The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  After the obligatory tot of vodka with Fred Kite, the toast to the United Kingdom, and the obligatory second shot of vodka and toast to the USSR, and the obligatory third shot of vodka and toast to nothing in particular, Masefield said, “Andrei Semyonovich, I would like to go back to the ministry.”

  §32

  Tact might be paying off. The look on Andrei Semyonovich’s face betrayed no offence taken, and Koritsev still seemed very willing to please. All the same, all explaining the “slight” misunderstanding led to was another, “Leave it with me. Perhaps next time.” He’d have to look in the cellar again.

  As Masefield left Koritsev’s office, the next man waiting to see the minister was waiting by the door.

  “I couldn’t help but overhear,” he said in good English. “The door is open after all, but . . . you’re not the Masefield who wrote the paper on post-transition metals for New World Geology in ’59, are you?”

  §33

  “Grigory Grigoryevich Matsekpolyev,” he said. “Professor of Physics and what have you at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute.”

  What have you? A throwaway line or a boastful use of English to show how good he was?

  “Come and walk with me a while, Mr. Masefield.”

  Masefield thought of the line from Lewis Carroll, one his dad had never tired of reciting to him, “O Oysters, come and walk with us” and no sooner had he thought it than his new friend uttered it.

  “‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!’ The Walrus did beseech. ‘A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, along the briny beach.’”

  Oh yes, he was definitely showing off. Nothing in Brown’s prep and pep talks had prepared him for this. He’d warned him about seemingly random encounters with seemingly harmless individuals, but not this. Not a tall, sophisticated show-off, a man exercising his command of English language and literature—a man who looked less like the shabby apparatchik in the black mac and more like a younger version of Lord Mountbatten, a man dressed far better than he was, far better than Comrade Under-Minister. With a heavy fur collar to his coat, a black sable hat, and pigskin gloves, all he lacked was a furled umbrella. This was one of the party elite. Masefield felt small and tatty beside him—­sophistication such as this was beyond his accomplishment, though not beyond his dreams. Come to think of it, he looked a bit like Burne-Jones, and he hadn’t even bothered with the moustache.

  “Of course I don’t have a briny beach, but the Borodinsky Bridge is just over there. We could have all the fun of looking down on a frozen river while we chat.”

  Chat? What was this man?

  “Of course,” Masefield replied.

  It was not a matter of “what do I have to lose?”—he had everything to lose, but the approach was intriguing, bizarre.

  “I thought your paper first rate. Indeed I was a little surprised to find that you were in industry rather than an academic.”

  In a matter of a couple of minutes they had reached the bridge over the Moskva. A clear, cloudless winter’s day with, thankfully, no wind. It was almost tolerable. Masefield wondered if the spot had been chosen for its privacy.

  “For my sins, I have to teach the odd class. Recalcitrant bunch of buggers at the best of times. Not the type to win a space race or fill a missile gap. Could I ask you to give a paper? Doesn’t have to be the same as the one you published, and you’d be doing me a great favour.”

  Out of the blue. Unbelievable.

  “I’ve never given a lecture in my life.”

  “First time for everything and you know more about the subject than I do. I’m heavy metal myself. Transuranics. But I will admit to a fascination with transition and post-transition metals, and, to split a hair, even the d-block elements have a certain charm.”

  “Yes,” said Masefield. “They’re beautiful. Almost unreal. I’ll never forget playing with mercury as a schoolboy, watching it roll in bright silver bubbles across my desk, knowing all the time that it’s a metal.”

  “Well said. Come and inspire my lackadaisical bunch of students with lines like that.”

  “You mean in Leningrad? I’m on a trade mission. I can’t leave . . . ”

  “Don’t worry about that. The institute will get you all the permits you need. And don’t worry about the cost. Koritsev will pay. Absolutely in his own interests. Feather in his cap as you people say, an academic-diplomatic exchange at the industrial level. By the bye, what was the problem with Comrade Koritsev?”

  “A little misunderstanding.”

  “Aren’t they all? World War Three will begin with a little misunderstanding.”

  “I asked to see indium processing. I’m here to buy indium, after all. The UK has none. So I’ve never seen it processed.”

  “And?”

  “The interpreter mixed up ‘pure’ and ‘poor,’ and I got all the crudity of a gold-smelting factory in an abandoned church. Nothing I haven’t seen a hundred times before, although never in quite such an odd location.”

  “I think I can fix that for you. When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know, but the next trip will surely be set up before I finish this one?”

  Matsekpolyev produced a personal card.

  “Let me know. Think about a revised paper on the transition metals. Come to Leningrad, give the talk, I’ll line up an interpreter for you, and I’ll find you a processing plant. It will be a good diplomatic exchange. A Khrushchev-pleaser if ever I heard one. Peaceful coexistence in a nutshell.”

  “You know,” Masefield said. “Peaceful coexistence has to be one of the great myths of our time, only it’s Khrushchev saying it not Neville Chamberlain.”

  This set Matsekpolyev laughing.

  “My God, and people think Russians are cynical.”

  §34

  On the Thursday, their last night in Moscow, the seven intrepid industrialists gathered in the bar at the Muromets. Whether out of duty or courtesy, Tanya Dmitrievna joined them.

  It was a night to hit the vodka—they were always going to hit the vodka—and it seemed that Glendinning had managed to learn something, perhaps just one something, about Russia . . . that it was bad form ever to put the cork back in a bottle of vodka once opened. He was ­going to get them all shit-faced and with one exception they did not care.

  Masefield reckoned they’d all knocked back the equivalent of three doubles apiece, when Glendinning banged the heavy base of his glass on the bar and got their attention.

  “Listen up, you drunken buggers. Drink all you want, drink all you can. No need to worry about the mess bill—old Geoffrey’ll be picking that up.”

  A susurrus of “eh?” “what?”

  “Little bet the two of us had, and Geoff lost. So nostrovya, comrades!”

  And with that he sank a very large vodka in one gulp, slammed his glass down again, yelled, “Set ’em up, Joe!” at the barman and turned around to face the room, both elbows on the bar, a proprietorial grin of measured bonhomie on his face—enough to show he was in charge, not enough for the warmth of fellow feeling.

  His gaze fell on Masefield, and the grin became a snigger and the snigger a guffaw, the hearty public school bray that had made Masefield detest evenings in the officers’ mess. Then Glendinning turned his back on him to drink again.

  “Mess bill” . . . well, that spoke volumes.

  Masefield stood clutching his glass, not drinking, not wanting to drink, and looked cautiously to his left. As he had deduced, Tanya Dmitrievna was standing next to him. Perhaps the taunting laughter had been aimed at her too?

  She returned his gaze. He could read not a shred of emotion in her eyes, but surely she had worked out the nature of the bet?

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be,” she replied.

  §35

  He had nothing to show MI6 for a week in Moscow, and he knew it. Tellin
g himself that it had cost them nothing, that New Caledonian was picking up the bill didn’t help much. Nor did telling himself that their expectation of him must surely be small.

  He gave the roll of 35mm film from his Zenit to Tom Radley in Berlin. Radley could have all the delights of the domes of St. Basil’s, the goose-stepping guards at Lenin’s tomb, and in complete contrast the faded, decrepit old church out in Preobrazhenskaya Ploshchad. All snapped for posterity.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s all very mundane stuff. Nothing you couldn’t find in a back number of National Geographic magazine.”

  “Early days. Geoffrey. Early days. At least you’ve established your credentials and you’ve made interesting contacts. This . . . whatsisname?”

  “Grigory Grigoryevich Matsekpolyev.”

  “That’s a mouthful and it’s also progress . . . progress . . . we’re talking to a professor at the Leningrad Poly . . . er . . .”

  It surprised Masefield that Radley had no idea what he was referring to.

  “The Leningrad Polytechnical Institute. It’s the dog’s bollocks of Soviet science. He’s a professor of physics.”

  “As I said, Geoffrey, progress. Who knows where this might lead? And you have another meeting set up at the Foreign Ministry?”

  “Yes, in January. In principle they’ll sell. We still have to agree on a price, and there’ll be a lot of argy-bargy about shipping and so forth. I would imagine at least another three trips before we get an ounce of indium. And after that I can think of half a dozen other metals I could be buying.”

  “Jolly good. The mills of Khrushchev grind as slowly as the mills of God, eh?”

  “Something like that,” Masefield said.

  He had more than an inkling of meetings of infinite boredom and a mountain of triplicated paperwork. And of spelling things out to Radley using only short words.

  He decided not to mention the Minox.

  He had also decided not to bring it back to Berlin with him. He had tried concealing it wrapped in his flannel at the bottom of his wash kit, but the weight of all those brass components made it a dead giveaway. Any nosy apparatchik who hefted the kit would know at once it wasn’t just a shaving brush and a tube of minty Gibbs SR. Instead, and he was proud of this, he had “thought like a spy” and on the assumption he would be at the Muromets for future visits, he had lifted a fire bucket full of sand off its iron hook at the end of the corridor, carefully removed about fifty fag ends, tipped out the sand onto a newspaper, buried the Minox in a stout brown paper bag at the bottom of the bucket, scooped up the sand, carefully replaced about fifty fag ends and hung the bucket back where he found it. It was his one sense of achievement, even if he could tell no one about it. Telling Radley would make him feel foolish, as foolish as he had felt when Radley had jokingly referred to him as “our man in Moscow.” Well, it was a joke, surely?

  §36

  Moscow: January 1961

  Masefield had little experience of art galleries. It wasn’t as if he knew nothing about art but “knew what he liked”—he’d been dragged to the local gallery in Derby as an adolescent by uninspiring art teachers and come back admiring the way Joseph Wright had with light, and pleased that someone before the invention of photography had chosen to depict scientists at work. Beyond this, he knew nothing or next to nothing. An art gallery was like a pop music chart, you looked for the greatest hits, for Elvis or Johnnie Ray . . . for Van Gogh or Monet. The Tretyakov Gallery seemed to have no greatest hits. No Van Gogh, no Monet, no Joseph Wright.

  He’d looked at portrait after portrait of “unknown” Russian nobles and was fighting off the sense of failure that he knew was the end product of boredom as surely as beta decay turned protons into neutrons. He was stuck in front of some bloke in a wig astride a horse, wishing the aspirant culture snob in him would just let go.

  “Mr. Masefield?”

  It was Tanya Dmitrievna—the “guide” who’d kept a watchful eye on them all during the trade mission last month.

  “You are back so soon.”

  “Oh, it’ll take more than one visit to do the deal as it were. And you?”

  “A tourist party. Just finished. I work for Intourist, as you know.”

  Of course he knew. Just as he knew everyone who worked for Intourist also worked for the KGB. Brown had told him so—they might be no more than low-grade observers reporting everything without discrimination, from who got drunk in the bar to who asked about space missions.

  “Is Mr. Glendinning with your party too?”

  “If he’s here I haven’t seen him. This trip is a bit different from the last. I’m a party of one, as it were. I have more meetings at the ministry . . . just happens I have nothing on this afternoon.”

  Suddenly she was transparent. He could read her like a book. Even knowing her trade was deceit, he could read her. She had sagged at the news, a tide of sadness lapping at her eyes. What had that bugger Glendinning told her? What had he done to her? He took out a clean handkerchief and passed it to her. She dabbed at her cheeks.

  “Do you know a café where we could have tea?” he asked.

  “Yes. Of course. Just not here.”

  Further down Lavrushinsky Lane she led him into a fogged-up café—puddles all over the floor, a pungent waft of steaming wool, the clank of cast-iron radiators expanding and contracting, the hubbub of forty voices all talking at once.

  “We will be OK here,” she said.

  Did they need to be OK? Didn’t they just need tea and time?

  She shed two of her outer layers, parked him at an empty table and joined the queue. Masefield looked around, concluded, as no one turned to look at him, that he was of no interest to the proprietors of the ongoing conversations. Perhaps that was the definition of OK.

  Tanya Dmitrievna returned with two glasses of black tea, their little silver handles looking to Masefield like tiny remnants of the ancien régime, a touch of curling Russian elegance in the stark new Soviet world of straight lines and plain facades.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know why I have you here.”

  He did.

  “No,” he said. “I’m the one who should say sorry. I didn’t agree to Glendinning’s bet, but I also didn’t say no. If I had he might not have boasted as crudely as he did in the bar that night.”

  “He’s not coming back, is he?”

  “Probably not. I talked to him at the airport before we boarded in December. He got the deal he wanted. He might be here, I just haven’t seen him.”

  If Glendinning were at the Muromets, Masefield felt certain he would have heard him.

  “I see.”

  “And now you feel used.”

  “What?”

  “Used . . . as in the sense of . . .”

  “I know what it means. It just doesn’t seem the right word. I gave myself freely. I wasn’t looking for a relationship.”

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  “Glendinning offered to help me.”

  “Help you with what?”

  She lowered her voice as she lowered her eyes, looking at the cracked Formica table, not at him.

  “Help me to get out of Russia.”

  §37

  They walked the streets as the daylight faded. Masefield didn’t look for a tail and hadn’t looked since morning. Either they had given up on him after the predictability of his last visit, or the tail was walking at his side.

  After two blocks in silence, she said, “I am not heartbroken, Mr. Masefield. I was not in love with Glendinning, I simply enjoyed him.”

  “And the offer to help you . . . defect? That is the word isn’t it, defect?”

  “I would not have taken him at all seriously if it had been his ploy to seduce me. I would have been seduced or not seduced as I chose. But, he said i
t afterwards, when he had had his way with me, and I with him. He had nothing to gain with an empty promise. And . . . I said ‘leave’ or ‘get out’ . . . not ‘defect.’ Why do you say ‘defect’?”

  They’d reached a moment he had known they’d reach for at least the last fifteen minutes.

  “Because KGB agents don’t leave, they defect.”

  “You think I’m KGB?”

  “Of course you’re KGB. Everyone who works for Intourist is KGB.”

  “Is that what they tell you in England?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do they also tell you that the only way to get a job with Intourist is to join the KGB, and that we join the KGB the way schoolteachers joined the Nazi Party in Germany. Simply to have or to keep the job they liked?”

  “You make it sound as benign as being a rural postman in Clackmannanshire.”

  “What is Clockmansheer? I don’t understand.”

  “Forgive me, I was making a joke. You are KGB? Yes or no?’

  “Of course I am. But you have to understand what that means. I carry no gun, I have never used invisible ink . . . I cannot kill you with one hand tied behind my back . . . It’s just a job . . . do you not have that notion in England . . . it’s just a job . . . . I am only doing my job!”

  She was tearful again—tears of rage. She pulled out the handkerchief he had given her in the museum and wiped away the tears before they froze to her skin.

  “I’m sorry. Of course I understand the idea. I’m not sure I believe it but I understand it.”

  “Will you ever stop saying you’re sorry?”

  “You have no gun, no invisible ink . . . so what do you do? Write reports?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you report on me?”

  “That you were the only one who wasn’t a drunken capitalist pig. They like that phrase: ‘capitalist’ and ‘pig’ go together. They have little problem with ‘drunken’ as you may imagine. And . . . I told them you were harmless.”

  “And Glendinning?”

  “I had to lie. I said he was harmless too. I wanted him to get me out. The truth would not have served me so well.”