A stillness in the office as everybody watched for Jones’ reaction. For a time he stared at his boots in silence, then picked up a pencil and played with it.
“Mr Jones, are you going to do that story on the ways and means committee,” the district editor asked, “or are you going to walk out of this office and never come back?”
The pencil snapped.
Jones said nothing and moved his chair closer to his desk and started typing: “The meeting of the Ways and Means committee…”
That evening, he went to the local library just before closing time and put in a request on a card for a book he had been thinking about reading for a long time. The librarian had a sympathetic face.
“You may have to wait a week or two, Mr Jones,” she said. “Das Kapital by Karl Marx, it’s very popular these days.”
Chapter Two
Moscow
October, 1932
The short walk from the hotel had already taken an hour, more, and if Jones didn’t find Kurskaya station in the next seven minutes he would miss the special train and so the opening of the Lenin Dam. With the dying of the light, the fog that cloaked the city was turning red and through it something was coming at him fast, metal squealing on metal, a monster from a child’s nightmare. Glancing down, Gareth Jones realised he was standing on a rail, a yard in front its sister. He stepped backwards and the tram brushed by him, inches from his face.
Loudspeakers on street corners Jones couldn’t see cackled the same phrase, over and over again. Shaking from the brush with the tram, he bumped into a man in a flat cap and dark black overcoat, fraying at the sleeves. Jones mumbled sorry, checked his watch and asked the man the way to Kurskaya station in his poor, clumsy Russian. The man was in his sixties, short, thick-set, his eyes red-raw. He made a sound and Jones, at first, thought he was laughing at a private joke. Then Jones realised that the man was crying. The contrast between the man’s solid appearance and him weeping was, like the fog, bewildering. Jones asked his question again.
“It’s gdye nakhoditsya Kurskaya stantsiya, you daft sod,” the man, replied, then took out a handkerchief and blew his nose.
“You’re British?” asked Jones.
“I am. Harold Attercliffe from Barnsley. And who might you be?”
“Gareth Jones, Western Mail.”
The man nodded slowly. “Saw you at the hotel this morning. Bloody reporters. Can’t trust a reporter. Needs must though. You a socialist?”
“I am a man of the left. I’m sorry, I’m in a frantic hurry, I’m going to miss a train.”
“If you want to find the station in this muck you follow the tram tracks.”
Jones headed off to the right.
“No, not that way! Look, I’ll come with you.”
They walked between the tracks through the fog.
Oumansky, the official at the foreign ministry, had warned Jones in his pedantic, irritating way that the special train for the opening of the Lenin Dam in Dnepropetrovsk would leave on the dot of five o’clock. The loudspeakers clacked again.
“What is that phrase they keep on repeating?” asked Jones.
“The liquidation of cowlessness,” said Attercliffe.
“That’s gibberish.”
“Watch what you say out loud son. Or the GPU” – he pronounced it the Gay-Pay-Oo – “will be after you.”
“What’s the GPU?”
“Never you mind.”
They walked in silence. The freezing air, poisoned by a hundred factory chimneys, tasted of burnt milk.
“Station’s here,” said Attercliffe.
“Thanks,” breathed Jones.
“Can I trust you, as one socialist to another?”
Jones hesitated.
The question came again. “Can I trust you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then give this envelope to someone at the British Embassy. No-one else, mind. It’s important.”
Attercliffe handed him a slim brown envelope, which Jones placed in the inside pocket of his jacket.
“Only one thing more…” Attercliffe continued – but at that moment he was cut off by the arrival of another tram punching through the fog, its bell clanging.
A surge of disembarking passengers parted the two men. By the time they had cleared, Attercliffe had been swallowed up – and, although Jones called out his name, climbing to the top of the station steps to call out again, it was all in vain. In reply, there was only the sound of the tram’s bell clanging and the soft footfall of unseen people threading their way through the murk.
The ticket hall had the feel of a marbled ballroom past its prime, gloomy apart from the place where a spotlit Stalin smiled down, the benevolent stationmaster. Across the quiet of the concourse, Jones ran helter-skelter, tumbling over his own feet as he made haste down a flight of steps into the train shed.
Down here, railings at head-height guarded the platforms. A crowd clutching cardboard suitcases and bags made out of blankets tied with string choked the single narrow gate to the platforms. At the gates, tickets and passes were being checked by a railway inspector, then checked again by soldiers – not regular Red Army, but special troops in khaki great coats with blue trimmings and red stars. The fur hats they wore, folded up into spikes, reminded Jones of the drawings he’d seen in Pears Encyclopaedia of the warriors of Genghis Khan.
By platform one stood a train, its seven carriages a forbidding black, with red hammers and sickles brightly painted on each carriage. Up and down its full length, soldiers at every ten paces.
Two minutes to five.
The engine puffed out a fat plume of steam. Jones clutched his Gladstone bag and charged into the mass of people, crying out “Sorry, sorry!” – but the crowd was having none of it. Blocked, he backed out and approached one of the soldiers on the outer rim of the crowd, pleading with him in English for permission to pass through.
“Nyet!” spat the soldier.
Jones trotted away from him, running parallel with the railings guarding the platform. Then, he stopped dead. Pivoting, he lifted his bag and hung it by its strap onto one of the spikes – and, grabbing hold of two vertical railings, found a toe-hold at thigh height. To cries of “Nyet! Nyet!” from behind, he launched himself up onto the sturdy horizontal cross-bar. He almost fell, balanced himself, stayed up, just.
Whistles blew. Soldiers barked. Rifles pointed their snouts at him, the guard at his back continuing to roar “Nyet!”
It was no use. The carriage was still too far. Finally, Jones lifted his hands high above his head and froze, a statue of surrender.
An officer, rolls of fat backing up over the collar of his uniform, walked down the platform towards Jones. Pork sausage fingers pried open his leather holster and he pointed his revolver directly at Jones.
As Jones hung there, the officer came closer, closer still. Thirty feet from Jones, his face broke into a smile that did not reach his eyes.
Twenty feet…
Fifteen…
“Press, press!” Jones shouted.
The officer’s shiny boots went click-clack on the platform, then stopped. He was ten feet away, if that.
“I’m Gareth Jones, Moscow reporter for the Western Mail.” His Welsh lilt was so thick it was almost as if he sang rather than spoke. Smile faltering, then dying; hands lifted higher, higher still. Jones closed his eyes and waited for the shot.