“A good friend… yes, that is true.” There was a curious look in her eyes and she, too, smiled faintly, inwardly. “We have talked much together. I am very, very fond of him, and l respect him greatly.”
“And you share his views?”
She answered cautiously, “I did not say that.”
“I know you didn’t, but—”
“But he did?”
He nodded, looking at her hard. “Yes, Dr Somalin, he did.”
“I see.” She hesitated, biting at her lower lip uncertainly. She looked away from Shaw into the glowing bars of the electric fire. Then she said in a low voice, “I accept you as a friend, Mr Alison. If Godov sent you, then I can talk to you. Yes, I will admit that I share his views. But I am just a woman, Mr Alison. I do not know what I can do to help you — or indeed what kind of help you want.”
“Perhaps you could give me some information,” he said.
She looked him straight in the eyes then. “Please tell me the truth,” she said. “Tell me why Godov sent you here.”
Shaw inhaled smoke deeply into his lungs. Godov had said this girl was absolutely all right and Godov himself had already guessed why he was in Russia anyway. Nothing could be lost now that was not already in jeopardy if things went wrong with Godov, and if the girl was to help him, then she must know the full score and no holding back. So he said, “Godov told me of some great tragedy that he believes to be building up, here in Moltsk, something that affects my country, Dr Somalin. Can you tell me anything about this?”
She had gone very white and he noticed the shake in the fingers that held her cigarette. She said, “This is dangerous. I think you must tell me a little more. Is that not fair, Mr Alison?”
“Quite fair.” He took a deep breath. He had to take a big chance now and had to force the issue with this girl; time was desperately short and there was no knowing when he might be connected with the shooting back at Khamchevko railway-station. He said, “I am a British agent, and I’m here to stop this thing taking place. Godov already knows this and I’m in his hands — and yours now, Dr Somalin.”
She had taken it perfectly calmly, reacting well to what must have been the cruel shock of hearing that she was sitting in a room with a British undercover agent, that she was now in the most terrible danger, that she would die if anything went wrong thereafter. But her trust in Godov was absolute, as his was in her, and she wasn’t going to weaken, to back out of anything or let the old man down. She simply said, very quietly, that since Shaw had told her honestly and openly what his job was, she in her turn wanted to tell him as much as was relevant about herself. Then, her lips trembling just a little, she went over to the window and looked out for nearly a minute; and then she turned away and went back to her chair, and spoke with her head bent, not looking at Shaw.
It was quite a short story and perhaps, except in one particular, unremarkable in present times. Triska Somalin had been married to a Czechoslovakian lawyer and she had been deeply in love with her husband. Violently opposed to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, he had been one of a small group of dedicated men and women working, like Gorsak in Hungary, against the State. He had been bowled out in the end and he had been third-degreed in Prague in an attempt to make him reveal the names of his group. He was not a strong man physically but in spite of all they could do in an attempt to break him, he had refused to say a word and one day he had simply died while under intensive questioning — died, Triska had assumed, as the result of being beaten-up and from the lack of sleep and food. This, Triska told Shaw, was little more than routine, the kind of thing one had come to expect in Czechoslovakia, and she was not the only woman who had lost her husband in such a way. But the manner in which the news had been given to her was not routine and was a refinement of cruelty that Shaw found almost unbelievable. Triska had been told nothing of her husband’s death until one night a thundering knock had come on the door of the flat in Prague in the small hours. When she pulled on her dressing-gown and opened the door, stiff with terror, four men dressed in black had pushed their way in and she had seen that they were carrying a coffin. They placed the coffin on the floor of the hall and then left without speaking a word to her. All the rest of that night Triska had sat by the coffin, alone, knowing perfectly well what it must contain, and during that vigil a coldness had crept into her heart and also a great hatred for her own country, the country that had brought its ideologies and methods to Czechoslovakia. Though, because she was a sensible young woman with her life before her. she had done her best to forget subsequently, that hatred had remained with her and had even grown, grown and crystallized and hardened into a set intensity of purpose to fight the communist regime if ever she got the chance.
Godov, she said, knew this.
She was a Russian citizen by birth and, to her own surprise, no obstacle had been placed in the way of her return to her own country after two whole days of grilling by the security police in Prague, though she was told that any application to visit the West would be automatically refused thereafter. No explanations were given when she was released but Triska had a muddled idea that they might have been attempting to show the Czechs that they had the magnanimity to soft-pedal the widow of a self-confessed traitor — as they made her husband out to be. So she had come back to Russia where she had reverted to her maiden name and she had retained this iron resolve to revenge her dead husband in whatever way was open to her. Godov, she said, had done his best to talk her out of her hate, but he had seen in the end that she was never going to weaken.
And now it appeared that he had put an instrument into her hands, insofar as he had sent Shaw to her.
Shaw interrupted there. He said, “This thing that’s going to happen isn’t an act of your Government, Dr Somalin. Someone’s going to take over in the Kremlin, or so we understand, and they’ll be the ones who’ll carry it through.”
She shrugged indifferently. “It is all the same to me, they are all communists.”
“You’ll help me, then?”
“Yes, I shall help you if I can,” she said. “It is not only because of my husband, Mr Alison. Before I was married I visited Britain with an official party of students. I so much liked what I saw, Mr Alison. The freedom, the leisure, the fact that your students did not have to spend their free time, as so largely our students have to, attending indoctrination classes and lectures on some current ideology.” She made a gesture of anger. “Me, I love my work, I love to feel that I am helping to heal and not destroy — but I resent having to spend much time even now in listening to the set pieces glorifying Soviet medicine for purposes of propaganda.” She leaned forward, spoke intensely. “Such propaganda, and such vile lies, when it is the Soviet that threatens the world with nuclear destruction and wholesale slaughter, rather than give it healing. Mr Alison, I hate nuclear armaments! I have seen so many of the results.”
“You have?”
“Yes!” Her lips were white. “From the tests in the Barents Sea, and on Novaya Zemlya. The fallout… men become sick when things go wrong.”
“Do things go wrong?”
She laughed harshly. “Of course — very often! The papers do not say so, and I am sure you in the West do not get to hear of it, but I know, I and my colleagues. They bring the victims to our centre sometimes.”
“For cure?”
“Certainly, if possible. But chiefly for — experiment. We are working on the total cure for all diseases caused by radioactive fallout — leukaemia, various other forms of cancer… you understand? It is right, of course, that we should find these things out so long as the world has these horrible, degrading weapons — but to use these men as guinea-pigs, as rats… it is terrible, horrible. To have to experiment to cure a man-made disease, do you not see?” There were tears in her eyes now, and her hands shook uncontrollably. “It is not unknown for men to be forcibly subjected to radiation, when there is no series of test-firings in progress. All this is why I hate the thing that has brought you here, the terrible thing which I, too, believe is going to happen—”