35

Evie

I hadn’t meant to go rushing up to Plevitskaya. But when she appeared, right in front of me, I saw red. All that sweetness, yesterday; all that concern … I could still remember how comforted I’d felt by her embrace. And all the time she was part of something so unspeakably awful as spying on General Miller. I couldn’t help myself.

But it felt like a dream, my moment of anger, because nothing came of it. She and her husband just went smoothly off, with their arms linked, leaving me standing there.

Except …

Except, now that I came to think of it, that when I’d first mentioned the wire she’d looked, for a moment, as shocked as I’d felt when I’d first seen it. And then she’d turned and glanced at Skoblin coming up behind, with his meek little half-smile and his paper.

And when she’d turned back to me, her face had changed. Could she have been scared?

I was standing in the street with the sun beating down on me. But, when I now called to mind the face of Skoblin – the neatly combed, thinnish hair, its once-black colour turning to iron; the small moustache and quiet eyes – I suddenly felt cold.

Perhaps it had been his presence that had frozen me. He knew ROVS. He knew spying. And she, after all, had had every reason to want the recording completed. Wasn’t he likelier than his wife to have wanted to do this, and known how?

I couldn’t make it out. But I had a vague sense, even then, out there in the innocence of the hot Paris morning, that just beyond my inner fog of incomprehension, a new landscape of unimaginable deceit might be about to loom into view.

I was still standing, transfixed, when I heard the sound I’d been waiting for.

A taxi drew up in front of Grandmother’s building. I saw Jean get out and go to the passenger door.

‘Jean!’ I called, rushing towards him. ‘General Miller!’

I was a good hundred feet away. As I ran, I saw the General rise above the chassis, look in my direction and then, with irritation and embarrassment plain on his face as he saw who was calling out, hasten off towards the front door. ‘Wait!’ I called, frantically waving. ‘Please!’ But he was fiddling with his key, and looking away.

The door clicked shut behind him just as I reached the taxi.

I would have let myself into the building behind him and banged on the door of ROVS until they answered, but Jean stepped in front of me and barred my way.

‘Please,’ I panted, hardly daring to look into those blue eyes. I had my hands on the tensed muscles of his upper arms. He was so close that I could smell soap and the cigarettes of the station café on him. ‘We need—’

‘Just leave him alone,’ he interrupted with cold anger. ‘Let him get on with his work.’

I let go of him. ‘You don’t understand,’ I said desperately. ‘Please don’t go.’

He looked at me then. He stopped. Waited.

‘It’s not about me, I promise,’ I went on, trying to make my voice steady and persuasive. ‘It’s about him. He’s being bugged.’

Jean rolled his eyes to the heavens and turned on his heel.

‘No!’ I cried. ‘I’ve found a wire.’

He’d already opened his car door by the time what I’d said sank in.

Then he stopped.

‘What wire?’

It took what seemed forever to persuade him to come up and see for himself. I was all fingers and thumbs with the keys and locks and handles.

But when I did finally get him into the study, and pulled out the wire, and held it so he could see how it had been cut through the floorboards and fed down into his father’s study ceiling, he stopped scowling and looking sceptical.

Instead he went very quiet.

Then he came over to where I was standing, and – quite gently – took the wire out of my hands. He tugged a little. But it was attached to something under the floor. It didn’t come loose.

‘I thought’, I whispered, ‘that it must have been connected with the recording they were editing up here; you know, of Plevitskaya’s voice.’

He took no notice of me. He just stared at the wire.

‘Because,’ I went stammering on, feeling foolish, ‘even if the other end has been cut, you can see it was just the right length to have reached the machine …’

He looked up, straight at me. I knew this wasn’t the moment for personal feelings, but I still couldn’t help a pang of joyful relief when I saw that he wasn’t angry any more – at least not with me. His eyes said, as clearly as anything, ‘I now see that you’re not just meddling.’ But some other emotion had overwhelmed him. He was searching for words.

‘The meeting’s a trap,’ he said. I stared back, lost. He didn’t explain – not, that is, unless a quick, appalled headshake and a mutter of ‘Skoblin’ counted as an explanation.

‘Skoblin,’ I repeated, wishing he hadn’t looked away again. ‘Because it’s his wife’s recording? Yes, that’s what I thought, too …’ But Jean was shaking his head and looking sick.

He threw down the wire, grabbed my hand and started pulling me towards the door. In spite of everything, I was grateful to feel his skin against mine.

‘I’ll explain,’ he said breathlessly. By then we were clattering downstairs and into the ROVS office. ‘I’ve got to talk to Father.’

We charged in through the front door, hand in hand, barging past the bewildered man who’d opened the door, and through the room full of uniformed secretaries typing at their desks – who all stopped and stared – and down the short corridor to the General’s room.

No one bothered with translating. ‘Gdye Ghe-nye-RAL?’ Jean called loudly over his shoulder, or that’s what it sounded like; and – though it was a shock to hear him speaking Russian – even I could more or less understand when the young men, pointing towards their boss’s office, started rising to their feet with the beginning of alarm. I could hear their footsteps, following ours.

But as soon as we opened the door it was clear we were too late.

The French windows at the back of his office – the ones opening on to the courtyard, from which you could sneak out of the service door into the back alley – were open, and the dingy muslin drapes were blowing in the wind. We stepped in with the young men following us. But the room was empty. General Miller had left.

It was only in the aftermath – once Jean started yelling in panicky Russian, and the young men started shouting, too, and then two of them chased out through the courtyard to see if they couldn’t stop the General somewhere further down the street, if he hadn’t gone far, while a third rushed to the phone and began calling, all with interruptions and orders from Jean – that, at last, he started explaining. It was only then that I heard what Jean was suddenly so frantic with anxiety about.

First, Skoblin had been planning a meeting between his master and two German agents. It had been supposed to be so hush-hush that none of the secretaries knew. Jean had pestered the secret out of him, as well as a vague sort of address. He had sensed his father was still holding back on him, but thought that was only because they both knew he so disapproved of the whole notion of the alliance with the Nazis that his father so wanted. (‘And not just me – I was imagining what you would say, too,’ he added, shaking his head. He didn’t quite look at me.)

Now that Jean had seen that someone, and it must be Skoblin, was also behind the clandestine bugging of the General’s office, this planned rendezvous – which was about the only thing, except Grandmother’s funeral, that would have lured his father out of the safety of his office – was taking on a still more sinister colouring. This one extra piece of knowledge made it seem all too likely that the talk of a secret meeting had, all along, been just a ploy to get the General out of his office. Skoblin might have other masters, maybe even Soviet Moscow.

The two young men soon came back, looking frightened. It was obvious they hadn’t found the General. I’d had no time to form an opinion of the General’s startling intention of forming a pact with the Nazi government before hearing the equally startling information that the plan had probably never existed outside his own head, and Skoblin’s.

I sank down on to one of the leather armchairs in the secretaries’ room, to keep out of the way of all the pacing and scurrying. The returning young men rushed to their phones, too. They picked them up, but even I could see they didn’t know whom to call. They waited, with the earpieces up and hands poised, mutely asking for instruction. They were underlings, I could see, and there was no fight in them, now there was no one left to give commands.

‘Jean,’ I said, putting a hand on his arm.

He raised his head a fraction and looked at me with blank, appalled eyes.

‘Do you remember the address your father told you?’ I asked.

He nodded, and his eyes quickened with relief. Perhaps he was tired, I thought. This was when he’d normally go to sleep, after his night-long job driving. But I could see his purpose returning.

‘Go there,’ I said. ‘Now. Go in the taxi. See if you can get there in time to stop them.’

He stood up. ‘Will you come?’

It was a request. His voice was humble. I could hear he wanted me with him.

‘No,’ I said, because I could still hear Plevitskaya’s voice saying, ‘I have an appointment at the dressmaker’s.’ ‘I’m going to find Nadya Plevitskaya. She knows about this, I’m sure.’