Billion-Dollar Brain

by Len Deighton

  ‘Yes,’ Harvey said. I noticed he kept his head bent downward, for even out here on the ice a parabolic reflector microphone could pick us up.

  ‘I hope you haven’t broken any of them?’

  ‘No. I’ve been very careful,’ Harvey said.

  That was all I needed to feel sure that Harvey had the half-dozen eggs that were stolen from me at London Airport. I said nothing. They were going to be surprised when they looked more closely at those canteen eggs. Harvey and Fragolli both carried identical black briefcases.

  ‘Change bags at lunch,’ said Fragolli. He gave a great peal of laughter with lots of teeth flashing. I suppose that was to fool anyone watching us from the river bank. ‘One of you,’ he said, still smiling, ‘is going to Riga.’

  ‘Dempsey will go,’ said Harvey. ‘I must stay here.’

  Fragolli said, ‘I don’t care which.’ He changed his position as we walked so that he could be closer to me. ‘You go to Latvia tomorrow. The 392 flight to Riga at two fifty P.M. Stay at Hotel Riga. You will be contacted.’ He turned to Harvey. ‘You’ve put his photo on the Brain index?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harvey.

  ‘Good,’ said Fragolli. ‘The person meeting you will know what you look like.’

  ‘But I won’t know what they look like?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Fragolli. ‘Is safer that way.’

  ‘Not for me it’s not,’ I said. ‘I don’t like the idea of my snapshots being found on one of your layabouts.’

  Harvey said, ‘There won’t be any pictures floating about. The man who will contact you will probably be the aeroplane passenger.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked. ‘Apply splints and bandages?’

  Harvey said, ‘The sooner you get it through your head that this organization doesn’t make slipups the sooner you can relax and stop bugging me.’

  Perhaps he said that for the benefit of Signor Fragolli, so I just said, ‘OK.’

  Fragolli said, ‘You are going to have to commit two thousand words to memory. Can you do that?’

  ‘Not verbatim,’ I said, ‘not every word exactly.’

  ‘No,’ said Fragolli. ‘Only the formulas—quite short ones—need be verbatim.’

  ‘I can do that,’ I said.

  I wondered how they would arrange my visa for Riga, but I didn’t ask.

  We reached the ice-locked boat. It was a great slab-sided craft with lots of wooden balconies and curtained windows. We picked our way through crates of beer and lemonade, and a man yelled ‘Tovarich’ at us in a rather threatening way. ‘Tovarich,’ he yelled again.

  Fragolli said, ‘It’s because we haven’t left our coats with him. It’s not cultured to enter anywhere in an overcoat.’

  The floating restaurant had the same equipment that every other restaurant had. The cutlery was from the same state factory and had the same design and so did the plates, the menu, and the waiters.

  We ate piroshky and bouillon and Fragolli told us what sort of morning he had had negotiating the sale of girdles. ‘You have no idea what remarkable minds the Russians have, cautious and devious perhaps, but clever yes. I sell my goods in many western countries, but these Russians…’ He hissed at his fingertips to demonstrate his admiration, and his voice became low and conspiratorial. ‘We make a deal. Other customers just give me a number and a date; eight thousand girdles model 6a in these sizes for this delivery date. The Russians, no. They want this suspender clip to be one inch lower, they want this seam double sewn.’

  ‘Tricky,’ said Harvey.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fragolli. ‘By changing the specification they ensure that those garments are made specially for them. Elastic deteriorates, you see. They don’t want garments that have been months in the warehouse. Clever capitalist minds they have.’

  ‘Capitalist?’

  ‘Certainly. Those old ladies selling bunches of flowers on the Nevsky Prospekt? Now, no militiaman says anything to them, even though it is against the law. But to sell those flowers long ago, it could be a dangerous thing to do. If I could give one of those women a supply of girdles…’ He stopped. ‘I have calculated that selling the girdles at normal price—and in Leningrad this day I could get double the normal price at least—but at normal price I could still retire at the end of one day’s work. This country is hungry for consumer goods just as Europe was about 1946.’

  ‘So why don’t you do just that?’ said Harvey.

  Fragolli crossed the first two fingers of each hand in the universal Russian sign for prison and everything connected with it.

  ‘Things will become easier,’ said Harvey. ‘You will soon be selling your girdles; all you can make.’

  Fragolli said, ‘There is a saying in Leningrad that a pessimist is a man who says that things were bad in the past, things are still bad, things will always be bad. An optimist says, things were bad in the past, are still bad, but nothing can be worse than this.’

  ‘So why do they put up with it?’

  ‘When a baby is born in this country he is swaddled. Swaddled from neck to toe, like a log of wood. When you unwrap him to wash, he cries. He cries because the control and restraint has been removed. He is free. He is alarmed. So he is soon swaddled up again, and mentally he stays swaddled up until he dies.’

  ‘They don’t do that swaddling so much nowadays,’ said Harvey.

  Fragolli said, ‘Look at this waitress, for instance. She just cannot buy proper foundation garments. She has no proper brassière or girdle.’

  ‘I like it like that,’ Harvey said. ‘I like my broads buttocked both sides.’

  ‘Non non no,’ said Fragolli. ‘I want to put foundation garments on to every pretty woman in Leningrad.’

  Harvey said, ‘My ambition is exactly the reverse.’

  Fragolli laughed.

  Harvey dropped his piroshky into the soup and broke it up with the spoon.

  Fragolli said, ‘The Russian style. You eat your piroshky in Russian style.’

  ‘My father was a Russian,’ said Harvey.

  ‘Newbegin is not a Russian name.’

  Harvey laughed. ‘It is the word “new” and the word “begin”. My father used it when he came to America for a new start in life.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Fragolli. ‘I meet many Americans.’ He lowered his voice. ‘To tell you the truth, my company is forty-nine per cent owned by an American company. The Russians do not like to do business with American companies so this is convenient arrangement for all concerned.’

  ‘Russians are realists,’ Harvey said.

  ‘They are realists,’ pronounced Fragolli, and he too dropped a piroshky into his soup.

  Harvey and I left Fragolli after lunch. Harvey said, ‘Relax. I didn’t really send your photo to Riga. I’ve got my own system for identification but I’m not telling that Fragolli anything.’

  ‘What’s your system?’

  ‘They have television telephones in this crazy country. I have a call booked for Riga for three o’clock. We’ll go now and take a look at this guy you are going to contact; it’s a heap better than smudgy little photos.’

  Harvey and I took a cab to Pavlov Street. Number 12a is a small building that looks as if it might house an unskilled worker with a large family. It is really the public video trunk call office. We knocked at the door, and a woman let us in. She parked a pencil in her hair, looked at her wristwatch, compared that with the wall clock, asked us what time we thought it was, then we all went to a small room that housed a phone and an old-fashioned-looking twelve-inch TV set. We sat down and Harvey picked up the telephone. The woman turned a dial on the TV set and the screen flashed blue. Harvey said ‘Hello’ four times, then suddenly he was talking to a bald-headed man who seemed to have four overcoats on at once.

  Harvey said, ‘This is Mr Dempsey, he’s coming to see you tomorrow and he’ll be staying at the Hotel Riga.’

  The man on the TV screen said, ‘It’s cold here in Riga. Bring plenty of sweaters.’ Th
en he said would I move a little bit to the right so that he could see me because the edges of the picture distort. Then the man in Riga asked if it was cold in Leningrad, and we said yes it was, and the man in Riga said you had to expect it now, and that the Riga Hotel was modern and well heated as long as it wasn’t damp. Harvey said how much he had enjoyed his last visit to Riga, and how sorry he was that he wouldn’t be going there, and the man at the other end said that Leningrad was one of the most wonderful towns in the world. Then Harvey said yes Leningrad was wonderful, and how it was called the Venice of the North on account of how wonderful it was. The man at the other end said yes, and how did Mr Dempsey like it, and I said it was wonderful but I hadn’t ever heard anyone call Venice the Leningrad of the South, and then there was a silence. I had spoilt the magic of the moment. That was when the little woman with the pencil in her hair came in and said that was the end of the time unless we wanted to extend it. Harvey said no we didn’t, and then the man in Riga said good-bye, and we said good-bye, so the man in Riga said it again and was still saying it when he melted.

  I was alone that last evening in Leningrad.

  I went to the Maly Opera Theatre that night and saw Verdi’s Otello, and with the voices still occupying my mind I decided to take a subway down the Nevsky and have a drink at the Astoria. I went down the steps at the sign of the big neon M. I put a five-copeck piece into the automatic entrance which won’t prevent non-payers travelling but buzzes in order to embarrass them. A man in a fur hat, long black leather coat, white shirt and silver tie got into the carriage. I wondered if he had enjoyed the opera. I smiled at him and he nodded back without smiling. I reached for a packet of Gauloises, tore open the corner and offered them to him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No thank you.’

  ‘You are a cigar-smoker, Comrade-Colonel?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘but in our subway we…’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I put the packet away. I didn’t want to break the law. ‘I don’t want to break the law,’ I said. The man smiled but I was serious.

  The train rattled along and we both hung on to the straps looking at each other.

  He was a heavy muscular man of about sixty. He had a round face that hadn’t done much smiling until middle age, and an uptilted nose that perhaps had been busted and reset by a plumber. His eyes were small black sentries that marched up and down, and his hands were bunches of bananas unsold over the weekend.

  I said, ‘I am getting off here and walking to the Astoria, where I will drink one hundred grams of port wine. I will listen to the band playing American dance music for perhaps twenty minutes, then I will walk back to the Hotel Europe.’

  He nodded and did not follow me as I got off the train.

  I did exactly as I had promised. Less than half an hour later I left the front entrance of the Astoria and walked down the dark side street. When it’s daylight in Leningrad and the buses and lorries are roaring along the wide Nevsky, and African delegates are being toasted at multi-course lunches at the Astoria, then it’s easy to see Leningrad as the birthplace of Communism. But when it’s dark and the moon glints on the Peter and Paul Fortress, and two out of every three street lights are extinguished for economy so that the puddles and newly fallen snow are discovered only by an errant foot, then it is once again St Petersburg, and Dostoevsky is humpbacked in a slum behind Sennaya Square, and Pushkin is dying after his duel and saying ‘Goodbye, my friends’ to his rows of books.

  Behind me I heard a slow-moving car. It was a large Zis—a car used only by government officials. The driver flashed the lights and the car drew alongside. The door opened, blocking my forward movement. From the back seat the voice of the colonel I had seen in the subway said, ‘Won’t you get in, English?’

  I got into the rear seat and the colonel closed the door. There was a lot of cigar smoke.

  ‘So we meet again, Colonel Stok?’ I said like they say it in films.

  ‘Oleg.’

  ‘So we meet again, Oleg?’

  ‘Yes.’ He gave an order to the driver, who switched off the car motor. ‘You are enjoying our Russian winter?’ Stok stared at me. His head looked like that of a statue that someone had found and rolled home so that all the delicate parts had broken off.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m enjoying the Russian winter. Are you?’

  Stok tugged at his fleshy chin. ‘We have a saying in my country, “For him who stands at the top of the tower there is no other season but winter.”’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, although I still don’t understand what that proverb means.

  ‘You are involving yourself with a particularly foolish and headstrong group of trouble-makers. I think they are exploiting you. When I move against them do not expect me to treat you differently from the way I treat them. It may be that you are investigating these evil people on behalf of your government, or it may be that you are ordered to co-operate with them. They are troublemakers, English; but they will find that I am more expert at making trouble than they are.’

  ‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘But in my experience there aren’t many evil people around. Just ill-informed, misguided and ignorant ones.’

  Colonel Stok said, ‘In Russia our people are not misinformed.’

  ‘There are many people who think that water has no taste,’ I said, ‘because we were born with it in our mouths and it’s been there ever since.’

  Stok didn’t reply. ‘Hotel Yevropeiskaya,’ he shouted to the driver. The car moved. ‘We will take you to your hotel,’ he said to me. ‘It is not a good night for walking.’

  I didn’t argue. If it wasn’t a good night for walking Stok would know.

  Chapter 12

  There are fifteen Republics in the Soviet Union. Each one constitutes a separate ethnic unit, has a self-sufficient economy, a flag, a Supreme Soviet, a council of ministers and, most important, is placed between the area we call Russia and the world outside. The three Baltic Republics are Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. They huddle close and drink at the trough of the Baltic along with Sweden and Finland.

  I caught the Aeroflot 392 flight from Leningrad to Riga. It left at two fifty P.M. and was crowded with people in heavy coats and fur hats who changed their mind constantly about leaving their outer clothing in the small wardrobe at the front of the cabin. There was some confusion about the seat numbering: two women with armfuls of overcoats and a crying baby had the same seat ticket that I had. This was sorted out by a ravishingly beautiful air hostess who distributed boiled sweets to all concerned and reprimanded a tovarich for smoking.

  The plane climbed across the smoky suburbs of Leningrad and over the Elektrosila plant. Brick suburbs gave way to big wooden houses, then single-storey houses which became more and more isolated until there was nothing but grizzled, frozen marsh. Winter had closed the eyelids of the land and the snow that covered it was ill-fitting and dingy like a second-hand shroud. Under the starboard wing slowly moved Lake Peipus, scene of Alexander Nevsky’s great battle when the Knights of the Teutonic Order probed too far eastwards and went, complete with horses and heavy armour, through the ice crust and into the deep black water.

  The trimly uniformed stewardess—definitely wearing Western foundation garments—brought a Cellophane envelope for leaky fountain pens and a plastic cup of fizzy lemonade. I smiled at her, and she jammed a copy of Pravda into my hand, her smile still ticking over. Below us the landscape shone in great brown-and-white patterns like the coat of a well-groomed piebald horse. We began the descent above the Gulf of Riga and dropped towards the military airport. In the seat in front two passengers recognized the farm where they lived and wanted me to see it too. We nodded, smiled and pointed down while a dual-seat jet fighter screamed off the runway in a climb that indicated that the instructor was pushing the buttons.

  The stewardess said, ‘You come from London?’ She offered me a tray of boiled sweets.

  I took one, and thanked her.

  ‘I know a poem about Lond
on,’ she said.

  ‘I know a limerick about Riga,’ I said.

  She nodded and passed on. The plane came down for a smooth landing amid the radar gear.

  The Hotel Riga is built on the site of the old Hotel Rome, just across the street from the opera house. The pavements were crowded with women sweeping snow and fur-hatted soldiers in padded fatigue coats and dirty boots. All the while long lines of lorries trundled along the streets as if it was 1945 and the retreating Wehrmacht only a couple of miles away. The dual language signs—in Latvian and Russian—heightened the illusion. As fast as the street-cleaners worked, more snow swept down upon the street, shining like tracer bullets on the dark winter air. I turned away from the window and sank down upon the bed.

  I went to sleep that afternoon fully dressed, and I didn’t wake up until seven forty-five P.M. I washed and changed my clothes, and walked through the old part of the city with its strange, crouch-backed, medieval buildings, like a Hollywood set built for Garbo. I walked as far as the castle, where the tram tracks jut out towards the far bank of the Daugava River to show where the bridge was torn away from under them. I picked my way through the narrow streets where the old bent buildings leaned together for warmth. I wasn’t followed. I suppose my shadow calculated that I would soon come in off the streets, or perhaps he was using the opportunity to go through my baggage. By comparison with the cold cobbled alleys, the hotel restaurant was a scene of throbbing gaiety. A small orchestra was playing ‘Lights of Moscow’ and the waiters were clattering metal dishes and semaphoring with table napkins, and there was the air of subdued hysteria that you get in a big theatre when the orchestra is tuning up. A waiter smiled and ushered me to a corner table marked with a reserved sign that said ‘Intourist only’, and gave me the English-language menu. It was bent and stained.