When he put the phone down, he gripped Tamriko firmly and told her that she would be allowed to visit Mariko in the Lubianka first thing in the morning and twice a day as long as she was being questioned, and she could take a food hamper.
‘How can they do this?’ said Tamara. ‘What kind of men are they? Tell Stalin! Call him!’
She did not know that Stalin was at the Potsdam Conference, his movements a state secret. Satinov held Tamara very tightly, her hair and the nape of her neck against his face, with their sweet smell that reminded him of home and children.
‘The Organs act only with the highest authority,’ he said, and this she understood. Abakumov would never have dared to arrest a Politburo member’s little girl without Stalin’s permission.
‘Hercules,’ she said softly, ‘how am I going to get through this? I just don’t know if I can. I feel I’m dying inside. I love her so much…’ She was weeping in his arms and she seemed so fragile, so exquisitely tiny, that he felt as if he could count every bone in her body. ‘How are we to survive?’
‘We will,’ he whispered back, ‘because we have to.’
‘Don’t fuck us around any more, Andrei. We think you’re being very stubborn for the son of an Enemy of the People,’ Colonel Komarov told Andrei later that evening. ‘My boss is getting bored with studying Pushkin so either we beat this shit out of you, or you just answer the question.’
‘On Pushkin?’
‘Yes. They say you’re the scholar on
What are the Organs up to now? he wondered. Are the Organs setting up a course on poetry? After all, they had departments for everything from tailoring to medicine and gold-mining, so why not Pushkin too? More likely, it was a trick of some sort.
‘I don’t know it half as well as some people,’ he said.
‘“NV
‘You said it meant New Leader.’
‘Now we think it’s something to do with
Andrei nodded slowly. ‘I think you may be right. My feeling is that NV may have been some codename for Rosa Shako.’
‘That’s convenient,’ chuckled Komarov. ‘She being on the slab with nine grams in her breast.’
‘It’s just what I think.’
‘Let me help you with your thinking,’ and suddenly Komarov moved very quickly, twisting Andrei’s arm and dragging him by it so that the chair went flying. The door opened and two warders rushed in. They grabbed him as Komarov kicked away his knees, leaving him gasping in agony. ‘Let’s go.’
Across the corridor and into the room with the two-way mirror they went, the warders holding him so that his arms hurt. In the next room, a woman was reading aloud from a newspaper. When Andrei looked through the glass, he groaned. It was his mother, right here in Lubianka.
‘Oh my God, Mama! What are you doing here?’ he called to her.
‘She can’t hear you or see you. We’re sick of you brats and our boss has told us to solve it tonight, whatever the cost. If you help us, we’ll let you see your mother. But if you hold back, she’ll get ten years in Kolyma.’ Komarov shrugged. ‘But you know she won’t survive. She’s skin and bone.’ He pulled down a beige blind, stained with dark brown specks. ‘So, Andrei?’
He turned to face Komarov. Before him stood an uneducated popinjay, insignificant in every respect except that he had the power of life and death over him and his mother.
‘NV can only be one person,’ he said. ‘It’s Nina Voronskaya.’
‘Nina Voronskaya. Is she at the school? We’ll arrest her right away.’
‘No, respected investigator, she’s a fictional character in
Komarov frowned. ‘But she can’t be,’ he reasoned. ‘Why would Nikolasha Blagov put her in the notebook if she wasn’t real?’
Andrei saw how the progress of this case resembled a play in the theatre. None of it was true, and he had no idea how the plotline would conclude. Yet this deadly fantasy could be tilted one way or the other by a word too many here, a piece of bad luck there.
‘Hurry up, boy, or the same thing will happen to you that happened to your father. Twenty-five years, remember?’
‘Without right of correspondence.’
‘Oh, of course,’ Komarov sneered. ‘Without right of correspondence.’
His laughing sarcasm opened Andrei’s eyes with crystal-clear clarity. His father was no longer amongst the living. He had died right here in Lubianka.
Andrei had never known why his father had been arrested, but he knew that in 1937–8, thousands of comrades like his father had been executed. He had always presumed that his father had committed some political crime – but it occurred to him, after his own experiences with ‘Soviet justice’, that his father could have been completely innocent. He had probably done nothing and been shot for some fabricated crime – treason or spying or Trotskyism – based on a false denunciation. These revelations, accompanied by the sight of his mother, almost broke him for the first time.
But tears can lie too. Because for Andrei, survival was all. He had one more option – to play his last card, the one that he hated himself for playing.
