by Joseph Hone
‘Yes – if I have time.’ And then more urgently: ‘Yes, I’d like to,’ and then softly, as her husband was speaking to the attendant: ‘As soon as I can. Tomorrow.’
She nodded and looked quickly away and he thought now that she had understood everything, that his message had got through to her. For in their affair, publicly and alone, they had long become accustomed to just such unspoken communication, adept in transmitting their needs as well as their affection through parables or by an expressive silence.
Flitlianov went to his compartment, checking with his two security men in the adjoining one on the way. Then he locked the door, and, with a deal of bumping and clattering of shoes, went through the motions of settling down for the night.
*
At two o’clock in the morning the train pulled into Morivinia station, the half-way point on the journey. Here it would wait for the arrival of the Leningrad-Moscow sleeper, due at any moment on the down platform. The snow had stopped. Odd strong gusts of wind whipped a thin covering of white along the roofs and across the platforms. The sky was clear, all the stars perfectly ordered and visible. The huge train slept. A lone official walked past its curtained windows. The guard stepped down from his van at the end. Two militiamen, heavily clothed in fur coats and helmets, machine pistols slung from their shoulders, stood silently by the exit at the middle of the platform. Behind them, in the shadow of the station canopy, two plain-clothes men from Sakharovsky’s special task force looked on.
Inside the train, Flitlianov’s two security men were awake – looking and listening, plumbing the silence for the slightest sound or movement: one in the corridor standing next to Flitlianov’s locked compartment; the other scanning the deserted platform on the other side of the tracks.
A minute passed. The militiamen shifted their feet discreetly. The guard checked his watch with the official at the far end of the platform. At the opposite end, in the cabin of the leading engine, a man was talking easily to the driver.
‘Of course, Comrade,’ the driver said, ‘I knew your father. When I worked the Southern Region – the Yalta–Moscow line – he was Engineer-in-Charge: a very fine man, a great man.’
In front of them as they spoke, half a mile away, the engine lights of the Moscow sleeper appeared, two long brilliant beams, fanning out over a carpet of snow, rounding a curve. It glided towards them against the wind without a sound.
‘It’s an honour to meet you, Comrade,’ the driver went on as the express passed their cab, drawing into the station. ‘I’ve greatly enjoyed our talk. Though you know as much about the railways as I do myself, if I may say so.’
‘My father taught me everything – never stopped talking about it. I take no credit for it. He was the real railway man.’
‘Indeed, indeed.’ They shook hands firmly, warmly, full of old memory. Then Alexei Flitlianov took his briefcase and climbed down onto the tracks between the two trains. He rounded the last carriage of the Moscow-bound sleeper and confronted the guard who had just got down from it, showing him his identity card. The man saluted promptly.
‘My reservation please. For Moscow. It was booked last night – joining the train at Morivinia.’
‘This way, sir. I’ll get the attendant at once.’
Flitlianov climbed up into the last carriage where a compartment had been reserved for him. The attendant opened the door.
‘Some tea, sir. Or some coffee? We have some coffee.’
‘Something stronger, please. If you have any. It’s cold.’
‘Certainly, sir. At once. Do you have anyone travelling with you?’
‘No, no one.’
Flitlianov turned towards the curtained window. The wheels of the Leningrad sleeper moaned briefly as the brakes were released and the train drew out of the station. Two minutes later his own train left and the attendant arrived with a half bottle of export vodka and a glass on a little tray.
By eight o’clock he was back at the Moscow terminus – just in time to catch the morning express to Leningrad. And by five that afternoon he had crossed the bridge onto Nevsky Prospect and was walking towards the Hermitage Museum.
He met Yelena downstairs in her office of the Exhibition and Loans department in the basement of the building, posing as the curator of a distant museum come to the Hermitage to choose some paintings for a provincial exhibition.
They walked along the basement to the new storage room, a long, specially lit and heated chamber. Here they inspected various paintings from the several thousand available, stored in lines, each canvas suspended over the floor in sliding racks, marked alphabetically after the artist, so that any work could be reached almost immediately by pulling the open crates out on their runners into the wide central aisle. The room was empty, smelling slightly of warm turpentine, and there was the vague sound of machinery somewhere. But none the less, Yelena spoke briskly and officially.
‘All the same, it seems to me, for a proper balance, you need some of the moderns – even if you’re not going beyond 1900. You should perhaps acknowledge the beginnings of the movement…. The Impressionists, of course. But none of our major examples is available, I’m afraid. A Manet perhaps. We have a sequence of his “Seine at Marly” paintings – one of those we could spare.’
‘Yes,’ Flitlianov said uneasily. ‘And what about Modigliani?’
‘Really outside your period altogether. Though we have some exceptional examples.’
They moved half down the chamber to the racks of the middle letters: Manet, Matisse, Modigliani.
‘Let me show you some in any case.’
She pulled a rack out gently, the first open crate sliding forward, a canvas stored on either side. And then another one. And a third, so that the central aisle was now partly blocked and they were hidden from the doorway. They stood facing a large Modigliani nude.
‘Well?’ Yelena inquired in a true voice, turning away from the dark glamour of the picture, the rose thighs, the incisive outlines of body and crotch.
‘Yes,’ he said simply, suddenly tired, gazing at the nude, a weary business man in a strip club. ‘Yes, it’s now.’
‘Everything is ready. A few details, that’s all.’
‘Passports, exit visa, money?’
‘You prepared it all yourself, Alexei. It’s all here. All you have to do is sign and pre-date your own authority for this man.’
‘And the London paintings will be the first trip out of here – the Baroque exhibition?’
‘Yes, you’re lucky. Thursday morning. The exhibition ends today. There’ll be two days packing. Then they go direct to London, part of the weekly cargo flight, an Ilyushin 62.’
She pulled the Modigliani over to one side and replaced it with another canvas, an early Matisse.
‘Cubist. Not for you at all.’ She changed her tone again. It was formal, almost scolding. ‘But effective. I like his invention – and his restraint. They balance out. With Picasso the same thing gets out of hand – too wild and no control.’
‘Stop it, for God’s sake.’
They looked at each other, both suddenly angry: tongue-tied, so much to say, and no time now, or place, to say it – resenting their shared experience because they could no longer acknowledge it. So they felt guilty as if they had carelessly broken their affair themselves some time before and had met now with only the blame to apportion.
‘You’ll have two days to wait. The room is ready.’
Two men appeared at the far end of the aisle, a young man and someone much older, balding with glasses. The young man had a clip-board and pencil in his hand.
‘The deputy curator. They’re preparing an Old Master exhibition – Titian, Tiepolo, Vermeer, Velazquez: they’ll be coming past us. Let me do the talking if they stop.’
But they stopped some distance in front of them, pulling a rack out early in the alphabet.
‘Boucher, Botticelli,’ Yelena said brightly. ‘We’re all right. Yes, the room: you know it. The old varnishing-room. There�
�s food. And water from the sink. It’s kept locked, used as a paint and chemical store-room now. They have to come to my office for the key. And there’s still an internal telephone, so I can warn you. Everything is there, as we arranged: the suitcase on top of the cupboard on the left. The suit is inside, hanging with a lot of old overalls. And the papers are taped underneath the cupboard: two passports – the Russian and the Lebanese, your new KGB identity card and the money, twenty-five thousand dollars in travellers cheques. I have your exit visa here, stamped last week and dated for travel on Thursday. All you do is sign it.’
The two men had finished with Botticelli and had now begun to move down the aisle towards them.
‘Hello Vladimir.’ Yelena turned to the balding man.
‘Can’t wean you off the moderns, can we, Yelena? All that bourgeois decadence.’
With any encouragement he might have stopped and talked. But she looked at him quickly, a finger to her lips, gesturing over her shoulder at Alexei. The deputy curator moved away.
‘How many will there be?’ Alexei asked when they had gone.
‘Two porters and an assistant curator from the museum and a fourth man, one of our security staff. You’ll be the fifth in the party – the additional KGB security officer, as we arranged. Loading starts first thing Thursday; I’ll phone down, let yourself out and come up to the packing-room. Introduce yourself, hang around. The flight leaves at midday. There’ll be some of our Embassy staff in London to meet it. But you should get clear away at the cargo terminal before they know who you are. The cargo manifest which they’ll have beforehand only names the four museum staff as accompanying personnel. They won’t know anything about you. Come on.’ She pushed all the Ms – the Modiglianis and Matisses – gently back into position.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said as they moved towards the entrance of the sweetly humming chamber.
‘No, I’m not surprised. Once we started on this, put so much work into it, I was sure that one day you’d have to use it. The sorry was there from the beginning. Will it be all right in London?’ she went on in the same matter-of-fact voice. ‘You’ll have someone there?’
‘Yes, I’ll be contacting a colleague. A close friend. I’ll be all right.’
They looked at each other once, walking slowly up the aisle, but said nothing more.
Book Two
1
McCoy had never hunted someone down before, least of all an Englishman, a major Soviet agent. Yet now, in these last moments, he found he hadn’t much taste for the job. He surprised himself. After years of unrequited bullying, at school and from behind various desks in the Mid-East section, this should have been a crowning day, a day when he could lay the many ghosts that had possessed him since youth, to Port Said in 1944, through Suez twelve years later, and beyond: a time at last when he could take the men – or man, at least – who would stand for all the others who had betrayed him.
Before, in his professional life, they had just vanished – from apartments in Beirut, or top-security prisons in England – just as the day-boys whom he had caught cheating and beaten before lunch found sanctuary every afternoon at half-past three from the school where he had been a boarder. His life seemed to have been cruelly dictated by such people – boys who had known the exam questions beforehand, men who were far better up on borders, check-points and night ferries than he was – men who, like the children in his junior school, playing tag, not only made base before he did but when they got there would turn on their pinnacles and, pointing him out from all the rest, would mock him with a special and happy impudence. The child was always father to the man, it seemed, in every case but his. And McCoy felt this loss bitterly, as though he was an orphan.
Nor had it been sufficient excuse that his had always been a desk job in British Intelligence, that he had never been more than a fonctionnaire in espionage, even though he headed the Mid-East section in Holborn now. Before this promotion he had been Control to a field section centred on Cairo. He processed their reports and had no business with timetables and guns. In any case, a chronic shortsightedness made variations in his physical routine a matter for careful thought, so that years before he had accepted certain limits of action. But in his heart he had always longed to play the puppet, not the master. For only there, he thought, among the men, might he find the nursery where these instabilities bloomed – might learn what it was that led these men astray, took them in giant strides clean out of one life, over a border, and into another. If he could be part of them for once, and not their master, he might as last make fair copy, among so many botched post-mortems, of the original sin, trace it far back to some source which he knew lay beyond the political simplicities of a Cambridge student rally in the thirties.
After so many betrayals McCoy had a psychiatrist’s hunger to lay bare the initial fault. He knew that the mechanics of frailty could be displayed, as under a surgeon’s knife; that a dissembling nature could be opened up and the parts named like a chapter in Gray’s Anatomy. And he nurtured this hope obsessively, like a longed-for doctorate, for only then, he thought, in this sure delineation of another’s treachery, could his own sorrow and incomprehension be lifted.
Until now he had never had a specimen to work on. And now of all times – now that the net was closing at last, he felt the cowardice of first love come over him, as if in this longed-for, imminent penetration he would lose the puritanical strengths and flavours which had nurtured his obsession in the years of waiting. He had come so to expect unsuccess in his work that the scent of victory made him shudder. He had come now to the border for the first time himself – close to the wire that divided certainty from confusion, the sure from the frail, loyalty from dishonour.
Quite soon he would look into another country, poisoned lands that he had heard much of. In an hour or less he would face the reality of evil: a figure that would sum up dissolution. Their eyes would meet and he would be responsible for the future. A time had come when he could at last fall upon the object of his passion, and yet he could find no virtue in the day.
The day was late in April, the sky above Marylebone faintly blue, the colour scrubbed out of it by a long and vigorous winter. Clouds ran in from the west, pushed fiercely by a damp wind that had already brought two downpours before lunchtime. The last of these had driven McCoy and Croxley into Henekey’s pub in the High Street next to the Greek restaurant.
McCoy had always missed the flat white lands of the Middle East, the certain weather of scorching light under a lead-blue dome. Years before – it had been a Saturday at midday, going back to Cairo for the weekend from Alexandria along the desert road – he had suddenly taken off his glasses and driven wildly along the shoulder of the road for half a minute before careering off down a gully and into a dune. And that moment had been so long – floating like liquid into the unfocused landscape, misty yellow and without margins, released by a sand-happy sun-madness before the darkness of the crash. He remembered the incident without qualms amongst so much doubt.
‘What will you have?’ He turned to Croxley, head of the Special Branch team that lay all about them in the streets, waiting for the man.
‘White Shield, if I may, sir.’
The girl started to decant the beer slowly, tipping glass and bottle into gentle diagonals, so that a small froth bloomed and the sediment remained undisturbed. She knew her business. McCoy doubled the order.
‘You’ve been here before then, Croxley? You know the beer.’
They were in the corner of the room at the far end of the bar, drinking comfortably like good men, between one of the old mahogany arches. Two cut-glass decanters, one of port, the other of claret, stood in front of them, undisturbed, while young lunchtimers pushed and shouted all over the rest of the room, anxious for runny shepherd’s pie and thin sandwiches, and draught beer that was so weak everywhere now that it was nothing more than a gesture. People didn’t come to pubs just to drink at lunchtime in England any more. Both men, though so genuinely formal, fe
lt awkward, even dissolute.
‘Yes, indeed. We had a long surveillance up here once. Guy Burgess had a flat round the corner. Course we didn’t know about him then. It was one of his friends we were after. Lived with him. That was during the war. We used to drop in here, changing shifts. Funny thing, you know – one night I was as near to Burgess as I am to you; just where you’re standing. By himself, wasn’t drinking. But he was drunk. There’d been a party at his flat, going on for two days, and he’d come out for a breather. Cornered me, he did, and of course you couldn’t help liking him. I mean, he really was very funny; very good company. Witty.’
Croxley drank the top off his beer and put the glass down carefully, thinking. A caricature of a man remembering: steady blue suit and quietly formal overcoat – going back to a time in the ranks in a distant war; gas masks in the cupboard under the stairs in Battersea and a conversation in the blackout with Burgess.
‘Witty? Even in drink?’
‘Oh yes. He had that ability – then. I don’t know about afterwards. I was on other work.’
‘He rather fell to pieces, I can tell you.’
‘Yes, but we never got him. He got away.’
‘He was just lucky.’
‘He had the confidence, though,’ Croxley insisted, ‘that brings the luck.’
‘A certain juvenile insouciance – that’s all.’
‘What?’ Croxley sipped again, perplexed. He was a straightforward man. The room was loud with chat and clatter but McCoy knew he’d heard him.
‘It wasn’t based on anything,’ McCoy went on. ‘He had nothing else. Just that confident good fellowship. So he had to push it like a lifeboat.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Croxley thought again, as though pondering an exam question. Then he turned, with hope: ‘Yes, he offered to get me a proper bottle of Scotch, I remember – not knowing my job of course. Cost price. Couldn’t be done with it. Said the black market was all wrong.’
‘I bet he did. Always had the right connections.’ McCoy paused, openly bitter. ‘A playboy. God knows even Moscow did their best to push him under the carpet when he got there.’