in just over twenty-four hours and the sittings being convened within three days, not the weeks which Malik had expected. He did not, either, have any investigatory role in the presented evidence. Nor sufficient evidence – beyond suspicion – to demand in the time available that the interrogation of Panchenko be extended by other examiners to the rest of the arrest squad that had gone that night to Agayans’ apartment with the security chief.
Victor Ivanovich Kazin was censured for lax and careless bureaucracy and Lev Konstantinovich Panchenko was officially criticized for lax and careless policing.
Malik, more convinced after than before the inquiry that he had been an intended victim of the Kabul operation, considered the outcome a travesty.
The further findings – effusive praise for himself, for interceding as he had, and an official commendation for Yuri, for his part in preventing a disaster – did nothing to balance Malik’s dismayed fury. The major conclusion, absolute condemnation of the medically proven unstable (and clearly maverick) Igor Fedorovich Agayans, only worsened that fury.
‘A commendation!’ said Yuri, tasting the sound of the word in the car taking them from the inquiry direct to the dacha in the Lenin Hills, not to the Kutuzovsky apartment. The image of the dacha – and a Zil like that in which they were travelling – had been one of the younger man’s first reactions standing back there, listening to the praise accorded to him. When there was no reply Yuri believed his father had failed to hear him so he said: ‘I thought the verdicts were very good.’
‘They were absurd!’
Yuri frowned sideways across the luxury limousine. ‘You were officially praised!’
‘They survived!’ said Malik bitterly, gazing straight ahead as the vehicle climbed from the sprawl of the city. ‘Escaped, both of them.’ Malik stopped talking, deep inside himself. He said nothing for several moments and then faintly, almost in private conversation, said: ‘Kazin was always good at avoiding responsibility for what he did.’
Yuri remained gazing curiously across the car. ‘It sounds as if you’ve known him for a long time?’
Malik appeared to become aware of his son, answering the stare and smiling, without humour. ‘Once my life depended upon him,’ Malik said suddenly. He humped the misshapen shoulder and said: ‘I would have died if he hadn’t got me to the field hospital…’
‘… You were in Stalingrad together?’
Malik’s empty smile broadened. ‘I was too heavy, too big, for him to carry. He found a bicycle, an abandoned German machine, and folded me over it. The front wheel was buckled and apparently I fell off twice. Actually broke a rib, apart from this. He was in a direct line of Nazi fire for a long time. As long as thirty minutes, I was told later. He was awarded a medal: Defender of the Nation.’
‘So what…?’ started Yuri but his father shook his head, stopping him.
‘The siege wasn’t absolute at that stage,’ remembered Malik, the recollections coming piecemeal. ‘I could not be moved, of course: I had no value anyway. But he could… it wasn’t the KGB then: then we were both in the Eastern division of Beria’s NKGB. Kazin was flown out because Moscow thought Stalingrad was going to be overrun and Beria wanted to salvage as much of his intelligence personnel as he could.’
‘I still don’t understand…’ tried Yuri again but once more his father stopped him.
Malik said: ‘There was a time when I actually wished he hadn’t bothered: that Kazin had let me die.’
Back at the First Chief Directorate headquarters the man about whom they were talking stood at the window of his office, gazing out over the bee-swarming weekend traffic, still hardly able to rationalize his escape. There was only one central thought in Kazin’s mind: he’d got away with it! Censure, certainly, which was a further minus in his official file. But still an incredible escape, considering how badly against him it could have gone: all it would have needed was just one piece of incriminating documentary evidence from Agayans’ secretariat – which there hadn’t been – and now he would be in Lefortovo prison instead of back here in his own warm, protected quarters. Not the easy chess game he’d imagined it to be, accepted Kazin honestly. Nor a personal disaster, either. Today had been a setback, that’s all: a setback from which he could recover. And would recover. He had a promise to fulfil. And not just to himself; to someone else, as well.
11
It was what the Russians call a gift day, a break in the late autumn weather already breathing winter’s cold, the sun throbbing from a cloudless sky and the air heavy with heat. The protective shutters were closed, as they always were during the week, so it was cool inside and it stayed that way after they opened them to the brightness. The double glazing would help to keep it cold, Yuri guessed, just like it kept the country house warm in winter. The house was wood shingled over a timber frame, with an encircling verandah built high to allow for the winter snows, and the log store was raised on stilts, for the same reason. The main room was dominated by a wood-burning stove.
Yuri knew the use of all government guest houses was expected to be transient but realized that his father had been accorded the use of this place for as long as he could remember: even as a child, with his nurse, he had been brought here at weekends to play out among the trees or the stream that ran through the property. Yet never had his father made any attempt to impose his own personality upon the place; bothered to alter the government- decreed decor or the government-decreed furnishings. The wood stove, which smoked and made his eyes sting, and the huge flocked bedcover and the rustic drapes and the prints of brave soldiers marching out to fight in the Patriotic War remained as he recalled from those childhood days: as if, despite the length of time he’d been allowed its use, the old man didn’t expect his occupation to be anything but transient either.
The only additions to the property appeared to be the photographs upon two side tables and a third upon the mantelpiece over the wood stove of a fair-haired, shyly smiling woman in a buttoned-to-the-neck-dress whom he had never known but had been told was his mother.
Perhaps the dacha would have been different, been a home instead of a temporary resting place, if she had not died giving birth to him. He wondered if he had inherited his fair hair from her.
Yuri helped his father carry their weekend provisions into the kitchen, original and basic like everything else. There was a cold pantry instead of a refrigerator and the cooker was wood fired and smoked only slightly less than the heating stove in the main room. It had to be fired summer as well as winter, because there was no hot-water system, so everything had to be heated upon it, just like the big-bellied boiler in the outhouse had to be stoked to provide water for the enamelled bath which was also in the outhouse and therefore unusable at those occasional freezing times of the winter when it was possible to come up from the city. He watched his father unpack, aware that only the bread and the milk were fresh. Everything else was in tins and once more he had the impression of being in transit, equipped with provisions that were easily transportable.
His father had halted the stop-start reminiscence long before they reached the dacha. Hoping to prompt him into beginning again, Yuri said, immediately after they had unpacked, ‘I still don’t understand why you consider the inquiry such a failure.’
‘Let’s walk,’ suggested the other man.
Yuri did not find the suggestion out of place. Yuri thought it odd for someone so awkwardly affected by permanent injury to make walking his only concession to physical exercise. One of his frequent student recollections was trailing around Moscow at his father’s heels, panting to keep up. The limp appeared to have worsened since their last such expedition and his father seemed to have developed a sagging stomach and become thicker around the hips, too. Yuri wondered if he would inherit a tendency to fat. Hopefully not, he thought: he lacked his father’s height by several inches. Another legacy from his unknown mother? So much he didn’t know: could never know.
As he followed his father across the verandah, he thought that when he was awarded his own dacha – and who could doubt it would eventually be awarded, after the praise of today’s enquiry? – he would do the opposite to his father and very much stamp his own personality upon it. He’d insist upon his own decoration and certainly dictate the fittings. Which would most definitely include a proper hot-water bathroom, not the ball-freezing torture of his father’s outhouse.
They reached the bank of the stream meandering through the grounds. It appeared wider and deeper than last time and Yuri stared around, caught by the impression of remoteness. Trees encircled them on three sides and there was emptiness on the fourth, beyond the water, apart from a wooden cottage – or maybe it was a shed – far
