Angels in the Snow

by Derek Lambert

  Grechenko ordered more fruit water. ‘A glorious day,’ he said. ‘They say you British talk about the weather all the time but I think we Russians talk about it more.’

  ‘I think it’s too bloody hot,’ Harry said. ‘It’s either too hot or it’s bloody freezing.’

  ‘Never mind, Harry. Perhaps you will soon be back in London where you can enjoy your fogs and your rain.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Harry said. ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘It depends on what you have been finding out for me.’

  ‘I haven’t got a great deal. Just a lead which I thought you could follow up.’

  ‘Really? Tell me about it in a little while. Let us enjoy the sunshine.’

  Harry sat back deflated. ‘I thought you’d want to get cracking on it immediately.’

  ‘There’s plenty of time, Harry. There’s all the time in the world.’ He blinked benignly.

  ‘I hear Yury Petrov’s dead,’ Harry said cautiously.

  ‘Yes, poor fellow.’

  ‘He made contact with me, you know.’

  ‘Of course I know, Harry. We shall have to find someone else for you, shan’t we. Poor Yury. Such a nice man. Such a pity none of his poems was ever published.’

  Harry gulped his fruit water. ‘How about something a little stronger?’ he said. ‘I don’t go much on this stuff. It’s a kid’s drink.’

  ‘You have something stronger, Harry. Your need is greater than mine.’

  Harry ordered a small carafe of vodka and some more fruit water for Grechenko. ‘I suppose it was an accident,’ he said.

  ‘What was an accident, Harry?’

  ‘Yury Petrov’s death. I reckon he was just leaning over a bridge thinking about his poetry and then he fell in.’ He looked hopefully at Grechenko.

  Grechenko examined his fingernails which he liked to keep scrupulously clean. He saw no point in assuaging Harry’s fear: he wanted to keep him in a malleable condition. ‘Who knows,’ he said, ‘Yury Petrov was playing a very dangerous game.’

  ‘You think he might have committed suicide then?’

  Grechenko said: ‘I hope I visit Paris again one day. This place always reminds me of it. I suppose I should be sipping an aperitif.’

  ‘I suppose he might have got very depressed what with his poetry not being published—and his other duties. I expect they got him down a bit.’

  ‘I don’t think Yury Petrov was the sort of man to commit suicide.’

  ‘Then you don’t think it was an accident or suicide?’ Harry tossed back a shot of vodka.

  ‘I have no idea, Harry.’ Grechenko managed to convey the impression that he had every idea. ‘Now what is it that you have to tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know if it will be of any use to you.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that.’

  ‘Well, I met a British diplomat out at Boris Leonov’s place the other day. You know Boris, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Grechenko said. ‘I know Boris Leonov.’

  ‘Well I decided to make contact with this diplomat fellow. Richard Mortimer was his name. He was pretty green. Snotty, too. Anyway I switched on the charm a bit and got him to invite me round to his place.’

  Grechenko said: ‘What charm?’

  ‘So the other day I went round to his drum.’ Harry paused. ‘And do you know what—he’s having an affair with a Russian girl.’

  Grechenko leaned forward. ‘How do you know, Harry?’

  ‘I as good as caught them at it. I rang the bell but no one heard me. And you know what those old doors are like in the Kutuzovsky blocks. Well, it hadn’t been shut properly and I pushed it open and peered round the corner and there they were.’

  Distaste and professional interest vied with each other in Grechenko’s mind. ‘There they were doing what?’

  ‘Having a kiss and a cuddle. But they didn’t see me. I went back on to the landing and rang the bell again until Mortimer answered it. He looked pretty flustered, too.’

  ‘Who was the Russian girl?’

  ‘I don’t know her name. But he said she was his Russian teacher.’

  ‘Then it will be easy enough to identify her. Are you telling the truth, Harry?’

  ‘Of course I’m telling the truth. I’ll swear it on the Bible if you like.’

  ‘There aren’t too many Bibles available in Russia,’ Grechenko said. ‘But I hope for your sake, Harry, that you do not lie to me. It would be most unfortunate for you if you were.’

  ‘I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.’

  Grechenko said reluctantly: ‘If it’s true then you’ve done well and you will be rewarded.’

  ‘You mean I can go back to England?’

  ‘Perhaps. But not yet. Our project is only just starting. And, of course, we do have to make sure that you are telling the truth.’

  Harry drained his last drop of vodka. ‘But you will keep your promise?’

  ‘Of course, Harry. A policeman always keeps his promise. And now it seems to me that I must go back to the office and find out about this girl who has been foolish enough to become involved with a British diplomat. Good-bye, Harry. I hope for your sake that you have told me the truth. If you have then maybe you will see England again. If you haven’t …’ He shrugged. ‘But then you already know what the inside of a labour camp looks like.’

  Nikita Grechenko bought a couple of meat pies and some fruit at a street booth and hurried back through the lunch-time crowds to Lubyanka. He was not exhilarated by Harry Waterman’s information because he had no enthusiasm for the intrigue which had been thrust upon him. But if he worked on it intensively for a few hours he would be able to leave early for his evening swim at Serebryanny Bor with a clear conscience.

  First he phoned UPDK. At first the woman’s voice was bored, almost hostile. But when he revealed his identity she became embarrassingly eager to please. Her subservience annoyed him and he spoke tersely. Could she tell him the name of the girl teaching Russian to a young British diplomat called Richard Mortimer and could a messenger come immediately to Lubyanka with the girl’s dossier. The woman asked him apologetically if he would mind waiting a few moments. She returned with the name—Nina Bashkirova. ‘Already,’ she said, ‘a messenger is on his way to you with her dossier.’

  Grechenko ate his pies and his fruit and waited impatiently for the messenger. He arrived within five minutes. Grechenko read the dossier slowly and carefully, filing salient points in his mind.

  Aged 21. University graduate. Fluent English speaker. Parents Ukrainian. Father decorated for heroism during the siege of Leningrad. First employed as an interpreter for an American journalist and accused of associating with him out of working hours after being observed in his company in the National bar. Indiscreet behaviour attributed to youthful naïvety and allowed to continue as an interpreter and teacher after a reprimand. Behaviour since then beyond reproach. Devoted to her brother, Mikhail.

  It was the comment about her brother that alerted Grech-enko’s professional instincts. Ardent member of the Komsomol but known to have undesirable literary connections. Grechenko nodded wisely to himself and went to another part of Lubyanka to consult police records. And there he was—Mikhail Bashkirov.

  No convictions, no charges but under police surveillance. Suspected of writing and trying—unsuccessfully—to publish literature contrary to the best interests of the State. Observed at demonstrations against the imprisonment of Daniel and Sinyav-sky and invariably present at the opening of unauthorised exhibitions of decadent art before their closure by the militia.

  Grechenko was satisfied. He returned to his office and dictated a memorandum to the department which had asked him to help them penetrate the walls of the foreign fortresses within Moscow. The memorandum was crisp and to the point. He suggested that pressure should be brought on a British diplomat, Richard Mortimer, through the girl who taught him Russian; and that pressure should be brought on the teacher by threatening to arrest her brother if
she didn’t co-operate. He did not suggest to what end the pressure might be brought—that was their business and he had no doubt that they would find one. He also advised them first to substantiate the truth of Harry Waterman’s allegations. That, too, was their business; but if the allegations did prove to be untrue then the future of Harry Waterman would be very much the business of Nikita Grechenko.

  He sealed the envelope with wax and dispatched it by hand. By 4.30 p.m. he was at the wheel of his Moskvich on the way to his home and the beach.

  Grechenko picked up his wife and their two boys from their apartment and drove them to the beach by the river. The sunshine was still warm, flitting around on the broad waters among the dinghies and speed boats.

  They all undressed quickly and ran into the placid water shedding the hot day’s problems. Grechenko played with the boys in the shallows, then swam strongly out to the deep, colder water close to the paths of the steamers and the hydrofoils hooting warnings to the bathers. Then he swam back and lay on a wooden sun-bathing rack feeling the water trickle off his tanned skin.

  He watched the big white steamers and remembered taking a girl away for the weekend on one. Then, as now, they had been popular for courtship. He had married the girl and he watched her now standing at the water’s edge calling to their children. Momentary sadness at departed youth was replaced by deep affection. They were very lucky, he thought.

  And so were the people around him. The women, still wearing nose shields although the glare of the day had faded; the young men standing, hands behind their heads, catching the weak rays on the sides of their bodies. Russians, he thought, were the most dedicated sun worshippers in the world. Behind him boys and girls played table-tennis at a line of tables and muscular young men played hand-ball.

  He was glad that none of them knew that a member of the secret police was in their midst. He felt proud of his countrymen relaxing around him; proud of his country for that matter. And very proud of his wife, plump now like most Russian women but with the prettiness still in her face, and his two boys, water glistening on their agile bodies, walking up the beach towards him.

  In a little while they would drive back to their smart apartment and watch a football match on the television while his wife cooked a meal. The children would go to bed after the match and he would sit with his wife reading, watching television or cleaning his guns. Later they might make love in their warm, mature, understanding way.

  Yes, he was a very lucky man. And of Harry Waterman, Richard Mortimer, Nina Bashkirova and her brother Mikhail, he thought not at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Nina Bashkirova was very businesslike during Richard Mortimer’s next Russian lesson, testing his vocabulary, correcting his pronunciation. They sat on opposite sides of the table and applied themselves to his studies with only a formal five-minute break for coffee. They were teacher and pupil and they were strangers.

  As he read and recited a sense of hopelessness enveloped him. He wanted to utter gentle words and beg forgiveness, but her impersonal efficiency stifled him.

  As she prepared to leave he said: ‘I’m sorry about last time.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. And that was all. She left and he watched her from the window walking around the playground, stopping to talk to an American journalist, disappearing round the corner on her way to an apartment which he had never seen in some concrete suburb. On her way to meet Mikhail or, perhaps, some other man.

  The hoplessness stayed with him broken only by bursts of jealousy about unknown people from her past. He had never believed it possible that he was capable of such dark feelings and the knowledge sickened him. Sometimes he dispelled the moods by concentrating on the present, on the Nina he knew; but the ugliness returned when he least expected it—when he was alone reading a book or just before sleep—and pulled him down into green depths of hatred and suspicion.

  He imagined her drinking with men and teasing them. He saw her in the act of commercial love and asking for payment in dollars. He heard the men boasting when they returned to their home towns that they had slept with a Russian girl. He knew that his thoughts were without justification and that, in any case, he had no right to adjudicate over her past, present or future. But the knowledge did not dispel the visions.

  Once or twice the despair lifted. He heard himself proposing marriage and being accepted. The Foreign Office and the Soviet authorities smiled upon them and he took her back to the little town in Sussex with its friendly shops and beckoning pubs set in pin-cushion hills. The Russians had recently allowed an In-tourist girl to marry a British businessman. Why not a diplomat?

  But the elation was short-lived. There were so many reasons why not. Despair returned and the recriminations and accusations, of imagined wrongs returned.

  During this period he heard the wild, lost cries of the unknown sufferer somewhere below more often. Neither the tenants upstairs nor downstairs heard them. He went on to the landing beside the weary lift, but when he closed the apartment door the cries faded; when he went back inside he heard them again distraught and tormented. He played music on his record-player to drown them, but he found that he was listening to the cries instead of the music.

  He also began to look for microphones in the apartment. He tapped the walls and watched workmen suspiciously when they came to fix the gas or electricity, particularly when they arrived without being summoned. He took devious routes through the city to lose black Volgas which he imagined were following him, and when walking he suddenly retraced his footsteps, glaring at pedestrians he suspected of trailing him.

  At night he watched the restless shadows on the ceiling and when he could not sleep, which was often, he sat by the window watching the glow of the militiaman’s cigarette far below, brightening and fading as he drew on it. He watched correspondents returning from their parties and from the two dollar bars, parking their cars with alcoholic verve and skill. He searched the sky for stars but saw none. He saw into bedrooms high in the blocks and averted his gaze. He saw neighbours from a dozen countries take the warm night air on their narrow rusty balconies. He heard motor-cycles pottering along distant roads; he heard children crying in their sleep, women’s laughter which seemed to carry farther than men’s and pigeons on his balcony muttering in downy dreams inside their wings.

  Sometimes thunder clouds gathered above and lightning seemed to strike the roofs of the adjoining blocks. Rain hammered the windows and the apartment filled with fresh wet smells. He liked the thunderstorms because he told himself that nothing sinister or furtive could be taking place during such massive electric anger.

  In the dripping peace afterwards he went to the lounge and poured himself a drink. Soon he found that he was drinking more than he should, tossing back shots of neat whisky to lull the suspicions, soothe the jealous angers and lift the despair. Drinking was a weakness to which he had never imagined he would succumb; but he had never imagined himself tormented by jealousy.

  After two whiskies he jeered at the men from her past because he was sure that she loved him. He waved to the unseeing militiaman and thumbed his nose at the invisible microphones. One night he drank three whiskies, dressed and drove round to the National bar. No one had ever said it was out of bounds and in any case he wasn’t a schoolboy.

  The bar, he thought, was as dreary as a railway buffet despite its gold-papered walls. Three men, engaged on business projects with the Russians judging by the gloom on their faces, sat hunched over their drinks. At the other end of the bar a man who looked as if he might be Russian—East European anyway—sat with a glass of beer which was flat and lifeless after being spurned all evening.

  Mortimer ordered a whisky. A girl with high-combed blonde hair collapsing around the ears served it and stood back staring at him. The cafeteria tables were unoccupied, the floor had not been swept for a long time. The dreariness of the place pleased Mortimer; it was not at all as he had imagined it; he felt suddenly ashamed of his suspicions. If he h
ad known then where Nina lived he would have hastened to her and sought forgiveness.

  The man sitting beside him uncurled from his drink. ‘It’s a bloody dump here, isn’t it,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not very lively,’ Mortimer said.

  ‘Like a drink?’

  ‘That’s very good of you. I’ll have a small whisky.’

  ‘Two large whiskies, miss.’ He brought out a crumpled pound note. ‘That’s all there is to do in Moscow—drink.’

  ‘Are you staying here?’

  ‘No, I’m over at the Metropole. That’s even worse. Are you staying here?’

  ‘No, I live in Moscow as a matter of fact.’

  ‘You poor sod,’ said the man. He was middle-aged and he suffered from dandruff. He wore a plain blue tie embroidered with a motif which looked like a bottle and a box.

  ‘What are you doing over here?’ Mortimer asked politely.

  ‘Packaging,’ said the man gloomily. ‘Trying to sell the silly buggers packaging. We’ve got a stand in the exhibition at Sokol-niki Park.’

  ‘Are you selling very much?’

  ‘Not a bloody thing. Lots of interest and vague promises but when it comes to it they haven’t parted with a bloody rouble. What do you do here if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Not at all. I’m with the British Embassy. Mortimer’s my name. Richard Mortimer.’

  The man groaned. ‘A bloody diplomat.’ The revelation seemed to weigh him down and he drooped closer to the bar. ‘My name’s Ramsden,’ he said. ‘John Ramsden. I happen to be British so I suppose, being a British diplomat, you’ll have lost interest by now.’

  Mortimer forgot his own disillusionment with his colleagues. ‘That’s a pretty provocative sort of thing to say,’ he said. ‘The British Embassy is very concerned with promoting British business interests in Russia.’

  ‘And my name’s Harold Wilson,’ said Ramsden. ‘Here, drink up and have another one. I’m on expenses.’

  ‘You have one with me,’ Mortimer said. He put a book of coupons on the bar. ‘Two large Scotches, please.’