Mightier Than the Sword Read online

  Harry paused as he tried to remember the opening line of the next chapter.

  By now, you will be asking yourself if I feared for my own life. No, because I was like wallpaper: I simply blended into the background, so no one ever noticed me. Very few of Stalin’s inner circle even knew my name. No one ever sought my opinion on anything, let alone my support. I was an apparatchik, a junior civil servant of no significance, and had I been replaced by a different colored wallpaper, I would have been forgotten within the hour.

  I had been working at the Kremlin for just over a year when I first thought about writing a memoir of the man no one spoke of unless it was in reverential tones—even behind his back. But it was another year before I summoned up the courage to write the first page. Three years later, as my confidence grew, whenever I returned to my little flat each evening I would write a page, perhaps two, about what had taken place that day. And before going to bed, like an actor, I would learn the newly minted script off by heart, and then destroy it.

  So frightened was I of being caught that Yelena would sit by the window whenever I was writing, just in case anyone paid an unexpected visit. If that had happened, I was ready to throw the page I was working on into the fire. But no one ever did visit, because no one considered me a threat to anything or anybody.

  “Please fasten your seat belts, as we will be landing in Stockholm in a few minutes’ time.”

  “Can I stay on the plane?” asked Harry.

  “I’m afraid not, sir, but we have a first-class lounge where they serve breakfast, and where I’m sure you’ll find an endless supply of paper.”

  Harry was the first off the plane and within minutes had settled down at a table in the first-class lounge with a black coffee, several varieties of biscuits, and reams of typing paper. He must have been the only passenger who was delighted to learn that the flight had been delayed because of a mechanical fault.

  Yakov Bulgukov, the Mayor of Romanovskaya, faced a potentially dangerous situation when he decided to build a massive image of Stalin, twice life-size, using convicts from a nearby prison to build the statue, which would be erected on the banks of the Volga-Don Canal. The mayor was horrified when he turned up for work each morning to find his leader’s head covered in bird droppings. Bulgukov came up with a drastic solution. He ordered that a constant electric current should be run through the statue’s head. A junior official was given the job of removing the little corpses every morning before the sun rose.

  Harry gathered his thoughts before he began the fourth chapter.

  Stalin had a hand-picked cadre of security guards led by General Nikolai Sidorovich Vlasik, whom he trusted with his life. He needed to, because he’d made so many enemies during the purges, when he’d eliminated anyone and everyone he considered to be a possible rival, at that time or in the future. I lost count of how many people were in favor one day and disappeared the next. If a member of his inner circle so much as hinted that someone was plotting against him, that person was never seen or heard of again. Stalin didn’t believe in early retirement or a pension plan. He once told me that if you kill one person, you’re a murderer; if you kill thousands, it becomes a mere statistic.

  Stalin boasted that his personal security protection was in a different class to anything the president of the United States was getting from the American Secret Service, and that wasn’t hard to believe. When he left the Kremlin for his dacha each evening, and when he returned to the Kremlin the following morning, Vlasik was always by his side ready to take an assassin’s bullet, although the nine-kilometer route was permanently patrolled by three thousand armed agents, and his bulletproof Zil limousine rarely traveled at less than eighty miles an hour.

  Harry was on page 79 of the manuscript when all passengers on the flight to London were requested to reboard the plane, by which time Stalin saw himself as something of a cross between Henry VIII and Catherine the Great. Harry walked up to the check-in counter.

  “Would it be possible to change my flight to a later one?”

  “Yes, of course, sir. We have one going via Amsterdam in two hours’ time, but I’m afraid there’s no connecting flight to London for another four hours.”

  “Perfect.”

  46

  GILES READ William Warwick’s signed confession on the front page of the Times the following morning and couldn’t stop laughing.

  How could they have failed to notice that it wasn’t Harry’s signature? He could only assume that the Russians were in such a hurry to get the confession into the hands of the international press before he arrived back in England that they’d made a cock-up. It had happened often enough in the Foreign Office when Giles was a minister, but it rarely got beyond the press department. Mind you, when Churchill was visiting America just after the war he asked the embassy to set up a meeting with the distinguished philosopher Isaiah Berlin, and ended up having tea with Irving Berlin.

  Photographs of Harry dominated most of the morning papers, while leaders and opinion pieces about the popular author and his long-standing battle to have Anatoly Babakov released from prison filled many column inches on the inside pages.

  The cartoonists had a field day, depicting Harry as either George slaying the dragon or David felling Goliath. But Giles’s favorite was one in the Daily Express of Harry fencing with a pen against a bear with a broken sword. The caption read: Mightier than the Sword.

  Giles was still laughing when he read William Warwick’s confession for a second time. He assumed heads would be rolling, perhaps literally, in Russia.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Emma when she joined him for breakfast, still looking as if she could have done with a good night’s sleep.

  “Harry’s done more to embarrass the Russians in one day than the Foreign Office could manage in a year. And there’s even better news. Just look at the Telegraph’s headline.” He held the paper up so she could read it.

  WILLIAM WARWICK ADMITS TO BEING A SPY.

  “It’s not a laughing matter,” said Emma, pushing the papers aside. “If he’d still been in Russia when the first editions came out it would have been a completely different headline.”

  “Well, at least look on the bright side.”

  “There’s a bright side?”

  “There most certainly is. Up until now, everyone’s been asking why Harry wasn’t in court supporting you. Well, now they all know, which is bound to make an impression on the jury.”

  “Except that Virginia was brilliant in the witness box. Far more convincing than I was.”

  “But I suspect the jury will have seen through her by now.”

  “Just in case you’ve forgotten, it took you a little longer.”

  Giles looked suitably chastened.

  “I’ve just come off the phone with him,” said Emma. “He’s been held up in Stockholm. He seemed preoccupied and didn’t say a great deal. He told me he’s not expecting to land at Heathrow until around five this afternoon.”

  “Did he get his hands on Babakov’s book?” asked Giles.

  “His money ran out before I had time to ask him,” said Emma as she poured herself some coffee. “In any case, I was more interested in trying to find out why it had taken him almost a week to do a journey that most other people manage in under four hours.”

  “And what was his explanation?”

  “Didn’t have one. Said he’d tell me everything as soon as he got home.” Emma took a sip of her coffee before adding, “There’s something he’s not telling me, that hasn’t made the front pages.”

  “I bet it has something to do with Babakov’s book.”

  “Damn that book,” said Emma. “What possessed him to take such a risk when he’d already been threatened with a jail sentence?”

  “Don’t forget this is the same man who took on a German division armed only with a pistol, a jeep, and an Irish corporal.”

  “And he was lucky to survive that as well.”

  “You knew what kind of man he was long before y