Captive of Desire

by Alexandra Sellers

  “Get going!” he said, and the young man, new on the job, thought that this was just like a movie and that he had a photographic scoop in his keeping. He dashed down the stairs and out to his cycle.

  Inside the phone booth, Laddy, who had been composing her story in her head from the moment Mischa Busnetsky had said, Please leave me alone, dialled the number she knew best and began dictating as soon as the Herald copy-taker was on the phone. Her shame and disgust at the way she had contributed to a sick man’s pain in that undisciplined crowd still suffused her.

  “‘Someone has got to say, “I will not trample the daffodils,”‘ Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said,” she began, “but Soviet dissident Mikhail Busnetsky’s reception at Heathrow Airport this morning proved, if anyone doubted it, that the press of this city is not going to refuse to tread on the daffodils when a news story is breaking. The gaunt, tragically sick man who arrived into freedom today after nine years in Soviet prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals must have thought he had gone from nightmare....”

  Knowing she had been part of the nightmare, Laddy dictated quickly, covering Busnetsky’s history with professional clarity, but focussing on his illness and the press’s reception of him.

  When she had finished, she asked to be connected to Harry Waller. “He’s come and gone, Harry,” she said. “No leads and no statement. The films are on the way.”

  Harry grunted absent-mindedly, and she knew he was reading the story she had just filed. He would have received it page by page as it came from the copy taker’s typewriter, and it would be obvious from the very first line what she had done.

  “What the Sam Hill is this, Laddy?” Harry asked.

  Laddy cut in, “Harry, that’s the way it was, it was—”

  “No doubt,” he interrupted dryly. “Would you like to take two minutes to collect your thoughts, dear girl, and file this again?”

  Rewrite the story, he meant, and Laddy, sensible, professional Laddy, whose hurt and shame overcame the knowledge that a slam like that on her profession and colleagues should never have been written, said, “Harry, that’s the way it happened, and that’s my story.”

  Harry sighed. “All right,” he said, “any leads?”

  “We think we got the license number of the car on John’s photos,” she said. “Have you got anything?”

  She had a job and a responsibility to the paper to get a story no matter how she felt about it, but she was not going to tell Harry about the blonde woman she was sure she knew.

  “Nothing here,” said Harry. “You’d better come in.”

  Harry Waller hung up the phone and flicked an exasperated finger at the pages of copy that were Laddy’s story. “Get me the agency copy on Busnetsky!” he hollered, to no one in particular.

  * * *

  John came out of the phone booth next to Laddy, where he had put in a call to Richard Snapes. “Going in?” he asked, and Laddy nodded. “Richard wants me over on some picket line, but I’m not hurrying,” he said. “Let’s have a coffee away from everyone, Laddy.” Laddy nodded again. At this moment she needed coffee.

  They found seats in a back corner of a coffee bar, where they might avoid being seen by any wandering reporter looking for a chat.

  “I got some great pictures of that bunch,” John began. “At the end there, when he turned around, he was surrounded by screaming faces. Looked tortured.” He grunted. “Good picture, that.”

  “Good,” said Laddy. The faces of the blonde woman and Mischa Busnetsky were burned on her mind—his accusing stare, and her somehow familiar features. Laddy couldn’t help her mind’s hungry search through her past to where she might have met that woman.

  John was speaking to her.

  “It would be wonderful to get away,” he said. He was talking about Lanzarote. Laddy wondered if the terrible exhaustion she suddenly felt could be of long standing. She felt as though she had been waiting ten years for a vacation.

  “I’ve heard that there’s a gorgeous beach near…”

  “Yes,” Laddy said. “Look, I’ve got to get back and see if I can get a trace on where he’s gone. See you.” She stood and bent to kiss him lightly and walked out, wondering how she managed to put one foot in front of the other.

  * * *

  There really was precious little in the clippings library, considering that the battle to free Mikhail Busnetsky had been going on for so many years, but Laddy dutifully skimmed it all for the second time in two days, looking for leads. Her father was mentioned in some of the early accounts, but few other people were mentioned by name. Laddy realised tiredly that it was going to be a long haul. There would be no easy road to Mischa Busnetsky unless she had some rare luck.

  In the end, her leads consisted of the name of the president of the Committee for the Liberation of Mikhail Busnetsky—which Laddy knew was partly composed of ICF people—and the names signed to a letter to the editor of the Times, prominent literary citizens condemning the “reprehensible detention of Soviet thinker Mikhail Busnetsky.” His name had cropped up, of course, in the Amnesty International lists of prisoners of conscience and again in the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse.

  She saw the gaunt and tortured face of Mischa Busnetsky again as she read the words of his oppressors, and felt a grief she hadn’t allowed herself to feel since she had made up her mind to forget him. “It is no secret to anyone that you can have schizophrenia without schizophrenia,” a powerful Soviet psychiatrist had said to justify the practice of declaring dissidents schizophrenic and committing them to institutions. Laddy turned the clipping over on the pile.

  “Arrested, stripped, searched, interrogated and detained twenty-four hours,” someone described the state’s early methods of harassment, “the prisoners experience systematic underfeeding and receive a hot meal only once every two days.” Well, she had always known that. “It is spiritual murder.”

  Laddy stopped reading and rested her forehead on her hand. “It is spiritual murder.” The words ripped at her. Not him, she prayed. Don’t let it have killed him; let him not have submitted to spiritual murder.

  She handed the grey envelope back to the librarian and returned to her desk in the newsroom. For all the names and various committees she had extracted from the clippings, she found phone numbers, some in her own contacts book, which yielded other names of people who might be helpful. She called every one.

  Either no one knew where he might be or no one was telling. Even the old friends of her father who had been involved with him in the International Council on Freedom could or would tell her nothing about Busnetsky’s whereabouts. She was her father’s daughter, but she was also a journalist.

  She told none of them that she wanted to know his whereabouts as a private person, for a private reason. She was not a private person in this search. This was work for the Herald.

  “I can’t tell you the whereabouts of Mikhail Busnetsky,” someone from the offices of a freedom-fighting committee said to her. “But I can tell you where Anatol Alexei Kolakowski is—in a labour camp in Siberia. And Ludmila Rinkovitch is in a psychiatric hospital undergoing ‘treatment’. And—”

  “All right,” Laddy interrupted. “Point taken.”

  “I wish it were a case of point taken,” the man said. “Why is it you people are only interested in someone after he’s released? Where’s the coverage for the thousands still over there?”

  “I don’t know,” was all Laddy could say.

  “He’s a sick man. Leave him alone,” the man said, and hung up.

  “Were you asking for these?” a voice said to her, and Laddy turned to see Salvatore, the Herald’s copyboy, waving some photographic prints at her.

  “Oh yes, Sally, thanks.” She took them from his extended hand. Sally didn’t leave. His bright enthusiastic gaze was fixed on her.

  “You working on Busnetsky?” he asked with interest. Laddy was not surprised. Salvatore seemed to know the story that each reporter was covering each day.


  “Yes,” she said.

  “He got away from you all, dinnee?” he said with relish. “Wish I’d abeen there.” Sally had yearnings to be an investigative reporter. He might well make it.

  “No, you don’t,” said Laddy. “It was awful, and useless, too.”

  “Well, that’s the way it is, sometimes, innit?” Sally said philosophically, and left her.

  There were two good shots of the license plate. A London license, she found, but her telephone search led to what was probably a dead end: the plate was the number of a rented car. Laddy sighed. The only possibility now was to get to the car-rental office and try to convince someone to let her look at the record of the transaction.

  Laddy pushed her chair back and crossed the office to get a cup of coffee, then came back to her desk for a re-think. There must be something she had missed.

  Sally had long since delivered the early-afternoon edition of the Herald to her desk, but she had not looked at it. She reached out to pull it towards her. Richard, the pictures editor, had used a picture that John must have caught just before Busnetsky got into the car, when he had turned to look at the reporters. At her. But the photo had been cropped. A tired, haggard man with accusing eyes looked just to the left of the camera, but his face filled the whole picture. No one appeared beside him.

  Laddy checked through the pile of prints that Sally had brought to her. Yes, there they were in the original photo, pushing microphones and cameras at him. Incredibly, most of her colleagues in the photo were smiling, and one man whom she did not recognise looked almost satanic, his mouth open, his eyes scrunched up, like an animal going in for the kill.

  Well, the picture had been cropped. John wouldn’t like that. Laddy returned to the paper, her eye glancing over the copy. “BUSNETSKY IN ENGLAND!” screamed the headline and, underneath, “Lucy Laedelia Penreith, Staff Reporter.”

  Mikhail Busnetsky, the well-known dissident who has spent much of the past nine years in Soviet prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals, looked tired and ill, but nevertheless happy to be free today, when he arrived at Heathrow Airport....

  Harry Waller had rewritten her story! Damn him! Anger ignited in her stomach as Laddy flipped the page to the continuation of the story, looking for some remnant of her indignation. But there was nothing. Harry had taken what she said about Mischa Busnetsky’s background, all the factual information, and had simply left out what happened at the airport. It was mindless pap, the kind of copy that anyone, whether at the scene or not, could have produced.

  For the second time in two days Laddy stood at the back bench waving a newspaper under Harry Waller’s nose.

  “Why didn’t you let my story stand?” she demanded, and when Harry looked up his eyes were unfamiliarly cold.

  “Because, dear girl, it doesn’t do to knock the profession,” he said. “I might as easily ask you what the hell you think you’re doing filing that kind of trash.”

  “Did you or did you not look at John’s pictures?” she demanded. “Do you have any idea what that scene was like?”

  “Yes, I think I have a very good idea,” Harry said. “If that is the first time you have run into something of the sort, you are either fortunate or blind. We have, in this country, a moderately free press. It should be freer. We do not need stories like the one you filed this morning to add ammunition to the guns of people who think otherwise.” He didn’t say “grow up,” but it was in the tone of his voice. He sat looking up at her, waiting for her to speak or to leave.

  “A free press means—ought to mean—a self-governed, responsible press,” Laddy returned. “And that lot out there this morning weren’t either.” She took a breath. “And I wish to hell you hadn’t used my by-line on it!”

  When he didn’t answer, she walked away.

  * * *

  The grey car had been rented by the president of the Committee for the Liberation of Mikhail Busnetsky, but he was no more willing to talk the second time she phoned him than he had been the first. In the phone booth outside the car-rental office, Laddy phoned Harry with what she knew and told him she was going home.

  It was five-thirty Friday afternoon. Laddy had never been so glad of an approaching weekend in her life.

  A weekend, of course, didn’t mean she could turn her brain off. Her thoughts were filled with the problem of how to find Mischa Busnetsky as she drove home, so that afterward she didn’t remember making the trip.

  But as she unlocked her front door and wearily hung up her coat, the alternatives were clear: either she had to stake out the home of the man who had rented the car, or she had to remember who the blonde woman was.

  Laddy walked down the hall to the kitchen, filled the kettle and lit the gas, her mind far removed from the mechanical motions of her hands. Who was the blonde woman? Someone from the long ago past, her faint memory told her, which logically meant a friend of her father’s.

  “This is my daughter, Laddy,” she suddenly heard her father’s voice saying.

  The woman, smiling and shaking her hand in a grown-up way that had flattered Laddy at the time, saying, “She’s very like you, Lewis.”

  Laddy looked down. The kettle was boiling and she made tea. She carried the pot and a cup and a pitcher of milk to the table and sat down.

  “She’s very like you.” That at least placed it in time. As a young skinny child Laddy had looked like a boyish version of her father, but at the age of fourteen she had begun to change, becoming more and more like the picture of her mother that occupied a corner of her bedroom dresser. After the age of fourteen or fifteen no one had ever again remarked on her resemblance to Lewis Penreith. “You’re your mother all over again,” her father had said to her one day, and she had been torn between the delight of knowing he thought her like the womanly beauty of the photograph and heartbreak at the sound of pain in his voice....

  So she had met the blonde woman at least ten years ago.

  More than ten years and less than fifteen, because if her mother had been alive, she would have been with them.

  That left a five-year period. Laddy sighed. In those five years she and her father had done a great deal of travelling; she could have met the woman almost anywhere.

  Still, she had something to go on. The woman was a friend of her father’s whom she had met sometime between about age ten and age fifteen. The fact that she had accompanied Busnetsky—probably from Zurich and certainly from Heathrow—meant that she was involved in the civil liberties movement now and probably had been then. This, added to Laddy’s certainty that English was the woman’s native language, was at least a start.

  The massive filing cabinets in her bedroom that held all her father’s papers from over the years were rather daunting, considering she was looking for one name, but starting with her father’s book of contacts, Laddy went through it, hoping that some face or phrase or name would spark that faint memory into flame.

  When she was finished she had a pile of papers to look through more closely, and it was time for the News at Ten.

  Mikhail Busnetsky was the headline story, and the newscast began with his gaunt face staring out from behind the anchorwoman’s shoulder, then cut to a film clip of his arrival that morning. The cameraman had been close to Busnetsky throughout his painful progress, and though Laddy’s own approach to him had not been captured on film, the reporter had been close enough to catch his “Please leave me alone.”

  Laddy was surprised at how quickly after that the blonde woman made her appearance, for it had seemed to her that she stood frozen on the pavement for a lifetime after hearing those words, seeing that accusing face. But suddenly there she was, climbing into the back seat. The film froze for a few seconds at the end of the report while the woman, one leg still on the pavement and her head out of the car, reached out to close the door, and Laddy sat up with a stifled gasp.

  She knew who the woman was.

  Chapter 5

  “I can still remember the first time I told you I loved you
,” the harsh-gentle voice sang into the intimate closeness of Laddy’s little car as she drove through the black velvet of the country at night, and she swallowed. How many memories could be evoked by a song heard in the small hours!

  The headlights tried to pierce the night, but they offered only a feeble resistance to the enclosing darkness. On the sparsely travelled road, Laddy suddenly caught sight of the pale red glow of the taillights of a car some distance ahead of her, and they gave her some direction.

  She relaxed and let the masculine voice touch her, seduce her into memory. “Now and then I find myself thinking of the day...” the singer told her, but when he went on to remember a walk in the rain, Laddy slipped back to a Moscow evening drifting with early snow....

  “Richard Digby, Tymawr House, Trefelin, Pembrokeshire, South Wales,” was the address she had found in her father’s contacts book, and instantly she had been in the grip of a compulsion; nothing could have prevented her setting out to drive to the place where Mischa Busnetsky might be... certainty not the fact that she would be driving through the night. She was no longer in control: she was on automatic pilot, like a salmon returning upstream, or a homing pigeon....

  “We didn’t wait to fall in love, we loved and then we met…” A woman’s voice now. The radio station seemed to be devoting what it called “the midnight hours” to the subject of lost love, and every song had a special significance for her—though perhaps, she thought wryly, it was in the nature of love songs to have a significance for people who had loved.

  Laddy pulled out to pass a large truck, its familiar roar and numerous lights a comforting sign of another intelligence in the lonely night.

  There was no guarantee that Mischa Busnetsky would be at her destination. In the years since Laddy had spent a faintly remembered, quiet two weeks with Richard and Helen Digby in their house in Wales, that house might have been sold. Or perhaps Helen Digby had taken Mischa Busnetsky somewhere else and not to their own home at all....