“This man is the real thing then?”
“Yes.”
“What about the woman with him?”
Rachel smiled, she had to.
“Eleni. The little monster was the reason her nephew and her uncle were murdered, killed,” again she sighed, ‘but in some twisted way I think she genuinely love’s the little shit. Still, I’m hardly one to talk, I suppose. Not after I let Arkady Pavlovich get so deep inside my head that I started to forget who I was…”
When the Foreign Secretary and Rachel Piotrowska entered the small ground floor annexe where Nicolae Ceaușescu and his nurse Eleni had been parked awaiting Tom Harding-Grayson’s convenience the middle-aged Greek woman immediately began to complain about the treatment she and her ‘friend’ had received since they had got off the plane earlier that day.
Rachel held up her hands.
“I’m sorry. People are going hungry in this country,” she explained in the woman’s idiosyncratic, very Cypriot tongue. Then she looked at the one-legged prematurely aged man viewing her with cool, calculating eyes from where he sat in the creaky old wheelchair the people at RNH Bighi on Malta had found for him. Rachel switched to Russian and spoke slowly so that Eleni could understand a word, here and there, as she spoke. “You should not complain about your treatment, Comrade,” she cautioned sarcastically. “The people in this country have every right to have you shot for your part in the Krasnaya Zarya abomination.”
“Red Dawn,” the man hissed, his English was grotesquely, clumsily accented with his mother Romanian vowels, “was,” he hesitated, struggled for the right word, “inflict, yes, inflicted on my people!”
And there it was in a nutshell.
Nothing that had ever gone wrong in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s life was his fault; always he had been betrayed, let down, disappointed by others and that was never, ever going to change because that was the sort of man he was.
“If you say that often enough they will put you up against a wall and shoot you,” Rachel told him in Russian.
Tom Harding-Grayson had pulled up a chair for Rachel, which she accepted with strained good grace. The Foreign Secretary sat directly in front of the man in the wheelchair and looked him straight in the eyes.
“Ask him if he knows who I am and if he doesn’t know, tell him please.”
“You,” Nicolae Ceaușescu stuttered, pre-empting Rachel, “Foreign Minister…”
“Very good,” Tom Harding-Grayson nodded. “Tell him you will ask the questions, Rachel. You will ask the questions in Russian and he will reply to you in the same language so that you can translate whatever he says to you word for word.”
He waited while the woman conveyed this to their ‘guest’.
Nicolae Ceaușescu shrugged and nodded.
Eleni began to protest but he stilled her babbling by a single touch of her arm. She frowned and shut her mouth, glaring at Rachel.
“Tell me,” the Foreign Secretary invited, “about your life and career, Nicolae Ceaușescu?”
Rachel translated obediently.
“What do you want to know?” Was the answer in Moskva Russian that she repeated verbatim in English; and so it began. It put her in mind of the first time Tom Harding-Grayson had ‘debriefed her’ all those years ago. So long ago that she had still been a scrawny student nurse at St Bart’s Hospital. In those days ‘Sir Dick’ White had been the poster boy of MI5, just plain Richard Goldsmith White, and Tom Harding-Grayson had still been a full time spook masquerading as Principal Officer at the old Foreign and Colonial Office.
“Your life story, Nicolae Ceaușescu? Only your life story? We can start with your date and place of birth, the names of both of your parents, their dates of birth and places of birth, and then you can tell me about your siblings?”
Now that he understood the game the one-legged man in the wheelchair relaxed a little; desperate to convey to his interrogators that he was unafraid, in control and that he sympathised with their dilemma.
He started to talk and went on talking until Tom Harding-Grayson held up a hand. Notwithstanding Rachel’s personal verification of the man’s identity — however unlikely and implausible it seemed that he was actually who he said he was and had survived the adventures that he claimed to have survived — he had had to be certain. Before the October War MI6 would have had a weighty file on Ceaușescu; that had gone up in flames in the war but the Foreign Secretary knew enough about the real Nicolae Ceaușescu to be able to make an informed judgement.
If this man was an imposter he was a superbly good imposter.
Not many people in the West knew that Nicolae Ceaușescu had owed his rise to the deputy premiership of the People’s Republic of Romania almost entirely to a chance encounter with the man who became his mentor and protector, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Ceaușescu had been a member of the Romanian Communist Party since the age of fifteen in 1933, the year of his first arrest by the Romanian authorities. He had been in and out of prison throughout his teens. During the Second World War the pro-Fascist regime of Ion Antonescu had cracked down hard on all known and suspected communist sympathisers and activists; and Ceaușescu had seen the insides of several internment camps; Jilava in 1940, Caransebeș two years later, and in 1943 first Văcărești, and then Târgu Jiu in the Carpathian Mountains.
It was at Târgu Jiu that he first shared a cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the man who within a year would become the leader of the ‘prison faction’ of the Romanian Communist Party, and the Party’s General Secretary.
At Târgu Jiu the prisoners ran their own cell blocks; the result of an unofficial pact that guaranteed that nobody would attempt to escape. Gheorghiu-Dej used this ‘freedom’ to assert his control over the other inmates, running so-called ‘self-criticism sessions’ in which Party members were forced to confess to their failure to interpret the gospel of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic as understood by Comrade Gheorghiu-Dej. Nicolae Ceaușescu's role in the ‘self-criticism sessions’ was as his master’s bully boy, enthusiastically beating up ‘comrades’ who refused to engage with or were insufficiently enthusiastic in their ‘self-criticism’.
After the war Ceaușescu’s rise had been meteoric. He had become a major general in the reformed Romanian Army; Gheorghe Dej’s deputy mister of defence and his mentor’s most faithful ally on the Central Committee of the Party by 1952. By 1954 he was a full member of the Romanian Politburo, and long before the October War Gheorghiu-Dej’s ‘enforcer’ had become the absolute master of the Securitate, the feared and loathed Departamentul Securității Statului — the Department of State Security — and consequently, the natural leader in waiting.
It had been a heady, breakneck rise for the third child of an impoverished drunken, wife-beating despotic father in Scornicesti in the obscure rural south of the country born in 1918, who had run away from home at the age of eleven to live with his elder sister Niculina in Bucharest…
Eventually Tom Harding-Grayson had held up a hand.
“Well, Nicolae Ceaușescu,” he conceded, a half-smile on his lips but cold purpose in his eyes, “now that we have established that you may be who you claim to be, let us talk about how exactly you came to know the particulars of Operation Nakazyvat.”
Chapter 10
The United States Ambassador to the Court of Woodstock had been unusually quiet, almost non-communicative most of that afternoon. He remained so now. This troubled Joanne Brenckmann as the couple walked unhurriedly down Beef Lane towards St Aldate’s Church.