Making Enemies (36 page)

The voice inside her is screaming at Stevens: refuse him, don’t trust him, get out of here as quickly as you can, these people are more dangerous than you can imagine. But another voice – one she has not heard before – is saying accept, you can live with us, we will be together again as we should always have been, even if it is only for a few weeks. For the first and perhaps the only time in our lives we will be a family.

‘I must have time to think it over,’ Stevens says.

‘Time is the one gift I am not able to give you.’

‘If I refuse your offer?’

Andropov shrugs. ‘To some extent, Professor Stevens, we are playing poker. You must assess how strong my hand is.’

Then something extraordinary and unexpected happens. She sees her son come over to his father, kneel down by his chair and take his father’s hand. The boy looks up into Stevens’s eyes.

‘I see we have our answer,’ Andropov says. ‘Good.’

I had gone straight to bed when Laurentzen dropped me off at Tanya’s flat shortly after six. She’d left me a note to say that she was at the hospital, an emergency with one of her mothers-to-be, and she didn’t know when she’d be back. I must have slept right through her return because when I awoke in the early afternoon, her clothes were on a chair, the bathroom floor was wet and I could smell her scent, but she was gone again. This time there was no note, so I assumed she was back on duty at the hospital.

How could the closeness of only a few days ago have vanished, so that now we could come and go without making contact with each other? What had happened? Was it all my fault? I tried to examine my obsession with her relationship with Sigrin. Why could I not accept that it was over? My questions had allowed Sigrin to come between us, and as the hours went by his presence became more and more of an obstacle. Some part of me that I was ashamed to recognize refused to accept that he had gone from her life. The thought of Sigrin was eating away at everything Tanya and I had created for ourselves in those few days on the island. I was aware of the damage he was doing and I seemed to have no power to prevent it.

I got up, had a bath, made myself something to eat and rang the Marski to talk to my father. There was no answer from his room. I remembered that he was due to speak at the conference at some point in the afternoon, which explained his absence. For a while I thought I ought to go to listen to him, but in the end I didn’t. My excuse was that he and Marchenko should have some time together away from me. I was an intruder in their lives.

Was my father in love with Marchenko? It was hard to tell. They had been so exhausted after their night of talking, that the fact that
he had his arm around her when they came out of the room in Laurentzen’s summer house meant nothing. They had said little on the journey back. Marchenko had slipped out of the car with no more than a quiet ‘goodbye’, and my father had said nothing. He had not touched her, kissed her; he seemed not to hear her, though I noticed that he had turned round to get a last glimpse of her before she disappeared. It must have been a traumatic night for them both.

It was so hot I slept again after that, to be woken by the sound of Tanya in the kitchen making supper. She let me kiss her but there was a coolness in her response, and she did not stop what she was doing. I poured myself a drink.

‘If you won’t believe me,’ Tanya said much later, ‘then you must meet Matti and hear the truth from him.’

I rejected the proposal half-heartedly. There was something strangely exciting in the idea of meeting face to face the man I saw as my rival.

‘It’s far too late,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to meet him and I’m sure he doesn’t want to meet me.’ But she didn’t listen.

‘I will telephone him,’ she said.

She spoke in Finnish. I could not understand a word, but I had the sense that at first Sigrin was unwilling to do what she asked. She persisted, and finally he agreed. She put down the telephone.

‘He is coming here now,’ she said. ‘I’m going to bed. I don’t want to hear you talk about me.’

It was after midnight when the bell went and I opened the door to a man in his late fifties, with grey thinning hair.

‘You must be Danny,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘I am Matti. Tanya has told me much about you.’

He asked for a drink. ‘She keeps her whisky in the cupboard.’ I was immediately made aware of his familiarity with the apartment.

‘These are troubled times,’ he said. ‘We are faced with threats we do not understand. We Finns try to practise our neutrality but sometimes it is hard, with the Russians sitting on our borders. What we see alarms us, East and West arming themselves with ever more powerful weapons; we hear the same threatening messages coming from both sides, sometimes it is hard to distinguish one from the other.

‘If war is to be avoided, then our country must be the meeting ground of East and West. We will play host to the most important dialogue of the century, the dialogue that avoids nuclear war. We
must learn to be the world’s diplomats. That is the role we seek for ourselves.’

At that moment I didn’t care about nuclear war, East or West or the role the Finns wanted to play. I wanted to know whether or not Sigrin had left Tanya for ever. My world had shrunk to the only issue that mattered to me.

Suddenly Sigrin laughed. ‘Why don’t you ask me the questions that are written on your face? Shall I answer even though you have not asked them? Is that not why I am here? Tanya wishes me to speak to you but she does not tell me what I am to say. When I look in your eyes, I have no more confusion. Now it is easy. If you do not believe what she says to you, then you do not trust her and your relationship with her has no future. There is nothing I can do to help you.’

‘Then why did you come?’

‘Tanya wanted you to set eyes on me. It is better to know your supposed enemy than to imagine him. Our dreams are usually more dangerous than the realities we face in our waking lives. If you think I am your rival for Tanya, then so be it. If not, then so be it also. It is not in my control.’

He got up and shook my hand.

‘I have been in love with her and she has been in love with me. I am sure she has told you that. In some ways I will always be in love with her. She will not have told you that but, man to man, I am sure you will understand.’

He was taunting me, humiliating me as he had every right to do, and I had no response but to smile bravely and say nothing. If it had been Tanya’s plan to solve our dilemma by getting me to talk to Sigrin, it had failed.

I didn’t like him and I wanted him to go but, unlike so many of his countrymen, he was a talkative Finn, and an arrogant one. He wanted me to know how important he was; how he knew everyone in Finland from the President down, how he had introduced Tanya to his world.

‘Her father was a diplomat, he had some knowledge of the world, but it was I who made her intimate with it.’

He gave me a picture of their life together: the parties he had taken her to, the journeys she had shared with him, the clothes he had bought her, the wines they had drunk together. I suppose it was meant to hurt, the creation of this image of a world that was
closed to me, where he had moved effortlessly with Tanya beside him.

As I listened, Sigrin as a threat began to shrink. I saw him for what he was, a man clinging to the past, lost in memories of a time when he had counted, when he had loved and been loved in return. I saw that the glamour that was now in shreds around him had understandably beguiled a young girl’s eyes and heart.

The Tanya he described was not the woman I knew. In his eyes, she was a child he had led by the hand into a grown-up world, given gifts because of her beauty but allowed to be no more than a decoration for a vain and worldly man. How far that was from the woman I knew, the doctor who had dressed men’s wounds and watched them die, who had faced her brother with the truth about his self-destructive will, who had waited through the bleak winter months for the return of a man, of which she could never be sure.

I knew then that Sigrin no longer counted. I had nothing to fear from this man. My shame at my own behaviour grew more acute with every minute that he stayed.

‘I know your people too,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘I am surprised they did not tell you that.’

‘My people?’

‘Lander. Maitland. Corless, though I have not met him. I am there when they need me. I can be useful to them. They know the value of my connections. Over the years I have done them good service.’

I was no longer listening to what he was saying. All I could hear were the words in my head, what I would say to Tanya when he was gone. I was impatient to see her, to hold her, to beg her forgiveness. I longed for Sigrin to go.

He left soon after two, more than a little drunk by now. He embraced me as he said goodbye. I shrank from his touch.

I was shamed by my experience. How could I done that? I had to find her, to apologize, to try to rewrite the past hours of doubt and despair, to go back to the love we had shared on her island.

‘Tanya.’

I went into the bedroom. The light was out. Without thinking I turned it on.

‘Tanya.’

The bed was still made. The room was empty. All the while I had assumed that Tanya was there. But she wasn’t. She had gone.

The first sign that there was a crisis in Helsinki came in a telex from David Lander. Stevens, he reported, had failed to give his speech at the conference. Professor Laurentzen’s apology for his absence concealed the fact that no one appeared to know where he was or why he hadn’t turned up. An hour later a second message told us Stevens had left the Marski hurriedly in the company of an unknown man, thought to be Russian, some time after three o’clock. At half past midnight we had an unconfirmed report that Stevens had been seen entering the Soviet embassy. By one-fifteen we learned that he had left the embassy but no one knew where he’d gone. We drank tea, smoked cigarettes, hardly dared to leave the room.

Shortly before three, we got a call from Moscow on the scrambler. Maitland took it. He said little but listened hard.

‘All right. Thanks. Keep in touch. We’ll be staying by the telephone.’

He looked at us, his face grey with exhaustion and doubt.

‘That was Martineau. Stevens arrived in Moscow an hour ago. He was driven away from the airport with an intelligence officer called Andropov and a senior member of the Fourth Directorate. He doesn’t know where they’ve taken him. It would appear that our leading nuclear scientist is in Moscow as a guest of the Soviets.’

‘Christ,’ Adrian Gardner said, ‘the bastard’s gone over.’

‘It certainly looks that way,’ Maitland said grimly.

‘I never believed he’d do it.’ Arthur Gurney looked at each of us in turn. ‘Not for a single moment.’

‘Somewhere along the line, we got it badly wrong,’ Gardner said, he echoed all our thoughts. We had made a serious miscalculation. Now the unthinkable had happened.

‘Our enemies have built a bonfire around us,’ Corless said, visibly shaken, ‘and we’re sitting on top of it. It’s first a question of time before they put a torch to it and we all go up in smoke.’

‘He was seen getting on a plane for Moscow some hours ago,’ Laurentzen said. ‘There were three other Russians with him. One of them was identified as a woman.’

‘Marchenko?’

Laurentzen nodded. ‘She had a boy with her. We presume it was her son.’

‘What was her son doing in Helsinki?’

‘That I cannot tell you.’

‘Did my father struggle?’

‘No. He walked unaided.’

‘You’re sure he wasn’t forced?’

How I wanted my mental images of an enforced, Krasov-like departure to be real: my father, strapped to a stretcher, drugged into unconsciousness, being carried away against his will.

‘I am sure of nothing but I have no evidence to suggest he left Helsinki against his will.’

He’d gone because he had wanted to go. That was what Jamie was saying. Marchenko had invited him to Moscow and he’d accepted. It was unthinkable. Impossible. Yet that was what had happened. My father had changed sides.

Angry and miserable, I rewrote the events of the previous twenty-four hours in a hopeless attempt to scrape some comfort from the disaster that now stared me in the face. What hurt most was that I had broken the habit of all the years of enmity between us: for the few hours of his meeting with Marchenko I had trusted my father. I had not questioned him. I had not burst into the room and demanded to know what was going on, what they were talking about, why they were meeting in secret. I had accepted Jamie Laurentzen’s argument that they needed time together. If I had asked
those questions, as I should have done, perhaps I might have shaken some sense into my father before it was too late, and his defection might never have taken place.

I had done nothing. I had compounded my error by not making contact with him afterwards. If I had not quarrelled with Tanya, and had gone instead to the Marski to persuade him to leave Helsinki as I had intended, how different events might have been. My inactivity made me an accessory to this whole bloody mess. There was no comfort to be had. I was horrified by my own complicity.

There has been no more sickening sight recently than that of a Nobel prizewinning British professor sitting at the same table in Moscow as his Soviet ‘hosts’ echoing parrot-like their words about the threat to the world of building a nuclear arsenal.

Don’t talk to us about the need for nuclear responsibility, Professor. We don’t need telling. Try explaining that idea to the men whose company you’re keeping. See if they listen. See if they will cut their so-called defence budget by a single rouble.

How could one of our best brains let himself be taken in so easily? How can this misguided man not see that by becoming the pawn of the Soviets, he has betrayed himself, his country and the democracy for which so many young lives were lost? Where were you, Professor, when the sacrifice of our young people gave us the promise of a future?

Don’t waste your time talking to the deaf. They can’t hear you. Go back to your ivory tower in Cambridge where you belong. Stick to what you know. Leave the real world to the rest of us. It’s not your place.