‘Oh,’ said Petrov.
‘What is it you want?’
‘A rifle.’
The man eyed him. ‘What’s that accent?’
‘Russian.’
‘Where’re you from?’
‘Russia.’
The man looked harder. ‘From where I’m standing, you look pretty serious.’
‘I need a rifle.’
‘I can see you’re going to buy one.’
‘That’s right.’
‘It’s not a window trip?’
Petrov didn’t know what that meant. ‘No. This is right.’
‘Cash?’
‘Oh, yes.’
The store’s interior was dim. The man explained that the gun room was in the rear. There was a shade on the skylight, whose string he pulled, dropping a small cloud of dust and bug-mess into the room. The firearms sat like sleek black missions, guns one side, rifles the other.
‘Rabbits is it?’ asked the storeman, putting a Remington in Petrov’s hands. He explained this was their top of the line. Top notch.
Petrov played the bolt. The weapon felt well weighted, solid with a walnut stock. He asked the cost, not truly listening because probably he would take it whatever the price. His first gun had been a hammer-lock, a joke weapon with a replacement stock that he’d bought for two roubles from the village wainwright. It was a stubborn gun. Ugly. He was fourteen then, and forty-three now, and he would buy this rifle because he wanted to have one nice hunting rifle before he died. He would buy it because this was Australia, land incredible, booming, beautiful, fifteen thousand kilo metres from Moscow, and he was intending to enjoy it. Another overseas posting. Not a prize granted to every man, and he would seize it, taking what liberties were possible, knowing the chances against his ever getting a third.
He bought the rifle and two hundred bullets.
‘What about a dog?’ the man said then.
‘A dog?’
‘Sure. A hunter buys a rifle, what’s the next thing he needs?’
Outside in a yard, Alsatian puppies wriggled in a coop against the fence. Petrov bent down. When the coop was opened, one broke from their number and flopped its way into the Russian’s grip. He held it at chest height, a skin of heart and heat.
He thought not of hunting but Evdokia. Of the joy his wife would find in such an improbable thing.
They put the rifle across the back seat of his car, then shook hands. ‘Volodya,’ Petrov said.
‘I’m Jack.’
The Russian laughed. ‘Jack,’ he repeated, holding the pup. ‘Then this will be his name too.’
The embassy’s secret section was on the top floor: five cramped rooms at the end of the eastern corridor. Somewhere, the roof leaked. He’d been told that when it rained, the main-wired lighting shorted, which was why each desk in the section had two lamps. Beyond this, the only noticeable difference between these rooms and the rest of the embassy was that each door had two locks and required two keys.
That and the corridor was deadly quiet.
That and it was probably bugged.
This was Petrov’s firming opinion. He thought the leak might have been caused by a commando who’d been up there setting microphones at night. He was planning to send Golo-vanov, the night duty patroller, up to comb the crawl-space.
At the start of the corridor, Prudnikov, the chief cypher clerk and a secret MVD recruit, occupied two rooms. The first was his personal office, where he kept an administrative watch on the section. The second he shared with his wife and baby daughter; it contained a bed and a cot, and in front of these a chest for the family’s belongings.
Petrov’s office was at the very end of the corridor. It had a small, knee-high fireplace set into the wall, which he liked. Because his MVD role was secret, even from other staff, he had a downstairs office too. The sign there said, ‘Third Secretary, Consular Business and Cultural Representation’. His job was to prevent defections. Nina Smirnova, the wife of the embassy’s former accountant, had previously attempted to escape. She had arranged herself a job in Sydney working as a nanny to two rich émigrés and, using the Canberra laundrette, had smuggled out two suitcases full of clothes. Her husband had had his suspicions. He had reported nonsense telephone calls, midnight pacings, travel magazines hidden under their mattress. Smirnova was investigated and arrested. The sentence was ten years. Add to this the defectors Gouzenko in Canada and Kravchenko in America, and Moscow was worried, having paranoid visions about any given western outpost. Petrov’s Moscow boss, a man known by the codename Sparta, was particularly wary, having promised someone important that nothing would happen again. So he had sent Vladimir Petrov to Canberra, armed with a file on every member of the embassy; Vladimir Petrov who was experienced in containment work; Vladimir Petrov who could be well and truly trusted.
There was a knock at the door. Philip Kislitsyn. The man ducked under the doorframe, sat in the interview chair and tossed Petrov a peach.
‘How is your house?’ Petrov asked.
‘It has a chimney stack, a hedge and a letterbox. Anna is buying appliances. Tatiana wants two kittens, and one of them must be orange.’
Petrov smiled. ‘In this country we should take our families on picnics and then we should try golf.’
‘You and I?’ said Kislitsyn.
‘Yes.’
It was a pristine game, Petrov thought. Played in pairs, with dew on the grass and morning sunlight on the fairways, it looked like the kind of thing that made lifelong friendships.
Even with his height, Kislitsyn’s jacket was too big. He looked like a second- or third-born child growing into the eldest’s suit. Petrov had known him a long time. They had met when Kislitsyn was night liaison at Dzerzhinsky Square and Petrov special cypher clerk. Petrov had handed Kislit-syn late-night decrypts for delivery to Stalin and watched him squirm. That was about the time that Petrov had focused his attentions on Evdokia Kartseva, the beautiful woman two floors below whose husband had recently been purged. Kislitsyn had warned him against it: she was marked, he said, lucky to still be on the streets let alone in the building—a month or two and she’d be gone. But Petrov had persisted, believing he couldn’t be tarnished, enjoying the idea that he could be the salvation for this woman and her young child. Yet Evdokia had not been easily persuaded. Before her marriage she’d had many suitors. She was a popular woman, good-looking, and why would she be interested in him, a podgy clerk? She had seemed embarrassed at times by his more public approaches but he did not mind. He began visiting her instead at her apartment, helping Irina—a bright young girl—with her maths, and bringing gifts: coffee and coupons for shoes. In a persistent campaign, he made their Sundays his own. They went to the parks and began to eat together at the MVD restaurant. Carefully, he never mentioned the husband, not once. It was his task to make a new world of Irina, Evdokia and himself. And he knew it was working. He bought Irina a wooden ballet dancer and blue knitted socks and Evdokia squeezed his hand in the doorway. Kislitsyn had thought it incred ible: not only had Evdokia Kartseva survived her husband’s downfall but she was reciprocating Vladimir Petrov’s attentions as well.
Kislitsyn gave his tie a gentle tug. ‘This Lifanov is a prick.’
Petrov shrugged. ‘He is simply the ambassador.’
‘You think his behaviour is natural?’
‘We are the MVD and we run a spy ring amongst his staff. We have a separate line to Moscow and who knows what we might say.’
‘In Moscow I read his file.’
‘Yes, I have a copy.’
‘It is very thin. A prick file.’
‘His behaviour is only natural.’
Kislitsyn pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped peach juice from his hands. ‘I am to tell you things. Firstly, I am the graduate of a course in espionage. Six months intensively freezing my balls in the Urals. Sabotage, explosives, short lessons in coding and in the handling of foreign agents.’
‘You are the expert now.’
<
br /> ‘Banks, signalling, photography, code work. My instructor says I am a living dictionary of these things.’
‘Explosives?’
‘Yes. I am to tell you. We are to prepare the ground for an illegal line.’
Petrov looked at him.
‘This is an instruction directly from Sparta,’ Kislitsyn said.
‘How illegal?’
‘I have the details.’
‘This is in response to Robert Menzies? His war-in-three-years plan?’
‘The prime minister has doubled his military budget. Now it is two hundred million pounds.’
‘But he can’t really believe there’ll be war?’
‘Korea, Indo-China, Malaya. These are his footnotes for the world situation.’
‘Hmm.’
‘ “A war of aggression is in the highest degree probable.” ’
‘Are they his words or ours?’
‘His. Ours.’
‘The point is?’
‘We are to make preparations.’
‘For a network?’
‘Yes. We are to prepare the facilities to support a team of independent, dependable, self-resourced spies.’
‘Functionals.’
‘Men and women to remain incountry in the event that this embassy is withdrawn.’
‘In the event?’
‘Upon the outbreak of war.’
Kislitsyn put a crumpled yellow envelope on the desk. He wore a very nice watch, Petrov observed; an Omega, not dissimilar to his own.
‘Active and aggressive methods,’ Kislitsyn continued. ‘We are to be bold in our forethought and inventiveness.’ He pointed to the envelope. ‘I am also ordered to tell you that Sparta apologises that these orders cannot arrive by regular channel. It has been learnt that the FBI have decrypted many communiqués from Washington and other places. The system failure was an accidental double-issuing of one-time pads.’
Petrov groaned.
‘To protect us, this envelope contains a new codebook and cypher. I have kept it on my person for three months at all times.’ Kislitsyn cut the envelope open and emptied its contents into his hand. ‘When you open this channel, further orders will arrive.’
‘Further orders?’
‘Aggressive methods. In Moscow, men are training. If and when circumstances demand it, they will arrive as experts in subterfuge and long-range wireless.’
‘We will place them?’
‘We will establish the systems that can bring them into this country and then help them disappear.’ Kislitsyn leaned forward and clasped his large hands in front of him. ‘And there is something else I am to intimate.’
‘All these things you know and I don’t.’
‘Under your predecessor, a situation existed. It was a set of affairs that hinged on the sympathies of certain well-placed men, internationalists and peace-seekers, acting in the interests of their fellow man. Moscow thought highly of this situation. These were Australian public servants in the Department of External Affairs.’
‘Agents?’
‘Not ours. They helped the Communist Party, but the Party passed the information on. Documents—US and British papers. Interesting bedtime reading. Moscow found this favourable and would like for steps to be taken to establish such an arrangement again.’
Petrov tossed the peach stone. He picked up the codebook and stood by the fireplace. Having said what was needed, Kislitsyn had seemingly disappeared into the furniture.
The As came first. ‘Arkadia’, Brisbane. ‘Azimut’, Perth. Thirteen pages of code. Two hundred and twenty-two of cypher.
‘Alright?’ said Kislitsyn.
‘Golf?’ said Petrov.
‘Yes, good, sometime.’
3
Michael Howley pulled off Oxley Street and into the car park of the Kingston Hotel. A single light shone over the space. It was past midnight and he sat for a few moments listening to the silence. He’d driven from Sydney non-stop and his back ached.
There was a hole in the Kingston’s fence that led to the yard of the funeral home next door. The home was two storeys of white brick, flower boxes on its limit. Howley opened its back door with a key and stood waiting for his eyes to adjust. Coffins in front of him. A chemical odour etched in the air.
He walked slowly up the stairs to the western end of the top floor. The room he came to was small, both windows overlooking a dual carriageway with a wide median strip. Canberra Avenue. Opposite sat the Soviet embassy.
On the windowsill was a pair of binoculars. Howley brought them to bear on the embassy’s front gates, on its windows, on the little he could see of its grounds. Darkness and silence. Silence and that impenetrable hedge.
The room was stale. He opened the windows slightly to introduce a breeze. It was more than six months since he’d come here. This room was used sparingly, only for specific operations, not as a general post. It was a question of resources. The organisation’s efforts were devoted to the problem of subversives, the Australian Communist Party, various left and far left groups. These were the cancers that needed cutting out. The Russians weren’t a sideshow by any means—inside the walls of their embassy was the worst place a secret could end up—but there were simple issues of manpower. The counterespionage division was only four and one half full-time officers, plus the director. Around-the-clock surveillance wasn’t on the cards. Instead, this room was used now and again, when it was thought that something useful might be gleaned.
He was here alone for a few days, looking for signs as to which, if any, of the embassy’s new arrivals were MVD. It was the kind of work he usually enjoyed. A few days in this room. A few days creeping the streets around. He thought it was a valuable thing, the occasional watch on the Soviet embassy. The building alone handed one a sense of purpose, the dark hedge, the dark walls. It had been built as a guesthouse, something designed to invite, and over this the Soviets had added their layers of menace: the spiked gate, the occasional runs of threatening wire. Howley thought the building played its part terrifically, resisting the observer’s attentions as it drew him in.
He made tea in the downstairs kitchen, spooning the minimum dose into the pot. The owner of the funeral home provided use of his premises gratis, and Howley didn’t want to indulge. He returned to the room and sat in the observation chair. A light at the embassy had come on. Top floor, eastern side. He set his tea down and looked at the light through the binoculars. The window was frosted. He peered, unable to make out anything behind the glass. The window fell again into darkness.
He checked his watch: 1.05 a.m. and well past time to turn in. He pulled a blanket over the observation chair then set his first and second alarm clocks for 5 a.m.
The ambassador’s antechamber was near the embassy’s main doors. The room had no door and so Evdokia was subject to the noise of everyone’s comings and goings, the deliveries and the visitations, the idle chatter of the doormen. There were also the children, who often played at the entrance while their parents worked, chasing each other with fitful squeals.
That morning, it was Lyosha Koukharenko who came into her room. The boy was four or five. He wore a red jumper with his collar sticking up.
‘What is it, Lyosha?’ she asked.
He was about to speak when something came flying past his head. It hit the near wall with a blunt thud. An orange. The boy turned to see who had thrown it.
Evdokia stood up, enraged. She shouted. She went to Lyosha and smacked him. The sound; the wasted food; Moscow’s threats against her sister—she knew it was a tightening vortex of these things. She marched the boy past the dazed doorman, who had been asleep, while the remaining children scattered westward towards the lodges. She yelled after them that this wasn’t the place to play.
Lyosha was crying. She took him to his mother, who was an assistant in the consular section.
‘Valya, here is your boy. You mothers. Keep your children away from the front gates.’
‘What has happened, Evdokia Alex
eyevna?’
‘They are throwing oranges. They are always so badly behaved.’
She made a ruling, as she was entitled to, that the children must stay away from the embassy during the day. It was a necessary and reasonable act, altogether in keeping with the idea that this was a place of work.
Then she made another ruling. This concerned the furniture in everybody’s homes, which was owned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and on which rent should be paid. This was a Moscow directive, clearly set out in the embassy regulations.
Ambassador Lifanov came to see her. The staff were unhappy about it, he said. Couldn’t she defer her decision? No, she explained. She had to think of the Moscow auditor, who would punish irregularities.
A few days later, Masha Golovanova told her that Lifanova and Koukharenka were spreading stories behind her back. They said she was embezzling money and using it to buy western clothes. This made her laugh. Let them be jealous, she thought. If they had no money and their husbands wouldn’t buy them Australian things, what fault was it of hers?
The following week, she attended the regular meeting for Party members. The minutes of these meetings went to the Central Committee of the Party in Moscow. Before the meeting concluded, Kovaliev stood up. ‘There is one more matter,’ he said with a wooden face.
‘Yes,’ the ambassador said. ‘Comrade Petrova, perhaps you will care to explain it.’
Evdokia looked at him.
‘Of course, we are referring to the matter of your desk,’ said Kovaliev.
The ambassador nodded. ‘Yes, I do not know what to say, it is such a remarkable offence.’
She studied them for a moment. What on earth did they mean? She sensed Volodya stiffen in the chair beside her.
‘Come, Comrade Petrova,’ said Kovaliev. ‘We must sort this out. Under the glass of your desk there is a picture of a dog playing piano, is there not?’
‘Yes,’ she said carefully.
‘You put it there?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it for?’
She was quiet. Kovaliev gave her a few moments, then became stern. ‘This is a Party meeting, Evdokia Alexeyevna. Come, we are asking you why it is there.’
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