Bearpit (33 page)

‘I agree, one hundred per cent,' said Myers. ‘I just wish to hell he'd hurry up and show us the way to go.'

‘What can we do about the Caribbean and Latin America?' asked Norris.

‘Check the desks, like you suggested,' said the security chief. ‘But discreetly: I don't want to drive anyone into the woodwork.'

‘What about analysis divisions?'

‘Those too,' agreed Myers.

‘We could play it back to Paris, in the hope Kapalet can offer something?' suggested Crookshank.

‘It's worth trying,' said Myers.

‘At this stage anything is worth trying,' said Norris. ‘What about the hunt that Moscow's started for Levin? Do you tell the FBI?'

‘I don't want to,' said Myers. ‘There's a risk of it spooking the Bureau. I don't want them running all over the country, trying to find a new place to hide and delaying our access to him.'

‘It would be a bigger problem if the Russians did get a lead and blew him away before he told us what we need to know,' said Norris.

‘I guess you're right,' said Myers reluctantly. ‘If they get jumpy, volunteer some protection from us.'

‘The improvement – the change – is remarkable,' praised Sylvester Burns. Petr Levin's tutor was practically a caricature of an academic, fair, disordered hair almost to the collar of a suit of expensive material and cut but seeming to have been tailored for someone at least two sizes smaller: the sleeves rode up his forearms and the trouser cuffs were ankle length. There was a hole in the heel of his left sock.

‘I'm glad you're pleased,' said the boy.

‘Pleased!' echoed the man. ‘I'm delighted. I'm sure your parents will be, too. Everyone.'

Never once during their one-to-one lessons had Burns referred to the FBI by title, used the word defection or shown any reaction to the unusual circumstances of his teaching. Petr supposed Burns was a contract employee of the agency. He said: ‘You think I'll have no difficulty, achieving my grades?'

‘I'd be shocked if you didn't.'

‘I'll be able to do it all, from here?' asked Petr, directing the conversation the way he wanted it to continue.

‘Tutoring like this most definitely has its drawbacks,' said Burns. ‘Apparatus for science, particularly. And there's a physical limitation on the number of textbooks I can transport.'

‘I've not found it easy, denied reference text,' said Petr impromptu.

‘Maybe I should speak to someone,' said the tutor.

As soon as you like, thought the boy; as soon as you like.

27

Knowing the side road off Novaya Street in which his father had been killed made it easy for Yuri to identify the nearest civilian militia post from which officers would have been summoned and his impulse was to go there immediately to find and question whoever had initially been called to the scene that night. But he didn't. Although he was conscious of the convoluted irony, Yuri decided the best way to discover what really lay behind Kazin's instruction to locate Yevgennie Levin was actually to attempt such an investigation and by so doing set himself up as a knowing bait. And having done that, to spend more time looking behind than in front. So Natalia Levin had priority.

Before setting out for Mytishchi, he went through the material Kazin had made available, almost at once disappointed. And then equally quickly irritated at himself for expecting a lead where to start in America. If Russian security attached to the UN mission had suspected the remotest contact with the FBI, Levin would have been arrested and hauled back to Moscow on the next available plane. Muddled thinking – and he couldn't afford muddled thinking. He concentrated upon what information there was, memorizing the biographical details that were available and particularly studying the photographs: Levin and his wife both fat, heavy people, the black-haired fourteen-year-old girl he was going to see squinting myopically at the camera through thick-lensed spectacles, but quite pretty apart from them, the boy smirking self-consciously, dressed up for officialdom.

It was not until he got to the copies of the correspondence between the girl and her family – and then not until, according to the date, he was halfway through the first letter that Levin had been allowed – that Yuri thought he'd found something. He stopped and went back to the beginning and then read steadily through in the order in which they had been written and replied to, building up the points in his mind, his reaction a mix of curiosity and bewilderment. Illogic upon illogic, he thought: if he resolved the doubts about these letters would he get any nearer to discovering what Kazin intended? A possible route, maybe; at the moment the
only
route. He wished there were more clearly marked signposts.

Accustomed always because of his father's position to the accommodation of the Soviet elite, Yuri was repelled by the concrete forest estate at Mytishchi. Apart from the absence of any spray-canned graffiti, it could easily have been one of those worn-down, worn-away parts of Manhattan he'd found it so easy to criticize when he'd first arrived in New York. How much his thinking and his attitudes about everything had changed: how much everything had changed.

The blocks were identical and unmarked, so it took him thirty minutes to locate the section where Natalia Levin's apartment was listed. He waited a further five minutes for the lift to arrive and when it didn't climbed the stairs instead: there were puddles on a lot of the steps and tiny lakes on two of the intervening landings, where the roofs leaked. The pervading odour was of cabbage and paraffin and maybe urine and Yuri decided some of the landing wet was not all rainwater. On the wall at the second level someone had crayoned ‘Raisa for Minister of Fashion' and Yuri decided the similarity with America was complete: American graffiti-writers had just served a longer and wittier apprenticeship.

There was no immediate response to his knock but Yuri detected a sound, a shuffling movement, beyond the door and so he knocked again. When it opened it was only by a crack. The apartment was dark, so that Yuri had difficulty in seeing: an old lady, a
babushka
, heavily shawled, all in black.

‘I want Natalia Yevgennova Levin,' he said.

‘Who are you?'

‘Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti,' Yuri announced formally. He found the effect startling. The old woman jerked back, as if she had been physically slapped, and despite the gloom the fear was immediately visible, not just in her face but in her eyes. It was the first time Yuri had witnessed the reaction of an ordinary Russian to the KGB. It was unsettling.

‘I knew you'd come. Said so,' stammered the woman. ‘Knew it would happen.'

‘Natalia Yevgennova?' repeated Yuri.

The old lady stood back, saying nothing more, and Yuri walked past her into the apartment: the outside smells seemed to follow him in. The girl whose features he had earlier studied stood in the middle of the main room, hand up to her face, knuckles against her teeth. The spectacles appeared thinner-lensed than in the photograph and her eyes were red beyond, but she was not squinting.

‘What is going to happen to me?' Natalia said. Her voice was cracked, difficult to hear from behind her hand.

While Yuri was searching for some response, the old woman's voice came from behind. She said: ‘When do we have to get out?' and Yuri partially understood their apprehension.

He said: ‘I am not here about the apartment.' It was minimally but comfortably furnished, he saw, and the impression of the outside smells had been mistaken. It was clean and there were flowers, in two separate vases. On a side table and a ledge that ran the length of one wall there were four separate photographs of Yevgennie and Galina Levin – in one of which they appeared dressed as he'd so recently seen his parents dressed, for the ceremony at the Hall of Weddings – and two of the boy, Petr. In both of them Petr was wearing American-style clothes and was clearly older than the official file picture.

‘We're not being expelled?' It was the old woman again, distrustful and suspicious.

‘Not by me,' assured Yuri. Why hadn't they been? he wondered, focusing on their concern. Yevgennie Levin
was
a traitor who had betrayed his country. Basic though it was, this was still a favoured apartment – and unshared, so therefore further favoured – and Yuri would have expected the privilege to have been withdrawn.

‘When?' persisted the woman.

Yuri realized the supposed positions were reversed: he was being interrogated instead of interrogating. He remembered the reaction at the door and decided he did not want to be cast as an interrogator. These two had done nothing wrong. Ignoring the question, he said to Natalia: ‘I want to talk about your father.'

‘I am being allowed to go to America!' The girl's hand came away from her face, abruptly relaxing into a tentative, hopeful smile.

Levin's apparently confident hope and Natalia's seeming expectation to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union had been one of the first points to register with Yuri when he read the letters. Wanting to move the exchange on to his terms, he avoided the direct answer and said: ‘It is under consideration. We have to talk first.'

‘What about?' asked the girl, the smile leaking away.

‘I want to know what it was like when you were in New York.'

‘Like?'

‘Where did you live?' asked Yuri, who knew anyway but wanted to conceal the real question. ‘What did you do? What friends did you have?'

Natalia frowned and Yuri hoped she was as confused as he wanted her to be. She said: ‘We lived at Riverdale, of course. Everyone does.'

‘You went to school there?'

The girl shook her head. ‘The Soviet mission academy.'

‘What about friends?'

‘Of course I had friends.'

‘What sort of friends? Russian friends? Or other friends?'

‘Russian friends.'

‘Only Russian?'

‘Yes: that's the way it is. The way it has to be.'

‘No others? American perhaps?' Natalia's face had closed against him in uncertain suspicion, Yuri saw.

‘No others,' said the girl.

The old woman came by him at last, going supportively to the girl's side. Uninvited Yuri sat in the chair he guessed to be the old woman's because it was in the dominant place in the room, a place he needed now to occupy. ‘Sit down,' he said to both of them, an order rather than an invitation. He was not enjoying the part of a bully, either. They hesitated and then did as they were told. Yuri said: ‘What about your parents? What sort of friends did they have?'

Yuri saw a further tightening of her face and guessed she had not been confused at all. ‘The same,' she said.

‘No Americans?'

‘No.'

He would have to bully further, Yuri realized uncomfortably. He said: ‘You realize, don't you, that the possibility of your being allowed to go to America … your being allowed to remain here, in this apartment, depends upon you cooperating?'

Natalia's eyes filmed and Yuri thought she was going to cry, and gripped his hands against her doing so. She didn't but he knew it had been close. Natalia said: ‘Yes, I realize that.'

‘You never saw your father with an American?'

‘Never.'

‘Overheard any conversation, between your mother and your father about any Americans?'

‘No.'

The conversation had gone into a cul-de-sac, Yuri accepted. He said: ‘Tell me about your operation.'

The girl hesitated, unsure how to respond. Then she said: ‘I had a cornea deformation, from the time I was born. The specialists said it could be corrected when I was old enough.'

This could be a useful direction, gauged Malik. He said: ‘So it was planned, for a long time?'

‘Yes.'

‘To be carried out now? Or was the date suddenly given to you from the Moscow clinic?'

‘There was about six weeks' notice,' said the girl.

‘What did your father say?'

Natalia looked quizzically at him. ‘That I had to have it done: that it was what we had been waiting for!'

‘He was anxious for you to have it done?'

‘Very anxious.'

Yuri was reluctant to ask the question but knew it was necessary. Prepared for her reaction from what he'd read in the letters, he said: ‘Your father loves you?'

This time she did start to cry, tears building up and then bursting by her glasses. Very carefully she removed them, tried to dry her eyes and then just as gently replaced them. Unevenly she said: ‘Of course he loves me.'

‘What did you think, when you learned he had defected?'

‘I couldn't understand it. I still can't understand it.'

Neither could he, decided Yuri. He didn't doubt the affection in the letters or what she had just said, about love. Which made it inconceivable that Levin would have moved with her out of the country, beyond reach. So six weeks prior to the provable date of her operation, the man had not intended to cross. Yuri wondered if it had any significance. ‘What have you come to think since?'

‘I haven't,' mumbled Natalia. Her lips quivered. She made a determined effort at control and said: ‘Will I be able to join them?'

Another imponderable, isolated Yuri: like their being allowed to maintain this apartment. And the constant references in the letters to their being reunited, which this girl clearly expected. What made Levin imagine it could – or would – happen? Unable to answer the girl's question, Yuri said: ‘That is being decided.'

‘How soon?'

‘I don't know,' said Yuri. Before there was the chance of another demand from her, he said: ‘Did you like America?'

‘It was different,' said Natalia, imagining he had the power of letting her leave or not and anxious against any offence.

‘What about your father?'