by Joseph Hone
Flitlianov looked at them easily. ‘I heard all the shooting. What’s happened?’
The two men said nothing, looking at him in dulled astonishment.
‘What’s going on?’ Flitlianov put his rifle on the bonnet of the jeep and opened the driver’s door.
‘We don’t know yet. The men have gone to see,’ Andropov said at last. And then the two-way radio started to crackle beneath the dashboard. Flitlianov picked up the receiver and handed it over to Andropov.
‘Yes?’ he said, listening. ‘Who? – what happened?’ His voice rose in genuine surprise. ‘Yes, all right. Get them all back here as soon as possible. Yes, we’ll carry on with the hunt’ He handed the receiver back. ‘An accident, Alexei. They’ve shot me.’ He looked at Sakharovsky, smiled, and began to clamber out of the jeep, brushing himself down, stretching and stamping his legs in the snow. ‘Yes, they got me in the end.’ He looked up at the marvellous sky, blinking, his face bright now, satisfied, enjoying the crisp air. ‘And I thought it might have been you, Alexei.’ He smiled again, breathing deeply.
‘I don’t quite follow.’
‘Well – it did look just possible, no? This conspiracy – your background. I had to take everyone into consideration, even my deputies. But it wasn’t you of course, Alexei. I did you an injustice. It was Vassily Chechulian – who would have thought it? Yes, Vassily has just shot me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Flitlianov said in real astonishment.
‘A tragedy, Alexei.’ Andropov came forward, wiping his spectacles, then pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘You were right at our last meeting. All we need do now is chase the rest of the group up. I think we have our conspirator. Our liberal, our counter-revolutionary.’ He put his hand on Flitlianov’s shoulder. ‘Thank you, Alexei.’
Andropov took his rifle from Sakharovsky, shot the bolt several times, loaded it, checked the safety catch, and finally made some imaginary passing shots in the air. Then he turned, and swung the rifle down towards Flitlianov. Sakharovsky, standing behind him, made an involuntary movement to one side.
‘Oh, and by the way, Alexei,’ Andropov checked his rifle again, crooked it under his arm like a shotgun and walked casually towards him, ‘now that we’re all three alone together, we can get on with some other important business that’s just come up: your internal security division. We need some work done in America. I’d like you to get one of your men to New York to check out one of our circles there. Do you have anyone you can send at once? You normally have some one in the pipe-line ready for these occasions – a completely fresh face.’
‘Yes, I have someone – due to go over to America quite soon in any case. Part of a routine replacement. He’s ready.’
‘A good man?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, you’re sure of him? He’s clear. No one has any tail on him?’
‘Absolutely. As you know, we keep these men completely clear of any contact at their base before sending them into a target area. He’s done some work before for us in Africa, years ago. But he’s completely unmarked now.’
‘Fine, I’ll give you the details tomorrow. Let’s get on with the hunting.’
The three men walked away from the jeep, up the hill, Andropov still brushing himself down, almost frisking about, as though he had been in a cardboard box all morning. His driver and his bodyguard emerged from the woods with the body of a man. The two groups stood together a moment in the dazzling light, Andropov giving directions like a stage producer, before they separated and the three hunters disappeared into the dark green tunnel of trees.
*
Alexei Flitlianov shot nothing at the hunt and on the drive back to Moscow that afternoon he looked out at the dull landscape, the bright day gone, remarking on the weather and the traffic to his Czech colleague who travelled back with him. But he disliked this flat countryside – a muddy April thaw edging the road, beginning to creep in over the immense fields – a landscape so drab and featureless by comparison with the sharp mountains and tangy springs of his own Georgian background in the south. And thus he politely lied about the beauties of the Moscow plain to the man beside him: he lied as he had done for most of his life, while thinking of other things that were true.
So they believed it was Chechulian, who had been quietly arrested midway through the hunt – or did they? Did Yuri Andropov really think that or was he pretending just as he’d had another man pretend to be him, and had Chechulian conveniently shoot the impostor? Or had the shooting been pure chance, an accident as Chechulian, he’d heard, had protested? Questions one could never ask. But whatever the reasons behind Andropov’s behaviour, whatever his real motive in arresting Chechulian, there was no doubt that Andropov, in his charade at the hunt, had been putting the pressure on him as well.
Chechulian’s arrest could have been a blind, so that he should feel himself in the clear – clear to make the one mistake which would completely convict him, which would be indisputable evidence of his guilt. And that mistake would be to run now.
Yet, on the other hand, if one took the arrest to be genuine, as it might well be, there was an inevitable progression to it: Chechulian, Flitlianov knew, was innocent; he himself was the man they wanted. And Andropov must soon discover Chechulian’s innocence: then the lamps would move brightly onto him. And then he would wish he’d run when there was the chance.
The English had a phrase for it – he could hear Andropov himself using it, happy in his sudden bizarre colloquialisms: ‘Six of one; half a dozen of the other.’ There was nothing in it. He had a few days. He had to run.
They had come to the outer suburbs of the capital now, an expanse of identical high-rise apartments that stretched away far beyond his vision. A People’s Park lay beside the roadway. And that too had been completely laid out in concrete. Yet Alexei looked now on these drab emblems of his nation’s progress with regret, and even spoke enthusiastically of the new development to his companion. He would have to go. And so this brutal urban sprawl took on a precious form. A time had come that he’d hoped would never come again, for he’d always imagined that he would have been able to see his work through without another exile like the first – his years as a KGB officer in Beirut, West Berlin, New York, London, preparing the way meticulously for his eventual return to Moscow and his present eminent position within the organisation.
It was Snakes and Ladders, and he had hit that square high up on 99 just before the end of the game that sent you tumbling right back to the beginning.
Yet not quite the beginning, he reflected. He wasn’t running away; he was running back into it all over again from the outside, fulfilling one of many contingency plans that had been arranged long before. He was leaving in order to build his group up again inside the citadel of Dzerzhinsky Square. There were men at this moment – he didn’t know their names or how many, some of them quite possibly colleagues of his, and other senior KGB officers in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia – who were members of his group, who had been recruited over the years by his various deputies overseas and at headquarters. And the only way he could make contact with these people, and re-activate the group at the centre, was to get out and contact his first deputy, and with him set the whole business in motion again. This man was his link with all the others, and thus with his whole political and personal future.
There was also the List, held in safety overseas by a person whose real name and whereabouts only he knew of, and which he might now familiarise himself with for the first time. This was a complete register of all the members in his clandestine group – their names, positions within the KGB, and elsewhere in the Soviet establishment, and all other relevant data: their ‘file’. One more reason for leaving – for this was the most crucial information of all – the identity of this person – and it was at risk now and would continue to be for as long as he remained in Russia.
There were as well more than a dozen key figures in Moscow – four in the army, two in both the navy and the air-force, t
hree senior officers with the KGB, six on the Central Committee and two in the Politburo – with whom he had made common cause over the years. They were his ‘recruits’; and this had been his main activity during his years in Moscow – searching out these men of new government in the Union, these men of goodwill who, for the moment, were behaving just like all the others, as bureaucratic robots, who had for so long denied all the human values of Marxism. They had worked well at the mechanics of government, these people, at industrial, military, of course, and now even consumer development. But they had left Russia barren of individual spirit, of singular idiosyncrasy and choice, of all inventive and exuberant life. And these qualities, Flitlianov believed, had been among the essential purposes of the revolution. They had been consistently and intentionally betrayed by all but a very few in power over the years, and of those who had supported these ideals nearly all were now in exile or long dead – apart from Flitlianov’s contacts, the very few in government who were stall there, like cocoons buried deep in rotten wood, waiting for the spring.
But of course he could make no use of such people now. It was impossible to risk their cover simply in order to save his own skin. They would soon find out that he was gone, keep their heads down until the storm blew over, and await developments from abroad. All the more important that he should get out now, he knew, for these were names he might well disclose under torture.
*
How closely were they watching him, he wondered, when he got back to his apartment in the centre of the city that evening? He looked out at the dark street: a few people hurrying by, fewer cars, a thin snow falling. There was no one around, no stationary vehicles. One of his own personal security guards in the ground-floor apartment would probably have been made responsible for the surveillance. Very well, then, he would make use of him. It didn’t matter for the first part of the journey. It would only count when he made the switch. He telephoned downstairs, speaking to the duty officer of the guard.
‘My appointments in Leningrad this week – I’ll travel overnight on the sleeper. Reserve me a front compartment and whatever you need for yourself. No – tonight. Now. Yes, I’ll be going alone. Warn the Leningrad bureau. Have them pick me up first thing when I get there.’
He went through some papers on his desk, putting a few of them in a briefcase. There was nothing to destroy. There never had been. He had always kept himself ready for immediate retreat. His housekeeper, a silent Eskimo-faced woman from the north, busied herself about the place, making up a suitcase for him. There was nothing else he needed to take. Everything would be ready for him in Leningrad. There were only the photographs which he would have to leave: his mother not long before she died, so young-looking it seemed she had years of life in her, who had died so suddenly, and his father, the railway engineer, stout with moustaches in the Georgian manner, quite old, taken at a holiday camp for retired staff on the Caspian. And there were his younger brother and sister, their families, his nephews and nieces. Would they suffer? How would they suffer? Long experience of his own work so quickly led him to an actual vision of that possible suffering, the mechanics of it.
He had not married so that there should not be that tie to deal with if the occasion ever arose – as it had now. But there were all these others, suddenly frail and exposed with his leaving. He felt for a moment that he should stay in Russia – simply go to Leningrad, return and accept the consequences. But just as he had made every physical preparation for sudden departure so he had long before anticipated exactly this emotional hurdle and the attitude he would take to it: the answer, he knew, was that they might well suffer, be used as hostages to try and bring him back to Russia. And he would do nothing about it. It wasn’t selfishness. He had staked his life on his political beliefs. Once you did that there was nothing you could do about the others. You had condemned them, in a society such as his, from the first moment of deviation – a contrary thought thirty years before, a morning at the University when a professor had presented as fact something you knew to be a lie: and that sudden moment’s consciousness of truth and difference was as dangerous as a bullet, a gun pointing at you and your friends and family for ever afterwards.
The only object he took with him which he would not normally have taken on such a trip was a small bamboo cigarette pipe he’d used fifteen years before in Beirut. Originally, he’d bought two of them – one for her as well, and they’d smoked them together, only once, rather self-consciously, one afternoon driving round the hills behind the American University. They’d laughed at each other. And he remembered that cigarette and the laughter.
He didn’t look round the apartment. Yet he was suddenly aware of the deep silence of the rooms – a quality of abandoned space, a prefiguration of his departure. He said goodbye to the housekeeper, counting out her money for her, exactly.
Then he went.
But she called to him when he was half-way down the corridor, and came to him, the money in her hand. He knew what it was at once. She never spoke of these things in the apartment itself.
‘Would you?’ she said, handing him some of the money. ‘If you have the chance. From the dollar shop – lipstick, hair spray, toothpaste, anything like that. My daughter –’
‘Fine, I’ll see to it. Next time my secretary goes there. Keep the money.’
He turned away, and now for the first time his leaving became real to him.
*
There was a smell of burnt flint in the station – dead sparks from the overhead cables, the leaking discharge of dynamos, the peppery smell of recent fireworks. The big engine throbbed at the end of the shallow platform. Just beyond it, outside the canopy, the snow fell brightly in the light. But a yard beyond this glittering curtain there was a deep darkness and a silence, so that the noise and illumination inside made the terminus a stage for a huge party, the guests taking frenzied last drinks and saying goodbye before embarking for an uncertain destination. The heavy sleeper carriages waited for them, curtains drawn, like the vehicles of a cortège.
Flitlianov’s compartment was near the head of the train and as he walked towards it, his two security men behind him, he saw Yelena Andropov and her husband climbing up the steps of the same carriage. The three of them met in the corridor while the attendant was showing them to their separate quarters.
‘Hello!’ She shouted to him loudly, still half the length of the corridor away, so that his security men turned questioningly behind them. Even a greeting with her, he thought, had all the brazen quality of a revolutionary manifesto, a call from the beginning for the truth. He feared for her more than for himself. His world of deceit wasn’t hers, after all. And though she shared his beliefs he was amazed each time she publicly confirmed her association with him. When he left, what would happen to her, even with her father’s influence? – a woman whom some would so sharply remember had been a friend of his.
But she had always told him not to fear. So often she had said that when he’d spoken to her about the risks she took. ‘I’d rather die laughing than crying … what other way is there? … discretion is the worst means of concealment.’ And there were other phrases of the same sort, brisk affidavits of her faith which were a continual absolution for him – outspoken, serious words, but never given seriously. In her fearlessness and free intelligence she had the quality of some pre-revolutionary aristocrat, he thought. Yet she had been born after that time. And this brought him great warmth, for sometimes he felt his ambitions were unique, that individual spirit had disappeared completely in Russia. Yet now, in her greeting alone, he sensed the existence of irony, knowledge and laughter hidden everywhere in the land.
He had tea with them in their compartment, the three of them crowded slightly among the bunks, the train pulling out of the station and beginning to sway very slightly, a boat moving into the current of twisting rails, the drive of wind and snow. Her husband talked to him formally about nothing, drinking nervously, so that soon she took the conversation up herself.
; ‘We saw Arkadi Raikin’s new show at the Rossiya on Friday night. Did you go? It was fine.’
‘Not yet. I’ve been busy. An official visit – a Czech delegation.’
‘Yes, Father told me. You were hunting on Sunday. I suppose you never missed once.’
‘No – because I never fired once.’
‘What’s it like up there where you go? Near the Morivinian forests isn’t it? I’ve never been there.’
‘Very wild, isolated. Swamps, bogs – and of course forests.’ He smiled at her.
‘It’s where all the labour camps are, yes? “Prison Province”.’
The train lurched over points, going through a junction some miles north of Moscow, keeping left on the main Leningrad line.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is the junction here. They go off that way.’ He pointed eastwards through the curtains.
‘“They”.’ Yelena considered the word carefully. ‘What do they do up there?’
‘Logging mostly. Timber felling and carting. And they make furniture. And television cabinets. They do fairly well. It’s not too bad. Short-term and first offenders.’
‘The others go further away?’
‘Yes. The serious cases. Persistent offenders. They go all the way. The Ukraine, Siberia, the Arctic Islands.’
‘Really to another country?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded, looking closely at Yelena now. ‘Another country altogether.’
The attendant came to the door. His compartment was ready. He stood up, wondering if she had understood anything of his plans, his predicament, from this exchange.
‘Oh, by the way.’ she said, returning his look just as carefully, ‘talking about other countries, you should take a look at the London exhibition we have at the Hermitage now: “Two Centuries of European Baroque”. Paintings, metalwork, porcelain, jewellery. Mostly from the Wallace Collection. It’s the last few days before we send them back – if you think you need to see them?’ She emphasised the word, questioningly.