The Double Image

by Helen Macinnes

  “We thought we’d have supper here, easier for talking, less waste of time,” George said. “And we are having a few friends drop in here afterwards. Just some men who have been stationed at one time or another in Moscow.”

  “They belong to the I-Was-There Club,” Sue said cheerfully. She had quite recovered. She noticed the expression on her brother’s face. “I’m sorry, John; we had to see them tonight—but you know how it is. There really is quite a bond between men who have lived through the same tensions—”

  “A bond of curiosity,” George said drily. “They want to hear the latest inside gossip and informed guesses.”

  “Veterans of Foreign Peace?” Craig suggested.

  “They’d never have forgiven us if we had slipped through Paris without seeing them,” Sue went on. She had a habit of over-explaining out of sheer politeness.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Craig assured her.

  “But you look so astonished.”

  “Well, after all—one night in Paris!” And that really did amaze him. There must be some kind of emergency, he thought. “Why, you only got here a couple of hours ago.”

  “And we very nearly didn’t,” Sue burst out.

  Craig stared.

  George said quickly, “Now let’s not exaggerate. We’d have got here eventually.” He looked at the astounded Craig, gave a thin smile. “We were almost detained.” His hand was steady as he poured the champagne and offered a glass to Craig.

  Almost detained? Craig regained his breath. He raised the glass. “Then here’s to your safe arrival!” He noticed that both drank to that without one smile. He tried to make a joke of it and lighten the heavy moment. “Don’t tell me you were doing some cloak-and-daggering.”

  “Haven’t the training, or the stamina. But that’s the label Moscow wanted to pin on me.”

  “Don’t you see,” Sue said impatiently, “so many of their embassies are engaged in active espionage that every now and again they have to polish up their public image? So they tarnish ours.”

  “Now, Sue,” Craig said, “we do have spies floating around. You know that.”

  “And that makes us just as bad as them? So there are no good ones and bad ones, and we are all equally to blame? Oh, John! Leave that kind of folk to the neutralists who want to justify their evasions!”

  “Darling,” George said quickly, “have some more champagne. We said we wouldn’t talk about this, remember?”

  “I think we’d better,” Sue said determinedly, “or else we’ll leave John thinking his sister is filled with prejudices instead of experiences. Dear John, I’m still me—just a lot older, a little wiser and much sadder. Come on, choose a Louis Fifteenth chair, and listen to George before you start judging me.” She sat down, tried to relax, act normally. “George was arrested four days ago,” she said.

  “What?” Craig almost spilled his champagne over the blue-and-gold rug. He sat down, carefully, on a yellow satin sofa, placed his glass safely on a smoked-glass table top, lit a cigarette. “Ready and waiting,” he said.

  George Farraday chose to pace slowly around the room as he talked. He, too, had abandoned his glass for a cigarette. He tried to keep his voice light, as if to play down his memories. “Oh, it wasn’t much. I was released in five hours. And I have to thank Sue for that.”

  “Wasn’t much!” That was Sue, indignant. “Why, they hadn’t even notified the Embassy that they had picked you up.”

  “That couldn’t have been very pleasant,” Craig said.

  “No,” Farraday admitted. “I kept thinking of Barghoorn, the Yale professor who got arrested last November. Not one of us knew about it for a couple of weeks. He wasn’t guilty of a damned thing, either. That’s one thing you’ve got to remember, John. When we detain a Russian or satellite citizen in the United States, we have an honest case against him. We have real evidence. The Russians invent evidence. So that is a big difference between them and us. Apart from all that good-ones and bad-ones talk, and God knows there are plenty of both groups in every country, there are some very big differences indeed between us and them.” He looked at his brother-in-law, waiting.

  There was no argument in Craig’s eyes, simply curiosity.

  “All right,” Farraday went on, “then I can tell you what happened.” He stopped at the mantelpiece to drain his glass and set it back on the marble top. “I had been having lunch with one of our visiting newsmen. I left him, and got on to a bus to get home. The bus was crowded. I was standing half-way down the aisle. A woman who had followed me on to the bus was standing beside me. Suddenly she whispered, in English, ‘Mail this to my daughter in America for me. Please!’ And she shoved an envelope into my hand. Now my arm was down by my side, just like this, and as she looked away I opened my hand and let the letter drop on the floor. No one noticed that. It was lost under the feet as I pushed towards the door, anywhere to get away from that letter. Almost at once, the bus stopped. And strange, strange—a black car was waiting just ahead of it. Two men got on to the bus, knew me at once, hustled me off. I made a bit of a protest. No one moved, no one did anything. The men strong-armed me into the car. I was taken to headquarters and charged with receiving secret information from one of my agents who had already confessed. They were annoyed a little—” George paused to savour his understatement—“when they didn’t find the envelope in any of my pockets. However, they found it in the bus, and then charged I had got rid of the ‘evidence’ when I saw I was about to be arrested. It could have been nasty. I kept demanding to get in touch with our Embassy but no one seemed to listen.”

  “Could they do that?” Craig was horrified.

  “As long as the Embassy wasn’t asking about me, they weren’t worrying about protocol.”

  “Then how—”

  “Sue. Your sister has brains; did you ever appreciate that?” George was smiling broadly, now, ready to tell the more pleasant part of his story. “She had been wary for the last few weeks, expected something to happen to someone at the Embassy—”

  “I was only remembering their usual tit-for-tat diplomacy,” Sue broke in, disclaiming any sixth sense. “After all, we had recently arrested some spies of theirs, and they would be looking for someone to hold as future exchange if he hadn’t diplomatic immunity—”

  But George has that,” Craig interrupted.

  “Let me finish, my bright young brother! Someone as an exchange if he hadn’t diplomatic immunity, or someone with diplomatic immunity whom they could boot out of the country in disgrace. Get it now?”

  “I get it. And you were booted out?”

  Farraday said, “I just scraped through, there: no envelope on me, and the Embassy taking a very firm line. If you act fast enough, you can assert your rights.”

  “Well, congratulations to the Embassy!”

  “The minute Sue told them I must be in trouble, they moved.”

  Sue? Craig looked at her in amazement. Old scatterbrained, happy-go-lucky, pink-bespectacled Sue?

  “As I said, she had been expecting something. She had talked me into promising to telephone her every hour on the hour, no matter where I was. And a damned fool I felt keeping that promise. So, when three o’clock came that afternoon and no ’phone call, she got in touch with the Embassy, told them where I had lunched and with whom, told them she’d give me until four o’clock and if no call came from me by that time, she was pressing every panic button in sight. However, they took charge. We didn’t even make the newspapers, thank God.”

  “She certainly deserves a suite at the Meurice,” Craig conceded. He rose and went over to Sue, and kissed the tip of her nose. “That’s for you, bright eyes. You can dine out for six months om that story.”

  “No, no. I keep my little lips tightly buttoned, even in Washington. There’s always some goony bird who’ll believe that if George was arrested, there must be a real reason and it’s possible he was a spy; dear me, the Russians would never behave that way if he were not, now would they?”


  “Let’s finish the champagne,” George said. “There will be more arriving with dinner any minute now.”

  “Cue to drop all interest in your story? But as family, George, and I hope not as a goony bird”—Craig shook his head over his sister’s slang, as out-of-date as her lipstick—“why did the NKVD choose you? Or is it now the MVD? Or KGV? Never could keep those initials straight.”

  “Smart to change them,” Sue said with one of her old light laughs. “Rouses hope way back in our minds that the secret police changes its nature along with its name. But security remains security, whether it’s KGV or any other title. And one thing that’s maintained is ‘No ideological coexistence.’ That’s why they didn’t like George.”

  George said briefly, “I just kept trying to persuade them to let a free flow of newspapers and magazines come in from the West. We can buy their newspapers in Times Square; why not our newspapers on sale in Moscow?”

  “And they won’t allow it?”

  George shook his head. “Some of our representatives at that cultural-exchange meeting in Moscow, last January, pressed this point. All they got was a bang on the table and an angry ‘There is no ideological coexistence possible!’ I’ve had the same treatment twice. Really ends all conversation. As one of my British chums said, ‘If that’s final, what price peaceful coexistence?’ Which, of course, is the sixty-four-dollar question.” He fell silent, frowning. Then he forced a pretty good smile. “Where’s that dinner, blast it? I’m hungry. What did you order, Sue?”

  “What you used to like: oysters, langoustes and some Sancerre nicely chilled, tournedos with insertions of pâté Strasbourg and a Nuits-Saint-Georges, asparagus with drawn butter, followed by a little Brie just properly flowing, and brandied cherries straight from the flames.”

  “We’ll be eating hamburger for the next three weeks.” But his warning was decorated with a large and happy smile.

  “We’re celebrating,” she said firmly, and laughed. She got up, and danced round the room. “Wonderful, wonderful night!” The waiter, whose well-trained knock had been lost in Sue’s improvised singing, recovered his well-trained face after the initial shock of entry. Dinner was served.

  * * *

  And now there were only the pleasant things to be discussed: the comic things that had happened in Moscow, the kindly people, the family at home (Father Craig still being sought for advice by the old patients in his little town in Ohio; a country doctor never could retire, it seemed), and all the nephews and nieces scattered around the country (three brand new since Sue had last seen her four other brothers). Then there were John’s plans to be talked over. Sue was relieved, tactfully, that her youngest brother had at last made up his mind what he wanted to do with his life. George was still enough of an old newspaperman to have some practical reservations.

  “I suppose,” he said, “this book will be read by five hundred people instead of five hundred thousand? In a way, that’s a pity. You can write, John.”

  Sue said, “But they will be the most important five hundred.”

  “I guess so,” George conceded. It had been an excellent dinner. “In fact, he’ll probably end up in Washington as one of those whiz-bang economic historians telling all the rest of us what to do.”

  John Craig was amused, shook his head. There were some plans you couldn’t formulate, not at this early stage of the game. It took a long time to build up any reputation, any standing in his world. He thought of Professor Sussman. There had been some pretty hideous and violent interruptions in Sussman’s life, of course, but he was now becoming a “world authority” in his field. A head phrase, world authority...

  “A nice racket, anyway. You can choose where you want to travel,” George said amiably. “Before you start writing a book, you say, ‘Now let’s see: what places do I want to visit?’ And then you get hold of a map, and start planning your chapters. Back in my young days, there weren’t so many foundations willing to give travelling fellowships for a tour through the Greek Islands. It’s the splurge in culture.”

  “High time there was an explosion in that, too,” Sue said. She was watching John. He had always had too many interests, spread his talents too widely, but now he was concentrating. She hoped it wasn’t too narrowly. She remembered the slight family panic, some ten years ago, when a talent scout had offered John a test in Hollywood. “And to think you might have become one of those television stars with a long, lean look and a quizzical expression in your quiet grey eyes,” she murmured. She studied him with approval. “You haven’t altered, did I tell you? How nice that some people don’t change much! Reassuring, somehow. But what are you thinking about, John?” It certainly wasn’t about college dramatics, or week-end skiing parties, or all the girls he hadn’t married.

  “Actually, I was thinking of a professor I met today; bumped into him on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.” He noticed the solemn polite silence settling on both their faces, and decided to startle them out of their incipient boredom. “He was on his way home to Berkeley from the Frankfurt trials. He had been giving evidence on Auschwitz. A strange mixed-up world, isn’t it? He is an archaeologist.”

  “A cruel mixed-up world,” Sue said softly. “That must have been a frightful experience, remembering all those hideous details.”

  “I’d like to have met him,” George said, definitely interested. “A pity we aren’t staying longer. What’s his name?”

  “Sussman. He’s leaving tomorrow anyway. You might meet him on the plane. His flight leaves at noon.”

  “Must be hitchhiking, courtesy of army or air force,” George decided. “We leave by regular flight in the evening. What was his impression of the trials? The Germans really do mean business?”

  “He didn’t talk so much about the trials—”

  “Is archaeology as engrossing as all that?” George asked, astounded. “My God, those scholars—”

  “He had his worries. He was sure he had just seen one of the important Nazis walking free on the streets of Paris.”

  “Well, that could be. There are several quiet ones who escaped in the general collapse.”

  “But this one is dead. At least, he has a grave, tombstone and all, in Berlin.”

  “Dead, and alive? Are you sure Professor Sussman hadn’t been under too much strain?”

  Craig didn’t answer.

  “That can happen, you know. When I got off the plane today I kept looking at every face, wondering who was friend or foe. Nerve ends rubbed just a little bit too raw. That’s all.”

  Sue said, “If your professor really did see a war criminal, he’d better report it. Don’t you think?”

  “He was going to telephone the Embassy here.”

  “Poor old Embassy,” George said. “It gets every travelling citizen’s troubles.”

  “But where else can a citizen go? When we’re up against something unexpected, what can we do? We don’t know the proper channels.”

  George admitted that, with pursed lips and a shrug of his shoulders. “Oh, well, anyway, I think he’d have done better to get in touch with Frankfurt.”

  “He will do that if necessary.”

  “He really believes his story?”

  “He’s completely convinced.”

  “And you?”

  Craig was saved by the ring of a telephone from the embarrassment of openly admitting his doubts. He had believed, and then he had retreated from that belief. All those details about being followed, tracked down from Frankfurt... Sussman had only been guessing; how could he have known? Yes, it had been the details that had stopped Craig believing. And yet, and yet... Why else would he have mentioned Sussman at all to George and Sue if he didn’t deep down, somewhere inside his mind, believe part of the story?

  George said from the telephone, “They are on their way. Let’s get rid of that table, Sue. And where’s the coffee? Perhaps we should order brandy, too.”

  “Scotch,” Sue corrected. “They don’t sip. They drink. Who’s arriving first?”
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br />   “Bob and Ed. Val is on their heels, they say.”

  Sue, amid the flurry of waiters and table removal, of coffee tray brought in, of orders for extra ice and soda, briefed her brother. Bob Bradley was now with NATO; he had been with the State Department, for a short time; stationed in Moscow when they first arrived there. Ed Wilshot was a newsman, who also had been in Moscow then. Val Sutherland was another reporter, who had taken Wilshot’s place after he had been asked to leave, and was now in transit to another post. Then there would be Tom O’Malley, an Australian journalist; and Joe Antonini, who had been one of the experts in tracking down all the hidden microphones that had recently been discovered in the US Embassy in Moscow.

  It was, thought John Craig, going to be a merry, merry evening for everyone except him. He had that stranger-at-the-reunion feeling even now as Farraday greeted the first arrivals. The Old Boys’ Club, most definitely. Sue seemed to know what he was thinking. “You won’t be the only one who hasn’t been to Moscow,” she told him gently. “Frank Rosenfeld is going to drop in. He’s a business-man—refrigeration—used to be in charge of his firm’s office in Saigon when George was a reporter there. Goodness, that’s over ten years ago, when Viet Nam was still Indo-China! Then Rosie was moved to the head office in Paris, and George was transferred to the Embassy here, so they got together again. He’s not really very bright about the things that matter—”

  “Snob,” he told her.

  “I mean, he’s inclined to repeat this morning’s editorial as his views on the world situation. But he’s very sweet and helpful. About finding you an apartment, or a hotel at short notice. You know...”

  “He sounds as if he needed someone to be nice to him in this setup. Me?” He grinned widely, and pushed her off to welcome the rest of her guests. They were all here except the business-man. None of them looked as if they needed any help at all in feeling right at home. They were introduced to him, gave him a warm handshake and an appraising look, friendly enough; made a brief attempt at general remarks; and then grouped together talking their heads off. Once the questions they were firing at George Farraday were answered, or fended off (no mention, Craig noted, of the arrest), and the general talk of Moscow had simmered down, there might be some reasonable conversation.