Brian Freemantle - The Bearpit

The executions were carried out on the same day as the verdicts were returned, in Lefortovo prison. Panchenko walked unaided to the post and refused to be hooded, standing upright and gazing defiantly at the firing squad. By then Kazin’s mind had gone completely; he had to be carried to the stand but just before the command was given he started to laugh hysterically.

The Crisis Committee were involved from the moment of the arrival at Langley of the translated dossiers, long before their publication in the New York Times. That first day Harry Myers rightly judged their propaganda worth: it was he who used the word dynamite in the promotion cable to Drew.

‘Who’s got whom by the balls now!’ demanded Norris when the success became more fully evident.

‘And Kapalet’s right there, in the centre of things,’ said Crookshank. ‘If this is his first shot what the hell is there to come in the future?’

‘You know what this means!’ demanded Myers, sniggering in his excitement. ‘OK, I know we’ve got a long way to go and the worm’s still in the apple here some place, but with this material we’ve drawn even.’

‘Better than even,’ disputed Norris. ‘John Willick’s story was a five-minute wonder, forgotten already. And only we know we’ve got an ongoing problem. We can keep this running for months; for years.’

‘Kapalet isn’t our only bonus,’ reminded the converted Crookshank. ‘Yevgennie Levin is our ace in the hole.’

‘And he’s already settling in,’ reported Myers, whose job had been saved by supposed reversal. ‘We’re going good: real good.’

The New York Times exposure was the first indication Yuri had that he might be safe and within twenty-four hours there was a personal message from Vladislav Belov, informing him of the arrest of Kazin and Panchenko. It said, further, that the recall order had been cancelled. With it came the assurance, following Yuri’s full report of his encounter with Petr Levin, that Natalia was soon to get her exit visa.

Yuri was determined to celebrate but could not give Caroline any explanation for it, so he said it was because he’d got a salary increase, which she seemed to accept. They went across into Brooklyn to the River Cafe where she had taken him that first night and then, the nostalgia established, to the same Mexican cafe. He was conscious of the mood, even before they left the restaurant, and when he made the approach in bed she held him off and said: ‘I want to talk, instead.’

‘What about?’

‘Us,’ she said. ‘I told you a long time ago that I loved you. Don’t you think I’ve been very patient?’

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘So?’

‘I think I love you too.’

‘What are we going to do about it?’

Did she love him enough to be told the truth? Absurd thought, more absurd than considering defection before he’d known what had happened to Kazin. He said: ‘What do you want to do about it?’

‘Just because one marriage didn’t work doesn’t mean I’m not willing to give it another try.’

What sort of conversation was this! He said: ‘There are problems.’

‘Like the marriage you said didn’t exist? These absences are pretty damned odd, you know.’

‘I didn’t lie: I’m not married.’

‘What’s the problem, then?’

Could there be a way fully of adopting the William Bell identity? He said: ‘Let me try to work something out.’

‘How long?’

‘Soon,’ he promised. ‘I’ll try to make something work soon.’ What? he demanded of himself. What the hell could he do? Did he love Caroline as much as his forgiving father had loved his unfaithful mother? A pointless question, leading nowhere. The letters were still unread, in the safe-deposit box, he remembered suddenly.

Yuri ran, literally and from the decision because it was a decision he couldn’t make. He told himself the obvious way to end the affair with Caroline was belatedly to agree to Granov’s suggestion about closing down the apartment, and just disappear. Then he told himself that Caroline might cause difficulty with the Amsterdam publication, trying to find him, and eventually confronted the fact that he was putting his own barriers in the way of his own problem. That he had, simply and brutally, to say he didn’t love her and wanted it over. And couldn’t do that because he did love her and didn’t want it over. The one situation for which there had been no training and no preparation because it was inconceivable to anyone in Dzerzhinsky Square that a Russian intelligence officer would fall in love with anyone but another Russian, preferably another KGB officer.

He lied about an assignment in South America and the night before he left 53rd Street they had their first real argument. At its height she actually asked him if he wanted to call it quits – giving him his opportunity – and Yuri said no, just a little more time, and she said how much and he said until he returned, just pushing back his self-imposed and impossible deadline.

Yuri hated Riverdale and the claustrophobia of the Soviet compound, refusing to mix or become part of their limited social environment, finding it easy to make comparisons with long-forgotten Kabul.

It was his third evening there, his mind constantly upon Caroline, that he recalled again the unread letters between his parents still in the safe-deposit box in the Second Avenue bank. He went there the following day, early, wanting to give himself enough time and when he explained it would not be a short visit the bank official allocated a study room just off the main, box-lined vault.

Yuri gazed first at the fading photographs, trying for an emotion he had not been able to find in the cramped loft in the Lenin Hills dacha. The soft-featured woman, hair caught high and full on top of her head, did look too demure and innocent to have done what she did, cheat and cuckold. Had she loved them both? Or just turned to Kazin in the terror of war, frightened and confused as people were frightened and confused in war, doing things which at any other time would be unthinkable? His father had been a handsome man, reflected Yuri. And before the deforming injury he would have been impressive, too, with his broadness and his height: it would have been easy to be proud of someone like his father. Had his mother felt pride, as well as love? She had loved, Yuri knew: his father had told him during that stumbled, inadequate account. And it was inadequate: still so many unanswered questions.

The last photograph was of the three of them together, at the wedding. Yuri concentrated upon Kazin. My supporter, his father had said. He’d also said he did not know how long the affair had been going on. Not then, surely? Surely she hadn’t married one while she was sleeping with the other? Yuri tried to remember his impression when he’d first seen the picture. Proprietorial, he recalled. Kazin appeared to be looking at his mother as if there was already something between them, an understanding. Yuri shook his head in the empty, metalled room, refusing the impression. It was a trick of the camera, a half-caught expression. How could it be anything else?

Now that the personal danger was over – now that Kazin was dead – Yuri felt differently about the imagery of the man. Later, during their confrontation, he had been over-indulged and bloated but that man actually wasn’t there in the photo, and it had been wrong to think him so. Heavy, certainly – a hint of how he became – but no more than well built. Still impossible to understand…

Yuri stopped the pointless drift, laying the photographs aside to turn to the frail, brittle correspondence, lifting the bundles completely from the box to set them out on the greater space of the table.