Jones was led by the Uzbek and Lintz out of the room, down into the lift and out through the front door of the Lubyanka. Standing on the front step, the great grey and yellow toad of the Lubyanka behind him, he gasped for air.
In front of him, the snow lifted and spiralled, creating a little tornado of swirling flakes. He headed straight into it.
Chapter Sixteen
The snow that had fallen whilst he had been a guest of the Cheka was the deepest in living memory. In the outside world, roads tunnelled through banks of snow as high as a house; the boughs of trees barely punched through the blanket of white. Jones hurried, dismal and alone, through the great white canyons to the Metropol. In the short walk, his cheekbones developed a dull ache, his fingers and toes lost their feeling, his throat burned with cold.
The bar was empty apart from a well-dressed foreigner, middle-aged, crumpled and ugly, with a beautiful Russian woman half his age. They studied each other intensely. They could have been discussing poetry; they could have been negotiating a price. Jones ordered a bottle of one of the very best red wines the Metropol had to offer, drank it, ordered a second, drank that too and was on his third when Evgenia came in.
Jones had a full glass of red in his hand, on the table a bottle embossed with two crossed keys.
“Is the wine French?” she asked.
“Yes. Chateauneuf du Pape.”
“Expensive?”
“Very.” He did not ask her join him but took a hefty slug of the wine. His rudeness was so out of character that it could only be deliberate. He was drunk, vilely so, but he hated her for her betrayal – and there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that she was the most worthless human being he had ever met.
Then she did something that burned through the alcohol he’d had, the thing he found so adorable in her. She turned her head away, suggesting that she would rather be anywhere else than where she was right now.
“You told them about that bloody poem?” Jones’ voice was slurred, his tone solemn, stating a fact.
She shook her head.
“Well, somebody ratted us out and it wasn’t bloody me. You work for them so logic suggests that you are the rat, sweetie.”
Her dark eyes were cast down at the floor. In a trembling voice, she whispered, “Something dreadful has happened. I need to talk to you.”
“I’m sorry, I’m working on my alcohol-fuelled delusions,” said Jones. “Lyushkov didn’t shoot Zakovsky. There is no famine and,” he raised his voice, “you don’t work for the bloody Ch-Ch-Cheka.”
The couple on the far side of the bar turned their heads, then went back to their haggling. If there was one word you didn’t overhear in the Soviet Union, it was “Cheka”.
Evgenia said, “Gareth, please, you must listen to me.”
It was the first time she had ever used his first name.
“I don’t see what the problem is about anyone knowing you work for the Ch-Ch-Ch-Cheka.” His stammer drew even more attention to the taboo word. “The Ch-Ch-Cheka know you work for them. And the Cheka is the only thing that matters in this town.”
She whispered something.
“What? What’s that you say?” His parody of an old and deaf man was all too accurate.
“I had,” she lifted her voice, “I had and have no choice. But you must listen to me. Something terrible…”
His mind, dulled by the buckets of alcohol he’d consumed, suddenly cleared. “Enough! You could have told me you worked for the killers. It would have been nice to know. It’s too late now to come up with some new sob story. I’ve heard enough fairy stories from you.”
She turned and fled.
Putting his wine glass down, he thought hard about what he had witnessed, strove to process it as rationally as he could. What was so extraordinary about the Cheka was its subtle calibration of human pain, how it managed to be so cruel and yet so cunning.
With a sudden insight which made his head spin – as if he had been lifted up by a giant’s hand to the top of a thousand-foot cliff – he realised that what he had endured was a specific edition of a general cruelty which spanned nine time zones, from the old borders of what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the icy wastes overlooking Alaska.
But as far as the rest of the world was concerned, this empire of cruelty did not exist. Fear had smudged out terror. Perhaps even better calibrated than the Cheka’s masking of torture by torture was the castration of the reporters in Moscow. This was, for him, the Cheka’s greatest triumph. From the perspective of the reader in London, New York, Berlin, the Soviet Union was not only an economic miracle but also an admirable social revolution.
Every single reporter in Moscow knew that to be a lie – but the Cheka had managed, through a subtle combination of carrot and stick, to make that lie unsayable. When the Cheka had offered him the carrot, Jones had declined. Money, access to power, sex – no carrot was good enough. He could not be bought. Tonight, he had experienced the stick: the fear, the intimidation of a spell in the basement of the Lubyanka. Well, it had had an effect on him – his hands were still shaking – but it wasn’t absolute. Yet… refashion the stick, whittle it down to the shape of a dagger and point it directly at Evgenia’s heart? They had him.
Jones was still lost in these thoughts when Duranty appeared at the bar, his hair oil gleaming in the Metropol’s chandeliers. Joining Jones for a drink, he prattled on about the snow, the cold and then said, “Pity about Max.”
Jones spilt his drink.
“What?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
Jones was becoming sick of that phrase.
“Suicide, it says here.” He waved a copy of Komsomolskaya Pravda in the air. It was the least theoretical of the Soviet newspapers, running scandalous stories about the party’s enemies, real and imagined. “Jumped out of the window of his flat, poor soul. Upset about Hitler gaining power, naturally, poor fellow. And showing signs of heavy intoxication. Depressed, drunk, he falls from the window. That’s what it says here.”
“What floor did he live on?” Even to his own ears, Jones’ voice sounded slurry.
“The fifth, old boy, it says here.”
“Does it give the address?”
“24 Tverskaya Street. Excuse me for asking, old boy, but have you been on the sauce again?”
Max’s “suicide” must have been the news that Evgenia had been trying to break to him, had he given her the courtesy of listening.
“Word of advice, old boy,” said Duranty. “You seem to be hitting the sauce overmuch these days. Worse, you’re making enemies in all the wrong places. Perhaps it’s time for you to say goodbye to Moscow. Move somewhere more forgiving of your foibles. The revolution is not a very charitable place at the best of times and these are not the best of times. You could do worse than Paris. Or Rome. Berlin, even?”
Jones studied the glass of red wine in his hand, holding it up to the light.
“Berlin, ” repeated Jones, solemnly.
“Sex and blood and gold, old boy,” Duranty said, “that’s what the readers want from you. But it doesn’t matter where, does it? You can do sex and blood and gold anywhere, any old how. It’s only newspapers. Front page news today. Tomorrow’s wrapping paper for fish and chips. What does it matter?”
“Do you think Max killed himself?”
“Obviously, for a Jew, Hitler as Chancellor would have been a terrible blow. He jumped out of the window, dead drunk and mightily unhappy because the big Jew-hater with the little moustache is now ruling the roost in Berlin. Maybe the Cheka gave him a push. Who knows? Who cares how he died? I’m sorry about Max, God rest his soul if there is a God, but I’m worrying about you Jones. Sex and blood and gold, old boy. Reporting’s the game but remember it’s only a game. Don’t take any of it too seriously. That way, you become boring – and there’s nothing worse under the sun than a boring reporter.”