Bella was impressed. She’d put this woman in danger and in response she’d been gracious, and eloquent, and measured, and wise. She was right about the theatre. Lenin had written the first act, to tumultuous applause, but now there was another hand at work in the script, darker, merciless, unforgiving. She remembered a picture she’d seen in Moscow, the body of Lenin en route to his funeral. There was snow on the ground in Moscow, and her eye had been drawn to the small, squat, swarthy figure in the leather boots with the felt tops, loping along behind. The path to tyranny, she thought, is paved with good intentions. You’re never aware of the wolf until it’s far too late.
‘One question,’ Bella was nursing the kitten again. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Not at all. With luck, we might have the rest of the night to ourselves.’
‘Are you and Ilya… you know…?’
‘Together?’
‘Yes.’
Waiting for an answer, Bella was aware of Larissa’s eyes on her. Finally, she pinched the end of the cigarette and let it fall to the floor. Then she unbelted her robe until it hung open. Bella could only guess at her age, but she had the body of a woman in her twenties, flat belly, firm breasts. She reached for Bella, cupping her face. When they kissed, Bella could taste the harshness of the tobacco Stalin loved.
‘It’s a big bed,’ Larissa nodded down at the kitten. ‘I’m sure there’s room for all three of us.’
*
She left before dawn, with a whispered promise to be back within an hour or so. Bella was on no account to answer the door or show herself at any window. There had to be a phone in the apartment because Bella heard the low murmur of Larissa’s voice before the tell-tale click when she put the receiver down. Then came a creak as she opened the front door and pulled it shut behind her. Bella remembered the endless flights of steps from last night. Fifth floor, she thought. At least.
She lay still for a moment, Larissa’s scent still on the pillow. She’d never had sex with a woman before but she’d occasionally thought about it, tempted by sheer curiosity, and now she was warmed by how natural it had felt. There was a rough urgency about Larissa’s lovemaking, which sat oddly with how calm and attentive she’d been in the restaurant, but Bella had been happy to follow her cues, and if the price of survival was having your saviour sitting on your face, then so be it.
After a while, with the faintest twinge of guilt, Bella wrapped herself in Larissa’s bed robe and tried to find the kitten. Half a lifetime living with cats took her to the most unlikely hiding places – the lined insides of a pair of discarded boots, a tiny cardboard box that had once contained bath salts, a barely open bottom drawer – but Mitya had disappeared. There were four other rooms in the apartment, including a handsome lounge complete with a grand piano, and she searched them methodically one by one, calling Mitya’s name, pausing only at the front door. It was made of steel. Two eye holes offered nothing but the darkness of the stairwell but there were bolts top and bottom and she slid them both across.
With the kitten still missing, she returned to the bedroom, hugging the wall, moving very slowly, one tiny step at a time. Ignoring Larissa’s instructions, she risked a peep down at the street. A metal grille masked the window of a jewellery shop across the road, and a uniformed guard was smoking a cigarette outside what looked like a hotel, but, to her relief, she could see no car. A prosperous little area, she thought. Doubtless a tribute to her new lover’s standing in the city.
Larissa was back within the hour. Wide awake, Bella caught the footsteps on the stairs, hoping to God the Emka hadn’t returned. Then came the turn of the key in each of the two locks, and the softest knock when Larissa realised the door was bolted. Still wearing the dressing gown, Bella opened the door. Larissa stepped inside and kissed her.
‘You smell of me,’ she said.
‘You approve?’
‘I do.’ The nod came with a rare smile. ‘You told me that was your first time. I’m not sure I believe you. Come.’
She led the way to the bathroom and closed the door behind them before switching on the light. Two faces appeared in the brightness of the mirror over the spotless sink. There was a moment of silence as they studied each other, then Larissa propped the bag on the edge of the bath and unpacked it.
‘I had to guess,’ she said. ‘But it won’t really matter.’
‘Guess what?’
‘Your height. Your build.’
‘You had no clues? Did I imagine all that?’
‘Bitch,’ the laughter was full-throated. ‘Here. Take that off. Let’s see what we can do for you.’
The clothes were old, unwashed, and belonged to someone a good deal fatter than Bella. A pair of heavy woollen work trousers. A stained singlet that would have looked better on a man. A rough serge jacket, olive-green, with two buttons missing and a collar that felt greasy to the touch. Larissa helped Bella put the garments on and then stood back to take a look.
‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘All you need now is a job digging the bloody roads up.’
‘Where does this stuff come from?’ Bella could smell boiled cabbage and the reek of old cooking oil.
‘It doesn’t matter. You’ll meet her soon enough. Take them off again.’
‘Why?’
‘Just do it, chérie. This is for your good, not mine.’
‘Chérie? You speak French as well?’
‘Bien sur. Vas-y.’ Of course. Just do it.
Bella shrugged and began to undress. By the time she was naked again, Larissa had produced a comb, a pair of scissors and a cut-throat razor from the bathroom cabinet. The implications were all too clear but when Bella began to protest, insisting she could wind her hair inside a hat, Larissa put a finger to her lips.
‘You’re in the wild, chérie. You have to be careful. You have to hide.’
Bent over the edge of the bath, Bella heard the snip-snip of the scissors as long hanks of blonde hair began to fall onto the pitted enamel. The sight distressed her, and she closed her eyes. Then Larissa filled the sink and moments later Bella felt the warmth of her hands as she soaped her scalp. She was deft with the razor, long, confident strokes that carved through the remaining stubble. When she was finished, she wiped the blade clean and invited Bella to inspect her handiwork.
Larissa’s blade skills weren’t quite as perfect as Bella had hoped. When she moved the bareness of her head in the mirror, blood was seeping from tiny knicks in her scalp. Larissa mumbled something in Russian that might have been an apology and turned her gently round.
‘Bend towards me,’ she said.
Bella gazed at her, and then shrugged. For whatever reason, she seemed to have stepped into a horror film. She did Larissa’s bidding and bent her head. For a moment nothing happened, then she felt the lightest pressure on her poor shaven head, first here, then there, before Larissa announced that her work was done.
Bella lifted her head again. Larissa’s face was inches away, her lips bloodied.
‘Kiss me,’ she said.
7
SATURDAY 13 SEPTEMBER 1941
Moncrieff was back at the Registry later than he’d planned. Woodfield, the Archivist, was already at his desk, as wrecked as ever, and Moncrieff wondered whether he’d spent the night there. He gazed at Moncrieff with a slightly quizzical air.
‘You survived The Spinney?’
‘I did. Just.’
‘Beethoven?’
‘Yes.’
‘That César fella?’
‘Franck. Yes.’
‘Enough to drink?’
‘They were more than generous. I knew I’d regret the third bottle.’
Moncrieff had spent the night in the bosom of Philby’s family. His wife, Aileen, had conjured a wonderful stew from the remains of a rabbit, the baby had kicked its plump little legs at the sight of the tall stranger beside her cot, and Philby himself had been the perfect host. Aileen, slight, pale and tone-deaf when it came to music, had retired early pleading the beginnings
of a headache, leaving Moncrieff and Philby to open another bottle. To Moncrieff’s relief, there’d been no mention of Souk, or even Bella. Instead, they’d compared notes about pre-war Europe, Philby easing up and down from his armchair to attend to the gramophone between movements of Beethoven symphonies.
Germany, they’d both agreed, was the place to have been in the tumultuous days after Hitler’s rise to the Chancellorship. Moncrieff had spent a year in Germany as part of his Edinburgh degree course, but he’d seen very little of Berlin. Philby, on the other hand, had been present on a balcony in the Potsdamer Strasse in 1933, watching a Communist from a neighbouring window unfurl a roll of toilet paper over the heads of the marching stormtroopers below.
‘The Nazis murdered socialism,’ Philby – glass in hand – was swaying along to Beethoven. ‘Hitler wanted to make the Reich safe for all those fucking capitalists. Für das Volk? For the people? You can sell anything if the lie is big enough.’
Aside from Germany, Philby had also spent time in Vienna, the Balkans, and then Spain. After they’d broached the third bottle, he’d mentioned a woman called Litzi, who might have been Austrian. In any event she seemed to stand in the way of his plans to make an honest woman of Aileen upstairs, so Litzi may have been his wife, as well. Either way, Moncrieff had tucked the name away for later. Ursula Barton, he’d thought. She’s bound to know.
Now, still in Woodfield’s office, Moncrieff asked for the Krivitsky files. Woodfield fetched them from a safe in the corner.
‘You started them yesterday afternoon?’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘Fascinating.’
‘Anything in particular strike you?’
‘How he came to grief. I started at the back and began to work forward. Shot to death in a Washington hotel? Gun left beside his body? A message for all those other defectors? He probably thought he was home safe. How wrong can a man be?’
‘Exactly,’ Woodfield gazed up at him. ‘Stalin never takes prisoners. Maybe we should all remember that.’
Indeed, Moncrieff thought. He picked up the files and made his way back to Cubicle Four. Here he’d spent most of yesterday afternoon reading and rereading Bella’s file, disappointed at how little it told him. Born in Scotland. Daughter of Guards officer who died at Mons and whom she barely remembered. Grew up in what the file termed ‘comfortable circumstances’, thanks to her stepfather, a businessman called Oliver Sanderson who’d made his fortune in Malaya. Won a place at Oxford. Emerged fluent in German and Italian. Dallied for a while with a series of inconsequential jobs after graduation, and then applied for a post in the Foreign Office.
The latter sounded a rather formal process but thanks to conversations in Berlin, once they were sleeping together, Moncrieff knew different. With her fluent German, her arresting looks, and most of all her connections, she’d bluffed her way into the diplomatic service. Within weeks, the result of a quiet word in the right ear, Bella had found herself assigned to Berlin as a Support Officer, responsible for liaison with the German press. This gave her access to an endless round of diplomatic receptions, with all the associated gossip, and by every account she was a success. Neither her stepfather, nor anyone in the Embassy, and least of all Moncrieff himself, had the slightest suspicion that all the time she’d been feeding anything she could get her hands on to Moscow.
These acts of treason MI6 had belatedly traced to a passionate affair she’d conducted during her last year at university. Moncrieff knew about this, too, because Bella had mentioned it in Berlin, but he’d only realised its full significance once she’d fled. According to the file, her lover’s name was Matthew Gore-Bainbridge. A committed Communist, he’d been reading Spanish at Oxford, and short stories he’d had published in one of the university magazines were excerpted in the file. Moncrieff had read them with some care, recognising talent when he saw it, and it came as no surprise to learn that Comrade Gore-Bainbridge had ambitions to become a presence in the left-wing press, and thus help change the world. Enlisting with one of the International Brigades had been part of that journey but, alas, a Nationalist mortar bomb had blown him apart on a rocky plateau on the edge of besieged Madrid.
Now, starting on the Krivitsky file anew, Moncrieff paused. After her years in Moscow, Bella had arranged for them to meet again in Lisbon. Moncrieff had been busy trying to tease out the tighter knots in the Hess affair, while Bella was on Politburo business she wasn’t prepared to discuss. She’d felt different – tougher, more wary – but they’d rekindled the affair and he remembered with absolute clarity the afternoon they’d idly discussed the possibility of a life together.
In Berlin, before she’d defected, she’d been suggesting an elopement to Seville. In bed in a Lisbon hotel, three years later, the only possibility left was getting together and making a new life in the Soviet Union. They’d both known it was a fantasy, dismissed with some reluctance, but what remained in Moncrieff’s memory was the way that conversation had ended. Philby was behind an MI6 desk in Madrid. Moncrieff had recently bumped into him on a flight back to England, a chance encounter that turned out to be anything but. Philby, in his benign way, had warned Moncrieff off SIS territory. Later, back in Lisbon, he’d shared the encounter with Bella. ‘Be careful,’ she’d told him. ‘Because that man is different. He was never an amateur. Ever.’
Amateur? Different? What, precisely, had she meant? At the time, without much real interest, he’d tried to press her for more details, but she’d shaken her head and changed the subject. Now, after nearly a week together at the Glebe House, he knew he had to get to the bottom of this man. Was he some kind of threat to her? To MI6? To all of them? Or was he what he claimed to be? A somewhat dishevelled patriot, gifted in all kinds of unusual ways, a linguist, an ex-journalist, a man of many worlds, pledged to King and Country?
Moncrieff opened his notebook and bent to the Krivitsky file. As Philby had warned, it was a long and complex story, badged by the NKVD man’s growing realisation that no one in the apparatus of state was immune from Stalin’s raging paranoia. Trusted colleagues working undercover across Europe, sincere Communists, pledged to the cause, were suddenly recalled to Moscow and accused of being part of a giant counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Under torture, to spare themselves yet more agony, they confessed their sins and were duly shot. But in Krivitsky’s view, the real counter-revolution was headed by Stalin himself. He’d doused the last embers of real Bolshevism and replaced it with the sour reek of tyranny. Word of this apostasy had somehow got back to Moscow and Krivitsky, fearing the worst, had fled to the West.
At this point, after hours of putting together the jigsaw that was Walter Krivitsky, Moncrieff knew that the essence of the man probably lay in his interviews with Jane Archer. Ursula Barton had already given him the headlines – how the Soviets spent years and years carefully nurturing bright young prospects already won over to Communism – but what she hadn’t mentioned were the specific leads that Krivitsky, for an undisclosed sum of money, was only too happy to share. These were top level agents-in-place, busy being spies.
The first was ‘a Scotsman of good family, educated at Eton and Oxford’. He was, according to Krivitsky, ‘an idealist who works in the Foreign Office and is happy to work for us without payment’. His minders who ran him in London were Theodore Maly and Arnold Deutsch, both of whom had recently returned to Moscow.
Moncrieff sat back a moment, bewildered. These interviews had taken place barely a year ago. While he was certain that a number of diplomats owed their education to Eton and Oxford, surely a lead like this would have triggered, at the very least, a major investigation? An enquiry like that would have come at once to the ears of MI5, charged with keeping the nation safe, yet he could remember no mention of the issue. Why not? What had kept this idealistic young diplomat unmolested?
Turning the page, his eye fell on the next paragraph. Jane Archer had pressed the ex-NKVD man for more leads. One of them, unnamed, was described by Kri
vitsky as ‘a young English aristocrat who’d worked as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War’. He, too, had been run by Theodore Maly, and had been assigned by his newspaper to the Nationalist side. Moscow, scenting the possibility of a major blow against the rebels, had ordered him to assassinate General Franco but evidently the journalist had declined. He was there to report, in detail, the workings of Franco’s army. Killing the man himself was beyond him.
Moncrieff sat back a moment, staring at the slightly smudged lines of type. Philby had been in Spain. Philby had been working as a journalist. Through his father, a noted Arabist and explorer, he may or may not have had aristocratic connections, and Moncrieff didn’t know which of the warring armies he’d been assigned to, but his years in counter-intelligence had taught him never to discount coincidence. Circumstantial evidence was all too easy to dismiss. And here might be the perfect example.
Did Ursula Barton know about any of this? And, if so, had she ever asked herself why Jane Archer had been sacked?
Moncrieff reached for his notepad and uncapped his pen, and as he did so he became aware of a presence behind him. The stench of alcohol told him it was Woodfield. He was right. The keeper of the files was staring down at the open Krivitsky file. Then his gaze drifted to Moncrieff’s notepad. Yesterday, in this same cubicle, Moncrieff had made a note in bold capital letters of Bella’s first love. Matthew Gore-Bainbridge. Underlined three times.
‘Damn clever,’ Woodfield was nodding in approval. ‘Has to be, doesn’t it?’
Kyiv (Spoils of War) Page 6
