Kirov asked Anya Dimitrievna to find Lucas’s number and put a call through. He checked his diary and remembered that Radek had organised a seminar to explain how he had broken the Ukrainian wholesale meat racket. Tapes of the interrogations were promised, and slides.
Neville Lucas came on the phone. ‘How about that drink?’ he asked. ‘You can’t sit at home brooding about Lara,’ he added, missing the point — that it wasn’t Lara that disturbed his dreams but something else.
‘OK,’ Kirov agreed. ‘Tonight — eight o’clock.’
He went to Radek’s seminar. Radek had commandeered a lecture theatre in the new building in Kalinin Prospekt and sat at the front with his team in their suntans and satisfied looks. Kirov caught Grishin’s eye. The General had an indulgent smile on his face; he took the rostrum and gave a brief introduction. He said that he had asked Colonel Radek to make this presentation so that others could learn how to conduct what was a new style of operation. He quoted Gorbachev on the need to root out corruption and Chebrikov’s dictum on the necessity for KGB to act in accordance with Soviet law. He waxed lyrical on ‘the new spirit of our times’.
This last remark caught Kirov’s wandering attention. It stirred a memory of having heard something similar before. He tried to remember and had a vision of Chestyakov saying the same thing to a class of candidates, God knew how many years before, when for a span KGB’s foreign service had tried to clean up its act. Chestyakov spoke of the need for both sophistication and humanity. He had a wheezy whistle to his voice as a badge of his own brief spell in the camps. Yes, Kirov knew about the spirit of the times. It ebbed and flowed, and people who caught the spirit became beached as it retreated. The cadres of KGB were layered like fossils. Last year he had attended Chestyakov’s retirement party. By then the years had passed since Kirov’s own training. Last year what Chestyakov recalled were his days of digging holes in the ice and slipping the bodies underneath. The old man had a nostalgia for the ‘real Cheka’, the way it used to be, a band of good-hearted buddies. Two months later Chestyakov was dead. Out of respect Kirov had attended the funeral, and now, watching Radek, he had a feeling that he too was buried in one of the shallow graves of the past.
Radek, however, was not. When Grishin was finished he got to his feet and was now working through a series of flip charts which described the organisation of his taskforce and the methodology of his operation. He threw off acronyms and buzzwords as he went along in a way that Kirov hadn’t heard since his time in Washington. Then, the preliminaries over, he dealt with the investigation itself, the leads, the clues and not forgetting the interrogations — ‘a subject about which there has been some popular misunderstanding,’ as he put it with a neatness that he never used to have; and he added a smile for those who still misunderstood. Under the new dispensation you could even joke about these things. And to prove his point he had some shots of the prisoners, not a mark on them, as spruced up and disreputable as guests at a wedding.
‘We live in changing times,’ Grishin repeated wryly when afterwards he and Kirov found themselves together in the elevator.
‘Security with a human face,’ Kirov answered simply.
Grishin caught the meaning.
‘Ah, yes. Some of us have been there before.’ He didn’t mention Washington and the Ouspensky Case, which had broken Kirov’s career until the business of the nuclear plant at Sokolskoye revived it. What had Yatsin said about Ouspensky? ‘Fuck your mother, Petya, even I didn’t know whether he was defecting to us or you were defecting to them!’
‘It was a matter of timing,’ Grishin cooed. ‘Like telling jokes. Back then — in the seventies — when there were only a few of you — you were out of harmony. But now we’re in an era of mass-market liberalism. You should be pleased.’ He gave a charitable look, even saintly.
Back at the office the phone was ringing. Bogdanov’s deputy, Tumanov, was on the line, breathless and excited. ‘We’re at Gusev’s place,’ he said. ‘Uncle Bog is tied up with something — he’ll tell himself when he sees you. Can you come here?’
‘I’m on my way.’
He got one of the drivers out of the Sluzhba pool to drive him to Gusev’s apartment on the Frunze Embankment. There was a militia guard on the door swapping small talk and cigarettes with one of Uncle Bog’s legmen. The KGB man snapped to attention and let Kirov in. Tumanov had heard the noise and was waiting at the door. He said, ‘Uncle Bog didn’t want to say too much on the phone.’ He gave a worldly smile: you know how it is. Kirov knew how it was — and had been. How old was Tumanov? Twenty-five and looking like a Komsomol class leader and eager to learn. He had picked up the habit of calling Bogdanov ‘Uncle’ — probably from me, Kirov thought. Then: I am — state a number, any number, like a magician calling for cards — years old. The operative word is ‘old’ — when did I become old? Tumanov wore a leather tank jacket with a zip front. Like an American cop.
There were voices in the next room. Behind him Tumanov was saying, ‘She doesn’t know who we are. Uncle Bog told her we were from the Public Prosecutor’s Office.’
Kirov opened the door.
Gusev’s apartment was as he remembered it, full of tawdry luxury. Only the pile of boxes was gone, and the militia had helped themselves to the drink and the cigarettes and taken a portable radio and an onyx lighter. Bogdanov was sitting in one of the chairs and the woman in another.
He put her in her twenties, not particularly good looking but knowledgeable enough to make the best of herself. Her make-up was stylish; her hair had been lightened not with the usual crude bleach but with something imported; the simple blue dress fitted over her figure without the bumps or straps that came from Soviet underwear. She had access to foreign goods but nothing too fancy.
As Kirov entered the room she turned in his direction. Her eyes were an indifferent blue but intelligent; her nose was on the snub side, set between high cheekbones. Neville Lucas would have called them ‘Slavonic looks’; they didn’t appeal to the English. She highlighted the cheeks with make-up and wore a dull crimson lipstick.
Bogdanov gave a lazy, ‘Hi, boss’ and returned to the woman, taking up casually some point he had left off.
‘So you work for Aeroflot.’
‘Yes.’
’Internal flights.’
‘Yes.’
‘Never abroad?’
‘No, never.’
‘Meet Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Mazurova,’ he said to Kirov. ‘But you can call her “Nadia” since we’re all friends. So,’ he addressed her, ‘where does all this stuff come from?’ He indicated her dress with his bony finger.
‘You can get these things in Moscow, if you know where to look — though I don’t suppose you do look, do you?’ The last statement was made without any obvious irony. Bogdanov got out of his chair, stretched his legs, touched his toes and gave an animal grunt.
‘Our friend Viktor’s tart,’ he said to Kirov. ‘She breezed in while Tumanov and I were turning this place over.’ He reached to the table and picked up her bag ’Nice,’ he murmured and turned it open onto the floor. With his toe he kicked the litter of objects apart and picked out a key.
‘For my locker — at the place where I live.’
‘She also has a key for you-know-where.’ Bogdanov spun it on its ring.
‘Viktor gave it to me.’