The Tamarind Seed (18 page)

‘I hope so too,' his chief said. He pulled at his nose again. ‘But I have a nasty little instinct that in spite of everything, it is.' He stood up and shook Loder's hand. ‘It's your party now. You might as well stay over for a few days, see your children if you like—then get back Wednesday.'

‘Thanks, sir,' Loder hadn't liked to ask for that particular concession. It was part of the man's ability to manage people that he should think of it at all. Thanks. I can see the kids and get a plane on Tuesday night. I'd like to get on with it. Goodbye sir.'

He went out and down into the bright spring morning to find himself a taxi back to his hotel.

Sverdlov was not at the Washington Embassy. Judith telephoned three times within the hour; the first time she asked to speak to him and after a five-minute wait, the line went dead. Frantically she dialled again; this time there was the same pause, but the operator cut in to apologise for keeping her and Judith hung on. A man's voice answered, speaking slow, careful English. He said that Colonel Sverdlov was not in Washington. No, he could give her no further information, but if she would give her name and call back within half an hour?

He had cleared the telephone call with General Golitsyn by the time she rang again. The name decided Golitsyn not to suppress the fact that Sverdlov was in New York. Farrow was his contact; she might have something important which she wouldn't pass on to anyone else. She had sounded urgent, according to the night clerk who had spoken to her.

She was in her bedroom with the door closed; she had managed to avoid Nancy, who wanted to know who Sandy Mitchel was, and what she wanted. Judith made up an excuse about finding an address of a mutual friend. It didn't fool Nancy for a moment, but it brushed aside the questions, and accounted for the spate of private telephone calls.

When she phoned the Washington Embassy a third time, she was frantic as the same maddening hiatus lengthened from two minutes into five and then eight, with the operator's mechanical voice asking her to keep on holding. She felt like bursting into tears and screaming down the telephone.

Finally the same man who had spoken before came on the line. Colonel Sverdlov was in New York, and could be reached at this number. There was a moment when she panicked; he was repeating the number, slowly and distinctly, but she had no pencil and in her anxiety she feared she might easily get them the wrong way round. ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,' she shouted down the phone, as if he were too far away to hear properly. ‘I haven't a pencil. No, for Christ's sake I said
pencil,
I want to write the number down! Hold on, don't ring off …'

Then she was back, with a dress bill and an eye-liner, which was all she could find to write with. But it was enough, and ten minutes later she had got through and Sverdlov's voice was answering.

‘I have to see you,' she stumbled over the words. ‘It's terribly important.' There was a silence, and she thought they had been cut off. Then he spoke.

‘It's difficult,' he said. ‘I am very busy. I leave early tomorrow.'

She sensed that he was not alone; he sounded impersonal, almost curt.

‘Feodor, I've got something to tell you. For God's sake cut your business short and meet me tonight. Whatever happens you mustn't go home tomorrow!'

‘All right, if it's really urgent. I will go to the place we met last time. In about an hour.' He hung up without even saying goodbye.

He was already in the trattoria where they had lunched that week; he was sitting at the same corner table with a glass of whisky in front of him. He looked up as she came through the door. The place was quite full; the atmosphere was hot and steamy with Italian smells; a large party at a long banquette table were toasting each other and making a lot of noise.

He pulled out her chair, and for a moment his hand rested on her shoulder and squeezed. The first thing she said was so irritable and petty that immediately afterwards she was ashamed.

‘You were very offhand on the telephone. I wouldn't have asked you to come if it wasn't important.'

‘I'm sorry,' Sverdlov said. ‘I was in a room full of people. Also I was surprised. How did you find me?'

‘Your Washington Embassy gave me the number. Listen, I've been nearly frantic trying to find you. You mustn't go back tomorrow!'

‘So you said.' Sverdlov picked up his glass. Take some of this, you look very white. Then tell me what this is about.'

‘Someone came to see me this evening, when I got back from the office she was waiting in the flat. It was the American girl that was living with your friend we met at La Popotte—Memenov. That's what she said, Peter Memenov. He'd given her a message to get through to you and she'd found out where I lived.'

‘What was the message?' He sounded calm to the point of being unconcerned.

‘She had it written down, but she wouldn't give me the paper. I memorised it. “Kalinin is in the Lubiyanka. They are waiting for you. On no account go back to Russia”—no, it was “on no account let them persuade you to go back to Russia”.'

‘Kalinin is my secretary,' Sverdlov said slowly. ‘You are sure about this—you are sure it was Lubiyanka?'

‘Absolutely,' Judith answered. ‘I've even heard of the place. It's a prison, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘It's in Moscow. It is an interrogation centre for the K.G.B.'

‘“They are waiting for you,” what does that mean?' She had reached out and gripped his hand. He caught and held it, locking her fingers in his. He held them so tightly that it hurt.

‘It means that my secretary has been arrested,' Sverdlov said. ‘And questioned. It could mean that when I go home, I will be sent to join him in the Lubiyanka.'

‘Oh my God,' Judith whispered. ‘Just because of the divorce …'

‘No,' he shook his head. ‘No, the divorce has nothing to do with it. That was just a trick to get me home.' He thought of Tomarov's letter, full of paternal sentiment and good advice to come immediately. His eyes went to slits and he said something in his own language which Judith didn't understand.

‘This is something much more serious.' He smiled, and the twisted mouth made it a bitter grimace. They took Kalinin back to manufacture evidence against me. By now they must have got it. So my old friend writes to persuade me to come back; my own wife agrees to divorce me …'

‘But what have you done?' Judith exclaimed. ‘Why should they “manufacture” something? I don't understand it …'

‘No, I don't expect you do,' he said quietly. ‘You wouldn't understand it, because in your world these things do not happen except in books. Spy novels, where the hero bites through the electrified wire with his teeth and escapes into the night. Nobody escapes from the Lubiyanka. I am sorry it was Kalinin. I hope he didn't try to hold out.' He gave her a cigarette and lit one for himself. ‘So the policy has been decided,' he said. ‘We have gone back to Stalinism. And now the purge begins. I have been very blind and foolish; I should have seen it coming.'

‘But why you?' Judith asked him. ‘Why all this trouble about you?'

‘I belong to the so-called moderates,' Sverdlov said. ‘I believe we can conquer the Capitalist world by a peaceful infiltration, by political manœuvre, by the sheer progress of history. But not by war. Not by the old Marxist theory of a world revolutionary movement sweeping all into the sea and building a new paradise on the ruins. You see I have become corrupted; I like Scotch whisky. Didn't you realise when we first met, that alone proves I've lost my Marxist soul?'

‘You have lost it,' Judith said suddenly. ‘You told me that yourself, the night you made me tell you everything about Richard. You said you had lost faith in all of it. You said you only cared about surviving. You must have shown this to your superiors. Oh Feodor, why didn't you keep quiet?'

To her surprise he laughed. ‘Not my superiors,' he said. ‘My underlings. One in particular.' The same look was in his eyes as when he thought of Tomarov. ‘Never underestimate an old dog; he can still bite with one tooth. It's a good proverb. All our Russian proverbs are good.'

‘If you don't stop trying to make this into a joke and talking about proverbs I shall scream,' Judith said suddenly. ‘You're in terrible danger. ‘You're going to be arrested if you go home; what will happen to you if you don't go? They could just put you on a plane, couldn't they?'

‘Not without authority,' Sverdlov said. ‘But that would come. That would come when they suspected that I knew what was going to happen and so I made excuses not to go. You know, you have given me a chance. Because of you I can cancel my trip tomorrow and re-book for later. I can say I have succeeded in recruiting you, and you have a tremendous secret for me. You are going to blow up Nielson's safe and give me all his correspondence.'

‘I don't know how you could laugh,' she said. She was so frightened for him that she was becoming angry.

‘It's better than to cry,' Sverdlov answered. ‘It helps me think. You must be hungry; let's order something for us both to eat. And drink,' he added, as if that were the most important aspect of the evening. ‘My glass is empty.'

‘I couldn't touch food,' she said. ‘And you shouldn't drink, you need to think clearly, not fuddled up with alcohol!'

‘
Dushinka
' he said, ‘stop looking sad. I told you, I believe the only thing that matters is to survive. They won't get me! I promise you.'

‘But you can't cancel again,' she pointed out, ‘what are you going to say then?'

‘That will depend,' he said. ‘That will depend on what I have decided I must do.'

Judith did her best to eat, but found it impossible. She sat smoking and drinking wine, not talking to him or breaking the silence. The divorce had been a trick; that must mean that his own wife had been persuaded to turn against him. He had talked of an old friend. Slowly, as she watched him, Judith realised that the humour was grim, and the man was concealing his real feelings behind a façade of cynicism.

She appreciated then how little she actually knew him, how lightly she had touched on his real character. That he had another, less attractive side she knew already; she had glimpsed it briefly in the restaurant, when the young man Memenov had sat down with them, deferent and ill-at-ease. It had exposed itself for a few moments when she first gave him the message. If he was afraid, he knew how to hide it, but he had been unable to conceal his anger.
Dunshinka.
He had called her that again. Darling. Oh God, she said to herself, what are you getting into … He doesn't mean anything to you, just because he's taken your mind off Richard. She almost caught a breath at that. He hadn't taken her mind off Richard Paterson, he had driven him out of it altogether. She hadn't thought of him for weeks. She hadn't thought of anyone but Sverdlov, and until now she hadn't realised it. When he made fun of his own danger she could have slapped his face to make him take it seriously. And she knew almost nothing about him; he had come into her life like an alien from Mars. He had moved his chair close to hers; their knees were touching.

‘Can I go back with you tonight—to your apartment?'

‘My friend is there,' Judith said. She had used Nancy as the excuse for keeping Sverdlov out so many times that he had said he didn't believe she existed at all. But she was home that evening, and she couldn't risk bringing him back without Nancy knowing. It never occurred to Judith for a moment that his suggestion had its usual motive. Even in the pink trattoria light, designed to flatter women, his face was grey.

‘I have got to think this out,' he said. ‘I can't decide in a moment.'

‘I'll go and call up,' Judith said. ‘Sometimes she stays away for the night or comes in very late.'

He watched her leave the table; several men glanced up at her as she passed. She was an attractive woman, at times she could look beautiful, as she had done the first time he saw her clearly under the light by the swimming pool in Barbados, drying her wet body with a towel.

Sverdlov lit a cigarette. His wife had asked for the divorce; was it genuine, or had she agreed to bait the trap being set for him? Tomarov he could understand, because the type was incapable of change, incapable of a true personal relationship independent of political attitudes. But he had loved Elena, spent hours with her in his arms, wanted to have children by her … Had this counted for nothing too? Had she no sentiment, no weakness which could be described as human, that she could agree to turn her husband over to his enemies? Would she have sat in the body of the court as he had done when Penkovsky was tried, and listened to the death sentence?

And suddenly he had seen it in perspective. His wife was not devious, neither was she capable of personal cruelty. But in the service of her ideal she was without compassion for herself or anyone else; she would divorce him because she believed him to be a traitor. The suggestion of such a crime was enough to annul their ten years of marriage, to make an association with him something unclean, to be cut off as if it were a gangrenous limb capable of infecting and destroying the rest of the body.

‘She's at home tonight. I'm sorry, but I couldn't do anything about it.'

He looked up into Judith's anxious face, and smiled.

‘It doesn't matter,' he said ‘We can sit on here. And I will not drink a lot of whisky. I promise you.'

‘I wish I knew what you could do,' she said. ‘It seems like some kind of nightmare. Is there nobody you could go to—your Ambassador? Couldn't he help?'

‘No,' Sverdlov shook his head. The Ambassador would know nothing about it and he wouldn't want to know. The decision to arrest someone like Sverdlov was quite out of his province. When you are at the top there is no one to whom you can go for protection against an attack coming from below. He had thought of Panyushkin, the dour, aloof head of the K.G.B. itself; he knew him personally, and had received marks of signal favour, like an invitation to spend a weekend with him at his Black Sea villa. He and Elena had gone together. It had been as stiff and formal as if they were visiting royalty.