“Would you like any food?”
She shook her head. With even fewer people at the counter now, it didn’t take him as long the second time to get another brandy. There was another soccer match showing on the television screen.
Irena said, “I worked an extra hour, and started two hours earlier this morning, so we’d have the afternoon.” She was already smoking her first cigarette.
“I wish you’d warned me last night.”
“Last night I didn’t intend coming back today.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I decided you’d try to find me. And probably succeed, eventually. So it would only be delaying things. I changed my mind about a lot of other things, too.”
“Like what?”
“That I don’t really care if they do find out and kill me.”
It wasn’t the answer Charlie expected. Or wanted. “That’s depressingly fatalistic.”
“No, it’s not,” she denied. “It’s decisive: my deciding what I want to do and will do, get the people who murdered Ivan brought to justice. That’s what you’ve been trying to persuade me to do, isn’t it?”
“I’m surprised by the change,” Charlie admitted, honestly.
“Let’s both hope I don’t change my mind again.”
“Let’s,” agreed Charlie, wondering if this were Irena’s first brandy of the day. Not trusting the covering sound of the television Charlie came closer over the separating table and said, “You were telling me last night that Ivan had found something?”
“I don’t know it all,” qualified the woman at once.
“Tell me as much as you do know,” encouraged Charlie, gently, unsure which of Irena Novikov’s shifting attitudes he preferred.
“It was to do with his job,” she began. “It took a very long time for Ivan to get properly well. .” She stopped, reflectively. “I don’t think he ever got properly well. The field hospital operation was botched and there had to be more surgery when he got back to Russia: he spent months in hospitals and after that in KGB recovery and rehabilitation centers and as I’d been dismissed because of how I’d been injured in Cairo-and that they were KGB places-I couldn’t visit him, even after the KGB became the FSB. He told me later he became convinced that I’d left him because of how he’d look after losing his arm. . ”
She was straying off on a tangent again, Charlie realized: too soon yet to bring her back on course.
“He was worried, too, that there wouldn’t be a job for him when he finally got better, because of the arm,” Irena was saying. “But there was a job, although obviously no longer in the field. Everything had become FSB by then, of course. But a lot of the changes were cosmetic, for outside-mostly western-consumption. One of the divisions that didn’t change, has never changed since the first name switch from the Cheka, was the Registry and Archives Department. .”
Charlie felt a lurch of grateful satisfaction at holding back earlier from any interruption but risked it now. “Ivan was assigned to archives?”
Irena shook her head. “Not current, ongoing records, although the division to which he was assigned is always ongoing. Ivan was put in charge of the bureau keeping up to date the official history of the Russian intelligence service, from its foundation under Feliks Dzerzhinsky by Lenin. Ivan was an ideal and very obvious choice, of course, with all the languages he could read and so easily translate.”
“What period was Ivan responsible for?” interrupted Charlie again, conscious of his voice sounding almost as hoarse as Irena’s in his excitement.
“I’m not sure of the actual dates,” said Irena, lighting another cigarette. “I guessed from what Ivan used to say from time to time that it spanned the last ten to fifteen years: it could have been longer. It certainly overlapped the KGB becoming the FSB.”
Charlie coughed, to clear his throat, almost frightened to ask the question to which he might not get the answer he wanted. “Did Ivan tell you how he worked?”
“Yes,” replied Irena, seeming to know the importance of the demand. “He had to go through all the old, raw case files and distill everything into a comprehensive, consecutive account for entry into the official history of the Soviet and now Russian Federation intelligence organizations.” She smiled. “He used to laugh that the remit was always to make it appear that we were the best and always won.”
Irena had given him the answer he’d wanted! It wasn’t actually the key, but it could be a window into the biggest and richest intelligence gold mine in the world!
In her seesawing mood swings, one moment appearing confidently determined, the next relapsing into twitching uncertainty, it was as if Irena had geared herself to go as far as disclosing Ivan’s job reassignment but then no further, similarly to her abrupt cutoff the previous night. He worked hard at soothing her suddenly returned fears, reluctantly letting the conversation stray from what he was anxious to concentrate entirely upon by letting her ask questions. He explained away his involvement in a murder investigation initially with no apparent intelligence connections as part of the British service’s hugely expanded role countering Islamic and other potential political fanaticism, repeatedly insisting there had been no prior identification of Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin-and most definitely not of Irena-before she’d responded to his television appeal.
“You weren’t linked to Ivan Nikolaevich by the KGB after your Cairo accident, or by them or the FSB after he was wounded in Afghanistan and spent all the time he did convalescing,” reminded Charlie, in support of his argument. “And not an hour ago, you told me you didn’t care if they discovered your involvement anyway. Which I promise you again, they won’t!”
“It was easier for me to think brave than it is to be brave, when I confronted the reality of what it could mean as I talked to you,” said Irena, the slur easy to detect in her hoarse voice.
“You can’t stop now.”
“I want to.” She was smoking what had to be her fourth cigarette.
Her conviction wasn’t absolute, judged Charlie. “No, you don’t. You want Ivan’s killers punished.”
“I want another drink.”
“Let me get you some food, instead.”
“The food here’s shit.”
“We’ll go somewhere else.”
“You want to be seen with someone with a face like this!”
“You’ve probably got more reason for self-pity than most, Irena. Don’t use it to hide behind. Your face isn’t disfigured, just marked.”
“Bastard.”
“Not as much of a bastard as those who murdered Ivan.”
Her throat began to work as she swallowed against an outburst, which Charlie was frightened would be yet another breakdown. Instead, seesawing again, Irena said: “Okay.”
Charlie was unsure what she meant. Guessing, he said: “So let’s go on. Ivan discovered something he shouldn’t have seen in the raw case files he was going through to prepare the official intelligence history?”
“Yes.”
“What?” demanded Charlie, tensed forward.
“That’s what I don’t know! What it was, specifically.”
“What did Ivan tell you?”
Irena hesitated. “You’ve unsettled me, from what you’ve just told me.”
Charlie smothered the frustration. “What unsettles you from what I’ve just told you?”
“About political fanaticism.”
“Go on,” urged Charlie.
“It was political, whatever Ivan discovered. He called it sensationaclass="underline" that was the actual word, sensational.”
“But he didn’t tell you what it was?”
“No.”
“He didn’t even give you the slightest indication?”
Irena shook her head. “What he did say was that it was payback time. That what he could get for what he knew would set us up in luxury for the rest of our lives. You know what his words were? That we could get married and live happily ever after.”
Charlie remained briefly silent, unsure how to phrase his next question, not wanting to drive her backwards. “You told me yesterday that Ivan was a fixer. How was he going to fix it that you lived happily and in luxury for the rest of your lives?”