In the Company of Spies

by Stephen Barlay

  He was lucky. Kolya returned in not quite two hours with a slim faded-green file, marked only “secret.” The folder contained hardly anything. Basic personal particulars and a brief note on Rust’s fourteen months as correspondent in Moscow in 1956 and 1957. Resigned to the boredom of the case, Boychenko closed the file. On the front cover, the attached “Seen/Removed/Returned” slip showed only four entries. The first three were dated 1957. The last one, August 1962. It had been seen by the “military neighbors,” the GRU in KGB parlance. Only some six weeks ago. An odd coincidence.

  He glanced at his watch. It was time to go to the airport to see the new arrivals. The rain was still coming down relentlessly. Boychenko picked up his short-brim fedora and dark-blue raincoat. He wished they had introduced some variations in the standard-issue plainclothes, at least for those officers who worked among foreigners. He would not object to the conspicuous plainclothes uniform for colleagues dealing with Soviet citizens, because he understood well the principle that on the home front, the obvious presence of a not too secret police acted as a deterrent to adventurous individualism.

  *

  The first breath of air, a mixture of cheap perfumes and uniquely obnoxious gasoline fumes, brought back long-forgotten memories to Rust. Sheremetyevo Airport had hardly changed since his last visit some five years ago. Aeroflot staff smiled like any other airline’s personnel at the passengers descending the stairs, but armed guards made sure that nobody strayed from the group. There were three coaches waiting, but they had to be filled one by one. When one was full, the doors were locked from the outside, and passengers had to wait for everybody else from the same aircraft. The terminal building had not changed either: it still threatened to burst every time a flight came in.

  Passport checkers from the KGB’s Chief Border Guards Directorate sat in individual glass cages with manually operated turnstiles in front of each. The line that Rust had joined suddenly dissolved. The officer up front had left his cubicle without a word of warning or apology — his shift was over. People jostled to join other lines, which fought them off. There was no sympathy for losers. Impatient and furious glances were exchanged all around, swearing could be heard here and there, but nobody grumbled about the injustice.

  Rust made good use of the extra time. He studied the faces of men and women who were milling around beyond the customs bench, apparently with nothing better to do. Sweaty faces, wet faces; it was very hot in the overcrowded terminal, and it was raining heavily outside. He studied the eyes. Curious eyes, watchful eyes, bored eyes, suspicious eyes, eyes of authority, eyes that met his gaze, eyes that bounced away, eyes that might have been assigned to focus on a certain Helm Rust arriving from London. He had to try to spot them if eventually he might want to escape from them.

  The line moved forward and shoved him in front of the smoke-filled glass cage. There was a clonk; the turnstile had locked him into position. He faced a young man whose old eyes wandered slowly from passport cover to the photograph inside, on to the photocopies of the first four passport pages that carried the visa, on to the photograph attached to the photocopies, back to the picture in the passport, down to some documents and another photograph under the desk, out of Rust’s sight, only to return to Rust’s face and compare it yet again with the pictures and papers.

  Something must be wrong, thought Rust, but then remembered that the lengthy scrutiny was part of the technique. It would make you feel guilty. And if you felt guilty, you must be guilty, guilty of impatience if nothing else, and no one but the guilty would be impatient with the officer who was only doing his duty.

  “Roost? Helm?”

  “That’s right.” Rust stared at the huge No Smoking sign inside the cubicle, then watched the young officer, who squashed his cigarette this way and that way until it was extinguished irrevocably. Yes, pragmatic Russian wisdom was still much in evidence: in most public places, ashtrays were supplied together with the No Smoking signs because regulations were expected to be broken in any case.

  Another clonking sound, and Rust could move on to Customs. His suitcase was opened, and he tried to look bored. He was sure he carried nothing objectionable, no presents, no printed material. Beyond glass doors he watched well-disciplined lines of people waiting patiently for transport in the driving rain. Every time a bus approached, the orderly lines broke into fierce free-for-alls.

  A nod told him he was free to enter the Soviet Union. A woman in a dark-blue raincoat eyed his shoes. Another in identical attire turned away from him. A small fat man yawned. Rust repacked his suitcase but took his raincoat out. Keep warm, he warned himself. Whenever those glass doors opened, cold and humid air rushed in, penetrating clothes and flesh alike.

  On the way into town, Rust began to plan how to contact his father. The use of the telephone would be out even if the old man had managed to get one in the past few years and even if he was not yet on the run or hiding somewhere. Calling in person at his address was also out: his father would not want to let the family know about the American son, and the omnipresent dezhurnaya, the professional Cerberus of every building, would inevitably see, note and report the visit to the authorities. Don’t rush, Rust told himself. Take your bearings. Take your time, take advantage of the ostensibly all-expenses-paid assignment, work on your fun like a tourist, enjoy yourself like a reporter. He could try to meet his father in the street. But the seventeenth-century church, the Solace of All Woeful Souls, had to be his best bet. Strange. According to his mother, his father had been an agnostic all his life. Well, at least until he had entered an atheist country. Had the old man found religious belief in the camps? Or had he started to attend the Russian Orthodox early-morning service for his wife’s sake? In which case, he would not be alone there. Don’t rush things. If his father had decided to ask for help and try to leave, there must be a reason. He must be in trouble. He might be watched.

  Rust checked into the Ukraine, one of the four tower buildings. By Moscow standards, it would have been quite unacceptable as a railway station of Stalinist grandeur. But it seemed perfectly adequate to serve as a hotel that would ape and, perhaps, belittle what was thought to be an American skyscraper. His passport was retained (indefinitely, for registration purposes), and in return, a pass was issued to identify him and gain him permission to enter the hotel. It was to be deposited with the floor dezhurnaya every time he wanted the key to his room.

  He telephoned the Moscow Métro Authority and arranged to visit the work in progress on the new Kaluga line, on Tuesday afternoon. He then descended to the service floor of the hotel, where only Western currency could buy unique privileges like a ticket to the Bolshoi and admission to a restaurant without having to wait on line. He also booked a sightseeing tour for Tuesday morning. It was about the last thing he intended to do but he hoped that his watcher, if there was one, would note the arrangements and relax in the full knowledge of the visitor’s plans. That would give Rust the opportunity to slip away.

  Tuesday, September 18

  CIA photo analyst studies pictures of bulk cargo carried on deck of Cuba-bound Soviet ships, and suspects delivery of medium-range missiles. Report is deemed “inclusive,” buried in “no further action” file.

  *

  RUST ROSE EARLY, SKIPPED BREAKFAST AND, AVOIDING the main lobby, left the hotel via the restaurant entrance in Kutuzov Prospekt. He walked across the bridge and took a circuitous subway and bus route to the Tretyakov Gallery. As far as he could tell, he was not followed. He sat on a bench, protected from the cold wind by a tobacconist kiosk, and pretending to read his Pravda, watched one of the smaller and better Moscow blocks of apartment houses. If his father still lived there and had not changed his habits since 1956, he would soon be visible in the glass tube that was attached to the building and housed the elevator that must have been an afterthought by the designers. Only a few minutes later, the old man appeared and began a slow descent. Rust followed him down the street and into the church. There was no tail,
no company. Three old women and a crippled war veteran were begging near the entrance. Rust gave them twenty kopeks each and wondered if they were woeful souls or KGB snoops.

  Inside, it was a peculiar gathering of the faithful. Most of them were older women; many of them could hardly walk, but managed to genuflect endlessly and at great speed. Younger people appeared and disappeared fast, keeping always to the shadows of columns or the thick of the crowd, mumbling a quick prayer to a favorite icon, listening to the choir, taking deep whiffs as they passed the censer-swinging acolytes, and always, always hoping against hope to remain invisible to onlookers. Rust moved up to stand behind his father. He genuflected with the rest of the people and waited for the singing to get louder. A pity he spoke only a few words of German. When he spoke Russian, people usually took his accent to be Estonian.

  “Don’t turn round, Vati. It’s me, Helmut,” he whispered. The old man went white and began to cough uncontrollably. “Don’t worry, it’s all right, you knew I’d come, it’s all right.” But it was no good. He already knew that the old man would never make it to Odessa, let alone survive the journey in that crocodile tank. “Where can we talk? Lead the way.”

  They stopped behind the church. Rust looked at the shivering old man and found it a painful experience. Mainly because he had nothing to say. He felt he should help. That was all. “Vati … “ he began, and stopped. He was not even sure why he tried to address him in German. Perhaps that one word was the only link between them. Daddy. He searched for his own features in his father’s face but found nothing. Herr Peter Rost was just an entry in his birth certificate. The man facing him was Pyotr Nikolayevich Rostonov.

  The old man meekly touched his hand. “I knew you’d come, my son. It was very important. But we can’t talk here. And you must meet someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s very important.” Pyotr Rostonov stopped shaking. He questioned Rust about his plans for the day, then decided that meeting at night would be the safest and most convenient. “Go to the Bolshoi as arranged. When you leave, try to make sure that you’re not followed. But don’t worry, I’ll help you lose your tail. I drive a cab these days. Quite good money, you know. Just come to the street on the right of the Bolshoi, Petrovka ulitsa, will you remember? It’s my name, how could you forget? I’ll pick you up if it’s all clear. Keep warm. It’s going to be cold and rainy again.”

  Rust’s day passed fast. He was back at the hotel in time for the sightseeing tour, and tried to look not too bored with the afternoon visit to the excavation of the new subway line. He refused to buy cheap rubles at black-market rate from the cab driver, who might easily be an agent provocateur, and discovered only too late that his lucky booking entitled him to hear Boris Godunov.

  *

  The same day, possibly the same hour, Oleg Penkovsky, Colonel of Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, the intelligence directorate of the Red Army, walked out of the GRU headquarters in Afbatskaya Ploshchad. In fact, he used the heavy wood and brass gate in Frunze ulitsa where traffic was light and where he hoped to spot if he had a tail. He saw no one. Yet he felt desperate. For a few weeks now, instinct had been telling him that something was wrong. He might be suspected. Or subjected to routine investigation. He ought to lie low. Or give up the work and risk he had undertaken voluntarily.

  He turned right, walking slowly, with occasional glimpses at the headquarters windows, the lower halves of which were covered by dense lace curtains. The reflection showed only an old woman behind him. He turned suddenly and walked back, past the top-heavy gate under the row of columns on the first floor, around the corner where a small old building formed part of the massive modern monster with the ominous mass of aerials and radar discs on the roof, past Gogol’s statue, and sat on a bench in the green patch of Gogolevsky bul’var. The old woman had not followed him. He might be seeing ghosts. He might be just nervous and exhausted. Might be — but he knew better than that. Had he been spying for cash, he would have given up now. Had he been doing it under pressure or blackmail, he might have disappeared by now. But the film he wanted to pass on was too important. He had to deliver fresh information on the range of Soviet missiles and Khrushchev’s Cuban plans.

  His regular British businessman contact had been watched for some time by the sosedi, the “neighbors” in GRU argot meaning the secret police. A KGB official had told him that. He had even seen the watchers. He had helped his contact get out of Moscow at great risk to himself. And, instead of lying low, he had stepped up his activities in the two months since then. Now his only hope was that his fears might be groundless. If he was really suspected, they might have arrested him or transferred him to curtail his freedom and opportunities to gather information. People with less well-founded suspicions had been shot without too many questions. And he would not be played and used as a bait to catch a bigger fish: he was the big fish.

  He stretched, stood up, and walked lazily in the sunshine along the old-gold walls, retracing his steps down Frunze ulitsa and rounding the block to reach the open parking lot in the square at the back.

  That evening, he took the film to an American Embassy reception, but the place was crawling with KGB agents under various covers. The following day he made a desperate attempt to meet a British emergency contact, but found no safe opportunity for a hand-over.

  *

  Boris Godunov seemed more popular than Rust would have thought. At the cloakroom of the Bolshoi there was a long line, as usual. The attendant, dressed like a Victorian maid, would not be hurried. Rust could not spot his tail, but felt in his bones that there must be one. When the attendant took his raincoat, he rented a pair of binoculars. That was essential.

  By the end of the performance he felt quite refreshed. Since receiving his father’s message in Florida, this was the first time he had gotten some extra sleep. He was in no hurry to leave the auditorium, and so the line was very long by the time he got to the cloakroom. He waited patiently. His tail must be somewhere near, behind him. After a few minutes, anybody trying to jump the line would only call attention to himself. So he made his move. He grumbled about the slowness of the attendant. “You must be Estonian. I know the accent and your type,” said the old woman next to him with mocking contempt. She kindly advised him that he could go to the head of the line right away, because those who were returning binoculars enjoyed priority. “You silly Estonians, you know nothing. It’s a miracle that you find Moscow on the map.” Everybody laughed, but the mood would have changed at once if anybody tried to advance with the silly Estonian. When Rust left the theater, he only watched if somebody without an overcoat followed him or if anybody was waiting to pick him up outside. If there was someone he was certainly unprepared for the miracle of Rust’s finding a free cab without any delay.

  “I think we’re all right,” said his father, who cruised around for a short while to make it doubly sure. “We’ll go to a place that’s safe.”

  Rust recognized they were in the Arbat district, where entire streets of wooden houses were being demolished to make room for modern blocks. The old man parked the car on a building site, hidden behind a crane, then led him through a maze of brick piles until they came out in another street, where a second cab was waiting. Rust caught only a glimpse of the woman who was driving, but she must have been almost as tall as Rust, and from the silhouette of a tight-skinned, finely drawn face, fiery eyes measured up the two passengers. Judging from a couple of newspaper photos and a cheap flag above the dashboard, she appeared to be a Dynamo fan. She drove off without waiting for instructions, down the poorly lit embankment, across the bridge away from the Kremlin, into even worse-lit back streets, where, Rust was sure, she doubled back several times until he had no idea where they were. That might be exactly the point of the exercise, he guessed, but said nothing.

  She drove through a narrow gate with about an inch to spare on each side and stopped in a dark, fully enclosed courtyard. She then led the way up the stai
rs, warning Rust, “Don’t touch the banister, it’s unsafe,” in a cold voice. As she reached the landing, she suddenly turned back to Rust and produced the slightest of smiles: “No, it’s not part of the official swinging-Moscow-by-night tour.” The light of the single fly-specked bulb above was enough to show Rust that she was very beautiful. No trace of high cheekbones, her blond hair a few shades too dark to match the rather Scandinavian features — perhaps a true Estonian, though Rust, except that her accent sounded Ukrainian. She was slim, yet her breasts, limbs and hips threatened to burst every seam of her dress: a careless fit or a provocative choice of a size too small — Rust tried to guess which. She wore spike-heeled shoes (an oddity for a cab driver, and Rust had not seen her change shoes before leaving the car) and knew how to walk in them.

  She went through a door without knocking, and Rust followed. The light came on, and Rust felt dwarfed by a massive bear of a man. Instinctively, he tried to step back, but his father was right behind him, closing and locking the door. She smiled again: “You have a fine son, Pyotr Nikolayevich, but you haven’t even introduced us.” She switched to English, spoken with a nondescript mid-Atlantic accent. “My name’s Yelena Ivanovna, and you don’t know how pleased I am to meet you.” Then again in Russian: “And that’s Florian.”

  “Florian Vladimirovich,” mumbled the giant grudgingly from behind his fingers on his lips and bit hard on his badly gnawed nails.

  “Of course, but our double names might be too much for our visitor,” she said softly. It was more her voice than the explanation that seemed to pacify him. Rust noted that no surnames had been mentioned. He looked at Florian’s bulging chest and concluded that the man must be armed.