The Restoration Game (16 page)

The mentality that had produced all that, and so much more and worse, was all over the confessions like the smell of blood. But in the midst of all that sinister stuff, it was the last signature that had rattled me the most. I had sat gazing at it for at least ten minutes. I found myself thinking in the paranoid style of the confessions.

A. I. Klebov. Could he by any chance be related to one I. A. Klebov, Ilya Andreievich Klebov, the same Klebov whom Ross Stewart had met and who had a few years later told me to remember his name, on the most terrifying day of my life?

Yes, I thought, he could. A. I. Klebov could quite easily be I. A. Klebov's father. The elder Klebov might even still be alive, though I didn't fancy his chances.

It's about time I told you about the most terrifying day of my life. But first I have to tell you what it was that had given me some sharp intakes of breath as I read Ross Stewart's diary and debriefing, and then again as I'd read Avram Arbatov's confession.

As I read them I'd remembered another confession: the one I'd heard from Great-Grandma Eugenie, Eugenie Montford herself, that Saturday evening in Boston when I'd gone to visit her after finding out that my mother was a spook.

So…we turn again to teenage Lucy, way back in the nineties, that age of innocence, after the Wall and before the Towers. You see me sitting on a Greyhound bus. Black jumper dress over white T-shirt and black-and-white striped tights. Hair just two days ago dyed electric blue. Cassette player on lap, earphones in, book in one hand, the other hand over my shoulder bag on the seat beside me. I rode the Greyhound to Boston and the T to Harvard Square and came out of the station into a bright late-summer late afternoon of open-air chess and ice cream drips and walked through familiar streets to the old brownstone where Eugenie had (and has) an upstairs flat. She's lived there since Great-Grandpa Bart died.

Eugenie didn't comment on my hair or clothes. She just greeted me with a big hug and hauled me in. Her flat was small, and full of artfully placed old furniture, perilous stacks of books, big plants growing out of pots, and the smells of cooking and of the little black liquorice-papered cigarettes Eugenie chain-smoked. These smells were on good days mitigated by fresh air from a tall door-window opening onto a small balcony with window boxes on its curvy wrought-iron railing. Eugenie had us sitting on wrought-iron chairs on opposite sides of a round wrought-iron table within about five whirly seconds. Somehow she had managed to get a fresh pot of coffee ready just in time for my arrival.

“Now, dear,” she said, pouring while lighting up, “you simply must tell me
all
about it.” I did.

“Well, well, well,” she said, puffing away. “How very, very interesting!”

“Didn't you know about Mom?” I said.

“Of course I did, dear.
Far
more than she's told you, actually. That's what's so interesting.”

“There's
more?”
I cried. “What more?”

Eugenie crushed out her cigarette. “You must be hungry,” she said.

“But—”

“The time for long reminiscences is
after
dinner, my dear.”

I knew better than to object, or to help. I mooched about the flat and flipped through books, discovering to my amazement that I could still read Russian, while Eugenie busied herself in the kitchen. Within about half an hour she'd rustled up chicken blinis and boiled potatoes, with side dishes of rollmop herrings and chopped liver. We ate on the balcony, looking out over the back gardens of the brownstones and exchanging remarks on what people and cats and dogs were doing in them. Too soon, the meal was over and we were back on the coffee and (in Eugenie's case) the cigarettes. She took a hard first drag, blew smoke out of the side of her mouth, propped her chin, and gave me an earnest look.

“Now, my dear,” she said, “the truth.”

That's how I heard all about her years as a wild young thing, including her trip to the USSR and her brief, intense affair with Avram Arbatov. She told me something she'd never admitted to my mother.

“Don't repeat this to anyone, dear, but it's the truth: your grandma Gillian was Avram's daughter.”

At the time I was quite thrilled at having such a romantic character for a great-grandfather. I asked what had happened to him, and she told me the sad story. She showed me her own copy of Avram Arbatov's book, talking to me as I flicked through it.

“I told most of this to Amanda, years ago, when she first got interested in anthropology. And I made her a photocopy of Avram's book. Naturally enough, the story of Avram and his book got her fascinated with Krassnia, Georgia, and the Soviet Union in general. It was when she applied to go to Edinburgh University, though, that things started to get
really
interesting. She was quite excited about finding places that had been in the family, tracing distant relatives, and so on. Just before she left, she told me she'd been approached by someone from the CIA, asking her to report on anything…interesting…she got wind of in the world of Soviet studies, of any students or academics with contacts in the East, that sort of thing. She asked me for advice. About whether it was a good idea to work with the spooks, you know? And of course I told her to go right ahead, but to keep her eyes open, because I'd once been a spook myself.”

“What?” I cried. “You?”

Eugenie leaned back and looked at me defiantly. “Yes, I was, and why shouldn't I be? King and country and all that. I wasn't even paid. I was just asked by a nice old gentleman and friend of my father's to keep him informed of anything interesting I learned at the company—the Ural Caucasian Mineral Company, that is. There were all kinds of intrigues going on there, you know—Whites, Reds, Whites who were secretly working for the Reds—which as a secretary I got wind of quite a lot, and I passed on anything I could to the old gentleman. He may have pulled strings to get me on the trade delegation, and before I went he impressed on me how important it was to keep a very sharp eye on everything I saw in the Soviet Union, and to write it all up for him the moment I got back. And I did, of course. Including some tiny snippets of information about the mines that Avram had mentioned in passing.
He
certainly didn't know I was going to report it!”

Eugenie looked down for a moment, and sighed. “I may even have mentioned Avram's name. I don't remember. I suppose I must have. I feel very guilty about that, now.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it could have got back to the Soviets. I don't know if you know this, Lucy, but even in the thirties the Intelligence Service was positively
riddled
with Soviet spies.”

“Philby and those guys?” I said, trying to sound knowledgeable.

“It might have been a little early for the Cambridge spies, but yes, chaps like that. Anyway, my dear, I wasn't to know any of that at the time, more's the pity. After my flight to the States…it seems the old gentleman had been quite impressed with my work for the Service, and put in a word for me somewhere, because in 1940—long before Pearl Harbor—I was contacted by someone from Washington, DC, who wanted me to work for what became the Office of Strategic Services—the OSS. I worked for the OSS throughout the War. Started off translating cables from Russian into English, then later worked in Switzerland with East European refugees and resistance people.”

“Wow!” I said. “That must have been exciting.”

Eugenie sighed again. “It was. But it all got very messy. Some of the people we worked with were Communists. We all had the same enemy, the Nazis of course, but we knew that the Soviets and the West were going to have some little differences of opinion once the War was over—or rather,
some
of us knew, that was the problem. We had people in the OSS who were starry-eyed about the Soviets, and some of the Communists were starry-eyed about
us.
Or at least about the possibilities of East and West keeping the alliance after the war. And of course, each side had its own people in the other's side, actual secret agents, you know? And some of
them
were double agents…. The upshot was, it got hard to tell which was which.”

“Like the White and Red Russians you met at the company?” I said.

“Yes, exactly!” said Eugenie. “That's the trouble, you see, with the whole business. All it takes is one person working for the other side to turn everyone reporting to them—at least—into unwitting enemy agents. Now, of course, there are ways to spot that, very subtle ways, and on the other hand there are ways to
play
that—by planting in the other side's mind the suspicion that one of their people is secretly working for you. And if that person is
already
a double agent—apparently working for you, secretly working for them—well, you can see how it gets complicated, can't you?”

“Ye-es,” I said.

“Well! As I said, it got messy. After the war…there were people in the Eastern bloc who'd been in the Swiss refugee camps, Spanish Civil War veterans mostly, about whom I'd always had a shrewd suspicion they were Russian agents. And lo and behold, they popped up in the puppet governments of the Soviet satellite states, the quote-unquote People's Democracies. Aha! I thought. And then, in the late forties, some of them confessed in show trials that all along they'd been working for us, having been recruited in the camps by people like me.”

“And were they?” I asked.

Eugenie shook her head. “Not these ones. There's long been a suspicion floating around that the Russians got
played
by Dulles—the head of the CIA, as it became—who very cleverly planted the suspicion that one of their agents, or dupes, a man named Noel Fields—had been working for us at a deeper level than he seemed, and had recruited a network which happened to include just about every leading Communist in the satellite states who had an ounce of credibility in his own country because he'd been in the resistance and hadn't spent the war behind a microphone in Moscow.”

“Why would Dulles…Oh! I get it! To get rid of the least unpopular Communists?”

“Yes,” said Eugenie, with an approving look. “Leaving the least popular ones in charge, and thus giving the populations no choice but to revolt. Hungary ‘56 might be seen as a success for that strategy, if that's what it was.”

She fiddled with her cigarettes and lighter for a moment, brushed something from her eyelid, and lit up.

“Some of my contacts,” she said, “were shot in the East in ‘47. I still don't know why, because soon after that I fell under suspicion myself, and had to leave the Agency.”

“Suspicion of what?” I asked.

She doodled a trail of smoke in the air between us. “Nothing was ever said. Later I picked up some scuttlebutt to the effect that someone high up thought
I
was a Red…either because I'd got on too well with the real Reds during the war, or because I was suspected of having betrayed the fake ones afterwards. Maybe it was the British connection.”

“That's awful!” I said.

“Oh, it's all water under the bridge. I'm just thankful I live in a country where suspicion alone can't get you shot.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway…you might think after all that I would be well out of the spook business. Not quite! In 1952 I got a visit from a pair of”—she smiled wryly—”CIA agents disguised as FBI agents. Smart suits and shoulder holsters, you know? Goodness knows what the neighbours thought—McCarthy was running wild at the time. It turned out they wanted to talk about Krassnia. They kept going on about some mountain, which I knew nothing about. Now why…?” She frowned, as if trying to recall. “Oh yes. They wanted to know if I knew whether there was uranium there.”

The mountain…uranium…I felt some niggle in my mind.

“Oh!” I said. “1952! That was when Mount Krasny glowed for a week! When Beria came to Krasnod!”

Eugenie gave me a very odd look.

“What do
you
know about Beria?” she asked.

“Not much,” I said. “Only what Nana-in-Krassnia told me. He'd been the head of the secret police and…” I closed my eyes, thinking back. “‘A Mingrellian, with cruel eyes,’” I finished, in a rush.

“He was all of that,” Eugenie said, wryly. “And in 1952, he was the head of the project to build the Soviet atomic bomb, and then the hydrogen bomb.”

“So that fits!” I said. “That must have been what they were asking you about. Some kind of nuclear accident…?”

Eugenie looked disappointingly wary. “Maybe, maybe. It's a hypothesis. Now, tell me more about what your Nana told you….”

So I told her about the daytime stories. She listened intently, half smiling, chain-smoking, as the summer evening darkened to twilight. And at the end, all she would say was: “That was very interesting, Lucy, very interesting indeed.”

At the time I didn't have the wit to notice, in what she told me, all that she
hadn't
told me. Now, as I sat on the bed scrolling back through the texts, I did notice. She hadn't said, for one thing, whether her 1952 visit had been her last contact with the Agency. And she hadn't said, either, whether any of her “contacts in the East” from her refugee-camp OSS work
hadn't
been shot. Nor, indeed, had she said anything about whether, and if so when, she'd ever stopped working for
British
intelligence.

All these thoughts, however, were a sort of penumbra to the big dark shadow cast by two realisations I'd had while reading the dossier.

First, Eugenie had been identified, correctly, by the NKVD—the Soviet secret police, back in the day—as a British agent.

Second, during all the time when my mother, Amanda, was being oh-so-hurt about Ross's secret activities and his going behind her back,
she
was almost certainly reporting on him to her handler in the CIA.

Oh! And speaking of Ross…make that
three
realisations. From what Ross had written, it was entirely possible that he wasn't my father at all, and that Yuri Gusayevich, the dissident he'd betrayed to Klebov, was.

Talk about not knowing your father. I didn't know my fucking mother.