A Spy's Life (40 page)

‘But your mother did and then a Soviet army photographer happened by to capture the scene for the Russian newspapers.’

‘It wasn’t like that. This tank crew was outside our apartment for a day. They were suffering and so she gave them food. When the Russians heard about this they sent a photographer and they staged the scene again. Of course she was against the invasion – everyone was. But she gave them food because once a Russian soldier had saved her life. Did Tomas tell you she survived the camp at Terezin – Theresienstadt?’

Harland nodded impatiently.

‘When the camp was liberated by the Russians a tank captain in General Rybalko’s Third Guard Tank Corps found her. That night he looked after her – he gave her water and small amounts of food because she could only take a little. She was very, very weak and on the point of death. Maybe she reminded him of his own child – she never knew why he took so much care of her. But she says that kindness – the relief at finding kindness in the world again – was what saved her. It gave her hope. Do you understand? And then all those years later she saw a tank crew who needed exactly what that officer had given her – food, water, kindness. You see she saw them as people and she knew in her heart that she had a debt of honour and that was far more important to her than the issue of the invasion. It was a personal obligation. And for that act she paid greatly. We both did. We were hounded from the neighbourhood. People did not speak to us. They spat at us in the street. They called us Russian whores.’ She paused and smoothed down the cover of her book. ‘So, you see, not everything is as simple as it appears.’

‘How did Kochalyin keep in touch?’

‘Oleg stayed in Prague. He was working full time on the Normalisation programme and overseeing work with the StB. He was stationed in Prague permanently. I don’t know how my mother found him, but she did and that was a good thing because the new regime was beginning to move against the Jews again. Those few Jews that remained in Czechoslovakia after the war were accused of anti-state and anti-socialist activities – a Zionist conspiracy. Oleg gave her protection. He found us another apartment and he got her a new job.’

Eva paused.

‘People in the West don’t understand now how difficult it was. She depended on him. When she came out of Terezin she didn’t have one living relation in the world. So, you see, if I had defected in 1975, she would have lost everything for the second time in her life. I had to go back, Bobby, and I couldn’t tell you why.’

Harland wondered if Hanna Rath had been Kochalyin’s lover before he transferred his attentions to her daughter. Had he been waiting all that time for Eva? Had Hanna pushed the match to keep her protection?

‘And you?’ he asked quietly. ‘When were you thrown into the bargain?’

She looked away. ‘You’re very cruel. I don’t remember you being like that.’

He persisted. ‘When did you become his lover? Before or after me?’

Her eyes darkened.

‘After you. We needed to survive. I was pregnant, for God’s sake!’

‘So you had Tomas and resumed work for the StB, or was it the KGB? What did you do? You said you went on a driving course in Russia. That sounds like you were being prepared for some type of active service. What were you doing? Wet jobs? Courier work? I want the whole story.’

‘You have no right to my story, Bobby. You were my lover twenty-eight years ago. That’s all.’

‘And the father of your child.’

‘Biologically – yes. But that doesn’t give you any kind of moral authority. Who are you to judge the decisions I was forced to take? They were very difficult and I made the best of my life after I took them. As for you, you didn’t have any of these responsibilities, did you? You just continued your career in the British Secret Service.’

There was no longer even a pretence of politeness.

‘Let me remind you of a couple of things,’ said Harland coldly. ‘You were living with a KGB butcher and a sadist. However much you averted your eyes, you must have known what he was. Second, you were serving a regime, the entire purpose of which was to suppress the Czechs and Slovaks – your people. So when it comes to morality, even I may have the edge on you.’

‘You spied for that regime,’ she said. ‘What does that make you?’

He looked at her with a new understanding. ‘How did you know what I did?’

‘You just told me.’

‘I didn’t say anything about that. I said that they just threatened to send the material to my superiors. I didn’t tell you how I reacted.’

At that moment a door opened and an officer from the Polish border police asked for their passports.

‘You are both travelling to Warsaw, sir?’

‘Yes,’ replied Harland. ‘A business trip – one or two days.’

He examined the passport again.

‘This passport was issued three years ago. The photograph is much older, no? You are more young in the photograph, Mr O’Donnell.’

Harland smiled ruefully and coughed.

‘Vanity, I’m afraid. I liked that picture.’

The man seemed to accept this and turned to Eva.

‘Have a pleasant journey,’ he said.

23

A HALT IN POLAND

They remained in silence for half an hour. Harland wished he had something to read because his eyes kept returning to Eva’s rigidly averted features. She knew more than she’d let on – he was sure of that. But he didn’t want to have it out with her now.

Quite suddenly the train slammed on its brakes. Eva got up and angled her head to look forward out of the window. Harland went into the passage and opened a window on the right side of the train. They turned to each other. Eva left the compartment and hurried back to the doors at the end of the carriage. She wrenched open the windows on both sides of the train and peered up the line.

‘There’s a station about a kilometre in front of us,’ she said.

Harland went to join her and leaned out of the window. The wind hummed in the electric cables overhead. He could just make out a row of white lights ahead of them and off to his right one or two clusters of orange lights that he supposed were villages. There was nothing obviously wrong, but he knew from the German travel schedule, issued with the tickets, that the
expresowych
wasn’t due to stop until they reached Wroclaw in half an hour’s time. What lay ahead was little more than a halt for local trains. He thrust his head out of the window and squinted. Now two or three pairs of lights were scything through the darkness towards the station. The first pair stopped and were extinguished. Harland turned round to tell Eva to fetch the bags, but she’d already done so and was looking out of the opposite window. They waited.

The train began to ease forward, the wheels groaning with inertia. They travelled a further hundred yards but without picking up much speed. It was obvious they were going to coast into the station ahead of them for an unscheduled stop. He went through the possibilities. The engine might be malfunctioning; the line ahead of them could be blocked; or the railway was suffering from a routine delay. But it did seem odd that the cars had turned up at that exact moment.

‘What do you think?’ he shouted over to Eva.

Without saying anything, she tried the door handle and found the automatic locking system was on. ‘Can you get out of this window?’ she said.

She put the bag over her shoulder, gathered up a short blue duffel coat and swung one leg up in a balletic arc so that it rested in the top of the window. ‘Like this,’ she said.

‘That’s all very well,’ said Harland, ‘but don’t you think it would be better to get out this side where there’s no track?’

‘It was for demonstration purposes,’ she said with a sarcastic grimace. ‘Perhaps we should stay on the train. You don’t look in very good shape, Bobby.’

He poked his head out again. There were figures on the platform ahead of them. ‘No, I think we should leave. We can catch another train at the station or thumb a ride.’

‘In this weather? I don’t think so,’ she said.

She went first and with very little effort wriggled her legs through the window and then turned round so she could lower herself to a step below the door. She held the window with one hand and worked the handle of the door from the outside. It opened a fraction. She smiled up at him, then dropped from the train, squatted for a fraction of a second and rolled into the darkness, like an expert parachutist.

Harland opened the door, grasped the vertical hand-rail and felt for the step below. Then he leaned back and slammed the door shut. The hand-rail allowed him to crouch down within two or three feet of the ground. He found he could hang there quite comfortably with his bag over his shoulder and so he decided to get nearer the station before launching himself into the dark. About two hundred and fifty yards from the end of the platform the train’s brakes began to grind again. He shifted his bag from his shoulder and leapt, hugging it with both hands. His jump was not as neat as Eva’s. He misjudged the distance and hit a mound of snow which sent him sprawling into a frozen ditch. He picked himself up, brushed the snow off and looked round to see Eva jogging towards him, taking care to keep out of the light thrown from the carriages.

She made her way to his side. The last coach passed and left them bathed in the glow from two red tail-lights. As the train juddered to a halt so that only the engine and the first coach reached the platform, four figures moved from the covered section of the station and boarded. Harland thought he saw uniforms.

‘What’s going on?’ Eva said.

‘I think they’re police.’ It was clear to him that the train had been ordered to slow down so that it wouldn’t arrive at the station before the cars did. But it didn’t make sense. Anyone who wanted to avoid them would simply jump down beside the track, as they had done.

They moved forward fifty yards to a piece of ground covered in rusting oil drums and concrete sleepers. Magnetic tape from a discarded cassette was caught in the branches of a stunted thorn bush and shimmered like Christmas streamers. They squatted behind the bush and waited. Harland was aware of two policemen moving towards them along the track. They were sweeping the snow with the beam of a torch, looking for footprints. They reached the last carriage and stopped. A man’s voice called out to them from the other side of the train, where the same operation was apparently in progress. Then both men looked up as a head appeared at the door of the last carriage. They exchanged a few words during which Harland registered a note of dejection. Eva bent to Harland’s ear and whispered that she’d heard that they had searched the train and found nothing.

The train eased forward with the police officers following and peering to see if anyone was hiding under the carriages. It drew level with the platform and stopped, whereupon the roof and the gaps between the carriages were searched. Eventually all the police officers assembled on the platform. There was a good deal of shrugging and gesturing and stamping of feet. Harland knew they’d given up on what was a hopelessly flawed plan. He rose a little, peered over the bush then edged round it and began to make his way towards the platform. Eva hissed at him to stay back, but he took no notice. She swore and scuttled after him, her blue duffel coat rasping over the surface of the frosted snow.

There was an officer in the middle of the group who turned from his men to someone hidden in the shadows. A lot of toing and froing ensued and now passengers were leaning out of the windows demanding to know why they were being delayed. A rail official came up and gesticulated, and then the man from the frontier police who had checked their passports joined in, insisting that the rail authorities hold the train at the station. He’s been well paid, thought Harland.

‘They’re going to have to let it go,’ said Eva.

‘Well, let’s go with it.’

‘Get on again?’

‘We can’t stay here,’ he hissed. ‘No cars, no roads – nothing. There’s bugger all here.’

Without consulting her further, he crouched down and slipped over the tracks into the shadows on the other side of the train. Eva followed so quietly that for a few seconds Harland didn’t know that she had joined him. She moved very close to him and stood, looking up at the door of the last carriage, her shoulders rising silently.

His plan was to step up and open the door as the train began to move off. But he saw the lights of another train approaching rapidly from the opposite direction and decided to make his move when it passed them. The murmur which preceded the express grew to a roar. It thundered through the station dragging a cloud of ice particles in its slipstream. Harland jumped up and wrenched the door handle downwards, but it wouldn’t shift. He thought it might be frozen and reached up again to hammer it up with his fist. Nothing.

Just at that moment the wheels protested and moved a few inches on the track, paused then moved some more.

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ Harland spat out the words.

Eva glanced at him and gestured with her head to the right. She dropped back behind the last carriage and jogged beneath the tail-lights. He followed because he didn’t want to be left standing like an idiot in the middle of the tracks. There was about a carriage distance between them and the end of the platform. Just as the last few feet of the carriage passed the platform, he understood what she planned. She crouched and flipped herself over the rail and landed in the blackness under the concrete lip of the platform. The projection offered about two feet of shelter but much more shadow. A second later Harland dived too, but made a hash of it. The strap of his bag got snagged on a bolt that held the rail to a sleeper and he was forced to let go and roll over the bag. Eva’s hand darted forward, released the strap and pulled the bag towards her. The train had travelled almost the length of the platform before they settled themselves under the concrete lip, knees clasped tightly to their chests.

Suddenly there was quiet. Most of the voices receded into the station buildings. But the sound remained of two or three pairs of footsteps moving randomly above. One pair came close to the edge about ten feet to the left of where they were huddled. The person seemed to be standing there in contemplation. Harland looked at Eva. She had put her finger to her nose and was lifting her head. He understood she’d picked up the scent of his heavy cologne.