John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

“Evgenia, we need to talk. This isn’t just a decision for us. Jones, thank you for coming. Perhaps we can figure something out with Mr Jones at a later date.”

“That’s not going to happen. I’m leaving Russia.”

“What?” said Evgenia, astonished. “What are you talking about?”

Jones let out a long sigh. “Today I went to the show trial of the coal wreckers. It was one of the darkest things I’ve seen, a travesty of justice. At the end, one of the accused said he had been asked to wreck his coalmine by a British engineer, Harold Attercliffe. I know this Attercliffe, he’s a friend of mine. They put him in the dock and he said, ‘Not bloody guilty’. I believe that he’s innocent and the accused man was tortured to implicate him. So, for the first time, I wrote the truth. I filed the truth. I gave my copy to Duranty to give to the censors. The moment they read it, my days in Russia are over.”

Silence.

“This is what I wrote at the end of the piece: ‘The truth is that the Soviet Union is a monstrous tyranny where the innocent are framed, where the state tells lies and where hunger is rampant. This useful idiot is one no more.’”

“We’re finished, then,” said Borodin, softly.

“You are Mr Jones, I think, our last best hope,” said Evgenia. Her tone was pleading. “Tell him, Max, tell him.”

“No. Not tonight,” said Borodin. “We must simply observe that Mr Jones’ potential usefulness to us has gone.”

“It’s not too late…” Evgenia’s voice was urgent. “Duranty’s lazy and he doesn’t need to file for the New York Times till past midnight. Who is the censor tonight?”

“Oumansky,” said Jones.

“Duranty most often prefers the Metropol to traipsing through the snow,” said Evgenia. “Most nights he gets someone else to deliver his copy to Oumansky’s flat. It’s not far from the Lubyanka.”

She said something to Borodin in Russian, so fast that Jones had no hope of understanding it. Turning back to Jones, she said, “Find Duranty. Get your copy back. It’s worth a try.”

“What about Attercliffe? To withdraw my article would be a betrayal.”

“You break with them openly, and you’ll never be able to help your friend in any practical way,” Evgenia said, her dark eyes focussed entirely on Jones. “You continue to play the useful idiot, you might be able to help him. Or his family. And us.”

Jones saw her logic instantly, and nodded his assent.

“Duranty will be at the Metropol, won’t he?”

Jones nodded for a second time. The Metropol was Duranty’s lair. “What about these documents?”

“Get your copy back first,” said Evgenia. “Then we’ll be in touch.”

“One last thing, Jones,” said Borodin. “For this to work, the less you have to do with Evgenia and me the better. If you see either Evgenia or I in the street, walk on by.”

“Got it,” said Jones.

Borodin led the way back up into the stable and to the door that led out onto the street. As Borodin busied himself unbolting the door, Evgenia kissed Jones, once, on his lips, hurriedly. The secret complicity of the kiss electrified him. Then, tumbling out onto the street, he headed for the Metropol where he had his single best chance of finding Duranty. Up above, the night sky was dulled by low cloud. There was no moon. He got to the first street corner and, before he turned into it, he looked behind him. No-one was following him. He started to walk, fast, through the snow.

The tune that Borodin had whistled and Evgenia had taken up? Suddenly it came to him. Let My People Go.

Duranty was in heaven, or the nearest thing to it on this side of paradise, perched upon a bar stool in the Metropol, Morgan to his left and Natasha to his right, a glass of vermouth in his hand. Jones sauntered in, cocky, snowflakes in his hair, his glasses lightly steaming from coming in from the cold.

“Dear boy!” said Duranty. His voice was slurred but there was no hiding his pleasure in seeing the younger man. Duranty’s success with women troubled Jones more than he would like to admit. The older man was no Adonis. His features were middling, if that. Too many late nights had given him hooded eyelids; too much alcohol a fern of red capillaries on his nose. Yet he had some lizard-like animality that women wanted and, no matter how much he tried not to, Jones envied that. But Jones also observed something else, too: sometimes it seemed that Duranty had become bored by his extraordinary success with women and liked, possibly even preferred, male conversation. Whatever the logic, Duranty’s good mood appeared to make the job in hand all the easier.

“May I buy everybody a drink?” asked Jones.

There were cheers all around.

“I’ve had a very good day,” said Jones. “Can’t tell you about it, but I’ve got a bit of a scoop. Which means, Duranty old chap, I want that copy I gave to you earlier at the House of Nobles. I want it back so I can polish it a bit.”

Duranty nodded and said, “Absolutely, old boy. Here it is.”

But, when he went to fetch the envelope from his inside jacket pocket, he found only air. He studied his empty hand, perplexed, while the two women looked irked. This minor bureaucratic issue was dampening the party mood.

“Forget about your boring work for one minute, baby,” said Natasha, her fingers running along Jones’ jaw.

“Workers need to relax sometimes, comrade,” advised Morgan, “or else they do a disservice to the revolution.” She said it with such deadpan seriousness that he could not quite work out whether she was mocking him or not.

“Hell, damn,” said Duranty, apologetically, “I remember. I gave it to Colonel Zakovsky to give to Oumansky. The colonel has an appointment to see him at home.”

Jones beamed. From the look of him, he could not have been more delighted to make contact with the Cheka colonel.

“He’s on his way there now. If you get your skates on, you might be able to catch him.”

“What’s Oumansky’s address?”

“Not far from the Lubyanka, old boy, but ssssh, don’t tell anyone.”

Duranty wrote, “Oumansky, Top Flat, 7 Little Lubyanka Street” in English and Russian on a scrap of paper and gave it to Jones.

“Where is it?”

“Get to the Lubyanka and dive round the back. You can’t miss it.”

Jones nodded.

“You still buy everyone drinkies darlink?” implored Natasha.

“Later,” said Jones, backing away – and, once outside, he started to run.

The moment Jones left the bar, Duranty made his excuses and hurried to the lobby where he made a brief telephone call.

The Lubyanka sat like a great grey and yellow toad at the heart of Moscow, due north of the Kremlin. Jones had heard dark things about what happened in its basement but, as with so much else in Russia, you couldn’t buy the truth in a shop.

Running at night in Moscow through the January snow wasn’t the done thing, he realised, when three police officers took overmuch interest in him. From that moment on, he slowed down to a fast walk and made it to the Lubyanka within ten minutes, then curved to the right-hand side and started asking people for directions. As usual, Muscovites bolted the moment he – an obvious foreigner – tried to engage them in conversation. But, after searching for some time, he found the street himself, his brain clumsily decoding the Cyrillic in the dim pool of light thrown by a streetlamp.

Number 7 was, as luck would have it, at the far end of the street. He hurried along. Two hundred feet ahead of him, a man was heading in the same direction.

Could it be Zakovsky? The man twisted around and there was something about his gait, the way he held himself, that made Jones confident he’d found his target.