by Paul Gallico
The assistant turned the glow of his dark orbs upon the vouchers, found them valid and produced booking forms and application blanks.
‘Passports?’ he queried.
‘Got ’em,’ replied Mrs Harris.
‘We’ll be needing three photographs.’
‘Got them too,’ exclaimed Mrs Harris triumphantly, ‘and our birf certificates.’
The assistant gave them a charming smile and said, ‘I can see you ladies are experienced travellers. No, no, only the photographs.’
These latter were leftovers from the time Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield had voyaged to the United States in the employ of an American film magnate.
Now the clerk said, ‘If you will just fill in these forms for me. You will find pen and ink over there at the table.’
One sheet was a booking form on which the young man had already entered the number and type of their package tour and the other, the visa applications, looked somewhat more formidable, the questions printed in both Cyrillic letters as well as the English translation.
Over at the table Mrs Butterfield took some alarm and said, ‘What’s this ’ere funny writing? I don’t like nuffink I carn’t read.’
Ada said, ‘Oh, come on, Vi, it tells you what it says right underneath.’
She ran rapidly down the list of questions to check as to exactly what extent the Russian might be prying into her private life. Name, citizenship, date of birth, profession and so on, she found them astonishingly innocuous. Ada was remembering the occasion of their visit to the Great Democratic Republic of The United States of America. In order to obtain a visitor’s visa they had been closeted for a half hour with a tight-mouthed and irritable Vice-Consul who had interrogated them not only upon their status, finances, intentions, but likewise their affiliations, their politics and also their morals to the point where Mrs Harris had been about to tell the young man what he could do with his visa except that she badly wanted it. Compared to the quizzing by the Great Democracy, the Russian questionnaire was mild and most of the questions could be answered very simply.
Calligraphy was not exactly the strong point of either Mrs Butterfield or Mrs Harris and often one of the latter’s clients would exclaim in despair to her husband, ‘Oh dear, somebody ’phoned while we were out; Mrs Harris has left a note and I can’t make head or tail of the name.’
The two women embarked upon the job of filling out the forms, writing painfully and slowly with considerable blotting and crossing out so that at the end of a half hour, much of which was consumed by argument and discussion, they had finished and the documents were almost legible.
Their longest debate had taken place over the question of their professions. Neither of them was ashamed of what they did for a living and yet what could one set down on paper for the eyes of the Muscovites? It seemed difficult to find the exact and satisfactory wording.
‘Char’ would certainly be unintelligible to foreigners. What then? ‘Cleaning woman’?, ‘Daily’?, ‘Household help’? Mrs Harris decided that a char she was and they’d have to make the best of it, but to make it look a little more imposing she filled in for her profession beneath her name, ‘Char Lady’.
Mrs Butterfield was equally at a loss. A detailed description of her functions at the Paradise seemed to be too complicated. What was one to call it? ‘Washroom’? ‘Powder Room’?, ‘Ladies’ Room’? The queries addressed by those in search of her place of work usually curtailed it to, ‘Where’s the Ladies?’ The compromise reached with Ada’s assistance was that she designated herself as ‘Ladies’ Attendant’.
The completion of this task filled them both with a sense of excitement as well as accomplishment. Ada took the batch back to the counter where the young man reappearing checked over them briefly and said, ‘Very good. When the visas are ready, in about two weeks, we will notify you at the address you have given. Tour Number 6A departs from Heathrow on a Sunday at 10:30 a.m. arriving in Moscow at 3:00 where you remain Monday to Thursday. You will be met at the airport by an Intourist representative and guide who will advise you as to the hotel into which you have been booked. Of course, we cannot give you the exact date of departure until your visas have been granted, or your hotel bookings, but have no worries, everything will be arranged.’
They left delighted and in good spirits. Mrs Harris had expected a good deal more red tape or interrogation problems, but everything had gone so swimmingly that in her elation both at the concurrence of her friend as well as the ease with which they had breezed through their applications she forgot to be suspicious. Suspicious, that is to say, of the fact that everything had gone so well. Life had taught her that nothing was easy, particularly when one wanted something, and if the realizations of one’s wishes or desires or ambitions moved too smoothly that was the time to watch out. However, she was not clairvoyant and hence could not follow what was happening to the documents she and Mrs Butterfield had left behind them in the Intourist Bureau.
6
A chapter in the forthcoming book by Mr Geoffrey Lockwood and one which the Russians were not going to like stated that the USSR was a nation partially paralysed by a bureaucracy still using methods hung over from the days of the various ‘Greats’ of the past, Peter, Catherine, and so on. They were a vast conglomeration of ignorant, stubborn men, hamstrung as well by terror, a maze turned in upon itself from which there were no exits.
Not only, wrote Mr Lockwood, was it the left hand, but likewise the left foot that kneweth never what the right ones did. Each department regarded itself as a little independent kingdom answerable to no one, with the chiefs up to Ministry level acting entirely upon royal whim or how they happened to be feeling on any particular day. The result was that any sensible suggestion or solution of difficulties emanating from the Olympus of The Presidium got bogged down, diluted, reversed or totally lost in the morass of bureaucracy before it had so much as a chance for the breath of life.
Added to which, according to Mr Lockwood’s acid analysis, not only was there no liaison or co-operation, but the chaos within each bureau due to the ignorance, block-headedness, stupidity and lack of proper training of the civil servants themselves was something to be admired. And thereafter he quoted chapter and verse on some of the larger fiascos which had helped to bring about such disasters as crop failures and equal catastrophes in the attempt to produce ordinary consumer goods.
One of the Soviet Union’s most important windows to the West was their big travel bureau known as Intourist which as travel bureaus went operated with more efficiency than most except that at home it was hampered by troubles not of its own making. One was the fact that once in Russia their clients were exposed to the slapdash methods of hotels, car pools, taxis, theatre tickets, etc. They were also responsible to some extent to the security branches. It would seem no traveller ever returned from the Muscovite bourne without a tale of some kind of foul-up.
The two women had hardly left the building when the large staff occupying the warren at the back of the office in Upper Regent Street went to work upon the documents deposited by Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield, picking their way through the hen-track replies to the questionnaires which were then photocopied, analysed and digested for dispatch to the various interested departments which would have to deal with them. These were the Consulate, Embassy, their own headquarters in Moscow, including the all-important KGB intelligence service which received an immediate photocopy of the original by electronic transmission.
The civil servant called upon to cope with a précis of the Harris/Butterfield forms had to deal with the problem posed by their professions, maiden and married names and other vital statistics. Faced with deciphering their aforementioned hen-tracks and further handicapped by myopia and a need for newer and stronger glasses, he dispatched to his superiors a remarkable document revealing that one Lady Ada Harris Char accompanied by her personal maid, Violet Butterfield, had made application for the five-day tourist trip to Moscow.
Mrs Harris’s eleva
tion to the British aristocracy had been the matter of a simple stroke of the pen. Since the words ‘Char Lady’ meant nothing to the clerk he had judged it to be an error of reversal and so had corrected it immediately to ‘Lady Char’ which made sense to him.
The case of who and what was Mrs Butterfield gave him considerably more trouble but he solved it by a piece of brilliant deduction which would have met with the highest approval from his equally dense superiors. Having decoded Mrs Butterfield’s profession as Ladies’ Attendant he reasoned that no British Milady would think of travelling without her personal bodyservant and thus Mrs Butterfield became attached to ‘Lady Char’ as ‘and maid’.
One copy of the original application went through to Intourist headquarters in Moscow where reservations were made in a tourist class hotel and the machinery started to put Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield along with their fellow passengers on Tour 6A. This called for an ironclad and unbudgeable routine of visits to landmarks, historic places, institutes, monuments and an evening at the Bolshoi as prescribed by the rigid Intourist programme. But there was also a special branch appointed to sift through the visitors’ list in case anyone of importance appeared thereon. Anyone of title fell into that category. British aristocrats in particular were to be handled with gloves of a very special quality of kid so that they might be lulled into the belief that the Big Brown Bear was really just a sweetly purring pussycat. This branch had a neatly concealed budget needed to supply the visiting VIPs and bigshots with caviar, vodka, champagne, chauffeur-driven limousines, country dachas, shoots, special privileges and entertainment. In due course the précis prepared with regard to the impending arrival of Lady Char and maid reached this branch where notice was taken of its importance and the subjects thereof scheduled to the routine called for by their eminence.
This exquisite muddle augured most auspiciously for the holiday planned by the two friends. However, all this took place during the period of the ‘good news, bad news’ jokes. The bad news in this case was the fact that the photocopy of the original applications of Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield, travelling together, sent to the security service wound up on the desk of Comrade Inspector Vaslav Vornov, he of the elephantine memory, whereas chance might just as well have deposited them with any one of five other similar inspectors.
These documents were merely part of the batch of some twenty-five or so comprising another scheduled departure of Intourist Package Tour 6A.
Comrade Vornov’s practised eye ran over them and found no suspect name, newspaper correspondent, special writer, prominent socialist, businessman or Trade Delegate Head who might be doing a bit of spying on the side. There appeared to be simply a group of normal and innocuous tourists who would, of course, as a precaution, be photographed anyway as they descended from the plane by means of a hidden long distance lens and naturally kept under constant surveillance by the Intourist guide, hotel staff and, in particular, the ‘Dragon Lady’ or auxiliary concierge who sits by the lift of every floor of every hotel handing out the room keys and from which position she is able to keep track of all comings and goings.
No problems. He was about to stamp the batch and lay them aside when he was aware that something was niggling at his mind. That memory was at work trying to call his attention to what? A name? A profession? Wait now. He relaxed to let whatever it was come through. The elephant trumpeted. He had it! A name, Mrs Ada Harris. Hadn’t it in some way been connected with that well-known archenemy of the Russian people, the Marquis Hypolite de Chassagne? Yes, that was it and there it was, the name on the application, Ada Harris, plus a travelling companion, Violet Butterfield. He picked up the telephone, called the computer section, gave them both names and said, ‘Run those through and give me the results immediately.’
The computer section complied at once. Their monster went into its routine of blinking lights and clicking circuits and a few moments later disgorged a fund of information which, landed upon Comrade Vornov’s desk and read by him, gave him the most intense satisfaction. By a most brilliant inspiration of total recall he felt himself on the verge of serving Mother Russia and his own career by exposing yet another capitalistic spy plot. He reached for pen and paper and composed the following memo:
Comrade Colonel Gregor Mihailovich Dugliev
Chief of Foreign Division Internal Security.
Dear Comrade Dugliev:
I have been so fortunate as to have uncovered a Capitalistic plot on the part of the British to infiltrate spies into the Soviet Union in the guise of tourists on a package tour, namely Tour 6A scheduled to leave London for Moscow on Sunday 26th August. It would appear from information supplied by our computer system that over a period of years, a woman by the name of Ada Harris has acted as a courier for a number of known enemies of the Soviet Union whose dossiers I will be sending you under separate cover. These include the Marquis Hypolite de Chassagne of whose activities you have been aware for some time, Colonel Wallace who was Captain Wallace when he spent a year in the Embassy in Moscow as Military Attaché and MI5 Intelligence Officer, the Wyszcinska family, the notorious Polish emigrés who have never ceased their efforts to undermine the revolution, Joel Schreiber, an American film producer who has specialized in anti-Russian pictures, Sir Wilmot Corrison and Sir Oswald Dant. Sir Wilmot was involved in the affair of the expulsion of some hundred of our innocent diplomats and attachés from London while Sir Oswald Dant was responsible for the cancellation of a trade deal which would have been greatly to our benefit.
Mrs Harris’s connection with these people has continued over the years. The cover she has employed has been that of a char, the British word for a daily cleaning woman, which has enabled her to maintain her contacts. We have evidence that in 1958 she made a trip to Paris to contact Chassagne and in 1960 made a journey to New York in the company of the anti-Russian producer, Schreiber, where she was known to have travelled widely in connection with subversive activities. In 1965, as a reward for her services to her country, she was appointed to the Houses of Parliament but apparently resigned shortly afterwards at the behest of the British Secret Service for further duties all the while maintaining her cover as a cleaning woman which as you will note appears upon the enclosed copy of her application.
Of the companion accompanying her, Mrs Violet Butterfield, nothing is known and I consider that our operatives in London have been highly remiss in failing to penetrate the activities of this unquestionably likewise dangerous woman. The very fact that she has been able to conduct her work without attracting our attention is sufficient indication of what appear to be truly extraordinary abilities.
It is my recommendation that the application for visas of these two spies be granted and that they be allowed to enter the Soviet Union in order that we may ascertain the nature of their mission and what new plots are afoot in London. Naturally they will be kept under constant surveillance but I would presume to counsel with particular attention to the one known as Mrs Butterfield who must obviously be the more dangerous of the two since she has been able to operate so long and successfully without her objectives being known. Our branch will keep you supplied with all photographs and information as soon as available.
I sign myself, dear Comrade Gregor Mihailovich, as your faithful and obedient servant,
Vaslav Vornov
Inspector Foreign Division
Internal Security.
7
Ten days later Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield received a notification from Regent Street that their applications for visas had been granted, that they were leaving for Moscow on Aeroflot Flight 101 at 10:30 Sunday morning the 26th of August and would they kindly come to the Intourist office to collect their tickets, documents, vouchers, instructions, etc.
Mrs Harris hovered over Geoffrey Lockwood.
She was clad in her going-into-action clothes, felt slippers, overalls, headcloth and long-handled dry mop. She was also loaded to the eyebrows with the import of her news but was unable to find the break to impar
t it. Mr Lockwood was reading page proofs of Russia Revealed.
He had once given her instructions: ‘When I’m at home or working when you come, Mrs Harris, don’t mind me. Take no notice and go right ahead.’
This had often proved to be the case. Sometimes he would be writing, at others reading or scrawling down notes or, as now, engaged in making corrections or marking up what seemed to be a printed book with queer symbols. All of these things he did with intense concentration enabling Mrs Harris to dust, wipe, clean and polish all around him. At none of these times would she dare to initiate a chat, however dearly she would have loved to. But at this point it had become a necessity.
She tried doing a little banging about with the stick of her mop. One of her virtues was that she worked as silently as a cat crossing a room to get to the door. And she was hoping that Mr Lockwood might look up and say, ‘Must we have all this noise, Mrs Harris?’ but he didn’t. He was imprisoned in the depths of his own prose. She then stood stock still not far from his desk and simply stared at him hypnotically. Somewhere she had read that if you did that long enough the other party was bound to feel it and look up. Mr Lockwood didn’t.
And so as was inevitable Mrs Harris burst. The load and nature of her information was too great to be further borne. She cried, ‘Mr Lockwood, I’m going to Russia. Me and me friend, Mrs Butterfield, we’ve got the tickets.’
Mr Lockwood thought: Christ! Proof readers. They ought to be in a home for the blind, and marked the change of the letter ‘w’ in the mysterious word ‘thw’ to an ‘e’. However, he was also aware that a sentence from somewhere in the outside world had assailed his ears; it had a subliminal import, and so aloud he said, ‘That will be nice for you’ at which point the one word of the sentence that could possibly connect with what he was doing registered and he looked up from his labours and asked, ‘What? What? Where?’