Brian Freemantle: The Blind Run

Sampson gestured to the last of the intercepted messages, the British identification response to the promised contact with the Soviet spy. ‘It’s Chekhov,’ identified Sampson. ‘It comes from The Three Sisters. ’

‘I’m aware of that,’ said Berenkov. ‘I was once very familiar with the works of Chekhov.’ The huge Russian paused and said, ‘Are you familiar with another quotation, “When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease that means it can’t be cured”?’

‘No,’ said Sampson.

‘It’s from The Cherry Orchard,’ said Berenkov. ‘I always preferred The Cherry Orchard. ’

The interview with Kalenin took place the same evening, a difficult encounter between friends.

‘There will have to be a suspension, initially.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’d recognised it a long time ago, of course. Hoped that it wouldn’t happen.’

‘It’s wrong, you know?’ said Berenkov.

Kalenin raised his hand, halting the other man, not wanting to prolong the meeting any longer than was absolutely necessary. ‘Please,’ he said. “Let’s leave it until the formal enquiry.”

They both tried hard – futilely – to maintain some sort of form to their relationship but it was hollowed out inside and with every day, like something hollowed out inside, it collapsed further in upon itself. Charlie refused, at first, to believe he couldn’t make her change her mind but as she had that night in the rooftop restaurant with its view of Moscow Natalia refused even to let him explain, demanding – with increasing anger – that he shouldn’t make things any more difficult for her than they already were. Evenings and days which had been relaxed and easy became tense and then hostile. They made love like strangers, mechanically, and then they stopped doing that, more and more becoming strangers.

Charlie considered missing the Thursday meeting but it was only two days from the initial confrontation with Natalia and Charlie’s professionalism didn’t allow him. It was as pointless as every other one had been but this time he concentrated, looking to see if Natalia would check. He didn’t detect her but then he hadn’t on the other occasions. He didn’t ask her and she didn’t volunteer the information.

It finally convinced Charlie that there was no further purpose in him going again. And as the difficulties grew with Natalia he realised, too, that it meant he had to leave. With belated honesty Charlie conceded to himself that for a long time she had been the only reason for his staying anyway. As with everything else, for so long, the apparent answer to one problem created another. He couldn’t just go, like he’d arranged with Wilson. He’d become involved with Natalia and guessed the authorities would be aware of it. And if they weren’t already they soon would be, when they investigated his flight; and they would investigate it, aware of the damage he could cause because of his admission to the spy school. To flee, as he now had to flee, would mean Natalia being arrested and interrogated and probably jailed. The awareness spurred Charlie into trying to make fresh approaches to her, to warn her, but always she refused the conversation. It led to one of their biggest arguments so far. He accused her of sticking her head into the sand, like an ostrich refusing to face reality, and she yelled back that Russia was her reality and that with its head in the sand an ostrich at least remained where it was. The outburst meant she knew – or at least guessed – what he wanted to say and assuming that Charlie argued that she didn’t know the risks she was taking. Distraught – actually crying – Natalia said she did and that she didn’t care and when he accused her of being stupid and child-like and not even making sense she fled, locking herself in the bathroom. Which added another level to the barrier growing between them because it meant eventually she had the embarrassment of unlocking the door and emerging again. She only did so after shouting through the door that she didn’t want to talk about it any more. Charlie’s instinct was to say they hadn’t talked about anything but instead he agreed and they sat in silence, not even looking at each other, and Charlie fully accepted just how completely things had ended between them.

He still refused to abandon her, however. He spent nights away from her, alone in his own apartment, needing the relief as much as Natalia did but needing more the solitude to find a seemingly impossible way to save her from any retribution. She wasn’t the only one facing retribution, he realised. From the early meetings with Alexei Berenkov Charlie knew that the permission to appoint him to the spy school in the first place had been approved by someone else but Berenkov had clearly been the instigator. So he’d suffer. Charlie sighed, trying to rationalise. But then Berenkov had always been going to suffer. Whether the attitude was cynical or professional or both, Charlie had known from the very first moment of contact – contact he couldn’t have refused – that the moment he entered the embassy gates, Berenkov would be the loser. That was business, decided Charlie, confronting the familiar thought. About Berenkov he could have done nothing – do nothing – but he’d knowingly pursued an involvement with Natalia – although not guessing what it would come to mean to him – and she didn’t deserve to suffer because of it. And she’d protected him. She’d said nothing about the GUM visits, when she could have done. And still wasn’t saying anything when, even if things weren’t actually out in the open, they were at least understood.

When the idea occurred to him Charlie snatched at it, like a drowning man at a lifebelt. But having got its support he looked around, like the same drowning man might look for the lurking shark that would pull him down again to destruction. It wasn’t perfect, Charlie recognised, with his ingrained objectivity. In fact – for a lifebelt – it was pretty waterlogged but it had a chance. Timing would be important. Absolute and utter timing, so there would be incontrovertible proof of her loyalty. Which meant – finally – that she had to hear him out. If it meant physically holding her down and keeping her hands away from her ears she had to hear him out.

‘No,’ she said at once, when she answered his telephone call. ‘I don’t want us to meet again. I’ve thought about it and I think it should end, now.’

‘We must meet,’ said Charlie, with quiet insistence, determined against any dispute that would harden her refusal. He added, ‘We must meet, for the last time.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ he said, anxiously.

‘I think so.’

‘It’s important,’ insisted Charlie. Determined to get her to agree, he said, ‘It’s not just you, Natalia. There’s Eduard.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s Eduard. There’s always been Eduard.’

To have gone to a restaurant would have made it into something it wasn’t and neither wanted to meet at their respective apartments, determined at the moment of parting upon pleasant memories instead of final unhappiness. They just walked – although nowhere near Red Square and GUM, because of other unpleasant recollections – choosing the embankment, watching the scurrying river craft and the misted insects. Natalia held his hand, schoolgirlish, her arm consciously touching his, the reserve of the immediate past weeks gone, and Charlie felt the despair lumped in him, having physically to swallow against the emotion, at the complete awareness of what he was giving up and could never hope to get again. He’d lost Edith and now he was going to lose Natalia and in a rare but lasting moment of self-pity Charlie wondered why he always had to lose and why, just once, he couldn’t win, just a little bit.