‘Oh – er, yes. But unfortunately he still has to pay me. These high-ups, you know, they forget we all have to live.’ I took a step past him.
He grinned. ‘Too right.’
I was across the hall before he could change his mind. Out of his sight, I climbed the stairs slowly to the third floor. What if my supposition was wrong, and Pelyagin simply didn’t know? There was no turning back now. I stopped for a moment to regain my breath, and slipped into his office. Rosa Gershtein, just arrived at work, was unwinding her scarf.
‘Rosa,’ I said hurriedly and in an undertone. ‘Please forgive me, but you must leave us alone now. Go, and do not come back until this afternoon. I don’t want to put you in any danger. And I must warn you, if you alert the guards I shall have to tell Pelyagin your real identity.’
‘Wha—’ She looked at me in horror.
‘Go now, don’t make a sound. I’ll tell Pelyagin you’ll be back at four o’clock. Not before, do you understand?’
She nodded, then took her hat and left. I glimpsed Pelyagin’s black shiny head bent over his desk in the next room.
‘Rosa!’ he called without looking up.
‘Rosa has been called away,’ I said as I entered. ‘Good morning, Comrade Pelyagin.’
He half rose from his chair as if to bar me from the room. ‘I’ve nothing to say to you.’
‘But if you don’t mind, I have something to say to you.’ I took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly. ‘You should know that I am a spy for the British government and you have been passing information to me about the activities of the Bolsheviks for six months.’
His expression was almost comical. ‘You’re a spy?’
‘Am I or not? I know what I would believe if I was the guard in the entrance hall downstairs. Please sit down.’
He fell into his chair, staring fixedly at me. ‘What do you want?’
‘Where is Nikita Slavkin?’
Pelyagin’s face worked. ‘I don’t know, I swear to you – I don’t know.’
‘But you did know where he was taken, didn’t you? Last time I saw you, you told me as much. “The Cheka aren’t holding him,” you said. It took me all this time to realise you meant “They aren’t holding him now.”’
He said nothing, looking at me coldly. Was I right? Or was he weighing up what I might do, what his best option was? Backing away from him, I opened the door into the corridor and called, ‘Comrade?’
Pelyagin jumped up. ‘What are you doing?’
‘You seem unconvinced. So I’m calling the guard up from the hall to tell him about our lessons. All the information I’ve gathered from your office. All right?’
‘No!’ He was ashen. ‘Wait—’
The young guard was coming up the stairs. ‘Did you need me?’
I raised my eyebrows at Pelyagin. ‘Do we?’
‘No, no – I’ll tell you what I know. For God’s sake—’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to bother you, comrade. We don’t need you after all. Thank you so much.’
‘Oh,’ said the guard, a little disconcerted. ‘All right then.’ His footsteps turned and receded down the stairs again.
‘You’d better be quick,’ I said to Pelyagin. ‘If I have to keep calling him up and down the stairs he’ll be in an even worse mood to hear what I’ve got to say.’
He swallowed. ‘All right. I don’t know much – only that our boys arrested him that night. He knew they were coming. They’d been questioning him that day, then they let him go, idiots. They were sent more or less straight back to pick him up. He was taken first to the Lubyanka. But after a few days they transferred him. He went to a special place, a laboratory…’
‘Lab 37.’
Pelyagin looked amazed. ‘You knew?’
‘Where is it?’
‘It’s…’ He gulped. ‘It’s in the Church of the Ascension at Kolomenskoye.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I – I—’
‘You put together a case against him, didn’t you?’ I said slowly. Hatred boiled in me. ‘You said – let me think – that his experiments were counter-Revolutionary? That he was plotting against the State? Why?’ With my huge belly, standing before him, I suddenly felt my rage was invincible. ‘Why? Was it because he humiliated you, that time at the Futurist performance? Or was it because you were offended I didn’t want to go out for a drive with you?’
Pelyagin frowned. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Yes, it was, it was some little pettiness like that, wasn’t it?’
He looked at me oddly. ‘No, that wasn’t it,’ he said quietly. He sat up. ‘Of course his line about “Communism can’t exist in this version of the universe” was enough to get him thrown into jail alone. But have you forgotten that you denounced him yourself?’
Ice down my spine. ‘I told you – I said I was mistaken, don’t take it seriously, I said.’
‘It was too late by then. Why did you think I came to the house that day? I had the warrant in my pocket.’ He had recovered his sangfroid. ‘By then you’d all denounced him, one after the other. We could have arrested him ten times over. Marina Getler spoke to an agent of ours at the hospital; Volodya Yakov shopped him to the Cheka; Fyodor Kuzmin came to us not long afterwards to tell us that Slavkin was making anti-Soviet statements; it seems as though it was one of the few things that commune of yours managed to agree on—’
‘Stop.’
Pelyagin stopped with his mouth still open.
I began to improvise. ‘How many hours have I spent here, in this room? You’ve left me here on my own several times, do you remember? When I fell asleep, for example? A spy doesn’t fall asleep like that. I’ve got so much good information from you, Pelyagin. The British Foreign Office are very happy with you.’
‘What information?’
‘Numbers in Cheka prisons, methods of interrogation, conditions in prisons, arbitrary arrests… It’ll cause quite a scandal, you know.’
He sat down. ‘What do you want?’
‘I just… I just want you to leave me alone. All right? I’ll leave now, and you won’t send anyone after me. You won’t mention this conversation to anyone, you’ll forget it entirely. Otherwise you’ll soon be at the mercy of those Cheka officers of yours.’
He stared at me for a moment, and then he nodded. ‘All right.’
‘I’ll need your ID card, and those spectacles, too.’
He gave them to me reluctantly.
‘Just one last thing. When you first asked me to come and give you lessons, was Slavkin already under investigation?’
He smirked. ‘You were a useful source from our first lesson.’
I slipped out of his office and down the back staircase. I could barely feel my feet on the floor. With shaking hands I pulled my shawl over my head and walked the long way around the building to the Aleksandrovsky Gardens.
20
‘Here, dyevushka – girl, over here!’
From the other side of the gardens a gnomish figure was gesturing to me. Behind him stood a cart pulled by an ancient donkey. As I drew closer I saw Pasha in the back.
‘Where to, then?’ sang out the old fellow.
‘Where to? My God, Pasha, what on earth are you doing?’ I hissed. ‘We need to get to Kolomenskoye! Dobbins here won’t get there before nightfall!’
I calculated that Kolomenskoye was eight or nine miles from the centre of Moscow. At a walk that would take us three hours…
‘Kolomenskoye? Chort vosmi, I thought we wouldn’t be going so far… but this is all there is, and the old man tells me she trots. She might do it in a couple of hours.’ Pasha pulled me in. ‘Poekhali, golubchik! Let’s go, whip her up, as fast as she can go!’