A Spy's Life (41 page)

Then came the voice, the voice of Oleg Kochalyin in the stillness of the deserted station. Eva flinched. Harland put his hand up to her mouth.

‘We’ll leave,’ Kochalyin said in Russian. ‘They’re not here. Get the engine started.’ There was no reply, just the scurrying of a pair of feet hastening to carry out an order.

He stood there for a few moments longer. Then he was gone and after a minute there was the cough of an ignition, followed by the whine of a helicopter engine. Harland realised that Kochalyin must have arrived at the station some time before the police. There was no mystery in this. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to work out which train they had taken from Dresden. The problem must have been to galvanise the Polish authorities to stop the train and have it searched. He wondered what story he’d used to persuade them to do this.

The noise of the engine reached a pitch behind the station buildings and then the helicopter lifted into the air with a sudden roar. It paused over the station and shot off westwards down the track.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Eva, shivering.

‘It’s still early. We’ll get on the next train, whichever way it’s going.’

Most of the lights on the platform were turned off and they were able to move away from beside the track. An hour later a slow service going east pulled in and they boarded for the next station down the line where they changed to a faster train to Warsaw. Late that night they boarded an overnight service for Pozńan and Berlin. A bribe of fifty dollars bought them the last free couchette. Before they left, Harland found a phone and put a call through to The Bird to tell him that Zikmund Myslbek had been killed that morning. The Bird already knew but wanted to hear the details. He said that Macy was extremely upset: he’d known Zikmund for over twenty years. Then Harland phoned Harriet to say that he was on his way back with Eva. She was cautious on the phone and said that the patient had had one or two unexpected visitors, but he was doing well. Harland bombarded her with questions but she refused to answer.

He returned to the couchette to find Eva sitting on the lower of two bunks scrubbing her trousers with a nailbrush. She didn’t look up.

‘How is he?’ she asked.

‘She says he’s doing well – improving.’

‘Nothing more than that?’

‘No, she couldn’t talk.’

She turned her head up. The closeness that had come so naturally when they were relying on each other a few hours before had evaporated.

‘I think you have to explain all this to me,’ she said.

Harland waited.

‘And you too – you have to tell me about Kochalyin and what you were doing in Prague in November ’89.’

She looked puzzled.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Well, let’s have something to eat and and we can talk.’

They went to the restaurant car and ordered as the train left the station – soup, lamb and potatoes, and a bottle of rough red wine.

Harland drained a glass.

‘You say I don’t have a right to know your story. I disagree because the entire course of my life was affected by our … our meeting in Rome.’

‘Mine too was changed,’ she said sharply. ‘I bore the child – remember!’

‘Well, at any rate I’d very much like to know about your relationship with Kochalyin, especially after your divorce. I want some answers first, then I’ll tell you why.’

‘It’s simple. I had to marry him because that was the only way we could survive. I told you that no one understands those days. Looking back now, we know that it all ended in ’89, but in the early eighties communism looked as though it would last for centuries. The system seemed impregnable and we had to make arrangements accordingly. Oleg was my arrangement.’

‘He was obsessed with you?’

‘Yes, I suppose you could say that.’

‘And he was your mother’s lover before?’

She looked at him defiantly.

‘I will tell you my story, not hers.’

‘If you needed him, why did you divorce in ’88?’

‘These things are difficult.’ A look of pain swept through her face.

‘Was it the sex?’

‘You’re so crude, Bobby. Of course it was the sex. I could not love him. He knew about you and he blamed you for my failure to respond to him.’

‘But you kept on good terms with him?’

‘Oleg is not a normal man. He never knew his parents. They died soon after the war. He was an orphan and he plunged himself into our little family. He recognised certain things in my mother – her lack of parents for one – and in his weird, obsessive way he decided to become the man in our household. He spent much time away and so it was bearable. You ask about the sex. I will tell you. There was none – at least there was no conventional sex.’

‘He was sadistic?’

‘It’s not so simple. Yes, he had those tendencies. He was abnormal – tormented.’

‘Did he beat you?’ Harland didn’t want to know but something made him ask.

‘Bobby, you aren’t going to understand this. This man was distorted. He showed affection to me and my mother and Tomas, the only time perhaps in his life. But I could not return it. And when he understood that that exchange wasn’t going to happen, he found gratification in other ways. There was a darkness in him. I don’t know how I can express it any other way.’

‘Humiliation?’

‘Yes.’ She was embarrassed.

‘But I don’t understand why he remained in touch with you after your divorce. It’s been nearly fourteen years. And for all that time he kept you in some style.’

She looked at him coldly.

‘Because I know him. I know his secrets; I know him like no one else can. I hold part of him. It was important for a man like Oleg, who is so much a mystery to himself, to feel that someone knew him.’

‘And Tomas?’

‘That was part of Oleg’s idea of himself as a father. We did not have children – there was no chance of that. But Oleg wanted to give Tomas what he did not have himself. It mattered to him that Tomas did not have a father. It was one of the very few normal parts of him. That was another reason why he kept in touch with us after the divorce.’

‘And did you tell him that I was in Prague that November?’

‘No, why would I do that?’ She paused. ‘Bobby, I wanted to see you. Why would I tell Oleg? Besides, I did not know where he was. He was obsessed with keeping his movements secret. That was the way he lived. He phoned us, or made arrangements through an intermediary. Why do you ask about that time in 1989? What does it matter now?’

He smiled weakly. ‘Were you working for the StB then?’

‘No, I worked until 1988. This was not active service, as you said before. I never served as an illegal after Rome.’

‘Why the training in Russia?’

‘I had been suggested for a job with a high-security clearance and the Russians wanted to test me. So I was sent on this training course which at the same time was a type of examination of my trustworthiness.’

‘In what field was this new job?’

‘Signals Intelligence.’

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Harland. ‘Code-breaking – that makes sense.’

She looked at him strangely.

‘And you were based in Prague for this?’

‘Yes – after training I got clearance and worked in Prague.’

‘Tell me about the operation.’

Her brow knotted. The habit of secrecy dies hard, thought Harland. He poured her some more wine.

‘We were concerned with acquiring cipher material from the Western embassies in Prague. We were breaking their codes and for this we needed cipher material.’

‘But the Soviets ran the Sigint operation in the Eastern Bloc,’ said Harland. ‘All the friendly agencies, like the StB, fed into a central pool. As far as I remember, this was all part of the KGB’s Sixteenth Directorate. Surely you didn’t attend the training school of cryptanalysts as well?’

‘No, I was trained at Moscow Centre. The training school was for Russians only. They thought it was secret, but we knew about it.’

‘So you returned to Prague with this new skill of yours. Was Kochalyin a part of this set-up?’

She shook her head.

‘But he would have had access to your material?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘So you were working with him right up to your divorce?’

‘Not directly.’

‘Tell me, what success did you have?’ This was interesting simply from a historical point of view to Harland. He recalled that the Americans and British were absolutely certain that the signals traffic wasn’t being read by the KGB, particularly after the leaps in computer-generated cryptography in the eighties.

‘We could read everything,’ she said simply. ‘Everything!’

‘The British and American traffic?’

‘Everything. We had been working on this for many years. Your people … your people were lax in many areas. There was a man in the US embassy. He fell for one of our agents. He never knew how much she stole.’

‘So you were reading all the communications by ’89?’

‘Yes, we knew what your embassy was saying to the British Foreign Office.’ She paused. ‘We tapped the line from the telex centre to the encryption machine.’

So they had got all the telegrams. That must have been how Kochalyin had learned of his and Griswald’s plan. Before they had set out from Berlin there had been furious exchanges between Prague and London, the embassy staff insisting that the plan to open negotiations for the StB files was fraught with danger. Three or four cables arrived saying that under no circumstances should it go ahead. What response these elicited from Century House, Harland never learned, but he knew they would almost certainly have told the embassy that the operation was off. But anyone with the slightest notion about these things or the way that SIS worked would have concluded that the operation was most definitely on. After that it would have been a simple matter to trace their entry into the country. And when Griswald started putting feelers out, well, there was no hope of them going undetected by Kochalyin.

They sat in silence for a long time. Harland was considering whether to tell her what had happened after that.

‘I met your friend at that time,’ he said. ‘I encountered Kochalyin.’

She looked startled.

He exhaled heavily and drank some wine. ‘I was … I was held by the StB then handed over to Kochalyin. But only this morning did I know for sure that it was him. I never once saw his face. I knew he was a Russian and one or two of the men with him were Russians. All I knew was his voice – the same voice that I heard leave a message on your machine this morning. I was absolutely certain at the station when we heard him again this evening.’

‘I don’t understand. Why did you never see his face?’

‘I was blindfolded.’ He paused, his eyes settling on a man at the far end of the restaurant car. ‘It was a clever observation of yours when you said Kochalyin is a mystery to himself. I can understand that. But there again, we all live our lives like that. Our histories are hidden from us. For all these years I had no idea why I was taken by him. I only understood today what it was all about. I … he … he was taking revenge on me for you.’

‘He hurt you?’

‘Yes. I never understood the pointlessness of what he did – the attention to detail of inflicting pain. But now I do. He was taking revenge for you. He was taking revenge for that photograph of you and me in bed – the picture you say you knew nothing about.’

Her hands had risen to her mouth.

‘And I imagine that the same motive was behind his taking Tomas to Bosnia. He wanted to contaminate him. He wanted to destroy him because he was my child, not his. There is no other explanation for what he did. You see Eva, he knew what was going to happen in eastern Bosnia that summer. He supplied the weapons and ammunition – the fuel. Kochalyin knew all along what he was doing.

‘I’ve been thinking about those pictures I showed you and I’ve come to recognise that Tomas didn’t just witness the massacre – he took part in it. Just before he was shot he said he’d killed a man. I ignored it at the time Tomas was in hospital fighting for his life and forgot about what he’d said. But they wouldn’t have let him see it without involving him – that was their way.’

He continued to look away from her although he felt the heat of her gaze.

‘That’s what they did in Bosnia. There are stories about the civilian bus drivers who were used to drive the Muslim men to the killing grounds. Each one was made to kill a man. That way they could never act as witnesses without admitting their own crime. I’m sure they wouldn’t have let Tomas see the things that he did without involving him in it. They would’ve made sure he understood that it was either him or the man kneeling in front of him.’

‘He could have told me,’ she said helplessly.

His eyes returned to her. ‘No, he saw where you lived. He knew how much money Kochalyin had put into your apartment. He knew he was paying your bills, paying for your life. And he knew you were indebted to Kochalyin for the drug treatment. He thought you wouldn’t believe him, which meant he had to deal with this guilt by himself. That’s why he left.’

‘Yes, but he knew I and Oleg were no longer—’

‘Were no longer what?’ At that moment it dawned on Harland that Kochalyin had kept in touch long after the divorce for a very good reason. There must have been some residual sexual relationship – some service that only Eva could provide.

‘When did it end, Eva? Or is it still a going concern? Is that what you mean by knowing his secrets, knowing him in a way that nobody else can know him? Jesus, Eva, what the hell do you two do together?’

He waited for her response. Nothing came.

‘Well,’ he continued, ‘it certainly explains why Tomas had to get the hell out of your life, and I suppose that’s why you never tried to contact me.’

She had lowered her head.

‘You’re right. There was something. But not now. Tomas knew that.’

‘The thing I don’t understand,’ said Harland, ‘is how your mother let this happen. She must have had a very shrewd idea what Kochalyin was about, even as a young man.’

‘For God’s sake, Bobby, you’re so remorseless. Can’t we stop talking about this?’

Harland pushed the plate of lamb to the side.