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Bitch!
He began to fight, thrashing the black water with his legs, clawing at the terrible pressure above, but dragged inexorably down the ice-tube by water-logged newspaper and felt.
He managed to grasp the edge of the ice. Crack. He heard the bones in his fingers snap as heavy boots stamped on them. Crack. Still he held on, not feeling pain anymore, just the cold of the grave.
Boots, kicking, pushing, grinding. Broken fingers uncurled.
Why?
Then he gave up the fight.
Gently, almost gratefully, he slid into the darkness to join the young man he had seen in the light of the flare, realising in the end that he had been beckoning him.
Gazing at Kreiber’s alabaster features in the open coffin in the Institute for World Economy and International Affairs, Robert Calder was nudged by an elbow of fear. How accidental had the deaths of any defectors been? How natural the causes?
In front of him in the queue in the entrance hall Kreiber’s maid, Maria, built like a wrestler, sobbed enthusiastically. She moved on, sniffing into a scarlet handkerchief, Calder took her place directly above Kreiber’s shuttered stare.
According to the post mortem Kreiber’s blood had been lethally charged with alcohol. Another Friday night drunk. Another statistic.
Calder, legal brain blunted but still cynical, didn’t quite buy that. Kreiber’s capacity for hunter’s vodka had been phenomenal and he had been an experienced ice fisherman.
Bowing his head, Calder examined the face that had been spotted two days after his disappearance peering from beneath thin ice between reflections of the cupolas of the Kremlin close to Bolshoi Kammenyi Bridge. They had been ennobled by the mortician but beneath the cosmetics you could still trace wandering lines of indecision.
At least, another defector could trace them. Calder touched his own face. The lines, dye-stamped by doubt, were as indecisive as Kreiber’s. And yet according to the photographs, his features had once been strong, almost fierce, as he strode the campus, climbed Capitol Hill; even as he crossed the divide between Washington and Moscow.
Kreiber, you sad sonofabitch, what happened?
The elbow of fear sharpened.
He left the coffin and joined the group of mourners, mostly defectors who worked at the Institute, waiting to depart for the cremation. The coffin, marooned in the echoing lobby, seemed to be pointing at them.
A blade of cold reached him through a crack in the inner doors of the entrance. Outside, the chilled February breeze nosing through streets still winged with soiled snow would be an executioner – a winter funeral usually dispatched some of the bereaved to their own graves.
Maria was there, stuffing her mouth with sugar-coated red-currants which she fished from a cracked plastic shopping bag. And Fabre, the French defector, creased tortoise face bobbing above the moulting collar of his topcoat, and Langley, the Canadian, one time ice-hockey star and sexual athlete, and … a girl Calder didn’t recognise.
She had grey eyes and her black hair, released from the fur hat she carried in her hand, made an untidy frame for her winter-pale face. Langley, of course, was talking to her but he didn’t seem to be making much of an impression.
‘She’s the new girl in Personnel,’ Fabre informed Calder, lungs making rusty music as he spoke. ‘She keeps our files in order.’
So she was Surveillance. A pity. But you couldn’t blame her: she wouldn’t have any choice.
‘Attractive, ‘Fabre judged, ‘in a distant sort of way, ‘vowels in his English theatrically Gallic.
Distant? Perhaps. When cornered by Langley. But Calder detected a challenge in the set of her eyes and mouth. Her nose was, perhaps, a little too assertive but, having had his own broken in a locker-room brawl at Harvard, he was sensitive on the subject of noses.
Fabre, losing Calder’s attention, turned to Maria. ‘A merciful release,’ he said in cassette Russian, bobbing his head towards the coffin. Startled, Maria stopped chewing. Red juice trickled down her chins like blood. But Fabre didn’t give up that easily. ‘He died for a good cause.’
Maria turned her back on him: the only cause she knew anything about was earning enough money or horse-trading enough merchandise to keep the stew bubbling on the stove. Any other causes unsettled her: they sounded official.
Despite his misgivings, Calder smiled at her. She regarded him suspiciously for a moment, then grinned. It was spectacular, that grin, shining here and there with steel teeth, and it banished Calder’s foreboding. Maria delved into her bag and produced half a dozen white-powdered redcurrants cupped in one hand. She handed them to Calder who chewed them slowly; they were delicious, sweet and sharp. He glanced up and saw the girl from Personnel smiling at him; it was positively unseemly – any minute now they’d all be rolling in the aisles.
Fabre said coldly: ‘This is a funeral not a burlesque.’
Calder was saved by the doorman who, as the last of the mourners trailed past the coffin, herded by a KGB sheepdog in a square-shouldered topcoat, let the cold in. Whoosh, it entered snapping and Calder buttoned up his grey Crombie (Blooming-dales and still wearing well) as the girl put on her fur hat, tucking in her hair with long fingers.
He wondered how much, being in Personnel, she knew about him.
As the red-draped coffin, destined for Donskoi Monastery, was carried down the outside steps by six pall-bearers, their breath smoking with exertion, Maria dug him in the ribs. ‘Come.’ She licked red juice from her lips with the tip of her tongue.
But he didn’t follow her into the blue and white coach, doubling up as transport and hearse, along with the other forty or so mourners. Instead, although he had no intention of attending the last rites, he followed in his black Zhiguli.
He parked the small car in Donskaya Square and waited in it while the coffin and wreaths and red cushion bearing Kreiber’s three Soviet decorations were carried into the monastery, stone walls surrounding the five bunched domes of the cathedral still plastered with old snow. The corpse would be burned immediately, ashes flown to West Berlin in an earthenware casket adorned with a sprightly hammer and sickle. In the final reckoning both sides would be seen to be commendably decent. What harm could a few cinders do?
Through the exhaust fumes billowing past the windshield Calder picked out the defectors among the mourners following the coffin. American, British, German, French, Dutch, Canadian, Scandanavian, Australian … known to the KGB as The Twilight Brigade.
Twilight …. How many of them, trapped between day and night, between dog and wolf, had wondered, as he had done, about the deaths of their fellows?
Donald Maclean, British diplomat and partner in a celebrated defection in 1952, who had died in March ‘83, ostensibly from cancer. Could he have been slipped a few spoonfuls of Brompton Mixture, alcohol, cocaine and heroin? It was said to dispatch patients singing.
Be fair. Even if the mixture had been prescribed it could have been on compassionate grounds. After all it was prescribed in the West freely enough.
And Guy Burgess, Maclean’s partner in espionage and homosexual lush, who had died in his sleep in 1963 in an iron bed in the Botkin Hospital. He had died from booze. But, of course, the simplest way to hasten the death of an alcoholic is to inject him with alcohol.
When Maria and the girl – was she the reason he had driven to Donskaya Square? – had been hustled into the monastery by the shepherd from State Security, Calder drove onto Lenin Prospect and headed for the centre of the city. Tomorrow, he promised himself, such neurotic fantasies would be banished for ever. Unless another defector died too accidentally or too naturally or too soon.
If in doubt consult Dalby.
Calder arranged to meet him late that afternoon beside the waterless fountain at the entrance to Sokolinki Park. You could safely trade indiscretions in Sokolinki’s lonely pastures of snow and belts of silver birch thick with silence.
When Calder arrived on Friday night boozers were already gathering, tilting bottles of vodka bought legally or paid as wages or distilled by the friendly chemist on the corner of the block, banding together in case any of them collapsed, easy prey for teenage muggers.
Hands deep into the pockets of his Crombie, fur hat worn with a jauntiness he didn’t feel, Calder roamed between the burgeoning drunks and the pavilions remaining from international exhibitions. The cold crisped his nostrils.
No sign of Dalby. But, like the Russians with whom he mixed more compatibly than most defectors, he wasn’t noted for punctuality. From the very beginning of his banishment from Britain he had managed to adapt. Calder envied him.
‘Good evening my dear fellow.’
Calder spun round. Dalby still managed to surprise; that was thirty years of espionage for you. He was smiling benignly. Although the slanting lines on his face had settled into pouches Dalby, now in his seventies, still looked like an urbane pirate. He wore a peaked cap instead of a shapka, challenging the cold to take off his ears.
He squeezed Calder’s arm. ‘Come, let’s take a walk.’
They walked down one of the avenues that had once rung to the harness jingle of aristocratic coaches; on either side the snow had been packed hard and bright by children at play and cross-country skiers, but they had departed for the night and loneliness was settling.
Calder glanced at the fountain. He saw a figure detach itself from the boozers and strike out towards the avenue.
‘Is he there?’ Dalby asked.
‘I didn’t know you had a watchdog.’
Dalby chuckled. ‘Not me, my dear chap. You.’
Sokolinki was derived from the Russian for falcon because falconry had once been practised in the park and Calder felt the scissored nip of sharp talons. ‘I wasn’t aware I was being followed.’
‘You wouldn’t be, would you? Not if your watchdog is a pro. And the comrades are very professional in these m …matters.’ Paradoxically, Dalby’s occasional stammer refurbished his authority.
‘How did you know I was being followed?’
‘Let’s just say I’ve acquired a certain prescience over the years.’
No one quite knew what those years had entailed. But as he had been in the top echelon of British Intelligence it was safe to assume that he had blown great holes through many Western spy networks.
But he doesn’t know what I know. The knowledge gave Calder an edge over the enigma that was Austen Dalby; it also scared him. He was about to look over his shoulder again when Dalby, gripping his arm, said: ‘Don’t.’
‘Why would they want to follow me?’
‘You would know b … better than me. After all, you’re from another generation of … let us say idealists. Perhaps you know secrets to which I couldn’t possibly have had access.’
Did he – could he – know?
Calder directed the conversation into safer waters. ‘Idealists? A cosy euphemism.’
‘Then how would you describe us? Traitors?’
‘There isn’t a tag,’ Calder said. ‘We merely followed our convictions. We had our own sets of values but they weren’t necessarily idealistic.’
‘Values … you make Moscow sound very different from London or New York. Is it so different?’
‘It’s different all right,’ Calder said. He half-turned his head with exaggerated nonchalance. The crow-like figure was alone on the avenue. Perhaps he was just a lone walker – parks could be the most desolate places in the world.
‘Mmmmm. Outwardly, perhaps, but what about the equation?’
Always the equation. Vodka in the Soviet Union versus drugs in the West. Scarcities versus surfeits. Spartan flats versus chic apartments. Full employment versus unemployment ….
Dalby who, like most defectors, tilted the equation in Moscow’s favour, said: ‘Here a police state, in the West freedom. Such freedom. A g …gutter press that incites violence, encourages promiscuity. A political system hellbent on self-destruction. I sometimes wonder which is the CIA’s greatest enemy, the KGB or Congress.’
When they reached the birch trees and the silence made conspirators out of them Dalby said: ‘All right, out with it. Kreiber?’
‘He looked so … puzzled. Even in death he seemed to be saying, “Now what the hell was that about?”’
‘I should imagine everyone thinks that before they meet their maker, defectors, priests, gangsters.’
‘I doubt whether they ask themselves if they’ve wasted their lives by taking a wrong turning when they were too young to understand.’
‘Don’t they? I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’ Ice-sheathed twigs slithered together like busy knitting-needles. ‘But that isn’t what you really want to talk about, is it?’
Calder said abruptly: ‘Do you figure it was an accident?’
‘Kreiber? Why not? He had enough alcohol in his blood to fuel an Ilyushin from Moscow to Berlin.’
‘He’d been fishing from that hole in the ice all winter. He wasn’t likely to fall in.’
‘People can die falling over their own doorsteps.’
‘There was blood on the rim of the hole.’
‘Sharp stuff ice, especially in minus twenty degrees.’
‘And bruising on one arm.’
‘You don’t fall down a well without touching the sides.’
‘It must be wonderful to be so sure of everything.’
‘Why doubt? We’re here. There’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it. Let’s enjoy our elected way of life.’ Dalby tore a strip of paper bark from a thin tree and began to shred it.
‘And Maclean?’
‘Cancer, surely. ‘Dalby threw tatters of bark into the air. ‘Ah, you mean euthanasia. A possibility,’ he admitted. ‘Compassionate people, the Russians. Just listen to their choirs.’
‘And Blunt?’
‘Poor old Anthony? He hadn’t even defected.’
‘He was blown,’ Calder pointed out. ‘And he died within three weeks of Maclean.’
The American newspapers, part of the material analysed by Calder and his staff at the Institute, had given a lot of prominence to Blunt’s death. Queen’s art adviser and Establishment figurehead, he had been exposed in 1979 as a one-time Soviet agent and died four years later.
‘Aren’t we being a little m … melodramatic? Paranoic even? Blunt died from a heart attack.’
‘They can be faked.’
‘True.’ Dalby knew about such things. ‘An injection of potassium chloride, usually into the main vein in the penis where it isn’t readily detectable. It alters the ionic balance between potassium and sodium and the heart febrillates. If the body isn’t found for five or six hours the potassium chloride isn’t detectable. But who would want to kill poor old Anthony? He wasn’t of any use to anyone any more.’
Somewhere a twig cracked.
‘I guess I’m getting morbid,’ Calder said.
‘Positively funereal. Anthony wasn’t neurotic. He would have been tickled pink to think that he was buried on Spy Wednesday – the Wednesday before Good Friday when Judas asked how much he would be paid to betray Jesus.’
‘Okay, I’m stupid.’
‘Not stupid, you just listen too much to Institute gossip.’
‘You’re right, let’s get out of here. I’m purged.’
As they emerged from the wood the figure on the avenue turned abruptly and began whistling to an invisible dog.
When they reached the fountain Calder asked: ‘Why weren’t you at the funeral?’
