‘No. But he knew and he cared about art. Khrulev felt that he could trust him, for that and for other reasons that do not appear in the file.’
‘What other reasons?’
Savchenko waved his hand. ‘He had good connections … But that is beside the point. He was an excellent Chekist. At the time of the coup, Orlov was out in the field. He was closing in on a man called Maslyukov in Berlin.’
‘An icon smuggler?’
‘A smuggler and a receiver. But more than that. An organizer and fixer. Almost a mastermind. In one of the memos, Khrulev estimates that more than half the icons smuggled out of the Soviet Union ended up with Maslyukov in Berlin.’
‘Did he find him?’
‘Yes. He found him but it was messy. Three of them went in, Orlov and two others. Either they were expected, or Maslyukov guessed who they were. Maslyukov was killed. His wife …’ Savchenko continued his train of thought for a moment in the silence. ‘They used extreme methods to persuade her to talk. They recovered the icons. Orlov sent back ninety-seven, many of them major works, with a junior officer. His name’s in the file.’
‘Partovsky?’
‘Yes. This Partovsky took a Volkswagen van on the ferry from Travemünde to Tallinn, then drove from Tallinn straight to the Tretyakov Gallery where they remain today. Orlov flew back two weeks later and was sacked.’
‘Why? If the operation was a success?’
‘Because of Khrulev. He had not only worked for Khrulev but it was thought that he shared Khrulev’s point of view. He was offered a job on the security staff of the Tretyakov along with Partovsky. Partovsky accepted. Orlov refused.’
‘So what did Orlov do?’
‘He disappeared.’
‘What do you mean?’
Savchenko frowned. ‘What I say. He left the service. No one bothered to find out what he was up to. And now that we want him, he can’t be found.’
‘Why do we want him?’
Savchenko sighed. ‘In reviewing the past operations of General Khrulev, I have come across certain … irregularities. Some of his files are missing – not just files like this’ – Savchenko nodded at the file in front of Gerasimov – ‘but also computer files, erased from the hard disk, and the back-ups removed from Khrulev’s safe. Khrulev, you see, was permitted to work on his own. The icon operation, in particular, had to be secret, even within the Lubyanka, because so many of our own people had done business with these Maslyukovs. For this reason, Khrulev may have used agents in Germany who were known only to him. It is the files relating to these agents that have disappeared.’
‘Could Khrulev have erased them before he killed himself?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Or do you think Orlov might have taken them?’
Savchenko shrugged. ‘That too is possible.’
‘Why would he want them?’
Savchenko lit another cigarette. ‘I don’t know. That is just what we would like to ask him. And there is something else. There is reason to believe that Orlov may have got hold of the Maslyukovs’ money, but he only returned the icons. He may therefore be guilty of appropriating state funds.’
‘So he may simply have gone back to the West to live on the Maslyukovs’ money?’
‘If you study the file, you will see why that is unlikely. Orlov was not chosen by Khrulev simply for his talents. They were like-minded. Zealots. They shared the same ideals. And I cannot believe that Orlov has changed simply because of the failure of the coup.’
‘So why did he want the money?’
‘I don’t know, but consider this. Khrulev sent Orlov to Berlin to recover the icons. Just as Orlov is about to pounce on the Maslyukovs, the coup occurs. Khrulev commits suicide. Does Orlov abort the operation? No. He goes ahead feeling, perhaps, that he now bears the responsibility for Khrulev’s mission – not just the mission to recover the icons, but the mission in a much wider sense. Indeed, the failure of the coup, followed by the suspension of the Party, must have made it clear to Orlov that if the Party was to survive, it would have to go underground, and that if it was now cut off from the resources of the Soviet government, it would have to raise funds as best it could.’
‘But if he got hold of the Maslyukovs’ money, why has he now gone back to the West?’
‘That is what I want you to find out.’
‘Do we know where he is?’
Savchenko shrugged. ‘The only thing we know for sure is that he took a night train to Kiev on the twelfth of October of last year. From there it is possible that he flew to Vienna on one of his Western passports, possibly posing as a German microbiologist who had been in Kiev for a convention.’
Gerasimov could not restrain a start of excited anticipation at the thought of a trip to the West. ‘Do we know the names on his Western passports?’
‘We know the passports he used for the icon operation. But he may have new ones. Orlov had friends in Directorate S. It’s quite possible that someone arranged for replacements.’
Gerasimov leafed through the file. ‘Who was the third man?’
‘A non-commissioned officer, a Chechen called Kastiev. He returned, but not with Partovsky, and was then sacked.’
‘And now?’
‘He too cannot be found.’
‘Was he sacked for his links with Khrulev?’
‘No. He was …’ Savchenko hesitated. ‘His methods … his speciality, as it were, belonged to an earlier era.’
‘Kryuchkov’s?’
‘More like Beria’s. It is regrettable, in my view, that such people should ever have been employed by our state security. We may all have to do unsavoury things from time to time, but the Chechen is the kind of man … Well, in my view, he should be either in prison or an asylum, not the KGB.’
‘Do you think he’s with Orlov?’
Savchenko shrugged. ‘Kastiev is cunning, even fanatical, but he speaks no languages. He would not have gone West without Orlov, so if we can find Orlov you will find Kastiev too.’
‘What about their wives?’
‘Kastiev was not married, and Orlov hasn’t lived with his wife for several years.’
‘All the same, she might know where he is.’
‘Yes. But leave her alone for the moment. Her father is someone who still has powerful friends.’
‘So should I pick up his trail in Vienna?’ asked Gerasimov, trying not to show his eagerness.
Savchenko shook his head. ‘No. At least, not yet. There, must be someone in Moscow who knows where Orlov can be found. Read the file. Talk to the people here who knew Orlov. Talk to the officers still in the Lubyanka who served under Khrulev. There is also Partovsky at the Tretyakov and, if you get nowhere with other sources, there is Orlov’s father and Orlov’s wife. But be tactful. People’s respect for our state security is not what it was.’
At six that evening, Gerasimov drove out of the Lubyanka in a beige Samara, his briefcase containing the file on Andrei Orlov on the seat beside him, and at once became caught in the traffic. Before the coup, he might have sped up one of the emergency lanes, confident that if stopped by the militia he could get away with it as an officer in the KGB; but now, in these democratic times, not even the generals in Zils used this privilege. It was prudent to be discreet.
Nor did Gerasimov resent the time spent in his 1989 Samara, a small car with only two doors but one of the only Soviet models with a modern, Western design. He had bought it with all his savings, and a loan from his father, the general; and he had added accessories, a Blaupunkt radio and a radar scanning device, brought back from trips to the West.
He crossed the ring road and continued north on Prospekt Mira towards the Sputnik Park. The engine hiccuped, the car faltered, but then picked up again. Gerasimov cursed the dirty petrol that clogged the carburettor. He would have to ring Georgi. The traffic stopped. He changed into neutral and revved the engine to prevent it dying. He looked at the faces of the other drivers, then at the people on the pavement making to
wards the Rizakaya metro station. As always, their expressions were gloomy and inscrutable. Two generations of terror had taught them to hide their feelings, and the present political changes were too recent to persuade them to drop their masks now.
Gerasimov looked at his own face in the mirror of the Samara. Did he look different? He was fitter and healthier than most Muscovites: the staff restaurant at the Lubyanka might not be quite as lavish as it was in the days of the KGB, but it still provided a better bill of fare than the average office or factory canteen. He also had regular medical checkups, access to a gym and, before the coup, an annual holiday with his family at the KGB’s own holiday complex on the Black Sea. He still had the marks on his face from acne in adolescence, but then so did Harrison Ford, and Gerasimov liked to think that when he stuck out his jaw he bore a close resemblance to the American star.
Gerasimov also had a certain confidence in his bearing: an ordinary Muscovite could sense that he was one of the few who was accustomed to kick the many around. But even the most confident can face frustration, and as the Samara chugged forward, Gerasimov’s forehead creased into a frown. He was hungry but was not sure that there would be anything for supper. The conference with Savchenko had gone on longer than expected. The special store in the Lubyanka had been closed when he came out, and the canteen had run out of supplies. He had called his wife to warn her, but her reply – a deep sigh – did not encourage him to hope that she had then gone out to join a queue at a state shop or squander her housekeeping allowance at the free market.
More likely, she would suggest going to some astronomically expensive cooperative restaurant, even if one could be found which would take roubles rather than dollars. And Gerasimov had run out of dollars. Surely some would have to be allocated for this investigation of Orlov? Without a trip to the West it was a tacky assignment. Gerasimov was trained to use his wits against an enemy; now he was being asked to investigate a colleague, and for all Savchenko’s talk of professionalism, there was a political whiff about the job – a quiet purge by the democrats of those officers who might suffer from too much nostalgia.
Not that Gerasimov had much sympathy for the likes of Orlov. Gerasimov had first gone to the West in his twenties, and had been stunned by the prosperity, but had somehow been prepared by years of ideological training in school and university, the Komsomol and the Party, to accept that the capitalist countries were richer because they had got off to a good start. It was only when he was sent to Singapore in 1986 to pick up the products of some industrial espionage that he realized that Asian nations, in one generation, had overtaken the Communist nations of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Why, if Socialism was superior, did Russians have to steal secrets from Chinks?
No doubt Gorbachev had reached the same conclusion: Gerasimov had come back to the new policy proclaimed at the 27th Party Congress – glasnost and perestroika. But two months later came the catastrophe at Chernobyl, and after that things had gone from bad to worse. A leopard can’t change its spots. Too many had a vested interest in the status quo. Gerasimov had seen the way in which his own superiors had paid lip service to glasnost and perestroika while working behind the scenes to frustrate them. It was not just that they wanted to hang on to their privileges: it was also the impossibility of envisaging any other way. Free speech? Free elections? The slogans of the imperialists and capitalists they had been trained to fight. A free market? The only entrepreneurs in the Soviet Union were the gangsters the KGB were supposed to prosecute – the currency speculators, icon smugglers and black marketeers. It was like being told to go over to the enemy without a fight.
But when it had come to the crunch during the attempted coup last summer, no one could face the thought of a return to the old days either. Seeing Vremya, the nine o’clock news on television, was like watching a newsreel that someone had dug up from the archives of Stalin’s days. The old rhetoric and bombast had raised the blood pressure of Gerasimov’s father, the general; but the officers of the KGB’s Alpha group had refused to storm the White House. The coup had collapsed, Yeltsin had triumphed, and Gerasimov’s only thought had been for his job.
Any Muscovite who knew the block of flats on the Ulitsa Akademika Koroleva where Gerasimov now parked the Samara would have understood why. The flat which went with the job was easy to reach from the centre of town, had a fine view over the Sputnik Park and had been built to a far higher standard than that usually found in Soviet dwellings. Some of the apartments were assigned to Western journalists and one of Gerasimov’s duties was to keep his eyes and ears open in the lobby and the lift – a small price to pay for two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen and bathroom with Finnish fittings.
The furniture was Russian: the same glass-fronted bookcase and three-piece suite that could be found in a million other apartments. The large colour TV had been made in Riga, but there was a Panasonic video-recorder brought back from a trip to Frankfurt and a Sansui stereo system from the trip to Singapore. Of the books in the bookcase, some like Jack London’s The Iron Heel were English-language editions published in Moscow dating from Gerasimov’s days as a student in the Institute of International Relations. Others were Russian classics by Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky; and there were a few Western best-sellers – by Arthur Haley or Jeffrey Archer – whose tattered covers betrayed how often they had been lent to the Gerasimovs’ friends.
Since the advent of the video, neither Gerasimov nor his wife Ylena had done much reading. Thanks to Georgi, they were able to get hold of pirated editions of most Western movies, some of which Ylena watched two or three times. Her job in the library of the All Union Institute of Geology was not challenging: she had persuaded her doctor to certify that she was susceptible to migraines and so often returned in the early afternoon to watch yet again a grainy copy of Pretty Woman or Gone with the Wind.
She also followed all of the soap operas, both Brazilian or home-grown, and when Gerasimov entered his flat that evening he was greeted not by the smell of cooking but the sound of the TV. He hung up his coat in the closet in the hall, removed his shoes, put his briefcase in the bedroom and then went into the kitchen to confirm that there was nothing either in the fridge or on the stove. That established, he went to the living room to try to disengage his wife’s attention from the television and discuss what they should eat that night.
Ylena was curled up on the sofa, a box of biscuits at her side. She looked at Gerasimov for less than a second, to let him know that she knew he was there; then her attention went back to the screen. Gerasimov’s spirits sank when he saw that most of the biscuits had been eaten: Ylena was a woman who acted on whim, and she only thought about food if she was hungry.
Like Gerasimov, she was in her early thirties and was still attractive with brown hair, blue eyes and a porcelain pale complexion; but already the soft femininity found in Russian girls had been replaced by a fixed look of dissatisfaction. In the Soviet Union, dreams had faded fast, and if Ylena as the wife of an officer in the KGB had been pampered in relation to other Soviet wives, with the flat, the car and holidays in the Crimea, her life nevertheless fell far short of the glossy luxury she saw on videos from the West, and now, since the coup, had fallen shorter still.
Nor had her privileged status saved her from the wear and tear of married life where the pill was unobtainable, even to the wife of an officer in the KGB, and condoms were so precious that they were washed after use and hung on a line to dry. She had had a baby, Sasha, soon after they had married; after that, four abortions in seven years; then nothing – neither sex nor abortions – until Georgi came up with some pornographic videos, after which came a short-lived revival of their sex lives followed by two more abortions.
Gerasimov suspected that she slept from time to time with some geologist at the institute – probably behind the cupboards containing specimens of rock – or even with her boss, Professor Bloch: someone had recently supplied her with tights and tampons, and he had noticed a box of Roget et Gallet
soap in the bathroom. She had told him that her friend Liubov had been given them by a French scientist who visited the botanical institute where she worked. Gerasimov had let it go at that. After all, he had affairs from time to time with typists and translators at the Lubyanka.
They stayed together, or had until then, partly because of Sasha, partly because it served the interests of both. Ylena liked the flat, and the perks that went with Gerasimov’s job. Gerasimov knew that apparent stability would help his career, as did his connection with his father-in-law who was in good standing with the Party. Now, of course, the Party had been suspended and even those like Gerasimov who had kept their jobs in the security service of the Russian Federation could no longer count on the perks that had kept Ylena happy. The cursory glance, and the sour look she had on her face when she finally turned off the television, were the punishment meted out to the now not so mighty hunter who had failed to bring home a rabbit for the pot.
‘Where’s Sasha?’
‘With my mother. She had a chicken.’
‘Couldn’t you have bought a chicken?’
‘You said you could get some sausage.’
‘I missed it. I was busy.’
She pouted and shrugged. ‘It was too late to go out, and anyway, do you know what they cost, now, on the market? Who can afford a chicken except the spivs and profiteers?’
‘Your mother …’
‘She was given it by her friend Natalia. She’s been at their dacha.’
‘That was kind of her.’
‘She’s done things for them.’
Gerasimov glanced at the cabinet where he knew there was a bottle of vodka still a third full. He longed for a drink but knew that if he started drinking on an empty stomach, with Ylena in that mood, it might end in a squalid brawl.
To try to placate both his wife and his growling stomach, he gave up all thought of thrift and suggested eating out.
It did not produce the enthusiasm in Ylena that he had expected. She sighed. ‘Where?’
‘The place on Petrovsky Boulevard.’