The dining room corner into which Packer had protectively placed himself became instead a trap from which he couldn’t escape through the solid pack of journalists and cameras, and most of the television footage actually showed him wide eyed, like an animal in a snare.
Charlie’s calls had identified Packer as an American State Department official on a secret mission to Moscow personally to explain to the Russian president the mystery of Yakutsk. Packer visibly cowered under the welter of questions, at first doing nothing but shake his head. When he did speak-in a surprisingly high-pitched New England voice-he appeared to confirm the suggestion. In his panic he babbled about speaking with Washington, too late remembering his pipeline engineer cover, which fell apart when he said he couldn’t remember the Russian company he’d come to Moscow to see. When his panic worsened, he tried to force his way through the wall of people confronting him and when they wouldn’t move lashed out, physically trying to fight his way through. At first that was panicked, but when he was shoved in return he openly tried to catch one thrusting reporter with an upward blow to the chin with the heel of his hand, which, if it had connected-which it didn’t, because of the madhouse scene-would have snapped the man’s neck. He chopped and jabbed several more times, very professionally, but again because of the jostling just one cameraman was hurt, a rib broken, because the knuckled punch again missed the fatal heart spot.
At least six reporters and cameramen went down with Packer when he fell, struggling, and he was gouging his way out of the melee when the militia arrived. At the police station, according to newspapers and later confirmed by Miriam, Packer first claimed diplomatic immunity, which immediately involved the embassy, and then claimed he was the victim of assault. Miriam told Charlie it took less than an hour for the State Department in Washington to disclaim any knowledge of the man and insist he in no way qualified for any immunity. It was midafternoon, according to Natalia, before Vadim Lestov got to Militia Post 23 to question Packer about Yakutsk. Fully recovered, the man insisted he knew nothing whatsoever about the television and newspaper stories running by then, nor why theyshould have imagined he did. Just as doggedly he maintained he’d come speculatively to Moscow as a pipeline engineer but had not yet been able to make contact with any oil exploration companies. He now demanded to leave the country immediately.
The colonel in charge of Militia Post 23 consulted with the Foreign Ministry after a junior counselor from the American embassy talked of an irritating diplomatic incident and Packer’s visa was revoked. Packer’s luggage being collected from the National Hotel by a second counselor, who also paid the man’s bill, would have been clue enough for the waiting press pack, even without the telephone calls from Militia Post 23 police on the media payroll. Packer arrived at Sheremet’yevo airport in an embassy car to another press ambush, which provided more footage of Packer fleeing across the concourse, knocking two people over as he ran.
It was when Charlie was assuring Miriam that evening he had no idea how the press had discovered Packer’s presence-reminding her she’d told him the man had returned with Kenton Peters-that he learned of Washington’s disavowaclass="underline" “The goddamned embassy’s in an uproar: the ambassador didn’t know what to do.” Charlie guessed it had been a badly conceived, independent CIA operation, which was the explanation he later put to Natalia. When he put the suggestion to Sir Rupert Dean, the director-general said, “You really think so?”
“You saw the way he fought on television.”
“And he definitely had you under surveillance?”
“Definitely,” insisted Charlie. “I think it should be officially logged.”
“So do I. And it will be. And I’ll ask Washington for an explanation, through the Foreign Office. It’ll all be denials and claims of misunderstanding, of course.” There was a pause. “You think you’ve removed the danger?”
“The publicity will have frightened Peters.” I hope, thought Charlie.
“Wonder how the Moscow press got on to him?”
“No idea,” said Charlie.
The confirmed recognition of the woman in the Yakutsk grave came on the fourth day after the publication of her photograph and literallyrelegated the Henry Packer fiasco to a one-day wonder. The identification came from a man who walked into the offices of the English-language Moscow News, which with admirable journalistic initiative obtained what they believed to be everything it was conceivably possible to get from Fyodor Ivanovich Belous before contacting either their local militia station or the Interior Ministry. And in addition to what Belous had to tell, which upon analysis was quite meager, the well-documented background ensured a story that within a further twenty-four hours brought the announcement of movie intentions from a leading Hollywood studio. One of the photographs Belous produced of his mother, Raisa, even appeared to show her in the same white shirt, dark jacket and skirt she had been wearing when her body had been found.
Belous’s story was of never having known either his father or mother. His entire knowledge of them had come from his now-dead maternal grandparents, who had brought him up in Moscow, where he had lived his entire life, mostly as a clerk in the central division office of the Communist Party and latterly as a bookkeeper at the Moskva Hotel.
His father, Ivan, had died in 1943, just days before the end of the Germans’ nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad. His mother had fled, unaware of being pregnant, one week before the siege began in September 1943. She had worked in the curators’ department at Tsarskoe Selo, the “Tsar’s Village” of five spectacular palaces established on the outskirts of St. Petersburg by its founder, Peter the Great. Raisa Belous’s particular responsibility had been the palace of Catherine the Great. It had been her job to organize the rescue convoy to Moscow of as much of the Catherine palace treasure as she could, in advance of the Nazi army and its Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg fur die Besetzten Gebiete, named after Alfred Rosenberg, who in 1940 had been personally appointed by Hitler to confiscate, loot or steal every work of art from Nazi-occupied territory for the world’s most complete museum Hitler planned for his Linz birthplace.
It was a matter of historical record that the Catherine Palace had housed one of the world’s greatest but now lost art treasures, the Amber Room presented to Peter the Great in 1711 by the Prussian warrior-king, Friedrich Wilhelm. And that Hitler had personally orderedthat the twenty-one honey-yellow amber panels, four gold-framed with jeweled landscapes picked out in Florentine mosaic, the others carved in flower and fruit motif, should be restored to their original splendor in East Prussia’s Konigsberg Castle in what he intended to be his personal study.
According to Belous’s grandparents, his mother’s greatest regret had been her failure to strip the three-hundred-year-old amber from the Catherine Palace walls to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Nazi E.R.R. looters. As it was, for what she had saved, Raisa Belous was made a Hero of the Soviet Union by Stalin. It was to let as many people know-not just in Moscow but in the West-that his mother had been such a heroine that he had approached an English-language publication.
As well as the photograph of his mother dressed in what she had been found in the Yakutsk grave, Belous produced four others, one of her standing in the middle of the Amber Room showing it in the dazzling glory that earned it a nineteenth century British ambassador’s description as the eighth wonder of the world. There was also the official notification of his mother’s death, which he now didn’t understand and wanted explained.
It was recorded as having occurred in Berlin in early April 1945. Raisa Belous had died, according to the notice, in an antipersonnel mine explosion.
“Which will have caused severe facial injuries,” predicted Charlie, during one of the twice-daily telephone conversations he maintained with London.