Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  But the fact that he doesn’t give me Mikhail’s real name still keeps me at a distance from the truth, so that if I choose to stay here in the West, I will never be burdened with it.

  For the moment I put aside the name of Sudhoff and turn Finn’s thesis over in my mind and compare it with what I know Russia has become in the years since Putin came to power. I run over in my head the iron grip in which Directorate ‘S’ holds Russia in 2007.

  Four out of every five–eighty per cent–of political leaders and state administrators in Russia are now members of the security services. Most of them have been appointed to these posts by Putin since 2000. They are known as the siloviki–the men of power. They are everywhere: in the presidential administration, in government, the deputies in our parliament, regional heads of Russia, they are on the boards of all of Russia’s top corporations. They are the four out of five.

  Under Putin, politics and business have become one. And all is under the KGB imprimatur, Directorate ‘S’.

  This has not happened anywhere else in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

  And when you add it all up, this power, what does it come to? What are all the oil and arms and steel and aluminium and gold and diamonds and uranium and coal and copper and titanium and tantalum, and everything else worth? How many trillion dollars? And all is controlled by the KGB, the siloviki, the men of power. The four out of five. Directorate ‘S’. It is the biggest heist in history.

  It no longer matters if Vladimir Putin is again ‘elected’, as we still choose to call it in Russia, in 2008. It no longer matters if he overturns the constitution in order to remain in the Kremlin. One of the four out of five will becoming president, that is all that counts.

  21

  AT THE BEGINNING of September 2001, just after we lost track of Finn as he crossed from France into Switzerland after his meeting with Liakubsky, I was summoned to the Forest by General Kerchenko. The General told me I was to be put through two weeks of intensive retraining. It was routine stuff, he told me, and there was no explanation beyond that.

  There was no sign of Yuri or Sasha, my case officers on Finn, and no explanation for that either. Instead, I was assigned Vladimir as my new case officer.

  I noted a new deference towards me from Kerchenko. He himself also seemed to have been gently sidelined from Finn’s case and was acting merely as a messenger. I never saw him again.

  Vladimir and I spent these two weeks barracked at the Forest. We worked sixteen-hour days and in the late evenings I was given new instructions in coding, separate from Vladimir. I knew I was being prepared to rendezvous with Finn again. My excitement was tempered by exhaustion, but mostly by caution. It was one thing for them to know that Finn loved me, but I knew it was necessary to establish that I had no such feelings for him.

  Vladimir was very attentive towards me. Our long acquaintance made the time together as relaxed as it could be. One evening, we had a drink together in the compound after my coding instruction ended. It was nearly the end of the two-week training and we both felt good. I was happy that the time for meeting Finn was near. We sat in a log house in the forest, away from the others, and drank beers and talked and laughed about how my father had been so angry that I’d refused to marry Vladimir.

  ‘Might you have married me if your father hadn’t wanted you to?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

  He looked pleased.

  ‘Why haven’t you married?’ I asked him. ‘You should be married. You’re the marrying type.’

  ‘What does that mean!’ he protested, and then he laughed easily. ‘Anyway, you can talk.’

  ‘One day I want to settle down at Barvikha,’ I said, ‘with four children and a good Russian husband.’

  ‘You’d better get on with it, then,’ he said. ‘You’ll be over the hill.’

  I punched him on the shoulder and caught him right on the nerve and he bent over in pain hugging his shoulder.

  ‘Thank God I didn’t marry you,’ he said through gritted teeth.

  Later we were sitting very close on the porch, facing each other on two stools, elbows on our knees and each cradling a bottle of beer. I saw a gleam of tenderness and excitement in his eyes.

  ‘I’ve always liked you, Vladimir,’ I said.

  I saw he couldn’t speak. Then he looked down, unable to hold my eyes.

  ‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever asked to marry me, that’s the truth, Anna,’ he said. ‘I never wanted to marry anyone else.’

  I put my hand on his arm and he looked up.

  ‘Maybe…?’ he said, and he let the question hang in the air.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ I replied.

  For our remaining days at the Forest, we shared a bed and I told him that when this was all over, we should get married. I don’t know if this was the cruellest lie I’ve ever told in my life. I don’t know, because I don’t know what his motives were, whether he was genuine or whether he was one more hook they wanted to plant in me before I went to Finn. I trusted nobody. Why should I? We were in the Forest and I was being prepared to find the thing the Patriots most wanted to find, the enemy within. But for my purposes, it suited me for them to believe I was committed to Russia and that Vladimir was my personal route home.

  On the last night at the Forest, lying in bed, I told Vladimir I loved him.

  ‘I’ve never told any man that before,’ I said.

  I don’t know if we were both play-acting, or if it was just me. All I know is that, a few days before my rendezvous with Finn, I’d told another man I loved him, and I’d never told Finn that.

  On a hot day at the end of September, I was summoned to Patrushev’s dacha, to the north of Moscow and across the lake from the dacha where Putin entertains world leaders. When I arrived in the car that Patrushev had sent, I saw that it was a meeting to be attended only by Patrushev, myself and Vladimir. I justified my great lie by the presence of Vladimir on that day. If he were so far on the inside, then how could I ever trust that his feelings for me were genuine either?

  Patrushev made a stirring speech at the dacha about my importance to my country and the crucial role I had to play.

  ‘And we’ll keep an eye on your grandmother for you,’ he said. ‘I know how much you care for her.’

  It was the usual threat. Despite my training, my job, my father and heritage, despite my visible attachment to Vladimir, they knew the only place my heart had always been, with Nana.

  When it was time to leave, Patrushev stood and we toasted Russia. He took me by the shoulders and looked at me with his penetrating eyes.

  ‘Remember, Colonel,’ he warned me, ‘his only interest in you is to use you. All the rest is fake.’

  Vladimir came to the airport with me and we–or was it just I?–made a great false show of hugging and kissing each other.

  22

  AFTER MORE THAN A YEAR without contact between Finn and me, our reunion held all the anticipation–principally the fear and doubts–that any lover would have felt in the same position.

  How would we feel about each other now, I wondered, away from the familiarity of the surroundings where our intimacy had grown? Was our affair a thing of a particular time and place? Would the spark between us still exist? Would it need rekindling?

  Too much expectation risked disappointment, too little risked failing to rise to the occasion and, perhaps, missing the moment, the opportunity, for ever.

  I felt awkward and out of place at the airport in Marseilles, coming through the sliding glass doors beyond Immigration. There were groups of my fellow Russians already brimming with enthusiasm for a summer holiday away from Moscow’s more anxious heat. My own arrival brought me face to face with a task that now seemed impossible: to love Finn and satisfy my masters.

  I didn’t see Finn at first. And then something drew my gaze towards a figure leaning against a car rental desk by the exit. He was reading a newspaper and it covered most of his face. Between
us was a throng of taxi drivers and private chauffeurs holding cards with names on them.

  I looked idly across the airport’s concourse and wondered who was from the Forest here, who had travelled with me on the plane, and where they were placed in the hall now.

  The reason I didn’t see Finn at first was because he’d almost completely changed. He was very tanned and hadn’t shaved for several days. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, and he’d dyed it a sort of dirty blond. He was wearing a light blue canvas jacket and jeans and, I was startled to see when he flicked the newspaper over briefly, he had no shirt under the jacket. Around his neck I saw a necklace of blue stones, lapis maybe. It was his feet I finally recognised. He wore a pair of old deck shoes with paint on the left shoe. I remembered them from his flat in Moscow.

  In a split second our eyes met and then he looked away, still holding the newspaper. He walked with measured swiftness in the opposite direction and exited through automatic glass doors into the azure heat. I didn’t follow him but exited through other automatic doors straight ahead of me. We found ourselves thirty yards apart, on the pavement where the taxis and buses pulled up. We were separated by travellers, their luggage, drivers, porters and airport staff. There was a convenient pandemonium of greeting, and the loading of vehicles.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Finn walk quickly across the road, dodging cars, and I followed parallel, keeping the thirty yards between us. Madly, I was briefly irritated in the heat that he wasn’t carrying my heavy case.

  I saw him weave into a car park. I watched him look around lazily, behind and in front, and automatically made the same scan myself to see if anyone on foot was tailing either of us. For me in the crush, it was impossible to know, but he seemed to be clear. I saw him flick a switch on a bunch of keys and the lights on a white Renault flashed. I stopped on the far side of the slip road.

  He got into the car, reversed out and drove slowly down the slip road towards me. I watched to see if other cars did the same. He stopped the car and threw open the passenger door and one of the rear doors. I manhandled my case on to the back seat and stepped in beside him.

  I had forgotten it would be like this. Because it was Finn I was meeting, I was unprepared for it. His first words to me were matter-of-fact.

  ‘What’s behind?’

  ‘A dark blue BMW about twenty yards away and a white Mercedes behind that.’

  ‘Ahead?’

  ‘Green Peugeot and a taxi.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, and grinned straight into my heart.

  We drew up at the automatic barrier and there were queues at all the barriers on either side. Finn put the parking card into the machine and the barrier rose. Before he accelerated through, he slid a thin metal card into the machine’s slot. We drove under the barrier, I saw him watch it fall in the mirror behind us, and then he grinned. The blue BMW couldn’t get the machine to accept its own parking card and was trying to reverse out, but there were at least four cars behind it. We drove out to the sound of angry horns.

  ‘There’ll be at least one ahead,’ Finn said. ‘They’re watching you, not me.’

  ‘There,’ I said.

  A green Peugeot was pulled over on to the grass fifty yards away and as we passed, it slipped on to the road behind us.

  ‘Look out for others,’ Finn said.

  We turned westwards out on to the motorway. I watched in the side mirror for what was behind us, the green Peugeot and whatever else might be following. Finn drove fast so that when, some twenty minutes after we’d left the airport behind us, he suddenly pulled up on the hard shoulder, I was jolted forwards.

  ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, looking in the mirror.

  The green Peugeot overshot by forty yards or so and swerved on to the hard shoulder also.

  ‘There they are,’ Finn said.

  I saw the passenger talking into a phone.

  Traffic passed us, but no one else stopped. I was watching the green Peugeot ahead of us further down the hard shoulder when Finn slammed his foot on to the accelerator and we surged backwards for thirty yards and then he slammed the gear lever into first and swung the wheel down to the left and on to a motorway works entrance that was so concealed I hadn’t seen it.

  We left the motorway in a squeal of tyres and crashed on to a dusty track that led to a quarry-like bowl full of road-making machinery.

  Finn drove through this apparent dead end and out of the other side on to another dust track that led back in the direction we’d come from. I looked behind and saw the green Peugeot racing backwards along the hard shoulder.

  Finn drove at breakneck speed for about a mile. I looked behind and saw dust kicking up far away as the green Peugeot finally found its way out of the quarry behind us.

  The track we were on led back under the motorway and joined a small country road. Finn turned on to it and headed back again in the direction we’d been travelling on the motorway.

  There was a distance of half a mile to the car behind and its occupants couldn’t have seen which way we’d turned on to the country road. Finn accelerated and drove so fast I hardly noticed what we were passing. We turned off again twice, on to two more single-track country roads like the first one. When he was finally satisfied he had lost our tail, he slowed and turned off on to another dust road that led out southwards over a great expanse of dead, flat, bleak saltpans that stretched for miles in either direction.

  There was no other traffic, not even the occasional slow farm vehicle we’d overtaken on the side roads. Finn drove the car out of sight into a gully and we waited, not speaking.

  When we came back up on to the track he drove very slowly and on the grass edges, so that the dust didn’t kick up. We must have driven for another twenty minutes on this winding track across the old, disused saltpans. And then I felt rather than saw the sea. We were so low that the dunes ahead obscured the view.

  We seemed to be heading nowhere in a salt-and-sand desert. But when we finally reached the dunes and Finn pulled up behind them, I saw there was a dilapidated wooden shack, obscured from the road. It was a campers’ restaurant, open only in the summer, which contained a few drifting adolescents sitting at rickety tables. Beyond the wooden structure of the restaurant were two more rickety wooden buildings, small shacks erected in a chaotic, haphazard fashion and constructed from what looked like bleached driftwood. Finn cut the engine and looked at me.

  ‘Fancy a swim?’ he said and grinned again. We got out of the car. ‘And I think it’s about time I carried your case,’ he said.

  We walked across hot sand–I’d kicked off my shoes–past the restaurant and up to the second of the two shacks built at an angle to the sea. We still haven’t touched each other, I thought. The door to the shack was unlocked and Finn pushed it open with his foot and threw the case down. Then he took off his jacket and his jeans to reveal a pair of faded blue floral swimming shorts. He ran down the beach and into the sea, not stopping until the water became too deep and he fell forwards into it.

  He looked round when he’d come up from under the surface and shouted.

  ‘Come on, it’s beautiful.’

  I changed and joined him.

  That was how it was, our first meeting in over a year. Finn never said hello. He didn’t kiss me. He never asked me how the flight was, if I was tired, what my departure from the Forest had been like. It was as if I’d just come back from a visit to the shops, rather than that we hadn’t seen each other for over a year.

  And all this suited me, I realised. Everything I’d half prepared in my mind before our meeting, and that was so inadequate, faded away, and with it went all my awkward anxiety.

  We drink beers sitting in the sand, swim again, and then go to bed in an extremely uncomfortable wooden structure that Finn tells me is the bed. Later we eat out at a table in the sand in front of what Finn insists is the restaurant as the sun starts to sink into the sea.

  There is only fish, Finn informs me. The owner of the shacks
is a Hungarian who came over in 1956 after the uprising against the Russians there failed. He’d taught himself to be a fisherman. Back then, when these things were still possible, he’d built the shacks illegally, constructed from driftwood in this isolated place where few people wanted to come and which he’d never left.

  He is now seventy-odd years old, Finn tells me, and whatever there is for lunch every day depends on what he’s caught that morning.

  ‘I didn’t tell him you were Russian, by the way,’ Finn says. Finn has a curious, self-deprecating and ultimately deceitful habit of apologising for who he is and expecting others to as well. In Moscow, when anyone asked him if he was English, he would always say, ‘I’m afraid I am.’ It was a peculiarly English deceit, I thought.

  ‘This is just about the only spot for nearly fifty miles that hasn’t been developed at all,’ Finn says. ‘They can’t build on the saltpans. There’s nothing at all in either direction for several miles. To the left you eventually come to Marseilles’ industrial wasteland.’

  I can see the ugly belching smokestacks in the distance.

  ‘To the right there’s a tourist beach, empty of buildings, three miles along from here. Sometimes you see someone who’s walked it but not often and they don’t do it a second time. It isn’t a pretty place except when you look out to sea.’

  ‘Fast work to find it in three days,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, you didn’t give me much warning, Rabbit.’

  But of course Finn has known the place for years. I find later that the Hungarian, whom Finn introduces as Willy, has some connection to the Service. At any rate Finn persuaded Willy to throw out some hippies from our shack when he received my message that I was coming.

  ‘We’ll be fine here for a while,’ Finn says later. ‘And this place is always here when we need to get away.’ And then, on our first night for fourteen months, he finally falls asleep with his arm around my stomach. I lie and watch the stars and listen to the thin-lipped waves that slip quietly on to the edge of the sand. Some gypsy music is playing from a hippy tent further down the beach. It is as if we’ve never been apart; as if we’ve known each other long before we ever met. It is the same as it was.