As the major stepped out of the witness box and made his way out of the courtroom, the press corps deserted their benches and followed him out into the corridor like a pack of baying hounds pursuing a wounded fox.
Giles leaned forward, patted Trelford on the back, and said, “Well done, sir. You crucified him.”
“Him, yes, but not her. Thanks to those two carefully worded questions from Sir Edward, Lady Virginia lives to fight another day.”
41
Something was wrong. Surely this couldn’t possibly be Anatoly Babakov. Harry stared at the frail skeleton of a man who shuffled into the courtroom and collapsed on to the stool opposite the state prosecutor.
Babakov was dressed in a suit and shirt that hung on him as if he were a coat hanger. They were both several sizes too large for him, and Harry’s first thought was that he must have borrowed them from a stranger that morning. And then he realized that they were Babakov’s own suit and shirt; he just hadn’t worn them since the day he’d been sent to prison, all those years ago. His hair was thinning, and the few strands left were steel gray. His eyes, also gray, had sunk back into their sockets, and his skin was lined and parched, not from the heat of the sun, but from endless hours of exposure to the frozen winds born on the Siberian plains. Babakov looked about seventy, even eighty, although Harry knew they were contemporaries so he couldn’t be much more than fifty.
The state prosecutor rose from his place; the sycophant replaced by the bully. He looked right through Babakov and addressed him with a cold arrogance, so different from the manner afforded to the comrade colonel when he’d been in the witness box.
“Tell the court your name and number,” he demanded.
“Babakov, seven-four-one-six-two, comrade prosecutor.”
“Do not address me in that familiar manner.”
The prisoner bowed his head. “I apologize, sir.”
“Before you were convicted, Babakov, what was your occupation?”
“I was a school teacher in the seventh district of Moscow.”
“How many years did you teach at that school?”
“Thirteen years, sir.”
“And the subject you taught?”
“English.”
“What were your qualifications?”
“I graduated from the Foreign Languages Institute in Moscow in 1941.”
“So after graduating, your first job was as a school teacher, and you’ve never worked anywhere else?”
“No, sir, I have not.”
“During those thirteen years as a school teacher, did you ever visit the Kremlin?”
“No, I did not, sir. Never.”
The vehemence with which Babakov said “Never” was a clear indication to Harry that he regarded this mock trial as worthy only of ridicule. Every Soviet schoolchild had visited the Kremlin at some time to pay homage at Lenin’s tomb. If Babakov had been a schoolmaster he would even have supervised such visits. Harry had no way of letting him know that he’d got the message without breaking the thin shell of deception.
“At any time did you ever meet our revered leader the chairman of the Presidium Council, Comrade Stalin?” continued the state prosecutor.
“Yes, on one occasion when I was a student he visited the Foreign Languages Institute to present the annual state awards.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“Yes, he congratulated me on being awarded my degree.”
Harry knew Babakov had won the Lenin medal and come top of his class. Why didn’t he mention that? Because it wasn’t part of the well-prepared script he had been given, and which he was sticking to. The answers had probably been written by the same person who was asking the questions.
“Other than that brief encounter, did you ever come across Comrade Stalin again?”
“No, sir, never.” Once again, he exaggerated the word “never.”
Harry was beginning to form a plan in his mind. If it was to work, he would have to convince those three stony-faced comrades sitting in judgement that he believed every word Babakov was uttering, and was appalled ever to have been taken in by the man.
“I should now like to move on to 1954, when you attempted to have a book published, in which you claimed that you had worked on the president’s private staff for thirteen years as his personal interpreter, when in fact you had never once entered the Kremlin. What made you think you could possibly get away with such a deception?”
“Because, like me, no one who worked at the Sarkoski Press had ever been inside the Kremlin. They had only seen Comrade Stalin from a distance when he reviewed our troops at the May Day parade. So it wasn’t difficult to convince them that I had been a member of his inner circle.”
Harry shook his head in disgust and frowned at Babakov, hoping he wasn’t overdoing it. He saw the chairman make a note on the pad in front of her. Was there even the suggestion of a smile?
“And is it also true that you planned to defect, in the hope of having your book published in the West, with the sole purpose of making a large sum of money?”
“Yes, I thought that if I could fool the people at the Sarkoski Press, how much easier it would be to convince the Americans and the British that I had been a party official working alongside the chairman. After all, how many people from the West have ever visited the Soviet Union, let alone spoken to the comrade chairman, who everyone knows didn’t speak a word of English?”
Harry put his head in his hands and, when he looked up, he stared at Babakov with contempt. The chairman made another note on her pad.
“Once you’d completed the book, why didn’t you defect at the first opportunity?”
“I didn’t have enough money. I had been promised an advance on the day of publication, but I was arrested before I could collect it.”
“But your wife did defect.”
“Yes, I sent her ahead of me with our life savings, hoping I would be able to join her later.”
Harry was appalled by how the prosecutor was mixing half-truths with lies, and wondered how they could possibly think, even for a moment, that he might be deceived by this pantomime. But that was their weakness. Clearly all of them were taken in by their own propaganda, so he decided to play them at their own game.
He nodded whenever the prosecutor seemed to have scored a point. But then he recalled his drama teacher at school chastising him, on more than one occasion, for overacting, so he reined it in.
“Did your wife take a copy of the book with her?” demanded the prosecutor.
“No. It hadn’t been published by the time she left, and in any case she would have been searched when she tried to cross the border, and if she’d had the book with her she would have been arrested and sent straight back to Moscow.”
“But thanks to some brilliant detective work, you were arrested, charged, and sentenced before even one copy of your book reached the shops.”
“Yes,” said Babakov, bowing his head again.
“And when you were charged with offenses against the State, how did you plead?”
“Guilty to all charges.”
“And the people’s court sentenced you to twenty years’ hard labor.”
“Yes, sir. I was lucky to receive such a light sentence for the despicable crime I had committed against the nation.”
Once again Harry realized that Babakov was letting him know he considered the whole trial to be a sham. But it was still important for Harry to look as if he was being taken in by the play within a play.