John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

“Do you seriously think that?”

He fell silent.

“Believe Duranty, if you want. Run, Welshman, run. This is a volunteer army. We don’t seek cowards.”

“Whore.”

She slapped him.

He gripped her wrists with his hands so harshly that she cried out. “Don’t do that again, Evgenia because, firstly, we’re not supposed to draw attention to ourselves and, secondly, because I object to being called a coward simply because I have foolishly allowed myself to get into a situation where I am an accessory to murder. Where I come from, we don’t go around murdering people we don’t like. You and Max, you could well be with Lyushkov for all I know. I want nothing more to do with you and your games.”

“Then run. We will never contact you again. Run. By the way, a whore is a woman who sleeps with a man for money. A woman who sleeps with a man to stay alive is not a whore. A woman who sleeps with a man so that a wider truth can be told is not a whore. Run, coward, run.”

He released her wrists.

“I’m not sure that in Moscow in 1933 running is an option.”

“Oh very good, ffwl. You’re paying attention.”

“Duranty…” He hesitated. “Duranty says that ‘the opposition’ could have killed Zakovsky. Did you and Max have anything to do with the killing?”

She breathed out a long deep sigh and angled her body so that she was tantalisingly close to him. Moonlight cascaded through the pines trees and lit her features, her brow deathly pale, her eyes obsidian, her full lips red. The moonlight shone on Jones, too.

“What happened to your face?” she asked, a tenderness in her voice he had never heard from her before.

“I fell off a wall.”

“Like Humpty Dumpty.”

“Exactly. And all the Kremlin’s horses and all the Kremlin’s men couldn’t put me back together again.”

“They didn’t catch you.”

“No.” He paused. “Not yet. You haven’t answered my question. Did you and Max have anything to do with Zakovsky’s murder?”

“If you become a guest of the Lubyanka, you will tell them everything. So it would be better for you if I do not answer your questions. Walk away now. Leave Russia. Go back to England. Play golf.”

“I hate golf. Spoils a good walk.”

“Then write about the cricket and the weather. Rain stops play.”

“It’s cricket. Not ‘the’ cricket.”

“Imperialist.”

“I’m not an Imperialist. Evgenia, if you cannot answer a fair question then I will not help you do the thing you want me to do.”

She gave out a second sigh, her breath ballooning in front of her in the frozen air. “You know what the Cheka is, don’t you, ffwl?”

“It’s the armed fist of the revolution,” Jones replied.

“And do you know what it does?”

“It does what armed fists do,” said Jones, feebly.

“Under Lenin’s command, the Cheka was created in 1917 by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish noble, psychotic, twisted. The Communists knew they could not win an election, so the mass murders started. From the very start, this whole thing wasn’t about the people. It was about gaining and keeping power by spilling blood. They killed by list. In 1919, the Cheka had all Moscow’s Boy Scouts shot. In 1920, every single member of Moscow’s Lawn Tennis Club, shot. Once the revolution was secure, the killing slowed down. Stalin bided his time, for a time. But now a new terror is being unleashed. No-one knows why. A neuro-pathologist diagnosed Stalin as paranoid. Two days later, he died of poison. They’re very imaginative when it comes to killing. When I was seven, not long after the revolution, the Cheka came to my home town in the very depth of winter…”

“Stalino?”

“Yes, Stalino. They came to a big house in the main street and they arrested a man. He’d been protesting about the lack of safety for the workers at the iron foundry he ran. There was a great pile of wood in our garden and I had a secret hiding place under it, so I was able to see everything. They took the man out of his house in his shirtsleeves and chained him to a wooden post so that he couldn’t move. It was minus thirty. Then they poured bucket after bucket of water over him until he was frozen solid, a pillar of ice. That man was my father.” She paused. “So, if I answer your questions, will you be strong enough to handle the Cheka if they come for you?”

“I’m sorry about your father,” Jones began, “but please stop trying to frighten me.”

“Ffwl, I’m not trying to frighten you. I just want you to know what you’re dealing with.”

“I’m not going to help you unless I know the facts. Did you have anything to do with killing Zakovsky?”

She whistled two bars of Let My People Go.

“That’s no explanation.”

“Some things are best left unsaid.”

“Zakovsky was Cheka,” said Jones. “I remember that time on the way to the Lenin Dam when he said that, if anyone got in the way of the revolution, they would be smashed to a pulp by the GPU, the armed fist. I remember it because he meant me. And you hate the Cheka. ”

“You’re suggesting I shot Zakovsky now?”

“No.”

“And by the way, not everyone in the Cheka thinks this New Soviet famine is a good thing. If you’re in the Cheka, you’re better placed than most in our society to understand what is really going on. You see how the men in power feast, how the wretches are shot or starved. Some of them are with us.”

“Lyushkov?”

She said nothing.

Jones could feel the cold gnawing at his bones. He started a sentence, then stopped and asked a quite different question.

“When I fled from the police, I left my hat at the scene. It made its own way back to my hotel room.”

“So black magic exists.”

“Stop playing with me, Evgenia.”

“I am not playing with you. Someone found your hat and put it on your bed. For the moment, you are not in the Lubyanka. That’s good for you and good for us.”

“Who told you the hat was left on my bed?”

She bowed her head a fraction, and the half-memory of a smile played on her lips. Evgenia so rarely smiled that, when she did, Jones found it almost unbearably erotic. With a struggle, he remembered he needed to stay angry with her.

“You and your friends work your black magic so I can carry on playing useful idiot for you?”

“Exactly.”

“So that you can use me?”

“Yes.”

Defeated by her honesty, he fell silent. Then his jealousy got the better of him.

“Like you use Max? Or is it Max using you?”

“Both, I think. Max is my lover. In the new civilisation, a woman can have as many lovers as she wants. It is the only real improvement from the time before.”

“Why do you sleep with Duranty?”

“I have no choice. He holds the power of life and death over all of us translators.”

“That night on the train?”

“He planned it, all of it, deliberately to enrage you, to make you seethe with jealousy. He knew you were attracted to me. He was angry with you, jealous that you’d interviewed Hitler. He hated it that you won his cigarette lighter, the one he’d been given by Aleister Crowley.”

“That’s pathetic.”

“He is pathetic. He did it to break you. He takes obscene pleasure in sleeping with a woman once he knows another man wants her. More than anything else, it excites him.”

“And you?”

“I had no choice, ffwl.”

“But you like him, yes?”

The shaft of moonlight died and her face was shrouded once more.

“Walter Duranty is the darkest human being I have ever met, worse than any Chekist, worse, perhaps, than Stalin. He is not a believer, not a Communist, not a fanatic. He can be extraordinarily amusing. He’s always sharp, brutally so sometimes. But he believes in nothing. He is the most immoral human being I have ever met. It’s no surprise that he was a friend of Crowley, this Satanist.”