They bundled him out of the car and through a side door and frogmarched him down the corridors and through the checkpoints with the same firm gentleness, no rough stuff, just a strong firm grip as long as he co-operated. A couple of heads poked out of doors and watched him with neutral curiosity, cipher clerks relieving their boredom on the uneventful night shift. His captors ushered him into a security elevator with a coded call-button and they were whisked a couple of floors to a carpeted lobby with a guard manning the night desk and a woman with a sleepy look and a stenographer’s pad who regarded him with hostility. They knocked at a door before introducing him to a room. His two companions pushed him through the opening and closed the door behind him. A light shone in his face.
‘Turn the light off,’ he said. That first moment was all that was given him to establish his dominance over his captors. The light came from an Anglepoise placed on a desk in the centre of the room and directed at the door. ‘Let’s not play games. Can I smoke?’ Kirov patted his jacket for cigarettes. A pack of Belomors was thrown towards him and a hand with a lighter extended from the circle of light. With a click the lamp was switched off and a gentler glow filled the room from the strips concealed in the cornices.
‘Who are you?’ a voice enquired flatly.
Two figures became visible. The speaker was sitting behind the desk. He wore a short-sleeved shirt open at the collar; his face was unshaven, he had half-moon spectacles and thin hair scraped straight back and oiled. It was an uninteresting face, large-pored and slack with tiredness. The speaker eased the spectacles off his nose and spun them in the stubby fingers of his left hand.
‘Who are you?’ he asked again.
‘Kirov — Pyotr Andreevitch — Colonel in the Second Chief Directorate of the Committee of State Security of the Soviet Union.’
‘Fuck your mother,’ the man murmured, and glanced over his shoulder at a second figure who was lounging in a chair against the far wall. A soldier in an unbuttoned uniform with colonel’s tabs.
‘Who am I speaking to?’ Kirov asked.
‘Gavrilov.’
‘The Resident?’
Gavrilov glanced over his shoulder again and then nodded. ‘I run this show. Now what the hell are you doing on my patch?’
‘I’ll sit down.’
‘Sit down, smoke, take your shoes off — who am I to object? A real live colonel from Moscow!’
‘You can check my credentials.’
‘Damn right I can!’
‘Contact General Rodion Mikhailovitch Grishin. He’ll vouch for me and tell you he authorised my visit.’
‘Authorised your visit? Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it? You can walk into here and wander all over the goddamned place without letting anyone on the ground know. I suppose it didn’t occur to you to let me know that you were coming or tell me what you wanted in case I could help you out?’
Kirov didn’t answer. Gavrilov’s anger only confirmed that nothing was going to happen to him. Gavrilov spoke in a low voice to his colleague and returned to the questioning.
‘What were you doing in Botevgrad nosing around the Bulpharma plant?’
‘I’m investigating the source of antibiotics being sold on the Moscow black market.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘That’s all.’
‘Why did you ask to see the cadre’s office?’ the soldier intervened smoothly.
‘I was checking for familiar names.’
‘Find any?’ asked Gavrilov.
‘No.’
The Colonel asked, ‘Why did you go looking for the American at his hotel?’
‘Curiosity,’ Kirov answered blankly. The Colonel received the answer in the same fashion. The GRU station chief? The other man gave no introduction. Gavrilov meanwhile was on the internal phone, asking his secretary to contact Moscow Centre to verify Kirov’s details and get a photograph and fingerprint match.
When he had finished the Colonel took the handset from him and ordered mineral water and coffee. ‘Do you want a sandwich?’ he enquired casually and without waiting put the order to the secretary, then took up an earlier point. ‘Why did you not notify the referentura that you were coming here?’
‘I didn’t need any local assistance.’
‘Why did you use false identities — two, or maybe you have some more?’
‘I’m conducting an investigation. I took security precautions. You seem nervous about the Bulpharma plant?’
‘It produces medical supplies for the Army.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yes.’
Gavrilov turned to his colleague. Kirov again read anger and uncertainty. Gavrilov wanted him off his hands. What was he into? The black market? The GRU investigation? What was that about? Two more conspirators to add to the Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring? Kirov felt a wave of tiredness hit him. Travel and tension. A sense of an explanation that was retreating from him towards the tip of understanding like an object pursued in a dream. Should he be frightened?
They gave him sandwiches and a chair in which to doze away the remaining hours of the night while the lines between Sofia and Moscow buzzed with urgent enquiries. In the morning they put him on a plane. First they roughed him up mildly. They guessed he was in no position to complain.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They escorted him to the aeroplane and let him go. There were two of them, in wedding suits, smiles like passport photographs and cement in their eyes. Kirov was bundled with their civilities onto the plane and assured that their thoughts would go with him. He could still feel them as the dark landscape unfolded and he hummed the tune to ‘Moscow Nights’, remembering that the tune did not apply to his Moscow but to another remote city, a distorted mirror image. ‘Don’t you feel it?’ Neville Lucas once asked in an unguarded moment. ‘Have you never felt it?’ To which the answer was, Yes — but not here.
Once before there had been a sinister world. It was Washington during the time when he was bringing home the traitor Oleg Ouspensky. Washington where the CIA would buy the drinks, call you by your first name and show pictures of their kids. The world of the ambiguous ‘Have a nice day’, where friendliness and insincerity clasped each other so that conversation became unintelligible.
‘Yes, Neville, I’ve been to places where it’s possible to be frightened.
He drove to Dzerzhinsky Square and called in at the office. It was night-time and the Fire Brigade were manning the duty office, playing chess and sorting cables to the music of the decoder. They turned towards him with their dead fish stares. ‘Don’t go up. The place is full of mice.’
The power to the elevator was cut and a guard blocked the stairs.
‘You can’t go in.’
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t make me laugh.’
He caught sight of Kruchkov from Special Investigations crossing the floor with a telex in one hand and a bread roll in the other.
‘Semyon Mironovitch! What’s going on?’
Kruchkov turned his short-sighted eyes, registered blankness, then recognised Kirov and fitted his face with a smile. ‘Hi, what are you doing here? It’s OK,’ he said to the guard. ‘He can come in. What are you doing here?’ he repeated.
‘I’ve been away on a trip. I wanted to check my mail.’
‘Good trip — bad trip?’
‘Bulgaria.’
‘Hmm — so-so. Good weather but not much chance of making anything on expenses.’
‘You’ve been there?’
‘No.’
‘Oh — I thought you had. I heard that Special Investigations had a team in Sofia after Andropov died.’