Making Enemies

by Francis Bennett

  ‘It would be a mistake to overestimate my role,’ I said.

  ‘I can tell you this,’ Iredale said, stubbing out his cigarette. ‘We want your man to pack his tent and bugger off. Either you remove him or we do. Right now I’m giving you a choice. But I’m not known for my patience.’ He fixed his cold expression on me once more. ‘The only question that remains unresolved is whether or not you’re a man of the world, Stevens. My people hope we can do business.’

  Slowly Iredale was putting his cold hands around my throat and beginning to squeeze. There was little I could do about it.

  ‘What needs to be kept quiet? You’re going to have to give me more ammunition if you want to get Watson-Jones to move.’

  I could see the calculation Iredale was making. How far did he have to take me into his trust in order to keep the dialogue going? Before he spoke again he engaged in his curious habit of looking round the room. He spotted a friend by the window and waved to him.

  ‘There are some strange goings-on in the Soviet Union at the moment, events we don’t fully understand. Are we witnessing the natural restlessness of a repressive regime or real signs of revolt? Are there positive signs of change we should encourage or do we wait and see? All very delicate. Then up pops Watson-Jones making a hell of a lot of noise while we’re listening to hear a pin drop. I’m sure you’ve got the drift. So I ask my question again. What’s your price?’

  ‘When it comes to decisions like that,’ I said, ‘I’m the monkey, not the organ-grinder.’

  ‘If I thought that were true I wouldn’t be wasting my time here.’

  For every avenue I closed off, Iredale opened another. He was a formidable opponent.

  ‘I’m not sure I can deliver the answers you want.’

  ‘Good God, man, what’s the matter with you?’ He was getting impatient. ‘We can’t afford to let Watson-Jones bugger this thing up. If you don’t do something damn quick, we will. In matters like this, my people lack finesse.’

  ‘Who are your people?’

  ‘I am sure you can respect their anonymity.’

  I was being warned off questioning him too closely.

  ‘I’ll speak to Watson-Jones.’

  ‘That’s not the answer I came for.’

  ‘It’s the only answer you’re going to get,’ I said with more aggression than I’d intended.

  ‘I’m disappointed, Stevens. I had hoped for more. I think we’ve made you a fair offer.’

  ‘Perhaps you haven’t got anything I want,’ I said. ‘Perhaps my price is beyond your reach.’

  ‘Coffee?’ He folded his napkin. I took it as a gesture of dismissal. Lunch was over. ‘What they laughingly describe as coffee here.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  Iredale called for the bill.

  ‘When you rang the office this morning, you asked for Charlie,’ I said. ‘You knew he wouldn’t be there, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling for the first time. It was an empty smile, a contraction of the muscles around his mouth that showed his teeth. ‘I wanted to speak to you.’

  That told me Iredale’s people, whoever they were, knew Charlie and probably knew him well.

  ‘Why not Charlie?’ I asked. ‘He’s the boss.’

  ‘Charlie’s dying. You’ve got Watson-Jones’s ear. You’re the man in the hot seat now.’ He signed the bill with a flourish of an unrecognizable signature. ‘Think it over, Stevens.’ He took a card out of his wallet and gave it to me. ‘Call me when you’ve something to say. My people have got itchy fingers and they’re resting on the trigger. We both know where the gun is pointed. I wouldn’t take too long about it if I were you.’

  *

  The resilience that I so much admired in Sylvia Carr appeared to have vanished when I showed up at her flat that evening. She was gloomy and undeniably if not seriously drunk. Her speech was slurred, and she made no attempt to get off the sofa.

  ‘You made me look under a number of stones, Danny,’ she said. ‘I hated what I found there. If I’d known that was going to happen I’d never have agreed.’

  As she talked I began to get some sense of the depth of her feelings. She was drinking to take the edge off them.

  ‘Something’s going on. I don’t know what it is, no one will tell me, though I do know you were right about Naismith. He doesn’t count. What frightens me is David Iredale’s involvement. That’s bad news.’

  ‘Tell me about Iredale,’ I said.

  ‘Friend to the rich and infamous. Surely you’ve heard of him?’

  ‘I’ve been babysitting in Berlin,’ I said. ‘Before that I was away fighting a war.’

  ‘Old Scottish landed family,’ Sylvia said. ‘Claims kinship with Robert the Bruce, or someone like that. Very well connected. More money than he knows what to do with. Sits on boards and advises people. Runs the estate in his spare time. Had a good war behind the lines in the desert, then did some shady things in Yugoslavia. Numerous wives and lady friends. Fidelity is not one of David’s virtues. Generally regarded as not someone to tangle with, which being translated means avoid at all costs. A hateful man.’

  ‘He gave me lunch today,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Danny.’ For a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears. She recovered herself quickly. ‘Then he must have wanted something pretty badly. He’s not known for his generosity.’

  ‘It was an awful lunch.’

  ‘Did he talk about Simon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He tried to bribe me to stop Simon doing whatever he’s doing.’

  ‘What is Simon doing?’

  ‘I’d feel a lot happier if I had a clue, but I don’t.’

  ‘Listen to him, Danny. Do what he says.’ There was an unexpected urgency in her voice. Her mind was concentrating now, grappling with the effects of the alcohol. ‘Get Simon out of Iredale’s clutches and have done with him. Do it as fast as you can.’

  ‘Are you warning me off?’

  ‘Iredale’s friends call him in to do their dirty work when they want something fixed. Powerful men make dangerous enemies. If Simon’s upset someone badly enough to bring David Iredale in, then he’s in real trouble.’ She beckoned me over to sit on the sofa beside her. She took my hand.

  ‘Don’t underestimate Iredale, Danny. He comes from a world you’ve never even imagined. I know him, you don’t. He’s an evil man. The best thing is do what he wants and get out.’

  In her attempt to paint for me a picture of Iredale as she knew him, she’d lost herself in her memories. ‘I know his second wife, Joan. She came round to my flat very late one night after they’d had a terrible row. She looked fine until I gave her a bath. He’s one of those wife-beaters who never touches the face. I won’t describe what her body looked like. She didn’t cry. In fact, she hardly spoke. She was frozen, terrified by the experience. No one knew about it, of course. She wouldn’t let me tell a soul. Iredale sued her for divorce, claimed she’d been sleeping with other men, and got away with it too, the bastard. I shall never forget what the judge said. “Lady Iredale’s behaviour suggests she is unsuited to the state of marriage.” Never a word against her husband. Who says it’s not a man’s world.’

  ‘Are you saying he fixed the judge?’

  ‘David told me afterwards he remembered him from school.’

  I questioned her as much as I could but I got little more than a repetition of the warning that I should go along with what Iredale wanted. I had a strong sense that she knew more than she was telling me, though what she was holding back and why I had no idea. Was it possible that she’d had a relationship with Iredale at some point? I dismissed the thought because she gave me no evidence to support it. Iredale, she told me, was a man without any moral sense, and once he had his claws in me he’d never let go until he’d got what he wanted. I was an outsider and I should avoid a world whose rules and conventions I neither knew nor would ever understand.

  ‘I’m
standing in the way between Iredale and Simon,’ I told her.

  ‘My problem is I don’t know what Simon’s done, which means I can’t meet Iredale’s demands.’

  If it was going to get rough, it was pretty clear who would be hurt.

  ‘Poor you, Danny. Poor Simon. He may deserve it but you don’t.’

  As I walked home I felt out of my depth. I had been swept up into events over which I had no control, but where I played some kind of central role. A straight fight I could understand. But guerrilla warfare, where the issues were cloudy to say the least, I was untrained for. The trouble was, I couldn’t see any way out. My only choice was to put myself through a rapid process of adaptation so that I was ready for whatever happened. I hoped I was up to it.

  13

  RUTH

  Elizabeth Markarova has her handkerchief pressed tightly to her mouth. Gromsky is weeping openly. Alexei Tomasov is stunned, white-faced and immobile. No one speaks. On the table in front of them lie black and white photographs: a country scene in winter, trees and fields, the last ribs of snow wasting slowly away, a collapsed wigwam of broken-off branches in a clearing, an area of recently turned earth, a hole dug in the ground, three eyeless female heads, the rotting skulls of elderly women still with their headscarves neatly in place, a heap of brass cartridges, a makeshift cross. Beside the photographs lies a map and sheet of paper on which has been typed a list of names with numbers against them.

  ‘This is the dossier,’ Pavel Lykowski says. ‘The evidence of the crime.’

  ‘There can be no doubt?’ Gromsky murmurs. Elizabeth Markarova sobs loudly.

  ‘None.’

  ‘I went with Pavel,’ Ruth says. ‘I saw it all with my own eyes. As much as I could stomach.’

  ‘How many on the list?’ Tomasov asks.

  ‘Sixty-eight.’

  ‘That many?’

  ‘Sixty-eight elderly men and women. They did not die in a fire. They were driven from their beds one freezing February night to be shot in the back in a field many miles from Moscow, for no reason other than they lived near the laboratory where we conduct our nuclear research. They were slaughtered in cold blood.’

  Ruth has said nothing to Andropov of her discovery of the mass grave. He has no idea she has seen the darkened and disintegrating faces of the dead. Why hasn’t she told him? Why hasn’t she confronted him with the evidence? She is frightened that if she tells him what she knows he will remove his protection from her. And then what? She doesn’t dare to imagine the consequences. She feels hollow, emptied by the sense of betrayal that overwhelms her. There is nothing left of her own life now. She is Andropov’s creature.

  ‘How did you discover this, Pavel?’ Gromsky asks. ‘How did you know where to look?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ Lykowski asks.

  ‘Give me an answer.’

  ‘I seduced a young soldier,’ Lykowski says. ‘A little kindness in a brutal world and a bottle of vodka. He was there when it happened. He told me everything. Are you satisfied now?’

  Gromsky looks away, unsure whether to believe Lykowski. It is not a statement he would have made himself. Ruth knows it is true because Pavel confessed it to her.

  ‘He was a boy,’ Pavel told her. ‘Seventeen, eighteen, no more. He said it was like killing your grandparents. He wanted to run away, to hide, but there was nowhere to go and they would have shot him anyway. He fired in the air, he told me, over their heads – he couldn’t bring himself to kill anyone. Do you know why? He’d never fired a rifle before; he was a cook in a tank regiment, he’d come back to Moscow early to help prepare the barracks for his regiment who were returning from a tour of duty in Berlin.’

  They were roused from their sleeping quarters at midnight, marched off to waiting lorries and given orders to round up the old people in the apartment block. It was bad enough driving them through the freezing night to an empty killing ground in the middle of nowhere. The grave had been carefully prepared, he said, a dark trench at the side of a field. Then they had to separate the men and women and shoot them in the back. A few weeks later the boy killed himself.

  ‘We may have the evidence of the crime,’ Tomasov says, ‘but we’re no closer to knowing who was responsible for what happened.’

  ‘A colonel from Military Intelligence was present. I have a description. He watched the event from beginning to end.’ Lykowski searches his pockets for a piece of paper, unwraps it and starts to read. ‘Medium height, thirty or thereabouts, thin, sandy hair, quite good-looking in a drained sort of way, poor eyesight.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Gromsky asks.

  ‘He has tinted lenses in his spectacles.’

  Andropov was there that night. He witnessed the execution. Perhaps he gave the order to shoot them.

  ‘It won’t be difficult to find him,’ Lykowski says.

  ‘If we bother to look,’ Gromsky says.

  ‘Of course we will look.’

  ‘Why?’ Gromsky asks. Lykowski has given him the opportunity he has been looking for. He can turn his distress into anger against the younger man.

  ‘We can’t let a crime of this nature go unpunished.’

  ‘It’s not our job to bring men like that to justice. We’re scientists, not policemen.’

  ‘We are involved in their murder … in some way we are culpable.’ There is silence. Lykowski’s sense of guilt is not shared.

  ‘Say we find him, then what?’ Elizabeth Markarova asks.

  ‘Then we will try him, find him guilty and execute him.’

  Ruth freezes. Whatever she may feel about Andropov now, she cannot possibly let that happen. They must not imitate the behaviour of their oppressors. Somehow she must divert Lykowski.

  ‘This intelligence officer, whoever he may be, is not our enemy,’ she says calmly. ‘We must not let Pavel’s evidence divert us from our cause. These people are dead. We cannot bring them back to life. Our task now is to stop the slaughter of future generations.’

  ‘Do we let murderers go free?’ Lykowski asks. ‘Is that the morality of this new world we’re risking our lives for?’

  ‘One life, sixty lives, a thousand even. These numbers are meaningless compared to the devastation we have discussed. A million lives. Ten million. A hundred million. That is what we have to stop. The death of the planet.’

  ‘Ruth’s right,’ Gromsky says. ‘We have a greater responsibility. In the total scheme of things, these deaths are meaningless.’

  ‘If one life is not important,’ Lykowski says angrily, ‘how can a million lives have any meaning at all?’

  The issue is discussed. Are they to pursue the murderer, the evidence of whose crime Pavel has so cleverly uncovered? The rules of procedure that Ruth and Elizabeth Markarova have drawn up decree that any issue on which opinion is seriously divided must be discussed and an agreement reached. If they cannot agree unanimously, then only a decision with a two-thirds majority may be adopted.

  Ruth stares at Lykowski, trying to catch his eye, make him respond to her silent plea. Do nothing. Say nothing. Please do as I ask. To her relief and surprise, he suddenly climbs down and they agree that it is not their duty to avenge the deaths of the old people by tracking down their murderer. They must stick to the agenda they have set themselves.

  At first Ruth feels an intense relief, an overwhelming warmth of gratitude to Pavel who has rescued her from her dilemma. The procedure she set up has worked well; the committee remains intact, their aims still holding them together. Then, insidiously, her anxiety returns. She is haunted by the pale, brooding figure of Lykowski, the young man who has discovered so much, who secretly, she knows, cannot stop now. Lykowski will continue his search until he finds Andropov, and then he will confront him with the evidence of the crime. At that moment, it will be left to chance whether Lykowski finds out about her before Andropov tells him.

  *

  They meet again within forty-eight hours. By now their horror at the crime has given way to anger.
If they cannot take justice into their own hands (and that decision holds, there are no second thoughts), then they must do something for the cause they so strongly believe in and for which they are risking so much. In their minds the faces of the dead women and the dying of Hiroshima become one, innocent people who have died unnecessarily. There are countless others ready to be saved.

  ‘Our actions have achieved a brief delay to our nuclear programme,’ Elizabeth Markarova says, expressing the feelings of the group. ‘A few months, possibly a year – certainly no more. Though we remain unscathed, we must not forget that while our cause has found a convenient expression in our actions, we have won no concessions, we have engaged in no debate either with our own directorate or any political authority. We have stopped nothing. To the world the doors of the Institute remain closed. Our triumph is to have survived this far. But it could all end tomorrow if the authorities choose to move against us. We must use what little power we have before it is removed from us. Somehow we must widen our cause, gain support, to ensure not only that it survives but that it succeeds. We must do all we can to make sure there is no Soviet bomb.’

  Andropov could have written those words, Ruth thinks, with relief. Could Elizabeth be working for Andropov too? Surely not.

  ‘What do you suggest we do?’ Lykowski asks. There is a challenge in his voice that alarms Ruth. He is a victim to moods that make him impossible to read.

  ‘We must smuggle your evidence to the West,’ Elizabeth Markarova says. ‘Let them look at your photographs and understand the true nature of our government.’

  Elizabeth Markarova is suggesting a complete change of approach, Ruth says. There are great dangers in moving out of the arena which they know and over which they have control. Protest is one thing. International politics is another.

  ‘I agree that the West should know of our protest and the humanitarian nature of our cause,’ Gromsky says. ‘But to engage in any political act would be wrong. That would give our government the excuse they may be waiting for to repress us. I oppose your course of action.’