Since that summer’s night in 1941, Harry had seen Rosa many times: on a street corner in Mayfair, in a jostling crowd at Waterloo railway station, from the balcony at a show in the West End, always just beyond reach, now as then. Even that sepia photograph, his only real evidence she’d ever existed, he’d lost when his wallet was stolen. But he knew in his heart of hearts, she hadn’t survived the bacillus with which he’d infected her.
Of Vova, he tried to think as little as possible; and when he did, he pictured the swaggering charlatan who had connived to steal Rosa. But it was the honourable youth who intruded on his sleeping hours: the sweeping bow, cloth cap held high, the ‘urchin’ who had sacrificed himself, for them, to the Cheka.
Harry had survived by a confection of chance that took him in Perkins’s car from Moscow to Archangel and then on a Royal Navy destroyer to Portsmouth. There, he languished for a day in a cell. He thought that was it. He’d be tried for treason, and rightly so. But with no questions asked, he was given a train pass to Abercorys. They even returned his Soviet documents adorned with that frightened, beseeching face – Lux pass, Party card, passport. He burnt them at the railway station and immediately wished he hadn’t; it was the last evidence the whole nightmare had been real.
Tilly was devastated by news of Joseph’s death. Heart attack, he said – sudden, quick. He stayed in Kitchener Lane, still packed with memories. Living room all polished up by Tilly. Radio dusty but intact in his bedroom. He trawled the ether and found that flat, echoing voice, and those numbers: 103-443-439. Some fool, like him.
When he chanced on old workmates, he found life had relieved him of his old guilt over Nye Jenkins’s death. You come back, then, ’arry? ’ow was it, then? They’d say. They’d sing the praises of Britain’s new Soviet chum, good old Uncle Joe. He’d tell them about the plague. Their eyes would glaze over, the questions dry up. There’s a thing, now.
He took a bus to London and was received in a tatty army recruiting office in Victoria by an old soldier who looked like he hadn’t fired a shot in anger since the Boer War. Harry passed over Moscow and presented himself as just a miner keen to do his bit for king and country. The old soldier took his details, shook his head, and apologised for something – for his defeated army or his defeated country. Go back to the pits. Country needs miners.
Two weeks later, a letter arrived at his door ordering him to an address on the outskirts of London: a grand mansion that, like the Lux, had been reduced to squalor by the bureaucrats now squatting in it. Dressed in a blue suit he’d taken from his father’s wardrobe, Harry found himself sitting opposite a younger, waggish officer who hinted he knew it all, without saying how.
“Reckon we can squeeze some good out of you yet, Speares.”
He was duly dispatched to a windswept hillside camp in the English Midlands, where he translated Russian military correspondence. After Victory, he was passed on to the British occupation authority in Berlin to liaise with what was then still wistfully known as the Soviet ally. There he met a German woman, Claudia, who worked as a stenographer in his section. They married quickly and divorced the same way. Perhaps she looked all too much like Rosa.
Harry Speares wasn’t one of the golden boys who’d drifted effortlessly from their elite private schools to the dreaming spires, thence to the heights of the diplomatic world. His singsong Welsh accent and his hands slashed and coarsened still marked him out. Whatever title might grace his door, he was, to them, a useful skivvy, and little more. But what did he care? He was intelligent and handsome enough to command respect beyond embassy corridors, his thick sandy hair still in place, his complexion and physique spared the predations of brandy and tobacco that bore down on his peers. And he was possessed of a soul tempered by a thousand nights they couldn’t begin to imagine. As they used him, so he could use them.
It was, then, for his mastery of the language and his intimacy with the dark Russian soul, hard-won, that the foreign ministry purloined Harry. Perhaps this was the invoice Perkins had told him would one day land on his doormat.
He returned as embassy cultural attaché to a Moscow rid of the blood-soaked Father of Nations, but still bearing his mark. From the first days of his assignment, he began searching every dark corner, twisting the arm of every available official and cultivating political malcontents for word of Rosa. “Her kind – there were so many,” said one colleague from the West German embassy. “Sorry, but chances are they shot her first night.”
*
A minor British cultural figure had pitched up, and the ambassador insisted Harry attend a reception given in his honour by a Soviet publishing house down by the river. He stayed his minimum hour, glass in hand, making polite conversation; then, head down to avoid further entanglements, he wove his way across a crowded hall towards the exit. The door swung open, and he stood aside for a woman in a breathless hurry, juggling an armful of papers. He paid her no heed until she stopped and turned to face him.
“Oy,” she said as if she’d seen a ghost.
He looked up. There stood Oksana Razgon. Hair dyed red, face fuller, glasses, lipstick fissures around her mouth, still that look of Russian melancholy.
“Oksana?” A stupid question, followed by another: “How are you?”
She looked around nervously, clearly reluctant to be seen alone in the company of a Western diplomat. He pushed her back through the door, away from prying eyes. Her hands shook as she shuffled the documents.
“Look, I’m fine,” she said, as if fending off an accusation. “Ten years in the camps. Now I keep my head down, in the ministry.” The papers slid from her arms onto the floor. “Leave it. I’ll – ” He leant down and gathered them in, very slowly. “They shot Pappy. Three months later.” She spoke as if it were a thing of no great consequence. He knew she’d adored him.
“And Rosa?”
He scarcely wanted to hear the answer.
“Rosa Zander’s dead, Harry.” She said it as if she’d said it a thousand times before.
“How?” He stood, holding her papers hostage.
“Look, it’s pointless. And I can’t be seen like this, with you.”
“Just give me ten minutes. A café. Anywhere, any time.”
She snatched the papers from him and turned to walk off. He caught her arm – too hard. She winced, then pursed those cracked lips.
“Friday,” she whispered. “The Lux. 1900.”
Before he could thank her, she had shaken off his hand and dived back into the crowd.
*
Friday. 1800. Harry walked up over Red Square, past the Spasskaya Tower, where the crimson star glowed bright as ever. From a hoarding on the Central Telegraph Office peered the face of the new Leader, the anti-Stalin, with his bald pate and gnarled peasant face. He’d marched over bodies, too, back then, but this was now. Kinder. By comparison.
Looking up at number 10 Gorky Street, he realised he was standing exactly where his father’s body had lain the day he’d made his choice. He whispered an apology to Myfanwy. On the wall, there was no plaque to Juan or Joseph or any of the plague dead. The Lux hid, as Juan had predicted, behind a new name, written on the portico in red – Hotel Tsentralnaya, the Central. A building as spitefully anonymous as any of its size could be.
He doubted Oksana would come. He’d left himself half an hour to look around the building he’d shied from since his return to Moscow. Ignoring the sour-faced doorman, he pushed through the familiar wooden doors into the lobby. No busy Comintern officials pacing around with their files, shaking hands, chattering in all languages of the world. But there, as before, stood the grey-green marble columns, the sentries with no one now worth guarding. Just a few weary citizens sitting on their cases, smoking, waiting for something, or someone.
Walking out onto the second floor, the same path of green carpet opened before him, where children’s feet had thundered in games of knock-knock and hide-and-seek; where the boots of the Blue Caps had echoed on those dark nights. In an odd way, he was home.
At door 203, he halted. So many thousands must have slept in it since, got drunk in it, made love in it, peed in the washbasin. Just another Ivan or Katya in just another sordid hotel room.
In the kitchen, no one standing around, no meat frying, no nappy boiling in a pot. He slumped onto a chair in ‘his’ corner, next to the window. He heard a soft knock on a door nearby; but there was no lightning stab of fear, no champagne wagon.