‘I’ll have to go,’ Finn now says unenthusiastically, standing up. ‘Putin!’ he chokes. ‘How perfect is that. The put-in. God! And God save Russia.’
‘Is that the view of your government or just your own?’ I ask him as I lean in a mockingly seductive way with my back to the fireplace. He grins at my pretence to be doing my job.
We have a game, Finn and I, saying one thing we each know about the other from our professional research. I’ll say, ‘You were brought up in a hippy commune in Ireland by your mother and her hippy lover.’
He’ll reply, ‘You went to school Number 47 and were brought up by Nana because your father was stationed abroad with the SVR.’
Then I might say, ‘At the age of twelve you were taken by an uncle away from your drug-addict mother and sent to a crammer near Cambridge.’
Usually he’s the first to say something below the belt. ‘At school when you were fourteen you were caught having sex with a teacher. He was punished, you weren’t.’
‘On our files you are a notorious womaniser. Despite your age,’ I’ll add.
One of us eventually attacks the other physically and the game will end with us wrestling on the floor, or on the bed, or in the forest.
When we make love, Finn says afterwards, ‘I don’t know what sort of crap we’ve got as researchers these days, but I’ve read a hundred times you’re not a pushover.’
‘Whereas you are such an easy lay,’ I say.
Now, Finn’s face is troubled.
‘What’s the point?’ he says, and slumps back down on to the sofa. ‘I can’t sit in the embassy discussing Putin on New Year’s Eve. We’ll all have plenty of time to talk about the little creep.’ He turns to me. ‘Anyway, Rabbit, you can tell me all about him, can’t you? Give me something to justify my staying at Barvikha. Throw me some bones so I can impress them all tomorrow. I have to do some intelligence work. It’s my job.’
Nana cackles delightedly.
‘Let’s toast Vladimir Putin,’ she enthuses mockingly. ‘Long live the KGB!’ She boosts Finn’s glass of brandy and pours a glass of vodka for herself. She rarely drinks alcohol. And we all, in our own ways, drink to forget.
8
WHEN FINN AND I had met a year before, at the end of 1998, our now new and unelected President, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, was prime minister under Boris Yeltsin. Nobody knew anything about him outside his close St Petersburg circle and the KGB. He had an approval rating well below twenty per cent among the population.
So he decided to wage war against Chechnya, to avenge the earlier Russian defeat there under Yeltsin. It was a hugely popular war. Chechens died by the tens of thousands and the Russian dead were flown back home secretly. Putin’s ruthlessness soon tripled his popularity rating among the Russian people.
In a rare moment at a news conference in Belgium, Putin’s mask slipped. When a Western journalist questioned his murderous tactics and the Russian atrocities in Chechnya, Putin snapped back at him.
‘Come to Russia,’ he said, ‘and we’ll circumcise you so that it’ll never grow back.’
This was our new president.
But now in the listlessness that grips us at the dacha, instead of pressuring me to tell him what I know about our new KGB president, Finn begins to tell us what he knows about Putin. It’s a strange moment, theatrical, even, and Finn talks half to himself, as if he’s reading a story.
It’s a story that, in truth, begins in 1961. As he tells it to us, Finn sits by the fire, cradling his tumbler of brandy. He knows he’s being recorded from somewhere in the room. My people, much to Nana’s annoyance, have of course wired up the dacha to catch his every word.
Much later, at the vault in Tegernsee, I realised- too late- that this was the turning point. At this instant in the dacha at Barvikha, Finn made his decision. The stand he chose to make began here, in the home of our hearts. Sitting by the crackling fire, he began to throw away his secret life and, as I now realise, he was throwing it away for my sake.
When Finn decided something, he decided it quickly. And events would then unravel very fast. He had the capacity to think fast and very far ahead on these occasions. As it turned out, the telling of this story put into play all that was to follow. From that afternoon at Barvikha what has happened to Finn and me was set in motion.
His aim was later to become clear to me, but it wasn’t clear at the time. He had a plan, for far into the future, to make sure we could share our lives together without the artificial, professional barriers preventing it. And it was for that reason alone that he began the process of burning his boats.
Six years later, picking up Finn’s first notebook and reading it by the light of the oil lamp in the vault at Tegernsee, it is an eerie experience. The first lines written in Finn’s hand are word for word what he said on that evening, the eve of the millennium.
‘For me,’ Finn begins, settling a cushion behind his lower back and tickling Genghiz under the chin, ‘the story began in January 1989. Although it really started back in 1961.
‘In 1989, I was stationed in West Berlin. One grey middle-European winter night an East German citizen by the name of Anatoly Schmidtke landed on a flight from Geneva at Berlin’s Tegel airport. The flight was less than half full and he was easy to spot. He was stopped and arrested immediately by the British. We controlled the zone around Tegel. Berlin was still divided into four zones. The Soviets had East Berlin, and West Berlin was divided between the British, the French and the Americans.
‘We swiftly moved Schmidtke to London where we put him in a high-security cell in Belmarsh prison. It’s where we keep awkward foreigners out of sight from the press.’
Finn bends down to stroke Genghiz who is curled up at his feet, ancient now like Nana, and who seems, unusually, to have given Finn his stamp of approval.
‘I was sent with a senior officer from the Service to interview Schmidtke,’ Finn continues. ‘I was an up-and-coming officer and my station head considered this to be a golden opportunity to introduce me to a real Russian- or East German- spy.’ Finn grins like a schoolboy at the word.
Then he looks at me and I see for the hundredth time how his eyes become completely different from each other when he’s focusing on something. One of them, the left one as I look at him, is soft and gentle. The other is hard, cruel even. He is like two different people in one pair of eyes. I’ve never seen a man’s eyes like this, eyes that could express two completely separate expressions at the same time, as if they were operated by two different sides of the brain.
‘So off we went to Belmarsh prison,’ Finn resumes. ‘You knew him?’ Finn says to me. ‘Schmidtke?’
‘Only by name.’
‘Yes, Schmidtke was a bit before your time.’ Finn smiles. ‘Anyway, back in eighty-nine, I was sent to Belmarsh to interview him about what he’d been doing in Geneva, not to mention what he’d been doing in the other twenty-eight years of his operational life.’
‘He wasn’t Russian?’ Nana asks.
‘He was—is—a Russian German, originally from the East. He became a Stasi officer. He was even Foreign Minister for a short time. But mainly he headed an organisation just over the Wall on your side called KoKo, for short. Kommerzielle Koordinierung. Of all his positions and centres of power, KoKo was the gold seam of his influence. It was KGB, of course, but it was run on a day-to-day basis by the East Germans.’