Brian Freemantle - The Blind Run

‘Why didn’t you kill him, like you did the policeman?’

Sampson came forward even further, to reinforce what he had to say. ‘I didn’t want to kill anyone: cause any more harm than was absolutely necessary. And like I said, I thought I had to get away from our cell. There are regular cell checks, every few hours. He would have been discovered.’

‘What about the prison officer you battered being discovered?’

Sampson smiled, as the points came his way. ‘The infirmary isn’t checked, during the night. There wasn’t a risk of discovery.’

‘There was with the policeman.’

‘I had to make the decision on the spot. I didn’t know whether the people you sent for me would drive off, at the first indication of danger. Whether I could subdue the man before he had time to sound an alarm. Could subdue him, even.’ Sampson gave another pause. ‘If I created a difficulty then I’m sorry. It seemed the only thing – the right thing – to do at the time.’

‘Do you like killing? Hurting people?’

‘Did that bastard say I did?’

‘Do you like hurting people?’ repeated the woman.

‘No.’

‘You told me you were prepared to do anything.’

‘Yes,’ remembered Sampson, cautiously.

‘If you were told to kill someone, would you do it?’

It was several moments before Sampson replied. Then he said, ‘I would argue against the order.’

‘Why?’

‘I am not trained to kill, to be an assassin.’

‘Is that your objection, your lack of training? You’ve no moral objection?’

There was another long hesitation from the man. At last he said, ‘If I am properly convinced of the need, then no, I have no moral objection.’

‘What do you think of Charlie Muffin?’ she demanded, in one of her directional changes.

Sampson sniggered, contemptuous again. ‘There’s nothing to think about,’ he said.

‘I don’t understand that answer.’

‘He was probably good, once,’ said the man. ‘That’s the reputation he had in the department, despite what he did. Maybe even a grudging admiration. But now he’s past it. He’s middle aged, out of condition, clinging like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood to some ridiculous charade about not being a traitor.’

‘Wasn’t he?’

‘I don’t know,’ shrugged Sampson, carelessly. ‘He exposed the British and American Directors, so of course he was. But it seems to have been a personal thing, not through any ideology…’ Sampson hesitated. ‘I really don’t think it’s important. I don’t think he’s important.’

‘What is he, then?’

‘A has-been,’ judged the man.

The conference that night between Berenkov and Kalenin did not last so long because Sampson’s commitment was so obvious but it was still later than normal when Berenkov returned to the exclusively guarded compound for the Kremlin hierarchy at Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Valentina was waiting, with the newly-wed pleasure as always, despite their twenty years of marriage. Because effectively they were newly weds. Berenkov had been posted as an illegal in the West within six months of their marriage, time sufficient for Georgi to be conceived but not for him to know what it was like to be a father, any more than to be a husband. The eventually established front in London as a wine importer – one of the capital’s best for more than fifteen years – enabled wine-buying trips to Europe where they had been able to meet for brief reunions but that was exactly how the encounters had seemed to both of them, holiday romances each knew would end. Throughout it all, each had remained faithful to the other, despite, in Berenkov’s case, frequent opportunities and frequent temptations as a London bon viveur. The three years in Moscow since his repatriation – three favoured, even indulgent years of special accommodation among the Kremlin elite, shopping facilities in concessionary stores, a Sochi villa whenever they required it – had been for both of them the happiest in a strange, unreal life. The only blur to that happiness was the difficulty that Berenkov had in getting to know his son and that was not a difficulty of dislike or youthful rebellion, because the boy knew enough of what his father had been doing to accept his mother’s insistence that Berenkov rightfully deserved the award as a Hero of the Soviet Union. It was, rather, the difficulty of strangers becoming father and son.

Valentina kissed him and held him tightly and he held her tightly too and then she led him into the apartment and poured him the scotch whisky their concessionary facilities allowed them, neat, without water or ice, the way he’d taught her it was properly taken in the West.

‘Dinner won’t be long,’ she said.

‘No hurry.’

‘Georgi is skating.’

‘What about the examinations?’ asked Berenkov. They were preliminary, before the proper graduation tests and if he achieved the necessary grades the boy was eligible for foreign exchange consideration; the possibility of Georgi going to the West – that amorphous place which had robbed her for so many years of a husband – was an increasing point of dissent between Valentina and Berenkov.

‘He thinks he did well,’ she replied. ‘He won’t know for some time.’

‘How well?’ persisted Berenkov.

‘Top five,’ said Valentina, unhappily. She was a petite, almost birdlike woman, neat and precise, a comparison in opposites to Berenkov’s expansive, casual bulk.

‘So he could qualify?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He could qualify.’

‘He’d benefit, going somewhere like America to finish his education,’ said Berenkov, aware of the familiar hesitation. ‘A lot of our people do it.’

‘I lost one person I love for too long to the West,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to lose another.’

‘It wouldn’t be for long; two years at the most,’ he said.

‘Still too long,’ she insisted stubbornly.

‘Something I never expected has happened,’ said Berenkov, wanting to move away from their usual disagreement.

She looked up to him, waiting. He held out the glass and she obediently refilled it, giving him the opportunity to decide what he could and could not say about Charlie Muffin. He should not have told her at all, of course, but Berenkov never conformed to any set of rules. When he finished telling her of Charlie’s Moscow arrival she said, ‘Will I meet him? Will he come here, perhaps?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Berenkov. ‘Maybe.’

‘He gave you back to me,’ said Valentina, simply. ‘I’d so much like to thank him.’

‘Maybe,’ repeated Berenkov, savouring the whisky and wishing it were the single malt he’d enjoyed in London.

‘Alexei?’

‘What?’ he said.

‘Do you miss it?’

‘Miss what?’

‘The West?’ asked the woman, anxiously. ‘The life you led there.’

Berenkov looked back at the whisky he had been contemplating. ‘Yes,’ he said, honestly, because one of the understandings of their relationship was that they were always honest with each other. ‘There are many things that I miss about it…’ He looked up at her, smiling. ‘But there are many things about living in Moscow that I prefer. And the most important of those is you.’

She didn’t answer his smile, remaining serious-faced. ‘You’d never do it again, would you?’ she said. ‘You’d never go away and leave me again?’

‘Never,’ assured Berenkov, seeing her need. ‘For the rest of our lives, we’re going to be together.’

On the other side of Moscow, Charlie Muffin managed to complete his sweep of the apartment before Sampson returned. He located six listening devices. Nosy lot of buggers, he thought.