Bogdanov had run out of words. He leaned back against the wall, thin and strung out like a torn poster. Kirov suggested they move on. He proposed they find somewhere and have another drink. Forget about the GRU investigation, everybody spied on everybody; it probably had nothing to do with the present business.
‘Maybe — maybe,’ Bogdanov agreed without much conviction. ‘But there could be a way to find out.’
‘How?’
‘The finance file has a name attached to it. It’s a long shot, it could simply be a clerk who collects the expense claims. But there has to be a chance that it’s the acting case-officer.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Heltai. That’s it, no first name, no rank. Just Heltai. To me he doesn’t sound like a Russian. You look as though you’ve heard of him?’
Kirov shook his head. He didn’t know any Heltai. The name was just a breath that shivered the surface of forgotten memories, so light that it could not be grasped.
‘Pyotr Andreevitch! I’m glad you could come.’
‘It was kind of you to invite me, Rodion Mikhailovitch.’
General Grishin wiped his hands on his rough cord trousers and extended one in friendly fashion. Kirov’s arrival had caught him chopping wood at the shed by the side of his brick-built dacha. Kirov had watched him from the road before announcing his presence. Grishin, a small figure in a blue check shirt and red braces, sweated away at the wood pile with a look of peaceful effort, pausing only now and then to take a swig from a bottle and study the sky, which was stained with yellow grey cloud and swirling with crows from the woods behind the house.
‘Do you think we’ll have snow?’ Grishin said doubtfully, and then, with simple pleasure, ‘It really is good of you to come. My wife — my mother — they see so few … I’m glad you came.’
‘I look forward —’
‘Yes. Well, let’s go in. Do you think it will snow?’
Kirov examined the clouds. Heavy with snow like a pregnant woman; the crows cawing in distress over the still treetops.
‘I think so.’
They walked along the path to the house.
‘You’ve been here before?’ Grishin asked.
‘Once,’ Kirov reminded him. They had walked in the woods where Grishin took pot-shots at the crows who ravaged his winter vegetables, and in a quiet clearing they discussed obliquely the people who had to be killed or terrified to solve their particular problem. Afterwards they sat around the family table and ate peasant food lovingly prepared by Grishin’s wife.
There was a story about Grishin’s wife: that she was a country woman whose manners unfitted her for the beau monde of the KGB chieftains, even that she was religious, which would have been in bad taste. It explained why she was never seen around the General’s Moscow apartment, nor shopping in the city, and why Grishin never took his holidays at the KGB villas in the principal resorts but went, no one knew where, off into the bush. The woman was a near idiot, it was said.
‘Pyotr Andreevitch Kirov — my spouse and my parent.’
The two women bobbed in acknowledgement. The wife was pale and distant and dressed in a home-made woollen frock and apron. The mother was round-cheeked like her son, in shapeless clothes trimmed with bits of lace so that she looked gift-wrapped like the presents Kirov remembered from the past: Uncle Kolya in his thin romantic period, standing on the apartment landing and bearing gifts.
‘Shall we eat?’ Grishin said, coming directly to the ostensible point of the invitation. Kirov glanced at the table. It was set for two. ‘Men’s talk,’ said his host. The women were gathering themselves to retire to another room. Grishin hopped to the door and opened it for them, then returned to his guest. He sat down, evidently uncomfortable with his own shyness, unable to explain it. The woman is a near idiot, Kirov recalled — and Grishin is in love with her, which explains everything.
They drank iced vodka with the zakuski. The General’s wife had prepared a simple borscht and shashlyk, and Grishin ate it with what appeared to Kirov to be contrived gusto. The two men sat in silence, occasionally exchanging smiles. Grishin eased the collar of his shirt and the belt of his trousers. He avoided Kirov’s curiosity and studied instead the furnishings of the world he had created outside the confines of Moscow, a little territory of overstuffed chairs, ornaments in tarnished frames, a cast-iron stove that burned sweet logs.
‘We live in changing times,’ he suggested, repeating the litany that rang these days through the corridors of Dzerzhinsky Square.
‘So I hear.’
‘Oh, we do, we do. Food? More food or another drink?’
‘Thanks.’
‘Food? Drink?’
‘Another drink.’
Grishin poured more vodka. Kirov picked up the glass but left the liquor untouched.
‘We must change with the times in order to survive. We must become — what? Butterflies? Frogs? It’s difficult to be sure.’ Grishin’s philosophising meant that he was drunk. ‘I knew your father,’ he went on. His eyes searched out a response. Cunning-drunk. ‘And your uncle, General Nikolai Konstantinovitch Prylubin. Ah, I forget: he wasn’t your uncle, was he? Just a family friend.’
‘You knew Uncle Kolya?’
‘I worked for him — just as he worked for your father, and your father in turn served Beria, and before him Yagoda and Yezhov. Yes. But in those days I was unimportant, a mere captain.’
Kirov took a sip of the vodka and asked if he might smoke. Grishin busied himself for a moment feeding logs to the stove though the room was overheated. In the next room the old woman was berating her daughter-in-law for something. The idiot!
‘Because of your father, I always took an interest in your career. I recommended you for the Washington posting. I suggested you handle the Ouspensky Case. You may recall my telling you that I was responsible for cleaning out the Paris station after he defected. I knew Oleg Ouspensky’s character and that if anyone could bring him back it was you. And I was right. An old-style Chekist would have frightened Ouspensky, made him back away. We could have killed him, of course, but even then times were changing and we wanted him alive. We needed a new kind of man to get him — a changed man.’
But after the Ouspensky Case there had been no place for changed men. They had pulled Kirov out of Washington and put him through months of dangerous debriefing to see what particles of himself he had left over there. That was ten years ago, since when America too had changed, and anything left behind was in a place that no longer existed. Grishin was well aware that the Ouspensky Case, while an operational success, was a personal blow. Only Kirov’s sidekick, Vanya Yatsin, who lacked the imagination to see the humanity of a traitor like Oleg Ouspensky, had risen after the event to become Washington Resident. Grishin looked at his guest sorrowfully and helped himself to another drink.
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘That’s how it was.’
‘I didn’t realise you knew my father.’
‘Nikolai Konstantinovitch didn’t tell you?’
‘Uncle Kolya has told me very little.’
‘Probably for the best. Your father lived through difficult times. We all did.’ Grishin stared remotely into his glass. ‘And even those days, which one might have thought had gone beyond all change, become re-evaluated. It seems that even the past won’t lie down unless we drive a stake through its heart.’ Kirov was reminded that Grishin was spending time with the Rehabilitation Committee, which contributed to perestroika by resurrecting the names of the dead and the undead and offering them to the Politburo for reconsideration of their past crimes, actual or alleged. Of late the Committee had been sitting more frequently and there were rumours that the proceedings had at times become heated. ‘The Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring…’