The Partisan, page 11
“What is the matter with you? This is supposed to be a happy day. You look like you’re at a funeral.”
He took a deep breath. “There is no longer any possibility of a romantic attachment between us. I am sorry if I led you on. I am older than you and it was a dishonorable thing to do. You are the last person in the world I would want to anger.”
He was very serious. She had to bite her lip to stifle a laugh.
“You didn’t lead me on. I walked willingly into damnation. Now, for God’s sake, put your hat back on and cheer up.”
The young soldier looked at her properly for the first time. “I have to tell you that there is another girl. She is expecting a baby. I am praying that you will forgive me.”
It took Yulia a while to process this. She felt anger stirring somewhere in her. Then she said “baby” to herself, unconsciously making the shape of the word with her lips. The warmth and joy of everything it promised made her smile.
“There is nothing to forgive. Who is the lucky girl?”
“Xenia is here now.”
Yulia looked over his shoulder and saw a very slight girl in a headscarf standing alone twenty yards away, staring hard at them. When she caught Yulia’s eye she hung her head. The girl was thin, almost malnourished, but pretty. She wasn’t showing yet.
“Bring her over here,” said Yulia. An unpleasant thought had begun to form in her head. When Andrey returned with the girl, the expressions on their faces confirmed it: both of them were mortally afraid—of Yulia.
Andrey seemed to read her thoughts: “They could send us all away at any moment. Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland. God knows what will happen. The uncertainty is killing Xenia already.” He lowered his voice. “Yulia, one word from you about what happened between us, and it’s Siberia for me. My son will grow up without a father.” The girl stifled a sob as he spoke. She looked pale and weak.
Yulia felt it properly for the first time: the power that people of her rank held over the lives of others. It was exhilarating and sickening at the same time. She shrank away from it with a shiver of horror.
She reached out and drew Andrey and Xenia close to her. The three young people stood in a huddle, their foreheads almost touching. Yulia said: “Never. I would never do anything to hurt either of you or your child. I swear this on my mother’s life.”
The girl sobbed again and slumped down. For a moment Yulia thought she was going to kneel and kiss her hand in the middle of Manezhnaya Square.
“For God’s sake, stand up straight. We’re not living in the time of the Tsars. Andrey—take her somewhere out of this heat immediately. Both of you, go and be happy. There is nothing to fear. Go!”
Xenia smiled tearfully at Yulia, and Andrey gave her a look of intense gratitude as he led the girl away by the arm.
13
Maxim Karpov sat in the MGB’s offices on the second floor of the Kremlin, watching Oleg eat and wondering how long he could stand it. They were waiting to be called to the third floor for an audience with the most powerful man in the world.
Oleg’s wife had made “little pigeons” with a sauce of tomato and sour cream. She always used a mixture of pork, veal and beef mince. Every morning before he drove into the Kremlin, Oleg put a deep bowl of her homemade food on the passenger seat next to him with a plate domed over the top. He handed the covered bowl to the women in the cafeteria in the morning and they kept it in the big refrigerator for him, ready to reheat. He could never last until lunchtime.
The telephone on the desk between them rang. It was Madame Sorokina, private secretary to the chairman of the Politburo, asking them to come up. Oleg wolfed down the last few mouthfuls that remained in the bowl, bending over it so that he would not splash sauce onto his shirt and tie. Karpov’s face bore a look of intense disgust.
Upstairs, they were still made to wait. Karpov paced, the thick green carpets swallowing the sound of his footsteps. They were refurbishing the palace, bit by bit, and they had replaced the dark wooden panels along the corridor that led to the chairman’s office. Karpov ran his hands over the grain. After five minutes he was muttering under his breath.
“That simpleton,” he hissed. “Who is he to keep me hanging around like a gypsy peddler at his door? That weak fool. A shambling farmer’s boy from Ukraine.” Well, Karpov would never make it back home by noon now. What would she be doing, the Uzbek girl? He felt a jolt of excitement. Putting on the clothes I have prepared? No, he thought. Eating the food laid out for her. Well, that would do her no harm. The girl was very young, spindly and emaciated, exactly how he liked them. Her bright green eyes were very Central Asian. They had made her stand out from the other girls offered to him by the deputy chief of the Moscow police department. They brought back strange, anxious, stirring memories.
The girl had taken well to her training so far. He had left her alone to rest on the first night. On the second he had explained exactly what was expected of her and she had complied, with a reluctance he found deeply exciting. He photographed her in various poses but did not touch her. She had been extremely frightened, but no harm had come to her. That was the key to it. She would be less scared next time. Karpov had struggled to restrain himself when he was alone with her, but his patience would be rewarded in the end.
After he had finished with the girl, he would experience a deep inner peace that nothing else could replicate. He would stretch out in glorious solitude on the carpet in his study, legs bent, knees pointing at the ceiling, head resting on a cushion right next to the gramophone, surrounded by his mother’s books and records. She was a cultured woman who had read literature and taught languages, until marriage to a Cossack ape had killed all her ambition and potential. Karpov would take out one of his mother’s Debussy records. He was returning more and more to the composer’s piano pieces lately. They were soothing and dreamlike. The time immediately after he sated himself with a girl was like the cool, clear spell that follows an afternoon thunderstorm over the steppe in late summer. He knew his lust would build again soon, as the heat and humidity build in the summer air in an endless cycle.
Oleg was standing against the paneled wall. Every couple of minutes, he transferred a caramel from the paper bag in his jacket pocket to his mouth. He chewed continuously.
When Karpov saw Vassily and Anna approaching at the far end of the corridor, he broke into a broad grin and spread his arms wide.
“El Catalan himself!” he cried, in an exaggerated Spanish accent. “Gallivanting around the capitalist countries suits you, Vassily. You look like that Egyptian—what was his name, Oleg? I can’t remember but he ran the biggest cathouse in Cairo. That fine tie must have cost a month’s salary. And this is a whole new kind of shirt collar. An American design?”
Vassily said: “You are looking very well yourself, Comrade Maxim Georgevich.” Karpov flinched. He did not like people saying his first name out loud and he disliked being reminded of his father’s.
Vassily came up close to Karpov—too close. He looked down at him insolently, allowing his eyes to drift across to the right side of Karpov’s neck. Oleg took a step away from the wall toward them. Vassily’s eyes hovered around the throat of Karpov, who appeared to be bracing himself for some outrage.
“If I may say so, Comrade Chief Administrator,” said Vassily, mildly, “that high style of collar suits you.”
Karpov colored and chewed his lip. His hand rose as if to reach for the spot on his neck where Vassily’s eyes had rested, but he mastered himself and forced it back to his side. He scowled at Vassily but said nothing.
Oleg was two paces away, still chewing slowly. Vassily jerked a thumb at him. “How come he’s always eating, but he doesn’t get fat? Is there a trick to it? I’ve always wondered.”
“He gets a lot of exercise beating the shit out of people I don’t like.”
“Is this really necessary, gentlemen?” asked Anna.
Oleg walked right up to Vassily and stood there without expression. Their faces were inches apart, like those of boxers squaring up to each other at the weigh-in.
“For God’s sake!” said Anna.
The two men stood toe to toe for a moment, searching each other’s face for signs of weakness. Neither detected any. Vassily sniffed theatrically and said: “Too much garlic.” A smirk played at the corners of Oleg’s mouth.
Madame Sorokina threw open the door and said: “Good morning to you all. The comrade Chief Administrator is kindly invited in first.”
The chairman of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union had a headache that morning. He had been obliged to drink heavily for three evenings in a row, against the specific advice of his personal physician. Saturday was a national holiday in honor of Socialist agriculture. Guests from all the Soviet republics and foreign trade representatives had been invited to the grandest hall in the palace and the chairman had put in a classic performance, expending his impressive stock of jokes and stories and leading the party in endless toasts.
On Sunday night he had spent a tense three hours with a group of senior military officials from East Germany discussing a document with a single long word printed on the front in bold type. Relations between the two allies were frosty and the chairman had relied on liberal amounts of good brandy as well as his considerable charm to lubricate the conversation.
On Monday there was an annual dinner to celebrate the defense of Moscow from the Nazis. This year was the twentieth anniversary of the siege. Anna should have been there. She had been his deputy then, when he was the chairman of the local party in the capital’s darkest days. The guests were a mix of officials, military officers and ordinary people from the city who had stayed to defend it, when the Germans had reached Khimki and were looking at the spires of St. Basil’s Cathedral through their field binoculars. Many others had tried to flee, choking the roads that led east, but that was not mentioned now.
In a normal year Anna would have sat on the chairman’s right, laughing and joking and squeezing his arm while he called her “daughter.” If he got lost in an anecdote and forgot the name of a comrade or the date of an incident, she would remind him gently. Last year, the main course had been a magnificent whole trout stuffed with pomegranate and sour apricots, which the waiters had placed in front of him with a flourish.
Only Anna noticed the strange, fixed expression that had come over the leader’s face, and she had swiftly had the plate moved. It was not widely known that the chairman, who regularly weighed decisions that might lead to the destruction of millions of lives, could not bear to contemplate death and suffering in the smallest of everyday things. He could not endure the sight of blood, be it from man or animal, and it was his wife who had to dispatch the live carp that she brought home for special occasions.
He wanted Anna at the feast, but the shadow that had suddenly fallen upon her family made it impossible. They would be cast out of the circle of light until the mystery of Sergei’s disappearance was solved.
There was a grand desk in the chairman’s private office with a high-backed chair, but he never sat behind it. It was covered with books and plastic scale models of Soviet airplanes and satellites. There was a small coffee table right in front of the desk with two soft leather chairs on either side. This was where the chairman entertained visitors. He lolled in one of the chairs now, a hand pressed to his temple. His secretary, Madame Sorokina, walked in with a glass of water fizzing with painkillers. She watched with great sympathy as he took a long sip.
“Are they both here?”
“Comrade Karpov has been waiting for a while now, Comrade Chairman, with his assistant. Anna Vladimirovna has just arrived.”
“Let’s get this over with. Send the MGB delegation in first, please.”
Karpov left the chairman’s office and walked past Anna, jamming his trilby down hard on his head and grinning his hunting dog grin. Oleg loped behind. The leader of the Soviet Union put a finger to his lips as Anna came in through the open door of the office. He gestured for her to sit opposite him. Vassily followed Anna into the room, walked over to the wireless set in the corner and stooped in front of it. He opened a panel at the back and fiddled with something. Then he moved the dial on the front up and down the spectrum. No radio stations could be heard, only static.
When Vassily had finished, he turned to the chairman. “Nothing.” He got up on a chair and looked at the light fixture in the center of the ceiling. He ran a finger over the light switches, and the bank of controls for the intercom system. He shrugged. “Nothing new.” The chairman smiled warmly. “Thank you, my friend. I will not keep Anna for long.” Vassily nodded and left the room.
Anna looked at the chairman in amazement. He said: “There is a signal generator hidden in the radio to disrupt any devices. I want us to be able to talk freely.”
“You think Karpov would dare to bug this office?”
“He has done so before.”
She screwed her hands into fists and almost shouted the word pederast. The chairman winced. His head still ached. “Why in God’s name do you tolerate him?” she said. “He is like a nightmare we cannot wake up from.”
“Do you know what my wife calls him? The long shadow that lingers all year round to remind us of the winter. For me, Maxim is my penance—the price I pay for everything I did back then.”
“I won’t let you talk that way. You were the springtime. You gave us hope again.”
The chairman shook his head. “I wasn’t brave enough to make a move against the Boss.”
They sat and looked at each other for a while. She had been crying but had done her best to conceal it with makeup. She was fifty and he was sixty-seven, but they might have been the same age. Drink and worry had aged her.
“You did the right thing by raising the alarm,” the chairman said at last. “If you had left it to Karpov to discover the news, things would be harder now. When did you report Sergei missing?”
“The night before last. We haven’t seen or heard from him.” She swallowed. “For four days now.”
“And Ivanov interviewed you last night at police headquarters?”
“The little deputy. Ivanov doesn’t want any part of this.”
“Very sensible. What did you tell him?”
“Everything I know. I told him he could search the house. I told them about our place in East Germany. There is nowhere else Sergei could have gone. Nowhere that I know of.” The chairman considered this. “There was a panic about Yulia that night, of course. I was in here, watching the embassy wires. Karpov wanted to drag her home immediately. Vassily insisted she continue with the second day of the chess tournament. He got his way. The honor of Soviet sports was at stake, and there was no point in creating a scandal in the foreign press.”
“Are you sure we can trust Vassily?”
The chairman raised an eyebrow. “I was under the impression that he was a friend of yours.”
“Of mine? Certainly not!” she snapped. “What has he said to you?”
“Nothing, daughter. I understood that you and Sergei knew Vassily well, that is all.”
“I might have bumped into him once in the war. I do not remember him clearly. They are all the same, that type of man. I believe Sergei was acquainted with him. And, of course, I have heard stories.”
“Not all of them, I think. Your hair would have turned white.” He chuckled to himself.
Anna did not return his smile. “Vassily always reports to you directly?”
“Absolutely not. When you employ a man like that, it is of the utmost importance that you have no idea what he is doing half the time. The truth would give me nightmares.” She was still not amused.
The chairman said: “Insofar as there is any certainty in this world, I believe that Vassily Andreyevich can be trusted. He is a rare man: one who thinks for himself and is prepared to take risks. Our system does not excel at producing people with these qualities. Do you remember Cuba? That was all him. I could not have found the place on a map and the name Fidel Castro was unknown to any of us. Vassily went absent without leave and ran the whole show alone. I have taken great pains to avoid finding out any of the details.
“And now we have our little opera box a hundred miles off the coast of Florida. I could have shot him for insubordination. Naturally, I am going to make him a Hero of the Soviet Union instead … when the time is right. It was for Vassily’s sake, among other things, that I have fought to keep the Fourth Directorate out of Karpov’s fat little hands for all these years.”
Anna’s face flushed: “You have fought? You, the leader of our country, must haggle with this hangman, this pervert? Please explain to me why.”
“Because we tried dictatorship,” said the chairman, patiently. “And look what happened. Now we have a chairman in charge, not a marshal. And, yes, everything is a negotiation. It is exhausting sometimes, but both of us know what the alternative is.”
“Karpov would make himself dictator in a heartbeat,” said Anna. “He would outdo Stalin in viciousness.”
“No,” said the chairman, firmly. “This analysis is incorrect. He is more cautious than you think. And he is always gnawed by doubt. Karpov had his chance on the day of the Boss’s death and did not take it. When the crown was rolling around the floorboards of the dacha, and the rest of us were scrabbling around, trying to pick it up and place it on our own heads, Karpov drew aside. He helped me become chairman then. His survival was the price. And then he set about making himself indispensable. He designed the nuclear weapons program and it would be hard to make it work without him now. There is, of course, the small matter of the files.”
“Now we are getting somewhere!” said Anna, bitterly. “He has a file on you.”
“He does, of course.” the chairman replied pleasantly. “And on you, and on your husband, without a doubt, and on many, many other people. Those flimsy little folders, finally, are the source of Karpov’s power.”
