Five bangs of his fist: he beat the tattoo. —Comrade!
Lights flicked on within number sixty-seven.
— Comrade, please, don’t make me knock again. I’ve no wish to wake up the entire floor.
A small man in his fifties wearing striped pyjamas opened the door.
Kostya showed his identification, an extra step he considered a basic courtesy. Last year, before he left for Spain, his peers mocked him for such behaviour when, surely, the uniform sufficed. Kostya had insisted, saying there was no need for incivility. He now lowered his voice to a murmur, arrest, for all its theatre, being private, intimate. —Come with me.
Eyes glittering, the man looked up. —Why?
— A small matter. It shouldn’t take long to straighten out.
— But why? What’s the charge? What is it you think I’ve done?
— If I make a note of belligerence in your file, then the other officers will be harder on you.
— Wait, please, my granddaughter just moved in with us. Her mother has disappeared. My daughter. Please don’t do this to us.
— Get dressed and pack a small bag.
— A bag? How long…
Kostya’s voice took on a comforting tone, one a nurse might use with a seriously ill patient. —Just a few things, comrade. Then come outside. I’ll wait here. Please, I don’t want to disturb anyone else.
Nod slow, automatic, eyes wide and fixed on the wall behind Kostya, the man eased the door shut.
Waiting, Kostya smoked a cigarette.
Raised voices, male and female, reached him from the flat as he tapped ash onto the floor. Adults spoke quickly in raised voices. A child asked a question. Then all voices ceased.
The flat door opened. Clutching the handles of a tatty overnight bag in both his hands, the man emerged. He wore a tan coat atop striped pyjamas, and his bare ankles showed over the edges of his shoes. Someone else closed the door behind him.
Kostya took him by the upper arm, and they descended the many flights of stairs.
Outside, Gleb waited by the car. His prisoner, a pretty woman of maybe twenty, sat in the back, head bowed. Kostya guided his prisoner to the seat next to her, then climbed in behind the wheel. The woman shifted and writhed; Gleb told her to keep still. The other team of officers sat in their car, engine idling, waiting for Comrade Senior Lieutenant Nikto’s signal.
Ignition, headlights.
Car doors slammed outside Hotel Lux. Ursula, fiddling with backgammon pieces and no longer trying to play, cried out.
Temerity spoke in English. —Steady the Buffs.
Not understanding the words, Ursula raised her eyebrows. Then, parsing the tone, she smiled.
Temerity smiled back, though her mouth twitched. And what shall you do, the Right Honourable Lady Temerity West pretending to be Margaret Bush, if NKVD knock on Ursula’s door? Protest? Scream? Demand a cup of tea?
Machinery rumbled and squeaked.
Temerity rolled the dice. —At least the lift is working again.
Ursula stifled a giggle.
Down the quiet hall, to the right of Ursula’s room, NKVD officers knocked on doors. Their low voices carried, and though walls and doors muffled the words, Ursula and Temerity knew the script. First, the naming ritual of Are you Comrade So-and-so? Then, the quiet orders to get dressed, pack a small bag, and wait in the hallway for the officer to return.
Two rooms to the right now, five bangs on a door, where the French couple with the baby boy who smiled at everything lived. The husband answered the door, and the NKVD officer ordered him to pack a small bag and wait outside his door.
Boot soles tapped; the officer strode past Ursula’s door.
Temerity closed her eyes, only then aware of the dryness, the grit.
Ursula tightened her hand over the mouth of the dice cup.
An officer knocked maybe three doors to the left.
Temerity’s room lay four doors to the left.
No one answered it.
Another door opened, and a high and girlish voice, speech rapid and pressed, answered the officer: Nina Fontana. She’d welcomed Temerity to the floor, showed her how the plumbing worked, asked if she needed anything. The night of her husband’s arrest, she’d cried in Temerity’s arms.
— No, I am not Comrade Bush. The Britisher hides in number twelve with the German, Ursula Friesen, right there.
Ursula scowled as Temerity struggled to understand.
Boots soles tapped, and a fist banged five times on Ursula’s door. —Comrade Bush, are you there?
Ursula rose from the game table. Still, a moment for hope, and a moment within that moment as she opened the door: a mistake, perhaps? Voice polite and a touch surprised, as if ready to calm a lost child or a savage dog, she greeted the officer. —Yes, comrade?
— Are you Comrade Bush?
Flushed in the face, Temerity stood up and plucked her handbag from the back of the chair. —I am.
— Come here.
Ursula stepped aside; Temerity walked to the threshold.
The NKVD officer, tall and thin, the shoulder sling of his portupeya buckled on the last hole, galife pants baggy at the knees, looked her up and down. A flicker of regret revealed itself in his eyes. Perhaps the light played tricks. —Good, you’re already dressed.
— My things are in my own room. Down the hall. We were playing backgammon.
— Wait here.
— But my things.
His voice sounded steady and certain. —You’ve got your papers.
— Yes, in my handbag, but—
— Then you will wait here. That is all.
Temerity stepped into the hallway, and, behind her, Ursula shut the door. The tall officer conferred in murmurs with his colleagues.
Temerity sagged against the front of the door, unaware that Ursula did the same against the back. Ursula sobbed; the door shook.
Temerity took a deep breath. Field training in the Service had included mock arrest and interrogation. Three times Freeman ordered such exercises for Temerity, without warning her. The arrests themselves — abductions, really, once from a train platform — offered little violence, more a menace of body language and words. The interrogations might not even start for hours. Temerity would have no idea how much time had passed, because her captors always confiscated her wristwatch. After a long confinement in either darkness or bright light, the questions began, voices perhaps soft and polite, or brutal and cold from the first words. As taught, Temerity accepted the disorientation and so managed to root herself. She clung to her cover stories, answering contradictions between what she said and what her interrogators said with feigned confusion.
She’d passed. Done rather well the third time, Neville admitted.
She’d cheated. Standing now in the Hotel Lux hallway, Temerity saw how. She’d never lost sight of the exercise as an exercise, of her tormentors as her teachers, of the rehearsal.
The tall NKVD officer? No ally there.
As the huddled NKVD officers continued their conversation, Temerity counted five other Comintern members also standing outside their doors, holding small suitcases, staring at the floor. Told to keep still, they kept still. Obedience, Temerity told herself, internalized and perfected.
Electric lights buzzed; radio speakers hissed.
The tall officer seized Temerity’s upper arm. —Come with me.
The grip that would leave a bruise, the ride down the crowded lift, the tap of the officers’ boots, the glimpse of Lauri Toppinen, Mikko’s father, climbing into another car, the click of doors not slammed but instead shut with care — all so stifled and polite beneath beautiful and indifferent stars.
Shoved into a back seat, Temerity groped for balance and told herself to sit up straight. A large man sat on her right, the French father of the smiling baby. Her arresting officer climbed into the front passenger seat. His colleague, wearing too much Troynoy cologne, took the driver’s seat, addressed the tall man as Ippolitov, and then teased him about a double shift. Ippolitov grumbled and reminded his colleague his turn for a double shift would come soon enough.