The Red House

THE RED HOUSE

Derek Lambert

COPYRIGHT

Collins Crime Club

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1972

Copyright © Derek Lambert 1972

Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008268343

Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008268336

Version: 2017-10-04

DEDICATION

to

Blossom with love

MANY good people helped in the preparation of this novel. They know who they are and I thank them. In particular I wish to express my gratitude to Brian and Nelli Hitchen and Gordon Lindsay who provided shelter. To Ross Mark who introduced me to Washington. To Peter Worthington who introduced me to a defector. And to Donald Seaman, my mentor.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THE period is 1968. A year that embraced the assassinations of a black and a white leader, a space-shot, the election of a new American president, race riots of unprecedented fury, the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. A savage, tragic, momentous year. In the interests of the narrative I have jockeyed a few dates, a few occasions, a few moods, and I apologize to any students of contemporary history who may be offended. It should also be noted that some of the speeches in the sequence dealing with an actual meeting of the United Nations Security Council are interpretations published by the U.N. and not precise translations.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part Two

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part Three

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Keep Reading

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

1

SEVEN a.m. on New Year’s Day. Beneath the aircraft the lights of Long Island probed the sea with disciplined jewelled fingers. The lights of Moscow, Vladimir Zhukov thought, had been more abandoned: scattered nebuli of milky neon. Symbolically, the lighting plans of Capitalism and Socialism should have been the other way round.

Zhukov swallowed his vodka as if it were the last drop of Mother Russia’s milk: there had been many vodkas on this special II-62 flight from Moscow to New York.

Beside him his wife closed her handbag with the finality she instilled into most movements. ‘Please excuse me,’ she said, standing up.

‘You are going to prepare yourself to meet the decadent, bourgeois imperialists?’

‘I am more concerned with making myself presentable for the representatives of our embassy.’

‘It was only a joke,’ he told her retreating figure as it stumbled, uncharacteristically, with the descent of the aircraft. He watched her with affection, then moved into her seat.

The affection melted into many emotions. Expectation, curiosity, pride at what he represented. And a vague, uncertain apprehension, as cold and disquieting as a first snowflake smudging the window of a warm and complacent room.

He gazed down at the avenues of lights, the pastures of snow luminous in the darkness, the black oil of the sea extinguishing the lights. Coney Island? Long Beach? The old movies on which most assessment of America was based—forgetting propaganda for the moment—had another revival in the auditorium of his mind. Jack Oakie, Alice Faye, George Raft. Cops with caps and nightsticks, black shoeshine boys, double-breasted suits with lapels as flat as cardboard, leaning tenements and jostling skyscrapers, ice-cream sodas, bourbon on the rocks, girls with lovely legs and afterthought faces, the drawling south and the snapping north, sub-machine guns, King Kong. That’s my America, that’s the America of the most humble apple-picker in Kazakhstan. There it is spangled beneath me. True or false?

And, returning inevitably to the propaganda, he thought: New York—the fount of decadence, the blood-bank of criminal aggression. True or false?

Vladimir Zhukov, aged forty-four, newly-appointed second secretary at the Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Washington, gripped his empty finger-greased glass tightly and regarded the accelerating reality with awe.

His wife returned smelling faintly of Russian cologne. The smell of our soap, our pomade, our scent. The smell of the audience at the Bolshoi. Turn the serpent head of the aircraft around and fly it back to Moscow. New Year’s celebrations—the children with presents from the toyshop in Kutuzovsky, Kremlin parties with clowns and storytellers, Georgian wine, Stolichnaya vodka, bearhugs, skating in Gorky Park, women singing with lemon-juice in their voices. From his pocket he took a New Year’s card—foreigners in Moscow sent them as Christmas cards—and examined the Kremlin. Two red stars and a flag perched on pencil-sharpened spires and golden baubles. Plus the new Palace of Congress completed in 1961 and seating 6,000, his statistical mind recalled. And somewhere in the centre of this symphony of architecture the big growling bears.

He glanced at his wife in case she was listening to his thoughts. But she was busy fastening her safety belt, pleating the waist of her black suit inside it.

Vladimir Zhukov said, ‘We’re fortunate to be flying direct to New York, instead of Montreal.’

‘We’re very fortunate,’ Valentina Zhukova agreed.

He patted her hand because of adventure shared and she smiled with a glint of gold; the glimpse of sunlight she sometimes regretted.

‘Do you feel nervous?’ he asked.

‘Not at all. You shouldn’t either.’

‘I didn’t say I was,’ he lied.

‘But you aren’t completely happy at the prospect of our arrival.’

He shrugged his big torso. Over-shrugged. Who would ever suspect the fragility inside such a big frame? The poetry drowning in statistics. His stomach rumbled as the vodka passed on, depositing the last of the alcohol into his blood.

Valentina said, ‘You shouldn’t have drunk so much.’

‘It’s the first day of the new year. Back home we’d be celebrating and Natasha would be singing to us in our apartment.’

‘Are you sure you didn’t drink to give yourself courage?’

Did a man of his stature need liquor to armour-plate his guts? Would the Party have permitted such a ‘degenerate’ to be posted to Washington, the enemy capital? Only Valentina could have asked such a question: only a wife with nocturnal knowledge, only a wife observing after sex, after a loss, after disappointment … ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

He held her hand. ‘Let’s feel this together. Would you have dreamed when we first met that one day we’d visit America together? Even now I find it hard to believe that Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx are down there.’

Mickey Rooney, the East Side Kids, Al Capone, organ-grinders with monkeys on their shoulders. Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, Dreiser, Mark Twain.

‘I know what you mean,’ she said, leaning across him to look down, her large breasts comfortable against his chest.

‘Africa wouldn’t have this effect on me. Or China or India. But this … I don’t think I really believed it existed. All those tourists in Moscow, those unlikely diplomats, those businessmen. All straight out of the movies.’

The lights swarmed up on them, streaking past the windows. The half dozen passengers on the jet loaded with provisions and equipment for the embassy in Washington and the Mission to the United Nations in New York waited for the landing with theatrical nonchalance or honest rodent fear. A bump and the lights were slowing, the white ranches of Kennedy International Airport braking. Dawn began to ice the skyline.

Ponderously the plane trundled towards the New World. The stewardess, plum-plump in threadbare blue, stood up and peered out of a window as if she were hoping it were Khabarovsk or Leningrad. The passengers pointed, nodded; the aircraft stopped.

Inside reception it was a bewilderment of glass, marble, neon, plastic. Negro porters, movie voices, no guns that Vladimir Zhukov could see. His head ached at the base of his skull and a vein throbbed on his right temple.

Somewhere a man addressed another as ‘pal’ and was, in turn, referred to as ‘a lousy sonofabitch’. He had arrived. He was in America.

Or was he? Two men wearing grey fedoras and black overcoats with clothes-hanger shoulders came up. ‘Good morning, Comrade Zhukov,’ one said. ‘Welcome to New York.’

Nicolai Grigorenko occupied half the front seat of the black Oldsmobile, his companion and the driver the other half. Grigorenko was a large man, Siberian-faced, not unlike Brezhnev, ponderous but authoritative, a chain-smoker, fiftyish, throaty. One of the growlers. Mikhail Brodsky was a sapling by comparison; soft-haired, smiling, with a cold lodged high up in his nose, gold-rimmed spectacles, nervous hands and a habit of prefacing answers with two sing-song chords. Uh-huh—D flat rising to E flat.

The Growler spoke. ‘Ordinarily we would have driven direct to La Guardia and boarded the shuttle to Washington. But there’s a blizzard in Washington and you’ll have to stay the night at the mission in New York.’

Excellent, Zhukov thought. Everyone should spend their first night in America in New York. ‘What is this shuttle?’ he asked.

‘It’s like a regular bus service. You buy your ticket on board.’

‘That sounds very progressive,’ Zhukov rashly observed.

The silence in the car throbbed.

Grigorenko turned his big polluted face around. ‘You will learn, Comrade Zhukov, that much of what appears to be progress in this country is achieved at the expense of far more deserving causes.’

Brodsky removed a bullet-shaped inhaler from one nostril and hummed a two-bar introduction. ‘An Aeroflot pilot would not have been deterred by the sort of blizzards they have in Washington.’

Zhukov leaned back in his seat and, with two fingers on the vein in his temple, observed the approaches to New York.

With the deep snow on the ground and flakes peeling off the sky it might have been Sheremetyevo Airport. Even a few pine trees on the perimeter. Except for the cars. Acres of them bonneted in white in a parking lot. In Moscow it took more than a year to get delivery of a stubby little Moskvitch or a Volga of ugly and ancient design at prices few could afford. Automobiles, he told himself, are my first impression. Uniform, luxurious, decadent, asleep in the comfortable snow. But so many … Did anyone walk?

Grigorenko followed his gaze or tuned in to his thoughts. Perhaps one day they would even achieve that. He pointed up to the sagging sky. ‘It’s the automobiles that cause the pollution. Every year it kills thousands of old people in New York City. It’s typical of the American mentality that comfort of the middle-classes should take precedence over the welfare of the aged.’

‘The senior citizens,’ Brodsky hummed. And giggled.

Grigorenko continued his recital while Zhukov thought briefly of the pollution over Kiev and decided not to make the comparison. He was a second secretary and his guides were inferior in rank. But not, he guessed, in that other hierarchy in which a third secretary could outrank a Minister Counsellor. Perhaps even an ambassador.

The houses on the left looked English; dozing villas alive inside with occupants preparing for breakfast. Silver buses and ruthless trucks spraying the windscreen with brown slush; highways wheeling and diving beneath each other; wires and roads and signs glaring and guiding. The mind panicking a little; the panic masked by the impassive trained exterior.

Grigorenko, official Soviet guide on the nursery slopes of first impressions, turned again. A single hair grew from the end of his suet nose. ‘You have been celebrating on the aircraft, Comrade Zhukov?’

‘It is the first of January.’

‘Certainly. And there will probably be a small celebration in New York. But it was, perhaps, a little unwise to drink so early in the morning?’

‘You lose all sense of time between Moscow and New York.’

‘True.’ The big puppet head nodded slowly.

Valentina squeezed Zhukov’s hand. ‘Look, Vladimir.’

Ahead, Manhattan assembled itself in the young, snow-tattered light, blurred coyly then reasserted itself—a postcard so familiar that it was again difficult to accept the reality.

Grigorenko isolated the Empire State from the rest. ‘The world’s tallest TV tower,’ he said reluctantly.

‘That’s correct,’ Zhukov agreed without thinking. ‘And the whole building weighs 365,000 tons—that’s fourteen tons to support each occupant.’

Grigorenko glared at him suspiciously. ‘You seem to know a lot about one American building? Perhaps it’s you who should make the introductions.’ He felt for the hair on his nose.

‘Not just one American building. The most famous of all. I read my tourist literature. And,’ he apologized, ‘I have this facility with figures and statistics. They lodge in my brain.’

Which was true. There was Manhattan, floating as serene as a reflection, and he had to toss 365,000 tons of concrete into it. Such training.

‘It’s very impressive,’ Valentina said. ‘Especially beside all this’. She pointed at some grubby miniatures along the road.

‘Uh-huh.’ Brodsky tuning-up. ‘But it seems to me that we should not forget the squalor and corruption that exists behind those façades. Drugs, drunkenness, violence, vice.’ He ticked them off on the fingers of his dogma, his voice lingering and slavering over V-I-C-E.

Only the driver said nothing, and Zhukov wondered how his young peasant brain reacted—if his training had left him with any reactions.

I want to feel and savour it by myself, Zhukov thought. I want my own private instincts which I have so carefully and privately nurtured. To feel and judge and file.

They lingered beneath a red light before entering the Kremlin of Capitalism.

Manhattan’s streets and avenues opened up and the sky narrowed—grey canals high above. He saw a Hollywood cop feeling his nightstick as if it were a damaged limb and thought of the Soviet militia with their dramatic topcoats and irritable toothpick truncheons. Discovery and nostalgia fought each other. Steam billowing from vents in the city’s bowels and lingering in the icy, lacy air: felt boots crunching fresh snow on Arbatskaya Square.

Discovery won the battle without deciding the war; the shops the stormtroopers. Windows of nonchalant plenty. Furniture in theatrical sets, beds of jewellery and dormant watches, racy clothes and gossamer fabrics, skis and golf-clubs, package tours to Las Vegas, Miami, Dublin or Tokyo, a coffee carafe of Pyrex and silverplate like a contemporary samovar, beckoning beds, busty, gutsy displays of brassieres and corsetry, a garden window with simulated grass being cut by a mower (plan ahead for summer), Tsarist perambulators, floors of shoes ready to quick-march, toys Russian children couldn’t dream of because they couldn’t imagine them. Everything cheaper than everything else, every store flaunting infinitesimal advantage.

And the Christmas tableaux in cavernous windows. Dwarfs and children and fairies strutting and dancing and blessing; a carousel carrying dizzy teddy-bears; a rocket bound for the moon with Santa Claus (Grandfather Frost) astride the command nodule. And Christmas trees (yolka) buttoned on to the haunches of the elephantine buildings with white electric bulbs.

Grigorenko interrupted as he had done with many other newcomers. ‘I know just what you are thinking.’

‘You do? You presume too much, comrade.’

‘You are wondering what can be wrong with Capitalism if it produces so many fruits.’

The vein had subsided, the ache at the base of his skull fading. ‘Is that what you wondered when you first arrived?’

Grigorenko’s pattern was disturbed. ‘Not I. But you. Is that not what you are thinking?’ The growl lost a decibel of menace. Brodsky felt the bridge of his sinus and made a noise that could have been a simper, a giggle or a sneeze.

Zhukov said it wasn’t, enjoying the transient authority of unexpected attack. He was, after all, a second secretary.

‘Then what are you thinking?’

‘Just remembering that in the shops in Gorky Street you can see nothing in the windows.’

‘You are commenting unfavourably on the commerce of the Soviet Union?’

‘On the contrary, Comrade Grigorenko. I’m surprised that you should interpret a remark so prematurely and so incorrectly.’ He gestured towards a windowful of lingerie threaded with tinsel. ‘If you judge a woman by her jewellery you may find a whore.’

‘Just so, comrade.’ Grigorenko made notes in his mind. ‘You speak very well—but of course that’s your job.’

‘Surely yours as well, comrade.’

Valentina’s elbow nudged his ribs, warning.

Brodsky said, ‘Perhaps Zhukov’s words are as empty as those shops in Gorky street.’

Zhukov said, ‘But the shops aren’t empty. Only the windows.’

‘You will make a very good diplomat,’ Grigorenko observed. ‘You’re smart with words.’

‘I am a good diplomat.’

‘Forty-four? Second Secretary? Perhaps your capabilities have been underestimated.’ The doggy face regarded Zhukov with total seriousness; in the bruise-coloured pouch under one eye there was an incipient growth.

If I were a man, Zhukov thought, I’d reply, ‘But you’re only a third secretary.’ But you had to be smart with not saying words as well as saying them.

The city was slowly on the move, the snow like the fuzz the morning after too much Stolichnaya.

A Buick fanning wings of slush hove past bearing the legend ‘Save Soviet Jewry.’

From what? Ah, diplomacy …

A street sign said Tow Away Zone. Another said Snow Emergency Street. They turned into East 67th Street. No. 136—The Mission of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the United Nations. And those of Ukraine and Byelorussia. And, across the road, down the street from the red-brick 19th police precinct clubhouse a synagogue.

2

BUT the spirit of good will and New Year’s resolution hadn’t penetrated the pale and clinical building at 136.

In the foyer Zhukov’s body turned clammy in the artificial heat. A woman with greying hair forced into a bun, and a lackey in a miserable suit and thin tie regarded him suspiciously. A plastic Grandfather Frost and the Snow Maiden beamed in the corner in spite of it all.

‘We shall stay here until they open Washington Airport,’ Grigorenko said. ‘You would perhaps like to get some sleep?’

‘I’d like to have a look at New York while I’m here,’ Zhukov said.

‘It would be better if you got some sleep.’

‘I should like to see New York. It might be my only chance.’

Valentina sided with Grigorenko. ‘I’m very tired, Vladimir.’

You couldn’t make a scene within minutes of arrival; nor could you relinquish all authority to a couple of third secretaries protected by the ghost of Beria. ‘Perhaps later,’ Zhukov said.

Outside they heard scuffling. Russian oaths involving mothers. A voice with a Uzbek accent screaming ‘Samarsky!’

The door sprang open. A blast of cold air followed by a young man held by two squat captors. They pinioned him easily, his feet just touching the ground. His hair was black and curly, badly cut; his skin dark, his body slight and struggling.

Grigorenko strode across to them and growled as softly as he could, showing the squatter of the two an identification card.

Grigorenko spoke to the young man.

‘Go and fuck yourself,’ screamed the young man. His dark face was frenzied with fear—a man being carried to the hangman’s noose.

Grigorenko nodded slowly, as if abrupt movement might dislocate the big head from his neck. ‘Put him down.’ The hunters released their quarry. ‘You haven’t made a very good start on the New Year,’ he observed.

‘Shit on you,’ said the prisoner.

Grigorenko stepped forward kicking hard and down the shin, crunching on the instep, bringing his knee up into the crotch as the man gasped forward, finally rabbit-punching the side of the neck with the blade of his hand.

The young man, doubled over in pain, was carried away.

‘Tomorrow,’ Grigorenko said, ‘he will be on the plane to Moscow.’

‘And what was that all about?’ Zhukov asked.

‘It’s nothing for you to worry about,’ Grigorenko replied.

Brodsky, who’d been watching with his inhaler held up one nostril, said, ‘Just another drunk, probably. They will insist on drinking Scotch when they’re used to vodka.’

‘That man wasn’t drunk.’

‘It affects different people in different ways.’

‘And now,’ Grigorenko announced, ‘it’s time for bed.’

He was, Zhukov thought, very avuncular. As avuncular as Stalin.

Only Grandfather Frost who had once been on the receiving end of denunciation—a puppet of the priests, no less!—saw any humour in the situation.

He allotted himself two hours’ sleep and lay down on one of the two single beds in the small bedroom. A bowl of fruit and a picture of Lenin dominated the decor.

He listened to his rapid vodka heartbeat and told himself to calm down about everything. About the priorities shifting around in his mind. About the tests of loyalty ahead.