In neat handwriting it read: TONIGHT 8.00 P.M. BARFLY, PUSHKINSKAYA PLOSHCHAD. There was no signature, nothing that would indicate who might have written it.
He wracked his brains. Who could have put it there and when? To have put it in his coat pocket inside the defence headquarters, they would have had to run the gauntlet of security and Olga, who was herself not to be underestimated in this. She had successfully guarded him from a myriad of unwelcome callers. It had to be someone with easy access to his office. He stood there a minute wondering whether to respond. He reckoned that rubbing a three-star general up the wrong way by inviting him on a pointless clandestine meeting was unlikely to improve their position in life. It could, of course, be some sort of trap. He looked at his watch. It was only seven fifteen and he could make it easily, but he would need to throw off whoever had been following him… if indeed he was being followed.
‘Tervaskaya,’ was all Yuri said to his driver. Ten minutes later they had slogged their way through heavy traffic to the front entrance of his apartment building. Acting as he did every day, he checked for messages before taking the lift to the seventh floor and his apartment. Quickly changing out of uniform, he donned jeans, an everyday jacket and silk scarf, which he wrapped loosely around his lower face, covering his mouth.
Ignoring the lift, he descended the emergency stairwell to the first floor and exited onto the landing. The corridor was empty. He followed it round to the rear of the building and an unmarked door, used in Stalinist times as a bolthole, and took a narrow staircase down to the ground. A janitor shifted bins ready for the morning collection.
Yuri walked up the long incline to the main street and continued for a couple of blocks before stepping off the kerb and holding out his hand. A car pulled up, a government employee out to make some extra money on his way home.
‘Pushkinskaya metro.’
The driver named a price. Yuri nodded and climbed in, ignoring attempts to engage him in small talk. The drizzle had thankfully stopped. Residents swept clean the entrance to their buildings as a construction brigade attended a burst water main.
‘Here’s Pushkinskaya.’ The driver pointed to a sign two hundred metres ahead. ‘Where do you want to be dropped?’
Yuri recognised Barfly on the opposite side less than one hundred metres away.
‘This will do fine.’
Outside, a photograph pinned to a cracked and broken glass frame displayed a poorly lit, smoke-filled interior. A girl, sidestepping puddles in her high heels, passed him and gingerly took the steps down to the basement entrance. He looked at his watch: five minutes before eight. He followed her down. A flat-nosed, shaven-headed bouncer blocked Yuri’s way.
‘I have to search you,’ he said bluntly. Yuri noticed he was wearing an old military jacket and heavy army boots. The tattoo of a claw crawled up his neck.
Yuri stood still while the bouncer patted him from head to foot. At least this way, Yuri thought, it would only be the bar staff that carried guns. The bouncer nodded; he was free to go.
A heavily made-up girl in a small cloakroom cubicle took his coat and handed him a ticket. He pocketed it, drew back the curtain and stepped into the bar. The photo outside did not do it a disservice. Cigarette smoke hung thick and pungent, draining what small light and oxygen there was in the room.
Negotiating low tables, Yuri made his way over to the bar, grabbed a stool and ordered a beer. It took a minute for his eyes to adjust. A woman, sitting at the far end of the bar, caught his eye, held it and smiled an invitation; around the room, men and women, both single or together, sat at small circular tables under outsized revolutionary posters that decorated the red-painted brick walls: a virile-looking man driving a sparkling new tractor in a sun-filled scape, his adoring wife looking on; a woman with her index finger at her zipped mouth; a man at dinner, his hand up, refusing a proffered glass of vodka. Yuri smiled; if only life were like art.
He looked at his watch again and wondered who he should be looking for: a man, a woman, someone he would recognise? He looked again at the woman at the bar. What was it that was so important that he be dragged out here? The bartender caught his eye and cast a look to the back of the room. A woman was signalling to him. Picking up his beer, he carried it back to her table.
‘May I join you,’ he said, standing over her. She was dyed blonde with thick smokey eye shadow and dark red lipstick. He didn’t recognise her at first. It took a few seconds for his brain to process her image, strip away her make-up. She was Volkov’s adjutant. Not unexpectedly, she looked entirely different out of uniform.
‘Another drink?’ he said, and she caught the bartender’s attention and pointed at her near empty glass.
‘Galina,’ she said, introducing herself – Lieutenant Galina Biryukova, he remembered. He had caught her studying him across the table during the day’s negotiation. He put her in her early thirties.
‘Please call me Yuri.’
Galina cast her eyes nervously around the room.
‘Just to reassure you… Yuri… I don’t normally go out looking like this. I had to pay the doorman five dollars to come in… I assume that’s the going door rate for sex workers.’
‘Well I do look like this when I go to hockey matches,’ he countered, and smiled, trying to put her at ease. She was certainly more provocative than in uniform.
Her drink arrived. Yuri waited for the waitress to move out of earshot.
‘Does General Volkov know you are meeting me?’
Galina shook her head.
‘So what is it that is so important?’
‘I am not sure.’
‘Not sure?’ Yuri started to wonder whether the lieutenant was wasting his time.
‘General,’ she slipped into army mode, ‘Yuri… I trust I can rely on your discretion. From what I’ve seen and heard, I believe I can.’
‘I think you need to spit it out,’ Yuri said, without giving her any guarantee.
She nodded and seemed to relax, almost anticipating the relief of telling him what was troubling her.
‘Look, I may be way off beam but something is going on which I can’t explain. You know I am General Volkov’s adjutant; I’ve been working for him just under three years. I organise, attend and take minutes of all his meetings. There’s not much I don’t know. But a month ago he attended a meeting at the Ministry of Defence. It was only by coincidence I found out. I was delivering some papers to the ministry and spotted him coming out.’ She hesitated.
‘Go on,’ Yuri encouraged her.
‘Well, it was who he was with.’ She paused, almost frightened to say their names.
‘And… they were?’ Yuri prompted her.
‘Gerashchenko, Karzhov, Dubnikov and Vetrov.’
Yuri frowned, puzzled. The deputy general secretary, KGB chairman, Soviet defence minister and the interior minister. There might be a hundred reasons why such a meeting might take place, but he couldn’t think of one offhand.
‘Did General Volkov see you?’
‘Yes… I could see he was startled at first… he could see that I thought it odd. He just said, “An emergency security meeting”. It just didn’t ring true. I know him. There isn’t a meeting in three years that I have not known about, not until that day, at least. When I got back to Berlin, I checked his desk diary. Under July 5 he had written in faint pencil the letters EC… I am not in the habit of checking on my commanding officers…’