Chapter 2

Lucja (Lucy) Grudzinska, so I heard later, was the wilful youngest child and only daughter of middle-class Warsaw parents. In a family of boys, she grew up outdoorsy and muscular, a contrast to her willowy mother and aunts. Since long before her birth, Russia had occupied that part of Poland — what had been Poland before the hard-luck country’s neighbours carved it up between them. The Grudzinskis were Polish-speaking Catholics and wishful-thinking patriots. They stayed clear of political gatherings, however discreet, never dreaming of open disobedience to the Tsar’s men. It drove Lucy up the wall having to listen to the might-have-beens, could-have-beens, should-have-beens voiced around the family dinner table. The comfort of their home made their laments all the more grating. No Grudzinski was going to bed hungry: perhaps foreign domination didn’t gall her family as much as they pretended. Lucy herself wasn’t the sort to complain and do nothing. She got involved with groups clamouring for reform and soon found herself arrested.

In an overcrowded holding cell at the Town Hall, she heard horror stories of Pavilion Ten at the Warsaw Citadel where the hardened “politicals” were sent, and was relieved to serve her thirty days in the gloomy but tolerable Pawiak Prison. Political inmates there — some nationalists, some Communists — found ways to communicate with each other and refine their thinking. Already infected by a poetic socialism, Lucy broadened her horizons. She became convinced that international peace and justice were goals more worthy of her idealistic energy than the narrower one of Polish autonomy. Tsarist oppression, she concluded, could be defeated only at its source. On her release from prison, she went to Russia to work for the Revolution brewing there.

Knowing what she wanted to learn, she learned fast. She mastered the Marxist line well enough to spread it. Eagerly, she absorbed and spoke the Russian of the Moscow workers. More at ease in the streets than in the parlour, she schooled herself to be tough, to care little what she ate, to not flinch at the sight of blood. Bit by bit, both before and after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, Lucy — now calling herself Svetlana — earned the trust of her superiors. Despite her name change, she didn’t have to hide her Polish origins. No one held them against her.

The proof of the confidence placed in her loyalty was the use Russia made of her in the 1920 war against Poland. She accompanied the advancing army first as a translator, then as a spy or swallow. The Russian word meant not only a bird but also a secret service seductress. Training was necessarily brief. And luckily so, for sex with charmless functionaries was thought the way to desensitize a swallow to feelings of pleasure and romance. Lucy graduated with poor grades but untarnished ideals and went to work seducing Polish officers. She was too timid at first, but once she had “mastered her bourgeois scruples,” she did wheedle out information of real, if limited, value. Along the way, she learned that all three of her brothers were fighting for Poland against Russia in Marshal Pilsudski’s army, the very army she was working to undermine. But this news in no way shook her faith. She knew the Soviets came as liberators, not invaders. Pilsudski the defender of Poland? Eyewash, thought Lucy. The victory that — despite her best efforts — he ultimately won that summer was nothing but the Polish worker’s defeat.

The failed Polish campaign was Lucy’s initiation into a Soviet organization with a reputation so ugly that it had to keep changing its name. It had originally been the Cheka, later the GPU, and now OGPU — the Joint State Political Directorate. It’s a name hard to take seriously in English: try saying the feared OGPU ten times quickly. But whatever they called themselves, they played rough. When the Red Army returned to Russia, Lucy’s status was made official. She received specialized training and better rations. She learned the effect of ingesting various chemicals. She learned how to kill with her bare hands. She was even issued a secret service uniform, which the nature of her duties meant she seldom wore.

I shake my head still when I think of all this. Of course, I flattered myself while I was walking Lucy Clarkson down the hotel stairs on that stinking hot September morning that as a good detective I was keeping an open mind about her history. But I was country miles from imagining the truth.

Late in 1921, she was sent to London to support the Communist Party of Great Britain’s first baby steps. As a Pole, she aroused less suspicion than a Russian would have. Nonetheless, she found the assignment frustrating. She’d been given only minimal language training and, before she’d acquired any fluency in English, was whisked off to Germany. Here at least she knew the language, which she’d picked up as a girl.

During the negotiation of the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, she was stationed in Berlin. Lucy’s challenge this time, her biggest yet, was to obtain proof of what the Weimar Republic would ask of Bolshevist Russia and what concede in return. The work involved not only obtaining access to secret documents but photographing them and smuggling the film back to Moscow. Lucy was commended for her work and thought of herself as a successful discoverer of secrets — although she was to learn that the treaty finally ratified had unpublished military provisions she’d never even suspected. A side advantage of the Berlin posting was that one of her lovers there, a German diplomat formerly posted to the United States, taught her to play poker. She bored easily when idle and loved the thrill of sudden gain. And if she lost, it was only money.

Not all Lucy’s assignments were in foreign parts. Often she was set to work spying on Russians, particularly on the so-called specialists. Peasants and factory workers might be good Communists, but lacked — for example — engineering skills. It was conceded that for certain essential tasks non-proletarians had to be employed. Of course, their privileged class background meant they also had to be watched carefully. Lucy got good at assessing which specialist should be retained and which should be delivered to a secret service prison to be shot in the head.

She believed that she was building the world’s first stable soviet state and that her contribution was recognized. When in 1922 membership in the Russian Communist Party topped 700,000, Lucy found herself in the elite two per cent that had fought in the underground before the Revolution. Then in 1924 Lenin died, and stability came into question. A short two years later, Trotsky’s internationalism and Stalin’s “socialism in one country” were duking it out for the party’s soul.

In June 1926, Lucy was called to OGPU headquarters in Moscow’s Dzerzhinsky Square. The agency was housed in an ornate, five-storey building called the Lubianka, home before the Revolution to an insurance company. Perhaps not too big a change of use, after all. OGPU insured Russia against damage by reactionaries. Lucy presented herself at the front door, in uniform for once. These uniforms had recently been simplified to remove sleeve insignia and badges of rank, which was now indicated only on the collar tabs. A sour porter, evidently weak-sighted, sent her to a side door. There she was met by a weedy official with greasy hair and a pistol on his belt. Instructed to follow him, she thought, Suits me — I won’t have to look at your scowling mug. She followed him up broad staircases and down parquet-floored halls. Along one of the latter, a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a mole on her left cheek was approaching, stopping at one of a dozen similar doors. Lucy recognized someone she’d shared a shabby room with nearly ten years earlier and called the woman’s name, which was Yulia Petrenko.

“Hey, Street Urchin,” came the hearty reply. “You posted here?”

“Silence!” the escort bellowed, glaring at each woman in turn.

Lucy shook her head and pointed at Yulia, who pointed to the number on the door before disappearing behind it. The young man warned Lucy that he would have to report that she had engaged in forbidden conversation in the hall.

On ushering her into an oak-panelled office a moment later, he did just that. The grandmotherly woman behind the desk — a Georgian to judge by her name — dismissed him with a smile before telling Lucy to be seated. Comrade Beridze had pink cheeks, a large, sagging chest, and dust-grey hair pulled into a bun. Lucy had time to note these details in respectful silence while Comrade Beridze reviewed a dossier, into which she absent-mindedly sprinkled cigarette ash. Lucy asked if she too might smoke. Not getting an answer, she abstained. Eventually, Beridze started asking questions, ones designed to elicit any oppositionist leanings. Lucy took the line that she was a doer. She believed in the Revolution and approved anything the party leadership found necessary to protect it. Trotsky was at the time still a member of the Politburo, but unable to command a majority, so her answer was accepted. Beridze regretted the necessity of this examination: Comrade Grudzinska’s record was exemplary. It was just that one of Lucy’s superior officers had come under suspicion, and some thought that once rot was found in the branch, the twig couldn’t be saved. Comrade Beridze disagreed. She believed she could count on Lucy. She would herself henceforth be responsible for assigning Lucy her duties and for receiving her reports.

Now Beridze set Comrade Grudzinska’s dossier aside and squinted at a separate page of closely written notes. Lucy’s next assignment would be to assess the reliability of Air Force Commander Arkadi Sergeievich Trigorin, inspector of military aircraft in the Voronezh region. Not a person Comrade Grudzinska could be expected to have heard of, so a word of introduction was in order. Before 1914, Trigorin had worked in the Russo-Baltic aircraft factory and during the war had flown bombers made by that company. After the Revolution, he’d been astute enough to join the Bolshevists. While not an aircraft designer, he knew as much about planes and flying as anyone in the Red Army. For the past nine years his climb through the ranks had been steady, his loyalty unquestioned. Lately, however, murmurings had been heard that he had a weakness for women. Since his latest posting was particularly sensitive — in ways that Lucy need not concern herself with — OGPU had orders to set a reliable female agent to observe and test him. Lucy would be lent an air force identity and posted to Trigorin’s office. Beridze told Lucy she would find Trigorin’s file down the corridor in Room 3019. She was to read and commit it to memory.

“Here, Comrade,” Beridze said, “take this pass authorizing you to enter the file room. You’ll also appreciate, I think, that it permits you to walk in the halls unescorted. Hand it to one of the porters as you leave the building.”

After studying the file as instructed, Lucy did not immediately leave the Lubianka. She tapped on the door of Room 3021, the door Yulia Petrenko had disappeared behind. Yulia welcomed her to what appeared to be an equipment depot. The furniture was a hodgepodge of bookshelves, dressers, buffets, china cabinets, and filing cabinets; anything that could be used for storage, whether cheaply knocked together at a people’s furniture factory or liberated during the Revolution from an aristocrat’s apartment. Behind glass doors could be seen Paris hats, pistols, and pill bottles. Lucy could only speculate as to what aids to espionage might be lurking in drawers, wardrobes, and cubby holes. The old pals chatted, then Yulia got Nikolai — her middle-aged co-worker — to take the two women’s picture. Noticing the camera’s resemblance to the one she’d used in Germany, Lucy asked to examine it. Yulia mischievously told her to keep it. It had been signed out to the hall-prowling snitch that had yelled at the two of them earlier. He’d wanted it to photograph an OGPU athletic event on the weekend, but he’d brought it back this morning with a few choice curses. He knew only about photographic plates and hadn’t managed to thread the thirty-five millimetre film this “new toy” used. Comrade Petrenko had better have it loaded and ready for him before quitting time. In his indignation, this People’s Hero had neglected to get a receipt, so officially he still had the camera. Quite a valuable one too, the latest from Germany. Yulia and Nikolai would happily swear he’d never brought it back.

Lucy had at that time no notion what use she might make of the camera. Taking it was just a prank. She knew she ran a risk of being searched as she exited the Lubianka, but seeing again her companion of the war years made her jaunty. She assumed an attitude of command with the sour porter, insisted he destroy her corridor pass before her eyes, and without interference left. By the front door.