by Marek Halter
Once again the room lapsed into silence. The smell of alcohol wafting up from T. C.’s glass was making me feel nauseous. Finally, I went into the kitchen to get myself a glass of water. When I came back, T. C. was on his feet, his hat in his hand.
I asked, “How did she get out of the camp?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t dare ask.”
“And what about Apron? Did she tell you?”
“No, we ran out of time. The guards had already been pressing to return her to her cell for quite some time, but we’ll find that information in the report, I suppose. As soon as you have it, contact me. We have to get her out of jail as soon as possible.”
“How do you mean to handle it? Surely you’re not going to barge into Cohn’s office and shove the report under his nose. … ”
T. C. smiled humorlessly.
“No, it’s a shame though. I’d have liked to see his face. … We’ll find a way. I won’t have her staying there a day longer. It’s out of the question.”
I knew what he was thinking. Every hour that Marina spent in her cell at the Old County Jail, it was as if we were carrying on where Khabarovsk had left off.
As he stood in the doorway, putting on his hat, T. C. murmured, “You do realize that no man will ever be able to get close to that woman again, don’t you, Al? Not you, or anyone else.”
From then on, it was relatively straightforward. Shortly before dusk, after an afternoon dragged out by too many useless thoughts and too much waiting, I was lying listlessly on my couch with Bill Haley’s voice blaring out of my radio when the doorbell roused me from my inertia.
It was a good second before I was certain it was her. She was wearing a Jackson Speedee Service delivery-girl’s uniform reminiscent of a lion tamer’s outfit, hip-hugging white pants and an extremely close-fitting spencer jacket embroidered with purple braid. Her hair was tucked under a long-peaked cycling cap, her cheeks were lifted in a vermilion smile, and her feline eyes were laughing at me.
“Shirley!”
“I’ve brought you your order, sir.”
She thrust three pizza boxes at me and brushed past me into my apartment. Once I’d set the boxes down on my desk, she removed the top one.
“There’s a real pizza in this one. You can open the others.”
She disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me to obey. The second box contained a thick wad of typewritten pages, a transcript of the stenotypists’ notes from Marina’s hearings. I tore the lid off the last box. The OSS headed paper, with Copy/Classified/AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY stamped across it in red, jumped out at me.
It was the report!
The report consisted of a dozen sheets of that virtually transparent paper provided by the administration at the end of the war.
“Satisfied with the delivery, sir?”
Appearing in the kitchen doorway, Shirley took off her cap and gave her head a shake. Her wavy hair came cascading down about her shoulders. The setting sun made her irises glitter and brought out the little freckles on her temples and forehead. She was gorgeous. Even her stupid outfit couldn’t hide that. She tossed her cap onto the desk. Her perfume floated up from the fabric. It was that French scent she never seemed to go anywhere without these days.
She remarked, “You look awful.”
“I didn’t get much sleep last night. … ”
“Hmm … That’s true. So you had no trouble remembering the Titanic memorial parking lot then?”
“Was that Wood’s idea?”
She laughed, setting her hair shimmying before brushing it back.
“Do you mean my fetching uniform to fool the good old FBI agents who are bored stiff out there, or the meeting with the congressman?”
“Both.”
“The only thing my ex-boss liked about the whole plan was my sense of strategy.”
“Your ex-boss?”
“I’ve resigned from his office.”
“Shirley … ”
“Of my own free will. We did a deal.”
“Did the FBI corner you over that blasted visitor permit for the jail?”
“No, it wasn’t like that. I went to see the good congressman myself and owned up to it.”
“But … ”
“Don’t worry.”
She sealed my lips with the tips of her fingers. Her perfume set me on fire, as did her pep, her lightheartedness, and her feigned indifference. My meeting with Wood in the small hours, the horrors endured by Marina, and T. C.’s parting words had worn my nerves to a thread. Seeing Shirley so fresh, so robust, taking in her skin that was so alive, took my breath away.
She opened the bottle of bourbon herself, poured out two glasses, and handed me one before pointing to the report.
“I had five minutes to sneak a peek at those papers midday yesterday, while Wood was out at lunch. My manager, Lizzie Doland, asked me to put some documents in the congressman’s safe. The CIA file from the Irishman was there and the report was inside, on top. I only read the end, but it didn’t take me a minute to understand.”
Shirley clinked her glass against mine.
“Except that, all of a sudden, it was like winning at bingo but not being able to collect the money. I didn’t know what to do anymore. If I stole the report, the CIA would be onto me before I could say ‘Jack Robinson,’ and there was no way I could make a copy. What’s more, Wood was supposed to return the file to the CIA before this evening. The whole lot was going to disappear.”
She took a sip of bourbon and sat down on the couch. Growing impatient, I took the report and ran my eyes over the header again.
“And?”
“I used my initiative, but if you’re not interested, I’ll put my glass down and we’ll discuss it later.”
“Shirley!”
“I went to see Wood as soon as he was back from lunch. I explained that I had made the fake permit, but that if the FBI pinned me down I would swear blind that I had done it because he, Congressman Wood, had ordered me to and that he would corroborate my story. … You can imagine the howls of indignation. ‘You’re crazy! Not on your life! Nobody will believe you, and why would I have done that?’ Of course, the answer to that was, ‘Because you had proof in black and white that the woman is innocent of Apron’s murder, Mr. Congressman. It’s written in the OSS report filed in your safe, and since you’re a fair man … ’ That prompted fresh protests until I convinced him that he stood to lose much more by going along with McCarthy’s and Nixon’s lies than by doing the decent thing. Wood tries not to show it, but he’s scared witless of McCarthy and Nixon.”
“So it’s because of you that he … ”
“He was moved by our Russian friend’s story. He thought that Miss Gousseiev would be of more use to his anticommunist campaign alive than burnt to a crisp in the electric chair, and he wasn’t sorry to see that jug hurled in Nixon’s face. … So he called me at home yesterday evening around ten. ‘How do we go about it, Shirley?’ ‘No problem, Mr. Congressman, I’ve got a friend who’ll be only too happy to help.’ And that was all there was to it.”
“But why quit your job?”
“Because somebody’s got to carry the can. You’re going to have to explain how you got ahold of this report, aren’t you? I’ll be the birdbrain who inadvertently got some top secret documents mixed up with a pile of old forms ready for the bin. Lizzie did throw out two boxes of papers this afternoon, so there’s an element of truth in that. And since everyone knows that journalists just love rummaging through bins … First thing tomorrow morning, Wood will precipitate events and announce that I’m fired. It’s about time I changed jobs anyway, so it couldn’t have come at a better moment. I can’t stand those Committee hearings anymore.”
I was at a loss for words.
Shirley gave a throaty little laugh that made me tingle. She got up off the couch, took my glass from me, and swallowed a mouthful before putting her bourbon-soaked mouth on mine.
Fool that I was, because it had been at the back of my
mind for too long, I asked, “Wood gave you that perfume, didn’t he? And you’ve had it for quite a while … ”
“Oh, so you know?”
She gave me a funny look. I couldn’t tell whether she was proud of my powers of deduction or was making fun of me. She made me put the report back in the pizza box.
“I suppose that just goes to show that nothing in life is free, Al darling, and your debt to me is going to become a monstrous burden to you if you don’t clear it.”
She put her arms around my neck and murmured, “Why don’t you start by getting me out of this ridiculous outfit?”
Later that night, Shirley said, “It was when you asked me to get some clothes for Marina that I really started to think about her, to wonder who she really was, what she was like underneath that exterior. I tried on the clothes I’d bought her and some of my own dresses that I was intending to give her. When I looked at myself in the mirror to see if they would suit her and imagined what she would look like in them, a bizarre idea occurred to me. Marina is as beautiful as any woman could ever hope to be. There’s plenty to be jealous of, and yet she carries her beauty as if it were a burden or scar, as if her beauty had killed her, long ago.”
Her words sent a chill through me. I didn’t have the heart to tell Shirley what Marina had gone through at Khabarovsk and the Gulag camp. While she was naked in my arms, I was afraid such horrors would sully her skin. I waited until she had gone to sleep before finally reading OSS Agent Overty’s report.
OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES
Washington, DC
*
C/Pacific Detachment 407
Copy/Classified/AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
USSR Mission NEW COUNTRY
(June 22, 1942–Oct. 3, 1945)
Mission report,
(rp/ N-C USSR-407/24)
Agent Julius. S. Overty
OSS-(LT-ag-102)
RE: Arrest and death of Michael David Apron (CPT-ag88) (July 25, 1945)
November 29, 1945
RECAP:
On April 22, 1942, M. D. Apron and I were dropped off in east Siberia for a lengthy operation as part of Mission New Country.
Following the stipulated procedure, Apron went to Birobidzhan.
On July 18, 1942, operating under the name Victor Ovaldian, I got a job as a barber in the Secretariat housing complex of the Khabarovsk Executive Committee (registered domestic passport in Ussuriysk, Secretariat of Vladivostok). It was my role to receive and send information obtained by Apron in Birobidzhan/on the Manchurian border, and to forward any information I gathered inside the Secretariat of the Khabarovsk region. For the latter purpose, the Secretariat barbershop, which was free for Committee staff, proved an effective location.
EVENTS:
On October 13, 1943, I heard rumors that an American agent had been arrested (in the company of a woman) in Birobidzhan. On October 14, the Birobidjanskaya Zvezda and the Khabarovsk Pravda reported the information. Both articles gave Apron’s name, describing him as a “double-crossing American spy.” The name of the woman arrested with him was not mentioned.
On October 15, I received confirmation that Apron had been transferred to the NKVD detention center in Khabarovsk. I managed to find out the name of Apron’s “accomplice”: Marina Andreyeva Gousseiev (confirmed by other sources). The Birobidjanskaya Zvezda had previously published a number of articles on and photos of the woman, an actress employed by the Moscow Art Theatre in Birobidzhan. She sometimes featured alongside Apron.
Due to the heightened risk of Apron’s interrogations leading the NKVD to me, I adopted the procedure stipulated for just such an eventuality as of October 16, and generated a military document requisitioning me to the military region of Ussuriysk/Vladivostok.
On October 27, in Vladivostok, contact was established with the liaison agent from Detachment 407. I informed him of Apron’s arrest and asked for orders to be sent (repatriation or prolonged stay in East Siberia).
On December 12, I received the order to prolong my mission insofar as security permitted (new mission code named Citadel, see separate report: rp/LT-ag-107/Citadel USSR-107/25).
I was asked to look out for information on Apron, particularly his place of captivity.
From December 12, 1943, to November 24, 1944, all attempts to obtain information on Apron’s whereabouts failed, mainly because the endeavor could have jeopardized my security and Mission Citadel at a time when the war on the border between southeast Siberia, Korea, and Manchuria was escalating, due to the strong military push toward Japanese territory.
On November 24, 1944, the captain of an iron-ore cargo ship sailing around the ports of the Tatar Straits (Sakhalin islands, off the coast of the far east of Siberia where there are dozens of Gulag camps) confirmed that a member of his crew, injured while negotiating a heavy swell, had been treated in the port of the mining camp of Grossevichi by a doctor held prisoner there. The captain had noticed that the guards and the other zeks had referred to the doctor as ‘the Amerlok.’
Cit.:
There’s no way we can have a doctor on board, and there are never any in the ports either. If the camps have zeks that happen to be doctors, so much the better. The doctor in question must have been a good one. My guy was at death’s door and he brought him back to life, but he could have done with some medical attention himself. His arms and head were okay, but he could barely stand up.
On November 26, 1944, I forwarded the above information to Detachment 407.
On January 2, 1945, I was released from Mission Citadel with the order to confirm that Apron was held at Grossevichi and assess the prospects of an assisted escape.
On closer examination, the port/mining camp (copper) at Grossevichi turned out to be on the 48th parallel north (on the same latitude as Khabarovsk). During the snowy months (October through to April), Grossevichi can only be reached by sea. A track through mountain passes at over 5,500 feet above sea level and barren landscapes (forest/taiga) stretching several hundred miles links the camp to Khabarovsk. The population of prisoners is estimated at around eight hundred men, including several hundred urki (common criminals and thugs), and around thirty guards. There are no camps for female prisoners at Grossevichi.
On February 6, 1945, a chance encounter with an old contact (a woman) in Khabarovsk satisfied me that Apron had not disclosed either my identity or my function to the NKVD (information forwarded to Detachment 407). It was thus possible for me to return temporarily to Khabarovsk to determine whether Apron was being held at Grossevichi.
On March 16, 1945, I once again made contact with my acquaintances at the Secretariat for the Khabarovsk region. I wasn’t able to confirm that Apron was being held at Grossevichi.
Throughout the month of March, there were persistent rumors that the sentences of certain categories of zeks were about to be remitted. The reason given was an agreement signed by Stalin at the Yalta Conference (February 1945).
On April 2, 1945, Stalin announced the plans for release on national radio and in the Pravda in a speech to mark the Red Army’s imminent victory over Nazi Germany.
An unofficial list of released prisoners (in the Khabarovsk region) was circulated. Michael Apron was not on it, but Marina Andreyeva Gousseiev was.
On April 7, I approached Marina Andreyeva Gousseiev as she was coming out of the Khabarovsk sorting camp.
Though emaciated, she was in relatively good physical and mental health, and I was able to recognize her from old photos.
However, it was extremely difficult to establish a relationship of trust. Obsessed with finding Apron, M. A. Gousseiev did not want to return to Birobidzhan, at the risk of once again attracting the NKVD’s attention. I therefore decided to intervene and introduced myself as Apron’s friend.
Cit.:
M. A. Gousseiev: You know him? You know Michael?
Me: We’re friends.
M. A. G: I don’t believe you.
Me: Why not?
M. A. G: Michael would h
ave told me about you.
Me: No, he didn’t tell you that he was a spy. He couldn’t tell you everything.
M. A. G: How do you know he was a spy?
Me: Marina Andreyeva! The NKVD arrested him with some equipment. …
M. A. G: Were you there? Do you know who planted the transmitter in our izba? Or are you one of them?
Me: No, I’m not with the NKVD.
M. A. G: Can you prove it?
Me: No.
M. A. G: You see. Why should I trust you?
Me: And what about me? Why should I believe a word you say? Maybe the NKVD released you because you’re working for them. After all, you’ve only been inside the camp for eighteen months. That’s not such a heavy price to pay for an American spy’s accomplice.
We nearly broke off contact more than once. At that time, it was very difficult to keep up a conversation with M. A. Gousseiev. It was hard to handle her aggression. I have to say that her behavior could make a man feel extremely uncomfortable. Nevertheless, for the abovementioned reasons, and because I had to leave Khabarovsk, I decided to unveil my plan to organize Apron’s escape.
Cit.:
M. A. Gousseiev: You know where Michael is?
Me: Yes.
M. A. G: Where?
Me: I’ll tell you when I’m sure I can count on you, if you come to Vladivostok with me.