The Dark Chronicles (45 page)

A tram at the front of the queue moved off, blocking my view of him again, and I leapt into the street and in front of a taxi so I could take up position on the pavement behind him on the other side of the road. But he had gone. I looked around frantically, but as I made it to the pavement I saw the outline of the back of his head and shoulders in the rear of the tram pulling out.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

I raced up to the next tram waiting, which was on the same line, and climbed aboard, paying the driver the fare and asking him when he was going to leave. Not for a few minutes,
signore
. I tried to calm myself and looked at the situation again. On the plus side, I knew where Pyotr was, and he could only go at a certain pace, on certain tracks. And I was still following him, from a vantage he couldn’t see. But unless we left very soon, I wouldn’t be able to see where he got off. What were my options: bribe the conductor to depart earlier? I dismissed it: he would be more likely to kick up a fuss or report me, and we’d probably end up leaving even later and I’d have lost Pyotr. I’d just have to hope I’d be able to see him when he got off.

I took a seat up front and kept my eyes glued to the tram ahead. After a couple of minutes, it slowed for a stop. An elderly lady disembarked, helped by a younger man. No Pyotr. It started back up again, veering in the direction of the river.

The driver of my tram started her up and we began following in leisurely pursuit. Soon we swerved around the corner, skirting the parked cars, and came to the same stop. A young mother tried to bring her baby carriage down the aisle, and berated a long-haired boy in jeans and an embroidered shirt who was standing in the way. Their argument became more heated, and the young man called the woman ‘
Fascista
’. I moved out of the way to avoid them, but they were blocking my view of Pyotr’s tram, which was now slowing for the next stop.

There! He was getting off. I pulled the cord.

‘
Scusi!
’ I cried, and leapt out of the doors as they were closing.

He was walking at a normal pace down the street, and I followed him through a cluster of parked motorbikes and Vespas, past fruit stalls and newspaper stands and shuttered restaurants. A
gattara
glared at me as I passed her feeding crumbs to an emaciated tabby. We were now on the outskirts of Trastevere, a once very down-at-heel neighbourhood that was becoming increasingly visited by tourists. A man in a leather jacket and a cap approached me. ‘
Tabacchi
,’ he said, as though it were a greeting. Black-market cigarettes sold for about two-thirds of the usual price here, and I was running low – but now wasn’t the time. I shook my head and carried on walking. Where the hell had Pyotr gone? I looked around frantically, and finally spied him. He was at the far end of the street: he had stopped at the entrance to a restored medieval house. A block of flats now, it seemed. And he was letting himself in with a key. So he had gone home – perhaps to signal Moscow that I had completed the job?

It was approaching eleven now, so he would have to leave again reasonably soon if he wanted to make our appointment in the Borghese Gardens at noon. There was a bar across the street and I walked into it. Roy Orbison was wailing from a jukebox in the corner, and two old men in cardigans and twill trousers sipped cloudy aperitifs as they studied a wooden chessboard with great solemnity. The owner, moustachioed and stout, stood behind a long mahogany-effect bar polishing glasses with a cloth. Posters
advertised Cinzano and proclaimed support for a local football team. There was no sign of Severn or anyone else.

I ordered a sandwich and an orange juice. I could have done with a cold beer, but this was no time for alcohol, and the sugar in the juice would give me energy. I found a table from which I could watch the front door of the block of flats through the reflection of a mirror, and waited for my quarry to reappear.

He emerged, looking a little flustered, twenty-three minutes later. He was wearing a different suit and his hair was wet – had he just gone home for a clean-up then? Perhaps the proximity to murder had made him squeamish.

He walked back up the street in the direction of the tram stop, presumably to head off to his appointment with me. I waited a few minutes to make sure he wouldn’t double back, and then headed into the building.

*

I rang the doorbell and waited. Through an iron grate I watched as a stout old woman in black shuffled out of a back room towards me. She pressed her face to the grate and glared at me with undisguised suspicion.

‘I am a plain-clothes officer of the Servizio Informazioni Difesa,’ I said. ‘We are currently engaged in an important investigation into a man who has just left this building.’

I spoke with a pronounced Milanese accent, because it is much harder to convince someone you come from the same part of the country as they. She asked me for my papers, and I patiently explained that it was not customary for plain-clothes officers to carry identification, for obvious reasons, but if she chose to call Marco Zimotti, the chief of the SID, at headquarters, he would be able to vouch for me. I gave her an invented number and smiled sweetly, praying she wouldn’t call the bluff.

She looked me over for a few moments more, and then reached into the folds of her capacious dress and took out some keys. ‘That
will not be necessary,’ she said, unlocking the door and letting me into the cool, dark vestibule. ‘How can I help you,
signore
?’

I described Pyotr and she nodded. The Swiss gentleman, Pierre Valougny. I told her that was an alias and that he was, in fact, a Communist agent, and after her eyes had widened and she had howled a bit, she spat over her shoulder and said she had known there was something wrong with him all along. I nodded soberly and asked her to show me his rooms, and she took me up a very creaky lift and along a dank corridor.

There was a large, well-furnished living room, with a window looking out onto the street and a telephone – he must have lived here a while to have arranged the connection, especially in this neighbourhood.

‘Three years,’ said the landlady. ‘Always paid the rent on time, and kept to himself. But I never liked him. I should have known. Please don’t tell anyone of our misfortune here. Was he planning a coup?’

I told her that was state business and asked her to leave. Once she’d gone, I got to work: I wouldn’t have too long before he realized I wasn’t coming to the meet and started heading back.

I began by just walking around the place, trying to get a feel for who I was dealing with. He’d done well, either through Moscow’s funding or his own business acumen, or a combination of the two. There were some hideous modern art paintings on the wall, but they were originals, and a few of the names were familiar. A desk by the window was home to an Olivetti typewriter and stacks of books – these were mostly hardbacks and, again, the subject was modern art. What was his cover, I wondered. Art dealer? That would bring him into contact with Arte come Terrore.

After rummaging around for a couple of minutes, I spotted a ladder next to one of the bookcases. Looking at the ceiling, I saw there was an attic. I pulled out the ladder and climbed up, pushing open the door.

I tugged a piece of string, and a naked bulb lit a small room
containing a wing-backed leather chair and a rusty-looking filing cabinet. There was a mousetrap by the wall, loaded with a small triangle of cheese.

The filing cabinet was unlocked. The top drawer was filled with magazines, and I picked out a few. The first that came to hand was called
La Classe
and was dated today: the headline read ‘LOTTA DI CLASSE PER LA RIVOLUZIONE’: ‘Class struggle for the revolution’. The rest of the pile contained other underground magazines, with names like
Carte Segrete
. Interesting. And slightly odd. Pyotr didn’t strike me as a flower child, in or out of cover, so what the hell was he doing with these in his flat? I opened the next drawer down. More papers, but these were mostly invitations to showings at local art galleries: La Salita, Dell’Ariete. But there were also magazines here, and one of them, I saw, was called
Transizione
. Even more interesting – but not really enough to hang anyone for.

I turned to the bottom drawer and jerked it open. The radio transmitter stared up at me.

Bingo.

It was a simple short-wave set with a high-speed transmission converter, the kind you could buy from most electronics outfitters. He was presumably using it to communicate with the Station in the embassy here – they, in turn, would send out messages based on his information via telegraph or diplomatic bag to Moscow. Hidden behind the set was a Praktina camera and several neatly bundled wads of money:
lire
and dollars. I considered pocketing the lot – it would certainly be satisfying – but decided I would need all the evidence I could get.

As head of Soviet Section, I’d read the reports from Five on the Lonsdale Ring, which they had rounded up in ’61. This wasn’t quite as damning as the material they had found in the Krogers’ flat in Ruislip – everything from cellophane sheets tucked away in a Bible to a microdot reader in a tin of talcum powder – but it was close. A radio transmitter, a camera and significant sums of money all
spelled out ‘foreign agent’ in capital letters. He’d been caught red-handed – or he soon would be…

I stopped. There had been a noise. Was that him returning already? I stood very still for a moment, breathing as shallowly as possible, wondering what the hell to do. I wasn’t armed, and he’d have his Makarov…

Then I saw the mouse, scuttling across the floorboards – the noise had merely been its nails scratching against the wood. The tiny creature paused for a moment, looking up on its hind legs with its snout twitching, before dropping back onto all fours and scurrying forward again.

Snap!

The trap sprung with brutal velocity, catching the mouse at the base of its neck. There was a tiny, almost inaudible squeak and then its eyes froze.

I made my way back downstairs and replaced the ladder next to the bookcase. A bookcase, I now noticed, that was built into the wall. I knelt down and inspected the skirting board. A few inches from the floor there was a sharp line in the board. I pressed the base of my hand against it and pushed. It slid upwards, revealing a small metal knob beneath, rather like a light switch. I flicked it, and the lowest shelf of the bookcase moved a few inches. I pulled it all the way out. Hidden behind it was a small space, inside of which sat a blue and silver cardboard box with the words ‘
Baci Perugina
’ printed on it.

The chocolates had long since been eaten, but in their place was a sheaf of papers bound with an elastic band. The front page was embossed with a red star in a black circle, and a string of reference numbers lay beneath the typed heading: ‘НЕЗАВИСИМЬІЙ’.

The world around me suddenly hushed, and everything narrowed to the field of my gaze. It was as if a mouse had scuttled its way across my scalp, and that one word had snapped the spring shut. The last time I’d met Sasha I had asked him what my codename was, and he had told me: ‘NEZAVISIMYJ’, meaning ‘independent’.

This was
my
file.

I picked it up and slowly turned to the first page:

Well, hadn’t Sasha been clever? He’d realized I might not listen to his message at Heathrow, so he had given Toadski a copy of my file and told him that if I didn’t come in with him he should follow me and hand it over to the local resident wherever I arrived. Presumably the photographs were in here, too? Yes, there they were, in a small plastic pouch beneath the file.

I shook them out and saw that, as well as the pictures with Anna that completed the nasty little honey trap that had brought me into this mess, there were around a dozen surveillance shots that had been taken of me over the years, in London, Istanbul and elsewhere. My anger at not having spotted the tails was somewhat mollified by the fact that I was now sitting in Pyotr’s flat looking through their photographs.

I turned back to the file itself. The typeface was raised and glossy, almost like Braille, and the paper thick and crested. The pages were torn in places, with official stamps placed haphazardly over them and the words
Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie
everywhere. So I was under the control of the GRU: Sasha hadn’t lied about that, at least. There was a long biography that focused mainly on my military service and relationship with Father, and detailed reports of every single meeting I’d attended. There was even a brief essay on my character, dated 12 December 1948, by one Nikolai Pavlovich Vasilyev – presumably Georgi’s real name:

Quite an astute assessment, on the whole. Had I really wanted everything to be of benefit to humanity? I couldn’t really deny it, absurd as it looked in black and white. Still, Pyotr hadn’t taken this advice to heart: his approach had been direct, all right, but it had certainly antagonized me, and unduly at that.

I checked my watch again: it had just gone half eleven. He would be at the gardens soon, and wondering what had happened to me. I calculated I had at least an hour before he would be back. I read on, transfixed. There was a bundle of correspondence from early in my career that made for very curious reading. Skimming through as fast as I could, it appeared that Moscow had not initially believed that they had succeeded in recruiting me. They had become convinced that the Service had
knowingly
let me be recruited, so they could then use me to pass disinformation over. This suspicion appeared to stem from one of the earliest reports I had given. In 1949, Georgi had asked me to note down everything I knew about the Service’s efforts to recruit agents in the Soviet Union. As far as
I knew there were no such efforts, and so I had said so. But that hadn’t been good enough for one Anatoli Panov, an analyst in the Third Department of the First Directorate: