Archangel

by Gerald Seymour

  It was not that he had been dilatory in his duty of interviewing all those sent to the camp who were in any way, minor or major, special. His own inclination would have led him towards this first interview three or four days earlier. But in the wake of the personal file of Mikhail Holovich had come further instructions and briefings over the teleprinter in his office. More material from Dzers-zhinsky Street that he must assess. By the time that he felt ready to bring Holly before him, he had spent three clear days shut in that office with the door closed to all inquiries.

  The Captain was a young man, not yet past his twenty-eighth birthday.

  There were those in the dim corridors of Headquarters who said that his rise had been too fast. Rudakov knew the pitfalls, knew of the knives that waited for him. The KGB

  officer responsible for the security, both physical and spir-itual, of the camp was a man on trial. It was his strength that he recognized the testing-ground. He had been on trial before. Aged only twenty-four he had held down the post of KGB officer attached to the 502nd Guards Armoured Division stationed at Magdeburg in the German Democratic Republic. He had learned there how a full colonel could wince and supplicate in his presence. He had felt the power of his position when he had taken a bottle to the room of any major and propositioned for information on the talk in the mess when he, the KGB's ears, was not present. He had seen the tremble jelly of a captain's chin and known it was his uniform and the blue unit tabs that won it. He was roller-coasting towards a high-rise career and now they had sent him to this stinking backwater to test further his resolve and capability. If he won here too, if he came back from Barashevo without a stain of the shit and slime of this place on his tailored khaki uniform then the road upwards and onwards was clear to him. The Captain was an egocentric man, one who believed in the great blueprints of life. He reckoned in a destiny that was mapped for his career. Fate had thrown the dice. Twin sixes had fallen, rocked, rolled for him to see them. Mikhail Holovich had been sent to Camp 3, Zone 1.

  The files told him their story - a tale of rare incompetence and of opportunity for him.

  An agent of the British espionage services had been captured in Moscow. A strong creature and determined in his denials, but that should have been short-lived. Of course there had been interrogation sessions in the Lubyanka, but they had been flimsy affairs, for hanging over their progress had been the sword of a man's release. From the very start the question of exchange had reared. All the superiors, all the gold-braided ranking officers, had been short in their duty when it came to the breaking of this Englishman.

  Where the Colonel Generals, where the Colonels, where the Majors of Headquarters had failed, idiot buggers, there was the opportunity for an ambitious Captain to succeed.

  Since the first file had arrived off the train from Pot'ma, Yuri Rudakov had dreamed of little else than his triumph of interrogation over Mikhail Holovich.

  He sat now at his desk, a manicured little man with a strength on his face, and a power about his sparse body, and a whiplash edge to his movements. A decisive and active young man. One who was going up. One on whom the sun played even through the bed of snow cloud over the roofs of the Administration block. His desk was clear of the papers that were memorized and locked in his personal safe. He had told his wife that morning over breakfast in their bungalow on the edge of Barashevo and within faint sight of the outer wooden fence of Zone 1, that he stood to gain a great prize . . . not tomorrow, not next week, but he had time, he had months of time to break this bastard.

  As he waited he realized that he had not felt such keen anticipation and happiness since he had served in the front line at Magdeburg.

  The knock at the door was respectful. Rudakov drummed his fingers on the table to count out five slow seconds, then called quietly for the prisoner to be brought into his presence.

  Holly looked around him.

  An office that might have been occupied by the Personnel Manager of the factory in Dartford. A tidy desk and behind it a man who might have come in on the Saturday afternoon for extra work. The collar of a checked shirt peeped from the neck of a thick blue sweater. A smaller table was beside the desk with a high-backed typewriter, the sign of a junior executive who has not been allocated a personal secretary and must write his own memoranda. A safe, a filing cabinet, a window that was curtained against the dusk of the camp and the reef of arc lights that surrounded it. A calendar with a colour photograph of a snow scene was set between the framed painting of Lenin and the portrait of Andropov of the Politburo. But a desolate room, without carpet, without furniture of quality, without personal decoration. Yellow painted walls that were cheerless and ran with dribbles of condensation.

  The warmth from the hot pipe that skirted a side wall billowed across Holly's face, rubbed at the cold that had settled under his tunic and shirt as he had walked from the compound with the trustie from Internal Order. One week and the changes had fastened on Holly, winter leaves sticking to lawn grass. Unthinking, he had placed himself not in front of the desk but at an angle to it so that he was closer to the pipes, and he wondered how long the interview would last because it was short of thirty minutes until the call to the Kitchen for dinner and the hunger pain pinched at his stomach.

  The man behind the desk would have been a little younger than himself. The man lounged easily in his chair and Holly stood. The man wore fitting and casual clothes and those of Holly were thin. The man was close-shaved, wore the scent of deodorant, and Holly was stubble-bearded and stank so that he himself could know the foulness. The man was relaxed and rested and Holly felt the tiredness brush through his mind and for nine and a half hours he had worked in the Factory at the lathe that fashioned chairs'

  legs. The man possessed power and pressures and Holly knew no stare he could offer in competition.

  And if they were together in Hampton Wick, if they were sitting in the front room of his home in south-west London, then Holly's company Fiesta would be in the road outside, and the clothes would be smart on his back, and the whisky and water in his hand, and the confidence in his talk. But this was not his ground. He stood in the damp boots that leaked the snow wet to his socks, and he hated the man who sat at the desk.

  'Would you like to sit, Holovich?'

  Holly straightened himself, shrugged at his shoulders to try to rid himself of the weariness, gazed back at the man's face.

  'I believe it is quite hard, the work that you do as a Strict Regime prisoner. You would be better to sit, Holovich.'

  The air was filled with cigarette smoke. Different to Holly's nose from the dry dust filth of the tobacco used in Hut 2. Something from a former world, a part of a deep memory. His nostrils flicked, the smoke spiral played before his eyes.

  'Forgive me, I didn't think, would you like a cigarette, Holovich?'

  'I don't smoke . .. my name is Michael Holly.'

  'My name is Rudakov,' the mouth of the Captain sagged in amusement. 'My papers tell me you are named Holovich, that is what the file calls you.'

  'Holly . . . Michael Holly.'

  'And it is important to you to keep an identity? You find that significant?'

  Holly stared down at him.

  'If your name is Holovich or Holly, that is important to you? That is my question.'

  His hands were clasped behind his back. Holly dug a thumbnail into the flesh of his hand. Trying to beat the tiredness and the sapping warmth of the room, and his eyes blinked when he wished them clear.

  'If you want me to call you Holly, then I shall call you that. To me it is immaterial, to you it should be irrelevant.

  You shall be Holly, you can be Michael Holly. I will start again. . . would you like to sit down, Holly? Would you like a cigarette, Holly?'

  'I will stand . . . I don't smoke.'

  He recognized the churlishness, saw Rudakov open his hands in the gesture of refused reasonableness.

  'Then it is your choice that you don't sit, your choice that you don't smoke, am I right?'
<
br />   'It is my choice.'

  'Your choice whether you smoke a cigarette, my choice on the name I give you. Whether I call you Holovich, or Holly, or Mister Holly, or Michael, that is my choice.

  Whether I call you by your number, that is my choice. I have every choice, and unless 1 wish it otherwise, you have no choice. That is the reality of your position. Know this. It is not important to me what your name should be. I don't give a shit, Mister Holly, what you are called. It is not something I would dispute with you; your insistence on a name amuses me. Understand this, though - if I were to dispute the matter with you, I would win. I spoke of the reality of your position, and I would like now to expand on that reality.'

  The muscles ached in his thighs and calves. The sweetness of the cigarette drugged his mind.

  Remember that you hate him, Holly . . .

  'You have been here a week, Holly, I have been here one hundred times longer. I know a little of the camp life. I tell you something, I tell you this as a friend, because I have a sympathy for you . . . Holly, you have to forget the past, that is what anyone who has spent time in the camps will say to you, you have to forget the past life. The name of Holly is behind you, it does nothing to help you. That you wish to be defiant and stand when you can sit, that is the attitude of your past life.' He leaned across his desk, and his chin rested comfortably in the palms of his hands, and there was a gentleness that belied the cut in his words. 'There is no exchange to look towards, that is in the past, just as your name is in the past. You must point towards your future, you must wonder if your future is to be fourteen years in the Dubroulag. I think you are a young man now, what will you be in fourteen years, and will it matter then whether you are Holovich or Holly? Will it matter?'

  Holly swayed on his feet. He looked past Rudakov's head to the curtain. He focused on the place where the draught blew a small bulge in the cotton.

  'Those who sent you here, those who sent you on your mission against the people of the Soviet Union, they are from your past. Is that a lie? You are not at your home, you have not crossed a bridge in Berlin... you are in Mordovia, in a Strict Regime camp. Their arm is not long enough, not strong enough, they cannot lift you out from here ..

  The bell rang, metallic and screeching. The call for the camp to hurry to the Kitchen. For the first in line the soup is warm, only for the first.

  'Can I go now?'

  'The pig swill they feed you, that is the future. You are learning well and quickly. The past has nothing for you, nothing, the past has abandoned you. Those that sent you here have forgotten you, buried you, stamped down the earth on your memory. I speak the truth, yes? If they had not abandoned you then you would not be here, you would not be wanting to run the width of the compound to drink the shit you wouldn't give your dog at home. Think on that. . . '

  'Can I go now?'

  'Enjoy your dinner, enjoy your future,' Rudakov leaned back in his chair and his face was happy with a smile, then he snapped to his feet. 'I will take you back to the cage .. .

  and in the morning I will give the order that you are to be called by any name you want.'

  They went together into the night and, when the inner gate was opened, Rudakov called at Holly's back, 'Good night, Michael Holly, good night. Think of those who sent you here, think of how they are spending their evening.

  Think of it when you are in the Kitchen line, when you are eating, when you have gone to your bunk. Piss on them, Michael Holly.'

  Holly walked steadily along a stamped snow path, and the laughter from behind gusted to his ears.

  'We are going to meet often, Michael Holly. You will learn that I can be a better friend to you than those who sent you here.'

  The inner gates of the Zone scraped shut, and Holly strode on towards the doors of the Kitchen where the end of the queue spilt out from the light.

  Chapter 6

  The sunburn prickled at the Deputy Under Secretary's neck.

  First day back from the winter holiday, the first morning that he had worn again his white shirt and knotted his tie and refound the quiet striped suit that was his favourite.

  Two weeks on the beach at Mombasa, not in a hotel of course, but in the bungalow of an old friend who had survived freedom and independence in Kenya and still made a living out of East Africa's import and export trade. It was many years since the Deputy Under Secretary had taken such a holiday; his previous inclination would have been towards fishing the west country salmon rivers or stalking the Scottish moors. But his wife had said that it was time for an opportunity to wear something other than thick tweeds.

  And the sunshine would do him good, she had said, would help with the arthritis that nagged at his left hip joint.

  Sunshine with a vengeance. Ninety degrees fahrenheit while the Century staffers were shivering in London. The Deputy Under Secretary had known heat before, but that was in the dim and dark ages when he had been young and ambitious, working the Counter Insurgency ticket in faraway Malaya and Kenya. Twenty years before he had known the draught-less heat of temporary offices in Kuala Lumpur and Nairobi, but God, you lost the habit of it. At the direction of his wife he had taken fourteen full days in the sun that beat back from the Indian Ocean's azure. He had greased himself in oil and he had cooked and broiled and yearned for the magic hours of noon and six when he could down a life-saving tumbler of gin and lime. The company had been good, the talk relaxing and buoyant, but limited for all that. The Deputy Under Secretary could talk of his host's prospects and disappointments, he could learn of the problems of digging out foreign exchange and hard currency in the Third World, the tribulations over the renewal of Residence Permits, the difficulties of keeping reliable servants, but of his own world he must remain silent. The Deputy Under Secretary headed the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom, and that was not a subject matter for gossip and conversation on a bougainvillaea-fringed veranda as the lights of the fishermen's dug-outs floated inside the coral reef. . . No bloody way.

  He was a man who could be honest with himself, and in honesty he could say that he was both pleased and relieved to be back at his desk on a grey Monday morning in London. And at the same time ashamed of the affliction that he had brought down on himself. Self Inflicted Wound, that was how they had referred to sunburn back in the old days of Counter Insurgency. In CI days you thought twice about taking your bloody shirt off. The Deputy Under Secretary had no one but himself to blame for the irritation that his starched collar created just below the line of his neatly cut hair. Silly and stupid, the sort of thing he might have done as a child, pathetic for a man of his age.

  He snapped shut a file on his desk, reached for his briefcase and extracted the small tin of vaseline.

  He heard the chatter of Maude Frobisher's typewriter in the outer office, the pattern beat that indicated that she had steam up, and with a slight secretiveness he loosened his collar and pulled down his tie and wiped a -smear of the vaseline across the offending skin. If word of the DUS's discomfort reached beyond his office then there would be a titter around Century House, from Library in the basement to Administration on the Tenth.

  The Deputy Under Secretary was a recent arrival at Century. It was less than a year since he had marched into this office, having forsaken the job of Director General of the Security Service for what he regarded as a promotion, while the men of Century recoiled at what they saw as a political insult. Security and Intelligence were distant half-brothers. Little fraternal love existed between these two clandestine arms of government. The move from Leconfield House to Century House crossed a chasm of prejudice and suspicion. Different animals and different beings, from separate heritages and upbringing. The movement of the Deputy Under Secretary had been ordered by the Prime Minister as a punishment to Intelligence, the senior service.

  A rare grimace could form at the Deputy Under Secretary's lips. It had been Intelligence's own Self Inflicted Wound that had lifted him from the status of a policeman to that of a ranking diplomat
. Excessive secrecy, unwillingness to consult with senior politicians, reluctance to uncover the hands of cards on the table of missions and operations, and for all that covertness there had been no great efficiency and success.

  'I'll not be treated as a damned security risk,' the Prime Minister had said to the Deputy Under Secretary, i'll not tolerate activities that can blow up in our faces which I haven't known about.'

  The Deputy Under Secretary's brief was clear and con-cise. The Service was to be cleansed. Intelligence was to be scrubbed free of the impurities of independent action. It would win him few friends in the offices of Century, few cosy evenings with his subordinates in the clubland of Mayfair. But with the Prime Minister at his shoulder and access to the seat of government a telephone call away, the new master in Century found such small irritations as insignificant as the raw blistered skin below his collar.

  Tomorrow he would tell his wife to put out a shirt of softer cotton.

  As the new man at Century wielding the new broom, he expected that decisions and policies would come to his desk.

  When his reorganization plan was completed then he could anticipate greater delegation, but not yet, not while he was imposing his will on the Service. The In Tray memoranda soared in a hillock on his desk. Busily he scribbled in a scratchy copperplate hand that had been taught him by a schoolmistress from the hills of Brecon his thoughts and directives in the margins of the typed sheets. He worked briskly and with a stolid aptitude. Everything in front of him he read, down to the last words. That was the way to retain control of the job.

  Amongst the papers was a brown folder stamped

  'SECRET'. A reference number had been typed on white paper and glued to the folder. With an ink nib had been added the name of Michael Holly.

  Of course the Deputy Under Secretary had not been beyond the reach of Century House while in Mombasa.