by John Lawton
He wrote it down. Then he crossed it out. Then he wrote it down again. Then he asked himself, Is this too close to home? … Isn’t anyone who does what I do potentially an Alec Leamas? … Is that how I’ll end up? Caught between East and West Berlin with a bullet in me?
So he crossed it out again.
§29
It took Farr four days to get the films Wilderness had asked for. Less than anticipated. Wilderness had hoped it might take him a fortnight. No such luck. Farr, if he had an opinion on Wilderness’s restatement of the Foreign Office’s vision of England in 1966, refrained from expressing it beyond “All good stuff … I suppose.”
In the interim he memorised Alice’s notes, drank a thousand cups of coffee with Janis Bell and avoided the Brocken Witch—not that he needed to. Once the chain of command had been established, she seemed to have no further interest in him. On the one occasion they passed each other in Janis’s office she spoke not a word while her eyes said, “Still here, are you?”
In the evenings, he coordinated Alice’s notes with road maps of Finland. He was to fit in two or three “shows” on the journey north (“Flying the flag, Joe”) in one-horse, one-reindeer towns … Yksikoirankaupunki … Kolme-kuolleen rotan kylää … Napatakiinni … wonder at Finnish’s preponderance of double consonants, double vowels and umlauts … and arrive in Persereiikkä, Lapland, a convincing representative of the British Council, “spreading” (that bloody word again) Anglo-Saxon culture and somehow managing not to think of it as flogging glass beads to the natives.
And as evening fell to night, he’d open a bottle of Estonian “Burgundy,” stare at the faux-gothic eyesore on the opposite side of the street and count his blessings.
Nada … niente … they’d gone again.
§30
Finland being, as he thought of it, unchanging, likeable, yet somehow avoiding invoking the word “dull,” nothing in the journey north surprised him. He’d seen the endless rows of silver birch before and the spindly plantations of pine, so regular as to make one think that everything in Finland strived for a near-perfect verticality. But—he’d never relaxed into Finland; every other visit had been the job, every aspect of it wrapped in the fabrications of urgency. This wasn’t even half a job. This was the slain shadow of a job. So he took time off. Each morning, and each afternoon ahead of his cinema shows, he’d pull the Mog over to the side of a lake—there always was a lake, and he had concluded that nowhere in Finland was more than half a mile from a lake—and watch the water ripple.
Just before he pulled into Napatakiinni, he sat on a rock by a lake unknown and watched an old geezer fishing.
The fisherman seemed to sense his presence and turned to see who compromised his idyll.
“Englannista?”
“Mistä tiesit?” (How can you tell?)
“Näytät englantilaiselta.” (You look English.)
“Todellako?” (Really?)
“Vihaan saksalaisia.” (I hate Germans.)
Hardly surprising.
“Vihaan venäläisiä.” (I hate Russians.) That too.
“I … I … I lika English.”
“Hauska kuulla.” (Glad to hear it.)
“Winstoon Churrrchill.”
Wilderness wondered where this might be leading.
“Duke off Edinburger.”
None the wiser.
“Mick Jagger.”
OK, so it was leading nowhere.
Just like his job.
§31
Persereiikkä was five or six times the size of the villages he stopped off in. Perhaps three thousand people. Big enough to have its own cinema, and big enough to have its own office of tourism—Matkailutoimisto Suomesta—run by one Niilo Pastorius, a man charged with enticing hopeless romantics to visit Lapland and watch the northern lights dance in the winter sky—and also charged by the Suojelupoliisi, the Finnish Secret Service, usually simply the Supo, with the watch on the border. Wilderness had been to Persereiikkä once some six or seven years before on nothing more than a “familiarising” mission. He’d never met Pastorius—couldn’t even remember the name of the bloke who’d enacted the fiction of tourism officer at that time.
The Office of Tourism was on the far side of Persereiikkä, next to the river. He drove the Mog across town—it was just about familiar, entirely made of wood, like some frontier town in Wyoming or Nevada. And it was deathly quiet, spreading itself in pristine silence, mostly just a single storey high, under the clearest blue sky he’d ever seen—not a single plume of smoke, not a whiff of pollution. A hint of something, something old, something half-remembered, something burnt.
The exception to wooden buildings was the Office of Tourism. It looked like a prefab off a London council estate. It might have been plonked down off the back of a lorry only hours ago. It differed only in the makeshift addition of a pitched steel roof and a front wall of triple-thickness plate glass, plastered with posters presenting the joys of life in Lapland.
A man about his own age stood in the doorway—about five foot nine, blond, with watery blue eyes and, when he spoke, the hint of a lisp.
“Pastorius. Call me Niilo.”
“Fine. You can call me Joe. It’ll keep things simple.”
“I thought I had to call you Michael?”
“Joe will do fine.”
“I can lock up now you’re here. I’ve booked you into the White Nights Hotel. Check in and we’ll have drink. And I can … brief you. If that really is the word?”
“You’re not sure?”
“Oh I’m sure. It’s just that brief might be almost too literal. You’ve just landed in the town where nothing ever happens.”
§32
Wilderness wasn’t sure what the tourist season was in Lapland. It seemed to him that it marketed itself as a winter wonderland, and made as much as it could of the constant crepuscular winters when most daylight was reflected light. The White Nights seemed neither full nor empty. People drifting in and out. They were only a couple of weeks away from the longest day—the phenomenon of days to come with no sunrise or sunset—and a midnight sun. He had no idea which was the more attractive to the visitor, as, much to his wife’s annoyance, he had hardly ever been anywhere as a mere visitor and found it hard to think like one. There’d always been the job—a job that smothered a multitude of marital evasions. More than ten years on Judy would drop hints that she was still waiting for a honeymoon. He was sure she’d like the midnight sun, she just wasn’t going to get to see this midnight sun. There was a song. He was sure there was a song. Hampton? Ellington? Ella? He couldn’t remember.
The bar at the White Nights was too full to talk.
“It’s not even half full, Joe. Wait two weeks, then you’ll have to fight your way to the bar,” Pastorius said.
“I’d be happier outside.”
“It’s not as if anyone would be listening.”
“Let’s not take that risk.”
They walked along the river, westward—into what in another latitude might have been a sunset.
“‘The town where nothing ever happens’ can’t be wholly true,” Wilderness said.
“Why’s that?”
“If it were true you wouldn’t be here. So backtrack a little, tell me what happened to bring you here … better still, to keep you here.”
Pastorius breathed deeply.
“Do stop me if you’ve heard all this before. I’ll go back just a few years—we don’t need 1917 or World War II. Khrushchev.”
“Abracadabra.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You just said the magic word.”
Pastorius smiled.
“Point taken. Two years after his downfall and he’s still the most evocative name in whatever game we’re playing. The ghost in the machine. Khrushchev … Khrushchev hit all our panic buttons when he invoked the treaty my parents’ generation signed in 1948 and demanded joint military exercises back in ’61. You can blame Eisenhower for that. U2, Gary Powers, a general
increase in the level of Soviet paranoia. I’d have difficulty telling you which is cart and which is horse, but around the same time it became obvious that Russia was upgrading the surveillance system on the border. I got here only a year ago, and we were still uncertain as to what they were up to. How good was their radar, how many more troops were just out of sight? The Americans have their satellites, the Emperor Ming has his death rays … all of it a bit impractical, not close enough to the ground.
“So, I tried an old-fashioned approach. There are a lot of charter pilots here … I say a lot … a dozen perhaps … mostly foreigners, Canadians and Australians, stragglers from the last war … who make a passable living simply because our railways are nonexistent and our roads bloody awful. They pick up a lot of cargo work. But if you’ve flown a Spitfire … well, I imagine it’s dull work … and when I offered them double the money to skim the border and test out the Russian radar, they jumped at it. A piece of the action. It’s known as ‘ferreting.’ It went well until about three months ago … three went out … two came back. Since then the survivors won’t make any more runs across the border. They have … how would you say? … other fish to roast.”
“Fry,” said Wilderness, somewhat awed by Niilo’s command of English. “Could I meet them anyway?”
“The pilots? Sure. They work out of Joeerämaa. It’s about an hour and a half north of here. It’s tiny. We can go up together in the morning and show another film tomorrow night. Perfect cover.”
“Is it? I feel as though I have ‘spy’ stamped on my forehead.”
“The diplomatic plates?”
“They scream ‘spy.’ ”
“No, no I don’t think so. It’s too obvious. And as such it’s good cover. Hiding in plain sight. Everyone knows the British are trying to nurture cultural resistance to communism, so your presence here is completely expected … you’d be much more suspicious here as an Englishman without a purpose.”
“But I’m sitting here talking to the chief of the tourist bureau. Michael Young might be a tourist. Why couldn’t I be a tourist? Why couldn’t that be my purpose?”
“Curiosity born of innocence shows. Yours is born of knowledge. That shows too.”
§33
They drove up together in the Mog. Pastorius shut up shop and casually hung a sign on the door. Wilderness’s Finnish didn’t extend quite as far as “Mennyt Kalaan,” but the squiggly drawing above it left no room to misunderstand: “Gone Fishin’.”
He let Pastorius drive.
§34
Joeerämaa was as small as any of the villages Wilderness had set up cinema in. It stood on the shores of a large lake, on the very edge of the Finnish Border Zone—a forty-five-kilometre strip, forbidden to visitors without a permit and to overflying by aircraft.
So, the flyers had set up right next the lake. They’d carved out a landing strip for their wheeled planes—two of which sat at the water’s edge. For all that he had served twenty years, nominally, in the RAF, Wilderness knew next to nothing about planes. The bigger one was a Cessna Bobcat … a light freighter with a sizable capacity—he didn’t think they’d made them after the war, so it had to be at least twenty years old. The other was much smaller. A two-seater. He’d no idea what model. And out on the lake, a floater, an amphibious de Havilland Beaver, painted blue below and a mottled greeny-brown above. Basic camouflage. A few years ago it had been a regular on TV and cinema newsreels, as the supply plane for the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition. British pluck’s last fling. Every English schoolboy could recognise a Beaver. It was a workhorse of a plane. It was said you just roll a barrel of beer straight off the quay into the belly of the aircraft.
Wilderness and Pastorius arrived just after noon. The Aussies lounged in deck chairs at the lakeside. Each with a bottle of beer. Each in grubby vests and Y-fronts. One of them smoked, the other lobbed alluvial stones into the water—to skim would have meant standing up and, clearly, that was too much effort.
They’d pitched tents, literally. Like a couple of infantry soldiers told the advance had stopped for a while. It looked more like the Desert Campaign than Lapland. Striped awnings on birch poles, an oil drum barbecue, a washing line of boiler suits and check shirts strung between the trees, a windup gramophone and a pile of 78s—an even bigger pile of empty beer bottles. A rusting mountain of engine parts. And a capacity for relaxation that Wilderness thought very Australian and very un-English.
A record spun down to nothing, the last refrain:
And every one was an ’Enery
She wouldn’t have a Willie nor a Sam
I’m her eighth old man named ’Enery
’Enery the Eighth, I am!
And then nothing but the splash of stones in water and the gentle rustling of birch leaves in the breeze.
Pastorius broke into this slackers’ paradise.
“Momo Brubeck, Bruce Kennedy,” he said. “This is Michael Young, from London.”
Wilderness had come almost instantly to hate this part of the fiction.
“Call me Joe,” he said.
“Just as well,” said Bruce. “Momo’s really a Mick and two Micks is two too many, eh Momo?”
“Fuck you, you old dag,” Momo replied.
They hauled themselves to their feet. Big men, running rapidly to seed—beer bellies hanging over the wide elastic of their underpants—hair bleached perpetually blond. Wilderness had heard Aussies washed it in lemon juice to keep it that way.
“Who’s for a beer?”
Alcohol was prohibited in most of Lapland. Pastorius had explained this to Wilderness on the way north.
“You might buy a beer or a glass of wine in a tourist hotel, but there’s no such thing as an off-licence—no shelves in the village grocer’s stacked with cans and bottles. Doesn’t stop anyone, of course.”
It didn’t stop these two for a moment. Before Wilderness could even answer, Bruce had stuck a bottle in his hand.
“What brings a young Pom like you to the land of the midnight sun? As if I couldn’t guess.”
“By all means, guess.”
“You’re one of Niilo’s spook pals. Got to be.”
Wilderness turned to Pastorius.
“Is there anyone who doesn’t know? Has it been on the national news?”
“Relax, Joe. These two are forever playing the joker. But they’re the men who’ll tell you what you need to know now. They work for us.”
“And what is it you need to know?”
“The last few flights?” Pastorius said. “Gavin?”
“Gavin?” Wilderness echoed.
“Our partner. The Canadian. We lost him in March. Sit yourself down. It’ll all make more sense with a map in front of us.”
Bruce spread out a map. It covered about one hundred kilometres of the Finnish border with the Murmansk Oblast, past Rayakoski, without reaching Murmansk itself.
“We made a couple of dozen runs. Low over the Finnish side. It’s illegal, but Niilo here tells his pals at the radar stations to ignore us. Mind … if the Russians had nabbed us, you’d have denied us in a flash, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course,” Pastorius replied.
“Keep low over the border, gain height over Russia, see what we can see, see how long it takes them to spot us.”
“You mean how long it takes them to launch a fighter?”
“Nah. They get to launch a fighter, we’re fucked. Can’t outrun it and nothing to shoot back with unless you point a shotgun out the fuckin’ window. Nah. A simple pulse detector. I made my own. Dead simple. Like Meccano. Not always reliable, but simple. If I weren’t such a lazy bastard, and if the valves in it weren’t Russian-made, I’d patent it. But … what it tells us is how low the Russkis can sweep, and where they have no cover. They’ve extended their border zone to a hundred K, and while they’ve been building their radar network for several years now, it’s patchy. I reckon they’re still building it. It’ll take them a couple more years. But they’re getting better.
Last time, I reckon, we underestimated them. Went in too high. Went in here, as matter o’ fact.”
Bruce stabbed at the map with a nicotined forefinger.
“They’ve set their radar steadily lower as they put in more masts. We’ve got a good picture of everything between here and here …”
His hands framed a good sixty kilometres of the border.
“Since last winter their coverage has pretty much doubled. Still not complete, though. Meanwhile, you can still fly in and out if you’re careful—but I can’t think of a reason why anyone would ever want to do that. There’s bugger all happening down there after all.”
“Smuggling?” Wilderness said.
“Easier overland … the ground patrols are scant … the border leaks … it’s porous.”
“So a man could get through one of these leaks?”
“You’re not thinking of paying them a visit, are you?”
“No … I was thinking more, do they pay us visits?”
“Possible,” Bruce said. “But I doubt it. They’d stick out like a sore thumb. I reckon Finns can smell a Russian. What do you reckon, Niilo?”
“There are no Russian agents that I know of.”
This struck Wilderness as complacent, but he made no comment.
“Most of what leaks,” Bruce continued, “are refugees, and these buggers just send ’em straight back.”
“We have no choice.” Pastorius said. “We sup with the devil.”
“Yeah? Well you need a longer spoon.”
Wilderness tacked them away from the subject.
“How did you lose Gavin?”
“Pranged his crate,” said Momo.
“No he fuckin’ didn’t. Gavin was the best pilot of all of us. He was a bit older than us. He flew Spits in the Battle of Britain. Momo and I backed up D-Day. Not exactly a cushy number but nothing like it was in 1940. Gavin was a bloody good pilot. He didn’t prang his plane. They shot him down. They got a MiG up. Bang.”