giggles.
We are always joking about poisoning Finn, Nana and I, ever since he’d told us he’d been warned by the embassy to be on his guard against it. Now, it seems like a bad joke. But back then, there was still some light in the East, as Finn put it. I had taught Nana the English words, ‘Doing him in’, and she would go around the dacha when Finn was staying, muttering about ‘doing him in’ to his face, and cackling loudly.
But the idea of Finn being poisoned seemed to have lodged itself in the mind of Finn’s station head at the embassy.
‘I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t see this girl Anna,’ Tom, Finn’s station head, had told him.
‘OK, Tom.’
‘In fact, it might be useful if you do. If we can learn something from it. We’re trying to get a profile on her for you. She’s new, she’s young, no record, but she’s straight out of the Forest, we know that much.’
Tom thought for a moment.
‘Only thing is, what if they grab you, Finn, when you’re in Barvikha? Poison you, and you spill out all our lovely secrets?’
‘I’ll eat only off Anna’s plate,’ Finn told him.
‘We’ll have a watch on you, of course, but we can’t follow you in there.’
‘I’ll wave from the end of the road every hour.’
‘Just remember, Finn. You’re supposed to be tapping her, not the other way round.’
‘Oh, don’t worry. I’ll tap her all right,’ Finn said, but this rare crude allusion was lost on his boss.
In retrospect, Finn and I saw the window that had briefly opened for us to be together in the year leading up to the millennium as one of those fleeting moments in history when two opposing sides seem temporarily to be struck with amnesia about why they are fighting.
The British would never have allowed Finn to come on to KGB territory, either before that brief historical moment at the end of Yeltsin’s presidency or after it. The end of the Yeltsin era, the final years of the 1990s, opened the window to our relationship for a camera-flash instant, before it was slammed shut again under Putin. At any other time, we would have seized Finn immediately to suck out the marrow of his professional life, before handing him back–empty, soul-destroyed, useless–in exchange for some similar unfortunate from our side whom the British possessed.
Our luck–Finn’s and mine–was to benefit from that moment when history paused, like the crest of a wave, before gathering its force to move on again.
‘It’s a moment,’ Finn once said, ‘like the one in the First World War when British and German troops stopped killing each other for a day and played football instead.’
Finn and I took advantage of the moment given to us.
One of our early meetings was at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow where Finn was particularly fascinated by Petrov-Vodkin’s painting, ‘The Bathing of a Red Horse’.
We walked around the gallery together until we stopped at this painting. Both Finn and I noticed the man in a black fur hat and black coat and the woman wearing a rabbit-skin hat and a thick Scandinavian herringbone coat. They were behind us, apparently looking at other works on the walls, but not really seeing what they were looking at.
‘Guess which one of them is your side,’ Finn said and grinned at me. ‘Or do you know?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
‘Come on, Anna.’ Finn grinned more broadly at me. ‘I bet you a thousand roubles the man’s one of ours.’
Even though Finn and I had already openly discussed our own roles in this seduction, I still tried to maintain the pretence that we had met casually, that our affair had nothing to do with anyone but us.
As Second Secretary for Trade and Investment, Finn had long been marked down by us as a member of the Service. He’d been in Moscow too long and he practically had ‘spy’ written all over him. He would joke in public about his job, a ruse he called a double bluff and which, admittedly, confused us for a while. In fact, it was only when, in late November 1998, we eavesdropped on a recording of his station head telling him to stop joking about being a spy that we knew he was a spy.
‘I’ll have to go,’ Finn now says unenthusiastically, standing up. ‘Putin!’ he chokes. ‘How perfect is that. The put-in. God! And God save Russia.’
‘Is that the view of your government or just your own?’ I ask him as I lean in a mockingly seductive way with my back to the fireplace. He grins at my pretence to be doing my job.
We have a game, Finn and I, saying one thing we each know about the other from our professional research. I’ll say, ‘You were brought up in a hippy commune in Ireland by your mother and her hippy lover.’
He’ll reply, ‘You went to school Number 47 and were brought up by Nana because your father was stationed abroad with the SVR.’
Then I might say, ‘At the age of twelve you were taken by an uncle away from your drug-addict mother and sent to a crammer near Cambridge.’
Usually he’s the first to say something below the belt. ‘At school when you were fourteen you were caught having sex with a teacher. He was punished, you weren’t.’
‘On our files you are a notorious womaniser. Despite your age,’ I’ll add.
One of us eventually attacks the other physically and the game will end with us wrestling on the floor, or on the bed, or in the forest.
When we make love, Finn says afterwards, ‘I don’t know what sort of crap we’ve got as researchers these days, but I’ve read a hundred times you’re not a pushover.’
‘Whereas you are such an easy lay,’ I say.
Now, Finn’s face is troubled.
‘What’s the point?’ he says, and slumps back down on to the sofa. ‘I can’t sit in the embassy discussing Putin on New Year’s Eve. We’ll all have plenty of time to talk about the little creep.’ He turns to me. ‘Anyway, Rabbit, you can tell me all about him, can’t you? Give me something to justify my staying at Barvikha. Throw me some bones so I can impress them all tomorrow. I have to do some intelligence work. It’s my job.’
Nana cackles delightedly.
‘Let’s toast Vladimir Putin,’ she enthuses mockingly. ‘Long live the KGB!’ She boosts Finn’s glass of brandy and pours a glass of vodka for herself. She rarely drinks alcohol. And we all, in our own ways, drink to forget.
8
WHEN FINN AND I had met a year before, at the end of 1998, our now new and unelected President, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, was prime minister under Boris Yeltsin. Nobody knew anything about him outside his close St Petersburg circle and the KGB. He had an approval rating well below twenty per cent among the population.
So he decided to wage war against Chechnya, to avenge the earlier Russian defeat there under Yeltsin. It was a hugely popular war. Chechens died by the tens of thousands and the Russian dead were flown back home secretly. Putin’s ruthlessness soon tripled his popularity rating among the Russian people.
In a rare moment at a news conference in Belgium, Putin’s mask slipped. When a Western journalist questioned his murderous tactics and the Russian atrocities in Chechnya, Putin snapped back at him.
‘Come to Russia,’ he said, ‘and we’ll circumcise you so that it’ll never grow back.’
This was our new president.
But now in the listlessness that grips us at the dacha, instead of pressuring me to tell him what I know about our new KGB president, Finn begins to tell us what he knows about Putin. It’s a strange moment, theatrical, even, and Finn talks half to himself, as if he’s reading a story.
It’s a story that, in truth, begins in 1961. As he tells it to us, Finn sits by the fire, cradling his tumbler of brandy. He knows he’s being recorded from somewhere in the room. My people, much to Nana’s annoyance, have of course wired up the dacha to catch his every word.
Much later, at the vault in Tegernsee, I realised- too late- that this was the turning point. At this instant in the dacha at Barvikha, Finn made his decision. The stand he chose to make began here, in the home of our hearts.
