Red Star Rising

27

Charlie allowed himself a discomforting hour before finally approaching the cafe in which he’d arranged to meet Irena Novikov. It was less crowded than before, the permanent sports channel showing a soccer match featuring Moscow Dynamo. The clothes-cocooned babushka was at the same table and Charlie wondered if she’d even left the previous night.

Charlie risked the brandy and chose the same table as before, able from where he sat to watch the cafe clock as well as the door. There had only been six press calls and two rambling cranks when he’d checked the embassy earlier. But nothing from Mikhail Guzov, Svetlana Modin, or London, which gave a chance for him to consider how to utilize each, when they came. And how to prompt them, if they didn’t. It was 12:15 according to the cafe clock. The place was filling, for the midday break. The majority of customers wore workmen’s overalls and heavy boots, and by Charlie’s estimate more vodka than beer was ordered. The vodka was in unmarked, unlabeled bottles and very visibly the yellow of alcohol-concentrated home distillation. Charlie decided he’d been wise to stay with the brandy.

By 12:35 Irena still hadn’t arrived. He’d give her an allowance, Charlie decided: there could be reasons, even for someone as time-conscious as she appeared to be. How much allowance? A lot. She’d had to force herself yesterday, constantly wavering; would have run-avoided things-if he hadn’t gently pushed. The noise in the cafe was irritatingly rising in proportion to the vodka intake. His own brandy glass was virtually empty. He didn’t want to lose the symbolic table by going to the counter for another but was tempted. It was now 12:45 and the place was becoming crowded, three people needed behind the counter now, the noise-spiked by shouted outbursts-growing at the soccer action on TV. It wouldn’t be easy to maintain unnoticed surveillance outside the cafe if Irena reneged. After his earlier location reconnaissance Charlie had naturally continued to check the surroundings of the cafe as he’d approached. It was situated slightly to the right of a far too expansive square directly overlooked by too many Brezhnev-era apartment blocks and house conversions and, illogically, far too few shops or other bars: there were side alleys and streets but insufficient concealing activity among which he could stay unnoticed.

At 12:50, Charlie tilted his chair against the table, to mark his occupancy, and eased his way through the noisy, tight-packed counter crush. That tightness-and the noise-eased during the time he stood waiting to be served and he realized why when he looked again at the cafe clock registering 1:10 P.M., marking the end of the break.

She’d run, Charlie accepted, as his brandy was finally poured. He’d give Irena the time it took him to finish this drink, maybe even another, but then have to accept what he’d been refusing to contemplate. He’d lost Irena. But only temporarily, he determined, with customary obstinacy. Whatever-however-it took he’d find Irena Yakulova Novikov again and try to convince her again.

And then he saw her.

He was at the edge of the thinning counter group, his first impression only of a figure at his table. Then his vision cleared sufficiently for him to realize who it was. Charlie didn’t hesitate, though, but continued on and by the time he reached her the doubts and the reflections had gone.

“Now you’re late,” he said, relieved that there was no vibrating nervousness today. She was wearing the same coat as the previous night, over what appeared blue canvas work trousers. The auburn hair, no longer covered by the woolen hat, was flecked with gray and in better light, Charlie guessed she was in her early fifties.

“I’m glad you waited.” There was even a wisp of a smile but no immediate explanation.

“What would you like?”

“That looks good,” she said, nodding to the brandy glass he was still holding.

“Would you like any food?”

She shook her head. With even fewer people at the counter now, it didn’t take him as long the second time to get another brandy. There was another soccer match showing on the television screen.

Irena said, “I worked an extra hour, and started two hours earlier this morning, so we’d have the afternoon.” She was already smoking her first cigarette.

“I wish you’d warned me last night.”

“Last night I didn’t intend coming back today.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I decided you’d try to find me. And probably succeed, eventually. So it would only be delaying things. I changed my mind about a lot of other things, too.”

“Like what?”

“That I don’t really care if they do find out and kill me.”

It wasn’t the answer Charlie expected. Or wanted. “That’s depressingly fatalistic.”

“No, it’s not,” she denied. “It’s decisive: my deciding what I want to do and will do, get the people who murdered Ivan brought to justice. That’s what you’ve been trying to persuade me to do, isn’t it?”

“I’m surprised by the change,” Charlie admitted, honestly.

“Let’s both hope I don’t change my mind again.”

“Let’s,” agreed Charlie, wondering if this were Irena’s first brandy of the day. Not trusting the covering sound of the television Charlie came closer over the separating table and said, “You were telling me last night that Ivan had found something?”

“I don’t know it all,” qualified the woman at once.

“Tell me as much as you do know,” encouraged Charlie, gently, unsure which of Irena Novikov’s shifting attitudes he preferred.

“It was to do with his job,” she began. “It took a very long time for Ivan to get properly well. .” She stopped, reflectively. “I don’t think he ever got properly well. The field hospital operation was botched and there had to be more surgery when he got back to Russia: he spent months in hospitals and after that in KGB recovery and rehabilitation centers and as I’d been dismissed because of how I’d been injured in Cairo-and that they were KGB places-I couldn’t visit him, even after the KGB became the FSB. He told me later he became convinced that I’d left him because of how he’d look after losing his arm. . ”

She was straying off on a tangent again, Charlie realized: too soon yet to bring her back on course.

“He was worried, too, that there wouldn’t be a job for him when he finally got better, because of the arm,” Irena was saying. “But there was a job, although obviously no longer in the field. Everything had become FSB by then, of course. But a lot of the changes were cosmetic, for outside-mostly western-consumption. One of the divisions that didn’t change, has never changed since the first name switch from the Cheka, was the Registry and Archives Department. .”

Charlie felt a lurch of grateful satisfaction at holding back earlier from any interruption but risked it now. “Ivan was assigned to archives?”

Irena shook her head. “Not current, ongoing records, although the division to which he was assigned is always ongoing. Ivan was put in charge of the bureau keeping up to date the official history of the Russian intelligence service, from its foundation under Feliks Dzerzhinsky by Lenin. Ivan was an ideal and very obvious choice, of course, with all the languages he could read and so easily translate.”

“What period was Ivan responsible for?” interrupted Charlie again, conscious of his voice sounding almost as hoarse as Irena’s in his excitement.

“I’m not sure of the actual dates,” said Irena, lighting another cigarette. “I guessed from what Ivan used to say from time to time that it spanned the last ten to fifteen years: it could have been longer. It certainly overlapped the KGB becoming the FSB.”

Charlie coughed, to clear his throat, almost frightened to ask the question to which he might not get the answer he wanted. “Did Ivan tell you how he worked?”

“Yes,” replied Irena, seeming to know the importance of the demand. “He had to go through all the old, raw case files and distill everything into a comprehensive, consecutive account for entry into the official history of the Soviet and now Russian Federation intelligence organizations.” She smiled. “He used to laugh that the remit was always to make it appear that we were the best and always won.”

Irena had given him the answer he’d wanted! It wasn’t actually the key, but it could be a window into the biggest and richest intelligence gold mine in the world!

In her seesawing mood swings, one moment appearing confidently determined, the next relapsing into twitching uncertainty, it was as if Irena had geared herself to go as far as disclosing Ivan’s job reassignment but then no further, similarly to her abrupt cutoff the previous night. He worked hard at soothing her suddenly returned fears, reluctantly letting the conversation stray from what he was anxious to concentrate entirely upon by letting her ask questions. He explained away his involvement in a murder investigation initially with no apparent intelligence connections as part of the British service’s hugely expanded role countering Islamic and other potential political fanaticism, repeatedly insisting there had been no prior identification of Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin-and most definitely not of Irena-before she’d responded to his television appeal.

“You weren’t linked to Ivan Nikolaevich by the KGB after your Cairo accident, or by them or the FSB after he was wounded in Afghanistan and spent all the time he did convalescing,” reminded Charlie, in support of his argument. “And not an hour ago, you told me you didn’t care if they discovered your involvement anyway. Which I promise you again, they won’t!”

“It was easier for me to think brave than it is to be brave, when I confronted the reality of what it could mean as I talked to you,” said Irena, the slur easy to detect in her hoarse voice.

“You can’t stop now.”

“I want to.” She was smoking what had to be her fourth cigarette.

Her conviction wasn’t absolute, judged Charlie. “No, you don’t. You want Ivan’s killers punished.”

“I want another drink.”

“Let me get you some food, instead.”

“The food here’s shit.”

“We’ll go somewhere else.”

“You want to be seen with someone with a face like this!”

“You’ve probably got more reason for self-pity than most, Irena. Don’t use it to hide behind. Your face isn’t disfigured, just marked.”

“Bastard.”

“Not as much of a bastard as those who murdered Ivan.”

Her throat began to work as she swallowed against an outburst, which Charlie was frightened would be yet another breakdown. Instead, seesawing again, Irena said: “Okay.”

Charlie was unsure what she meant. Guessing, he said: “So let’s go on. Ivan discovered something he shouldn’t have seen in the raw case files he was going through to prepare the official intelligence history?”

“Yes.”

“What?” demanded Charlie, tensed forward.

“That’s what I don’t know! What it was, specifically.”

“What did Ivan tell you?”

Irena hesitated. “You’ve unsettled me, from what you’ve just told me.”

Charlie smothered the frustration. “What unsettles you from what I’ve just told you?”

“About political fanaticism.”

“Go on,” urged Charlie.

“It was political, whatever Ivan discovered. He called it sensational: that was the actual word, sensational.”

“But he didn’t tell you what it was?”

“No.”

“He didn’t even give you the slightest indication?”

Irena shook her head. “What he did say was that it was payback time. That what he could get for what he knew would set us up in luxury for the rest of our lives. You know what his words were? That we could get married and live happily ever after.”

Charlie remained briefly silent, unsure how to phrase his next question, not wanting to drive her backwards. “You told me yesterday that Ivan was a fixer. How was he going to fix it that you lived happily and in luxury for the rest of your lives?”

Now it was Irena who paused, arranging her words. “He told me he was going to do a deal. That he held all the cards and that they didn’t have any alternative but to agree to whatever he asked.” The woman gave another humorless laugh. “But they did have an alternative, didn’t they?”

Avoid the word blackmail, Charlie warned himself. “Ivan was going to deal, bargain, to keep you both comfortable, for the rest of your lives after you got married?”

“Yes,”

“Because he’d learned something politically sensational?”

“Yes.”

“But he didn’t tell you what?”

“No.”

Charlie was unsure which or what to offer next from his mental selection. “Neither the KGB nor the FSB ever discovered you and Ivan were together, for all these years?”

Irena shifted, uncomfortably. “No, they never did.”

“You never lived together? Had the same address?”

Irena stared into her empty brandy glass. “We were going to, of course, after we got married. Ivan said that to do so before wouldn’t be safe: that we’d compromise ourselves if we set up home together.”

She was lying-lying badly-and Charlie was sure he knew why. “Ivan was already married, wasn’t he, Irena?”

“Only on paper. There were no children. It was over years ago, before Cairo even.”

“His wife wasn’t in Cairo with him, was she? She was kept back here, in Moscow. And again when he was in Afghanistan.” Unless husband and wife were both KGB, it had been standard KGB operational procedure to hold spouses hostage in Russia against overseas defection. In the case of husband and wife, their children were detained under the guise of receiving a better education than would have normally been available.

“No. She was always here.”

“Which was why you couldn’t visit him, when he was repatriated from Afghanistan, wasn’t it? It was his wife who was able to visit and his wife to whom he went home when he was finally and fully recovered?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know if she’s been hurt, killed even, after Ivan was murdered?” Whoever killed him would have torn apart the house or apartment in which they’d lived.

The hoarse-voiced woman sniggered. “The first mistake in your grand deduction! She died, two months ago. She’d had cancer for years. That’s why Ivan wouldn’t divorce her. . abandon her, even though we’d been together in every other way for so long. He was a good man: intended to make sure she was comfortable from the money he was going to get.”

Could a potential blackmailer be a good man? If Ivan had stayed with a terminally ill wife and undergone all the misfortune than he and his mistress had suffered? “But officially, on all the records and registers, Ivan’s address is where his wife lived?”

Irena nodded, not speaking.

“So you must have it, Irena! Whatever it was that Ivan found among the raw files and smuggled out of the Lubyanka, knowing its significance. Yours was the obvious-the only-place where it could be hidden.”

Irena began to cry at last but soundlessly, without any sobs, tears just coursing down her face, oddly spreading out to wash completely over her scarred left cheek.

“You know more, Irena,” directly challenged Charlie. “And I need more, properly to understand. If I don’t, everything else you’ve told me is meaningless.”