Every few steps he passed armed soldiers. Hadn’t they got anything better to do with their time, thought Harry, than guard a fifty-year-old man who was literally on his last legs? On and on until at last they reached an open door. He was pushed inside, landing unceremoniously on his knees.
Once he’d caught his breath, Harry tried to haul himself to his feet. Like a cornered animal, he looked around a room that must, in better times, have been a classroom: wooden benches, small chairs, and a raised platform at one end with a large table and three high-backed chairs behind it. The blackboard on the back wall gave away its original purpose.
He summoned up all his strength and managed to pull himself up onto one of the benches. He didn’t want them to think he was broken. He began to study the layout of the room more carefully. On the right of the stage were twelve chairs, in two straight lines of six. A man who wasn’t in uniform but wore a gray, ill-fitting suit that any self-respecting tramp would have rejected was placing a single sheet of paper on each of the chairs. Once he’d performed this task, he sat down on a wooden chair opposite what Harry assumed was the jury box. Harry took a closer look at the man and wondered if he was the clerk of the court, but he just sat there, clearly waiting for someone to appear.
Harry turned around to see more green uniforms wearing heavy greatcoats standing at the back of the room, as if waiting for the prisoner to try to escape. If only one of them had heard of Saint Martin, he might have taken pity and cut his coat in half to share it with the freezing man from another country.
As he sat there waiting, waiting for he knew not what, Harry’s thoughts turned to Emma, as they had done so often between stolen moments of sleep. Would she understand why he couldn’t sign the confession and allow them to hammer another nail into Babakov’s coffin? He wondered how her own trial was progressing, and felt guilty for not being by her side.
His thoughts were interrupted when a door on the far side of the room swung open and seven women and five men entered and sat in their allocated places, giving the distinct impression this wasn’t the first time they had performed the task.
Not one of them as much as glanced in his direction, which didn’t stop Harry staring at them. Their blank faces suggested they had only one thing in common: their minds had been confiscated by the State, and they were no longer expected to have opinions of their own. Even in that moment of darkness, Harry reflected on what a privileged life he’d led. Was it possible that among these blank-faced clones there was a singer, an artist, an actor, a musician, even an author, who had never been given the opportunity to express their talent? Such is the lottery of birth.
Moments later, two other men entered the room, made their way to the front bench and sat down, facing the stage, with their backs to him. One of them was in his fifties, far better dressed than anyone else in the room. His suit fitted, and he had an air of confidence that suggested he was the sort of professional even a dictatorship requires if a regime is to run smoothly.
The other man was much younger, and kept looking around the courtroom as if he was trying to find his bearings. If these two were the counsel for the state and for the defense, it wasn’t difficult for Harry to work out which of them would be representing him.
Finally, the door behind the platform opened so the principal actors could make their entrance: three of them, one woman and two men, who took their seats behind the long table on the center of the stage.
The woman, who must have been about sixty and had fine gray hair tightly pinned up in a bun, could have been a retired headmistress. Harry even wondered if this had once been her classroom. She was clearly the most senior person present because everyone else in the room was looking in her direction. She opened the file in front of her and began to read out loud. Harry silently thanked his Russian tutor for the hours she’d spent making him read the Russian classics before getting him to translate whole chapters into English.
“The prisoner” — Harry had to assume she was referring to him, although she had not once acknowledged his presence “recently entered the Soviet Union illegally” — Harry would have liked to take notes, but he hadn’t been supplied with a pen or paper so he would have to rely on his memory, assuming he would even be given the chance to defend himself — “with the sole purpose of breaking the law.” She turned to the jury and did not smile. “You, comrades, have been selected to be the arbiters of whether the prisoner is guilty or not. Witnesses will come forward to assist you in making that judgement.”
“Mr. Kosanov,” she said, turning to face counsel, “you may now present the State’s case.”
The older of the two men seated on the front bench rose slowly to his feet.
“Comrade commissioner, this is a straightforward case that should not trouble the jury for any length of time. The prisoner is a well-known enemy of the State, and this is not his first offense.”
Harry couldn’t wait to hear what his first offense had been. He soon found out.
“The prisoner visited Moscow some five years ago as a guest of our country and took cynical advantage of his privileged status. He used the opening speech at an international conference to mount a campaign for the release of a self-confessed criminal who had previously pleaded guilty to seven offenses against the State. Anatoly Babakov will be well known to you, comrade commissioner, as the author of a book about our revered leader, Comrade Chairman Stalin, for which he was charged with seditious libel and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labor.
“The prisoner repeated these libels despite the fact that it was pointed out to him on more than one occasion that he was breaking the law” — Harry couldn’t recall that, unless the scantily dressed young woman who’d visited him in his hotel room in the middle of the night was meant to have delivered the message, along with the bottle of champagne — “but for the sake of international relations, and to demonstrate our magnanimity, we allowed him to return to the West, where this kind of libel and slander is part of everyday life. We sometimes wonder if the British remember we were their allies during the last war and that our leader at the time was none other than Comrade Stalin.
“Earlier this year, the prisoner traveled to the United States for the sole purpose of making contact with Babakov’s wife, who defected to the West days before her husband was arrested. It was the traitor, Yelena Babakov, who told the prisoner where she had hidden a copy of her husband’s seditious book. Armed with this information, the prisoner returned to the Soviet Union to complete his mission: locate the book, smuggle it back to the West, and have it published.
“You may ask, comrade commissioner, why the prisoner was willing to involve himself in such a risky venture. The answer is quite simple. Greed. He hoped to make a vast fortune for himself and Mrs. Babakov by peddling these libels to whoever would publish them, even though he knew the book was pure invention from beginning to end, and written by a man who’d only met our revered former leader on one occasion when he was a student.
“But thanks to some brilliant detective work carried out by Colonel Marinkin, the prisoner was arrested while trying to escape from Leningrad with a copy of Babakov’s book in his overnight bag. In order that the court can fully understand the lengths to which this criminal was willing to go to undermine the State, I will call my first witness, Comrade Colonel Vitaly Marinkin.”
38
Emma thought her legs would give way as she walked the short distance to the witness box. When the clerk of the court handed her a Bible, everyone could see her hands were shaking, and then she heard her voice.