The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (13 page)

History often forgets about the siege of Leningrad, focusing instead on its southern counterpart, Stalingrad. In that the Nazis’ retreat from Stalingrad has widely been seen as a turning point, the focus is understandable, but as a consequence it is easy to overlook the siege that Leningrad, a fine city of wide promenades and ancient jingling trams, endured for eight hundred and seventy-one days of unrelenting war. Once the home of tsars, then the heartland of the revolution, it seemed remarkable to me that any semblance of the royal city had survived the beating it had taken, and indeed, in the suburbs all the way through to the heart of the city, an architecture of pragmatism and speed had taken over, of squares and rectangles and grey tarmac before brown walls. History was of little interest to the Soviets, unless it was the history of their success, and, as if embarrassed by the fine stone houses that still survived around the canals of the inner city, the high walls of the old town were plastered over with posters proclaiming
STRIVE FOR VICTORY! and CELEBRATE COMMUNISM AND UNITE IN LABOUR!
and other such azures of wisdom. The Winter Palace stood rather awkwardly in the midst of all these ugly good intentions, a monument to a bygone era and testimony to the regime
which had been overthrown. To celebrate the Winter Palace would have, in some quaint way, glorified its previous occupiers, but to destroy it would have been an insult to those men and women of 1917 who fought against it and all it stood for, and so it and much of Leningrad remained standing strong, walls too thick to be more than scratched by bullets or cracked by ice.

The Leningrad Cronus Club resided, to my surprise, not in one of the great buildings of the old city, but in a far smaller, more modest tenement tucked in behind a Jewish cemetery, whose stones were long-since overgrown and whose trees dangled heavy over its high grey walls. The Club’s gatekeeper and, as it turned out, one of the few remaining members, introduced herself simply as,

“Olga. You must be Harry. You won’t do at all–those boots are quite wrong. Don’t stand there–come in!”

Olga, fifty-nine years old, grey hair plaited down to her waist, shoulders bent slightly forward to give her chin a jutting, protruding quality that her face itself did not merit, may once have been a beautiful young woman at whose lightest step upon tiny feet the heart of many an aristocrat raced; but now, as she grumbled and grunted at the creaking pipes that ran up the staircase of the tenement block, she was almost a child’s caricature of that creature called a crone. Green tiles on the floor and faded cobalt-blue paint on the walls were the tenement’s only real concession to vitality, and the doors that looked out on to the winding staircase upwards were kept firmly shut, “To keep the heat in!”

It was March in the city, and though the air was still biting cold, the snow was beginning to melt, whiteness giving way to a perpetual shimmer of grey-black as five months of embedded dirt, soot and grime was revealed from beneath the crystal piles shoved up against the roadside. The worst of the ice had gone from the roofs, but these masses of shovelled snow remained, insulating themselves, monuments to the fading winter that had gone before.

“I’ve got whisky,” she said, waving me to a padded chair by the orange-banded electric fire. “But you should have vodka and be grateful.”

“I’ll have vodka and be grateful,” I said, slipping into the soft padded furniture with relief.

“You speak Russian with an eastern accent–where did you learn?”

“Komosomolsk,” I admitted, “a few lives ago.”

“You need to speak with a western accent, because you look soft,” she chided. “Otherwise people will ask. And your boots–far too new. Here.” Something metal flashed across the room and landed in my lap. It was a cheese grater. “Have you never been to Russia before?” she demanded. “You’re doing this all wrong!”

“Not on a Russian passport,” I admitted. “American, British, Swiss, German—”

“No no no no! All wrong! No good, start again!”

“Forgive me,” I blurted as Olga sat down in front of me with an unmarked vodka bottle and two intimidatingly large glasses, and I set to work with the cheese grater on my boots. “But I expected there to be more people at the Club. Where’s everyone else?”

“There’s a few sleeping upstairs,” she grumbled, “and Masha’s got a toy boy in again, which I don’t approve of. They drop in sometimes when passing through, but that’s all they ever do these days–pass through. Not like the old days.”

There was a misty gleam in Olga’s eyes at the mention of the old days, but it was quickly supplanted by a focus on the vital business of drinking and chastising. “Your hair is disgusting,” she exclaimed. “What colour do you call that? Carrot? You’ll have to dye it at once.”

“I was going to—” I began feebly.

“The papers you used to get in, burn them!”

“I’ve already thrown them—”

“Not throw, burn! Burn. Can’t be bothering with people coming here causing us trouble! With so few members in the Club the bureaucracy is endless, endless!”

“Forgive me asking, but what is the status of the Leningrad Club?” I enquired. “The last time I came here glasnost was in full swing, but now…”

She snorted derisively. “The Club,” she explained, thumping
the bottle with each word on to the tabletop, “is in the shit. No one can be bothered to stay–no one! In the good old days there were always one or two who worked their way into senior party ranks, just to make sure anyone born into this place would have a reasonable friend at court, but now? ‘It’s too unreliable, Madam Olga,’ they whine. ‘Doesn’t matter what we do, or whose side we’re on, we keep on being purged and shot, it’s just not worth the effort. And if we’re not purged in the 1930s, we’re purged during the war, and if we’re not purged during the war, we’re purged by Khrushchev. We’re bored with this game.’ Weedy little arses! They don’t have any sticking power, that’s the problem! Or it’s ‘We want to have the good life, Madam Olga. We want to see the world,’ and I exclaim, ‘You’re Russian. You could spend a hundred lifetimes and never see all of Russia!’ but they can’t be bothered.” Her voice dripped scorn. “They don’t want to waste their time and energy on being in their native lands so they all cross the borders and emigrate, but they still expect to be looked after when they’re born again, little whiny snots!”

I flinched as another good slam of the bottle on the table threatened to topple both glass and furniture. “I’m the only one who sticks around, the only one who bothers to look out for our up-and-coming members! You know I have to get money sent in from other clubs? Paris, New York, Tokyo. I’ve got a rule now. If you pick up one of
my
members, then any money they contribute gets sent straight back to me! No one argues,” she added with satisfaction, “because they all know I’m right. It’s only visitors come to gawp who keep things interesting now.”

“And… what about you?” I hazarded. “What’s your story?”

For a second her chin drew back, and there it was, the flash of the woman Olga might have been, beneath the layers of jacket and wool. Gone as quickly as it had come. “White Russian,” she proclaimed. “I was shot in 1928,” she added, sitting up a little straighter at the recollection, “because they found out that my father was a duke and told me that I had to write a self-criticism proclaiming that I was a bourgeois pig, and work at a farm, and I refused. So they tortured me to make me confess, but even when
I was bleeding out of my insides I stood there and said, ‘I am a daughter of this beautiful land, and I will never participate in the ugliness of your regime!’ And when they shot me, it was the most magnificent I had ever been.” She sighed a little in fond recollection. “Course now,” she grumbled, “I can see their point of view. Takes having lived through the revolution to notice just how hungry the peasants are, and how angry the workers get when they run out of bread, but at the time, when they pulled the blindfold over my blood-soaked face, I knew I was right. The course of history! I’ve heard so much crap about the course of history.”

“I take it the Club doesn’t have many contacts in the administration.” This would be something of a blow. In my time in SIS one of the few lessons I learned was that almost no one had good sources in positions of Soviet power during this period, as much from the endless cycle of purges which Olga described as from any lack of effort in developing suitably placed moles. Even Waterbrooke & Smith had a bare minimum of contacts within Russia, and I had been largely relying on the Cronus Club to come good for me.

Then Olga grinned. “Contacts,” she grumbled. “Who needs contacts? This is Russia! You don’t ask people to help you. You tell them. In 1961 the commissar who lives two doors down is arrested for keeping a rent boy in a dacha on the river; the boy had lived there for ten years, so lives there now! In 1971 a grave is uncovered in the bottom of the butcher’s garden–the wife who ‘vanished’ in 1949, he had no idea where. In three years’ time the commissioner of police is going to be arrested on the testimony of his deputy, who needs a bigger house because his wife is pregnant again from her affair with her sergeant lover… Nothing changes. You don’t need contacts–what you need is money and dirt.”

“And what dirt do you have that could help me?” I asked.

“The head of physics at the academy,” she said briskly. “He’s interested in the universe, wants to find out where we’re all from–that stuff. For five years now he’s been secretly swapping letters with a professor of astronomy at MIT via a mutual friend in Istanbul who sends the mail with his cousin when he runs soap in
and moonshine out on the black market. There’s nothing political, but it’s enough.”

“You’ve used this before?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes he goes for it, sometimes he doesn’t. He’s been shot twice and exiled to the gulags three times, but usually, if you handle him right, he comes good. You get it wrong, that’s your own fault.”

“Well then,” I murmured, “I’d better not get it wrong.”

Blackmail is surprisingly difficult to pull off. The art lies in convincing the target that whatever harm they do themselves–for, by definition, you are compelling them rather than coaxing them into obedience–is less than the harm which will be caused by the revelation of the secrets in your power. More often than not the blackmailer overplays their hand, and nothing is achieved except grief. A light touch and, more importantly, an understanding of when to back away is vital to achieve success.

I’ve employed plenty of dirty tricks to achieve my goals; employing them against people I like is harder. Professor Gulakov was a man I liked. I liked him from the moment he answered his door with a polite smile of enquiry, a grizzle-chinned man in a thick brown jumper, to the moment he offered me thin boiled coffee in a china cup no thicker than a fingernail and invited me to sit down in a room laden with scrounged, begged and borrowed books. In another life I might have enjoyed his company, shared thoughts on science and its possibilities, hypothesised and debated with him. But I was here
with a very precise purpose, and he was my means to achieve it.

“Professor,” I said, “I am looking for a man by the name of Vitali Karpenko. Can you find him for me?”

“I don’t know this man,” he replied. “Why do you want to see him?”

“A relative of his died recently. I was instructed by his lawyer to find Karpenko. There is a matter of some money.”

“Of course, I’d help you if I can…”

“I’m told Karpenko is a scientist.”

“I don’t know all the scientists in Russia!” He laughed, uneasily swirling the coffee around his cup.

“But you could find out.”

“Well I… I could make some enquiries.”

“Discreetly. As I said, there is a question of some money, and his relative did not die within Russia.” Gulakov’s face twitched–he was beginning to sense where this might lead. “I understand,” I went on calmly, “that you have dealings with scientists outside the Soviet Union?”

His hand stopped still, but the coffee kept tumbling around inside his cup, whipping up the granules from the bottom. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t.”

“A professor in MIT, do you not correspond with him?” My smile was fixed, but I couldn’t quite meet Gulakov’s gaze, my eyes transfixed by the coffee in his cup. “There’s no harm in that,” I added brightly, “no harm at all. Science should be beyond the boundaries of politics, should it not? I merely suggest that a man of your influence and ability should have no trouble–discreetly–finding this Vitali Karpenko, if you wanted to. The family would be very appreciative.”

My work done, I shifted the subject at once and for another half an hour talked about Einstein and Bohr, and the question of the neutron bomb, though in truth Gulakov made little more than empty noises to my speech, and then I left him alone in silence to consider his next move.

Gulakov didn’t call for three days.

On the fourth the phone rang in the Cronus Club, and he was there and frightened.

“Kostya Prekovsky?” he asked. “It’s the professor. I may have something for you.”

He was talking slowly–a little too slowly–and there was a clicking on the line like the amplified rattle of an insect’s skin.

“Can you meet me in twenty minutes? At mine?”

“I can’t get to yours in twenty,” I lied. “Can you make it to Avtovo Metro?”

His silence–a little too long. Then, “Half an hour?”

“I’ll see you there, Professor.”

I was reaching for my coat even before the receiver was down. “Olga!” I sang out, voice echoing round the hard, empty corridors of the Cronus Club. “Do you keep a gun anywhere on the premises?”

I had never fully understood the hypocrisy of the Soviet metro systems, for it seemed that the world above and the world below ground were from different universes, let alone different times. The Leningrad Metro had been open less than a year, extensions already planned, and the stations on its one gleaming line were palaces of crystal decadence. Twisting columns and mosaics which, at their best, were triumphs of modern art and, at their worst, gaudy declarations of vanity and ego, lined the tiled platforms like palace viewing galleries. It was a system where the clock didn’t count down to the next train, but up from the last, daring the passenger to believe that, in this perfect world, you would never have to wait more than three minutes for anything.

It was also, in terms of any pursuers who might be out there, something of an unknown factor. The system presented problems to local agents in that, in the few months since it had been open, it seemed unlikely they would have developed a method of operating in it, and crowds have always been a friend to anonymity. So, for that matter, has Russia’s need for large warm hats and bulky clothes worn tight against the winter. Short of a society where
religion obligated modesty, a Russian winter could do wonders for thwarting facial recognition.

I arrived early, and so did they. They were easy to recognise, men in dark coats who didn’t board the train when it came. They were uncomfortable, shifty spots of gloom beneath the brilliant bright walls, aware that when it came to discretion they weren’t handling themselves particularly well. One was trying to read a copy of
Pravda
, the other stared at the one-line Metro map with the intensity of a snake trying to work out if it could swallow a goat. On my second pass through the station I also detected the woman, who was doing far better. She’d brought a baby in a pram, a prop the merits of which I was divided on, and her air of dedication towards the infant put the distracted quality of the other two watchers to shame. I caught the train out of Avtovo, rode it a couple of stops, then caught the opposite direction back. I repeated this pattern twice, overshooting Avtovo the first time, looking for the professor. When he turned up, he was the most nervous of them all. Standing awkwardly by a wall, shifting from one foot to the other, he looked as if he wanted to pace but wasn’t sure if pacing was appropriate. He held a book under one arm, cover out. It was
The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory
by W. Heisenberg. Thinking about it retrospectively, I can’t help but wonder if the book was an attempt by the professor to warn me that he was being observed. It was certainly a curious choice of reading matter being so prominently displayed, and perhaps he hoped the incongruity, as much as anything else, would alert me to something being amiss. Whatever the case, the fact remained that the professor was under observation but probably had the knowledge I needed. As I rode through Avtovo and beyond, I considered my next move. Attempting to acquire information from him now would be dangerous to say the least; but then, if I failed to make the meeting, there was every possibility that he would be whisked away and my best chance at finding Karpenko gone. It isn’t always easy for ouroborans to make bold decisions, spoilt as we are by the luxury of time, but this seemed too good an opportunity to miss, and the consequence of not acting on it
too dangerous. I headed back to Avtovo station, and as the train began to pull into the platform, pulled my hat down over my eyes and shouted, “Stop, thief!”

There was no thief to stop, but speed in a crowd can often compensate for this particular problem. I barrelled through the shoulders of the people on the train, elbowing them aside with no regard for age or disposition, until, as the train slowed to a halt and the people turned to stare, I raised my head and shouted, “He’s got a gun!” To make my point, I drew my own and fired it once into the wall of the carriage. The doors opened, and the stampede began.

There were certain disadvantages to my technique, not least being that the point of origin of the surge of people was a clear indicator of where I was. However, this was to a degree countered by the chaos that reigned on the platform and by the herd mentality of the people around as they perceived the carriage emptying, heard the cry of “A gun, a gun!” and made their own, potentially unwise, decisions. I like to think I contributed in my own way to the chaos, stumbling into the crowd with my head down and giving an occasional cry of “Oh God, help us” or words to that effect. The finer details of what I said were hardly inspiring, but in that heightened state no one really cared. I was pushed, shoved and stumbled upon, my fellow travellers knocking me aside as thoughtlessly as I had ruined their day, and I went with them, the surge of the crowd sweeping me past the bewildered-looking professor, who pressed himself into the wall for refuge, only to give a surprised whimper as, stumbling through the crowd, I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him after me.

All stations have bottlenecks, and while the crowd wished to run, there wasn’t the space to do it, so as we pressed and piled for the exit I pushed my body close to Gulakov, pushed my gun into his belly and hissed, “I know they’re here. Tell me where I can find Karpenko.”

“I’m sorry,” he whimpered. “I’m sorry!”

“Karpenko!”

“Pietrok-112! He’s in Pietrok-112!”

I let go of his arm and plunged back into the flow of people. There didn’t seem much point saying anything more. The three watchers on the platform were shouting, moving among us, pulling hats from faces, hollering at commuters to stop, to stay calm. I could see the woman had now a gun in her hand, the pram abandoned, and was shouting at everyone to stand still and present their papers. At the top of the stairs to the outside world more voices were being raised, police, some in uniform, some not, pouring down towards the human weight that wished to go up. However good their security services, the transport system hadn’t yet got the message. I heard the rattle of wheels on metal and as the first watcher came near me, a long-faced man in a fur-lined coat, I turned, face an open picture of panic, wailed, “He’s got a gun! Oh my God!” and nutted him as hard as I could in the nose, grabbing the gun in his hand and twisting his wrist hard towards the ceiling. I heard a shot, felt the bite of the metal moving beneath my fingers, and someone next to me screamed, a woman, clutching her leg, before I twisted the pistol free and kicked the watcher squarely between the legs. He fell inelegantly to the floor, and as the crowd parted around us like a flower I turned towards the approaching train, slipped the gun into my pocket and ran for the opening doors.

I had never been a fugitive in Russia before.

The feeling was exhilarating at first, until the discomfort of the settling night and the damp cold eating through my boots reminded me that exhilaration held nothing over reliable hygiene and warm sheets. My Kostya Prekovsky papers were now an even greater liability to me than no papers at all–no papers would at least cause bureaucratic delay, whereas the Prekovsky name was instant, guaranteed incarceration or death. I threw them into the slow black waters of the canal, bought a new hat and coat, and in a second-hand bookshop beneath the glowing lights of a doctor’s surgery flicked through an atlas of the Soviet Union, looking for Pietrok-112. I couldn’t see it. I considered going to the Cronus
Club, but the grief that I would bring upon Olga and her ilk seemed uncivilised in light of her hospitality, and I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was the professor’s enquiries alone which had led to the appearance of security forces at Avtovo. Instead, I found Pietrok-111 and Pietrok-113 in the atlas, two tiny markers on an empty stretch of nowhere in the north of the country, and considering this as likely a place to start as anywhere, waited until the last tram had slipped into silence, and headed to Finland Station to recover my escape papers. I had left two sets of documents in an empty signal box by the railway tracks, where a man, hopefully in a fur hat, had once spent his days switching points, and where now mice hid from the worst of the winter’s cold. The first document declared that I was one Mikhail Kamin, party member and industrial adviser, a position high enough to accord me respect without necessarily inviting security checks. The second was a Finnish passport, stamped already with an entry visa, which I attached to the back of my calf with surgical tape and rubber bands. I then spent a chilly night in the signal box, listening to the mice scurrying below, around and, in one particularly adventurous case, over me, and waiting for sunrise and the journey north.