John Gardner - Man From Barbarossa

‘Lazarus? Really?’ Her voice had become breathy. Oh, God, he thought, Helen should have been kept out of it. He had told Stepakov that the woman was possibly a weak link. Mouthy, he had called her, meaning she was insecure. Stepakov said that was Chushi Pravosudia ’s problem.

‘Can he phone you? I’ll get him to give you a bell the minute he gets in.’ She was obviously excited, knowing her lover was committed to the cause of a new Communist freedom. You could sense that she felt Lazarus also included her.

‘No. I have to be out,’ he said, very quickly. ‘Out now, in fact. But this is urgent. Ask him to stay by the dog, would you?’ Lyko was particularly proud of this last. As often as not, someone from South London would call the telephone the dog. Rhyming slang, dog and bone, phone.

‘I walked along Oxford Street, turned left, and made my way through to Marylebone High Street,’ he told the silent, slightly cynical audience in the sterile room below the Russian forest. ‘Give them the tradecraft,’ Stepakov had instructed him. ‘Don’t elaborate. They’ll want to hear you did the job well. These people believe in the rituals. They’re old Cold War veterans and won’t be impressed by your usual flamboyant lecture style. And no shoddiness, Vladi. Understand?’

So he said nothing of what was going on in his head. Nothing about the pain of coming to England and only spending time in London. Lyko had learned, studied and taught English for the best part of his life. He loved, lived, and breathed Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, the poets Wordsworth and Shelley. He had even instilled a love for Shelley in the clown-faced Stepakov. In England he wanted to visit the libraries, the old sites. He wanted to take a train to Stratford-upon-Avon and see the views that Shakespeare had seen. His mind was always on the great writers and poets when he was in England, but he told them none of this.

Lyko walked on into Marylebone High Street where he used another public telephone to call George. George was in and said, ‘Yes, yes, of course. God, I thought this would never come. When do we leave?’

‘As soon as I can get hold of Guy.’

‘I’ll stay in. Let me know as soon as you’ve got it organised.’

‘I’ll call you sometime tonight.’

Lyko walked back into Oxford Street, hailed a cab and asked to be dropped at the Hilton. He had not spotted the surveillance, but knew it would be there. Stepakov’s people were good, and they were everywhere. He relied on them to pick up any watchers Chushi Pravosudia might have on his back. There had never been any sign of people following him, and Stepakov’s men and women had come almost to second guess the little professor. They certainly knew his haunts and his morals. He had given no signal of success, so they would probably be in the Curzon Street/Shepherd Market area before him. ‘All the time,’ he told them in the sterile room, ‘I doubled back. I lingered at shop windows. I detected no surveillance. I even spent half-an-hour in the Selfridges department store. People were returning gifts that were sub-standard, or broken. I saw a lot of women returning underwear.’ A schoolboy snigger. ‘Then I checked the street again.’

In telling the story, the professor was as honest as possible, though he clouded the next hour and a half by simply stating baldly, ‘I went with a whore to pass the time.’

There was a splutter from Stepakov who was well aware of the way in which Vladimir Lyko passed the time with whores. He did it regularly on Chushi Pravosudia money whenever he got out of the country. His favourite was a tall black girl with immense breasts who worked the Shepherd Market area blatantly, unconcerned by the laws that banned prostitutes from the streets. Stepakov knew all about her. How they called her Shiner, and how she specialised in helping men like Lyko live out their fantasies. Stepakov’s people had even bugged her little work apartment near Curzon Street and heard her tell of the client who liked to crawl around on all fours while she pelted him with oranges. He even brought the oranges with him while she provided the strange leather underwear on which he insisted. Stepakov considered this a great waste of oranges and was pleased that Lyko’s sexual fantasies were more comprehensible. Why, he could supply Vladi with lastochka who owned whips and chains, right there in Moscow.

By six on that bitter cold evening, the professor was back in Oxford Street and called Guy again, from another telephone kiosk. This time the cameraman was in, and elated by the news. They set up the meet for Gatwick airport the following afternoon.

‘Where’re we going?’ Guy asked.

‘You’ll see soon enough. Tomorrow. Three o’clock.’

The professor glossed over the following hours, leaping ahead to the next afternoon. ‘Here it began to get difficult. Helen turned up with the two men. They all insisted on her being with them. I had no papers for her. No visa. Nothing.’

This was real trouble. His instructions were clear. You will bring in the cameraman and sound assistant, they had told him. Now the two major players would not move without Helen who had often worked with them in the past. They argued that she was one of the team, so Lyko aborted that day’s departure, returned to London and made a crash call to Sweden.

At ten o’clock the following morning a special delivery reached him at the hotel, direct from Stockholm. These people were very efficient. He thought they must have prepared documents for all the recruits, for the package contained a visa stamp and extra papers for Helen.

‘You must understand that Chushi Pravosudia recruits from Britain, or anywhere else, were to use their own valid passports. They provided visas and other control documents. I was very concerned about being watched, because they seemed to have everything so tightly sewn up. Knew everything. So I made the next move quickly.’

He telephoned Sweden again, saying he was heading into place. Helsinki. The group would follow as he instructed them. They met at Gatwick, and he gave them the tickets, all rescheduled by telephone, once more from a public kiosk.

He flew out to Helsinki that night, direct by Finnair from Heathrow. Stepakov’s people picked him up at Vantaa. ‘The most delicate part was about to begin. If we pulled it off, we would be very close to penetrating the Scales of Justice ’s inner circle.’

The man who checked into the Hesperia Hotel under the name Dieter Frobe was not Lyko, but a trusted Stepakov agent, a former First Chief Directorate field agent who physically resembled the professor. They had briefed him thoroughly, and it was this man – in the sterile room they simply called him Dove – who had next made a crash call to the Swedish number, telling them there was a hold-up. The pigeons, he said, had been delayed. He would let them know as soon as they started to fly.

‘Sweden appeared to accept this calmly at first.’ Lyko was standing straighter, occasionally walking up and down as he went through the story of his little adventure. ‘By two days ago they had started to get frantic.’

‘We need the pigeons. We need them now.’ The voice from Sweden was sharp, commanding.

‘It’s no fault of mine,’ Dove told them, whining and laying it on with a trowel. ‘I’ve ordered them. It is a domestic matter. Be patient.’

‘The window is not large,’ by which they meant there was a serious time-scale problem, a window of opportunity.

The people whom Dove talked of as the pigeons were, in fact, long gone. All three, two men and a woman.

Lyko waited for them as they came off the Finnair flight from London. There was a car outside, he told them. He even helped them with the luggage. ‘We must make a short helicopter trip,’ he said.