Brian Freemantle - The Lost American

Ruth accepted that the apology in Blair’s card – that there was nothing really worth buying in Moscow for Paul’s birthday – was probably true but she still wished he’d tried, instead of enclosing an impersonal cheque. Trying for something different she took both boys on one of the cruise trips along the Potomac, on a boat where it was possible to eat. Afterwards they went to the Biograph in Georgetown because a movie was showing she knew Paul particularly wanted to see and even though they had the big tubs of popcorn she took them to eat, afterwards, at the French restaurant on the opposite side of M Street.

‘I’d like you to write to your father when we get back, to thank him.’

‘What for?’ demanded Paul belligerently.

‘Your present,’ Ruth replied carefully. She wouldn’t fight, not on his birthday.

‘Twenty lousy bucks!’

‘Stop it, Paul,’ she said evenly. ‘He’s your father and he loves you and it made more sense for him to send you the money to buy something you really want instead of him guessing.’

‘If he hadn’t run out on us he wouldn’t have had to guess, would he?’ said the boy.

‘He hasn’t run out on you,’ said Ruth, maintaining her control. ‘He divorced me.’

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’ asked John.

‘No, it’s not,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you he loves you. And he does.’

Paul took his father’s cheque from his pocket, looked at it and said, ‘He can go stick it up his ass.’

‘Stop that!’ said Ruth, her voice rising for the first time. ‘I will not have you use language like that in front of me.’

Paul tore the cheque in half and then in half again, letting the pieces fall into the ashtray between them.

‘That was stupid!’ said Ruth.

The boy looked up at her and said, ‘So’s not having a father.’

Sokol was a bachelor with no outside interests and thought passingly that it was fortunate because his absorption with the problems arising from the famine meant he stayed all the time at Dzerzhinsky Square, frequently sleeping on a collapsible cot in his office. Despite the pressure, he refused to delegate to his subordinates, wanting awareness of everything at the time it happened, not days or weeks later when the advantage might be lost. It was almost midnight and his eyes were drooping with tiredness when he came upon the report on the newly-arrived Englishman. He blinked tightly against the fatigue, concentrating upon the accounts from the permanent observers at the embassy and from the guards and workers in the foreigners’ compound. There appeared to be a friendship with the American Resident, Sokol noticed. But then the previous man, Ingram, had been a friend, so the introduction was obvious. He put aside the report. There was nothing to indicate that Brinkman was doing anything but settling in. There was no cause for any special activity against the man.

Orlov was born in Georgia, at the port of Poti. He’d tried, prompted by the urgings of his anxious mother and aided by the blurred, already fading photographs, later to recall his father and said he could, because he knew it was important to the woman, but truthfully he could not. He could remember, however, the anguish. The helpless crying and afterwards – for several months – the long days and the long nights she spent in her room by herself, refusing to emerge and for whole weeks not bothering to eat, although it was not until years later that he came to know what Leningrad meant beyond the name of a city and realised that the desperate mourning had been for his father’s death during the Nazi siege. It resulted in Orlov being brought up almost entirely by his grandfather, a fiercely moustacheod man – and to a lesser extent by his grandmother. Orlov knew now that the bellowed talk and the guffawed laughter and the belly slapping and the drinking – corks were never preserved for replacement, but always discarded on opening – were covers for an inferiority, the man’s inner fear. But as a child he lived in permanent awe of his grandfather, thinking him the bravest man who lived. Certainly that’s how Orlov considered him after that day on the sea although like the realisation about fear Orlov recognised what had happened to have been through stupidity and their survival through luck. The old man was a fisherman, so he should have known better, even though when they sailed there had been no hint of the storm, not the smallest cloud in the sky. He’d taken them too far out for a coastal dory, and ignored the clouds when they appeared, first a bubbled line on the horizon and then, with such frightening quickness, churning out over the sky and completely blackening the sun. The old man reacted then, of course, trying to get them back to safety but the wind was already too strong, tearing at the full sail he first attempted and threatening to overturn the boat, so that he had to trim it practically to the degree of pointlessness. He’d roared and shouted, making his own noise to give him courage over the sound of the storm, and made Orlov take the tiller while he rowed, the effort against the heaving waves as futile as maintaining the sail. The old man had shown some seamanship, Orlov supposed, keeping their constantly-swamped head into the wind and despite his age – he must have been nearly seventy – never flagging throughout the long night baling the water, to keep them afloat. The storm eased by early morning, so that they could put more sail on but when they were actually in sight of the harbour the sea played a trick, like the old man should have known the sea often did, suddenly trapping them in a confluence of converging currents and eddies and tidal shifts. They’d spun, helplessly, tiller and sails and oars useless, caught in a sort of whirlpool that Orlov had thought was going to suck them down with them powerless to prevent it. Which was how he felt now. Everything was happening too quickly – with the unexpected quickness of that childhood storm – and he hadn’t anticipated any of it and felt himself being sucked deeper and deeper and being powerless to do anything about it. He’d known his position and the esteem in which he was held – if it had been less the danger to Natalia would not have been so great – but no way, not in his talks and discussions with Harriet nor in his own, private considerations, had he anticipated how quickly he would be caught up in affairs and events upon his return to Moscow. He’d actually expected a transitional period, a time when he would be spared from the ministry to settle back into the country, which was when he had intended as kindly and as painlessly as possible formally separating and divorcing himself from Natalia. But it hadn’t happened that way. There had been the need constantly to attend the Kremlin, practically from the first day, and now he felt as trapped as inexorably as he had been that day long ago in the spinning water. Trapped by the ambition of a trusted and dear friend and trapped in his relationship with Natalia, from whom he should have been distancing himself and with whom, instead, he was increasingly resuming the complete and normal married life that had been interrupted by his posting to America. That day at sea the spinning had stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the sea flattened into an unnatural calmness, enabling them easily to get back to shore. Now Orlov felt himself caught between two different sorts of tempest and couldn’t imagine a way that either would blow themselves out.

There was a meeting with Sevin the morning before his election, an unnecessary preparation for his appearance before the Central Committee but an indulgence the old man required and which had to be allowed.

‘This is it!’ said Sevin, enthusiastically. ‘This is the beginning.’ At once he corrected himself, given to flamboyance in his speech. ‘No,’ he said, ‘definitely not the beginning. The final, well deserved end.’