Archangel

by Gerald Seymour

  He nodded a courtesy greeting and pushed his way through the doors. He saw two occupied beds and, from the pillows, pairs of concerned eyes peered at him. They were the living, they could resent the circus arrival that had been summoned to the curtained laager in the far corner. There was a trolley beside the semi-concealed bed, its top stretcher surface empty. A nurse was detaching electrodes from their cables, another was writing her notes busily. Two young doctors stood close to each other, their eyes hollowed by tiredness. A pair of West Indian porters, expressionless, wheeled the trolley away across the open-plan unit and out through the door.

  'Doubtfire, Home Office.' A sharp voice behind Millet.

  'You're a bit late, old chap.'

  'Millet. . .' he paused,'. . . Foreign and Commonwealth.

  What's happened to him.'

  'Just gone on the trolley. There's a box underneath the top, they put them in there, doesn't upset people that way.

  About twenty minutes ago they gave up. Not a chance, everything done that could have been, he had the red carpet.'

  'They said he hadn't long when they called me at home. I suppose I was sort of hoping.. . they're sometimes wrong.'

  'Good riddance. What'll he get, Hero of the bloody Soviet Union?'

  A nursing Sister approached the two men. The message was bright in her eyes. This was an operational area.

  Doubtfire had a car and driver. Night Duty Officer for the Home Office, a travelling fire brigade. He was returning to his cubbyhole in Whitehall and the telephone that he prayed would stay silent, and a thermos of instant coffee. Millet was thankful to accept a lift. In the back of the car they talked in desultory fashion. Two practised civil servants, uncertain of the other's role and standing, and cautious of confidences. Millet was dropped in Great Charles Street at the entrance to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which left him a long walk along the river to Century House.

  The wind whipped at Alan Millet's legs as he hurried along the empty pavements. The sleet pecked at the skin of his cheeks, fluttered his close-cut hair. He was obsessed with a man called Michael Holly. A tall man, alive with enthusiasm, totally self-contained. Memories more than a year old. He supposed that every desker felt a stifling involvement with his field man. Like the first whore of a man's life, never forgotten, never to be escaped from. There was a pub across the river, where he had taken Holly - he always called himself that, never bothered with his given name -

  where they had sipped their drinks and nibbled at the tired bread and ham, where Holly had asked the expected question. What happens if . . . ? No problem, Alan Millet had said, no problem there. The ransom money's under lock and key in the Scrubs, and a bloody good laugh he'd had as he said it. Nothing for Holly to worry himself with, and of course it wouldn't come to that anyway. A bloody good laugh . . . The street lights picked out the man who stood against the river parapet, and who stared down at the ruffled water. Must have been the antibiotics he had been taking to stifle the influenza bug, must have been that which had loosened his tongue. A field man should never have been given a guarantee.

  But Millet had offered Holly a promise.

  It won't happen, of course. . . but there's a man in a cell at Wormwood Scrubs. Of course it won't happen . . . but if it did, well, there'd just have to be a swap.

  Bloody marvellous, wasn't it? And all the spadework done through Belgrade, all the ribbons tied. All ready for the flight to Berlin, and the only haggle was over which crossing-point, what time, which day.

  Michael Holly for Oleg Demyonov. Them happy and us happy.

  But now a man lay in the mortuary of the Hammersmith hospital and Alan Millet's promise was a worthless thing.

  Chapter 2

  His weapon against the rusty binding of the bolt was a fifty kopeck coin.

  For more than an hour he had crouched on the floor, bracing himself as the speed changes of the train and the unevenness of the track destroyed the momentum of his painstaking work. With the milled edge of the coin he chipped at the red-brown crust that had formed between the lower lip of the cap of the bolt and the metal sheet plate of the carriage flooring. He had something to show for his effort. A tiny pile of dust debris was collected beside his knee, and some had stained the material of his grey trousers.

  Those who had known Michael Holly at his home in the south-east of England, or had shared office and canteen space with him at the factory on the Kent fringes of London, might not now have recognized their man. A year in the gaols had left its mark. The full flesh of his cheeks and chin had been scalped back to the bone. A bright confidence at his eyes had been replaced by something harsher. Clothes that had hung well now fell shapelessly like charity hand-outs. A ruddiness in his face had given way to a pallor that was unmistakably the work of the cells. His full dark hair had been cropped in the barber's chair of the holding prison to a brush without lustre.

  This was an old carriage, but still well capable of performing the task set for it when it had first joined the rolling-stock in the year that Holly had been born. It had carried many on this journey. It had brought them in their hundreds, in their thousands, in their tens of thousands along this track. It was a carriage of the prison train that ran twice weekly from the capital city to the interior depths of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Mordovia. On the floor, in the filth and the watery amber half-light, he scraped at the bolt that had felt the boots and slippers and sandals of the prisoners who had encompassed his life time.

  Not easy to prise at the rim of the bolt, because this was a purpose-built carriage. No ordinary carriage, not subject to any hasty conversion to ensure its usefulness, but out of the railway factory yards of Leningrad and designed only for transporting the prisoners. A walkway for the guards, and compartments to separate the convicts into manageable groups, each fitted with small hatches for the dropping of their black bread rations, and unmoveable benches and shelves for a few to sleep on. The carriages had their name.

  The Stolypin carriage carried the name of the Tsarist minister struck down by an assassin seventy years before. The new men of the Kremlin were not above the simplicity of taking a former idea and adapting it to their needs. The walls, the bars, the bolts and the locks remained; only the prisoners of the regime had changed.

  They had brought Holly by car from the Lefortovo gaol to the train while Muscovites still slept. He had barely slept after the meeting with the Consul from the Embassy and the escort of men in the khaki uniforms of the Komitet Gosu-darstvennoi Bezopasnosti had taken him still drowsy from the back seat to the train at a far platform. The one who wore on his blue shoulder flash the insignia of major's rank had shaken his hand and grinned a supercilious smile. Into the carriage, the door slammed, the bolt across, the key turned.

  Two other men for company. Perhaps they had been loaded on the train many hours before Holly, because they seemed to him to be sleeping when he had first seen them in the darkened carriage. He had not spoken then, they had not spoken since. A barrier existed between them. But they watched him. All through the morning, as they sat on the makeshift bunks, they stared without comment at the kneeling figure who ground away at the rust around the bolt.

  The work at the bolt, mindless and persistent, allowed the thoughts of Michael Holly to flow unfettered. The week before had stretched the distance of a lifetime. And the lifetime had ended in a death, and death was the carriage that rolled, shaking and relentless, towards the East.

  Where to go back to, where to find the birth? Months, weeks, days — how far to go back? The coin had found the central stem of the bolt, the rust shell was dispersed. The bolt was not strong, arthritic with age and corrosion. How far to go back?

  Not the childhood, not the parentage, that was a different story, that was not the work of the last crowded hours.

  Forget the origins of the man.

  What of Millet? Complacent, plausible Millet. But neither was Millet a part of these last days, nor was the journey to Moscow, nor the rendezvous tha
t was aborted, nor the arrest and the trial. Millet had a place in the history of the affair, but that place was not in its present, not in its future.

  Where did the present begin?

  Michael Holly, now on his knees on a Stolypin carriage floor, and unshaven because they would not permit him a razor, and with the hunger lapping at his belly, had been a model prisoner in the Vladimir gaol 200 kilometres east of the capital. A foreigner, and housed on the second floor of the hospital block in the cell that it was said had held the pilot Gary Powers and the businessman Greville Wynne.

  Down for espionage, given fifteen years by the courts.

  Everyone from the governor to the humblest creeping

  'trustie' knew that Michael Holly would serve only a mini-

  mal proportion of those fifteen years. There was a man in England, there would be an exchange. So they gave him milk, they gave him books to read, they allowed food parcels from the Embassy. They waited, and Michael Holly waited, for the arrangements to be made. The Political Officer at Vladimir said that it would not be too long, and the interrogations had been courteous, and the warders had been correct. When they had taken him from the hospital block with his possessions and spare clothes in a cloth sack he had smiled and shaken hands and believed that the flight was close, Berlin he had thought it would be. In Lefortovo holding prison he had learned the truth across a bare scrubbed table from the Consul sent by the Embassy. An obsequious little man the Consul had been, crushed by the message that he brought. The Consul had stumbled through his speech and Holly had listened.

  . . It's not that it's anyone's fault, Mr Holly, you mustn't think that. It's just terribly bad luck, it's the worst luck I've heard of since I've been here, that's eight years. It was all set up — well, you know that. People had worked very hard on this matter, you really have to believe that.. .

  Well, we can't deliver. That's what it's all about now. A swap is a swap, one man to be exchanged for another. It was you and this fellow, and we can't deliver. . . I'm dreadfully sorry, Mr Holly, it's the most extraordinary thing but the chap's dead, snuffed it. He had the best medical treatment —well, you'll not be interested in that.. .'

  The bolt shifted. Holly strained with his fingers to twist the coin under the lip of the bolt. The bolt had moved a millimetre, perhaps two.

  '. . . But I can assure you that people back in London were really most upset at this development . . . I'm afraid the Soviets are going to take rather a hard line with you now, Mr Holly. There's no point in my not being frank .. . The Foreign Ministry informs us now that, since your parents were both born Soviet citizens, under Soviet law you are a Soviet citizen also. I know, Mr Holly . . . you were born in the United Kingdom, you were brought up there, you were in possession of a valid British passport when you travelled to Moscow. The Soviets are going to disregard all that.

  We've had a hell of a job getting this degree of consular access. I want you to know that. We said they couldn't have the corpse if we didn't get it - that's by the by - but it's understood by both sides that this is the last of such meetings. You're being transferred to the Correctional Labour Colonies, but you won't be classified as a foreigner, you won't be in the foreigners' camp. They're going to take you beyond our reach . .. Mr Holly, you've always proc-laimed your innocence of the charges and accusations made against you. From our side, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have been very firm too. You are innocent as far as Her Majesty's Government is concerned. We're not wavering from that position. You understand that, Mr Holly? We deny absolutely that you were involved in any nonsensical espionage adventure. It's very important that we continue to take that line, you can see that, I'm sure. Mr Holly, the British government knows that you have supported your parents most generously during their retirement. Your parents will not be abandoned by us, Mr Holly, just as we will not abandon the stance that you were completely innocent of trumped-up charges. You do understand me, Mr Holly . . . ?'

  The bolt rose a centimetre.

  There was a dribble of sweat at Holly's forehead. Too much space now for the coin to be useful, his finger could slide under the lip. The rough metal edge cut into his finger tip. An eddy of chill air swirled into the carriage, fastening on his knuckles. He heard, louder than before, the dripping clatter of the wheels on the rails beneath him.

  ' . . . Look, Mr Holly, I've painted the picture black, because that's the only honest thing to do. We'll keep trying, of course, that goes without saying, but in the present climate of relations there's little chance of your situation altering dramatically. You'll be going to the camps and you have to come to terms with that. What I'm saying is - well, you have to learn to live in those places, Mr Holly. Try and survive, try and live with the system. Don't kick it, don't fight it. You can't beat them. I've lived here long enough to know. In a few years things may change, I can't promise that, but they may. And you have my word that you won't be forgotten, not by Whitehall, not by Foreign and Commonwealth. It's going to boil down to keeping your pecker up, looking on the best side of things. You'll do that, won't you, old chap.. . There's not really anything more for me to say. Only I suppose, Good Luck . . . '

  That was what the present had on offer to Michael Holly.

  A furtive junior diplomat bowing and scraping his way out of the interview section of the Lefortovo, ogling the KGB

  man and thanking him for a fifteen-minute access to a prisoner for whom the key was now thrown far away.

  Forget the present, Holly, reckon on the future. The future is a plate of steel floor covering that creaks and whistles as it is dragged clear of the supports to which it was bolted down thirty years before.

  That's the future, Holly.

  A steel plate above the stone chippings and wood sleepers that mark the track from Moscow to the East through Kolomna and Ryazan and Spassk-Ryazanski. The chippings are coated in fine snow, and the cold blusters into the carriage through the draught gap. Behind him the men swore softly, breaking their silence.

  The train was not running fast. He could sense the strain of the engine far to the front. There was a dawdle in its pace, and there had been times when it had halted completely, other times when it had slowed to a crawl. The daylight was fleeing from the wilderness that he could not see but whose emptiness beyond the shuttered windows he understood.

  Barely audible above the new-found noise of the wheels, he heard the sharp step of feet in the corridor and close to the door of their compartment. There was the flap of the food hatch swinging on its hinge one door away from his. Holly pushed the steel plate down, eased the bolt back into its socket with his toe.

  The flap of the door flipped jauntily upward. A sneering face gazed at the caged men. Three brown paper bags were pushed through the hatch to tumble to the carriage floor.

  The flap fell back. The two men moved at stoat's speed past Holly. One bag into the hand of the man who was gross and white-skinned, a second for the man with the beard. For a fleeting moment he braced himself for confrontation, sus-pecting that they would want all three bags, but they left him his. They darted back to their bunk and behind him was the sound of ripping paper. Animals .. . poor bastards, pitiful creatures. But then at Vladimir, Holly had been segregated from the mass of the zeks, the convicts who formed the greatest part of the prison population. At Vladimir, Holly had been categorized as a foreigner, he had been on the second floor of the hospital block and allowed special food and privileges. There was nothing special for these men. These were the zeks - they might be killers or thieves or rapists or parasites or hooligans. At Vladimir, Holly had been different from these men.

  But not any longer. The stammered words of the Consul flooded back to him. He was to be classified as a Soviet citizen, he was being sent to the Correctional Labour Colonies

  . . . Try and live with the system, don't kick it and don't fight it, you can't beat them. You'll hear of me, you bastard, you'll hear of Michael Holly.

  He reached out across the floor, snatched the last pap
er bag. A slice of black bread, supple as cardboard. A mouthful of sugar held in a torn square of newspaper. A fillet of dry smoked herring. It might have been better at Vladimir for Holly than for the zeks herded into the communal cell blocks, but he had learned to eat what food was provided.

  He had been taught the hard lesson that you eat where there is food, because food is sustenance and without it there is failure and collapse. Always he felt sick when he ate, but he had been taught and he had learned, and his eyes squinted shut and he swallowed. The last meal for how long?

  Holly grimaced.

  Not much to eat in the snow beside the tracks, nor in the forests that would skirt the railway line.

  They'll come with dogs, Holly, dogs and guns and helicopters. The compartment of the carriage is the small camp, everything out there is the big camp. The big camp is vast, colossal, but even beyond the hugest encampment there is still the wire and the watch-tower and the searchlight. Live with the system, the Consul had said. You'll hear of me, Mister bloody Consul, you'll hear of Michael Holly.

  He munched hard at the bread, biting deeply. He turned towards the two men, smiled at them for the first time. They looked away.

  It was ridiculous that he should think of lowering himself through the floor of the carriage, that he should contem-plate hanging for moments or minutes beneath the train, that he should consider allowing himself to fall on to the frozen stones between the wheels. Lunatic to reckon that it would work for him.. . but only as stupid as the acceptance of the alternative which was fourteen years in the camps.

  His clothes were wrong. They had dressed him in the shoes and suit and overcoat that he had worn when arrested. Not the clothes for cross-country, and he would stand out like a beacon on the fringes of the villages and collectives that he must circle like a fox coming to the dustbins for food.