Gaddis could see that he was expected to reply, to explain himself, but he was confused by Tretiak’s manner, which was at once confident and yet oddly disconnected.
‘Perhaps I should explain why I am here,’ he suggested.
‘Perhaps you should.’
She suddenly smiled with a jarring, false rictus. Had she popped a pill before leaving her apartment? Sunk a couple of shots of vodka? Something had taken the edge off her anxiety and calmed her nerves. It was like talking to a doll.
‘I’m an academic in the Department of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies at UCL. Charlotte and I were friends. She was investigating a story relating to an NKVD operation in the United Kingdom before World War II which involved a graduate of Cambridge University named Edward Crane. When Charlotte died, I took on the story myself, with the idea of writing a book about it. My primary source of information is a man named Thomas Neame, a British citizen resident in England. It was Mr Neame who gave me your name.’
‘I have never heard of this man.’ Tretiak’s tea arrived in a tall glass and she stirred three packets of sugar into it, the tiny granules funnelling around the spoon. Gaddis watched them dissolve, hypnotized, and wondered how much he could risk revealing about ATTILA.
‘In the twilight of his career, Edward Crane was living in Berlin. Your husband was his final KGB handler.’
Tretiak produced a look which suggested an almost complete indifference to her husband’s career.
‘I was not privy to Fyodor’s work,’ she replied. ‘We were married when I was very young. My husband was a rising star in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.’ This was the formal, unabbreviated name for the KGB. ‘He was forty-seven when he died. I was just twenty-six. We had a small baby, my son, Alexey. We were left alone, to fend for ourselves. Everything is fine.’
A faultline ran through her features, like a crack in the make-up of her personality. The effect of whatever medication she had taken had briefly shut down. Tretiak struggled to resume her customary air of intelligent hauteur and took a straight-backed sip of tea.
‘Would you have met any of your husband’s informants?’ Gaddis asked. He heard his own voice and felt like the worst kind of snoop. This woman was evidently unstable; he was no better than a tabloid hack door-stepping a grieving widow.
‘Of course not. Are you suggesting that agents would come to our apartment in Dresden? That I would cook for them while Fyodor talked business in the living room?’
‘Dresden? Why Dresden?’
‘Because that is where we lived, Doctor Gaddis.’ She was looking at him in the way that an aunt looks at a nephew of whom she is not particularly fond. ‘That is where we kept our apartment.’
Gaddis was puzzled. He could only assume that Fyodor Tretiak had made trips from Dresden to Berlin whenever he had been required to meet Crane. It was a distance of — what? — a couple of hundred kilometres. He looked up to find that Tretiak’s widow was still staring at him and felt as if he was on the losing side of the conversation. Unless he could extract something useful in the next few minutes, he was facing the prospect of a wasted trip to Moscow.
‘Look,’ he said, trying to summon as much charm as he could muster. ‘I know from my limited understanding of intelligence work that wives can play a useful role in providing cover for their husbands. There was a famous example of an MI6 officer in Moscow whose wife passed information to a KGB colonel. He eventually defected to the West.’
‘Oh?’ Tretiak’s voice was like the song of a distant bird. ‘Who was that?’ She had no interest in the answer.
‘Never mind.’ Gaddis steeled himself. ‘Can I ask, please, how did your husband die?’
Tretiak looked to one side, numbly surprised that this stranger from England had suddenly crossed a line into an area of her past which was still raw and private. Gaddis saw this and apologized for being crass.
‘It is all right,’ she said. ‘If I was not prepared to talk about this, I would not have come downstairs. I knew from your note that this would be the subject of our conversation. As I have already told you, I was intrigued.’
This seemed hopeful. Gaddis encouraged her to tell the story.
‘It is quite simple. He was walking home one night to our apartment in St Petersburg when he was shot by three men.’
‘Three? Were they ever identified? Were they brought to trial?’
She gave a resigned smile. She was resigned to everything. ‘Of course not. These men were gangsters. Mafia, you call them. It was simply an act of vengeance against a senior figure in the KGB.’
According to Neame, Tretiak had been murdered by the KGB, yet his widow had the story the other way around. Gaddis suspected that she had been hoodwinked. In all probability, the KGB had simply hired a trio of St Petersburg thugs to do their dirty work for them. It was the most plausible thesis: the links between Russian intelligence and Russian organized crime were murky, to say the least.
‘Vengeance for what?’ he asked.
‘How would I know?’ Tretiak shrugged and stared outside at the traffic. ‘As I have told you, I was not privy to the secret nature of my husband’s work.’
Gaddis looked down at his lukewarm tea and drank it, just to give himself something to do with his hands. Tretiak was gazing out of the window, like a teenage girl bored by her date.
‘It’s interesting,’ he said. ‘My understanding of what happened to your husband is quite different.’
‘Go on,’ she said.
Gaddis lowered his voice beneath the clatter and chat of the cafe. There was music playing on a broken stereo; it sounded as though the speakers were fizzing. ‘Look, I know that it’s hard for you. I know that you have no reason to trust me-’
‘Doctor Gaddis-’
He spoke over her interruption.
‘But this is what I know. The source your husband was running had been working for Russian intelligence for almost fifty years. His KGB cryptonym was ATTILA. He was the greatest Western asset on the books at Moscow Centre for decades — but he was a double agent.’
Tretiak’s mouth parted very slowly, strands of saliva appearing between her lips like a thin glue.
‘How do you know this?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.’
‘You cannot tell me who has levelled this accusation?’
‘Mrs Tretiak, what I am suggesting to you today is that the KGB wanted to cover up the existence of ATTILA. They wanted to save themselves the embarrassment of being deceived by the British Secret Intelligence Service. So they killed anybody who had anything to do with him. They murdered your husband to silence him.’
‘What was Crane’s position in Berlin?’ she asked. Lines had appeared in the light foundation around her eyes, further cracks in the mask. Gaddis recalled a detail from the obituary in The Times.
‘He was on the board of a German investment bank which had offices in Berlin.’
She swore under her breath. For the first time, Gaddis caught a vapour of alcohol, sharp and full.
‘Why do you swear?’ he asked.
‘Why do I swear?’ She laughed so loudly that several customers turned to look at them. ‘It’s just that only recently I was told never to speak about this affair.’
Gaddis wasn’t sure that he had heard her correctly. Then why had she responded so freely to his letter? Why had she come down to the cafe?
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was only last month, shortly after Berg had been in contact with me.’ Tretiak said ‘Berg’ as if she had no energy for the full name. ‘I received a visit from a government official.’
Gaddis felt a threat in his gut, tugging at him like the grinding traffic outside.
‘What does that mean? Somebody from Belyi Dom came to see you?’
Belyi Dom was the Russian translation of White House, the seat of government in Moscow. Tretiak nodded. She looked weary, almost bored. She might have been talking about a visit from a postman or a plumber. ‘This man told me that he was under instructions from Sergei Platov himself.’
‘ Platov?’ Gaddis couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘I don’t follow, Mrs Tretiak. What would the President
