A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (15 page)

There was other worrying news from Petrograd. Major McAlpine, a member of the military mission that was evacuating supplies who fancied himself an expert on the Russian situation, was sending reports to London criticising Lockhart’s policy of ‘blindly backing’ the Bolshevik government.
²⁶
McAlpine wasn’t the only one stirring up trouble, either; several officers (thankfully not Cromie or Garstin, who remained loyal) were campaigning against him. ‘Stupid idiots,’ Lockhart commented acidly in his diary.
²⁷
But with the continuing peace and the imminent arrival of a German Ambassador in Moscow, it was getting harder to resist the view that the Bolsheviks were not to be trusted.
²⁸

Lockhart spent a long time in conversation with Le Page, but inside he was boiling with impatience. He was only interested in the visitor who had arrived with Le Page. After the disappointment of the letter Garstin had brought last week, Lockhart had been thrilled to get a second note, scribbled hastily on a page torn out of a pocket pad: ‘Dear Lockhart, Just a few hurried lines in the office to tell you am better . . . Do write again and keep a room for me in the Elite for about Sunday. Best love, Moura B—’
²⁹

After Le Page had gone, there were still more meetings to be got through. Would they never end? On and on they went. Moura was here, in this very building, and he was being kept from her. It was nearly one o’clock when the last visitor shook hands and was ushered out of the door. Lockhart paused in front of the looking-glass, adjusted his tie, pushed back his hair, shot his cuffs, then dashed to the landing. Gathering himself, he descended the stairs soberly to the next floor, where there was a suite set aside as the mission’s living and dining room. He paused outside the door, took a breath, and let himself in.

The room was aglow with midday spring sunshine. Standing near the window, her dark, waved hair alive with light, was Moura. Lockhart paused, then walked towards her in silence, so overcome he couldn’t trust himself to speak. When those eyes turned on him, and she smiled that smile, he knew that this was a bond unlike any other, that this was a woman he could never let go. ‘Into my life,’ he would recall, ‘something had entered which was stronger than any other tie, stronger than life itself.’
³⁰

From this moment on, there would be no more pretence, no more stolen kisses, no more formality. For Lockhart it would be a passionate adventure; for Moura it would begin as a struggle to accept the feelings that he had woken in her.

That evening they went to the ballet, a performance of
Coppélia
at the Bolshoi.
³¹
Lockhart had once sat in a box here and watched Kerensky whip the aristocratic audience into a frenzy with his swoon-inducing oratory. (He had little idea that the woman sitting close beside him now had been Kerensky’s mistress for a short time.)
Coppélia
was a much calmer affair. The aristocrats in the boxes had been replaced by high-ranking Bolsheviks, but the ballet was the same as it had ever been, and it was possible to forget that the Revolution had ever happened.
³²

Whether Lockhart was conscious of any irony in the subject of the ballet – and if so, whether he identified at all with Franz, besotted with a woman brought to life in his own imagination, or wondered if there was a Dr Coppélius pulling strings anywhere behind the scenes – he never recorded it. His adoration of Moura was complete. For her part, Moura still didn’t know quite what to make of her feelings. She wasn’t a woman who loved, any more than Coppélia was. Or at least, she had not been until now. When she looked back on this time, she came to believe that she was waking up, coming to life.

The illusion that they were back in the pre-revolutionary era was dispelled when the curtain came down and the orchestra struck up the ‘Internationale’ instead of the old ‘
Bozhe, Tsarya khrani
’.

Walking out of the theatre into the chill spring night, Lockhart and Moura headed back to the Elite. There was nowhere else to go now that the city was being brought to heel. During their first few weeks in Moscow, Lockhart, Denis Garstin and visiting SIS agent George Hill had gone to an illegal cabaret, appropriately called the Podpolye,
^†
in a cellar beneath the Okhotny Ryad, a street linking the Bolshoi Theatre and Red Square, just a block away from the Kremlin itself. In this underworld, champagne could be had and a rich, anti-Bolshevik audience listened to radical, decadent songs performed by the actor, composer and film star Alexander Vertinsky, who incorporated into his art the gypsy music that Lockhart found irresistibly sensuous. Vertinsky’s melancholy style struck a deep resonance with the audience, a class demoralised and without hope. One night the Podpolye was raided by a gang of bandits – former Russian army officers reduced to thieving. While filling their pockets with the clientele’s cash and watches, the bandits, noting Hill and Garstin’s uniforms, declined to take their belongings – ‘We do not rob Englishmen,’ said the bandit leader to Lockhart, and apologised on behalf of his country for the contemptible state it had got itself into.
³³

There were no more cabarets now. The Bolsheviks had already criminalised them, and the purges which destroyed the Anarchists had also cleaned out the city’s underground nightlife.

With the music of
Coppélia
still dancing in their heads, Lockhart and Moura arrived back at the Elite. With Hicks still away, Lockhart had the suite of rooms all to himself. He had booked Moura a room of her own, but she was in no particular hurry to retire. During the week that followed her room was destined not to be used very much.

He wrote her poetry, just as he had for his Malayan princess. Moura was delighted by it. There were more evenings at the ballet, and outings. Lockhart had a motor car at his disposal, and he made full use of it. With the coming of spring, a favourite destination was the deserted palace at Arkhangelskoye, a few miles west of Moscow. The former country retreat of the Yusupov princes, it was an idyllic spot, a bijou palace set in woodland on a bend of the Moskva river. Although the estate lands had been taken over by peasants, the house had been left miraculously untouched. No looters, no squatters; just an elegant peach-coloured palace unlived-in and stuffed with priceless furniture and art. Hardly anyone in Moscow had transport, and for this brief springtime the place could be enjoyed in tranquil solitude.
³⁴

By the time that week came to an end, Lockhart and Moura had crossed the boundary where romantic flirtation turned into a physical bond, and left it far behind. They had become lovers.

My dear . . .

Moura paused, her pen hanging over the note paper. How should she address him? Not as ‘Lockhart’, certainly, not now. But he never went by any other name. Her pen inscribed a hesitant line, and at the end of it wrote . . .
Locky
. She smiled.

She was back in her own apartment in Petrograd after a week spent in Moscow, and still trying to make sense of things.
³⁵
She couldn’t even decide on the proper tone to take in a letter. ‘A hurried line to tell you I miss you so very very much . . . Thanks so much for my week in Moscow. You don’t know how much I enjoyed it.’

This was hopeless – was she writing to one of her Benckendorff in-laws? Or was she speaking to the man who excited her above all others, the man she had just opened herself up to, whose body she had welcomed into hers?

‘All this is fatuities,’ she went on impatiently, ‘that with natures like mine exist to hide the real true feelings. But you know I care for you very very much, or all that has happened wouldn’t have happened
.
’

But what exactly
had
happened between them? Why could she still not work out what these feelings were? She wrote on, swinging erratically between the roles of friend and lover. She promised him ‘a deep, great friendship for the man who “likes Russia, has a great big brain and a kind heart”’. She implored him, ‘do not class me with the rest, will you, with the rest who trifle and with whom you trifle – but keep a separate little place for me, where I will remain a long time’.

Still it wouldn’t come out right. She was like a singer trying to master a new, elusive tune, and the notes were all wrong.

Abandoning sentiment, Moura fell back on her first instinct – inquisitiveness. She mentioned the worrying rumours that a German invasion was imminent, and that Petrograd would be unable to resist it. Did Lockhart know whether the Germans would come?

Stumbling on, she resumed the casual tone that was her accustomed voice, the one she used with all her friends. ‘I hope to be able to come some time during Easter week.
³⁶
I am looking frightfully forward to it . . . Well – good-bye – or better au-revoir. Take care of yourself. Tell me what I should bring with me, I cannot get your hat, you never gave me the key
.
’

She signed off with ‘Love and a kiss from Moura’.
³⁷

It would be some time before she discovered how to sing this unfamiliar song, how to express what she was feeling. And as for the feelings themselves, she would never quite master them or fully understand them.

While the bond between Moura and Lockhart drew tighter, the taut relationship between their countries was beginning to approach snapping point.

On 23 April, the second full day of Moura’s stay in Moscow, the new German Ambassador, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, had arrived in the capital to take up his post. Lockhart had been incensed to learn that the Bolsheviks were requisitioning forty rooms in the Elite for Mirbach and his staff – most on the same floors as Lockhart’s. ‘White with passion’ (and perhaps moved by the intense feelings inspired by Moura’s presence), he went to see Trotsky’s deputy, Chicherin, to complain. Getting apologies but no satisfaction there, Lockhart contacted Trotsky himself (who had to be dragged out of a commissars’ meeting to come to the telephone), and threatened to terminate his mission and leave Moscow if Mirbach stayed in the Elite. Trotsky relented, and the Count and his staff were relocated to an inferior hotel.
³⁸

For the time being, Britain had the diplomatic edge over Germany. When Mirbach had his first official meeting, it was with a deputy rather than Lenin himself, and the tone was ‘acidly polite’.
³⁹
Meanwhile, Lockhart wired London to say that the Bolsheviks were willing to agree to all the British proposals for military access to Germany’s Eastern Front via Russian territory. An Allied force might enter via Archangel in the north, or from the east via Siberia. There were only a few sticking points needing to be smoothed out.
⁴⁰
While in his moments of free time Lockhart bathed in the joy of Moura’s presence, in his working hours he negotiated with Trotsky and with Whitehall. He and Garstin had cooked up a list of proposals for the British government to consider, including the possibility of dealing openly with the Bolsheviks if, as Trotsky was intimating, they were conducive to the Allied military expedition through Russia. It seemed that Lockhart and Garstin might have discovered the solution; even Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, was beginning to come round to the idea.
⁴¹

What Lockhart did not openly admit was that he was starting to lose faith in his own policy of friendship with the Bolsheviks. The presence of Mirbach shook him, and he knew that the SIS was intriguing to force the issue. It had come to Lockhart’s attention, through his intelligence contacts, that anti-Bolshevik elements in Russia, led by Boris Savinkov, former Minister of War in the Kerensky government, were plotting a coup.

Although he denied it later, Lockhart made contact with Savinkov, and knew of his plans.
⁴²
The date set for the coup was 1 May. The Foreign Office was deeply wary of Savinkov (he’d been an anti-government terrorist in the days of the Tsar), but British intelligence were secretly planning to support his coup, and had been funding him. If the coup succeeded, it would blow Lockhart’s mission to pieces.

But when May Day dawned, Savinkov’s coup failed to materialise. The Cheka had learned of it, and the organisers were forced to postpone. Instead, May Day was marked in Moscow by the first of the triumphal Red Army parades in Red Square.
⁴³

It was never discovered exactly who warned the Bolsheviks about the coup. Perhaps one of the commanders of Lenin’s Latvian ‘Praetorian Guard’, whom Savinkov had tried to bribe. The Germans seemed to be extraordinarily well informed about the affair, and it was from their news service that the announcement of the aborted coup came.