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“And Ivan Ivanovitch?”
“Six weeks after the vacation in Yalta I realized I was carrying his child. Ivan was born here, he is a U.S. citizen. At least he will grow up free.”
“Did you ever correspond with him, let him know?”
“To what point?” she asked bitterly. “He is married. He lives in a gilded prison, as much a prisoner as any zek in the camps. What could I do? Remind him of it all? Make him yearn for what he cannot reach?”
“Have you told your son about his father?”
“Yes. That he is a great man. A kind man. But far away.”
“Things are changing,” said Monk gently. “He could probably get as far as Moscow nowadays. I have a friend. He travels often to Moscow. A businessman. You could write to the man in Arzamas-16 whose mail is not intercepted. Ask the father to come to Moscow.”
“Why? To tell him what?”
“He should know about his son,” said Monk. “Let the boy write. I will see his father gets the letter.”
Before he went to bed, the small boy wrote, in good but touchingly flawed Russian, a two-page letter that began: “Dear Papa …”
¯
GRACIE Fields returned to the embassy just before midday on August 11. He knocked on Macdonald’s door to find his Head of Station deep in gloomy thought.
“Bubble?” said the older man. Fields nodded.
When they were ensconced in Conference Room A Fields tossed a photo of the dead face of an old man on the desk.
It was one of the batch taken in the woods, similar to the picture brought to the embassy by Inspector Chernov.
“You saw your man?” asked Macdonald.
“Yep. And it’s pretty traumatic stuff. He was the cleaner at UPF headquarters.”
“The cleaner?”
“That’s right. The office cleaner. Like Chesterton’s Invisible Man. There every night but no one noticed him. Came about ten each evening from Monday to Friday, cleaned the offices from end to end, left before dawn. That’s why he was a shabby old thing. Lived in a slum. Earned peanuts. There’s more.”
Fields recounted the story of N. I. Akopov, late personal secretary of Igor Komarov, who had elected to go for an unadvised and as it turned out terminal swim in the river about the middle of July.
Macdonald arose and paced the room.
“We’re supposed, in our job, to rely on facts, facts, and only facts,” he said. “But let’s indulge in a little supposition. Akopov left the damn document out on his desk. The old cleaner saw it, flicked through it, didn’t like something he saw, and stole it. Make sense?”
“Can’t fault it, Jock. Document discovered missing the next day, Akopov fired, but as he’s seen it he can’t be left in the land of the living. He goes swimming with two hefty lads to hold him down.”
“Probably done in a water butt. Slung in the river afterward,” muttered Macdonald. “Cleaner doesn’t show up and the penny drops. Then the hunt is on for him. But he’s already slung it into Celia Stone’s car.”
“Why? Jock, why her?”
“We’ll never know. He must have been aware she was with the embassy. He said something about giving it to Mr. Ambassador for the beer. What bloody beer?”
“Anyway, they find him,” suggested Fields. “Work him over and he tells all. Then they finish him off and dump him. How did they find Celia’s apartment?”
“Followed her car, probably. From here. She wouldn’t notice. Found out where she lived, bribed the guards on the gate, checked out her car. No file lying around, so they broke into her apartment. Then she walked in.”
“So Komarov knows his precious file is gone,” said Fields. “He knows who took it, he knows where he threw it. But he doesn’t know whether anyone took any notice of it. Celia could have chucked it away. Every crank in Russia sends petitions to the high-and-mighty. They’re like autumn leaves. Perhaps he doesn’t know the effect it caused.”
“He does now,” said Macdonald.