Document Z (10 page)

‘Just before the photographer struck. Should I not have said?'

‘No. It's alright.'

‘We don't know with you blokes. We're not sure who's in charge.'

‘I am in charge. Do you think you can recruit this girl?'

Chiplin shrugged. ‘Not now. She's off to London for a holiday.' He stood upright to go, then pointed to the plane and said, ‘You can play golf in that. They'll set you up with a practice net if you can swing the club alright.'

He left Petrov standing on the balcony, wondering how Evdokia's name had ended up in red, wondering whether there was a way to stop Pakhomov sending Moscow the news.

He arrived at the Adria Café to find Lydia already seated with Doctor Bialoguski. They spoke Russian, mostly about the weather until Lydia mentioned Korea and there was a discussion of the latest movements; the 38th parallel; defence lines in towering mountains; a new make of Chinese tank. About Australian involvement, Bialoguski seemed noncommittal. They ordered a bottle of wine and the conversation somehow drifted onto British strategy in Hong Kong.

Eventually, Lydia sat a film canister on the table. ‘Michael and I have been taking photographs of navy destroyers in the harbour,' she said.

Petrov looked at the canister and then at Bialoguski. The man looked back warily, perhaps trying to gauge whether the film's production had been an order of Petrov's.

‘In the harbour?' repeated the Russian.

‘Yes,' said Lydia. ‘Including American ships.'

He left the film sitting by the salt. Silence fell until Bialo-guski said he was thinking of quitting the Russian Social Club.

‘It's becoming dull,' the doctor explained. ‘The cabaret is uncultured.'

Petrov made no comment.

‘What do you think, Vladimir?' asked Lydia. ‘I say quitting is a good idea. The club is full of people who talk but take no action. Bela, for example. She yaps and yaps, but do her recruits stay longer than it takes them to realise she has no real interest in bedding them?' She looked for agreement. ‘No. Before the revolution, action will be required. That is why the social club wastes us. It is all boards and committees and no one willing to make a stand.'

Petrov picked up the menu. He wondered whether Bialo-guski would now hammer home the charge, and was pleased when the man did not.

The following day, he rang the doctor and went to visit him at his clinic. The signs in the cramped waiting room were in Polish, Latvian and Russian. The walls needed painting. Bialo-guski's name was on his door on an attractive gold plate. There was a bill for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra pinned to the wall. The doctor shared a secretary with an eye specialist down the hall, a woman with a cleft palate and what appeared to be bad eczema. She ushered Petrov in.

‘Ah, Vladimir,' said Bialoguski. He stood up from his desk. In his hands was a copy of the
Polish Bulletin
.

‘No. Call me Volodya,' Petrov encouraged.

He was put in the examination chair.

‘Now, let's see about this knee.' Bialoguski leaned down.

‘I think it is my circulation.'

The doctor prodded. ‘Does that hurt?'

‘No, it is less painful today. Do you have appointments now? We should drink.'

They went to a nearby hotel. Compared to his mood at the Adria, Bialoguski seemed more relaxed. They discussed his practice at first. How many patients? What nationalities? Bialoguski said that the Australian medical system was obviously inferior to that of Russia.

‘That is true,' said Petrov. ‘Moscow has the best hospitals.'

Bialoguski asked about the world's most expensive painting, Raphael's
Alba Madonna
, which both America and the USSR claimed to have. Petrov joked that either the Americans' was a fraud or the master had painted two. They had whisky, embassy shout. It felt good to buy and better to drink. Bialoguski talked about horses, a system he was developing to make money from the races. Petrov said he'd loved horses since he was born.

‘What do you know about Lydia Mokras?'asked Petrov.

‘I don't know.'

‘Her history . . . I don't know.'

‘This uncle in the Cheka.'

Laughter.

‘She says her family is rich. In Prague they have an electrical shop, a house and two motor cars.'

‘She says she is Czech and she says she is Russian. She can't decide.'

‘I know she is trying to cancel the certification of her marriage.'

‘I've heard it said she is an agent of Security. Have you noticed her head is fishbowl-round?'

They drank on. At about half past five came the rush. It was a long bar and they sat at its end, the room dense with smoke, the ceiling fan churning a slow current, voices carpeting one side of the room to the other, men in suits, and a gang of them playing crib, and boys not sixteen offering a small commission on trips to the bar. The diplomat and the doctor ate sandwiches standing up.

‘What do you think of Australian women?'

‘Yes, they are alright.'

‘I want to see Bondi Beach.'

‘The coast is better. What shall we do now?'

Petrov said he knew a place. He took them both to the club he'd found. There was a girl on stage. The stage was small and the girl danced in a bathing suit. They stood there watching. They bought Swans from the bar and sat on two stools either side of a high table. He saw that Bialoguski was staring at the drinks waitress's enormous breasts. She lit cigarettes for them. They smoked and watched the girl on stage and she watched them back as she moved. Enlivened, Petrov decided to see what kind of source this man might turn out to be.

‘Doctor,' he said, ‘do you know a man, a Russian, named Efim?'

It was someone Moscow was searching for; a possible escapee to Australia sometime before the war.

‘Efim?' Bialoguski asked.

‘Through your practice perhaps?'

The girl produced a parasol. She sat its stem in one hand and spun it with the other, her hips cocked to one side.

‘I don't think so,' said the doctor.

‘We are looking for a man by this name, should you meet him.'

There was a screen of frosted glass by the girl. She disappeared behind it then stuck her leg out. Petrov clapped and cheered. He asked Bialoguski what he knew about passports. He asked what papers were necessary for migrants to enter the country.

The doctor looked from Petrov to the girl and then to Petrov again. He was drinking rum now. ‘I can get the papers for you,' he said. ‘I can get them from the department.'

‘What about passport blanks?' Petrov asked. Procuring these would win him a reprieve from Moscow's scoldings.

Bialoguski seemed to take the question in his stride. ‘I think that would be very difficult. There are likely security measures that prevent the distribution of such things.'

The girl held the bathing suit at arm's length, twirling it. She was hard to see through the glass. The music on the gramophone was melancholy but had punch. The girl put her breasts on the glass and moved her hips round and round, and the men in the room clapped for the two white and lonely circles and for the hips below them that moved.

They went to the Metropole Hotel for gin. Bialoguski was becoming certain that this man was MVD; all this probing about passports and names. They listened to 2UW on the bar's radio while Petrov chained three cigarettes. The place was empty except for themselves. Sinatra came on and Petrov said, ‘Who is this?' and Bialoguski said Sinatra.

The Russian began tapping his pockets.

‘What's the matter?' asked Bialoguski.

‘Keys. I've dropped the Oriental's keys somewhere.'

‘The keys to your hotel room?'

‘I'll have to leave early,' said Petrov. ‘While the doorman is still on.'

Bialoguski thought. ‘Forget the Oriental,' he said slowly. ‘Why not stay at my flat? It has a magnitude of space.'

He was mostly being polite. He presumed that Russian diplomats had strict rules against staying with locals. Petrov looked across and said, ‘Okay.'

Inspired, Bialoguski decided it was time for a small stunt. ‘Pakhomov asks about you,' he said. ‘At the club. He wants to know, have I seen you? Have you been in town? I get the impression he's keeping tabs.'

Petrov peered up at the wireless. ‘What do you say?'

‘Nothing.' The doctor shrugged. ‘I say that I haven't seen you. I make jokes about how he's your countryman and how on earth would I know where you are.'

Silence. Petrov began to toy with the flame of his lighter.

‘Leave the club,' he said.

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. It attracts too much interest from Security.'

The doctor didn't reply. He reached over the bar for the ice spade. Petrov looked pensive now and Bialoguski wondered what he'd done.

That night, Bialoguski lay awake, the flat quiet except for the dull hum of rain. He was tossing an idea slowly in his mind. It was to do with listening. He thought that sounds had surfaces, and he wanted to penetrate that plane and listen deeply to whatever lay underneath. He thought that there, in noise just as in music, maybe he would hear the truth.

He sat up breathlessly and listened, using all the training he could muster. Between the master bedroom and the guest room was a bathroom, and between the bathroom and the guest room was a line of creaking boards. He listened like somebody superhuman, like a comic-book hero using a secret force. He was certain that Petrov was sleeping.

He got up and began to move. At the bathroom, he opened the door slightly and switched on a light and stood listening to the Soviet's breath. He didn't think it possible to step over the creaking boards and into Petrov's room without making a noise. He put one foot where he knew the boards would creak, and they did creak and he listened. No change to the Soviet. He raised his foot and set it down again, one hand on the bathroom doorframe, preparing to yank him towards an excuse.

He went carefully into the room. Petrov was turned towards him, his glasses on the night table. If he woke, they'd be staring at each other. His coat was on the door knob. Bialo-guski put his fingers in the inner right-hand pocket. Nothing. He checked the outer right-hand pocket. Nothing. In the inner left he felt a booklet. He memorised its position with his hand: spirals facing out, the thread pointed down. The master spy at work. He took the booklet to his bedroom and turned on a lamp. The book was names and numbers, a mixture of scribble and Cyrillic. Bialoguski copied each page. He copied not only the numerals but also the layout, just in case the layout was a secret in itself. There were twelve pages and forty-two names. It took him the best part of an hour.

He replaced the book. Petrov looked whale-ish rugged up in his blankets. In the next pocket was the Russian's wallet, and in its cash fold the beginnings of a letter, unaddressed. It was a request for a meeting. Petrov's cursive was horrific and hard to read. At points Bialoguski was reduced to copying simply the shape and clash of the scrawl.

The remainder of the wallet was identification, business cards and scrap. Bialoguski copied each item with an artist's precision. He thought that the true facts of the wallet would ionise around the smaller, literal details—the slant of a phone number or the fade in the circumference of an official stamp. He drew a diagram mapping the wallet and the position of each item. By the time he'd finished, the sun was coming up. A wide white yawn beyond the hill that broke the light.

Petrov's flight back to Canberra rattled in the morning sun. Golden light belting the crests and valleys below, working on the palette of paddocks.

He was trying to read the newspaper when he realised there were blurry spots in his vision. He rubbed his eyes and looked west. The spots didn't move. They were unlike anything he'd known. He read on, hoping they would disappear.

That night, he and Evdokia lay together in the dark.

‘My eyes,' he said.

‘Your eyes?'

‘I have spots.'

‘Spots. Do you mean flecks?'

‘I mean spots are clouding my vision, like small warpings in glass.'

‘Is it dust?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘It hurts?'

‘Painless.'

‘Did you do something?'

‘Why are they there? I don't know.'

‘Tell your doctor friend.'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘You sound worried.'

‘Are you worried?'

‘About your eyes?'

‘No . . .'

Evdokia rolled towards him and the mattress sank a little.

He said, ‘I think the ambassador will relax. He will decide we are no threat.'

Silence.

‘You don't?' he asked.

‘I think we will be recalled.'

‘If we are recalled . . .'

‘Ten years.'

‘No, not prison.'

‘Death then.'

‘Not death.'

‘Poverty and nothingness.'

‘Perhaps expulsion.'

‘Perhaps.'

They lay awake for a time. It was so dark he thought maybe someone had broken the streetlight. He put his hand on her belly. They lay listening and not moving. He didn't tell her about the Security service's interest in her and the fact that Pakhomov would report it. He wondered instead whether he were going blind. In so much darkness his eyes were okay. He wondered if the blind man saw the world in darkness or in light, or in some nothing state beyond both that only blind men knew. He took his hand back and rolled over. He reached for his Omega on the bedside table and wound it five or six times and put it back. He lay there listening to its tick. It was the only noise in the quiet room and quiet house and darkened street.

8

A
sign said, ‘Cake Needs'. Bialoguski sat in his car in the parking area of a food and liquor store in Willoughby. It was midnight; the store was closed and nobody was there. He watched the way the light fell from the street across the car park as he sat in the Holden and smoked through the driver's window.