Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [151]
A moment later they brought Marina. “Thank you for rescuing me, boys,” she said. “They just returned my phone.” She was shaken, but trying to smile. It was past midnight. Zakayev drove her home.
On Saturday morning I picked up Professor Henry on my way to UCH. Thallium, he explained as we drove, “is tasteless, colorless, odorless. It takes about a gram to kill you. For the first ten days or so it looks like a typical case of food poisoning. Hair begins to fall out only after two weeks, which gives the assailant ample time to get away. It’s a poisoner’s ideal weapon,” he said.
In the hospital he gave the young doctor a lecture about thallium: “The body tries to get rid of it by excreting it into the gut, but it is quickly reabsorbed. The antidote works by capturing it in the intestines.”
They were giving Sasha dark blue pills of “Prussian Blue,” an antidote dye. The large pills were extremely painful to swallow given the state of his mouth. But he was a brave soldier. He immediately appreciated Henry’s authority. “I know you’ll get me out of this, Professor,” he said.
“You are doing well,” Henry said, cheering him up. “Let me see how strong you are. Squeeze my hand. Oh, you are strong!”
“I could still do push-ups if not for these tubes,” Sasha said, pleased.
But when we left the room, Henry looked perplexed.
“It looks very strange. They are treating him for thallium, but with thallium he should’ve lost his muscle strength, and he has not.”
I showed him the toxicology report from Barnet Hospital.
“See,” he said, “it says here that the level of thallium is elevated, but only ‘three times over the norm.’ This is too low to account for his symptoms.”
On Sunday the papers broke the story: “Russian Spy Poisoned in London. Anti-terrorist Police Investigate.”
“Sasha is not a spy,” protested Marina. “He never spied. Why do they call him a spy?”
“This is the least of our concerns right now,” I said.
We were sitting in the UCH cafeteria downstairs. Sasha had just been transferred to intensive care “as a precaution,” the doctors explained. They were now giving him a fifty-fifty chance of survival.
Marina was wearing dark glasses. There was a crowd of reporters outside, but they could not get to her. The hospital had deployed extra security to keep them at a distance. Ever since the Sunday Times hit the stands, the press had been chasing her, forcing her to use the back entrance to the hospital. Reporters were seeking out her address at Muswell Hill. Scotland Yard assigned two officers to her, who hung around just in case of a problem.
She did not want to speak to the press yet. “You know me,” she said to Zakayev and me. “This is your game. I want to stay out of this as long as possible.”
In truth, I was just getting to know Marina. I would remember our conversation later, after Sasha’s death, when she decided she was ready to face the media. She did it with force and grace, in spite of her aversion to the limelight, as an obligation to Sasha, like a settler’s wife who puts aside her laundry and picks up her fallen man’s rifle to defend her home.
While he was at the hospital, however, Marina managed the disaster quietly, maintaining the household routine, keeping Tolik’s schedule, holding her emotions at bay, with only the redness of her eyes betraying her lonely anguish. I saw her several times a day, but she never showed any sign of despair nor gave any cause for worry.
Later, she explained to me how she managed to live through those weeks.
“The truth is, I never believed that he would die. Not when they said fifty-fifty, not later, even up to the very end. If I had admitted that he could die, I would have broken down. But I kept telling myself it was just another crisis, the third in our marriage. The first was when he was in prison, the second when we were running away in Turkey. I used the coping skills that I had learned before. It was like being caught in a stream: you swim along hoping for the best and doing what