Greenfly (Commander Shaw Book 18)

by Philip McCutchan

  I was growing fanciful. I thrust it out of my mind. We moved on unhindered. In the side streets we lost the military movements and there were more people around, housewives at their shopping, lifting booted feet above the snow, their faces frozen beneath the fur caps on their heads, so many of them looking old and pinched, probably old beyond their actual years. Moscow was a hard place to live in, especially in winter.

  It was a little over an hour’s walk from Katrina’s flat to the flat of Radley-Bewick’s friend. The name Katrina had given me was Comrade Sharef. A Jew. The Soviet didn’t like Jews and there was good reason for Jews not to like the Soviet. Comrade Sharef lived in a block of flats as had Katrina but it was a tenement block for workers without that extra comfort accorded the elite, and it was forbidding and dirty and seemed to be filled with hordes of children tearing around the concrete passages and staircases, intent on some game or other.

  We grinned matily as we were almost knocked flat by half-a-dozen juveniles moving at speed. It wouldn’t do to take up British attitudes. Or what had once been British attitudes of discipline.

  “Little buggers,” I muttered to Felicity. The noise was appalling and I might just as well have shouted. We went up seven floors and knocked at Comrade Sharef’s door. The door was quickly opened by a woman, or what looked like a woman, a very over-painted one with a suggestion of hairs on her arms and the look of a razor having been used. I remembered that at no time had Katrina mentioned Comrade Sharef’s sex and had in fact used the term ‘person’. Now I understood why: Comrade Sharef was a transvestite.

  “Who are you?” The voice, speaking Russian as would be expected, could have been of either sex.

  I said, “We come from where the birds sing.” Sharef nodded and gestured us to enter, standing aside to let us through. The place stank; there was no other word. Comrade Sharef was using a violent scent and at the end of the passage was a pile of garbage, old bits of food wrapped in copies of Pravda. Dust lay thick everywhere and as Comrade Sharef moved and stirred the air there was indication, right through the scent, that he didn’t wash as often as he might.

  What, I wondered, had come over Radley-Bewick since he’d left Britain? Comrade Sharef by no means went with Eton and Christ Church; but possibly he had hidden attractions, though I would never have thought it of Radley-Bewick.

  In Russian, I asked, “Do you speak English, Comrade?”

  He did; he’d learned the language from his friend, he said.

  “Radley-Bewick?”

  “Yes. How do I trust you, Comrade?”

  I said, “I don’t know how you do, but I promise you you can. Naturally I carry no identification, but I come from Olga Menshikova and Katrina. Before that, Comrade Storvac. And Comrade Yasnov.”

  It was quite a list of trustworthy names and Sharef nodded at each like a massive bird pecking corn – he, or she, was in fact a massive man, or woman, with a long nose and a wide, sensual mouth. There was a tendency to middle-aged spread and no breasts, not surprisingly if I was right about the sex. We were ushered into a room not unlike Katrina’s but smaller and less well furnished: no books and no sofa and an even thinner carpet. We were left to stand while Sharef sat with his legs apart and his skirt lifted to just below his knees, not the way normal to a lady, and I caught a glimpse of what looked like calico knickers and muscular thighs.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  I said, “I come from London. I come for a message. Now I have the message. I wish to return to London. It is vital that I do so quickly. I understand that you’re aware your friend wanted to contact … someone from the West. Perhaps you know also that Radley-Bewick is dead.”

  I was unprepared for Comrade Sharef to burst into tears but that is what he did. Between sobs and cries he said yes, he did know. Only an hour or so earlier he had had a message from a trustworthy source. Only now, he sobbed, was he beginning to take it in. Was it really true? I said yes it was. I had seen no sign of tears up to now: I supposed he’d been in a state of limbo and what I said had breached the dam. He wept and wept, twisting his body about on the hard chair. I didn’t know how to comfort him and time was passing. His agitation was wafting the scent about and I felt suffocated. Felicity was waving a handkerchief in front of her nose. Comrade Sharef, if he noticed, didn’t seem offended.

  I said, “Come now, Comrade. You must do your best for your friend now he is gone. You must pull yourself together and listen, and you must help. For Radley-Bewick’s sake.” I wished I could recall Radley-Bewick’s Christian name but I couldn’t, and bare Radley-Bewick, in a moment of stress and mourning, sounded heartless. I looked at Felicity for some feminine help, but she shook her head and grimaced and I got the message: it wasn’t feminine sympathy Comrade Sharef wanted, nor the gentle touch of a girlish hand. But I wasn’t cut out for the other role.

  I sharpened my voice. “Listen,” I said, and he stared back at me big-eyed, mouth open. “We need help. Katrina said you would help.” I refrained from mentioning another death just then, even that of a woman. “Katrina said you would help us to get out of Russia, and back to London – with the message your friend wanted passed. Can you do this, Comrade Sharef?”

  He began to pull himself together. A compact came out and fresh rouge was applied to the tear-induced runnels; another compact produced powder. The effect was dreadful but the action appeared calming: a new face was always a help, I supposed. Soon he might go out and buy a new hat. Anyway, he said he could probably help, though it would be an immense risk for him as well as for ourselves. Like Katrina he was willing to take the risk; he had loved Radley-Bewick. He said so.

  “A kind man and a sad one,” he said, sniffing.

  Comrade Sharef, I thought, looked far from a happy man himself. Exiles and homosexuals, there was an affinity in sadness. But Radley-Bewick had been no ordinary exiled traitor; he had been a plant and never a traitor. There had always been that chance he would return to Britain, if not in overt honour then certainly in good odour with the Establishment. He might never have been given a knighthood but he would have lived out his life in comfort once his usefulness inside Russia had come to an end and an exchange had been effected.

  I quizzed Comrade Sharef about Radley-Bewick. Why, I asked, had it been impossible for Radley-Bewick, even if he didn’t know the nature of the threat, at least to warn the West that there was something in the air? That, more or less, had been supposed to be his function. But Sharef couldn’t answer that one; I was left to assume that the very fact Radley-Bewick had passed word that a woman was coming through the East German wire was in itself not only enough in his view but literally all he had been in a position to pass. Again, the non-sharing of knowledge, the close secrecy because the eye of Greenfly was everywhere. And the ear: like Katrina, Comrade Sharef had switched his radio on full blast. In Russia, you didn’t trust your life to a simple bug search.

  I said, “Well, the sooner we start the better. Have you a route, and safe houses?”

  “I know of persons, yes. Myself I. do not come with you.”

  I nodded: just as well really. Comrade Sharef would attract attention. Then he corrected himself: he would come a little way, to where we would contact the person who, as he put it, commanded the route out, the one with the contacts, the safe houses.

  I made a guess. “Ladybirds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you not give me directions?”

  He could not. “It is not safe – you will see. The address must not be spoken to anyone.”

  “In case of – accidents?”

  “That, perhaps – if you were taken and interrogated. But you will see.”

  That was all he would say. I wondered why it was all right for him to know the address: he didn’t look to me the sort who would stand up for long under KGB violence, or Greenfly violence or whatever. But, of course, you never could tell. He could be as tough as old boots and never mind the recent tears. After that Comrade Sharef didn’t waste time. He got to
his feet and pulled on a big, heavy cloak with a hood. We left the flat and went out into the freezing cold. Snowflakes dappled Comrade Sharef’s hood, from which stray ends of peroxided blonde hair peeped and straggled. The cloak covered his more outrageous aspects; he lost his attention-attracting flamboyance and I was much relieved. We moved anonymously through the snow, just three more Muscovites braving the weather to go shopping, a man, perhaps, with his wife and mother-in-law. Up to a point we did go shopping: Comrade Sharef entered a baker’s, gesturing us to follow him in. From the women, two of them, behind the counter he asked for a loaf.

  “For my friends, good friends.”

  I was aware of the women watching me and Felicity closely. One of them said something sotte voce to Comrade Sharef, who nodded in reply. The woman who had spoken lifted a flap in the counter and Sharef went through, again gesturing us to follow. There was the unnerving feeling of a trap, but we were committed now. We needed Comrade Sharef and I had no reason for mistrust, but I kept a hand ready for the heavy part of the stripped-down gun.

  12

  We went into a small back room lit only by a candle in a bottle which Comrade Sharef had picked up and ignited whilst on the way through a long, narrow passage. The flame guttered and flickered eerily off dirty walls with peeling paper and a smell of long established damp. Not a word was said. Once in the room, Sharef reached out for a bell-pull set in the wall beside another door and gave it a jerk.

  Very distantly, I heard a bell tinkle. After that there was a long wait. I asked Sharef if he wasn’t worried that we might have been tailed. He wasn’t. A tail there might have been – though in fact I hadn’t noted one – but we certainly wouldn’t be followed in here, either by the KGB or Greenfly. His tone said he didn’t wish to be questioned further. I was left to make the large assumption that the women in the shop were Ladybirds. (Later, I discovered I was wrong in that.) As we waited impatiently and in my case anyway with a stomach-loosening sensation of extreme danger, I thought backwards with time on my mind. It was almost unbelievable that a mere four days earlier – always assuming I hadn’t been in drug-induced sleep for longer than I believed in the Greenfly establishment with the doctor and Senyavin – four days ago we had been in the West, in Braunlage. Time was playing tricks. And time was currently passing slowly; but at last there came some sort of response to that bell.

  There was a click, that was all, and the door ahead of us came slightly open. Comrade Sharef gave it a push.

  “Follow,” he said. He had thrown back his hood now and the blond hair streamed in the candlelight. The cloak now gave him the appearance of a mad bat. With the candle held high, he walked along another passage, one that seemed to take a gentle downhill slope. Seen from behind, Comrade Sharef on the move was quite a sight: he had the build of a man who would stride right out, really long steps, but he didn’t, he minced with little short steps and although the cloak hid his bottom I could imagine the buttock movements, up and down.

  We walked for a long way, still in the pervading smell of damp. Also drains; it was horrible and stifling but I had to assume it was leading ultimately to the West. The surface of what had all the attributes of a subterranean tunnel was uneven and we stumbled about a bit from time to time. Not Comrade Sharef who had obviously been this way before and knew all the pitfalls. Wondering where the tunnel might end got me nowhere: I would find out soon enough.

  I did.

  Sharef halted by another door, not in fact at the end of the tunnel but set into the wall on our right. He turned round and said, “When we are admitted, you will wait – I shall show you. I shall then leave you. Another person will come. You will be in good hands. You will of course remain very, very quiet.”

  I said we would, not half. I said, inadequately, “Thank you for your help. I hope you won’t suffer as a result, Comrade.”

  “If you remain quiet, then I shall not.”

  He reached out and knocked on the door, not loudly, three times followed by a pause, then two more knocks. We had another wait and then the door opened, cautiously at first. There was some talk in Russian and we were admitted by a young woman who placed a finger across her lips. She shut the tunnel door. We were in dim light from an electric bulb high overhead, and I heard distant music, the strumming of a guitar I fancied, rather haunting. Like Comrade Sharef himself, the place smelled of scent. It didn’t take me long to guess that we had arrived in a brothel. I knew that in Russia brothels didn’t exist and prostitution was a crime, but this applied in the main to the masses. The elite was treated differently. They wouldn’t call it a brothel, of course; but it would be used for that purpose by the high-up Party officials, the bureaucrats and the military.

  The young woman showed us into a room little bigger than a cupboard leading off the sleazy lobby.

  “You will wait,” she said in English – whispered the words into my ear. “I shall not be long, Comrade.” Sharef was already mincing away through another door and going, I guessed, to do his duty: not all the elite, the men who came and went by devious means through the tunnel via the baker’s shop – which would have been why Sharef had been so certain the KGB wouldn’t follow – not all would have normal sexual desires and Comrade Sharef was there to fulfil a need. Also perhaps to fulfill another need, the need for people from the West sometimes to be compromised? Photographs from hidden cameras, and then the blackmail? I shuddered at the thought of being compromised with Comrade Sharef. But, for his present purposes as an ally of the Ladybirds, it was all pretty good cover.

  I hoped it was, anyway. Right now we were firmly in Sharef’s hands. But in our situation you had to trust someone. Without help we could never hope to make our way out of Russia. That was an axiom.

  Obeying orders, we kept silent. Bugs might be found even in what seemed to be a broom cupboard. That cupboard acted as a sort of sound box in the other direction, though: we heard voices, men and women, laughter, giggles, other sounds. Now, and then, more distantly, the music again and song. No doubt, officially, the brothel was simply a place of music and vodka, a relaxation for the brass, what in the West we would call a drinking club. I wished we could see just who patronised it. While we waited in thick darkness, other knocks came at the tunnel door and were answered and we heard the young woman’s welcoming voice as the clientele entered and clumped through to their pleasures. In a short while I counted fourteen: someone would be having a busy time.

  *

  The young woman opened the door at last: it had felt like years. But she hadn’t come to release us. She put her lips close to my ear and whispered, “You will wait longer, please. There has been a delay.”

  “What sort of delay?”

  “The car. Also it will be safer to wait until the early hours when no new clients come and those that are here are drunk.”

  Or safe in bed, I thought. But I saw the girl’s point. Before I could say anything she went on, “The car will now come at two o’clock in the morning. When it is here, I will come. I am sorry for the delay.” She went away. I was sorry too: I was growing desperate in that wretched cupboard, a case of creeping claustrophobia. I couldn’t do anything other than hold Felicity close, so small was the space, but now I held her even closer and tried to give her comfort and reassurance. In fact she was doing very well so far but the thought of all those extra hours in darkness and constriction wasn’t funny – and the need for total silence made it worse. Imagination ran riot: Comrade Sharef had done the dirty on us and shopped us to the KGB … but if he’d done that, then they wouldn’t be wasting time, they would have come for us right away. I forced down thoughts of treachery: Sharef hadn’t seemed like that and the tears for dead Radley-Bewick had been genuine, and we were friends of Radley-Bewick’s, well vouched for by Olga Menshikova and Katrina, neither of whom would as it were have onforwarded us to him if we were not on the level. So if Comrade Sharef shopped us he would shop himself as well.

  Logical: but it didn’t entirely suppress uneasy thoughts and
that long wait loomed like eternity. Every footstep, every voice outside, brought the sweat pouring. I didn’t even dare to drop off though once or twice I found it hard to keep my eyelids apart – the close atmosphere was having its effect. If I dropped off I might snore.

  *

  The door opened, very quietly. So quietly that I wasn’t aware of it until slightly fresher air came in. The lobby was totally dark. I felt a light touch on my shoulder, a girl’s hand.

  “Come,” she said.

  “The car … ?”

  “At the end of the tunnel.”

  We came out, stiff and weary. I stretched my limbs, took Felicity’s hand. It felt cold and she was shaking. I reckoned we’d been let out just about in time. The Russian girl took my other hand and pulled and I heard the outer door opening. We followed through into the tunnel. When she had closed the door behind us she fumbled about and struck a match with which she lit a candle. Ghostly light flickered and things scuttled away around our feet, rats, mice, I didn’t know. The light didn’t reach the floor. But it showed me the strain in Felicity’s face and I was glad when our guide, who had to be a Ladybird, said in an encouraging voice, “Now it will not be long. We go not to the baker’s shop but the other direction where the car waits.”

  “With a driver?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “One of the Ladybirds? Or a man?”

  “A Ladybird,” she answered. We were moving now, and to move felt good, even in the foul-smelling tunnel. “The car will take you out of Moscow and will drive all day. In the evening you will reach a safe house and will change cars for the next stage. It is all arranged.”

  I asked where we were to cross into the West. I asked what the cover would be. She was non-committal about the cover, but she said we would be driven south-west to the three-way frontier town of Chop on the Soviet-Hungary-Czechoslovakia borders and thence into Austria via St Gotthard. Detailed instructions would reach me en route, and the cars would be driven fast. The girl knew the urgency.