Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [111]
Seymour Menzies Solicitors are located behind an inconspicuous green door on the top floor of a three-story walk-up in Carter Lane, a narrow, crooked side street not far from St. Paul’s Cathedral.
George Menzies, a fair-skinned, athletic, and cheerful Englishman of the sort who once managed the world, opened a bottle of champagne. It was his party, too. For countless days that winter, he had translated into coherent English Sasha’s incredible tales of Khokholkov and Gusak, Kovalyov and Skuratov, Berezovsky and the Party of War, with the aim of persuading an anonymous immigration inspector that Sasha, Marina, and Tolik had a “well-founded fear of persecution” from Putin, the man whom Tony Blair called his dear friend. For six months, that nameless official reader had become a permanent unspoken presence in the Litvinenko household. He was invested with the key attributes of a deity: he (or she?) was invisible, and possessed the power of life and death over them. And now the immigration god had spoken—the incredible was deemed credible. They could stay.
“Now we need to choose a name for you,” said George Menzies.
As it turned out, the Home Office gives every new asylum seeker an option to pick a new legal name; this is part of the package. To those who are still sought by the powers from whom they had fled, a new name gives an extra bit of protection, especially when traveling abroad with new British documents.
“You choose a name for me, George,” said Sasha. “You, in a way, are responsible for me becoming British, so you have the right to baptize me, so to say.”
“Okay, you will be Edwin. He was the first political refugee.”
Menzies had studied history. He explained that when the Romans left Britain, it was conquered by the Saxons. At around AD 614 Edwin, the Saxon prince of Northumbria, had to flee for his life from a usurper by the name of Ethelfrith. Edwin sought refuge at the court of King Redwald of East Anglia. But his protection was not secure. Ethelfrith, using a combination of threats and bribes, nearly convinced Redwald to give up Edwin.
Everything would have ended badly had not the queen, who had learned about Edwin’s impending extradition, shamed King Redwald for not keeping his word. Should he go ahead and surrender Edwin, he would be punished with guilt and infamy. Redwald changed his mind and decided to put up a fight to protect his guest. He defeated Ethelfrith at a battle on the banks of the River Idel, in Nottinghamshire, at the cost of the life of his beloved son. Thus began the tradition of which Sasha was a beneficiary.
“You will be named Edwin Redwald,” said Menzies. “Pauline, please write it down on the form.”
“Come on, George, he cannot possibly be named that,” said Pauline, George’s secretary. “It trips off the tongue.”
“You’re right,” sighed George. “Let’s pick a less assuming surname. How about Carter, to reflect that we are here, at Carter Lane?”
So Sasha officially became Edwin Redwald Carter, a closely kept secret until the day of his death.
Some time later, Sasha received his refugee travel document from the Home Office. George Menzies assured him that it was now safe for him to travel—at least in the Western world.
“Civis Britannicus sum,” he explained. “I am a British subject.” It was what Lord Palmerston, Britain’s prime minister in 1849, uttered in Parliament to justify sending the navy to help out a single citizen, a Gibraltar-born Jewish merchant by the name of Don Pacifico, stranded halfway around the world. Sasha’s new status gave him the protections of a civis Britannicus.
In the meantime, the prosecutor general in Moscow launched an all-out search for Alexander Litvinenko, who had jumped his restraining orders. Once found, he was to be arrested and incarcerated until trial.
In December 2001 his trackers scored a breakthrough. Marina’s sixty-five-year-old mother, Zinaida, was returning home after her first visit to London. At Moscow