After a time, Lyushkov said, “Miss Miranova suffers from the same terrible delusion, perhaps in an even more heightened form.”
“Does she now? Fancy that.” Jones tone was the opposite of respectful.
Lyushkov signalled to the figure in the shadows and the pulp was tap-tapped, more forcefully than before.
Jones gasped and coughed up some blood, then uttered, “May I speak frankly?”
Lyushkov nodded.
“Evgenia and I were last seen alive and well by five witnesses, Professor Aubyn, Dr Limner, Walter Duranty and the two Danes. You’ve got your hooks into the first three, no question. They’re all useful idiots. Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. But the Danes? I don’t think so. So, sooner or later, you’re either going to have kill me or let me go. You’ve only told me that Moscow has decided to let me go for your own amusement. The question that’s eating away at all of you is will I talk about the famine?”
Lyushkov stared at him.
“If I do, you will kill Evgenia,” he whispered. “So I won’t, will I?”
Lyushkov stood up and walked slowly out of the room.
They took him back to the cell. It wasn’t so damp and it wasn’t so cold. There was even a small square window at the top of one wall through which shafts of sunlight could reach him. I’m an honoured guest, thought Jones.
His theory, that the Kremlin wouldn’t like it if he was killed, held true. They fed and watered him and they didn’t touch him for a whole week. But the mental torture was far worse than the physical. Somewhere, close by, somewhere under this same Odessa sky, was Evgenia.
Perhaps.
The left side of his face was still a pale duck-egg blue when the cell door opened and Lyushkov’s bulk filled the doorframe.
“So.”
“How may I assist the Colonel?” Jones’ mock deference was not lost on Lyushkov, but the time for beating had past.
“You are free to go.”
“By ship?”
“By train. I will accompany you to the Polish border.”
“Thank you very much,” said Jones, with icy politeness.
The quickest route to the Soviet-Polish border would have taken less than a day but in the event they travelled for three whole days. Slow trains passed through wildernesses of snow and ice, of dead villages with blackened churches and roofless izbas, past corpses lying this way and that, past fields of weeds, empty and untended because there was no-one left to tend them.
Sometimes the escort, five guards, said something banal to Jones and he replied – but, for the whole of those three days, Jones and Lyushkov did not exchange a word.
They arrived at the border at three o’clock in the morning, Stalin time. It had been snowing but now the stars appeared. The border post was guarded by a machine gun nest and, high above it, a spotlit hammer and sickle, blood-red against the night sky. Outside stood a queue of a hundred or so wretches, shuffling in silence in the frozen air. Lyushkov barrelled to the front of the queue. Just before they entered the post, he turned and smiled bleakly at Jones and said, “Your face looks good now, yes?”
“Yes.”
“No bruises?”
“There were never any bruises.”
“And the famine?”
Jones said nothing. The moon rose, its light casting black shadows from the girder bridge onto the frozen white of the Zbruch river below, reversing reality, as if the entire world could only be seen through a photographer’s negative.
“The famine, Mr Jones?”
“There is no famine, Colonel.”
Lyushkov nodded and handed him his passport and wallet – “nothing missing, Mr Jones” – then pushed open the door. Lenin and Stalin looked down as Jones’s passport was stamped.
The formalities did not take long. He had no baggage, none at all. Lyushkov indicated the way to the pedestrian crossing at the side of the railway bridge. Jones started walking and did not look back, not once. He waited until until he was certain he was more than halfway across the border when he started to run.
Somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Poland, he’d got the train guard to stop the train so that he could wire ahead, alerting the free spirits of the Berlin press corps – some still existed in 1933 – to his press conference the next day. When he had finished, he took a short-cut and hurried through the railway station buffet and saw a half-eaten sausage on an abandoned plate. He had not the seen the like of it in six months.
He was moving as fast as humanly possible but it took him a day and a night to cross Poland and enter Germany, the morning to get to the German capital. Arriving around noon, he discovered the old Berlin, the one he loved, had gone. In its stead was a city with Swastikas hanging from the station, from all the grand buildings, with loudspeakers at the street corners playing recordings of Herr Hitler’s speeches again and again. The manager of the Berlin press club, a Herr Schmidt, dapper, fastidious, greeted him fulsomely, too much so, and led him in to the conference room. Behind the dias where he was due to speak hung a Swastika flag.
A bell hop found him and gave him an envelope with his name on it. Recognising Evgenia’s handwriting, he was about to open it when something stopped him.
“Is everything in order, Mr Jones?” asked Herr Scmidt.
Jones placed the envelope in his jacket pocket and gestured at the Swastika.
“Take that away,” said Jones, flatly.
Schmidt thought about it for a few seconds, then nodded, and asked the bellhop to remove the flag.
The journalists started to arrive soon after. Once the room had filled up, Jones began: “In the Soviet Union, right now, as we speak, millions are dying of famine…”
At the end, questions.
The hardest one was asked by no-one he recognised: “Got any collateral for this famine story, Mr Jones? Any still photographs? Any film footage?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Why not?”
Silence.
“You’re saying millions are dying, Mr Jones. That’s a big claim. It’s your word against the entire Soviet Union. And you’ve got no photographs or film to back your story up?”
“That turned out not be be possible,” Jones said and his voice cracked, a little.
“But Mr Jones…”
“…there’s nothing more to say,” and he closed the press conference.
When he got to his hotel, he asked for a bottle of sleeping pills. In his room, he closed the curtains, undressed, took Evgenia’s envelope from his jacket and kissed it but did not open it and then took a fistful of pills and studied them in his hand. There were about twenty or so pills in his palm, gleaming dully in the light from the bedside lamp. His hand started to tremble. Then he threw the pills away and they pattered on the parquet floor. Stooping, he picked up only two and swallowed them and sluiced them down with a glass of water and closed his eyes and had his first proper sleep for time out of memory.
In the night he woke to a rustling sound. Someone was pushing a copy of a newspaper underneath the door of his hotel room. He hurried to the door, opened it and saw, just in time, a man in a black suit disappear down the corridor and take the stairs. Jones checked himself, closed the door and inspected the paper. It was the New York Times and it had given pride of place to a column by Walter Duranty. Jones got to the words: “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda” then ripped the newspaper into shreds.
He sat back on the edge of his bed and opened Evgenia’s envelope and started to read: