Charlie’s Apprentice

to answer the questions that might be asked.

The red-starred, Top Priority designation on the bulky, concertina-sectioned folder was overstamped with a discarding ‘Erase – Grade IV marking, indicating minimal remaining importance. Only important to me, thought Natalia. She realized, with surprise, that she was frightened, without knowing what to be apprehensive about.

The moment she opened the file Natalia was aware her emotions were not that tightly controlled and that the mere sight of him, even in snatched and grainily blurred photographs, was enough to jar her composure. It was the standard assembly, with photographs in the first section. There was a total of five, arranged in dated sequence, the final two far better quality than the others: she didn’t need the dates to know they had been taken when they had been reunited in London, when she had become unknowingly pregnant. In one of the other, earlier pictures Charlie was actually bending, soothing fingers inside the heel of a sagging left shoe. Natalia began to hurry the photographs back into their pocket, not needing any physical reminder of how he’d looked. But then stopped, expertise taking over from emotion. The pictures were unquestionably of Charlie Muffin, whom she believed she would have known and recognized anywhere. Unquestionably identified, in addition, by their being in an officially created file designated by the man’s name and description. Yet none, not even the later ones, were by themselves sufficient definitely to identify him: simply by the way he was standing or holding himself or half- concealing his face in a head-twisted posture, two could arguably and easily have been of quite a different man.

The first written material was almost twenty years old, paper already yellowed and brittle at the edges.

Charlie had told her of this first episode, but not in detail: the Cold War at its most frigid, Alexei Berenkov already suspected as the London-based Control for one of the most successful Soviet cells in Europe in the late 1960s. Now here, before her, were the details. All of them, chronologically set out, easy to comprehend. It had been a Berlin Wall crossing by Charlie and two other SIS officers, to collect the proof legally to bring Berenkov to trial: proof they’d got, because there was a full transcript of the interrogation of the later discovered East German double who’d passed it all over. The next documents in the bundle were the flimsy paper cables, setting out the time – even the vehicle – in which the then unknown Charlie would be making the return, a return that British intelligence and the American CIA had sacrificially leaked to distract from the coordinated crossing back of his two colleagues, with the evidential proof. But it hadn’t been the always cautious, always self- protective Charlie who’d driven the car: it had blown up in the Border Guard crossfire, destroying the identity of whoever the driver had been, providing the diversion for Charlie also safely to cross back to the West by U-Bahn. According to the archive, Charlie had been asked, subsequently, but always refused to supply the name of who he had duped to protect himself.

There was a gap here in the chronology: an actual notation, attested by a signature Natalia could not read, conceding that the interception had been a failure and that the London cell had been wrapped up, Alexei Berenkov with it. The sparse details of Berenkov’s in-camera trial was just a single page concluding with the forty-year sentence.

And then more cable flimsies, from the Soviet embassies in London and Vienna, at first highly suspect but anonymous approaches finally confirmed to be from a man called Charlie Muffin who wasn’t offering secrets or defection. Just a way to wreak retribution upon those prepared to let him be captured or killed, a scheme that eventually enabled Berenkov to be swapped in exchange for the SIS and CIA Directors held in humiliating Soviet detention.

It had meant personal contact, between Charlie and the then head of the First Chief Directorate, General Valery Kalenin, someone else whom she had known but who had long since disappeared into oblivion through KGB changes. Natalia was caught by the assessments that Kalenin had recorded about Charlie. Absolute professional was a frequent phrase. Twice the exchange scheme was qualified as being in no way a defection by the Englishman. Kalenin had written: This is a man believing himself betrayed and vindictively intent upon creating the maximum embarrassment for men who planned to abandon him. I consider it extremely unlikely this man could ever be turned: throughout our meetings he has – although illogically – consistently presented himself as a loyal British intelligence officer. It is a morality difficult to understand but obviously a situation of which we have to take the utmost advantage.

There was another gap in the timetable, but here again Natalia was able to fill it in for herself, from what Charlie had told her. Of months stretching into more than a year of endless running, dragging the hapless Edith from country to country while he was hunted by the British and American agencies: of his wife’s death, intentionally putting herself in the path of a bullet meant for him: an even greater retribution, against her murderer: of eventual capture, treason trial and British imprisonment with a believed KGB agent, and the phoney jailbreak and defection, to Moscow.

The moment of their meeting, reflected Natalia, enveloped now in smothering recollection. She hardly needed any reminders from the file but she read on, actually studying after the gap of almost six years her own reports of debriefing Charlie Muffin. He’d deceived her, Natalia conceded: just as he’d deceived the repatriated Berenkov and even Valery Kalenin, the man who had earlier decided Charlie would never become a traitor. At once Natalia found the personal contradiction. He’d deceived her professionally, convincing her his defection was genuine, so that she never once suspected the entire exercise to be a discrediting operation against Berenkov. But he’d never deceived her personally. Theirs had been a genuine love – still was on her part – and when, finally, he’d triggered the trap for Berenkov he’d done it in a way that kept her beyond any danger from their intimate relationship.

Now, before her on the desk in black and white, she finally had the confirmation of how successfully he had shielded her. General Kalenin had conducted the inquiry, extending to the absolute limit the friendship that existed between the two men to minimize the harm to Berenkov’s career. And exonerating her completely.

Comrade Colonel Natalia Nikandrova Fedova at all times conducted herself in an exemplary manner, the General had recorded. It was she who finally alerted senior officers that the Englishman’s defection was, after all, a false one. The failure to affect an arrest was that of counter-intelligence not reacting quickly enough upon information supplied by Comrade Fedova.

Natalia stretched up from the dossier, needing a moment’s break from the jumble of words, passingly amused now at being referred to as ‘Comrade’, which seemed so archaic after all the changes. She remained scarcely conscious of her official surroundings, still wrapped in long-ago memories. She’d believed she would never see Charlie again, after his escape back to England. But the hurt had not been so bad that time. She’d been more easily able to accept the division between their personal, impossible dilemma and what he had to do operationally.

Natalia hunched over the file again, reaching the second inquiry upon Alexei Berenkov, the one from which the man had not escaped. Nor deserved to escape. It was not difficult, even in the stilted official language of what virtually amounted to a trial without judge or jury, to gauge Berenkov’s megalomania: the man’s unshakeable belief, even under interrogation, that he was justified to carry on a personal vendetta operation to discredit Charlie Muffin as Charlie Muffin had -minimally because of Kalenin’s intervention – discredited him. It was, she supposed, the dread of every organization such as theirs: that someone with enormous power would become mentally unstable and start abusing it to satisfy private ambitions.

Natalia closed the file, trying to form judgements on the necessarily separate levels, as always finding one overlapping on to the other.

By staying away from the final London rendezvous – the meeting she’d kept, finally deciding to abandon everything and everybody – Charlie had avoided being discredited as a Soviet sympathizer, to prove which Berenkov had created a miasma of additional disinformation material. So yet again – as always – Charlie had proved himself the ultimate survivor.

And by doing so destroyed whatever there could have been between them, personally.

Natalia believed she could have settled with Charlie, in England: certainly now, with the baby. It would have been difficult at first, of course: horrendously so, because she would never have been a defector, never prepared to disclose any secrets from her organization, any more than Charlie had ever been prepared – truthfully – to disclose anything from his side. So the official pressure upon her – upon both of them – would have been staggering. But with Charlie she could have endured it, eventually for them to have been together.

In the solitude of her Yasenevo office, Natalia shook her head, as if trying physically to throw off the reminiscence. What might have been could never be: so why had she bothered to go through the charade she had for so long denied herself?

Having at last posed herself the question, Natalia forced herself to answer it, properly for the first time.