Document Z (33 page)

Was he responsible for that young girl? Weren't there a billion small events that had added up to get them here? Why blame him when any link would do?

He took a pillow from the bed and slept the whole night in the chair.

23

Y
es, she was a Soviet intelligence worker, a captain in the MVD. Yes, she had run agents in the field. Yes, she knew something of the espionage situation in Australia. No, she was not aware of the types of document that Volodya had brought out.

Michael Howley's face was mild, a young man's face, pleasant, helpful. They were in the lounge room drinking tea with the translator, Saburov.

Howley asked what she knew about radio equipment. What type of transmitters did the Soviet embassy use?

‘Are you able to get news of my family?' she said.

He drank from his teacup and looked at her blankly.

‘You must have agents in Moscow,' she said. ‘Can't you send a man to check?'

‘What is the address?' he asked.

She gave it in English and in Russian. That and the building's telephone number, E-1-31-36. He said the matter would be considered. Whatever help that could be given, it would be done.

Saburov stared at his fingernails.

‘We never transmit by radio,' she explained. ‘There was an old one, broken. Everything travels by the cable.'

That afternoon she went to the beach. Volodya was anxious about the idea but she did it anyway to spite him. Elizabeth brought several bathing suits for her to try and she decided on a black one with the best fit. There was a good beach in front of the safe house but they didn't risk it. Instead, they drove forty minutes up the coast to a small cove, which was deserted when they arrived. Leo Carter erected an enormous umbrella on the sand. He looked thin and wiry in swimming trunks. The three of them stood in the surf. The water, washy, darkly toned, came up and to their knees.

She felt guilty and ashamed. Unreal. As if she were living a sudden second life, parallel to her own. They ate bits of ham and cheese in the shade. Carter went to sit in the car, leaving her and Elizabeth to chat.

Only they didn't chat. They simply sat there, staring at the sea.

They returned at dusk. Volodya was playing chess with Gilmour at a table in the lounge room. Upstairs, on the bedside table, her carry bag was open. It was one of her few certain possessions and she was sure she had zipped it closed.

She went downstairs. ‘What is this?' she demanded.

Volodya and Gilmour looked up, the Security man appearing suddenly afraid.

‘Why is my bag open?' she said. ‘Who has been in here when I left it closed?'

Volodya moved a chess piece. ‘I opened your bag,' he said.

‘What for?'

‘We were searching for your air ticket.'

‘Why?'

‘The embassy can gain a refund on the Sydney to Zurich section. The BOAC agent in Canberra needs to see the unused document returned.'

Gilmour was staring. She narrowed on Volodya. ‘I thought you had quit the embassy,' she said. ‘But still you do their bidding.'

‘Don't be snide.'

‘Don't tell me what to be. Don't go poking through my things!'

‘Hundreds of pounds, the price of that ticket. I am just preventing them from making further accusations.'

‘That you are a thief.'

‘Yes.'

‘The ticket was not there.'

‘No.'

‘Ironically, you
are
a thief.'

He said nothing.

‘Hotel receipts,' she said. ‘Not paying the duty on all that liquor.'

Her husband's face screwed up. He asked her how the beach was. He asked in a mocking tone, designed to bring things into focus and to hurt.

‘You,' she said. The nearest object was a porcelain ashtray. She threw it across the room. It hit his shoulder high, surprising him more than anything, falling to the floor with a dull thud. Reacting dumbly, his hand came forward and knocked the chess pieces.

Gilmour stood up.

She gave him a painful look and rushed from the room.

Grief and the amplifications of night. She stood at the back of the house, facing the hill, a massing blackness. The night was cloudless. The stars were the Canberra stars, the southern stars that Masha thought patternless and rogue. Carefully, she climbed the stairs to the rooftop balcony. Houses below her to the sea. The balcony's railing at her waist. Underneath was the front garden and, with a little effort, the longer drop over the garden wall.

She wondered about her father's cancer. Where it was in his body. How it felt to carry that inside. What about treatment? Would the state provide for his care now?

She guessed that the money she had in Moscow had by now been seized or frozen. Section 1.3 of the USSR Statute of Political Crimes. Funny to have betrayed your childhood, your whole life, the lens by which you viewed the world. She was a Marxist. She believed in the revolution. Capitalism was vulgar, an apocalyptic depravity. How would she make her way here? What was she going to do?

Tell the Australians everything, she supposed. Offer them all she knew about secrets in the Soviet Union, the names, the methods and structures, the missions, the countries, the handlers, the chiefs of sections, the ideals and the cruelties of approach. Tell herself it was a doublecrossing of no choice. Because the Australians had got to her cleverly, it being their job.

Yet how long could that last? A year to remember and recount? Moscow, Stockholm, Japan. The story of her past life. Afterwards, what? Who did she know on this earth but Volodya? And once she'd had the time to reflect on these last few years, would she claim to know even him?

She heard something shift behind her. A face in the darkness; one of the policemen at the foot of the balcony steps. They looked at one another for a moment. His name was Grandelis. They had spoken only once. She thought he might say something but instead he lit a cigarette, a spark of flame and a fiery red circle. Then he turned and vanished with a slow walk, going back to guarding and to listening.

She heard the sound of an accelerating car somewhere in the distance.

Her heart, somehow, was thundering.

She remembered the items she had left for shipping. Would the embassy give her these if she asked? Just as likely, they had already incinerated them, or perhaps sent them to an investigations office somewhere in central Moscow, the subject of a forthcoming paper: ‘Items of Suspicion When Detecting Potential Traitors'.

Now we are passing through the curtain, she thought. Maybe you expected your life to unravel, but might you better have prepared for the threads to disappear?

It was a physical feeling. Empty.

She went slinking to the back door and into the kitchen and to the brandy cupboard, poured a midnight glass, the liquid brash and fuming, aftertaste like blood. Grandelis still smoking somewhere, the coarse bitterness of the tobacco a deadening of the air, a starvation. Darkness in the hallway and under Volodya's door.

Standing without reason, holding the glass.

The next morning, she took her time getting up. Nine, and she was just out of bed. Howley and Volodya were already in session in the lounge room. Elizabeth had seemingly been waiting for Evdokia to rise and they ate breakfast together, marmalade on toast.

The woman said, ‘They want to know whether you'd like to talk at eleven o'clock.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yes.'

Elizabeth poured her a juice and told her about the questions that had come by wire overnight. Cryptic lists from the British and the Americans, from the French and the Swedes and other places. Names—there were a number of countries who wanted to know about missing men, missing families of men and missing activists. A lot of people seemed to have vanished recently in Egypt. There were questions of history also, about massacres and war crimes, Katyn Forest, various prison camps.

‘I think you will be asked everything,' said Elizabeth. ‘The political mysteries of our times.'

Evdokia buttered more toast.

‘Of course, the CIA and MI5 have asked to interview you personally,' Elizabeth went on. ‘This will be your choice, down the road.'

Evdokia had the feeling there was something she wasn't being told. They were holding something back. A part of the process not yet named, a secret they thought she might resent.

‘My husband has Jack,' said Elizabeth.

‘
Your
husband?'

‘Yes. A policeman in Canberra collected him from your house. He was tied at the back there. He had a bucket of water and seemed alright. They've given him to us to look after. Mr Howley thinks he's too famous, for the moment, to come here.'

Evdokia turned her ear to the lounge room. Volodya's voice seemed happy and cooperative. She was jealous suddenly.

‘No news yet of your family,' Elizabeth said.

Outside, the morning sky was grey light, overcast, the noise of bird life in the air. They sat with cups of tea on the balcony and waited. When eleven o'clock came, Howley invited her downstairs. He gave her pencil and paper and asked for drawings of the control structure of the MVD.

‘Write in Russian,' he said. ‘Saburov can translate it.'

She put herself at the bottom and sketched up and across. The end product was a mess, departments and sections linked in wayward trees. It was supposed to look mechanical, Moscow's secret apparatus, highly structured and well defined.

‘We'll draft a diagram,' said Howley. ‘You can correct it and we'll add to it over time.'

She described her history in intelligence. Her recruitment and beginnings in the Anglo and Asian sections, her learning of Japanese.

He wanted to know about Rupert Lockwood: Voron. She described the encounter in general terms: the typewritten documents, the pleasantries exchanged. Howley wanted details. What pages or passages did she see him type? What brand of caviar was it that he received? She knew the specifics weren't meant to test her. Howley was already believing everything she said.

‘What are these facts for?' she asked. ‘You are going to arrest him and make charges?'

Howley looked at her. ‘In the end that will be up to the government,' he replied. ‘Our job here is simply to get the evidence and the information straight.'

Is this it, she thought. Are they going to ask me to testify in open court?

‘It's possible,' Howley admitted when she pressed. ‘But the more you can remember, perhaps the less you will be needed. Whatever facts you provide, we may be able to confirm them in other ways.'

Erase myself, she thought. Give them everything and so avoid appearing in public—the worst of fates, further endangering everyone I know.

They spoke for five hours, not stopping for lunch and finish-ing only when Howley thought they should. By the session's end, she had given up more details of Russian code systems than she thought she knew. Howley seemed pleased. An hour later, under the pretence that the two events weren't related, he gave her a Grace Bros catalogue.

‘We're making arrangements to get you a wardrobe,' he told her. ‘The store has agreed to see you after hours any time this week.'

She flicked through the pages. The world seemed suddenly very small.

24

T
ime now to reinvent the self. He moved out of Cliveden, renting a small one-bedroom flat in Paddington with white walls. He sold his Holden and, using the bounty ASIO had paid on Petrov's defection, bought a Ford Custom Sedan, an American car with ivory duco.

To furnish the flat, he purchased a second-hand armchair. He bought a wooden school desk, a typewriter, a lamp and an ashtray and he set himself up in the middle of the lounge. He got his notebooks, everything he'd recorded as a secret agent, and placed them in a neat pile. He poured a glass of whisky, sat his loaded gun on the desk, stared at the keys in front of him. Time to write the book. My Life Drawing Soviet Defectors Over the Line
.
It would be a composition of careful construction, not unlike his music, he thought. To begin, he needed a tone, a pitch, a theme inside the words. He crafted a sentence in his mind: a description, as it happened, of his own appearance.

He saw Petrov again. They met at a safe house in the Cahors building under Leo Carter's supervision. The Russian was noticeably fatter. He was sweaty and uncommunicative. They drank beer and didn't say much. The Petrov in Bialo-guski's book became more rotund, more incapable.

He gave his first two chapters to Security, typing the drafts using carbon paper. He'd had to agree to it being vetted. It didn't worry him. His plan was to get Security's approval, insert his condemnations of their various petty behaviours afterwards as a surprise assault.

Whenever he left the flat, he carried the revolver. He took it shopping. He took it to the races. At the surgery, he kept it in a desk drawer, the first and second chambers empty so it wouldn't misfire and bullet a patient.

The Royal Commission began: an inquiry into Soviet espionage in Australia, charged with uncovering means and extent and especially the involvement of any Australians. Judges Owen, Philp and Ligertwood were entitled to pursue this inquiry in whichever way they saw fit. Witnesses would be compelled to appear. Lines of investigation would stem from Petrov's documents: the letters written to him by his Moscow command.

There were other documents too. Document H: a slanderous catalogue of the members of the press gallery written by an as yet unnamed citizen for the benefit of Soviet intelligence. Document J: a ‘malicious foulness' of a typescript written inside the Soviet embassy by another Australian citizen in an act of ‘beastly cowardice' designed to dodge defamation laws. ‘Document J appears,' said Mr Windeyer, counsel assisting the commission, ‘to be a farrago of facts, falsities and filth.'

On 29 May 1954, Labor, under the leadership of Doctor H.V. Evatt, lost the federal election. The popular vote was won, but not the House. Just five weeks after Evdokia's defection, Robert Menzies returned for a third term. People claimed that it had been the Petrovs' defection, igniting fears of spies and Reds like a magnesium flare, that had cost Labor dearly.