The Red House
A classic Cold War spy story from the bestselling thriller writer Derek Lambert.The Red House follows a year in the life of Russian diplomat Vladimir Zhukov, the new Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington – a ‘good Communist’ in 1960s America.Seeing what life in the West is really like, he discovers there is more to America than what Soviet propaganda has taught him. Increasingly intrigued by the Washington circuit, from outspoken confrontation between diplomats to the uninhibited sexual alliances arranged by their wives with other diplomats, the capitalist ‘poison’ begins to work on him and his wife.As he struggles to remain loyal to his country and begins to question who is the real enemy, he has to decide to whom is first loyalty due: country or lover, party or conscience.‘A gripping and topical novel’ Reading Chronicle
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THE RED HOUSE
Derek Lambert
Collins Crime Club
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1972
Copyright © Derek Lambert 1972
Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008268343
Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008268336
Version: 2017-10-04
MANY good people helped in the preparation of this novel. They know who they are and I thank them. In particular I wish to express my gratitude to Brian and Nelli Hitchen and Gordon Lindsay who provided shelter. To Ross Mark who introduced me to Washington. To Peter Worthington who introduced me to a defector. And to Donald Seaman, my mentor.
THE period is 1968. A year that embraced the assassinations of a black and a white leader, a space-shot, the election of a new American president, race riots of unprecedented fury, the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. A savage, tragic, momentous year. In the interests of the narrative I have jockeyed a few dates, a few occasions, a few moods, and I apologize to any students of contemporary history who may be offended. It should also be noted that some of the speeches in the sequence dealing with an actual meeting of the United Nations Security Council are interpretations published by the U.N. and not precise translations.
CONTENTS
SEVEN a.m. on New Year’s Day. Beneath the aircraft the lights of Long Island probed the sea with disciplined jewelled fingers. The lights of Moscow, Vladimir Zhukov thought, had been more abandoned: scattered nebuli of milky neon. Symbolically, the lighting plans of Capitalism and Socialism should have been the other way round.
Zhukov swallowed his vodka as if it were the last drop of Mother Russia’s milk: there had been many vodkas on this special II-62 flight from Moscow to New York.
Beside him his wife closed her handbag with the finality she instilled into most movements. ‘Please excuse me,’ she said, standing up.
‘You are going to prepare yourself to meet the decadent, bourgeois imperialists?’
‘I am more concerned with making myself presentable for the representatives of our embassy.’
‘It was only a joke,’ he told her retreating figure as it stumbled, uncharacteristically, with the descent of the aircraft. He watched her with affection, then moved into her seat.
The affection melted into many emotions. Expectation, curiosity, pride at what he represented. And a vague, uncertain apprehension, as cold and disquieting as a first snowflake smudging the window of a warm and complacent room.
He gazed down at the avenues of lights, the pastures of snow luminous in the darkness, the black oil of the sea extinguishing the lights. Coney Island? Long Beach? The old movies on which most assessment of America was based—forgetting propaganda for the moment—had another revival in the auditorium of his mind. Jack Oakie, Alice Faye, George Raft. Cops with caps and nightsticks, black shoeshine boys, double-breasted suits with lapels as flat as cardboard, leaning tenements and jostling skyscrapers, ice-cream sodas, bourbon on the rocks, girls with lovely legs and afterthought faces, the drawling south and the snapping north, sub-machine guns, King Kong. That’s my America, that’s the America of the most humble apple-picker in Kazakhstan. There it is spangled beneath me. True or false?
