Document Z (32 page)

‘It's not possible,' said Howley.

‘Why?'

‘He's Soviet property.'

‘He is my property. They hate him at the embassy and they might starve him. If you refuse to fetch him, I will do it myself.' ‘Vladimir, please don't.'

‘I will. Get me a car.'

Gilmour offered a cigarette. ‘If you leave this safe house, that will be it for all our jobs.'

‘That's right,' Howley said. ‘We've strict instructions to keep you safe.' He paused. ‘Now listen, the rumour in Canberra is that the Soviet embassy is about to withdraw. Molotov is furious. At the very least, they're chucking us out of Moscow. So if Molotov doesn't order your colleagues home, we'll be doing it for him. That will be the best time to collect Jack.'

‘What if they shoot him?'

‘Why would they bother to do that?'

‘They will have orders to burn everything. Get rid of everything.'

‘I've never heard of anyone scuttling a dog.'

‘Hitler.'

‘What?'

‘It's always a man's dog who wears his mistakes. I should have brought him with me. Let's go and get him. Let's get him because he's important to me.'

Howley shifted on his feet. ‘I know, Vladimir. I promise, in good time we will retrieve him.'

That afternoon, he made sure he was more uncooperative than usual in their debriefing. The first thing on the agenda was whether he knew a communist named Ted Hill. He said he didn't. Then he said he'd met him twice, socially, though perhaps that was a man named Hall.

He demanded to know why they were interviewing him and his wife separately. Were they comparing their testimonies, attempting to trip them up?

‘Of course not, Vladimir.'

‘You're afraid that I'll tell you lies.'

‘No. What reason would you have to do that?'

‘None at all.'

‘That's right.'

Howley was good at the game. His tone hardly wavered, no matter how irksome the mood of their conference became.

But something shifted that evening. Suddenly, he was being asked if he wanted to see Doctor Bialoguski. He put down the dessertspoon he was holding and looked across the table to Evdokia. She had a look that said, please.

‘Alright,' he said.

Leo Carter drove him in one car while Howley went ahead in another. It was a twenty-minute trip into Sydney. When they came up on the major intersections, Carter dialled the volume lower and picked up the speaker of the short-range radio clipped to the dashboard in case Howley had something to say.

They took the Bridge and bore left.

Ascending the stairs at Cliveden, Petrov heard music coming from Bialoguski's flat. He thought at first that it was a record player or a wireless. When they knocked at the door and the noise stopped, he realised it had been the doctor playing violin. Petrov had never heard him play before. All this time, the doctor's highest passion, a member of the city's orchestra, and Petrov had never sat down to hear his friend play. Perhaps he was off balance tonight, but this fact, sharp and new, upset him.

‘Ah!' said Bialoguski, inviting the group into his flat. ‘Here is someone famous.'

They got to drinking straightaway. Bialoguski seemed to know Leo Carter already, or at least no time was taken for an introduction.

The doctor was in a good mood. There was small talk, men's talk. They discussed Sydney's left wing, their pitiful reaction to events. Unimaginative, the way they mimicked the Soviet line. Petrov asked after the boxes in the corner.

‘Lady Poynter is returning,' Bialoguski grumbled. ‘That, or news of my sacking from the orchestra finally reached London. I'm to vacate by the end of the month.'

The Russian joked that Bialoguski should move to the safe house. If certain communists found out how he'd helped him, the doctor might need the protection.

‘That's right,' said Bialoguski. ‘That's right.'

Suddenly, and, Petrov thought, quite awkwardly, both the Security men excused themselves, Howley muttering something about checking the cars. They left quickly, their drinks unfinished. Carter caught the doctor's eye and looked instructively at his watch.

Petrov turned to Bialoguski. The doctor looked at him, fetched a whisky bottle, poured them both a glass.

‘They've gone because I need a word,' he said.

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. Let me preface this by saying it is my certain belief that you know what is coming. I wonder, in fact, if it really needs declaring at all.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘It's been my desire, of course, to confide in you for a long time. That has not been possible, but you understand how it works.'

‘What is this?'

‘I must tell you, Vladimir, that I am an agent of the Security organisation. It is my belief that you have known this for some time.'

Blank.

‘I have been a paid agent for many years,' the doctor continued. ‘Since before we met—an important point, I think. Once we became friends, of course, I stopped the rest of my work to concentrate on helping you to remain in Australia. I don't think our friendship should suffer as a result of what I'm telling you. I believe you were aware of who I was; however, the situation dictated that our circumstances remained unspoken. Of course, it was not my job to encourage you. Only to be there if you made your choice. I don't think any of this is news. Nothing that would surprise you. I'm sure you knew or heavily suspected. It would have been no good putting questions or making accusations. What purpose could have been served? So we kept the fact outside ourselves, you and I, a secret that stayed in the background. I believe there were many things your suspicions caused you to hide from me. There should be no need of that now. Please understand also that Security and I were never the same thing. Out of friendship for you, I kept things from them. The women, for example, the escapades with girls—entirely our own affair. Never reported. What would have been the point? Do you understand? That was private and it will remain so, between you and me. The things that brought us together were unfortunate. We should remind ourselves that you were MVD and that officially I was not aware of that also. But now it is all in the open. Yes? And I hope our friendship will grow stronger now that all this secrecy is gone.'

The doctor finished his whisky. ‘You are very quiet, Vladimir,' he said.

Bastards.

He drank some whisky and looked past Bialoguski to the kitchen, at nothing. He felt beaten, like a player who, outmatched in the final moment, looks for a rule that has been broken only to find, gallingly, that none has.

He reached forward, performing the only act that seemed to make sense, which was to shake the doctor's hand. To his mind, Bialoguski's blow couldn't have been better delivered, softened by those palatable fibs supposed to allow his friend, Vladimir, to save face. Silently, the Russian finished his whisky and poured another, returning the bottle to the doctor's side of the coffee table but not refilling his glass. ‘Of course we are friends,' he said. And that was all.

The Security men returned. As they sat, the doctor told Howley to advise Colonel Spry that he and their prize asset remained friends, true roles out in the open. Howley nodded in a diminished way, lighting a cigarette. They sat quietly until Leo Carter brought up the topic of the federal election, which was locked up, he said, at forty-nine points apiece. They discussed it for a time. Bialoguski joked that perhaps Vladimir ought be issued with a vote. Big laughs. Nervous laughs. They were trying to bring him back, draw him in again, resurrect his ability to trust.

There was a section of road on the return trip that hugged the coastline, bringing the cars to the black edge of the sea. It wasn't a long stretch, climbing slightly uphill for perhaps only a hundred metres. There was a point, however, where the road curved, bracing against the cliff that stood over its dark height. Here, when road conditions were right, travellers could feel the land beneath them dissolving.

He would need to go over everything. The last three years were suddenly a fresh and opaque concern. Too early, he supposed, for evaluations. It was time for considered thought and the replaying of events in his mind. Hard to believe. He'd always been a popular man in Moscow; fair with the privileges he'd had; respected as a man and for his work. Friends he'd had then—men who put his interests on equal footing with their own. Pronin, one of his clerks. Unbelievably slender, as if horribly underfed. Fishing partners for years, boating on the River Moskva, venturing to discuss many things, even politics and systems of rule. Pronin was an amateur technologist, a scientist of a type. He admired Petrov's Omega, jesting cash amounts and material inducements to buy it. In Sweden, Petrov bought him one, a newer and more stylish model with a date and day function built in. When he returned to Moscow, Pronin wasn't there to receive it—he had been promoted to head of cypher for the ekrano-plan project on the Caspian Sea: huge aircraft prototyped to fly mind-boggling distances over water at an altitude of one metre or less. Petrov sent the watch in the mail—an ambitious idea at best—and it was robbed in transit. Pronin wrote, saying, never mind. They never saw each other again. Strange when friends vanish from your life and you do not give them a second thought.

Leo Carter killed the engine and turned towards him.

‘Now that your wife is here,' he said quietly, ‘the director thought we should tell you. The girls. No one has any reason to dredge that up. It's a secret between us. Does that suit? Only the case officers saw the details. We're not paying it any mind, and you can be trusting. There'll be none of it that sees the light.'

She was sleeping crossways on the bed, the solid expanse of her back facing upwards, her sides expanding with each breath. The room was only halfway dark, with the curtains open and the twin windows fed by streetlight. He stripped down to his underwear and sat across from her in a bedside chair.

In the far corner was the safe. A black, short-legged structure with an antique appearance, holding a shade under five thousand pounds.

He was thinking that he had never been cut out for this. At one stage he'd thought he was, but obviously he'd never been. These other men—the likes of Kislitsyn, the doctor, the Australians—they were an alien breed in comparison, a peculiar subset of humanity he had thought he could mix with, but—judging by where he now found himself, in this room—he could not. Embarrassing. He had been the world's worst spy: a dupe and a traitor. His only solace was that he hadn't asked for it. They had given it to him, the mantle, insisted that he take it on. Well, they regretted that now. So did he. He wondered what part of this room he should put down to his incompetence rather than Lifanov's and Generalov's greed? What was it a question of? He didn't know.

He looked down at her body and was thankful she was there. For a moment he regretted everything. Every part of what had been done. The room was a sorrow; not of his own making, but of a cohesion of personalities and forces, and who could pick one event or decision as the cause? Strange to be these people in this room. Odd to be doubled in the news papers and on the radio and to be those people and these at the same time.

No special thing to feel this way about history. He had never been a collector of mementos or keepsakes—something in the impulse struck him as politically unsound. His material connections were a suitcase of clothes, a comb, a toothbrush, some spectacles, the pair of shoes he'd just removed, a key. Sum total. He saw this as a good thing. Not to be weighted by the past. He had no need of reminders to know the wretchedness at the heart of things.

Desolate views. He looked from the window, the streetlights' electrical glow more stark and less inviting in some spots than in others. There was a jetty or some other fixed object by the water, putting an arc of yellow light onto the sea, picking out whitecaps, barely.

He wanted to vanish now. Escape and use his ransom to buy somewhere to live a life. Go alone. Find an isolated place to reside without ever being found. Such a big country. So many places just like that. Queensland, maybe. Tasmania. Buy a small farm, blocked by sea frontage or a river, some wily route by which to flee should anyone from Special Tasks manage to track him down.

Not possible, of course. He was coming to realise how deeply imprisoned he was by the freedom that he'd bought.

A whole country that knew his face. How long could a man like that hide? He could picture the brute emerging from the everyday haze, a stranger at first like any stranger, a well-dressed insurance seller or a tradesman in overalls, approaching to the sound of cicadas, the same smells in the air, everything regular, nothing amiss—which, he supposed, it wouldn't be—knocking at the door, looking for sales, asking for work, regular, regular. The only plan you could have was to bargain for the pistol and not the pick.

The unfortunate thing about the future is that it cannot be taken back.

He opened the window slightly and Evdokia stirred. He looked down, hoping she would not wake. The bedsheets were white, like hospital clothes, dim in the darkness. He stood and held his breath. He didn't want his wife to become a conscious presence in the room, discomforted by the idea of her seeing him.

Did Gouzenko have a family? Had he taken them with him or left them behind? If they met each other in South America or Africa, two defectors on safe and neutral ground, would friendship be possible? Would they remind each other, awfully, of what their choices had done?

Tamara looked as he imagined Evdokia might have at fifteen. Curls and a movement of body that was athletic and self-assured. He'd taught her in one afternoon how to ride the bicycle her sister brought her from Sweden. They had gone to a square of grass in a park and she had ridden, just clear of his hands, in circles. That was the only time he could think of when they had ever been alone together. Otherwise, he only saw her with Evdokia, the two sisters, Moscow cosmopolitans making the best of their advantages, pretending to be Americans, not quite convincing when they were discussing merit systems in the Komsomol and which play to see of Brecht's.