‘I forget how to pretend when I’m with you,’ Finn said to me.
And I felt the same way about being with him. I’d fallen like a stone, but what I said was: ‘You think you’re good at pretending?’
‘Are you?’ he said, smiling.
‘Yes. Better than you by a million miles.’
‘Pretend this, then,’ he said, and he kissed me.
But Finn’s reckless frivolity got him into trouble with others, particularly his masters at the British embassy, on more than one occasion.
‘It is symptomatic of your behaviour,’ was the way Finn’s head of station put it. ‘You don’t seem to take anything seriously any more.’
But he was wrong on both counts. First, Finn hardly ever took anything seriously.
‘There’s hardly anything worth taking seriously,’ he would say.
And, second, when he did take something seriously, he took it more seriously than anyone, his head of station included, could possibly have imagined.
4
IT WAS NOT ONLY my father who was delighted when Andropov came to power, but also the whole of the KGB. And as soon as he had power, the old spy pursued a two-pronged policy. He ruthlessly put down dissent, including punishing people who committed economic crimes, and simultaneously he set about loosening the same reins a little by allowing a small, KGB-controlled experiment in free trade.
This was hugely significant in terms of how Russia has developed. A few carefully chosen so-called buzinessmen- traders with their own semi-legal tzekhs, or workshops- were allowed to conduct business while at the same time being closely monitored by the security services.
What Andropov and his cronies failed to see–or, more probably, exploited-was that the only people who could take advantage of these little windows of opportunity were the criminal elements, the mafia, the men who had conducted business throughout the history of the Soviet Union. They were the only people who knew what to do.