Chapter 4

When Commander Arkadi Trigorin noticed the new woman assigned to his office, he expected she’d been sent to spy on him and said she should go right ahead: the only woman he feared was his wife Olga.

Lucy had come the three hundred miles from Moscow by train. It was her first time in the southern Russian city of Voronezh, which at 120,000 was big enough to have a ballet-opera theatre. She soon learned that Trigorin liked going backstage to offer homages to the young sopranos and ballerinas, but also that his visits were short and — by all reports — correct. Lucky for the slender, delicate-skinned girls he favoured, as he himself was thick and hard at every point. Thick arms, broad in the chest, a thick neck. The back of his head dropped straight to his collar, and there was little overhang to his chin. His moustache was thick and black.

Of the women in the air inspectorate office, his favourite appeared to be a fragile blonde perpetually in tears at the thought she might have done something wrong. Trigorin would pat Nina’s shoulder and whisper in her ear while she stared helplessly at her typewriter keyboard. You had to wonder why she was there. Once again, though, Lucy could discover no evidence of more going on between the two than everyone in the office could see.

Then, out of the blue — it was the Friday before midsummer — Trigorin told Lucy she would be accompanying him to Lipetsk, which she knew from her paper-pushing as home to the 4th Squadron of the Red Air Force. She had half an hour to pack an overnight bag. He would meet her at his plane.

Never having flown before, Lucy approached the two-seater warily. It was about twenty-four feet long, painted olive green with a red star on its tail. Unlike the canvas-covered wooden biplanes of the war era, it was all metal and had only one wing, held above the body on struts — what Trigorin called a parasol configuration. Asked the make of this improbable device, he called it a Junkers Ju-21. A German plane then, said Lucy. No, Trigorin insisted indignantly, a Russian plane.

Wondering if that news should be reassuring, Lucy climbed into the rear seat, which was elevated slightly compared to Trigorin’s in front. After takeoff, the commander piloted his Junkers sixty-five miles north by northeast along the Voronezh River. Lucy had been given goggles, but there was no canopy or windshield and she took a sporty pleasure in the stinging breeze on her face. She pretended to enjoy also the steep climbs and tight turns Trigorin did to scare her. When they started to descend, she saw that the Lipetsk base consisted of about twenty buildings and two runways. Trigorin could have used both runways laid end to end, he landed at such terrific speed. Lucy believed they would end up in the bushes and wasn’t wrong by more than a foot or two.

She’d been on the ground barely long enough to catch her breath before she realized that the planes she’d seen parked at the perimeter of the field were Great War derelicts that would never fly again. And the airmen that came to greet her, while they wore Russian uniforms, were as Slavic as the Kaiser. Plainly the 4th Squadron of the Red Air Force existed only on paper. Trigorin made it clear she needn’t expect him to answer her questions. He’d brought her this far from Voronezh and Olga for another reason, which he made clear as soon as he got her to the two-room cabin reserved for his personal use.

She was prepared for some advance, and for it to be coarse, but not for the urgency of Trigorin’s appetites, which made his every touch bruising. Lucy smouldered with rage. To use sex to further the Revolution, yes, she was prepared for that; but to submit to this mauling was no work for an OGPU agent. At least she had the answer to Comrade Beridze’s question. She could in theory have put Trigorin under immediate arrest. In theory. But she didn’t know whether there was anyone on the base she could count on to back her up. In OGPU terms, she suspected, she wasn’t even supposed to be here. There was some secret about Lipetsk — perhaps the secret that made Trigorin’s job particularly sensitive, but that Lucy wasn’t authorized to know. Before she put up any resistance to the commander, she had to find out the lay of the land. Curiosity and caution made her choke back her anger and swallow her humiliation.

Her repugnance was nothing to Trigorin; it neither aroused nor offended him. He simply didn’t trouble to notice it and would not, Lucy believed, have recognized what he was doing as rape.

Afterwards, he entertained her with cigarettes and vodka and his flying anecdotes. He had convinced himself that she would look forward to many repetitions of his attentions over the next two or three days. After the first attack, she was at least prepared; she even found ways to make the encounters less painful. And she kept her eyes open, building a picture of what really went on at Lipetsk. It was a flying school for the German military and a facility where the latest warplanes could be test flown. These machines were never left parked by the runway, but kept out of sight in hangars. There were Junkers monoplanes like Trigorin’s made at the town of Fili, outside Moscow. The best fighter planes, however, were Fokkers imported from Holland. These were said to be more powerful, better climbers, bigger, and faster than anything Britain or the United States could command. Germany was building a forbidden air force outside her borders and out of sight of the allied control commissions. In exchange, the Russian hosts got modern planes for their own air force and training in German military science.

So much Lucy gathered by eavesdropping on conversations in German, which she was believed not to understand, and by conversations with any German pilots themselves that spoke some Russian. They were sworn to secrecy, of course, but from her air force uniform they inferred she was in on the secret. And their enjoyment of what they were doing made them talkative, if not boastful. Flying and high spirits seemed to go together.

On her second day in Lipetsk, Lucy had an opportunity to hear more. Trigorin had finished what he thought of as lovemaking and, while Lucy was pretending to sleep, he entertained the senior German in the next room. The rough plank partition had been knocked together with no thought of soundproofing. Lucy pressed her ear to a knothole. She understood only some of what Trigorin said: whether from regard for security or for her supposed slumbers, he kept his voice low — and his German was heavily accented. Trigorin’s guest, on the other hand, spoke as fearlessly and confidently as the pilots he commanded. His voice was clear and ringing, although both drinkers got louder as the vodka flowed. They called each other Volker and Arkadi. It became a great game for these Great War enemies to plan the coming war on Poland. This project sounded to Lucy not at all like the Soviet campaign to liberate the Polish worker of 1920. The jolly chatter had a very different drift.

“Poland is intolerable,” said Volker. “It must be destroyed.”

“Drink,” said Arkadi, “drink to the boundaries of 1914. Russia and Germany sharing a frontier of sixteen hundred kilometres, with no buffer states between. Plague on buffer states.”

“A common border, yes,” said Volker, “but straighter than in ’fourteen. Between our land and yours, my friend, a thousand kilometres would be long enough.”

“France won’t be able to save Poland,” Arkadi proclaimed.

“England won’t lift a finger.”

“England will be Bolshevik.”

“Whoa, friend,” said Volker, still loud but calming. “None of that Bolshevism for export. Export your vodka and keep the Bolshevism for your own people. You can have Bolshevism in your share of Poland.”

“The hell with politics,” said Arkadi. “Drink to flying, drink to dropping bombs on the Poles. Big bombs. Little bombs. Gas bombs. Drop enough bombs and it won’t matter if the corpses are capitalist or Communist.”

Lucy knew that these commissioned blowhards, big enough frogs in their own ponds, swam far below the circles of power where policy was set. Their exchanges could be dismissed as boozy vapourings without authoritative backing; all the same, they filled her with such fury that keeping still was torment.

From her listening post, she heard the officers’ conversation take a technical turn. Soon after, the two left the building to test the tuning of the engine in Volker’s plane. Lucy seized the opportunity to have a good snoop around Trigorin’s premises. He was not as a rule careless with documents. His desk and safe were always kept locked. His Florentine leather briefcase, however, was old — a pre-Revolutionary relic. A metal plate crimped to the end of the leather strap carried a staple that clicked into the lock. This plate was loose. Perhaps the case was the gift of a family member or former lover, and some unwise sentiment prevented Trigorin from replacing it. Lucy took advantage of his lapse.

She found an inventory of the airplanes that had passed through the Lipetsk facility, along with their technical specifications. In the margins and on the reverse of these papers, Trigorin had noted by hand how the machines had behaved in test flights. There was also a memo on future Russo-German aviachemical tests to ascertain the feasibility of spraying mustard gas from planes onto enemy ground troops. Among these papers, Lucy discovered a letter. It was dated Tuesday, May 11, 1926, and was on the letterhead of the Chief Directorate of the Air Force of the Red Army, Commissariat of Military and Naval Affairs. It was addressed to Commander A. S. Trigorin, Inspectorate of Aircraft, District G, Voronezh, Russian SSR.

Outside the sun was shining. Sparrows were chirping in the eaves of the cabin. Then the revving up of a twelve-cylinder Napier Lion engine silenced or drowned out the birdsong — and, a moment later, just as effectively, the pounding of blood in Lucy’s ears obliterated the engine’s roar. The paper trembled in her hand so that the Russian words danced before her eyes. At the same time, those words appeared to be typed much larger than they were and lit by a light brighter than the sunbeams pouring through the western window.

This letter shifted the centre of Lucy’s universe. Suddenly, the ground beneath her feet was in motion. The ideological concrete with which she had paved over her love of her native land was blown sky-high; the world revolution to which she had given her heart had become a narrow nationalism, land-greedy, calculating, homicidal. The scourge of capitalism and imperialism? No more. Well, she would have no more of it. She was only one voice of protest, but if the Russo-German pact was vulnerable through its secrets, she would use those secrets to destroy it.

She needed proof. She had the camera in her overnight bag, but it was too dangerous to start snapping the documents now. Trigorin might be back at any moment. She couldn’t make copies after he went to bed tonight: there wouldn’t be enough light. Her best chance was early morning, before the commander was awake. This morning, he had not opened his eyes till six, when the sun was already high in the sky. Promising, but one morning was not enough to set a pattern, and Lucy couldn’t wait for the evidence of other mornings. She decided to take out some insurance.

That evening she slipped the contents of two veronal capsules into Trigorin’s nightcap. She washed his glass as soon as he dozed off. The last thing she wanted was for him to wake up groggy and wonder what the white residue was. At four thirty a.m., she took Trigorin’s briefcase and Yulia’s Leica into the bushes that surrounded the airfield. She spread her tunic on the ground, placed the papers on it one by one, and weighted each page down with twigs and coins. Luckily there was no breath of wind.

She took her pictures and got everything back in place, including herself back to bed, before Trigorin woke. He woke with no suspicion he’d been drugged, but out of sorts all the same. He found dew on Lucy’s boots and accused her of having sneaked out early to meet one of the Germans. She replied that she’d been sleepless and had just gone for a walk alone; she’d seen no one. Unconvinced, Trigorin struck her in the face, breaking a tooth. Lucy hoped his jealousy would occasion a speedy return to Voronezh, but they stayed on another miserable day, during which Lucy found herself imprisoned in Trigorin’s bedroom and at the mercy of his amorous whims.

Next morning the commander was awake early, feigning sleep in the hopes he’d catch Lucy attempting another early-morning tryst. When she didn’t stir, he got up stealthily — remarkably so considering his habitual brutishness — with the intention of searching her overnight bag. Lucy leaped from the bed. “Let me help you with that, Comrade,” she said. “Is this what you’re looking for?” She reached into her bag. When her hand came out, it was holding her OGPU badge. She told him he needn’t look so disconcerted. He’d always suspected, hadn’t he? In any case, there was no cause for alarm. In view of the pleasure they’d taken together, she could overlook much in his conduct, his jealousy included. Even his smashing her in the mouth she could interpret as a flattering sign of his deep feelings. But he had no authorization to inspect her bag, and if he did so she would arrange accommodation for him in the basement of the Lubianka. There one had no need of an overnight bag as there were enough prisoners shot each day to furnish the survivors with serviceable clothes — once the ones they arrived in had fallen to rags. Trigorin blustered that no secret servicewoman would behave as she had done. Fine, she replied coolly. He could put her assertion of authority to the test. If he were a true modern Russian, she said, he would comply with orders, however absurd, however improbable their source. Or her favourite pilot could gamble his specialist’s reputation on disobedience and risk burial in a cell so deep he’d never again see the sky.

Trigorin’s idea of saving face was flying Lucy back to Voronezh without breakfast, which annoyed her not a bit. She couldn’t get done with him fast enough. In the privacy of her own cockpit in his plane, she breathed more freely. Once landed, she asked to be excused from the office that day. Trigorin grunted permission.

On reaching her quarters, she changed from her air force to her OGPU uniform, which would obtain her more deference from the petty officials she’d encounter between Voronezh and the frontier. Many of these, drawn from the level of society worst off before the Revolution, would be illiterate — better able to read a secret service black-buttoned tunic and blue forage cap than the travel pass she lacked. That lack would be fatal on the better policed highways and railways, so Lucy’s journey west would have to be by the slowest and roughest back roads. By plane it would have been no more than eight hundred miles west to Warsaw, only twice the range of one of those wonderful Fokker D.XIII fighters. Lucy was looking at a much longer trek.

In Kursk she sold the camera. She didn’t need the money quite this soon, but reasoned that it would fetch a better price in a larger town. She spent the proceeds frugally, delaying as long as possible the necessity of commandeering the peasants’ food. Hitching rides on wagons and in vans, she came in late July to the heavily patrolled border area. From here she had to walk and then crawl into Poland with no more than the film and the clothes she had on.

She was under no illusions that the Pilsudski dictatorship was about to welcome her home. The photographs she’d carried so far were more likely to be dismissed as the trick of a spy and traitor than accepted as the bona fides of a born-again Pole. Her plan was to contact first her brother Piotr, the sibling she had been closest to in age and temperament. The two of them had raced bicycles side by side down steep country lanes over loose gravel, reckless as to the oncoming lorry around the next blind corner. She wondered if Piotr had fulfilled his ambition to study engineering. If so, he’d be able to appreciate the technical data she’d collected regarding the aircraft being marshalled against Poland.

Meanwhile, though, she had to acquire civvies and get to Warsaw. She had no remaining roubles, which would in any case have done her more harm than good. She had no Polish marks, which in any case Poland had not used since their catastrophic devaluation three years earlier. She had no zlotys, the replacement currency, which she had never seen. Crime, Lucy felt, was her only option.

Outlawry was not new to her, of course; all her work in Russia before the Revolution had been in Tsarist terms illegal. Just as her theft of Trigorin’s documents and subsequent escape from Russia had been illegal in Soviet terms. But what she had to do to survive now was different. For the first time she would be breaking the laws of a society with which she was not at war. She reminded herself that whatever enabled her warnings to be heard was ultimately for Poland’s good. Still, she felt she was about to bite into a pretty wormy apple.

She braced herself and bit. Her first theft was of the clothes of a village dairymaid she waylaid at dusk. Lucy grabbed the girl’s throat and squeezed till she passed out.

Using a combination of theft — with or without violence — and seduction, she reached Warsaw on the last day of July. Some of the people she stole from along the way were already struggling to put food on their tables, and for making them poorer she was sorry. At least, she made sure she left no one destitute.

As she approached her native city, she tried to work out how she was going to get a message to Piotr. Even if her family didn’t know the treacherous part she’d played in the 1920 war, she had left against their wishes. A letter to her brother at the old address might be read by unfriendly eyes. She wrote instead to a former schoolmate who’d lived in the same New Town apartment block as the Grudzinskis. The two girls had been friends and athletic rivals, dividing between them the honours in track and field. Lucy didn’t know if any members of Wanda’s family could still be reached there, but didn’t want to call in person for fear of meeting one of her own parents or brothers. In fact, she shrank from showing her face on Freta Street at all and suggested meeting Wanda at noon two days hence at the Copernicus Monument in the Old Town. She hoped Wanda would appreciate her choice of the astronomer’s statue as a symbol of Polish nationalism. In the old days, Lucy had disapproved of what she’d seen as Wanda’s political narrowness. She’d gone to Russia without telling her friend goodbye.

Lucy arrived ten minutes late in front of the Staszic Palace, which she barely recognized. Since Poland had regained her independence, the building had sloughed off all false and gaudy Russian decoration, leaving uncovered for the first time since Lucy’s birth its original, clean-lined face. Lucy was too preoccupied to investigate what lay behind the dressed white stone and classical columns, but hoped some scientific inquiry — suppressed by the Russians — was now flourishing there.

She studied every woman that passed through the busy square. Most were too short or too old. None approached her. By 12:20, she began to despair of the reunion with Wanda, and stayed twenty minutes more only because she could think of nowhere else to go. Then a pale, serious woman with a long stride detached herself from the crowd and made for where Lucy stood in the shadow of the statue. The expression on Wanda’s long face was grim, whether from animosity or sorrow Lucy could not say — until Wanda’s strong arms looped around her in an embrace so fiercely warm it took Lucy’s breath away. Wanda wasn’t angry. Her news, however, was bad.

Her parents knew how things stood with their neighbours the Grudzinskis. Piotr had been killed in the Russo-Polish War; Lucy’s father had suffered a stroke. Her two surviving brothers had disowned her.

Lucy did not attempt to go home. Instead, she concentrated on delivering her warning of the new conspiracy to wipe her country off the map. It promised well that Wanda was now married to the secretary of the Polish Olympic Committee with acquaintances in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Following these leads, Lucy caught the interest of a junior government official named Jan Tomczak. Unfortunately, Jan was more interested in a fling than in introducing her to his superiors. If she had evidence that Russia and Germany were plotting Poland’s destruction, he said, it would be wasted in Warsaw. The government already believed in the threat; the trick was to convince the Versailles victors that their peace treaty needed enforcing.

It may have been that, after a few hot dates, Don Juan was giving Lucy the brush-off, but she accepted his advice to take her discoveries to London. It didn’t hurt that Jan was offering not only to cover travel expenses but also to arrange travel documents. Leaving town appealed to her even more after she was almost run down in front of the Jablkowski department store by a car containing two grim-faced men. She suspected the long arm of OGPU.

By this time she’d had her film developed. Photos of one document were too poorly focused to read, even when the prints were magnified to poster size, but the crucial letter was clear and intact.