by Simon Mawer
‘To discuss what?’
‘Something.’
‘Am I in trouble?’
‘We don’t talk on telephone.’
So they arranged to have coffee in the rather dreary café in Holborn that they had made their meeting place ever since the failure of their lunch encounter in Piccadilly. The bell on the door made a peremptory ping as she went in, and the Russian looked up from his corner table with an uneasy smile. He half rose from his seat to greet her. ‘Sit,’ he said, pointing to the empty chair in front of him. ‘Sit.’
The waitress brought her coffee.
‘So what is this all about?’ Marian asked. ‘Is it about Major Absolon? Is that it?’
‘Your intervention with ambassador was not considered appropriate.’
‘All I asked for was some information about one of your colleagues. Why is that a problem?’
Gorshkov had the manner of someone struggling with a foreign language, unsure whether he was being understood, unsure whether he had got the words right or was committing the kind of solecism that brought either laughter or dumb incomprehension. ‘It was not appropriate to ask Comrade Ambassador in that fashion.’
‘So do I have to say I’m sorry?’
‘That is not necessary. Comrade Ambassador is very understanding.’ He glanced round, as if someone might be listening but there was no one near enough to be interested in what he was saying. ‘But he wonders why should you be so concerned about Comrade Absolon.’ There was anger in the man’s eyes. And something else – a thin, insidious worm of jealousy.
‘Because his departure seemed so sudden. He was doing a story about the Peace Union for us. And then he wasn’t here any more. I thought perhaps he’d done something wrong. I don’t even know where he has gone.’ She paused, and gave him a smile. ‘Could you find out for me, perhaps? Where he is, what he is doing? Would that be possible?’
He sniffed. ‘I have to tell you something.’
‘What?’
The door pinged again. People came in and out. ‘I have spoken with David Trofimovich.’ Gorshkov tried to look modestly triumphant. It was not a success.
‘You’ve spoken with him?’
‘Why not? We have the telephones in the Soviet Union, don’t we? It is not only the capitalist world that has these things. Soviet science—’
‘Of course you do … My brother is a great admirer of Soviet science.’ A trick of dissimulation. The apparent indifference, the carelessness. ‘So tell me, how is Absolon?’
‘He is well. What do you say? In good spirits. He sends his regards.’
‘And where is he?’
He raised his coffee cup to his mouth, as if it might hide him from lip-readers. ‘In Moscow.’
‘In Moscow. Where in Moscow?’
‘He has been posted to his headquarters. Of course I cannot say where that is. These matters are state secrets.’
She sipped coffee. He was not telling the truth, she could see that. The pat answers, as though rehearsed. The expression that was unconvincing and unconvinced. ‘Is that all you have to tell me?’
He looked relieved, as though she was conforming to the conversation he had been told to expect. ‘There is someone from Comrade Absolon’s department who wishes to speak with you.’
‘Where?’
‘At the embassy.’
‘I presumed I was no longer welcome.’
‘You will be invited to the embassy. There you will meet this man.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘His name? I cannot tell you his name. Just that you will meet. I am not authorised to say any more.’ He got up from his chair and counted out the exact change for two coffees.
She reached out and took hold of his wrist. ‘Wait.’
He froze.
‘Tell them that I want to hear directly from Absolon. A letter, a proper letter, so that I know he is all right.’
He looked down at her hand in horror, as though by grabbing him she had transgressed all boundaries of decency. ‘Please—’
‘And a return address where I can write to him. Tell them that. I won’t do anything without that. You tell them that.’
‘I am not authorised to say any more,’ he repeated. ‘Now please, I must go.’
She knew the date, clearly enough. A reception in honour of the British-Soviet Friendship Society to which Mr Roper had already been invited as representative of the Peace Union. Now, unexpectedly, a second invitation arrived, for Mrs Marian Walcott, MBE.
Roper evinced surprise. He called her into his office like a head teacher upbraiding a promising but insolent pupil. ‘After your last performance I imagined you were persona non grata,’ he said.
She delivered a thin smile. ‘I expect they value my independence of mind.’
‘Are you being sarcastic?’
‘I’m being ironical.’
‘Well, I hope we don’t have any repetition of last time. That might finish us with our Soviet friends.’ Then he relented a moment and his tone became almost sympathetic. ‘You haven’t heard anything about this man?’
Absolon, she thought. Not this man. David Absolon. Where might he be? What might be happening to him? She knew, that was the thing. Deep in her own memory, from her own experience, she knew every horror that might befall him. ‘Nothing,’ she told Roper. ‘Nothing whatever.’
The postcard came a few days later. It arrived by way of her father. She was in the habit of phoning home once a week and he mentioned it almost in passing. Apparently it had been there among all his other post in college, in an envelope addressed to Professor Frank Sutro, which seemed strange. ‘I’m not a professor,’ he pointed out to her indignantly, as though it were a great solecism. ‘I’m just a boring old doctor.’
‘What did it say, Papa? Who was it from?’ But he’d torn the envelope up and thrown it away, keeping only the card which he handed to her when she next went down to Oxford. The picture showed an innocuous view of a lake with a sailing boat in the foreground and wooded hills behind. Grüße vom Bodensee, Greetings from Lake Constance was inscribed across the bottom of the image. The message on the back was cursory. Happy days, it said in handwriting she didn’t recognise. It was signed ‘A’. There was her own name in the addressee section and a poste restante address in the name of Anton Albrecht at the post office in the German city of Konstanz. ‘I don’t know anyone by that name,’ she said. But she wondered, of course she wondered. And when she was back in London she wrote a letter to Herr Albrecht asking if, perhaps, there had been some mistake.
Embassy
The Soviet embassy occupied a number of neo-classical villas in Kensington Palace Gardens. Carved out of white stucco and couched amid trees and bushes, they looked like the homes of Tsarist plutocrats. Inside, past the uniformly unsmiling guards, there were chandeliers and velvet drapes and rococo furniture and the faint sense that the servants had taken over the mansion and hadn’t quite got things right. Service was offered with a scowl. Drink and food were too much or too little. Conversation between embassy officials and the guests was stilted and awkward, the stuff of amateur dramatics. The guests included a posse of Labour MPs and carefully selected representatives of the arts and sciences, people who might, in theory at least, be sympathetic to the Soviet cause. They applauded politely when the ambassador delivered a glum panegyric to the British-Soviet Friendship Society. It was then that Gorshkov emerged from the throng to take Marian’s arm and lead her away from Mr Roper and his gaggle of fellow writers.
‘Now you come with me,’ he said. He drew a curtain aside, opened a concealed door and quite suddenly they were in a corridor, with the noise of the reception shut away behind them as though the lid of a box had been closed. There was a moment of uncertainty, anxiety even. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘You ask about Major Absolon.’
‘You have some news?’
‘I told you, someone who must speak with you.’
For a ridiculous moment she ima
gined that it might be Absolon himself, brought back from Moscow to reassure her. With Gorshkov still holding her elbow, they went down a corridor where windows overlooked the shadowy gardens at the back of the villa. There was a turn, a short flight of stairs, a second corridor. Memories of 84 Avenue Foch began to intrude, the movement from room to room, from floor to floor, the fear and the relief, her interrogator reassuring her in dulcet tones while the threat of the baignoire lay there before her. At last they stopped before an anonymous door. Gorshkov knocked, opened the door and ushered her into a large office.
A man looked up from his desk. He was silver-haired and blue-eyed, the kind of blue you see in the heart of a glacier. His skin seemed polished by winter days on the Russian steppe. Although he was wearing a grey suit, somehow it was easy to imagine him buttoned into a military uniform, his chest emblazoned with medals. On the wall above his head was a photograph, framed in black crêpe, of the late Joseph Stalin. To one side, in an alcove, was a bust of Lenin.
The man indicated the solitary chair in front of his desk. ‘Mrs Walcott, please sit down.’
Marian composed herself as best she could, back straight, knees together, hands folded in her lap. Gorshkov had slipped quietly out of the room, closing the door behind him. She felt a small tremor of disquiet at his departure. ‘What am I doing here?’ she demanded. ‘What is this all about?’
The man behind the desk looked at her through rimless glasses, as though she were a specimen brought to him from a distant and only half understood continent. He attempted a smile. ‘May I start by thanking you for work you have done in name of world peace? Of course I do not talk about’ – he gestured dismissively in the vague direction of the reception that was going on elsewhere in the building – ‘all this. I talk of what you and your brother have done.’
‘Are you in a position to talk on behalf of world peace? I don’t even know who you are.’
‘My name is of no matter. Call me Kuznetsov. Colonel Kuznetsov. Do you know meaning of kuznets? It means “smith” in your language. There are many, many Kuznets in Russia. As many as Smiths in England. So, although sadly I do not speak for the world, I can speak for much of Soviet Union. We are pleased with what you have done. We thank you. Perhaps you deserve medal.’
‘I’m not interested in medals.’
He glanced down at a paper on his desk. ‘Apparently not. I see your people only made you MBE. Member of Order of the British Empire. That is not worth very much, is it? I think we would give you a medal that is worth more, perhaps Order of Lenin. What do you think of that?’
‘I don’t think anything of it. I did what I did – what we did – because we believe that the secrets of nuclear weapons should not be the possession of one country. It’s as simple as that.’
Kuznetsov nodded, tapping a pencil thoughtfully on his desk. ‘But it seems that you allowed personal matters to get in the way.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I am talking about Comrade Absolon.’
She shrugged. ‘I want to know what has happened to him, that is all. I was working with him and suddenly he disappears. What am I to make of that?’
‘That he was moved away.’
‘Why? Where to? He seemed frightened the last time we met. I want assurance from him that he has come to no harm.’
‘Why should he have come to harm? He is official of Soviet Union and so he is under orders. I cannot tell you where because that information is confidential, but I can assure you he has not come to harm.’
‘I want to know that from him.’
Kuznetsov looked at her with those bleak blue eyes. ‘Tell me about Comrade Absolon,’ he said. ‘Tell me about your relationship with him.’
A chill seemed to have descended, conjuring up the cold fog of espionage. She tried to peer into the murk, remembering Fawley’s words: GRU and MGB – the Main Intelligence Directorate and the Ministry of State Security. Like the Abwehr and SD. One watches the other and they both watch us. Was this man from the rival organisation? Was she treading even now into the mire of an internecine war? ‘Absolon was my contact. What more do you want to know?’
‘How often did you and he meet?’
‘Eight or nine times. I can’t be sure. Once a month, roughly. He must have logged the meetings.’ Kuznetsov was still watching her intently. She remembered the instructor in unarmed combat, the one who had taught them how to use the fighting knife. His eyes had been like that: a clear blue, like a doll’s. ‘What has happened to him?’ she demanded. ‘He was recalled suddenly. Something has happened to him, hasn’t it?’
Kuznetsov ignored her. His face seemed curiously devoid of real expression, as though it had been carefully modelled to give a representation of a human face but without any kind of emotion, like an illustration for a medical textbook. ‘When did you first meet him?’
‘In 1946, at the Ravensbrück trial in Hamburg. Look, what has happened—’
‘Please answer my questions, Mrs Walcott. Tell me about that first meeting.’
So she told him, trying all the time to think how the smallest thing, the least hint, might inculpate him or her. She told him about the trial and about her role as witness, and her encounter with Absolon in the bar of the hotel afterwards. ‘I saw him later on at dinner, and that was all.’
‘And this man Bright. He was intelligence agent?’
‘He was in the Intelligence Corps, as far as I remember. That makes him a soldier, not an agent.’
‘And you did not see Comrade Absolon again?’
‘I think he was there the next day when I left the hotel but I didn’t speak to him. Or maybe I said goodbye. I can’t really remember. Then I ran into him in Paris a few years later—’
A frown. ‘You ran into him?’
She gave what she hoped was a sympathetic smile. ‘A figure of speech. I met him by pure chance in Paris, at the cultural department.’
‘It was not planned, you mean?’
‘No, it was not planned.’
‘And what happened on this occasion, after this collision?’
A voice came out of the past to help her, the voice of an instructor at Beaulieu. ‘Stick as close to the truth as you can,’ it whispered. ‘Lies are your most precious resource: use them sparingly.’
‘We talked a bit and agreed to meet up the next day.’
‘When?’
‘In the evening. We had dinner together.’
‘And then?’
‘And then …’ She frowned, as though trying to remember. ‘We went to some kind of jazz club. The kind of thing Paris is famous for. The Left Bank, you know the kind of thing.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘Oh, goodness. Afterwards, I suppose I went back to my hotel. Look—’ she glanced round, as if looking for escape of some kind, ‘I really ought to be getting back to the reception. People will miss me …’
‘I think it is quite all right. Your associate, Mr Roper, has been told that we are taking care of you.’
‘And if I insist on going back?’
‘Then you will not be able to help us … or Comrade Absolon.’
‘So is he under some kind of investigation?’
Kuznetsov ignored her question. Another trick of interrogators: to be able to ignore what they please and pursue what they want. ‘Can you tell me the purpose of this meeting that you had in Paris?’
‘Purpose? There was no purpose. I told you, it was a chance thing. We were acquaintances. We got on together. Of course, he knew something about my war career from the trial in Hamburg. Perhaps that interested him.’
‘And that is all? He was interested in your career in war?’
‘Well, I must admit that afterwards, I did wonder …’
‘What did you wonder, Mrs Walcott?’
‘I wondered whether he might have been trying to recruit me.’
‘And was he?’
‘In Paris? Apparently not. We talked politics only in the most general terms.
He knew my views, I knew his. Which were, I can assure you, very orthodox.’
‘And then you met again in London.’
‘Yes, we did.’
‘Tell me about that.’
Kriegspiel, the war game, the blind chess that Clément and Ned used to play with her as adjudicator. But she was not adjudicator now; she was a player. She moved forward into the darkness, not knowing where Kuznetsov’s pieces lay, not knowing which squares were empty and which occupied. She told him of the chance encounter at the art exhibition and then the subsequent meeting in his house. ‘That was when I told him about my brother.’
‘What about your brother?’
She hesitated. ‘That he wished to meet up with someone from the Soviet scientific community for an exchange of information. That he was unhappy with the way that nuclear research was going in the West and he felt these matters were too dangerous to be the property of one nation or group of nations only. We’d been talking it over for some time, my brother and I. We believe that with the hydrogen bomb the world is facing its greatest threat ever, far worse than anything that happened in the last war. It’s obvious, really, isn’t it? Hiroshima and Nagasaki multiplied a hundred times, right across the Soviet Union. We wanted to do something to stop that happening.’
Kuznetsov appeared unmoved. ‘What next?’
‘He – Absolon, I mean – arranged a meeting in Geneva between my brother and a Soviet scientist. I think the name was Chernikov. Is that right? Academician Chernikov?’
Kuznetsov said nothing.
‘And then there were meetings in various places. In a pub somewhere, then in Kew Gardens. Gardens and parks are good places to meet, but I expect you know that. The usual business of running an agent. It must be on your files. There must be records somewhere in your registry.’
‘Describe to me what happened at these meetings.’
‘I’m sure Absolon kept a log—’
‘Please do as I ask, Mrs Walcott.’
‘I was just a courier between my brother and Absolon.’
‘What exactly did you give him?’
‘Film cassettes. Small ones, from a Minox camera. I had no idea what the film contained. And he gave me a new one in return. Sometimes there was nothing, of course. Look, Absolon can tell you all this. Have you asked him?’