The Lost American Read online

  Chapter Seven

  The cafeteria of the American embassy is an annex building at the rear of the main premises on Chaykovskovo, on the ground floor. The walls are festooned with posters of American scenes, aerial shots of the Grand Canyon and Mickey Mouse at Disneyworld and the Statue of Liberty, all reminders of home. There were some framed pictures, too, outdoor scenes again and around some hung forlorn streamers, forgotten residue of some celebration like Christmas or Thanksgiving. The menu prices and payment, Brinkman saw, were in dollars; another reminder of a far-away home. He chose steak, knowing it would have been flown in. As Blair warned, it would never have achieved the place a listing in the Guide Michelin but it wasn’t bad, either. Both drank coffee.

  ‘Able to abandon the map yet?’ asked Blair.

  Brinkman frowned, momentarily not understanding, then remembered his casual remark the night they first met, at Ingram’s party. ‘Just about,’ he smiled. Blair had a remarkable memory.

  ‘Like Moscow?’

  ‘I can see its limitations but they don’t worry me, not yet. So yes, I like it,’ replied Brinkman, honestly. Wanting to match the other man’s recall, he said, ‘I think it’s a worthwhile place to be, professionally: always got the attention of a lot of important people.’

  Blair grinned at the other man, awarding him the point. ‘That wheat thing came out right,’ said the American, giving him another.

  ‘Ingram did the groundwork,’ said Brinkman. The two had been friends and might still be in touch. It was unlikely they would discuss something like that, even if they were, but Brinkman decided it didn’t hurt to be generous.

  ‘Half an assessment isn’t any good,’ said Blair.

  Brinkman began to smile, imagining further praise but then stopped, suspecting that Blair meant something else. ‘What’s yours?’ he said.

  ‘I think there’s more to switching the wheat purchasing to Canada than finding alternative supplies. That’s too simple.’

  Blair was being objective, not critical, Brinkman decided: and he hadn’t committed himself too strongly to London, he remembered, relieved. Wanting to show analysis in his question, Brinkman took a chance and said, ‘You think the shortage is serious?’

  Blair nodded and Brinkman was further relieved. ‘We know it is,’ he said. ‘Got a playback from Langley: our spy satellites go over the wheat growing areas. It’s a disaster area.’

  ‘Famine proportions?’ probed Brinkman, staying on safe ground.

  ‘Practically, in some areas. The harvest was bad last year, so there isn’t any stock for them to fall back upon.’

  It was repayment time, Brinkman realised: he hadn’t expected it so soon. Deciding it wasn’t a naive assumption. Brinkman said, ‘Which puts Serada on the spot?’

  ‘The whole Politburo,’ expanded Blair. ‘But Serada most of all, I agree. He’s shown bad leadership, from the time of his election. There have been the changes within the ministry, sure, but that’s just cosmetic: doesn’t matter a spit within the Politburo, where Serada’s critics are. And he’s got plenty.’

  ‘Enough to be purged?’ Brinkman tried to avoid any excitement showing and thought he’d succeeded.

  ‘Difficult to be positive,’ said Blair cautiously. ‘But it could happen. Serada came from the agricultural ministry: was supposed to know all about it. Agrarian reforms were the first things he introduced, when he got the Politburo chairmanship.’

  ‘So he’s directly responsible?’ said Brinkman, another safe question. He did not want any more of his meal but continued eating, to disguise his feelings from the other man.

  ‘Right in the firing line,’ agreed Blair. ‘So we’re going to see some defensive play.’

  Brinkman didn’t understand and searched desperately for the right question. ‘Can he manage it?’ he said.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Blair, pushing his plate away. ‘Maybe not.’

  Come on, for Christ’s sake! thought Brinkman. He wanted it all. He said, ‘It’ll have to be something pretty dramatic’

  ‘I think it will be,’ said Blair. ‘Predictable but dramatic’

  But I can’t bloody well predict it, thought Brinkman. Unable to manage anything better he said, ‘Could support swing back to Serada if he gets it right?’

  ‘ If he gets it right,’ qualified Blair. The American hesitated, appearing unsure whether or not to continue: Brinkman sat with the apprehension burning through him, hoping it wasn’t showing in open perspiration on his face. Then Blair said, ‘The Canadian deal has got two sides, in my opinion. It’s to relieve the shortages here, certainly. And for insurance if the United States uses its supplies as a weapon. Serada’s gesture has got to be dramatic, like I said. It’s got to be dramatic and it’s got to be convincing to everyone here: the Politburo and the committees that matter and those poor sons-of-bitches who are starving out there in the boondocks. So what’s the usual move of a dictatorship when there’s an internal threat?’

  Brinkman drank from his coffee cup, to give himself time. Predictable, the man said; what the hell was predictable! ‘Create an external one,’ he risked, stomach knotted at the fear of getting it wrong.

  ‘Exactly!’ said the American and Brinkman put the cup down, not wanting the shake of his hand to be apparent. Blair said, ‘The Soviets are paranoid about war. They lost twenty million people fighting Hitler and have never forgotten it. Neither should we forget how it affects their thinking. If Serada can stir up a war threat, then he’s home and dry.’

  Blair was mad, thought Brinkman. Up to now everything had been logical and acceptible but now the man was running off into fantasyland. And then it came to him and he said, ‘So you’re guessing Geneva?’

  ‘Right first time,’ congratulated the American. ‘I think Serada is going publicly to put up a whole bunch of proposals to the disarmament conference, proposals he knows damned well will be unacceptable to the United States. Say something like he’s prepared to go there personally to negotiate and sign a treaty and actually invite the President to meet him there. We’ll turn it down, because we’ll have to. And the President will make an announcement saying he’s not going. Serada will be able to tell the Politburo and the Russian people and anyone else who’ll listen to him that he made a genuine gesture for peace but America, the warmongers, rejected it. And then, in protest, he’ll break off the Geneva conference. My guess is that he’ll actually hope we’ll use wheat as a weapon. If we do that he can say it’s America causing the starvation, not his half-assed policies.’

  It was good, conceded Brinkman: bloody good. A neat, intricate jig-saw puzzle with all the bits in place, even the awkward ones all the same colour. He said, ‘It’s a fascinating scenario.’

  ‘It’s the way I’m reading it,’ said Blair.

  The American gestured for more coffee and Brinkman took some too, content to let Blair run the encounter. The ace, Ingram had called him, remembered Brinkman. He thought it was a pretty good description. He said, ‘Who succeeds, if Serada goes?’

  Blair grinned. ‘The sixty-four thousand dollar question, as they’ve said too many times. It’s Russia’s perennial problem, a gang of old guys at the top. Gushkov is a contender, but he’s seventy-two. Chebrakin has got the support of the military, which is always a factor. But he’s seventy. Didenko is the youngest, at fifty-nine. But he’s spent most of his administrative life out in the provinces and hasn’t got any international experience at all: never even been out of the country. I’d put Yuri Sevin down as an outsider but my guess is he wouldn’t take it. His reputation is that of a behind-the-scenes policymaker.’

  ‘Anybody’s guess then?’

  ‘If I were asked to make it, I’d risk a buck on Chebrakin. But only as a caretaker.’

  ‘Until Didenko gets the experience?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Blair, uncommitted. ‘Maybe someone we’ve never heard of. I’ve got a gut feeling that we might see changes that will take us all by surprise…’ Blair grinned again and said, ‘But that’s all
it is, a gut feeling. And gut feelings make bad intelligence.’

  If Blair were right then he couldn’t have been posted to Moscow at a better time, thought Brinkman. He realised, too, that the American had repaid him in full: with interest. He said, ‘Would America suspend the wheat sales, to get Serada back to the conference table?’

  ‘Not if we’ve got any sense,’ said Blair. ‘It’s a myth that we supply all that much anyway. And what we do could easily be replaced. As a gesture it would be more to Russia’s propaganda advantage than a serious threat.’

  He’d include that in the file to London, Brinkman determined. It would show impressive political acumen: maybe even get transmitted between London and Washington. He experienced a warm feeling of contentment and satisfaction. He said, ‘I’d like to return the other night’s dinner. Have you and Ann over to my place.’ In fact, thought Brinkman, he wanted Blair to be a frequent guest at this rate; very frequent.

  ‘We’d like that,’ accepted the American. ‘Ann’s got lots more she wants to talk about with you, about England.’ The American paused and said, ‘Found the bugs yet?’

  ‘I haven’t seriously tried,’ said Brinkman, who had but found no listening devices against which in London he’d been warned to be careful.

  ‘Light fittings are a favourite,’ said the American. ‘Interior of keyholes, too. When they swept the apartment of our trade attache last time they found one in the flush handle of the John.’

  Brinkman laughed and said, ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Took it out,’ said Blair. ‘The Soviets know from the maids when there’s an official sweep and because it’s official anything found is removed. We don’t touch anything we find ourselves. Indicates we might have something to hide and they’ll only put another one in somewhere else. If you know where they are you can just avoid them.’

  Remembering Ingram’s praise of the other man’s electronic ability, Brinkman said, ‘Found all yours?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Blair, casually. ‘Score’s up to five so far. I play them a lot of Country and Western. Dolly Parton’s a favourite.’

  ‘I prefer classical,’ said Brinkman.

  ‘I guess they do, too,’ said Blair.

  Brinkman’s report to Maxwell was lengthy and it took a long time to encode, so it was late when he got back from the embassy. Despite the time, he spent three hours making a detailed examination of the apartment, concentrating upon the spots suggested by Blair. He found three devices, two in light fittings.

  Four days later the Soviet leader appeared publicly on State television to announce his new disarmament proposals for the Geneva conference. Washington responded not with a rejection but with caution, issuing a communique that they would have to be studied in depth before any proper response could be given. Brinkman got another cable of congratulation from Maxwell.

  Ruth accepted that the apology in Blair’s card – that there was nothing really worth buying in Moscow for Paul’s birthday – was probably true but she still wished he’d tried, instead of enclosing an impersonal cheque. Trying for something different she took both boys on one of the cruise trips along the Potomac, on a boat where it was possible to eat. Afterwards they went to the Biograph in Georgetown because a movie was showing she knew Paul particularly wanted to see and even though they had the big tubs of popcorn she took them to eat, afterwards, at the French restaurant on the opposite side of M Street.

  ‘I’d like you to write to your father when we get back, to thank him.’

  ‘What for?’ demanded Paul belligerently.

  ‘Your present,’ Ruth replied carefully. She wouldn’t fight, not on his birthday.

  ‘Twenty lousy bucks!’

  ‘Stop it, Paul,’ she said evenly. ‘He’s your father and he loves you and it made more sense for him to send you the money to buy something you really want instead of him guessing.’

  ‘If he hadn’t run out on us he wouldn’t have had to guess, would he?’ said the boy.

  ‘He hasn’t run out on you,’ said Ruth, maintaining her control. ‘He divorced me.’

  ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’ asked John.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you he loves you. And he does.’

  Paul took his father’s cheque from his pocket, looked at it and said, ‘He can go stick it up his ass.’

  ‘Stop that!’ said Ruth, her voice rising for the first time. ‘I will not have you use language like that in front of me.’

  Paul tore the cheque in half and then in half again, letting the pieces fall into the ashtray between them.

  ‘That was stupid!’ said Ruth.

  The boy looked up at her and said, ‘So’s not having a father.’

  Sokol was a bachelor with no outside interests and thought passingly that it was fortunate because his absorption with the problems arising from the famine meant he stayed all the time at Dzerzhinsky Square, frequently sleeping on a collapsible cot in his office. Despite the pressure, he refused to delegate to his subordinates, wanting awareness of everything at the time it happened, not days or weeks later when the advantage might be lost. It was almost midnight and his eyes were drooping with tiredness when he came upon the report on the newly-arrived Englishman. He blinked tightly against the fatigue, concentrating upon the accounts from the permanent observers at the embassy and from the guards and workers in the foreigners’ compound. There appeared to be a friendship with the American Resident, Sokol noticed. But then the previous man, Ingram, had been a friend, so the introduction was obvious. He put aside the report. There was nothing to indicate that Brinkman was doing anything but settling in. There was no cause for any special activity against the man.

  Chapter Eight

  Orlov was born in Georgia, at the port of Poti. He’d tried, prompted by the urgings of his anxious mother and aided by the blurred, already fading photographs, later to recall his father and said he could, because he knew it was important to the woman, but truthfully he could not. He could remember, however, the anguish. The helpless crying and afterwards – for several months – the long days and the long nights she spent in her room by herself, refusing to emerge and for whole weeks not bothering to eat, although it was not until years later that he came to know what Leningrad meant beyond the name of a city and realised that the desperate mourning had been for his father’s death during the Nazi siege. It resulted in Orlov being brought up almost entirely by his grandfather, a fiercely moustacheod man – and to a lesser extent by his grandmother. Orlov knew now that the bellowed talk and the guffawed laughter and the belly slapping and the drinking – corks were never preserved for replacement, but always discarded on opening – were covers for an inferiority, the man’s inner fear. But as a child he lived in permanent awe of his grandfather, thinking him the bravest man who lived. Certainly that’s how Orlov considered him after that day on the sea although like the realisation about fear Orlov recognised what had happened to have been through stupidity and their survival through luck. The old man was a fisherman, so he should have known better, even though when they sailed there had been no hint of the storm, not the smallest cloud in the sky. He’d taken them too far out for a coastal dory, and ignored the clouds when they appeared, first a bubbled line on the horizon and then, with such frightening quickness, churning out over the sky and completely blackening the sun. The old man reacted then, of course, trying to get them back to safety but the wind was already too strong, tearing at the full sail he first attempted and threatening to overturn the boat, so that he had to trim it practically to the degree of pointlessness. He’d roared and shouted, making his own noise to give him courage over the sound of the storm, and made Orlov take the tiller while he rowed, the effort against the heaving waves as futile as maintaining the sail. The old man had shown some seamanship, Orlov supposed, keeping their constantly-swamped head into the wind and despite his age – he must have been nearly seventy – never flagging throughout the long night baling the water, to keep them afloat. T
he storm eased by early morning, so that they could put more sail on but when they were actually in sight of the harbour the sea played a trick, like the old man should have known the sea often did, suddenly trapping them in a confluence of converging currents and eddies and tidal shifts. They’d spun, helplessly, tiller and sails and oars useless, caught in a sort of whirlpool that Orlov had thought was going to suck them down with them powerless to prevent it. Which was how he felt now. Everything was happening too quickly – with the unexpected quickness of that childhood storm – and he hadn’t anticipated any of it and felt himself being sucked deeper and deeper and being powerless to do anything about it. He’d known his position and the esteem in which he was held – if it had been less the danger to Natalia would not have been so great – but no way, not in his talks and discussions with Harriet nor in his own, private considerations, had he anticipated how quickly he would be caught up in affairs and events upon his return to Moscow. He’d actually expected a transitional period, a time when he would be spared from the ministry to settle back into the country, which was when he had intended as kindly and as painlessly as possible formally separating and divorcing himself from Natalia. But it hadn’t happened that way. There had been the need constantly to attend the Kremlin, practically from the first day, and now he felt as trapped as inexorably as he had been that day long ago in the spinning water. Trapped by the ambition of a trusted and dear friend and trapped in his relationship with Natalia, from whom he should have been distancing himself and with whom, instead, he was increasingly resuming the complete and normal married life that had been interrupted by his posting to America. That day at sea the spinning had stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the sea flattened into an unnatural calmness, enabling them easily to get back to shore. Now Orlov felt himself caught between two different sorts of tempest and couldn’t imagine a way that either would blow themselves out.

  There was a meeting with Sevin the morning before his election, an unnecessary preparation for his appearance before the Central Committee but an indulgence the old man required and which had to be allowed.