Nikita Grechenko who worked for the Russian secret police sucked moodily at his draught beer, rolled a morsel of black bread into a moist pellet and squashed it flat so that he could examine his finger-print. He for one doubted the theory that no two people had the same print. How did anyone really know? How could anyone say that there might not be a peasant living in Baku with the same curves and whorls as himself? But that was the trouble with so much police work: its rules were inflexible and took no account of such phenomena as coincidence. Indeed that was the trouble with many of the edicts of the Party and laws of the State: they were inflexible and took no account of changing circumstances. He imagined the reaction if he voiced such thoughts at Lubyanka; he shuddered and drank deeply of the beer which he did not like.
Grechenko’s duties as a policeman were concerned with the Western defectors living in Moscow. He did not enjoy his work. He had lived in America, which was where he had bought his smart suits now slightly frayed and had enjoyed the company of the Americans he had spied upon there. He did not like mixing with defectors whom he considered to be traitors whether they were Westerners or Russians. His dislike had one advantage: it gave him the strength to use them mercilessly when necessary.
But Grechenko was basically an ordinary plain-clothes detective. He had been flattered when, because of his fluent English and comparative sophistication, he had been elevated to duties far more complex than the pursuit of common thieves. But when he came back from America he had hoped to return to routine work. His application was refused and he was given duties even more closely involved with loyalty—mistaken or otherwise—and treachery than his work in the States had been. Ordinary criminal investigation was a decade behind him: it had been the apprenticeship before the profession. An old friend of his, teased in the police force because of his bookish ways, now accumulated evidence against wayward authors; another who had helped to edit a police gazette now mixed with foreign correspondents in town and reported their activities. None of these specialised detectives enjoyed their work—it had nothing to do with police procedure—and all yearned for the carefree apprentice days before their particular talents had been noticed.
This evening Grechenko particularly disliked his job. He was a family man. He loved his plump wife and his two children and would have liked to be home in his new flat near the river beach at Serebryanny Bor which he shared with his wife’s parents. He liked to share a bottle of wine, brandy or vodka occasionally, but he did not like to linger drinking in the city. Drinking in beer halls had been part of the job when he was chasing a murderer who might kill again: he resented it now that he had the easier job of observing and manipulating defectors and foreign Communists. He did not like beer and he would have preferred to be cleaning his hunting guns or watching ice-hockey on television.
His predicament was the fault of the secret police department which compiled the dossiers on foreign diplomats in Moscow; the men who spent their time seeking cracks in diplomatic decency with all the usual apparatus—microphones, cameras, homosexuals and available girls.
Recently the department had not been having much success apart from discovering attempts at espionage by a couple of military attachés; as no one believed that military attachés were sent abroad for any purpose other than clumsy spying, the discoveries were not rated very highly. Privately Grechenko thought that the whole concept of East-West subversion was as out-of-date as the methods employed. As out-moded, he thought scowling into his unwanted beer, as the whole farce of antagonism between Russia and the West. If only the Americans, his beloved old enemies, would stop their aggression in Vietnam. It was time both sides stopped playing at spies, stopped perpetuating old hatreds which no longer had any substance, and turned their attention to the real menace to world peace—China.
However, there it was—the game was still being played and the department wanted his help. ‘Nikita,’ they had said, ‘it occurred to us that some of your little flock might be able to help us.’
‘My flock?’ He had been genuinely surprised. ‘But they are rabbits, weasels, ferrets.’
‘Ferrets,’ they had said, ‘are what we are after.’
Grechenko tried to argue that the Twilight Brigade—as they were called by the Westerners—had no contact with their countrymen in Moscow and therefore could not assist in the infiltration of foreign embassies. But the department reminded him that a few of them maintained contact with their diplomats: the correspondents of Communist newspapers, those whom the diplomats assessed to be stupid rather than treacherous and, in particular, those from whom the diplomats hoped to obtain information.
It was because of the existence of those whose defection had been instigated by stupidity that Nikita Grechenko now waited in the beer hall for Harry Waterman. His flock were creatures of habit: none was more reliable in his habits than Harry Waterman: some time this evening he would arrive for a few mugs of beer laced with vodka which he drank to help him remember England and forget Russia.
Grechenko finished his beer and bought another because he looked conspicuous standing there too long with one drink. As it was, the customers seemed to avoid drinking too close to him. He wondered if it were true that policemen had a special smell. If it were so the people of the Soviet Union had not been short of practice in testing their olfactory senses. Not so long ago these men drinking their beer would have suspected each other of being secret policemen, suspected even their own sons of being informers. Grechenko was glad that he had not been a fully qualified officer in those days, that he had never been involved in the wholesale arrests and mock trials of the purges. He was also glad that he knew himself well enough to admit that he would have taken part, although he would have abhorred his duties because they betrayed the calling of the policeman. The police were there to protect the public: in the Soviet Union this had been forgotten. In the days of Stalin they had behaved worse than criminals and the stigma would not be erased in his lifetime.
Thus Grechenko felt uneasy about his business with Harry Waterman. He felt nothing but contempt for him: he was a braggart and a nonentity. Nevertheless he had been the victim of a terrible injustice of which the police had been the instruments. When he thought of Harry Waterman Grechenko felt guilty for his profession.
At 8 p.m. the man who had unwittingly achieved what many people would have told you was an impossibility—the insertion of guilt into a policeman’s soul—walked into the beer hall.
Immediately he walked into the bar Harry Waterman saw Grechenko just as if he were standing alone in a field. Instinctively he knew that he had come for him. In England he would have turned and fled; given them a run for their money if nothing else. Here the thought never even occurred to him: you did not run from the Russian secret police: you did not run from anyone in the Soviet Union.
Grechenko left his beer and joined Harry at the doorway. Yury Petrov and Nicolai Simenov watched them. ‘Let’s go,’ Grechenko said. He spoke in English, almost without accent.
‘Did you have to pinch me here in front of my friends?’ Harry asked.
Fear moved inside him. He knew of no offence that he had committed; but an offence was not a necessary preliminary to arrest. He, Harry Waterman, knew this only too well. Perhaps it was his drunkenness—they were pretty hot on it these days; perhaps his mother-in-law and that prissy old sod Nosov had ganged up on him. But no, this man in his soft overcoat—British by the look of it—and his expensive shoes which failed to disguise his big, policeman’s feet, was not sent out to pick up drunks. This man was the KGB, the real McCoy, this man had class.
All this went through Harry Waterman’s mind as they climbed the hollowed steps to the street. And as they turned into the snow sprinting down the street he thought: Now I shall never see England again. And, because nothing seemed to matter any more some of the spirit which he had learned to suppress in the presence of Soviet policemen returned. He wrenched his arm from Grechenko’s grasp. ‘Where are you taking me?’ he demanded. ‘What’s the charge?—as if that mattered.’
Grechenko sighed. ‘There’s no charge,’ he said. ‘We’re just going for a little talk.’
‘I’ve had some of your little talks before. The last one cost me the best years of my life.’
‘Nothing like that, Harry. We do not behave like that these days. There is no charge. You have not committed any crime. We’re just going to a little café I know of where we can have a chat.’
‘I don’t have to go with you.’
‘You do, Harry. You know you do.’ He would have been much happier, he thought, if Harry were a criminal and he were taking him to headquarters to charge him.
Grechenko drove them in his Moskvich to a little café behind Sovietskaya Square where he was known. He liked the area because it reminded him of Paris which he had once visited. It was very small but the café had an open-air terrace where even on the coldest of days you could sometimes find men braving the cold and fighting it with a carafe of brandy. When it was not too cold an old woman stood on the corner selling fruit and flowers. Here it seemed that the snow always fell softly and from the outside the shops looked snug, even if they were not so inside.
Grechenko ordered some brandy.
‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘what can I do for you?’ Now that the possibility of arrest had receded he spoke more respectfully: you did not get stroppy with the KGB.
‘What do you want more than anything in the world, Harry?’ Grechenko asked.
Harry was nonplussed. ‘I don’t know. To spend the rest of my days in peace I suppose. You know what I’ve been through, I suppose.’
‘I know, Harry. And I’ll tell you what you want more than anything in the world. You want to go home.’
‘What makes you think that?’ Harry asked guardedly. Perhaps he was being tricked into making anti-Soviet statements.
Grechenko sipped his brandy and felt it burn away the sour aftermath of the beer. ‘You have made no secret of the fact,’ he said.
‘Has someone been talking then? You can’t trust anyone, can you?’
‘You have been talking, Harry,’ Grechenko said. ‘You very rarely stop.’
‘Well, maybe I would like to see the old country again. It’s only natural, isn’t it? But it’s not because I don’t like the Soviet Union. It’s just that it’s the place where I was born and I’d like to see it again before I kick the bucket.’
Grechenko poured Harry some more brandy. ‘Harry Waterman,’ he said, ‘let us not play games with each other. I know everything there is to know about you. I know the circumstances of your relatives in Britain, I know your friends in Moscow. I know everything about your wife and your wife’s family. I know that you are a drunkard and that it has been the sad duty of your father-in-law to treat you at his premises and that he discharged you before the recognised formalities had been completed. There is nothing I do not know about you. This gives me no satisfaction because you are a man of little importance. You are also a liar. I am aware that you detest the Soviet Union and that on frequent occasions you have expressed yourself forcibly on this theme. I am also aware that the only ambition in your miserable life is to return to your own country.’
The fear returned and Harry swallowed his brandy with difficutly. ‘You forget what I’ve been through,’ he said. ‘The lost years of my life. It kills something inside you.’
‘I have told you that I am aware of what you have been through. Hardship affects people in different ways. It makes some people stronger, it made you weaker. I feel sorry for you but I have no respect for you. However, none of this matters. What matters is that you would like to return to Britain. It is no good saying that you only want to visit the old country as you put it. You and I know that once you got back there you would never return to the Soviet Union.’
Harry spread his hands hopelessly. ‘You seem to know it all. You tell me. I tell you that I would like to visit Britain and return to the Soviet Union which is now my home. You tell me I would never return. There’s nothing more I can say.’
Grechenko nibbled at the bubliki which the waitress had put on the table. He said: ‘Supposing I told you that it might be possible for you to return to Britain.’
Inside Harry there sounded a small cry of hope and pain. ‘How’s that?’ he said. ‘How could that be?’ He spoke fuzzily like a man just awakening from sleep.
‘It is possible. Everything is possible. It is only you who have stopped yourself from returning. You, Harry Waterman, are your own worst enemy. You make so much noise in Moscow that we fear that you will make more noise in London.’
‘You mean you think I will say bad things about the Soviet Union? That I might sell my story to one of the papers or something like that?’
‘Precisely,’ Grechenko said. ‘That is precisely what we feel. Not even us so much. Your own Communist Party in Britain. It is they who don’t want you back, Harry. They think you would embarrass the Party in Britain.’
‘If they don’t want me back what can you do in Moscow? And’—his mind began to worry about the implications—‘why would you do it anyway?’
‘Have some more brandy, Harry. I know you like your drink. Only don’t end up at Papa Nosov’s tonight. Now come on, you cannot be as naïve as that. Does it matter what the Communist Party in Britain say if the order comes from the Kremlin?’
‘What do you want out of it then?’ Never trust a copper, his old man had said. And, by Christ, his old man had been right.
‘Just a little help, Harry. A little information from your friends.’
‘My friends? What, old soaks like Yury Petrov and Nicolai Simenov?’
‘Come, Harry. I said we should stop playing games. Your Western friends.’
‘I haven’t got any. They don’t want anything to do with me. Anyone would think I was some sort of sex criminal the way they treat me. They just don’t want to know me.’
‘So you don’t want to go back to Britain?’
Harry heard a pub sign swinging in the breeze blowing up the Thames. Funny how he always thought of that sign even though he couldn’t remember the name of the pub. The Duke’s Head, maybe, or was it the Queen’s Head? And the sound of ships’ sirens and the smell of the mud and the sound of the water gurgling in the mud. Moorland, beaches, suburbs as dull as summer dust and villages pickled in cider: for these Harry Waterman felt nothing: to him England was the London Docks.
‘Of course I want to go back. I keep telling you.’
Yellow fogs and acid London voices. Cranes and funnels, Charlie Browns and Laskar seamen. Girls with bobbed hair and ankle-strap shoes. The fashions had departed but the Cockney girls must be as pert and pretty as ever.
‘Of course I want to go back,’ he said again.
‘But how can we be sure that you won’t start telling the world what you think of the Soviet Union?’
‘I promise you I won’t. In any case people wouldn’t take any notice of what Harry Waterman thought about the Soviet Union.’
‘I wish you were right,’ Grechenko said. ‘Unfortunately you are wrong. Eight years in a prison camp just because you were born British. Quite a story. And we both know that certain elements in Britain would not waste an opportunity to publish anti-Soviet propaganda.’
Harry said sadly: ‘Then all you’ve got is my promise.’
‘Which I am afraid is not worth a great deal.’ He considered his well-manicured hands. ‘However we are prepared to take the risk. You would, of course, have to give an undertaking that you wouldn’t indulge in anti-Soviet propaganda.’
‘You mean I can go?’
‘As I said there is a chance of you going if you can help us. Do not say you don’t have any Western friends because we know that you do have. You are friendly with several newspaper correspondents who are in turn friendly with diplomats. You also know a man called Randall.’
Red double-decker buses and London bobbies. ‘But they wouldn’t tell me anything you wanted to know.’
‘We just want to keep contact, Harry. Tell us what they’re saying and thinking. Journalists talk a lot. They can’t help it—it’s like a disease with them. They might let a few things drop about the diplomats they know, their weaknesses and suchlike.’
‘And you would let me go home just for that?’
‘It’s possible if you showed willing. And if you came up with something really worth our while then we most certainly would.’
Harry Waterman had never thought of himself as a traitor. Nor had anyone else for that matter. Was it treachery to relay a few snippets of harmless information to the Russians? What secrets would he ever have access to? Anyway he would not refuse Grechenko point blank: that way he would never see Britain again and they might make things difficult for him in Moscow. He really had no choice.
‘I’ll think it over,’ he said. ‘God knows what I can do for you though.’
‘Leave that to us,’ Grechenko said. ‘Who knows, this time next year you might even be drinking in one of those London pubs you’re always telling everyone about.’
‘Do you think so?’ Harry asked. ‘Do you really think so?’
‘Perhaps.’ Grechenko finished his brandy; his distasteful duty was finished; although he did not really think much had been accomplished. ‘There is just one thing, Harry. And I’m sure you’ll forgive the American turn of phrase. For once in your life keep your trap shut about this. You know where you’ll end up if you don’t.’