Angels in the Snow

by Derek Lambert

  He watched the pigeons on the balcony printing crosses in the snow with their claws. Figures moving across the windows in the next block. Charred paper from a bonfire far below flying past his window. The sky descending and absorbing the coil of smoke hanging over the city, swallowing the pink light that briefly slit the grey screen in the west. The cold settling and the snowflakes brushing the window as if they were trying to come in.

  In the evening Diana returned polished with the cold, as healthy as an Irish nurse. ‘And how’s the patient?’ she demanded, rubbing her fresh cheeks against his.

  ‘I’m fine.’ He smiled at her, pleased that she was happy and he was the cause of her happiness.

  ‘Good. I thought you were a little bit low this morning, Doesn’t do to get low. Now, what about something to eat?’

  ‘Steak,’ he said. ‘Steak and onions and chips followed by roly-poly pudding and cheese and biscuits and coffee.’

  She looked surprised. ‘My goodness,’ she said, ‘we are better, aren’t we. I think I’d better stay in the lounge tonight.’

  This, Mortimer knew, meant that she would join him in bed. ‘There’s really no need for you to stay tonight,’ he said. ‘I’m quite all right now. I’ll take tomorrow off and go back to work on Wednesday.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Diana said. ‘I’ve cleared it with the doc again. He’s all for it.’

  And so was the rest of the embassy staff, Mortimer thought. But tonight he really did not want Diana in the flat, not to mention the bed. But there seemed to be little he could do to stop her without hurting her feelings—and this he did not want to do.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m very grateful. But I must insist you stay in the lounge for both our sakes.’

  ‘You mean you won’t be able to control yourself? I don’t know—you men. We’ll just have to see how you’re feeling, shan’t we.’ She sat on the bed and stroked his hair. ‘After all it’s not as if we’re strangers to each other, is it, Richard?’

  He was very kind and gay for the rest of the evening. And when, inevitably, she did join him in bed he found to his relief that his body didn’t betray him. He kissed her gently and fell asleep instantly, and she slept soon afterwards without suspecting that the reason for his happiness was the imminence of his next Russian lesson.

  She brought him a Christmas present—the complete recording of ‘Swan Lake’—and he was dismayed because, as yet, he had bought her nothing.

  ‘I intended to buy you a present yesterday but I was laid up in bed,’ he said, and told her about his accident.

  She was immediately filled with concern. She made him put his legs up on the sofa and put a cushion behind his head.

  She admired his tree and plugged in the lights and he thought she looked like a child lit by their small, brave glow.

  He made a pot of tea and then at last she tried to teach him some Russian. But he couldn’t concentrate and after a while he told her that his head was aching.

  ‘Then I must leave at once,’ she said. ‘You must rest.’

  ‘No, don’t go,’ he said in alarm. ‘Just sit and talk for a while. Play the records you bought me.’

  He watched her slim fingers, nails polished but not lacquered, tapping the table as Tchaikovsky’s music filled the room. He wanted to hold her hand but that way lay disaster. Just to be together and to share, that would have to be enough. Sharing the white light staring through the windows, the ambience of the Christmas tree born for the snow and already dying in the breathless indoors, the music dancing between them: that was theirs for today to be preserved and enjoyed until they met again.

  Instead of her hand he touched the amber necklace around her throat, the yellow stones smooth like pebbles sculptured by the sea, and warm as if they lived.

  ‘I wanted to buy you a necklace like that,’ he said.

  ‘It is very beautiful, isn’t it. Baltic amber. We have a lot of it in the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Was it a present?’ He realised, to his horror, that the question was prompted by a curiosity closely allied to jealousy.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The man I worked for as an interpreter last year. He was an American journalist. He was a very kind man but he had to leave suddenly. Sometimes that happens in Moscow.’

  ‘He must have admired you a lot to give you a present like that.’

  ‘Not really. You can buy it quite cheaply with hard currency. Sometimes he used to give me those rouble coupons which the bank give foreigners to spend in the dollar shops. You can buy beautiful things there which we Russians cannot buy. And they are so much cheaper. It seems to me that it is not somehow right that foreigners should have these advantages over Russians.’

  Mortimer hated the absent American who looked, in his imagination, like Randall. ‘I thought,’ he said carefully, ‘that it was against the law for Russians to spend coupons.’

  ‘I know it is wrong,’ she said. ‘But many people do it. Especially at the time of the New Year. The authorities do not take so much notice at this time.’

  ‘You mean you would like me to pay you in coupons?’

  She turned over the record. ‘It sounds awful, does it not. Mercenary—is that the right word?’ He nodded—it was, he thought, exactly the right word. She went on: ‘But we Russians have grown up differently to you. You must understand this. We have grown up with scarcities and hardship. There is something inside us that always makes us look for the bargain. I do not know what English word would describe this attitude.’

  ‘Grasping,’ Mortimer said.

  ‘That does not sound a very nice word.’

  ‘It’s not a very nice word. But don’t worry—I’ll pay you with coupons.’

  ‘I think you are angry.’

  ‘Not angry. It was just that sitting here listening to the music I had forgotten the realities of life.’

  ‘Do not be angry. I did not think it would matter to you whether you paid me in roubles or coupons. Pay me in roubles—I do not mind.’

  ‘I’ll pay you in bars of gold if only we can stop talking about money,’ Mortimer said.

  They talked for a while, drank more tea, played more music. But—or so it seemed to Mortimer—they no longer shared. When she left he paid her with coupons. He tried to recall the first warmth of her visit, but he could not reach it: instead he brooded on the idea that he had bought her companionship, as some men buy love.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Nikita Grechenko who worked for the Russian secret police sucked moodily at his draught beer, rolled a morsel of black bread into a moist pellet and squashed it flat so that he could examine his finger-print. He for one doubted the theory that no two people had the same print. How did anyone really know? How could anyone say that there might not be a peasant living in Baku with the same curves and whorls as himself? But that was the trouble with so much police work: its rules were inflexible and took no account of such phenomena as coincidence. Indeed that was the trouble with many of the edicts of the Party and laws of the State: they were inflexible and took no account of changing circumstances. He imagined the reaction if he voiced such thoughts at Lubyanka; he shuddered and drank deeply of the beer which he did not like.

  Grechenko’s duties as a policeman were concerned with the Western defectors living in Moscow. He did not enjoy his work. He had lived in America, which was where he had bought his smart suits now slightly frayed and had enjoyed the company of the Americans he had spied upon there. He did not like mixing with defectors whom he considered to be traitors whether they were Westerners or Russians. His dislike had one advantage: it gave him the strength to use them mercilessly when necessary.

  But Grechenko was basically an ordinary plain-clothes detective. He had been flattered when, because of his fluent English and comparative sophistication, he had been elevated to duties far more complex than the pursuit of common thieves. But when he came back from America he had hoped to return to routine work. His application was refused and he was given duties even more closely
involved with loyalty—mistaken or otherwise—and treachery than his work in the States had been. Ordinary criminal investigation was a decade behind him: it had been the apprenticeship before the profession. An old friend of his, teased in the police force because of his bookish ways, now accumulated evidence against wayward authors; another who had helped to edit a police gazette now mixed with foreign correspondents in town and reported their activities. None of these specialised detectives enjoyed their work—it had nothing to do with police procedure—and all yearned for the carefree apprentice days before their particular talents had been noticed.

  This evening Grechenko particularly disliked his job. He was a family man. He loved his plump wife and his two children and would have liked to be home in his new flat near the river beach at Serebryanny Bor which he shared with his wife’s parents. He liked to share a bottle of wine, brandy or vodka occasionally, but he did not like to linger drinking in the city. Drinking in beer halls had been part of the job when he was chasing a murderer who might kill again: he resented it now that he had the easier job of observing and manipulating defectors and foreign Communists. He did not like beer and he would have preferred to be cleaning his hunting guns or watching ice-hockey on television.

  His predicament was the fault of the secret police department which compiled the dossiers on foreign diplomats in Moscow; the men who spent their time seeking cracks in diplomatic decency with all the usual apparatus—microphones, cameras, homosexuals and available girls.

  Recently the department had not been having much success apart from discovering attempts at espionage by a couple of military attachés; as no one believed that military attachés were sent abroad for any purpose other than clumsy spying, the discoveries were not rated very highly. Privately Grechenko thought that the whole concept of East-West subversion was as out-of-date as the methods employed. As out-moded, he thought scowling into his unwanted beer, as the whole farce of antagonism between Russia and the West. If only the Americans, his beloved old enemies, would stop their aggression in Vietnam. It was time both sides stopped playing at spies, stopped perpetuating old hatreds which no longer had any substance, and turned their attention to the real menace to world peace—China.

  However, there it was—the game was still being played and the department wanted his help. ‘Nikita,’ they had said, ‘it occurred to us that some of your little flock might be able to help us.’

  ‘My flock?’ He had been genuinely surprised. ‘But they are rabbits, weasels, ferrets.’

  ‘Ferrets,’ they had said, ‘are what we are after.’

  Grechenko tried to argue that the Twilight Brigade—as they were called by the Westerners—had no contact with their countrymen in Moscow and therefore could not assist in the infiltration of foreign embassies. But the department reminded him that a few of them maintained contact with their diplomats: the correspondents of Communist newspapers, those whom the diplomats assessed to be stupid rather than treacherous and, in particular, those from whom the diplomats hoped to obtain information.

  It was because of the existence of those whose defection had been instigated by stupidity that Nikita Grechenko now waited in the beer hall for Harry Waterman. His flock were creatures of habit: none was more reliable in his habits than Harry Waterman: some time this evening he would arrive for a few mugs of beer laced with vodka which he drank to help him remember England and forget Russia.

  Grechenko finished his beer and bought another because he looked conspicuous standing there too long with one drink. As it was, the customers seemed to avoid drinking too close to him. He wondered if it were true that policemen had a special smell. If it were so the people of the Soviet Union had not been short of practice in testing their olfactory senses. Not so long ago these men drinking their beer would have suspected each other of being secret policemen, suspected even their own sons of being informers. Grechenko was glad that he had not been a fully qualified officer in those days, that he had never been involved in the wholesale arrests and mock trials of the purges. He was also glad that he knew himself well enough to admit that he would have taken part, although he would have abhorred his duties because they betrayed the calling of the policeman. The police were there to protect the public: in the Soviet Union this had been forgotten. In the days of Stalin they had behaved worse than criminals and the stigma would not be erased in his lifetime.

  Thus Grechenko felt uneasy about his business with Harry Waterman. He felt nothing but contempt for him: he was a braggart and a nonentity. Nevertheless he had been the victim of a terrible injustice of which the police had been the instruments. When he thought of Harry Waterman Grechenko felt guilty for his profession.

  At 8 p.m. the man who had unwittingly achieved what many people would have told you was an impossibility—the insertion of guilt into a policeman’s soul—walked into the beer hall.

  Immediately he walked into the bar Harry Waterman saw Grechenko just as if he were standing alone in a field. Instinctively he knew that he had come for him. In England he would have turned and fled; given them a run for their money if nothing else. Here the thought never even occurred to him: you did not run from the Russian secret police: you did not run from anyone in the Soviet Union.

  Grechenko left his beer and joined Harry at the doorway. Yury Petrov and Nicolai Simenov watched them. ‘Let’s go,’ Grechenko said. He spoke in English, almost without accent.

  ‘Did you have to pinch me here in front of my friends?’ Harry asked.

  Fear moved inside him. He knew of no offence that he had committed; but an offence was not a necessary preliminary to arrest. He, Harry Waterman, knew this only too well. Perhaps it was his drunkenness—they were pretty hot on it these days; perhaps his mother-in-law and that prissy old sod Nosov had ganged up on him. But no, this man in his soft overcoat—British by the look of it—and his expensive shoes which failed to disguise his big, policeman’s feet, was not sent out to pick up drunks. This man was the KGB, the real McCoy, this man had class.

  All this went through Harry Waterman’s mind as they climbed the hollowed steps to the street. And as they turned into the snow sprinting down the street he thought: Now I shall never see England again. And, because nothing seemed to matter any more some of the spirit which he had learned to suppress in the presence of Soviet policemen returned. He wrenched his arm from Grechenko’s grasp. ‘Where are you taking me?’ he demanded. ‘What’s the charge?—as if that mattered.’

  Grechenko sighed. ‘There’s no charge,’ he said. ‘We’re just going for a little talk.’

  ‘I’ve had some of your little talks before. The last one cost me the best years of my life.’

  ‘Nothing like that, Harry. We do not behave like that these days. There is no charge. You have not committed any crime. We’re just going to a little café I know of where we can have a chat.’

  ‘I don’t have to go with you.’

  ‘You do, Harry. You know you do.’ He would have been much happier, he thought, if Harry were a criminal and he were taking him to headquarters to charge him.

  Grechenko drove them in his Moskvich to a little café behind Sovietskaya Square where he was known. He liked the area because it reminded him of Paris which he had once visited. It was very small but the café had an open-air terrace where even on the coldest of days you could sometimes find men braving the cold and fighting it with a carafe of brandy. When it was not too cold an old woman stood on the corner selling fruit and flowers. Here it seemed that the snow always fell softly and from the outside the shops looked snug, even if they were not so inside.

  Grechenko ordered some brandy.

  ‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘what can I do for you?’ Now that the possibility of arrest had receded he spoke more respectfully: you did not get stroppy with the KGB.

  ‘What do you want more than anything in the world, Harry?’ Grechenko asked.

  Harry was nonplussed. ‘I don’t know. To spend the rest of my days in peace I suppose. You know what I’
ve been through, I suppose.’

  ‘I know, Harry. And I’ll tell you what you want more than anything in the world. You want to go home.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Harry asked guardedly. Perhaps he was being tricked into making anti-Soviet statements.

  Grechenko sipped his brandy and felt it burn away the sour aftermath of the beer. ‘You have made no secret of the fact,’ he said.

  ‘Has someone been talking then? You can’t trust anyone, can you?’

  ‘You have been talking, Harry,’ Grechenko said. ‘You very rarely stop.’

  ‘Well, maybe I would like to see the old country again. It’s only natural, isn’t it? But it’s not because I don’t like the Soviet Union. It’s just that it’s the place where I was born and I’d like to see it again before I kick the bucket.’

  Grechenko poured Harry some more brandy. ‘Harry Waterman,’ he said, ‘let us not play games with each other. I know everything there is to know about you. I know the circumstances of your relatives in Britain, I know your friends in Moscow. I know everything about your wife and your wife’s family. I know that you are a drunkard and that it has been the sad duty of your father-in-law to treat you at his premises and that he discharged you before the recognised formalities had been completed. There is nothing I do not know about you. This gives me no satisfaction because you are a man of little importance. You are also a liar. I am aware that you detest the Soviet Union and that on frequent occasions you have expressed yourself forcibly on this theme. I am also aware that the only ambition in your miserable life is to return to your own country.’

  The fear returned and Harry swallowed his brandy with difficutly. ‘You forget what I’ve been through,’ he said. ‘The lost years of my life. It kills something inside you.’