IN THE AFTERGLOW of our mild hysteria, I walked alone back across the river from the hotel and descended into a depression that was bound to follow. I didn’t want to take a taxi, so I walked past the Kremlin on the far side of the river and up towards Pushkinskaya Square. I stopped briefly and drank half a cup of coffee behind the Bolshoi and watched the slow flow of summer passers-by, window-shopping in the expensive fashion shops for objects that would have cost many of them a lifetime’s wages.
I shook myself out of the crash in my mood by buying something myself. And I thought about what Finn had said. I even briefly entertained the idea of doing my job by telling my superiors what I believed was the truth, that Finn was deliberately getting himself the sack. But I dismissed it quickly. Finn had drawn me into…what? Complicity? No. He had, in his strangely awkward way, opened his heart completely.
This decision to omit something from a report was the first certain sign that my personal relationship with Finn was gaining ground over my professional one. It hurts me now to think that this shocked me. I realised I was going to lose him and I knew I had to harden my heart.
I questioned his feelings for me, and then I remembered his invitation, which I hadn’t answered. It seemed like a moment of reality that glittered as a patch of water thousands of feet below glitters briefly when it catches the sun.
I want you to come with me.
I couldn’t imagine how I could or would leave Russia. I couldn’t conceive of such a step at the time. Things–defences–began to pile up in my mind to prevent me from leaving: my job and the fateful result of walking away from it. I would be branded a traitor. Then there was Nana; not to mention the brave new Russia with its hope for the future, despite Finn’s misgivings. I counted up all the reasons, no matter how trivial, for not accepting his invitation–anything, in fact, but face what I really wanted to do, which was to go with him. I was hooked to my past, shackled by fear to the familiar. I was afraid of such momentous change. To walk away from the Forest in itself was an unimaginable step.
As I walked I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a traitor. On a street in London, perhaps, how would it feel? Would I always be looking over my shoulder? And if all failed with Finn? I would never be able to return.
It flashed across my mind that treason would be the perfect revenge. But revenge for what? My father? The evils of the organisation I had chosen to work for? The injustice of something or other in this imperfect world?
And yet somehow, in my conflicted state, I sensed that Finn understood that I couldn’t leave with him. Not yet, at any rate. That realisation opened up new questions. Did his understanding make his question insincere? It wouldn’t be beyond Finn, by any means, to ask for something that couldn’t be given but that, in the asking, somehow absolved him from guilt or responsibility for it.
But I didn’t believe his invitation to go with him was insincere. I believed he wanted me to go with him, that he knew I couldn’t and- most intriguingly- that it didn’t matter. There was something else he hadn’t said, something missing that would make everything right between us when it finally appeared.
I looked back at our relationship and tried to find a pattern that clarified what was happening.
As long as we had had a professional reason to see each other, to be lovers, we never had to ask ourselves how we really felt about each other. We were like two people in an arranged marriage who grow towards each other without seeing it happening. Finn had crossed this line, although I hadn’t. In his invitation he had shattered the mirage. How did I feel about Finn when the arrangement was broken, when the professional reasons for seeing him disappeared? I wanted to expose him then, a foreign intelligence officer working against my country. Finn was everything I had been trained to destroy.
The answer caused me a moment of anger.
As I read his notebook for this period in the vault now, I see three entries for that day, the last time we met at the Baltschug Hotel. ‘Pick up trousers’ is the first. ‘Call Bob about the flat’ comes next. And finally he writes, ‘Asked R [for Rabbit, presumably] to come with me.’
Strangely, I feel great warmth at the juxtaposition of these thoughts that dispels the dank cold of the vault. To be included with his trousers and his flat is the honour I would most wish for, a sign that I was always part of his fundamental reality.
For the next three days I worked steadily and when I wasn’t working walked the streets of Moscow. I told my bosses that I was concerned about my relationship with Finn, that he was getting too close. They just laughed and lewdly told me to enjoy it. But they didn’t ask me any awkward questions.
Finn and I had prepared a special drop, a dead letter box to use in an emergency and which only Finn and I knew of. Neither of us, I think, had any intention of ever using it but even its existence was precious, a private thing between the two of us, away from all the surveillance around our relationship. He trusted me to keep it that way and, I suppose, this was another instance of our personal attachment beginning to take precedence over our duty. But as long as we had never used it, it was just that, a lovers’ secret, and no more.
Finn had chosen a place for this drop that was usually crowded in the daytime with tourists, both Russian and foreign. It was a bookshop on the corner of a cobbled street dotted with old Moscow shops and another road with street stalls and bureaux de change, behind Moscow’s Savoy Hotel. The Savoy was where Finn sometimes went to play roulette and where he claimed to have won over $20,000 one night a few years before.
The bookshop was a few yards from the Lubyanka, the old and notorious KGB headquarters, until Yeltsin transferred its operations outside the city. I visited the Lubyanka sometimes in my first years, before I went to the Forest. I still remember with dread the netting that hung over the stairwells to prevent prisoners throwing themselves to their deaths before interrogation. The KGB owned the Savoy Hotel back then and we would go across the street sometimes to drink.
Along this cobbled street behind the hotel there are a number of bookshops, a shop that sells maps, and some new cafés that now spring up almost weekly in the centre of the city. In one bookshop Finn had identified a dusty corner with some second-hand books. Behind a Bulgarian translation of Jeffrey Archer’s Cain and Abel, there was a piece of wood that looked like the upright back of the shelving and that Finn had somehow managed to fit unnoticed. It came away by pulling out two books and pressing hard on a third. In this space I looked, at different times of the day, for three days. But there was nothing. And I had heard nothing from Finn since we had met at the Baltschug Hotel.
On the fourth day I received a message from my boss and the controller of Finn’s dossier, General Kerchenko. It was an order for me to come immediately to the Forest. It was not an unusual summons. In the KGB, urgency usually meant that a senior officer was angry because he had been diverted from some other, more profitable, personal activity, not that the matter itself was urgent. Kerchenko, for example, had many private and personal activities, some of which I’ve witnessed. I was once present at his dacha outside Moscow, when he met with two mafia bosses from Tashkent who were bringing him his share of the clan’s profits.
I dressed smartly in the kind of outfit that I knew made Kerchenko, a cruder version of my father, happy. With a pair of high-heeled shoes, I looked the typical female object Russian men were so enamoured of.
I have sometimes wondered how much my elevation to the rank of colonel owed to my looks. I have received several frank offers from Russian billionaires and, though I say so myself, in the right fur coat I can hold my own with any high-class whore in the lobbies of Moscow’s swanky hotels. Oligarchs have offered to dress me from head to toe in white sable and fly me around the world for non-stop beauty treatments while they discuss the price of oil or the flotation of their companies.
My friend Natasha says unkindly that my rank owes everything to how I look. For my part, I am content to play with the fragile egos of such men, while not denying that it gives me more than just a sense of power.
I drove along the motorway south of Moscow to the Forest and while I waited in the café in the main block of the huge intelligence complex I ran into Vladimir, my old school friend and the man my father had wanted me to marry. I hadn’t seen him for nearly ten years.
‘You still here?’ he said, grinning. ‘I thought you were better than that.’
This casual remark struck right through me, disengaging the hold on my job that I was clinging to so tenuously. Vladimir’s remark took me back to a comment of Nana’s on the day I became a colonel. ‘Just be who you were meant to be,’ she had said. ‘Be who you want to be, it’s the same.’
Like that comment of Nana’s, Vladimir, too, had exposed everything that I hated about myself: my job, my position–everything I was still unwilling to give up in order to go with Finn. I was suddenly reminded of my father and his anger, and his inability to change. I was reminded of the grip of the past on him. And, now, it seemed, the past had its grip on me.
We drank a coffee together. Vladimir told me what had happened to him back in our new dawn of 1991 when we were promised our freedom.
He had been encouraged to speak out, he told me, as we all were back then in the era of perestroika and glasnost and Yeltsin’s ascent to power. At the Forest they had asked him to voice any concerns about the way the Forest was run, anything at all that struck him as wrong or wasteful or outdated. Foolishly, Vladimir took them at their word. He told his questioners that he thought it was wrong for senior officers to use official cars for their own private business, a common practice in the nineties and today. He was praised for this honesty, and then summoned the following day to his observer’s office, where a lieutenant colonel was waiting for him.
‘We’re sending you to the Cape Verde Islands,’ the officer told him abruptly.
Stunned, Vladimir replied that he didn’t speak Portuguese.
‘Don’t worry,’ the lieutenant colonel told him. ‘We’ll blind you, too, so you won’t be able to see anything either.’
And so Vladimir had spent nearly ten years in Cape Verde, in exile, effectively, doing nothing apart from learning perfect Portuguese. They hadn’t actually blinded him but such a fate as Vladimir’s, I was suddenly reminded, was and still is today the result of the self-defeating vindictiveness of the organisation I work for.
We said goodbye and arranged to meet the following week.
After waiting for nearly two hours for this ‘urgent’ meeting, I was finally called up to Kerchenko’s office.
There were three of them there, including Kerchenko. The other two were the case officers who also worked on Finn’s dossier. Yuri, one of the ‘new KGB’ Russians from Petersburg, lounged in a corner with his feet up as if to make it clear he didn’t take orders from an old-timer like Kerchenko.
I knew Yuri took a cut from a logging business out in northern Siberia and had become rich from the new black market run by the nexus of security officers and mafia buzinessmen.
The other one, Sasha, like Kerchenko an old Brezhnevite, had a lined face and bushy eyebrows. He sat to the side of the room with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor like a prisoner. The General sat behind the overlarge desk so favoured in former times by self-important bureaucrats.
Before I had even sat down Kerchenko asked me where Finn was. He used our codename for Finn, which was Markus.
I didn’t reply until I’d sat in the empty chair in front of the desk.
‘I haven’t seen him for more than three days,’ I said.
I knew immediately that I was under suspicion; a cross-examination began, questions flew from all three of them, from all sides simultaneously.
I calmly and clearly told them about our last meeting and, in particular, everything that Finn had said about Putin. It was all stuff that was in the report I had made the day after he and I had met. I always made a report after every encounter with Finn.
I recounted Finn’s anxiety and his anger with his own people. I didn’t tell them the whole truth, nothing about his invitation to me to go with him but just enough, I hoped, to manipulate the manipulators who see betrayal and falsehood everywhere. What I really wanted to know was what had caused them to call me in so suddenly, but I concealed my interest in the reasons for their inquiries as well as I could. Of course they weren’t satisfied.
‘Why didn’t you tell us he was leaving Moscow?’ the bald Yuri barked eventually, and simultaneously snapped the buckle of his expensive watch. He looked at me with all the lust of assumed conquest.
My shock was evident.
‘You didn’t know?’ Kerchenko said accusingly.
‘No, I didn’t.’
There was a pause while they watched me.
‘When did he leave?’ I asked, in an attempt at professional, rather than personal curiosity.
‘This morning. On the British Airways flight to London. With two officials from London,’ Kerchenko said.
‘You didn’t know,’ Yuri sneered. ‘You didn’t know.’
I ignored him, looking at the watch on his wrist and thinking how brashly our new officers now wore their illegal wealth.
‘Why didn’t he tell you he was leaving?’ Sasha asked so softly that I could barely hear the question. He still hadn’t looked up from the floor.
‘I don’t know why. He doesn’t tell me everything.’
‘Surely he would tell you something like this,’ Yuri demanded.
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose he would. Normally. So I suppose it must have been a sudden decision.’
‘Of his? Or theirs?’ Sasha asked softly again.
‘I can’t say. Of theirs, I guess. Unless he’s ill, or has family problems.’
‘What was his mood?’ Sasha said from under the bushy eyebrows which were all I could see of his face. It was a question that was asked many times during that afternoon and evening.
‘Just anxious. And, as I said, angry. He was very angry.’
‘Did he say anything unusual to you at this recent meeting?’ Kerchenko asked. ‘Your last meeting. Anything that seemed too unimportant at the time, perhaps, to include in your report?’
I thought for a moment, giving them time to register this moment of contemplation. And then I smiled. It was Finn’s instruction to tell them that made me smile, but they weren’t to know that.
‘What’s so funny?’ Yuri said. ‘You’ve lost a British intelligence officer you’re being paid to stay up close to night and day. What’s so fucking funny?’
‘What he said,’ I replied coolly. ‘That’s what was funny.’
Kerchenko raised his eyebrows and Sasha looked up at last.
‘Well?’ Kerchenko said.
‘He told me he loved me,’ I said.
There was a moment of silence in the room, the first real silence since I’d arrived. For me, it was unnervingly a thing of beauty. Finn had invaded the room. I was thinking only of Finn.
It was Yuri, inevitably, who finally brought me back.
‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘Falling for our whore.’
‘I am a colonel in the SVR,’ I reprimanded him. ‘I am not your, or anyone’s, whore.’
I looked at Yuri’s face and saw the amorphous hate I’d seen so often in my father’s face. To me it came from a fury that anyone was capable of independent thought.
‘So,’ Sasha said, recapping my words, ‘you said that this was funny.’ I liked Sasha for that.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘To me it is funny, yes. For a colonel in the SVR to be told by a British intelligence officer that he loves her–yes, that’s funny. He’s been out of control for some time,’ I continued. ‘It’s in my reports. But this was a new low. It seemed such an obvious, ridiculous thing to say to me. Apparently he’s lost it.’
‘And you’ve lost him,’ Yuri said.
‘Why isn’t it in your report that he told you he loved you?’ Kerchenko asked, turning a page in a mannered way so as not to meet my eye. I wanted to laugh at his pomposity next to the question.
‘It meant nothing. It was just one more symptom of his loss of discipline. It’s not an important piece of information.’
‘Maybe you were embarrassed?’ Kerchenko said.
‘Embarrassed, no,’ I replied. ‘Disgusted. It was laughable. As I say, it was a complete collapse of discipline and I’ve reported on his loss of discipline extensively.’
‘Yes,’ the General said heavily. ‘We were hoping you would take more advantage of that than you have. We’ve been expecting some results for some time from his apparent disintegration; something that tells us what he’s been doing in Moscow for so long. Far too long. But now he’s gone.’
‘It’s something that’s been discussed in this room many times,’ I agreed. ‘But on the instructions I was given I didn’t want to alarm him, scare him off. He’s been quite unstable for some time. He could do anything, in my opinion.’
‘So you’ve said,’ Kerchenko replied, leafing through Finn’s dossier. ‘Do you believe that he…he loves you?’ he said squeamishly, as if he’d just discovered some chewing gum attached to the underside of his desk.
Yuri snorted.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I doubt it.’
‘But he said so.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he’s never said so before.’
‘No.’
At this moment, Patrushev entered the room.