One Night in Winter

11

A FEW HUNDRED metres away, in the room behind the Lenin Mausoleum, an old man smiled, honey-coloured eyes glinting, his face creasing like that of a grizzled tiger.

‘You’re looking like a Tsarist station manager in your uniform,’ Stalin teased Andrei Vyshinsky, his Deputy Foreign Minister, a pink-cheeked, white-haired man who stood before him in a grey, gold-braided diplomatic uniform with a ceremonial dagger at its belt. ‘Who designed this foolish rig? Is that a dagger or a carving knife?’

‘It’s the new diplomatic uniform, Comrade Stalin,’ replied Vyshinsky, almost at attention, chest out.

‘You look like a head waiter,’ said Stalin, his eyes scanning the leaders who formed a semi-circle around him. Golden shoulderboards and gleaming braid, Kremlin tans and bulging bellies. ‘What a collection,’ he said. ‘Some of you are so fat, you hardly look human. Set an example. Eat less.’

Hercules Satinov, who stood to Stalin’s right in a colonel general’s uniform, was proud to stand beside the greatest man in the world to celebrate Russia’s victory. Stalin had promoted him, trusted him with challenging tasks in peace and war and he had never disappointed the Master. Stalin’s restless scrutiny of his comrades-in-arms was sometimes mocking, sometimes chilling – even Satinov had experienced it – but it was just one of the many methods Stalin had used to build Soviet Russia and defeat Hitler. Virtually the entire leadership was in this room. Every single man was pretending to talk – but actually they never took their eyes off him, and Satinov knew that Stalin was always aware of this. Now he felt Stalin’s gaze upon him.

‘Now look at Satinov here. Smart! That’s the ticket!’

‘He’s no more a soldier than me,’ Lavrenti Beria objected.

‘True, but at least Satinov has the figure for it, eh, bicho?’ Stalin gave everyone nicknames and he often called Satinov bicho – ‘boy’ in their native Georgian. ‘He looks like a Soviet man should look. Not like you, Vyshinsky.’ Stalin beamed at the sweating courtier, enjoying his discomfort – especially when Alexander Poskrebyshev, his chef-de-cabinet, a bald little fellow in a general’s uniform, crept up behind Vyshinsky, slipped the dagger out of its scabbard and replaced it with a small, green gherkin.

‘I think Vyshinsky needs to drink a forfeit, don’t you, comrades?’ asked Beria, the secret-police chief. Satinov did not like this bullying of Vyshinsky even though he was a craven reptile: sycophantic to superiors, fearsome to inferiors. He observed how Beria played up to Stalin, however. Beria’s glossy, braided Commissar-General of Security uniform ill suited his glinting pince-nez, grey-green cheeks and double chins.

‘But I have to be careful, I have a heart condition,’ pleaded Vyshinsky.

‘Comrade Vyshinsky, might you deign to join us in a toast to the Soviet soldier?’ said Stalin, as flunkies in dark blue uniforms filled all the glasses.

Stalin had drunk several vodkas earlier and Satinov could tell that he was slightly drunk – and why not? Today was his supreme moment. But the stress of the war – four years of sixteen-hour days – had visibly aged him. Satinov noticed that his hands shook, his skin was waxy with red spots on his cheeks; the grey hair resembled a spiked ice sculpture. He wondered if Stalin was ill but put that thought out of his mind. It was unthinkable; Stalin’s health was a secret; and the Master distrusted doctors even more than he distrusted women, Jews, capitalists and social democrats.

‘To Comrade Vyshinsky,’ Stalin announced. ‘And to our diplomats and our gherkin-growers who supplied our brave forces!’

The leaders guffawed at this and Vyshinsky, still wearing his scabbarded gherkin, joined in with oblivious enthusiasm, unsure what the joke might be.

Stalin was still smiling but he immediately noticed when the State Security Minister, Merkulov, who ran the secret police Organs, tentatively joined the outer edges of the circle.

‘Comrade Merkulov, welcome,’ said Stalin. ‘Haven’t they arrested you yet?’ He winked. It was a running joke.

Merkulov bowed but was hopelessly tongue-tied around Stalin. ‘C-c-congratulations… C-c-comrade Marshal Stalin.’

A silence inside, the hum of crowds and engines outside.

Stalin narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you reporting something?’

‘Yes, but n-n-nothing important… Should I report to Comrade Beria?’

‘Haven’t we shot you yet?’ teased Stalin since it was Merkulov’s ministry that was responsible for chernaya rabota – the black work, his euphemism for blood-letting. Stalin was not shy about that: killing was the quickest, most efficient way to accelerate the progress of history. ‘We must never lose our sense of humour,’ said Stalin with the tigerish grin, ‘eh, Comrade Merkulov?’

Merkulov mopped his brow and tried to laugh, but hurried across to brief his boss, Beria. Satinov had been waiting for just this gap in the conversation. He nodded at Marshal Shako, the stalwart air force commander. But the marshal hesitated. Even brave warriors were nervous around Stalin, and with good reason.

‘Go on,’ Satinov prompted him. The gruff commander saluted.

‘Permission to report! Comrade Marshal Stalin,’ Shako blurted, ‘I propose on behalf of the marshalate of the Soviet armed forces that you be promoted to the rank of generalissimo and receive the gold star of the Hero of the Soviet Union.’

‘No, no.’ Stalin waved this aside with his good arm; the other he kept stiffly by his side. ‘Comrade Stalin doesn’t need it. Comrade Stalin has authority without it. Some title you’ve thought up!’ Stalin, who had started to refer to himself in the third person, cast a black glance at Satinov and Beria. ‘Who cooked up this pantomime?’

‘The people demand it,’ replied Satinov.

Stalin suddenly paled and raised his hand to his forehead. He was having one of those dizzy spells that had become frequent at the end of the war. He stumbled forward and leaned against the wall, but it passed, and he dismissed the concerned frowns of his comrades. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. I’ll work another two years then retire.’

‘No, Comrade Stalin, that’s unthinkable!’ cried Beria.

‘I will let Molotov and Satinov run things,’ insisted Stalin.

‘No one could replace you,’ said Molotov urgently. ‘Certainly not me.’

‘Nor me. We need you!’ added Satinov. His comrades, whether in marshal’s stars or Stalinka tunics, repeated this, outdoing each other in enthusiasm. ‘You’re everything to us! Indispensable! Retirement is out of the question!’

Stalin’s honey-coloured eyes scrutinized them, but he said nothing. He pulled a pack of Herzegovina Flor cigarettes out of his pocket. ‘Bicho!’

Satinov lit it.

‘Generalissimo?’ murmured Stalin. ‘It makes me sound like a South American dictator. Comrade Stalin doesn’t need it, doesn’t need it at all.’

‘The people demand you accept this rank,’ insisted Satinov.

‘Ten million soldiers insist,’ said Marshal Shako. Marshals Zhukov and Konev, the most famous army commanders, forming a bull-necked human rampart of shoulderboards and medals behind him, nodded gravely.

‘What liberties you take with an old man!’ Stalin said, almost to himself, closing his eyes as he inhaled.

‘We have to do something,’ said Beria. The courtier knows when the king wishes him to disobey, Satinov thought. Stalin was weakening.

‘It’s not good for my health at all,’ said Stalin. ‘As for the gold star, I’ve never commanded in battle.’

‘But I have the gold star, right here,’ said Satinov, drawing a little box out of his pocket. ‘May I present it?’

‘No!’ Stalin held up his hand, the cigarette between the fingers. ‘That, I won’t accept.’

Satinov looked across at the other leaders, Molotov and Beria. What to do? He put it back in his pocket.

‘Fuck it! He’ll accept in the end like he accepted the generalissimo title,’ Beria whispered.

‘We’ll find a way to give it to him,’ Molotov, formal in his dark bourgeois suit, agreed.

Beria stepped closer to Stalin. ‘Josef Vissarionovich,’ said Beria, ‘may I report?’

‘What, even today? Can’t you decide anything without consulting me?’

‘We all wish we could, Comrade Stalin, but it’s something a little out of the ordinary.’

The wily old conspirator inhaled his cigarette wearily. Satinov wondered what it was. It was often better not to know the black work Stalin discussed with Beria. Yet even as the two stepped back slightly, Satinov could still hear some of their conversation.

‘There’s been a strange event on the Kammeny Most. A schoolboy and schoolgirl have been killed. Just thirty minutes ago.’

‘So?’

‘They are both pupils at School 801.’

‘School 801?’ replied Stalin, a degree more interested. ‘The finishing school for little barons? My Vasily and Svetlana were there.’

‘Some of them were in fancy-dress costume, Josef Vissarionovich.’

‘What on earth were they doing?’

‘We’ll find out imminently. We haven’t identified the dead yet but initial reports mention the involvement of the children of “responsible Party workers”.’ Satinov took a quick breath. ‘Responsible workers’ was the euphemism for the leadership.

Stalin focused like a diving hawk. ‘Who?’

‘Some of the parents are in this room. Comrade Satinov, Marshal Shako, Comrade Dorov…’

Stalin shook his head. ‘Fancy dress, you say? We let our guard down during the war. This could be the work of our enemies abroad – or of the children themselves.’ He held up a single finger as straight as a tallow candle. ‘No little princelings are above Soviet justice. Everyone knows how I demoted my Vasily for behaving like a spoilt aristocrat. Solve the case. If it’s murder, heads must roll.’

‘Right, I’ll get to work,’ said Beria, backing away from Stalin and leaving the room.

Satinov felt the hand of fear clutch his heart: what role did his children play in this? What if George or Marlen or Mariko lay dead on the bridge?

But Stalin was strolling back towards him and Satinov saw that he was bristling and bushy-tailed again, a satyr refreshed by the macabre excitement of conspiracy. His eyes twinkled roguishly.

‘How’s your family?’ Stalin asked. Satinov concealed his worries with all the arctic expertise of a veteran of Stalin’s world. There would be time later to find out what happened on the bridge.

12

JUST BEFORE 7 p.m., Sophia Zeitlin and her husband Constantin Romashkin climbed the steps to the Georgievsky Hall. The dinner to celebrate victory would be her moment to shine and be admired – but that depended on her table placement. The fifteen hundred guests crowded nervously around the table plans on boards outside; a seat near Stalin endowed the lucky ones with an almost visible halo; those seated furthest away could scarcely hide the shadow of disappointment.

‘Darling, that dress will dazzle everyone,’ said Dashka Dorova, kissing Sophia and Constantin. Many were quick to criticize Sophia for un-Bolshevik vulgarity but she knew that Dashka was a real friend who wished her well.

‘I have to give the public what they expect.’

‘Well, your dress certainly does that,’ said Dashka.

‘I love your dress too. That cream colour really suits you, and the pleated skirt shows off your curves,’ said Sophia, who also meant it. ‘I have to tart myself up a bit, but you always look so chic and professional. You are our most glamorous minister!’ She hesitated, and then gave her deep throaty laugh. ‘But that’s hardly a compliment when you see the rest of them!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Dashka laughed away the compliments and started to peruse the table plans. ‘Ah, there I am. Not too bad. I’m on the Council of Ministers’ table.’ She looked at her husband. ‘How about you, Genrikh?’

Genrikh looked pasty and irritable. ‘I’m nowhere near the Politburo,’ he said glumly.

‘No one will notice, dear,’ Dashka said, patting his arm. But Sophia knew that everyone noticed such things and she certainly liked her own placement. Her husband was placed with the editors of the Red Army newspaper, even further away than Genrikh, but she was on the Politburo table.

The leaders hadn’t arrived yet and she could feel everyone looking at her as she put a cigarette in her holder and Marshal Shako lit it.

A hush; then a collective intake of breath: Stalin had entered with the Politburo. The entire Georgievsky Hall jumped to its feet and shouted ‘Urrah! Urrah!’ and cheered for so long that Stalin himself first waved at them to sit down, then clapped back at them and finally became cross, ordering them to stop. But no one would stop. Stalin sat down at the table next to Sophia’s between Marshal Shako and Molotov, and, shrugging modestly, looked a little embarrassed until the cheering subsided.

Sophia could not take her eyes off Stalin. As an actress she noticed how he seemed to change before her eyes, walking sometimes with quick little movements, occasionally like a clumsy goose, often more like a stealthy panther.

She was sitting between Satinov and Mikoyan, the most courteous and elegant of the leaders, who were, as a rule, uncouth and dreary. When she looked around, she saw most of them sported the telltale archipelago of red spots on their cheeks, the signs of alcoholism and arteriosclerosis. She noticed the gruesome Beria making eyes at her across the table.

‘I wish he would look at someone else,’ she whispered to Satinov.

‘You are dressed to be admired,’ replied Satinov, who seemed to Sophia to be uncharacteristically tense. ‘Wasn’t Serafima meeting with her Pushkin club friends tonight on the Stone Bridge?’

‘I think so, but I never know where she goes these days,’ Sophia said with a sigh.

‘We know less about our children than we think,’ Satinov agreed. ‘It worries me.’

‘And they know even less about us! Thank God!’ And Sophia laughed huskily.

Twenty stodgy courses – blinis and caviar, borscht with cream, beef Stroganoff, sturgeon, suckling pig, Georgian wines and Crimean champagne, brandy and vodka – were served by the waiters Sophia recognized from the Aragvi as well as the Metropole and National Hotels.

Stalin stood. Silence fell. He spoke in his Georgian tenor, surprisingly high and soft, toasting the Russian people ‘without whom none of us marshals and commanders would be worth a damn!’ Then he turned to the generals, starting with Marshal Zhukov, whom he invited to come and clink glasses with him. Sophia noticed that Stalin downed his glass of vodka at each toast, and guessed that his carafe was full of water.

When he toasted Admiral Isakov, Satinov whispered to Sophia: ‘How’s Isakov going to walk all that way?’ – Isakov had lost his leg in the war – but Stalin seemed to know where the admiral was sitting for he threaded through the tables to the far end of the hall and clinked glasses with him there.

‘That’s so touching!’ Sophia said.

Ten, twenty, forty toasts were drunk, and she lost count until suddenly, surprisingly, it was her turn.

‘Sophia Zeitlin!’ The breath left her body and she felt quite alone in the magnificent hall. ‘Your beauty inspired our soldiers in dark times!’

Somehow she walked over to him, fifteen feet that seemed like a mile. Stalin kissed her hand: ‘Katyusha!’ he toasted. ‘An example to all Soviet womankind.’ How he had aged during the war, she thought as he stood before her. A paunchy old man, grey, grizzled, his skin yellow with pinpricks of red in his cheeks. But what a fine, noble head, what eyes.

When the toasts were over, Stalin and the Politburo filed out but Sophia realized she would never be able to sleep after so much wine, vodka and excitement. She couldn’t go home. She wanted to go on for a nightcap. Marshal Shako winked at her. And then she remembered Satinov’s tension, his question about Serafima, and, as a woman who listened to her instincts, she called for her driver and told him to hurry home.

Serafima was still in her blue dress with the white Peter Pan collar when Sophia and Constantin came in.

‘Mama!’

‘Aren’t you going to ask who toasted your mother tonight?’ Sophia started, but then she saw her daughter’s face. ‘What is it?’

‘Sit down and tell us,’ suggested Constantin, joining Serafima on the sofa and taking her hand. Sophia had to admit he was good at moments like this.

Sophia poured herself a cognac and lit a cigarette: ‘Come on, darling,’ she said, ‘You know nothing shocks me! I’m an actress, for God’s sake.’

‘Let her speak, Sophia,’ Constantin told her.

Then out it came – the Game, the bridge, the gunshots and the two dead children.

‘Oh my God,’ said Sophia, shocked yet relieved that Serafima was safe. ‘I always thought Nikolasha Blagov was a maniac. But dear Rosa, and her poor parents. What on earth were they doing?’

‘The Organs are investigating,’ Serafima said, wiping her eyes. ‘I just can’t believe that Rosa—’

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ said Sophia, looking at her husband to see if he was as worried as she was. She leaned over and put both her hands on Serafima’s face as if to keep her safe, and then straightened up and started to pace the floor. ‘I’m so sad about sweet Rosa but… Stalin kissed my hand tonight. You will be safe. No one would dare touch Sophia Zeitlin’s daughter!’

‘I wish that were true,’ said Constantin, kissing both Serafima’s hands. ‘How I wish that were true.’

Satinov didn’t get home until 4 a.m. the next morning. Stalin had invited him back to the Nearby Dacha after the dinner. The drinking had seemed interminable. All the time he’d been worrying about the children and Tamara.

She was waiting for him as he opened the front door.

‘You know what happened, don’t you?’ she asked.

He nodded.

‘Those poor children,’ she said. ‘And oh, their mothers! I can’t bear to think what they must be going through.’

‘Tell me what you know,’ he said, and listened carefully. ‘Tamriko, I fear our boys have been foolish.’

Tamara sank wearily on to the divan. ‘I noticed the clique at school; we all did. And I warned George not to get mixed up with it. But, oh Hercules, they’re just children.’

‘It will probably be fine,’ he said, looking down at her in his serious way.

Tamriko – he always used the Georgian diminutive – was blonde with green-brown eyes and the most perfectly delicate bone structure. When he held her body in his arms, she felt vulnerable and soft as a little bird. Bolshevik wives were expected to work and he admired her career as a teacher at School 801. When he had wanted to bring his four grown-up sons by his late first wife up from Georgia, she had agreed, treating them as if they were her own. He couldn’t do without her, and the cosy household she’d created in her own image.

‘Hercules, what will come of this?’ she whispered.

He looked at her with unwavering vigilance in his cool, grey eyes that she understood meant that the apartment was probably bugged. But he could imagine a number of different scenarios including one in which everything was fine. ‘Can you speak to the children now? They’re terrified of what you’re going to say to them.’

‘It’s the middle of the night.’

‘But they’re still wide awake.’

He sighed and stood up. ‘Boys!’ he called out.

Seconds later, George and Marlen were standing in their pyjamas, almost at attention, in front of their father, who, still in his general’s uniform, himself stood rigidly upright, framed by the martial portrait of Stalin behind him. He was exhausted but, as he now examined his sons, flushed with the night and very anxious – the cheeky, genial George and the conventional, serious Marlen – he saw they were still really children, shocked by this tragedy, mourning their friends. He felt such love for them that suddenly it was all he could do not to take them into his arms.

‘You’ve been very stupid, you little fools,’ he said, knowing he had to be stern. It was his way, and he knew no other. ‘Tamriko’s told me what happened. If you’ve anything to do with this mess, I’ll strangle you myself. Now: bed and sleep!’

‘Thank you, Papa,’ said George.

‘Good night, Papa,’ said Marlen, who appeared to be fighting back tears.

Tamara followed them to their rooms and, making a calm sign with two open hands, she let them each know that it was over and their father was no longer cross. Then she kissed them both on the forehead as if they were still little.

When she came back to Satinov, he was sitting on the divan. He lit a cigarette and she sat next to him and patted her knee. ‘Come on then,’ she said, and he raised his legs on to her lap and she helped pull off his boots, unclicked his holster, unbuttoned his tunic.

When they went to bed, she went to sleep quickly for she found sleeping easy and it had been quite a day and an even more stressful night. But he lay with his eyes open playing out the possibilities, until the first birdsong of dawn.

13

‘CHILDREN, PLEASE!’ SAID Director Medvedeva the next morning, tapping the rostrum with her baton after the singing of ‘Thank You, Comrade Stalin’. Tap, tap. ‘As you all know, the school has suffered a tragic incident. We’ve lost two of our pupils. However, we Soviet people are strong. We have suffered much in the Great Patriotic War but the Great Stalin has taught us that toughness is a Bolshevik virtue. We are no different here at School 801. We are agreed’ – and here she looked down the row of teachers, and Dr Rimm, Teacher Golden and Miss Begbulatova nodded vigorously – ‘there’ll be no wailing here, no bourgeois sentiment. The self-indulgent folly of misguided youth is nothing compared to the sacrifices of our Soviet peoples.’

She was about to dismiss her pupils to their classes when the doors at the back of the gym swung open.

‘Can we help you, comrades?’ she asked, acutely aware of the slight tremor in her voice.

With the sound of dropped satchels and dragged chairs echoing on the gym’s wooden floor, the children turned around too, and their eyes grew wide. Three men in tidy blue suits stood at the back with the air of purpose, urgency and fearlessness that they all recognized. Absolute silence fell as the men walked down the aisle of the hall, looking into the faces of the children until they reached Vlad Titorenko, instantly recognizable with his white face and long black hair.

‘Titorenko, Vladimir?’ asked one of the men.

Vlad opened his mouth and tried to say yes but no sound came.

‘Come with us!’ But he could not move so the men lifted him under his arms and dragged him out. As they left, one of them turned back towards the teachers on the raised platform. ‘Carry on, comrade director,’ he called, and then they were gone down the corridor. Everyone could hear Titorenko’s sobs.

The children rushed to the windows and there, outside the Golden Gates, they saw Vlad being pushed into a grey Pobeda car, which drove off with the skidding of tyres.

There was an ominous calm in the staff common room during lunch break. Antique Dr Noodelman dozed in the deep armchair, but everyone else was only pretending to read their newspapers and mark their essays.

Golden looked over the top of his copy of Pushkin’s stories at Agrippina Begbulatova, who was, as usual, brewing the chai in the Chinese teapot. He was not considering the silkiness of her thighs and the intoxicating taste of her excitement on his lips in spite of the deaths and Vlad’s arrest that morning but, on the contrary, even more intensely because of them.

Agrippina had the essential gifts for achieving happiness in life, and there was none greater than her boundless capacity for pleasure. Benya had long since realized that in sex, as in life, intelligence and technique counted for nothing; the capacity for pleasure was everything. She always said: ‘You’re old’ – Benya was forty-seven – ‘and I’m young so I must marry soon. But when I’m married, will you still fuck me once a month?’

Once again, the darkness had stepped closer to him. Golden, who had known unbearable torments already, knew that he had to enjoy the proximity of sensual joy while he still could. But actually he needed no excuse. He found himself entangled in delicious flirtations wherever he went, and since even at the best of times he suffered from Jewish fatalism and rampaging hypochondria, always believing death was imminent, he seized every opportunity with boyish enthusiasm.

When he heard the humming of ‘Comrade Stalin, thank you for…’, he turned towards the door. Dr Rimm came in, sat at the table and started to smooth out the crumpled pages of Komsomolsky Pravda. Then he threw it down and said: ‘Comrades and citizens, if I may have your attention. I need to say something.’

Do you? thought Benya Golden. I wish you wouldn’t.

‘In the light of the arrest of our pupil, I propose a vote – a unanimous show of support – for our esteemed director, Comrade Medvedeva, for the way in which she has run the Josef Stalin School 801.’ All the teachers raised their hands in agreement.

As Golden passed Agrippina in the corridor afterwards, he whispered: ‘Unanimous vote of support from Dr Rimm – now we know Director Medvedeva is in trouble.’

And she whispered: ‘Later, Benochka?’

That afternoon: frantic knocking on the door of the Satinovs’ apartment. When Leka the maid answered it, Irina Titorenka almost fell into the lobby and ran straight into the arms of Tamara Satinova. She was crying hysterically and seemed to be trying to get to Hercules Satinov’s study.

Tamara stopped Irina before she could burst through the double glass doors and led her into the kitchen, sitting her at the table and offering her some Georgian delicacies. Like Jewesses, Georgian housewives regard food as the best cure for unhappiness, and the sweetmeats earned Tamara a respite – but not for long.

‘I saw everyone at pick-up,’ Irina sobbed. ‘The children came out. But not mine. Then I’m told by Director Medvedeva: Vlad’s been with the Organs since nine a.m. No one rang me. No one knows where he is, or what he’s done. No one knows anything. What can I do? Comrade Stalin loves children. Comrade Stalin will put things right.’ Shouting now: ‘Tamara, I must ring Comrade Stalin!’

Tamara was sitting next to Irina. ‘Have you called your husband?’

‘Yes, yes, he’s distraught. He’s trying to ring Comrade Beria, anyone, but no one will take his calls. That’s why I came here. Comrade Satinov is my husband’s boss: no one is closer to Comrade Stalin than he is. Comrade Satinov will speak to Comrade Stalin, won’t he? Say he will!’

Tamara chose her words carefully: ‘The Organs only act with good reason, and the good reason in this case is that they are simply investigating the deaths of poor Nikolasha Blagov and Rosa Shako. That’s all. Your boy will tell them what he knows and then they will release him. You must calm down, Irina.’

‘No, no, they’ll beat him. He’s very sensitive and vulnerable. Anyone can see that. He could kill himself. They could kill him.’

‘No, that couldn’t happen.’

‘But they’re capable of anything. We both know this. I must speak to your husband. I know he’s here. He must call Comrade Stalin!’

Tamara took both of Irina’s hands and squeezed them hard. ‘Stay here. Quietly. I will speak to my husband now.’

As she said it, Tamara’s voice almost cracked. Hercules himself had gone to pick up the children that day. He planned to do so every day until the case had blown over. He’d told her that pick-up at the Golden Gates was buzzing with the news of Vlad’s arrest and gossip about Nikolasha’s weird games. But there was nothing particularly sinister about the Organs’ questioning of Vlad, he’d said. The deaths had to be investigated and Vlad was Nikolasha and Rosa’s best friend. There was nothing to worry about.

‘Hercules?’ Tamara said, softly knocking on the door, and coming in.

‘I’m working, Tamara.’

‘Irina Titorenka is here. She’s hysterical. She wants your help to appeal to the… the highest authority.’

Satinov raised his eyes from his papers and shook his head very slightly. ‘Take her for a walk in the yard and give her some advice. Tell her to trust in Soviet justice. That’s all.’

Tamara kissed the top of his head and was hurrying back to the kitchen when she saw George and Marlen peering down the corridor at Irina Titorenka, who was blowing her nose.

‘What’s going on, Mama?’ demanded George.

‘Is that Vlad’s mother?’ asked Marlen.

‘Hush! To your rooms – or your father will have something to say.’ And they were gone.

A few minutes later Tamara led Irina Titorenka downstairs to the yard. Losha Babanava and the other bodyguards were down there smoking. A couple of old people, Molotov’s aunt and Politburo member Andreyev’s father, in shorts and a string vest, were sitting in the sun playing chess. They knew. All of them whispered to each other when they saw the distraught mother.

When they could not be overheard, Tamara placed her hands on Irina’s shoulders. ‘Now listen to me,’ she said. ‘I know this is worrying. But you must say nothing of this to anyone. Do not ever mention Comrade Stalin. Never try to call him or any other leader. That will only delay Vlad’s release. The Organs will inform you of Vlad’s whereabouts when they’re ready. Take your younger child to school. Everyone is watching you. My husband says you must put your faith in Soviet justice. Do you understand me?’

But when Irina was gone, Tamara noticed that her own hands were shaking.

14

‘WHAT WAS YOUR role in the criminal conspiracy to murder the two schoolchildren Nikolasha Blagov and Rosa Shako?’

‘Conspiracy? Murder? I don’t understand.’ It was early the following morning, and Vlad was sitting in a grey room at a Formica table with a single light.

‘Let’s start again shall we? Your name?’

‘Vladimir Ivanovich Titorenko.’

‘Age?’

‘Seventeen and nine months.’

‘I am Pavel Mogilchuk. Special Case Section, Ministry of State Security, understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come on, Vlad, stop crying,’ Mogilchuk said, handing him a handkerchief. Vlad looked at him, at his round spectacles and reddish hair with a touch of grey. He looked a little like a teacher. ‘I know it’s been a tough couple of days and you’re worried but I want to reassure you.’

‘But I want to see my mother. Does she know where I am…?’

‘Do you know where you are, Vlad?’

Vlad’s romantic locks had been cropped, and without them, his face seemed long and forlorn. He shook his head.

‘It’s a state secret, boy, but I’ll tell you: you’re in Lubianka Inner Prison, Dzerzhinsky Square. Was it very frightening arriving?’ Vlad nodded. ‘It’s scary being processed here, stripped and searched inside and photographed. But it’s just routine. How did you sleep?’

‘They wouldn’t let me sleep. They kept the light on; they woke me up; they made me put my hands on top of the covers. I couldn’t sleep. Where’s my mother?’

Mogilchuk leaned forward across the plain table and re-directed the light so it was not shining into Vlad’s eyes. ‘Come on, boy. Show some Bolshevik toughness! I’m going to ask you questions and you’ll answer everything in full. Don’t lie about anything. If you lie, that will be worse for you. If you tell the truth about everything, you’ll go home soon. OK?’

Vlad nodded.

‘What was your role in the conspiracy to murder Nikolasha and Rosa?’

‘What conspiracy?’

‘Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? Or you’ll never go home.’

Vlad took a sharp breath, and looked at his hands. ‘Nikolasha Blagov had a club and he liked to play something called the Game.’

‘The Game? What was that? Whites and Reds? Cossacks and Tartars? Soccer?’

‘No, we dressed up in costumes.’

‘So it’s a theatre group?’

‘Yes, we pretended to be Pushkin…’

‘Go on,’ said Mogilchuk. ‘I understand. I’m a writer myself. We Russians love poetry, do we not?’

Vlad nodded. ‘We played characters from Onegin.’

‘What could be more normal than that?’ Mogilchuk opened his hands. ‘Where did you meet? At school?’

‘No. We usually met in the graveyard in the Sparrow Hills.’

‘The graveyard? Why?’

‘Because it was a secret club.’

‘And did this club have a name?’

‘Yes, the Fatal Romantics’ Club.’

‘And what did you do at these secret meetings?’

‘We talked about romanticism. Poetry.’

‘And politics?’

‘No.’

‘There’s something missing here. Come on, think!’ Mogilchuk clicked his fingers. ‘How did it go from poetry play-acting to the shooting of two children?’

Vlad gave a loud and unexpected sob. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘You were Nikolasha’s deputy in the club, weren’t you? So what did you debate?’

‘Love. Death. Nikolasha said that if you could not live with love, it was better to die. Like Pushkin.’

‘Did Rosa mention death?’

‘No.’

‘Would you say it was likely that they’d agreed to a suicide pact?’

‘No. Never!’

‘Would you say it is possible that Nikolasha killed her and then himself?’

Vlad’s face was in his hands. ‘I don’t know.’

‘That evening on the Stone Bridge, did you see them close up?’

‘No.’

‘You’re lying.’

The door flew open as if kicked in, and a lieutenant general of State Security entered the room. The word ‘swagger’ might have been invented for this bull of a man, thought Vlad miserably. He seemed too bulging, too bright, too big to be real. An array of precious rings sat on fingers as fat and hairy as grubs. And Vlad thought that the muscles of his arms, let alone his legs in their striped britches, seemed as thick as his waist.

‘Comrade Kobylov!’ Mogilchuk stood to attention.

‘Sorry to interrupt your gentle chat.’ Kobylov brought his fleshy, olive-skinned face very close to Vlad. He was wearing an eye-wateringly strong cologne and smelled of cloves. ‘I warn you, if you lie to me, you may never get out of here. No matter who the fuck your parents are!’ He smashed his fist on to the table, and Vlad jumped with fright.

‘So Nikolasha shot Rosa?’ Kobylov said.

‘If you say so, maybe. Yes.’

‘Where was the gun?’

‘I never saw it!’

Kobylov rolled his eyes at Mogilchuk. ‘He never saw a gun!’ he imitated Vlad in a girlish intellectual voice. ‘You’ll spit it out in the end.’ He ruffled Vlad’s hair and chuckled. ‘Mogilchuk, a word!’

The two MGB officers stepped outside. General Bogdan ‘Bull’ Kobylov was Beria’s right-hand man, and Colonel Mogilchuk, standing to attention in his blue shoulderboards and tunic, hurried to light Kobylov’s cigarette.

‘Comrade colonel,’ Kobylov said, ‘remember Comrade Beria’s orders?’

‘A murder. A conspiracy. To be solved without regard to rank or position. The very words of the Instantsiya.’ Mogilchuk paused. ‘But they’re just kids.’

‘You milksop! You’re getting soft. There are two children with gunshot wounds on Professor Schpigelglaz’s slab right now down at the Kremlevka. And not just any teenagers either. Did you ever hear about the Lakoba case in Georgia?’

Mogilchuk pretended that he hadn’t.

‘Well, I’ve got some experience of working with kids,’ said Kobylov modestly. Comrades Beria and Kobylov had killed the Abkhazian leader Lakoba and then they had inflicted unspeakable torments on his young sons, but they couldn’t be executed until they were twelve so they were kept alive. On the day they celebrated their twelfth birthdays, Kobylov shot one and beat the other to death. ‘Comrade Stalin says, “You can’t make a revolution with silk gloves,”’ he went on. ‘But so far the order is: no French wrestling, and that suits me. I don’t want to hurt a bunch of kids either.’

‘So what do you suggest, comrade general? Should we wait for Schpigelglaz’s post-mortem?’

‘The Instantsiya wants this solved fast, Mogilchuk. It’s obvious what happened. Let’s just tie it up quickly and get on with some real work.’ Kobylov took a drag on his cigarette and then kicked open the interrogating-room door.

Vlad, startled, recoiled, knocking his chair over backwards and crouching in the far corner.

‘Hey, easy now! Not so jumpy, eh? Come on. Sit down again.’ Kobylov coaxed Vlad back into his chair. ‘Who else was in this poetry-reading, transvestite, cock-sucking, arse-licking, Pushkin-duelling strip club?’

‘It wasn’t like that at all, I promise!’

‘Look, just cough up the names and you can go home. Who helped Nikolasha plan the murder? Or did he do it alone?’

Satinov’s bodyguard, Losha, collected George from the football game later that evening.

‘What’s news, Losha?’ George asked anxiously as he got into the car.

‘On the shooting case? Nothing yet. Chinese saying: Never worry worry until worry worries you!’

George nodded. ‘How are you, Losha?’

‘Sizzling, son. Now, have you kissed that girl yet?’ He accelerated through the traffic in the Packard.

‘Which girl?’

‘Minka Dorova, you sissy. She’s your girl, ain’t she?’

‘Well, I suppose so, but I haven’t kissed her.’

‘What are you, a sissy or a man?’ Losha boomed. ‘She’s longing for a Georgian man. You can tell by the way she’s always looking around under those long black eyelashes. It’s time you kissed her. Now you’ve got to kiss her tonight. Or I’ll… shave off half my moustaches in protest!’

‘You’re joking, Losha!’

‘No, I swear. Everyone will say, “Losha, where’re your whiskers,” and I’ll tell ’em what a sissy you are. Ask her for a walk in Sokolniki Park. Give her a full meal. With girls, a full stomach goes straight between their legs. Kerboosh! Like a train when you put coal in the furnace. The train builds up steam and, kerboosh, it toots its whistle! Add a few shots of cognac. Losha knows. Call her now.’

George thought for a few moments. Losha was right. He did like Minka. He dreamed of her. It was now or never. ‘Drop me off at the House on the Embankment.’

‘Kerboosh! Attaboy!’

George, still in his Spartak football strip and white shorts, watched the limousine speed away across the bridge. He peered up at the eighth floor of the eastern wing of the modernist complex beside the Moskva. The lights burned in the Dorov apartment. He prayed Minka’s father, the Uncooked Chicken, wouldn’t answer: with any luck he would be at Old Square bullying his staff as usual. And surely her mother Dr Dorova was at the Kremlin Clinic? Ludmilla the housekeeper would be cooking supper for Senka, Demian and his own adorable Minka. He picked up the phone in the public phone booth, listening to it ringing, then he dropped the kopeck in.

‘I’m listening.’ Victory! Minka’s voice, soft as the buzz of a bumblebee.

‘What’s news? It’s George. My parents are driving me mad about… about the case. What about you?’

‘Same here. Papa says the club was un-Bolshevik, a bourgeois heresy. He thinks everything’s a conspiracy. But Mama says that’s nonsense. The school’s seething with rumours. It’s ridiculous! Shall we ask Andrei and Serafima to join us somewhere? I called Andrei earlier, and said we might…’

George panicked suddenly. Losha would have to shave off half his moustaches. Courage!

‘No, let’s just be the two of us tonight. There’s so much to discuss.’

A pause. Had she guessed? ‘Oh, all right. Are you inviting me to supper?’

George made a thumbs-up: Kerboosh! A full stomach!

‘I’m at the phone on the embankment. Looking up at your window. How about meeting in the usual place?’

‘Give me ten minutes. I’d better put on a nice frock. See you soon!’

With his back against the phone box, George settled down to wait. Not long now.

Minka came out of the lobby of the House on the Embankment in a red summer dress that she knew she looked good in. But as she stepped into the breezy evening air, two men in suits took her arms with such smooth momentum that she found herself sitting between them in the back of a boxy Volga, the car of the middle bureaucracy, before she had even had time to say anything.

‘What’s this? Who are you?’ she whimpered as the car sped into the night.

The man in the passenger seat turned round. ‘Just a few questions,’ he said. ‘You’ll be back for your hot date before you know it.’

Across the street, the boy in the Spartak football strip standing next to a public telephone had seen it all.

‘Minka! No,’ said George, as he too was almost lifted off his feet and guided into a little Emeka car. As it accelerated into the traffic and crossed the river, he kept saying to himself: Losha will have to shave off his moustaches… This was just about the deaths on the bridge, he told himself a few minutes later. He had nothing to hide. The Organs had to investigate it, and he would answer all their questions.

But if it was so straightforward, why was he so afraid? Why was his football shirt soaked with sweat? And why was he worried for Minka too? Surely his father would get him out soon enough. Then he remembered overhearing his father say to his stepmother: ‘At this rate, I’ll have to take them and pick them up every day until this blows over.’ George had often heard them whispering behind the doors of the bathroom and though the main part of the conversation was always inaudible, it virtually always ended with the words: ‘Say nothing to anyone. Carry on as normal.’

His heart was thudding in his ears. This could only mean one thing: his father would do nothing.

High in his kommunalka apartment, Andrei was planning the evening. Losha was on his way to pick him up, and then he would meet up with George and his friends.

‘Have fun,’ said his mother. ‘But be careful too. Watch your tongue.’

‘Don’t be silly, Mama. See you soon.’

But when he went downstairs, it wasn’t Losha at the wheel, but another driver entirely.

‘Hop in, boy,’ said the driver. ‘We’ll have you with your friends sooner than you think.’

‘But this isn’t the way to Granovsky Street,’ said Andrei, five minutes later, as the car swept into Dzerzhinsky Square where the buildings seemed like colossal granite tombs.

‘You’re not going to Granovsky Street,’ replied the driver.

Andrei closed his eyes for a moment and experienced the terrifying feeling of falling into an abyss without end.

‘You’re not surprised, are you, kid?’ asked the driver.

Andrei shook his head. He was not sure he could have spoken even if he had wanted to. He felt the joints in his arms and legs were made of jelly and his blood ice cold.

‘My…’ He could not say it.

‘Your mother? She’ll be fine. After all, she’s used to this, isn’t she?’

The Aragvi Restaurant that night. Maître d’ Longuinoz escorted Sophia Zeitlin and some of her friends from the Mosfilm Studios to her favourite table just below the band. He held her wrist a second longer than necessary: he knew something important.

‘Go right ahead to the table,’ she called to her friends. ‘Order me a cosmopolitan.’ As she lingered beside the maître d’, Longuinoz whispered: ‘More on holiday. Up the hill.’

‘Up the hill? How many? Who?’ she replied breathlessly, her mouth close to his ear with its pearl earring.

‘One Yak fighter plane. Second model. Check-up at the local doctors. Two o’clock appointment.’

Her heart raced: ‘Oh God,’ understanding his code instantly.

On holiday meant arrested. Up the hill was Lubianka Prison. Yaks were the brand of fighter plane built in Satinovgrad. Therefore ‘Yak’ was Satinov. ‘Second model’ meant second son – George. ‘Local doctors’ – Dr Dorova. ‘Two o’clock’: second child, i.e. Minka.

Sophia guessed that Longuinoz knew this because he performed discreet favours for the Chekist ‘responsible workers’, favours no doubt involving food, girls and information. He was safe provided the information only went one way.

Longuinoz raised two hands as if to say: Sorry, but it’s routine. As he showed her to the table, he whispered, ‘A bit of advice, Sophia. Pull your horns in, darling!’

That night, Sophia could not eat her food. Would this touch her Serafima? she thought. They say I’m Stalin’s top actress and he loves Constantin’s scripts. Or am I believing my own publicity? Comrade Satinov is Stalin’s favourite and that hasn’t protected George. Stalin demoted his son Vasily and disowned his other boy Yakov when he was captured by the Germans. The lesson? The shooting would be investigated, whoever was involved. And she could not help but remember those terrible years at the end of the 1930s when her beloved cousin Sashenka had vanished with her husband and children, vanished off the face of the earth.

She thought about her own life: her love affairs, her wartime movies, her hotbloodedness inherited from her incorrigible father, her addiction to those intrigues that made bearable the daily grind of the worthy institution that was marriage. But what if they arrested Serafima? Could she bear it?

15

THE SCHOOL RUN: eight fifteen the next morning. In the car park at Granovsky, Sophia Zeitlin got into the Rolls with Serafima.

‘Why do you have to come? I hate you coming.’ Serafima frowned at her mother. ‘It’s embarrassing enough to be in this car.’

‘I’m just doing my maternal duty,’ answered Sophia. She was dreading the scenes at the school gates. ‘Look! There’re the Satinovs.’

They watched Hercules and Tamara Satinov get into their car with Marlen and Mariko. Tamara looked terrible. She had black circles around her eyes, her skin seemed tight across her narrow cheekbones – and the poor woman now had to teach classes in which her own stepson’s chair was empty.

Serafima looked at her mother urgently. ‘Where’s George? Mama, you know something, don’t you?’

‘Good morning, Khirochenko,’ Sophia said loudly to their chauffeur. They drove on in silence.

At the Golden Gates, Sophia read the parents and the missing children in a glance. The other parents moved too quickly, too skittishly, looking around but afraid of what they might find. Whose child had vanished into the maw of the Organs? The small crowd outside the school gates, formerly so fashionable and sociable, seemed suddenly despondent and doom-laden.

She met Hercules Satinov on his way out, Tamara having taken the children in with her.

‘Hercules!’ said Sophia. ‘Aren’t we good parents dropping off our children so dutifully!’

‘Duty. My second name,’ replied Satinov.

The Titorenkos passed them, greeting Sophia and Satinov.

‘Yes, comrades, a beautiful day, isn’t it?’ Satinov responded.

Sophia tried to imagine how the Titorenkos must be feeling, and realized that their apparent warmth was a mixture of solidarity and relief. Now that the Satinovs and Dorovs were in the same boat, their Vlad was no longer alone.

Sophia stood in the queue to shake hands with Director Medvedeva. The Dorovs were just ahead – with Demian and little Senka but no Minka. Dashka wore no make-up and her black hair was pulled back in a bun but she still looked lovely in a loose flowery blouse, and she had the chutzpah to chatter frivolously as if nothing was wrong.

‘Doesn’t the banquet seem an age ago,’ said Sophia.

‘Several lifetimes,’ answered Dashka, bustling around her children. ‘Now, did I remember all those textbooks? Every day there’s more and more to remember! They want me to organize a charity quiz night. They seem to have forgotten that I have my own work to do. Oh, Demian, did I forget the maths homework? Right, off you go.’

Dashka usually just gave Demian a peck but today she hugged him.

‘Get off, Mama.’ The seventeen-year-old wriggled out of her arms. ‘You’re like a boa constrictor.’

‘Oh dear,’ sighed Dashka. ‘I got that wrong.’

‘You can kiss me as much as you like, Mama,’ said Senka. Being a little boy, and therefore in love with his mother, Senka gave himself to Dashka, closing his eyes with a beatific smile – until Genrikh poked his wife’s shoulder.

‘Don’t throttle the child,’ said Genrikh sharply. He was paler and more shrivelled than ever. ‘I’ve told you before. You indulge that boy too much. That’s not how we Bolsheviks do it.’

‘I can’t get anything right today.’ Dashka shrugged, smiling bravely.

At the front of the line, Director Medvedeva offered her hand. ‘Good morning, Comrade Dorov, Dr Dorova, I see not everyone’s in today. Summer colds are the worst, aren’t they, doctor?’

‘Let’s hope it doesn’t spread,’ agreed Dashka.

‘Oh Madame Zeitlin, good morning,’ Director Medvedeva greeted Sophia. ‘We do have a full turnout of parents today. It must be the sunshine.’

But Sophia was not listening. She was watching her daughter disappear down the school corridor.

Serafimochka is safe, she was thinking. So far.

In the interrogation room at Lubianka Prison, Kobylov leaned over the desk to smell Minka’s thick hair.

‘You even smell sweet. Like honey. What shampoo do you use? I want to tell my girls what to use. They could use a lesson from a little princess like you.’

Minka shrank from him, afraid of this bull of a man with his rings, and his cologne so strong that she could taste the cloves on her tongue.

She had no idea who else was in prison being interrogated.

At first, as she lay awake all night in the cell that stank of detergent and urine, she had worried about George: had he waited for her? Had he thought she had stood him up? But then she realized that her arrest had been planned. Either the Chekists had been listening to her parents’ phone or George had lured her out to be arrested. But surely he couldn’t have done that. Not George.

By the morning, by the time the warders collected her slops bucket and then doled out the watery kasha and the thin tea with half a sugar lump, her date with George seemed a century ago. And then there were her parents. Did they know where she was? They seemed far away too. Even after a few hours of Lubianka, she was becoming a different person.

A warder opened the eyehole in her cell door that prisoners called ‘the Judas port’, and then the locks ground open and she was marched along the corridors, up the stairs, down some metal steps, through a padded door with more locks, into a new building without the smell of urine and detergent and the room where she was now sitting in front of a Formica desk with a single light. Moments later, the door had opened and this giant with general’s stars on his shoulderboards and kinky oiled hair had appeared to stand, hands on hips, looking at her.

‘Minka,’ he said now. ‘Help me tie this up. Tell me about Rosa and Nikolasha.’

‘They were together.’

‘As a couple? Did they fuck?’

‘Oh no, no one does that sort of thing. But they were together.’

‘Did they love each other?’

Minka looked down at her shoes: she was still wearing her pink sandals.

‘Sort of,’ she said, feeling a kind of betrayal.

Kobylov got up and left, kicking the door shut, swaggered down the corridor to the next door and opened it. Inside another child sat on his own.

George Satinov looked up, startled.

‘The girl named Rosa Shako loved Nikolasha Blagov?’ asked Kobylov. George blinked at him as if slightly disorientated. He still wore his football strip. Here was a boy who breathed privilege, Kobylov noticed, a right little baron’s son.

‘Yes.’

‘What sort of love? Puppy love? She wanted to marry him?’

‘Real love. Yes. She was so sweet, so romantic about him.’

‘I didn’t ask for her biography. Was it a crush on her part or the real thing?’

‘She probably wanted to marry him but—’

‘Just answer the questions. She loved him. He loved her. Case closed.’

George’s eye twitched and Kobylov could see that he was concentrating, choosing his words carefully. ‘Well…’

‘Good boy. That Minka’s a right beauty. Your girl?’

‘No.’

‘Have you kissed her?’

‘No.’

‘Have you fucked her?’

‘No, of course not.’ George raised his hands to his face, blushing.

‘What are you, a sissy?’ Kobylov smiled, relishing his power over the boy. ‘You see? I know all about you. Losha’s my old buddy. Oh yes, we’ve had some moments together, I can tell you.’

Kobylov got up, slammed the door, and went into the next interrogation room where Andrei Kurbsky was being interviewed by his keen subordinate, Mogilchuk.

‘Rosa adored Nikolasha,’ Andrei was saying. ‘She’d do anything for him.’

‘How did he treat her?’ asked Kobylov, taking charge.

‘He shouted at her. He belittled her. He was a real bully. He had to be in charge.’

‘Is this one cooperating?’ Kobylov asked Mogilchuk.

‘I am,’ said Andrei.

‘You’d better be,’ said Kobylov. ‘Because we know who you are, and you’re not like the others. We don’t have to wear silk gloves with you, Kurbsky. You’re the son of an Enemy of the People who’s wormed your way into that school, into the golden youth. And what we’re asking ourselves now is: Did you set up the murders?’

Andrei’s face went white. ‘No!’

‘If you turn out to be connected to this murder, you’ll receive the Vishka.’ Kobylov used the acronym for the Highest Measure of Punishment: death. ‘Nine grams in the neck.’ He turned to Mogilchuk. ‘Do you believe him, comrade colonel?’

‘I’m not sure I do, comrade general,’ said Mogilchuk.

‘Me neither. So Rosa and Nikolasha were love’s young dream. Tell us what changed, Andrei?’

‘I wouldn’t say Nikolasha was…’

‘What changed? What made him kill her? Tell me or I’ll grind you into camp dust.’

Kobylov saw that Andrei was clasping his hands to stop them shaking.

‘I think… I think Nikolasha heard about his father’s posting to Mexico.’

Kobylov clapped his hands: ‘Of course! The posting! Nikolasha was going away!’

He grabbed Mogilchuk’s puny arm, heaved him out of the room and down the corridor. The prospect of a case solved in a matter of hours made his nostrils flare.

Minka looked up as the two men came into her interrogation room. One was the bejewelled giant with the kinky hair, the other the ginger-haired colonel in spectacles, dull enough to be an accountant.

‘Minka,’ said the giant. ‘When did Nikolasha find out about the posting to Mexico?’

‘A day before the Victory Parade.’

‘Was he happy about it?’ asked the ginger man, leaning over her. She felt nauseous suddenly.

‘No. He said he would refuse to go.’

‘Good!’ said the giant, clapping his hands. ‘Comrade Mogilchuk, let’s have a smoke.’

Out in the corridor, the two men huddled.

‘What do you think, comrade general?’ With grandees like Kobylov, thought Mogilchuk, one should use their titles and ranks whenever possible. ‘Are we getting close, comrade general?’

‘It was worth pulling ’em all in,’ replied Kobylov. He rubbed his hands together. ‘Let’s go and report to Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria. He’s going to be pleased with us, isn’t he?’

16

DR DASHKA DOROVA donned her white coat absentmindedly, shut the door of her surgery on the top floor of the Kremlevka, the Kremlin Clinic – and sat down on her velvet divan.

It was a cosy room decorated in old-style comfort with Persian rugs overlapping each other, oil paintings of dachas and woods from the turn of the century, an umbrella stand in brown leather, two soft leather chairs, the divan. To the right was a medical couch with a white curtain round it.

She usually sat behind an old desk with green leather on top and two Bakelite telephones on the side desk. The portrait of Stalin – always a guide to an official’s importance – was medium-sized, not an original Gerasimov, and not an oil, but her safe was a large one because the medical records of the leaders were a state secret.

Finally alone, she found she was breathing fast. Keep it together, Dashka, she told herself. The pressure of her different roles – mother, wife, doctor, minister – was suffocating – and there was more. It was too much and something, however precious, had to be sacrificed. Even at home, she had had to be careful: Genrikh believed the Party and its ‘fearless knights’, as he called the secret police, could do no wrong. There was a Bolshevik way to behave and he, as the Party’s conscience, its enforcer, would decide what it was because Comrade Stalin trusted him to know. Genrikh decided every detail of their life. He had to. He was a Bolshevik leader and nothing – neither the décor of their dacha, nor the recipe for lunch, nor the rules for their children – nothing was too small for him to pass judgement on it. And that made Dashka feel safe. Only her love of fashion had somehow been allowed outside Genrikh’s control.

But now Minka had been arrested, her adorable Minka. Dashka’s outer personality was sunny and exuberant but within she was a tangle of emotions and anxieties. Minka, darling, where are you? Are you safe? she whispered. Answer their questions and come home. Thank God, her other children were safe.

She loved all four of them passionately of course, but Senka, the fourth, the baby of her thirtieth year, the last, that miniature of herself with his long face, his full lips, the sprinkle of freckles across the nose, the olive skin, was her delight. Nothing else, no ambition, no other passion however cherished, counted for more than her Senka, her Little Professor.

She closed her eyes. A drum beat behind them; her temples pounded. If only Genrikh would talk to her; if only he could bend his rules, checks and regulations a little. As it was, she felt utterly alone.

‘Comrade Doctor, you have an appointment in five minutes,’ her assistant blared from the intercom on her desk.

Dashka had two offices: one was in the Ministry of Health and one was here at the Kremlevka, the place where the ‘responsible workers’ were treated by the finest specialists. When she started working there, the Kremlevka had been in the Kremlin itself, but now it stood in a new home on Granovsky, near the building where many of the leaders lived.

The daughter of a cultured Jewish family in Galicia, Dashka had studied medicine in Odessa. After years of working as a cardiologist, she was promoted to the Kremlevka where she had become the trusted doctor to many of the leaders. Most of them suffered from hypertension, arteriosclerosis and other complaints associated with overwork, a fatty diet, stress, lack of exercise, obesity and alcoholism.

Comrade Andreyev: headaches. Treatment: cocaine. Comrade Zhdanov: heart disease and alcoholism. Treatment: total rest and no alcohol. Comrade Beria: overweight. Excessive drinking. Treatment: vegetarian diet.

Then in late 1944, Comrade Molotov had summoned her to the Sovmin – Council of Ministers – in the Kremlin. ‘Sit down, comrade doctor,’ he said in that robotic voice of his. Dashka noticed his spherical head with its pince-nez was connected to his torso without much of a neck. ‘Let me cut to the chase. How do you feel about becoming Health Minister?’

Dashka recoiled in surprise – shock even. ‘I’m a doctor,’ she had protested. ‘Even running the Kremlevka is not ideal. I’ve never worked in government.’

‘Comrade Stalin wishes you to start tomorrow.’ He looked down. In front of him on the desk was a note scrawled in red crayon. During their short meeting, she managed to see that it read: Com. Molotov. Health Minister works poorly. Remove him and appoint lady cardiologist from Kremlevka. J. St.

Comrade Stalin had not even remembered her name, she realized, but she had never met him. She was not particularly ambitious and had never sought such a promotion, so someone must have recommended her. Zhdanov or Beria?

Dashka had a powerful vocation: she adored medicine, loved to help people and she had always aspired to be a doctor. Yes, she enjoyed the fine things in life, especially fashion (preferably imported from Paris), but she lived for her family, more specifically for her children.

Now at 9.30 a.m., she had an appointment that would not normally have concerned her. But she could not stop thinking of Minka and worrying about the other children. She had not slept and the worst of it was that she could do nothing to help them. Nothing at all.

She knew the leaders. She had seen them without their shirts on. She knew their medical secrets and often more, because even Bolshevik grandees felt the need to confide in their doctor.

She was waiting for her next patient, surely a powerful man who could get Minka released. But even asking for special help was against the rules.

No, she must continue as if her darling Minka was not a mile away in a cell in the most dreaded prison in Europe. She raised her hands to her face. She would not let herself cry. She must not!

One of the phones on her desk rang and, shaking herself free of the silent tears running down her face, she rose and answered it.

‘Comrade doctor, the comrade is waiting for you.’

Dashka looked at herself in the mirror. She wore a little mascara to hide her tired brown eyes and her black hair was pulled back in a strict bun but she looked presentable. Her mother had taught her that the greater the challenge, the better you should look. Dashka knew she was a beautiful woman.

She pulled back her shoulders, clipped her stethoscope around her neck, opened the door and gave her dazzling smile. ‘Comrade, come on in.’

‘Comrade Beria is not in his office,’ said the aide who ran Beria’s complicated schedule. ‘Please wait.’ He nodded to Kobylov to take a seat at the far end of the otherwise empty ante-room.

Kobylov grunted and shifted his considerable weight on the leather sofa as he resigned himself to a wait.

After ten minutes, one of the Bakelite phones on the aide’s side desk rang. ‘Comrade Kobylov, Comrade Beria is on the phone for you,’ said the aide.

Kobylov seized it hungrily: ‘Lavrenti Pavlovich,’ he said. ‘We’ve solved it. Yes, I’ll tell you. We’ve closed it! Well…’ Here Kobylov grinned triumphantly at Mogilchuk who was still in awe of Beria. ‘It’s like this: Nikolasha Blagov loves Rosa Shako; she loves him. They want to get married. He’s a fucking degenerate who talks about death all the time; she’s a droopy, simpering rose petal – but he loves her to death. Literally. He hears his father’s being sent off to Mexico. He’s going to lose Rosa. Perhaps never see her again. So he kills her and then himself. Solved!’

A hush except for a tinny voice blaring faintly out of the earpiece. Kobylov straightened up by degrees until he was standing to attention. ‘Right. Of course. We’ll be right down there, Lavrenti Pavlovich!’

Kobylov banged down the phone, feeling his heart racing and his hands sweating.

‘You idiot!’ Grabbing Mogilchuk by the arm and heaving him out of Beria’s antechamber. The moment he was outside, he punched him in the face: ‘This is far from solved and you’ve made a fool of me in front of Comrade Beria!’

‘But I… aah!’ Mogilchuk stepped back and felt his cheek. Stalin had once recommended Management by Punching. It was Bolshevik leadership. But his lip was bleeding. ‘Your rings cut me!’

‘You want another smack in the kisser, you pansy? Come on!’ boomed Kobylov, marching down the corridor and out into the courtyard where a group of drivers waited.

They rode in a Packard down the hill around the Kremlin and up towards Gorky, turning left on to Granovsky. They did not stop at the building where the Satinovs lived, however, but drove on.

At the end of the street, the car turned left into a new building with no name. Two checkpoints waved them through. Kobylov and Mogilchuk, who was by now holding a handkerchief to his mouth, jumped out and hurried up the steps. Nurses in pinafores and a doctor in a white coat were smoking in the lobby of the building where four bodyguards in blue MGB tabs kept watch brandishing PPSh machine-guns.

At the end of the hall, Colonel Nadaraia, Beria’s chief bodyguard, a small sturdy man with fair hair and slightly bulging eyes, was expecting them. He kissed Kobylov with the camaraderie of drinking partners. ‘Hurry up, Bull,’ he said in their native Georgian. ‘And who’s your ginger friend with the bleeding lip? Hurry up. He’s ready!’

One of Nadaraia’s men was holding open the lift even though a handful of doctors and nurses were waiting to get in. They rode down two levels and when the doors opened, they found another two bodyguards waiting.

‘This way!’ said a third, leading them down a corridor with a blue-tiled floor and through two double swing doors. Kobylov noticed that the deeper they went into the building, the colder the air became, the more acrid the stench of formaldehyde and carbolic soap. Finally, they entered a chilly white-tiled room with channels set in the concrete floor, like an abattoir. One entire wall of steel doors faced the men.

‘Ah, there you are, Sherlock Holmes! What kept you? Solving more cases, you fat fool?’ Lavrenti Beria, wearing a summery cream jacket, a flowery Georgian shirt open at the neck and baggy linen trousers, stood between two white slabs. ‘Don’t you think I’ve got better things to do? My wife’s away in Gagra and I’ve got a new fourteen-year-old girl waiting for me at the dacha.’

‘I apologize, Lavrenti Pavlovich,’ said Kobylov, bowing slightly.

‘Comrade Stalin will want a report tonight. But don’t rush so much, Bull. That’s how we make mistakes. Things take as long as they take.’ Beria glanced at Mogilchuk. ‘What happened to your lip?’

‘I banged it on a door.’

Beria laughed. ‘I can see the imprint of Kobylov’s rings. But don’t blame your subordinates, Bull. It was your theory, right? Professor Schpigelglaz, where are you?’

‘Here!’ trilled an adenoidal voice with a Yiddish accent. ‘Stwaightforward, very stwaightforward, comrades.’ Beria stepped aside to reveal Professor Schpigelglaz, whose angular glasses with huge black frames dwarfed his beaky face. He had a white coat and a cloud of frizzy white hair to match.

The professor was such a wraith that he had been entirely concealed by Beria’s paunchy bulk. ‘Gentlemen, I have something to show you.’

‘Get it right,’ Beria said, ‘and you go back to your cushy sharashka laboratory. Get it wrong and you’ll be hauling logs in the Arctic.’

‘Ach, no danger of that!’ Professor Schpigelglaz seemed delighted to have such an interesting case. ‘May I pwoceed? Now, let’s roll out our young overnight guests. That’s what we call them here – overnight guests.’ He gestured to a hollow-eyed young man who looked as if he had spent too much time in the company of the dead. The assistant opened the steel doors to pull out a metal platform on which lay the waxy naked body of a male red-haired teenager. As the platform came out, wheeled legs dropped down from it, enabling the hollow-eyed young man to push the trolley alongside one of the slabs. Then he and another assistant lifted it on to the slab.

‘Let’s see now, gentlemen.’ Kobylov enjoyed being addressed as a gentleman – the professor talked as if the Revolution had never happened and he and Beria were a pair of aristocratic generals. ‘Who are our overnight guests? Ach ya. Blagov, Nikolasha. Eighteen years old,’ said the professor, reading from a label tied to the big toe.

The body looked to Kobylov as if it had been filleted: jagged red lines – like railways on a map of flesh or a zip made of skin – ran around the hairline of the head and from the throat down the centre of the chest to split at the waist. All was clean and neat – except the jaw and mouth. All the cleaning in the world could not put that together again. The assistants then returned to the steel doors. This time a naked female body was laid on the other slab. Again, a label on the toe.

‘Shako, Rosa. Eighteen years old.’

Beria whistled through his teeth, looking at the teenage girl. ‘Shame we didn’t get to her when she was alive, eh, Bull?’

‘Not my type,’ said Kobylov, grinning. ‘A little dainty for me.’

Beria turned to the professor. ‘Start with the boy,’ he instructed.

‘Ach yes, Lavrenti Pavlovich. Well, it’s quite obvious when you examine the wounds. The boy has a diwect bullet wound fired from a Mauser service revolver. One shot.’ He leaned over Nikolasha’s face. ‘There’s the entwy wound in the mouth which shattered the jaw and passed through the cwanial chamber, causing catastwophic twauma.’ He twisted the boy’s head with its slicked-back red hair, ‘And here’s the exit wound, back of the head. Death instantaneous.’

‘And the girl?’ said Beria.

‘Ach yes, the girl.’ He crossed to the other slab. ‘Here on the right breast, gentlemen, we see a single shot to the heart. Vewy neat. We dug out the bullet. Here it is. You may keep it, dear genewal, as a memento of me, ha ha. Yes, a standard service revolver was used. Mauser. Death also instantaneous.’

‘There it is,’ said Beria.

‘So he shot her and then himself? Like I said?’ said Kobylov.

‘Please enlighten my blockheaded comrade, professor,’ Beria said.

‘All right, gentlemen. Nikolasha Blagov was killed by a shot fired at about seven metres. You see the wound.’ He leaned over the slab until he was very close to the shattered mouth. ‘No powder burns. Now look at her wound.’ He switched to the other slab with surprising agility. ‘Look! Hers is blackened quite clearly awound the edges. Her wound is point-blank. It was she who killed him and then herself. She made a mess of him, but as is typical of a female suicide: one shot to the heart. A lady likes a tidy house, yes? Her face is immaculate. You see, stwaightforward, all very stwaightforward.’

‘Thank you, professor.’ Beria looked at Kobylov and Mogilchuk and opened his hands: ‘You got it the wrong way round, you imbeciles. Remember the dead are a marshal’s daughter and a deputy minister’s son. Remember whose children we’ve arrested. Get a move on or you’ll find yourself guarding scum in Kolyma. The Instantsiya is impatient.’ He turned away from them, rubbing his hands. ‘Now, I’ve got a girl waiting who’s good enough to eat! Fresh as summer strawberries. And then a game of netball with the guards.’

He swept out of the morgue, followed by Colonel Nadaraia and the other bodyguards.

‘What energy Comrade Beria has,’ murmured Kobylov. ‘And what a brain. Every moment of every day is organized as precisely as a Swiss watch. We are pygmies beside him. Come on, Mogilchuk, let’s return to our school games.’

17

TAMARA HAD SCARCELY spoken to Hercules in their apartment. Was it bugged? He thought so. She couldn’t speak to him in the car because of the guards; nor at the Golden Gates.

So, most unusually, after drop-off at the school, she said, ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Do you have time to walk with me to Alexandrovsky Gardens?’ Satinov asked her.

Tamara did not have a class until ten so they walked towards the Kremlin in silence. That day Hercules was not in uniform but a summer suit, with a white fedora low over his eyes, and Tamara thought what a handsome man he was.

Two guards walked ahead, Losha behind, and their car purred twenty metres behind them. The summer blizzard of gossamer seeds swirled around them. Young soldiers, a girl in naval uniform, pensioners in cloth caps walked the streets, eyes half closed, cushioned by the soft, easy air. Tamara noticed how sometimes these sleepwalking members of the public were jolted awake with the spark of recognition. ‘Wasn’t that…?’ they asked their companions as they passed Satinov.

If only they knew that our life isn’t as easy as it appears, Tamara thought.

Having checked everyone was out of earshot, she put her hand through Satinov’s arm. Ever since George had disappeared, she had longed to talk to him.

She adored her Hercules. Amongst those coarse, hard-drinking leaders, with their fat, depressed wives and spoilt, disturbed children, Tamara’s friends would often say, ‘If only I had a husband like Satinov. Tamara, you’re so lucky,’ and she would reply, ‘He’s a wonderful husband but I just wish he talked to me more…’

Despite their years together, she found it hard to breathe around his coldness, his detachment. Why didn’t he cuddle her? Why couldn’t she be with a man who talked to her and told her about his day? It had been the same when his eldest son Vanya was killed. She wanted to shriek and tear her clothes – but he just seemed to absorb it. She wondered if he really wasn’t that deep, if he was simply uncomplicated or, worse, flinthearted? He had cried once, but afterwards he just said to her, ‘The whole Motherland is weeping, Tamriko. We’re no different.’ And he had returned to the front, leaving her to comfort the other children. Now his son was in prison and still she could not reach him.

‘Hercules, is there any news of George?’ she asked now.

‘Nothing.’

‘But you saw… him last night?’ She meant Stalin, of course.

‘Yes.’

‘Did he say anything?’

Satinov shook his head. ‘He’s exhausted.’

‘Did Beria say anything?’

‘No.’

‘I do hate that man. He’s repulsive, Hercules. How can you work with him?’

‘The Revolution needs people like him. He’s our most capable Bolshevik manager, whatever his faults.’

‘He’s a rapist, a criminal.’

‘Tamriko!’ He sighed. ‘Let’s be grateful that I am friendly with him now, of all times.’

‘Oh God!’ So George was in Beria’s hands. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I can’t sleep, Hercules, I’m so anxious. Usually I love my classes but the school is like a hornets’ nest. I look at George’s seat… and Andrei, Vlad, Minka – all absent! And sweet Rosa. I want to cry. The children can’t concentrate either; some are terrified, some are queuing up to denounce their friends. The common room feels… like it did in the thirties. Dr Rimm is up to something…’ She hesitated to share the petty intrigues of the common room with her husband, but she couldn’t stop herself, and out it all came.

‘How very familiar,’ he said afterwards with a thin smile. ‘It’s like the Politburo in miniature.’

‘I miss George bitterly, and he’s not even my son. How are you finding it?’

‘I don’t sleep a lot. For once, Stalin’s schedule suits me.’

‘You were so strong about Vanya…’

‘Listen, Tamriko,’ said Satinov tersely. ‘You must hold the line. Especially at school.’

‘But Mariko is asking for George, and Marlen too.’

‘You must tell them not to. George and his friends will be well treated and home soon. They are simply witnesses. Two children are dead. They have to investigate. Find out what happened. That’s all.’

‘Then why is it so secret?’

‘It’s the way we Bolsheviks do things.’

‘But you’re one of the most powerful men in the country, so why can’t you speak to someone? Find out when George is coming home?’

‘Stalin is dead set against any favouritism.’

And that’s supposed to make me feel better? Tamara thought. ‘Of course,’ she replied.

‘Look, we built Lenin’s state, we won the war. When you chop wood, chips fly.’

Not that damn slogan again! But she nodded submissively.

Satinov stopped. ‘I’ve got to go.’ He kissed her forehead and she watched him enter the Kremlin through the Spassky Gate.

Sometimes, she thought, it’s a lovely thing to be married to an iron hero; sometimes, it’s just too painful for words.

Beria collapsed wheezily by the side of his new girl, his green-grey man-breasts hanging pendulously like a camel’s buttocks. What a session! Then the vertushka, the special Kremlin line, rang. Doesn’t a man get a moment’s peace? he thought, picking it up.

‘Comrade Beria?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Comrade Stalin expects you,’ said the expressionless voice of Poskrebyshev. The line went dead.

It was five past midnight but in Stalin’s world, it was the middle of the day. Beria dressed quickly in his usual garish Georgian shirt and loose jacket but then turned to look one last time at the fourteen-year-old girl lying naked on his bed, the skin of her flat belly a little flushed and creased by his weight.

‘Colonel Nadaraia will drive you home,’ he said softly, sitting beside her for a moment. Thank God he had managed to get his pox cleared up before he found this treasure. But he had to lose weight! Leaping around with a girl this age tired a man out. Memo to Comrade Beria: eat more salad! His hand actually trembled as he stroked her long hair, the satin of her lower back. ‘But first Colonel Nadaraia is going to show you the apartment I’ve chosen for you and your mother.’

‘Oh Lavrenti, thank you! How amazing. Mama will be so happy.’

‘She will,’ he agreed. He knew her mother. She had been his mistress first.

‘You’re pleased with me, aren’t you?’ she asked, frowning sweetly.

‘Yes, yes I am. See you tomorrow.’

I am really very taken with her, he thought as his Packard raced through the Spassky Gate in the Kremlin and round to the Little Corner of the triangular Yellow Palace. Yes, this perfect girl is melting the heart of one of the hardest men in our carniverous era.

Beria took the lift to the second floor, showed his pass to two sets of guards (even he was not exempt) and hurried down the interminable corridors with the blue carpet held in place by brass rings set in the parquet. Two more checkpoints, and finally he was handing in his Nagan pistol to the guards outside Comrade Stalin’s office.

Two man-sized globes stood by the doors. A couple of ministers and several generals were waiting stiffly in the ante-room, grown men holding their papers on their knees like frightened schoolchildren. Quite an appropriate analogy, thought Beria, as schoolchildren were one of things he had come to discuss.

He was no longer so impressed with the Great Stalin though. He had seen Stalin’s dire mistakes in the early weeks of the war, his obstinacy, his panic, the waste of millions of lives; yes, Stalin would not have won the war without his help. Didn’t Stalin realize that he, Beria, and the Organs had held the state together? Beria saw himself not just as a Chekist, but as the most capable statesman in the entire leadership.

The old sot doesn’t appreciate my talents, he thought, although he now thinks himself a genius and never stops boasting!

‘The Master will see you now,’ said Poskrebyshev, the livid red skin on his face wizened as if he had been burnt. The two men did not like each other: Poskrebyshev was a lowly cringing ink-shitter who hated Beria, and blamed him for the execution in 1939 of his beloved young wife after which he continued to serve Stalin loyally. Beria couldn’t tell him, of course, that although he had brought Stalin the evidence that his wife had Trotskyite connections, it was Stalin who had ordered her killing.

As Poskrebyshev, in tunic and britches, escorted him through the short corridor that led to the double doors, Beria asked quietly, ‘Is it a good evening?’ He meant: Is Stalin in a good mood?

‘It’s a beautiful summer’s night,’ replied Poskrebyshev, meaning: Yes he is. ‘He’s going to look at his new uniforms. Here they are!’

Three strapping young men, athletes all, entered the ante-chamber wearing flamboyant cream, braided, golden uniforms that wouldn’t have been out of place in an Offenbach opera. One even had a golden cloak. In their wake shuffled Lerner, the tailor, his nimble white-tipped fingers a-twitch with tape measure and chalk.

‘Very smart,’ chuckled Beria.

‘Stand over there,’ said Poskrebyshev to the youths. He then lifted one of his many phones and said: ‘Comrade Stalin, Lerner’s here. The uniforms.’

Sometimes life was just too absurd, Beria reflected as the double doors opened and Stalin emerged, drawn in the face, his grey hair standing on end as if razor cut. He was wearing a plain tunic with just his marshal’s shoulderboards and a single Order of Lenin.

‘Who are they?’ he asked gruffly, looking at the youths. ‘What are these peacocks doing here?’ The three models saluted. Lerner bowed.

‘The generalissimo’s uniforms for your approval, Comrade Stalin,’ said Poskrebyshev. ‘Lerner’s here to show you the finer details.’

Lerner, who’d started work sewing the Tsar’s uniforms, bowed again.

‘Comrade Stalin is grateful to you, Lerner,’ Stalin said, always polite to ‘service workers’. But to Beria and Poskrebyshev, he snarled: ‘Whose idea was this? Yours, Lavrenti? Well, they’re not right for me. I need something more modest. Lerner, do you want me to look like a doorman or a bandmaster?’ He turned and went back into his office.

‘You’re designing for Comrade Stalin not Hermann Göring!’ hissed Beria to Lerner. ‘It’s back to the drawing-board!’

Lerner wrung his hands and backed away into the ante-chamber.

As Poskrebyshev closed the doors behind him, Beria entered Stalin’s spacious room with its ruffled white blinds covering most of the windows. On the far wall were portraits of Marx and Lenin and the latter’s death mask. A long table with twenty seats, each with notebooks and ink blotters, filled the centre. At the far end was a desk with an extension holding about eight Bakelite telephones and a small table at right angles that formed a T-shape. The desk was very neat with scarcely anything on it except a blotter, an ashtray with a pipe that contained a lit cigarette smoking in its bowl, and a glass of steaming tea. Behind was a grey safe as large as a man and a small door whence Stalin now appeared, bearing a bottle of Armenian cognac. He sat down at the desk, poured two teaspoons of the spirit into the tea which he stirred and then looked up.

‘Gamajoba.’ He often spoke Georgian to Beria when they were alone. ‘What have got for me?’

‘Much to report, Josef Vissarionovich.’

‘What’s the plan for the German trip?’

Beria opened the leather portfolio and brought out some papers. Even after all these years, all their shared schemes, triumphs of war and construction, and their little secrets of ‘black work’, murder and torture, Stalin still treated Beria like a trusted servant who specialized in dirty jobs. Yes, there had been family holidays on the Black Sea – Stalin liked Beria’s wife Nina and trusted his son Sergo – but still Beria felt under-appreciated. Just in January, at one of the dinners in Yalta, Stalin had introduced him to President Roosevelt as ‘my Himmler’. It was at that moment that he started to hate Stalin. The drunken braggart! Where would Stalin be without him?

‘The meetings with the American President and British Prime Minister are set to begin on the seventeenth of July,’ said Beria.

‘I’ll arrive last. Let the others arrive first,’ Stalin said.

‘Understood.’

‘I miss Roosevelt. This Truman’s not a patch on Roosevelt. As for Churchill, he’ll reach into your pocket to steal a kopeck; yes, even a kopeck.’

‘Everything is ready for you in Berlin,’ Beria told him. ‘The route to Potsdam is 1,923 kilometres. To provide proper security, 1,515 MVD/MGB operatives and 17,409 MVD troops are placed as follows: in USSR, 6 men per kilometre; in Poland, 10 men per kilometre; in Germany, 15 per kilometre. On the route, 8 armoured trains will patrol. Seven MVD regiments and 900 bodyguards will protect you. Inner security by the 6th Department will function in three concentric circles of 2,041 men and—’

‘All right,’ said Stalin, waving his hand. He relit the pipe, puffing clouds of smoke and watching them waft up, his eyes moist slits, almost closed.

‘It’s all in the memo here.’ Beria handed over some typed sheets.

‘I don’t want honour guards and brass bands when I arrive. I mean it. I’m tired.’

‘Understood.’

‘Anything more about the new American weapon?’

‘The nuclear device. Our agents in the British Foreign Office report that it is almost complete. It is possible America will use it against the Japanese. It has astonishing destructive power.’

‘Keep me closely informed. Now, what about the schoolchildren?’

‘We have made some progress…’

‘Some of them are with you?’

Beria knew that ‘with you’ meant in his prisons. ‘Yes, four of them,’ and he gave their names.

‘One of Satinov’s boys, eh? What were they playing at?’

‘We’ve investigated, and discovered that it was the girl – Marshal Shako’s daughter – who shot the Blagov boy, Nikolasha.’

‘Ah – Romeo and Juliet, is that it?’

‘She was in love with him. But he was infatuated with another girl, Serafima Romashkina – you know, the actress’s daughter?’

‘As I thought. A love triangle.’

‘You were right. When Rosa Shako found out Ambassador Blagov was being posted abroad and the boy with him, something snapped and she shot him.’

‘And then herself?’ Suicide was a sensitive subject with Stalin: his wife Nadya had shot herself. A long silence. ‘Nadya would be forty-three now.’ Stalin sighed and then collected himself. Silence. Just the mellow puckering of an old man puffing on a pipe.

Beria waited. He knew Stalin was thinking about the Children’s Case. Beria had no wish to interrogate teenagers. It was messy, too close somehow to his own beloved son who had also attended School 801. ‘They’re just harmless children. Let’s release them,’ he was tempted to say. But he and Stalin knew better than anyone that there was no tool on earth as powerful in the management of men as a threat to their children. He raised his cloudy colourless eyes to meet Stalin’s remorseless gaze.

‘You said they were in fancy dress?’ A tigerish grin.

‘Correct,’ said Beria. Stalin tapped his pipe. Now he was waiting. Beria shuffled his papers and read from Kobylov’s report. ‘“Both dead children were members of a secret group named the Fatal Romantics’ Club. Covert chosen membership. Clandestine meetings in graveyards. Obsession with romance and death.”’

‘Were they reading Dracula?’ Stalin asked, puzzled.

‘Pushkin.’

‘At least they were studying good literature.’

‘As you saw at once, it’s a teenage love story. An old chestnut. Should we release the children now?’ Immediately Beria regretted his words.

‘Do you know what they were doing?’

‘Kobylov says they were playing something called the Game.’

‘And Kobylov didn’t think to find out what this Game was? And where did Rosa Shako get the gun?’ Beria knew that Stalin had never forgiven his brother-in-law for giving his wife the pistol that she used to shoot herself. ‘There’s more to do in the Children’s Case.’

Stalin leaned back in his chair and pressed a button that rang a bell outside.

Poskrebyshev opened the door and stood to attention, notebook raised, pencil at the ready. ‘Yes, Josef Vissarionovich?’

‘Sasha, let’s invite some comrades to watch a movie and have a snack. Call Comrade Satinov and the rest of the Seven.’

It was already half past midnight. From Vladivostok in the east (where the Soviet armies were massing to attack Japan) to Berlin in the west, the Russians and their new subject peoples slept, but not their leaders. In Moscow, ministers, marshals and Chekists waited at their desks for Comrade Stalin to leave the office. Now that Stalin had summoned the Seven for dinner, Poskrebyshev would let a few favoured friends know that they could go home too.

‘Are you busy later, Comrade Beria?’

‘Didi madlobt, thanks so much,’ said Beria in Georgian. Busy later? Who dared be busy later? Not him, that was for sure.

18

AT ONE IN the morning, the Judas port on George Satinov’s cell door clicked open. He was sleeping properly for the first time because he was sure the interrogations were over. His interrogators had seemed satisfied with his answers and then he had been taken back to his cell and given a meal. Now suddenly he feared there was more. The clink of keyrings, the clip of boots on concrete, and then, moments later, the locks were grinding.

‘Get dressed. Now.’ He heard other doors opening, other locks turning and wondered who else from his school was there. As he was escorted along the corridors, he heard another prisoner coming behind him. Was it Vlad? Or Minka? He prayed that Minka was all right and that no one else was in trouble: not Serafima, not Andrei. He longed to see Minka, so that she would know he was nearby and that he had not betrayed her. I wonder if I am in love with her? he asked himself. How does one know?

Lines of cell doors, detergent vying with sweat, metallic stairways. ‘Eyes straight ahead! No talking!’ snapped one of the warders.

‘Prisoner, step inside the box,’ said the other, and he was forcefully guided into a metal box like an upright coffin: its door was closed, a lock turned. Short of breath, George started to sweat. He heard another prisoner coming, the same way as he, and that prisoner too was ordered: ‘Eyes straight! No talking!’

In the gait of the steps, in the breaths of the prisoner, he imagined it was Minka. For a moment he tensed his vocal cords and prepared to shout: ‘Minka! Is it you? I know you’re here!’ But soon the corridor was empty again, the coffin unlocked, and he was free to breathe. Up stairways and down, through more sealed doors. As he was marched towards the interrogation rooms, he thought of his father’s fury: ‘I’ll strangle you myself,’ he’d warned George and Marlen if he found they were involved in the shooting. And now George was. What would his father say?

Inside the room, George found not just the gingery, bespectacled Mogilchuk but the giant Kobylov too. Both were tense, focused. There was going to be no more playing around.

‘We’re almost ready to send you home,’ Mogilchuk said. He held out a cup of coffee. ‘For you!’ and he placed it in front of him.

‘Thank you,’ said George. He sipped the coffee. ‘Do you always work at night?’

‘You know how it works from your father,’ answered Mogilchuk.

‘Now,’ said Kobylov, his bejewelled fingers drumming like cockroaches with diamonds on their backs. ‘Just tell us: what was the Game?’

‘The Game?’ George said, surprised.

‘We want the details,’ explained Mogilchuk.

‘It was a pantomime, really.’

‘Who ran it?’

‘Nikolasha and Vlad.’

‘And you wore fancy dress?’

‘Yes, but why does that matter? It has nothing to do with what happened.’

‘Let us be the decider of that,’ said Kobylov. ‘Continue.’

Minka shook her head. ‘I never took it seriously. I thought it was absurd.’

‘But what was the Game about, Prisoner Dorova?’ Kobylov asked. Mogilchuk sat beside him, writing.

‘It was a re-enactment.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of literature or history.’

‘You’re losing me, girl, just spit it out. We need this fixed by dawn.’

‘Sometimes it was the death of Pushkin himself. We’d re-enact the duel in which he was killed—’

‘—and sometimes,’ continued Vlad in the third interrogation room, ‘it was the duel from Pushkin’s Onegin.’

‘Who decided?’ asked Mogilchuk.

‘Nikolasha.’

‘Then what?’

‘We borrowed the costumes and turned up at the graveyard where Nikolasha led our rituals.’

‘Rituals?’ repeated Kobylov, who was by this time leaning against the wall, chain-smoking.

‘We would chant things.’

‘What things?’ Kobylov leaned over Vlad, breathing smoke in his face.

‘You’re frightening me,’ said Vlad.

‘I’ll really frighten you if you don’t get on with it.’

‘Well, first… Nikolasha checked who was there in his Velvet Book of Love and he’d say something like, “Comrade Romantics, we’re here to celebrate passion over science. Without love let us die young.” And everyone repeated: “Without love let us die young!”’

Kobylov shook his head, and exhaled a lungful of smoke with a sticky cough. ‘Sounds to me like voodoo!’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Andrei agreed. ‘I only went once to this secret club. It worried me. It was un-Soviet. But no one took it seriously except Nikolasha, Vlad and Rosa.’

‘Did she chant with the others?’

‘Yes, and then she said, “Who dies tonight?”’

‘This is dark stuff,’ Kobylov said. ‘Carry on, Prisoner Kurbsky.’

‘Then Nikolasha decided who would play Onegin and Lensky. Onegin kills Lensky in the duel.’

‘Then what?’

‘We played out the duel, reading the poetry.’

‘Using which guns?’

‘The duelling pistols from the theatre.’

‘And the duelling pistols fired blanks?’

‘Yes.’

‘So there were no real guns?’

‘Not that I ever saw.’

‘So they would choose their pistols from the cases and then, holding them up, they would take the steps,’ said George.

‘Like a real duel?’ said Mogilchuk, looking interested for the first time that night.

‘Yes, sometimes I did the counting.’

‘Count what?’

‘The steps in the duel. I had to say: “Approach at will!” That night, Nikolasha was playing Onegin, and Rosa was playing Lensky, and they started to take the steps at the far end of the bridge. In their costumes. It was crowded, but we always followed the poem exactly.’

‘What did they say?’

‘I can’t remember exactly.’

‘Dammit, prisoner, I’m not here for a literature lesson.’

‘Lensky tried to aim, but Onegin – that’s Nikolasha – was quicker.’

‘So you saw the pistols?’ asked Kobylov.

‘Yes. Just the duelling pistols from the theatre,’ said Minka.

‘And what did they look like that night?’

‘Like they always did. We weren’t paying that much attention, general.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘We were drinking vodka. And laughing. George, Andrei, Serafima…’

‘You weren’t watching?’

‘The bridge was packed with people so I kept losing sight of George and Rosa and… Anyway, we thought it was a joke.’ Minka started to cry.

‘I took it seriously,’ admitted Vlad. He rubbed his eyes, fingers jiggling compulsively, and Kobylov could tell he was still in shock. ‘Some of the others were mucking around and ruining the evening. But the Game was a serious tribute to Pushkin. Nikolasha got angry when the others fooled about.’

‘Concentrate, Prisoner Titorenko. Tell us what happened.’

‘Because Rosa was Lensky, it meant she was the one who was going to die.’

‘How do you all prepare for your roles?’

‘I had the costume: frock coat, boots, tricorne hat. Whoever played Lensky, in this case Rosa, had fake blood from the theatre ready.’

Fake blood, wrote Mogilchuk.

‘They took the steps. Nikolasha cocked his pistol.’

‘And Rosa levelled hers?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nikolasha aimed his?’

‘Yes, and he recited the verses from Pushkin that recount the duel: And that was when Onegin fired!’

‘I don’t want your fucking poetry!’ Kobylov banged the table. ‘Just get on with it!’

‘It was very dramatic. Nikolasha would fire his pistol and then Rosa would fall as we’d recite:

Mogilchuk leaned forward. ‘But he didn’t fire his pistol, did he?’

‘No,’ said Andrei. ‘Onegin was meant to kill Lensky. Then they were supposed to put:

‘But that didn’t happen?’

‘No, because some drunken sailors kept interfering, and the bridge was so crowded that most of us got separated…’

‘But Nikolasha and Rosa were still holding the pistols?’

‘I think so. We were looking for them. We’d all drunk vodka and we were fooling around. But I couldn’t see them and then I suddenly heard two shots.’ He put his hands to his ears, and looked at Kobylov, stricken. ‘I can still hear them. Boom! Boom! Even now!’

‘That was the Game?’ Kobylov scratched his kinky hair. It was 4 a.m. and they were taking a break outside the interrogation rooms. ‘That’s all it was?’

‘Ludicrous children,’ agreed Mogilchuk.

‘And they died for this childish pantomime.’ Kobylov rubbed his face wearily. ‘Come on, comrade. Before we report, we need one more piece of the puzzle.’

‘Now, George,’ persevered Mogilchuk. ‘We’re nearly there. But I need to ask you about the murder weapon. It was a Mauser service pistol and we found it on the ground. Now we know who killed who—’

‘Nikolasha killed Rosa, the bastard,’ George replied eagerly.

‘Just answer the fucking question, boy. Did Nikolasha have a pistol?’

George leaned back in his chair. ‘I have no idea. I’m sure his parents have guns in the house.’

‘I’m sure they do too. But suppose it wasn’t Nikolasha who fired the Mauser at all. Suppose it was Rosa.’

‘Did you see Rosa with a Mauser pistol, prisoner?’ Kobylov asked Minka.

‘No. Nikolasha was the one obsessed with guns and death.’

‘So did you see Nikolasha with a pistol?’

‘Yes.’

‘A duelling pistol?’

Minka put her head in her hands to think. When she looked up again, Kobylov could see that she was so tired she wasn’t focusing properly.

‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘It was a real pistol.’

Kobylov smiled. At last they were getting somewhere. ‘Where did he get that?’

Minka looked worried suddenly. ‘I don’t know.’

‘So how did you see the Mauser?’

‘I was watching Nikolasha as he took the duelling pistols out of their case before the Game started. He put the real pistol in their place.’

‘Did he plan to use the real pistol – but changed his mind at the last moment?’

‘Possibly. He believed all sorts of stupid things. He said the duel was the front line between ordinary life and extraordinary romance.’ Tears began to run down Minka’s face again. ‘He used to say things like that. Perhaps a real gun would have made it even more real.’

‘Don’t hide anything from us, Andrei,’ said Mogilchuk. ‘You know that your mother is all alone. She is worried, Andrei. You’re all she has left.’

‘How did Nikolasha get hold of that pistol?’ asked Kobylov.

‘After the dinner at Aragvi, in the car park, Nikolasha asked if any of us had a gun.’

‘Why would he ask that?’

Andrei shrugged. ‘He said silly things all the time. He said, “Death is better than routine.” Total nonsense.’

‘And did anyone have a gun?’

Andrei hesitated, staring down at the table.

‘I’d hate to see your mother on the trains for Norilsk,’ insinuated Mogilchuk. ‘Most people never arrive in the camps. They die on the way and when the train slows down, the other prisoners throw out the bodies. Did you know that, Andrei?’

‘No.’ He was shaking.

‘Think, Andrei – who is more important to you? Your mother or those rich kids?’

Andrei sat up and looked directly at Mogilchuk. ‘Nikolasha asked George, who said he didn’t have a gun. But his father’s bodyguards did.’

Kobylov sat down beside Vlad Titorenko and put his arm around him. ‘You see? This can be fun. Now, where did Rosa get the gun?’

‘Rosa? I never saw her with it.’

‘But you saw her open the gun case?’

‘Yes.’ Vlad was whispering.

‘Which Rosa picked up. That was how she got the gun,’ said Kobylov slowly.

‘But Rosa loved Nikolasha,’ said George. ‘She was never interested in guns. She never hurt a fly.’

Kobylov and Mogilchuk were facing George. ‘Leave the detective work to us, George,’ said Kobylov, twirling the rings on his fingers. It was early morning and somewhere above the ramparts of Lubianka the horizon was glowing with light. Soon they’d have him and they could go home. ‘Who gave Nikolasha the Mauser in the first place?’

A twitch. Like the first bite of a fish at the end of a line. Kobylov glanced at Mogilchuk and noticed his swollen jaw.

‘I don’t know.’

Kobylov leaned forward on his elbows so that George could almost taste his spicy breath – and feel his power.

‘Did you give Nikolasha that gun, prisoner?’

George was sweating. His confidence, his entitlement, his very will to exist seemed to have melted away. He was just scared, a scared child in serious trouble, and Kobylov was pleased.

‘But you said Rosa shot Nikolasha. I never gave her a gun. I swear it!’

‘We know where Rosa got the gun. From the case. And we know how the gun got in the case. Nikolasha put it there. So how did Nikolasha get it?’

George doubled up and began to sob. Kobylov leaned in for the kill.

‘Oh my God! My father’s going to kill me.’

‘Forget your father, George. We don’t care who your father is. He could be the King of England for all we care. We have orders from the Central Committee to grind you to camp dust if we have to. Now, let me ask you again: did you give—’

‘Yes,’ George shouted. ‘I gave Nikolasha that pistol. He asked for it and I thought nothing of it. My father has a pistol. My brother has a pistol. Half Moscow has them, I thought. He could have got one anywhere.’

‘But he didn’t get one from anywhere, did he, George? He got one from you.’

George nodded, his face swollen from weeping.

‘And where did you get it? Did you go into your father’s office and take it? Does the Mauser that killed two children belong to him?’

George sat very still, then he leaned across the desk and vomited.

19

FROM THE MOMENT he arrived at Stalin’s Nearby Dacha earlier that night, Satinov could only think of his son.

Stalin, the Seven leaders and Poskrebyshev sat at the long table in the gloomy wood-panelled dining room. They were discussing the coming war against Imperial Japan, but all Satinov could think about was what George was doing. Sleeping? More interrogations? George, his impertinent son; his undutiful, un-Bolshevik son; yes, his favourite son.

‘May we come in?’ Valechka Istomina, Stalin’s cheerful housekeeper, and her assistants, plump ladies in white smocks like nurses, wheeled in the dinner: a Georgian feast with shashlik kebabs. They laid out the dishes on the side table. Valechka waddled right over to Stalin. ‘It’s all ready for you, Josef Vissarionovich,’ she said indulgently. She was right at home with him. ‘Just as you like it!’

‘Thank you, Valechka. Go and pour yourself a glass of Telavi. You deserve it.’ Stalin treated the housekeeper like family, and Satinov sensed their bond was closer than anyone knew. ‘Come.’ Stalin raised his hands to Satinov and the others. ‘Help yourselves!’

The leaders followed him to the sideboard.

‘Is everything well, bicho?’ Stalin was right beside him, ladling out the lobio and then soaking it up with bread.

‘Yes, of course,’ he replied – except my son is in prison, as you very well know, he thought drily.

‘Tamriko’s on good form? Still teaching English?’

‘Very much so.’

‘The family?’ Stalin gazed right into his eyes, challenging him to mention George, to beg for forgiveness, to intercede and break all the rules, to reveal some bitterness that would taint the whole family and bring about their total destruction. Don’t hesitate in a single answer, Satinov told himself. Don’t evade his eyes. You have nothing to hide from Stalin, not even a whisper of resentment.

‘Everything is as it should be,’ he answered steadily.

Stalin’s hazel eyes did not leave him. ‘Good! Help yourself to dinner.’

Satinov exhaled. Stalin’s cold, compressed ferocity never ceased to awe him.

After food: toasts. Stalin mocked Beria for not eating the shashliks: ‘Still eating that grass? You’re turning into a breed of cow.’ Then he teased the triple-chinned Malenkov: ‘Eat less! I suggest calisthenics with Satinov.’

‘Or dancing?’ suggested Nikita Khrushchev. Satinov observed this squat confection, the warts on his face, teeth like a horse, his suit as baggy as a sack. He was a real peasant. ‘Isn’t Comrade Satinov an expert at the lezginka?’

Stalin swivelled towards him. ‘I thought you were the great dancer, Nikita.’

‘Me? I can hardly take two steps.’

‘I think we need to see you dance, don’t we, comrades?’ suggested Stalin, eyes glinting.

‘I’ve heard that Khrushchev is the best dancer we have!’ cried Beria.

‘The very best!’ added Malenkov.

Zhdanov hiccuped. He was deathly white. He never joined in such horseplay. He was a serious man.

‘Show us,’ ordered Stalin.

‘I can’t… I mustn’t… Not after such a banquet!’ said Khrushchev anxiously.

‘I think you’ll survive,’ laughed Stalin. ‘Comrades, let’s vote on it. Who wishes to see if Comrade Khrushchev can dance the gopak?’

Satinov raised his hand. Beria, Poskrebyshev, Zhdanov, Molotov copied him.

‘Unanimous!’ declared Stalin.

‘Dance!’ shouted Beria, who’d already begun to clap.

‘It’s a Politburo order!’ teased Stalin.

The others – everyone except Stalin – also clapped in time, chanting: ‘Khrushchev dance! Khrushchev dance!’

Khrushchev looked at Stalin, who shrugged apologetically and opened his hands. Khrushchev got to his feet and, raising his hands and bending his knees, started to dance the gopak.

‘You’re like a cow on ice!’ Stalin tapped out the tune. ‘No sense of rhythm at all, Nikita. Sit down now!’

Khrushchev slumped panting into his seat.

Beria, who was serving as the tamada, the toastmaster at a Georgian feast, raised a series of toasts to dancers male and female – especially female.

Stalin was focusing on Zhdanov. ‘You’re sitting there very virtuously like Christ himself but you didn’t drink much.’

‘He should drink a forfeit shot,’ said Beria. Satinov knew Beria hated Zhdanov, Stalin’s companion in intellectual matters. Stalin’s choice as successor.

Streams of sweat ran down Zhdanov’s face, and Satinov could see he was ill. ‘The Kremlevka says I have to refrain. It’s my heart,’ he explained.

‘The Kremlevka? The lady doctor there?’ asked Stalin.

‘Dr Dashka Dorova.’

‘Taking orders from women eh? Well, you obey your lady doctor,’ said Stalin with a grin. ‘Women with ideas are like herrings!’ He hated independent women.

‘Comrade Poskrebyshev also didn’t drink that last toast properly,’ sneaked Beria.

‘Is that true, Sasha?’ asked Stalin.

‘I did. Didn’t you see?’

‘The rules are that Comrade Poskrebyshev must drink a forfeit: three shots in one!’ said Beria.

Stalin raised his eyebrows, smiling. Beria filled a tumbler with vodka and Malenkov, his sidekick, delivered it to Poskrebyshev, who stood up. Taking a breath, he downed it: gulp gulp gulp. Flushed, he tottered. A hiccup convulsed his body, and he ran for the French windows, threw them open and vomited into the fish pond outside. Beria started to chortle.

‘Sasha’s got the hardest head I ever knew,’ said Stalin, trying not to laugh. But then his expression suddenly changed. ‘I think you’re overdoing it, Beria. Stop bullying people at my table. I don’t like it. You’re lowering the tone here!’

‘You’re right,’ said Beria. ‘I apologize.’

‘Go and check he’s all right.’

Beria pulled himself up and followed Poskrebyshev outside into the grey light.

‘I think it’s bedtime.’ Stalin stood up, slightly unsteady on his feet. Leaning on the doorframe, he went out on to the porch at the front. Guards in white suits stood like statues in the illuminated gardens. The sun was rising over Moscow.

The leaders staggered on to the porch, stiff-legged, bleary-eyed and as pale as a plate of kasha. Satinov thought he had never seen an unhealthier gaggle of middle-aged men outside a hospital ward.

He looked back and saw Beria trying to heave Poskrebyshev down the corridor from the dining room. ‘Bring the bodies out!’ Stalin shouted.

Together they dragged Poskrebyshev outside, past Stalin, down the steps and pushed him into the back of his car.

As they did so, Beria took Satinov’s hand, squeezed it tightly and whispered so close to his ear that he wet it with his saliva: ‘George is fine. The children are coming home.’

‘What are you saying?’ called out Stalin.

‘I’m telling him that Poskrebyshev’s going to vomit again,’ said Beria.

‘Pah!’ said Stalin hoarsely.

Satinov felt weak with relief. The Organs had investigated the shooting, and that was that. He would not reprimand George again, he decided. The boy had been punished enough.

The road was a deep mauve, the sky, lilac with shards of pink: a perfect Russian summer dawn. The sweet scent of flowers and resin emanated from the woods. A peacock in Stalin’s garden trilled a high-pitched leee-at! Leee-at! A nightingale cooed its last notes.

Stalin picked a rose, smelled it with his eyes closed and handed it to Satinov. ‘For Tamriko,’ he said.

Satinov understood. It was for George.

20

AT SEVEN TWENTY that morning, Dr Rimm, the Deputy Director of School 801, nicknamed the Hummer by the children, was waiting in the janitor’s storeroom. He felt in his waters that he was about to receive a revelation. There had been no love letters from the enigmatic ‘Tatiana’ for a while, not since the shooting. But he wasn’t thinking of this. He was thinking of the note that he’d been sent two days earlier.

He had been in his classroom preparing for Communist ethics when he’d noticed the envelope peeping out of his copy of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. When he saw it, his heart had leaped: was it another love letter? Those letters had kept him alive for the last term. Rimm was long divorced from a Communist Party instructor whom he’d met on a Pioneers camping trip to the Crimea – and he had not had a girlfriend since. But surely he deserved happiness like anyone else? (Why did women so adore Benya Golden? What did that effete, skirt-chasing smooth-talker have that Rimm didn’t? Didn’t they know he was tainted?) The feeling that someone – he was sure he knew who it was – loved him had restored his battered pride. He knew their passion was impossible, at least for now, but this aura of love gave him confidence in his ambitions.

The envelope had been addressed in a childish hand. ‘Tatiana’s’ love letters were always typed in capitals. But the disappointment had passed swiftly. The school was on the rack: two children dead, more arrested, all of them the scions of Bolshevik grandees. Out of the tragedy, he was convinced, the rottenness of Director Medvedeva’s headship would be exposed. She had made mistakes, allowing bacterial heresies to spread through the school. He had warned her about the peril of employing Golden as a teacher and allowing the Fatal Romantics’ faction to indulge in bourgeois romanticism. And he had been proven right in the most terrible way possible. Only he could cleanse the school of her un-Bolshevik, unpatriotic mistakes. He opened the note. I need to speak to a person in authority. May we meet by the janitor’s storeroom 7.30 a.m.? A young comrade.

‘Tra-la-la Stalin…’ he burst out singing his favourite song. He had known instantly with a surge of sap in his gut that this note heralded his moment.

So now he was waiting there. He had woken at 4 a.m., heart palpitating, walked around Moscow since dawn, taken a coffee at the Moskva Hotel, just to celebrate. He had not served in the war (too old, and the problems with his hips) but he longed to be a spy or a leader. He knew people in the Organs and they appreciated him. And now, he was the only honest and vigilant Communist at the school, ready to do his duty. What time was it now? Seven forty and no one had come. Inside the storeroom, he began to hum.

The door opened and he jumped. It was the janitor, that hoary Tajik in brown overalls.

‘What are you doing here?’ the janitor asked.

Rimm hadn’t thought how it would look: an important teacher like him skulking in a cupboard full of bleach and lavatory paper.

‘How dare you!’ he barked. ‘Get on with your work! And not a word to anyone! Or you’ll be on the next train home to Turkestan!’

‘Yes, boss,’ said the janitor, backing away quickly.

Five minutes later, Rimm opened the storeroom door to get some air – and there he was, a small dark boy approaching with the tentative steps and lithe vigilance of a night creature. When he saw Rimm, he froze.

The covert craft of a spy comes naturally to me, Rimm thought, as he led the way into his classroom. Closing the door, he sat at his desk and pointed to the front row of desks. The boy sat.

‘Demian Dorov, why did you write me that note?’ he asked.

Demian seemed terrified as he stared at Rimm.

‘If anyone asks, we can say I was tutoring you on Stakhanovite poetry,’ Rimm said more gently. ‘Now, you’ve been very brave coming to see me.’

Demian nodded and relaxed a little, but still he didn’t speak.

‘What have you got?’ Rimm asked again.

Demian shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I… I was just joking.’

Think like a Chekist, like a Bolshevik, Rimm told himself. Analyse your informant and his family. The key will lie there.

The Dorovs. The father Genrikh was the Chairman of the Party’s Control Commission, an admirable enforcer of discipline and morals; the mother, that comely doctor and Health Minister. They had four children. After a son in the army, the daughter Minka had her mother’s looks but was un-Party-minded, frivolous and impertinent. The Organs had been right to pull her in. The little boy Senka was clever but sickeningly spoilt by his mother. So Demian Dorov, who resembled his father and tried to emulate him by leading the school’s Young Pioneers, was stuck between the two favourites. Rimm suddenly warmed to him: Demian too was unappreciated. The other children nicknamed him the Weasel but perhaps he too had seen the poison of bourgeois romanticism seeping into the rotten school…

Rimm came down from his seat on the platform and sat at the neighbouring desk to Demian.

‘You’ve been noticed by the Party and I’ve always known that you will go far.’

‘Thank you,’ said Demian. Rimm could see he was blushing a little.

‘I don’t think your parents have really respected you enough. They’re too busy with their important work – or in your mother’s case with your younger brother, her favourite. Am I right?’

Demian nodded slightly.

‘If you did something for the Party, I think we could change that,’ continued Rimm. ‘Let me help you.’ But Demian had begun to fidget nervously again. ‘You have a choice,’ Rimm said slowly. ‘You can either be a hero, just like the schoolboy Pavlik Morozov who denounced his wicked parents, and tell me everything – or you can hold back a secret. But if you do, and we find out, you could destroy your family.’ He paused, giving his words time to sink in. ‘Tell me what you know. The highest authorities in the Party are interested. Now!’

Demian’s eyes blinked quickly. Rimm put his hand on the boy’s narrow shoulders. ‘I know what righteous Bolshevik deeds you are capable of.’ Finally, reluctantly, Demian reached into his satchel and pulled it out. An exercise book with velvet covers.

‘I recognize this book. It was Nikolasha’s. Where did you get it?’ asked Rimm.

‘Senka found it on the night of the deaths and he took it home.’

‘He hid it?’

‘Under the mattress in his room.’

‘He must have taken it right under the eyes of the Organs. Have you read it?’

‘No.’

Rimm didn’t believe him. He opened the book up and for a moment, he was disappointed. ‘The Velvet Book of Love.’ A schoolboy’s scribblings. But as he glanced at its contents – lists of names, chronicles of meetings, strange rituals – he sensed there was treasure here.

‘Demian, you’ve done a wonderful thing for the Party. Rest assured this will be our secret. You were right to bring this to me. Now go on with your day. And tell no one of this.’

Demian scuttled away, leaving Rimm with the book. Thoughtfully, he walked over to the new Lenin Library and sat at a desk in one of the remotest stacks. Should he show the notebook to Director Medvedeva? Possibly, but she might refuse to take it further. Or she could inform on him for being a meddler in an official investigation. She had every reason to suppress this for her own ends. Besides he, Dr Rimm, was the secretary of the school’s Communist Party committee while she was a mere member.

Furthermore, if he kept the exercise book within the school, it would remain a school matter while this case surely concerned higher authorities. Should he take it to Demian’s father, Genrikh Dorov, Chairman of the Central Control Commission? In normal circumstances, yes, but his daughter Minka was under investigation and Demian’s role in procuring the book might compromise Comrade Dorov’s ability to pass judgement.

Perhaps he should take the information to Comrade Satinov himself. Comrade Satinov would say, ‘Comrade Rimm, someone wants to see you, to hear it from your own lips,’ and a door in a Kremlin office would open, and there would be the Great Stalin himself, smoking his pipe. ‘Comrade Rimm, we meet at last. I’ve heard so much about you,’ Stalin would say. But no, no, Satinov’s wife was a teacher and his son George had also been arrested.

So it was clear. Rimm would have to handle this himself. In short, this was a case for the Knights of the Revolution.

Stalin lay on the sofa in the wood-panelled little study of the Nearby Dacha, feeling weary, hung-over and liverish. It was early evening. He listlessly opened a Zola novel, then read the script for the movie Ivan the Terrible Part Two. He did not like it. It must be rewritten. Who should do it?

A knock and that soft lullaby voice: ‘Coffee for a weary man who never gets any peace!’

It was his dear housekeeper, Valechka Istomina. She poured him a cup, just as he liked it, with two sugars. He looked around his study. Every surface was covered with piles of books and literary journals that he loved to read. But now, wearing his favourite old tunic (darned by Valechka in three places), soft kid-leather boots, baggy canvas trousers like an artist, and smoking a Herzegovina Flor cigarette, he tried to rustle up the strength to go into the Kremlin. Soon he must leave for the conference at Potsdam. Do I have the strength? he asked himself.

The vertushka rang. It was Poskrebyshev. ‘Comrade Abakumov wants to see you. He says something new has come up.’

Something new. Stalin relished a fresh gambit in the game of shadows that was counter-intelligence. It was his natural habitat. Even before the Revolution, even in the underground, he had mastered the game of agents and double agents, of cash in envelopes, shots in the night, daggers in the back. The Organs were the only part of government, except foreign and military policy, that he would never relinquish.

A car drew up. One of the bodyguards knocked. Abakumov had arrived.

Stalin stood up, his knees unsteady. He felt dizzy; his vision blurred and there was a frightening tightness in the back of his neck. He had to steady himself by grabbing his desk.

‘Send him in,’ he said.

Victor Abakumov stood in the lobby in a general’s uniform, looking the other way. Stalin could tell he was expecting him to come from the big office across the hall. It was always good to keep the security people on their toes.

‘Come on in, Comrade Abakumov!’

‘Oh.’ Abakumov turned, startled. ‘Good day, Comrade Stalin.’

Stalin led him into the bigger study where there was more space. He nodded at one of the divans and took his own seat behind the desk. ‘What have you got for me?’ he asked. ‘How’s the cleansing and filtration of traitors in the Baltics?’

‘We’ve arrested and deported thirty thousand Estonians this week,’ said Abakumov. ‘But I came about the Children’s Case.’

‘So you’re sticking your snout into Comrade Beria’s trough again?’

‘That is not my aim.’ Abakumov knew that Stalin was delighted that he was interfering in Beria’s ministries. The MGB reported to Beria but Abakumov, Chief of Military Counter-intelligence, SMERSH (Death to Spies), reported directly to Stalin. And Stalin had added his name to the distribution list for documents on the Children’s Case. ‘Thank you for your trust, Comrade Stalin.’

‘But I don’t think this one’s for you. The young hooligans are about to be released. I think we should forgive them.’

‘That’s what I’ve come about. My operatives have discovered an aspect of the case that has been hidden from the Central Committee.’

‘What aspect?’ If there was anything Stalin hated, it was to have important matters concealed from himself.

‘The political aspect.’

‘Go on.’

‘Comrade Kobylov reports that the children’s romantic club was harmless. But I believe it was more serious than that. Much more serious.’

Stalin was now very awake, and feeling much better. His vision was clearer, and the pain in his neck had vanished.

‘You base this on what exactly, Comrade Abakumov?’

‘This.’ Abakumov opened his briefcase and took out what appeared to be a school notebook with red velvet glued on to the front and back.

‘I haven’t seen one of those since I last signed Svetlana’s homework,’ Stalin said.

‘It belonged to Nikolasha Blagov, the boy shot on the bridge.’

‘And how have you got it?’

‘It seems that Comrade Kobylov’ – Stalin knew that when Abakumov named Kobylov, he really meant Beria – ‘may have deliberately ignored this piece of evidence. It came to us because apparently Comrade Kobylov’ – Beria again – ‘was uninterested.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The two Chekists appointed by Comrade Beria to investigate the Children’s Case were slack and reduced their vigilance. They allowed this vital piece of evidence to be pilfered from the murder scene, obviously in order to conceal it from the forces of Soviet justice. The extraordinary intelligence-gathering of SMERSH operatives uncovered this a few hours ago via an informant – a teacher named Rimm within School 801 – and I have brought it straight to you.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘Comrade Stalin, permission to approach to show you a page that I think is relevant?’

Stalin raised an almost feminine hand and beckoned him to the desk. Abakumov bowed slightly as he handed over the notebook open at a certain page. Stalin read:

Stalin put down the book in some surprise. ‘The Satinov children are involved?’

‘I am afraid so,’ said Abakumov sombrely. ‘It seems that we’ve uncovered a conspiracy to overthrow the government.’

21

THE CHILDREN WERE coming home; Tamara Satinova was so happy.

‘Is that you, Losha?’ she called out from the kitchen.

‘It is,’ replied Losha Babanava. ‘May I come in?’

‘Do. How are you?’

‘Sizzling.’ His smile was all sunburn, moustaches and white teeth. Losha had guarded Hercules Satinov since he was in Tbilisi as the First Secretary of the Transcaucasus. He had seen Hercules married in the 1920s; he had guarded him on grain-collecting expeditions into Ukraine during collectivization; he had been at his side on sunny, relaxed holidays with Stalin on the Black Sea when they ate al fresco and sang Georgian songs; he had witnessed Hercules widowed and lonesome, and then happily meeting and marrying Tamara; he remembered the Terror when Hercules’s friends were arrested and vanished; and in the darkest days of 1941, he had accompanied him to the front when the armies were being routed by the Nazis. So Tamara knew he was as anxious as anyone to see George come home.

‘Is there any news?’ he asked, looking at his watch.

‘No,’ Tamara said. ‘But surely it can’t be long now. It’s seven p.m. after all…’ Hercules was sure George would be home soon, and Hercules was always right about these things.

In the kitchen, Leka was making George’s favourite meal, beef Stroganoff, and Mariko was playing with her friend Raisa, the only other girl who enjoyed her game, the Moscow School for Bitches.

‘I’ve got to stay here, Losha, in case the phone rings,’ Tamara said. ‘Please could you pick up Mariko? She’s at the Bolshakovs. Just off Pushkin Square.’

‘Done,’ said Losha. Losha knew where everyone lived, where anything could be procured, all the secrets. He left, and Tamara looked at her watch for the umpteenth time.

On the other side of the Moskva River, in the House on the Embankment, Dashka Dorova was not watching the clock because Genrikh had told her that the MGB bureaucracy was always slower than you might expect, so the call would probably come first thing in the morning. She thought: one more night! For Minka a night might be an eternity. At least Demian was dependable – and she had her Senka.

‘Let me see how you look!’ said Dashka, clapping her hands. She had a way of throwing back her head when she laughed. ‘Turn around.’

Even in his pyjamas, Senka Dorov looked every inch a little professor. While other ten-year-olds sported pyjamas with pictures of bears or rabbits, Senka’s were dark blue with stripes and red piping, made of Chinese silk.

‘Do you like them, Senka?’

‘Yes I love them, Mamochka.’ He circled her, dancing round and round. ‘They’re so smart I think I could lecture in them, don’t you think, Mamochka?’

‘Oh, you’re so sweet, darling,’ cried Dashka, pulling him towards her and wrapping him in her arms. ‘If you give me your matinée-idol face I’ll have to kiss you.’

Senka focused his big brown eyes on to the distance and tilted his head a little, knowing very well that, to her at least, he was adorable.

Dashka showered his face in kisses. Then he raised his hands around her neck and pulled her down to kiss her cheeks. ‘I really love you so much, Mamochka!’

Dashka looked down at her youngest son, at his long eyelashes and the dimple in his chin. She buried her nose in his hair and inhaled the smell of him. Boys smelled stronger than girls. ‘You’re so handsome, my Little Professor. And so original. And such a charmer. One day a girl is going to be very lucky to be married to you.’

‘I don’t want to marry anyone but you!’ he said.

‘You won’t want to be with me when you’re a teenager and I’m a wrinkly old lady.’

‘Mama, you’ll always be the most beautiful woman in the whole wide world.’

‘Rubbish,’ she laughed. ‘I wish!’

Senka frowned. ‘Why are you so happy when Minka’s still away?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’ But she smiled.

‘Ohh,’ he cried out. ‘I understand – Minka’s coming home!’

‘Hush,’ said Dashka. ‘Never talk about such things.’ But she was certain Minka was coming home: the clues were all there. At dinner at the Aragvi the previous night, Longuinoz the maître d’ had taken her hands and said, ‘Dr Dorova, let me show you to your table.’ He had moved so close she could see his mascara. ‘Some of my favourite guests had colds in the last few days. Summer colds. But today, everyone is better and tomorrow, completely cured.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow. Here’s your table. Enjoy your meal.’

Ever since Minka’s arrest, Dashka had not enjoyed a moment’s ease. Even her surgery, which she loved, had barely distracted her. She worried every second: was Minka sleeping? Was there a lavatory in her cell? What was she eating? What if she got her period in there? Were they being kind to her? Oh please, let them be kind to her: I beg you, Comrade Beria or whoever is in charge of her, don’t crush her love of life. Dashka knew that Genrikh was in pain too even though he had lectured her about Bolshevik justice. In a flash of temper, she had shouted at him: ‘I want my daughter back, Genrikh! You can keep your Bolshevik justice!’ But now that Minka was coming home, she could enjoy her family, and this meant enjoying her Little Professor.

‘Mamochka?’ Senka was holding her face in his hands and shaking her a little. ‘Wake up at the back of the class!’

She had been dreaming of going to Lubianka to collect Minka. When would the call come? How would they celebrate? I will cook her pancakes with strawberry jam, her favourite, and she can have pancakes every day, she decided, forever!

‘Mamochka, did you know I caught Demian in my room the other day, looking through my things? He was plundering my room.’

She shook herself back to the present. ‘Plundering, was he?’

‘Or it could have been looting. Or a deed of opportunistic piracy?’

‘Good words, Little Professor. But Demian’s too old to play with your toys, darling. I’m sure he didn’t take anything.’

‘But it’s vexing.’

‘I’ll talk to him, I promise.’

‘Thank you, Mamochka.’ Another kiss. ‘Can I pop next door and borrow a book from Lulu Nosenko’s daddy? For homework.’

‘What book are you borrowing?’

‘Tchaikovsky’s Music and Librettos in Opera and Ballet.’

‘Well, that’s essential reading.’ Dashka smiled indulgently. ‘Put on the matching dressing gown, and off you go. Papa will be here any minute and then we’ll have supper. Hurry up!’

Dashka went into the kitchen. Demian was in his room. The maid Luda was stirring Genrikh’s favourite spicy borscht with extra chilli. A few minutes later, she heard the door shut on the latch. Genrikh was home.

He kissed her and as he did, she whispered, ‘Is the news still good?’ and he said, ‘So far. Luda, pour us both a glass of wine.’

Dizzy with excitement, Dashka kissed her husband, and even Genrikh had to smile.

Soon their supper was ready. ‘Demian! Senka!’ called Genrikh. Demian appeared and sat at the table. Dashka noticed the dirty hair and pimply skin of her teenage son. What a surly phase he was going through. He was the image of his father, not like the other children, who were all her.

‘Get Senka,’ she told him.

‘He’s not in his room.’

‘No, he went next door to the Nosenkos. Will you fetch him?’

Demian left slightly sulkily but was back in a moment. ‘He collected the book ten minutes ago.’

Dashka looked at Genrikh – and in that moment, she felt as if her stomach was falling, falling for ever, through her body, the floor, the earth, eternity. Then she bolted out of the kitchen.

‘Senka! Senka!’ she shouted, going from room to room. She ran back into the dining room where Genrikh and Demian were still sitting at the table in silence. ‘But he was still in his pyjamas. Where could he be? Genrikh, what the hell is going on? Help me look for him for God’s sake! Senka!’

It had been a long and confusing day for George Satinov. As soon as he had revealed where he got the gun, he’d known he had done something terrible. Everyone in Lubianka was suddenly being kind to him and that made him even more worried.

After breakfast, he’d been taken to the interrogation where Mogilchuk chatted to him about football and Kobylov popped his head around the door as if to wish him luck. Back in his cell, he’d paced up and down. Perhaps I’m going home, he’d thought in a delirium of hope. The lunch was lamb cutlets and potatoes, a special feast, not the usual Lubianka fare.

But the hours passed, and nothing happened. And by the time it was supper, he was rattled. Then the food arrived: the thin gruel with a few knuckles of fat floating in the grease and the tiny square of bread and butter. No one came to fetch him, to collect his things and free him. Night fell. The light stayed on. He could not sleep but as he began to doze, the Judas port clicked. ‘Hands on top of the blanket. Wake up!’

The lock groaned open and he was marched down the corridor back to the interrogation room. ‘No talking – or the punishment cell!’ he was told. ‘Eyes straight ahead.’

He was in the same room but a new interrogator was waiting for him.

‘Sit down, Prisoner Satinov,’ said a man who had a sharp face, sheer, flat cheekbones and a mouth and jaw that protruded like the muzzle of a dog. Prisoner? The words ‘prisoner’ and ‘Satinov’ did not go together at all. Satinov was usually mentioned with ‘hero’ or ‘Comrade Stalin’s closest…’

‘Answer the questions directly and truthfully. Hide nothing from us.’

‘But I’ve told you all I know.’

‘Me? You haven’t told me anything. I am Colonel Likhachev and we’re starting again, boy. When did you plan to seize power, Prisoner Satinov?’

‘Please, I’m confused. I’m a schoolboy. I’m not even interested in politics. I leave that to the Party.’

‘Insolence is not tolerated here, prisoner.’ Likhachev slapped him across the face with the back of his hand. Stars flickered behind George’s eyes; his mouth stung.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Don’t footle with me,’ Likhachev said, ‘or I’ll reduce you to a puddle of fluid on the floor.’

George’s stomach seized up. He was suddenly very afraid.

‘You were a member of a conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet Government, kill members of the Politburo and install a new ministry,’ Likhachev stated.

‘I want to answer but I don’t understand. I am utterly loyal to Comrade Stalin and the Soviet Government. I’m a Komsomol.’

‘What was your role in Nikolasha Blagov’s provisional government?’

‘Oh my God, that was a joke.’

‘Be careful, prisoner. A conspiracy against the Soviet Government is not a joke.’

‘But it wasn’t a conspiracy. It was Nikolasha’s idiotic game.’

‘Do you recognize this?’

‘Yes. Yes, it’s Nikolasha’s Velvet Book.’

‘Let me read you something: Today I, First Romantic Secretary Nikolasha, will meet the members of the Central Romantic Committee to discuss the appointment of a new government. You read this and agreed with it, did you not?’

‘No!’

‘But you signed it. Look – there’s your signature.’

‘I didn’t take it seriously. I thought Nikolasha was mad and ridiculous. We all did!’

‘You’re in deep trouble, boy. This is treason.’

‘I’ll tell you anything, anything at all. Just ask!’

‘Why were you to be Minister of…’ Likhachev looked down the list of appointments. ‘…Sport?’

‘That shows I wasn’t serious. Sport’s not important. I said I’d do it because I’m more into football than literature.’

‘You could be shot for this, prisoner.’

‘I’m only eighteen. Please, I don’t understand any of this.’

‘Whose idea was it to form an anti-Communist government?’

‘It was Nikolasha’s idea. It was all him.’

Likhachev cleared his catarrh. ‘That’s convenient since he’s dead. Who was behind him? Forget your father. Forget your fancy friends. Forget the Aragvi. Now it is just you against the almighty power of the Soviet State.’

George was exhausted. He wiped his face, tried to focus. ‘Vlad Titorenko was his best friend but I don’t think Nikolasha even showed him the notebook.’

‘But reading his notebook, it is clear that one person had to approve his ideas, his conspiracy, his government. Who was it?’

The shock was making George feel leaden. His eyelids were heavy and he wanted to yawn. ‘Sorry, I’m so tired…’

‘Concentrate, prisoner. It is clear that someone else was the brains behind this treason. Let me read you this: NV has approved my ideas. Or here: NV must approve the government.’

‘It was not about politics. It never has been. It was about love.’

Likhachev punched George in the mouth, throwing him across the room.

‘We have the written evidence of his notebook. And it is quite clear that this “NV” is the grey cardinal of his conspiracy. Who is “NV”?’

‘Prisoner Minka Dorova, the punishment for conspiracy under Article 158 is death. Were you a party to a terroristic conspiracy?’ asked Colonel Komarov. Soft-spoken with the habit of running his hands through his light-brown curly hair, he focused on Minka sitting opposite him. His forehead, she decided, had the rumpled frown lines that marked the sincerity of the truly stupid.

‘No.’ Minka closed her eyes. She never thought she would miss Kobylov and Mogilchuk, but now, each question made her feel sicker. She fought waves of giddy panic and told herself: Keep your head!

‘Then why is your name in the government as Minister of Theatre?’

‘But that’s a joke. Surely you can see from the title of the ministry?’

‘We believe that you and Nikolasha Blagov and your other friends were pawns in this vile plot. Someone is behind it. Someone important.’

‘I don’t know whom you mean.’

‘Answer the question. Who is really behind this conspiracy to form a new government?’

‘No one.’ Minka was conscious of the tears running down her cheeks.

‘In his notebook, Nikolasha says that “NV” approves all his decisions. Who is this “NV”?’

Concentrate, Minka, she told herself, confess nothing, and you will get through this. She shook her head.

Komarov lit a cigarette. ‘Come with me, prisoner,’ he said and pressed a button on the desk.

Two warders entered and took her by the arms.

‘Where are you taking me? What are you going to do to me?’

‘We’re going to show you something to concentrate your mind.’

She was marched into a room with a glass wall through which she could see an empty interrogation room, just like the one she’d been in. Table, lamp, two chairs.

‘You can see in but no one can see out,’ said Komarov. ‘And no one can hear you.’

The door opened into the neighbouring room, and a small boy with tousled hair and large brown eyes walked in, wearing blue silk pyjamas with red piping.

‘Senka!’ she cried, throwing herself against the glass. ‘Senka!’

22

ANDREI KURBSKY LAY in his cell. He now knew he would never escape the curse of his tainted biography; he’d always be the son of an Enemy. But there was one consolation: he felt closer to his father.

His father must surely have been through the same registration, the same cells, perhaps even this one. Andrei looked at the marks on the walls: drawings, words, scratches. He read out the names, dates, messages. Some must have died here; some must have been shot in the cellars and they wrote their names here to be read. He searched for his father’s name and dreamed that he too would be sent out to the Gulags – and that one day, in a snowy forest clearing, he would meet his father chopping logs…

The night was lonely. Someone was shouting; someone was coughing. Andrei was tired and so afraid. It was the uncertainty that was the hardest thing. Who else was in the cells here? What had they said? What was it safe to say?

The clip of boots outside. Locks turning. The door opened, and he was on his way to the interrogation rooms but this time he found a new officer was waiting for him. One look at Colonel Likhachev’s sunken, broiling eyes and little yellow teeth and Andrei knew that the case had taken another twist.

‘Prisoner Kurbsky, you were a party to an anti-Party conspiracy with Nikolasha Blagov.’ Likhachev took a book from a beige folder – a book Andrei recognized all too well – and began to read: ‘We in the Romantics’ Club are no longer interested in that nonsense of the progression of history, the dialectic, class struggle: the passion of the individual is supreme. How do you regard his views?’

‘They are un-Leninist, un-Marxist: I was profoundly disgusted. As a Communist I reject it. Nikolasha was a clown, but a dangerous one nonetheless.’ It was a relief, thought Andrei, to see the book, and know how he should respond to these questions.

‘But you did nothing about this?’

‘I did do something…’

‘Don’t lie. Let me continue. Serafima is appointed Minister of Love. NV must approve all appointments. Meet NV for instructions.’

Andrei struggled to sit up straight and focus. ‘Look, I don’t know any “NV” but I was the last to join the Fatal Romantics’ Club. This is really nothing to do with me.’

‘I’m interested in this “Minister of Love”. It says here that Serafima Romashkina was elected to this position by the Politburo.’

‘I didn’t know.’ Andrei did not want to discuss Serafima at all. Don’t mention Serafima, he told himself. Stay awake! ‘You couldn’t take Nikolasha Blagov seriously about anything. He was unbalanced.’

Likhachev leafed through the notebook. ‘Even so, here he writes: Minister of Love is supreme because love is supreme, higher than Gensec.’

Andrei shivered. ‘Gensec’ was the acronym for ‘General Secretary’ of the Party and there had only ever been one Gensec: Stalin himself. This was treason.

Likhachev leaned across the desk, and Andrei was struck again by his bloodshot and yellow eyes, which reminded him of an egg with blood in the yolk. ‘You need to tell me who NV is.’

‘I think NV is imaginary.’

Likhachev slammed his hands on the table. ‘Don’t dare to misdirect this investigation. We know that you, Prisoner Kurbsky, know who NV is. And you will tell us. Even if I have to scrape it with a scoop from the inside of your dead skull.’

Minka had lost all track of time. She was back in her interrogation room and trying hard not to panic. But the sight of her small brother had rattled her, especially as she now knew that if she fell, she would drag Senka and her parents to perdition with her. She closed her eyes, picturing herself and Senka being shot in the back of their heads. What should she do? What should she say?

‘Why is Senka here?’ she asked. ‘He’s ten. Please, I beg you, send him home. My mother must be frantic.’

‘Tell us about Nikolasha Blagov’s notebook. The one you call the Velvet Book of Love.’

‘I never knew what was in it. If I had known that he was doing something so evil, something against our great Soviet State, I would have informed against him. But I promise: I knew nothing of any conspiracy. Nothing.’

‘Who is “NV”?’

The walls seemed to lean in on Minka as she thought of Senka, her little brother. What was NV? NV? She must come up with something to free Senka, to free all of them. NV had to mean something. Perhaps she should invent a code, plant a red herring, a distraction to direct the Chekists away from herself and Senka, from George and Serafima. She presumed that because a code did not exist, they would not find it – and therefore nothing would come of it. Already an idea was ripening in her mind, taking shape at the tip of her tongue until the experienced Komarov could see it was coming.

‘Tell me,’ he coaxed.

‘I’ve never heard of NV. But can I suggest something it might be? Could “NV” stand for “New Leader”? NV. Novi Vozhd. Someone that none us knew about?’

‘Go on?’

‘Perhaps it was Nikolasha’s candidate for a new Romantics’ leader?’ proposed Minka.

‘So you’re confirming that this was a conspiracy? For there can only be one Leader, the Father of Peoples, the Head of the Soviet Government.’

‘Well, no, I was just suggesting something…’

‘There are no suggestions here, girl. There is just evidence. We will find the so-called New Leader of this conspiracy.’

‘I was guessing,’ Minka said, beginning to feel unsure of herself again.

‘Are you telling me lies? Are you wearing a mask?’

‘No, of course not… I’d never lie to you.’

‘Good, then explain this. Here in the notebook, Nikolasha writes this: Serafima and NV. NV and Serafima. Meeting to approve the Romantic government. What was Serafima’s relationship with Nikolasha?’

‘There was no relationship. She didn’t even like him.’

‘So if Serafima Romashkina was not having a relationship with Nikolasha, who was she with?’ Komarov settled back in his chair. ‘She was with NV, wasn’t she? NV is Serafima’s lover.’

‘No! She had no lover. I’m her best friend and I’d know if she did.’

Komarov opened his arms wide and stretched, like a diver leaping into a pool, and then he ran his hand through the fluffy hair that seemed alien to his uniform, his job, his lifeless eyes. ‘We’re going to have to start again. Tell me about Serafima and her relationship with NV.’

Minka felt the sweat start to shimmer through her skin; her jaw clenched, her shoulders tensed. She had meant to protect Senka, and Serafima. Now she realized that the sight of her little brother had distorted everything. To save him, she had made a terrible mistake and had placed Serafima at the centre of a conspiracy that had never even existed.

Too late, she saw that in this world, every breath had consequences.

23

‘I’LL BE HONEST, Madame Zeitlin, I’m a fan. So I had to come myself,’ said Victor Abakumov in his deep baritone. ‘I’m a movie buff. I watch everything. Of course I have some of Goebbels’s movies from Berlin. I have a movie director’s eye. But you in that movie Katyusha. I’d call it a masterpiece. Your husband’s script contributed to its success but your performance…’

It was early morning, and Serafima could hear Abakumov talking as she quickly packed a little bag under the eyes of the two uniformed Chekists who had already searched her bedroom and taken away books and letters.

‘Well, Comrade Abakumov, you are very kind but I wish we had met under other circumstances,’ her mother was saying. Her actress’s voice lacked its usual vigour but Serafima was grateful her mother was not howling in hysterics. She too hoped that if Sophia was civil to the Chekists, it would somehow help her.

‘Is that a poster from the movie I see over there?’

‘Yes, it is.’ A silence. ‘Would you like it?’

‘I would and I’d like it signed: “To Victor, with love”. Yes, that’ll impress my friends.’

‘You flatter me, comrade general.’

‘I’d like to discuss the art of movies with you.’

‘I’d like that too – but couldn’t you question Serafima here? Do you really need to take her in?’

‘Perhaps we could meet some time later. Just you and I—’

The Chekist’s trying to seduce my mother, thought Serafima, but didn’t every marshal or apparatchik flirt with her, regardless of the feelings of her long-suffering papa?

Serafima felt the joints of her body prickling like pins and needles: it is fear, she told herself. Two of your friends have died; the incident has to be investigated; that’s why your other friends are in prison. There is nothing to fear! Yet when the Organs investigate, they always find something more, and that is what I must hide at all costs.

Still wearing her school uniform, Serafima had finished packing her bag. Toothbrush. A sweater. Pyjamas. A couple of books: Hemingway and Pushkin.

‘Are you ready?’ said one of the Chekists.

Serafima nodded. She wanted the packing to go on forever. She wished Abakumov would keep talking to her mother eternally. She sat down on her bed again. Her legs were weak. She put her face in her hands and started to cry, and the next thing she knew, her mother was with her, and had taken her in her arms.

‘There, there, Serafima, you’ll be back soon, just answer their questions… You’re not the only one, so don’t worry. Darling, I love you so much.’ But this only made the goodbye even worse. Her mother was trying not to cry herself but her voice petered out, and now Serafima was weeping so hard she couldn’t stand. She wished her papa was there too but he was away, covering the war against Japan. Yet there was something worse than that, far worse. She couldn’t say goodbye to the man she loved.

She had always known she might be arrested. She had felt the shadow over her ever since the day on the bridge because she realized (and she had always known) that Nikolasha’s ideas were tinged with madness. She saw clearly how the members of the Fatal Romantics’ Club were roped together: when one fell into the abyss, the rest would surely follow.

‘She’ll be back soon,’ said Abakumov jovially as if he was taking her on a camping expedition. ‘We’re talking to all the children and then we’ll release them soon enough. It’s just a formality.’ He filled the doorway like a slab of Soviet manhood. Wiping her eyes, Serafima looked up at his thick black slicked-back hair, his heavy eyebrows, his general’s uniform with its rows of medals and his sportsman’s barrel chest. Looking bored, he crossed his arms and leaned on the doorpost.

Finally she managed to stand up. If you love someone, she thought, you can endure anything. Slowly – unbearably slowly – her mother walked with her to the door, and gave her the overnight bag.

‘Time to go!’ Abakumov said breezily. ‘Madame Zeitlin, it’s been an honour,’ and he took Sophia’s hand and kissed it. ‘Enchanté!’

He mispronounced the French, but the humanity of the hand-kissing broke something within Serafima’s mother.

‘Please, comrade general, please… Do you have to take her? You don’t have to. She’s done nothing. She’s a child! Take me instead!’

The two Chekists flanking Serafima took her arms, and together they walked down the wide steps of the Granovsky building; then they stood back as Abakumov strode past them, his gold-braided hat on his head, his dark eyes straight ahead under the visor, and the movie poster under his arm.

‘Get in with me, Serafima,’ said Abakumov, gesturing at the open door of his car, a white Fiat sports car, once the toy of an Italian general. ‘Few girls resist a ride in this machine.’

The creamy leather creaked as he manoeuvred himself into the driver’s seat next to her. ‘I like to drive myself,’ he said, slipping on his driving gloves and gripping the beige calf’s leather of the wheel. ‘You’ll be more comfortable than in a ‘black crow’.’ He looked at her as she sat mutely in the passenger seat.

Throwing the gearstick into first, he accelerated out of the courtyard of Granovsky, followed in convoy by one of the secret police vans, known as ‘black crows’, and a little Zhiguli full of guards. As they sped through the streets, Abakumov saw that Serafima was still crying. Fuck it, why did I transport her in my car? he thought. Because of the mother, of course. Weeping girls were tough for a man to see, even for him, whose rise had been oiled with the blood of men, women and children, those he had beaten to pulp with his own fists, or despatched with his own sidearm – and those hundreds of thousands more he had never met but whose lives he had destroyed. He suppressed a spasm of anger at her tears: didn’t the little fool realize how kind he was being to her? She could have been in the cage in the back of a ‘black crow’.

‘And I thought it was just a love story,’ Abakumov repeated Stalin’s words to him from the previous day. Stalin had been implying that the Children’s Case was a serious conspiracy that Abakumov must investigate vigorously. Well, he had arrested the children – even the ten-year-old Senka Dorov – but these were VIP kids. Silk gloves were called for. Stalin was preparing for the Potsdam conference but what did he really want Abakumov to do with them? Stalin spoke in hieroglyphic codes and Aesopian fables, and even Abakumov was often bewildered by the obscurity of his intentions. Abakumov needed another clue.

The high steel gates of Little Lubianka Street were opened by guards and the car swung into the courtyard. The gates closed behind and the car doors were opened by two Chekists.

‘Take her down and register her,’ said Abakumov.

He watched Serafima Romashkina get out of the car as if she was in a trance and look around, unsure which way to go, at the high walls with the tiny barred windows and, to the side, at the rank of waiting ‘black crows’. Placing his hand on her shoulder, he pushed her gently towards two figures in long brown coats who looked like laboratory assistants. ‘That way! And don’t worry, girl. You’ll be home before you know it. It’s just routine – you know that. Don’t cry.’

The stench of detergent, distilled urine, compacted sweat – the perfume of prison life – made his nose twitch even though he knew it so well. He saw her face as it hit her for the first time. She staggered a little on her long legs and fear shadowed her green eyes. Well, prisoners were meant to be afraid, and this prison had been designed to frighten them because the power of the Knights of the Revolution had to be beyond the imaginations of the Enemies they had to break. But the main thing for him was that he was always on top. He always won. Stalin trusted him, and he believed absolutely in his own invincible destiny.

Holding her little case, Serafima walked down the steps into the lobby of the prison and stood before the counter. Its varnish was cracked, its surface greasy from the hands of thousands upon thousands of prisoners, and there were two slight indentations formed by their elbows as they leaned forward, just as this new prisoner was doing now.

‘Surname, first name, patronymic and age?’ said a brown-coated woman.

‘Romashkina, Serafima Constantinovna. Eighteen.’

She was pretty, this Serafima, thought Abakumov, but it was the mother, the film star, that he wanted. He wondered what else Serafima was saying but weren’t the words, like the tears, always the same, and hers were lost in the cacophony of doors slamming, cars arriving, locks grinding, orders barked and the crack of his boots on the stairs worn smooth by decades of unsteady feet entering the lost world for the first time.

‘Sign here, prisoner,’ said the warder. ‘Go through that door. Body search.’

The registration section worked like clockwork, thought Abakumov, who had perfected the stages that reduced a free person to a prisoner with a number: register, surrender belongings, body search, photograph. It did not matter who they were before. They might be a Polish prince, a German general, a Communist bigwig or a film-star’s daughter, but that was the glory of the Soviet State and the Party.

I am the servant of this all-powerful state, I am the sword of the Party, thought Abakumov, and I can reduce anyone to a number, to a smudge of grease on the floor. He was sorry to see this girl fed into his machine – but she had been very unwise.

He walked further into the gigantic building, and now it was quiet. He had left the registration section far behind; here the doors were no longer opened by men with keys on their belts. Now his boots sailed over blue carpet as he was saluted by men in shoulderboards and striped trousers. A secretary opened the doors of his office. He tossed some genial words at his assistant: he prided himself on his lack of formality with subordinates.

A wood-panelled office. Persian rugs, six telephones (plus a Kremlin vertushka), a man-sized safe, a life-sized oil painting of Stalin. The chief of SMERSH lay down for a moment on the divan, crossing his legs and admiring his shiny boots.

Tonight, once he had read the interrogation reports on the children, should he watch Dynamo play football? Or go jazz dancing? He was proud of his nickname in the Dzerzhinsky Club’s dance hall where the MVD Jazz Band played the new songs: Vitya-foks-trotochnik – Victor the foxtrot-dancer. Or the theatre? Sometimes he even chatted to ordinary people during the interval.

That’s the man I am, he told himself. Unlike Beria, I have interests beyond sex and power. He had learned how to work from Beria, but now they were nearly equals. And Beria hated him.

He congratulated himself for stealing the Children’s Case off Beria. But success raised the stakes. The phone buzzed on his desk and he called out: ‘Send them in.’

It was his two chief interrogators, Komarov and Likhachev, who saluted stiffly.

‘Easy. Sit.’ He waved at them from the divan and they sat in the leather chairs. ‘Comrades, before we get on to our new prisoner, I want you to work the other brats tonight. We must have names by morning.’

They left, and on the divan, Abakumov closed his eyes. Serafima Romashkina was the key. Did she have a secret life? The Chief of Military Counter-intelligence grinned: I know something about secret lives. Everyone has one.

24

SENKA DOROV WAS the first to be called for interrogation that day. Even though he was ten and small for his age, he had spent the previous night in an adult cell. Twelve-year-olds could be shot and he was younger so they couldn’t shoot him but suppose the rules had changed and…

Every other second he whispered to himself aloud: Mama, where are you? I’m here. Please come and find me. I’m frightened. I love you. Do you know where I am?

These words had sustained him ever since last night, when, at home (a radiant place that now seemed far away), he had tried on his new silk pyjamas, navy blue with red piping, made in China specially for him. His mama had loved the pyjamas, she even clapped when she saw him in them and she had kissed him again and again. She always laughed with her head thrown back, making a high sound as if she was singing. Even though she was so busy, being a minister and a doctor, she always took him, Demian and Minka to school and often picked them up too.

I think I’m her favourite even though she says she loves the other three equally, he thought now. She kisses me more than them, especially Demian. Yes, they’re older but still, she says I’m irresistible. She’s the most beautiful mummy in the world, and when I’m grown up, I can marry her. (But she’s married to Papa, of course. Would Papa mind? He’s often very grumpy and gloomy, so I think not. Surely Papa would step aside?)

Last night, he’d decided to borrow a book from the neighbours so he went out on to the landing and down the stairs, still wearing his incredibly smart pyjamas and a little red and blue dressing gown to match. Minka said he was a dandy. Was that bad? ‘I’m merely a flamboyant academic,’ he’d told her.

He’d knocked on the neighbours’ door and his friend Lulu answered. Her mother was behind her.

‘Hello, Little Professor,’ said Lulu’s mother.

‘May I please borrow a book: Discussing Music, Choreography and Libretto in Tchaikovsky’s Opera and Ballet.’

‘For your parents to read?’

‘No, for me to study,’ said Senka quite seriously.

‘Don’t you like Marshak’s stories? Terem-Teremok? Or Timur and his Team?’

‘Those are for babies!’ he said indignantly.

‘What a character you are, Senka,’ said Lulu’s mother.

The book was very heavy but Senka was carrying it upstairs again when he saw four men, two in suits and two in uniform with blue tabs.

‘You’re Senka Dorov, aren’t you?’ said one of the men, who had a bald head the shape of an onion dome.

‘Yes. Who are you?’

‘That book looks most interesting. Can we have a look at it downstairs?’

‘I’ve got to get back for supper. Mama’s waiting.’

But the man had taken the book and was perusing it in a very puzzled way. ‘Opera, eh?’

‘Which is your favourite Tchaikovsky?’ asked Senka. ‘Don’t answer Swan Lake. That’s too predictable.’

‘You’re a funny lad,’ said the man as he steered Senka into the lift.

‘Hey! Hang on,’ cried Senka, but at that moment, his arms were held behind his back and one of the other men put a cloth over his face and he went to sleep. And when he woke up (he didn’t know how long afterwards), he was between the same two men in a Pobeda car approaching Dzerzhinsky Square.

‘Where are you taking me? Who are you?’ he asked sleepily.

And the domed one said: ‘We’re taking you to play Reds versus Whites with your friends. There’s nothing to worry about!’

‘You must think I’m very stupid or was born yesterday,’ said Senka fearlessly – though as the drug wore off, he was beginning to feel fear rising up his tummy and into his throat where he could taste its bitterness, a sensation he had only experienced once before, when one of Demian’s horrid friends had held his nose at school and he thought he was suffocating until he remembered that he could breathe through his mouth.

He found he was still holding Discussing Music, Choreography and Libretto in Tchaikovsky’s Opera and Ballet on his knee. He looked out of the windows: I know this building, he thought as they drove into the grey, granite mountain of Lubianka. He had heard his parents mention it as they passed, and he had not missed the awe, even the dread, in their voices. Before he could say another word, the steel gates swung open and the car accelerated into a courtyard, the doors were opened and he was being frogmarched down some steps and up to a filthy counter which he could not see over.

‘Where is he?’ barked an old woman in a brown coat. ‘I can’t even see him. Little blighter, isn’t he?’

‘Are you taking me to see my sister?’

‘Surname, name, patronymic.’

‘Ring my mama. She’ll come and get me. She doesn’t know where I am.’ Then he remembered something important and reassuring. ‘Is my sister Minka here? Maybe I’m here to collect her?’

‘No talking, prisoner,’ snarled the woman. ‘Answer the questions!’ But Senka was so relieved that he had remembered this and so accustomed, at home and even at school, to being treated with indulgent love, that he ignored her.

‘Because Mama says Minka’s going home soon. Now I understand why I’m here.’

‘Another word out of you,’ shouted a man in uniform, ‘and you’ll get a thick ear, if not a beating! Do you understand me?’

‘Yes,’ said Senka, now shocked and deeply worried. ‘Please can I ring my daddy. He works on the Central Committee.’ He thought mentioning his father might frighten them, but they did not seem to care. They took away his book and gave him a receipt that he didn’t know what to do with. Then a fat warder in a brown coat led him through a door: ‘Body search. Medical,’ she said. ‘Take all your clothes off and hurry up about it.’

Senka felt shy. ‘Even my pyjama bottoms?’

‘Move it! You collect your clothes after.’ She pushed him through another door.

‘But I’ve got a terrible tummy ache. Mama makes me lie down when I have it and then it goes. And I have asthma.’

‘Come here,’ said a man with a wen on his nose and a stethoscope and a white coat. He was sitting in an old metal chair beside a plain hospital trolley, its mattress stained a faded brown. Senka could tell he was a doctor but he was not a doctor like his mother. ‘Stand!’

Senka sensed danger: ‘No!’ He bolted for the door. But the doctor had pressed a button on the wall and the door flew open and in came three warders, a man and two women. Senka was crying now, sobbing: ‘I want my mama. I want to go home, my tummy is really hurting!’ But they held his pale naked body and carried him to the trolley where they dumped him roughly.

‘Let me check you, or they’ll hold you down,’ said the doctor, who was wheezing heavily. ‘And it’ll be worse than a stomach ache, I can tell you.’

Senka stopped struggling but he found he was shaking with fear and foreboding. The doctor told him to open his mouth. Then the wen-nozzled medic pushed in his fingers, which tasted of metal and rubbish simultaneously, and felt Senka’s teeth and his tongue. ‘Turn over,’ he said. ‘Take a breath!’

Senka felt something in his bottom and he started to fight again and cry out, but it was over quickly, and soon he was back in the first room and in his pyjamas and dressing gown again. Another room: a greasy-haired old man beside a camera told him to sit in the chair but he was too small so the photographer placed a cushion on it, before disappearing under a black blanket: ‘Look at the camera’ and boom: there was a flash and a fizzing sound. ‘Well done, son.’ The photographer ruffled his hair.

Senka saw an opportunity.

‘Please can I call my mama? I so miss my mama!’

‘You’re young to be in here,’ the photographer whispered quickly. ‘You’ll get out, son, unlike me. But my advice is to let the current take you. Don’t fight it.’ Then he cleared his throat and called out: ‘Prisoner for transfer.’

Senka was given back to the warders in their brown coats, who handed him over to two uniformed guards. Each held one of his arms. Keyrings holding many keys jingled from belts next to their pistols. ‘No talking. Eyes forward. Let’s go.’ Steel stairways, down, up again, through locked doors. Senka felt tiny in this enormous hidden world. Every time one door closed and another opened he was in yet another towering hall filled with metal landings, each of which held row upon row of enforced steel doors.

The place stank of wee, poo, sweat, detergent, dampness. Repulsive. Repellent. Revolting. Rebarbative. Nauseating. Egregious. Emetic. The thesaurus of words comforted him but his heart was beating like a train travelling at speed.

When he heard some more footsteps getting closer, his heart raced. ‘Is it Minka?’ he said, his voice quivering. But they pushed him into a box like an upright coffin, and locked the door. Senka thought he might suffocate and his tummy cramp returned but he heard the steps go past and then they took him out and finally they opened a cell number 235 and pushed him inside.

‘Someone’s weed in my bed,’ Senka called when he saw the thin mattress on the metal bed: it bore a yellow stain in the shape of the Crimea. He wanted to go himself but there was no lavatory. He did not know what to do. Then the Judas port opened and closed, the locks turned and a warder looked in.

‘I’m hungry and I need to go to the lavatory,’ he said.

‘You’ve missed that time,’ said the warder. ‘Use that slops bucket.’

‘I don’t think I can use a bucket.’

‘Save it up till morning then, your majesty. Rations soon.’

‘Please call my mama,’ said Senka, bursting into tears. Soon he was crying in spasms, the tears running down into his mouth and even down his neck. ‘Please!’

The door slammed again, and the eyehole was opened and closed repeatedly, but no one came, so Senka spread the blanket over the mattress. The pillow had a red-brown mark the shape of Africa, he noticed.

Finally, he had to use the repugnant slops bucket; afterwards exhaustion forced him to lie down and he started to cry again. The door opened and this time it was a lady with a trolley. She gave him a bowl of soup (which was really just grey water with two chunks of straggly yellow fat floating in it), a square of black bread and a tiny rectangle of butter. He was so hungry but the soup stank and the fat was horrid so he just ate the bread.

‘May I have an extra piece of bread?’

‘Against the rules. That’s your allowance.’

She gave him a cup of tea with a tiny piece of sugar; then the door was shut again and he lay on his bed, terrified by the sounds of the vastness of the Inner Prison of Lubianka. The symphony of prisons, he decided, is more percussion than strings: slamming doors, tinkling keys, grinding locks, coughing, spluttering, spasming, howling, sobbing, shouting, the clank of boots on metal landings and stairs. All was harsh and all he had known until this moment had been gentle.

Who were all these heaving, grunting, hacking strangers in the cells nearby? Was there anyone his age? Were the other children from the school close to him? Where was Minka? He closed his eyes and dreamed of his mama, of his home, of his brothers and sister. Mama, I’m here. Please come and find me. Do you know where I am?

He cried and cried but even when the tears ran out, the fear remained. How had this terrible mistake been made? Surely they didn’t know he was ten. If only he had told them that, they’d have realized they had the wrong person. He could not believe they didn’t know who his mama and papa were.

He replayed the night of the shooting on the bridge in his head: he was in the prison because of those deaths; he knew that. But had George and Andrei been arrested in their pyjamas?

Senka realized that he had nothing to cuddle and no one had kissed him tonight: how could he sleep without his toy bear, Aristotle? He had never slept without the bear. At home, he would lie on his bed with the cover pulled up to his neck, feeling like a warm prince at the very centre of the entire world. His mama would sit on his bed and tell him stories and take his face in her hands and kiss his nose and his forehead and his cheeks and sometimes even his eyes and he would look up at her and sometimes he gave his matinée-idol look, lowering his face and raising his eyes, and his mama would say: ‘Oh! Who could resist those brown eyes? One day, you’ll get married and she’ll be a lucky girl!’ And then she’d throw back her head and laugh.

This made him cry again but at least he was beginning to realize why he was there. When Minka disappeared, his mama said, ‘Two of her friends were killed so of course they have to investigate. Then she’ll come home.’ But Mama and Papa said Minka was going to come home tonight. So why was he in prison too? And why couldn’t he sleep? The eyehole kept opening, and the electric light was on. When he curled up, a voice said: ‘Hands outside the blanket!’ He was desperate to sleep. ‘You’re such a good sleeper,’ Mama always said. He closed his eyes but just when darkness was beginning to close in around him, the door was thrown open abruptly and he was shaken out of bed, marched down the corridor, up a metal stairway, down, up again through several doors.

A bright room. Two metal chairs. A man with a grotesque face dotted with thousands of little red spots, a jutting chin that resembled the muzzle of a dog and hands like lobster claws faced him.

‘I’m Colonel Likhachev,’ said the man. ‘We’ve treated you children too gently, but now we know that you are criminals and enemies, we’ll deal with you just the same way we punish adults. I don’t care if you’re ten or eighty years old: you answer my questions and you tell the truth. If you lie or withhold anything, I’ll knock your teeth in. Do you understand me?’

Senka looked at this vicious myrmidon and gave a loud sob, and the man brought his fist down on the table so hard that the lamp jumped and Senka recoiled, knocking his chair over. The man rose fast and grabbed Senka by the chin, his claws squeezing him so that his mouth was all squashed.

‘Don’t you ever fucking move a muscle without my permission. And don’t cry either.’

Senka started to pant fast and faster until he was struggling for air.

‘Answer me this one question and you can go back to your cell.’

Senka nodded.

‘Do you know Serafima Romashkina?’

‘Yes,’ he whispered, still breathing very fast.

‘Do you know her well?’

‘She’s eighteen but… well, she’s very nice to me.’ Senka felt as though he might faint but knew he must not. He took a few quick breaths. ‘She’s my sister Minka’s friend.’

‘Now think carefully. Don’t say no. Don’t protect anyone. We find out everything and if you lie, you’ll go to the camps and you’ll never see your parents again. But if you tell the truth, you’ll go home very soon. We are investigating the deaths on the Stone Bridge. You were there, were you not?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you see there?’

‘Two of my sister’s friends were dead on the ground.’

‘But you noticed something?’

‘Yes. The notebook. Nikolasha’s Velvet Book. And I picked it up.’

‘You know when you picked it up, you committed a serious crime by purloining evidence of a murder?’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Then why did you act like a traitor?’ asked the livid, pimply man who Senka now realized was really a lobster masquerading as a human. ‘Why pick it up? Why hide it?’

‘I didn’t think. Is my mama coming soon?’

‘Not until you tell us the truth. What did you do with the book?’

‘I put in my room and hid it.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought it would be interesting to read. I didn’t know it was a crime, I’m very sorry.’

‘Did you tell anyone you had it?’

‘Only my brother. Demian. Later I found him opening my desk drawers and I was so cross I told my mother, but the notebook was gone.’

‘You never read it?’

‘No. I promise I didn’t.’

‘Did you know it contained plans to form a government and assassinate our leaders?’

Senka shook his head, trying to think back to his parents’ conversations. His earliest memories were of the lifts in the House on the Embankment groaning at night as the secret police arrived to arrest another person. On one occasion his mother had glanced tensely at his father: ‘What floor?’ she had asked.

‘Eleventh.’

‘The Larins. They aren’t Enemies, Genrikh.’

‘The Party never makes mistakes, Dashka. Better to kill a hundred innocents than miss one Enemy. We’re in a life-and-death struggle to prepare for war against Fascism and there are Enemies everywhere. Let’s not discuss this in front of…’ And his father had looked at him.

‘Senka’s too little to understand,’ Mama had said. And he hadn’t understood then, but he did remember how the Larins had been taken away and never returned.

After the shooting on the bridge, Senka’s mama had taken them all for a walk in the woods near their dacha and said, ‘If you’re ever asked about this, tell them what you know. But nothing extra. Don’t gossip; stay off politics. Secrets are like a minefield: you don’t know the mine is there until you tread on it. Chatter can destroy a family.’

‘This comes from the highest authority in the Soviet Union,’ said the Lobster now. ‘Search your memory: things you’ve seen, things you’ve heard. Did Serafima have a boyfriend?’

‘Of course not. If she did have one, it would be me!’

‘Christ!’ The Lobster bent his hands back and clicked the bones. ‘A special friend then?’

‘But Serafima was always on her own.’

‘Did anyone pay her special attention?’

Senka hesitated. He sensed danger, knew somehow that his words could hurt people. But where could the danger lie here? Was it a crime for a boy to admire a girl? He wasn’t at all sure.

‘All boys liked Serafima,’ he said. ‘Me most of all.’

The Lobster was writing on a piece of paper. Now he pushed it across the table. ‘Do you confess to stealing this evidence of conspiracy from the crime scene?’

‘I don’t understand,’ Senka said.

‘You can’t deny you took the notebook and hid it. Your brother Demian found it.’

‘Oh!’ Not only had Demian found the notebook, but he’d also given it to the secret police. That’s why he was free. And he was jealous of Senka and obsessed with rising up the Pioneers and Komsomol and becoming as important as their father. Demian was a snitch and a weasel.

‘If you ever want to see your mother again, sign this now,’ the Lobster said, pushing it to Senka, who signed it quickly.

‘If you were twelve, this piece of paper could sentence you to the Highest Measure of Punishment: death by shooting to the back of the head. But as you’re only ten, you face ten years in the camps under Article 158,’ the Lobster said.

Senka’s head spun and he held on to the edge of the table.

‘But if you help us about Serafima…’

‘Minka said she had… admirers… suitors… chevaliers.’

‘Name them now before I punch you.’

Senka loved Serafima and would do anything rather than get her into trouble but how would this harm her? How would it harm anyone? Beware the mines! He racked his brains for something about Serafima’s admirers. Hadn’t he heard Minka and Serafima laughing about the Crown Prince? They thought he didn’t understand this code name – how stupid did they think he was? But he knew not to mention Vasily Stalin. Anything to do with Stalin was perilous. He had to find something that wasn’t dangerous but it was hard because Senka did not know what the Lobster wanted. The mines were invisible. Senka’s stomach started to churn and his breathing became laboured again.

‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ he said.

The Lobster stood up, his chair grinding against the floor, and he started to count: ‘At three, I’ll beat the answers out of you.’ He pulled out a thick rubber bullystick, and banged it on to the table. ‘I’ve smashed in a man’s skull with this little friend,’ and Senka could see that the club rested happily in the Lobster’s claws as if he was accustomed to using it. ‘One, two…’

‘Well, yes, yes, there was a time…’ Don’t get Serafima into trouble, Senka told himself. Don’t mention Vasily Stalin. Don’t involve Mama or Papa. Don’t harm Minka. There was so much to consider. He ran through the possibilities: this is nothing, that’s secret; this won’t satisfy him, that’s dangerous. His mind was overheating with responsibilities, ambuscades, minefields, unspeakables, unmentionables, all of which were balanced against his own confession of taking the notebook and the ten years awaiting him in the Gulags: the train journeys, the snowy tundra, the threat of never seeing his parents again.

‘There was one time…’

‘When?’ The Lobster put down the club and took up a pen.

‘It was a few weeks ago… Minka and I were walking on Gorky Street and… and…’

The truncheon came down hard on Senka’s hand. It hurt desperately and he started to cry, holding his wounded right hand in his left. The tears blurred his eyes until he couldn’t see. ‘I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you!’

But he still hadn’t decided what to tell.

‘Please don’t hurt me again. I want to see my mama… Once Minka and I were walking down Gorky and we saw Serafima and…’ He tried to remember and then he had it. Yes, this was perfect – and it hurt nobody he loved. ‘Behind her, a hundred metres behind her, we saw him following her.’

The relief was intoxicating as Senka settled down and began to tell his story.

25

KAPITOLINA MEDVEDEVA WAS in her office waiting for Innokenty Rimm to speak. In the last few days, that witch-hunting hypocrite had pranced the corridors like a broad-hipped conquistador. Something – nothing good – had happened to give him this spurt of confidence. What was it? Kapitolina Medvedeva had studied Dr Rimm as a zoologist does a rare and poisonous spider. His bluster had to be connected to the Children’s Case, she knew this.

Director Medvedeva was a strict disciplinarian, a Party member of many years, but what she really cared about was teaching and the children. This case had ruined her term – and she knew it could ruin her life too.

At night, she couldn’t sleep. By day, she sat at her desk but she couldn’t work. The parents (had Comrade Satinov ever visited the school gates so often?) brought the children; the children attended lessons, which the teachers taught, but all were pretending. They weren’t really there. They were in the dungeons of Lubianka. If she was lucky, the children would be released quickly and the case would blow over, but she knew such crises were often exploited by busybodies with axes to grind, overweening Party-minded pedants like Rimm who could turn harmless scandals into tragedies. I must be strong, she resolved, I must be like steel. Tverdost – hardness – is a Bolshevik virtue.

Rimm hadn’t knocked; he had just barged in. Now she was scrutinizing his nose – it was like a duck’s beak – and his hair the colour of rusty wire.

‘I wish to call an extraordinary meeting of the School Party Committee,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘To examine if any mistakes have been made in your leadership of the school.’

Kapitolina sat back in her chair. I’m in charge here, she thought. Not him. Not the Hummer. ‘I veto that idea, Dr Rimm.’

‘You cannot do so, comrade director. I am its secretary.’

‘There are three members of the committee and I have already spoken to Comrade Noodelman, and he is against.’

Director Medvedeva could see that Rimm was prepared for this. ‘You may remember that the rules allow for me to convene an extraordinary meeting of the School Party Committee with the attendance of all school staff to read Party announcements. Such as this one on mathematics teaching textbooks from the Central Committee Education Sector.’

He raised his eyebrows, and Director Medvedeva could see the gleam of victory in those watery red-rimmed eyes. ‘I shall see you there, shall I?’

The common room was full for Dr Rimm’s special meeting of the School’s Party Committee. The teachers were pale, tense, worried – and Director Medvedeva remembered the tragic meetings during the late thirties when two teachers had disappeared off the face of the earth and they had voted unanimously that ‘Enemies of the People should be shot like hyenas’.

Now only one teacher, Benya Golden, was relaxed enough to recline on one of the sofas with his legs crossed and a world-weary grin on his face.

She opened the meeting but Rimm immediately interrupted her. As secretary, it was his meeting and he moved fast to pass a series of resolutions – that the committee should examine whether the Children’s Case exposed any mistakes by the director of the school; that during this process, he, Dr Rimm, should take over the school…

Silence greeted these proposals.

‘Is this a coup d’état, Dr Rimm?’ said Benya Golden at last. ‘Do you wish to be the Napoleon of School 801?’ There was quiet laughter from somewhere, and then silence.

‘I’m surprised you joke! Your bourgeois and un-Party-minded teaching, particularly in your Pushkin lessons, has played a role in this tragic case, Teacher Golden.’

‘All right, Dr Rimm,’ Golden said, sighing and stretching. Director Medvedeva knew how hard Golden had taken the shootings and the arrests, and she sensed he had more experience of men like Rimm than she did. ‘Have your vote but I will only vote for you if you promise that your singing of “May Comrade Stalin Live Many, Many Long Years” will improve dramatically. In fact, are you singing it deliberately badly? That may be a subversive act of musical sabotage.’

A gasp of surprise and, from someone, an attempt to fight laughter greeted this, but Rimm’s officious demeanour, laced with hints of powerful connections, bewitched the frightened staff who voted for him unanimously.

Afterwards, Kapitolina Medvedeva, who felt herself growing smaller and more insignificant with each step, walked slowly back up the corridor to meet the parents at the Golden Gates. She could survive this. Such intrigues occurred all the time. But her worry about the arrested children compounded by this blow made her limbs heavy as lead. At the gates, she greeted the first parent, Dr Dorova. Demian was at her side but where was Senka? Director Medvedeva glanced at her face and the answering look of sleepless despair revealed the unthinkable. They had taken a ten-year-old! Whatever next?

She heard the ominous humming get closer, and Dr Rimm stood right in front of her, his womanly hips in his Party tunic blocking her way. ‘I’ll greet the parents and hold assembly this morning,’ he said. ‘This place is riddled with rotten elements and a fish rots from the head.’

She stepped backwards just as Dashka Dorova left and Comrade Satinov arrived.

‘Esteemed Comrade Satinov,’ she heard Rimm declare in his breathless soprano. ‘I’m delighted as acting director to greet you at the gates of our school! Long Live Comrade Stalin!’

It was early morning but the good humour of the Chekists, even though their eyes were tired and their chins covered in stubble, showed Andrei Kurbsky that they were making progress, and that meant someone had sung. Andrei knew he was the only outsider amongst the children, and he simply could not bear to go backwards, to exile, to penury. He was determined to survive this. I still have cards to play, he reminded himself. I can still get out of here.

Andrei knew that Colonel Likhachev would beat him but in that knowledge lay strength, for violence is at its most potent when it is unexpected. Andrei distilled all his fears down to two concerns: first was his mother. She would know by now where he was. She might even have been to the prison, having queued outside so many jails for his father. While the other parents could probably ring Comrade Beria himself, she alone had no one to turn to.

The bullystick struck him so hard in the face that it did not hurt. He felt a blackness with a heartbeat and pumping blood that turned the light into a night sky speckled with red sparks instead of stars. He was on his back on the concrete floor when Likhachev and another guard picked him up.

‘That’s just to wake you up, scum. To show you that here you’re nothing. Whatever you say, you might never see the streets of Moscow or your mother again.’ Andrei could feel his face pulsating as if it was a creature with its own life. He tried to wipe away the blood.

Be calm, he told himself, return to your mother, protect those you love. Above all, Andryusha, survive this to reforge yourself. Play chess with these brutes, even if your eyes are blind with blood.

Likhachev placed the truncheon glistening with Andrei’s blood beside his notebook and pen: ‘Nikolasha Blagov’s conspiracy against the Party was inspired by a mentor known as NV. Your friends have already told us this stood for Novi Vozhd. New Leader. We know this snake was connected to Serafima Romashkina.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Andrei said quickly. A smirk crossed Likhachev’s face. ‘No one was close to her.’

‘Even after a smack in the chops, you jump when she’s mentioned,’ said Likhachev. ‘Perhaps you’re her lover. Are you NV?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ But Andrei did, because protecting Serafima was his second priority.

‘We know how you followed her around like a puppy, and that you conspired avidly to overthrow the Soviet Government.’

‘Not true.’

‘That’s not what your friends say.’

‘Did they also tell you that I was working for the Organs?’ There. He’d said it. Played his ace card. Now the question was: How would it be picked up?

Likhachev twitched. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I offered to work with the Organs.’ Andrei made himself speak slowly. ‘When I read the Velvet Book I was worried by these potentially dangerous views. Given my background, I wanted to show my loyalty. I informed them that Nikolasha Blagov was propagating anti-Soviet ideas. I met my controller in a safe apartment. My codename was “Teacher’s Pet”. I am proud of my work with the Cheka.’

Likhachev’s red face had turned a sickly grey. This was something he should have known.

‘We will check your claims. Did you inform your controller that Nikolasha was planning a coup?’

‘I didn’t realize he had gone that far.’

‘You were concealing evidence from the Organs?’

‘No, he didn’t show us his scribblings.’

He saw Likhachev sit forward as he tried a different tack. ‘Serafima Romashkina. You think you knew her well? The one thing we Chekists know is that no one knows anyone well. You can be married to a woman for twenty years and not realize that she is an Enemy, a traitor, a whore. Since you’re one of us, let me share with you that we know from Nikolasha Blagov’s notebook that Serafima Romashkina was central to the conspiracy.’

‘I know that’s not true because I was watching her on behalf of the Organs.’

Likhachev smiled. ‘Your friends have already told us name after name of her lovers. All were devoted to her. Young and old. What was her trick? Who taught her? The geishas of Japan? She must be quite a girl.’

Andrei was trying to keep his footing in a landslide. He church-steepled his fingers to concentrate. Save yourself, your mother and Serafima, he repeated. He had to give them someone else. But who?

‘Serafima’s a decent, honourable Soviet patriot,’ said Andrei. ‘She didn’t have a lover. I reported on her movements, her routine, I saw who she met. Yes, she met people like anyone does. Maybe she had mentors like we all do. But no lover. Read my reports.’

Likhachev was caressing his bullystick. ‘Now you’re fucking boring me. You mentioned a mentor, did you not?’

Andrei touched his face. His right cheek and mouth were numb and swollen. And he was tired. He felt he would die if he didn’t get some sleep. The answer was obvious: Vasily Stalin. Perhaps there was something between Serafima and him? Vasily Stalin had picked her up, and she knew him. If NV – New Leader – was Vasily Stalin, wouldn’t they see this entire case as a harmless joke, instead of a conspiracy? But George Satinov had warned him: never mention Vasily Stalin, and he had left him out of his reports to the Organs. Anyway, who would believe him, the son of an Enemy? And what gruesome Caucasian vengeance would the Great Stalin himself take on a boy who dared to mention the Name in vain? Yet despite it all, the word Vasily danced on his lips.

Likhachev leaned over and put his jaw so close to the wounds on Andrei’s face that he could taste the sausage on his interrogator’s breath. ‘Come on, lover boy,’ he said. ‘Prove to me that Serafima’s whiter than white.’

At lunchtime, the inspector from the Education Sector of the Agitprop Department, Central Committee, arrived to hear Dr Rimm’s accusations.

‘Comrade director.’ Inspector Ivanov licked his finger as he turned some papers. ‘In the light of the Children’s Case, we have received four anonymous complaints about the direction of School 801.’

Kapitolina Medvedeva looked miserably at Rimm, who beamed jubilantly back at her. Who cares if she knew it was he who had written all four denunciations, he thought? Whoever had written them, they told the truth.

‘Therefore, I have been deputed to consult Comrade Rimm who has confirmed some of the accusations. Is that right, Comrade Rimm?’

‘Yes, Comrade Ivanov. But most reluctantly and with sincere sadness.’

Dr Rimm was delighted at the way things were going. It turned out he had quite a talent for undercover work. Demian had given him the Velvet Book and he had given it to an officer whom he knew in the Organs. Yes, Senka Dorov had been arrested thanks to him but Comrade Stalin often said, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ and, besides, the Chekists had promised no harm would come to Senka and the shock might teach the runt some respect.

‘Good,’ said Ivanov, licking his fingertips repeatedly as he turned more pages. ‘Shall we take these one by one, comrade director?’

Kapitolina Medvedeva nodded.

‘Who accepted Andrei Kurbsky, the son of an Enemy of the People, into the school this term?’

Kapitolina looked a little surprised. ‘I did.’

‘Why?’

‘Comrade Stalin said we must not visit the sins of the fathers on to the children,’ she said.

‘True enough.’ Ivanov made a note. ‘Who is paying the fees?’

‘I am. Out of my own salary.’

‘Comrade director, did you permit’ – two licks of the fingertips – ‘the teaching of Pushkin against Communist ethics with a romantic-bourgeois sentimentality?’

‘If I suspected any teacher of bourgeois philistinism I would have dismissed them.’

He noted this.

‘I fear these petty accusations are wasting your time, inspector,’ Kapitolina continued. ‘In recognition of this, I propose that Comrade Rimm, with Comrade Noodelman, should investigate this and report in one month.’

This was a clever move. Even Rimm had to admit this, although he could see she was playing for time.

‘That seems a good idea,’ said Inspector Ivanov. ‘Perhaps for the moment that is the best solution, don’t you think, Comrade Rimm? The Central Committee would be satisfied with that.’

‘Thank you Comrade Ivanov,’ said Rimm. The director had foiled him – cunning bitch. Now he would have to prove his own accusations, which would be much harder than sending anonymous denunciations.

But he had held back his gravest accusation.

‘I have one question, Comrade Ivanov. You are doubtless aware of Teacher Golden’s biography and the role he played in the tragedy.’

Inspector Ivanov looked interested. ‘Pray tell us, comrade.’

Rimm leaned forward. ‘Golden created the poisonous ideology that inspired these children to kill. I propose you investigate why this two-faced mask-wearer is teaching at this school? Who hired him? And even more importantly, who is protecting him, even now?’

26

WHEN GEORGE WAS young, an aquaintance of his parents named Mendel Barmakid, a famous Old Bolshevik, had been arrested. His parents had whispered about it in the bathroom as parents did in those days – with the taps running.

‘Can he be guilty?’ asked Tamara.

‘Read this,’ answered his father.

Tamara quietly read out: ‘“Protocols of Interrogation of Mendel Barmakid…” But they could have used excessive methods,’ she said. ‘Excessive methods’ meant torture in Bolshevik language.

‘I doubt it,’ answered Satinov. ‘Look. He confesses everything and every page is signed by him. See? That’s convincing. If he wasn’t guilty, he wouldn’t confess. Confession is the mother of justice. The lesson is to tell the truth but never confess anything!’

George Satinov was repeating this to himself now.

‘Who is NV?’ Colonel Likhachev was asking. ‘And what was his relationship to Serafima Romashkina?’

George thought of Vasily Stalin. He recalled his brother David saying, ‘Vaska’s crazy about Serafima, and he always gets what he wants. When the rogue takes girls flying, they fall into bed with him out of sheer terror!’ What if Likhachev found out George had not told him about Serafima’s partying with Vasily Stalin? What if Andrei had told them already, and they were testing him? George kept his nerve and held back.

Likhachev stood up abruptly and banged on the door, which opened almost instantaneously. ‘Major,’ he rasped, ‘bring in Prisoner 72.’

George’s heart beat faster as terrible thoughts rushed through his mind. Would this be Minka? Or Serafima? And he prayed that if it was any of his friends, they would not be harmed. He hoped that they had not punched Andrei or Vlad as they had punched him and he prayed too they had been as strong as him and not incriminated themselves. And then for a moment, the nightmare: could it be his father? But that was simply unthinkable. He could hear the clip of footsteps getting closer. For the first time, George, so confident, so brash, experienced the most elemental fear. His belly contracted. Amidst the martial marching of guards, he sensed dragging: the shuffling of another presence barely walking at all. Then two guards pulled in a figure whom they deposited on the chair opposite. There was a bump like a sack of grain and a big head fell forward, but Colonel Likhachev seized the hair and held it up like a primitive warrior with the scalp of a fallen enemy. George gasped. At first it was just the atrocious wounds that shocked him: the face was smashed into pulp, swollen to twice its normal size, the nose crushed, teeth missing, the lip gashed to the nose, the hair caked with blood.

His head spun, his jaw clenched, his belly tightened and he vomited in the corner of the room. The face was scarcely recognizable but when he wiped his mouth and looked again, Colonel Likhachev said, ‘Don’t you remember your dear friend? Look more closely!’

The man seemed barely conscious. He was muttering to himself, and one of his eyes was totally closed, with blood seeping out of it. He wore a uniform, though the tunic was missing half its buttons, the chest was torn where the medals had been ripped off and the shoulderboards had been cut away. George half covered his eyes. Even like this, the man was all too familiar.

‘Losha?’ he said. ‘Losha – oh God, what have they done to you?’

‘Ssssizz!’ The sound came from Losha Babanava’s mouth but it was incomprehensible. He opened his good eye which somehow almost seemed to twinkle at George. ‘Ssshhhzz.’

‘Sizzling?’ said George.

The head nodded.

George collapsed back into his chair. He thought he might vomit again. After his father, Losha Babanava was the man George most loved and respected. He had known him all his life. Whatever happened, whatever he needed, Losha had been able to fix it. Now Losha, this prince of men, was the bloodied ruin before him, flanked by two guards, in this Godforsaken prison. If Losha was broken, anything was possible. His father could be here too.

‘George, George, calm down,’ said Likhachev. ‘You can see what happens when you don’t tell us all you know. No one can stand in the way of the state, however strong you are – isn’t that right, Prisoner Babanava? Losha’s as strong as an ox but we broke him, didn’t we?’ He paused, and then smiled at George, his face shining with sweat. ‘We should thank you, George. How else could we have known where you got the gun that Rosa Shako used to kill Nikolasha and herself?’

George was almost overcome with the shame of it, and angry too. There was no shortage of guns in Moscow. Nikolasha could have got that gun anywhere. Yes, he, George, had borrowed it from Losha and given it to his schoolfriend, but it had not occurred to him that Losha would get into trouble. And now he realized that this ruin of blisters, blood, bruises, was his own doing.

But Losha was shaking and trying to say something. ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ he thought Losha was trying to mouth. ‘Do whatever you have to do.’

‘Silence, prisoner,’ shouted Likhachev. ‘Or we’ll finish you off!’

Losha slurred one more word until George recognised it: ‘Family!’ Family was everything to a Georgian, and Losha loved their family. George buried his face in his hands.

‘Let’s get on with this,’ said Likhachev. ‘Losha says there’s something you haven’t told us, George.’

George could barely hear him. He felt the fires of hell were screaming in his ears.

‘If you want to earn Losha a visit from the doctor, tell us who was the important man who chased Serafima. Focus, George. Losha might die without a doctor.’

George looked at Losha and the caked head nodded. He was right. It did not matter. He must tell or Losha would suffer more.

‘I’ll tell you, if you get him a doctor. It was Vasily…’ Losha nodded. ‘Vasily Stalin.’

Likhachev stiffened when he heard the name. ‘Vasily Stalin and Serafima?’

George read in Likhachev’s face that no one else had mentioned that name in connection with Serafima. Well, now he’d said it, and it didn’t matter because Vasily Stalin was untouchable.

Likhachev rubbed his narrow brow. ‘Vasily Stalin, you say?’

‘Yes.’

Likhachev called out to the guards: ‘Get Colonel Komarov.’

Komarov joined them, and Likhachev turned to George again.

‘General Vasily Stalin was courting Serafima?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said George.

‘Did they have an immoral relationship?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can you confirm this, Babanava?’

Losha nodded and George told the story that he had heard from his brother about the night Vasily had gone out with Serafima. The two interrogators looked at one another in silence for what seemed like an age while George understood that they, like him, were running through all the possible consequences of his revelation – but from a very different angle. All George could hope was that he had won Losha a medical visit. The interrogators would have to report to their superiors and George wondered if the magic name might stop this crazy investigation altogether. Surely if Comrade Stalin was told, if Vasily complained to his father, then the schoolchildren would be released… But this was George’s last burst of optimism: he was so drained that, whatever the consequences to himself, all he wanted to do was sleep, to escape this hell.

‘Let’s return to the New Leader,’ said Likhachev. ‘If you still want to help Losha, that is?’

George rubbed his eyes. ‘I don’t think NV means New Leader. Nikolasha may have been referring to someone in Onegin. You need a Pushkin scholar…’

As the guards were dragging Losha towards to the door, he looked back at George trying to say something again. ‘Sszzy…’ And then George understood it: ‘Sissies.’

George wept. For himself. For Losha. For sissies everywhere. Innokenty Rimm had never been happier. In the past, he had often felt himself handicapped by his figure, by the bottom that looked big in whatever suits or tunic he chose. (He replayed the pain of his schooldays, thanks to the trousers that made his hips look ungainly, however tight or baggy they might be! What tantrums he had had when his mother bought him trousers and he looked in the mirror!) When he had received those love letters from ‘Tatiana’, he had often wondered what such a Helen of Troy had seen in him. But now power had lightened his chunky midriff, now he felt snake-hipped with the headiness of success. If she liked him then, when he was merely deputy director, she must love him so much more now. He expected the next letter to acclaim his new status.

He was at the Golden Gates, greeting the parents with bon mots. How natural: they all treated him as if he had always been in charge.

Assembly. School, stand! A simple gesture to sit. A merry song. A pointed homily.

Afterwards: ‘Morning, Teacher Golden. A word please?’ he said, buttonholing Benya as the children pushed back their chairs. The children were watching him inconspicuously, wondering if he was reprimanding Golden, interested in his every act now he was (acting) director.

‘Yes, Innokenty,’ said Benya Golden. ‘I’m all ears.’

‘Your Pushkin classes are suspended while the school is under such scrutiny and while we are rethinking the literature syllabus. Understood?’

Benya Golden had opened his mouth to make one of his facetious comments when Rimm spotted four strangers in suits who were obviously plain-clothed officers of the Organs. Now he was in charge, he hoped they were not here to arrest any of his pupils. He was quite sure that the children in custody would be released very soon. If the Party believed Kapitolina Medvedeva had committed crimes, well, he would not dream of challenging the Party. ‘Morning, comrades!’ he said to them masterfully. In fact, he knew why they were here: to arrest Benya Golden after his denunciation.

The agents marched purposefully down the central aisle. The children too recognized them as the comrades who had arrested Vlad Titorenko on the day after the shooting, and shouldered their satchels more slowly, scared but still curious. The teachers froze in their seats. Rimm smiled as they approached, knowing why they were there, ready to guide them. Sure enough, one of them gestured slightly towards where he and Golden stood. So he had been correct. He always was.

Rimm looked at Golden and he was amazed to see that, while he was pale, he was calm. A courage of sorts.

Rimm stepped forward towards the Chekists. Now that they were close, he could not help but take control (as acting director and advisor to the Organs). He gestured a little towards Golden, to guide them to the right place, and they were grateful because they placed their hands on Golden’s arms, lightly but firmly.

‘Would you come with us?’ said their leader. ‘It won’t take long. We just have a few questions.’ They turned Golden around – he glanced back at Agrippina Begbulatova – and were just about to march him out when the chief agent said, ‘You are Innokenty Rimm, are you not?’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Golden.

‘I’m Dr Rimm,’ Rimm said. ‘But surely…’

‘Apologies,’ said the chief agent, patting Benya Golden on the arm in an entirely different way than a second earlier. ‘Do carry on and have a good day.’

Then, moving with the robust agility of men who live in the realm of physical force, they laid their hands on Rimm in such a way that they instantly assumed possession of him. He felt cumbersome as if made of clay. He could not move his legs, and his face seemed to burn.

‘Innokenty Rimm? Come with us, please. Just a formality. A couple of hours and we’ll have you back in class. Nothing to worry about…’

As he was frogmarched out of the hall, Rimm glanced back, expecting to see a smirk of triumph from Benya Golden – but instead he saw only deep sympathy, and this from a man who had every reason to despise him.

And he wondered in that fearsome moment of freefalling if he had been wrong about Golden, about the headmistress, about everything, all along.

27

WAS IT MORNING or midnight, midsummer or the dead of winter? The days and nights were blurred together: interrogations that started in the middle of the night seemed to last into the afternoon. But the very fact that Senka had settled into the almost reassuring routine of the Grey Granite Mountain proved that a great deal of time had passed. More than a week. Maybe even two weeks. How could he tell? All Senka Dorov knew was that he was very tired and very hungry, and back in the interrogation room that had become his entire world, facing Colonel Likhachev.

I am cleverer than you, you ugly old bully, he thought as he looked at the Lobster. Senka had confessed to taking the Velvet Book but in innocence. When he saw the notebook, there on the bridge, he had grabbed it. When he read all that nonsense about the Romantic Politburo and Minister of Love after lights-out in his bedroom, he grasped that he must hide the book. But he had made two grievous mistakes: the first was not destroying it, and the second was telling his snitch brother. But in that all-important session, he had managed to find something to give the Chekists a new strand of investigation: ‘Once we were walking down Gorky and we saw Serafima, and a hundred metres behind her, we saw Dr Rimm following her.’ Yes, he’d offered up the grotesque Rimm as Serafima’s secretly besotted admirer, and wondered if they had arrested him too.

The stench of Likhachev brought him back to earth. Senka analysed the Lobster (after all, he had spent hours with the horrible man). He identified: cologne, sweat, salami, garlic, too much vodka and wee – yes, not unlike the odour of the school lavatories. However, he felt a tremendous urge to please this thug, to win his favour. This man had absolute power over him and his family, yet he was determined that he would not tell anyone anything, not anything important anyway. He remembered that his papa often said, ‘Discretion is one of the cardinal Bolshevik virtues.’ Comrade Genrikh Dorov was a clever and important man (if lugubriously solemn – did he never laugh?). Yes, even his mama admitted with a laugh that Papa was a curmudgeon. And how he loved his mama. Even here, he could will her presence: her lovely scent (it came all the way from Paris, she said), which he could identify quite separately from the sweet way her skin and hair smelled. But his daddy understood Bolshevism and politics better than his mama: Genrikh Dorov had been one of Stalin’s own secretaries and Papa said, ‘The Party is always right.’ But why did his parents whisper things if the Party was always right? There was an inconsistency there, thought Senka, an inconsistency that could not be explained, not even by his parents.

One thing was clear amidst all the esotheric mysteries of the Lobster’s questions: he would be a lot more comfortable in his professorial suit than these pyjamas. And now his chance came.

‘So,’ said the Lobster in a new amused tone. ‘I hear you wear a suit all the time and sweep up leaves instead of doing school gymnastics. A weird little boy, aren’t you?’

‘Comrade colonel,’ Senka burst out, encouraged by this lugubrious affability, ‘when my mama comes, please can you ask her to bring my suit?’

The smirk hovered around Colonel Likhachev’s mouth. ‘A Soviet child should wear socks and shorts.’

‘Yes. But my dignity depends on a suit.’

‘Your dignity? A suit?’ Likhachev pulled out his bullystick and thumped the table.

Senka lowered his head, his eyes fixed on the truncheon. He was afraid of course but he was clever enough to appear even more afraid, and he saw that his fear pleased the Lobster.

‘Quick question for you tonight, Senka. Which of you really knows Pushkin’s Onegin?’

Senka sighed. Could it be part of a code? There were often codes within ordinary things: he liked to read the Fables of Aesop, and Papa had explained to him that the Party leaders often used a special secret language that was Aesopian, with lots of double meanings, so Senka was always aware of the Aesopian language when he read the newspapers or listened to the news on the radio, and here in Lubianka he constantly examined each question with the diligence of a cryptographer.

So Senka turned the Lobster’s literary question over in his mind: how could that hurt his mama and papa? He could not imagine that it would. How could it hurt his sister Minka? No, he could not see that either. He was puzzled. It appeared to be a question that he could answer but what was its meaning in Aesopian language? Was Pushkin, in this case, national poet (good) or romantic nobleman (bad)?

‘Get a fucking move on, boy, or you’ll feel this across your face.’ The Lobster brandished the bullystick. ‘Who knows Onegin best of your sister’s friends?’

He chose the boy whom he hoped would do the least harm. ‘Andrei Kurbsky. You could ask him.’

Kapitolina Medvedeva was suspended. Even though her chief accuser, Rimm, was under arrest, her decisions on Andrei Kurbsky and Benya Golden were under investigation. At home that night, she wondered if she was going to be destroyed. She was being called before a judgement tribunal of the Education Sector of the Agitprop Department, Central Committee, at Old Square. Most likely, she would be sacked and then arrested. She would never teach again. The Gulags were likely. Even execution was possible. At the very least: exile. It was time to make a plan. A plan for survival.

I know who I am, Serafima told herself as Likhachev interrogated her. I know I love and am loved. Nothing else matters. And she touched her scar, the mark she called her snakeskin with her hand, and heard his voice reciting their poem. But Likhachev was asking her something again.

A stark, white villa in Babelsberg, Berlin. Stalin lay on a divan identical to the one in his Nearby Dacha in a library filled with the same books and journals. His first meetings with Churchill and Truman were set for later that day and he wore his new generalissimo’s uniform: a white tunic with a single star and golden epaulettes, creased blue trousers with a red stripe, and laced bootkins, instead of the baggy trousers tucked into high boots he generally favoured.

Outside the room, he heard the hum of the headquarters of an empire: motors revved, phones rang, boots clipped on marble floors, young officials bustled, typewriters clattered.

He was not quite alone, however: his son Vasily stood before him in full uniform, almost to attention, as if he was not family at all but a lowly air force general.

‘Sit, sit,’ said Stalin.

Vasily sat nervously.

‘How are you, Vaska?’ Stalin said softly. He was about to ask how Vasily’s poor wife and child were doing but it seemed a waste of time. He knew exactly how they were, and they were not happy.

‘Fine, Father.’

‘As you can see, I’m busy. No one can do a thing on their own, you know. You tell them what to do and they either ignore you or screw it up.’

‘Of course, Father. Only you can decide anything.’

‘You can see I’m weary. Not quite well.’

‘You look very well to me, Father. Congratulations on the new rank, generalissimo.’

‘Pah!’ Stalin waved this aside disdainfully. ‘We’ve got a lot to do here.’ He knew from his British agents that Truman would tell him in the next two days that America had its nuclear bomb and that they would now drop it on Japan. He would pretend that he knew nothing about it. If its awesome power was not exaggerated, he would have to accelerate the Soviet nuclear programme to get his own bomb at breakneck speed. A titanic endeavour. Only his best organizer, Beria, could pull it off… Stalin had won the war, he had toiled sixteen hours a day for four years, sometimes, in the early crises, sleeping on a campbed in his office for days on end. But now he had defeated Germany and conquered half of Europe. And just when he had triumphed, the Americans had got this new bomb and he would have to start all over again. His enemies were still strong and he would have to be harsher, stronger, more vigilant than ever. No one must find out how ill he was.

‘Father…’ Vasily started and Stalin, whose mind had been far away, focused on the sickly, grey face of his son. It was the face of an alcoholic. Like Stalin’s father.

‘Vaska,’ said Stalin, suddenly colder and businesslike. He didn’t have much time and the boy bored, shamed and irritated him in equal measure. What would his late wife Nadya have thought of this pathetic ne’er-do-well? She’d have blamed him, of course. ‘You’ve been mentioned in connection with the Children’s Case. The Chekists say you were chasing Sophia Zeitlin’s daughter. You’re a general now, and a married man. I’ve already cashiered you and demoted you once. Stop chasing skirt, stop drinking. You’re making a fool of yourself and me. They’ll ask you some questions. Answer them properly so I don’t have to hear about this again.’

Vasily hung his head. ‘Yes, Father, I promise. But this case involves Marshal Shako’s daughter, Rosa, and I wanted to talk to you about him.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s about our fighter planes and how they crash far too often.’

Stalin sat up abruptly: ‘What are you saying?’ Military technology was his own speciality, so if things went wrong, it meant either incompetence or sabotage. Both were crimes.

‘Our planes, specially Yak and MiG fighters, crash seven times more frequently than American Hurricanes or British Spitfires. Many pilots have been killed and there is considerable anger in the air force.’

‘Why haven’t you told me this before?’ Now Stalin was paying Vasily his fullest attention, and Vasily, who seconds earlier had been no more than a delinquent weakling, now basked in the blazing sunlight of his focus.

‘I reported this in full to Marshal Shako and Aircraft Production Minister Titorenko.’

‘Their reaction?’

‘They basically suggested that I conceal the evidence from you. To push ahead with production. To sacrifice more machines and pilots.’

Stalin was furious – he was thinking about those patriotic young pilots crashing in those faulty planes, and the criminals who had sabotaged them. He took a breath. He had to keep calm, preserve himself for his sacred mission in world history.

‘You’re not blackening the name of a Soviet hero like Shako just because he complained to me about your behaviour? That would be unforgivable in my son, Vaska.’

‘No, this is sabotage,’ replied Vasily. ‘Something must be done.’

Stalin immediately saw how this revelation dovetailed neatly into one of his most urgent concerns. Perhaps the boy wasn’t such a fool after all.

He padded to the desk and lifted the special phone to Poskrebyshev who sat outside the door: ‘Get Abakumov back in here.’ He turned to Vasily. ‘Wait outside, boy.’

When Abakumov entered, he bowed to Stalin and slightly less obsequiously to Vasily, who passed him on the way out.

‘Have you visited Hitler’s Chancellery?’ asked Stalin.

‘Yes, Comrade Stalin.’

‘I was planning to take a look but then I changed my mind. Leave that to Churchill and Truman. Comrade Stalin doesn’t make tours.’

He told him about Vasily’s allegations. ‘Check out Shako and Titorenko. Do whatever you need.’ Abakumov knew that when Stalin said, ‘Check out,’ he meant, ‘Arrest.’

‘Their children are mixed up in the Children’s Case,’ said Abakumov.

‘Oh, those poor children.’ Stalin lit a cigarette and the fingers of blue smoke curled themselves around him. ‘But they have to be punished. Their families could well be rotten to the core.’

‘Comrade Stalin, Comrade Satinov is in charge of the aircraft industry. Should I check him out?’

‘No. Find out what you can. A bit of pressure won’t do any harm. Do we have Comrade Satinov’s attention? If he’s guilty he’ll answer to the Central Committee, but he’s a hard-working comrade.’ Stalin paused, deep in thought. ‘You know some of our generals behave as if they won the war on their own.’

‘You won the war, Comrade Stalin,’ said Abakumov.

Stalin scowled at him. ‘Don’t talk nonsense, Abakumov. The people won the war, the people.’

‘Yes of course, Comrade Stalin, but many of our generals are corrupt. Their heads have been turned by titles and applause. Their apartments are filled with paintings, rugs and furniture brought in trains from all over Europe.’

Stalin grunted his agreement. ‘We Bolsheviks don’t tolerate corruption. Get back to Moscow and take off the silk gloves. Check out the generals and mount your prisoners at once. Vasily says pilots barely dare fly their planes at present. A crime.’

Stalin half closed his eyes. Abakumov was a blockhead, but this time, he seemed to have understood his coded semaphores. Didn’t all the heroes of history – Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Nadir Shah, Napoleon – talk in riddles?

Abakumov saluted. ‘I’ll report, Comrade Stalin.’ He headed for the door.

‘Oh, and Comrade Abakumov?’ The Chekist turned back. ‘When I was a boy at the seminary, I was always curious about my friends, so I studied their parents. I could learn everything about the parents by talking to the children. Remember this, won’t you, when you’re back in Moscow?’

It was late in the evening when Hercules Satinov got home, but as soon as he opened his door, Tamara threw herself into his arms as if she had been waiting for him. She was so distraught that she could scarcely speak, and her skin was mottled with weeping. In the background he could hear Leka the housemaid sobbing too.

‘You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to talk to Stalin!’ Tamara cried.

The Name made Satinov’s cheeks tighten and his eyes keen. He took his wife’s hands and led her into his study. George had been in the Lubianka for weeks now, and long days had passed since they had thought he was going to be released. And still no word.

‘Call Stalin!’ she was shouting. ‘Now! I’ll call him myself!’

It had to be the children – or was it… no: had something happened to George? He had lost one son already. Could he bear the loss of another?

‘Tamriko, calm down. Tell me what’s happened.’

‘They’ve taken Mariko! She’s six, Hercules. Get her released! How will she survive in there?’

Oh my God: little Mariko, his only daughter, the jewel in his crown. A pulse started high on his cheek, and the fury rushed through him. The humiliation stung him. Analyse what this means, he told himself. Put together the pieces of the jigsaw in a game where there are no coincidences.

Stalin specialized in surprises, and Satinov spent his time predicting them if he could. Earlier that day, Marshal Shako and five other generals had been arrested. He knew this concerned the planes. It was aimed at him as the boss of the aircraft industry. But Mariko! This was unworthy of a Bolshevik, unworthy of Stalin.

The phone rang. Both of them jumped. Satinov answered it. ‘Satinov. I’m listening… Comrade Abakumov, thank you for calling.’ He looked at Tamara and gestured reassuringly as he listened. As he held the phone, Tamara stood up and pressed herself against him, laying her head on his shoulder; he wrapped his other arm around her. ‘Yes, naturally we’re worried… Yes Tamara is upset. Mariko is only six, comrade general, she’ll be terrified and—’

‘Tell him Mariko doesn’t eat eggs,’ said Tamara. ‘She’s allergic and if she doesn’t have a biscuit at eleven, she feels faint. She doesn’t have her toy dogs, and she can’t sleep without them. Tell him, Hercules!’ But Satinov held up a finger for quiet.

‘Comrade general, I know Mariko was on the bridge that night and I appreciate that it is the Organs’ Communist duty to investigate. If Mariko is essential, then yes she must be questioned.’ He listened. ‘I appreciate that… Tamara will be there twice at eight a.m. and eight p.m. Thank you, Comrade Abakumov… Bolshevik greetings to you too.’

When he put the phone down, he gripped Tamriko firmly and told her that she would be allowed to visit Mariko in the Lubianka first thing in the morning and twice a day as long as she was being questioned, and she could take a food hamper.

‘How can they do this?’ said Tamara. ‘What kind of men are they? Tell Stalin! Call him!’

She did not know that Stalin was at the Potsdam Conference, his movements a state secret. Satinov held Tamara very tightly, her hair and the nape of her neck against his face, with their sweet smell that reminded him of home and children.

‘The Organs act only with the highest authority,’ he said, and this she understood. Abakumov would never have dared to arrest a Politburo member’s little girl without Stalin’s permission.

‘Hercules,’ she said softly, ‘how am I going to get through this? I just don’t know if I can. I feel I’m dying inside. I love her so much…’ She was weeping in his arms and she seemed so fragile, so exquisitely tiny, that he felt as if he could count every bone in her body. ‘How are we to survive?’

‘We will,’ he whispered back, ‘because we have to.’

‘Don’t fuck us around any more, Andrei. We think you’re being very stubborn for the son of an Enemy of the People,’ Colonel Komarov told Andrei later that evening. ‘My boss is getting bored with studying Pushkin so either we beat this shit out of you, or you just answer the question.’

‘On Pushkin?’

‘Yes. They say you’re the scholar on Onegin.’

What are the Organs up to now? he wondered. Are the Organs setting up a course on poetry? After all, they had departments for everything from tailoring to medicine and gold-mining, so why not Pushkin too? More likely, it was a trick of some sort.

‘I don’t know it half as well as some people,’ he said.

‘“NV”. What’s it stand for?’

‘You said it meant New Leader.’

‘Now we think it’s something to do with Onegin.’

Andrei nodded slowly. ‘I think you may be right. My feeling is that NV may have been some codename for Rosa Shako.’

‘That’s convenient,’ chuckled Komarov. ‘She being on the slab with nine grams in her breast.’

‘It’s just what I think.’

‘Let me help you with your thinking,’ and suddenly Komarov moved very quickly, twisting Andrei’s arm and dragging him by it so that the chair went flying. The door opened and two warders rushed in. They grabbed him as Komarov kicked away his knees, leaving him gasping in agony. ‘Let’s go.’

Across the corridor and into the room with the two-way mirror they went, the warders holding him so that his arms hurt. In the next room, a woman was reading aloud from a newspaper. When Andrei looked through the glass, he groaned. It was his mother, right here in Lubianka.

‘Oh my God, Mama! What are you doing here?’ he called to her.

‘She can’t hear you or see you. We’re sick of you brats and our boss has told us to solve it tonight, whatever the cost. If you help us, we’ll let you see your mother. But if you hold back, she’ll get ten years in Kolyma.’ Komarov shrugged. ‘But you know she won’t survive. She’s skin and bone.’ He pulled down a beige blind, stained with dark brown specks. ‘So, Andrei?’

He turned to face Komarov. Before him stood an uneducated popinjay, insignificant in every respect except that he had the power of life and death over him and his mother.

‘NV can only be one person,’ he said. ‘It’s Nina Voronskaya.’

‘Nina Voronskaya. Is she at the school? We’ll arrest her right away.’

‘No, respected investigator, she’s a fictional character in Onegin, a beautiful society hostess in Petersburg.’

Komarov frowned. ‘But she can’t be,’ he reasoned. ‘Why would Nikolasha Blagov put her in the notebook if she wasn’t real?’

Andrei saw how the progress of this case resembled a play in the theatre. None of it was true, and he had no idea how the plotline would conclude. Yet this deadly fantasy could be tilted one way or the other by a word too many here, a piece of bad luck there.

‘Hurry up, boy, or the same thing will happen to you that happened to your father. Twenty-five years, remember?’

‘Without right of correspondence.’

‘Oh, of course,’ Komarov sneered. ‘Without right of correspondence.’

His laughing sarcasm opened Andrei’s eyes with crystal-clear clarity. His father was no longer amongst the living. He had died right here in Lubianka.

Andrei had never known why his father had been arrested, but he knew that in 1937–8, thousands of comrades like his father had been executed. He had always presumed that his father had committed some political crime – but it occurred to him, after his own experiences with ‘Soviet justice’, that his father could have been completely innocent. He had probably done nothing and been shot for some fabricated crime – treason or spying or Trotskyism – based on a false denunciation. These revelations, accompanied by the sight of his mother, almost broke him for the first time.

But tears can lie too. Because for Andrei, survival was all. He had one more option – to play his last card, the one that he hated himself for playing.

28

MIDNIGHT IN THE Lubianka. In the middle of darkened Moscow, the lights burned in every window as if it was the hull of a gigantic ship. Victor Abakumov hurried into the Inner Prison, moving with the stiff gait of the profoundly weary. The electric lights burn brightly here, he thought, and no one sleeps soundly in my night kingdom.

A blue-tabbed officer waited and saluted: ‘She’s here, comrade general!’

‘Let me take a look.’ The officer opened a door in the long sterile corridor. Abakumov looked through the window into the interrogation room at the young schoolgirl, still in her school uniform, who sat at the Formica table. Likhachev, smoking a cigarette, was pacing up and down shouting at her: ‘Come on, you whore, who are you fucking? You little bitch, I ask you again—’ Abakumov flicked off the volume.

The single desklight lit up the gold threads of her hair. Serafima Romashkina was waiting, playing with her curls, and she looked tired, and too thin. Her lip was cut and swollen – one of my boys went too far, reflected Abakumov. He shook his head to see this glorious creature sitting so forlorn and dejected. He had meant just to take a look before he went in but now, leaning on the wall, lighting up a cigarette and relaxing for the first time in his gruelling day, he was free to stare at her intensely – as both a connoisseur of female beauty and a manipulator, sometimes even a butcher, of men, families, villages, nations.

She wasn’t as brazen as her famously alluring mother, but even so, he admired the perfect crescent of her white forehead, the heart shape of her face and her arrestingly green eyes with their lush dark eyelashes. This simply adorable girl was in his power, waiting for him and no one else. No wonder those stupid, spoilt schoolfriends had done foolish things to win her favour. But she possessed the last key to their case, a key he needed to unlock without delay.

Abakumov walked straight into Serafima’s interrogation room. Likhachev sprung to attention.

‘I’ll take over here, comrade colonel. Shut the door as you leave.’ Likhachev saluted and vanished; the door closed. Abakumov sat, smoking his cigarette, boots on the desk, eyes fixed on Serafima. She said nothing but something about the way her nostrils flared made his power seem futile. Yes, he could beat her to pulp, he could rape her, but he still wouldn’t possess her.

‘I was in Berlin a few hours ago and I had a chance on the flight home to think about you and the case.’ Abakumov sighed huskily.

‘You did?’ said Serafima, looking bored.

‘There’s lot to think about.’ Abakumov was still mulling over Stalin’s riddles that were becoming ever more obscure and gnomic. He had not been allowed to arrest Satinov – whom Stalin respected – so he had devised a way to ‘get the attention of Comrade Satinov’, as Stalin put it: he’d arrested Mariko.

Stalin had also said the children ‘have to be punished’. What did he mean? They were already in prison. Extra homework? A good thrashing? Nine grams in the back of the neck? I’ll be damned if I guess wrong! But Abakumov was sure of one thing: Stalin’s real targets were arrogant generals and smug bosses.

Serafima touched her lip and looked at her finger: still bleeding.

‘We’re all struggling with the truth here, Serafima, Colonel Likhachev most of all. I’m sorry about your lip. It’s nothing serious, I hope?’

‘No. Thank you,’ she said softly.

‘Did you get any sleep? You look tired, dear girl.’

‘I’m fine.’

Silence. Abakumov thought about the Children’s Case once again. A play-acting club, which was a front to conceal passions of adolescence, had led to the death of two kids. The investigation had uncovered a puerile game. If they hadn’t been élite brats, Stalin would never have heard about it. But now that he had, he would use the children in any way that suited his manoeuvres of the moment. He, Abakumov, had applied pressure to the children to discover the mastermind behind the conspiracy but it was clear that none of them knew who it was. He could torture Serafima, but it was possible even she didn’t know. While the other children awaited Stalin’s judgement, he decided, right there and then, to play a special game with her. And the only way it would work was if he freed her.

‘Now, you will tell your mother how kind I was, won’t you? You’ll say, “Abakumov really looked after me!” eh?’

‘I will, general.’ Hope rose in her face and he saw how she suppressed it. But when she put her head on one side, that charming mannerism of hers, he couldn’t help but smile.

‘Go and get your things,’ he said. ‘There’s a bath ready for you. Stand up, come on…’ and he took her hands and helped her up.

The door of the room opened and two warders stood ready to escort her to a meal and, yes, that bath.

Serafima stood and he saw her relief, her exhaustion; her skin flushed from her neck upwards and she set her jerking lips, as if she was trying not to lose control. But she was hesitating.

‘But what about the others? My friends – Minka, George, Andrei – are they coming home too?’

Abakumov was suddenly angry with the arrogance of these children when he had so much on his mind. He banged the table with his hands and saw her flinch. ‘That’s none of your business, girl. Get out before I change my mind.’

Tears running down her cheeks, she walked out of the room, and Abakumov sat listening to her footsteps disappearing down the long corridor.

Now it’s my turn, he thought. Now we play my game.

Still suspecting that it might be a trick, Serafima walked down the prison corridors. The warders no longer held her but touched her elbow to guide her into a new section of the prison and into a room where there was a meal laid out. Pirozhki. Hot shchi vegetable soup. A sturgeon steak, newly grilled and served with potatoes. She sat and feasted on this, eating too fast, washing it down with Borzhomi mineral water. Next they gave her a bath, letting her lie in it for a time, and then told her to hurry up and dry herself. She was to be collected.

As soon as she was dressed, she waited in a wood-panelled waiting room, alone, until the door opened and her mother came in. Sophia was caked in make-up and dressed in an army uniform, having come straight off the set of her latest movie. Speechless with relief, Sophia held her in her arms; then she walked her to the waiting car. It was time to go home. Time to sleep.

When Serafima awoke the next day, she thought she was still in prison. Then she remembered that she was at home, that all was how it should be once more. She got up, to find that she had slept away almost the entire day. Her mother was out at Mosfilm Studios but the maid cooked a meal, which she ate thinking of him. She had a bath and then put on a yellow dress with a Peter Pan collar – and she went out. Down the steps of the Granovsky building and, looking behind her to check that no one was following her, out into the streets, towards the House of Books.

‘You look even more lovely amongst all these old books,’ said Benya Golden to Agrippina Begbulatova.

It was the lunch hour, and Benya stood naked in his tiny, one-room apartment just off Ostozhenka. He was showing her a new book. Vellum binding, antique. Agrippina lay on her back with her stockinged legs crossed, beautifully setting off the collage of book covers: some of pale kid leather, some of expensive black lacquer, many of greasy, torn, modern paper.

‘All your favourite things in one place!’ she laughed. ‘Books, food and girls. I know you so well, Benochka. You’re a Rabelaisan and Epicurean. It must be confusing trying to work out which to consume first. But choose me while I’m here. We can eat together, and make love; then you can read after I’m gone.’

In just a couple of years, Benya had managed to amass quite a collection of first editions and prints from the early nineteenth century. Wartime meant that a poor man with a good eye had many opportunities to buy refined rarities for next to nothing. The books closer to the sink and oven doubled as kitchen tables for black Borodinsky bread, goat’s cheese, a half-empty bottle of wine. He looked around him. The picture – books, food, lingerie, the pale curves, tousled curls and fair pubic hair of the young teacher – would have worked well as absurdist art.

‘I can take a hint,’ said Benya. He started to kiss her feet. ‘But how long are you here for?’ His laugh was exuberant and frequent: there was much that amused him and nothing delighted him as profoundly as Agrippina’s sweetness. She was so cultured, so intelligent, and had such a promising future ahead of her, while he had been to hell and back, and it showed.

He worked his way up her body, kissing her. She gradually brought her knees up and around him until her ankles were on his shoulders. He kissed her there very slowly, absolutely delighted by her pleasure, by the taste of her, the heat; the sinews in her thighs were the most lovely he had ever seen in his life.

‘I love being fucked by you,’ she said.

‘I love fucking you.’

Afterwards, they lay silently, until she cleared her throat. ‘Benochka,’ she started in a tone he had never heard before, but knew immediately what it meant. His heart pounded in bursts and a sliver of ice chilled him from the inside. ‘Benochka? I have a bad feeling.’

‘Agrippina, let’s not spoil this.’

‘Benochka, are you listening?’

‘I’m trying not to.’

‘Benochka, if something happens… I want to tell you that I…’

‘I know. You don’t have to say anything. Remember where I’ve been…’

‘You never told me.’

‘In our world, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.’

‘I think you’re the best teacher I’ve ever seen.’

‘Teacher?’ He laughed. ‘Fuck my teaching! What about my lovemaking?’

They were laughing and he was kissing her again as the knock came at the door.

She turned away from him. ‘They lied to me. They promised not to come now…’

He heard the fear in her voice. But he was eerily serene as he grabbed his underwear and trousers and pulled them on. ‘I’m just opening the door,’ he called out.

As a drowning man reviews his entire life compressed into an instant, Benya relived the happiness of the two years he called his Second Coming: his Pushkin classes – the best job of his life, the sharing of his love of literature with young people; his wanderings through bookshops and flea markets; the pleasure in finding a volume, and being able to afford it. Even Genghis Khan as he plundered another rich city filled with gold and jewels could not have enjoyed a prize as much as Benya bearing home a new book in triumph. And then the hours of lovemaking with Agrippina.

He opened the door. Agrippina, quite forgetting she was naked, had covered her face with her hands as the Chekists in blue uniforms poured into the apartment. Benya gathered his few possessions in the carpet bag he already had packed. He could see that the plain-clothed chief investigator was fascinated by Agrippina and, quite honestly, who could blame him?

‘Get dressed, girl!’ said the bald-headed Chekist. ‘Where’s your Bolshevik modesty? You’ve done your bit. Now scram!’

‘Benya, I had to—’ But Benya, now fully dressed and ready to go, waved her away. He could imagine the pressure the Organs had brought to bear on her. The threats they’d made.

‘Agrippina, I wish you luck. Never let this hold you back. Promise me that.’

Her eyes lowered, she dressed quickly, and was gone.

Golden stood alone in the cage in the back of the black crow van (on which was written ‘Eggs Milk Groceries’), freefalling into the abyss, normal life ending. Something occurred to him: Agrippina had managed to come twice even though she must have been anxious. Even Judas hadn’t managed that! In the rumbling half-light of the van, he smiled admiringly as he remembered her brazen hunger for pleasure even under stress. What nerve! Then he shook his head with a maudlin fatalism. He knew what lay ahead, and how a man who has risen from the dead once could not count on pulling it off again.

29

EARLY MORNING IN the Lubianka. A delicate, fair woman sitting stiffly, alone and silent in a room of plain wooden chairs, a glass wall, damp patches on the yellow wallpaper, paint peeling stiffly like oversized flakes of dry skin. She looks at her watch. She has been here for forty minutes already but she will happily wait here all day.

She has a bag on the seat beside her and she opens it several times, checking and rechecking obsessively that everything is there. With every creak, echo, footstep, she turns to look at the door, tenses, twitches, listens, and then subsides again, face in her hands.

The door opens. A plump female warder enters in a brown coat.

Tamara Satinova stands up, terrified that they’ve changed the plan. But then, after a moment, there’s Mariko, dazed, pale, and still in her school uniform.

‘Mariko!’ cries Tamara, rushing towards her.

‘Mama!’ Mariko runs into her mother’s arms.

Don’t cry, don’t cry, Tamara tells herself. Don’t make things worse.

Tamara sits down. Mariko is on her knee; two warders stand watching, arms crossed; a guard in blue tabs at the door. Tamara kisses Mariko on her face, her forehead, her temple, her hair. Her hands are shaking.

‘Mama, when can I come home?’

‘Soon, Mariko. Soon. But I can come and see you twice a day.’

‘But, Mama, what am I doing here?’

‘We cannot know about the investigations of the Organs but they know what they are doing and as soon as they have finished, they will send you home.’

One of the warders blows her nose.

‘I want to come home now. I’m frightened.’

‘Papa sends his love. He says you must treat it like an adventure, like Timur and his Team – but answer the questions truthfully, won’t you?’

‘I don’t want to stay here. It’s horrible.’

‘I know,’ said Tamara. ‘I know – but you must be brave. Now…’ She is trembling with the effort of not weeping. She sets her jaw to stop the spasm of tears.

‘Mama, you look funny. You’re shaking.’

Tamara nods as she turns to her string bag. Just concentrate on practicalities, she tells herself. ‘Are you warm enough?’ she asks.

‘No, I’m cold in my room. And the bed is horrible.’

‘Right, so first here is a dressing gown, pyjamas and a sweater for you to wear and stay warm. Do you want to put on the sweater now?’ She helps Mariko put it on. ‘You must be hungry, darling.’

‘The food was vile. I couldn’t eat it.’

‘Here’s bread, your favourite cheese and biscuits, and yogurt. And fruitcake. All from Gastronom One.’ They shop there often. Mariko opens the cake and starts to eat a piece.

‘I won’t be able to sleep, Mama.’

‘You must try, darling.’

‘I’m missing my dogs and my School for Bitches.’

‘Well, look who I’ve got for you! Hello, Crumpet!’ She pulls out a black-and-white dog.

Mariko smiles for the first time and grabs the toy.

‘And who’s this?’

Mariko takes the next dog and hugs it with the first.

‘And hello!’ Tamara pulls out another

‘Oh Mama, they’re all here!’ Mariko says their names: Crumpet, Bumble, Pirate.

Tamara packs the food and the clothes into the string bag.

‘Time’s up,’ says one of the warders. ‘Prisoner to be returned to her cell.’

Prisoner! The word hits Tamara hard and a fit of sobs well up again. Stop! You mustn’t cry!

But Mariko, trying to hold on to her toy dogs, throws her arms around her mother. ‘Mama, don’t go!’

‘I have to,’ Tamara whispers. ‘But I’ll be back tonight with all your favourite things, and more dogs.’

‘You can’t go. I won’t let you go,’ cries Mariko. She drops the dogs and Tamara puts them in her bag which she gives to one of the warders.

‘It’s time,’ says the warder. She and another guard approach them, and as they come nearer, Tamriko feels their shadows, smells the cheap Red Square perfume and detergent, sweat, perhaps vodka.

She hugs Mariko and then she, herself, starts to pull back. ‘Now I have to go. Be good. Don’t worry. I love you so much and soon you’ll be home. I’ll see you very soon. What would you like me to bring?’

But Mariko throws herself against her mama, as if trying to burrow into her, and Tamara clutches her.

‘Mariko!’ Tamara is fighting for control, but she is not sure she can manage it. Her entire body is telling her to hold on to her little girl.

‘Mariko, you must let go of your mother,’ the warder says, sternly.

‘I won’t!’

‘You must or we’ll separate you.’

Tamara loosens her grip on her child, but Mariko holds on. Feeling as if she is in the midst of a whirling tornado of debris and dust that darkens the world, Tamara buries her nose in Mariko’s vanilla-milk-and-hay hair and inhales as if it is oxygen.

‘Mariko, let go or they’ll force you and it will be horrid. I’ll… I’ll be back so soon!’

‘I won’t let go. Don’t go, Mama!’ Mariko is sobbing, shaking, struggling to breathe, winded by her own desperation. Tamara closes her eyes as the guards prise open the child’s fingers and lift her and take her away. She hears the door close and Mariko’s screams as they carry her down the corridors. Tamara finds herself on the floor of the empty room, on her hands and knees like an animal, howling with anger and heartbreak. She thinks for a moment that she might just die right here. The walls of her heart feel paper-thin, her lungs shallow, her stomach is lined with gravel and she wants to die.

There is something beside her. One of the dogs has fallen out of the bag, and she picks it up. It smells of Mariko. She hugs the toy, and rocks herself, amazed that she, wife of a leader, respected teacher, proud mother, is lying on a floor, holding a toy, weeping.

She lies there for a long time. Finally, holding the dog to her like a baby, she staggers out, so broken that she isn’t sure she will ever be able to put herself back together again.

The rays of a sinking sun – gold and purple and white – soothe Serafima. How gorgeous the light is after her prison cell. She raises her face like a flower following the sun, noticing as if for the first time the blizzard of gossamer seeds that dance in the beams. She is free, she has preserved her secret, and now she is overwhelmed by the beauty of this evening.

Up Gorky Street to the House of Books she goes. Upstairs to the Foreign Literature section. Hemingway? Galsworthy? There it is. Edith Wharton. She opens the book hungrily, reads what is inside; then she runs downstairs and out into the streets again.

It is 7 p.m. and crowds of smartly dressed Muscovites and some foreigners are waiting to go into the Bolshoi to see Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Serafima goes inside to the ticket office. There’s a queue. When she reaches the front, her ticket is there in an envelope.

Serafima is one of the last to take her seat in the stalls and when she’s sitting, with an old grey man on one side of her and a young girl like her on the other, she feels her face is flushing. She is happier than she’s ever been in her life – but it is more than this. His eyes are on her and she can sense the love in them. She looks up at his box and there he is. Waiting for her, loving her, as he has been since the days before the shooting and her imprisonment in Lubianka.

Later that night, Satinov is in his study at his apartment, which, with just one child at home, is much quieter than it should be. Tamara is in his arms as she tells him about Mariko.

Satinov closes his eyes. His little Mariko with her brown eyes and braided hair, hay-sweet. A spasm flutters from his stomach to his throat and spreads to his eyes and mouth, to his whole being for, in spite of his being the Iron Commissar, in spite of his being Comrade Satinov, he is out of control.

He blinks. In the mirror on the far wall, he sees himself, holding Tamara, her hair in a bun, her long neck, her jerking shoulders. And he looks deep into his own eyes and sees they are full of a terrible betrayal. Shocked, he looks away, at the photographs lined up on the desk. But instead of his children and Tamara, he sees only one woman’s face.

Yes, he is weeping for Mariko, for George, for Tamriko, but he is also weeping selfishly. For himself. And for the woman with whom he has fallen desperately in love.