Document Z (14 page)

‘That's good.' Petrov seemed in a buoyant mood. ‘But don't stick out too far. Don't attract too much attention.'

‘From Security, you mean?'

Petrov shrugged.

‘I've been wanting to ask you.' Bialoguski lowered his voice. ‘What is your embassy's opinion of the Security here? What do you think of their capabilities?'

The Russian spoke without pause. ‘Getting better. They trace our movements now. Noticeable pressure at times. I think they have hired more or smarter men. Of course, it's all of no consequence. They are wasting their time.'

Bialoguski nodded. Petrov fell silent when their two steaks arrived. Afterwards they drank coffee, and only when Bialo-guski had asked for their bill and was walking to the register to settle did he remember that he'd spent the last of his cash that afternoon on petrol.

‘Eliska,' he said, embarrassed, ‘I've made a mistake. I haven't brought my chequebook.' This was Security's bloody fault. If they paid him a retainer in advance, like they should do, he'd have money in his wallet right now. ‘I thought I had cash, but I don't,' he went on. ‘Can I be inconvenient and pay tomorrow?'

The woman looked at him. ‘I don't see why not, Doctor,' she said. ‘But I'll need to ask.'

‘Thank you,' he said, and waited uncomfortably while she sought the Adria's manager, whom he knew, which made the situation more humiliating, even though the man didn't hesitate to give him credit.

As they got into Bialoguski's car, Petrov said, ‘Let's find some company tonight.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘There are some girls I met the other day.'

‘Whores?'

Petrov laughed. ‘What's put you in a mood? No, they're just some girls. Drive me over to collect them. I've been telling them about your flat.'

Bialoguski started the car. Perhaps the flat was a good idea; going anywhere else would require money.

The address was a crumbling terrace off the far end of Darlin-ghurst Road. It looked on the verge of collapse, a dozen or more living there, the smell of cooking baked into the walls. Bialoguski stood on the doorstep while the Russian went inside. Two girls came downstairs, looking only half as bad as the doctor thought they might. Neither were New, which relaxed him. They'd been drinking, he saw. One asked his name and smiled, and he knew then they weren't professional girls at all.

At Cliveden, he played host and fixed drinks. Petrov seemed most interested in Dorothy, a largish woman who said she was a clerk for the Chamber of Manufactures. Bialoguski sat with Lucinda on the sofa. She told him he must be in a lucrative business if he could afford a place like this.

‘I'm in metals,' he said.

She asked what he thought about flying saucers. She thought they were Soviet aircraft, cycloid planes flying at high altitudes. Experimental, atomic probably, the reason for the disc shape. He told her he wasn't sure Soviet science had reached such heights. They watched in silence as Dorothy and Petrov left the room.

‘Outside sources, then,' said Lucinda.

‘Hmm?'

‘The alternative saucer theory. Sources outside this planet.' ‘

This is the choice we face? The Soviets or outer space.'

‘Weather balloons also, but you'd be mad to believe that. I think the outer space theory is an understandable reaction. Mysterious third parties. We're looking for someone to save us.'

They opened a champagne bottle. He invited Lucinda to stand on the small balcony with all the lights off so there was no dampener on the view. Dark ocean mass and a carpet of lights. Lucinda said she'd come from Adelaide three months ago. This was her first view of the city from any height. He felt like volunteering something, some pristine fact. He told her about his marriage, a failed holiday in New Guinea he'd had with his wife, and the coming divorce. He felt himself performing, which was disappointing, because this wasn't an act but the truth. She seemed to be sympathetic. They watched boats moving as lights on the harbour.

‘Your friend's a strange man,' Lucinda said.

‘Oh?'

‘He tells Dorothy he's Polish. Later he's Bulgarian. He says he's a bonds trader, then an importer and exporter of antiques.'

‘He said he was Polish? He may have been drunk.'

They heard giggling from the guest room.

A few hours later he drove both women home. The front door to the terrace was wide open and unattended, light spilling onto the street. He suggested checking the house for intruders, but Lucinda said the door often willed itself ajar, some broken impulse in the lock.

‘Goodnight,' she said.

Outside Lydia's flat, he was shocked to find an Essex tourer against the kerb. He stood in the dark, watching. He knew the car's plate. It was driven by Claude Watts, a young man from the club. There was no light on in the flat. Why Lydia was doing this he didn't know. He considered breaking his way through her front door, confronting them; the lover, jilted. But that would be Claude's win. Best to challenge the bitch alone.

Gleaming wounds. He found a rock and gashed the paintwork on the tourer, a coarse squeaking and a long mark, pale in the lamplight, on the driver's side. He kept the rock in his hand and lowered his Holden's window and drove past the car and released the rock. Loud crack on the windshield.

10

V
asili Sanko gave the horn a half-toot, bringing the staff running. They stood on the lawn at the front to watch the ambassador arrive. Nikolai Ivanovich Generalov wanted his door opened. He got out of the car and looked into the waiting faces. He was larger than Lifanov, with a definite military build, silver hair over his ears and a receding scalp-line. Generalova was more solid, taller than her husband and broader. Not too awful a dress, Evdokia thought, for someone straight from Russia.

The new ambassador took a tour. The grounds first, the tennis court and orchard. Evdokia went to her desk to work and so she was there when he came in.

‘Ah. My office?' he said.

‘That's right,' answered Kovaliev, behind him.

The men waited, without a word of greeting, while Evdokia retrieved the official envelope in which the key had been sealed. Generalov broke it open, and the two men went inside. She stayed in the antechamber listening to Kovaliev point things out—the telephone, the lighting board, the combination cabinet with the embassy's top-secret files.

‘Evdokia Alexeyevna,' said Generalov's voice. She went into the room to find his hand pointing at a vase. ‘These flowers have died,' he said. She awaited further instruction until she realised he simply wanted them removed. Kovaliev was staring at her. She collected the vase and was on her way out when the ambassador spoke again.

‘Comrade, various reports of your behaviour have found their way to Moscow. I will warn you once. I am not a man as gracious and lenient as Lifanov. You will not be permitted to be a disruptive influence on my staff.'

She glanced at the commercial attaché. ‘Ambassador,' she said, ‘I can assure you that any reports you have read have been slander. A campaign has been made against my husband and me, the result of petty jealousies.'

‘Yes, you remind me,' he said. ‘Please tell your husband that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has ordered that he no longer bring his dog into the precincts of our embassy.'

She poured the flower water down a drain, feeling angry and a little panicked. As it happened, there was little time to marvel at the ambassador's words. When she came back to the antechamber, the unimaginable had occurred. Kovaliev was standing with the embassy's external phone in his hand. ‘Evdokia,' he said. ‘Talk to this man.'

She picked up. It was a journalist from the
Argus
wanting to confirm that Stalin had died.

Generalov became sickly pale. After the
Argus
came the
Sydney
Morning Herald
, the
Courier
, and the ABC. They didn't know what to tell them.

The senior staff huddled around Sanko who was trying to repair the broken radio set that received news broadcasts from Moscow.

2CA were knocking at the embassy's front door. ‘We're not sure,' Evdokia told them. ‘Please go away.'

The rest of the embassy got word of the happenings, the children, in quiet awe, creeping along the corridors of the ground floor, looking for out-of-the-way vantage points where the cross-legged might disappear.

‘We can call Auckland,' she suggested to the ambassador. ‘We can ask the legation in New Zealand.'

The operator booked the trunk call for quarter past the hour. Each time the ringer went it was a journalist not an operator. Eventually, it was Sanko's radio that brought the Soviet outpost their news.

The Supreme Leader had passed at 11.32 p.m. Moscow time. Stroke.

Generalov agreed to speak first with the ABC. He gave a heartfelt eulogy, saying that he spoke for a shocked nation, a nation that had lost a great revolutionary equal to Lenin and Kirov.

The ABC journalist wanted to know who would lead the USSR now. The Party would decide, said the ambassador, but the people, as ever, would continue to be well served.

What had been Stalin's legacy? The Generalissimo's bringing about of the Soviet Union as a world power. His showing of the way forward after Marx and Lenin.

Would the ruler's death encourage dissidents in the USSR to find a greater voice? No one was opposed to the regime. Why would they be when it took care of their every need?

Was Stalin the greatest dictator the world would ever see? The Generalissimo opposed dictatorial rule. He was a man for the people, even if the west could not bring itself to understand this fact.

Were they sure he died of natural causes?

Generalov permitted no further questions. He created a statement, which Evdokia read aloud to the newspapers, and made no further comment. On Pakhomov's advice, the only other journalist given audience with the ambassador was Rupert Lockwood for the
Tribune
, whose enquiries were bound to be less embarrassing.

Late that night, Evdokia left for home. On her way out, Generalov gave her an unexpected appreciative nod. She called in at the embassy kitchen and collected two servings from a hot soup that was sitting on the stove.

At Lockyer Street, Volodya was on the back porch, smoking. ‘Well,' he said.

‘Stalin dies.'

‘Seventy-four years old.'

‘Is this a good thing? I don't know.'

‘Chaos, you think?'

‘Possibly.'

‘Here we have a power vacuum with yet-to-be-felt destabilising effects.'

‘If they say he is dead tonight, probably he has been dead for weeks.'

‘There will be a succession plan in place.'

‘Several plans, I would think.'

‘Now moves the mercury of terror.'

‘Hmm.'

‘Did you know that Karasev has a portrait of Molotov in his living room?'

‘Yes, but it is not his. The house rents it from the embassy.' She transferred the soup into bowls. They sat in the lounge room by the wireless, listening to 2CA report the news.

Bialoguski lost his job with the orchestra. He should have seen it coming. It was the fault of the ABC, who, with the Musicians' Union, had decided that nine in ten members of the symphony be Australian-born and not New. It didn't matter that he was a naturalised subject, only that once he'd been a Pole. The unfairness grated. He suspected that Goossens was behind the move. They'd booted six foreign players but kept nine, which meant they'd conspired to put him out. Had he got wind of it earlier, he could have mounted some kind of defence.

He wrote Goossens a death threat that he knew he wouldn't send, typing it out on the Poynters' Hanimex, wearing gloves and redrafting twice.

On the telephone, Lydia refused his dinner invitation. ‘This was a busy week, Michael. Perhaps another time.'

‘Are you sure?' he demanded. ‘Are you certain that busyness is your best excuse?'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘You're not a very good liar, Lydia. It's not an appealing quality, being easy to see straight through.'

He jammed the phone into its cradle, and then rang Howley in a mood. The man's voice was distant, disappearing into static. Noises and scratches meant only one thing.

‘This handset is bugged,' Bialoguski said.

‘Come again,' said the Security man.

‘This line or this handset. Your voice is vanishing in the feedback.'

A pause. ‘Well, it's not us,' said Howley. ‘You're our agent. If we'd bugged you, we'd say.'

Bialoguski thought hard. ‘What if there are two files?' he said. ‘In one file I'm Crane, but in the other I'm a regular com-munist, Michael Bialoguski. My cover but a real file.'

‘We don't double-keep.'

‘Are you sure? Perhaps a colleague hears about me, starts a file on me, a communist falling under notice. What stops him tapping my phone and ordering surveillance?'

‘Are you under surveillance?'

‘Men follow me all the time.'

‘Is that a joke?'

‘What's it called? Banter.'

The voice was strained. ‘Followed or not?'

‘Once or twice.'

‘Where?'

‘From my practice, certainly. Last month perhaps. There's a feeling you have, an awareness. You think, what do I look like? Where do I think I'm going? What does my left arm usually do as I walk—in fact, how do I walk at all?'

‘Did you see who it was?'

‘I didn't want to look in case he disappeared.'

The voice slowed. ‘Well, it wasn't us. The Russians, maybe. Might have been the communists too.'

‘They follow people, the communists?'

‘The ones who are serious about things, yes.'

The doctor tried to picture the room where Howley was.