Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  Lyudmila

  Late June 1952

  Moscow

  Lyudmila has never traveled outside the Soviet Union. She does not even possess a passport. To travel overseas is to bring attention to yourself, and anyway she has plenty to do in Moscow, stamping out the sparks of counterrevolution before they can catch flame.

  Still, the enemies of the Soviet state flourish throughout the world, so she’s developed a network of overseas agents to act as her eyes and—occasionally—her deputies. Mere hours after identifying Mrs. Digby’s sister as one Ruth Macallister of New York City, Lyudmila has a tail put on the woman, just in time to catch her departing New York on a Pan American flight to Rome. When the airplane departs from its scheduled stop in Boston, one of Lyudmila’s operatives accompanies her to Paris. A local tail in Rome picks up Miss Macallister there, where the new husband—a Mr. Sumner Fox, who caught a later flight—meets her at the atelier of a Russian émigré aristocrat.

  There’s something fishy about the husband. Lyudmila can’t quite put her finger on it. The marriage checks out—some decadent American resort in Rhode Island in May—certificate, marriage registry, all paperwork in place. But why don’t they travel to Rome together? Why Rome at all? And why do they meet at the place of business of a Russian counterrevolutionary, of all people?

  Today is Thursday. Mr. and Mrs. Fox are due in Moscow in three days. Lyudmila’s telephone rings—it’s the head of the American section. He wants her to join him in his office this instant.

  Vashnikov was against Lyudmila’s plan from the beginning. He said it was too risky, too much potential for sabotage, and for what gain? Lyudmila told him she had evidence of a Western counterspy active in Moscow at the highest level, being run out of London. He asked to see this so-called evidence. She refused on grounds of security, but really because she doesn’t trust him—which isn’t personal, remember. Lyudmila does not trust anybody, except Marina.

  She doesn’t like him, either, although she doesn’t like most people. At one time he was a handsome, trim, dark-haired man—they slept together once or twice, a decade ago—but now he’s run to fat, and his face is always red, and his teeth are yellow from cigarettes. Like her, he’s never traveled outside the country, but in his case it’s because of incuriosity and general laziness. He was given this plum job of head of the American section because he’s very good at claiming credit for other people’s successes, such as Lyudmila’s. This is why he reluctantly gave permission for the plan to go forward—not because he likes it, but because if it succeeds, he’ll get the recognition. If it doesn’t, Lyudmila will take the blame.

  “All right,” he tells her now, pushing a manila file folder toward her. “You have your visas and special permissions. You can have Kedrov to mind them, and a driver. They will stay at the National, suite 807.”

  Lyudmila nods. Suite 807 is exceptionally well covered with listening devices.

  “You understand that Digby is irreproachable. He was one of our most valuable assets in the West, until he was unmasked through no fault of his own.”

  “Then this operation will confirm your trust in him.”

  He grinds his teeth and lifts his cigarette from the ashtray. “I have looked into Fox’s background. All clean. He works as a lawyer in Washington. At university he became famous playing American football, which means he cannot possibly be working in any form of intelligence work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Have you seen an American football player? They are like oxen. Oxen in a china shop. Besides, this one is famous. His face alone disqualifies him.”

  “In short, the ideal cover. What about the war?”

  Vashnikov glances down at the papers on his desk. “He flew torpedo bombers in the Pacific. Spent two years in a Japanese prison camp.”

  “So he knows how to resist interrogation.”

  “You see an ominous sign in every star, Ivanova.”

  “I am a realist. If you will excuse me, I have many details to arrange before the Foxes arrive in Moscow.”

  She rises from her chair. Vashnikov remains seated, staring at her speculatively while he flips a pen between his thumb and forefinger. He turns his head to smoke from the cigarette in his other hand—a gesture of dismissal.

  Lyudmila walks to the door and pauses with her hand on the knob.

  “What about Mrs. Digby?” she says. “Is there any news of her health?”

  Vashnikov shrugs and stubs out the cigarette. “She’s still pregnant, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Good,” Lyudmila says, and walks out the door.

  Downstairs, she composes a cable and takes it down herself to the cipher room. It’s addressed to a KGB operative called SALT in Odessa, who has done excellent work for her before.

  URGENT APPREHEND FEMALE ITALIAN NATIONAL IN SOCHI NAME DONNA ANNA ORLOVSKAYA AGE 15 CURRENTLY RESIDENT HOME OF GRANDFATHER SERGEI ORLOVSKY ADDRESS KAMANINI STREET STOP DETAIN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE STOP

  Ruth

  July 1952

  Moscow

  My first glimpse of Russia occurs between some clouds as we approach the airport in Moscow. I’ve been peering out the window for some time, hoping for any open seam in the almost unending blanket that’s covered the landscape since we took off from Berlin, while I smoked cigarette after cigarette until even my tolerant husband made a gentle cough from the seat next to me.

  The aircraft is called a Lisunov something-or-other, but it’s really an old DC-3 built in Russia by license from the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, on account of the Soviet Union being our ally at the time. I haven’t flown in a DC-3 in years, but here it is again, the particular timbre of the propellers droning in my ears like a childhood memory. Actually, I find it comforting. Everything else around me is incomprehensibly foreign.

  No, I lie. Inches away sits Sumner Fox, who’s somehow taken on all the familiarity of a long acquaintance in the short, packed days we’ve spent together. Was there ever a time I haven’t known him? I now recognize the smell of his shaving soap and the way he chews his meat, the vibration in his voice that signals impatience and the note that means he’s amused. I know he’s not strictly teetotal but only drinks wine on occasion, that he doesn’t smoke or swear but sometimes looks as if he wishes he did. I know he has an extraordinary facility for language. He mentioned, in an apologetic way, that he’d learned Russian in two months, including the Cyrillic lettering that I still couldn’t make heads or tails of. He also speaks Italian, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Urdu, Mandarin, Persian, and—of course—Japanese. (He stressed that he was only proficient in Mandarin and Urdu, not fluent.) As for Latin and ancient Greek, he picked them up as a schoolboy and studied classics at Yale. I told him the rhyme I learned at school: Latin’s a dead language, as dead as it could be. First it killed the Romans, now it’s killing me. He smiled and said he’d heard that one before.

  The airplane seat is too small for his shoulders, but he’s wedged himself in gallantly and crossed his legs to keep them from straying against mine. Early this morning we flew from Rome to Vienna and then Vienna to Berlin, and at Schoenfeld Airport we boarded this Aeroflot for the final stretch. Now the clouds open up at last, just as we plunge through them and hurtle toward the airport, which is east of the city center. I peer eagerly at the roads and buildings and fields below me, but they don’t seem any different from the landscape outside New York or Rome or any other big, sprawling metropolis. There’s nothing that says this is incontrovertibly the Soviet Union, no Communist shade coloring the country. The grass is green, the clouds are gray, the cracks of sky are blue. The runway’s the same dirty slate as every airport runway, rising up to meet us with a solid bump that rattles my teeth.

  I look at Fox, and maybe I wear an expression of terror on my face, because he leans forward and kisses me on the lips, and his mouth tastes like the mouth of any other man, the particular taste of kissing, except that it isn’t.

  As we sat together in the studio over the course of t
wo days, going over every possible detail, cramming months of training into a few spare hours, Fox told me that I should remember one thing above all: the KGB was always watching. There would be watchers at the airport, as soon as we presented our passports and visas and alerted the authorities that Mr. and Mrs. Fox had arrived as the particular guests of the Soviet people, who had graciously allowed sister to visit beloved sister as a gesture of goodwill between our two countries. (Some very clever diplomats have been at work on our behalf, you see.)

  There would be watchers on the airplane, he went on. The driver who guided us around Moscow in an official car would report back to Moscow Centre. There would be watchers in the lobby of the luxury hotel where we would stay—a hotel designed expressly for visits from foreigners, of course. The hotel room itself would be bugged—the telephone, naturally, but also the bedroom and the bathroom, the closet, maybe even the bed. We could not risk a single candid conversation, in other words. We would have to speak in code instead. So if I mentioned my aunt Vivian, for example, that would mean I thought I had been poisoned. (Apparently the Soviet intelligence service was fond of poison.) If one of us made a reference to elephants, that meant we should abort whatever activity we were attempting. Foreign language not being a strength of mine, I abandoned my attempts to learn some rudimentary Russian and focused my mind on memorizing this code instead, because Fox told me it would likely save our lives at some point, when something went wrong. As it would. Something always went wrong.

  Above all, we must act at all times as if we were a married couple, recently wed. According to the story put forth by the US diplomatic service, in arranging for our visit together, we met each other at a New Year’s party six months ago at the Yale Club, where Fox was given some kind of award for athletic accomplishment for the glory of the university. (That last part is actually true.) That night, we fell madly in love and married quietly in May—a marriage certificate was duly submitted to the Russian authorities, to demonstrate that Fox’s presence was on the up-and-up—in a small weekend ceremony in Newport, Rhode Island, close family only. This was because Fox had been married before, another fact that turned out to be genuine.

  “You’re not serious,” I said.

  “No, it’s true.”

  “So what’s the story?”

  He put on that granite expression of his. “We married right after college. I went away to fight in the war and didn’t return for years. She fell in love with someone else.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “At one point, they told her I was dead,” he said grudgingly, as if this was a piece of information he didn’t like to share.

  I stared at him a moment, trying to think of any question I had a right to ask.

  “Did you have any children?” I said finally.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  And apparently this was all I need to know about that, because he wouldn’t reveal any more, other than her name: Constance.

  “Well, that’s ironic,” I said.

  Where was I? Right. Fox kisses me on the lips, as a new husband should, and squeezes my hand. His palm is perfectly dry, the nerveless bastard. I myself am trembling, a fact of which I’m sure he’s aware—hence the peck and the squeeze. The plane slows and then spins nimbly around, preparing to trundle to the terminal. Fox leans his mouth to my ear and murmurs lovingly, “Don’t worry so much.”

  Easy for him to say. He’s done this kind of thing before, I feel certain. Marriage, obviously, but also operating undercover. I have all kinds of questions I know he won’t answer—questions I don’t really want to hear answered, I suspect—and that ought to make me feel secure. He knows what he’s doing! All I have to worry about is the cover story. I think it’s strange, for example, that he’s using his real name. Won’t the Soviets know Sumner Fox works for the FBI?

  Unlikely, he said, because he’s always worked under a code name, per standard tradecraft. And his employment records plainly indicate that he works for a corporate law firm in Washington, not the FBI.

  What if they investigate? I wanted to know. What if they ask around and find out we didn’t meet at the Yale Club on the first of January, that nobody in Newport knows anything about a wedding between Mr. Sumner Fox and Miss Ruth Macallister?

  He said they’d filed all the paperwork with the town hall in Newport, for one thing. Hudson’s been briefed, he’ll cover for us. Vivian’s been briefed about the beautiful wedding at dawn on Bailey’s Beach, how she cried buckets of tears, how Tiny and Pepper and Little Viv were my bridesmaids and all kinds of rubbish, and nobody lies quite so convincingly as Aunt Vivian.

  “How the hell do you know so much about Aunt Vivian?” I asked.

  “As I said,” he answered placidly, “we’ve been working on an extraction plan for some time, just in case.”

  All right to all that, but I still feel as if I’m missing something, and I tell myself that’s the reason for the bad behavior of my nerves, which usually perform so well in moments of high excitement. The airplane comes to stop outside the terminal. I catch a glimpse of a pair of men in dark suits, watching the workers in their boiler suits wheel the stairs into place. The stewardess opens the door and a moment later, the two men duck through the hatch and scan the interior.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Fox?” says the man on the right, who has light brown hair and a pointed face like a rabbit.

  Fox lifts his arm. “Right here.”

  He holds my hand as we make our way up the aisle—we sat in the third row—and out the hatch into the hazy sunshine of early evening. The terminal building looks right out of America, all pale beige stone and clean, rounded art deco lines. At the bottom of the stairs, the men in boiler suits have already taken our luggage from the hold. They carry the suitcases to a large, clumpy black car that sits near the door to the terminal, engine running. Fox keeps a snug hold of my damp hand. My shoes click on the asphalt. I’m wearing a dress, which is not my usual costume, and I can’t get used to the way the skirt swishes around my legs as I walk.

  We reach the car. One of the men opens the back door. Fox puts his hand to the small of my back and ushers me inside, then swings around to the other side and slides in beside me.

  As we hurtle into Moscow, I can’t tear my eyes from the scenes around me—the road signs with their strange letters—the building, building everywhere—gray, featureless blocks that seem to merge into each other, so you can’t tell one from another. I remember reading the desperate newspaper dispatches from the Battle of Moscow, ten years earlier—how the brutal cold and the brutal fighting nearly broke both armies, Soviet and German, and yet you wouldn’t ever imagine all this annihilation to see it now. Life goes on—the country rebuilds in ambitious, gigantic projects that rise from the ancient earth.

  We don’t say much, just hold hands and look out the windows. I glimpse people in flashes—walking down sidewalks, queuing up outside shops, sitting on benches to scatter crumbs for pigeons. When the car turns a corner and scoots to a stop outside the façade of an enormous fin de siècle building, I have to shake myself free of a trance.

  To stand before the National Hotel in Moscow, you would never imagine you had traveled deep inside the beating heart of world communism. You would think yourself transported to maybe Paris before the calamity of war, everything that was decadent and cosmopolitan, chock-full of the aristocratic and the celebrated and the just plain rich—just picture the shining Packard limousines and the furs, the glimpses of ankles in white stockings, the black silk top hats and the swirling capes, all thronging in and out of these revolving doors, staring between the curtains of these pedimented windows. Inside the lobby, a man’s waiting for us. Like the men at the airport, he wears a dark suit. He seems about forty years old, starting to bald, medium height and stocky. His wide, Slavic face stretches to an expression of welcome.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Fox!” he exclaims, in supple English. He steps forward and holds out his hand. We perform the rituals. “My name is Yv
geny Kedrov, of Soviet Foreign Office. On behalf of Soviet people, I welcome you to Moscow.”

  I mumble some thanks and noises of gratitude, although I’m frankly distracted by the gigantic classical statue next to me, one of four holding up the walls. I don’t object on principle to the mere strips of marble fabric protecting the modesty of these figures—on the contrary, I am all in favor of the human form—but the fellow’s scarcely swathed stone privates hover just above my head.

  I realize Mr. Kedrov is attempting to address me.

  “Your journey, was it comfortable?” he inquires.

  “Charming.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Fox says. “But I’m afraid my wife is exhausted. I don’t suppose we could rest for an hour or two before we start all our engagements?”

  “Yes, of course. Your room is prepared. We have taken liberty of providing some refreshment for you. Won’t you follow me, please?”

  It seems odd to head straight up to a hotel room without checking in, but Fox falls right in step behind Mr. Kedrov and pulls me with him. Behind us, the men carry our suitcases discreetly to the service elevator, where—Fox has already warned me—they’ll be carefully searched and repacked before being brought to our room. I hope they hurry. My dress is damp with sweat, and I can’t wait to change clothes.

  Now, I haven’t asked who’s paying for our accommodation—the Soviet taxpayer, the US taxpayer, or we Foxes ourselves—but the bill will surely be monstrous. Kedrov leads us into a suite of parlor and bedroom and opulent bath. The balcony offers a view right over the red turrets of the Kremlin itself, by which I presume they mean to remind us to behave ourselves. I allow Fox to take the full force of Kedrov’s observations and instructions while I wander through the rooms, test the wide, voluptuous bed, examine the wardrobes. I return to Fox and loop my arm through his. I tell him this place reminds me of Paris. (Paris happens to be our code for I need to speak to you alone.)