Her father’s advice lingered joyfully with Natasha in her bedroom. Honesty was a quality that you learned about, presenting itself in many forms, having many qualifications. Vaguely she thought she might have lost something by this reappraisal of Charlie Hardin. But the doubt was thrust aside by the release: honesty was a very malleable product when put to the test. But, she assured herself, Charlie had done his best to be honest—with her and his oath of allegiance. An impossible situation for absolute honesty. Eagerly she reaffirmed her naïveté in expecting the impossible: thus, without realizing it, she stepped from youth into adulthood where many qualities are malleable.
The answer, she knew, was for her father to accompany her across the street from East to West. Had he not implied that he was willing? Oddly, she didn’t consider her mother’s reactions, presuming, without too much application, that wife would follow husband because that was the bond of marriage. Anyway, now that her father had spoken, she presumed that together they would make their plans accordingly; she presumed this because that was the way this new, unleashed impetus directed her. So she hugged her joy to herself, refusing to consider anything but the traditional course of true love, and wrote Charlie Hardin a note suggesting that they meet tomorrow afternoon in the bar of the Hawk ’n’ Dove.
She also left a note for her father in view of the difficulty of exchanging spoken words on the subject.
In the bedroom next door, while her husband was still at work, Valentina Zhukova wrote the last words of her report and wept.
20
MIKHAIL BRODSKY met Vladimir Zhukov next day in a book shop called Brentano’s adjoining the National Press Building. ‘The open air is the safest place for this sort of talk,’ he explained.
‘You mean you’re afraid of being bugged?’
‘Uh-huh. Anything is possible, Comrade Zhukov. It pays to be cautious.’
They crossed the road and rounded the White House, a building which adapted itself well to the seasons, a chameleon of atmosphere. Now it was Irish gentry, peering from behind sad trees at the mauve and russet Wicklow Mountains, soon it would be holly-berried, spiced, and rounded with snow, a jingle of harness bells perched on the frosty air.
Brodsky produced a new inhaler, black and gentle, and eased it into his nostrils affectionately.
‘Are you sure that isn’t bugged?’ Zhukov asked.
Brodsky withdrew the black bullet and regarded it suspiciously.
The day was cool and vague, the sunshine filtered. Chrysanthemums grew raggedly in the gardens and the roses opened up fatalistically for the first frost. Soon the woods around Washington would glow with stained-glass reds and yellows.
They crossed Lafayette Square and turned down 16th. Already some of the shops were showing ski equipment and clothes envisaging a long hard winter.
The secretaries on the street still wore minis fringing tanned thighs and the men wore autumn suits.
‘The climate at this time of year isn’t so very different from Moscow,’ Brodsky observed. ‘Soon there will be fogs and Sheremetyevo Airport will open and close like the doors of an elevator.’
And the first tissue of ice will form on the lake in Gorky Park, Zhukov thought, to melt and freeze until the first skates sing in the falling snow.
Zhukov said, ‘What have you got to say to me, Comrade Brodsky?’ He felt now as if he were in Moscow, closing his senses to the bargaining shops and the queuing cars.
‘It’s not good news, I’m afraid, Comrade Zhukov.’
‘I didn’t imagine it would be.’
‘It seems to me that you have acted very foolishly.’
‘I think perhaps you’re right, Comrade.’
Brodsky catalogued Zhukov’s foolishness with pleasure. ‘First of all you seem to have been greatly influenced by the bourgeois press and your conversation has, to say the least, been unguarded. This worried us a bit but we attributed it to the baptism with the West which we have come to regard with tolerance. But you have been here a long time now, Comrade Zhukov, and you still draw unfavourable comparisons with the Soviet Union. We are not happy about that.’
‘We? Who’s we?’
‘You needn’t trouble yourself with that,’ Brodsky said. He seemed to have been invested with new authority. ‘Your attitude over the plea from Czechoslovakia for military assistance from the Soviet Union and her allies was unforgivable.’
‘You will never understand this,’ Zhukov said, ‘but I’m a better Socialist than you, Mikhail Brodsky.’
Brodsky thought about this, looking like a delicate schoolboy who would never be any good at games. ‘It seems to me, Comrade Zhukov, that you are an enemy of Socialism.’ He continued cataloguing. ‘Then there was your hooligan behaviour in New York—an assignment which never had my approval.’
‘Should it have had your approval?’
The wariness that Brodsky wore next to his skin showed itself. ‘It was the ambassador’s decision, of course. But there is no reason why I shouldn’t entertain my own private approval or disapproval.’
‘No reason at all,’ Zhukov agreed.
They watched a cop apprehend a Negro jay-walking against a Don’t-Walk. Brodsky said, ‘Do you know they even put race on the warning ticket? The racial intolerance in this country is disgusting—an insult to Mankind.’
‘I’m glad,’ Zhukov said, as they approached the gallows of Brodsky’s speech, ‘that I’m not a Jew living in the Soviet Union.’
‘This sort of talk won’t help you, Comrade Zhukov.’
‘I am beyond help.’
Brodsky went on, ‘According to Comrade Muratov of the Soviet United Mission in New York your reaction to the Soviet case put before the United Nations with such articulate competence was one of profound cynicism. Comrade Muratov was shocked that a first secretary and apparent confidant of the ambassador himself should have expressed such doubt.’
They passed the Statler Hilton, nearing the Russian Embassy.
Brodsky said, ‘And, of course, there was the inexcusable behaviour in the New York bars. First newspaper interviews, then an attempt to pick up two prostitutes, then a vulgar brawl. Hardly the behaviour one expects from a diplomatic representative of the Soviet Union …’
‘They weren’t prostitutes.’
‘Amateurs then. It doesn’t matter. Then there is the question of your beautiful daughter.’
Zhukov stopped walking. ‘What about my daughter?’
‘She has not been discreet.’
Please, Zhukov implored all deities, make indiscretion her greatest crime. ‘In what way, Comrade Brodsky?’
‘First of all she deliberately eluded members of the staff who were sent to protect her. This is a dangerous city—didn’t you warn your daughter of its perils?’
‘Young girls with spirit don’t like to be followed.’
‘Uh-huh. But I’m afraid that isn’t all. It has come to our notice that she has been having a liaison with an American—although it would seem to be over now.’
‘What sort of a liaison?’
‘The usual sort. As is well known after the Alma-Ata episode your daughter is not a girl of the highest moral calibre.’
Zhukov grabbed the lapels of Brodsky’s East German suit just above the first button. ‘I should take that back if I were you, comrade.’
Pedestrians sampling the autumnal tranquillity in the air glanced curiously at the scene.
Brodsky’s eyes rolled a little and his soft hair uncurled over his ears. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put it quite so crudely.’
Zhukov released him. ‘Say anything like that again, Brodsky, and I will kill you.’
Brodsky tugged at his suit which resented ordinary wear let alone attack.
Zhukov said, ‘How do you know about this liaison? What lovers’ tryst have you been polluting this time?’
‘It came to our notice through a good servant of the Soviet Union at Black Walnut Point. A Ukrainian called Sokolov. He reported that your daughter was lea
ving the establishment at night and disappearing with a young man in a green sports car. Also that she was unduly interested in the American travesty of the intervention in Czechoslovakia as portrayed on the television here.’
‘This young man,’ Zhukov asked, ‘do you know who he is?’
‘We’re working on it,’ Brodsky said. ‘Probably C.I.A. or F.B.I. Your daughter has been very foolish indeed. And we must get her out of harm’s way.’
‘Perhaps,’ Brodsky said, ‘we could go up to your office. I don’t have one of my own …’
‘Third secretaries don’t usually,’ Zhukov said.
‘That is most unkind, Comrade Zhukov.’ They sat on either side of Zhukov’s desk. ‘I’m only acting in your best interests.’
‘Come to the point, Brodsky. What are you going to do?’
Mikhail Brodsky said it wasn’t what he was going to do—it was what the Kremlin was going to do. And the Kremlin had decided that Natasha Zhukova should return to the Soviet Union. In any case, wasn’t it about time that she returned? Moscow had been very generous allowing her to stay so long.
‘You had your reasons,’ Zhukov said.
Brodsky smiled, the school sycophant grateful for any small flattery. Of course—there had been reasons for everything, he said. Firstly they wanted to show good faith with Zhukov and to reward him for his efforts in espionage.
Zhukov interrupted: ‘And, of course, you wanted Natasha and myself to become close once more so that the inevitable parting would be all the more harder and I would be all the more worried about what you bastards might do to her in the Soviet Union. In short you worked it so that you would have me at your mercy.’
Accepting it as a compliment to his strategy, Brodsky conceded that the psychology behind Natasha’s stay in America had been along those lines. And he, personally, could see nothing wrong in that: no one suffered and the cause had been served.
‘When is she to return?’
Brodsky fiddled with blotter and papers so that it looked as if he were seated at his desk. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘That will give you time for a last supper together. Her passage has already been booked,’ he added with finality.
‘She isn’t freight, you know,’ Zhukov said.
‘Uh-huh. Secretaries book flights for ambassadors, Comrade Zhukov.’
‘But an ambassador has some say in where and when he’s going.’
‘Not always,’ Brodsky said. ‘And, by the way, could you please tell your daughter that she is not to leave home—for her own good, you understand. There’s no knowing what American intelligence might try now they realize they’ve failed with this operator in the green sports car.’
‘You mean she’s under house arrest?’
Brodsky shrugged. ‘Put it how you wish—she is not to leave the apartment.’
Zhukov got up and walked to the window. The kids were out of school making their way to drug stores and soda-pop, to suburban houses with no fences around the gardens. Taxi cabs fought and bullied; beckoning neon stammered into life in the light of the wasting sun. He asked, ‘And what do they propose to do with us, Valentina and myself.’
Brodsky opened the black Czechoslovakian briefcase he had been carrying. Inside was a folder bearing Zhukov’s name in red ink. He opened this too, so that Zhukov could see the thick wad of papers. ‘This goes back a long way, comrade. Right back to Vladimir Zhukov schoolboy, Vladimir Zhukov patriot and heroic defender of Leningrad, Vladimir Zhukov minor poet’—he glanced at Zhukov for appreciation—‘and Vladimir Zhukov Foreign Ministry clerk.’
‘It looks very thorough.’ Zhukov sat down. ‘Your organization must have had very good informants.’
‘The best.’ Brodsky left the file open on the desk.
‘So what is to become of us?’
‘It saddens me to have to tell you this,’ Brodsky gloated. ‘But Moscow has decided that you must return to the Soviet Union. Your little flirtation with the West is over, Comrade Zhukov. It has been decided that you are a security risk.’
‘When are we to return?’
‘The day after your daughter.’
‘Can’t we go together?’
‘A decision has been taken against this course. By the time you arrive in Moscow your daughter will be in Alma-Ata.’
‘Doesn’t the ambassador have a say in this?’
‘The ambassador is already in Moscow. For talks,’ he added, giving the words his own special connotation.
‘The minister, then.’
‘The minister has already approved the decisions of Moscow.’
At that precise minute—twelve minutes before five on his wristwatch—Vladimir Zhukov decided to accept the ruling of his Moscow mentors. Whatever the compulsion, he had done the cause of Socialism a disservice.
By eleven minutes before five his decision was in fragments. Because the last report on the file lying on the desk was in the unmistakable handwriting of his wife. A surging Sibiryak hand that had been tutored to conformity between the ruled lines of bureaucracy and doctrinaire.
This autumnal evening, when there was a faint smell of fireworks and mist in the air, Vladimir Zhukov acted with the swift inspiration of the damned seeking salvation.
He left the Embassy at speed, on the presumption that pursuers wouldn’t be prepared for such a premature departure, and went to a call box on the ground floor of the National Press Building.
From there he phoned his Sibiryak.
‘Hallo, Vladimir,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’
‘It doesn’t matter where I am.’
‘What’s the matter, Vladimir?’ The connection was so good that she might have been in a booth beside him. Voice, he thought, doesn’t alter with age. He knew that he still loved her.
‘Is Natasha there?’
‘No, she went out about an hour ago. She said she would be back by ten.’
So he had five hours. ‘Valentina,’ he said, ‘I know.’
‘Know? What are you talking about, Vladimir?’
‘About everything,’ he said. ‘About the drawer and the key and your reports.’
A pause. Then the young voice from the mountains: ‘It was for your own good, Vladimir. For the good of … of everything. Do you understand?’
Of course he understood. Nothing. Who is the enemy?
‘Vladimir.’
‘Yes?’
‘Come home. Please come home.’
His voice spoke. A voice spoke—it didn’t sound like his. ‘All our life together,’ it said.
‘A good life.’
‘A mockery.’
‘Please come home.’
‘For how long has this been so?’
‘Not long. Please come home. I love you, Vladimir.’
‘Goodbye, Valentina.’
Then he hung up, reminding himself that men didn’t weep. Why this was so he had no idea.
He took the elevator up to the 13th to see if Richter or any of his new friends were there. Richter was drinking in the big dignified bar. Crisp, pomaded and tough. ‘Where have you been hiding yourself?’ he asked.
‘Socializing,’ Zhukov told him. ‘I’m sure you’ve read about it.’
‘I heard that you gave some sort of interview in New York. It sounded like a lot of fun.’ American parlance clipped incongruously with Germanic precision. ‘What will you have to drink?’
‘A Scotch, please. A large one.’
‘Hey,’ Richter said. ‘What’s up with you?’
Zhukov drank the Scotch thirstily, as if it were beer, and ordered two more drinks. Then he went to the phone and made two calls: one to the Madison hotel booking a room for the night, the other to Helen Massingham.
In the bedroom at the Madison Zhukov bought himself another Scotch and waited. She arrived one hour after the phone call, wearing a green silk costume; very tanned with a white tidemark just visible at the foothills of her breasts. She carried a vanity case and smelled expensive. But, he thought, despite all the costly trappings
you still look like a whore.
‘My,’ she said, sitting down, smoothing her skirt and lighting a cigarette, ‘what’s come over you all of a sudden? We rather got the impression that our friendship was all over.’
Zhukov sat on the edge of the bed, jacket and tie on the chair. ‘What you mean,’ he said, ‘is that you thought I was persona non grata and therefore no longer of any use to you.’
She looked shocked. ‘I don’t mean that at all. You didn’t turn up at any more parties and I presumed that you had grown tired of the decadent life.’ Her voice was excited and clotted.
‘I have a proposition to put to you.’
‘Marvellous.’ She crossed her brown shaved legs, a little shiny at the shins.
‘But we have to be honest with each other. I know perfectly well why you and your husband cultivated me. My motives were exactly the same. Can we please accept that.’
She walked round the modernistic bedroom with its double bed waiting to be used, her silk rustling, her breasts swinging a bit. ‘I don’t know what to say, Vladimir. You’re such a forthright person. Such a blunt huggy bear.’
‘This is what you have to do,’ Zhukov said, finishing his Scotch. ‘My daughter is at this moment with a young American employed by American Intelligence. She intends to defect but will return to the Embassy before she does. If she does that then she is finished. We must get a message to her now. That is what you have to do.’
‘But, Vladimir, how can I do that?’
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Forget the pretence. Call your husband. Tell him to get in touch with American Intelligence. The young man is employed by the F.B.I. Tell them to reach him and stop my daughter from coming back to the Embassy.’
She looked at him uncertainly. ‘I don’t know anything about all this. I just do what my husband asks me.’
‘He will understand.’ He picked up the phone and ordered two more whiskies. ‘Also tell him that Natasha’s father is willing to do a deal.’
‘And are you, Vladimir?’
‘Please do what I’ve asked you.’
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