Season of Storm (43 page)

His footsteps thudded hollowly on the wooden floor and the rattle of his car keys in his hand was lost in the silence as he crossed the dimly lighted newsroom. Harry Waller's chin sank into the collar of his old mac as he let himself out.

Very curious. He hoped the SALT talks would keep Brian in Brussels over the weekend. He would like to be able to leave Laddy on the story for a while. He would like to learn what this was all about.

* * *

Laddy sighed, stuffing all the clippings back into the grey envelope, and threw it into the filing tray for the librarian to put away in the morning. There was nothing there she didn't already know. This had served no purpose except to bring back all the memories, all the pain.

Laddy rested her forehead on her palm and glanced at the wristwatch on her other arm. She had better get home; she couldn't stay here all night, although if unconsciousness had descended on her here and now she would have welcomed it.

John was coming for dinner tonight, she suddenly remembered. Of all nights! John, who had something special to tell her, something she knew she wanted to hear. But not tonight. Tonight she wanted to crawl into her bed and cry herself to sleep.

Well, she couldn't. It was the first time she had invited him to dinner at home, and John would not understand a last minute put-off.

Wearily she got to her feet and left the library, thinking about the evening as she had originally planned it. She should have had the meal halfway cooked by now and had time to dress herself carefully, beautifully, and been relaxed and smiling when John came in.

Relaxed and smiling and ready to hear, when he told her, that he loved her. That was what she was sure he was going to say, and that was what she wanted to hear.

But now she would be rushed and unhappy, and all she would want to do would be to put her head on his broad chest and weep and have him tell her that it didn't matter.

Laddy gathered up her coat and ran through the door, down the stairs and out into the warm spring evening.

If the sun had not actually set, it had certainly gone down behind the tall buildings of the Fleet Street area, and Laddy walked down the laneway to the small red car that sat, alone now, by the pavement. Well, at least the rush-hour traffic would be long since over; she would make good time home.

She tried to push Mischa Busnetsky's face out of her mind as she drove, and her father's, too, but it was impossible. She tried to think of John, to conjure up his smiling handsome face to drive away her pain, but his magic was impotent against this. Everything took a back seat to this, even the face of the man she was sure she loved.

Laddy parked her car behind a dark green one in the old, tree-lined street and breathed deeply in the scented spring air as she moved up the front path to her house.

Margaret and Ben Smiley were home upstairs, and if she had had time, she might have gone up for a cup of tea and a quiet, calming chat. That was one of the benefits she had not foreseen three years ago when she had rented out the upper storey: that she always had friends on call.

But not tonight. Laddy unlocked her door and moved down the hallway to the kitchen at the back.

Laddy's kitchen was the prettiest room in the house, its soft yellow wallpaper with the tiny flowers giving it a warm glow all year round. But tonight it was too full of memories: she could not look at the unstained pine table without seeing her father sitting there, talking, listening, understanding.

Laddy dropped her bag and the paper onto the table and turned to the stove. Well, she had planned a simple menu, melon and beef Stroganoff and salad, and luckily she had prepared the beef last night. Now she turned it into a saucepan and pulled mushrooms from the refrigerator and began chopping them. Suddenly she put down her knife and crossed over to the table, staring down at the copy of the
Herald
that she had dropped there. Mischa Busnetsky's face filled half the front page under the blazing headline and she studied the picture intently.
 

A broad forehead, close-cropped hair, dark eyes full of a dedicated fire that were riveting in their intelligence. He would look older now; the photo had been taken almost eight years ago. Laddy had seen it countless times. It had been shot during one of his early trials, after he had already spent a year in Lefortovo prison. He wouldn't look like that now, she reflected grimly. Not after all those years of....

And tonight he was flying to freedom. What was he thinking now, she wondered, leaving the homeland he might never see again?

The hot oil in the saucepan spat loudly, and with an exclamation Laddy hurried to the stove to continue her preparations for the meal. Damn it! He was a job of work, a story assignment, that was all! She would think about him tomorrow.

After a moment she returned to the table and collected the paper, taking it back to set beside her on the counter. She gazed at Mischa Busnetsky from time to time as she worked.

Her father had first shown her the picture when she was seventeen and the man in the picture twenty-three. She had been mesmerised by him then and she was now, but now between her and those eyes was a barrier of pain. Personal pain, which, added to the long years of hatred she felt for Mischa Busnetsky's oppressors, became an intolerable knot in the pit of her stomach. A knot of anger and hatred for all the oppressors of the world, who sought out that intelligence and burning dedication in order to destroy it.

Laddy gazed at the picture. He had a wide and well-defined mouth that seemed to be almost smiling at the photographer, at his accusers, and in his eyes was the knowledge, the contemptuous acceptance, that the outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion.

What had happened to that intelligence now? What would he look like now, after the long series of prisons and labour camps and, finally, confinement in psychiatric hospitals? What had happened to that burning intelligence under the onslaught of modern medical and psychiatric knowledge?

Laddy put the salad in the refrigerator, leaving the rice and the beef simmering on low heat, and went into the bedroom. John would be here in fifteen minutes; she would have time for a shower if she were quick.

But it was not the way she had intended it, she thought as she dried herself quickly and pulled over her head the beautiful wine-coloured caftan embroidered in gold thread that her father had brought her back from one of his last trips. She had meant to laze in the bath, and dress and make up carefully.

She put on more makeup than usual, mechanically outlining her dark eyes and using mascara and a lipstick in a shade called raisin, which matched the caftan. Her black hair needed no special care. A quick brushing restored the natural fall of curls that clustered around her head and over her shoulders.

In the kitchen Laddy laid the table quickly, foregoing the flowers she had meant to cut from the garden for a centrepiece. She was ready, but it looked as though John was going to be late. Laddy sank into a chair and almost involuntarily picked up the paper again....

"Another Soviet dissident on the ICF's list," her father had said, passing the picture to her across the desk in his study upstairs, now Margaret and Ben Smiley's sitting room. "I'll be traveling to Moscow soon, with a fair chance of meeting him."

Laddy had not been able to tear her eyes away from the face in the photo. "I wish I could go with you this time," she said. She had just entered university to study journalism, and it was the first time in seven years that her own interests would prevent her traveling with her father.

As one of the founders of the International Council on Freedom, Dr. Lewis Penreith had put his massive dedication behind the cause of dissident thinkers under totalitarian regimes the world over. His small publishing house in Covent Garden had published the works of these dissident thinkers, which Lewis Penreith had obtained secretly on his travels and had often smuggled out of various countries. The publication of such works in the West sometimes contributed to the release of the author from prison or internal exile, or to his expulsion to the West.

From the age of ten, ever since her mother had died, Laddy had travelled with him. Lewis Penreith had believed that travel was the best education she could have, and her warmest childhood memories were of lying on his study floor, poring over an atlas while her father described the people, culture, language and history of the country they were about to visit.

Although they had travelled as far afield as Hong Kong and Argentina, Lewis Penreith had been a Russian scholar, and the Soviet dissidents had been closest to his heart. Their cause he had made his personal one.

He had taken up Mikhail Busnetsky's cause after publishing a powerful expose of the Soviet treatment of political dissidents that Busnetsky had written in Lefortovo Prison. Lewis Penreith had decided to go to Moscow to try to meet him.

"I wish I could go with you this time," Laddy said again, looking into the searching eyes in the photograph and feeling somewhere inside her that she knew the man as deeply as though he were herself. But Laddy was seventeen then and starting on her own career, and her years of traveling with her father were over. She was excited by the future work she had chosen—her goal even then had been to work as a newspaper reporter—but now she was seeing the price of it for the first time, and it caught her a deep blow somewhere in behind her ribs: because of her choice, because of the timing, this was a man she was destined never to meet. She looked at her father sadly.

"Well, it's only a five-day trip," Lewis Penreith said easily. "Why don't you come? Make it our last jaunt together. It'll be worthwhile."

Laddy read Busnetsky's
Details of Oppression
that night, and she knew that if there was the faintest chance of meeting the author, she had to go with her father. The next morning she told him she would make one last trip with him—to Moscow.
 

It was an end for her, she thought, and somehow also a beginning.

Chapter 2

Moscow was stark, cold, grey, dirty and impressive, as always, and although she had been here several times with her father, as always it took her breath away.

But there was little time for tourist pursuits. They had contacts to make, people to seek out—in secret. Pushkin Square, Red Square, the Kremlin; all were seen with craned neck through the dirty window of a taxi.

The rules she had learned on past visits came quickly back to Laddy: never talk about anything but the weather in your hotel room; ignore the fact that you are being followed; never carry the address of any Russian contact with you; and don't bother to get upset over mild inefficiencies like a lack of toilet paper in the hotel.

Mischa Busnetsky, who had been out of prison only three months, had organised a showing of the works of an underground artist—a showing that had no official sanction. It was at this exhibition that Lewis Penreith hoped to meet him. In those days in Moscow there was another "thaw," and foreign correspondents were allowed almost uninhibited access to certain dissident intellectuals who had been published in the West. These men and women, holding court in small overcrowded apartments, were taking all the advantage they could of their sudden immunity from the secret police, for they were felt to be too well known in the West to be sent to internal exile or prison.

It was in one of those small apartments that Mischa Busnetsky had organised the art showing, and as they approached the large stark apartment building, Laddy's heart leapt in a kind of fear she had never known before on such trips. No meeting with a dissident, famous or obscure, had ever caused such turmoil in her.

The building was large enough that no secret follower could be certain of which apartment was being visited, and as she and her father climbed the stairs to the fourth floor they heard no step on the stairs behind them; nevertheless, a tight band had formed itself around Laddy's ribs so that it was almost impossible to breathe.

The apartment was packed to the rafters. The exhibition had been running for six days, and people knew that it would not be allowed to run much longer.

The forbidden paintings were all nudes. Sensuous, erotic, compelling, and the glow from the skin tones seemed to suffuse that small, over-furnished, overcrowded apartment with a wave of sexual warmth that touched her, washed her from the moment Laddy walked through the door.

At seventeen, Laddy had never even had a boyfriend. Her father's work and her life of travel had cut her off from conventional friendships, but she had never missed such things, her life was so full.

The paintings—some softly, some harshly seductive—made Laddy suddenly, and for the first time, aware that she was a woman. She stood motionless, gazing at the nudes, scarcely able to breathe, until her father softly called her name.

And she turned, and her father was standing beside the man in the photograph.

Laddy had watched her body's changes over the past few years, had watched herself becoming a woman, with an air almost of detachment: her breasts had filled out, her legs had suddenly been long and well shaped. She was, after all, of the female of the species. But it had not touched her. She had begun to wear more adult clothing because the salesgirls had led her to those racks.