The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [60]
‘I have never heard of this man.’ Tretiak’s tea arrived in a tall glass and she stirred three packets of sugar into it, the tiny granules funnelling around the spoon. Gaddis watched them dissolve, hypnotized, and wondered how much he could risk revealing about ATTILA.
‘In the twilight of his career, Edward Crane was living in Berlin. Your husband was his final KGB handler.’
Tretiak produced a look which suggested an almost complete indifference to her husband’s career.
‘I was not privy to Fyodor’s work,’ she replied. ‘We were married when I was very young. My husband was a rising star in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.’ This was the formal, unabbreviated name for the KGB. ‘He was forty-seven when he died. I was just twenty-six. We had a small baby, my son, Alexey. We were left alone, to fend for ourselves. Everything is fine.’
A faultline ran through her features, like a crack in the make-up of her personality. The effect of whatever medication she had taken had briefly shut down. Tretiak struggled to resume her customary air of intelligent hauteur and took a straight-backed sip of tea.
‘Would you have met any of your husband’s informants?’ Gaddis asked. He heard his own voice and felt like the worst kind of snoop. This woman was evidently unstable; he was no better than a tabloid hack door-stepping a grieving widow.
‘Of course not. Are you suggesting that agents would come to our apartment in Dresden? That I would cook for them while Fyodor talked business in the living room?’
‘Dresden? Why Dresden?’
‘Because that is where we lived, Doctor Gaddis.’ She was looking at him in the way that an aunt looks at a nephew of whom she is not particularly fond. ‘That is where we kept our apartment.’
Gaddis was puzzled. He could only assume that Fyodor Tretiak had made trips from Dresden to Berlin whenever he had been required to meet Crane. It was a distance of – what? – a couple of hundred kilometres. He looked up to find that Tretiak’s widow was still staring at him and felt as if he was on the losing side of the conversation. Unless he could extract something useful in the next few minutes, he was facing the prospect of a wasted trip to Moscow.
‘Look,’ he said, trying to summon as much charm as he could muster. ‘I know from my limited understanding of intelligence work that wives can play a useful role in providing cover for their husbands. There was a famous example of an MI6 officer in Moscow whose wife passed information to a KGB colonel. He eventually defected to the West.’
‘Oh?’ Tretiak’s voice was like the song of a distant bird. ‘Who was that?’ She had no interest in the answer.
‘Never mind.’ Gaddis steeled himself. ‘Can I ask, please, how did your husband die?’
Tretiak looked to one side, numbly surprised that this stranger from England had suddenly crossed a line into an area of her past which was still raw and private. Gaddis saw this and apologized for being crass.
‘It is all right,’ she said. ‘If I was not prepared to talk about this, I would not have come downstairs. I knew from your note that this would be the subject of our conversation. As I have already told you, I was intrigued.’
This seemed hopeful. Gaddis encouraged her to tell the story.
‘It is quite simple. He was walking home one night to our apartment in St Petersburg when he was shot by three men.’
‘Three? Were they ever identified? Were they brought to trial?’
She gave a resigned smile. She was resigned to everything. ‘Of course not. These men were gangsters. Mafia, you call them. It was simply an act of vengeance against a senior figure in the KGB.’
According to Neame, Tretiak had been murdered by the KGB, yet his widow had the story the other way around. Gaddis suspected that she had been hoodwinked. In all probability, the KGB had simply hired a trio of St Petersburg thugs to do their dirty work for them. It was the most plausible thesis: the links between Russian intelligence and Russian organized crime were murky, to say the least.
‘Vengeance for what?’ he asked.
‘How would I know?’ Tretiak