The Secret Speech - Страница 56

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Reaching the Astoria Hotel, several blocks from her apartments, Fraera took a moment to observe the crossroads before glancing up at the hotel’s top-floor window. In the last window along, on the corner, a red candle was burning, the quaint signal that she’d devised. In this context it meant she was to come upstairs. Moving around to the back of the hotel, entering through the deserted kitchens, she climbed to the top floor, walking to the room at the far end of the corridor. She knocked. A guard opened the door, gun drawn. There was a second guard behind him. She stepped into the suite, frisked before being ushered next door. Seated at a table, glancing out the window like a contemplative poet, was Frol Panin.

An alliance with Panin, or any man like him, had never been part of Fraera’s plans. Arriving in Moscow, she’d accepted that unless she was content with merely plunging a knife in Leo’s back, she needed assistance. Similarly, Budapest had never been part of her plans. It was another improvisation. With the illusion of Zoya’s death, her original ambition — to bring ruin down on Leo’s hopes of happiness — had been achieved. Leo was tortured as she’d been tortured: the loss of a son paid for with the loss of a daughter. He was broken, forced to live with grief, and not even allowed the fire of righteous indignation that had sustained her through those same emotions. Her revenge complete, she’d been faced with the decision of what to do next. It had become apparent that she couldn’t untangle herself from Panin and melt away. If she stopped being useful to him he would order her death. If she escaped it would be a life of wealth and growing old, a life she had no interest in. Hearing of his international operations, his attempts to agitate disturbances within the Soviet Bloc, she’d volunteered herself and her men. Panin had been skeptical but Fraera had pointed out that she was likely to make a far more convincing agitator against Soviet Russia than the loyal KGB agents he was using.

Panin offered his hand — a polite, formal gesture that she found absurd. Nevertheless she shook it. He smiled:

— I’ve flown over to monitor progress. Our troops are in position on the border. They have been for some time. Yet there is nothing for them to do.

— You’ll get your uprising.

— It needs to happen now. It is of no use to me a year from now.

— We’re on the brink.

— My other cells have had considerably more success than you. Poland, for example…

— The riots you instigated in Poznan were crushed with no serious loss of face for Khrushchev. They did not have the impact you required, otherwise you wouldn’t be bothering with Budapest.

Panin nodded, admiring Fraera’s gift for weighing up situations exactly. She was right. Khrushchev’s plans to scale back the conventional military had not been derailed. They were a central platform of his reforms. He had argued that the Soviet Union no longer needed so many tanks and troops. Instead, they had a nuclear deterent and were building an experimental missile delivery system that required no more than a handful of engineers and scientists, not millions of soldiers.

Panin considered the policy foolhardiness of the most dangerous kind. Aside from the inadequacies of the missiles, Khrushchev had fundamentally misunderstood the importance of the military, just as he’d misunderstood the impact of his Secret Speech. The military existed not solely to protect against external aggressors; its purpose was to hold the Soviet Union together. The glue between the nations of the Soviet Bloc wasn’t ideology but tanks and troops and planes. His proposed cuts, combined with the reckless sabotage inflicted by his speech, were putting their nation in peril. Panin and his allies were arguing that not only must they maintain the size of the conventional army but they must also extend and rearm it. They must increase spending, not decrease it. A disturbance in Budapest, or indeed in any other East European city, would prove that the entire fabric of the revolution depended upon its conventional military might, not merely its nuclear arsenal. Several million men with rifles were useful in reminding the population, at home and abroad, who was in control.

Panin said:

— What news do you have for me?

Fraera handed him the leaflet printed with the sixteen points:

— There’s going to be a demonstration tomorrow.

Panin glanced at the sheet of paper:

— What does it say?

— The first demand is for Soviet troops to leave the country. It is a call for freedom.

— And we can trace the inspiration back to the speech?

— Certainly. But the demonstration won’t be enough.

— What else do you need?

— A guarantee that you will fire upon the crowd.

Panin placed the leaflet on the desk:

— I’ll see what I can do.

— You must succeed. Despite everything these people have been through, the arrests, the executions, they will not become violent unless provoked. They are not like…

— Us?

Ready to leave, Fraera hesitated by the door, turning back to face Panin:

— Was there anything else?

Panin shook his head.

— No. Nothing else.

SOVIET UNION
HUNGARIAN BORDER

THE TOWN OF BEREHOWE
23 OCTOBER

THE TRAIN WAS CROWDED with Soviet soldiers, raucous conversations crisscrossing the carriage. They were being mobilized in preparation for the planned uprising, of which they knew nothing. There was no sense of anxiety or trepidation, their jovial mood contrasting starkly with Leo and Raisa, the only civilians on board.

When Leo had heard the news—Zoya is alive—relief had been muddled with pain. In disbelief he’d listened to Panin’s explanation: the retelling of events on the bridge, including Zoya’s calculated pretense and her willing collaboration with a woman who wanted nothing other than to make Leo suffer. Zoya was alive. It was a miracle, but a cruel one, perhaps the cruelest good news Leo had ever experienced.

In explaining events to Raisa, he’d witnessed the same shift from relief to anguish. He’d knelt before her, apologizing repeatedly. He’d brought this upon them. She was being punished because she loved him. Raisa had controlled her response, concentrating on the details of what had happened and what it revealed about Zoya’s state of mind. There was only one question in her mind: how were they going to bring their daughter home?

Raisa had no difficulty in accepting that Panin had betrayed them. She understood the logic of Fraera’s cooperation with him in order to enact her revenge in Moscow. However, Panin’s attempts to initiate uprisings within the Soviet Bloc was political maneuvering of the most cynical kind, condemning thousands to death in order to consolidate the position of Kremlin hardliners. Raisa couldn’t understand what part of this appealed to Fraera. She was siding with the Stalinists, men and women who thought nothing of her imprisonment or the loss of her child, or indeed the loss of any child. As for Zoya’s defection, if that was the right way of looking at it, defecting from one dysfunctional family to another, Raisa was less puzzled. It was easy to imagine Fraera’s intoxicating appeal to an unhappy teenager.

Leo had made no attempt to talk Raisa out of accompanying him to Budapest. The opposite was true: he needed her. Raisa stood a much better chance of getting through to Zoya. Raisa had asked Leo whether they were prepared to use force if Zoya refused to come, confronting Leo with the grim prospect of kidnapping his daughter. He nodded.

Since neither Leo nor Raisa spoke Hungarian, Frol Panin had arranged for them to be accompanied by forty-five-year-old Karoly Teglas. Karoly had worked as an undercover operative in Budapest. Hungarian by birth, he’d been recruited by the KGB after the war, serving under the hated leader Rakosi. Karoly had recently been in Moscow on a temporary basis, advising them on the potential crisis in Hungary. He’d agreed to act as a guide and translator, accompanying Leo and Raisa.

Returning from the toilet, Karoly wiped his hands on his trousers, taking his seat opposite Leo and Raisa. With a portly stomach, plump cheeks, and round glasses, there was hardly a straight line anywhere in his appearance. A collection of curves, he appeared, at a glance, an unlikely operative, definitively nonlethal.

The train slowed, nearing the town of Berehowe on the Soviet side of the heavily fortified border. Raisa leaned forward, addressing Karoly directly:

— Why has Panin allowed us to go to Budapest when Fraera is working for him?

Karoly shrugged:

— You would have to ask Panin himself. It is not for me to say. If you want to turn back, that is up to you. I have no power over your movements.

Karoly looked out the window, remarking:

— The troops are not crossing the border. From here on, we behave like civilians. Where we are going, Russians are not loved.

He turned to Raisa:

— They won’t make any distinction between you and your husband. It doesn’t matter that you’re a teacher and he’s an officer. You’ll be hated just the same.

Raisa prickled at being spoken down to:

— I understand hatred.

* * *

AT THE BORDER, Karoly handed over the papers. He glanced back, watching Leo and Raisa, in conversation, seated in the back of the car — paying careful attention not to glance at him, a giveaway that they were debating how far they could trust him. They would be wise not to trust him in any way. His orders were simple. He was to delay bringing Leo and Raisa into the city until an uprising had begun. Once Fraera had served her purpose, Leo, a man reported to be of great tenacity and zeal, a trained killer, could be allowed his revenge.

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