Angels in the Snow

by Derek Lambert

  Randall said: ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Will you? Will you really?’

  ‘I’ll get one sent round to your room.’

  ‘Jesus, don’t do that,’ said the fat man. Then grinned shakily. ‘Don’t make jokes like that,’ he said. ‘I got a weak heart.’

  ‘Okay,’ Randall said. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll fix it. Just one word of advice.’

  ‘I’m always willing to listen to advice.’

  Make sure you don’t catch Russian pox. It’s worse than any other kind.’

  Randall stood up and the envelope fell out of his pocket. The KGB man picked it up and handed it to him.

  ‘Spaseeba,’ said Randall, feeling his stomach contract.

  The KGB man smiled pleasantly. ‘Pazhahlsta,’ he said.

  ‘Hey,’ said the tourist as Randall headed for the door. ‘What do you mean? How would I know if I caught it?’

  Randall turned. ‘It has the same effect as frostbite,’ he said.

  In the foyer downstairs Swedes argued with the cloakroom attendant. On the pavement outside Swedes argued with cab drivers and the girls they had picked up.

  As Randall climbed into his Chevrolet a girl came over to him and said: ‘You a Swede?’

  ‘No,’ Randall said. ‘American.’

  ‘Okay,’ said the girl, ‘let’s go. I like Americans. Swedes … Poof.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Randall said. ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘I like you. Let’s go.’

  All he needed, he thought, was a currency spiv buying dollars and the evening would be complete.

  ‘Go back to your Swede. They’re nice guys really.’

  Stiff blonde hairs stuck out from under her fur hat and she smelled of whisky. Silent men stood watching in the snow.

  ‘You have twenty dollars?’

  ‘No,’ Randall said.

  ‘Fifteen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You give me ten dollars. Okay let’s go.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ Randall said. He let the clutch out gently so that she didn’t lose her footing. He sensed the disappointment of the watchful men. Police, ponces, blackmailers. Whoever they were they would have liked to see Randall take the girl away. As he drove away she walked unsteadily back to the gesticulating Swedes.

  The night looked soft and blurred but the air was sharp. Randall breathed deeply and felt it catch in his lungs. It felt clean, as if it had travelled far over frozen seas and white resinous forests.

  Back in the apartment he decoded the letter. It was a message reminding him that, as a CIA agent in Moscow, he should not confine himself to seeking the secrets of the Kremlin. The United States was also interested in the intentions of other powers in their dealings with the Soviet Union; in particular those of France who was openly flirting with Russia and, of course, Britain whose policies, if not necessarily perfidious, were usually devious and often incomprehensible. The message pointed out that foreign diplomats, sharing the common bondage of life in Moscow, might talk more freely and indiscreetly than they would in friendlier capitals.

  The message reached the point in the last paragraph. It was Randall’s task to investigate and assess British policy and intentions.

  He burned the message over the toilet. It was, he thought, all so juvenile. A few officials, their bureaucratic inclinations given licence by the demands of secrecy, revelling in the dispatch of every mundane coded instruction. He considered his new orders and decided that there was little to them. If at any time he had been presented with an indiscretion by a British diplomat he would automatically have sent it to Washington.

  On the table stood two glasses, one with a lipstick imprint on the rim. He wiped it clean, undressed and went to the bed where three hours earlier he had made unimpassioned love to a lonely woman. He hoped that by now she was asleep in her room across the frozen city.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Randall regarded his CIA duties as a titillation to the diplomatic routine. He did not treat them as seriously as the official spies among the Service attachés at the embassy; he regarded these attachés as entertainers and observed their efforts with the same quiet enjoyment that he imagined they afforded Soviet counter-intelligence. One of their tasks was to report several days beforehand what weapons would grind across Red Square at the parades in November and on May Day. When the rockets first reached their assembly point in Moscow for rehearsals one attaché took to having morning coffee in a nearby café: and when rehearsals were in progress at night he or one of his colleagues took nocturnal exercises assessing and mentally measuring the shapes of the canvas-covered rockets on the trailers. In dimly-lit streets, the attaché met—and acknowledged with embarrassment—military attachés from other embassies; and the Russians watching the whole pantomime noted with satisfaction that once again their bi-annual exercise in propaganda was succeeding. The attachés then dispatched a laborious report to Washington which was read with cursory interest because Randall, using his own contacts, had several weeks earlier anticipated what they had seen.

  Randall also enjoyed his privileged knowledge of the habits of other diplomats in the Kremlin and in the American and other foreign embassies. He knew of a counsellor in his own embassy engaged in currency racketeering, of a homosexual in the British Embassy who had so far managed to contain his inclinations, of an Italian having an affair with an Intourist guide, of a Russian in the Foreign Ministry who hoarded art treasures in his dacha in the country and exported them illegally to the West, of an East German who, when he had finished his daily bottle of whisky, still toasted Hitler before turning in for the night.

  He knew the identities of many intelligence agents of other countries and guessed at others. They were not difficult to spot—junior political officers not quite as drearily stereotyped as their colleagues, journalists working for newspapers which could not normally afford a Moscow correspondent, businessmen on hopeless export missions. He knew the identities of two of his fellow CIA agents and was aware that there were others.

  Randall was also aware that his way of life, particularly since his wife left him, had aroused the interest of many men in Moscow and Washington. If he had been an ordinary diplomat then there would have been a rebuke from the Ambassador, possibly a recall to Washington. But his other masters had decided that he might have his uses in his present role. They realised that it was too obvious to send a bachelor to Moscow to go whoring for secrets—diplomats were never so extrovertly lecherous. But his marriage break-up and his return to bachelor pursuits seemed perfectly natural. He was now ideally established to corrupt—or be corrupted. Randall suspected that there would have been disappointment in Washington if he had not seduced their last courier.

  In Moscow his fellow diplomats regarded him with suspicion and envy. Suspicion that he had influential friends—the Ambassador, maybe, or someone even higher in Washington—and not that he worked for the CIA because few took the department seriously; envy that he had discarded a bitch of a wife and seemed to be able to fornicate freely without reprimand.

  The Ambassador accepted Randall and his unorthodox behaviour because he knew he had to. No one had ever positively identified to him the agents on his staff—and he was grateful that officially he had not been informed. But he thought he knew most of them and he certainly had no doubt about Randall. He despaired of Randall as a diplomat and resented his cynicism towards a profession in which he believed; he admired him in his other role because he suspected that the big sardonic man might be very good at it; he liked him as a man; he treated him with respect as a poker player because he had never forgotten a certain evening when Randall had relieved him of several hundred dollars. He tried to convince his Minister that Randall was really a very able diplomat but the Minister only smiled knowingly implying that he was aware that even the United States foreign service was susceptible to nepotism.

  Randall tried to make friends with some of the Twilight Brigade—Communists from the West, traitors, misguided innocents and r
etired idealists who formed a shy, restless community of their own in Moscow. Men like Donald Maclean, the defector from the British Foreign Office, who used the name Fraser; Kim Philby, his mentor, also from the British Foreign Office; old Len Wincott from Britain who fought the Germans in the Red Army in the last war and was rewarded by Stalin with ten years in a labour camp; Joe Melia, a Communist and United States patriot who had been converted to disloyalty by Senator McCarthy; Harry Waterman, the pathetic Cockney who fled from the military police after a brawl in Berlin after the war and presented himself to the Russians reciting Communism which he had not understood then or now.

  Most of them worked in the State publishing houses, translating or writing propaganda; some represented foreign Communist newspapers in Moscow; some lived in uneasy leisure. But it was not easy to gain their trust. They were suspicious of everyone; aware that they were regarded with pity by their compatriots and contempt by the Russians. And as far as the journalists were concerned the Russians seemed to have more respect for newspapermen from the Capitalist Press than they did for foreign reporters who were as predictable as their own.

  All members of the Brigade were reticent about their predicament: wary of criticising a regime which had betrayed their ideals in case the secret police were listening, wary of praising it in case they jeopardised their remote chances of returning to their homelands. Only those treacherous beyond redemption allowed their praise of the Soviet Union to be published abroad.

  Those who had retained their nationality were sometimes invited to official functions by their embassies. They attended defiantly but were as embarrassed as their hosts. They were courteously squeezed to the corners of rooms where they discussed the weather with the more simple wives, asked about life back home, and departed for their flats leaving behind only relief at their departure.

  Under the influence of drink, or the cameraderie of meeting fellow countrymen, these men whose passports ensured that they might one day return home sometimes went to parties and joked about Soviet life. About fat generals, abortions, Khrushchev, queues and the KGB. But not those who had discarded their birthright: for them there was little to joke about.

  A few believed that their early notions of equality for all men might one day be realised here at the fount of Communism. They looked around and rejoiced at the new homes breaking the skyline, at the families crowding planes and trains for the summer vacation, at the clothes and food in the shops. Rejoiced and wished they could do so without the guidance of the Soviet Press which rejoiced daily.

  They also looked around and saw a people who had never known freedom; and tried to forget that they who had known it had relinquished it. Of this they never talked, not even when they met within their own outcast community.

  Each cherished the idea that one day he might see again Oxford Street, Times Square, The Champs-Elysées, the Via Veneto; the mansion or cottage where he was born; his school, his sky, his sea. Few ever returned because of the retribution they anticipated or because the Communist Parties in their own countries stopped their visas fearing bad publicity. And, like long-term prisoners who sometimes plead to be kept in jail, they also feared what they would find if they went home—new landscapes, new attitudes, new values; thus many never tried to return; one day, they said, they would go back but they died before the day dawned.

  Randall had attended a funeral for an American member of the Brigade. They had all been present like family mourners. There was little grief, just a brooding awareness of futility among them. The dead man, like so many of them, yielded to impetuosity, sought a new meaning to life like a jilted girl fleeing to the monastery; and had found failure in different garb. Together the mourners supported his failure, their failure.

  Pressmen attended the funeral, too. Taking pictures and seeking the faces of known defectors who had not yet materialised in Moscow. They mostly talked to Harry Waterman who was less reticent than the others, and that was where Randall met him.

  He spoke to Dick Hellier, a youngish agency chief whose face was pinched and aged by feverish dedication to his job. ‘Could you introduce me to Waterman?’ he said. ‘He sounds as if he might be interesting.’

  ‘He was interesting once,’ Hellier said. ‘And that’s it. Once you’ve heard about Siberia you’ve heard everything. He had a tough time but you can’t be sorry for people all the time.’

  ‘Why does everyone bother with him then?’

  ‘He’s useful to us. He knows all the Twilight Brigade and when he’s stoked up with a few vodkas he sometimes drops the odd crumb of information.’

  ‘That can’t be very healthy for him.’

  Hellier shrugged and made some notes: he was always making notes. ‘Maybe he’s told what to let slip. Who knows. Who knows anything in this city.’

  Randall said: ‘I thought you did.’

  Hellier looked as pleased as he ever did. ‘I got a few contacts,’ he said. ‘I don’t use Waterman all that much. He’s small fry. A bit crazy with it, too, especially when he’s been on the hooch. Gets people to bring him back boxes of British soil and all that sort of crap.’

  ‘Just soil, I hope,’ Randall said.

  ‘Huh huh. Now I got to be going to get this junk over before the others.’

  ‘You mean there’s a story here?’

  ‘Everything’s a story with a Moscow dateline on it. People in this guy’s hometown will remember him.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to Waterman?’

  ‘Sure. Although I don’t think he’s your line of country. Didn’t you just come as an official mourner?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Randall said. ‘The Ambassador couldn’t decently find anyone much lower than me. But these people interest me. I’d like to know what makes them tick. Just for my own personal satisfaction.’

  ‘No one better to talk to than Waterman,’ Hellier said. ‘As a matter of fact he’s the only one who will talk. But censor what he says. He can be a wild one.’ He introduced Randall to Waterman and left; immediately the other agency men departed too.

  ‘Can I give you a lift home?’ Randall asked.

  ‘You’re from the American Embassy?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Does that prevent you from accepting the lift?’

  Waterman glanced around furtively. ‘We’re not really supposed to mix with you,’ he said. ‘But why the hell shouldn’t we? I come from a free country even if this isn’t one.’

  Randall sensed that he was delighted at an overture of friendship from a diplomat.

  Waterman said: ‘Give it a few minutes until all this lot have scarpered. Then we can vamoose.’

  ‘I don’t want to get you into trouble,’ Randall said.

  ‘I don’t give a monkey’s toss what anyone thinks,’ Waterman said. ‘They can do what they bloody well like to me. They’ve done enough already. What about coming back to my place for a snort? I’ve got some Scotch there.’

  Randall shook his head. ‘I’d like to,’ he said. ‘But there’s no sense in asking for trouble. And you’d get plenty if you asked an American diplomat to your place. We’ll meet again soon and have a drink somewhere.’

  In the car Harry Waterman talked about the dead man. ‘Drank himself to death,’ he said. ‘Said he had nothing to live for. Silly sod.’ He pleaded with Randall: ‘There’s always something to live for, isn’t there, Mr. Randall?’

  Randall said: ‘Call me Luke. Of course there’s always something to live for.’

  ‘I expect you enjoy life.’

  ‘Most of the time,’ Randall said carefully. ‘Not always.’

  ‘I enjoy it,’ Harry Waterman said without conviction. ‘I’ve got a good little wife. Not a bad flat by Russian standards. But there is one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Randall asked.

  ‘I’d like to see England again.’

  ‘You might be disappointed.’

  ‘No I wouldn’t. I know it’s different. Some of my friends let me have their old newspapers. I can see
how it’s changed.’

  ‘Is there anything to stop you returning?’

  ‘They keep telling me there’s nothing to stop me,’ Harry Waterman said. ‘But somehow I can never get a visa. You see I’m just like a bloody Russian now.’ He pointed out of the window down a street leading off Leningradsky Prospect. ‘That’s where I live. You drop me here and I’ll walk the rest. But before you go there was one thing I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘What was that?’ Randall asked.

  ‘Do you pull any weight? I mean is there any way in which you might be able to pull a few strings and persuade them to give me a visa?’

  Randall shook his head. ‘An American doesn’t pull much weight in Moscow,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Harry.’

  ‘No, I suppose they don’t,’ Harry said. ‘Stupid of me. It was just a thought.’ He stood on the pavement holding on to the car door, reluctant to let his new friend escape. ‘Well, so long. Sure you won’t come in for a flyer?’

  ‘Not today. We’ll meet again soon and have a drink.’

  ‘Okay,’ Harry Waterman said. ‘Let me have your phone number. I’ll be in touch. I know a lot of journalists in town. I expect we’ll meet a lot now. That’s usually the way.’

  Randall gave him the phone number of his apartment. ‘Keep in touch,’ he said, and drove away. Harry Waterman walked slowly towards a battered grey block of flats, which looked as if they had been scarred by shrapnel, as if he had the whole afternoon to cover the 200 yards.

  Randall met Harry Waterman several times after that. At parties given by journalists and once at Randall’s own apartment. Harry was valuable because he was Randall’s principal link with the Twilight Brigade: he was also a bore and an embarrassment. With a few drinks inside him he didn’t care what he said about the system or the Kremlin leaders, and Randall sensed tiny microphones in his apartment pulsing with eagerness to catch every word. Harry was also a pest—phoning twice a week, offering hospitality from his whisky bottle, soliciting friendship with practised cunning. He succeeded because everyone hoped that one day he would repay their kindness with information; they told each other that he succeeded because they felt sorry for him.