a child, of the confessional’s dank odour, of guilt, remorse and tears. And of the terrible boredom of life.
What made you show yourself, Alex? Didn’t you want to follow me any more? Didn’t you want to see where I might lead you?’
‘I decided it was time we talked. Time we shared our thoughts. We can help one another. Don’t you agree?’
Patrick said nothing. Across the vanishing rows of silent pews, he could still make out the unmoving figure of Eamonn De Faoite, inexplicably murdered. In the early morning stillness, the small church filled with ghosts. Men he had killed or allowed to die. Men he had betrayed, men he had bought and sold, all dead or as good as dead, all unshriven, all unforgiving. Hasan Abi Shaqra coming to him for amnesty, his blood shattered across the dust like bright red shards of glass, abandoned eyes opening and closing in disbelief.
‘I’m no longer with the Agency, Alex. It’s true, whether or not you choose to believe me. I know nothing of your rumours, I never saw the man you followed before tonight. I’m not lying to you.’
Up aloft, tiny feet scratched on wood. Years ago, someone had seen a vision here, a statue moving or oozing blood, or perhaps the Virgin herself, pale in a blue veil - Patrick could not remember. What did it matter anyway? Nothing had changed. And a priest lay dead on the altar with his sins still heavy on his heart.
‘Please tell me what you know, Patrick. We aren’t children. I don’t believe in coincidence.’
‘I’ve told you. I’m no longer in circulation. If you don’t believe me, have it checked out. One phone call, that’s all it’ll take.’
Chekulayev lifted the cigarette from his lips. He did it without affectation or self-consciousness.
“You were always too trusting, Patrick. That’s a great fault in an agent. Perhaps you thought I was your friend. Some of us thrive on that conceit, that we are brothers beneath the skin, allies beneath our ideologies. It was easy to think that in Beirut. They hated us all without discrimination. They took us hostage, killed us. We were all unbelievers, all without salvation. And such a camaraderie that gave us: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Such talk. Such foolishness.
‘People like us don’t have friends, Patrick. We can’t afford to. For me it would be the final luxury, something more insidious than American cigarettes or French perfume. Friendship has a smell of decadence, it lies on the skin longer than attar of roses. They would smell it on my body and whip the skin from my flesh and the flesh from my bones to exorcize it. So please don’t ask me to believe you. Tell me the truth instead. Tell me about Passover.’
Patrick started. Not ‘pass over’, but ‘Passover’. Was that what De Faoite had said? What did it mean? He said nothing. This was such a game. They were playing such a game. ‘Tell me what you know. Tell me the truth.’ Like children at charades, they mimed and signed to one another with grotesque gestures. But unlike children, they sought to confuse, to mislead, to pervert one another. In this world, truths became falsehoods, falsehoods truths, until all became a single, consuming lie.
Like a worshipper, rapt by the sight of God’s blood wine-like in a gold chalice, he stared ahead, saying nothing. Chekulayev made a small gesture with his cigarette, a little red gesture that pin-pricked the darkness. There was a footstep in the shadows behind them. Something hard and cold pressed against the nape of Patrick’s neck. He heard the unmistakable sound of a pistol bolt drawn back.
‘I think,’ Chekulayev whispered, as though in belated recognition of the dim sanctity of the place, ‘I think you had better come with us.’
NINE
The house looked like every safe house he had ever visited or lived in: a little shabby, a little damp, a little sad. They took his blindfold off once the car was safe inside the garage. A dull green door led into the house itself. Chekulayev went ahead, saying nothing. Cheap carpets patterned in lilac, flocked wallpaper, damp-stained cornices: a cut-price haven for the morally dispossessed. Safe houses are like railway platforms: not places but moments in time.
There had not yet been time to feel afraid. That, he knew, would come. Ordinarily, Chekulayev would never have dared pick him up and bring him here. There were unwritten rules, and abducting the opposition’s agents on neutral territory was one of the least bendable. The Russian must be worried. Worried about something big.
They followed a dingy wooden staircase to the top of the house, on the third floor. Chekulayev opened a door and preceded Patrick into a small, sparsely-furnished room. A couple of armchairs upholstered in drab green Dralon, a coffee table bearing the ring-marks left by hours of unrelieved boredom, a landscape print that might have represented anywhere from the Urals to the hills of Wicklow.
On the wall facing the door a little lamp burned on a copper bracket. Chekulayev took hold of it and pulled it towards him. A second door opened in the wall. The Russian stood back and ushered Patrick through the opening.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘After you.’
Patrick stepped inside. This was a smaller room, its walls soundproofed, like a radio studio. It held a metal table, bolted to the floor, and two uncomfortable wooden chairs. A bright bulb was screwed into the dead centre of the ceiling, protected from tampering by stout wire mesh. The floor was uncarpeted. In one corner sat a toilet bowl with a plain wooden seat. A large mirror had been built into one wall. There was nowhere to wash or shave. He turned just in time to see the door close heavily behind him.
Chekulayev shared the interrogation with a woman. Her full name was Natalya Pavlovna Nikitina, and Patrick noticed that Chekulayev, when addressing her, never omitted her patronymic. He guessed her age to be about forty and her rank in the RGB at least that of major. She and Chekulayev took turns through the days and nights that followed, leaving Patrick little time for rest.
Natalya Pavlovna, Patrick assumed, would have cover as a first secretary or assistant attache at the embassy on Orwell Road. She was thin, patient, and given to long silences. Her long black hair was always tied back in a bun, held in place by pins. She dressed plainly and always in black, as though in constant mourning. Her long pale neck gleamed like alabaster.
Patrick thought her anorexic at first, but in time revised his estimate: Natalya Pavlovna was an ascetic.
The pale limbs, the vestigial breasts, the alabaster neck reminded him of a ballerina. But this woman was dedicated to a different dance and moved to a different music. Where Chekulayev feared the lash that would open his skin and bring to light his inwardness, she welcomed its lacerations. Where he was sensual and used deprivation as a threat, she was abstinent and treated the rigours of interrogation as a discipline out of which truth, chastened and polished, would finally emerge.
Patrick had no way of telling how much time passed. No natural light entered the room. The powerful bulb in the ceiling was never extinguished. Patrick would waken from a broken, desperate sleep to see Natalya Pavlovna or Chekulayev standing by his side, ready to begin another session.
The worst were those with the woman. She had served her apprenticeship on the women’s block in Leningrad’s Kresty prison, before the block was turned into a psychiatric wing. There she had learned the rhythms of pain and the cadences of despair. She understood the finesse that left the skin unbroken and the mind in tatters. She spoke the language of betrayal in all its vernaculars. But the language of her heart was suffering: she knew it in herself and taught it to others, unselfconsciously.
From the Kresty, she had been transferred to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, where she had worked on dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Bukovskii. She had talked at length about her experiences there. Above all, she remembered the great nets the authorities had stretched across the gaps between the landings, to prevent inmates from throwing themselves to their deaths.
‘Think of me as a net,’ she would say to Patrick. ‘I’m here to help you, to stop you falling. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’
The room became a nightmare. Floor and walls and ceiling merged into a landscape without shape or dimension. The light never dimmed or flickered. Soon after Patrick’s arrival, an orderly had taken away his clothes and given him a long white shift to wear instead. No sounds reached him from outside. He knew he could not be heard, even if he screamed.
It was clear from the outset that the mirror was a one-way glass through which they kept him under constant surveillance. He would sit facing it for hours, like an animal in a zoo, staring at his captors. At other times, he turned his back on them and stared at the other wall.
Food was left for him in bowls while he slept. It came regularly enough to stave off real hunger pangs, but not often enough or in sufficient quantities to satisfy. It never varied: white rice, a few beans, cold black coffee. The
