Mightier Than the Sword

“But if I don’t, or if it isn’t even there? You’ll have spent a hundred thousand dollars and will have nothing to show for it.”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” said Guinzburg. “But then any half-decent publisher is a gambler at heart. Now let’s talk about more agreeable things. My beloved Emma, for example, and Sebastian. Not to mention Lady Virginia Fenwick. I can’t wait to hear what she’s been up to.”

*   *   *

Lunch with his publisher had gone on far too long and Harry only just made it to Penn Station in time to catch the Pennsylvania Flyer. During the first part of the journey to Pittsburgh, he went over every question Guinzburg wanted answered before he could part with his $100,000.

Later, as Harry dozed off, his mind drifted to his last conversation with Sebastian. He hoped his son could win Samantha back, and not just because he’d always liked her. He felt Seb had finally grown up, and that Sam would rediscover the man she’d fallen in love with.

When the train pulled into Union Station, Harry remembered that there was something he’d always wanted to do if he ever went to Pittsburgh. But there would be no time to visit the Carnegie Museum of Art, which Jessica had once told him housed some of the finest Cassatts in America.

He climbed into the back of a yellow cab and asked the driver to take him to Brunswick Mansions on the north side. The address had an air of middle-class gentility about it, but when they came to a halt twenty minutes later Harry discovered the reality was a decaying slum. The cab sped off the moment he had paid the fare.

Harry climbed the well-worn stone steps of a graffiti-covered tenement building. The Out of Order sign hanging from the lift door had a permanent look about it. He walked slowly up the stairs to the eighth floor and went in search of apartment number 86, which was on the far side of the block. Neighbors looked out from their doorways, suspicious of the smartly dressed man who must surely be a government official.

His gentle knock on the door was answered so quickly she must have been waiting for him. Harry smiled down at an old woman with sad, tired eyes and a deeply lined face. He could imagine just how painful her long separation from her husband must have been by the fact that although they were about the same age, she looked twenty years older than him.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Clifton,” she said with no trace of an accent. “Please come in.” She guided her guest down a narrow, uncarpeted corridor into the living room, where a large photograph of her husband, hanging above a shelf of well-thumbed paperbacks, was the sole adornment on otherwise blank walls.

“Please sit down,” she said, gesturing toward one of the two chairs that were the only pieces of furniture in the room. “It was kind of you to make such a long journey to see me. And I must thank you for your gallant efforts to have my dear Anatoly released. You have proved an indefatigable ally.”

Mrs. Babakov talked about her husband as if he was late home from work and would appear at any moment, rather than serving a twenty-year prison sentence more than seven thousand miles away.

“How did you first meet Anatoly?” he asked.

“We both trained at Moscow’s Foreign Languages Institute. I ended up teaching English at a local state school, while Anatoly moved into the Kremlin soon after he won the Lenin Medal for coming top of his year. When we were first married, I thought we had everything, that we must have been blessed, we were so lucky, and by most people’s standards in Russia, we were. But that changed overnight when Anatoly was chosen to translate the chairman’s speeches so they could be used for propaganda purposes in the West.

“Then the chairman’s official interpreter fell ill, and Anatoly filled in. A temporary appointment, they told him, and how he wished it had been. But he wanted to impress the country’s leader, and he must have done so, because he was quickly promoted to become Stalin’s principal interpreter. You’d understand why, if you’d ever met him.”

“Wrong tense,” said Harry. “You mean I’ll understand why when I meet him.”

She smiled. “When you meet him. That was when his problems began,” she continued. “He became too close to Stalin, and although he was only an apparatchik, he began to witness things that made him realize what a monster Stalin was. The image presented to the people, of a kind, benevolent favorite uncle, could not have been further from the truth. Anatoly would tell me the most horrendous stories when he came back from work, but never in front of anyone else, even our closest friends. If he had spoken out, his punishment would not have been demotion, he would simply have disappeared like so many thousands of others. Yes, thousands, if they so much as raised an eyebrow in protest.