Ruth dragged her steamer trunk into the hallway and shut the door. Iris heard her call for the taxi driver—bark instructions—bang bang bang as the poor trunk made its way to the courtyard. Then nothing, not even the roar of an engine. Just the smell of vinegar and wood, the smell of an empty apartment.
Iris sat down on the lid of her trunk and waited for Sasha to arrive.
Two
I am really two people. I am a private person and a political person.
Of course, if there is a conflict, the political person comes first.
—Kim Philby
Lyudmila
June 1952
Moscow
Sometimes it seems to Lyudmila that her work is futile. No matter how many traitors she unmasks, no matter how many acts of subversion, no matter how many instances of heresy to the great faith, a hundred more spring to life before her eyes. There’s always some note out of tune in this Soviet chorus, some person who puts his own self-interest ahead of the interest of the state. Sometimes it’s the very person who sings the best and the loudest.
Trust no one.
Early on in her work—the beginning, really—she learned to strip away all sentiment from her judgment. When is it possible to feel and to think at the same time? Never. So as Lyudmila pursued all possible candidates for the ASCOT leak over the past year, she didn’t regard past service to the Soviet Union, faithful or not; nor did she consult her opinion of the man’s character. There are only facts—did he have access to the information suspected to have been leaked? Did he have the opportunity and the means to communicate it? But until recently, there were not enough facts to guide her. No further ASCOT communications were intercepted. The agent seemed to have gone quiet.
Now she sits in her small, windowless office in Moscow Centre and contemplates a photograph. It was taken a year ago in Gorky Park, where a local team had intercepted a bundle of photographs and coded messages during a random search of an ice cream vendor. Under interrogation, the vendor admitted to operating a postbox for an agent whose name and identity he didn’t know. So the KGB sent a surveillance team. They had taken hundreds of photographs that yielded nothing useful, so the photographs had been filed away. Lyudmila had discovered their existence almost by accident, a conversation in the corridor with a secretary in the Moscow counterintelligence section.
To any ordinary observer, the scene’s perfectly innocent. A tall, gangly man buys ice cream for his family—a wife and three children, two boys and a girl—what is wrong with that? But Lyudmila recognizes this man. It’s HAMPTON, the American defector. HAMPTON now works primarily as an academic, lecturing on foreign relations at Moscow State University, but he’s also frequently employed by the KGB training program. He lives in Moscow with his three children and his wife, who (if Lyudmila’s not mistaken) is shortly to deliver another baby. Lyudmila knows all this not just because it’s her job to know what men like HAMPTON are up to, but because his two older children happen to attend the same school as her own daughter.
Lyudmila has a daughter, yes. Marina was born at the end of 1940, nine months after Lyudmila discovered her husband in possession of a radio set, with which he regularly listened to broadcasts from the BBC and other Western sources. She was twenty-six years old and deeply in love, but it was her duty to report this subversive activity to the authorities and so she did. She kept the baby, however. She and her mother raised little Marina together, and the three of them were Lyudmila’s whole family until her mother—weakened by wartime deprivation—died five years ago. So now it’s only Lyudmila and Marina.
When Lyudmila arrives home from work, her head full of the ASCOT case, Marina calls to her from the tiny kitchen, where she’s making dinner. “Coming, pet,” says Lyudmila. She sets down her briefcase and takes off her shoes and her small hat and pads across the living room. Marina looks up from the stove. Her blue eyes are exactly like her father’s, crisp and smiling, surrounded by wet black lashes.
“How was your day, Mama?” she asks.
“Good. What are you making?”
“Solyanka.”
“Hmm. My favorite soup, is it? Have you been misbehaving at school again?”
Marina gives her a playful look. “Maybe.”
They eat the soup together at the little table in the corner of the tiny living room. Marina does her homework and Lyudmila checks it carefully. Of course, there are no mistakes. Dmitri was an electrical engineer when he was sent to the gulag; he had been the smartest boy in school, when they were children. He also had a rebellious streak, which he passed on to his daughter.
“Mama,” Marina says, once they’re settled on the sofa—Lyudmila reading a KGB training manual, Marina reading Tolstoy for school tomorrow—“how old were you when you met my father?”
Lyudmila thinks for a moment. “I was twelve years old.”
“Ah. The same as me.”
“A little older.”
“Oh, a few months,” Marina says impatiently.
She returns to her book and Lyudmila returns to her training manual, but thanks to Marina’s strange question she can’t concentrate. She keeps thinking about Dmitri, and how he used to shield her from some of the other children, who teased her because she was so smart and serious and wore clothes even uglier and shabbier than the other girls. She thought he was just being kind, but when she turned seventeen he told her it was because he fell in love with her that first day at school, when they were both twelve years old.
The next day, Lyudmila receives word of an unusual request from the American embassy. Mrs. Alexander Digby, who has a history of difficult childbirth, has apparently invited her sister to stay with her in Moscow, during and after the period of her delivery. The sister wishes to formally apply for two visas to enter the Soviet Union, one for herself and one for her husband, to whom she is newly married.
Lyudmila’s skin prickles as she reads this report. She holds no truck with sentiment, but instinct is a KGB officer’s most valuable asset.
She picks up her telephone and asks to speak to the head of the American section.
Ruth
June 1952
Rome, Italy
I’ll say this for Herbert Hudson. When I told him I needed four hundred dollars to fly to Europe and help my sister with her new baby, he didn’t ask any silly questions, like why couldn’t I sail instead, and when would I return. He wrote me a check and wished me bon voyage, then expressed his hope that the agency would remain a going concern in my absence.