John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

“The SS, what are they like?” asked Lyushkov.

“The SS remind me of you, the Cheka.” This time the translation came slowly, almost stumbling. Lyushkov broke into a smile, snuffed out his cigarette and immediately lit a fresh one.

“How so?”

“You both…” he searched for the right word, “…share commitment.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that,” Jones paused while Evgenia translated the half-phrase, “if you or the SS had a snake in the grass, you would throttle it with your bare hands.”

“Snake?” asked Lyushkov.

“Zmeya,” Evgenia hissed.

“Zmeya,” Jones repeated her hiss.

“Kakaya zmeya?” asked Lyushkov – “what snake?”

“There are always snakes seeking to undermine the cause. The issue for both the SS in Hitler’s New Germany or the New Soviet Man is faith.”

Jones could tell from Evgenia’s tone as she translated that she thought what he was saying wasn’t helping.

“Faith?”

“Sorry, I meant not faith but fidelity to the cause.”

Lyushkov drew on his cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “The Hitlerite experiment in Germany is a return to barbarism. What we are trying to do here, under the guidance of Joseph Stalin, is to create a new future. Do you agree with that, Mr Jones?”

“Yes,” said Jones, “very much so.”

Through the window, the chimneys on the roofs of the buildings opposite the Lubyanka had been transformed into towers of white. A mass of snow had fallen in the time Jones had been the Cheka’s guest in the basement.

“Tell me about the poem.”

“What poem?”

“Come on, Mr Jones, I’m not an idiot.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“ He pokes out a sausage-shaped finger, And he alone goes boom,” Lyushkov quoted. “That poem.”

“Not heard of it. Is it about a butcher?” Jones’ expression was deadpan.

Lyushkov snorted, then moved on. “In the car on the way here, you said Colonel Lyushkov had been shot. Tell me more.”

“He died in a car accident.”

“Did he?”

In the corner, a radiator bubbled to itself.

“Oumansky held a conference at which it was made clear that Colonel Zakovsky had been killed in a car accident.”

“Oumansky is a functionary of a lower organ of the state. What he says is of no serious merit.”

Jones could not help but smile.

“Mr Jones, this is not a laughing matter. Explain your theory that Zakovsky was shot.”

Jones hesitated.

“Can you answer the question, Mr Jones?”

He cast his mind back and lived those moments again. In his mind, the limo with the shark teeth grille was overtaking him, Lyushkov waving at him. Then it slowed down, the bullets were fired, the man gunned down…

“Please answer the question, Mr Jones.”

It was Evgenia speaking. To ensure that he understood the dark majesty of their power over him, they were using her to torture him. If he got the answer to the question wrong, it would end in her execution, not his.

“The vehicle from which Zakovsky was shot,” asked Lyushkov, “was it a fish truck?”

Jones smiled and shook his head. “My theory that Zakovsky was shot was based solely on a paranoid alcoholic delusion.”

“Meaning what?” snapped Lyushkov.

“Meaning I have a problem with alcohol. The night before I had too much to drink. Meaning I got so drunk I had a nightmare soused in alcohol and I mistakenly thought that my nightmare was the truth.”

“Surely someone must have put that thought into your head?”

“Only Madame Vodka. And her friends: fine red wine, brandy, flaming sambucas, limoncello.”

Lyushkov roared with laughter, his jowls a-wobble with glee, his fit of merriment all the more striking because the other five people in the room – Jones, Evgenia, Lintz, the Uzbek and Yacob – remained stony-faced.

“Very good, Mr Jones, very good. You are a close friend, are you not, of Mr Harold Attercliffe?”

“What of it?”

“He is an enemy of the Soviet Union.”

“No, Colonel, you are mistaken. He is accused of being a wrecker. An accusation is not the same as a verdict. The People’s Court has yet to deliberate and he has indicated that he is not guilty.”

Lyushkov said nothing but held his cigarette to his lips, a finger of ash growing longer in the silence. He stubbed it out, smiled, and said, “We are minded to release you from our care.”

“May I go?”

Lyushkov looked down at his notes. “One last question, Mr Jones. This talk of famine in the bourgeois capitalist press in Berlin, New York?”

He leaned forward in his chair, the finger of ash dropping onto his precious desk unregarded. He was taut, engaged, his former pretence of joviality forgotten. This was the real meat, Jones realised. The rest had just been softening him up.

“There is no famine. Perhaps some isolated cases of malnutrition.”

“You’re sure?”

“There is no famine, Colonel.”

“Very good. It has been a pleasure and an honour talking to you, Mr Jones. Please go carefully. The revolution faces a thousand snakes, as you like to put it.”

Jones stood up. The Uzbek handed him his overcoat and hat.

“Good day to you, Mr Jones.”

“Good day to you, Colonel – and congratulations, once again, on your promotion.”

Lyushkov bowed, acknowledging both the compliment and its falseness at the same time.

Jones was led by the Uzbek and Lintz out of the room, down into the lift and out through the front door of the Lubyanka. Standing on the front step, the great grey and yellow toad of the Lubyanka behind him, he gasped for air.

In front of him, the snow lifted and spiralled, creating a little tornado of swirling flakes. He headed straight into it.

The snow that had fallen whilst he had been a guest of the Cheka was the deepest in living memory. In the outside world, roads tunnelled through banks of snow as high as a house; the boughs of trees barely punched through the blanket of white. Jones hurried, dismal and alone, through the great white canyons to the Metropol. In the short walk, his cheekbones developed a dull ache, his fingers and toes lost their feeling, his throat burned with cold.

The bar was empty apart from a well-dressed foreigner, middle-aged, crumpled and ugly, with a beautiful Russian woman half his age. They studied each other intensely. They could have been discussing poetry; they could have been negotiating a price. Jones ordered a bottle of one of the very best red wines the Metropol had to offer, drank it, ordered a second, drank that too and was on his third when Evgenia came in.

Jones had a full glass of red in his hand, on the table a bottle embossed with two crossed keys.

“Is the wine French?” she asked.

“Yes. Chateauneuf du Pape.”

“Expensive?”

“Very.” He did not ask her join him but took a hefty slug of the wine. His rudeness was so out of character that it could only be deliberate. He was drunk, vilely so, but he hated her for her betrayal – and there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that she was the most worthless human being he had ever met.

Then she did something that burned through the alcohol he’d had, the thing he found so adorable in her. She turned her head away, suggesting that she would rather be anywhere else than where she was right now.

“You told them about that bloody poem?” Jones’ voice was slurred, his tone solemn, stating a fact.

She shook her head.

“Well, somebody ratted us out and it wasn’t bloody me. You work for them so logic suggests that you are the rat, sweetie.”

Her dark eyes were cast down at the floor. In a trembling voice, she whispered, “Something dreadful has happened. I need to talk to you.”