“Find her, Adrian. And when you have, I’ll do all I can to make sure you have free rein with this Bykov. But not until you’ve found the woman. Bargain?”
Adrian gritted his teeth in frustration.
It was the same instruction he’d received from the damn Russian, Sergei Limov, back in Helsinki in January. Find the Russian colonel. But the bitch had disappeared.
“Thank you,” he managed to say. “I appreciate it.”
“Now let me show you this monument,” Parkinson said. “It really is very intriguing.” He stepped with surprising agility over the stile.
A
NNA RESNIKOV WALKED DOWN
the slight hill from the house, holding her son’s hand. They paused outside the wrought iron fence at the rear of the house, behind which the tall palm tree in the garden dropped its dead fronds into the road. The boy stooped to look at something on the ground. A trail of ants were crawling up into a hole in the wall like a party of sherpas.
They often stopped here on the two-hundred-yard journey to the square, where the boy’s crèche was situated. The place held some magic, some child’s attraction that was important to him. She let go of his hand and watched him as he squatted and stared at something in the road. Sometimes he picked up a bug that crawled slowly across their path, or just watched the ants that lived under the holm oak that had split its way up through the tarmac. She liked his curiosity. It echoed her own and his father Finn’s. And it made her even more watchful herself.
It was her birthday. She was thirty-eight. Finn would have been fifty, she thought, and she smiled at the memory of her grandmother once chiding her to find a man her own age.
She saw her life thus far as being one of continual adaptation—most of it forced on her by external circumstances. First there’d been adapting to the lies of the Soviet state, before the Wall fell in 1989, when she was nineteen years old. Then there’d been her long efforts to fit in with her father’s demands. A senior SVR officer, he had run the Russians’ Syrian station in Damascus until his retirement. He’d wanted her to be like her mother, a quiet, compliant wife to a KGB careerist.
But rather than obey him, she had decided to outdo him; to beat him at his own game. And she’d succeeded in that. Only to discover that she’d become a successful SVR officer for the wrong reasons—with an eye to her father’s approval, that was all. That was part of life’s trickery.
And then there’d been Finn himself, the greatest act of adaptation of them all. First she was sent to spy on him. She’d first informed on him, then attempted to undermine his reasons for being in Moscow. Then, in the cause of Russia, she’d seduced him. And finally she’d fallen in love with him. Another of life’s humourous twists.
But at the same moment as her professional liaison with Finn had developed into a personal one, she’d discovered that the man she’d once tried to impress, her father, was procuring girls as young as eight years old for the KGB, to be drugged and used as sexual favours for the entrapment of a Swiss banker. That was the truth about her father and about the organisation for which they both worked.
Finn had been her way out, as well as her lover. So she’d adapted to exile—and to constant fear of the KGB, which would never forget her treason.
And now she and her son had been in the village for just over a year, under false identities supplied by the French. She was becoming happy, she realised. She was finally beginning to feel that this little village was their home. And she knew she was dropping her guard, bit by bit.
At first, French security personnel had taken a house in the village too, while her safety was established. The villagers said nothing—they rarely commented outside their homes on the affairs of others. But she was aware that they connected her arrival with the two men and a woman from Paris. Her three guardians were unmistakably police or security officers. The mayor, at least, would have been told of the reason for their presence, and he was a drinker and a gossip.
Anna might now have a French name, and she spoke the language well, but she was clearly a foreigner, and to the villagers, she was someone special.
She felt lighthearted this morning, as she had done, she suddenly realised, for weeks now. The weight of the past was beginning to lift, and her grief at Finn’s death was more of a numbing sensation than the all-consuming pain it had once been. She felt free to expand again—in herself and from this place of safety—more free than she had felt for a long while.
When her French guardians had finally packed up and gone, assuring her that she and the boy were now safe, they had left her with emergency numbers. Then someone from the DGSE in Paris would come to visit once a month. There was always competition for the job, for a trip to the south certainly, but mainly to spend time in her company. She was highly regarded for her expertise and experience in matters of espionage, but she was also admired by her French handlers for her cool beauty and her bravery.
Her controllers in Paris—and now she herself—believed that the secret of her identity and location was solid, and for her the monthly meeting had developed into a formality that became an irksome reminder that all was not right and never would be.
It was true, there had been one or two bad moments, like the incident at the village fete the summer before, just after they’d arrived. It was the only time of year when the village filled up with outsiders. A fairground had been set up in the square, and much was drunk late into the night. There was dancing, and two men had approached her, first flirtatiously, then aggressively, finally insisting she dance with them. But they were drunk, and when they ignored her refusals and began to manhandle her, she had instinctively laid them out on the grass, one with a blow to the side of the head, the other with a broken arm and leg.
The villagers had looked at her with new eyes after that. She became respected, but also an object of greater suspicion. She had made a few friends that night, but others wondered, Who was this foreign woman who could overcome two men and knock them cold? It was also noted that the police who arrived to arrest the men were overrespectful towards her.
But in general it had been an increasingly peaceful year. She felt stronger and more ready to take whatever steps life held in store for her now. She was beginning to understand that, in order to control her life, she needed to stop trying to control it, as she always had.
Her life was small, with the days centred around her son. She had named him Finn, Little Finn, as she and Willy referred to him. The villagers noted that she spent a great deal of time with him, that she never had visitors, except for the older man she called Willy, and that she was as independent and capable of fending for herself as anyone. A quiet admiration for her grew in the village. She never asked anyone for anything, never intruded into their lives, and slowly, her quiet, dignified calm drew the people of Fougieres out of their natural reticence with strangers to the extent that they greeted her and Little Finn in the street. She hadn’t been invited inside their homes, but as another exile like herself—the gay owner of the village’s bed and breakfast—had told her, it took at least a quarter of a century to become a local here.
She and Little Finn continued on their way, past the wrought iron fence and down the lane.
The French children were not yet back at the village school at the end of August, but the crèche was hardly a school and stayed open irregularly. Today it was open, however, and its rules were negligible. It didn’t matter how late they were, or if Little Finn went at all. But today Anna was going to meet Willy for lunch on her birthday. Willy had been her only regular contact in the two years since Finn’s death, apart from the sporadic meetings with the officers from French security. But today she needed to speak to him alone, with her head clear of her son’s needs.
Anna and Little Finn walked on, past the head-high shutters of the old, huddled homes, closed as usual against the heat, but more, she believed, against prying eyes, and so that those inside could pry without being seen. These rural French were private, she thought, almost like the Sicilians; friendly enough in a monosyllabic sort of way when you encountered them, but unforthcoming, at any rate to anyone outside their own history.
The village was empty as usual. It was only ever full during the fetes, or when the grapes were being brought in, which would be soon. There were few visitors except for the occasional car full of tourists who had taken a blind diversion to see something they would otherwise have missed on the main roads. There was also the infrequent visitor to the gay bed and breakfast establishment at the manor house, where Jonny, the other exile, and his French boyfriend ran an Internet-only lodging. The two of them had become as close friends as she had anywhere. Everything—life, family, work, and friends—was either dead or left behind in Russia.
She recalled that in the years leading up to her defection, her chief worry had been that Finn would leave her as soon as she committed herself to coming over. It had never occurred to her that he would die. That wasn’t something people in life-threatening occupations gave much thought to.
They stopped outside the bed and breakfast, and she saw Jonny and his boyfriend dipping in and out of the pool. “Come and have a glass of wine,” Jonny shouted when he spotted her.
“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning,” she retorted, laughing.
“Exactly,” he said.
She smiled without replying. They were unlikely friends, she thought, but she trusted them after a year. They were outsiders in the village like her, and with a cosmopolitan flair. It was the only house other than her own that she had entered in the village. They accepted her and Little Finn without asking questions.
“No visitors this week?” she called. It was a routine question.
“Two Danish lesbians just booked in for tonight.” Jonny relished shouting the information across the village square.
She and Little Finn walked on.
It was a good place to be hidden, she thought. It was a good place, end of story. But most importantly, anyone new—and any strange car—would be noted down by someone. She felt the safety of being watched by the eyes of the village. And little from outside disturbed the slow torpor, apart from the library van on a Thursday and the baker’s van on a Friday.
Even the hunters who visited in the winter months and surrounded the village on misty mornings all came from the surrounding villages, and she’d learned to identify them all in their first winter. They met at 5:00 a.m. in the “bar,” a room owned by the mayor that was a bar only in name. Then they dispersed into the fog after a few
coupes de vin
, before it was light, and returned late in the afternoon, often with the carcass of a boar, which was butchered in the village and shared out. And then the bar was full until they all drove home with varying degrees of recklessness across the fields.
Anna and Little Finn reached the
mairie
, which was where the crèche had its home. She led him inside under the drooping tricolour at the entrance to find a room full of children on the floor, drawing, talking, shouting. The two women who ran the crèche were from the city, Marseille, and they were happier than the children to be living in this rural paradise.
“Madame Paulin,” she was greeted by the younger of the two teachers. “Bonjour, Charlot.” She smiled at Finn.
Finn didn’t yet know there were two languages, only that he spoke different words for the same things at home and at school; and that sometimes his mother called him Charlot and sometimes Finn. He didn’t seem to mind.
“A quinze heures, c’est bon?” the teacher said to Anna.
“Oui. Et merci.” Three o’clock would be fine. She’d be back long before then.
“De rien,” the teacher said, and smiled. “Bonne journée.”
Anna let go of the boy’s hand. He didn’t look back, safe in the company of the women and his friends.
She returned to the house around the path through the fields. M. Barry was cranking the portable sawmill on the other side of the street from her house. There was a pile of tree limbs and bits of broken fencing, ready to be cut.
She’d learned that M. Barry, like the others, prepared long in advance for the winter. It was cold up here, not like in Russia, but a damp, chilling cold that entered the bones.
She wished him good morning, and he raised his cap; same clothes, same cap, summer and winter. He was a handsome man in his sixties, with a wife who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. He’d told Anna once that he had never been beyond Uzès, seven miles away, in his entire life. In a year, she had come to enjoy her fleeting conversations with him out by the sawmill, conversations that went beyond the natural reserve of the other villagers. He had quietly assumed a paternalistic role of looking out for her.
“You need anything?” he enquired. “I’ll have some wood soon, but anything else?”
“I don’t think so. Thank you for asking.”
He was kind to her and her son. He gave them homemade cheese sometimes, or sausage he made himself from one of the wild boars shot in winter.
“It’s hot now, but soon it will be autumn,” he said, as if to explain the woodpile. But she thought he looked awkward, more so than usual.
He paused, raised his cap, and scratched his head. He seemed to be thinking of what to say, not like his normal, relaxed manner at all.
“You are not too lonely?” he suddenly asked.
This was out of character—too intimate, she felt. But there was something about his face that told her he was serious.
“No, not lonely,” she replied and smiled.
“Never any visitors,” he remarked, again pricking her into wariness. It was not the type of conversation they had. There was never anything personal. Not like this at all. But equally she felt drawn to reply honestly, without fear.
“No. Never any visitors,” she replied. “Apart from Willy.”
Willy and M. Barry had struck up a joint friendship, in the unspoken cause of her protection.
M. Barry paused and lifted his cap again and wiped the sweat from his head with the back of the same hand. Then he took out a tobacco pouch and began to roll a cigarette. As he did so, he spoke, as if he needed something to do in order to say what he was going to say.
“Not the man on Saturday, then,” he said.
She immediately froze. “Saturday?”
“He came to your gates. No farther. I thought you must be out walking.”
“Did he ring the bell, then?
“No. No, he didn’t.”
He put the cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and picked up the crank handle for the sawmill.
She was silent, her mind racing through the events of Saturday, looking for something out of the ordinary.