Revelation

30 Lev Baruch Petrosian

They found the flat close to the Westgate, near the Toy Museum and within sight of the Castle. Findhorn followed Romella up the stairs, trying not to notice her well-shaped legs. There were three doors leading off the top landing. The right-hand door had a handwritten card in the nameplate holder: L. Peterson. Findhorn and Romella looked at each other. Then Findhorn took a deep breath and knocked.

The delay was so long that it began to seem there was nobody at home. But then there was a noise from inside, and the door was opened by a white-haired woman with deeply wrinkled skin. She was in her eighties, and was a little stooped, but smartly dressed in a grey cardigan and long blue dress. She was wearing a gold necklace. 'Yes?'

'Mrs Peterson? My name is Fred Findhorn, and this is Romella Grigoryan. I wonder if we might have a word with your husband?'

Her voice was frail but clear, well-spoken but with just a hint of some foreign accent. 'You're not the telephone people.'

Findhorn patted his briefcase. 'We want to return some lost property.'

She frowned suspiciously. 'I did not think we had lost anything.'

'It was lost a long time ago.'

There was a hesitation as the woman absorbed this startling information. Then she opened the door further and said, 'You had better come in, then.'

She left them in a large, airy drawing room. The furniture was old but of good quality. There were no photographs. One corner of a bay window looked out over the city, framed by cathedral and castle. The other corner looked across at a flat whose windows were covered with stickers and pennants.

The man who entered the room was also white-haired and wrinkled. He had a grey pullover and rather shapeless flannels. His skin was brown, through heredity rather than suntan, and his eyes were dark and intelligent. He looked at his visitors with curiosity. His voice was quiet and clear, with just a trace of American. 'Sit down, please.' Findhorn and Romella shared a couch.

'Would you like some coffee?' Mrs Peterson asked at the door.

'Yes, thank you,' Romella said for both of them. 'Can I help?'

'I can manage.'

Mr Peterson sat down on a worn armchair opposite the couch Findhorn and Romella were on. 'Lost property, you said?'

It was the moment Findhorn had both dreaded and anticipated. He opened the briefcase at his feet and pulled out the A4 sheets a bundle at a time, placing them on a low coffee table between them. He handed one bundle over at random; he had written '1945' on a transparent cover with a black felt tip pen. 'These are only copies, I'm afraid. But I think I know where the originals are held.'

Mr Peterson took spectacles from a shirt pocket and slowly put them on. He did not immediately open the document. He held it in both hands, looking at the date. His hands seemed a little arthritic. Then he gave Findhorn a long, disconcerting stare, a strange expression on his face. Finally he opened the diary and slowly flicked through the pages.

The sound of a kettle being filled came from the kitchen.

He stopped at a page halfway through the 1945 diary. 'That was some day. I remember it like yesterday: At nine a.m. Louis Slotin begins to assemble the core.' He looked up. 'He was a Canadian. Poor Louis was killed at Los Alamos not long afterwards, doing much the same thing. He put two sub-critical bits of plutonium just a fraction too close. There was a burst of radiation. Very brief, but enough.'

'Biscuits?' Mrs Peterson was asking at the doorway.

'No, thanks. Are you sure you don't want some help?' Mrs Peterson shook her head and left.

'So…' Peterson said, waiting for Findhorn.

'They were found last week, in the wreckage of a Soviet light aircraft near Greenland. I'm a polar meteorologist.'

Petrosian, alias Peterson, sighed. 'After fifty years. I'm supposed to have died in that crash. How did you find me?'

'A survivor called Victor led us to Sachs, and Sachs led us to you.'

'I suppose it was a bit of an obsession, all this diary writing. You know I keep a diary even to this day. I have a cupboard full of them. Of course I have nothing of consequence to write about these days. Not like Los Alamos, or Germany in the thirties. And I'm glad of the fact, if only because I find it hard to hold a pen. And who will be interested enough to read them after Lisa and I are gone?'

'You have two customers right here,' Romella said quietly.

'Coffee won't be a minute,' said Mrs Peterson, putting a tray on the table. It had milk, cups and sugar neatly laid out, and she had given them biscuits anyway.

Petrosian waited until she had left the room and said, 'This will be a terrible shock to my wife. Partly because it revives a past which she prefers not to remember. Different survivors handled their pain in different ways. Lisa's way was to put the past firmly behind her. To blot it out if you like. Her only contact with those days is an old friend in… ah, you say that is how you found us?'

Romella said, 'It wasn't Herr Sachs's fault. I tricked him. I got him to phone Lisa and recorded the number electronically. It was probably an illegal act.'

'And of course, there is the destruction of our life together. Do you think they will send me to prison at my age?'

Findhorn was shocked. 'That is not our intention. We're not here in any sort of official capacity.'

Romella added, 'We intend no harm to your wife and yourself.'

'We're the only people alive who know your identity. And we intend to keep it that way.' As soon as he had spoken, Findhorn remembered Petrosian's brother Anastas. He hoped Lev wouldn't ask about him.

'What then?'

Findhorn did not feel ready to ask the question. 'There is something which puzzles me, sir.' As a rule he didn't 'sir' anybody, but in the presence of this man it came naturally. 'It's about your escape from Lake Michigan. You weren't on that Russian plane, but of course the diaries we have don't cover that event. What happened, that night?'

Petrosian leaned back in his chair. The smell of coffee was drifting through. 'Well now. That too was some day. Or rather, some night.'

Petrosian was wakened by the rhythmic slap of water on the side of the yacht. Grey light was streaming through the little portholes. Suddenly afraid that the boat owner might appear, he rolled out of the bunk and climbed up the steps to the galley door. It had frozen in place. He put his shoulder to it without success, then retrieved a bread knife and finally managed to prise the door open with a loud crack.

The yacht was six inches deep in overnight snow. The lake, however, had not yet frozen, although the surface was dotted with thin floes and the little waves had a turgid, almost treacly look about them.

The holiday cottage, where he assumed the pickup would take place, was on the opposite coast of the lake, about a hundred miles over the horizon to the west.

The abandoned car might or might not be reported within hours.

They might or might not think to search a boat.

The owner might or might not turn up.

His appearance on a public highway, conspicuously lugging his suitcase, would seal his fate. Unless they hadn't yet started looking hereabouts.

He could sail the boat across the water. He'd never sailed a small boat in his life. Its loss might go unnoticed for days, or the owner might live in one of the houses a hundred yards away.

All imponderables, on which his life came or went.

By about three a.m. it had become clear that the spy, if he was indeed heading for one of the Great Lakes, had slipped off the main highways. There was nothing to be done until daylight.

Dawn was a somewhat nominal concept as it brought little more than a grey gloom to the landscape. However, as the day progressed, police patrols in a score of little towns bordering the Great Lakes reported no sightings of the black Pierce-Arrow car. It began to look as if the lake referred to had been a minor one, like Mooselookmeguntic or the Richardson Lakes, or Moosehead or First Connecticut. They all skirted the Canadian border. They were all in remote and inaccessible places. Or maybe they were fooling themselves and the spy's rendezvous was further south, say Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Despair began to settle round the FBI team like a descending mist.

The team's musings were interrupted by excellent news around mid-morning. Forestry workers had reported an abandoned car to the local police. It had been driven off a narrow track deep into the woods. It was a Pierce-Arrow with whitewall tyres. Its number plate told them that Tom Clay was the legally registered owner. A place called Ludington, a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan, was within sight of the car.

They as good as had him.

The early afternoon, however, brought no reports from hotels, boarding houses, restaurants or cafes. This was odd because firstly the guy had to eat, and secondly, if he'd stayed out overnight he would now be as stiff as a board. It was known that he had money; he had emptied his account of nearly a thousand dollars a few days previously, and Tom Clay had reported that the spy paid for the car out of a fat wad of notes.

A boarding house enquiry produced one sighting. The proprietor had seen nothing, but one of his resident ladies had mentioned, over breakfast, a man behaving oddly. At around ten o'clock the previous night she had just happened to be looking out of her upstairs window. She had seen a man with a briefcase climb over the railing directly opposite the house, and disappear out of sight below the embankment wall. There was a perfectly good sidewalk, and if he was taking a stroll, why carry a briefcase? She had kept looking and thought she had seen movement on the pier a few minutes later. It was sufficiently odd that she mentioned it to her other friends over breakfast. Was he a spy or something, she asked the FBI agent, her eyes gleaming, and the proprietor had tut-tutted politely.

God bless old ladies and net curtains everywhere. He was either heading north to Manistee, or he had found a boat. Any attempt to hitch a ride on that quiet road at that time of night, at twenty below, would have saved the state the cost of the high voltage electricity. Therefore he must be in one of the boats, not a hundred yards away from them.

He wasn't, but he had been. His footprints were still on the deck and the owner was a New York construction worker who hadn't been near the place for three months. Unfortunately the footprints went back into town and soon merged with those of the pedestrian populace at large. And by the time they found that the early morning ferry to Kewaunee was still sailing, it had already crossed the Lake and disgorged its passengers.

Petrosian was shivering violently and glad of the fact.

Somewhere, maybe in a Reader's Digest article in some waiting room, he'd read that you're in trouble when you stop shivering. It meant the body had run out of the energy it needed to shiver.

Shivering is a heating mechanism. Hold onto that.

He was also frightened.

There were two hazards to be avoided, an imminent death through exposure, and a delayed one through electrocution.

He looked into the dark woods. There were probably moose and timber wolves, and beavers in the frozen ponds. So far, however, there had been only a deathly stillness. As the evening progressed the clouds had thinned and the temperature was plunging downwards. A three-quarters moon was rising.

He looked at his watch for the tenth time in an hour. It had little luminous numbers and hands, and as a man who knew about radiation he had made sure the luminescence came from electron transitions and not radium.

He hadn't eaten for thirty hours.

So what? Survive the night. Then worry about your belly.

Having just looked at his watch, he did so again. It was twenty minutes to ten. The lights of a small town reflected off the water some miles to the south. Three point two miles to be exact. An hour's walk for a fit man with a briefcase on a good surface. Longer for a physical wreck who hadn't eaten for thirty hours and who peered fearfully into the dark woods between every step.

Petrosian had watched a solitary angler on a jetty, wondering in alarm if he intended to fish overnight. Around eight o'clock, however, the man had packed up his estate wagon and driven off through the forest track, having had no luck. Now Petrosian was left in a silence broken only by the gentle lapping of waves on the shore just beyond the road.

There was a roaring log fire, and a hot plate of chilli con carne, and a woman with Lisa's wonderfully curved body and a warm, loving expression, and yet at the same time with Kitty's long legs and slim face and blonde hair. The warmth from the fire was penetrating his bones and he sank into the deep pile of the rug, and he yielded to the overwhelming urge to sleep, and he found himself lying in the snow, face down, with no recollection of having fallen. He had lost feeling in the toes of his left foot, wondered if they would have to be amputated, had a brief, panicky vision of losing his leg.

At first he wondered what had wakened him, and then he heard the faint engine sound, coming from the direction of the lake. At first he thought it must be some ship, but as it grew in intensity he recognized it as the sound of an aircraft. He rolled over, managed to get onto his hands and knees, and then with an effort staggered to his feet. He tugged at the briefcase, but it now seemed to be full of bricks. He started to drag himself through the snow, falling and picking himself up, steering around bumps and hollows.

And now he could see it through the trees, a small dark shape, its propeller scattering the moonlight. It was maybe a couple of miles out.

And there was a car, approaching swiftly from the direction of Kewaunee.

Petrosian stopped about twenty yards back from the edge of the track, hidden in the trees. The plane was low and seemed to be heading directly for him. The car was maybe a couple of miles away and closing fast.

The engine noise dropped in pitch, sounded almost like a cough. Then there were twin sprays of water, bright in the moonlight, and the engine was revving up and the aircraft was taxi-ing towards the jetty. Petrosian, in an agony of indecision, held back.

The engine of the little aircraft died. The door opened and a man stepped on the float. He was gripping the wing with one hand and holding something in the other. It looked like a coil of rope. He was looking into the trees, seeming to stare directly at Petrosian. Then, suddenly, the car was driving over the pebbled shoreline, its headlights momentarily flooding the plane and the pilot. Petrosian, terrified, dropped the suitcase and braced himself to run into the woods.

The driver of the car was out and running along the jetty. The pilot threw him a rope. There was an exchange of conversation in Russian. Petrosian recognized one of the voices, tried to run forwards, fell, couldn't get up. By the time he got to his feet the driver was half-crawling along the wing, a leg dangling in search of a strut, the pilot holding him by the arm while the little aircraft tilted and swayed dangerously.

And then they were in, the door was slammed shut and the propeller was revving up, and Petrosian was stumbling along the jetty like a drunk man, waving and shouting hoarsely.

The engine died and the door opened.

'Hey, Lev!' Rosenblum shouted in pleasure.

'I have them. The diaries.'

'So where are they? Bring them here!'

Petrosian stumbled back into the dark, returned with the briefcase. Rosenblum was halfway along the wing. He threw the coil of rope. Petrosian caught it and pulled, and then he was heaving Rosenblum off the wing and onto the jetty. It took up all his remaining energy.

'Thought you hadn't made it, old pal. The shoreline's crawling with feds. This is it?' He lifted the case, grinning, his spectacles reflecting moonlight.

'They're all there, Jurgen.'

Rosenblum reached into his inside pocket. For an insane moment Petrosian thought he was about to be shot. But then Rosenblum was handing over an envelope and saying, 'Passport, driving licence, birth certificate etcetera. They've even given you a life history if you want to use it. You're born again, Lev. Look, we can probably squeeze you in. You sure you want to do it this way?'

Petrosian nodded, took the envelope, looked at it stupidly.

'The car's yours, you've owned it for years. The key's in the ignition. Now take it and clear off fast. And excuse me if I get the hell out of here. The Motherland awaits her revolutionary hero.' They shook hands.

Just before he closed the door, Rosenblum waved and shouted, 'Get moving, Lev! Go to Mexico or someplace.' And then the propeller was revving up, and the aircraft was accelerating over the water.

In the life-saving warmth of the car, Petrosian took a last look over the lake. But there was little to be seen; only a decaying wake scattering the moonlight, and shadows.