Jones read. “Splendid illustrated magazines… crowds of brightly dressed well-fed happy looking workers are shown with their palatial dwellings… nobody who ever sees these publications will ever believe tales of a half-starved population dwelling in camps under the lash of a ruthless tyrant.”
The letter was signed George Bernard Shaw.
“You agree with Shaw?”
“Not necessarily. What is illustrated in magazines may not be true.”
“Stop sitting on the fence, Garry. What about what you write? Do you tell your readers about the stuff that doesn’t add up? The people crying for no reason? The terror of authority? The beggars? The people starving? The beautiful women who’d fuck anyone so long as they eat and stay out of trouble? You write about the Cheka?”
Jones stared into his beer.
“You a believer?”
“I’ve read a lot of Marx.”
“That ain’t any kind of answer to my question.”
“Maybe before,” said Jones quietly. “Not now.”
“You know, high up in the Kremlin circles, they have this phrase that Lenin kicked about and Stalin picked up. They say that people in the West who give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt are ‘Useful Idiots’. You strike me as an honest man, Garry. You swing an honest punch, that’s for sure. But if you don’t write the truth about the show trials, the hunger, the Cheka, you’re a useful idiot.”
Jones drank his beer in silence, turning over what he had seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears. He thought, too, of what he had glimpsed just five minutes before, of Beal holding the broken bottle of champagne in his hand, looking at Lyushkov who had checked with Duranty. For the thousandth time, he thought about the woman in black, her dead child, and he clawed at the meaning of what Evgenia had said on the hotel staircase in Dnipro. Everything they show you is a lie. Everything.
She hadn’t taken the special train back to Moscow. She hadn’t been at any of the regular haunts used by the foreign journalists, the Foreign Ministry’s press room, nor the dead centre of their trade, here at the Metropole. Her absence was a mystery, but so too was what she had said and the way she had said it. Who had taught her to speak Welsh so fluently? His mind wrestled, once more, with what on earth she was getting at when she had warned him that he would ruin everything. Jones knew that, if he could trust just one man in Russia, he could trust this old Wobbly.
“I met a woman, Haywood, a Ukrainian. She spoke my language too. She spoke Welsh beautifully. We both saw something terrible, a starving mother leaving her dead baby by a Lenin statue in Dnipro. She said that everything they showed us was a lie.” He trailed off. “It’s been months now and, and, and” – he struggled to find the words – “she’s vanished.”
Haywood finished his beer, wiped the back of his hand against his mouth and said, “Listen, son, in the Soviet Union, in Stalin’s Russia, people disappear. Some day I will too.”
And, whistling Let My People Go, Haywood walked off through the bar and out into the night.
Jones watched him go and nursed his own vodka, lost exploring the depths of his own melancholy. After some time, he was aware of someone drawing close, of great brown eyes watching him.
“May I say that you have the most beautiful voice?” he told Winnie, without looking around.
“You may, darling, you may.” She affected a stiff British accent but it didn’t quite come off, a failure that made her giggle, deliciously. “You’re the new British reporter. You sure can box. Folks say you can jump higher than the moon.”
“That’s an exaggeration, Winnie. My name is Gareth Jones. Where are you from back in the States?”
“New Orleans.”
“Getting used to the snow?”
“No, heavens to Betsy! Had I known how cold it could get here, I would never have left Louisiana.”
“Let My People Go. Everyone loved it. May I ask, what’s the story behind that?”
She nuzzled close to Jones so that what she said couldn’t be overheard. “To answer your question, darling. It is Christmas but there’s a fair number of folks here, members of the Communist Party of the United States, left-wingers, radicals who came to Russia to see the future. Some folks ain’t happy. But they can’t go back.”
“Why not?”
“The fact that they came to Russia is a great propaganda victory for the big man in the fancy castle.”
Jones pulled a face.
“The Kremlin, silly. It’s bad news for the Soviet Union if folks go back. So they can’t. It’s not permitted. When you first arrive, the authorities take your passport. That’s fine, who cares? But once you’ve seen how things really work here, you want to go back to the States, and… you can’t. Officially, passports get mislaid. Then there’s some who are afraid to go back, on account of being on the run from the law back home. Anyways, folks get homesick. So celebrating Christmas, that’s a way of messing with the big man without getting in too much trouble. And listening to little ole me sing Let My People Go, that makes Christmas for us all. You see, folks think that the big man in the fancy castle, he’s just like the old Pharoah in the song.”
“How many American Communists have had their passports mislaid?” asked Jones.
“Hundreds.”
“And you Winnie?”
She hesitated, running a finger down the lapel of Jones’ jacket.
“Might you be an informer, honey?”
“Certainly not.”
“You not going to tell on Winnie, honey?”
“No.”
Her fingers twiddled with a button of his shirt.
“I’m trapped. A negress is a jewel for the Comintern, proof of the sickness in American capitalism. The truth is that Winnie would love to go back to the States but she can’t.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“That’s all right, Mr British. You want a little relaxation? I can show you some fancy tricks?”
“Oh, Winnie,” he sighed. “I’m in love with someone else.”
“She in love with you?”
“No.”
“Ain’t that always the way?” she said and, smiling sweetly at him, she moved away.
Jones had one more solitary drink, then returned to the cloakroom. As he stood in the long queue, a side-door opened, revealing Lintz putting on his coat and, behind him, sitting at a table, was Beal sharing a joke with a bulky figure. Lyushkov turned and, recognising Jones, smiled back.
Chapter Seven
The workers from the Number One Tractor Factory chatted animatedly to one another as they came in, as if they were at the first night of a new play. Apart from the cigarette smoke, everything else was red. Red banners, red carpets, red table cloths covering the tables for the lawyers and the judges, red spotlights playing on portraits of Red Marx, Red Engels, Red Lenin and Red Stalin. Red pillars of light rose up to find the painted ceiling where cherubim and seraphim played, icons from the time before. No-one had yet got round to painting them out.
The journalists were the next to file in, a hundred or more, Russian and foreign. Oumansky had not been over-stating the truth when he had told Jones that seats at the Coal Saboteurs trial were at a premium. The trial had been long delayed but finally it was taking place. Almost the entire Moscow foreign press corps was there: Fischer, Lyons, the whole gang and their interpreters, the latter almost exclusively female. Only Duranty was missing, but everyone one knew he would turn up sooner rather than later. The biggest show in town wouldn’t start without him.
Finally, in came the diplomats to relay the spectacle of the people’s justice back to London, Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo. Jones looked around for Ilver from the British Embassy but he wasn’t present. He was still searching the room when Duranty sidled up and sat down beside him.