Motherland. It waited for him in Zurich, Poshekhonov would say, the pay-off. Had Holly ever been to Switzerland, because there was a bank there? He told of the Black Sea fishing collective where the catch was counted not in kilos of fish flesh but in the grams of the salted roe of the sturgeon. A co-operative company for the canning of caviar, and the plan had been brilliant in its sauce and complexity. A Dutch businessman had proposed the idea, a wonderful invention… A tin of caviar but the label declared the produce to be herring, and as herring it was sold to Amsterdam before the transfer of the labels in Holland and entry to the shops of the European capitals.
And the rip-off was well divided and a segment found its way to a bank account that was anonymous in all but its number. Couldn't have lasted. Brilliant but temporary, and Poshekhonov was lucky not to have been shot with his two principal collaborators. Poshekhonov could summon a short clear smile from Holly, a smile that was chained and brief.
Each in his way – Adimov, Feldstein, Poshekhonov – reached out towards Holly and waved a flag of interest or concern or friendship. All failed.
Holly was alone.
He waited, bandaged in his own thoughts, for the summons to the Administration block.
A full week after Holly had been delivered to Camp 3, Captain Yuri Rudakov issued the instruction that the new prisoner was to be brought to his office.
It was not that he had been dilatory in his duty of interviewing all those sent to the camp who were in any way, minor or major, special. His own inclination would have led him towards this first interview three or four days earlier. But in the wake of the personal file of Mikhail Holovich had come further instructions and briefings over the teleprinter in his office. More material from Dzers-zhinsky Street that he must assess. By the time that he felt ready to bring Holly before him, he had spent three clear days shut in that office with the door closed to all inquiries.
The Captain was a young man, not yet past his twenty-eighth birthday.
There were those in the dim corridors of Headquarters who said that his rise had been too fast. Rudakov knew the pitfalls, knew of the knives that waited for him. The KGB officer responsible for the security, both physical and spir-itual, of the camp was a man on trial. It was his strength that he recognized the testing-ground. He had been on trial before. Aged only twenty-four he had held down the post of KGB officer attached to the 502nd Guards Armoured Division stationed at Magdeburg in the German Democratic Republic. He had learned there how a full colonel could wince and supplicate in his presence. He had felt the power of his position when he had taken a bottle to the room of any major and propositioned for information on the talk in the mess when he, the KGB's ears, was not present. He had seen the tremble jelly of a captain's chin and known it was his uniform and the blue unit tabs that won it. He was roller-coasting towards a high-rise career and now they had sent him to this stinking backwater to test further his resolve and capability. If he won here too, if he came back from Barashevo without a stain of the shit and slime of this place on his tailored khaki uniform then the road upwards and onwards was clear to him. The Captain was an egocentric man, one who believed in the great blueprints of life. He reckoned in a destiny that was mapped for his career. Fate had thrown the dice. Twin sixes had fallen, rocked, rolled for him to see them. Mikhail Holovich had been sent to Camp 3, Zone 1.
The files told him their story – a tale of rare incompetence and of opportunity for him.
An agent of the British espionage services had been captured in Moscow. A strong creature and determined in his denials, but that should have been short-lived. Of course there had been interrogation sessions in the Lubyanka, but they had been flimsy affairs, for hanging over their progress had been the sword of a man's release. From the very start the question of exchange had reared. All the superiors, all the gold-braided ranking officers, had been short in their duty when it came to the breaking of this Englishman.
Where the Colonel Generals, where the Colonels, where the Majors of Headquarters had failed, idiot buggers, there was the opportunity for an ambitious Captain to succeed.
Since the first file had arrived off the train from Pot'ma, Yuri Rudakov had dreamed of little else than his triumph of interrogation over Mikhail Holovich.
He sat now at his desk, a manicured little man with a strength on his face, and a power about his sparse body, and a whiplash edge to his movements. A decisive and active young man. One who was going up. One on whom the sun played even through the bed of snow cloud over the roofs of the Administration block. His desk was clear of the papers that were memorized and locked in his personal safe. He had told his wife that morning over breakfast in their bungalow on the edge of Barashevo and within faint sight of the outer wooden fence of Zone 1, that he stood to gain a great prize… not tomorrow, not next week, but he had time, he had months of time to break this bastard.
As he waited he realized that he had not felt such keen anticipation and happiness since he had served in the front line at Magdeburg.
The knock at the door was respectful. Rudakov drummed his fingers on the table to count out five slow seconds, then called quietly for the prisoner to be brought into his presence.
Holly looked around him.
An office that might have been occupied by the Personnel Manager of the factory in Dartford. A tidy desk and behind it a man who might have come in on the Saturday afternoon for extra work. The collar of a checked shirt peeped from the neck of a thick blue sweater. A smaller table was beside the desk with a high-backed typewriter, the sign of a junior executive who has not been allocated a personal secretary and must write his own memoranda. A safe, a filing cabinet, a window that was curtained against the dusk of the camp and the reef of arc lights that surrounded it. A calendar with a colour photograph of a snow scene was set between the framed painting of Lenin and the portrait of Andropov of the Politburo. But a desolate room, without carpet, without furniture of quality, without personal decoration. Yellow painted walls that were cheerless and ran with dribbles of condensation.
The warmth from the hot pipe that skirted a side wall billowed across Holly's face, rubbed at the cold that had settled under his tunic and shirt as he had walked from the compound with the trustie from Internal Order. One week and the changes had fastened on Holly, winter leaves sticking to lawn grass. Unthinking, he had placed himself not in front of the desk but at an angle to it so that he was closer to the pipes, and he wondered how long the interview would last because it was short of thirty minutes until the call to the Kitchen for dinner and the hunger pain pinched at his stomach.
The man behind the desk would have been a little younger than himself. The man lounged easily in his chair and Holly stood. The man wore fitting and casual clothes and those of Holly were thin. The man was close-shaved, wore the scent of deodorant, and Holly was stubble-bearded and stank so that he himself could know the foulness. The man was relaxed and rested and Holly felt the tiredness brush through his mind and for nine and a half hours he had worked in the Factory at the lathe that fashioned chairs' legs. The man possessed power and pressures and Holly knew no stare he could offer in competition.
And if they were together in Hampton Wick, if they were sitting in the front room of his home in south-west London, then Holly's company Fiesta would be in the road outside, and the clothes would be smart on his back, and the whisky and water in his hand, and the confidence in his talk. But this was not his ground. He stood in the damp boots that leaked the snow wet to his socks, and he hated the man who sat at the desk.
'Would you like to sit, Holovich?'
Holly straightened himself, shrugged at his shoulders to try to rid himself of the weariness, gazed back at the man's face.
'I believe it is quite hard, the work that you do as a Strict Regime prisoner. You would be better to sit, Holovich.'
The air was filled with cigarette smoke. Different to Holly's nose from the dry dust filth of the tobacco used in Hut 2. Something from a former world, a part of a deep memory. His nostrils flicked, the smoke spiral played before his eyes.
'Forgive me, I didn't think, would you like a cigarette, Holovich?'
'I don't smoke… my name is Michael Holly.'
'My name is Rudakov,' the mouth of the Captain sagged in amusement. 'My papers tell me you are named Holovich, that is what the file calls you.'
'Holly… Michael Holly.'
'And it is important to you to keep an identity? You find that significant?'
Holly stared down at him.
'If your name is Holovich or Holly, that is important to you? That is my question.'
His hands were clasped behind his back. Holly dug a thumbnail into the flesh of his hand. Trying to beat the
