by John Gardner
He took great pains to ask constantly about his friend and former controller, Arnold Farthing. He was told Arnie was well and looked forward to being reunited with his friend and colleague as soon as was conveniently possible.
At night, Naldo would be returned to the apartment block to find Barbara looking frozen and harassed. Her hair, until then, had retained its deep blackness and, from the first days he had known her, she had worn it cut short, like a black cap. Now, during that freezing winter, the black sheen disappeared and turned grey. For the first time in all their years together, she had let her hair grow to shoulder length.
The apartment smelled of cabbage. In Moscow at that time there were few culinary luxuries. Barbara managed to get bread, cheese, cabbage, beetroot, on good days potatoes and fish. On really good days she obtained steak: a tough, stringy sweet-tasting meat that she swore was reindeer. Naldo hoped it was not dog.
In the cold of the night they huddled together for warmth, and made love with the intense passion they had experienced in their younger days. When he was able, Naldo would write down instructions for her to memorize and, once she had them pat, he would dispose of them in the same way he got rid of all their most secret conversations. In this manner he told her the realities: that he was posing as a defector in order to put right wrongs that affected their country and family. He also told her that she should go back to the West and be there for the children, and to take out the truth to his superiors. He would not be staying long in Russia.
However, he added a warning, saying she should keep certain true facts from a short list of names. Three of the names were heavily underlined and her eyes widened with both sadness and horror when he explained the reason for this. All three were connected by inter-family ties. All three were at the top of his knowledge of treachery. ‘One of these three,’ he wrote in front of Barbara, ‘can never be trusted. You must warn others off, and never speak the truth to them. As far as these three are concerned you do not know the full truth. For their knowledge only, I am as bent as a corkscrew.’ He smiled at her as he wrote these last words: raising his eyebrows in a comical grimace.
Barbara made it clear that she did not wish to leave him, but would do so only if he assured her he would be returning soon. Her love and loyalty to him remained undiminished. She had thought briefly about admitting her own infidelity on that one ghastly occasion, then decided against it. What purpose would a confession serve at this juncture?
As for Naldo, his view of women stemmed directly from Barbara. She had been his rock, his anchor to reality when, for so much of the time, he spent the better part of his life in a world of illusions, tricks, fake boxes, and the art of deception. For him, Barbara was the real world when he returned from dabbling in that dangerous and, for the most part, fictitious land they called the secret world. In spite of his own moments of physical infidelity, which he regarded with as much emotion as a man might regard the passing pleasure of a good meal, he adored his wife.
Barbara was like all women, but held the most special place for him. Naldo thought of women not as the weaker vessels, but as the bedrock of human life. For him, women were there to counterbalance the follies of men. They added colour to the drabness of the male; gave strength and intelligence to the stupidity of his own sex; gilded the style of life by their very presence; enriched the world in ways a man could never contrive. In short, Naldo regarded women as much more than the equal to men. In his philosophy, man could not exist without women. Mankind would be lost without their best qualities, and he was certain that while men could never survive without women, it was a sure thing that women could survive and live quite easily without men, except to impregnate them and continue the human race.
The so-called debriefing sessions became more and more delicate. But Naldo had two small advantages. First, Arnold’s trust. The American had obviously built up a firm relationship with the Russian service over the past few years. It was quite clear they trusted him, but did they trust Naldo? Probably almost, but not quite, though Arnie as an ally was a definite advantage. Second, Naldo had a great deal of experience in interrogations and debriefings. He had seen grand masters at work, and knew what the KGB team would expect. All defectors, even those who came with goodwill, tried to retain something. They held things back until they were on safe ground. They also made up answers which they considered their inquisitors wanted to hear.
Naldo structured the whole of his interrogation in layers within his mind. He was the receptacle of many true secrets and these he buried deeply. They would never surface unless the team resorted to full frontal violence, the water, electrodes and rubber hoses, which was unlikely; or the system the Ks referred to as chemical: injections of ‘soap’, as sodium pentathol was known, or other so-called ‘truth serums’, like scopolamine.
So, he gave them items they probably already knew, adding in small, uncheckable lies of his own; some of operational value, others merely the tittle-tattle of the shop. He gave no names he thought might be compromised, only tiny morsels that, on the face of it, sounded good. In the early days he threw in some of the intelligence about squadrons and units of the United States Air Force based in Britain, then, slowly, he drifted into the shop itself. Throughout the first months he switched the subject and showed reticence about the interlinked triple operation about which he knew they badly wanted cross-references.
He could only hold out for a short time, and by spring, as the snows and ice started to thaw, the debriefings had zeroed in to the bull’s eye of his supposed secret work for the Soviet Union: the three operations called Fontana, Dredger and Matador.
The team spoke quite openly of the cryptonyms, as though they knew every move, each meeting, and the planning details on an almost day-to-day basis. Naldo was heartened as the questions continued, for it was obvious they knew only the parts of the operations they were meant to know. They were aware of the three possible agents who had wandered into their sights. They even named them. They outlined to him their own analysis of each subject, how they had almost been fooled by the third one, an East German political analyst called Schütz. ‘I gather our people were about to make the final approaches and begin his training when they had the message from your friend Farthing,’ Pliner told him. Then he looked up and smiled broadly. ‘Later we discovered it was you who had provided the information. Three times. Three really good agent material. All or any of them could have been recruited. But you gave them to us. Tell us now about how you manipulated Schütz?’
Naldo, in his mind, saw the little bald-headed Heinrich Schütz, in the Berlin safe house they had shared, on and off, over more than a year.
2
Schütz was one of those natural, grey men in the world Naldo and his colleagues inhabited. The old adage of the secret world was that a grey man would have difficulty in catching a waiter’s eye. Schütz was just such a man. Naldo’s problem with him was that he appeared to be a grey man with bad nerves.
The other difficulty was that he, Naldo Railton, had the responsibility of making the final choice from two such men, Heinrich Schütz and another middle-aged man, Joseph Brunner. There was little to choose between them. They were both the right age, they had kept their noses clean, were accepted as party members in East Berlin, and they were both academics respected in their own fields. Schütz, the political analyst, who had spent the final two years of the war in one of the death camps because of his public analysis of the Nazi Party and his, never proved, leaning towards the left.
Brunner was about the same age, a bald, short historian, accepted as a party hack who did the lecture circuit, urging his students in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany to accept the current line of history as demanded from Moscow. Brunner’s nerves appeared to be intact, though Naldo wondered if he had fallen too deeply inside his cover. A year ago there had been a memo from London suggesting that he should be pulled out for a long period of R & R, then put at a desk.
Sometimes, London advised, the man with bad nerves had m
ore of an instinct for survival. The choice was horrific. No agent runner, control, case officer, call them what you will, likes to lose an agent, yet there are times when you have to walk away in the knowledge that you are abandoning a man or woman who has put his, or her, trust, confidence, future and life into your hands. Naldo had already been forced to do it twice, during Fontana and Dredger. Both of the people concerned in those two operations had always been marked as expendable; both were hooked, dangled as bait and rejected. One, a woman called Hanna Düse, had gone missing, never to be heard of again. The other had made it back by his fingernails. The final operation, Matador, would be the clincher. They had to deliberately pick one man, who would be blown by an American penetration agent, and then choose someone whose whole legend stood up.
When it came to the final choice, Naldo went against his instincts. Brunner would be the one to come out of it alive. For weeks he instructed both Schütz and Brunner, each without the other’s knowledge, and the instruction of the men differed in subtlety. Schütz’s already frayed nerves were played upon, as a man will clean the plastic casing off electrical wire, leaving the wire bare so that a connection can be made with it. Brunner’s confidence was bolstered, and his weakness was probed in an attempt to remove it as a surgeon might remove a growth.
Naldo hardly slept for the six weeks he had been given for the final phase of the job. He suffered a recurrent nightmare in which, with no warning, he was sent off in place of Schütz. In the dream he would look in the mirror and see he had become the little bald German, so that he knew what would happen.
In the end it worked like a charm, though there was a nasty ten days when it looked as though the Russians had wholly taken the bait on Schütz. On the eleventh day the body was found, dumped near the SIS headquarters in Berlin. Six weeks later they heard that Brunner was receiving special treatment. A short time before Caspar’s death, Naldo had the first taste of the product. Brunner was in and running, working between Moscow Centre and the DDR.
Now, in Moscow, Naldo went through each move in the preparation of Schütz, adding little details for the record — how Schütz had been turned, and what specific targets they had given him. ‘We wanted names,’ he told Pliner. ‘There had been a call from my service and the Americans for details of changes among the Russian personnel in the East. That’s what they needed.’
‘You think, yes, from the names they could have built an analysis of what we were doing?’ Pliner, stoop-shouldered, and carrying a little too much weight, raised his dark eyes and gazed speculatively at Naldo from under his bristling eyebrows. ‘You really think names would have been enough?’
Naldo shrugged. From what he had seen in Registry at the London shop, the files on KGB field officers were good, he told the General. ‘Each has a page or two on his specialist work. You get the names of a couple of good agent-runners so you assume they’ve something going for them in West Berlin. Extra Russian cipher clerks mean “listen to the traffic with greater care.” It must be the same for you.’
The General gave a little nod and said they also wanted names. Arnie had given most of the Americans. The General did not know the agency had taken to reversing names and faces, playing tricks and giving false expertise so that a CI man could very well be an expert on strategy, and thus was able to read the runes from the new military units stationed in the satellite countries. Naldo gave them the two main Berlin safe houses he had used for the three operations. They would almost certainly have been closed down and put on the market as soon as he disappeared.
It was immediately after this particular session on Matador that Naldo asked if his wife could go home. They had played several little charades for the sake of the listeners. Word games which became heated, knock-down, drag out domestic fights. By now the listeners must have had a good idea that all was far from well in the Railton apartment opposite the watch factory. Naldo had even noticed that Kati was taking more interest in him, asking concerned questions, saying he looked under strain or very tired. ‘Family problems,’ he would say as though naive to the way the apartment was spiked. His look of fatigue came almost solely from the high amount of sexual activity, which they covered by playing a cheap radio loudly. They did not know when they would see each other again, so sex became the salve for the yet-to-be-inflicted wound.
‘Ivan,’ Naldo said to the General, ‘I have a favour.’
‘If I can grant.’ Pliner went on writing notes in longhand, making a crude pretence that there was nothing in the way of recording going on.
‘My wife.’
‘Yes?’
‘She is unhappy here. She misses the children. Also she is disenchanted with me.’
‘She did not know of your activities before you ran to us?’
‘No.’
Pliner’s shaggy eyebrows went up and down, like some crude imitation of Groucho Marx. ‘So?’
‘So she wishes to leave.’
‘To leave Soviet Union?’
‘It will make my life easier. I go home to World War Three each night.’
Ivan Pliner made a noise that was half laugh and half grunt. ‘If she does not like … then, I suppose we have no reason to keep her. You do not discuss work with her?’
‘Of course not.’ They certainly had nothing on the tapes.
‘I do what I can.’
‘If you can do it, I would hope it would be without drums and trumpets.’
Pliner smiled, nodded like an old sage. ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘Your people have not even posted you officially missing. The rags that pose as newspapers in your land have not even a nose. Is that right, a nose?’
‘A sniff, probably,’ Naldo corrected. Barbara would need time before the SIS inquisition got to her.
That night, in the midst of a fake row to keep up appearances with the sound stealers, Naldo wrote more instructions for Barbara. ‘Before anything happens officially you must get to …’ He filled in a name and Barbara smiled for the first time that evening. ‘You just say to him that a friend wonders if he remembers the night they invented champagne,’ he wrote, lifting his head and smiling before saying loudly, ‘I’ve asked General Pliner to get you home. This cannot go on, Barbara. It’s interfering with my work.’
She told him loudly to do something anatomically impossible with his work. ‘I hated it in England. I hate it even more here, you bloody traitor.’
‘How can I be a traitor when I simply follow my conscience?’
‘Fuck off, Naldo.’
Three days later, when he was brought back to the apartment, Naldo found Barbara was gone. No note. No explanation. Her clothes had also disappeared. Twenty-four hours later he was worrying in case they had her in the Lubyanka or one of the camps. It would not take much to sweat Barbara.
During the following week, Ivan Pliner told him that his wife was back in London. It had taken a few days to get her out, but he could telephone her if he so wished.
It was another four days before Naldo was sure she was out. Ten times the call was placed to his London number. It made the connection five times and there was no reply. Finally, on a Saturday morning, Barbara picked up the telephone. ‘I’ve been to my lawyers,’ was all she said. ‘You’ll be hearing from them, care of Dzerzhinsky Square.’
This was what they had arranged. They would even go through with some kind of legal divorce to keep the play going until the last act.
By June, Naldo was moved into a better apartment, on the Smolensk Boulevard in one of the modern blocks which seemed despairingly at odds with the decorative older buildings nearby; the old Morozovs’ house, and the small Nevitsky Palace, now, respectively, the party committee headquarters, and a school for delinquent children. He was given more help, and allowed to go out without any obvious watchers on his back. They still said he could not see Arnie yet, but on the first Saturday of this new freedom Kati Lunev suggested that he might like a visit to the Bolshoi.
Naldo had never been one for the ballet, but he had heard peopl
e enthuse over the Bolshoi’s performances. In any case, this was a chance to test why Kati had been assigned to the team.
Inside the plush and gilded theatre, she talked of other great performances she had seen. Also of last year’s visit by the Royal Shakespeare Company. ‘It was the Paul Schofield King Lear.’ Her eyes glowed. ‘Every woman in Moscow is in love with Paul Schofield, and I was lucky. I went on the first night and shook hands with him at the reception.’ She lifted her elegant hand as though showing him an icon. ‘It was wonderful. Oistrakh led the standing ovation. He is so huge and when he clapped, his arms moved right out as though he would embrace the Schofield. I wept.’ She gave him a little smile and he patted her hand, ‘the hand that touched Paul Schofield’, he said.
The ballet was Giselle, and Naldo thought the sets looked old and tatty, and the performance seemed mannered. But what would he know?
They had dinner at a restaurant in a side street off the Arbat. Half the diners were already very drunk when they arrived, and the slothful service was matched only by the food which made any indifferent English meal seem like a gastronomic delight. As yet Moscow had not accepted the fact that tourism could benefit their economy. They were still suspicious of any foreigner. Dissidents, subversives and all foreigners were possible enemies of the state and the cause, so they were treated as such.
During dinner, Kati flirted, and threw tourist information into the gaps in conversation. ‘The composer Scriabin lived in the next street. You know Scriabin?’
‘Not personally but I’ve heard his music.’ Naldo smiled, but the joke was lost on her.
‘Now it is museum. Personally I prefer modern music. I am very fond of the Shostakovich Thirteenth Symphony, you know? Where he had put the Yevtushenko poems to his music? “Babi Yar”, “Yumor” , and the others?’