John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

Jones huddled closer to her and whispered, “Nid oedd marwolaeth Zakovsky yn ddamwain. Gwelais rhywun yn saethu iddo” – Zakovsky's death wasn't an accident. I saw who shot him.

She replied, “Ddim yma, nid yn awr, ffwl. Mae'n rhaid i chi gerdded ymlaen” – Not here, not now, fool. You’re supposed to walk on by.

Jones winced. While Professor Aubyn looked on, disturbed but still immobile, Oumansky returned to the stage, armed with a glass of water, to discover Jones ministering to Evgenia, gently encouraging her to sip from the glass. The official gestured to Jones to leave the stage in an imperious manner. That’s when the booing started. The workers in the audience were unlit, hard to identify in the gloom. They gave Oumansky the raspberry and then the subversion started: “Get off!” “Leave her be!” and “No wonder she fainted, she had to translate all that rubbish!”

Twitching, Oumansky closed the event due to unforeseen circumstances, thanked the professor for his illuminating contribution and the workers for their interest and the hall lights went on.

In whispered Welsh, Evgenia told him to get away, fast. She would find him when it was safe to do so. Jones nodded, wiped her lips once more with a brush of water and walked off the stage – only to find Dr Limner blocking his path.

“You ruined the professor’s speech,” said Dr Limner, his lips so thin as if they had been drawn by a ruler. “You make a fetish out of democracy while you seek to block progress with every action. You did that deliberately. You and that hussy.”

Jones smiled at Dr Limner. “No, Dr Limner. The professor ruined his speech all by himself.”

He walked off, knowing that he had just made one more enemy in Moscow.

His typewriter was clacking out the necessary lie, Professor Aubyn’s lecture on the great increase in electricity output across the Soviet Union, when darkness fell as suddenly as the blow of an axe. Sometimes, the power-cuts would be momentary, sometimes they would last all night – but the bewildering fickleness in electricity supply was, officially, a lie. Officially, the lights in his room at the Hotel Lux were still on.

Snow crystals on the neighbouring roofs glittered under a full moon, its ghost-light rendering Moscow’s shadows all the darker. From one deep pool of blackness, immediately across the street from Jones’ hotel window, a figure stepped out and looked up. Jones went to his chest of drawers, found his bottle of vodka and poured himself a thick slug, then returned to the window and raised the glass to his lips.

“Damn you,” said Jones and drained the glass in one. They still hadn’t arrested him. They might never, of course. Zakovsky’s life had officially ended in Oumansky’s fictional car accident. That was another lie. Duranty was suggesting that he was killed by the oppositionists. That, too, was a lie. Or was it?

His right hand jerked in spasm. Out of habit he plunged it into his pocket. He knew that Zakovsky had been murdered and he knew who had done it – and he was certain that, sooner or later, he would pay a price for that knowledge. It was one thing to be in the basement of the Lyubianka, under the third degree, to face his tormentors head on, to try to come up with some plausible explanation as to why he had taken an envelope from the still warm corpse of their own officer and not report the murder to the police. But to sit in the waiting room of his own fear was worse. He’d read about how the Spanish Inquisition used to show their instruments of torture to the poor wretch in their hands before they started on him. It was a clever policy. Jones was stretched out on the rack of his own imagination and his nerves were shot.

The moonlight silvered his room. Feeling the vodka burn its way down his throat, he shivered at the terrible mistake he had made. He should never have followed Evgenia across Moscow to the horse stables. He should never have indulged their strange conspiracy, whatever it was Evgenia and Borodin were up to. He should never have tried to retrieve his story from Zakovsky. He should have stayed with the dead man and explained everything to the authorities. Sooner or later, the Cheka would kill him. He wondered how they might do it. Nine grammes of lead in the back of the head was the most likely method. A fall from a window? A car crash on a lonely country road? Poison? He shook his head. Poison was for high value enemies of the state, for someone it was necessary to project a judgment to the wider world. Jones would just merit the ordinary murder of a useful idiot, one who had outlived his usefulness.

Studying his glass of vodka, he swirled around the last bead of alcohol. Someone had left his hat on his bed to show that they knew he was there when Zakovsky had been shot.

Who would do that? As a foreign journalist, he was under some degree of surveillance the whole time. No-one else other than the Cheka would dare risk to plonk his hat back on his bed. So why wasn’t he with Attercliffe in some hellhole in the Lubyanka right now? They were toying with him, of that he had no doubt.

He held his head in his hands, his mind faltering, and drained the last of his vodka.

There was no electricity but, by the light of the moon, he finished his piece on Professor Aubyn’s lecture. He didn’t include Evgenia’s collapse or the heckles from the workers or the nickname “Professor Pig-iron” in his reporting. That wasn’t what was expected of him. When he had done, he took out the original and the under-copy from the typewriter, placed the original in an envelope and addressed it to Oumansky. The copy he filed in a drawer. Out on the street, there was no sign of the watcher. He had either gone home or retreated back into the shadows. Squaring the copy with the Foreign Ministry would pose no problem, but that could wait until the morning. He put on his coat and trilby and headed out into the moonlight.

Nobody followed him. The watcher had been called off. Out of habit he headed towards the Metropol, but the idea of making light banter with Duranty and his women that night made his head ache. He’d gone two hundred yards when he passed a small park, trees etched in silver, shadows painted in black, and heard the softest of whistles. A few bars from Let My People Go and then silence. Stooping down, he affected to tie his shoe laces, then looked behind him. There was no-one in sight. Standing up, he headed towards the park, keeping to the shadows as best he could. To one corner there was a child’s playground, a swing in motion. Someone had left the seat just moment’s before.

A cloud passed in front of the moon, dulling the light. Then, once more, there came a soft whistle: that tune, coming this time from a stand of pine trees some distance ahead. Walking onwards, he ducked his head under a branch, and a sliver of snow off-set his trilby, sending ice-water trickling down his back.

He smelt her before he saw her: a hint of perfume, the scent of wet wool. A touch on the small of his back, and he spun round to face her. He longed to hold her but, more, he longed to know the truth.

“So, Evgenia, what’s happening?” His voice was over-wrought, racked with tension. “I saw Lyuskov shoot Zakovsky.”

“Zakovsky passed away in a car accident.” Her tone was that of a schoolchild reciting the seven times table.

His breath ballooned out. “Evgenia, I was there. Lyushkov drove past me in his ZIS. Then two shots and Zakovsky falls down dead. I took the envelope from the corpse. I did that to help you. What game are you playing with me?”

“A game where the winner gets to tell the truth to the world about a great crime.”

“The truth may get us all killed. Duranty says that the opposition may have killed Zakovsky. He’s warned me to stay away from dangerous friends. Is Lyushkov with you?”