The Red House. Derek Lambert
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planning further explanations and revenge. But for the time being I’ve got you on the defensive Zhukov thought with satisfaction. It was quite an achievement to score over an officer of the K.G.B., however slight the indictment.
He picked up a small cardboard canister from Grigorenko’s pile. ‘Lemonade, eh? Another Gallic speciality?’ He read the label and smiled. ‘I’m pleased to observe that it is pink lemonade, Comrade Grigorenko.’
Grigorenko growled and departed. With an easier conscience Zhukov began piling many permutations of decadence into his own basket. Starting with chunky blue cheese dressing.
The Embassy was jumping but the ambassador didn’t jump with it. He had survived too many international crises in his 16th Street kremlin to be over-excited by the seizure by the North Koreans of the American spy ship Pueblo; besides he had a heart condition.
The trick was to smooth each crisis into the day’s working routine that began at his desk at 8 a.m. and finished at midnight. Never agitate yourself—particularly in public—like Khrushchev or a senator exposing corruption: composure was one of the essences of diplomacy, even if it wasn’t always appreciated by the hawks of Moscow. But Soviet diplomats were at last learning the sophisticated approach, and he, Valentin Zuvorin, considered that he had overtaken the Americans in the delicate art. A smile, a half-truth, a witticism: a swift rapier thrust of assertion through lowered defences. Thus one President had been moved to call him a liar, another had told him to ‘quit horsing around.’ Small victories of behaviour—even if policies had been defeated.
Zuvorin picked up the phone in his high-ceilinged, somewhat Czarist office, and called the Press Counsellor. ‘What’s Moscow putting out on the Pueblo affair?’
The counsellor began to read a Tass report of an article in Izvestia. There was the usual line on American aggressive intent and expansionism plus a suggestion that the American President was using the incident as a pretext to call up reserves for Vietnam.
‘Thank you,’ Zuvorin said, as the predictable tirade continued.
‘But …’
Zuvorin hung up. Competent of its kind and ineffectual. The language of protest blunted by repetition. Even the outrage over Vietnam had lost its impact, like the lingering atrocity of the war. If only the propagandists would seek some diplomatic style.
He sipped his lemon tea and scanned the dispatches from Moscow. Aid pouring into the Arabs who would squander at least half of it; such waste because of political necessity. During the Six-Day War Zuvorin had privately enjoyed some of the jokes. ‘Come to Israel and see the pyramids.’ He smiled again now: you had to admire the flyweight prize-fighter felling the heavyweight. The rapier over the machete. Not that Valentin Zuvorin doubted the Kremlin policy in the Middle East because ultimately it would be a victory for Socialism. And he believed steadfastly in Socialism.
And now Czechoslovakia. Antonin Novotny had been ousted from his post as first secretary of the Party—a job he had held for fifteen years. Soon I shall have to lie again and eventually my lies will be exposed. Because the Czechs will try to break away and they will have to be taught a lesson. Zuvorin admired their spirit; but, sadly, blood had to be spilled, tissue destroyed, in the ultimate surgery on Mankind.
Although, in the camouflaged recesses of his soul, Valentin Zuvorin loathed and feared aggression, as anyone who had lived through the siege of Leningrad well might. He endured the humiliation of the Cuban missile crisis because a world war had been averted; he secretly rejoiced when the Arabs capitulated to the Jews, when the Koreans came to terms; he grieved before sleep at the plodding tragedy of Vietnam. He envisaged a time—not in his day—when the world solved its problems through diplomacy. Provided the settlement favoured Socialism.
The ambassador’s philosophies were complicated by one particular factor: he had come to regard Washington as more of a home than Moscow. He enjoyed the company of many of its inmates and considered John F. Kennedy to have been the finest man he had ever known. Such was his easy absorption into the Washington scene that he had been summoned to the Kremlin to explain his attitudes. How had he arrived at the conclusion that the President did not want to escalate—even the new phraseology of war was ugly—the Vietnam hostilities into an all-out attack on Socialism? ‘Because, gentlemen, I know the President and, with respect, you don’t.’ So Soviet and American leaders had subsequently met and now the Kremlin was willing to talk about missile disarmament.
A small aching protest behind the sternum. Zuvorin took a white tablet (American) with his last sip of tepid tea.
How much longer before his recall? Until they found another man as fluent and deceptively amiable in his conversations with the Americans as Valentin Zuvorin. A difficult task, the ambassador flattered himself.
Within limits he enjoyed the socializing. The guarded banter, the outrageous flattery. ‘You are so suave, Mr Ambassador. So witty—so unlike so many other Russians …’ Hand to the mouth at the Martini indiscretion. Himself—he only took two drinks, no more. But, of course, flattery, however flagrant, always worked. He cherished his reputation for cultivated conversation; his laugh, he had been told, was a pleasure to hear.
(How dreary, by comparison, were the parties given by his Socialist allies. Valentin Zuvorin ducked the gaze of V. I. Lenin high on the wall.)
Black ties and banquets and cocktails. Such dismay when he declined vodka—‘I bought it especially for you’—and took whisky. World affairs and American politics bundled together into a hub of parochialism in which treaties and pacts were as casually treated as village-green boundaries. Lovely girls with haughty faces offering their bodies, young men their souls. And the official spies with medals jingling, as subtle as tanks. And the spies spying on the spies; always a little obsequious, just as blatant with their trained ears and stilled tongues. And others less obvious.
Such a magnificent, incongruous phenomenon, this Washington. All its palaces of power, its burrows of bureaucracy, archives of history, vaults of intrigue, all clustered within a few blocks of celebrated architecture; squalor halted around the edges of the village green. The White House and the Capitol, the thrones of Western power, overlooking the garbage cans of domesticity.
Often Valentin Zuvorin felt sad about the American people. An emotion dangerously akin to sympathy. Their patriotism, their naïve disgust at corruption in their midst, their bright scalpels of sincerity slashing ineffectually at their cancers, their decent inability to crush dissidence as we crushed the Hungarians.
Most of all Zuvorin admired their unequivocal belief that they were right. That was their weakness. The crusaders had lost and they would lose.
The ambassador sighed. He picked up his agenda for the day. While his aides digested official anger over the Pueblo incident—the Americans’ crime, Zuvorin privately thought, was getting caught—he would interview a newcomer to the flock. Vladimir Zhukov.
He replaced his diplomatic mask and looked Lenin straight in the eye.
The ballroom at the top of the marble stairs was empty except for a grand piano and a couple of chairs, the gloom heavy behind the half-closed drapes on the tall windows.
Zuvorin explained, ‘I sometimes have informal chats here because it’s cooler. Did you know,’ he asked chattily, ‘that our embassy is said to be the hottest building in Washington during the winter? About eighty degrees, I believe. It’s too hot. But, of course, we Russians are used to heat indoors in winter.’
The ambassador appraised Zhukov. A good servant of the Party, he judged. Perhaps a little too honest with himself; a mouth that betrayed a poetic soul. Although what the hell was wrong with a poetic soul from a country that had produced Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Pushkin, Zuvorin couldn’t imagine. He was pleased that they were now sending him people instead of puppets.
Two men who had survived war and purges; one senior because of circumstance and ambition. To me he is still young, Zuvorin thought. To himself he is hopefully young. To the young themselves he is an old man—and I am senile. ‘And how are you enjoying Washington?’
‘It’s