‘Well, she’s not keen on Russians, so she could be quite fierce.’
‘Seriously. I think I ought to be with you.’
Marianne smiled. ‘OK. You win. Eleven o’clock on Tuesday.’
‘I’ll be here at 10.30. Armed with my Luger. The old theatre store had some realistic props.’
Mikhail Libman was a small man of around thirty with a dark, closely cropped beard. His unusual eyes appeared to bulge from their sockets – although it may have been only that his thick-lensed spectacles made it seem so. Marianne, sitting behind her large desk, watched him intently as he sat in a chair in front of her, fiddling with a cheap biro while making some introductory remarks – in Russian, until she urged him to speak English.
‘I’m far too old to do this in Russian,’ she said.
‘Of course. But I beg your pardon if I make mistakes with my English.’
‘And I want to hear as well,’ said Dorrie from the armchair in the corner of the room. Libman turned and gave Dorrie a slight bow, though his eyes expressed displeasure at her intervention. He showed Marianne a letter of introduction from some academic institute in Moscow – she barely looked at it – and explained he was researching the relationship between the Soviet State and Russian Jews in the 1960s and ’70s. With her love of Russian history and literature, Marianne was predisposed to be friendly to any Russians she met, but there was something about the tense formality of this Mr Libman that put her on edge.
‘I think your contact at the American Embassy, Larry Anderson, took a particular interest in Jewish emigration to Israel?’
‘That’s true.’
‘And you were helping him gather information about this?’
‘Look, let me just tell you briefly how it was. Then you can ask me any questions you like.’
‘Of course. Please proceed.’
Marianne explained how she had first met Larry Anderson at a US Embassy party and subsequently at a restaurant. How he had wanted to learn about dissident material circulating around the university; how they had become friendly, and in due course lovers. ‘As you can see, my role was really quite trivial. Handing over the odd Samizdat, that kind of thing. Then there was the air crash – did your archives mention that?’
‘You and Anderson went to Georgia and you came back on your own.’
‘Yes, and after the crash I was in hospital for several weeks. On the day I was about to leave and fly to England with my husband and daughter, I was arrested.’
‘Indeed so.’
‘Well, I expect you know about my time under arrest?’
‘I would like to hear it from you.’
‘I was kept in prison for… I can’t remember exactly, but quite a long time.’
‘Twenty-five days.’
‘Was it? Well, if you say so.’
‘Not a very long time.’
Marianne looked at him, surprised at the sudden change of tone. ‘Have you spent much time yourself in prison, Mr Libman?’
‘Not myself…’
‘Well, let me tell you that twenty-five days with the KGB doesn’t seem like a short time.’
Libman nodded.
‘Do you want me to continue?’
‘Please do.’
It was into this somewhat chilly atmosphere that Anna, unhappy at being excluded from the scene of Libman’s visit, now emerged from the hall, kicking the door open without ceremony, and carrying a tray into the room. ‘I bring coffee,’ she announced in a loud voice. Placing the tray on a side table, she began pouring the coffee.
‘Do you want sugar?’ she asked in Russian, looking at Libman.
Her tactic had the desired effect. Libman looked suitably surprised. ‘No, thank you,’ he said. And then, after a pause, ‘Are you Russian?’
‘I’m from Riga.’
‘Ah, I see.’
‘And you?’ said Anna, handing the coffee to him and studying him with a look of undisguised distaste.
‘I’m from Moscow.’
Dorrie, sitting at the back of the room, caught Marianne’s eye during this exchange, and smiled broadly. When everyone had received their coffee, and Marianne had thanked Anna sufficiently, Dorrie got up. ‘I’ll hold the door for you,’ she said, ushering Anna out of the room and following her into the kitchen.
Now alone with Libman, Marianne resumed her account of her time with the KGB. She explained about the two different interrogators, how the aggressive one had hit her in the face, about the endless questions and the revelation of the photographs.
‘I just want to establish the conditions in which you were held,’ said Libman. ‘It wasn’t a prison cell?’
‘No.’
‘More like a hotel room?’
‘Perhaps – an extremely basic one.’
‘Were you cold?’
‘No.’
‘And you had adequate food?’
‘Adequate, yes.’
‘You weren’t dragged from your bed to be interrogated in the middle of the night?’
‘No.’
‘And I understand you saw a doctor in connection with your crash injuries?’
‘That’s true.’
‘And someone from the embassy.’
‘Only after I’d been there a couple of weeks.’
‘And apart from getting a slap in the face, you didn’t suffer any mistreatment?’
‘It was a bit more than a slap.’
‘But it wasn’t a punch?’
‘Maybe not, but what are you trying to get at?’
‘It’s just important for me to… to get a feel for what it was like in this… this so-called prison.’
‘It was certainly a prison for me.’
While this exchange had been going on Dorrie had returned to the room. She looked as if she might be about to intervene, but Marianne gestured for her to stay quiet.
‘You mentioned earlier that one of Anderson’s main interests was Jewish emigration?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yet you haven’t mentioned much about this?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, the subject of your interrogation?’
‘Well, they asked a lot of questions about different individuals – most of whom I had never heard of.’
‘But some that you had.’
‘Yes.’
‘In particular?’
‘Mr Libman, I am trying to be as helpful as I can, but it’s almost sixty years since these events took place. What exactly are you trying to discover?’
‘I beg your pardon. I will come to that now. Transcripts exist of your conversations with Anderson at a hotel.’
‘They still exist? In the archives? Really? Just transcripts – or other material… like tapes or photographs?’
‘I didn’t find any photographs.’
‘And so, the transcripts…?’
‘One name appears more often than any other. The name David. You were asked a lot of questions about this. Do you remember that name?’ Marianne looked away towards the window; she shut her eyes. A long silence followed. Did she remember?
‘So let us come back to “David”,’ he is saying. It’s the second interrogator speaking – the small, squat one she named Blackberry. ‘Every time you meet Anderson at your little love nest, he asks you about David’ – now his face is close up to hers. ‘It is insulting to our intelligence,’ he is saying, ‘insulting our intelligence – and yours – to pretend you can’t remember. I’ll ask you again, who is David?’ She can hear Blackberry’s voice, his thick Russian vowels, but not her replies. ‘Let me help you,’ he says. ‘You made a slip once. Called him “Davydovitch” – which as you know was his patronymic. That was why you chose the code name David, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?’ How does she answer? Perhaps she tells him; she can’t remember. But somehow the name is established because he is going on about him – about Aleshkovsky, the distinguished scientist wanting to emigrate to Israel. ‘You knew that,’ Blackberry is saying. ‘You knew that the Americans were planning to assist their Zionist friends – to smuggle Aleshkovsky to Israel. You knew all about it, didn’t you?’