Dr Berlin (34 page)

The burning sensation behind his eyes told him that he had to escape into the dark, as if he were running into a long tunnel, and only then would the direction of his future become clear. Perhaps this was a time of madness again. If so, its strength was as great as before and there was nothing he could do to control it. He was governed by forces more powerful than his own will.

He zipped up the bag and secured the straps. It was heavy with the weight of his typewriter. There was one last thing. He opened a drawer and took out a revolver. Why he might need it he wasn’t sure. But he felt better taking it with him, so he tucked it into his bag and went out into the night.

‘Who’s this?’

Kate showed him a framed photograph of a man in his sixties she had found tucked behind a pile of books stacked in the empty fireplace.

‘My father,’ Valery said.

‘Why do you keep his picture hidden?’

‘I do that when I’m angry.’

‘What’s he done to deserve banishment?’ she asked.

‘You haven’t got enough time left in Moscow for me to explain.’

It was not the first time he had shown a reluctance to talk about himself. Despite her questions, he had only recently explained why he didn’t work, and even then his answers had left her perplexed. His department had been disbanded, he said, when the project he was working on had come to an end. He was waiting for the next project to materialise. Until then he had nothing to do. She didn’t believe him for a moment but with so few clues, what was the point in trying to deduce the truth? Why was he so evasive? Her only explanation was that he was engaged in some kind of conflict with himself and that he needed time to resolve that conflict. Its nature and the shape of any possible resolution remained mysteries to her. She would show patience. He would tell her the truth, she was sure of that, but only when he felt he was ready to do so, not before.

*

Sunday dawned clear and bright, the city shining under an arching blue sky. Why not take a bus and go into the country? Kate suggested. It would do them good to escape Moscow for a few hours. Valery had agreed. There was a place he knew, he said. Two hours later, they were sitting beside a river at one end of a long field that sloped gently down from a birch wood. There was no sound except for the water washing over stones and the humming of insects.

‘Is your father still alive?’ Kate asked.

‘When I last heard, yes.’

‘Don’t you see him much?’

‘I haven’t seen him for years.’

She sensed the tension in his voice. He wanted to tell her but did he have the courage?

‘I didn’t know he was my father until I was fifteen.’ The words burst from him as if he was surprised to find himself
saying anything. ‘One day this man I’d never seen before turned up, and my mother told me he was my father. He stayed for a few weeks, then he vanished from my life again. I’ve not seen him since.’

‘Are you angry with him because he deserted you?’

‘I don’t blame him for that,’ he replied. ‘It was obvious he couldn’t stay here. I’m more angry with myself.’

‘Why?’

‘For not understanding who I am.’

She waited for him to continue but he said nothing.

‘My mother died when I was fifteen,’ she said suddenly. ‘I know what it’s like to want someone who can never be there. I know what it does to you.’

She saw the look of relief on his face, as if her sudden admission had broken a barrier inside him.

‘My father is English,’ he told her. ‘That’s why he could never stay in Moscow. He lives in Cambridge. He’s a professor of nuclear physics. Now you probably understand even less than before.’

*

‘How do you come to have an English father?’ she asked later.

‘I have to tell you sometime, don’t I?’ He lay on his back on the grass and gazed up at the sky. In the early thirties, he said, his mother had gone to a conference on nuclear physics in Leyden. She was an ambitious scientist, newly married, and she had never been outside Russia before. It was her first conference and she didn’t know what to expect. The first lecture she attended was given by the English physicist, Geoffrey Stevens. She was swept her off her feet.

‘She had never met a man like him, she said. He was like a gale. He knocked everything she had believed in completely flat. He gave her new ideas, new energy, new enthusiasms. He showed her all the possibilities that sprang from the extraordinary discoveries they had made.’

Their affair lasted the week of the conference. Six weeks later she knew she was pregnant. She never told her husband he was not the father. It was just as well: the marriage hadn’t lasted. In those days many didn’t.

‘In all those difficult years before the war she longed to see my father, she longed to tell him about their child, but she was afraid. Those were dangerous times in Moscow. Had she succeeded in making contact, she would probably have been arrested and shot for spying. So she did nothing.’

‘Was that when she told you about your real father?’

‘No,’ he said carefully. ‘Not then. Later.’

He was silent for a moment. Would he continue? Would this be one more tantalising glimpse, or would he continue to unravel what happened?

‘In the years after the war, my father had a kind of conversion. He was in charge of the building of the British bomb. During this time, for reasons I have never really understood, he changed his mind and opposed the manufacture of nuclear weapons. He came to Moscow to try to persuade the Soviet government to make public all their nuclear secrets, so that no side would have any advantage over the other. It was naive of him to think it would work, and of course it didn’t. But if he hadn’t done so, I would never have met him. So something came from his madness.’

Marion hurried across the court, wishing that she had made some kind of plan last night before Berlin had gone home after dinner. It had been impossible to get him on his own for more than a moment after the lecture, and she had not wanted him to feel she was monopolising him. Yet she was the one who invited him, fought for him. Not surprisingly, she felt responsible for his presence. That was why, she told herself,
the lack of arrangements for the day concerned her. She had to see him.

She ran up the wooden stairs, her cheeks burning – what would he think of her, out of breath and blushing? She knocked on the door of the guest room. There was no answer. She knocked again, waited and then went in. The room was deserted. The only signs of occupancy were a few clothes thrown over the back of a chair, a copy of yesterday’s newspaper spread across the bed and an opened bottle of whisky on the chest.

She went back to the porter’s lodge. Had anyone called for Dr Berlin? Not since this morning, she was told. This morning? A man had called for him twice, Wilkins had mentioned that, and they’d met up on the second occasion and gone off together. And no one since then? He’d only come on duty an hour before: he couldn’t say for sure, but he didn’t think Dr Berlin had returned. Wilkins might know but he wasn’t on again until five. If she could try again later.

‘I’ll leave a note,’ she said.

Please
call
me
, she wrote.
We
need
to
discuss
arrangements
for
the
second
lecture.
It wasn’t true but Berlin wouldn’t know that.

‘Good morning, Marion,’ Michael Scott was walking across the grass towards her, his gown draped casually over his shoulder. ‘How is our Soviet friend today? Nursing a sore head, if there’s any justice. They can certainly drink, these Russians, can’t they?’

‘You’ll have to ask him yourself, Michael,’ Marion said testily. ‘I’ve not seen him since last night, so I’ve nothing to report.’

‘I saw you emerging from his staircase just now, didn’t I?’

‘He’s not in, Michael.’

‘Not done a bunk, has he?’

‘Why on earth should he?’

‘It can be quite a shock to the system, crossing from one side of the Iron Curtain to the other. Too strong a dose of
freedom can be hard to swallow. I sometimes think it’s a taste that some of us are not meant to acquire.’

‘I would have thought he was well able to take care of himself.’

‘Keep an eye on him, Marion.’ He was standing close to her. ‘We don’t want to gather before an empty podium for lecture number two, do we?’

‘It’s an interesting story,’ Hart said, ‘no question about that.’ He pushed aside his lunch tray and gazed out of the window. He appeared to be talking to himself. ‘Intriguing.’

Their walk had ended the moment Hart had suggested they find a better place to talk. He waved his arm and a minute later a car appeared. For a while Berlin wondered if he was being kidnapped, but there was no coercion, no threat, just a smile and an open door, and that extraordinary charm with which the English seemed to get their way. For all the choice he had, Hart might just as well have held a gun. The only weapon he used was courtesy.

They were driven a few miles outside Cambridge, along a twisting country road that linked a succession of hamlets with strange-sounding names. He passed an observatory, a war cemetery, a few isolated farms and the occasional grand house, but mostly he saw the flat empty landscape of East Anglia, endless fields ploughed ready for winter and poplars on the horizon. After thirty minutes or so, they turned down a rutted drive and drew up in front of a Victorian mansion of patterned red and grey brick, with oak doors and a bewildering number of turrets and towers with leaded windows.

They walked into an oak-panelled hall. Berlin saw a coat of arms above an open, empty fireplace, and a staircase leading to a gallery. A suit of armour had been placed at the turn of the stairs. Swords and spears and ancient firearms were fixed to the
walls. Hart led the way, his feet echoing on the wooden flooring, to a sunny room overlooking a formal garden at the back. Lunch was brought on trays: cold chicken, salad, bottled beer and cheese. It was Tolley’s beer, Berlin noted. And it was as good as the guidebooks had stated. When they had finished eating, they were joined by a tall, silent man to whom he was not introduced. Berlin was asked to start again, to retell the whole story with as much detail as he could remember. It took him almost an hour to complete his account.

‘In many ways what you say is plausible,’ Hart said. ‘But is it credible? Do I believe you?’ He turned to face Berlin. ‘That’s the difficulty, isn’t it? Are you telling us the truth, or are you deliberately trying to mislead us?’

Berlin was perplexed. He had followed Gerasimov’s instructions to the letter. He had given the series of codes that the old general had said would put it beyond doubt that the information he brought was authentic. Uncertainty was not a reaction either he or Gerasimov had anticipated. He felt a growing sense of alarm.

‘I have told you what I was instructed to say, everything I know. There is nothing more.’

‘That may be so,’ Hart said, ‘but if you expect us to take your message seriously, you’re going to have to work a lot harder. You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you, George?’

The silent man looked up from the notes he was making and nodded.

There was an edge to Hart’s manner now. Gone was the bonhomie encouraged by their lunch together, when they had talked openly about anything that was not political, when Berlin had relaxed, enjoying the younger man’s company. Now he saw that though the manner might be different, beneath the surface there were more similarities than differences with Hart’s opposite numbers in Moscow.

‘Let’s go through the details again, shall we, and see where we run into trouble.’

Remember why you are here, Berlin told himself. When
you answer their questions, tell them everything you can be sure of. If you don’t know the answer, say so. Invent nothing. Above all, don’t lie.

‘Where were you when Gerasimov gave you these instructions?’

‘In his car on the way back to Moscow.’

‘Was there anyone else in the car?’

‘Only the driver.’

‘Could he hear what you were saying?’

‘It’s unlikely. The glass partition was closed. I am sure it was soundproof.’

‘No hidden microphones?’

Berlin shrugged. ‘How would I know? It’s always possible, but I doubt it.’

‘Where had you been?’

‘I’d accompanied Marshal Gerasimov to a cemetery in a village some miles outside Moscow. We visited his wife’s grave.’

‘Are you a close friend of his?’

‘No. I’d never met him before.’

‘Why do you think Gerasimov took you on this pilgrimage to his wife’s grave?’

‘I have no idea.’ Berlin shrugged his shoulders. How could he explain to them in ways they would understand the significance of the homage Gerasimov had paid, in Berlin’s presence, to his wife’s unrelenting eye for the truth? Hart and the silent man would never comprehend that. ‘All I can tell you is what happened. I am here as the voice of others.’

‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd, Dr Berlin, that a man you don’t know takes you on a visit to his wife’s grave and then asks you to betray your country’s best-kept secrets to the West?’

‘He asked me to betray nothing,’ Berlin said sharply. ‘He instructed me to bring to the West the truth about the Soviet inability to wage an offensive war. He did so out of a deep sense of patriotism. He has no wish to see once more
thousands of his citizens slaughtered. We suffered enough in the last war. I think that is sufficient reason to give you information. If you are looking for traitors, then I suggest you look elsewhere.’

Hart’s expression gave no indication of his response to Berlin’s appeal.

‘All right, let’s try another tack,’ he said. ‘Let’s paint the picture as we see it.’ He was walking around the room, his hands in his pockets. The silent man wrote relentlessly in a notebook. ‘The Soviet government appears intent on going to war over West Berlin. However, the head of the Soviet armed services, the austere Marshal Gerasimov, opposes this policy. He is in possession of important information about the real state of the Soviet Union’s readiness for war. In particular, he tells us that the much-vaunted nuclear satellite does not exist, that it’s a figment of someone’s imagination, and that Professor Radin, the architect of your space programme, is dead. Two very significant statements which, if true, will have enormous repercussions on what happens in Berlin. He decides to share this information with the West because he believes it may prevent such a catastrophe. All correct, so far?’