“Ya ne ponimayu,” said Jones. “I don’t understand.”
Lyushkov added something. From behind the screen in the far corner, an unseen woman’s voice delivered the translation: “You’ve met Hitler, they say. Tell us about the man the Germans call My Fuhrer.”
The sunlight ended as suddenly as if someone had pulled a giant switch. Slabs of black cloud were banking up in the sky.
“Hitler, Stalin?” replied Jones without thinking, “It’s the same show, the same faces.”
From behind the screen again came a women’s cough: light, discreet – even, you might say, bourgeois. The unseen woman duly translated.
Once more, a controlled, elegant cough. Evgenia.
Pieces of an appalling puzzle fell into place. Shadows receded, fresh horrors revealed themselves.
She worked for them. Evgenia worked for the Cheka.
A sickening impotence washed over him. In all their conversations, in everything she’d said about the Cheka, its cruelty, how it had turned her own father into a pillar of ice, how it would treat Jones most terribly if he ever ended up in the basement of the Lubyanka, she had not once found it necessary to mention that she was their creature.
The hated secret police? She was one of them.
Yet, at that very moment, his mind started to fret at another possibility: that she was both one of them and also, at the same time, their prisoner too. Jones himself could do what he liked. If he wanted, he could leave Russia far behind. He was, after all, a British subject. But the Cheka held power over the woman he loved. They could destroy her for their pleasure and his agony and do so in a twinkling of an eye.
They had him.
A fresh cough brought him back to the surface.
“Hitler was banal,” gabbled Jones, “a grey figure, flabby and insignificant. I should tell you that I was given a ride in his plane to Berlin but that I had only a few words with him. In fact, I spent more time in the company of his praetorian guard, the SS.”
Evgenia translated that at a gallop. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Yacob jot everything down in a notebook. If Evgenia mistranslated a word, Yacob would pick up on it. They would know.
“The SS, what are they like?” asked Lyushkov.
“The SS remind me of you, the Cheka.” This time the translation came slowly, almost stumbling. Lyushkov broke into a smile, snuffed out his cigarette and immediately lit a fresh one.
“How so?”
“You both…” he searched for the right word, “…share commitment.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that,” Jones paused while Evgenia translated the half-phrase, “if you or the SS had a snake in the grass, you would throttle it with your bare hands.”
“Snake?” asked Lyushkov.
“Zmeya,” Evgenia hissed.
“Zmeya,” Jones repeated her hiss.
“Kakaya zmeya?” asked Lyushkov – “what snake?”
“There are always snakes seeking to undermine the cause. The issue for both the SS in Hitler’s New Germany or the New Soviet Man is faith.”
Jones could tell from Evgenia’s tone as she translated that she thought what he was saying wasn’t helping.
“Faith?”
“Sorry, I meant not faith but fidelity to the cause.”
Lyushkov drew on his cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “The Hitlerite experiment in Germany is a return to barbarism. What we are trying to do here, under the guidance of Joseph Stalin, is to create a new future. Do you agree with that, Mr Jones?”
“Yes,” said Jones, “very much so.”
Through the window, the chimneys on the roofs of the buildings opposite the Lubyanka had been transformed into towers of white. A mass of snow had fallen in the time Jones had been the Cheka’s guest in the basement.
“Tell me about the poem.”
“What poem?”
“Come on, Mr Jones, I’m not an idiot.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He pokes out a sausage-shaped finger, And he alone goes boom,” Lyushkov quoted. “That poem.”
“Not heard of it. Is it about a butcher?” Jones’ expression was deadpan.
Lyushkov snorted, then moved on. “In the car on the way here, you said Colonel Lyushkov had been shot. Tell me more.”
“He died in a car accident.”
“Did he?”
In the corner, a radiator bubbled to itself.
“Oumansky held a conference at which it was made clear that Colonel Zakovsky had been killed in a car accident.”
“Oumansky is a functionary of a lower organ of the state. What he says is of no serious merit.”
Jones could not help but smile.
“Mr Jones, this is not a laughing matter. Explain your theory that Zakovsky was shot.”
Jones hesitated.
“Can you answer the question, Mr Jones?”
He cast his mind back and lived those moments again. In his mind, the limo with the shark teeth grille was overtaking him, Lyushkov waving at him. Then it slowed down, the bullets were fired, the man gunned down…
“Please answer the question, Mr Jones.”
It was Evgenia speaking. To ensure that he understood the dark majesty of their power over him, they were using her to torture him. If he got the answer to the question wrong, it would end in her execution, not his.
“The vehicle from which Zakovsky was shot,” asked Lyushkov, “was it a fish truck?”
Jones smiled and shook his head. “My theory that Zakovsky was shot was based solely on a paranoid alcoholic delusion.”
“Meaning what?” snapped Lyushkov.
“Meaning I have a problem with alcohol. The night before I had too much to drink. Meaning I got so drunk I had a nightmare soused in alcohol and I mistakenly thought that my nightmare was the truth.”
“Surely someone must have put that thought into your head?”
“Only Madame Vodka. And her friends: fine red wine, brandy, flaming sambucas, limoncello.”
Lyushkov roared with laughter, his jowls a-wobble with glee, his fit of merriment all the more striking because the other five people in the room – Jones, Evgenia, Lintz, the Uzbek and Yacob – remained stony-faced.
“Very good, Mr Jones, very good. You are a close friend, are you not, of Mr Harold Attercliffe?”
“What of it?”
“He is an enemy of the Soviet Union.”
“No, Colonel, you are mistaken. He is accused of being a wrecker. An accusation is not the same as a verdict. The People’s Court has yet to deliberate and he has indicated that he is not guilty.”
Lyushkov said nothing but held his cigarette to his lips, a finger of ash growing longer in the silence. He stubbed it out, smiled, and said, “We are minded to release you from our care.”
“May I go?”
Lyushkov looked down at his notes. “One last question, Mr Jones. This talk of famine in the bourgeois capitalist press in Berlin, New York?”
He leaned forward in his chair, the finger of ash dropping onto his precious desk unregarded. He was taut, engaged, his former pretence of joviality forgotten. This was the real meat, Jones realised. The rest had just been softening him up.
“There is no famine. Perhaps some isolated cases of malnutrition.”
“You’re sure?”
“There is no famine, Colonel.”
“Very good. It has been a pleasure and an honour talking to you, Mr Jones. Please go carefully. The revolution faces a thousand snakes, as you like to put it.”
Jones stood up. The Uzbek handed him his overcoat and hat.
“Good day to you, Mr Jones.”
“Good day to you, Colonel – and congratulations, once again, on your promotion.”
Lyushkov bowed, acknowledging both the compliment and its falseness at the same time.