Somebody laughed. Traffic hummed on Holland Park Avenue. Sam Gaddis was looking at a sea of nodding, attentive faces.
‘Do you know about the siege of Leningrad?’ he asked. He hadn’t meant to start on that, not tonight, but it was a subject on which he had lectured many times at UCL and the Daunt crowd would go for it. The manager, standing near the door, was bobbing his head in a way that looked enthusiastic.
‘It’s the winter of 1942. Minus twenty degrees at night. Three million people in a city surrounded by German troops, a million of them women and children.’ The matriarch gasped. ‘There is so little food that people are dying at the rate of five thousand a day. Leningrad’s entire supply of flour has been destroyed by German firebombs. The fires cause molten sugar to saturate the earth at the Badayev warehouses. People are so hungry that they are prepared to dig into the frozen ground to extract the sugar and sell it on the black market. The top three feet of soil sells for one hundred roubles a glass, the next three feet for fifty.’
A bell and a sudden burst of traffic. The door of the bookshop opened and a young woman stepped inside: shoulder-length black hair, knee-high leather boots over denim jeans, and the sort of figure that a forty-three-year-old, divorced academic who has drunk three glasses of Sauvignon Blanc notices and photographs with his eyes, even while giving a talk at his own book launch. The woman whispered something to the manager, briefly caught Sam’s eye, then settled in a seat at the back.
Gaddis wished that he had brought his props. At UCL, his annual lecture on the siege of Leningrad was a must-see sellout, one of the very few events that every student in the Russian history programme felt both obliged and enthused to attend. Gaddis always began by standing behind a table on which he had placed a third of a loaf of sliced white bread, a pound of minced beef, a bowl of bran flakes, a small cup of sunflower oil and three digestive biscuits.
‘This,’ he tells the packed auditorium, ‘is all that you get to eat for the next thirty days. This is all that an adult citizen of Leningrad could claim on their ration cards in the early years of World War II. Kind of puts the January detox in perspective, doesn’t it?’ The lecture takes place in the early weeks of the New Year, so the joke always whips up a satisfying gale of nervous laughter. ‘But enjoy it while you can.’ Confused looks in the front row. Plate by plate, bowl by bowl, Dr Gaddis now tips the food on to the floor until all that remains on the table in front of him are ten slices of stale white bread. ‘By the time the siege really starts to bite, bread is more or less the only form of sustenance you’re going to get, and its nutritional value is nil. The people of Leningrad don’t have access to Hovis or Mother’s Pride. This bread’ – he picks up a piece and tears it into tiny pieces, like a child feeding ducks – ‘is made mostly from sawdust, from sweepings on the floor. If you’re lucky enough to have a job in a factory, you get 250 grams of it every week. How much is 250 grams?’ Gaddis now picks up six slices of the bread and hands them to a student in the front row. ‘That’s about how much it is. But if you don’t work in a factory’ – three of the slices come back – ‘you get only 125 grams.’
‘And I warn you not to be young,’ he continues, channelling Neil Kinnock now, a politician from yesteryear whom most of his students are too young to remember. ‘I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to grow old in the Leningrad of 1942. Because if you do’ – at this point, he gets hold of the final three slices of bread, tossing them to the floor – ‘if you do, you’ll most likely starve to death.’ He lets that one settle in before delivering the coup de grâce. ‘And don’t be an academic, either. Don’t be an intellectual.’ Another gale of nervous laughter. ‘Comrade Stalin doesn’t like people like us. As far as he’s concerned, academics and intellectuals can starve to death.’
The beautiful woman in the knee-high boots was staring at him intently. At UCL, Gaddis usually picked out a volunteer at this stage and asked them to take off their shoes, which he then placed on a table at the front of the lecture hall. He liked to pull grass clippings and pieces of bark from the pockets of his jacket. Christ, if Health and Safety had allowed it, he’d have brought a dead rat and a dog in, as well. That, after all, was what the citizens of Leningrad survived on as the Germans tightened the noose: grasses and bark; leather shoes boiled down for sustenance; the flesh of vermin and dogs. Cannibalism was also rife. Children would disappear. Limbs would mysteriously be removed from corpses left to freeze in the street. The meat pies on sale in the markets of war-torn Leningrad could contain anything from horse flesh to human being.
But tonight he kept things simple. Tonight Dr Gaddis spoke about Platov’s aunt and first cousin surviving three years in a German concentration camp in the Baltics. He related how, on one occasion, Platov’s mother had passed out from hunger only to wake up while she was being taken to a cemetery by men who had assumed she was dead. Towards eight o’clock, he read a short extract from the new book about Platov’s early years in the KGB and, by eight fifteen, people were applauding and he was taking questions from the floor, trying to make the case that Russia was reverting to totalitarianism and all the time wondering how to persuade the girl in the knee-high boots to join his party for dinner.
In the end, he didn’t need to. As the launch was beginning to thin out, she approached him at the makeshift bar and held out her hand.
‘Holly Levette.’
‘Sam.’ Her hand was slim and warm and had rings all over it. She was about twenty-eight with huge blue eyes. ‘You were the one who was late.’
A smile of what looked like genuine embarrassment. Her right cheek had a little scar on the bone which he liked. ‘Sorry, I was held up on the Tube. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.’
They moved away from the bar.
‘Not at all.’ He was trying to work out what she did for a living. Something in the arts, something creative. ‘Have we met before?’
‘No, no. I just read your article in the Guardian and knew that you were speaking tonight. I have something that I thought you might be interested in.’
They had found themselves in a small clearing in the Travel section. In his peripheral vision, Gaddis could sense somebody trying to catch his eye.
‘What kind of something?’
‘Well, my mother has just died.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
It didn’t look as though Holly Levette needed much comforting.
‘Her name was Katya Levette. Before her death she was working on a book about the history of the KGB. A lot of her information came from sources in British and Russian intelligence. I don’t want her papers to go to waste. All that hard work, all those interviews. I wondered whether you might like to have a look at her research, see if there’s any value in it?’
It could have been a trap, of course. A mischievous source in MI6 or the Russian FSB looking to use a mid-level British historian for purposes of propaganda. After all, why come all the way to the bookshop? Why not just phone him at UCL or send an email to his website? But the chances of a honey-trap were slim. If the spooks wanted a scandal, if they wanted headlines, they would have gone for Beevor or Sebag Montefiore, for Andrew or West. Besides, Gaddis would be able to tell in five minutes if the documents were genuine. He’d spent half his life in the museums of London, Moscow and St Petersburg. He was a citizen of the historical archive.
‘Sure, I could take a look at them. You’re kind to think of me. Where are the papers?’
‘At my flat in Chelsea.’
And suddenly the tone of the conversation shifted. Suddenly Holly Levette was looking at Dr Sam Gaddis in the way that mischievous female students sometimes look at attractive, fortysomething bachelor academics when they are up to no good. As if her flat in Chelsea promised more than just dust-gathering notebooks on the KGB.
‘Your flat in Chelsea,’