by Arno Baker
The old spies couldn‘t help chuckling when they first saw George Smiley as portrayed by Alec Guinness appear on the screen; however the critical moment came when Smiley visited another retired spy, a Hungarian dealer in fake art in London’s fashionable Kensington. The actor attempting a thick imitation of a Magyar accent says at one point: “Careful George! You‘re an old spy in a hurry!” Morris Cohen asked that the scene be replayed immediately and Molody obliged by rewinding the tape and repeating the exchange as the camera lingered on Smiley looking at his old comrade with a blank stare through his thick glasses “...an old spy in a hurry!” then, “Careful, George!...” and going over the whole sequence several times. A voice in the group suddenly blurted out: “Careful Alex! You‘re an old Chekist in a hurry!” Anatoly repeated the words and they all laughed in unison except Feklisov who as usual failed to see the reason for any merriment at his expense. They all repeated the words like a singsong nursery rhyme and he finally understood the joke and began to laugh with them until they were all in tears like teenagers, stomping the floor with their feet.
The rest of Le Carré‘s story after the second viewing they found too simple and obvious. The KGB officers, as portrayed, were just not believable and some of them were downright grotesque. The phantom “Karla” was much too clever and his immense power was totally unrealistic, even Beria at the height of his reign was never as powerful as Le Carré seemed to imply. Then Anatoly said:
“But Alex, that Smiley imperialist spymaster resembles you in many ways! You are so angry about your retirement that you would do anything to get back in, even for a single week! I know you...one single operation is really what you crave, just to set things straight once and for all. It’s that skipped rank that’s gnawing at you so bad, is it not? Am I right, Alex? Ah yes, of course! Good thing you are such a loyal comrade, otherwise we‘d have to really start heading for the hills! Hey, imagine old Alex going off on a rampage! Why he probably reenacts the scene every night at bedtime! The proverbial ‘old spy in a hurry,’ well that’s you, Alex.”’
Most of the men present that day would soon be vanquished by terrible illness and old age but on that weekend, one of the last they all spent together, they were still very much alert and in reasonably good health. By Sunday night, as the laughter waned and darkness fell over the lonely dacha in the forest, Alex began sinking into one of his vengeful moods. It was true, he still resented at not having been promoted before his retirement just like the others who had been given tio rise to the rank of general including Vyliam (William) that notorious bungler and drunk who got himself caught in a hotel room in New York with a box of condoms!
The next day the car drove them back to the railroad station and Alex stared out the window at the frozen Russian landscape covered with snow and ice thinking about what he could do to set things straight. Every one else had been promoted with the rewards and the generous pensions the rank carried while he, who had probably handled the most effective agents in Soviet history, never made it beyond full colonel. What an injustice! Ironically, a few years later, Alex, “the old spy in a hurry,” had outlived most of the other retired generals and remained vital and vigorous: in excellent physical shape and eager to saiffy a woman, still.
He spent most of his time at home in an apartment complex built for army officers in the 1950s some kilometers north east of the city center. Vast wooded areas and the pristine parks abundant nearby and the heavy silence made his modest two bedrooms very attractive to the rare visitors who came to visit him. He had much more space than in any of the newer buildings although the plumbing was of inferior quality and the heat was still generated by those huge tiled wood-burning stoves that hogged so much space in the bedrooms and living room. But they were so reliable.
After his second wife died he lived alone. His two daughters would visit him rarely and he preferred to travel to their apartments on the opposite side of the capital district just to get away and enjoy a change of scenery. Twice a year there were extended family gatherings at a cousin’s dacha near Vladimir, sedate events where they would get regularly on one another‘s nerves after a few hours.
On one such occasion he ran into his nephew who had recently divorced and remarried. Sacha, that notorious drunk, proudly introduced his dapper uncle the colonel, to his new wife Natasha, an attractive typist and former ballet dancer who was also divorced with two teen age children. Her dancing career had been cut short by an automobile accident and she barely managed on a small pension that she supplemented with temporary jobs at various government offices. That at least was what she told Sacha who was desperately fighting his heavy drinking habit that made him virtually unemployable. Alex wondered how he even managed to stay sober enough to seduce such an attractive woman.
On an impulse Alex suddenly asked Natasha if she was looking for extra work. She said she was and he asked her if she would agree to help him at home... of course he wanted to help poor Sacha and guessed that she could use some assistance. Sacha smiled gratefully and nodded his assent; he was already tipsy by early afternoon. Natasha agreed to come over on Wednesdays to help Uncle Alex with the housework. She was a forty year old dark haired Georgian beauty with the lithe, elegant body of a ballerina, a deceptively placid smile and a soft quiet manner. The drunken Sacha was tearful and hugged his uncle effusively.
Alex wasted no time and within minutes on the first day she came over he told Natasha that he had a very different project in mind. He could take care of the housework himself, so what he really wanted her to do was to type what he referred to as his “top secret memoirs.” The work was to be done on one of the two old “Iskra” mechanical typewriters that he kept like shrines on top of a chest of drawers in the living room.
She looked at him with those shiny brown eyes, puzzled and not fully understanding what he meant. Alex then produced thick reams of handwritten pages that he kept neatly stacked in the cupboard. There were hundreds of sheets covered in a fine handwriting that weaved endless sentences that were all too often repetitious and tedious to read. She simply nodded and he placed one Iskra at the head of the dining room table with a sheets of white paper that he had already been storing up for this exercise. Within a few minutes Natasha was typing the beginning of the first page at high speed clips that sounded like magic to the retired colonel.
The young woman was indeed very fast and accurate, almost 100 words per minute; the handwritten text turned out to be so long and dense that it took weeks just to complete a single chapter of fifty pages. She immediately understood that this was neither an ordinary novel nor a life story but a true and frightening account of the working life of a major spy. The minute he opened up both sides of the cupboard and showed her the complete mammoth manuscript he demanded that she swear that not a single page or line would leave his apartment and that she wouldn’t mention her typing to anyone. Officially, should anyone ask why she was going to visit so regularly, she was to say it was just helping an old man with household chores and running errands, nothing more.
The workload seemed to increase because Alex would make innumerable handwritten changes and additions to each newly typed page so that the text would almost double while she was still typing the first draft. She would then go back and add all the corrections and new parts on a new retyped page. Soon she was coming over twice a week and always had to stay the whole day. Alex was paying her much more than her other temporary jobs …and she desperately needed the money.
But the old spy remained inverately suspicious and wanted to be sure that her worthless drunken husband Sacha didn‘t find out what she was really doing. He had no choice but to trust Natasha and would stop at nothing to have that peace of mind. Given to frequent demonstrations of affection for her newly acquired “uncle,” who had the reputation within his family circle, of being a very unpleasant ogre, she began confiding in the older man and soon was complaining bitterly about her drunken and sometimes violent husband, his nephew. At first, even though he found her attrac
tive, Alex remained suspicious and guarded and did nothing to encourage any deeper friendship. Yet other thoughts began to surface in his mind.
One morning about three months after she started working with him, something changed. Alex would usually like to sit at one end of the dining room table correcting pages while she typed at the other end. He would show her his corrections and discuss the use of words and phrases. Natasha timidly suggested alternatives acting more and more as an editor. She would retype a page then bring it over and stand next to him as he read it out loud. It was in the spring and for the first time she was wearing a light green dress that revealed her incomparable legs.
She would sit and type and without thinking she would often pull her skirt up a bit too high. The colonel didn’t miss any of those details. When she handed him the page their fingers brushed accidentally and he felt an excitement he’d not experienced in a long time, the touch a woman’s skin, a young and desirable woman who happened to be there with him alone. Then as he went on reading and without looking up at her he let his hand wander down her legs and then back up around her waist. She didn’t move as he gently placed his head against her stomach and felt her heartbeat and the slight trembling of her body. He was surprised that she didn’t immediately break away and refuse the advance as he expected she would. Seconds went by as he waited for a reaction. Then like a naughty child he looked up and could see that she was faintly smiling and then she gently began stroking his grey hair.
They made love on the couch.
As the weeks slipped by, Natasha became increasingly and openly passionate. It surprised Alex to such an extent that he became suspicious all over again. His professional training, his memory of hundreds of ‘honeytraps’ he’d organized interfered with the affair and almost destroyed it. Why, he asked himself when he was alone, would such a young beauty have any interest in an old man like me? It didn’t make sense. Then he‘d remember her situation, her ailment, her two difficult girls and her chronic lack of money. That had to be the answer: the money, the security which Sasha was incapable of providing. He was old but he had a colonel’s pension, and in the USSR of the 1980s that was certainly worth a few concessions.
Later on when he would dwell on the affair, he would blame his blinding passion for temporarily shutting off his natural instinct for tradecraft and failing to notice the other signs much sooner. He knew that a ‘honey trap’ was meant to have the same consequences but he failed to detect those signs with Natasha because he was caught off guard or blinded by a double passion and couldn’t recapture the detached objectivity that was always required. While making love she would rid herself so completely of any inhibitions that he would interpret it as a well rehearsed piece of theater.
The growing manuscript, both handwritten and typed versions, was stacked very neatly inside the cupboard against the living room wall. On the top shelf were the reams of the original yellow handwritten papers; beneath those came the typed version with his corrections, while the “finished” copies, painstakingly retyped by Natasha one full page at a time, were kept on the bottom tier. All these versions were neatly piled up in tall stacks one above the other on different shelves. One night as he was rereading the latest chapter of the finished version he noticed that a few pages had been skipped or were missing completely. He took the entire stack of some nine hundred pages and placed it carefully on the dining room table to check it thoroughly, page by page. Fortunately after a few minutes he discovered that the three pages had simply been misfiled and were located some sixty pages ahead.
Misfiling to Alexander Feklisov, however, was not an ordinary occurrence; it couldn’t be an accident since he was the only person to handle the final manuscript and was in the habit of carefully checking everything. Natasha never even opened the cupboard in his presence and worked only on the pages he handed her that he would then retrieve at the end of each session; the old pages were carefully shredded, a task he performed slowly with scissors. He was so careful about this whole procedure that he was convinced it would have been impossible for him to have misfiled those three pages: he’d have remembered something like that even at his age. There could be no doubt, someone else had been inside the cabinet.
“Tasha, did you by any chance rearrange the final pages last week before you went home?” he asked as soon as she walked through the door the next morning.
“No Alex, you know that I never even open the cupboard. I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing. Do you think I enjoy seeing you angry?”
She gave him a kiss but he just shrugged his shoulders, unsmiling and worried. She went into the kitchen and made tea. When she returned he was about to ask more questions but noticed that her blouse was unbuttoned just one button too low. Was that a purposeful oversight, he thought? To get his mind off any more questions perhaps? Within minutes they were in bed and she was on her stomach as he caressed her back, running his rough fingers through her short black hair. Suddenly he pulled her head back slightly but firmly.
“Oh, Alex, why do you want to hurt me?”
“Did you rummage through my papers?”
He was pinching her as his voice suddenly grew harsh and unpleasant.
“No Alex, no, I told you I didn’t! I wouldn’t do anything like that simply because you wouldn‘t want me to!”
She sounded sincere and frightened. He remembered that she had typed the various interrogation scenes in Budapest in 1956 where he described in detail how the prisoners were tortured and always ended up confessing to crimes they hadn’t committed. He described in detail how the confessions were signed while the beatings continued. And how many died during interrogation. So he let her go, immediately regretting having displayed his brutal flash of anger and suspicion. She turned around and they kissed passionately until he was inside her and she was screaming with pleasure. But still he remained unconvinced that this and everything else wasn‘t all an act.
Later on he reasoned that if any third party had gone through the manuscript it could only have been the “brothers.” Alex discounted any Western spies mounting such a complex operation even during the chaotic moments of early post-Soviet Russia. It would be far too difficult, since as a former KGB officer, he was automatically under routine FSB surveillance which also meant that he came under their protection. The CIA or SIS would be immediately stopped if they attempted to approach him directly or break into his apartment. But that such an operation could be carried out using cutouts or even through an unsuspecting third party was always a possibility.
Every month he always carefully conducted a “sweep” of his apartment just to keep up his old habits and training. The listening devices were checked mainly to see if the ”brothers” went to the trouble of adding new ones or replacing the equipment with any regularity. Armed with a tiny screwdriver he would open up all the electric fixtures, the television set, the radio and the telephone. He found four main “bugs,” in the vestibule at the entrance, in the living room and each of the two bedrooms. This was very flattering to the colonel and soon after he began his affair with Natasha two miniaturized cameras, in the bedroom and living room also suddenly made a very discreet appearance. If they cared about his movements that much then there was reason to hope that they might still need him.
The misfiled pages then began to make sense: while he was out on errands on specific days, the “brothers” would come in and photograph each new batch of pages. He remembered having to return home unexpectedly several times and may have interrupted a particular session forcing them to make a quick and sloppy getaway. If the fellows detailed for the operation had to explain to a very perceptive retired colonel what they were doing in Lukoil uniforms in his living room at 11 a.m., it would affect their careers rather negatively. Feklisov was known to have reported back with written comments about the “ineptitude and dangerously haphazard behavior,” of those keeping an eye on him. In a few cases it led to their rotation to some remote central Asian city.
The question bothering Ale
x now was whether Natasha was working for them or not. In bed the carefully hidden side of her personality would surface, and she would become increasingly passionate and at times sexually aggressive. By then months hjad gone by and she had been coming over for one year. At the beginning he would beg her to spend the night but she refused and insisted she had to return home to “poor” Sasha and her daughters. This she claimed, was to maintain the fiction that she‘d actually spent the whole day in an office. The manuscript had become a monster covering four decades and three thousand four hundred single spaced pages, a total of one and a half million words! A few copies of War and Peace bound together! It was actually the story of several lives of a spy interspersed with long and extremely tedious ideological passages of 1940s Stalinist ideology that were guaranteed to put even the most diligent reader to sleep.
When Natasha wasn‘t typing or doing the chores, she would lock her exquisite legs strongly around his back. He realized how powerful she could become that way as she squeezed him, sometimes mercilessly. Her growing passion also managed at times to rekindle his early doubts about her sincerity. Could she be playing a clever role concocted by the “brothers” or even by some other group? But then for what purpose? Why did she keep on coming to his apartment? She had to be on a mission...He asked himself all those questions insistently but then he would also remember her real and desperate need for money. In eighteen months Sasha had reached the point where he had to be hospitalized for long periods. Once he recovered they agreed to a divorce and he moved to St. Petersburg dropping out of sight and mind. Still, Natasha refused Alex‘s requests to spend the night and preferred to let their lives continue just in parallel as they were. His suspicion would resurface with amazing regularity everytime he noticed the slightest change.