He said Putin was the worst type of KGB insider, and always would be, and that the West was duping itself with its wishful thinking about a new Russia. He said that the British were mad to trust him, even to do business in any committed way with him. And that Putin had showed his spots with the Chechen war and then continued to emerge from the KGB chrysalis in his policy towards the oligarchs.
‘Surely London can see that if Putin really cares about changing Russia he’d force the oligarchs to bend before the rule of law, not before the KGB’s version of it?’ he said angrily.
All Putin was doing, he said, was confiscating the oligarchs’ assets and giving them to his own cronies, not putting them up for auction for the good of the state.
‘But Putin’s clever,’ Finn admitted. ‘By both making war against the Chechens and reining in the oligarchs he’s appealed to the popular tastes that guarantee him the support of the people, which he needs until he tightens the noose. He’ll discard the people when he’s done that, you watch.’ Finn leaned back in his chair. ‘Putin’s won his domestic audience in two simple, brutal moves,’ he said.
I remember Finn’s fist striking the table a little too hard while he was making one of his points, so that other occupants of the bar noticed.
‘It won’t stop there,’ he said. ‘The end of freedom and the confiscation of property for the rich few is just the beginning. There’ll come a time when the KGB will be in control of everyone’s lives again, right down to the minutiae. Doesn’t anybody in Russia care about that?’
He ordered more champagne and I drank so that there would be less to fuel his anger.
‘If London’s going to support Putin in public, it might just as well have supported the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War! It’s worse than that! Russia will be far more dangerous now than it ever was with thousands of nuclear missiles it would never have fired.’
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said, worried that too many people were overhearing him. But he didn’t seem to hear me.
‘Remember the Plan,’ he said. ‘I told you about the Plan by the pond at Barvikha on New Year’s Eve.’
‘I remember, Finn. I don’t know what you mean.’
But he seemed to check himself, and said no more about this obsession of his than he had back then.
Finally, he looked at me with his strange, schizophrenic eyes and said that it wasn’t his conscience that was forcing him to say this, but his common sense, and that it would be hypocritical of him to continue supporting a national policy he totally disagreed with.
I was taken aback by his outburst. It was so public.
‘I’ll only ever tell you the truth,’ he suddenly said. ‘I want you to know that.’
‘Why should I believe you?’ I said.
‘Only you can decide that,’ he replied.
And when I looked at him, I knew that I believed him, even though he was lying about being sacked. I knew that he was speaking to me suddenly from his soul, and that he would only tell me the truth. And in that moment I discovered something that I’d never known; that when someone truly believes in you, a door is opened and you automatically believe in them, too.
I realised then that I felt more for him than I’d dared to think before and I didn’t like to watch him apparently destroying himself. For that’s what he seemed to me to be doing.
I told him that all his high-minded talk about common sense over conscience was simple sophistry, and that it sounded like a contradiction.
And then a strange thing happened. He leaned back in his chair again and a gleam of interest came into his eyes, as if this was the first thing I’d said that he’d noted. In fact, I had the distinct impression he was about to make an actual note of my remark so that his argument could be refined for the real performance of it later.
It was then that I knew for certain this conversation with me was a rehearsal and that he was deliberately engineering his own fall from grace.
But he just smiled. When the rehearsal was over, he was more relaxed than I’d seen him for months. Crises made Finn calm. I’d seen it in him before. They were what he knew and understood. His childhood years had been spent in always having to form his own resolutions to crises.
But I didn’t show that I knew what he was about. I didn’t tell my bosses about this aspect of the afternoon or that I thought Finn was engineering his own dismissal from the Service. He didn’t ask me not to tell them, but it was as if he knew I wouldn’t reveal it to them. And that, I guess, was the first time that I betrayed my country, if only in the small print.
‘I’m going to follow my own path,’ Finn then said, rather grandly. ‘I’m going feral.’
He poured me another glass of champagne. For the first time that afternoon there was an awkward pause. I realised we were entering something he hadn’t rehearsed, something in the real world, and Finn always looked as if he was in a bit of a muddle when his personal reality got too close.
‘Look,’ he said and smiled broadly. ‘You see…darling Rabbit,’ he said, ‘I want to ask you something. I want us to be together. I want you to come with me, Anna.’
His eyes, one beautiful and kind, the other hard and a little frightening, looked into mine.
‘We’ve known each other for such a short time,’ he said.
‘It’s been more than a year,’ I said.
‘You’re the person I want to share my life with.’
I couldn’t speak, and he smiled into my eyes.
‘You don’t have to say anything now,’ he said. ‘Or ever, in fact.’
‘Ask me something else,’ I said at last.
Finn didn’t ask me anything else. Normally, he would have said something like, ‘OK, what time is it in Ouagadougou?’ or something equally facetious. But this time he fiddled with the stem of his glass. We were both, I saw, circling the dangerous territory of acknowledging a need rather than just a desire for one another.
He looked up from his fingers on the champagne stem.
‘When they ask you,’ he said, each word coming out of his mouth like a heavy object, ‘if I said anything out of the ordinary at this meeting…when they ask you that, tell them that I told you I loved you.’
I looked at him in astonishment and then I laughed out loud. It was so perfectly typical of Finn. To be so obtuse, to confuse, to disguise- that was always the geography of his mental processes until time and our knowledge of each other had helped him drop his defences. Whoever he was speaking to had to draw their own conclusions from his riddles.
‘Wait a second,’ I said. ‘Tell them…you told me…that you love me.’
We stared at each other before Finn broke into a smile once more. He knew I was laughing at his inability to just say it. I love you. And then, to the alarm of the other people in the bar, we began to laugh. We laughed and laughed until the laughter itself made us laugh. We stood up and hugged each other closely, and when we pulled away I saw his eyes were watery.
‘You’re leaving, then,’ I said.
He said nothing, and I knew he wouldn’t be drawn by such a direct question.
‘I bet you,’ I said, ‘that you tell me you love me before I tell you I love you.’
‘You’re on.’ He grinned.
It would be a year before I saw Finn again.
10
IN THE AFTERGLOW of our mild hysteria, I walked alone back across the river from the hotel and descended into a depression that was bound to follow. I didn’t want to take a taxi, so I walked past the Kremlin on the far side of the river and up towards Pushkinskaya Square. I stopped briefly and drank half a cup of coffee behind the Bolshoi and watched the slow flow of summer passers-by, window-shopping in the expensive fashion shops for objects that would have cost many of them a lifetime’s wages.
I shook myself out of the crash in my mood by buying something myself. And I thought about what Finn had said. I even briefly entertained the idea of doing my job by telling my superiors what I believed was the truth, that Finn was deliberately getting himself the sack. But I dismissed it quickly. Finn had drawn me into…what?
