Comrade Charlie

frightened me with the chances you’re prepared to take but sometimes you think like someone who’s survived here in Dzerzhinsky Square and in Moscow all his life.’

‘You’re going to propose it?’

‘Exactly as you’ve suggested it.’

‘It’s all going to work out fine: everything, I mean,’ said Berenkov, sensing a slight reconciliation between them.

‘I hope, Alexei,’ said Kalenin, the doubt coming back up like a briefly lowered shield. ‘I hope.’

Emil Krogh rationalized it all in his confused mind and it came out fine – well, nearly fine – and he was suffused by an enveloping calm, the first mental peace that he’d known since he couldn’t remember when. Of course it wasn’t perfect. There’d be the stigma of taking his own life when he was mentally disturbed but there’d be a lot of evidence about how hard he’d worked, and people sympathized with dedicated men who drove themselves over the edge like that, so there wasn’t much to sneer about there. He worried for a while about the life insurance for Peggy, because that was negated by suicide. But he calculated that the insurance was really for the corporation anyway – for their loss of a dynamic chairman – rather than anything personal, for Peggy. With the Monterey estate paid for completely and the stock he owned on the open market, she’d be a millionairess twice over. And that before he took into account the stock options in the company itself, which totted up to another million and a half. He’d read carefully through the fine print of the pension agreement and was sure that would be unaffected, so the income would be more than enough for her to live on, without her having to cash in anything. It would leave Cindy with the condo and the car, but he’d already said goodbye to that anyway: he didn’t even think about Cindy or the property any more. Certainly there’d be no chance of what he’d done ever becoming public, because there was no gain in the Russians exposing the empty blackmail. And so he would have defeated them, after all. Finally fucked them like they’d fucked him, because without the British contribution they’d have nothing. And now they weren’t going to get the British contribution.

Krogh considered for some time leaving a note, actually working out the rambling phrases in his mind, stuff about pressure of work and how he found it increasingly difficult to cope. But then he reckoned that made him appear weak and he didn’t want any weakness being publicly discussed so he decided not to leave any message.

He took a lot of trouble, building up the stockpile of pills, driving for miles to different pharmacies to spread the purchases and avoid any challenge from a curious dispenser. And despite their separate sleeping arrangements he didn’t set out to do it at home, where Peggy might have interrupted and screwed it all up by discovering him too quickly and getting medical help.

Instead he made the sort of overnight business trip excuse he’d used a hundred times before and Peggy accepted it without question, like she’d accepted it those hundred times before. Krogh set out without any positive direction, driving up from Monterey towards San Francisco. He found himself on the Bay View side so he crossed over the Oakland Bridge and recognized the surroundings because one of the meetings with Petrin had been this way, at a motel that really had had Hell’s Angels motorcycles in the car park. And then Krogh thought: Why not? It would be his way of shoving up the middle finger to the Russians when they learned what had happened. He started to concentrate and found the motel again. This time there were no Hell’s Angels bikes.

Krogh paid in full and in cash and the clerk asked with smiling expectancy if there were going to be anyone else joining him, and was clearly surprised when Krogh said there wasn’t. From the earlier motorcycles and the question about company Krogh expected the cabins to be whorehouse dirty but they weren’t. Everything was pressed-cardboard cheap but it was clean, the bedding fresh and with even an unbroken wrapper band over the toilet seat to prove it had been sanitized after the last occupant.

Krogh toured it all and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, seeking something different in the image gazing back at him but finding nothing. Except that he did look like hell, as Petrin kept complaining: the carefully tucked skin seemed sagged, especially around his neck, and his eyes were watery and veined. Krogh wondered what sort of photograph the newspapers would use: he hoped it was one of the early ones from his publicity portfolio. They’d been a good set and he’d liked them.

Back in the bedroom Krogh looked about him uncertainly, not sure what to do next. How did you kill yourself? Just did it, he supposed. He unzipped the overnight bag and took out the pill bottles and stacked them neatly on the table beside the bed, like he’d stood his soldiers up as a kid. At the bottom of the bag there was the quart of Jack Daniels he’d brought as well, because he thought he remembered it was a more effective way to kill yourself, mixing pills and booze, and he figured he might need a little Dutch courage anyway. In fact he’d do just that: just a little nip by itself first, to relax him. Krogh poured a stiff one in a wrapper-sealed bathroom glass, grimacing slightly as the liquor burned its way down, and thought he’d take a second by itself, because why not? He decided to undress, for no particular reason, neatly hanging his suit in the closet, and sitting on the edge of the crisp bed in his shorts, feeling quite calm about what he was going to do. Halfway through the second drink he began emptying the pills out on the side table, so that he wouldn’t have to fumble with childproof stoppers when he got fuzzy-headed, and then thought what the hell was he waiting for? So he started taking them. He did it patiently, not shovelling handfuls into his mouth or anything silly like that; a pill, a sip of whisky, a positive swallow, then waiting a few seconds before taking another.

Soon after he started Krogh began to belch, as if he had indigestion. He stopped for a while, mouth clamped shut. He had expected to be feeling some effect by now, a drowsiness, but there was nothing. There appeared to be an enormous number of pills in front of him, a mountain range. He started again, slowly like before, but after two the whisky caught in his throat and he coughed and a lot came up, sour and bitter tasting. Krogh swallowed and got them down and waited longer this time. When he resumed again he was feeling something, nothing like positive sleep but a tingling numbness to the back of his hands and his cheeks.

He threw up just after that. Krogh tried desperately not to, biting his lips closed and cupping his hands in front of his face but he realized he couldn’t hold it down and so he rushed to the bathroom. The damned wrapper- band got in the way and he didn’t quite make it but didn’t cause too much of a mess.

He didn’t think he’d lost everything so there would still be some effect from the pills, and certainly the numbness hadn’t gone. He’d clung to the toilet bowl in the end so he stayed on the floor, crawling back into the bedroom and propping himself against the bed edge. Had to start again; get it right on this attempt. He developed the same pattern as before, a pill, a sip, a pause, but there was no indigestion and he didn’t feel nauseous and the heaviness came, his eyelids too full to keep open. Krogh fought against it, wanting to be sure, trying to maintain the routine, vaguely conscious of spilling the drink over himself and several times dropping a pill he couldn’t find because it rolled away so that he had to fumble for another.

He wasn’t aware of losing consciousness. His realization was rather of waking up, his head feeling as if it were stuffed with cotton wool, but knowing at once where he was and that he hadn’t taken enough and had to do more. The whisky now was foul to taste and he gagged and it ran down his chin. On rubber legs he staggered into the bathroom to get water in a second glass and started swallowing the pills with that, which was better and although he was beyond counting he knew he’d taken a lot and then there was blackness again.

The retching brought him out of his unconsciousness once more, although that wasn’t his immediate impression because there was a dream that he was ill, dying, and everyone was gathered around and people were saying what a wonderful man he had been and what a great loss it would be. He tried not to vomit in front of all the sympathetic visitors because it was disgusting but he couldn’t stop himself and then he was somehow back in the bathroom, sprawled by the toilet which he hadn’t reached soon enough. Krogh rolled over in his own filth, unable to move any more, unable to make his body do anything, drifting in and out of consciousness.

It was absolutely quiet when he finally awoke, nothing moving in the early morning stillness. Krogh was bitterly cold, shivering violently, and he felt like the death that he’d tried to achieve but knew he couldn’t. He stayed lying where he was, tears sobbing from him at his complete, aching helplessness.

The men were clearly frightened to be called before him which was what Berenkov wanted because fear was a great guarantor of orders being strictly obeyed.

‘Is it quite clear what you are to do?’ he demanded.

The nervous Gennadi Redin, whose major’s rank put him in charge of the KGB escorts accompanying the delegation to Britain, said: ‘Whatever happens we are to do nothing whatsoever to interfere with Comrade Natalia Nikandrova? She is to be allowed to do whatever she chooses, without question or challenge.’

‘Absolutely,’ confirmed Berenkov. ‘Whatever she chooses.’