27
HAROLD GUINZBURG placed the manuscript on the desk in front of him. Harry sat opposite him and waited for his verdict.
Guinzburg frowned when his secretary entered the room and put two steaming hot coffees and a plate of biscuits in front of them, and remained silent while she was in the room. He was clearly enjoying making Harry suffer a few more moments of torture. When the door finally closed behind her, Harry thought he would explode.
The suggestion of a smile appeared on Guinzburg’s face. “No doubt you’re wondering how I feel about your latest work,” he said, turning the screw one more notch.
Harry could have happily strangled the damn man.
“Shall we start by giving Detective Inspector Warwick a clue?”
And then buried him.
“A hundred and twenty thousand copies. In my opinion, it’s the best thing you’ve ever done, and I’m proud to be your publisher.”
Harry was so shocked that he burst into tears, and as neither of them had a handkerchief, they both started to laugh. Once they had recovered, Guinzburg spent some time explaining why he’d enjoyed William Warwick and the Time Bomb so much. Harry quickly forgot that he’d spent the previous two days endlessly walking the streets of New York agonizing over how his publisher would react. He took a sip of his coffee, but it had gone cold.
“May I now turn your attention to another author,” said Guinzburg, “namely Anatoly Babakov, and his biography of Josef Stalin.”
Harry placed his cup back on the saucer.
“Mrs. Babakov tells me that she’s hidden her husband’s book in a place where no one could possibly find it. Worthy of a Harry Clifton novel,” he added. “But, as you know, other than to confirm that it’s somewhere in the Soviet Union, you’re the only person she’s willing to tell the exact location.” Harry didn’t interrupt. “My own view,” continued Guinzburg, “is that you shouldn’t become involved, remembering the Communists don’t exactly consider you to be a national treasure. So if you do find out where it’s hidden, perhaps someone else should go and retrieve it.”
“If I’m not willing to take that risk myself,” said Harry, “then what was the point of all the years I’ve spent trying to get Babakov released? But before I decide, let me ask you one question. If I were able to lay my hands on a copy of Uncle Joe, what would be your first print run?”
“A million copies,” said Guinzburg.
“And you think it’s me who’d be taking a risk!”
“Don’t forget that Svetlana Stalin’s book, Twenty Letters to a Friend, was on the best-seller list for over a year and, unlike Babakov, she never once entered the Kremlin during her father’s reign.” Guinzburg opened a drawer of his desk and extracted a check for $100,000, made out to Mrs. Yelena Babakov. He handed it to Harry. “If you do find the book, she’ll be able to live in luxury for the rest of her life.”
“But if I don’t, or if it isn’t even there? You’ll have spent a hundred thousand dollars and will have nothing to show for it.”
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” said Guinzburg. “But then any half-decent publisher is a gambler at heart. Now let’s talk about more agreeable things. My beloved Emma, for example, and Sebastian. Not to mention Lady Virginia Fenwick. I can’t wait to hear what she’s been up to.”
* * *
Lunch with his publisher had gone on far too long and Harry only just made it to Penn Station in time to catch the Pennsylvania Flyer. During the first part of the journey to Pittsburgh, he went over every question Guinzburg wanted answered before he could part with his $100,000.
Later, as Harry dozed off, his mind drifted to his last conversation with Sebastian. He hoped his son could win Samantha back, and not just because he’d always liked her. He felt Seb had finally grown up, and that Sam would rediscover the man she’d fallen in love with.
When the train pulled into Union Station, Harry remembered that there was something he’d always wanted to do if he ever went to Pittsburgh. But there would be no time to visit the Carnegie Museum of Art, which Jessica had once told him housed some of the finest Cassatts in America.
He climbed into the back of a yellow cab and asked the driver to take him to Brunswick Mansions on the north side. The address had an air of middle-class gentility about it, but when they came to a halt twenty minutes later Harry discovered the reality was a decaying slum. The cab sped off the moment he had paid the fare.
Harry climbed the well-worn stone steps of a graffiti-covered tenement building. The Out of Order sign hanging from the lift door had a permanent look about it. He walked slowly up the stairs to the eighth floor and went in search of apartment number 86, which was on the far side of the block. Neighbors looked out from their doorways, suspicious of the smartly dressed man who must surely be a government official.
His gentle knock on the door was answered so quickly she must have been waiting for him. Harry smiled down at an old woman with sad, tired eyes and a deeply lined face. He could imagine just how painful her long separation from her husband must have been by the fact that although they were about the same age, she looked twenty years older than him.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Clifton,” she said with no trace of an accent. “Please come in.” She guided her guest down a narrow, uncarpeted corridor into the living room, where a large photograph of her husband, hanging above a shelf of well-thumbed paperbacks, was the sole adornment on otherwise blank walls.
“Please sit down,” she said, gesturing toward one of the two chairs that were the only pieces of furniture in the room. “It was kind of you to make such a long journey to see me. And I must thank you for your gallant efforts to have my dear Anatoly released. You have proved an indefatigable ally.”
Mrs. Babakov talked about her husband as if he was late home from work and would appear at any moment, rather than serving a twenty-year prison sentence more than seven thousand miles away.
“How did you first meet Anatoly?” he asked.
“We both trained at Moscow’s Foreign Languages Institute. I ended up teaching English at a local state school, while Anatoly moved into the Kremlin soon after he won the Lenin Medal for coming top of his year. When we were first married, I thought we had everything, that we must have been blessed, we were so lucky, and by most people’s standards in Russia, we were. But that changed overnight when Anatoly was chosen to translate the chairman’s speeches so they could be used for propaganda purposes in the West.
“Then the chairman’s official interpreter fell ill, and Anatoly filled in. A temporary appointment, they told him, and how he wished it had been. But he wanted to impress the country’s leader, and he must have done so, because he was quickly promoted to become Stalin’s principal interpreter. You’d understand why, if you’d ever met him.”
“Wrong tense,” said Harry. “You mean I’ll understand why when I meet him.”
She smiled. “When you meet him. That was when his problems began,” she continued. “He became too close to Stalin, and although he was only an apparatchik, he began to witness things that made him realize what a monster Stalin was. The image presented to the people, of a kind, benevolent favorite uncle, could not have been further from the truth. Anatoly would tell me the most horrendous stories when he came back from work, but never in front of anyone else, even our closest friends. If he had spoken out, his punishment would not have been demotion, he would simply have disappeared like so many thousands of others. Yes, thousands, if they so much as raised an eyebrow in protest.
“His only solace was in his writing, which he knew could never be published until after Stalin’s death, and probably not until after his own death. But Anatoly wanted the world to know that Stalin was every bit as evil as Hitler. The only difference being that he’d got away with it. And then Stalin died.
“Anatoly became impatient to let the world know what he knew. He should have waited longer, but when he found a publisher who shared his ideals, he couldn’t stop himself. On the day of publication, even before Uncle Joe reached the shops, every copy was destroyed. So great were the KGB’s fears of anyone discovering the truth that even the presses on which Anatoly’s words had been printed were smashed to pieces. The next day he was arrested, and within a week he’d been tried and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labor in the gulag for writing a book that no one had ever read. If he’d been an American who’d written a biography of Roosevelt or Churchill, he would have been on every talk show, and his book would have been a best seller.”
“But you managed to escape.”
“Yes, Anatoly had seen what was coming. A few weeks before publication, he sent me to my mother’s in Leningrad and gave me every ruble he had saved, and a proof copy of the book. I managed to get across the border into Poland, but not until I’d bribed a guard with most of Anatoly’s life savings. I arrived in America without a penny.”
“And the book, did you bring it with you?”
“No, I couldn’t risk that. If I’d been caught and it had been confiscated, Anatoly’s whole life would have served no purpose. I left it somewhere they will never find it.”
* * *
The three men who had been waiting for her all rose as Lady Virginia entered the room. At last the meeting could begin.
Desmond Mellor sat opposite her, wearing a brown-checked suit that would have been more in place at a greyhound track. On his left was Major Fisher, dressed in his obligatory dark blue pinstriped double-breasted suit, no longer off-the-peg; after all, he was now a Member of Parliament. Opposite him sat the man who was responsible for bringing the four of them together.
“I called this meeting at short notice,” said Adrian Sloane, “because something has arisen that could well disrupt our long-term plan.” None of them interrupted him. “Last Friday afternoon, just before Sebastian Clifton traveled to New York on the Buckingham, he purchased another twenty-five thousand of the bank’s shares, taking his overall position to just over five percent. As I warned you some time ago, anyone in possession of six percent of the company’s stock is automatically entitled to a place on the board, and if that were to happen, it wouldn’t be long before he discovered what we’ve been planning for the past six months.”
“How much time do you think we’ve got?” asked Lady Virginia.
“Could be a day, a month, a year, who knows?” said Sloane. “All we do know for certain is that only needs another one percent to claim a place on the board, so we should assume sooner rather than later.”
“How close are we to getting our hands on the old lady’s shares?” inquired the major. “That would solve all our problems.”
“I have an appointment to see her son Arnold next Tuesday,” said Des Mellor. “Officially to seek his advice on a legal matter, but I won’t tell him my real purpose until he’s signed a nondisclosure agreement.”
“Why aren’t you making him the offer?” Virginia asked, turning to Sloane. “After all, you’re the chairman of the bank.”
“He’d never agree to do business with me,” said Sloane, “not after I got Mrs. Hardcastle to waive her voting rights on the day of her husband’s funeral. But he hasn’t come across Desmond before.”
“And once he’s signed the nondisclosure agreement,” said Mellor, “I’ll make him an offer of three pounds nine shillings a share for his mother’s stock—that’s thirty percent above market value.”
“Surely he’ll be suspicious? After all, he knows you’re a director of the bank.”
“True,” said Sloane, “but as the sole trustee of his father’s estate, it’s his responsibility to get the best possible deal for his mother, and at the moment, she’s living off her dividend which I’ve kept to the minimum for the past two years.”
“After I’ve reminded him of that,” said Mellor, “I’ll deliver the coup de grace, and tell him that the first thing I intend to do is remove Adrian as chairman of the bank.”
“That should clinch it,” said the major.
“But what’s to stop him getting in touch with Clifton and simply asking for a better price?”
“That’s the beauty of the nondisclosure agreement. He can’t discuss the offer with anyone other than his mother, unless he wants to be reported to the Bar Council. Not a risk a QC would take lightly.”
“And is our other buyer still in place?” asked the major.
“Mr. Bishara is not only in place,” said Sloane, “but he’s confirmed his offer of five pounds a share in writing, and deposited two million pounds with his solicitor to show he’s serious.”
“Why is he willing to pay so much over the odds?” asked Lady Virginia.
“Because the Bank of England has recently turned down his application for a license to trade as a banker in the City of London, and he’s so desperate to get his hands on an English bank with an impeccable reputation that he doesn’t seem to mind how much he pays for Farthings.”
“But won’t the Bank of England object to what is obviously a takeover?” asked Fisher.
“Not if he keeps the same board in place for a couple of years, and I stay on as chairman. Which is why it’s so important that Clifton doesn’t find out what we’re up to.”
“But what happens if Clifton gets his hands on six percent?”
“I’ll also offer him three pounds nine shillings a share,” said Sloane, “which I have a feeling he won’t be able to resist.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Mellor. “I’ve noticed a change of attitude recently. He seems to be working to a completely different agenda.”
“Then I’ll have to rewrite that agenda.”
* * *
“The book is where a book should be,” said Mrs. Babakov.
“In a bookshop?” Harry guessed.
Mrs. Babakov smiled. “But no ordinary bookshop.”
“If you want to keep that secret, I’ll understand, especially if its discovery is likely to bring even greater punishment on your husband.”
“What greater punishment could there be? His last words as he handed me the book were, ‘I’ve risked my life for this, and would happily sacrifice it to know it had been published so that the world, and more important the Russian people, can finally be told the truth.’ So I only have one purpose left in life, Mr. Clifton, and that is to see Anatoly’s book published, whatever the consequences. Otherwise every sacrifice he’s made will have been in vain.” She grasped his hand. “You’ll find it in an antiquarian bookshop that specializes in foreign translations on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Bolshaya Morskaya Street in Leningrad,” she said, continuing to grasp Harry’s hand like a lonely widow clinging to her only son. “It’s on the top shelf in the farthest corner, between War and Peace in Spanish, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles in French. But don’t look for Uncle Joe, because I hid it in the dust jacket of a Portuguese translation of A Tale of Two Cities. I don’t think too many Portuguese visit that shop.”
Harry smiled. “And if it’s still there, and I’m able to bring it back, are you happy for Mr. Guinzburg to publish it?”
“Anatoly would have been proud to be—” She stopped, smiled again and said, “Anatoly will be proud to be published by the same house as Harry Clifton.”
Harry took an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. She opened it slowly and extracted the check. Harry watched to see her reaction, but she simply put the check back in the envelope and returned it to him.
“But surely Anatoly would have wanted you to—”
“Yes, he would,” she said quietly. “But it’s not what I want. Can you imagine the pain he suffers every day? So until he is released, I do not care to live in any degree of comfort. You, of all people, must understand that.”
They sat silently together in the little room, holding hands. As the shadows crept in Harry realized there was no light. She was determined to share her husband’s prison. She displayed such dignity that it was Harry who felt embarrassed. Finally, Mrs. Babakov stood.
“I’ve kept you far too long, Mr. Clifton. I will understand if you decide not to return to Russia, as you have much to lose. And if you do not, I make only one request: please say nothing, until I have found someone who is willing to carry out the task.”
“Mrs. Babakov,” Harry said, “if the book is still there, I will find it. I will bring it back, and it will be published.”
She embraced him and said, “I will of course understand if you change your mind.”
Harry felt both sad and exhilarated as he walked back down the eight flights of stairs to the now-deserted sidewalk. He had to walk for several blocks before he was able to hail a cab, and he didn’t notice the man following him, dodging in and out of the shadows, and occasionally taking a surreptitious photograph.
“Damn,” muttered Harry as the train pulled out of Union Station and began its long journey back to New York. He had been so preoccupied with meeting Mrs. Babakov, he’d quite forgotten to visit the Carnegie. Jessica would chastise him. Wrong tense. Jessica would have chastised him.