A Matter of Honour (5 page)

Once Romanov had completed his fifth year at
the university and obtained his diploma (with distinction), he remained in
Moscow and joined the diplomatic service.

Zaborski had now reached the point in the
file at which he had first come across the self-confident young man. Each year
the KGB
were
able to second from the diplomatic
service any person they considered to be of exceptional talent. Romanov was an
obvious candidate. Zaborski’s rule, however, was not to enlist anyone who didn’t
consider the KGB to be the elite. Unwilling candidates never made good
operatives and sometimes even ended up working for the other side. Romanov
showed no such doubt. He had always wanted to be an officer of the KGB. During
the next six years he carried out tours at their embassies in Paris, London,
Prague and Lagos. By the time he had returned to Moscow to join the
headquarters staff he was a sophisticated operative who was as relaxed at an
ambassadorial cocktail party as he was in the gymnasium.

Zaborski began to read some of the comments
he himself had added to the report during the last four years – in particular
how much Romanov had changed during his time on the Chairman’s personal staff.
As an operative, he had reached the rank of major, having served successfully
in the field before being appointed head of a department. Two red dots were
placed by his name indicating successful missions. A defecting violinist
attempting to leave Prague and a general who had thought he was going to be the
next head of a small African state. What impressed Zaborski most about his
protege’s efforts was that the Western press thought the Czechs were
responsible for the first and the Americans for the second. Romanov’s most
significant achievement, however, had been the recruitment of an agent from the
British Foreign Office whose parallel rise had only assisted Romanov’s career.
Romanov’s appointment as head of a department had surprised no one, himself
included, although it soon became clear to Zaborski that he missed the raw
excitement of field work.

The Chairman turned to the last page, a
character assessment, in which the majority of contributors were in accord:
ambitious, sophisticated, ruthless, arrogant but not always reliable were the
words that appeared with regularity in almost every summation.

There was an assertive rap on the door.
Zaborski closed the file and pressed a button under his desk. The doors clicked
open to allow Alexander Petrovich Romanov to enter the room.

“Good morning, Comrade Chairman,” said the
elegant young man who now stood to attention in front of him. Zaborski looked
up at the man he had selected and felt a little envy that the gods had bestowed
so much on one so young. Still, it was he who understood how to use such a man
to the State’s best advantage.

He continued to stare into those clear blue
eyes and considered that if Romanov had been born in Hollywood he would not
have found it hard to make a living. His suit looked as if it had been tailored
in Savile Row – and probably had been. Zaborski chose to ignore such
irregularities although he was tempted to ask the young man where he had his
shirts made.

“You called for me,” said Romanov.

The Chairman nodded. “I have just returned
from the Kremlin,” he said. “The General Secretary has entrusted us with a
particularly sensitive project of great importance to the State.” Zaborski
paused.
“So sensitive in fact that you will report only to
me.
You can hand-select your own team and no resources will be denied
you.”

“I am honoured,” said Romanov, sounding
unusually sincere.

“You will be,” replied the Chairman, “if you
succeed in discovering the whereabouts of the Tsar’s icon.”

“But I thought. . .” began Romanov.

Adam walked over to the side of his bed and
removed from the bookshelf the Bible his mother had given him as a Confirmation
present. As he opened it a layer of dust rose from the top of the
gold-leaf-edged pages. He placed the envelope in Revelation and returned the
Bible to the shelf.

Adam strolled through to the kitchen, fried
himself an egg and warmed up the other half of the previous day’s tinned beans.
He placed the unwholesome meal on the kitchen table, unable to put out of his
mind the slap-up meal Lawrence and Carolyn must now be enjoying at the new
Italian restaurant. After Adam had finished and cleared his plate away, he
returned to his room and lay on the bed thinking. Would the contents of the
faded envelope finally prove his father’s innocence? A plan began to form in
his mind.

When the grandfather clock in the hall
chimed ten times, Adam lifted his long legs over the end of the bed and pulled
the Bible back out of the bookshelf. With some apprehension Adam removed the
envelope. Next, he switched on the reading light by the side of the small
writing desk, unfolded the two pieces of paper and placed them in front of him.

One appeared to be a personal letter from
Goering to Adam’s father, while the other had the look of an older, more
official document. Adam placed this second document to one side and began to go
over the letter line by line. It didn’t help.

He tore a blank piece of paper from a
notepad that he found on Lawrence’s desk and started to copy down the text of
Goering’s letter. He left out only the greeting and what he assumed to be a
valediction –
‘hochachtungs-voll’ –
followed
by the Reichsmarshal’s large, bold signature. He checked over the copy
carefully before replacing the original in its faded envelope. He had just
begun the same process with the official document, using a separate sheet of
paper, when he heard a key turning, followed by voices at the front door. Both
Lawrence and Carolyn sounded as if they had drunk more than the promised bottle
of wine, and Carolyn’s voice in particular had ascended into little more than a
series of high-pitched giggles.

Adam sighed and switched off the light by
the side of the desk so they wouldn’t know he was still awake. In the darkness
he became more sensitive to their every sound. One of them headed towards the
kitchen, because he heard the fridge door squelch closed and, a few seconds
later, the sound of a cork being extracted – he presumed from his last bottle
of white wine, as they were unlikely to be so drunk that they had started on
the vinegar.

Reluctantly he rose from his chair, and
circling his arms in front of him, he made his way back to the bed. He touched
the corner of the bedstead and quietly lowered himself on to the mattress, then
waited impatiently for Lawrence’s bedroom door to close.

He must have fallen asleep because the next
thing he remembered was the tick of the hall clock. Adam licked his fingers and
rubbed them over his eyes as he tried to get accustomed to the dark. He checked
the little luminous dial on his alarm clock: ten past three. He eased himself
off the bed gingerly, feeling more than a little crumpled and weary. Slowly he
groped his way back towards the desk, banging his knee on the corner of a chest
of drawers during his travels. He couldn’t stop himself cursing. He fumbled for
the light switch, and when the bulb first glowed it made him blink several
times. The faded envelope looked so insignificant – and perhaps it was. The
official document was still laid out on the centre of the table alongside the
first few lines of his handwritten duplicate.

Adam yawned as he began to study the words
once more. The document was not as simple to copy out as the letter had been,
because this time the hand was spidery and cramped, as if the writer had
considered paper an expensive commodity. Adam left out the address on the top
right hand corner and reversed the eight digit number underlined at the head of
the
text,
otherwise what he ended up with was a
faithful transcript of the original.

The work was painstaking, and took a
surprisingly long time. He wrote out each word in block capitals, and when he
wasn’t certain of the spelling he put down the possible alternative letters
below; he wanted to be sure of any translation the first time.

“My, you do work late,” whispered a voice
from behind him.

Adam spun round, feeling like a burglar who
had been caught with his hands on the family silver.

“You needn’t look so nervous. It’s only me,”
said Carolyn, standing by the bedroom door.

Adam stared up at the tall blonde who was
even more attractive clad only in Lawrence’s large unbuttoned pyjamas and
floppy slippers than she had been when he had seen her fully dressed. Her long,
lair nair now dropped untidily over her shoulders and he began to understand
what Lawrence had meant when he had once described her as someone who could
turn a match-stick into a Cuban cigar.

“The bathroom is at the end of the corridor,”
said Adam, a little feebly.

“It wasn’t the bathroom I was looking for,
silly,” she giggled. “I don’t seem able to wake Lawrence. After all that wine
he’s passed out like a defeated heavyweight boxer.” She sighed. “And long
before round fifteen. I don’t think anything will rouse him again until
morning.” She took a step towards him.

Adam stammered something about feeling
rather whacked himself. He made sure his back shielded her from any sight of
the papers on the desk.

“Oh, God,” said Carolyn, “you’re not queer,
are you?”

“Certainly not,” said Adam, a little
pompously.

“Just don’t fancy me?” she asked.

“Not that exactly,” said Adam.

“But Lawrence is your chum,” she said. Adam
didn’t reply.

“My God this is the sixties, Adam.
Share and share alike.”

“It’s just that...” began Adam.

“What a waste,” said Carolyn, “perhaps
another time.” She tiptoed to the door, and slipped back out into the corridor,
unaware of her German rival.

The first action Romanov took on leaving the
Chairman’s office that morning was to return to his
alma mater
and hand-pick a team of twelve researchers. From the
moment they had been briefed they proceeded to study in pairs on four-hour
shifts, so that the work could continue night and day.

The early information had come in almost by
the hour and the researchers had quickly been able to establish that the Tsar’s
icon had remained in his private quarters at the Winter Palace at Petrograd
until as late as December 1914. Romanov studied religiously a photo of the
small delicate painting of St George and the Dragon. St George in tiny mosaic
patterns of blue and gold while the dragon was in fiery red and yellow.
Although he had never shown any interest in art, Romanov could well understand
why people could be moved by the little masterpiece. He continued to read
details of the icon’s history, but still couldn’t work out why it was so
important to the State. He wondered if even Zaborski knew the reason.

A royal servant who had testified before the
People’s Court a year after the Revolution claimed that the Tsar’s icon had
disappeared for a few days in 1915 after the visit of Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke
of Hesse. At the time, the inquisitors had taken scant interest in the
misplaced icon because it was still on the wall of the Tsar’s study when they
had stormed the Winter Palace. What concerned the court more was why, in the
middle of a fierce war with the Kaiser’s Germany, the Grand Duke of Hesse
should want to visit the Tsar at all.

The Professor of History at the university
had immediately been asked for his opinion. The great academic was puzzled by
the request, as the KGB had never shown any interest in the nation’s past
history before. Nevertheless, he briefed Romanov on everything that was known
of the incident. Romanov pored over his report once again. The Grand Duke, it
was thought, had been on a secret visit to his sister Alexandra, the Tsarina.
Historians now believed that it had been his intention to secure a cease-fire
between Germany and Russia, in the hope that Germany could then concentrate her
war efforts on the British and the French.

There was no proof that the Tsar made any
promises on behalf of his people but the Grand Duke, it seemed, did not return
to Germany empty-handed. As the reports of the proceedings of the People’s
Court showed, another palace servant had been instructed to wrap up the Tsar’s
icon and pack it with the Grand Duke’s belongings. However, no one on the
palace staff could properly explain to the court how a few days later the icon
reappeared in its rightful place on the wall of the Tsar’s private study.

Romanov’s chief researcher, Professor Oleg
Kon-stantinov, having studied the professor’s notes and the other researchers’
contributions, had underlined his own conclusion in red ink.

“The Tsar must have replaced the original
painting with a brilliant copy, having handed over the real icon for
safe-keeping to his brother-in-law, the Grand Duke.”

“But why,” asked Romanov, “when the Tsar had
a palace full of Goyas, El Grecos, Titians and Rubens did he bother to smuggle
out one icon and why does Brezhnev want it back so badly?”

Romanov instructed the professor and his
twenty-four researchers to turn their talents to the Royal House of Hesse in the
hope of tracing what had then happened to the Tsar’s icon. Within ten days,
they possessed between them more information about the Grand Duke and his
family than any professor at any university had managed to gather in a
lifetime. As each file appeared on his desk Romanov laboured through the night,
checking every scrap of information that might give him a lead to the
whereabouts of the original painting. He came to a dead end when, after the
Grand Duke’s death, the painting had been left to his son who was tragically
killed in a plane crash. Nothing had been seen or heard of the icon after that
day.