She slept. In the darkness she curled up on the bed in a foetal position, and when he spoke she didn’t answer. He covered her with the bedclothes and for a while watched over her. He went downstairs to the lobby and persuaded the desk clerk to allow him the use of the phone. He called Moscow, a safe number he had prearranged with Bogdanov. The old man was jumpy and swamped him with questions until Kirov calmed him and put his own question: ‘Have you managed to pull Craig’s file?’
‘No. I told you it can’t be hurried. Krapotkin can’t find the access code. He’s waiting for a legitimate request for a closed file and he hopes to piggy-back our business onto it. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not. Where’s the rush?’
‘Craig is in Tbilisi,’ Kirov answered, and waited through the long silence.
‘Jesus! How?’
‘Craig and Zagranichny are the same man. That was the point of the film. That’s how Viktor hoped to save himself.’
The line went dead again and Bogdanov came back slowly: ‘I’ll speak to Krapotkin. I can’t make promises … I … like I said, I’ll speak to Krapotkin.’
‘Do that.’
‘Sure.’ Tentatively the old man asked, ‘Anything else?’
Kirov ignored the plea behind the words, which said, Don’t tell me any more. He asked, ‘What do you know about Batumi that makes it special?’
‘Batumi?’
‘The plant at Tbilisi is bringing in secret supplies from there.’
‘Batumi,’ Bogdanov repeated, and lingered over the name, using it like a spade to lever up an ancient memory. ‘The gold fraud?’ he said speculatively.
‘I’ve never heard of it. How is it relevant?’
‘It probably isn’t,’ the other man answered cautiously, ‘except for the way it worked. Batumi is only a few kilometres from the Turkish border. The boys in the gold fraud case used to trade gold over the frontier for Western imports. What do you think? Is that it? Those guys down there could be running a smuggling operation.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘Ludmila Fillipovna,’ Kirov said with quiet humility. ‘Here, let me carry that for you.’ She gave up her shopping bag without question even as she was examining the stranger with surprise. ‘Pyotr Andreevitch Kirov — I work for your husband — I have visited your dacha — do you remember?’
‘I remember,’ she answered peaceably, and in her distracted fashion glanced back at the village grocery store in case she had left something. ‘Yes, I remember,’ she repeated as though the memory were a fond one. ‘We don’t receive many visitors, Mother and I. Rodion Mikhailovitch says that his work is too confidential to allow many friends. Is that right?’ she added with a strange curiosity.
‘Friends can be unreliable.’
‘Like Pasha Radek?’ she replied unexpectedly shrewdly. ‘He brought me presents when he visited us. I didn’t think it was necessary. It was showing off. He’d been somewhere — Kiev, I think — and was feeling very pleased with himself. I tried to warn my husband, but he wouldn’t listen. He said he had to trust someone. I thought that he would have trusted you.’
‘I thought he did trust me. I was mistaken.’
Nadia emerged from behind a car. Kirov took her gently by the arm and introduced her to Grishin’s wife as a friend. Ludmila Fillipovna accepted this explanation. She looked down at the snow underfoot and her felt boots and the others’ shoes and said, ‘You’re not dressed for the weather.’
‘We’ve been away — in the South.’
‘That must be nice. The General is also away at the moment.’
‘At your flat in Moscow?’
‘I think so. Things are very busy there.’
‘Is anyone staying with you other than your mother-in-law?’
‘No — should there be?’
‘Have you had many visitors lately, perhaps Radek or his friends?’
‘No.’
‘Workmen at the dacha?’
‘No.’ She laughed to suggest that that never happened.
‘And neighbours?’ he said with a receptive smile. ‘Still the same old neighbours?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘You think we’re being spied on?’ she asked with the same odd display of intelligence, so that Kirov concluded that Grishin’s wife was not the rumoured idiot. She was naive, childlike even, a product of the purdah in which some of the KGB and Party chiefs kept their partners, but no fool.
They walked away from the village along the snowbound paths that serviced the secluded cottages behind their screens of birch and spruce. Ludmila Fillipovna talked gaily of life in winter out here in the countryside; she shared the General’s intimate love and knowledge of their private territory. Kirov nodded and sympathised and watched the cars and the passersby, the shuttered houses and the fleeting figures chopping wood and clearing snow.
She opened the door of the dacha and called out, ‘Mother, we have visitors!’
‘Who are they and what do they want?’ The old woman emerged from the kitchen with flour on her hands and her face set in a sour grimace.
‘What do you want?’ Ludmila Fillipovna asked.
‘Haven’t you asked them?’ interjected the mother. ‘Times like these, and you don’t ask questions of strangers? Idiot!’
‘I need to speak to Rodion Mikhailovitch.’
‘Go and see him in Moscow,’ said the mother.
‘I’d like you to phone him,’ Kirov addressed the daughter. ‘Ask him to come here. But don’t tell him that anyone is here with you — don’t even hint it.’
‘You’ll do no such thing!’ said the mother. ‘We’re in enough trouble as it is.’
Ludmila Fillipovna regarded the older woman meekly, but she reached for the phone.
Under pressure Grishin agreed to come to the dacha, but not before evening. His time was occupied by another long session in front of the Rehabilitation Committee, justifying his role in the affair of Academician I.A. Yakovlevitch. Kirov passed the brief day watching the silent snow and the uneventful forest. Nadia sat with Grishin’s wife while the latter took her through the children’s stories that she spent her days writing; and the old woman rattled like a poltergeist in the kitchen. ‘Have you read these?’ Nadia asked him, referring to the stories. ‘They’re really good!’ Kirov shook his head. He had noted the bond of sympathy building up between the women and felt excluded from it. ‘Is anyone out there?’ she enquired. He told her nobody. There was no one out there, nobody to turn to: he had reduced all the world to strangers.
Grishin came bustling through the door at six-thirty. He gave his eager wife a peck on the cheek and said testily, ‘What’s this all about? Can’t you see I have things to do?’ Kirov emerged from the back room and put a finger to his lips to silence the other man. He moved to the window and studied the road. The General’s Chaika was parked conspicuously, the driver lounging at the wheel. Behind it was a grey Volga with four occupants showing no interest in getting out of the warmth of the car.
‘How are you, Rodion Mikhailovitch?’ The General was across the room and it seemed to Kirov, watching them, Grishin small and open-mouthed clutching the hand of Ludmila Fillipovna, that they were refugees as he had seen them in films. ‘You weren’t expecting me? You thought that Heltai had got me — or maybe Radek?’
‘What are you doing here? My spouse— my parent…’
‘Your wife recognises a friend when she sees one,’ Kirov answered. Ludmila Fillipovna retreated at that suggestion of involvement; her lively eyes turned to glass buttons. Kirov put a hand under Nadia’s arm and raised her out of the chair. ‘May I introduce Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Mazurova. I may have mentioned her. She was Viktor Gusev’s girlfriend.’