The Red Dove
When finally she slept Massey got out of bed and went to the chest of drawers beneath the window. Reynolds had been right: he would be waiting for him in the morning.
He opened a drawer and took out a World War II Colt .45 automatic.
Dawn. Two figures walking on the hard sand beside the gentle waves, their presence emphasising the emptiness around them.
Reynolds wore a camouflaged windcheater and grey trousers tucked into rubber boots. Massey, shaved for the occasion, wore sneakers and jeans and an old tweed jacket, leather-patched at the elbow, over a white, roll-neck sweater. He wore the jacket to hide the gun stuck in the belt of his jeans.
The storm had blown itself out leaving its signature on the sand – driftwood, seaweed, cans and plastic bottles. The sea was milky calm and pink-flushed. Sanderlings pattered among the jetsam and in the sky a single, low-flying pelican kept the two men company.
‘I understand how much you hate me,’ Reynolds said. His hands were plunged deep in the pockets of the windcheater, his stride was measured; his voice rang with sincerity.
‘I don’t hate you any more,’ Massey told him. You don’t hate a doomed man. ‘I despise you, sure, but I don’t hate you.’
‘It had to be done. You were a risk. In war millions die for their country. Peace is merely a euphemism for another kind of war, an undeclared war, when men are equally expendable in the interests of the majority. In the Soviet Union,’ he said, glancing at Massey, ‘they would have eliminated you.’
Massey kicked a plastic bottle. Later in the day the debris would be cleared from the beach, Reynolds’ body with it. Now was the time to kill, while the sky to the west was still cold, while the day was primitive. But still he delayed. Once, while Reynolds’ attention was distracted by a leaping fish, he slipped his hand inside his jacket and felt the butt of the automatic.
Reynolds said: ‘We in the intelligence agencies attract a lot of criticism, some of it justified. But mostly it’s misguided. Without such agencies the United States, the whole Western concept, would be submerged by the Soviet Union, by tyranny. They talk about our Dirty Tricks Department: it’s lily white compared with its Russian counterpart. These people,’ Reynolds continued, an edge to his voice, ‘would have us haul down our defences, self-destruct. They remind me of a crowd demonstrating for the Communist dream: if they got that dream they wouldn’t be allowed to demonstrate, they’d be shot instead.’
‘What do you want from me?’ Massey asked, thinking: ‘I have to know before I kill him.’
The pelican veered away and headed out to sea. There were a few fleecy clouds in the sky and the pearl-pink of dawn had strengthened to blood-red.
‘I’ve got a lot to give you,’ Reynolds said enigmatically.
‘You should, you took enough away.’
‘I want to give you back your self-respect. To give you a cause. You had one once.’
‘Sure, to explore space. And to safeguard it.’
‘Which by definition means keeping ahead of the Russians. When we get to Washington I’ll show you the documented evidence of Soviet aggressive intent in space.’
‘So we’re going to Washington?’ Massey stopped walking and stared at the rays of the sun splintering on the water. He said: ‘Stop crapping around, Reynolds, what do you want?’
When Reynolds told him he wondered whether he was experiencing another hallucination.
He said: ‘You mean you want me who once babbled about sharing our secrets with the Russians to persuade a Soviet cosmonaut to defect?’
Reynolds said: ‘That’s one of the reasons why it has to be you. When you were …’ Reynolds hesitated, choosing his words, ‘… when you were ill the Soviets discovered that you wanted to communicate with them. Therefore they will be sympathetic, now that you are cured, when you make contact with them prior to meeting Talin.’
‘Why didn’t they ever try to contact me?’ Massey held up one hand and answered himself: ‘Because they thought I was out of my mind, a raving, 22-carat lunatic. You made sure of that.’
They walked on, more slowly now. Behind them their footprints had moved a little closer together. Before I kill him, Massey thought, I have to know everything. He picked up a small branch of driftwood scoured bone-white by sea and sun; it was shaped like a hand-gun; he pretended it was the gun in his belt.
Reynolds said: ‘You see now why I had to let you read the dossier? You would never have believed that I would seriously ask you to undertake a mission like this when I had once dismissed you as crazy.’
Reynolds had done more than dismiss him as crazy: he had emblazoned his craziness across the world. As a result Helen had divorced him; if you were the Vassar-educated daughter of an oil-rich fat cat in River Oaks it was fine being married to an astronaut; being married to a madman was different.
Massey asked: ‘What makes you think the Russians will take me seriously now? I presume you mean I would have to pull a fake defection.’
‘I’ll come to that later,’ Reynolds told him. ‘First the other reasons why it has to be you.’
‘Because the computer says so?’
‘Of course.’ Reynolds turned in his tracks. ‘Let’s go back.’ Massey followed because he still had to know.
A jet flew high over the Gulf spinning a white thread behind it. Reynolds took his hands from the pockets of his windcheater – the sun was beginning to warm the day – and ticked off the other reasons on his fingers.
‘One: in a way you’re Talin’s double. Older, sure, and badly out of condition. But, like him, you’re an idealist. Two: you had started training for the shuttle so you’ve got a lot of common ground there. Three: Talin’s stability was slightly suspect but he had a mentor who covered up for him.’
‘As unstable as me?’
‘You weren’t unstable,’ Reynolds said. ‘You had a vestibular condition which could have been corrected.’
‘You didn’t think so at the time.’
‘Like I said, it wasn’t a risk I was prepared to take.’
‘But you can now.’
‘What I can do now,’ Reynolds said carefully, ‘is utilise the unfortunate events of the past. Talin will be sympathetic to your experiences, especially when he sees that you’re eminently sane.’
‘You’ve got two faucets,’ Massey said. ‘One marked sane, one marked nuts. You turn them on and off at will.’
‘Four: you speak Russian.’
‘I often wondered in the past whether that would be held against me.’
‘Why should it? I understand that you decided to learn it when the possibility of the Soviet-US joint venture with Apollo and Soyuz ships docking with a Salyut space station was first mooted.’
‘Some computer,’ Massey observed. ‘In fact the Apollo and the Soyuz ultimately docked directly. Any more reasons?’
‘A few.’
‘But you’re not telling?’
‘That’s right,’ Reynolds said.
Massey, disappointed with himself for trading conversation with Reynolds, said: ‘You still haven’t told me just how the hell you think I’m going to persuade a man like Talin to defect.’
‘If I explain you’ll do it?’
It would be satisfying, Massey decided, to get a concession from Reynolds before shooting him. He said: ‘I would only consider co-operating with you on one condition –’
‘That you are allowed to return to space? Don’t worry, that’s already in the pipeline. As soon as this operation is completed you are to be allocated a fresh place in a training programme for service in the shuttle.’
Massey’s thoughts blurred; the initiative left him. Without realising it he straightened his body. He saw the curve of the Moon, the bright shining globe that was Earth. Infinity beckoned. Everyone had their price.
Reynolds said: ‘So you agree?’
When he didn’t reply Reynolds took his arm and said: ‘Don’t let that gun in your belt confuse you. You don’t want to kill me now: you want to fly to the stars.’ He increased the pressure on Massey’s arm. ‘In any case that old Colt’s crocked. You don’t think I’d have walked down the beach with you if it worked, do you?’
When Reynolds finally got around to explaining how Russian scepticism to his reported mental condition would be overcome, and how Talin would be persuaded to defect Massey said: ‘But that’s real Dirty Tricks Department.’
‘Do you want to be an astronaut again?’
Beaten, Massey nodded.
Reynolds got back to the President’s ranch at 5 p.m. on Saturday. Half an hour before dinner he handed the President a cardboard folder containing five sheets of typescript. ‘The scenario for your spectacular,’ he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
Many people imagine the Kremlin to be a brooding mausoleum. Nothing could be farther from the truth. On a fine day the gilded husks of its cathedrals sail majestically in the blue sky and the sunlight finds gold in its green-roofed palaces; during fog or blizzard it is baronial and snug.
For Nicolay Talin the Kremlin was a joy. Not because it was the fount of an ideology, far from it, but because its epic history appealed to the Siberian in him. As he walked through its grounds this November day, with the first snow on the ground freshly crisped by frost, with ice-dust sparkling in the sunlight, he marvelled at its fragile elegance conceived in violence.
Talin knew his Kremlin as well as he knew his spacecraft. Here in the twelfth century the natives built a wooden stockade, a kreml, to protect themselves against the Mongol hordes. Thereafter it was taken, sacked, freed, by Mongols, Tartars, Turks, Poles, Swedes … Here Ivan the Great reigned – demanding the title Tzar (Caesar) – and built the cathedrals of the Annunciation and Assumption; here was born Ivan the Terrible who terrorised his own countrymen and was not above stuffing his enemies full of gunpowder and exploding them – to his credit he built St Basil’s Cathedral, with its cluster of spun-sugar baubles, in Red Square.
Here in 1613 the Romanov dynasty was born, to last three centuries until in 1917 it reached its bloody end and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin installed the Supreme Soviet in the Grand Palace.
Napoleon reached the Kremlin, Hitler failed; both were ultimately beaten by a land and its people whose spirit was crystallised here in the Kremlin, and both should have known better.
Talin and Sonya often visited the parts of the Kremlin grounds open to the public when Talin was on leave. They met beside the dumb 200-ton hulk of the Tzar Bell, which crashed from its tower during the fire of 1737, they walked the cobbled squares, they held hands watched inscrutably by a bronze and granite Lenin.
This morning Sonya wasn’t with him, she was rehearsing at the Bolshoi. But he feit she was beside him and smiled at her, and two fur-hatted militia stamping through Cathedral Square agreed that the blond, arrogant-looking man in the Western-styled topcoat and sealskin shapka was as drunk as Ivan’s Bell Tower, knocked out of alignment by Napoleon’s gunners.
They were not to know that, later that day, he intended to ask the girl they couldn’t see to marry him.
But first he had to meet Oleg Sedov in a bar off Petrovka Street, not far from the Bolshoi. He left the Kremlin and walked across Red Square, heels tapping on the cobbles. Sometimes Talin felt like grabbing a clutch of gawping tourists and telling them that its real name was Krasnaya Ploshchad, Beautiful Square, and that Red had nothing to do with politics, only its colour. Or hauling them off to see the real Russia outside the Intourist guide books. Siberia, of course; or the bar where he was meeting Sedov for that matter.
The cold crackled in his nostrils, he breathed it deep into his lungs as others inhale cigarette smoke.
On the far side of the Square he climbed into his red Moskvich, an ageing but neat little car that butted through the sparse traffic.
He was lucky to have a car, but he was a cosmonaut and therefore one of the élite, like authors (approved by the State), officers of the Party and the Services, academics, doctors, footballers … Privilege it was true, but that didn’t bother him. He was entitled to it and, in his book, Communism should be the equal distribution of wealth not poverty.
Sedov thought otherwise.
You could see it the way he dressed as he leaned against the bar peeling shrimps and small crabs and dropping their shells on the floor. His bruised shoes looked as though they were made from cardboard, his fawn suit beneath his blue parka was East German rubbish tailored to fit a coathanger.
Talin had come to tell Sedov that tonight he was going to propose to Sonya; he told him most things.
‘Beer?’
Talin nodded, pointing at the plate of crustacea, prawns on a good day but not today. ‘And some of those.’
Sedov ordered two brown bottles, fluted like barley sugar, of tepid beer, black bread and more seafood. The bar, as basic as a barn, was crowded with men, cheeks polished by the cold, talking and guzzling. Listening while Sedov ordered, Talin picked up snatches of football – Dynamo’s prospects – sex, wages … no politics.
They drank. Sedov wiped foam from his lips. ‘You’re looking remarkably cheerful,’ he said.
‘I’ve got reason to be.’
‘Good news?’
‘I think so.’
‘I have news, too. From the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Force.’
‘Really?’ Talin refused to look surprised; he was used to Sedov’s dark humour; he searched the face of his friend and mentor, eyebrows charcoal black, shadow of a cleft in the chin. ‘And what does the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief have to say?’
‘He wants you to get. married,’ Sedov said, popping a morsel of crab meat into his mouth.
Talin grinned, waiting for the rest of the joke; when it didn’t come he began to roll a pellet of black bread between his thumb and forefinger; the sparkle that had been with him all morning faded.
‘He wants me to get married?’
‘He’s a romantic,’ Sedov said. ‘But, to be fair, he’s merely conveying a message from the image makers.’
‘Married to anyone in particular?’
‘To Sonya Bragina, of course.’
‘Supposing I don’t want to marry Sonya Bragina?’
‘But you do, don’t you?’ Sedov stared at him over the rim of his glass.
‘I did.’
Sedov ordered another couple of beers from the headscarved woman behind the bar and said: ‘I don’t know why you’re being perverse. Both you and the General want you to marry Sonya.’
‘What the hell’s it got to do with him or anyone else?’
Two men in spaniel-eared fur hats pushed their way into the bar bringing a gust of cold air with them. ‘You know how it is,’ Sedov told him, ‘you and Sonya are featured in every magazine in the Soviet Union. Readers are beginning to think it’s time you made it legal. It’s quite permissible for husbands to be unfaithful to their wives but young people living in sin … that’s a different story.’
‘I thought,’ Talin said, flattening the pellet of black bread, ‘that the Cult of Personality was discouraged.’
‘Ah, if you’re a big wheel in the Kremlin, yes. If you’re a young man and a beautiful girl who personify the spirit of Soviet youth, no.’
‘Some big wheels seem to get their fair share of publicity.’
Sedov held up a warning finger.
The sunlight outside had faded. Or was it the grime on the windows? Talin said: ‘As a matter of fact I was going to ask Sonya to marry me this evening.’
He noticed a fleeting change of expression on Sedov’s face. Pleasure? Regret? It was a difficult face to read; theirs was a difficult – no, unusual – relationship; it had endured since university when Sedov, responsible for indoctrination of young cosmonaut hopefuls, had singled him out for special attention. In appointing Sedov for that job the KGB had chosen well; he hadn’t been too old – mid-thirties – and he had himself been a cosmonaut and therefore a hero. Talin who had lost his father when he was twelve had responded to his advice: Don’t kick the system, it kicks back. And Sedov whose only child had been stillborn had responded to him.
So here we are, Talin thought, father-and-son, adviser-and-pupil, fellow cosmonauts, friends, discussing my marriage. An unusual relationship.
‘She will accept, of course,’ Sedov said.
‘I said I was going to ask her. Before a bureaucratic match-maker interfered.’
A chunky man wearing a blue boiler-suit barged past Talin saying: ‘Sorry, Comrade, we mustn’t spill beer on that fancy coat of yours, must we,’ but when he noticed Sedov he moved away: there was something about Sedov.
Sedov said: ‘In three months’ time, in February 1984 – and let’s not believe everything Comrade Orwell had to say about that year – you and I will be flying together in space again in Dove II. May I suggest that before the flight, in December perhaps, you take a couple of weeks off training and go to the Black Sea for your honeymoon?’
‘I wish,’ said Talin tightly, ‘that you and the Comrade General would stop trying to market my life. Perhaps Orwell wasn’t so wrong …’
‘Our lives have always been arranged, you know that. And let me assure you that it’s not so different in the West. Lives are regulated just as methodically there but the people don’t realise it: they believe they are masters of their own destiny. But they still set their alarms for seven, catch the eight-twenty train, leave the office at five-thirty, switch on television at seven-forty-five and go on vacation every August. Life is a timetable, Shakespeare knew that. All we can do is enjoy the ride in between the stops.’
‘I’ve never heard you talk so much,’ Talin remarked. ‘You must be nervous.’
‘I’m just telling you not to let our version of the timetable interfere with your feelings for Sonya.’ Sedov zipped up his parka. ‘Personally I think I instilled a little humour into the situation. Imagine a general acting as a go-between.’ He stuck out his hand. ‘Well, I must be off.’
‘To report on the success of the mission to the Comrade General?’
‘To buy a bottle of vodka to celebrate your engagement,’ Sedov said.
They shook hands and walked into the street and went their separate ways in the cold bright sunshine.
The swan died. The curtain fell. The audience erupted.
In his box in the great red and gold well of the theatre Talin watched the audience clapping and cheering. Sedov should have been with him: nothing was arranged here.
Beneath him a stout woman dressed in grey was crying; her husband, a balding man in a black suit and open-neck white shirt, put his arm round her.
The Bolshoi, the gold domes of the Kremlin, wooden cathedrals in the countryside, dachas, Tzarist treasures, icons … they were all the scourge of the Party publicist trying to accommodate the decadent past in the present. The publicist’s mistake was in trying; the extremes and contradictions were an entity, part of the exquisite torment of Russia.
In the front stalls they were on their feet, these discriminating judges. If they departed after a mere couple of encores then the ballerina might as well retire to teach dancing in Archangel. Tonight Talin lost count of the encores for Bragina who, according to his companions in the box, was comparable with Pavlova. Her arms were full of flowers.
Talin excused himself from the box; outside he drank a glass of pink champagne in which a glacé cherry bobbed like a cork. Communism! He fetched his coat from the cloakroom and in the street, beneath the Quadriga of Apollo, hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to the Georgian restaurant where he had reserved a table for two.
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