by Hugh McLeave
“I’ve got nowt,” the wild man growled. “But it’ll buy a half.”
We made our bargain with the watchman and split the half bottle the younger man fetched against the use of the bothy. “But no trouble,” he warned. “No scrappin’.”
In the cramped both, we converted a few building blocks and a pile of plastic foam and sacking into a low couch. Out of the wind and huddled together with the vodka circulating, we soon thawed out. We also shared those other vodka-drinker’s fetish items, a hunk of black bread and an onion. They were supposed to buffer the liquor effects, but in my experience they did nothing.
“You’re not from hereabouts?” asked the squint-eyed man, digging me with his elbow.
“No, out of town.” Vodka tipplers didn’t have to show their credentials or mention names, and this man seemed too nosey by half.
“Where’s that?”
I was about to tell him to mind his own business when someone rapped on the door. A woman’s face came round it. “So, this is where you’ve got to, Tollya,” she said to the younger man. “What you got there, a bottle?”
“’S’right…come in, Nadya.” He introduced her as his girl-friend and asked permission to offer her some vodka. I nodded, but the other man hesitated before agreeing.
Nadya corked herself between us on the makeshift couch; in the reflected light from the watchman’s brazier, I saw she was blonde, well-built with a fleshy body and heavy face; her cheap scent overpowered the smell of wet sacking, paraffin oil and our stale sweat in that confined, airless place; she could have been a casual prostitute, for she produced several rubles, coaxed two more from me and one from her boyfriend for another half of vodka. When she returned from the supermarket, we were all bathed in that mellow atmosphere of back-slapping camaraderie and a timeless, to-hell-with-everything feeling.
Halfway through the new bottle, Nadya and her boyfriend grew amorous, kissing and petting, whispering and sighing as though we weren’t there. Beside me, squint-eye was getting restive.
“Move over, you,” he croaked, sliding between me and the girl. I don’t know what liberties he took, but suddenly Nadya screamed, “Take your dirty, filthy paws off of me.” Her brawny arm swung round, backhanding him across the face and knocking him over my knees.
In the drunken mind, everything speeds up, but it seemed only a second before both men jumped to their feet to face each other.
I saw a knife glint in the squint-eyed man’s hand then heard the crash as the younger man broke an empty vodka bottle on a building block, leaving the jagged stump in his fist like a dagger.
Give it to him, Tollya. Give it to him in the face,” Nadya shouted.
Tollya lunged and to avoid the thrust from the broken bottle, squint-eye stepped back. I stuck a foot out, he tripped over it and went down, cracking his head on one of the building blocks and going out like a light.
For good measure, Nadya removed her heavy shoe and banged him over the forehead twice with its heel, “Filthy bastard,” she shouted in his dumb ear. “Get him out,” she ordered. Between us, we heaved and slid him out of the bothy, dumping him on the freezing mud twenty yards away. We pushed home the door bolts, finished the last bottle and all three of us rolled on to the couch and went to sleep.
Someone was shaking me. I heard the old watchman’s gruff whisper. “It’s the militia…get out o’ here, quick.” Tollya and Nadya had already vanished, but with the vodka I had shipped I could never have outrun the three men who were crossing the site, silhouetted in their police car headlamps. They grabbed me, hustled me to their car, flung me inside. In three minutes, I was sitting in the district commissariat under the ubiquitous Lenin portrait, denying squint-eye’s accusations that I and two other people had assaulted him. With one eye swollen shut and a bandage over his right temple, he looked a mess.
Although drunk, I stuck to my passport story; I was Josef Feodorovich Kuzin, a Vladimir hospital orderly now working in Moscow and living in the Zamoskvoryech district. Where did the hundred rubles come from? I explained half was my two-weeks’ pay and the other half I’d picked up at the races. “Sober him up in a cell for the night,” the desk officer ordered. They handed me a blanket and, with the sympathy Russians have for drunks, a mug of scalding, sweet tea which tasted like nectar. Almost before I collapsed on the hard cell palliasse, I was snoring.
I don’t know what woke me. Perhaps the cell light which they had switched on; or the squeak of the peephole sliding back into place. A grating voice outside the door asked, “What was he saying when he was talking in his sleep?”
“How would I know, sir—I told you it wasn’t Russian.”
“What was it, then? -- English, French, German?”
“Me, I wouldn’t know the difference, sir.”
Just as I was cursing myself for having broken Casanova’s first law—not to talk in one’s sleep in any language—the door burst open and four men literally sprang at me, rolling me over, pinioning my arms and legs and snapping handcuffs on my wrists and ankles. Turned face-up again, I recognized two faces from the tube station, that blotched, porridgy skin and the Mexican moustache of two murder-squad members.
Now I did panic, for they had obviously arrived to finish the assassination job they had muffed in the tube. As they picked me up, I lashed out with my bound feet, knocking one of them back. I yelled to the astonished desk officer, standing watching, “I’m guilty of the assault and demand to be charged with the crime .”
Those were my last words for a long time. From somewhere behind my head, a heavy fist descended on the nape of my neck and I remembered nothing more.
Chapter 18
When I came to, my head was thudding with pain and I felt as if I had broken a couple of ribs. A brilliant, fluorescent light overhead seared my eyes. I was lying on the floor in a windowless, stone-flagged cell about a yard and a half broad by two and a half yards long. I’d seen bigger lifts. It was furnished with one item only—a slop pail. No bed, no chair, no table. Not even a blanket. They had removed my jacket and shoes, but left me a shirt and trousers; but in that damp, unheated cell I shivered with cold. No need to ask where they’d brought me. This was the real Lubyanka. I flexed my arms and legs then went over my body, feeling everywhere. No broken bones. I recalled the Mexican bandit and pebbledash face. Why hadn’t they finished me off, or even used me as a punch-bag? Obviously, someone high-up had given orders not to kill or cripple me.
As I finished my medical examination, the peephole slid back. “Start walking,” a face said. “And keep walking.” I shook my head. Two minutes later, the peephole opened again and a jet of freezing water caught me on the body, soaking me. “Now, get moving,” the voice said.
I had to walk to keep myself from freezing to death. Back and forth, round the clock they forced me to march. Stop and their TV eye, out of reach like the ceiling light, informed them and I had another cold douche. Since they had confiscated my watch, I had no idea whether it was day or night or how long I had lain in that cubicle; and the peephole faces changed too often for me to identify them with certain shifts.
My only way of measuring time was to count the steps and try to remember how many I had taken between the meals they passed through the peephole. Round and round that little box, pacing as slowly as I could, I counted between 90,000 and 120,000 steps (I sometimes lost the place) between each meal.
So, once in about twenty-four hours they fed me. And what food: A hunk of black bread, a mess tin of beet soup with other vegetables bathed in grease, a glass of lukewarm tea without sugar or lemon. And this tasted bitter, as though they were doping it. I can tell you, after 100,000 steps, a man doesn’t bother much about that. Tea and the soup were my only liquid, and that saved them emptying my slop pail every day.
Why didn’t they complete the treatment and interrogate me every six hours, roughing me up if I didn’t co-operate and threatening me with extinction? I decided they might still be trying to round up all the others and break them dow
n before tackling me. But while waiting, they were giving me the Pavlov sensory-deprivation bit to disorientate me and the route-marching to break my strength and will.
After three meals, that is three days of shuffling round my cell, I felt the walls spinning slowly round me, or toppling in on me; I hardly knew where I was and must have stopped walking often without knowing it, for I remember the hose hitting me several times to get me moving again. Finally, I was too tired to care and collapsed on the floor with their hose water lapping round my thighs. I blacked out.
I must have been unconscious for several hours, for when I came round they had changed my clothing, swabbed my cell clean, emptied the slop pail and sprayed carbolic over the walls and floor. Now, I was wearing gulag pyjamas in rough twill with no buttons I could swallow, or cord to strangle myself in a box without a nail in sight. Something else had happened. They were leaving me alone. No peephole drill. No hose.
I lay there for perhaps three hours before the cell door opened and three men entered. Two were in uniform, the third in plain clothes. “On your feet,” one said. I tried and fell over. They manhandled me to a lift which took me up three or four floors. My head felt full of air, my eyes were sparking and I had a queasy sensation in my stomach as they marched me along a corridor and into a small room that seemed immense after my concrete coffin. They dumped me in a chair facing a crude desk in the full glare of a spotlight masking my vision of everything else. A door slammed, then the plain-clothes man moved into my line of sight.
“You asked to see General Agarov. Why?”
“To stop you and your kind using a battering-ram on an open door.”
“Explain.”
“I wanted to confess without being ill-treated.”
“Confess what?”
“The part I played to steal Lenin from his mausoleum.
“Do you know General Agarov?”
“I know of him.”
“What?”
“He was Soviet military attaché in London in the seventies until requested to leave; he was counselor in your Cairo embassy until 1978 then forced to leave because of activities inconsistent with his duties. He was examining magistrate who prepared the case against four dissidents about two years ago—Bukov, Arakelyan, Stalnov and Charnov. That is all.”
“Is that last fact important?”
“Yes.
“Anything else.”
“No.” In fact, I knew a lot more about Agarov, but why tip my hand at this stage? In any case, I felt so weary that even answering these few questions taxed my mental and physical energy.
“Who else knows about your activities here?”
“Only my collaborators.”
And that was the interrogation. Hustled downstairs and dumped in my cell, I had time to swallow the food they passed me before their marching routine began. Like a circus pony, I tracked round and round, back and forth, even counting when I had stopped walking and the freezing jet hit me. Evidently, they didn’t think me docile or disorientated enough to carry on with their questioning.
In my more lucid instants, I wondered what my own bosses were doing after putting out their alert for me. Had Frazer let slip the little I had revealed? My brain also tried to grapple with the implications of being held prisoner here, incognito. Did they mean to kill me and dispose of my body? But they would have already done it instead of playing this mixture of human squash and water polo with me. To prevent myself from going completely mad, I started to add together the steps for each day. I had reached 272,455 when the figures began to reel and revolve in my brain and I flaked out.
This time they fed me decent soup and ran an electric shaver over my face before taking me upstairs to a room with better furnishings and even a window which, though veiled, gave me my first taste of daylight for a week. Two men watched the guards push me into a chair; one was the KGB officer who had interrogated me; the other had a face I had seen ten years younger in a half-tone newspaper picture. But a face no-one could forget.
This was Kyril Sergeyevich Agarov, KGB general, the man who had sent Larissa’s brother and hundreds of others into gulags and oblivion. He was fully a head taller than his squat colleague, and his thin body accentuated this height; his arms were short, barely reaching to his hip bones, and he had a long, scrawny neck; his well-cut woolen suit, poplin shirt and tie hadn’t been bought off-the-peg in GUM, nor had he procured those expensive English cigarettes locally.
Agarov also had the most evil face I have ever encountered, and I had ample time to study it during our meetings. To me, it recalled pictures of the man who had wormed into the confidence of the Tsar, Tsarina and their family after the Revolution, then butchered them all in cold blood. Agarov was obviously a Eurasian mixture; he had small, slightly oblique eyes and flat cheekbones, yet a straight nose and rectangular face; his green eyes had a cold, sterile stare and the sneer around his small mouth and nostrils stamped this man as a sadist.
Yet, I had my reason for demanding to see him. Agarov was a survivor of four regimes, and in the USSR that meant he had powerful Politburo friends. Recruited as a youth by Lavrenti Beria himself, he had been picked by Kruschev’s KGB chairman, the infamous General Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov as KGB resident in Turkey. When a British press campaign prevented Serov from accompanying Kruschev to Britain, it was Agarov who looked after the Party leader’s safety.
He had been kicked out of Britain and Egypt for spying in the seventies. Since spotting his name in Larissa’s samizdat account of her brother’s trial, I had done a lot of homework on General Agarov, in the British and American press, in Pravda and Izvestia, in books about the KGB, in casual talk with men like Frazer. Agarov liked life’s good things for himself, his wife and two teenage boys. As a top man in KGB headquarters, he had much to lose if the Lenin case backfired.
“Have a cigarette, Mr. Churchill,” he murmured, in smooth English, proffering his silver cigarette case.
“Niet va nye kuryou,” I replied, waving the case aside and making it clear I would speak Russian.
Agarov’s henchman took exception to this gesture. Stepping forward, he slapped me hard across the face and said in that gravelly accent, “That’ll teach you to have respect for the Comrade-general.”
“Enough of that, Makurin,” Agarov murmured. “Mr. Churchill might form a bad impression of us and Lubyanka. His teeth bared, showing none of the steelwork Russian dentists favored. Agarov was playing the clean, decent policeman and it didn’t fool me. In this double act, there’s always a goodie and baddie; the bad one roughs you up to fill you with pain and hate and loathing, then the good one steps in to sympathize and let you weep your life away on his shoulder. They are the dangerous ones, the sadists. “Makurin’s an impulsive fellow,” Agarov went on. “Know what he suggests? That we should let them fish you out of the Moscow River about level with the British Embassy.”
I spoke slowly, for my tired brain had to search and grope for the words I needed, “Then you had better show him the pictures we took in the mausoleum—the ones I left for you.”
“What made you come here and ask for me?”
“You dealt with Bukov and the other dissidents. Also, I have a horror of physical violence and I thought placing myself in your hands would save me from torture.”
“We don’t torture people.”
“I’ll tell them that downstairs.”
“Why didn’t you go to your embassy when you had the chance?” Agarov sat on his desk, speldering his long legs, twirling his ebony holder in curious squat fingers. “You have diplomatic immunity and could have left the Soviet Union without hindrance.
“I wished to confess, to tell the whole truth, to take my punishment. Didn’t Makurin tell you?”
“Yes, he did.” Agarov bit on the holder and looked at his subordinate then at me. They both appeared uneasy about the words ‘confession’ and ‘truth.’ Perhaps confessions weren’t supposed to be made voluntarily but wrung from people who resisted torture to a certain point t
o salve their conscience or save face before surrendering. Perhaps the KGB recognized only one truth, its own.
Agarov ejected his cigarette, ground it into an ashtray. “Well, Makurin, I think we owe it to Mr. Churchill to hear this famous confession.”
“If it’s a bunch of lies, we’ll string you up by the thumbs or your big toes,” Makurin said. He disappeared for two minutes to return with a man bearing a typewriter. When the typist was installed, Agarov turned to me and nodded.
I had so often rehearsed the story that even in my exhausted condition, I could narrate it without missing many salient points. However, I took it very slowly, knowing this was a rest from the cell treatment. I had the typist read back each paragraph to keep me on track. Agarov seemed impressed, for he had no doubt read much the same story from their interrogations of Vanya and Anastas and from the men who had tortured Kolya to death.
I only omitted those facts they could not know, such as my first meeting with Larissa in Sofia, where I had bought the Lenin dummies and statues, and what I had done between leaving the mausoleum on May Day and my arrival at the Shapirov flat.
As each page was completed, I read and initialed what I had dictated and signed the five typed pages. When I had finished, I leaned back. “Ah, that makes me feel better,” I said with a contented sigh.
Agarov flourished his copy of the confession which he had read as it was typed. He sneered at me. “It’s a nice story, Mr. Churchill. Do you really expect us to lend the slightest credence to this fairy tale?” And, to emphasize his contempt for their contents, he calmly shredded the five sheets of paper and tossed them into his waste-paper basket.
Makurin dismissed the typist. Clumping round the desk, he hoisted me up by the armpits and shook me until my teeth rattled. “So you’re trying to make fools of us and discredit the greatest man who ever lived, the real savior of humanity,” he bawled, his blotchy face turning livid. “Instead of confessing to what you were really doing, recruiting and organizing spies.”
