Angels in the Snow

by Derek Lambert

  ‘Yury was a deep one all right,’ Harry said.

  Simenov was becoming maudlin. ‘He was a wonderful friend. A very wonderful friend. Then he passed on just like that. And for no reason—after a lifetime driving rich pigs around in his cab and writing poetry which no one would publish.’

  The fear stayed with Harry. ‘Was there any suspicion of foul play? A wound or anything?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Simenov said. ‘But his body was pretty bloated. It had been in the water for ten days.’

  ‘Someone might have coshed him to get his dough. You never read about these things in the Soviet papers.’

  ‘No,’ Simenov said. ‘His cab was at the depot. He must have gone off to compose poetry or something. You know what he was like. Perhaps he just stood gazing into the river and found he couldn’t put it all into words and threw himself in.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Harry said.

  But he didn’t think Simenov was right at all. He believed Petrov had been murdered. He didn’t know why. Perhaps he had been untrustworthy, perhaps he had tried to double-cross them, perhaps he was merely inefficient. He imagined Grechenko turning his attention to the inefficiency of Harry Waterman. He saw his eyes looking at him impersonally as if he were an unloved animal and felt his strong hands around his throat. He felt the beer lurch inside him. He put his hand to his mouth.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Simenov asked. ‘You look ill. What’s the matter? Is it the shock of hearing about poor Yury?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘That’s it.’

  He looked around the beer hall. If Yury had been removed from his beat then a replacement must have been posted. Or perhaps Nicolai Simenov was working for the KGB, too. But he did not think so. How was he now to pass on any information to Grechenko? He certainly would not be able to recognise the replacement. Perhaps the new man was observing him at that very moment.

  Harry scanned the bar furtively. A fat man gulping beer and stuffing his mouth with black bread. The young artist sketching the customers. Two bespectacled men in hot creased suits arguing about China. A thin tired man haggling with a fat whore who looked as if she would crush him if she cuddled him. None of them looked likely candidates; but nor had Yury Petrov with his poetry and his dented taxicab. He had probably been a mere go-between, an informer, a paid helper.

  There was one way to discover the replacement’s identity. If Grechenko wanted him at the moment the new man would follow him out on to the street. Harry finished his beer and said: ‘Time to be off, Nicolai. I don’t feel like drinking any more. Your news has upset me a bit.’

  He stood up and made a show of preparing to leave. Somewhere in the beer hall Grechenko’s representative was watching him.

  ‘Good-bye, Nicolai. Look after yourself. Don’t drink too much and for Christ sake keep your bloody voice down if you don’t want to be locked up.’

  Simenov also stood up. ‘I’ll walk up with you, Harry,’ he said. ‘I’ve drunk enough.’

  No one else in the bar moved.

  Harry mounted the steps, the taste of vomit at the back of his throat. It was dusk now and the thunder was advancing on the centre of the city. Lightning lit the sky like distant gunfire. Soon it would be raining.

  Harry turned at the top of the steps and waited.

  Nicolai put out his hands. ‘Good luck, Harry,’ he said. ‘Look after yourself.’

  He hurried off through the sweating air, anxious to get his new suit home before the rain started.

  Harry walked slowly home wondering why Yury Petrov had died; wondering who his successor was; wondering about Nicolai Simenov and, as his sense of persecution grew, wondering about Nicolai’s last words—‘Look after yourself.’

  Warm blobs of rain splashed in his face, soaking his jacket and trousers. Lightning lit the sky with jagged wounds, thunder cracked overhead and, borne on a cool breeze that swept away the hot air, the main force of the rain arrived. It sluiced along the gutters, bounced furiously on the buses and half-drowned small dogs.

  It streamed down Harry’s face into his mouth. It plastered his thin hair over his forehead and blinded him. When he arrived home he allowed his wife to undress him and dry him. Then, obedient as a child, he climbed into bed and hoped that he might catch pneumonia and be confined between the sheets for several weeks.

  But the island resilience of the British that had sustained him in the labour camp was still strong and he didn’t even catch a cold.

  All next day Harry worried. Supposing Yury Petrov had been killed merely because he had failed in his job. They were even less likely to extend mercy to Harry Waterman, a British-born Soviet citizen with a beer-hall reputation for anti-Soviet views.

  He worried so much that by the afternoon a rash had appeared on his hands and arms. He couldn’t eat the meal that Marsha had left him; he drank some vodka but it only dramatised the imagined perils ahead.

  Again he needed company; but not in the beer hall, never again in the beer hall. But where else was there? If people wanted company in Moscow they visited each other’s flats. Harry could think of no one who would welcome him. So he left the apartment and headed for Leonid Nosov’s sobering-up station.

  The air, cooled by the rain the previous night, had been heating up all morning. The face of Christ beamed in the sunshine and workmen applied themselves lazily to the task of restoration which all of them considered to be unnecessary.

  The sobering-up station looked particularly shabby in the bright light. Harry walked in.

  Keres looked at him in surprise. ‘What’s this,’ he said, ‘a voluntary patient?’

  ‘I was just passing,’ Harry said. ‘I thought I’d drop in for a chat. Where’s Leonid?’

  ‘Sleeping off everyone else’s hangovers,’ Keres said. Your father-in-law is a very unhappy man. There just isn’t the drunkenness around these days.’

  Nosov appeared stroking his nose. ‘Of course there’s drunkenness around,’ he said. ‘People are entitled to celebrate this wonderful year. But the militia won’t bring the revellers to a place where they’re digging up a religion we are supposed to have buried fifty years ago.’ He sat down heavily at his scratched desk. It was a few moments before the incongruity of his son-in-law’s presence occurred to him. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘You don’t look drunk.’

  ‘I dropped in to see you,’ Harry said. ‘I can visit my father-in-law at his place of work, can’t I? Just because you run a sobering-up station it doesn’t mean to say I have to be drunk.’

  Nosov looked at him suspiciously. ‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘You haven’t come here just to see me.’

  ‘Honest to God I have,’ Harry said irritably.

  ‘If it’s honest-to-god you’ve come to the right place,’ Keres said. ‘We’ll be holding services here soon.’

  Nosov said: ‘We didn’t have one drunk in here last night. Not one. It’s not right. Here am I trying my best for the anniversary year and the State sabotages me. It’s not fair. I’m told there might be some sort of anniversary award for the station with the best record.’

  Keres said: ‘At the present moment poor Leonid won’t even fulfil his quota.’

  Nosov transferred his attentions from the outside to the inside of his nose. ‘You’re in a very humorous mood today Comrade Keres,’ he said. ‘I remember the days when you were not so funny. You were one of our best customers.’

  Keres ignored him. ‘The trouble with a sobering-up station,’ he said, ‘is that you yourself can’t do anything about attracting customers. You have to rely on their decency. Harry here was normally pretty decent to us. What’s the matter with you today, Harry? Why are you so disgustingly sober?’

  ‘I’ve cut down on the booze,’ Harry said.

  ‘Then you’re no use to us,’ Keres said.

  Nosov looked out of the window at two workmen in their vests scraping the rust from a cross. ‘Religion,’ he said. ‘What good’s it ever done anyone? It’s caused more wars even
than imperialism.’

  ‘Or Communism,’ Harry said. He fancied a row to take his mind off his plight.

  ‘Communism has never caused a war,’ Nosov said.

  Keres said: ‘That’s hardly accurate. True Communism was born in bloodshed.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Nosov said, ‘but that wasn’t a war—that was a revolution. A glorious fight to win our freedom from a tyranny.’

  ‘What freedom?’ Harry said.

  ‘Frankly,’ Keres said, ‘I think peace has caused more war than anything else. Everyone is always fighting for peace.’

  Nosov rounded on Harry. ‘You watch your tongue,’ he said. ‘If you’ve only come up here to talk treason then you can take yourself away again.’

  ‘I was only joking,’ Harry said.

  ‘What’s the matter with you anyway?’ Nosov said. ‘My wife was talking about you only this morning. She says you’ve suddenly lost all your guts.’

  ‘Bloody good, isn’t it,’ Harry said. ‘She didn’t like it when I rowed with her. Now she doesn’t like it because I don’t.’

  Keres said: ‘I think we’ve got a customer.’

  A militia motor-cycle with a crumpled figure in the sidecar pulled up outside. Nosov smiled for the first time since Harry had arrived. ‘They haven’t completely deserted us then,’ he said.

  The customer was a disappointment. Nosov liked to deliver a lecture but the little man they brought in was unconscious.

  Nosov greeted the militiaman with gratitude. ‘It’s good to know that you still appreciate an efficient station,’ he said.

  ‘The one I usually take them to was full,’ said the militiaman. ‘I wish I’d never picked this one up. It’s not right bringing drunks to a monastery. Anyway, where’s Ivan the Terrible?’

  Keres grimaced. ‘It’s none of your business,’ he said.

  ‘Yes it is—where is he?’

  Nosov applied himself to filling in the admittance form for the drunk.

  ‘Yes, where is he?’ asked Harry. ‘It isn’t the same without that fat bastard here.’

  Keres said: ‘As a matter of fact he got drunk. We understand he’s being sobered up in another part of the city.’

  The militiaman laughed and slapped his thigh. He said: ‘Even you, Comrade Nosov, must see the funny side of it.’

  Nosov put down his pen. ‘I consider him to be a traitor to the cause,’ he said. ‘He has brought ridicule to an establishment of the State.’

  ‘And made a prize idiot out of you,’ said the militiaman. He laughed a lot more before leaving.

  ‘A peasant,’ Nosov said.

  There was a thud in the adjoining room. ‘It sounds as if your customer’s fallen off the bed,’ Keres said.

  ‘It’ll sober him up all the quicker,’ Nosov said.

  ‘That’s hardly the attitude to show to your patients,’ Keres said. ‘After all you’d better be nice to him—he’s the only one you’ve got.’

  ‘Go and see to him then,’ Nosov said. ‘Someone’s got to do the work now that traitor Ivan has left us.’

  But the drunk had awoken and decided to have some action. He came into the office on bending knees and sat on a chair opposite Nosov. ‘Where am I?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d like a rouble for every time I’ve heard that question,’ Keres said.

  ‘You are in the care of the State,’ Nosov said. ‘Your hooligan behaviour is a disgrace to the decent aspirations of your fellow citizens.’

  The drunk looked at him without comprehension. ‘My wife left me,’ he said.

  Keres said: ‘Were you mourning or celebrating her departure?’

  The drunk said: ‘My wife has left me. I want a drink.’

  Harry looked at his sharp sly face. It was vaguely familiar. Where had he seen it before, and how had a man, unconscious one moment, suddenly come to life? He tried to remember the faces in the beer hall the previous night. His frightened brain, open to any suggestion, decided that the drunk had been in the beer hall. He found that his hands were trembling uncontrollably. ‘I think I’ll be off,’ he said.

  The drunk stared at him muzzily. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘Where’s my wife?’

  ‘You won’t let him out, will you?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Let him out?’ Keres said. ‘Are you crazy? He’s the only one we’ve got and we’re holding on to him. What’s the matter with you anyway? You’ve only just arrived.’

  ‘I think I’ll go and meet Marsha from work. It will be a nice surprise for her.’

  The drunk said: ‘I know him. He’s a bad man.’

  Harry walked out into the sunshine and headed for the street without even glancing at the face of Christ looking down upon him with his pebble eyes.

  The smell of low-grade petrol was foul and heavy in the air and storm clouds were gathering again. Harry decided that he would have to get in touch with Grechenko and tell him something, anything, true or false.

  As he walked past the mouth of a Metro station he saw a pretty girl with reddish hair darting up the steps. Where had he seen her before? It wasn’t until he reached home that he remembered that he had seen her leaving Richard Mortimer’s apartment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Nikita Grechenko sat in his office in Lubyanka overlooking the Dyetsky Mir children’s shop and sadly read the file on Yury Petrov. Poet, cab driver, informer, KGB courier. Deceased.

  Grechenko had not known Petrov well. He had interviewed him in Lubyanka: he had seen him without acknowledging him the evening he picked up Harry Waterman in the beer hall. There seemed little doubt that he had committed suicide. But why? Had his mind, muddled by the imprisoned poetry that could never quite escape to his pen, been broken by the strain of deceiving those who trusted him?

  Poor Yury Petrov, serving his country, betraying his friends. Grechenko knew that he should never have employed such a sensitive man in such guilt-ridden duties. But at first the task of watching Harry Waterman had not assumed its new importance.

  Grechenko found the business of using any of his flock of ferrets, his little herd of weasels, to make contact with Western diplomats and correspondents a distasteful business. It seemed to him that he was creating trouble instead of preventing it; and preventing trouble had been the calling he had chosen. But there it was: he was expected to help penetrate the foreign diplomatic front in Moscow and he had to co-operate even if it meant using poor quality material like Harry Waterman.

  He closed the file on Yury Petrov for the last time and looked wistfully at the sunshine outside. Over the weekend he had been camping with his family in the pine forest beside a river beach. From their tent he had watched the big river steamers sailing with the dignity of galleons towards the Black Sea. The memory of the boats and the chuckle of the water at night made him restless. He walked around his office which always smelled of disinfectant but never smelled clean and tried to think of an excuse for leaving it and breathing the sunshine. When no reason surfaced he sat down again and read the morning papers.

  The Press was full of articles about the Revolution: it had been full of articles about the Revolution for the past six months. Grechenko wondered if they were not overdoing it. Sadly the anniversary year had not gone well so far. A cosmonaut had died and Stalin’s daughter had defected. Grechenko was glad that Svetlana had not been one of his responsibilities. A friend of his was in charge of the campaign to counter the publicity which Svetlana had attracted; the effort, he said, was exhausting and the results were as convincing as the Twilight Brigade’s claims that they were happy in Moscow—which they were not. So far the Russian Orthodox Church and Svetlana’s children had obeyed instructions and denounced her. Grechenko felt sorry for her son and daughter; for Svetlana he felt nothing but contempt because she had been given everything in the Soviet Union—money, freedom and a fine flat overlooking the river.

  Grechenko sighed and glanced at his gold wrist-watch bought in New York. It was eleven o’clock and the hot little clouds were high in the sky. He opened t
he window and gazed at the businesslike people below; without realising it they seemed to walk as far away as possible from the innocuous building with its sinister reputation. Their unconscious fear was a legacy of Beria’s reign. It was sad that people should react thus to the presence of police. The police were there to protect them, not to terrorise them; perhaps one day the legacy would be buried. But not in his lifetime.

  He opened the drawer of a steel filing cabinet and thumbed through the files on his hapless brood. Maclean alias Fraser, Burgess (closed), Philby—perhaps the most interesting of them all. A professional spy, a man of such charm that his acquaintances sometimes forgot that essentially he was that lowest species of Mankind—a traitor. But he, Nikita Grechenko, never forgot. And he knew that, like the rest of them, Philby was a lost soul awaiting the ultimate release. Now he was keeping company with the wife of Maclean, the man he had helped to escape from Britain. It was the sort of development that Grechenko expected from the squalid and unbalanced members of the little community which was unwittingly and unknowingly under his care.

  He sat down, poured himself a glass of fruit water and surveyed his office. The battered filing cabinets, the worn linoleum, the picture of Lenin and the square on the yellow paint where once a picture of Stalin had hung. A finger of sunlight played on his desk beckoning him towards the bright day outside. He put on his jacket: surely he did not have to find excuses to leave Lubyanka.

  But just then Harry Waterman made the only gesture which ever remotely endeared him to Grechenko: he provided him with a reason for leaving the office. He phoned and said he had information which he thought Grechenko should know about. Without inquiring what it was Grechenko arranged to meet him outside his favourite café behind Sovietskaya Square.

  Grechenko sat down at one of the tables on the terrace and enjoyed the sunshine. He loved the heat, he loved rain stinging his face, most of all he loved the cold polishing his cheeks. Harry Waterman hated the heat—he sweated profusely and his clothes stuck to his body, he hated the rain, he hated the cold. He looked abject during any climatic extreme.