitivity to the circumstances in which they found themselves. He had never once had to say anything to her of the risks of their being together, though that did not prevent him from being continually vigilant.
On arrival, he was directed to the third floor. He took the stairs. This is my last lecture, he thought. After that we will have two more days here before we must return. Two whole days to ourselves.
Perhaps if he had not been thinking of Kate, he might have noticed that there were no lights on in the lecture theatre. Some instinct might have caused him to hesitate for an instant before pushing open the door. By the time he realised something was wrong, it was too late. He was inside the room, and in the darkness someone had moved behind him to close the door and lock it. He felt a gun in his back and a voice said quietly in Russian: ‘If you offer any resistance I will be forced to shoot you.’
‘I wouldn’t be so foolish,’ Berlin replied.
The lights came on. The lecture theatre was deserted, except for two men, one guarding the door, the other covering him with a revolver fitted with a silencer.
‘I see you have not lost your reputation for punctuality.’ The man with the gun was the senior. He smiled grimly. ‘Your lecture was planned to take an hour. With questions – and for so distinguished a speaker, there will always be questions – the whole process will take an hour and a half, shall we say? Very well’ – he looked at his watch – ‘in exactly one hour and twenty-nine minutes we will release you. If you do as we tell you, you will be able to walk from here unaided.’
The girl, Berlin said to himself. For an hour and a half they’ve got the girl to themselves. They’d set a trap for him, and he had fallen into it without a second thought. Now she would suffer and he would be unable to protect her.
2
The photograph was where he had always kept it, protected by a brown paper envelope and tucked away at the back of his edition of Lenin’s Collected Works – surely the last place anyone would look. He removed it carefully. He had taken the picture one afternoon at the swimming pool in the Dynamo Stadium. Eva had emerged from the pool, dripping wet and exhausted after a training session. She was laughing, her arm round her friend Julia, complaining breathlessly that she was not fit to be photographed. That hadn’t stopped him pressing the shutter release. If he’d had the courage, he would have taken a hundred pictures of her then. There had been another figure in the photograph – Alexei Abrasimov – but Koliakov had long ago cut out his image and thrown it away. If he looked carefully he could just see a disembodied hand around Julia’s waist. If only that was all that remained of his memories of Abrasimov.
He looked at the smiling girl, her rich auburn hair released from her bathing cap and tumbling down over her shoulders, the ends wet where the water had leaked into her cap, her skin shining from the pool. He could see the outline of her breasts through her bathing costume, her flat stomach and strong legs. She had the ideal body for a swimmer, compact and muscular, with powerful shoulders and thighs.
What had she been thinking, he wondered, as she posed for him? Did she know that his dearest wish was to photograph her naked? All she had to do was slip the straps from her shoulders and peel off the wet costume – an act that would have taken a moment. Then she would have been standing before him as he wanted her, and he would no longer have had to use his imagination. But she never did take her costume off for him. She never thought of him in that way. That was his tragedy.
He felt a sudden wave of revulsion surge through his mind. How could he imagine for a moment that the girl in the mews cottage was like Eva? What could have possessed him? She bore only the slightest physical resemblance to the woman in the photograph: she had the same colour hair perhaps, the same triangular shape to the face, but that was all, and it wasn’t enough. She was a parody of Eva, her skin too pale, her legs too thin, her smile too closed and her eyes – couldn’t he have seen that when he first met her? – her eyes were dull and lost, closed doors concealing nothing but a terrible emptiness. How could he have touched her, imagining he was touching someone else? How could he have defiled himself so easily? He felt physically sick with self-disgust. Why had he deceived himself?
He remembered Pountney’s expression when he had talked of the girl, how pleased he’d been when he had given his ultimatum – silence for information. Pountney had imagined he would respond to such a crude proposal because an exchange like that was the language of his craft. Well, the Englishman was wrong. He had no intention of entering into any negotiation with him. If Pountney thought he would become their creature, they had seriously underestimated him. Seeing the girl was a bad mistake, he couldn’t deny that, and his weakness gave Pountney the upper hand. Now he would have to rely on his own inventiveness to extricate himself from a trap of his own making.
3
Berlin raced up the stairs, only halting briefly outside the door of their room to listen for voices. There was no sound. He let himself in.
‘Kate?’
She was curled up on the bed, hands clasped to her mouth, eyes red, pale face streaked with tears. She was shaking uncontrollably. She tried to speak to him but her shivering was so strong she could say nothing intelligible. He attempted to reassure her, telling her not to speak until she felt better. She was to nod her answers.
‘Did they hurt you?’
Her eyes swam with tears. For a moment he feared she had been beaten or worse, and his anger rose like a storm, but she shook her head and murmured, ‘No. They didn’t touch me.’
He made her as comfortable as he could, covering her with a blanket, rubbing her hands to bring back some warmth. He ordered tea and held the cup to her lips to prevent her shaking hands spilling it over the bed. After a while she fell into a nervous sleep, her body twitching under the blanket, while she murmured words whose meaning he couldn’t catch. At one point she hummed a tune he didn’t recognise.
He looked at her and wanted to cry. Her innocence had a dark shadow over it now. She had seen for herself that bullying, brutal side of his country that he had worked so hard to conceal from her. She had been frightened in a way she could not possibly have imagined and that he had never felt able to warn her about.
She was our friend, our hope. She could have told the world that we are not the beasts we are thought to be. Now we have lost a friend, and destroyed a small chance to change the world’s perceptions of us. How foolish, how wrong-headed our judgements are.
He lit a cigarette and waited by her side as she slept. Outside, the sky darkened as the clouds moved in and snow began to fall again.
*
For a moment Kate thought the knocking was in her dream but it persisted, more urgently now and louder, and she knew it was real. She got out of bed, put on her dressing gown and opened the door. Three men burst in, one racing past her into the room, the other two t
aking her by the elbows and dragging her backwards. The door was kicked shut and locked. She was thrown onto the bed, too frightened to scream.
‘What did they want?’ Berlin asked quietly, as soon as she was awake.
‘They asked me where you were,’ she replied.
‘Did you tell them?’
‘How could I? You never told me where you’d gone.’
‘What did they ask you?’ He was sure they wouldn’t have stopped at that, not when they knew they had her for an hour and a half before he was due to return.
‘Stupid questions. What I was doing in Moscow. Why I had come here. Nothing really.’
He looked at the pale, frightened figure on the bed and knew that something terrible had happened that she was concealing from him.
‘Where is he?’ Her captor spoke in Russian.
‘Who?’ she answered foolishly.
‘Your boyfriend.’ The man’s face was threateningly close to hers and his breath smelled sourly of cigarettes. She saw his pock-marked skin and its awful yellow colour, stained brick red where the irritation was alive.
‘He is giving a lecture,’ Kate replied.
‘There is no lecture,’ the man with the sour breath told her, ‘and there never was. At this moment your boyfriend is answering questions.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We have plenty of time to talk. We won’t be disturbed.’
He lit a cigarette and stared at her. She saw no humanity in his eyes, only a terrifying emptiness as if conscience and compassion had been burned out of him. There was no quality within him she could appeal to.
‘Do you know what he is being questioned about?’
‘How can I?’ she said.
‘His relationship with you. Do you know why?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ She felt very cold. She began to shiver.
‘We have evidence that you are a British spy.’
‘I am a music student,’ she said, trying to sound defiant but aware that her voice was hardly above a whisper. ‘I’m studying the cello under Vinogradoff.’
‘That is your cover. We know you are an agent of British Intelligence, and that you are here to steal secrets from the Soviet Union.’
‘Did they ask you about me?’ It was her turn to ask questions now.
‘No,’ he replied. If it is to succeed, the lie must always be close to the truth. ‘It was some ridiculous alert about security.’
He was breaking his own rules. Would she believe him? Somehow he feared not.
‘It was madness to bring her here.’ The man’s voice declared neither mockery nor surprise. He had no interest in Berlin. He was here to perform a function. Berlin said nothing. ‘Did you imagine you would get away with it?’
Berlin felt the gun being prodded into his side. He remained silent.
‘You cannot behave in this way. The risks are too great.’
What difference does my relationship with this English girl make? he wanted to ask. As if he could read his mind, his interrogator continued: ‘The girl draws attention to you. Her presence could lead to speculation about your connection to us. We can’t risk any disclosure about our relationship with you. The Department still believes you have a value worth protecting. Your actions are thoughtless and stupid.’
The idea of the girl as a threat was nonsense and they both knew it. He could guess what was coming next.
‘They must have asked you why you had come to Moscow?’ Berlin said.
‘I told them about the Conservatoire.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Nothing that mattered. They frightened me by being there. They seemed so heartless, so brutal.’
He was sure they had made terrible accusations against her. What he hadn’t expected was that she would hide them from him.
‘You are an English spy,’ the man with the pockmarked face shouted. ‘Make it easy for yourself. Tell us what we know to be true.’
‘Go to the Conservatoire,’ she repeated. It was all she could think of to say. ‘Ask Vinogradoff. He will tell you that I am his student. I came to Moscow to study with him.’
She was crying now, any pretence of bravery long gone. She wanted Berlin here to make this horror end. But she knew he wouldn’t come. Somehow she would have to get through this nightmare on her own.
‘Did they ask you questions about me?’ Berlin asked gently. She was grasping his hand as if she were terrified that at any moment he might slip from her grasp, never to be seen again. ‘Try to remember.’
‘They asked few questions,’ she replied. ‘They went round and round in circles. They were trying to trick me into saying something I didn’t mean.’
‘Is this the bed you share with your Russian lover?’ She turned away, defiantly refusing to answer. ‘Is this the bed where you fuck your Russian boyfriend?’ he shouted at her, his face inches from hers.
‘What do you want from me?’
‘Answer my question.’
For a moment Kate was too frightened to speak. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.
The man turned to his companions and they laughed our loud. She felt an icy terror spread through her veins. Once more her interrogator walked round and round the chair she was sitting on, until she thought she would go dizzy.
He bent over her again, bringing his damaged face as close to hers as he could without touching. ‘Is he your first man?’ he asked.
Kate said nothing. He twisted her face towards him.
‘Answer me when I talk to you. Is he your first man?’
‘Yes.’ Very quietly.
‘Does he fuck well, your Russian boyfriend?’
She was crying too much to answer. Once more her interrogator circled the chair until she had recovered her composure.
‘We have a present for you. Would you like a present from us? Would it make you feel better?’
‘I want you to go.’
He took out a small tape recorder from his briefcase and plugged it in. ‘You will like this,’ he said. ‘It will bring back happy memories.’
The interrogator switched on a machine. For a while the tape ran silently. Then there came sounds of movements, muffled laughter, two voices, both distant and indistinct.
‘Do you recognise yourself?’
She heard her own voice murmuring over and over again, Andrei, Andrei. There were murmurs from Andrei that she could not understand but which tore into her heart – something so pure was being spied on, eavesdropped, used against them.
‘Turn it off,’ she shouted, ‘turn it off.’
Berlin was standing by the window. It was dark outside. Weeping clouds scraped the rooftops of the city and the snow fell heavily. He felt numbed by what had happened. He knew these people. He had associated with them for years. They were the agents of an authority fearful of threats to its power, though it would never admit to that. They were licensed to terrorise and kill and they had turned their brutality onto an innocent girl. Nothing in her experience can have prepared her for such an encounter. What could they have told her that she now felt unable to tell him? He felt sick. In one encounter the two sides of his life had collided and the girl was suffering. He should never have brought her here. He had made a terrible mistake. What damage he had done to her he could not imagine.
‘They must have said something else.’
‘What they told me was unimportant.’
‘I have listened to the tape a number of times,’ her interrogator said. ‘I would describe it as a rare pleasure. My only regret is that we do not have it on film. Listen. We have more.’
This time it was different, and she felt a brief moment of relief. She heard a voice like hers but it was not hers, talking about her conversations with someone called Radin, reporting on plans for manned space flights. Then another voice, like Andrei’s but not his, asking technical questions about rocket engines, payloads, phrases that the real Kate would never understand in ten lifetimes.
‘Do you recognise yourself?’ the Russian asked.
‘That�
��s not me. That’s not my voice.’
‘You are in bed, fucking your Russian boyfriend, you are asking him questions and he is telling you secrets which you will give to your contact at the British Embassy.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ she said, trying to sound brave.
‘This tape is sufficient evidence,’ his interrogator replied. ‘You will be arrested, tried, and found guilty of anti-Soviet activity. The punishment for that is ten, fifteen years in a labour camp. We will not expect you to serve out your time with us. After some months, we will release you under pressure from the British Government. A magnanimous gesture, in the interests of good diplomatic relations between our two countries. During your imprisonment, you will meet with an accident. Your hands will be scalded. We will be unable to get you to a suitable hospital in time. That will have put paid to your dreams of playing the cello in the concert halls of the world.’
‘The girl is a spy for the British,’ the man with the revolver said.
‘That’s absurd.’
‘We have evidence.’
‘If she was a spy,’ he said, ‘I would have told you by now.’ He hoped his self-disgust was evident. ‘I am expert at that. I steal the secrets of my friends and betray them to you. If the girl was a spy, I would already have betrayed her.’
‘Unless you had fallen in love with her.’
Silence. They were locked in the struggle now. This was the turning point. There could only be one winner.
‘Are you in love with her?’
What was he to say? ‘She’s a student.’
‘You don’t fall in love with students.’ Berlin shrugged. ‘You fuck them and throw them away, is that it?’
‘That’s right.’ The mockery in his voice would be lost on his interrogator.
‘And the English girl is no exception?’
‘Why should she be?’
His interrogator did not answer. He unscrewed the cap on his pen once more and wrote in his notebook. He kept his cigarette clamped in his mouth as he did so. His breathing was laboured.
Dr Berlin Page 27