The Tamarind Seed (21 page)

His introduction was effected by a member of the Soviet Embassy in London; he had been recalled to Moscow soon afterwards, and as far as Fergus knew, he had not followed the usual practice and appeared at another Embassy under a different name. Fergus had been given a controller and he had chosen his own code name. Blue. True Conservative blue. The colour of his class politics, and his pedigree blood. He sat on in his study, at the age of fifty-four, brilliant, distinguished, marked for the top in his career, and wondered what his wife would do.

He had disappointed her and she hated him. The hate had subsided into a mixture of irritation and contempt, but it was still there as a base. He had deceived her grossly when they married. He had failed her as a husband and committed the worst possible mistake with a woman of her type by trying to enlist her sympathy. In revenge she had goaded him for twenty years, humbled him with lovers, even with the suggestion that the last of their children wasn't his. But nothing had satisfied that burning female desire to punish the impotent male.

Now, at last, she had the means to hand. To destroy him utterly, to see him exposed, reviled, imprisoned. He wondered if she would do it. Even after all the years, he didn't know the answer. He got up and went to the door. The camera was useless; he would have to memorise the details of that morning's meeting. It might well be the last information that his American controller would ever get from ‘Blue'.

‘I can't tell you who it is,' Judith said. Richard Paterson had been out of Washington on Friday—sheer desperation had made her make that call to his home. She had not asked him to sit down; they stood facing each other at a distance of a few feet in the living room of her apartment. Now that he had come she was quite calm. The anticipation had been so much worse than the reality of seeing him again, that she found it possible to be cool and polite, as if they were just casually acquainted. On his part Richard Paterson seemed as eager to maintain a strict formality. He hadn't even tried to shake hands. The identity of the Russian who wished to defect was his first question; she repeated her refusal.

‘Then you'd no right to drag me up here,' he said. ‘I'm not at all anxious to be involved in this, and if it's some bloody fellow filling ink bottles who thinks he's going to con some money out of the West …'

‘It's nothing of the kind,' Judith interrupted. ‘I know the person very well. He's in very great danger and he wants political asylum. Believe me, Richard, nothing but a real necessity would have made me get in touch with you.'

‘I'm relieved to hear it,' he said. ‘My wife overheard your call and it upset her terribly. I had the hell of a time trying to calm her down.'

Judith looked at him. Indifference; total indifference. That was what Sverdlov had done for her. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘But it couldn't wait till Monday. I had to call your home. What my friend wants to know is whether the British will receive him and whether they will promise not to hand him over to the Americans or to his own Embassy. That's what he told me to ask you. I tried the Intelligence man who's been in on this, but he's gone to England. I couldn't think of anyone else to approach.'

‘I can't answer either of those questions on my own authority,' Richard said. ‘All I can do is go back and refer the whole thing to the Ambassador. If this is a really top man in the Russian Embassy, then it should go to the Ambassadorial level straight away. At any rate I could see the Minister first.'

‘There isn't time. Go to the Ambassador,' she said. ‘My friend would take an assurance from him. You can tell him that this man would be a very valuable acquisition to Britain.' Sverdlov had told her to stress that. She hadn't understood till he explained it, that in these affairs, countries bargained for people as if they were commodities.

‘If you can't give me his name,' Paterson said irritably, ‘I don't see how I'm going to back that up. What section is he in—can you tell me that?'

‘Military,' Judith answered. Beyond that, Sverdlov had warned her not to go. It was enough to wet the official appetite.

‘Hmm. That could mean anything. You keep calling him your friend …' He glanced at her, slightly accusing. ‘You must know his name. Why can't you trust me? It would give me something to go to the Ambassador with—it's all so damned vague, otherwise.'

‘I'm sorry, but I'm not allowed to tell you. I've told you all I can; he's important, he wants to come over to us, and he hasn't much time. I know you're a great stickler for the rules, Richard, but if you tie this thing up in red tape, it'll be too late to help him.'

‘I'm not particularly interested in helping him,' he said. ‘I came here in case it would be a help to
us.
There's always the odd unreliable who's ready to sell himself to the highest bidder just because he's in trouble with his own side and he wants to get out of punishment. We've had this kind of thing before—soldiers coming in from East Berlin calling themselves political refugees, when they'd got drunk and gone AWOL.'

He knew perfectly well that this wasn't the circumstance but her attitude irritated him. He hadn't expected her to be so cool; she might never have been to bed with him at all. All she appeared to be thinking about was the safety of her ‘friend'.

‘Oh my God,' Judith exclaimed. ‘My God—I never thought I'd want to see that little brute Loder, but I'd give anything to have him here instead of you. If you can't do anything to help, then can you put somebody from the Intelligence people on to me direct? That's all I want! You don't have to go to the Ambassador or get involved at all—after all, if it didn't turn out well, it might do some damage to your almighty career, though I'm damned if I can think what!'

‘I'll get in touch with Loder when the Ambassador tells me to.' He went to the door. ‘I don't know what you've got yourself mixed up in, Judith, but it sounds like a pretty scruffy mess this time. I advise you to remember which side you're on. I'll get in touch with you tomorrow.'

She ran after him to the door. ‘There's not much time,' she said. ‘A week or ten days. For God's sake, get them to make up their minds!'

‘I can't commit myself to any time limit,' he said curtly. ‘I've told you, I'll pass it on at the top and I'll call you tomorrow.' He walked rapidly down the corridor to the lift, and she shut the front door.

Sverdlov came out of the bedroom. He had a cigarette in his hand which he gave her. ‘You heard it?' Judith asked him.

‘Yes. It was satisfactory. He will go to his Ambassador and the Ambassador will refer it to his Intelligence section. You've done very well for me.'

‘How do you know? How do you know it will happen like that? Supposing Richard never does anything at all—you heard what he said about a scruffy mess—he may decide it's better not to get himself involved—you don't know how he thinks things out!'

‘I know better than you do,' Sverdlov said. ‘He will do what he said, because he wants to claim some credit for himself. He will go to the Ambassador and say “Sir, I have a most important Russian officer who wishes to come over to our side.” It will go down on his record and he will be happy. But he won't deal with me himself. I'm glad about that. I don't like him.'

Judith looked at her watch. ‘We'd better get out of here before Nancy comes back from her lunch date. Feodor, do you have to go back to your Embassy? It worries me so much in case they suspect anything.'

‘They won't,' he said. ‘It is amusing, really. The one who is trying to catch me in a trap, thinks I have caught you in one. He will wait to get the reward for himself, before he shoots the bolt on me. It's an old trick, but it is always working. If you have something in one hand that an enemy wants, show him there is something in the other. Then he can't make up his mind which one to take from you first.'

‘Another Russian proverb?' Judith asked him. He looked less tense than the previous night, but even so the signs of strain were evident. There was a nerve by his mouth which was jumping visibly under the skin, and there were deep rings under his eyes. She herself had been unable to do more than doze during the night. Waiting for him was made into a nightmare by the fear that he might somehow be prevented from arriving, and she would never know exactly what had happened to him.

‘We can go to a movie,' Sverdlov suggested. ‘Then I can hold your hand in the dark.' He suddenly threw an arm round her shoulders, catching her off balance, and kissed her on the mouth.

‘You don't like that Englishman any more, do you?'

Judith disengaged herself. ‘How do you know that?'

‘Because now you kiss me,' Sverdlov said. ‘We will go to the movie and sit in the seats in the back row.'

Afterwards Judith couldn't remember what they saw that afternoon. He insisted on putting his arm around her, and though she whispered and argued with him in the darkness he refused to take it away or sit back in his own seat. All round them couples twined and necked, oblivious of the programme. Sverdlov rested his head against her shoulder, and within minutes she knew he had fallen asleep. She sat there in the darkness, uncomfortable because of the weight of the exhausted man lying against her. It was impossible, a situation far more incredible than the phoney dramatics being enacted on the wide screen. Nobody would believe it; nobody seeing them together in the darkness would imagine that the man sleeping was taking a respite from the pressure of imminent arrest and certain death.

They looked like lovers, and they weren't. They had met on a Barbadian beach and begun a relationship under the sun which was growing into something as dark as the atmosphere around them at that moment. She had gone away from trouble; in the island refuge she had unwittingly engaged herself in trouble of a kind that made a disappointing love affair, a simple widowhood, into mundane events in an unremarkable life. The man whose head was on her shoulder, was not an ordinary man; meeting him, allowing him to get as close to her as he had done, was not only a mistake in judgement which she had no excuse for making, but she sensed that as a consequence her life would never be the same again. She didn't love him; she was sure of that. Whatever she had felt for Richard Paterson her feeling for Sverdlov was not the same. It was not love. But she didn't want anything to happen to him. She didn't want him taken back to suffer and die. She got one hand into her bag and found a handkerchief. He was so sure Richard would help him. She lacked that confidence. Sitting in the dark cinema, she blamed herself for having taken an aggressive attitude. She knew her ex-lover's vanity; she should have played upon it. He hadn't liked her reference to the Russian as a ‘friend'. Pride, not jealousy but even so it might affect his actions. Her mind raced backwards and forwards down different avenues of anxiety. Sverdlov made a joke of it, quoting those maddening, folksy Russian proverbs, like a poor man's Krushchev. She would say that to him, she decided, the very next time he produced another. But the nervous twitch remained, the black hollows under the lazy greenish eyes, the sudden lapse into sleep because he felt it was safe to relax for an hour or so. There was a musical crescendo and a change in the lighting; the movie was over, whatever it was, and she moved him gently, waking him.

‘I'm sorry,' he sat upright quickly. ‘I meant to make love to you.'

‘You were dead tired,' Judith said. ‘It did you good to sleep.'

‘Was it a good movie?'

‘I don't know; I wasn't concentrating. Feodor, why don't you move into the apartment with me until we know?'

‘What about your friend—Nancy?'

‘I'll tell her you've taken Richard's place. She won't ask questions; I don't enquire who she's going with; we lead our own lives. I can say you're a White Russian.'

He began to laugh until the people in front of them turned round and hissed angrily at them to shut up. The second feature had begun. He went on laughing at her, shaking in the seat.

‘This is my friend Feodor Sverdlov, the White Russian! Oh my darling, what a fool you are! Come on, it is time we went back. I have work to do tonight; you will get the message from your Embassy tomorrow.'

He took her home in a taxi, where he subjected her to bear hugs and rough kisses until she forgot to be frightened for him and told him angrily to stop.

She could get no serious reaction from him about anything. He repeated the remark about White Russian several times, and started to laugh at her over again. Judith had offered to take him in to live with her. And after weeks of determined efforts to wrest this out of her, Sverdlov had declined to take advantage of the offer. It was not until she was actually in bed and trying to get to sleep that she realised it might be because he knew himself to be in greater danger of arrest than he had told her. And the presence of a couple of women in a Manhattan flat would not deter his people. He had elected to stay in his Embassy where she couldn't become involved.

Two days passed; Monday and Tuesday and still no telephone call from Richard Paterson. On Wednesday she managed to work with her usual efficiency till lunch time; she refused to take a break but stayed on in Sam Nielson's office, drinking coffee from the automatic machine in the corridor outside, waiting for the call that didn't come. She made several mistakes in dictation and had to come back and ask Nielson to repeat himself. He was working at full pitch and she had chosen the wrong day to foul up his letters. He said so. ‘I'm sorry.' Judith actually stumbled over the apology. The phone in her office was ringing. She gave Nielson a startled look, half pleading and half defiant, and then ran out to answer it.

Her anxiety was such that she said ‘Richard' as soon as she picked it up.

‘Mrs. Farrow?'

She grabbed the receiver with the other hand. It was Loder's voice.