Guy Adams - The Clown Service

‘No thank you, dear,’ she replied, giving him a wave and pulling herself over the wall into the next garden along. ‘I think I can manage.’

A Russian sets great stock by his homeland. Even one who has defected, like me, finds it hard to let go. Patriotism was a badge you could wear, a patch you stitched over the wounds of the state. I’m over-simplifying, of course, but you’re not here for a lesson in loving your country. You want to hear about Krishnin – don’t worry, we’ll get to him in time. In those days the country was a ruin of haves and have-nots; things were hard, and the only way you ignored the fractures, the compromises and the discomfort was to sew that patch on and swear to yourself that everything you did was for the best.

I never wore it comfortably.

My father had been stationed over here under a French passport since the late fifties. He spoke the language fluently and his accent was natural enough, especially to London ears.

My mother’s death left me with no other family, so he was given leave to have me with him. Had anyone thought him important, it would not have been allowed; I would have been a distraction, a weakness, a target. But he was a nobody, an unused asset who spent most of his life working as a grocer in Surbiton. Some nights he would get drunk and rage about having been forgotten, abandoned over here to a pointless life. In truth I think he rather enjoyed it. I certainly did. Would you rather be a teenager in Moscow or London? I was there at the birth of rock’n’roll and shrinking hemlines.

He liked to pretend he was important – don’t we all? He received his final insult from the bumper of a car on Tottenham Court Road, eliminated not by enemy agents but by a salesman who wasn’t looking where he was going. My father died as he had lived, unnoticed and still feeling ill-used.

I should have been brought back to Russia but the lack of interest towards my father extended to me. I ended up in the care of another officer, a dour, isolated man who blessed me with his indifference. His attitude towards me was fluid: I was a burden, but I was also a useful worker. Soon, I was performing courier runs and surveillance tasks, the grunt work that nobody else wanted.

When Olag Krishnin arrived in the winter of ‘63, I was seventeen, and soon found myself one of the men under his command, shifting packing crates, cooking food, keeping watch. We were based in a warehouse by the river, a good location; it was a credible hive of activity in the middle of a dead zone. Nobody paid us much attention.

People claimed Krishnin was charming, but I never saw it myself. Perhaps it was the unblinkered eyes of youth, but when I met him I knew I was in the company of a monster. Later, as I began to get authority and respect (and eventually the section he had once controlled) I found out what his masters had thought of him. They were afraid. He terrified them. You think it was August Shining that ended Krishnin’s career in espionage? Only by default. He had already been marked as a threat. Agents had been sent to deal with him. If Shining hadn’t pulled the trigger, someone else would have done. He was uncontrollable, he was dangerous and, above all, he was quite, quite, mad.

I came across him once, just sitting on his own in the corner of that warehouse. I don’t think he knew I was watching him but he just sat there in the semi-dark, whispering to himself and working at the skin beneath his fingernails with the point of a stone he had found. That was the Krishnin I remember, not the authoritarian, the magician, the master spy, no… To me Krishnin will always be the madman in the dark making his fingers bleed.

I knew little about the operation. We just followed orders, believed what we wanted to believe and did as we were told. Krishnin was not a man you questioned.

What we didn’t know was that Operation Black Earth was not officially sanctioned. Instead it was the conclusion of a path Krishnin had followed since the war. He saw it as his master plan, the ultimate strike against the West.

He had been working with a German scientist, Hans Sünner, off and on for years. Like Krishnin, Sünner’s interests lay in combining modern scientific thinking with magical methodology. Most of his work was nonsense. Years later I worked through his notes in the hope of finding salvageable material. I came away with little more than a headache and a profound contempt for a stupid man with a dull mind. Krishnin did not share my opinion. To him Sünner was the guiding light in a number of his later operations and experiments.

A few of us had been working late in the warehouse. I say working; when Krishnin was not there his authority dwindled. The men liked to talk brave when they knew they could not be heard. They called him the Soviet Satan, Comrade Frankenstein… names I can’t help but wonder if he would have relished. There were five of us in total, hidden away on the upper floor, drinking and playing cards. We didn’t imagine we were ever under any threat from your country’s authorities. I assumed they would assess the work as we had: grotesque but pointless, no threat to anyone. I, in my ignorant way, just picked up on the mood of the others and adopted the same casual air. I was living in a cheap room of my own by that point, a cold and wet little place that I tried to avoid spending time in. The landlady had designs on me. I think she had designs on everybody . So, I would hang around with the others, drink their liquor and smoke their cigarettes. Sometimes I would even win a hand or two. That was as good as life could get back then.

Despite our lack of concern we had guarded against being caught unawares. The rear entrance was alarmed. So there we were, half drunk and happy without the shadow of Krishnin, when suddenly the alarm went off.

Leonid was the one who always pulled rank; he had been an officer in the army and never failed to remind us of the fact. The minute the alarm sounded he was whispering orders, demanding we dowse the lights and get ready to either fight or make a break for it, depending on who it was that trying to creep up on us.

We lay in wait at the top of the stairs, listening as two people – Shining and another man, whose name I never learned – broke in through the rear door and began to nose around.

I was actually terrified. I hadn’t seen combat, I just fetched and carried, kept my head down. It had been easy to forget that I was part of a force on enemy soil, a spy who would likely be shot if discovered. I think I had subconsciously adopted the country as my own even then, a problem I had to deal with many times over my subsequent career.

Once we were sure what we were dealing with, Leonid went first. Shining had been heading up the stairs and Leonid shone his torch on him, pointing his gun at the young man’s head while a couple of the others ran down the stairs past him, to detain his companion.

It was a brief and painless business. Shining’s associate fired a single shot but didn’t manage to hit anybody; I think he was too surprised to aim properly.

I was sent to contact Krishnin – a pointless exercise, I would soon discover, as he was already on his way to the warehouse. I have no idea whether he had been aware of Shining’s interest or was there through dumb luck – I never found out.

At the time I didn’t care. I was happy to leave the building, having no desire to see what was to happen to the two intruders. I was young and naive, but I wasn’t stupid. There was no way they would be leaving the warehouse alive.

Does it sound as if I’m trying to present myself in a positive light? Painting a picture of a reluctant young man caught up in business he had no taste for? Partly that was true, then. My career afterwards was another thing. I have not always been so reluctant in matters of violence; there’s plenty of blood on my hands. After that night there would be a period of chaos and uncertainty, one that I filled with training and preparation. I got out of the country for a while and when I returned I was not the uncertain boy who had left. I still could not claim the fervent ideologies of some of my peers, but I adopted my role with relish and determination. I have, in short, done many bad things for what I hope were the right reasons. That those reasons were contradictory to your government’s welfare I make no apology for. Both of our governments have torn at each other’s throats over the years. I am what I am.