Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  Out of the blue he said, ‘Let’s talk about Finn.’ He simply said Finn. We’d never used anything but Markus.

  The other three men in the room looked aghast and then confused. Proper procedure had suddenly been obliterated and they didn’t understand.

  I felt my stomach drop and a horrible void open up in its place. I closed my eyes.

  As Markus, Finn was always, to me, at a convenient distance in my reports. I was informing on Markus, not Finn. The two had become separated. To me, Markus was almost another person, Finn’s professional doppelgänger. But I understood immediately why Patrushev had dropped this bombshell. We were no longer to talk about a target of Russian intelligence, but about a relationship, mine and Finn’s.

  I remember, presumably when I had opened my eyes again, seeing Patrushev watching from the other side of the desk. His face expressed a non-committal curiosity.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, as if he had seen some answer in my reaction. ‘Let’s talk about Finn.’

  And so, for the next hour or so, we talked about Finn, right back to the earliest reports on him, right back to the beginning.

  Of course, much of it had appeared already in the dossier, both from before I knew Finn and from my own reports. But Patrushev wanted what was behind the facts. We strayed increasingly from the area of intelligence into assessment.

  Looking only at Patrushev, I began to talk about what I knew of Finn’s childhood.

  Finn had told me about it on a trip to Irkutsk in Siberia. He was visiting the city to look over a British investment there in his Trade and Industry role and he asked me to accompany him. He had a surprise for me. We arrived in Irkutsk on a bleak afternoon in January when the temperature was minus twenty-five degrees and he went at once to the offices of a gold-mining company, a joint venture between British and Russian investors. It was a Friday. When he returned to the hotel, he said, ‘Now we have the weekend to ourselves, Rabbit. I’ve booked a place up on Lake Baikal. That’s the surprise,’ he said delightedly.

  He’d arranged the business trip in order to spend the weekend with me.

  We stayed in an old wooden house by the frozen lake, the deepest in the world. The house had been bought by a tycoon in Irkutsk and then modernised, though the only real concession to the modern was central heating and a generator. At night, in bed, it was too hot under the bearskins.

  The next day we walked along the cliff below the house and found a way down to the lake. Finn collected up some brushwood and made a fire on the ice.

  ‘It must be six feet thick at least,’ he said.

  ‘Be careful,’ I said.

  We sat on blankets around the fire and then Finn began to tell me where he was born, about his family and his upbringing.

  ‘I come from the island of Inishturk,’ he said in a self-mockingly grand way, as if he’d owned the island. ‘It’s on the west coast of Ireland.’

  Finn’s Irish connection had always fascinated General Kerchenko as well as my two case officers. In their world view, anyone born in Ireland would surely wish to damage the British Government.

  ‘The community I was born into was an experiment. I was born into a social experiment, Anna, just like you but in a different way. Inishturk back then was what is known as an “alternative community”. It later morphed into a hippy colony. My mother and father were actually both British but Ireland was the venue for my conception and birth for the simple reason that it was as far from what they called the “rat race” or the “machine” as possible. It still provided some familiarity of culture, I suppose, if only in the climate and the rugged scenery of the North Atlantic.

  ‘The idea of the community was that everyone played an equal role,’ he said, and stirred the fire with a stick. ‘There were no leaders. Whether your job was cultivating vegetables or chairing what they called community conscience meetings to decide where the community was going, or what was wrong, you were all equal.’

  He looked at me with weary amusement and exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke. ‘Sound familiar?’ he said.

  I smiled but said nothing.

  ‘The children all belonged to the community,’ he went on, now staring into the fire. ‘They were not part of their parents. I stayed in most of the stone crofts, which had been renovated in a rudimentary way, at some time or another. The community was more or less under orders to be one happy family. I was taught that my family was the community, and my blood relations were like anyone else.

  ‘When I was six I was put through an ordeal they called ‘shouting therapy’, which was for my own benefit, of course. I was stood in the centre of a circle while the adults shouted abuse at me and hurled the most vicious personal insults they could come up with; what I looked like, how I talked, my pathetic desire to be close to my mother. It was a ritualistic humiliation. It was very frightening but very organised. I cried. I couldn’t stop crying and they judged that to be good. The purpose of the process was to destroy my self-belief and make me need them more. Equality meant the equality of subjugation.’

  Finn threw more wood on the fire and stood up.

  ‘That, of course, is always the way with social engineering,’ he said. ‘You know that as well as I do, Anna. But hippies were supposed to be different. They’re just human, as it turned out.’

  He held out his hand for me and we walked away from the fire a little. The low sun had disappeared behind a clouded winter sky. The trees were frosted up above us, and it was completely still. Then it started to snow.

  ‘My mother became the leader of the community,’ he resumed. ‘She was a tyrant. My father was weak, resentful, humiliated and did nothing to protect me at all. He became an alcoholic eventually and left the island. That was when I was about seven. I haven’t seen him since. Then, slowly, an elite formed in the community, as it does in any community. In this case it was made up of the members who controlled the supply of drugs, mainly hashish in the beginning, then heroin. Opium for the people.’

  We walked back to the fire and Finn raked it over unnecessarily. No spark could have lit anything on that bitter day. Then he put his arm around me and we walked back up the fishing track we’d found to get down to the lake.

  ‘But when I was twelve, I was saved. My uncle, my father’s elder brother, came to Ireland and took me away,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how he managed it, it was totally against my mother’s will. I expect it involved money. I went with my uncle to Cambridge and began school for the first time, proper school. My uncle was a biochemist at Cambridge University, my aunt taught Buddhism. For a while after they took me away, people from the community hounded us. They wanted me back and it was frightening. They came to the house outside Cambridge, sending my aunt and uncle threats and hate mail. But they tired of it and disappeared from my life. So my uncle had me educated. I won a scholarship to Cambridge. I haven’t seen my mother since I was twelve. She disappeared to South America, I believe.’

  We arrived at the wooden house and Finn hugged me for a long time before we entered. When he pulled away he couldn’t look at me and I knew he’d told me something very painful to him. I think it was the first time I felt I loved him.

  It was getting dark outside the windows at the Forest. I realised it must be late. But Putin’s head of intelligence showed no signs of urgency. A bottle of vodka had finally arrived, apparently to placate the General, but Patrushev’s fondness for our national drink is well known.

  We could hear the traffic on the motorway into Moscow and I thought of Barvikha, which lay not far away in the forest in the opposite direction to the capital. I’d said I would meet Nana there, but she was used to me breaking arrangements.

  Suddenly Patrushev shot a question at me.

  ‘And did they?’ he asked. ‘Did they destroy Finn’s self-belief at the commune?’

  ‘In a somewhat misleading way, I’ve never met anyone with more self-belief,’ I said. ‘He has a certain confidence that finds it unnecessary to display self-belief in public at all. It is a
peculiarly English assumption, in my opinion. He demonstrates self-belief without there being any outward signs of it. I would say that his regular undermining of himself, for example, of his background and of his country is a supreme sign of self-confidence. He told me that ever since the shouting when he was six, conflict, anger and aggression have all left him cold.’

  ‘And all the time Finn kept something of himself back from them,’ Patrushev said.

  ‘I think so. Certainly since I’ve known him, apart from that one conversation he seems to have placed his childhood in a sealed room. Either that or he has come to terms with it.’

  ‘He’s had psychiatric help, perhaps. Maybe he’s been in therapy?’ Patrushev said.

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’

  Yuri sneered and knocked back the full glass of vodka that Patrushev had just poured. I admit it was strange to hear Patrushev utter the word ‘therapy’. I wanted to smile, but stopped myself. Finn liked to call the repressive political measures of Putin’s regime ‘theraputin’.

  Patrushev filled my glass and those of the others.

  ‘What was his relationship with his uncle and his aunt?’ he said as he was pouring the vodka.

  ‘Gratitude, certainly. Respect, duty. He keeps in touch with them, sees them regularly when he’s in England. His uncle is retired from a professorship—’

  ‘Yes, yes. In biochemistry. But love, does he love them?’

  Kerchenko looked shocked that the word had come up a second time in a single day.

  ‘No, no, I don’t think so,’ I said carefully.

  ‘He’s a man independent of love,’ Patrushev said, and I wasn’t certain whether it was a question or not.

  ‘He told me that he loves Russia,’ I volunteered.

  ‘Ah,’ Patrushev exhaled and unclasped his hands and leaned back for the first time in the broad armchair. ‘The English are the most fatally romantic people on earth. They’re always falling in love with other people’s countries. A symptom of something or other, eh, General?’

  Kerchenko didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Patrushev leaned forward again.

  ‘So, Finn has no parents to speak of,’ Patrushev summed up. ‘He doesn’t love the people who raised him as their son, he runs from woman to woman during all the time we’ve known him, and he loves an abstract Russia.’

  I didn’t reply, knowing now what was coming.

  ‘And now he says he loves you,’ Patrushev said, rolling his tanks gently on to my lawn.

  ‘He says so,’ I said, emphasising my doubt about it.

  ‘Apparently Finn doesn’t tell women he loves them in order to get them into bed,’ Patrushev said knowledgeably. ‘Apparently he doesn’t need to. We know that from several sources before you. And besides,’ he said, looking at me in a strangely aggressive way, ‘he’d already got you into bed, hadn’t he? So why did he tell you he loved you? What do you feel, Anna?’

  ‘Perhaps he told me because he knew he was going to lose me,’ I said, ‘and it brought out the romantic in him. In my opinion, Finn is the sort of man who tells you he loves you as consolation for him leaving you.’

  I instantly regretted my reply.

  ‘But he told you three days before he left Moscow that he loved you,’ Patrushev snapped immediately. ‘If he knew he was leaving you, he would have told you that too, surely.’

  ‘Then perhaps I’m wrong about my previous thought,’ I said, and felt the ground slipping under me. ‘In that case, my guess is that he must have known he was being recalled, or something of the kind. But he couldn’t tell me for security reasons.’

  ‘We believe he left in an unplanned way,’ Patrushev said sharply. ‘He was bundled out of Moscow by his people. That’s true, isn’t it?’ He looked at Yuri.

  ‘He was practically frog-marched,’ Yuri said.

  Patrushev swung his head back at me. ‘So it’s odd, isn’t it, that he knew he was leaving, even though it was unplanned. He tells you he loves you because he knows he’s leaving. That is very plausible. But how does he know he’s leaving?’

  Patrushev leaned across the desk and fixed me with his stony eyes.

  I had nothing to say. I was trying to recover myself.

  ‘Perhaps the whole thing is a set-up,’ I repeated. ‘The British want us to think they’ve sacked him.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ he said.

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  But Patrushev ignored my question.

  ‘Do you believe he loves you, Colonel?’ he asked, for the first time using my rank rather than my name.

  I felt the other three focusing their gaze on me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said finally. ‘Yes I do,’ and I surprised myself by saying it. Suddenly, I felt light and happy, and as if the men in the room were from some other, unreal time and place.

  Patrushev suddenly dismissed Kerchenko and the two officers.

  It was very late by now, I don’t remember what time it was, and I wanted to get away and to go home to Barvikha. But Patrushev showed no sign of leaving when the others had gone and suggested that the two of us have something to eat in the building. I felt uncomfortable that the night might be taking a turn for the personal. He couldn’t take his eyes off me and I now regretted wearing the clothes intended to disturb the General.

  But a deeper instinct told me that this wasn’t the real root of my anxiety. This instinct was a feeling that Patrushev’s interest in Finn and me wasn’t over just yet and that I didn’t know where it was leading.

  He was now full of courtesy, which only put me further on my guard, opening doors and offering his arm to me. When we came to the restaurant in the Forest’s recreation block, the staff and the other people still working in the building were wide-eyed that Patrushev, the FSB chief and Putin’s close friend, should be here at all, let alone at this hour. I felt my status rising as we walked down the corridors and took the lift down.

  Patrushev ordered a bottle of wine and from somewhere that certainly wasn’t the staff restaurant, sushi was produced for us.

  It was as I took a mouthful from the tray in front of me that he asked a seemingly casual question.

  ‘Do you sometimes wonder about that conversation on New Year’s Eve, Anna? When Finn talked about Schmidtke? You remember?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s strange that he never talked about it again, never, ever alluded to it, don’t you think?’

  My pulse quickened as I thought of that night, of the look in Finn’s eyes when he stared at me as he told the story of Schmidtke; of how there was a deeper meaning in the story that was somehow meant for me personally, unseen, of course, by any of the microphones that recorded every word.

  ‘I believe he said it in relation to the President,’ I said. ‘It seemed to be some sort of back bearing that Finn was taking from the moment he first heard that Vladimir Vladimirovich had been appointed Acting President. The back bearing was East Germany, the end of the eighties, the President’s former years of service over there.’

  ‘Yes, of course. In a sense it was part of his obsession with the President,’ Patrushev said. ‘But I think the connection he was making was more than just a back bearing to those days and to the President alone. He seemed to be making some kind of link, not just of the personalities, but of the nature of their work, of a policy perhaps that connected Schmidtke to the President. On what basis is he trying to link Schmidtke to the President? Why does he think there is such a link?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He said nothing more.’

  ‘And then you both left the house, didn’t you?’ Patrushev pressed me now. ‘You talked intensely by the pond in the forest. At least, he did and you listened. You’re sure you remembered everything he was saying in that twenty minutes or so in your reports?’

  ‘I think so. It was late. So much had happened that night already. Finn spoke in a wild way—I remember thinking he seemed almost possessed.’

  ‘Pos
sessed?’

  ‘Yes. I remember wondering at the time what the General and the others would think of his words; that Finn was mad, perhaps.’

  ‘But we agree that Finn isn’t mad, that he doesn’t ramble unnecessarily. Yes?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so, but everyone has their moments when they don’t make much sense.’

  ‘Do they?’ Patrushev said coldly. ‘Tell me again what was possessing him.’

  ‘He was talking about history and the remaking of it, over and over again. He seemed obsessed by the recurrence of the same themes. This link between Schmidtke and the President seemed to be one of those themes.’

  ‘So he believed that what Schmidtke was doing in Germany back then involved the President too?’ Patrushev said. ‘Finn is trying to change the good opinion the President enjoys in the West. He’s looking for evidence. And then…Beware of Vladimir Putin…is that it?’

  ‘I don’t know. He wasn’t specific.’

  ‘Oh, I think so,’ Patrushev replied quickly. ‘Finn sees a connection somewhere between those times and the present. He believes he can make trouble from the President’s past.’

  I thought of Finn then, in the forest at Barvikha, of how he had seemed infused by some external power. And I thought of my question to him, that he hadn’t answered. What plan was he talking about?

  He had mentioned the Plan again at our last meeting at the Baltschug, just once before he clammed up as he had done before in the forest. But perhaps from some instinct, I hadn’t included it in my last report after our Baltschug meeting, and now Patrushev was really close to this omission.

  Suddenly I felt very alert. The tiredness that had been washing over me for some time, and which Patrushev seemed to be enjoying, evaporated. I wondered why he was asking me this, after the other three had been dismissed. It seemed somehow to have a crucial importance because of that. Even the General and his case officers weren’t to hear this line of questioning. I felt we were approaching the centre of power.