Document Z (2 page)

Her downstairs duties complete, she was to move each afternoon to the secret section where she carried out her work for the MVD—the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The MVD's traffic was hidden inside the embassy's regular diplomatic cables, identified by a four-digit flag. Evdokia helped her husband decrypt the spy organ's messages using a one-time pad. The matrices were laborious but the job was somehow fulfilling. The results were plain text messages, most littered with secret words. Many of the codes were obvious. ‘Fraternal' was the Australian Communist Party. ‘The Competitors' were ASIO, Australia's security organisation. ‘Voron' was the MVD's agent and so was ‘Yakka'. There were other codes that only Volodya understood. Evdokia knew better than to ask.

The third MVD officer at the embassy was Philip Kislitsyn, an impossibly tall man who walked with a stoop. He arrived a week after the Petrovs. He had a daughter, Tatiana, and a wife, Anna. They all came to dinner, neatly dressed.

‘You spent the war in London?' Volodya asked.

‘That's right,' said Kislitsyn. ‘Five years at the embassy there.'

‘Were you bombed?'

Kislitsyn shrugged. ‘When we arrived it was sporadic.'

‘We were in Sweden.'

Volodya produced the photo album of Stockholm: the Grand Hotel and the Royal Palace, a picture of Evdokia eating strawberries in Gamla Stan. Kislitsyn asked what conditions were like.

‘Terrible,' said Volodya. ‘In capitalist countries, goods will rot on the docks if the people cannot pay.'

‘That's right,' said Kislitsyn. ‘England was just as bad, though perhaps they had an excuse with the war. It is difficult to know.'

Evdokia told the story of their voyage from Archangel, how their ship had been torpedoed by a pig-shaped German submarine.

‘It surfaced?' asked Anna.

‘Right by the lifeboats. We thought we were all about to die.'

Anna looked impressed. Evdokia told her of the three days in the lifeboat; how, as the ship was holed and sinking, a child slipped from the ropes and disappeared. Volodya said they owed their lives to the radio operator who had stayed on board, signalling SOS.

‘Next time you will be saved by television,' said Kislitsyn. ‘This is going to replace radio. I saw it at the BBC.'

The next morning, Kislitsyn came to Evdokia's desk wanting to know if she had any contacts in the Australian business community.

‘What do you mean?'

‘People who can get people jobs. Captains of industry, they are called.'

He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, quite an attractive pair. She gave him the embassy rolodex and he flipped through it hungrily, hovering over certain names.

‘How can I tell who these people are?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘It's mostly the ambassador's list.'

He groaned.

‘Which of us needs a job?' she joked.

He looked at her quietly. She realised now that she'd seen him before, recalling a figure in the Special Cypher Department in Moscow who had usually sat alone in the canteen. Yes, he'd been in the building for a few months, not much more, then he'd disappeared. Purged, she'd thought then, but evidently not so.

‘These are our only records?' he asked.

‘No, no. There are other lists too. The film nights, for example.'

He looked on eagerly as she began reaching for the files.

She met the Australian prime minister. Ambassador Lifanov came to her desk one afternoon and asked if she wouldn't mind. It was a diplomatic dinner for the Europeans, and he needed staff who spoke English and were suitable. The parliament building was white and, she thought, rather beautiful. Its lights were on, the grasslands around dark black.

‘Robert Menzies,' said the prime minister.

‘Pleased to meet you.'

He had silver hair and black bushy eyebrows. He was a fascist, or at least had fascist tendencies. He was unfailingly polite. He asked them to a cricket match he was organising, a charity game to raise funds for Legacy. They didn't know what Legacy was.

There was roast turkey, the huge bird sitting fatly on a plate. At dinner, Evdokia engaged in small talk with Zizka, the Czech trade consul, a slight-framed man who she thought worked for Czech intelligence. Afterwards, there were drinks in a room with a fireplace. Men stuck to one side, women the other. Prime Minister Menzies made a toast. Evdokia watched Kovaliev, the commercial attaché, the way he seemed to hang from Ambassador Lifanov's coat-tails, his equine features making him look like the man's mule.

Lifanova seemed awkward and out of place. Evdokia presumed it was her lack of English. She thought the wife of the Soviet ambassador shouldn't be someone who stood alone and so she went to her, to help by being there to translate. The only people who approached them came to compliment Evdokia on her outfit. The wife of a French diplomat suggested that she investigate a store named Kosky Brothers in Melbourne. No one said anything to Lifanova. She stood at the edge of the conversations, reduced to nodding along.

Evdokia woke the next day feeling enthused. She smoked a cigarette in the backyard and penned a long letter to Tamara, her fourteen-year-old sister. This is a koala, she wrote
.
Here is where we live. This card shows the Harbour Bridge and this one the Blue Mountains. She concluded by imploring her sister to study hard, to take up languages and to read each day
Pravda
's notes on international affairs. She promised that she would organise Tamara's membership of the Komsomol. She promised that by hard work and struggle Tamara too could go abroad. Capitalism wraps its women in tissue paper, she wrote, but you and I, we are not the beneficiaries but the very benefit of the Great October Revolution.

She had photographs of Irina and Tamara playing with woodblocks on the floor, her daughter and her mother's daughter, born so close together under the same stars.

She took Tamara's letter to the embassy to post it. She hadn't been there five minutes when Volodya came to her desk with an instruction from Moscow. It had come by telegraph, he said. It was truly the strangest thing.
Please update your records and
use the following in correspondence.
The centre had changed her codename. They wanted her to be known as ‘Tamara'.

She re-read the telegraph, feeling somewhat confused. It might have been a coincidence, but they knew her whole history, as they knew everyone's, so what were they trying to convey?

She pondered as she worked and by lunchtime couldn't avoid the conclusion that it was some form of threat. Her sister would be their retaliation should anything go awry.

2

‘B
enson's Games & Goods.' Closed, said a sign on the door. Vladimir Petrov tried it anyway, setting off a small bell on its far side.

‘We're shut,' said a voice. ‘It's Sunday.' A man's face appeared at the glass. Near to white hair.

‘Oh,' said Petrov.

‘What is it you want?'

‘A rifle.'

The man eyed him. ‘What's that accent?'

‘Russian.'

‘Where're you from?'

‘Russia.'

The man looked harder. ‘From where I'm standing, you look pretty serious.'

‘I need a rifle.'

‘I can see you're going to buy one.'

‘That's right.'

‘It's not a window trip?'

Petrov didn't know what that meant. ‘No. This is right.'

‘Cash?'

‘Oh, yes.'

The store's interior was dim. The man explained that the gun room was in the rear. There was a shade on the skylight, whose string he pulled, dropping a small cloud of dust and bug-mess into the room. The firearms sat like sleek black missions, guns one side, rifles the other.

‘Rabbits is it?' asked the storeman, putting a Remington in Petrov's hands. He explained this was their top of the line. Top notch.

Petrov played the bolt. The weapon felt well weighted, solid with a walnut stock. He asked the cost, not truly listening because probably he would take it whatever the price. His first gun had been a hammer-lock, a joke weapon with a replacement stock that he'd bought for two roubles from the village wainwright. It was a stubborn gun. Ugly. He was fourteen then, and forty-three now, and he would buy this rifle because he wanted to have one nice hunting rifle before he died. He would buy it because this was Australia, land incredible, booming, beautiful, fifteen thousand kilo metres from Moscow, and he was intending to enjoy it. Another overseas posting. Not a prize granted to every man, and he would seize it, taking what liberties were possible, knowing the chances against his ever getting a third.

He bought the rifle and two hundred bullets.

‘What about a dog?' the man said then.

‘A dog?'

‘Sure. A hunter buys a rifle, what's the next thing he needs?'

Outside in a yard, Alsatian puppies wriggled in a coop against the fence. Petrov bent down. When the coop was opened, one broke from their number and flopped its way into the Russian's grip. He held it at chest height, a skin of heart and heat.

He thought not of hunting but Evdokia. Of the joy his wife would find in such an improbable thing.

They put the rifle across the back seat of his car, then shook hands. ‘Volodya,' Petrov said.

‘I'm Jack.'

The Russian laughed. ‘Jack,' he repeated, holding the pup. ‘Then this will be his name too.'

The embassy's secret section was on the top floor: five cramped rooms at the end of the eastern corridor. Somewhere, the roof leaked. He'd been told that when it rained, the main-wired lighting shorted, which was why each desk in the section had two lamps. Beyond this, the only noticeable difference between these rooms and the rest of the embassy was that each door had two locks and required two keys.

That and the corridor was deadly quiet.

That and it was probably bugged.

This was Petrov's firming opinion. He thought the leak might have been caused by a commando who'd been up there setting microphones at night. He was planning to send Golo-vanov, the night duty patroller, up to comb the crawl-space.

At the start of the corridor, Prudnikov, the chief cypher clerk and a secret MVD recruit, occupied two rooms. The first was his personal office, where he kept an administrative watch on the section. The second he shared with his wife and baby daughter; it contained a bed and a cot, and in front of these a chest for the family's belongings.

Petrov's office was at the very end of the corridor. It had a small, knee-high fireplace set into the wall, which he liked. Because his MVD role was secret, even from other staff, he had a downstairs office too. The sign there said, ‘Third Secretary, Consular Business and Cultural Representation'. His job was to prevent defections. Nina Smirnova, the wife of the embassy's former accountant, had previously attempted to escape. She had arranged herself a job in Sydney working as a nanny to two rich émigrés and, using the Canberra laundrette, had smuggled out two suitcases full of clothes. Her husband had had his suspicions. He had reported nonsense telephone calls, midnight pacings, travel magazines hidden under their mattress. Smirnova was investigated and arrested. The sentence was ten years. Add to this the defectors Gouzenko in Canada and Kravchenko in America, and Moscow was worried, having paranoid visions about any given western outpost. Petrov's Moscow boss, a man known by the codename Sparta, was particularly wary, having promised someone important that nothing would happen again. So he had sent Vladimir Petrov to Canberra, armed with a file on every member of the embassy; Vladimir Petrov who was experienced in containment work; Vladimir Petrov who could be well and truly trusted.

There was a knock at the door. Philip Kislitsyn. The man ducked under the doorframe, sat in the interview chair and tossed Petrov a peach.

‘How is your house?' Petrov asked.

‘It has a chimney stack, a hedge and a letterbox. Anna is buying appliances. Tatiana wants two kittens, and one of them must be orange.'

Petrov smiled. ‘In this country we should take our families on picnics and then we should try golf.'

‘You and I?' said Kislitsyn.

‘Yes.'

It was a pristine game, Petrov thought. Played in pairs, with dew on the grass and morning sunlight on the fairways, it looked like the kind of thing that made lifelong friendships.

Even with his height, Kislitsyn's jacket was too big. He looked like a second- or third-born child growing into the eldest's suit. Petrov had known him a long time. They had met when Kislitsyn was night liaison at Dzerzhinsky Square and Petrov special cypher clerk. Petrov had handed Kislit-syn late-night decrypts for delivery to Stalin and watched him squirm. That was about the time that Petrov had focused his attentions on Evdokia Kartseva, the beautiful woman two floors below whose husband had recently been purged. Kislitsyn had warned him against it: she was marked, he said, lucky to still be on the streets let alone in the building—a month or two and she'd be gone. But Petrov had persisted, believing he couldn't be tarnished, enjoying the idea that he could be the salvation for this woman and her young child. Yet Evdokia had not been easily persuaded. Before her marriage she'd had many suitors. She was a popular woman, good-looking, and why would she be interested in him, a podgy clerk? She had seemed embarrassed at times by his more public approaches but he did not mind. He began visiting her instead at her apartment, helping Irina—a bright young girl—with her maths, and bringing gifts: coffee and coupons for shoes. In a persistent campaign, he made their Sundays his own. They went to the parks and began to eat together at the MVD restaurant. Carefully, he never mentioned the husband, not once. It was his task to make a new world of Irina, Evdokia and himself. And he knew it was working. He bought Irina a wooden ballet dancer and blue knitted socks and Evdokia squeezed his hand in the doorway. Kislitsyn had thought it incred ible: not only had Evdokia Kartseva survived her husband's downfall but she was reciprocating Vladimir Petrov's attentions as well.