Brian Freemantle: The Bearpit

Vasili Dmitrevich Malik was a huge man, barrel-chested, bulge-bellied and well over six feet, maybe as tall as six and a half feet. And the disfigurement appeared strangely to accord him even greater height, from how he held himself because of it. The injury occurred during the Stalingrad siege, long before General Zhukov’s relief forces had encircled von Paulus’ attackers. No one had ever been able to establish how it had happened – certainly not Malik, who’d mercifully been rendered immediately unconscious – but the consensus was a shrapnel ricochet from an incoming Soviet shell. It would have had to have been a very large and very sharp piece of metal. Malik’s left arm had been instantly severed high at the shoulder, which had further been crushed by the impact. It was still only October, 1942 – almost three months before the lifting of the Nazi assault – but even by then only the most basic medical treatment had been possible. The doctors had been able to save his life by sealing the obvious wound, although they’d had little anaesthetic left either, but there were no facilities in the holed and cratered makeshift field hospital to rebuild the shattered shoulder. It had set pressed high, almost in a hump. Malik had completely adjusted to the loss of his arm, not needing any assistance after the first six months, but the right side of his body remained lower than the left and as he had grown older he had developed the tendency to walk with something resembling a limp. In the last five years it had been necessary to have his right shoe reinforced, to compensate for the constant pressure.

What other – and different – types of pressure was he going to encounter because of the transfer of Chief Directorates, Malik wondered. A lot, he guessed: some that were impossible, at this early stage, even to anticipate. It was inevitable that Victor Kazin, a man he had once considered his closest friend, would regard the split directorship as a reduction of his authority. Logically it had to be so despite the insistence of KGB chairman Victor Chebrikov at the appointment interview that it was merely a provisional division of the largest and most important Chief Directorate within the organization. How long had it been, since his last proper encounter with Kazin? It would have to be almost forty years, he supposed: the three of them at the Gertsena apartment, Olga sobbing emptily and he and Kazin holding back when each had wanted physically to tear at the other: kill each other. Certainly that’s what he’d wanted to do. Kazin would have won if it had come to that, Malik conceded, because he’d hardly healed by then. He remembered realizing that at the time but he’d still wanted to try because the hatred was so strong. So what about now? Was there any hate left? No, Malik decided at once. It was all too long ago; too distant. There was no hatred, no disappointment, no urge to cause hurt. He’d actually found it possible to love again, Malik remembered; love again completely. He wondered if he would have difficulty in recognizing the other man.

And he was going to have to recognize him. Recognize him and work with him. An experiment, the KGB chairman had called the decision to divide the Directorate control: an experiment from which greater efficiency was expected. If only the chairman had known what real sort of experiment he was creating!

Malik sighed, staring around the still-new office, momentarily unwilling to confront the necessary decision. It had been naive expecting the approach to come from Kazin; preposterous, even if he had just been the newcomer into the other man’s domain. And he was anything but that. His had to be the offer, not the other way around.

Kazin’s agreement to Malik’s request for a meeting took three days, which Malik considered pointedly too long, almost childishly petulant; he, not Kazin, had been the victim, after all! Kazin’s memorandum stipulated the encounter should be in his office – making Malik go to him – rather than somewhere neutral like the Dzerzhinsky Square headquarters. Passingly Malik thought of suggesting an alternative but just as quickly dismissed the idea: it would have been matching petulance with petulance. He did not want any longer to fight.

Kazin’s office was at the front of the Directorate headquarters and obviously better established than that of Malik. The furnishings were predominantly Scandinavian, all light wood except for a conference area to one side where there were dark leather chairs and a couch and a long, chair-bordered table around which at least a dozen people could have assembled. Kazin’s desk, which was quite bare, even the blotter unmarked, was directly in front of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the traffic-clogged ring road. There was complete double glazing, creating a disorienting effect of scurrying vehicles devoid of noise, television picture with the sound turned down.

Malik hesitated immediately inside the door, unsure now that they were at last face to face how to proceed. Malik’s immediate impression was of Kazin’s weight. When they were friends the man had been stocky, but Malik had never imagined his becoming this fat. Kazin seemed bloated, like an inflated carnival figure. Malik knew he would not have recognized the other man if the encounter had been unexpected.

From the far side of the room, seated behind his desk, Kazin examined Malik. The hair, which Kazin remembered to be deeply black, was absolutely white now but still thick, and Malik wore it surprisingly long, almost an affectation. And the stance was peculiar. After the return from Stalingrad and that one confrontation there had not been many meetings – not with Malik, at least – so Kazin’s strongest memory was of the man before his injury: certainly there was no recollection of him like this, oddly sloped and lopsided. Old; until this moment he’d never thought of Malik as being old.

‘Victor Ivanovich,’ greeted Malik, not moving.

‘Vasili Dmitrevich,’ responded Kazin. He did not rise from his high-backed seat.

They remained motionless, each looking expressionlessly at the other. It was Malik who moved, limping uninvited further into the room. There was a stiff-backed seat near the desk but Malik ignored it, making much of bringing one of the leather chairs from the conference area and lowering himself heavily into it.

‘I did not seek the transfer,’ announced Malik at once.

Kazin said nothing.

‘And there’s no feeling left, about what happened before.’

Why was the lying bastard even bothering! Kazin said: ‘Comrade Chairman Chebrikov explained the idea to me: an experimental division from which a permanent decision could be made.’

He’d made concessions enough, Malik decided. By rights Kazin should be the supplicant, not him. Malik said: ‘So there has to be a working arrangement, difficult though it might be.’

You can’t begin to imagine the difficulties I am going to create, thought Kazin. Stiffly he said: ‘Comrade Chairman Chebrikov defined the responsibilities, too.’ And allocated you Afghanistan, Kazin thought: he could not have devised the trap better himself. The division of the First Chief Directorate between them was not going to be the demotion that everyone would regard it as being: it was going to be the opportunity for which he’d dreamed, all these years. His chance: the chance he was not going to miss.

‘Olga’s dead,’ said Malik, in another abrupt announcement.

‘I know,’ said Kazin. Like I know the very day and the very year and the very cemetery plot in which she is buried: the plot I have discreetly visited so often and from which I have so often cleared the wind-flustered leaves and so often tidied the stones and where I have held so many one-sided conversations. One-sided conversations where ‘why’ had been the most frequently uttered word, the most frequently uttered question.