Our Woman in Moscow(40)
“Takes one to know one.”
“Not true. I’ve slept with one or two, that’s how I recognize it.”
“Give me the letters.”
“Iris, you’re such a sweetheart. You’re so sweet and gentle. He’s going to crush you. He’s going to gobble up all that sweetness to try and make himself whole, and it’s not going to work, and he’ll blame you for it and make you miserable. I couldn’t let him do it.”
“Give me the letters.”
Ruth held out her hand. “You’ll note they’re still sealed.”
“How honorable of you.”
“I was going to give them to you later. Once you were cured.”
Iris put the letters in her pocket. “I should have known. I should have figured it out. I should’ve had the nerve to call him up myself. I should’ve had the guts to march right up to him and ask him what was going on. But I didn’t. You know why?”
“Because you trusted me. You never imagined in a million years I would play such a mean, dirty trick on you.”
“So I ask you, Ruth. Who’s worse, you or him? Who’s really using me to fill some hole inside?”
Ruth blinked and turned around to close and lock the lid of the steamer trunk. She wore a white linen shirt tucked into the beige linen trousers. A silk scarf secured her hair in a ponytail. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a fashion shoot for a travel magazine. When she straightened and turned bravely back to Iris, only her pink eyes gave her away.
“So are you coming with me, or not?”
“I’m going to have a baby,” Iris told her.
“You don’t say.”
Iris folded her arms across her chest. Ruth glanced to the shuttered window and back to Iris, and it reminded her of the time Sasha stood in her bedroom, not quite certain of her, and the same confidence she felt then returned to her now.
“You’re making a mistake,” Ruth said. “You can still come home with me. We’ll find a way. You and me, Iris. You still have a chance.”
“Actually, I like my chances here.”
“Then you really are an idiot.” Ruth picked up her pocketbook and slung it over her shoulder. “So long, then.”
“So long.”
Ruth dragged her steamer trunk into the hallway and shut the door. Iris heard her call for the taxi driver—bark instructions—bang bang bang as the poor trunk made its way to the courtyard. Then nothing, not even the roar of an engine. Just the smell of vinegar and wood, the smell of an empty apartment.
Iris sat down on the lid of her trunk and waited for Sasha to arrive.
Two
I am really two people. I am a private person and a political person.
Of course, if there is a conflict, the political person comes first.
—Kim Philby
Lyudmila
June 1952
Moscow
Sometimes it seems to Lyudmila that her work is futile. No matter how many traitors she unmasks, no matter how many acts of subversion, no matter how many instances of heresy to the great faith, a hundred more spring to life before her eyes. There’s always some note out of tune in this Soviet chorus, some person who puts his own self-interest ahead of the interest of the state. Sometimes it’s the very person who sings the best and the loudest.
Trust no one.
Early on in her work—the beginning, really—she learned to strip away all sentiment from her judgment. When is it possible to feel and to think at the same time? Never. So as Lyudmila pursued all possible candidates for the ASCOT leak over the past year, she didn’t regard past service to the Soviet Union, faithful or not; nor did she consult her opinion of the man’s character. There are only facts—did he have access to the information suspected to have been leaked? Did he have the opportunity and the means to communicate it? But until recently, there were not enough facts to guide her. No further ASCOT communications were intercepted. The agent seemed to have gone quiet.
Now she sits in her small, windowless office in Moscow Centre and contemplates a photograph. It was taken a year ago in Gorky Park, where a local team had intercepted a bundle of photographs and coded messages during a random search of an ice cream vendor. Under interrogation, the vendor admitted to operating a postbox for an agent whose name and identity he didn’t know. So the KGB sent a surveillance team. They had taken hundreds of photographs that yielded nothing useful, so the photographs had been filed away. Lyudmila had discovered their existence almost by accident, a conversation in the corridor with a secretary in the Moscow counterintelligence section.
To any ordinary observer, the scene’s perfectly innocent. A tall, gangly man buys ice cream for his family—a wife and three children, two boys and a girl—what is wrong with that? But Lyudmila recognizes this man. It’s HAMPTON, the American defector. HAMPTON now works primarily as an academic, lecturing on foreign relations at Moscow State University, but he’s also frequently employed by the KGB training program. He lives in Moscow with his three children and his wife, who (if Lyudmila’s not mistaken) is shortly to deliver another baby. Lyudmila knows all this not just because it’s her job to know what men like HAMPTON are up to, but because his two older children happen to attend the same school as her own daughter.