by Hugh McLeave
Approaching the massive oak door of Lubyanka Prison, I wondered how many people had rung its bell, unsolicited. Most people arrived at the KGB headquarters under constraint, escorted through a side door into dark courtyards or even darker underground cells. Too many hundreds of thousands had entered this building since Lenin founded the Cheka secret police in 1917 and had disappeared off the earth for anybody to be foolhardy enough to march voluntarily into the place. Which was precisely why I was doing just that.
I rang the bell, keeping a finger on it for ten seconds but hearing nothing on the other side. Another two minutes went by before the door opened. A uniformed commissionaire ran his eyes over me, noting my tieless shirt, shabby overcoat and unpolished shoes then asking what I wanted. I measured my words.
“I have come to put myself in the hands of General-General Kyril Sergeyevich Agarov, the senior magistrate.”
At this, the man’s old eyelids retracted and he gazed at me as if I were crazy. It seemed that only the KGB decided who would be in their hands. He made as though to hunt me away when I produced my card and told him to take it to General Agarov with a request to be seen. Growling at me to wait outside, he banged the door shut in my face.
For five minutes I stood outside that door, drawing sympathetic stares from passers-by before the old man reappeared and beckoned me to follow him. We went up the wide staircase of Lubyanka to the first floor. Fortunately, he took the impressive, marble steps slowly, for my heart was hammering and I stopped on the landing to admire the statue to Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Pole who founded the Cheka, later to become the KGB.
They did themselves well. Our feet sank into the thick carpet as we advanced down the broad corridor. We came to a door with neither number nor name and he rapped softly, opened, gestured me inside and shut the door behind me. I found myself in a cubicle furnished with a desk, three chairs and a filing cabinet; it stank of stale Mazurka tobacco from the pile of papirosa in the ashtray. A man behind the desk looked up; his face betrayed as much as I expected from an inmate. Nothing. He had slicked, dark hair, a sallow face with clapped-in jaws. If I knew anything about Soviet respect for rank and status, this man wasn’t General Agarov.
“Who are you and what do you want?” he asked in Russian.
“My name is Alan Churchill, I’m attached to the British trade mission, and I want to see General Agarov.”
“What about?” He spat his questions in a thick, Georgian accent. His yellow fingers found and lit a cigarette while he jotted my name on a pad. Did he not know it? “What about?” he repeated.
“About the Lenin Mausoleum affair.”
He concealed his feelings well, for not a twitch of interest showed in his features. He wrote on his pad THE LENIN MAUSOLEUM AFFAIR in block Cyrillic script. “Wait here,” he ordered and disappeared through a side door, allowing me a flash of a bigger office. In just over five minutes, he returned to sit down without comment. And there we remained in that small cubicle, giving on to a deep courtyard with veiled windows all round; for three quarters of an hour, we stayed immobile and silent, he reading the Word in that morning’s Pravda and I smoking three of my last seven Players. Suddenly, the phone on his desk buzzed and he put an ear to the handset, listening. Cradling the receiver, he turned to me. “General Agarov cannot see you,” he said.
“Why not?”
“There is no Lenin Mausoleum Affair.”
“But…” As I went to protest, the door opened and a uniformed man appeared. “Take him down,” the KGB officer ordered, signaling me to follow the man. He led me back along the corridor and down the marble steps to the front door which the old commissionaire was opening. I had no more than ten seconds before the man pushed me through the door and banged it behind me.
I used them to hand him the package I had brought with me. “Make sure General Agarov gets that,” I said. He took it without a word.
For several minutes, I stood outside Lubyanka, disorientated, confused. I couldn’t believe it. Bounced from Lubyanka by the KGB! It was like getting bounced from Hell by Beelzebub himself. Even the pedestrians turned to stare at me, amazed at witnessing someone actually allowed to leave Lubyanka, bewildered that the KGB, the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient KGB had apparently given up on a poor-looking specimen like me when they could nail anybody at all for speaking, breathing, just Being and put them away. In some eyes, I imagined catching a glint of respect as though they regarded me as something special.
But what did it all mean? I wandered along Kirov Street to a small café near the main post office and bought myself a glass of tea and a fist-sized sandwich. I sat down at a window table to reflect. What did it mean? That they intended to stifle the whole plot? No. They were going to arrest Shapirov, had already rounded up Vanya and probably Anastas and were hunting for Raya. But they didn’t want to know me. In fact, it looked as if they’d be delighted if I disappeared on the next plane back to London. Then, with me out of the way, they could either liquidate Larissa and the others, or dispatch them to the other end of the country to serve a lifetime in the camps or prisons. Anything I might say about the Lenin Mausoleum Affair they would deny or discredit. They had left us alone those two nights in the dacha, hoping I would ask the embassy to help me escape.
In the central post office, I called the embassy from a cabin, asking for Jock Frazer. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded in that grating voice. “Simmonds and the embassy have put out an alert for you.”
“Tell Simmonds I’ll explain everything when I see him.”
“You’ll no’ ha’e time m’boy. You’ll be on the first plane out.”
“Did the stuff go?”
“Ay, the way I told you. What’s your game, anyway?”
“I’ll tell you later.” I banged the phone back, wondering how long before that conversation lay, typed, on Agarov’s desk in the Lubyanka. What did it matter, in any case?
Larissa had given me enough hints on how to spot plain-clothes KGB men from the cut of their privileged overcoats, hats and shoes, all from their own special stores. One was gazing, absently, into a bookshop window across Kirov Street when I left the post office. He did not follow me but signaled to another man who stepped into my tracks as I walked to Sverdlov Square metro.
So, they were tailing me in relays, hoping I would lead them to Larissa or Raya. Or disappear, discreetly, into the embassy and catch a plane. At Dzerzhinsky Square, I bore left to the taxi rank and a Zil with its ‘free’ green light glowing. “Smolensk Square,” I ordered the driver. Through his rear mirror, I noticed another Zil keeping pace. I had chosen Smolensk Square which was always busy with three lines running under it. With luck, I could lose the KGB in the crowd and by switching underground trains a couple of times.
Approaching the square, I thrust three rubles into the driver’s hand and stopped him fifty yards from the tube station. I jumped out, hurried to the entrance and down the escalator before realizing I had no ten-kopek coins to get through the turnstile. I lost half a minute changing a ruble note then made for the circle line, packed even at that early afternoon hour. I pushed through, into the thickest wedge of people, hoping the KGB tail wouldn’t have spotted me. In any case, why worry since they had just kicked me out of their own headquarters? Perhaps that was why I wasn’t really on my guard.
Moscow underground claims you can set your watch by the trains which, on busy lines, run every two minutes. One had just pulled out, but already the light was flashing to indicate the next train had left Arbat station.
Yet, those two minutes were an eternity. For no sooner had I taken my place than I noticed five men infiltrate the crowd and form a circle round me, their hands characteristically thrust into the pockets of their invariable, long coats. Holding guns, no doubt. Now I could guess why they had kept me in Lubyanka for three-quarters of an hour—to deploy a squad of their men around me and follow me.
I glanced at them. One had a red, coarse-grained vodka-tippler’s face and muddy eyes,
another sported a floppy, Pancho Villa moustache and looked through sly, brown eyes; the three others had typical, square Russian faces and stocky build. Not only did my mind imprint their faces. With a flash of something like intuition and premonition, I realized why these men had taken post around me. These KGB thugs meant to push me into that trench a couple of yards away! Into the track of the incoming tube train! Both men standing in front had already cleared the way and would step aside at the right moment to let their pals do the heaving. Russians could smell KGB and Lubyanka, like dogs, and had backed off. There were three behind me, and perhaps others I hadn’t identified.
At first, a sort of cold panic seized me. My spine prickled and my legs felt full of water at the idea of landing on that electrified rail. I lit a cigarette, well aware of the no-smoking rules and signs in the metro. Aware, too, that Russians did not allow flouting of their rules. “Cigarette out,” somebody ordered, and several people protested at me. I stamped on the cigarette, conscious that I had distracted the KGB platoon. I had also decided if they were going to play lethal games, I’d take at least two of the murder squad on to the track with me.
“Keep the quayside clear,” came the usual voice over the public-address system.
That announcement gave us thirty seconds before the train arrived. I began the countdown on the big wall clock to my right. At ten seconds, a slight pressure wave passed over us as the train rammed air through the tunnel. Then came the slow, rhythmic clatter of its wheels. I counted off seven more seconds to my thirty-second limit. At that moment, the flicker of the train lights appeared along the tunnel.
As it broke into the station, I put my foot in the back of one of the KGB men and kicked hard. At the same time, I dropped to the ground and grabbed the ankle of the other man. A scream broke from the first man who teetered for an instant on the platform edge then fell thirty yards in front of the oncoming train.
At that moment, I wrenched hard on the ankle of the second man, and heaved, sending him flying after his companion. A cry went up from the people all round, then the metallic screech of brakes and a shower of sparks as the tube train driver tried to stop. It was now that the platform lights went out, plunging the place into darkness except for the dim illumination from the halted train.
Several pairs of hands had already fastened on me, but I lashed out with both hands and feet, hearing curses as I struck flesh and bone. Around us, everything was panic as the crowd surged back from the train while some were barging through to reach both men on the track. In the darkness, people were trampling over each other and me in what had become a gigantic rugger scrum. I sank my teeth into a hand that held me, then wriggled out of my heavy overcoat. I kicked myself free of the hands holding my legs then crawled and clawed my way through a dozen pairs of legs to the platform wall. There, I got to my feet and charged my way to an archway.
On the far side of the great vault, through the archways another train was blowing its siren, preparing to leave. I sprinted across the station and flung myself at the closing doors forcing them open then collapsed on a seat. “What’s the next stop?” I gasped to the woman passenger in the next seat.
“You shouldn’t do things like that, young man,” she said, reprovingly. “Krasnoprenskaya is next stop.”
I was therefore heading north on the circle line, but I couldn’t stay on the train. Someone might have sighted me boarding it, and anyway they had too many agents in these Ali Baba caverns for my comfort. At the next station, I got down and took the escalator to the surface.
Like so many Moscow districts, this one had sprouted hundreds of high-rise flats, offices and shops separated by wide boulevards and neat little open spaces planted with spruce and birch trees. While wondering where to duck, I spied the planetarium sign and walked quickly along Krasnoprenskaya Street to the park containing the zoo and the planetarium and paid my seat. While heady facts and figures were booming at me in Russian and sputniks, planets, constellations and galaxies were streaking or wheeling overhead, I was trying to make sense of that crude attempt to murder me.
They had obviously decided and planned my assassination while I sat in Lubyanka. Even down to staging that blackout in the metro when the train arrived. Now, their motive had become obvious. Without me, nobody need ever learn about the attempt to body-snatch Lenin. They could take care of all the others their own way.
As for myself, had their plan to execute me succeeded, they had their story all ready: Mr. Churchill had been drinking heavily (wasn’t his predilection for whisky, vodka, brandy and every other liquor well-known to his superiors?) and had staggered and fallen in front of a tube-train provoking a blackout on the platform.
Not a line of all this would have appeared in any paper in the Soviet Union; no-one in the capital would have questioned the story; those metro passengers who had witnessed the murder would have shut up or have been shut up; Simmonds and the embassy would have assumed that Churchill had gone on another binge during his five missing days and finished in the way he deserved, cut in two by a train; if they grew too inquisitive, the Russians would do their usual blustering and threatening with perhaps a hint that I had been engaged in anti-state activities.
Only, the KGB did not know about my contact with my London solicitor, Andrew Rankin Pattinson; nor had they had time to look at the package I had left at Lubyanka before they detailed the execution squad.
I survived two hours of cosmic jargon but still quit the planetarium with no precise plan, either about tonight or succeeding days. Had Larissa given them the slip? How was she faring? At least she knew Moscow and had friends to hide her. An alien like me had several million Muscovites against him.
For, I knew this capital resembled no other. It wasn’t the sort of place where you could book into a quiet hotel, spend a night in some hostel, lose yourself in a night-club or disco, look for a red-light district and a soft-hearted pro. KGB surveillance touched everybody, even the man-in-the-street; and since foreigners were never supposed to stray from the Intourist track or their planned itinerary, they were doubly suspect and vulnerable. Knowing Russians, I realized no people on earth so distrusted foreigners, and since their xenophobia was heavily infected with espionitis, they became willing secret-police accomplices.
I marched west through the chessboard of high-rise buildings and squares, broken now and then by waste ground where the last of the old isbas had been demolished to make way for more concrete boxes. Between the bigger buildings dusk was already settling, and soon I had to find somewhere to spend the night. I had no coat, not even a toothbrush and I was beginning to feel hungry.
But at least I had a hundred-odd rubles and I began to look for a gastronom where I might buy bread, cooked meat and cheese as well as something to drink.
At the edge of a park containing a children’s playground and a cemetery, my eye caught a small supermarket. On one side, it had a liquor shop and there, half a dozen unwashed, ill-dressed, unshaven men were loitering. They had sized me up long before I noticed them—which says something for my down-and-out appearance. One man gestured at me, holding up two fingers, another took the cue and held up three; a better-dressed individual pointed at me and held up one finger.
Anastas had taught me this sign language; the first two men were looking for two or three partners to share the cost of either half a liter, or perhaps a liter of vodka, their fingers showing they had only enough to pay a third or a quarter; the third man’s one finger indicated he had either one and a half rubles for a half, or three rubles to share a liter. He looked far and away the best of that wild bunch. I beckoned to him and held up one finger. In my jacket pocket I found and crumpled three ruble notes, passing them to him. Into that shop he went like a ferret down a rabbit-hole. When he emerged with a liter of vodka, one of the other men with a squint eye and a huge scab forming over a recent nose injury, offered a ruble to buy a share and my man agreed. Now, we were the classic vodka troika, on a three-man binge.
“Where are we going?�
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“Vorosky site,” they both said over their shoulder. Trailing behind, I noticed the squint-eyed man was swaying as though already drunk. We trudged over the park to the other side where they were building flats. On the churned-up ground, they had a watchman’s hut, a workers’ bothy and a site office. All the men had left, and the bonfire of wood from the old dwelling houses was burning out. “We’ll get in there out o’ the cold,” the better-dressed man said, pointing to the bothy.
“Ay, but meanwhile give’s a slug now,” the older man croaked.
Behind the site palisade we halted. A clenched-fist clout and the bottle cork disappeared. It wouldn’t be wanted. Both men produced the symbol of the vodka lush, a small tumbler to ensure they got their full ration. They looked at me and I shrugged. “Have mine and the first tot,” said the younger man. I felt the fiery liquor sear my gullet as I tossed it back.
I had met vodka soaks before, but not even a heroin addict looked at his long-awaited fix the way this squint-eyed man watched his glass filling; his face was transformed, he ran a dry tongue round his lips, his nostrils flared and his little eyes seemed to converge even more; when he swallowed the liquor without even tasting it, his protracted aaah! sounded like a last gasp.
We knew it was necessary to find a safe place to finish the liquor before the drunks patrol made its rounds, or we would all finish up in cells with our heads shaved. After another tot each, we plodded over to the watchman’s hut where the old man had a wood fire going in his brazier. He accepted a couple of tots, slipped us the bothy key and whispered we could use it for an hour or two
“If we buy him a bottle, can we use it all night?” I asked, then could have bitten out my tongue when the cross-eyed man nudged me.
“You got enough ready for ‘nother bottle?” he said in his Muscovite twang.
“I’ve got three rubles I was going to spend on a night’s digs, but if I can get drunk as well…” I said.
“I’ll put a ruble to that,” the first man cut in.
