by John Gardner
Clifton did a mental double-take. His immediate superior was not known for showing feelings for wives and families.
After the holidays were over, Clifton drove in and took a week or so doing the Heartbreak report. After it had been presented, he was told that they had taken him off the operation. His chief of section, a short, bullet-headed former FBI man, said his specialist services were needed. He was off the Soviet and Eastern Bloc desk.
Within twenty-four hours Clifton was being briefed for work in South-East Asia. Vietnam in particular. ‘We need men with your experience more than ever now,’ his new boss said. ‘We’re pushing more and more people over there and things are getting worse all the time. I guess Vietnam is going to be the place where we show the Communists where they get off: and tell the rest of the world not to kick us around, eh?’
Clifton nodded obediently, but felt a gnawing pain in his guts. He did not see it as an easy job. They told him that he was to make a field analysis of the Viet Cong’s intelligence organization. ‘We plan to exploit them,’ the operational planning staffer said. ‘Cut off their agents, and it will be like cutting off their balls. The entire apparatus of the Viet Cong’s intelligence networks will be unmanned. It’s the intellectual way to win this little war before it really gets off the ground.’
Clifton did not like to ask him how to find the Communist agents and apparatus, any more than he liked to ask how castration could be intellectual. He had spent a lot of time around the Vietnamese and, to some extent, had an inkling of how they thought and acted. He wanted to ask, ‘How do you find their balls if they have them hidden away in their guts?’ but he knew what the answer would have been. ‘You cut each one of them open and find the damned things.’
There were going to be a lot of innocent Vietnamese cut open to find one Viet Cong spy. When he left, Clifton almost shrank away from the horror he knew must come, even if he did his report correctly and with care for the innocent. He mentioned it to one colleague who simply said, ‘There’re going to be fewer innocents in the world in a year’s time anyway.’
Clifton wondered if he would have been better off going where Arnie had gone with the Brit. As the aircraft flying him out tilted upwards and set course, he thought about the tall Brit who he knew was related distantly by marriage. Under his breath he asked, ‘I wonder who’s screwing him now?’
FOURTEEN
1
Naldo dreamed that the nuclear holocaust had taken place. The earth was changed into a great wasteland. He and Arnie were left alive. They seemed to move across countries and continents as though possessed of magical powers. Naldo looked at Arnie and saw that his friend’s skin had become infected with great brown blotches.
He examined his own hands and arms and saw he was also covered with these hard growths, some the size of saucers. The blotches were like large scabs, crusted and hard. He squeezed one and liquid ran out.
When he next looked, Naldo saw a small twig-like object starting to sprout from one of the huge crusts that almost covered his entire body. He saw the same was happening to Arnie. They were growing branches. From the branches, buds and leaves began to sprout and they could no longer move with the magical speed they once possessed.
‘You know what’s happening,’ Arnie told him. ‘We’re turning into trees. Soon we will not be able to move at all. We’ll put down roots. The roots will seek out water and creatures will begin to live in that water. In a thousand years or so, birds will nest in our branches and the whole cycle of life will start again. This is to be our reincarnation.’
When he woke, Naldo was sweating, terrified by the dream, and relieved to be himself. He even went to the little bathroom of the apartment which he shared with Barbara, and examined his skin to make sure he was all right. The dream had been so vivid he needed reassurance.
When they had arrived in Moscow, Gloria was already there. It had taken them a week to be brought out of Switzerland, then into East Germany. The team who travelled with them were snatch experts, trained to move secretly in Europe, able to alter their identities so that they became other people, with new papers and lives, in a matter of minutes. Years later these same people, and many like them, helped in the training and movement of Communist-financed terrorist groups. But for the present their one job was to bring Arnold and Naldo to Moscow. They knew nothing except the fact that their charges had worked secretly for the cause in the West. This gave Arnold time to brief Naldo further in his own story, or legend as the Soviets would have it. Naldo was to be grateful for this instruction during the year to come.
They constantly changed passports and trains, while the final portion of the journey was made by air. Just the two of them, Naldo and Arnold, with the four KGB people and the aircrew in a military plane that creaked and bumped alarmingly. They landed at a Soviet air base near Moscow and there Gloria was reunited with Arnie. Their children had been left with Gloria’s sister, Esther, in Connecticut.
Barbara arrived a month later. She told Naldo how a letter had been brought to her at the Axbridge hotel, saying that she should go by bus to Weston-super-Mare. She was met at the railway station by a young man wearing a very smart coat over a badly cut suit. Arthur and Emma had been picked up and taken to Redhill Manor by car, where they were left at the entrance to the long drive. She had spoken to them from a flat the KGB took her to in London. It was Christmas Eve, and as soon as the holiday was over, they gave her a false passport and she flew to Amsterdam where an Aeroflot plane had made an unscheduled landing to take her on board. She could not understand how she had gone so easily through the passport controls without being recognized.
‘Naldo, is this for real?’ she asked, looking around the cramped, dingy apartment they had been given on Leningrad Avenue, in a pink ugly building almost opposite Factory No. 2, the watch factory. Their neighbours worked either at the watch factory or the nearby tobacco factory. ‘Are you for real?’
‘Yes,’ said Naldo, carefully pointing to the light fittings and the telephone that never rang, cupping his hand to his ear to indicate there would be listening devices in the apartment. ‘If you don’t like it, Barbara, they’ll let you go back to England — I think.’ While he spoke, Naldo wrote on a pad of paper, ‘No this is not real. The conditions are real but I’m doing something else. Be very careful.’ Most of the time they talked aloud about the children and other members of the family, or daily trivia. Important conversations took place on paper which was burned afterwards in the pot-bellied stove, or ignited and flushed down the lavatory, together with two or three sheets directly below the pages on which they wrote. At that time in the mid-sixties life in the small apartment was almost primitive. The tap water ran red with rust and the food was poor.
A woman KGB officer came each morning to take Barbara out and look after her while shopping, and to help her with the language. They only went to local shops, never into the heart of the city. Two KGB surveillance men were on duty around the clock to see that they did not go out by themselves. They were virtually prisoners in the apartment, but a car with smoked glass windows arrived at 7.30 each morning to take Naldo to ‘work’ .
Work consisted of long interrogation sessions, described as debriefings. He was not allowed to see Arnie, and did not even know where his cousin lived. Certainly he did not see him in the big offices at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square.
The weather was bitter. Neither Naldo nor Barbara had ever been so cold and they could not stand being outside for more than half an hour at a time. The cold bit deeply into their lungs so they could hardly breathe, while inside they rarely moved far from the big old wood-burning pot-bellied stove. The KGB watchers occupied a street-level apartment directly opposite the building where Naldo and Barbara lived, and there was always a car nearby. Naldo reasoned that it would be a long time before they could be trusted to move without bodyguards.
He wondered if any of this was worth it, either for himself or Arnie, and their families. At home he would be branded as a traitor, whil
e all they desired was to save his Uncle Caspar’s reputation and the honour of their families. In the end he saw their two families as microcosms of their countries. Both the families and the countries were being eroded by change and decay. At the same time things that they believed in — honour, allegiance, decency, the law, essential knowledge between right and wrong, the freedom of the individual — were being ground down under new political ideologies, or presented in a propaganda drive aimed at making countries believe that weapons, and the warfare that could be waged with them, would be for the sake of the individual. Hypocrisy, waste, lack of caring, the idea that the state owed you a roof, work and money, had crept like a dozen cancers through the bodies of their once great nations.
Now, Naldo did not care what happened to either Barbara or himself. He knew he must do what he had set out to accomplish, even if politicians, civil servants, or the omnipresent man in the street might scoff at him for being idealistic and old-fashioned. So he went meekly to Dzerzhinsky Square each day to undergo the interrogations that were camouflaged as debriefings.
The four people assigned to him behaved impeccably, and with friendliness, putting him at ease, asking their questions as though this was merely a routine matter. In overall charge was General Ivan Ivanovitch Pliner, who asked Naldo to call him Ivan on the first day. ‘And I shall call you Donald, yes?’ He had a square open face, almost the look of a peasant, though there was a hardness around his eyes, which seemed to say, ‘I am a long-serving officer. What I know, I know.’
‘My family and friends call me Naldo.’ He had caught the trick in time.
‘Ah, yes, I had forgotten.’ The General smiled, showing two gaps among his bad teeth. ‘As a child you could not say the name Donald. I remember now, this is in your dossier.’ It was a hint, Naldo suspected, that they knew a great deal about him.
Ivan Pliner was assisted by two majors, Andrei Novik and Semen Gorb. Both were tall young men, in peak condition, strangely similar in looks, high Slavic cheekbones and silky blond hair. They treated Naldo with grave respect and asked if he would care to exercise with them. ‘The chairman has given permission for you to use the gymnasium and the swimming facilities as long as one of us accompanies you,’ Semen Gorb told him. ‘There are set hours for you to use these places.’
‘So that nobody can lay eyes on the British traitor?’ Naldo asked with a smile.
Both men appeared greatly shocked. Oh no, they assured him. It was for his own protection. The comrade chairman was anxious that nobody should speak about his presence in Moscow. ‘When the time is ripe,’ Novik said, ‘the entire world will know of the bravery of you and your companion. There will be a press reception in your honour, and you will explain your motives to all.’
Naldo asked when this would be, and their answer came in the form of another question. For a complete record would he tell them of his motives? Why had he, a member of the British bourgeoisie, and an officer of the British secret organs, passed secrets to the Soviet Union?
He lied convincingly. ‘First, I believe that all peoples will eventually be bound together in one aim and one ideal,’ spreading his hands, his elbows tucked into his side and arms extended in a gesture which said ‘My body is your body. We are all one people.’
‘Personally, the sooner that men and women of all nations understand there is only one way to go, the better it will be. I helped gladly, and will help again. I became sick and disgusted, after the Great Patriotic War, by the phoney socialism and the challenge of the old capitalist ways; the double standards of my country, and America’s duplicity. I could see the only thing to do was look to the East and embrace the full fervour of the revolution.’
Though he had only been in Moscow for two months, Novik now dropped a hint. ‘It is possible you will be asked to return and carry on the fight.’ He spoke gravely. ‘Who knows?’
‘I thought the world was to be told of what I have done?’ Naldo thought the statement very odd.
Semen Gorb quickly stepped in. ‘I have heard the comrade general say that it might be good for us to issue a statement saying you had been apprehended on a charge of espionage. We would pretend you were in one of the camps for political prisoners. Eventually they could exchange you for another of our people held in the West. It is perfect cover for you to carry on with your deception.’
Naldo wondered if they would really pretend that he was in a camp on the Gulag. It was much more likely, he considered, that they would put him there if they became suspicious of his motives. It was at that moment he decided to send Barbara back home.
Nobody played the old interrogation games of hard and soft, even though General Pliner always gave a cheerful impression that they all knew everything about Naldo anyway, so these sessions were simply a matter of filling in a very few gaps.
The fourth member of the debriefing team was a woman. Major Katarina Lunev was obviously either very well connected within the Russian nomenklatura, or had been specifically set up for Naldo. ‘You must call me as my friends like, Kati,’ she began her introduction one marrow-freezing morning when even the car ride, with the heater going full blast, had failed to warm him. She spoke English with an American intonation, and was later to tell Naldo that she had spent several years in the Russian Embassy in New York. She had enjoyed New York, and, at their first meeting, said she found the way of life in America pleasant. ‘The food is good. Also I have bought many nice clothes and luxuries while I am there. They have so much and yet so little. While I like it in America, I see so many impoverished people and so many with great riches. There is unfairness. Here we try to be fair. Jobs for all. Homes for all. Care for the sick and aged.’
Naldo thought of the Russian women he had seen that very morning, shovelling snow from the pavements, clad poorly against the cold, their feet wrapped in sacking. ‘All people here are not as lucky as you, though, Kati.’ There was, perhaps, a hint of criticism in the way he said it, for two red spots of anger flushed to her cheeks. ‘People here do the jobs best suited for them.’ Her tone became snappish. ‘If a man or woman shows intelligence and aptitude, they will have a better job. All have equality, though this cannot apply where intellect is concerned. My work is not all comfort, you know.’
He did not want to irritate her, so he rephrased his words, making it clear that even in a country that was truly socialist, like the Soviet Union, it was necessary for the better minds to hold more important jobs.
Kati could never have been called beautiful in any accepted sense, her face was too thin, but with good cheekbones, set very high. She had a large nose and her upper teeth were long, touching her lips when she smiled. But it was a wonderful smile, which spread to the big dark eyes that widened when she showed either surprise or amusement. Her hair was coal black and a shade rough in texture, while her eyebrows always seemed to need plucking. Kati’s main asset was her body. She was tall, slim with breasts just a shade too large for the rest of her frame. All in all she was inexplicably sexually attractive, though even an expert in these things would have been hard put to explain why.
Also, at thirty-two she was a widow who claimed her husband had died in a tragic air accident.
Semen Gorb told Naldo that her former husband had been an air force general, which explained some of the privileges. ‘Much older than she,’ Gorb explained. ‘He died in helicopter crash. Very sudden. Never really explained. It is said he did not get on with the chairman, so …’ He raised his eyebrows in speculation. Naldo noticed that none of his ‘debriefing’ panel ever referred to the head of the KGB by name. They would say ‘the chairman’, and nod, as though they knew something would soon happen to put the man out of business.
The daily routine resolved itself into a pattern, not immediately discernible, but it was there, under the surface when you looked for it. There was always one part of the day during which he would be kept waiting, sometimes for an hour or so, on other occasions merely for fifteen minutes. After a couple of weeks Naldo realized it was alwa
ys done at a time of maximum inconvenience: when he had been asked to hang around for a couple of minutes before going to eat, or to be taken around some specific department within the headquarters complex, at that time still confined to the old All-Russian Insurance building, backing onto the Lubyanka. There were outstations of course, but in those days the larger extra facilities were only on the drawing board.
The so-called debriefing was methodical and expert, to the extent that Naldo found himself being constantly surprised. In the field he had known KGB professionalism, but it had always been tinged with a sense of inferiority. All the Western intelligence community talked as though the Russian service was big on brawn and small on brains. Here in Moscow, Naldo began to feel that, possibly, the British and US services had taken KGB inefficiency for granted.
There were no question and answer sessions. Instead, they would sit around in what he soon recognized as a contrived relaxed atmosphere, and talk. Naturally the talk revolved around the information Naldo was supposed to have provided for Arnie. But there was always an air of general chatter, in which any questions were deeply buried. All four members of the team were at pains to point out the exceptionally detailed knowledge they possessed about the Secret Intelligence Service, from its basic structure to names, and the mannerisms, foibles, strengths, weaknesses and efficiencies.
During these conversations, which often went on at great length, one or another of the team would leave the room, without explanation. When that person returned, Naldo observed that a new line of questioning would start within fifteen minutes or so. From this he judged that they were not only being monitored by recording apparatus, but also by another, possibly more knowledgeable, officer.