The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “I want to interview Brezhnev,” I announced.

  “Why?” she asked, stifling a laugh.

  “He’s a sportsman. People say he hunts and fishes. Our readers would like to know about this. It’s a human angle. Nobody’s done it.”

  “He rarely gives interviews.”

  “I still want to give it a try.”

  The simple act of making such a request was complex, requiring interviews, phone calls, continuous prodding and cajoling and voluminous paperwork, all of which had to go through layers, across departments and ministries. I got two turndowns. In the third request I noted that I had sources indicating that the General Secretary’s agent had purchased rare fishing books for him in London and that I would like to talk to him about fishing and his collection. I didn’t know who the Oxley books were for except someone in the Kremlin and since Brezhnev was the boss, I figured I would allege they were his. What was the harm?

  Still no answer by mid-May. Instead, Valoretev picked me up on the street one night. He was driving a boxy green vehicle that looked part jeep and part VW. He looked grim, glanced my way, and growled, “Get in quickly.” It was an order, not a request.

  When I was in he said, “You are insane!”

  “Is that a diagnosis or an opinion?”

  “Do not make jokes.”

  We raced south and left the city. His credentials got us through security checkpoints. In the morning we dumped the strange vehicle in a woodlot and stood in the bushes beside the road. A green truck came along, stopped, and we clambered into the back and closed the canvas. We drove all day and all night. The truck dropped us in a forest and we slept in a ramshackle barn.

  A motorcycle was waiting there. At sunrise we were on the motorcycle and aiming west. I kept asking what we were doing, but Valoretev was stone-faced and refused to talk. I was unnerved by his behavior.

  We stayed on dirt roads, deeply rutted, and followed spine-­juddering trails through dark forests. Eventually we reached a poor excuse for a shack. It was unpainted, leaned to the left, and looked like a light gust of wind would flatten it. Valoretev stashed the bike. We went into a cellar through a trapdoor. The cellar was well equipped. Kerosene lamps lit the area. There was canned food. This was a cache. I realized that whatever was happening was neither practical joke nor spontaneous event. Valoretev had planned this and I wanted to know why.

  “What the fuck is the deal?” I asked angrily.

  He poked me in the chest with a powerful finger. “You are deal!”

  “I could use just a touch more detail.”

  He opened a can of beets. German label. “Okay, facts. You requested audience with Brezhnev and accused him of crimes against the people.”

  “I didn’t accuse him of anything.” Was he serious? I had to stifle a laugh.

  “Rare books,” Valoretev said. “The regime is corrupt, Bowie. We know and pretend not to know. They know we know and pretend we don’t know.”

  “That’s twisted.”

  “Da,” Valoretev said. “This is the Soviet way. You said an agent of the General Secretary bought books. The agent’s name was Mikhail Peshkov.”

  I was shocked. I had not identified Peshkov in my requests. “That’s right.” I initially missed the tense distinction.

  “Comrade Peshkov was recalled to Moscow and transferred to a more distant place.”

  “How distant?”

  “Eternally,” Valoretev said.

  I felt sick. “He’s dead? Just because I wanted to get an interview?”

  “Yes, he is dead, and you are in trouble. They are trying to decide what to do about you.”

  “Expel me?”

  “At the least take you into custody and trade you for a comrade traveler. They already have a warrant with your name on it. They have been trying to determine how to proceed next. They talk and talk and flit around dark offices debating your fate.”

  I couldn’t comprehend this. I was a fugitive? In the Soviet Union? This couldn’t be.

  Valoretev nodded. “I think they are inclined toward a permanent solution. They don’t know how much you know. They do not want you writing in the West that Brezhnev is using the people’s funds for his personal benefit.”

  “This can’t be real.” I was nauseous. Dizzy. They killed Peshkov? “How do you know these things?”

  He answered my question with a question, spreading his hands and looking around us. “Is this not real?”

  It was, in an unreal way. Surreal. “What are we doing?”

  Valoretev grinned and narrowed his eyes. “We are on lam, da?”

  I said, “Oh shit.”

  He dismissed my words with a wave of his hand. “We are going out.”

  “Out where?”

  “Through the Iron Curtain, as you put it. To the West.”

  “How? Can’t we go back? I can explain this. Really, I can,” I implored him.

  “If they arrest you, you are guilty. That is the system.”

  I was so focused on myself that I had not thought about him. “What about you?”

  “I will go to America and fish for trout.”

  “And you think I’m insane?”

  Valoretev laughed. “Don’t worry, Comrade Bowie. I have the situation under control.”

  “Why are you doing this for me?”

  “For you?” he said with a laugh. “I do this for me. I have been planning for a long time. You will be my insurance, my ticket, my passport into the West.”

  “Insurance with whom?”

  “We shall see,” Valoretev said. “Paranoia is the heart of the Russian soul.”

  “It ain’t paranoia when people are really after you.”

  Valoretev smiled, took a piece of paper out of his jacket, and handed it to me. It was typed in Cyrillic, a carbon copy, not an original. It was the itemized contents of Oxley’s collection. Near the bottom of the page was the snowfly manuscript.

  “The books were bought for Brezhnev?”

  “Yes.”

  “He fly fishes for trout?”

  “No, he invests. He likes the rare and beautiful. He has fleets of automobiles, even an American Cadillac. It is red, which he claims as patriotism.”

  A red Caddy. Ironic. “How do you know these things?”

  Valoretev looked at me. “I am colonel, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.”

  “Fuck me,” I said. KGB. “You’re too young to be a colonel.”

  He smiled. “Competence is rewarded in the Soviet system. I have achieved a position of high trust, which in our system is also a position of high risk. My job is to oversee people who make acquisitions from the West for members of the Politburo.”

  I was dumbfounded and speechless. “Peshkov worked for you?”

  “No one works for me. I assure security. I was aware of him.”

  I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull the dirt on top of me.

  The next night we began walking. We walked for five nights. Each day we stopped and each place we stopped there was a cabin or shack, well provisioned. My escort had painstakingly planned this, and though such knowledge did not calm me, it boosted my confidence in Valoretev. I did not let myself dwell on the consequences of being caught.

  On the sixth day we continued to walk. We were in a tangled forest, but Valoretev seemed to know his way. Eventually we came to a river. It was narrow, with glissading clear water and yellow boulders stacked neatly in retaining walls along the sides. There were long riffles down the center. Valoretev dumped his pack and began rummaging through it. In minutes he had his homemade fly rod assembled and was attaching a gut leader and a bushy brown fly. Somehow he had gotten hold of a fly line.

  I was stupefied. He stepped onto the rocks and cast into a dark green slick. But casting skill in this river was nothing like on the Drake in Cornwall. T
he take was immediate. He played the fish to shore. It was twenty inches and fat, yellow with green and orange spots.

  “Brown trout?”

  “Yes. Join me?”

  He carefully took a second case out of the pack and handed it to me with a bow. “A remembrance of your Russian comrades.”

  I found a newly made four-piece fly rod in the case and I was moved beyond words by the gift. The fly line on the reel was not in good shape, but it would do. Valoretev gave me a leader and one of his flies and I rigged up and joined him.

  We didn’t fish long and put all but two fish back. Val cleaned and cooked the two large trout over a small fire made on the gravel bar under an overhanging cedar tree. He cooked the fish quickly. When we ate, the pale white meat fell off the bones, and Val dug in his pack and brought out black bread and vodka and we each had a couple of shots and grinned at each other like schoolboys playing hooky. Self-delusion is a close companion of obsession and errant judgment.

  When we were done eating, we disassembled the rods, put on our packs, and headed into the forest. Mosquitoes came at dark. They were large and carnivorous. At one point Valoretev said, “I just saw a mosquito carrying a hare.” I couldn’t help but laugh.

  We walked all night. From time to time we rubbed mud on our exposed skin. I felt like I was being bled to death.

  In the morning we came to a road. “Remain here,” Valoretev said. He bathed in a puddle beside the road, left his pack with me, and, when a truck came along, stepped in front of it and held something up. Then he got in and was gone and I was overwhelmed by fear.

  Two hours later I heard a small plane. It circled once at treetop level, dipped down to the road, bounced, and taxied to a stop, scattering gravel. Valoretev motioned for me from the cockpit. I grabbed our packs, ran, and crawled in. The plane had a single engine that ran rough. There was a metal barrel lashed on its side to the floor behind me. I was cramped in my seat, but no more so than Valoretev, who looked like he had no room to move.

  “You can fly?”

  “Better all the time,” he said solemnly.

  “Where are we?”

  “Eastern Poland,” he said. “On Soviet border.”

  It would be my fate to know a number of pilots who might’ve spent their time and effort more productively on other endeavors. Val was not smooth, but the bird stayed aloft and I took what comfort I could in this. In a tight spot a few small facts are often enough to hold us together, this the definition of a false sense of security.

  “We’ll be shot down.”

  “No. It’s easy from here on!”

  We flew at treetop level. It was a rough ride and gave me the dry heaves. “Where are we going?”

  “Sweden,” he said.

  When we reached water, the weather got worse and the ride turned violent. I prayed we would crash but we didn’t and eventually we landed on a road on a rocky island. Valoretev jumped down to the road and held the door open for me and I stumbled out, fell to my knees, and puked my guts out.

  The Swedes detained us for several days until an American came down from Stockholm. He was short, fat, graying. “I expect you fellas have a story.”

  He talked to us separately and I told the man as close to the truth as I was able. I did not tell him anything about the snowfly or Key’s manuscript. I told them I knew that the Kremlin had arranged to buy a book collection, that Brezhnev was a sportsman, and that I was following that angle and apparently rubbed people wrong. I had no way to know what Valoretev told them.

  We were taken by boat to Malmö after the initial interviews. There Valoretev and I were again separated.

  Three men interrogated me. They were always polite. They asked me to tell my story and I did. They rarely interrupted, but they were anal about details. I would tell the story, they would ask questions, and I would tell the story again. It was the same routine every day.

  “Do you know the man you traveled with?”

  I tried to explain our relationship.

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Not precisely. He is a KGB colonel who has something to do with imports. That’s all I know.”

  “Good,” one of the men said. “Let’s maintain the status quo. It’s safer for him.”

  I never liked half an equation.

  This is how the interrogations went: “What color was the house?”

  “It had no paint.”

  “What color was it when it had paint?”

  “I’m not that old.”

  “Was there a tinge?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think of a color when you picture it in your mind?”

  “No.”

  “We need your cooperation.”

  “You have it.”

  “Would you agree to hypnosis?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “What color was the house?”

  Ad infinitum, ad nauseum. For three weeks, sometimes days only, sometimes day and night, sometimes nights only. They were trying to wear me out, looking for inconsistencies. They would have been great reporters.

  I endured. They were CIA and presumably on my side.

  Sometime in the fourth week Valoretev and I were given five minutes outside together, in full view of several sets of watchful eyes. I was exhausted. He looked fresh and happy.

  “My friend Bowie, I am going to America,” he said in a whisper.

  “When?”

  He shrugged. “When they unravel their red tape. I will come to see you.”

  “You won’t know where to find me.”

  He smiled. “I can find a track before it’s made.”

  I suspected this was not an idle boast.

  The next day I was given a new suit, which fit perfectly, and driven to an airport outside Stockholm. I was kept in a room in a drafty hangar and taken out to an SAS flight just before other passengers boarded.

  “You’ve been on vacation,” my minder said. “Your Soviet companion is a clever man. He sent a confederate to Vienna, traveling with your passport and suitcase. The confederate has disappeared, and you are clean and clear. But you will not write your story.”

  I was tired of mandatory obedience school. “It’s a free press out here.”

  My minder gave me a copy of the Times of London. A story had been checked with ink. The headline read, rare angling books sold to canadian mine developer.

  “You can read on the plane,” my escort said. “Here’s the between-the-lines: You got their attention. The Kremlin bosses were scared shitless you were going to blow the whistle on them. Everybody knows they are dirty, but they don’t like seeing it in print. They pulled their man back from London, arranged a resale through the original broker, and made sure Fleet Street got the word. You’ve got no story. The broker will say he’s had the collection in his possession all along.”

  “That’s baloney.” How did the CIA know what books I was looking for? Had it been the CIA who threatened Danny in New York? So many questions, but I wasn’t anxious to ask them.

  “It’s bullshit, but airtight. No paper trail.”

  “They killed their man from London,” I said. “Peshkov.”

  My minder shrugged as if to say that was not his business.

  He walked me to the steps up to the plane and gave me my old passport. “One other thing.”

  “You people always have one more thing.”

  “You are to have no further contact with your former traveling companion. This is a matter of national security.”

  A term that could mean anything and often changed meaning.

  “He rescued me.”

  “He used you for his own purposes,” my minder said.

  “I don’t even know where he’s going.”

  “We’re going to keep it that way.”

  I got on
the SAS flight and ordered a vodka straight. The seat was in first class. That was something. I folded the Times and stuck it in my jacket. I had entered the Soviet Union as a journalist and exited as something else. Precisely what was still up in the air.

  10

  I found Grady Yetter waiting for me outside customs and immigration at Kennedy Airport. “I was on vacation,” I said, following the script I had been ordered to follow by my debriefers in Sweden.

  “I heard.” He looked weary, his eyes puffy, the creases in his face deeper than when we had last seen each other.

  “You want to hear the details?” I asked.

  “Is there a story in them?”

  “That depends on who you ask.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Then it can wait. The Soviets officially expelled your ass after you officially got to Vienna.”

  I had never been anywhere near Vienna. The way he said it suggested that he knew what was going on. “On what grounds?”

  “Probably because you’re an obnoxious sonuvabitch.”

  “That’s against the law there?”

  He grinned and stuck out his hand. “You wrote some great stuff over there.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I did.”

  “Suppose you’re gonna tell me you want the summer off to fish.”

  “I accept the offer. Then where?”

  “Let’s worry about where when then becomes now. Want a hot dog?”

  “Those things’ll kill you.”

  “Everybody dies from something, kid.”

  “Don’t call me kid.”

  “Okay, asshole.”

  According to the edition of the Times I had been given in Sweden, the new owner of the Oxley collection was Lockwood Bolt of Elliot Lake, Ontario. Bolt had made a fortune in uranium in the 1950s and early 1960s and had parlayed his money into a conglomerate called Canadian Forest Products. According to the article, the book collection had cost him in excess of a quarter million dollars, an amount that made me dizzy. That much for books?

  I flew to Detroit, rented a car, visited my sister and her family in Alpena, and stopped briefly to see Buzz and Fred and my other friends in Grand Marais.

  I felt a powerful urge to remain in my adopted town, but I knew I had to move on. I had asked the right questions in the wrong country and now that I was out and free and knew where the books were, I was determined to find them and get this mystery solved. Buzz and Fred complained about my leaving so soon and Staley just growled at me.