Making Enemies (25 page)

‘Now you’re back in London, do you see much of Monty?’ he asked me later over dinner.

‘Not as much as I’d expected,’ I said. ‘He’s always busy.’

‘You don’t know what he’s doing in Cambridge, then?’

‘I had no idea he was in Cambridge.’

‘I’ve seen him a few times over recent weeks. Not to speak to. I thought you might know what he’s up to.’

‘He never talks about his job.’

I realized my mistake the moment I opened my mouth. My father had wanted my opinion on something that was clearly troubling him (why else would he have brought the subject up?), and, without thinking, out of perverse habit, I had rejected him. His question had held the promise of an intimacy that was now as remote as ever. I had been both hasty and foolish. The moment had come and gone and I was unable to do anything about it.

The conversation after that was desultory and pointless. We both knew an opportunity had been lost and neither knew how to make a new approach. We kept away from any topic of substance.

As I walked back to Strutton Ground, I was unable to clear my mind of my father’s question about Monty. Why was he interested in him? He never had been before.

Monty was in Cambridge, his remark told me, for days at a time, possibly longer. No wonder I hadn’t seen much of him since my return to London. What was he doing there? Was he watching my father? Was he working on the basis that what Krasov had told me was true? I felt a sudden pang of guilt. I had assumed that Monty had accepted my verdict on that long night’s meeting and I had interpreted his reluctance to talk about it and his absence from my life as confirmation. Now I was faced with the awful thought that perhaps my assumptions were wholly wrong and the opposite was true. What if Monty had believed every word Krasov said? What if my father was now under suspicion of dealing with the Russians? If that was so, I knew only too well who was responsible for placing him in this position.

She watches the procession pass by. The coffin is carried by four elderly men in black overcoats, followed by a silently weeping woman holding a bunch of white flowers and supported by two young men, presumably her sons. No mourners. No friends. No players from any part of the life just ended. A last journey of true loneliness.

How different from the hollow stage management of her father’s funeral, when he was escorted to his grave by an honour guard of senior Party officials. Her brother walked behind the coffin carrying a huge, garlanded photograph of a man she hardly recognized, taken many years before when his hair still fell over his forehead. Ranks of politicians and officials in black hats and coats followed, whispering to each other, the hypocrisy of their show of public grief striking her with as much force as the driving wind on that bitterly cold December morning. Her father had fought with so many of them during his life. Now they were walking to his grave to satisfy themselves that he was well and truly dead.

The small procession has stopped near a group of ancient, wind-torn gravestones. They are preparing for the burial. She shudders. How long before her mother is carried in a box and lowered into the ground, while flowers are dropped on to the wooden surface of the coffin and the cold earth is shovelled over her too? Will she be mourned by only her daughter and her grandson?

As she checks the directions given her by the keeper of the cemetery (she knows that he will already have reported her presence to someone in authority) she notices the silhouette of a man by the iron gates. He is too far away to be identifiable but his presence disturbs her. What is he doing in this unkempt garden of the dead? Is he watching her? Following her? She experiences an all too familiar spiral of fear.

The grave is newly dug; there is no tombstone and probably never
will be, nor any name board to identify whose body lies there. A single bunch of dried flowers has been placed at the head of the grave, or what she imagines is the head, and attached to it a card with a scrawled signature. She bends to read it.

My beloved Miklos. Farewell
.

Miklos Khudiakov. Tall, thin, balding, with delicate white hands and a studious expression. He would listen with infinite patience to her requests. When he spoke it was always thoughtfully and practically. Now he was dead, killed by a bomb, and he would never be able to help her again.

She feels rage burning within her and she closes her eyes. Can the dead renew the living? Can she draw the strength she needs from the fact that his damaged body lies under the earth? She is in pain, suffering outrage at the crime that has been committed, frustrated that there can be no justice, no righting of wrongs, no moment of judgement for the guilty.

Tears spring to her eyes and she weeps openly. No one can see. No one can hear. She lets herself go, sobbing as if Miklos Khudiakov were her husband or her son. She cries for him, his wife and children, for herself, her mother and her son, for her life without Stevens, for Miskin.

‘Are you all right?’

She turns round, terrified at the sound of a voice.

‘Pavel! You gave me a fright.’

‘I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m sorry.’

She blows her nose and wipes her eyes. She does not want him to see her like this.

‘He’s left a widow and three small children,’ Lykowski says, pushing at the earth with the toe of his shoe. ‘I wonder what will happen to them?’

She cannot think of the woman whose handwriting is on the card at her feet. It is too much to bear.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asks.

Is it her imagination or does he hesitate before he speaks?

‘I have been wanting to talk to you for days. I could never find you alone. That is why I followed you.’

She is not convinced by his explanation. This is not the Pavel she knows, a young man full of emotional fervour, secure in the simplicity of his beliefs. He is hesitant, nervous, without any sign of the assurance she has previously found to be unwavering.

‘You can say what you like,’ she says. ‘Only the dead can hear. I am sure they have better things to do than listen to us.’

He smiles, but his eyes don’t meet hers. When he offers her a cigarette his hand shakes. She refuses. He takes one for himself and lights it, cupping both hands around the lighter. She watches the smoke drift away on the clear morning air.

‘Poor Miklos,’ he says. ‘How we will miss him.’

Is he nervous because of what he wants to tell her? Or is he there to betray her? Will the secret police step out from behind the battered gravestones or from the shadows of the fir trees, and drag her to the airless basement in the Lubyanka where she will be forced to bargain for her life?

‘What happens now?’ he asks.

That is the question she has been asking herself ever since she heard from Andropov and Little Krasov that the explosion in D4 was not an accident. It is the reason she is standing now beside the grave of a young man who died in that explosion. The knowledge she seeks is not to be found in the mound of earth before her, but in the private territory of her mind. She must stand before Miklos’s grave and remind herself that he is dead, and find the strength to fight. How easy it is to accept the inevitability of what happens, to shrug your shoulders in defiance of what you know and get on with your own life. How hard to find the courage to oppose what you know to be wrong.

‘What can we do?’

This time their eyes meet. She reads the simple appeal in his expression. He is more frightened than she is. She is angry with herself for misjudging him. She takes his hand in hers.

‘We will have to face the truth sooner or later,’ she says.

‘Nothing went wrong that night.’ She feels his hand tighten in hers. They are allies in their secret knowledge. ‘The explosion was not an accident. Miklos did not make a mistake. He was murdered,’ he says. ‘The pensioners too. They were all murdered.’

‘How can you be sure?’ she asks. She is not challenging him. She is looking for reassurance. He will know from her expression and the pressure of her hand that she has reached the same conclusion. What he says next shocks her when she thinks of the risks he must have taken.

‘I’ve checked the D4 worksheets for the past three months. Nothing they were working on could have caused an explosion on that
scale, it’s not scientifically possible. They weren’t so behind schedule that they needed to work at night to catch up. Yet Miklos and his colleagues died at three in the morning.’

‘Do you know why they were working that night?’

‘They were instructed to do so.’ He hands her the familiar carbon copy of the worksheet they have to fill before the laboratory will act on their behalf. ‘See who signed it?’

Miskin. Miskin signed it. She cannot believe this. Miskin could not have told Khudiakov to work that night.

‘Miskin never signed worksheets. We both know that.’

‘It’s his signature, isn’t it?’

‘Or a forgery.’

‘All Khudiakov would have looked for is a signature on the sheet. No one ever reads who signs these papers.’

She holds the forgery as if it might contaminate her.

‘There’s something else.’ He digs in the pocket of his overcoat and hands her a piece of paper. ‘I’ve calculated how strong the explosion would have to have been to carry all the way from from D4 to the block of flats. It must have been enormous. I’m sure there was a separate explosion in the flats, soon after the damage had been done in D4. It’s the only possible explanation.’

She takes the paper from him and checks the calculations. He is right, of course, as she knew he would be. It fits. It all fits. What can she say?

In the distance, the burial is over. The pall-bearers are shaking hands with the widow and moving away. How many at her father’s funeral knew the secret of her mother’s dignity, so praised in the
Pravda
report? She didn’t cry that day because after the years of her father’s persistent infidelities there was nothing left to cry for. The marriage had been held together by her mother’s respect for convention and her courage. The man so lauded in death had in more than twenty years of marriage made her mother’s life almost intolerable.

‘You’re right.’ She says it so quietly she wonders if he has heard.

‘I began to despair of anyone listening to me.’

‘I believe everything you say is true.’

‘Why did it happen?’ he asks. He can’t keep still. He fiddles with the pockets of his overcoat, his scarf, his fur hat, incessant nervous movements. ‘That’s what I cannot understand. Why kill a man like Khudiakov on whom we all depended? Why kill those old people?
They never did anyone any harm. What’s going on, Ruth? Sometimes I think I’m going mad.’

‘If I knew I’d tell you.’ That’s not true. If she tells him what she knows she will reveal her sources and then she will put her own life in jeopardy. ‘Explanations are beyond me.’

He turns his back to her, pretending to survey the cemetery. He is making sure they are not being watched.

‘At least we know what happened.’

‘What’s the point of knowing the truth if we are powerless to act on it?’ The bitterness in her voice surprises him.

‘Are you saying we should do nothing?’ He sounds incredulous.

‘Even if we knew the names of those who are behind all this, how can we avenge Miklos Khudiakov’s death? If we move a finger, who will suffer? His wife and children. Can you live with the thought of what might happen to them? We’re powerless, Pavel. Surely you see that?’

‘I won’t accept that.’ He is angry with her, his face mottled with red spots which mingle with his ginger freckles. ‘A great wrong has been committed, Ruth. We can’t leave it there.’

‘We have to, Pavel. We have no power. There’s nothing we can do.’

‘Why did you come here today to visit Miklos’s grave?’

She says nothing, too afraid and distressed to speak.

‘I found you weeping by his grave, Ruth. You were weeping for the wrong of it all. That was why you came. To find the strength to continue in the face of it all.’

‘No.’ He has taken hold of her arms. She pushes him away. ‘I should never have come here. It was a mistake.’ Tears burst from her suddenly. She is desperate, confused, ‘I don’t know what I am doing here. Go away, Pavel. Leave me, leave me alone.’

She turns from him and runs away.

Horseferry Road was gripped by the idea of a
coup d’état
in Moscow. The work of the Department was inspired by the hope that one day (and the sooner the better) the Soviet empire would collapse. The possibility of a popular revolt, the people rising up in arms against their oppressors, was remote. We had come to accept that the Soviet citizen had been stunned into acceptance of the status quo, his responses to the aberrations of Soviet policy numbed by years of terror and crisis.

‘They’ve been scared out of their wits and they won’t move a muscle to help anyone,’ we had learned at one of our periodic briefings by our experts in Oxford. ‘Don’t hold your breath for a popular uprising, there won’t be one. Look instead for the power bases. If there is to be a new revolution, that is where it will start.’

Opposition, we were told, would come from within the Soviet leadership, from those who believed they were losing their power base or that the government’s policies were no longer sustainable. We should keep our eyes open for signs of ranks being broken, of political ambition being brutally curtailed, of serious disagreements within the Politburo. We watched, waited, and then came Marchenko. Not what we had expected but when we came to think about it, we weren’t sure what we had expected.

The analysts set to work on the revolt in the Institute of Nuclear Research. Had the prevailing social and economic conditions in the Soviet Union reached the point where we were witnessing the beginning of social breakdown? we wanted to know. Would Stalin’s removal by his own people usher in a truly new world? Would we soon be able to settle down to the real task of creating a post-war society that could offer a total break with the past, a rejection of
war and the new deadly weapons of war? These were tempting hypotheses to consider.

We pinned the names of our targets to a board on the wall in Arthur Gurney’s office: Voroshilov, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov and others. We scanned photographs from the news agencies of recent state events, ticking off the names of the sombre figures on the podiums. We compared lists of names in
Pravda
reports of official meetings. We read transcripts of broadcasts from Radio Moscow. We reviewed Martineau’s briefings for the last six months.

‘You’ll be surprised how much good information lies in front of our eyes only we never see it,’ Colin Maitland said to encourage us after a particularly bleak day. His remarks did little to relieve our frustration. What we were looking for, he reminded us, were convergences, coincidences, missing names, names unexpectedly linked by presence or absence, a senior commander with a member of the Politburo, the head of the KGB with a member of the Central Committee or the Supreme Soviet. But if the links were there, they evaded us.

One by one the names on the board were eliminated. After five days we were left with three names, two members of the Politburo and a general. Martineau helped us clear the politicians; one was ill (over eighty and in hospital suffering from cancer of the liver) while the other, a deputy from Tashkent, was abroad (a member of a Foreign Affairs Committee mission to Tito in Yugoslavia). That left one last name, General Alexei Kosintzev, a military commander unknown to all of us. It was not the conclusion to the exercise we had expected, nor did it fill us with jubilation.

Kosintzev was Ukrainian, a young commander (mid-forties) of a tank regiment, a professional soldier all his life. He had fought against the Romanians at Stalingrad as part of General Eremenko’s army, before being seriously wounded with a crushed pelvis when the car in which he was travelling overturned during a German mortar attack. He had recovered to take his part in the last campaign of the war and he had been one of the first to arrive in Berlin. After the war he had served on the Allied Commission for a time and was known to the British and American military as an ambitious and intelligent officer, if abrasive in manner. A disciplinarian, he was not liked but respected.

He had made his reputation during the war and was regarded as one of the brightest of the coming generation of military
commanders. Cautious, calculating, a good administrator, a soldier whose bravery drew great respect from his men – these were the recurring epithets used to describe him. That was where the problem lay. Similar descriptions applied to others like him. Kosintzev was strictly second-division, a face too young to be seen at the front of the podium, one of a number of future front runners. The problem was, at this moment in time he did not carry any power or authority (so the analysis ran), so how could he pose any threat to the political hierarchy?

‘Where’s the leverage with a tank regiment that’s not even stationed anywhere near Moscow?’ Corless asked, impatient that our activities had yielded little of any value. ‘Kosintzev’s a professional soldier who’s managed his career well. He may get to the top but not for years yet. We’ve no evidence of any political activity, no confrontation with Party officials, no deviation from Marxist ideology, and nor would we expect any. He’s a Party member by default because those are the rules he must obey. Men like that don’t lead revolts against authority because authority is the goal they’ve set their heart on achieving.’

We went back to our SOVINT advisers, calling for anything we could get. They returned the expected verdict that Kosintzev was a determined and loyal officer who had neither the military prestige nor the political power base to be the focus of any kind of opposition. By now I agreed with Boys-Allen that our search had sent us haring off in the wrong direction and if we spent much more on this investigation, we’d be up to our necks in something evil-smelling and sticky. Better to call it a day now – and try another tack. The amateur psychiatrists among us – Adrian Gardner and Guy Benton – would have none of it. They insisted on a further investigation, looking for psychological reasons for a Kosintzev revolt. Couldn’t he harbour grudges against that authority, they argued, which his ‘correct behaviour’ might conceal? Perhaps he had suffered experiences that had undermined his moral position. His injury at Stalingrad? A failure to win promotion? A bitterness at favours granted to others?

‘My guess is he thanked his lucky stars he got a crushed pelvis and not a bullet in the head and spent most of that campaign in hospital,’ Boys-Allen said to general agreement. ‘We wouldn’t be talking about him today if he hadn’t.’

Adrian Gardner was undeterred: how about psychological damage
caused by the appalling casualties his regiment had suffered in the battle for Stalingrad?

‘Show me a Russian commander who loses sleep over the cost of victory,’ Arthur Gurney said dismissively. From the limited analysis we had conducted, he said, the subject was clean and he couldn’t see that situation being reversed.

We were depressed at Kosintzev’s unlikely casting in the role of opponent to the regime. Was this a case of mistaken identity? Had we got the wrong man? Should we start all over again, from a different angle this time – and if so, which angle? Yet despite our doubts, we couldn’t quite dismiss Kosintzev: he was still a member of the military elite – an insider–and his regiment provided some kind of power base.

‘On the surface he doesn’t look like our man,’ Colin said. ‘But maybe he has a dark secret. If so, we must uncover it.’

Looking for what Adrian Gardner cynically described as ‘a second-rate needle in a collectivized Soviet haystack’, we went in search of Kosintzev’s secret. Almost on cue, Martineau reported that Kosintzev had done a disappearing act. His regiment was on manoeuvres on the Polish border but he wasn’t with them. He didn’t attend the bimonthly regional commanders’ meeting in Moscow. Our hopes rose. Was he on secondment at a military academy? we asked cautiously. No sign of him there, apparently. Martineau located his apartment in Moscow. Empty. No one had been seen entering or leaving for ten days or more. Kosintzev was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was our man after all.

‘Generals don’t disappear,’ Corless said, dismissing as fanciful the idea that our inability to find Kosintsev implied anything other than our own inefficiency. ‘They retire or they die. Kosintzev is too young to retire and we’ve no evidence he’s dead. On that basis alone, he can be found. Find him.’

Hardly had he spoken than Kosintzev was back (‘lucky Corless’) tanned and fit, at a meeting of the Military Policy Review Committee. His wife and two sons reappeared in his Moscow apartment. They too were tanned. Kosintzev’s absence could be easily explained, Martineau told us shamefacedly. He had been on holiday at the Black Sea. Our hopes dissolved. He didn’t stay long at the military conference. He flew back to rejoin his regiment on the Polish border. We couldn’t build a conspiracy on that.

*

Two weeks went by. Kosintzev was fading ingloriously into one of the many ‘might-have-been’ cases in the filing cabinets of the Registry when an extraordinary and apparently unconnected event took place. A young soldier, on leave from his regiment, was queuing with hundreds of others outside Lenin’s tomb in Red Square when he suddenly stepped out of the line, turned to face the crowd, pulled a revolver from his overcoat pocket and shouted something incoherent. Then he put the gun to his head and blew his brains out.

Although it was a very public suicide, it was not reported in the Soviet newspapers but it was seen on the front pages of the Western press, its cause the source of much speculation but no definite conclusions. (A tourist had taken a photograph of the crumpled body before the guards got to it and had then, despite aggressive tactics by the secret police, successfully smuggled it out of the Soviet Union.) Peter had nothing to say about it, but Martineau came up with an unexpected link that brought new life to our investigations.

Suicide soldier in K’s regiment
, his encoded wire read. If there was any connection between the suicide and our discovery of Kosintzev, we had no idea what it was but the wire was enough to make us reach for the file once more. Martineau did a good job for us, sending back secret photographs of the funeral: the grieving mother at the graveside, the young soldier’s brothers, other relatives (we presumed) and friends and there, in spite of the grainy quality of the photograph, beside the dead man’s mother we saw, Kosintzev in uniform, who, Martineau told us, had flown to Moscow for the funeral.

After the funeral, Kosintzev did not return at once to his regiment as we had expected. He stayed in Moscow. In the next forty-eight hours he made two visits to the Kremlin. On each occasion he was unaccompanied, though there was nothing sinister in that. Each visit lasted an hour.

We chewed our pencils and puzzled it over. A young soldier kills himself while on leave; his general flies back to attend his funeral. Why? A gesture, the good general associating himself with his men? If it had been an accident, a death in the course of duty, we could understand Kosintzev’s presence. But this was suicide. Kosintzev’s behaviour was unusual.

‘Perhaps something has happened, some event, which caused this poor young man to kill himself. You could explain Kosintzev’s
presence as a gesture of solidarity, a protest – dignified, correct, but a protest none the less.’

It was a possible, if unlikely, reading, awakening echoes of Maitland’s ‘dark secrets’. We put forward possible reasons for the suicide. Homosexuality. Depression. Incidents of bullying (upgraded to racial bullying – the young man was a Muslim from Azerbaijan, we had learned). We were about to give up when Martineau sent us a cutting from the pages of
Isvestia.

‘February the eighteenth was the day on which the Soviet research laboratory went up in flames,’ Colin Maitland reminded us, ‘according to Peter.’

What possible connection could the 24th Tank Regiment have with an accident in a Soviet nuclear laboratory in a suburb of Moscow? If there were connections (and there were cynics among us), this was really going over the top, too bizarre to carry credibility. We were baffled. Over the next four days, with Martineau’s help, some facts emerged.

The 24th Tank Regiment, under Kosintzev’s command, had been stationed in the Russian Sector of Berlin. That was not difficult to establish. Their tour of duty came to an end on 14 February. On that day they began the laborious process of packing up to return to their barracks outside Moscow. We got confirmation of this from the British High Command in Berlin.

Kosintzev had made his last official appearance at the Allied Commission on 12 February. That was a matter of record. He had then flown back to Moscow, in advance of his men, and two days later had gone on leave – he had mentioned to Martineau at a party on 15 February that he was going to the Black Sea. His second in command, Gerenko, who had accompanied him to Moscow, stayed behind with an advance party preparing the barracks.

Had there been any accounts or rumours of an accident around that time involving the military, we asked Martineau, as we tried to identify ‘those who died on 18 February’? No, came the reply. None.
Apart from D4 explosion, night of February 18 quiet
.

Unexpectedly, Boys-Allen put forward a theory that gained support
throughout the day. ‘Solidarity,’ he said, suddenly. ‘That’s the connection. Maybe the parents of some of the soldiers in the Twenty-fourth Tank Regiment died in the fire at the apartment block,’ he argued.

‘How do you explain the phrase “To all those names we add one more in sorrow”?’ Guy Benton asked.

‘We know many died in the accident. Perhaps a few survived, badly burned. Maybe the father or mother of one of them has died within the last week of injuries received that night.’

We put the question to Martineau. ‘Any reports of old age pensioners dying in the last ten days of burns received on the eighteenth of February?’

‘That’s a tricky one,’ Colin said as he watched the cipher clerk encode the message for the teleprinter. Two days of silence followed. Then:
No survivors of fire on 18 February. Official report appears true
.