Alex Dryden - Red to Black

But neither of these fault lines is true in the case of Finn and myself. We have, or is it had? other troubles. Whatever the truth of our love, we allowed too much to come between us. And the past sneaked into any available crack and fissure in our relationship as frost enters the cement courses of a house.

We had the malevolence of others, with their huge forces arrayed against us, but it was we, ultimately, who allowed their hostility to disrupt the peace we might have found.

We had microphones, watchers, tails, people in every corner. We had two of the world’s most experienced intelligence services tracking our every movement. We had shining slivers of time to snatch for last minute walk-ins in hotel rooms across the city. At reception desks, Finn would call me his wife.

‘I’m not your wife,’ I told him at the beginning. ‘I’m a colonel in the SVR. Doing a job, that’s all.’

‘OK. Colonel,’ he might say. ‘Allow me to undo the buttons of your shirt.’

“Please.”

‘Please, then,’ he’d say.

Do I mean that we had the malevolence of others, or do we still have it? Where is Finn? What has happened to him? Is Finn now the past or is he still in the present?

I MET FINNfor the first time back in January 1999. Our meeting had been at the Baltschug Hotel, across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. The hotel was to remain a place of good memories for us throughout Finn’s residency in Moscow. As he put it, rather unnecessarily, ‘It was the venue for our first official fuck, Rabbit, endorsed by Her Majesty and the KGB.’

Finn was sitting at the head of the table in a private meeting room at the Baltschug, in his role of Second Secretary of Trade and Investment. He was holding court with a dozen or so business and security acolytes and their boss Pavel Drachevsky, the billionaire aluminium tycoon. Drachevsky had invited some of his managers: his leaden ex-KGB security boss Chimkov; Alexander, the poet, translator and KGB snake who had worked at the United Nations in Geneva for several years; and my friend Natasha, who tried to act in Russia’s confused public relations world as Drachevsky’s PR assistant.

Whether Finn knew the lunch was a set-up or not, he didn’t show it. When I arrived, deliberately late, he looked completely relaxed. He was sitting in a high-backed chair at the head of the long table. He wore a slightly creased blue suit and a tie, which could have been tied by a schoolboy, with a large thick knot and one very short end. He had brown hair, brushed straight back over his head and greying slightly at the temples, and his face was lined from laughter. His eyes, which changed through various shades of green and brown, depending on the light, as I discovered later, contained a kind of merry amusement that stopped just short of scorn. Finn always seemed to be enjoying himself.

I noticed that he addressed more of his conversation to Natasha, who is very pretty, than to Drachevsky, who was the reason Finn was there and who can’t claim good looks as his forte.

Whether or not Finn knew who I was, I couldn’t tell, but as I entered the room dressed in black leather–it embarrasses me now to recall this–I immediately had his attention. Of course I did. That was the idea. Finn’s reputation for womanising in Moscow was always considered to be the hook to catch him with, despite our consistent failures up till now, and in the crude logic of the KGB it was considered that Finn would be more of a pushover if I, the youngest female KGB colonel, wore black leather.

I took my seat next to Natasha so that Finn would now look at both of us, and the conversation continued in a relaxed and businesslike way.

And then, at the appointed moment, Natasha looked up the table towards Finn. It was all rehearsed. In her lazy seducer’s voice which she and I would practise to our increasing amusement in her apartment over a bottle of wine, she came out with the line we’d told her to say.

‘Tell me, Finn, are you a spy?’

This was the signal for the whole table to stop talking and look directly at Finn. I was supposed to read his face.

There was dead silence. It was a foolish, old-fashioned Cold War moment.

But all I saw in Finn’s eyes was his continued relaxed amusement. And then, startlingly, he put up his hands like a pickpocket caught in the act.

‘How did you guess?’ he said.

It was brilliantly done.

It was certainly not what anyone had expected. It threw the business officials at the party into barely concealed consternation. One or two of Drachevsky’s managers looked around, breaking the injunction to stay staring at Finn, as if they were personal witnesses to a great diplomatic scandal. ‘The Second Secretary of Trade and Investment at the British embassy in Moscow admits to being a spy.’ These managers were almost there, at the interview with ORT News, telling the story of the headline with knitted brows and the melodramatic seriousness beloved by TV interviewees.

But I saw immediately that to look at Finn was not to look at a man who appeared to have confessed to anything at all.

At least silence was maintained in the confusion and the rest of us stayed staring at Finn, hoping, I suppose, to unsettle him. Finn, however, treated us like an audience he had spent hours trying to win. This was his moment of triumph, not defeat, he seemed to say.

‘I’m double O zero,’ he said, and smiled that open, guileless smile that still makes my stomach tighten when I think of it.

There were a few unrestrained grins around the table; Natasha actually laughed out loud. The brain-dead Chimkov and the snake Alexander kept their blank, trained expressions in place. Drachevsky just looked mildly curious. And as for me, I could not help smiling but I resisted aiming it at Finn and looked down at my plate.

The tension, which we thought we would create, but which Finn had effortlessly usurped, was broken. I suspected then that I had been promoted beyond my ability. I was charmed by him.

Finn pressed home his advantage, supremely confident, every inch the willing entertainer. ‘I do know some spies,’ he said, as if to compensate for the drudgery of his trade job, and again he rocked those managers who, a moment before, had thought they were at a crucial moment in contemporary history.

‘What, here? In Moscow!’ one of them said, outraged.

‘No,’ Finn said, apologetic now that he might have led them to expect too much. His face said how embarrassed he was that he didn’t know any spies actually in Moscow. ‘No, they’re retired now. I only know them socially, I’m afraid.’

Later in the day, Finn called me and asked me to dinner, just as my controllers at the Forest had expected. I accepted, of course. It was my job, after all, but it was easier than I’d feared.

We went to a sushi restaurant which had recently opened up near the church where Pushkin got married; Finn said it was the most expensive dinner he’d ever bought anyone. He’d booked our first room at the Baltschug that night because, as he made clear, he had a discount. I remember I was annoyed by his deliberately aimed presumption. But already he knew I had my orders-we both had our orders-and he decided to make the most of it.

I remember that evening clearly and things Finn said still play over in my mind. He was incredibly indiscreet. He made no attempt to pretend we were anything other than what we were. Looking me in the eye, he said, ‘There wouldn’t be any need for spies if there weren’t any spies, Anna.’ And later, in bed, he said, ‘You’re completely wasted as a colonel, you know. You’re the best honey trap there ever was.’

He knew just how to get a rise from me at that first meeting.