the same story. The headline on the front page of one of them, the
Naider had been found dressed in a white towelling dressing gown in the bedroom at his expensive duplex bachelor apartment inside the walls of a converted medieval building up in Geneva’s old town. He’d been shot three times, in the stomach, the shoulder and in the head, to finish him off. It was an execution Russian-style, but who else knows our methods nowadays? The stomach and shoulder shots were his punishment, the rest his death. One of the stories in a Swiss paper claimed that he had been tortured, and then his still-living body had been rolled around the walls of the bedroom, which were covered in blood. This story added that the body was then tossed over an internal balcony on to a white rug in the living room below. This may have been a sensational and untrue addition to the truth, but I doubted it.
The police were following several leads into the identity of the killer and were looking over the appointments Naider had made in the previous weeks. They had a letter written by Naider which, it was evident to me at any rate, had been extracted by the killer before Naider’s death and deliberately left for the police to find. But the police were not divulging the contents of the letter to the press, not yet.
When we had finished reading it all, Finn said, ‘They’re getting very close, Anna, your people.’
‘Naider must have cracked,’ I replied. ‘He thought that if he told them what happened, they’d give him credit for it.’
‘Why torture him?’
‘They probably thought he could tell them more about Robinson than he had,’ I said. ‘And he couldn’t.’
I put my hand on Finn’s shoulder.
‘I’ve been called to Moscow,’ I said.
Finn looked up from the chair to where I was standing behind him. There was a frown on his face.
‘This?’ he asked, turning back to the papers.
‘I’m sure.’
‘What do you want to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘If you do go back,’ Finn said slowly, ‘what will you do if they don’t let you out again?’
‘I’ll find a way.’
‘Maybe. You know what I want most of all,’ he said.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘They’ll go over you with a fine-toothed comb,’ he said.
‘I’ll be OK.’
‘Do what you feel is right, Anna.’
‘I must say goodbye to Nana.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand that.’
‘Will you tell me something?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘When this is finished, will we be free?’
‘Yes, we’ll be free,’ he said.
We left the Baren Inn after breakfast and took the train to Basle, where Finn was to change for a train to north Germany. Finn carried my bag across the platform for me to board a train for Zurich and the flight to Moscow. When he’d put the bag down, he kissed me and wished me luck. Neither of us wanted to be the first to let go, until we each became conscious of the other’s thoughts. Then we laughed.
Finn threw my bag into the open door of the train as the whistle blew.
‘Don’t be a stranger,’ he said.
I didn’t reply, just watched him as the train pulled away from the platform.
29
THE PLANE LANDED at Scheremetyevo airport north of Moscow at five o’clock in the morning. It was the first time I’d been in Russia for four years.
At the foot of the steps two thugs from the Forest took me in a car, its blue light flashing with unnecessary urgency through to a side entrance of the airport. Within a few minutes of landing, we were on Moscow’s ring road.
They didn’t speak, even to one another; we just raced at high speed towards the centre of the city. We weren’t heading in the direction of Balashiha and the Forest, and I didn’t know where they were taking me–the Lubyanka, perhaps, or a Forest apartment, or somewhere else. The fear they were hoping to generate by the speed of the drive served only to wake me up and make me more alert.
After half an hour of this breakneck journey, the car pulled up outside the Savoy Hotel, just around the corner from the Lubyanka. One of the men opened the door for me, more like a policeman than a doorman, and they walked on either side as we entered the hotel and headed for the small downstairs bar.
The hotel was as I remembered it, a faded, scuffed reminder of its former empire glory before the 1917 Revolution, untouched by Moscow’s real-estate boom. Upstairs above the bar there was the tiny casino where Finn claimed to have won so much, so long ago, it seemed now.
The bar downstairs was empty apart from one man. I don’t know why I was surprised, but it was Vladimir. It put my mind at ease, a dangerous thing. But he was a welcome anticlimax compared to the reception I’d been expecting.
Vladimir kissed me four times in the formal Russian way and there was no attempt in here to remind me of our intimacy of four years before. He was now a colonel in the SVR, he said, but it seemed to me he had lost none of his old directness, simplicity, humanity even.
‘You and I have much in common,’ he said as he poured coffee. ‘They need people like us,’ he added, ‘if Russia is ever going to change.’
He was effusive, asking me genuinely innocent questions about my time away, what I liked about Western Europe, if I’d ever like to settle there for good.
He wanted to know about the Russian scene in the ski resorts and on the beaches over there. What was London like? And Geneva? And Paris? Meeting Vladimir was like coming home to a brother who has never left home. And for all I knew Vladimir had never been anywhere but Moscow and the Cape Verde Islands. I was aware, however, that the men with the car, whom he’d told peremptorily to wait outside, could in a moment take me elsewhere, to a place where the welcome wasn’t so warm.
Vladimir ordered breakfast for us both. At one point a hotel guest entered the bar and Vladimir sharply told the barman to tell him the bar was closed. On the television, screwed to the ceiling above the bar counter, a violent Russian gangster film played out, the Russian hotel equivalent of the wallpaper classical music in a Western hotel.
When breakfast and coffee had arrived, Vladimir switched the conversation to the reasons for my return.
‘They feel the British have stepped over the line,’ he said. ‘This death has made everyone very angry.’
I was relieved that they seemed to believe the British were still involved, rather than just Finn, but I felt uneasy that there would now be a change in their approach to Finn.
‘But you are truly the returning hero,’ he said. ‘I’m told Patrushev is pleased with the way things have gone.’
His use of the past tense–‘the way things have gone’–sent a shiver through me. Was it over? Was I not required any more, would I not be ordered to return to Finn?
‘It’s good to see you, Anna. I’ve missed you.’
I kissed him on the cheek.
‘Are you married yet?’ I said.
‘No.’ He grinned, and returned my kiss.
