Prologue

April pretended to be spring. The cruellest month, and a bad joke. Midday in Moscow teased you with a sunbeam, and midnight froze you down to the bone. The heating in the crumbling hotel-cum-jail came and went with a chilling irregularity, and when it went you needed every scrap of clothing, every inch of bedding. Grey days, black nights, and a sting in the nipples that cotton wool in the end of the brassière did little to alleviate.

The little guy wore layer upon layer of clothes. Three or four sweaters, she thought, a thick navy pea jacket, mittens over his gloves, a woollen hat under a cheap rabbit-fur flapcap. The little guy, Yuri, was OK. As thugs went. The affable apparatchik. It was the big one, Mischa, she had to watch.

Little Yuri was teaching himself English. He’d never been out of Russia in his life and, thought the Major, probably never would, but he was delighting in the oddities of the language, and he seemed to relish any opportunity to talk English with her.

‘Many a mickle maks a muckle,’ he said to her one day.

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

He didn’t know, no more than she did herself, but he produced a tatty magazine from his coat pocket and handed it to her.

‘I Belong to Glasgow,’ she read. ‘The magazine for Scotsmen abroad. Sydney 1955. Where d’you get this?’

He shrugged.

‘Can you get stuff for me?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘So long as . . .’

The Major understood. So long as Big Mischa never knew.

She asked for a copy of Huckleberry Finn. A week later he brought her one. In Russian. Translated in 1909. Good God, Twain was still living when this book was printed. They’d spelt it with a cyrillic Г. Геккельерри Финн. She guessed it was the nearest they could get. Gekkelberry. She’d never thought before how it would read in her native tongue. The most American word in her American vocabulary—it went with Hoboken, Hoosier and Hominy Grits—rendered into the language of her father and forefathers. She laughed till she cried and couldn’t get Yuri to see the joke in either language.

‘Is problem?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No problem. I’ll read it. It’ll make a change.’

She was almost at the end, those weak scenes where Tom Sawyer steps in and screws up the plot, when Mischa showed up. She slipped the book quickly under the mattress and watched as he unbuttoned his flies. So, this was it. At last. It had been a long time coming, but she’d always known he’d try.

It took him less than a minute to rip every shred of clothing off her. She fought hard, and as he held her down managed to get her thumb and forefinger into the socket of one eye. Mischa froze. He could move, he knew, but he also knew the hold she had on him, knew that he’d leave the eye behind if he did.

She squeezed a little, dug her thumbnail into the eyeball.

‘Have they told you to kill me, Mischa?’

The other eye stared motionless at her.

‘Speak, dammit!’

‘No,’ he said.

‘If you finish what you’ve started, you’ll have to kill me. ’Cos if you don’t, I’ll kill you. And if they still want me alive, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. Capiche?’

She squeezed again. He yelled. She let him go. He backhanded her across the face and stomped out. After that he beat up on her regularly, but he never tried to fuck her again.

She’d already lost track of the days and weeks, but not long afterwards, it seemed, Yuri appeared in the early morning with one of her suitcases and one of her coats, the ankle-length black number she’d bought in Paris on her last trip there. He set down the case quietly and threw the coat to her.

‘Cast not a clout till May be out,’ he said.

‘We’re leaving?’

He nodded.

Was this the end? A car ride out to the forest, a bullet in the back of the head, an unmarked grave and her KGB service record erased? One more anonymous Khrushchev casualty?

‘I’m sorry, Major,’ he said. ‘It’s only to another hotel. We’ll be there in half an hour.’

Half an hour. Half an hour outside. Light. Air. Movement.

The car was a battered Moskvitch saloon, a drab shade of no-colour, crude and angular like a pre-war Citroën, the classic Gestapo car, redrawn by a clumsy child. At least it had a heater. The Russians were way ahead of the French, light years ahead of the English, in putting heaters in cars. It smelt like frying tripe but it was warm.

Yuri drove. Mischa sat in the back with the Major, looking bored and tired, legs spread, fat thighs taking up the lion’s share of the seat. The Major stared out of the window. Once or twice when he caught sight of her in the mirror Yuri could have sworn she was smiling to herself as one thing or another flashed by her gaze.

Two blocks from Red Square the thin line of traffic stopped moving, a few cars came up behind them, blocked the street and honked a couple of times.

‘Get out and look,’ Big Mischa said through a stifled yawn.

‘Boss, it’s bollock-freezing out there!’

‘Do it!’

Yuri did up the top buttons of his pea jacket and stepped into the street, his breath billowing out in front of him in white clouds. A few minutes later he was back. He bounced into his seat and slammed the door.

‘Tanks,’ he said. ‘Tanks and troop transporters and ICBMs and thousands of poor fucking Ivans all rehearsing May Day. It’ll be half an hour before they pass the end of the street.’

Mischa looked behind them at the growing line of stalled traffic.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘We’ll just have to sit it out. Pass the time.’

The Major watched. He undid his oatmeal-coloured, double-breasted overcoat, then popped his fly buttons and got out his cock. It rose up, uncircumcised and ugly, rolling back its little bonnet in greedy anticipation.

‘Sweet lips you have, Major.’

He wasn’t kidding. He was pushing his luck. She could hardly believe hers.

She put out her hand and stroked it. He closed his eyes and she felt an involuntary judder pass through him. Then she snapped it back and heard it crack like willow as ten thousand engorged blood vessels ruptured. He opened his mouth to scream. She punched him in the throat with her other hand and all that escaped him was a strangled wheeze. She put the hand into his jacket and pulled out the automatic from the shoulder holster a full second before Yuri could pull his and turn in his seat.

‘Don’t make me, Yuri. You been good to me. Don’t make me shoot you.’

He held his gun up by the barrel and passed it back to her. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Before the slob comes round.’

She reached for the door and the last thing she thought she heard was Yuri softly saying, ‘Good luck. By God you’re going to need it.’

She had always been careful where Dorry was concerned. Dorry was her secret. Dorry was her escape route. She’d never been seen with Dorry. She’d never visited her except when she was certain she was not followed. She considered herself an expert at shaking off tails. Wasn’t so hard. You took one cab, paid him to cross the city, got out round the corner, ran like hell and picked up one going the other way.

Dorry cried when she saw her on the doorstep.

‘I thought for sure you were dead,’ she said through her tears. ‘It’s been weeks. They stripped your apartment down to the floorboards and then they took up the floorboards.’

There was nothing for them to find. All that mattered was here. The passports, the travel permits, two thousand US dollars and an array of dreadful wigs.

Dorry got out the suitcase. The Major pulled out the false bottom and sifted its contents for anything incriminating. She’d need the passports. If she made it out of Russia she’d be half a dozen different people before she found safety. There was the letter from Guy Burgess. Why on earth had she kept it? It could get them both killed. Better now to burn it. But she didn’t. She folded it over one more time and dropped it in with the passports.

Dorry had the stove door open and was feeding in oddments as the Major passed them to her.

‘That too,’ she said, pointing to Huck Finn.

‘Nah. Not Huck.’

‘It’s a dead giveaway. It’s your trademark. Besides, a book that thick, we’ll get twenty minutes of heat off it.’

She pulled on the mousey wig, wrapped herself into the peasant overcoat. It felt like it had been run up from a mixture of horse blanket and candle wax. Then she passed the chic black number to Dorry.

‘Oh no,’ said Dorry, running a fmger down the lapel. ‘It’s beautiful. It’s worth a year’s wages.’

‘And it’s a “dead giveaway”. It’d never fit you. You’re five feet nine, and I just about make five nothin’—burn it!’

‘Where will you go?’

‘West. Where else can I go?’

‘Will you write to me?’

‘Sure. If I can. I mean. When it’s safe.’

‘Send me something.’

‘Like what? Scent? Lingerie? That sort of thing?’

‘No. Send me an Elvis Presley record.’

‘Elvis Presley? Who the hell is Elvis Presley?’