Tom Smith - Child 44

Yet wasn’t this a presumption? What if the traitor was, as he’d confessed to being, a traitor? What if he’d somehow been working with Raisa? Perhaps he’d spoken the truth. Why was Leo so sure that this man was innocent? Why was he so sure his wife was innocent? After all, why did she befriend a dissident literature teacher? What was that coin doing in their apartment? Hadn’t the six other names listed in the confession been arrested and all been successfully interrogated? The list was proven and Raisa was on the list. Yes, she was a spy and here in his pocket was the copper coin, the evidence to prove it. He could place the coin on the desk and recommend that both she and Ivan Zhukov be taken in for questioning. He’d been played a fool. Vasili was right: she was a traitor. She was pregnant with another man’s child. Hadn’t he always known that she’d been unfaithful to him? She didn’t love him. He was sure of that. Why risk everything for her — a woman who was cold to him, a woman who at best tolerated him? She was a threat to everything he’d worked for, everything he’d won for his parents and for himself. She was a threat to the country, a country Leo had fought to defend.

It was quite clear: if Leo said she was guilty then this would end well for both him and his parents. That was guaranteed. It was the only safe thing to do. If this was a test of Leo’s character then Raisa would also be spared. And she would never need to know. If she was a spy then these men already had the evidence and were waiting to see if Leo was working with her. If she was a spy then he should denounce her, she deserved to die. The only course of action was to denounce his wife.

Major Kuzmin began the proceedings.

— Leo Stepanovich, we have reason to believe your wife is working for foreign agencies. You personally are not suspected of any crimes. This is the reason we’ve asked you to investigate the allegations. Please tell us what you have found.

Leo had the confirmation he was looking for. Major Kuzmin’s offer was clear. If he denounced his wife he’d have their continued confidence. What had Vasili said?

If you survive this scandal you’ll one day be running the MGB. I’m sure of it.

Promotion was a sentence away.

The room was silent. Major Kuzmin leaned forward.

— Leo?

Leo stood up, straightened the jacket of his uniform.

— My wife is innocent.

13 March

The car-assembly line switched over to the late shift. Ilinaya stopped work and began scrubbing her hands using a bar of black rancid-smelling soap, the only kind available if any was available at all. The water was cold, the soap wouldn’t lather — it simply disintegrated into greasy shards — but all she could think about were the hours between now and the beginning of her next shift. She had her night planned out. First, she’d finish scraping the oil and metal filings from under her fingernails. Then she was going home, changing her clothes, daubing some colour on her cheeks before heading to Basarov’s, a restaurant near the railway station.

Basarov’s was popular with people visiting on business, officials stopping over before they continued their journey on the Trans-Siberian railway east or west. The restaurant served food — millet soup, barley kasha and salted herring — all of which Ilinaya thought was terrible. More importantly it served alcohol. Since it was illegal to sell alcohol in public without selling food, meals were a means to an end, a plate of food was a permit to drink. In reality the restaurant was little more than a pick-up joint. The law that no individual was to be sold more than one hundred grams of vodka was ignored. Basarov, the manager and namesake of the restaurant, was always drunk and often violent and if Ilinaya wanted to ply her trade on his premises he wanted a cut. There was no way she could pretend she was drinking there for the fun of it whilst sneaking off with the occasional paying customer. No one drank there for the fun of it; it was a transient crowd, no locals. But that was an advantage. She couldn’t get work off the locals any more. She’d been sick recently — sores, redness, rashes, that kind of thing. A couple of regulars had come down with more or less the same symptoms and bad-mouthed her around town. Now she was reduced to dealing with people who didn’t know her, people who weren’t staying in town for long and who wouldn’t find out they were pissing pus until they reached Vladivostok or Moscow, depending on which way they were travelling. She didn’t take any pleasure from the idea of passing on some kind of bug even if they weren’t exactly nice people. But in this town seeing a doctor about a sexually transmitted infection was more dangerous than the infection itself. For an unmarried woman it was like handing in a confession, signed with a smear. She’d have to go to the black market for treatment. That required money, maybe a lot of money, and right now she was saving for something else, something far more important — her escape from this town.

By the time she’d arrived the restaurant was crowded and the windows steamed up. The air stank of makhorka , cheap tobacco. She’d heard drunken laughter fifty paces before stepping through the door. She’d guessed soldiers. She’d guessed right. There were often some kind of military exercises taking place in the mountains and off-duty personnel were normally directed here. Basarov catered specifically for this sort of clientele. He served watered-down vodka, claiming, if anyone complained and they often did, that it was a high-minded attempt to limit drunkenness. There were frequent fights. Even so, she knew that for all his talk about how hard his life was and how terrible his customers were, he made a tidy profit, selling the undiluted vodka he skimmed off. He was a speculator. He was scum. Just a couple of months ago she’d gone upstairs to pay him his weekly cut and, through a crack in his bedroom door, caught sight of him counting out rouble note after note after note, which he stored in a tin box tied shut with string. She’d watched, hardly daring to breathe, as he’d wrapped his box in a cloth before hiding it in his chimney. Ever since then she’d dreamed of stealing that money and making a break for it. Of course Basarov would snap her neck for sure if he caught up with her, but she figured that if he ever discovered his tin box was empty his heart would give out right there, by his chimney place. She was pretty sure his heart and that box were one and the same thing.

By her reckoning the soldiers were going to be drinking for another couple of hours. At the moment all they were doing was groping her, a privilege they weren’t paying for unless you counted free vodka as payment, which she did not. She surveyed the other customers, convinced she could earn a little extra money before the soldiers started clocking on. The military contingent took up the front tables, relegating the remaining customers to the back. These customers were sitting on their own — just them and their drinks and their plates of untouched food. No doubt about it: they were looking for sex. There was no other reason to hang around.

Ilinaya straightened her dress, ditched her glass and made her way through the soldiers, ignoring the pinches and remarks until she found herself at one of the back tables. The man sitting there was maybe forty, maybe a little younger. It was hard to tell. He wasn’t handsome, but she reckoned he’d probably pay a little more because of that. The better-looking ones sometimes got it into their heads money wasn’t necessary, like the arrangement might be mutually pleasurable. She sat down, sliding her leg up against his thigh and smiling: