Archangel

by Gerald Seymour

  Twice a week a Second Secretary accompanied by a High Commission security officer had driven down from Nairobi with a gutted digest of the Service's affairs telexed from London. He had known of the death of Oleg Demyonov, he had been told of the Soviet retaliation, he had been informed of the visit by the Consul to Lefortovo gaol.

  Before opening the file he added his initials to the readership list gummed to the top right corner.

  There had not been many there before him, reading the file on Michael Holly.

  But then he, himself, had never concerned himself greatly with the case of Michael Holly. The man had been recruited before the start of the Deputy Under Secretary's reign at Century, recruited and arrested and tried. The transfer arrangements for Holly and Demyonov had been basically a Foreign and Commonwealth matter, and rightly so. It had never been admitted that Michael Holly, small-time en--

  gineer, was anything other than a falsely-accused business representative on lawful business in the Soviet capital. The wrinkle of annoyance creased the Deputy Under Secretary's mouth. Idiotic and dangerous to send an untrained man to Moscow . . . inadequate preparation on East Europe desk

  . . . incompetence . . . and now the turned bloody ankle of embarrassment. The sort of affair that would not be tolerated now that he held the stewardship of the Service.

  And yet the matter had so nearly been blessed in a strange and unforeseen way, the Service had almost wriggled off the hook through no credit to itself . . . Incredible, bloody incredible, that the Service should have found itself within a whisker of escape, within a few heartbeats .. . Extraordinary that the Soviets had not already grilled and broken this man, unbelievable that they had permitted a trial for espionage to go ahead without the evidence of a confession. There was a reason why they had foregone the privilege of having a singing canary in the dock. They, along with their British colleagues and brothers across the Curtain, had thought only in terms of a swap. They had wanted Demyonov back.

  Perhaps it had been a decision taken by a General of KGB in the Lubyanka, perhaps the papers had gone to the Politburo or even to the President, but the matter had not been pushed.

  There was an unspoken and unrecorded understanding between the two teams of far-divided intelligence men . . .

  anything was possible of those buggers he'd inherited. The minimum of diplomatic finger-pointing over Holly in return for the homecoming of the major operative that was Demyonov.

  But Demyonov was dead. Demyonov had gone home last week in an elaborate casket dark inside the cargo hold of a Tupolev airliner.

  Holly's easy ride was over.

  They'd want a damned confession, they'd want exposure, they'd want to milk the man. The Deputy Under Secretary rubbed his nose, watched a flake of skin pirouette down to the opened pages of the file. Damn . . . what a fool he'd look if his face peeled. He anointed himself again with vaseline, bruised the jelly into his nose. He reached for his telephone.

  'Maude, I'd like Mr Millet, East Europe desk, to come up.

  Soonest, please .. .'

  Whenever he spoke to the woman he regretted that he had not stamped his authority and demanded that Gwen should be released from Leconfield and transferred with him, but they had said in Century's personnel that he must have a secretary who knew the ropes of the Service, and he had acquiesced. A tepid little frog of a woman, that was his view of Maude Frobisher, and probably harbouring a latent spinster love for his sacked predecessor. Because she dis-liked it so, he found a fleeting pleasure in calling her by her first name.

  The Deputy Under Secretary thought that he liked the look of Alan Millet. A young man without the priggishness that the Deputy Under Secretary believed he could identify in all Public School pupils, without the conceit of a Cambridge College.

  'Sit down, Millet.'

  'Thank you, sir.'

  The Deputy Under Secretary warmed to respect, detested condescension. The former years in the Colonies with the regimen of rank had left their imprint.

  'Michael Holly . . . '

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Where is he now?'

  'Mordovian ASSR, in the Dubrovlag complex, Camp 3

  we think . . . '

  'That's Barashevo, right?'

  'Correct, sir.'

  It pleased the Deputy Under Secretary to display his knowledge. If the chief hasn't mastered minutiae then his subordinates can hide behind the drape of his ignorance, that was a favourite theme of the Deputy Under Secretary.

  'They're going to try to break him. .. you agree?'

  'I agree he's a tough time ahead of him, yes.'

  'Bloody tough, Millet.. . and what's he going to do when the going's hard and bad, what's his break point?'

  'Everyone has a break point, sir.'

  Millet shifted in his chair. It was the first time he had been alone and across the desk from the Deputy Under Secretary.

  'That's a cliche, Millet. This man wasn't prepared for deep interrogation. You might just as well have sent him out naked round the privates. I want information, Millet, I want to know how he's going to cope. We've never admitted involvement, neither has he, I want to know if it's going to stay that way. 1 want to know whether we're going to be blushing when they put him up in the Foreign Ministry at a press conference and he spills.'

  'That's difficult to say, sir.'

  'Of course it's difficult to say. It's impossible, impossible because you don't know, Millet, the homework hasn't been done. When you've done that homework, then you'll come back and give me your answer.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'I don't like to be in ignorance, Millet, I detest it. The Prime Minister doesn't like it either. There will be a bright little man at Camp 3, very clever and on the up, and your Michael Holly is going to be his pride and joy, and when he can wheel your man into that press conference he's going to be very smug. And I'll tell you what we'll be, we'll be on the floor, and it hurts down there. You understand me?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'When you netted this young man, unproven, untrained, did you tell him of the risks?'

  'Not exactly, sir. Well, it wasn't really discussed.'

  'Should those risks have been discussed, Mr Millet?'

  'I didn't want to go into any more detail than absolutely necessary. But perhaps, perhaps they should have been discussed. Yes, sir.'

  'And if they had been discussed then he might not have gone. That's surely worth brooding on, Mr Millet.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'On your way then, lad, and I'll offer you one thought to tide you over. Michael Holly didn't come to you, you recruited him. You put him where he is now. Camp 3 at Barashevo won't be fun, not in summer, not in winter. It'll be bloody awful there. You won't forget that, Millet?'

  'Yes, sir.' Millet was rising from his chair. ' N o . . . I mean, no I won't forget that, sir.' _

  The roof of the porch was shallow. It offered Alan Millet little protection from the rain that drove across the street and battered against his body.

  He had rung the bell twice, listened to its chime and heard a distant door open and the call of voices.

  He was pressed against the wood face, his hips hard onto the letter box, and he cursed the slow reaction. Below his raincoat his trousers showed the damp, and his shoes were lustreless from their soaking.

  The door opened, a few inches only, the limit of a security chain.

  'My apologies for coming without warning . . . it's Mr Holly, isn't it?'

  'I am Holly, Stephen Holly.'

  An old man, the grey face of age, a dulled unhappiness in the eyes. A striped shirt without a collar, and trousers that were held at a slender stomach by braces, and carpet slippers in checked shades of brown, and a smell of pipe tobacco. He spoke English with the gravel accent of the Central European, and there was a tremor in his words.

  'Who are you? What do you want?'

  'My name is Alan Millet. I'm Foreign Office, I'd like to talk to you about Michael.' He'd rehearsed that as he walked from the st
ation, but it was still blurted. He felt a fraud.

  'There is a Mr Carpenter at the Foreign Office, we deal with him . . .'

  it's a different department, a different matter.'

  The rain dribbled down Millet's socks.

  'Mr Carpenter had not told us anyone else was coming.'

  'I'm half drowned out here, Mr H o l l y . . . I'd like to come inside.' Millet mouthed what he hoped was a winning smile.

  And he was admitted.

  He shook his coat outside and it was carried before him by Stephen Holly along the corridor that led into the backroom where a windowed coke boiler blazed and the coat was draped across a fender. A woman with a brush of close-cut grey hair sat with her sewing close to the fire and a cat rested on her lap, and she looked at Millet with fear and seemed to warn her husband that this was an intruder. It was a tidy, precious little room, from the polished linoleum floor to the filled bookcase of works in English and Russian, from the glass-shined pictures of distant landscapes to the square table covered by plastic cloth and laid for a meal.

  it's Mr Carpenter who comes from the Foreign Office to see us. No one else has ever come.' The woman echoed her husband.

  it's a pretty big place, Mrs Holly. We have a lot of sections there . . . '

  'What do you want from us?' For a man of such broken physique, Stephen Holly's voice carried a curious brusqueness.

  What did he want? Well, you don't tell two old people that a year and a bit too late you're out to find what the sticking power of their son will be when it comes to the choicer interrogation techniques of KGB. If they use the noise machine, if he doesn't sleep for a week, if it's the rubber truncheons, if it's the electrodes, if it's a pardon in return for goodies . . . well, you don't tell two old people that. Slowly, he told himself, slowly and gently, because the flow won't come easily, and they're frightened and foreign, and alone without a breakwater to shelter behind. What did he want?

  'We're very concerned about Michael, both of you must understand that. We worked very hard to get him out of the Soviet Union - well, you know all that, Mr Carpenter will have told you, and he will have told you what went wrong. . .'

  'Mr Carpenter told us why they would not release Michael.' Stephen Holly spoke sharply as if now he regretted his decision to admit the stranger.

  'I'm one of the team of people at the Foreign Office that will be constantly working on Michael's case. I thought that it was right that I should talk to you, try and build a better picture of Michael.'

  'You want to know whether he can survive his sentence?'

  'I wouldn't put it as bluntly . . . we're very concerned, though, about Michael, Mr Holly.'

  'Do you know anything of the Dubrovlag?'

  'I know a little of it.'

  'You want to know whether he can live through fourteen years in the camps, whether for our son that is possible?'

  'We feel that the more we know about Michael, then the more we can help him.'

  The cat yawned and stretched and its teeth and claws flashed, then it turned its back on Millet and settled again on the lap of Michael Holly's mother. The old woman stared at him and her eyes were bright and piercing and the silver thimble had fallen to the lap of her dress, and her fists were clenched now as if she searched for a memory, and her husband watched her anxiously as if he witnessed that she was at war within herself. Alan Millet stood with his back to the fire, feeling his inadequacy and waited for the woman to settle herself.

  'You said your name was Millet... you said that you had come here to find out more about our son.'

  'Alan Millet, Mrs Holly. Yes, I said . . .'

  She dismissed him to silence with a wave of a narrow, fleshless arm. The arm hovered before the bookcase and then darted at a book end and retrieved a bound diary. The fingers scooped at the pages as if there was a reference that was familiar.

  if you are Mr Alan Millet then you come to us in deceit.'

  The world was caving around him, and he did not know yet from which quarter the disaster would fall, only that its arrival was certain.

  i don't know what you mean, Mrs Holly.'

  'My son kept a diary . . . three weeks before he flew to Moscow he recorded that he met an Alan Millet. . . four days before he left he met again with Alan Millet. . . why now does this Alan Millet speak of our son as if he were not known to him? Why . . . ?'

  Just a frail little thing, wasn't she, the wind could have picked her up and tossed her away, yet she had demolished him as surely as if she had wielded a pick-axe handle to his belly.

  'I can't answer. You know that. . . you understand that

  . . . I'm sorry.'

  The silence gathered in the room around Millet. He saw the shadows that reached from the furniture, that slipped from a man and the woman of his life. When they had met at the pub, and boasted of the ease of the despatch of the packet that Michael Holly would carry, he had never thought of a moment such as this. He wanted only to be gone, to break out of the circle of reproach and injury around him.

  'My son will survive, Mr Millet. That is what you want to hear from me? Michael will survive. If he serves every day of the sentence passed on him. . . even if you desert h i m . . . he will survive. He would never bow to them. I know my son, Mr Millet.'

  The tears dribbled on her face and made bright lines across the greyness of her cheeks and then her head was lost in her hands.

  'You should go now, Mr Millet,' Stephen Holly said.

  'You should not come to us again.'

  Alan Millet plucked his coat from the fender and saw that the drips had made a pool on the linoleum floor. He let himself out of the front door and when he was beyond the shelter of the porch he felt the sting of rain on his cheeks.

  He walked on glistening pavements, across streets where the rain spat back from the tarmac. He shivered in shop doorways as he waited for the traffic lights to give him green. He traversed this suburb of south-west London with its roads of London brick terraces and Snowcem semi-detached homes.

  A strange quest for him, an eccentric Grail that he sought.

  This was a place where the Soviet world was a thing of books and newspapers and television shows and magazines

  - not tangible. And Alan Millet traced a path to discover how well a man might withstand the sophistication of modern interrogation at the hands of the masters of that art.

  There should have been a better backcloth, something that smacked more of the dramatic and less of the bare ordinariness of these humble homes.

  He met a schoolmaster, now retired.

  Alan Millet sat in a front room filled with books of modern English history and photographs of small boys lined in the formations of the posed soccer team. He watched a man scratch back the memory of many years. He heard of a boy who was a loner - but not lonely, you know -

  satisfied to be with himself, happy with his own company.

  i don't think he needed the rest of the class, I don't think he even needed us, his teachers. A very self-contained child, if you know what I mean. Very strong in his own way, not swaggering or throwing his weight about, but a great inner strength. You'll appreciate that it's years back, that boys come and go for a schoolmaster, they're a bit phantom. But I remember this o n e . . . No real brilliance, nothing outstanding in class or sports, but there was an individuality there. I suppose you want an example from me . . . ? Well, I'll tell you this, he wasn't exceptionally strong, but none of the other lads ever fought with him. That's a pretty poor example, but none of them ever dared to rag him. There was this sort of aura round him. The other boys shied away from him, and he didn't seem to notice an absence of their friendship. . . I'm afraid I haven't been of much help to you, Mr Millet.'

  There was a lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the Kingston Technical College across the river from Hampton Wick.

  Millet took the bus to the pre-war inelegance of the College close to the Thames towpath and blessed the warmth that he found on the upper deck.

 
The lecturer was at first impatient at being called from a tutorial session, before his vanity was fed the magical words of 'Foreign and Commonwealth Office'. He wore a bow tie, a corduroy jacket, and suede shoes and appeared to Millet to be well-distanced from any workshop floor. He sat his guest down in a cubbyhole office, mixed instant coffee with the help of a whistling electric kettle, and rambled into a monologue of his thoughts on Michael Holly.

  'Academically there wasn't anything to shout from the ceilings, in fact I don't think that he found the work easy, but there was a dedication there that some of his contem-poraries of the same ability could have used. If he didn't understand something, he was reluctant to stand up and ask, instead he'd worry it out himself, sometimes I reckoned he'd been at it all night. If I asked a question of him then he'd answer seriously, but if 1 floated a question and waited to see which of the students would pick it up 1 could guarantee that it would never be Holly. He had no thought of impressing me, or anyone else for that matter. I don't think he had many friends here, certainly none that would have lasted after he took his diploma. He was never on for 'A's, not in written work or practical, but the 'B's were consistent enough. You know in a funny sort of way he was really rather prim. There was once some heroin floating round the college and there were two students who were the pushers —

  that's the phrase for them I think - and they were both beaten up. I don't mean they were just knocked about a bit

  . . . they were smashed, stitches and a fractured jaw for one, severe abdominal bruising for the other. You could see the scratches on Holly's knuckles for days afterwards, and no one ever said anything about it. It was just not referred to

  . . . I read about the poor devil, that those buggers trumped up an espionage charge against him and he's years to serve in Russia. I hope I'm not being facetious, but they'll have a hell of a time with him . . . I'll put it another way to you, Mr Millet. He was a little bit frightening. He could make the rest of us, adults and kids, seem rather frivolous. Nobody likes that, do they?'

  On to the parish priest of St Mary's and St Peter's. Tea and a plain biscuit in a brick-built vicarage's front room.