Our Woman in Moscow

A Novel

Beatriz Williams

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9780063020818
• Print ISBN:
  9780063020795
• Subtopic: Literature General

"A captivating Cold War page-turner." — Real Simple

The New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Wives returns with a gripping and profoundly human story of Cold War espionage and family devotion.

In the autumn of 1948, Iris Digby vanishes from her London home with her American diplomat husband and their two children. The world is shocked by the family’s sensational disappearance. Were they eliminated by the Soviet intelligence service? Or have the Digbys defected to Moscow with a trove of the West’s most vital secrets?

Four years later, Ruth Macallister receives a postcard from the twin sister she hasn’t seen since their catastrophic parting in Rome in the summer of 1940, as war engulfed the continent and Iris fell desperately in love with an enigmatic United States Embassy official named Sasha Digby. Within days, Ruth is on her way to Moscow, posing as the wife of counterintelligence agent Sumner Fox in a precarious plot to extract the Digbys from behind the Iron Curtain.

But the complex truth behind Iris’s marriage defies Ruth’s understanding, and as the sisters race toward safety, a dogged Soviet KGB officer forces them to make a heartbreaking choice between two irreconcilable loyalties.

Two

I am really two people. I am a private person and a political person.

Of course, if there is a conflict, the political person comes first.

—Kim Philby

Lyudmila

JUNE 1952

Moscow

Sometimes it seems to Lyudmila that her work is futile. No matter how many traitors she unmasks, no matter how many acts of subversion, no matter how many instances of heresy to the great faith, a hundred more spring to life before her eyes. There’s always some note out of tune in this Soviet chorus, some person who puts his own self-interest ahead of the interest of the state. Sometimes it’s the very person who sings the best and the loudest.

Trust no one.

Early on in her work—the beginning, really—she learned to strip away all sentiment from her judgment. When is it possible to feel and to think at the same time? Never. So as Lyudmila pursued all possible candidates for the ASCOT leak over the past year, she didn’t regard past service to the Soviet Union, faithful or not; nor did she consult her opinion of the man’s character. There are only facts—did he have access to the information suspected to have been leaked? Did he have the opportunity and the means to communicate it? But until recently, there were not enough facts to guide her. No further ASCOT communications were intercepted. The agent seemed to have gone quiet.

Now she sits in her small, windowless office in Moscow Centre and contemplates a photograph. It was taken a year ago in Gorky Park, where a local team had intercepted a bundle of photographs and coded messages during a random search of an ice cream vendor. Under interrogation, the vendor admitted to operating a postbox for an agent whose name and identity he didn’t know. So the KGB sent a surveillance team. They had taken hundreds of photographs that yielded nothing useful, so the photographs had been filed away. Lyudmila had discovered their existence almost by accident, a conversation in the corridor with a secretary in the Moscow counterintelligence section.

To any ordinary observer, the scene’s perfectly innocent. A tall, gangly man buys ice cream for his family—a wife and three children, two boys and a girl—what is wrong with that? But Lyudmila recognizes this man. It’s HAMPTON, the American defector. HAMPTON now works primarily as an academic, lecturing on foreign relations at Moscow State University, but he’s also frequently employed by the KGB training program. He lives in Moscow with his three children and his wife, who (if Lyudmila’s not mistaken) is shortly to deliver another baby. Lyudmila knows all this not just because it’s her job to know what men like HAMPTON are up to, but because his two older children happen to attend the same school as her own daughter.

LYUDMILA HAS A DAUGHTER, yes. Marina was born at the end of 1940, nine months after Lyudmila discovered her husband in possession of a radio set, with which he regularly listened to broadcasts from the BBC and other Western sources. She was twenty-six years old and deeply in love, but it was her duty to report this subversive activity to the authorities and so she did. She kept the baby, however. She and her mother raised little Marina together, and the three of them were Lyudmila’s whole family until her mother—weakened by wartime deprivation—died five years ago. So now it’s only Lyudmila and Marina.

When Lyudmila arrives home from work, her head full of the ASCOT case, Marina calls to her from the tiny kitchen, where she’s making dinner. “Coming, pet,” says Lyudmila. She sets down her briefcase and takes off her shoes and her small hat and pads across the living room. Marina looks up from the stove. Her blue eyes are exactly like her father’s, crisp and smiling, surrounded by wet black lashes.

“How was your day, Mama?” she asks.

“Good. What are you making?”

“Solyanka.”

“Hmm. My favorite soup, is it? Have you been misbehaving at school again?”

Marina gives her a playful look. “Maybe.”

They eat the soup together at the little table in the corner of the tiny living room. Marina does her homework and Lyudmila checks it carefully. Of course, there are no mistakes. Dmitri was an electrical engineer when he was sent to the gulag; he had been the smartest boy in school, when they were children. He also had a rebellious streak, which he passed on to his daughter.

“Mama,” Marina says, once they’re settled on the sofa—Lyudmila reading a KGB training manual, Marina reading Tolstoy for school tomorrow—“how old were you when you met my father?”

Lyudmila thinks for a moment. “I was twelve years old.”

“Ah. The same as me.”

“A little older.”

“Oh, a few months,” Marina says impatiently.

She returns to her book and Lyudmila returns to her training manual, but thanks to Marina’s strange question she can’t concentrate. She keeps thinking about Dmitri, and how he used to shield her from some of the other children, who teased her because she was so smart and serious and wore clothes even uglier and shabbier than the other girls. She thought he was just being kind, but when she turned seventeen he told her it was because he fell in love with her that first day at school, when they were both twelve years old.

THE NEXT DAY, LYUDMILA receives word of an unusual request from the American embassy. Mrs. Alexander Digby, who has a history of difficult childbirth, has apparently invited her sister to stay with her in Moscow, during and after the period of her delivery. The sister wishes to formally apply for two visas to enter the Soviet Union, one for herself and one for her husband, to whom she is newly married.

Lyudmila’s skin prickles as she reads this report. She holds no truck with sentiment, but instinct is a KGB officer’s most valuable asset.

She picks up her telephone and asks to speak to the head of the American section.

Ruth

JUNE 1952

Rome, Italy

I’ll say this for Herbert Hudson. When I told him I needed four hundred dollars to fly to Europe and help my sister with her new baby, he didn’t ask any silly questions, like why couldn’t I sail instead, and when would I return. He wrote me a check and wished me bon voyage, then expressed his hope that the agency would remain a going concern in my absence.

That was Saturday afternoon at his place. By Sunday afternoon at five o’clock, I’m safely belted into my seat on the Pan Am Strato Clipper transatlantic service, scheduled to stop in Boston before continuing across the ocean to Paris and then to Rome. On my lap, the Sunday paper features a photograph of our party at the Palmetto Club on the front of the society page, in which Miss Barbara Kingsley is singled out as “the up-and-coming model in New York these days.” I fed that caption myself to my old pal Joan on the social beat, and it gives me immense satisfaction—it always does—to see my words repeated back to me in sincere black and white.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been inside one of those new double-decker Boeing Stratocruisers, but I can’t recommend them enough. For one thing, they’re fast. We lift off from Idlewild bang on schedule at five P.M., and an hour later we descend from a thin layer of clouds to land in Boston to take on a few more passengers. You hardly even notice the change in altitude because they pressurize the cabin to sea level, and the noise of those four giant Pratt & Whitney propeller engines is no more than a droning annoyance. We land with scarcely a bump and roll to a magnificent stop near the terminal. The seating’s all first class, as it should be, and I paid extra for one of those sleeping berths up front, since we won’t land in Paris until the following afternoon and God knows I need a few decent hours of shut-eye. I settle back in my seat and peer idly out the window at the five passengers preparing to board. There’s a young couple that looks as if they’re headed on their honeymoon, bless them, all pink and bright the way you set off on adventures when you’re just a baby. A couple of dour businessmen in pin-striped suits and fedoras, not entering into the spirit of things at all. A grand dame speaks in an animated way to the head stewardess, telling her exactly how to do her job.

They find their seats—the stewardess bolts the door. The propellers whine, the airplane trundles back to the runway. It’s nearly seven o’clock in the evening and the sun is a molten pool to the west. I light a cigarette and stare out the window at America as it falls away below me. God only knows when I’ll see it again.

I HAVEN’T RETURNED TO Rome in twelve years, not since I sailed away on that terrible day in June of 1940. The good ship Antigone was packed with desperate Americans and I had to share my second-class berth with a middle-aged artistic type of woman whose summer tour of Italy’s Renaissance treasures had been cut short almost before it began. I remember she was indignant about it all, as if she’d traveled to Italy that spring with no expectation whatsoever that her travels might be interrupted by a thing so inconvenient as war. In fact, she hadn’t wanted to go home at all—she’d kicked up a real fuss, she claimed proudly—but since the Italians were putting all the great paintings in storage and boarding up the museums, there was no point but to capitulate as rapidly as the French had. I found her complaints strangely soothing. She was one of those people who was happy to talk about herself and her troubles to a complete stranger and expected nothing more of you than the occasional sympathetic noise. She said she would go back just as soon as this awful business was over. Sometimes she asked about me, and what I was doing in Italy, and I made up extravagant lies about a love affair with a Russian émigré, a jealous Italian wife, some extremely valuable jewelry, a discreet apartment decorated in beautifully preserved Carracci frescoes, all of which she drank up like punch. When we docked in New York she insisted on exchanging addresses. I’m afraid I never answered her letter.

DINNER IS CATERED BY Maxim’s of Paris and lasts seven courses. I’m able to sleep a good six hours in my berth before being awakened by the happy, muffled cadence of the honeymooners consummating their union in the berth below, the darlings. I put on my robe and grope my way through the dimmed corridor to the ladies’ dressing room. When I return and part the curtains to peer through the little window, the first gray-green streaks of dawn have appeared on the vast dome of sky outside, and I think what a miracle it is that this disappearing sun should reappear so soon, and how clever of man to rush east to meet it. Then I suppose I fall asleep, because I wake to a series of hard bumps, followed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Ruth
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Author’s Note
• P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
• Praise
• Also by Beatriz Williams
• Copyright
• About the Publisher