in the corridor the two officers smiled at each other.
Before they entered the next compartment they were overtaken by Colonel Yury Razin who was in charge of the whole security operation. He was a big man, a benevolent family man, a professional survivor who had once been close to Beria and retained his rank even after Stalin and his stooges had been discredited; to maintain his survival record he allowed none of his paternal benevolence to affect his work.
The two junior officers stopped smiling and straightened up. One of them made a small salute.
The colonel was holding the list of names marked with red crosses. “Any luck?”
“Two doubtfuls,” said the shorter of the two. “We wouldn’t have bothered with them normally. Minor irregularities in their papers.”
Colonel Razin nodded. He had soft brown eyes, a big head and a blue chin which he shaved often. During the Stalin era he had been involved in fabricating charges against nine physicians – the infamous “Doctors’ Plot” exposed in Pravda on January 13, 1953. Six of the accused were Jews and they were charged with conspiring not only with American and British agents but with “Zionist spies”. One month after Stalin’s death Moscow Radio announced that the charges against the doctors were false. Colonel Razin, the survivor, who didn’t see himself as anti-Semitic – merely an obedient policeman – helped indict those who had fabricated the plot.
He rubbed the cleft in his chin, which was difficult to shave, and prodded the list. “Leave the next compartment to me.”
The two officers nodded. They didn’t expect an explanation, but they got one.
The colonel said: “This man Pavlov. I know him. He’s given information against Jewish agitators in the past. A brilliant mathematician. Married to Anna Petrovna, heroine of the Soviet Union. Odd to find him on the train today?”
The two officers looked at each other. Finally one of them asked: “Why’s that, sir?”
The other said respectfully: “He’s got authorisation from the very top – from Comrade Baranov – and a letter from the State Committee of Ministers for Science and Technology.”
Razin silenced them. “I know all that. And he’s going to meet his wife in Khabarovsk.” He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “He and I are old friends. I’ll talk to him.” He blew out a lot of smoke. “But it’s odd just the same.” He didn’t enlighten them any more.
He opened the door and switched on the light.
Pavlov wasn’t surprised to see him: he wouldn’t have been surprised to see anyone. He shaded his eyes and said: “Good evening, Comrade Razin.”
“Good evening,” Razin said. “A pleasant surprise.”
“Pleasant,” Pavlov said. “But surely no surprise?”
The Tartar general glared down from the top bunk. “What now? What the hell’s going on?”
Razin said: “You must excuse me, General. I am only doing my duty. We have a very important guest on board.”
The general’s wife stuck her head out from beneath her husband’s berth. Her hair was in curlers and there was cream on her face. Her chest looked formidable. She said: “You’re surely not suggesting …”
Colonel Razin held up his hand. “I wouldn’t dream of suggesting anything. You and your husband are well known to us. But there are others in the compartment.”
The general and his wife stared at the breezy stranger and Pavlov knew that a small charade was about to be acted.
Colonel Razin said: “Can I see your papers, please?”
The stranger sighed and reached for his wallet. A smell of embrocation reached Pavlov: the stranger had been working on his cover – but he had forgotten to limp when he first arrived.
Colonel Razin thumbed through the papers while he addressed Pavlov: “I understand you’re meeting your wife in Khabarovsk.”
Pavlov, head on his hand, nodded. “First I have some business in Novosibirsk and Irkutsk.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“I know,” Pavlov said. “I hope to hear the speeches.”
“Do you, Comrade Pavlov? Do you indeed?” He handed the stranger’s papers back to him with a perfunctory “Thank you.” To Pavlov he said: “We must meet and have a drink for old-time’s sake. In the restaurant car, perhaps, at eleven tomorrow morning?”
“That would be fine,” Pavlov said.
“Are you making the whole journey?”
‘I’m leaving the train at Khabarovsk. I presumed you knew that, Colonel.”
Razin looked annoyed: he didn’t like to hear his rank used. Particularly in the presence of a general. Even if his status was superior when the chips were down.
Pavlov asked: “Don’t you want to see my papers?”
“It won’t be necessary. The husband of a Heroine of the Soviet Union shouldn’t suffer the indignity.”
He bowed as if he were in uniform, a Prussian officer’s bow. “Good-night, ladies and gentlemen. Pleasant dreams.”
After he had closed the door the general’s wife asked: “Is it true that your wife’s a heroine … ?” Her voice sounded as if her mouth was full of food.
Pavlov said: “I’ll tell you in the morning.”
He lay quietly listening to the soporific sound of wheels on rails – the 5 ft. gauge! Could anything go wrong before the plan was actually put into action? With the appearance of Colonel Razin one more imponderable had been used. He worried about it for an hour, then fell asleep. By that time it was 1.13 a.m. Moscow time and they were just leaving Kirov at the beginning of the second day of the journey.
* * *
The special coach was a mixture of styles. A functional office, two soft-class sleeping compartments for guards and staff, a K.G.B. control room with radio and receiving equipment for the microphones planted on the train, a cell, a larder and two compartments knocked into a large deluxe sleeper with mahogany panelling, thick pink drapes, a chair made of buttoned red satin, a Chinese carpet, washbasin and mirror with frosted patterns round the edge, a mahogany table and chair, and a bed with pink plush curtains controlled by a gold cord with a tassel.
Despite the luxury, the Kremlin leader couldn’t sleep. He lay alone, guarded in the corridor by two armed militia. It was always at night that the power left him to be replaced by doubt. He was sixty-six, entering the period of self-appraisal when the past presents itself for assessment. He saw the faces of those whom he had executed; he remembered the way he had hacked his way to absolute power. And he tried to equate it all with achievement: the prestige of the Soviet Union, the fear it struck into the bowels of other powers; the standard of living of the people. When he concentrated – when he recalled the tyranny of Tsarist days, the twenty million lost in World War II, the massive injustices of the Stalin era – the equation sometimes worked.
It
