When neither of the other two spoke, he said, ‘May I sit down?’
Vanag looked at him. His manner had lost some of the affability it had held during his address upstairs. ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘Well, what do you want?’
‘Nina Petrovsky,’ said Theodore, settling himself on a wooden folding chair. ‘Where is she, do you know? She doesn’t seem to be in any of the cells here.’
‘Of course I know where she is; I know where everybody is. She’s in hospital, but she won’t be there for long. Just a little concussion. Nothing serious.’
‘How?’
‘She resisted arrest.’
‘But what could she do’? She’s only a girl.’
‘Perhaps no more than verbally.’
‘May I see her?’
‘No you may not,’ said Vanag sternly.’ Do you think I have men to spare for frivolous errands like that’? There’s still a lot of work to get through.’
‘Will I see her again?’
‘It’s possible; it’s also unlikely. You may be moved out at any moment. Is there anything else?’
‘How was her brother killed?’
‘Shot by one of his own men as he was about to shoot his father.’
‘Oh.’ Theodore reflected. ‘How did the man happen to be there so conveniently? It doesn’t matter – what about your man? Where was he at the time? Or-’
The other gave a convulsive nod. ‘You have a point,’ he said. ‘Our man was snoring on his bed and the show woke him up. He only had three of the servants under his orders and he wasn’t expecting anything to happen till the next day but one. Like everybody else, I’m only as good as whoever they send me.
‘Who was he?’
‘No. There are some rules I never break.’
‘Whoever he was, how’s that episode going to look in your report?’
‘Very different from how it happened.’
Theodore gave a sort of laugh. There was hardly any amusement in it, but it affected Vanag. The look he now sent Theodore was not friendly, but it was not contemptuous or irritated either; it acknowledged the intimacy brought them by having taken part in the same operation, even though on opposite sides. He spoke a single word into the intercom on his desk and seemed to relax a little.
‘If there ever was a fool,’ he said, ‘it was the late Alexander Petrovsky, whom you recruited with such headlong alacrity. Only a fool of prodigious dimensions would pursue an affair with the Korotchenko woman. A vicious child and a destructive child too, that one. She has her uses, though, as you must agree.’
‘I still don’t understand that. Surely she wasn’t under orders when she threw herself at Alexander.’
‘No, no, she was following her own inclinations, as always. Some days afterwards, they led her to tell her husband about her latest adventure. No doubt he had displeased her in some way. And then again perhaps he hadn’t.’
‘But she… but he might have…
‘Your wonderment proclaims your ruinous ignorance of the world and of human character. Young Petrovsky’s evident failure even to consider the possibility that she might betray him in that way proclaims something even more crass. As he was in an unimprovable position to have known, that was exactly the sort of thing she likes doing. Well, one of the sorts of thing.’
‘He guessed that in the end. When it was too late.’
‘Quite so. Actually Korotchenko had heard about her and your friend Alexander already, so she only thought she was betraying him.’
‘Who told Korotchenko?’
‘I did. It’s important that a Deputy-Director of Security should be informed when his wife has relations with a counter-revolutionary. Yes, the after-dinner conversation at the mess.
‘That fellow with the birthmark,’ said Theodore bitterly. ‘But I looked carefully and found nothing.’
‘Having done which, you felt altogether safe from eavesdroppers, safer than if you hadn’t looked, and of course, you didn’t look further. Our man’s conduct was slightly creditable.’ Vanag made a note on his pad.
‘Did you record our outdoor conversation? Or was that impossible?’
‘We have the capability of recording any conversation anywhere, but even after all these years outdoor technique is still rather complicated and calls for a skilled operator. We’re chronically short of them and so we tend to keep them for gathering material of some importance.’
‘Weren’t you rather taking a chance? We might have been planning to steal the projectiles the very next day.’
Vanag smiled broadly. ‘You can’t ever have thought seriously about that, as indeed about anything else. If you had, you’d have realised that it was out of the question for soldiers to be able to get their hands on real projectiles whenever they felt like it. Do you think a man in my position would trust Field Security? They’re soldiers too. What your mate would have been shooting at me were dummies painted like the genuine article.’
‘But there must be real ones somewhere.’
‘Assuredly there are, and where do you imagine they’d be? The same place as the real TK gas. When real projectiles are needed for a practice, we dole them out, and we account for every one. Just like the KGB in days gone by. But you wouldn’t know about them. That’s one of the things that’s so depressing about all you people. Because you don’t know how to live in the present, you haven’t the slightest interest in the past. You and I had a very brief argument once, about what happened when we Russians came here, about the Pacification. I remember you said that organised English resistance ceased on the third day of fighting and thereafter there were isolated pockets of resistance. Perfectly true, and perfectly misleading. And you are one of the great number of misled, of those willing or more than willing to be misled.
‘Pockets of resistance. Wherever our soldiers went they ran into one of those, especially in the country, though they came across plenty in the towns too. There was a particularly capacious pocket in the village of Henshaw, not far from here, where naughty Alexander used to do some of his courting. The English slaughtered a company and a half of our boys and severely mangled the relieving force with captured weapons before they were themselves destroyed. Only a few of their troops were involved. Most of them were villagers, including women and adolescents. They refused to surrender even when the buildings they had occupied were set on fire. They went on shooting through the smoke. They weren’t hitting much by then. Our side had to hush all that up as hard as it could. It would have done terrible damage to morale. Some things couldn’t be hushed up.’
‘The English must have suffered appallingly.’
‘Yes, very appallingly indeed. It had been said earlier that they had gone soft. If they had, I’d be interested to know what they were like before. They went on after they’d lost – Henshaw was after that – after they knew they were beaten. In the name of God, why? Well, that’s one thing we can safely say we’ll never know. And it went on. There was a victory parade through the streets of Liverpool, one of a series that turned out to be called for, and a middle-aged woman took a carving-knife out of her handbag and put it through the heart of the man marching on my father’s right. She was dead in a second, but so was he. Perhaps it was something to do with their queen being killed. It was an accident, but nobody ever came across one of them who believed it. She was supposed to be a shadowy feudal relic. Those who’d said that, or were said to have said that, underwent corrective training that proved fatal in most cases.’
There was a pause. The fair-haired man looked interestedly out of the window. Theodore scratched his armpit, waited a moment and said,
‘Could I please have a drink?’