The Blind Run (29 page)

Because by then I’d lost everyone, thought Charlie. And was actually going towards the store. He felt a numbness of uncertainty.

‘I didn’t try to follow you, in case you spotted me,’ continued Natalia. ‘I took a chance on GUM. Saw you waiting there, in the same place as you waited before. It wasn’t right, according to any tradecraft principles, for you to return to the same place as before. That’s why I didn’t challenge you. And then we went out and I enjoyed you, although I didn’t realise then just what that enjoyment was going to develop into. I was in the GUM store again, Charlie: saw you, when you visited the next time and then I recognised there was a pattern so I followed it, too. And you conformed, every time. Every third Thursday of every month, between eleven and noon. Always with a copy of
Pravda
and a guidebook. Always in your left hand.’

‘What are you going to do?’ said Charlie, dry-voiced.

‘If I were going to do something, don’t you imagine I would have done it, by now?’ said Natalia. ‘I made the decision a long time ago. I decided to clutch on to what I had – what we had – for as long as I possibly could. Knowing that it couldn’t last forever but not wanting it to stop. Just have every day and every night and try not to think of the one that followed, in case it didn’t follow …’ She stopped momentarily and then said, ‘I’ve dreaded this moment, Charlie. I’ve dreaded all the indications of a special occasion: the time when it would be obvious that you’d made a particular effort. And most of all I’ve dreaded you saying something like “I’ve got something to tell you.” I’ve longed to hear you say you love me but I’ve always known there would be something else and I don’t want to know what that something else could be.’

‘It could be all right,’ repeated Charlie, in hollow desperation. ‘Everything could be all right. I promise.’

Natalia shook her head, quite positively. ‘It wouldn’t, Charlie. For all the reasons I’ve tried to explain and all the reasons you know. We had it – we have it – but we can’t keep it.’ She was crying now, unashamedly, without any sound but with the tears pathing down her face.

‘I
love
you!’ insisted Charlie.

‘I love you, too,’ said Natalia. ‘But that isn’t enough.’

Britain made the maximum capital out of the spy expulsion. The Prime Minister personally named forty in the House of Commons and when Moscow made the necessary protestations the Foreign Office the following day itemised another thirty who would be expelled as well. The Soviet ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Office and warned personally by the British Foreign Secretary that if Russia attempted the predictable response – mass expulsion of Britons from the Soviet capital – then there were twenty-five further Soviet spies who could be declared
persona non grata
and that if that occurred, London would declare unacceptable fifty replacements, diminishing the stature of the embassy.

In Moscow Berenkov conducted the meeting with Edwin Sampson with the impression of Kalenin standing at his shoulder, guessing that the KGB chairman would be watching the television monitored meeting live from the control room at the end of the corridor, behind the security guarded doors.

Sampson gestured to the last of the intercepted messages, the British identification response to the promised contact with the Soviet spy. ‘It’s Chekhov,’ identified Sampson. ‘It comes from
The Three Sisters.
’

‘I’m aware of that,’ said Berenkov. ‘I was once very familiar with the works of Chekhov.’ The huge Russian paused and said, ‘Are you familiar with another quotation, “When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease that means it can’t be cured”?’

‘No,’ said Sampson.

‘It’s from
The Cherry Orchard
,’ said Berenkov. ‘I always preferred
The Cherry Orchard.
’

The interview with Kalenin took place the same evening, a difficult encounter between friends.

‘There will have to be a suspension, initially.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’d recognised it a long time ago, of course. Hoped that it wouldn’t happen.’

‘It’s wrong, you know?’ said Berenkov.

Kalenin raised his hand, halting the other man, not wanting to prolong the meeting any longer than was absolutely necessary. ‘Please,’ he said. “Let’s leave it until the formal enquiry.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

They both tried hard – futilely – to maintain some sort of form to their relationship but it was hollowed out inside and with every day, like something hollowed out inside, it collapsed further in upon itself. Charlie refused, at first, to believe he couldn’t make her change her mind but as she had that night in the rooftop restaurant with its view of Moscow Natalia refused even to let him explain, demanding – with increasing anger – that he shouldn’t make things any more difficult for her than they already were. Evenings and days which had been relaxed and easy became tense and then hostile. They made love like strangers, mechanically, and then they stopped doing that, more and more becoming strangers.

Charlie considered missing the Thursday meeting but it was only two days from the initial confrontation with Natalia and Charlie’s professionalism didn’t allow him. It was as pointless as every other one had been but this time he concentrated, looking to see if Natalia would check. He didn’t detect her but then he hadn’t on the other occasions. He didn’t ask her and she didn’t volunteer the information.

It finally convinced Charlie that there was no further purpose in him going again. And as the difficulties grew with Natalia he realised, too, that it meant he had to leave. With belated honesty Charlie conceded to himself that for a long time she had been the only reason for his staying anyway. As with everything else, for so long, the apparent answer to one problem created another. He couldn’t just go, like he’d arranged with Wilson. He’d become involved with Natalia and guessed the authorities would be aware of it. And if they weren’t already they soon would be, when they investigated his flight; and they would investigate it, aware of the damage he could cause because of his admission to the spy school. To flee, as he now had to flee, would mean Natalia being arrested and interrogated and probably jailed. The awareness spurred Charlie into trying to make fresh approaches to her, to warn her, but always she refused the conversation. It led to one of their biggest arguments so far. He accused her of sticking her head into the sand, like an ostrich refusing to face reality, and she yelled back that Russia was her reality and that with its head in the sand an ostrich at least remained where it was. The outburst meant she knew – or at least guessed – what he wanted to say and assuming that Charlie argued that she didn’t know the risks she was taking. Distraught – actually crying – Natalia said she did and that she didn’t care and when he accused her of being stupid and child-like and not even making sense she fled, locking herself in the bathroom. Which added another level to the barrier growing between them because it meant eventually she had the embarrassment of unlocking the door and emerging again. She only did so after shouting through the door that she didn’t want to talk about it any more. Charlie’s instinct was to say they hadn’t talked about anything but instead he agreed and they sat in silence, not even looking at each other, and Charlie fully accepted just how completely things had ended between them.

He still refused to abandon her, however. He spent nights away from her, alone in his own apartment, needing the relief as much as Natalia did but needing more the solitude to find a seemingly impossible way to save her from any retribution. She wasn’t the only one facing retribution, he realised. From the early meetings with Alexei Berenkov Charlie knew that the permission to appoint him to the spy school in the first place had been approved by someone else but Berenkov had clearly been the instigator. So he’d suffer. Charlie sighed, trying to rationalise. But then Berenkov had always been going to suffer. Whether the attitude was cynical or professional or both, Charlie had known from the very first moment of contact – contact he couldn’t have refused – that the moment he entered the embassy gates, Berenkov would be the loser. That was business, decided Charlie, confronting the familiar thought. About Berenkov he could have done nothing – do nothing – but he’d knowingly pursued an involvement with Natalia – although not guessing what it would come to mean to him – and she didn’t deserve to suffer because of it. And she’d protected him. She’d said nothing about the GUM visits, when she could have done. And still wasn’t saying anything when, even if things weren’t actually out in the open, they were at least understood.

When the idea occurred to him Charlie snatched at it, like a drowning man at a lifebelt. But having got its support he looked around, like the same drowning man might look for the lurking shark that would pull him down again to destruction. It wasn’t perfect, Charlie recognised, with his ingrained objectivity. In fact – for a lifebelt – it was pretty waterlogged but it had a chance. Timing would be important. Absolute and utter timing, so there would be incontrovertible proof of her loyalty. Which meant – finally – that she had to hear him out. If it meant physically holding her down and keeping her hands away from her ears she had to hear him out.

‘No,’ she said at once, when she answered his telephone call. ‘I don’t want us to meet again. I’ve thought about it and I think it should end, now.’

‘We must meet,’ said Charlie, with quiet insistence, determined against any dispute that would harden her refusal. He added, ‘We must meet, for the last time.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ he said, anxiously.

‘I think so.’

‘It’s important,’ insisted Charlie. Determined to get her to agree, he said, ‘It’s not just you, Natalia. There’s Eduard.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s Eduard. There’s always been Eduard.’

To have gone to a restaurant would have made it into something it wasn’t and neither wanted to meet at their respective apartments, determined at the moment of parting upon pleasant memories instead of final unhappiness. They just walked – although nowhere near Red Square and GUM, because of other unpleasant recollections – choosing the embankment, watching the scurrying river craft and the misted insects. Natalia held his hand, schoolgirlish, her arm consciously touching his, the reserve of the immediate past weeks gone, and Charlie felt the despair lumped in him, having physically to swallow against the emotion, at the complete awareness of what he was giving up and could never hope to get again. He’d lost Edith and now he was going to lose Natalia and in a rare but lasting moment of self-pity Charlie wondered why he always had to lose and why, just once, he couldn’t win, just a little bit.

‘I don’t think you properly heard the words, on the telephone,’ she said.

‘I did,’ said Charlie. ‘And it wasn’t words. It was just one word.’

‘I think myself I’d take the chance,’ said Natalia. ‘I have taken the chance. I can’t risk Eduard.’

Resigned now, Charlie still tried. ‘What if it wasn’t a risk to Eduard?’

‘Can you guarantee that?’ she asked, almost desperately. ‘Can you guarantee that you could protect us both, forever?’

They were at the Kalininskiy bridge. There were bordering seats and resting places and without any discussion they went towards a seat and sat upon it, all the while without Charlie talking.

‘You haven’t answered,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘So?’

‘I was thinking,’ said Charlie. ‘I was thinking that if I didn’t love you so much how easy it would be to lie. To say yes, that I could guarantee it.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ said Natalia. ‘Because I’d know it was a lie and I don’t want you to lie to me, not any more.’

‘I didn’t lie,’ said Charlie.

She felt out for his hand, all the comfort and contentment back between them now. ‘Stop it,’ she said, softly chiding, not angry like she had so often been recently. ‘I know there was no other way. We just shouldn’t have got involved, not like we did. Lost people shouldn’t find lost people, that’s all.’

‘I want you to listen now,’ said Charlie. ‘I’m concerned for you, because I love you but I want you to listen because of Eduard, too. Because if anything happens to you then it happens to him, as well.’

Natalia sat with her head forward, not even looking at the river but she didn’t protest about not wanting to know as she always had in the past. Charlie was glad of her attitude, which he hadn’t expected but which made it easier, because it made him sure of her and by the same token knew that she was sure of him. So she wouldn’t doubt him. And she couldn’t doubt him, not for a moment, if she were properly to withstand the interrogation and the pressures that were going to come.

Charlie lied easily, because they were easy lies, just slight but vitally important deviations from the truth that fitted all the facts and all the circumstances. He knew how good she was – what her training was – and although he appeared to be as deeply enclosed as she was Charlie was alert for any reaction from her: for the sort of challenge that her questioners would make, very soon now. There was no dispute from Natalia and Charlie hoped more desperately than he had ever hoped for anything that it meant it would work and there wouldn’t be any way she could be exposed.

‘It means I made a mistake,’ she said. At once, defensively, she said, ‘I wasn’t given enough time. Everything was rushed.’

‘Then it’s not your fault.’

‘No,’ she said, doubtfully. ‘It wasn’t my decision.’

‘There’s us,’ he pointed out.

‘Yes,’ she said.

And then Charlie told her how to account for that, as well, on easier ground now because outright lying wasn’t involved. He was still tensed for her to expose a fault but she didn’t and when he finished Charlie hoped it was because that part of the story was as good as the earlier account and not because her emotions and feelings were clouding her usual alertness.

‘Now?’ she said, emptily.

‘Now,’ said Charlie. He felt the surge of despair and fought against it because it was too late for despair now. They’d recovered what they’d known before because of their acceptance of the end; there was no turning back because there was nowhere to which they could turn. Conflict upon conflict, ifs upon ifs. ‘You understand the importance of the timing, don’t you?’ pressed Charlie. ‘The timing’s got to be precisely right.’