“I’m so sorry,” she said to the Uzbek.
He grunted that he had been sent to fetch her because she had been gone too long. The way he had grunted it suggested he didn’t really care, but the bosses might and you don’t want to mess with them. Together, they walked to Lyushkov’s office, the Uzbek just behind her.
The moment she opened the door, Yagoda pounced.
“What kept you so long, girl?”
“There was a delay at the Registry. I’m so sorry that I have kept you waiting.”
Yagoda’s dry voice repeated her phrase in a high-pitched girlish falsetto.
“A file was being updated, Comrade Yagoda,” said Evgenia, coolly. “That was the cause of the delay. If there was any fault, it was mine alone.” She handed over the thirteen files and the original of Yagoda’s letter, bowed her head and held her hands behind her back, waiting for the verdict from the man who had power over the life and death of every person in the Soviet Union.
Yagoda said nothing.
“You were too slow,” said Lyushkov.
“Hold your tongue, Colonel, or someone will cut it out. Girl, what is your speciality?”
“I work for Special Services, sir. I’m a translator for the party, the armed fist, when required, foreign dignitaries and from day to day foreign reporters. Such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times.”
Yagoda’s eyes twinkled. “Ah, yes. Duranty is a good friend of New Soviet Man.”
She bowed her head. And New Soviet Woman, she thought.
“You may sit, child.”
Yagoda lined the files up, opened the master file on Zakovsky and started reading, using Lyushkov’s pen to make a crisp note in the margins. It was as thick as a bible.
Sitting on the edge of his seat, Lyushkov’s pink tongue kept darting out and wetting his lips. You could smell his fear.
Twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Yagoda said, “Enter” and the Chief Clerk came in, bearing a file.
“One more file that we thought relevant for you to examine, sir,” she said.
“Name of said file?” asked Yagoda, without looking up.
“Borodin, M.”
“Status?”
“WRC.”
WRC was shortform for a ten-year sentence “Without the Right of Correspondence”. It was the bureaucracy’s fondest lie, the phrase suggesting that the guilty citizen was denied the right to send and receive letters. In reality, it meant Max had been shot.
“Legend?”
“Suicide.”
“Significance?”
“Borodin was a Jew,” said the Chief Clerk, “half-Russian, half-German, suspected of working with the left-wing deviatonists and a known sentimentalist about the fascist wreckers in the agriculture sector. Well known to Zakovsky.”
Yagoda grunted, then opened the file. Flicking through its pages in a hurried fashion, he soon came across a photograph, which he laid out flat on the desk in front of him. In the image, Borodin was lying flat on a mortuary slab, a bullet through this forehead.
Yagoda yawned, then returned to reading the file on Zakovsky. Behind him, the Chief Clerk left the room.
At length, Yagoda closed this file too. He looked briefly at the stack of others, yawned once more, and used his right thumb to stroke his toothbrush moustache. Then he spoke: “The rest of you, get out. Colonel Lyushkov and I need to have a private conversation.”
Evgenia, Lintz and the Uzbek walked out of the room and along the corridor, coming to a stop halfway between Lyushkov’s office and the central stairwell. Even from this distance, they could hear raised voices: Lyushkov’s rumble, Yagoda’s dry jabs. Eventually, Lyushkov appeared, his trademark smile on his face. The private conversation had gone well for him, it seemed.
Yagoda left the office and, as he passed, he nodded pleasantly to Evgenia. “I do hope we meet again, Comrade?”
“That would be a pleasure, Comrade Yagoda.”
She turned to watch him go, his breeches swishing against each other as he plodded along the corridor, his satchel swaying this way and that, making him look like nothing more than an enormous schoolboy.
Chapter Eighteen
After Evgenia had typed up her notes of the translation, she and Lyushkov had had a long conversation; then, she had been free to leave. She had gone to the Metropol to find Jones and tell him the grim news about Max but he had been both drunk and obnoxious. After that, she found herself drawn to Max’s flat, not quite believing the evidence of her own eyes: the photograph of a corpse lying on the slab in the morgue with a bullet through his brains. Though she got close, she had not dared enter the apartment block herself. Instead, she had watched from a distance, astonished and afraid, as Jones ran up the steps and inveigled his way in.
But her bemusement and fear were nothing compared to her feelings when, looking up, she saw Jones appear on the balcony, then climb onto the balustrade and jump.
Jones vanished into a great bank of snow, his fall creating an avalanche which cannoned out into the road. After the balls of snow, big and small, stopped rolling and the cloud of billowing snow dust settled, the whiteness lay thick and deep and even.
Evgenia hurried to the core of the avalanche, scrabbling around in the snow, calling out, “Jones! Jones!”
Nothing moved.
“You stupid bloody Englishman, where are you?”
Sitting bolt upright in front of her, caked in snow, more ghost than man, and said, “Not a bad cure for a hangover, I’d say. But, personally, I wouldn’t recommend it. One more thing. I’m not Engli…”
She hit him, not at all tenderly, pummeling him on the shoulders and chest. Grappling out for her, he dragged her down into the snow and kissed her with the passion of a man who should by rights be dead.
From the balcony, the concierge yelled something, appalled at this fresh outrage. They got up, both coated in snow, and, laughing uncontrollably, disappeared into the night.
They held each other close in his bed in the Hotel Lux, in awe at the tender savagery of the sex they had just had: guilty that Max was dead, full of joy that they were still alive.
“Mae'n ddrwg gen” – “I’m sorry…” they both said.
Here, where perhaps nobody was listening, they felt free to speak in Welsh.
“You first,” said Jones.
“No, you first, Mr Jones.”
“I’m sorry that I was so drunk and angry with you that I ignored you at the Metropol.”
Evgenia kissed him on the forehead, then began, “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you that I work for them from time to time. You cannot think for a second that I have any choice in the matter. They call me up, sometimes just send a car, and whatever I’m doing I have to drop and attend to them. Sometimes, they send for me in the middle of the night. But most of the time it’s for VIPs, such as yourself.”
“I’m honoured to be a VIP in the eyes of a Chekist.” She squeezed his balls, hard, and he yelped with pain. “But you are a Chekist,” he said, doggedly.
She studied him along the side of her eyes. There was something determined about him which made her both afraid of and for him. “Nyet, idiot. I work for them but I am not one of them. Nor will I ever be.”
Jones picked his words carefully, lest she hurt him again. “But to work for them, that’s the same as being one, isn’t it?”
“No. “She shook her head, rubbing her nose against his. “They can use and dispose of me whenever it suits. It gives me some protection, a little roof perhaps, against party big shots or others who get too big for their boots. I mention I do some work for the Cheka and they go away with their tails between their legs.”