Phyllis

by Howard Fast

  I mentioned to him the difficulties that I had encountered on the floor below. He shrugged and smiled and explained that they had their ways and we had ours. “Like yourself,” Grischov said, “I am, in a manner of speaking, a visitor here. I represent a branch of the service that they don’t take too kindly to. No one likes to think that a professional investigator is eating and sleeping under the same roof that he is. That’s human nature and human nature is still very much evident in the Soviet Union, Mr. Clancy, in spite of certain opinions in your country to the contrary.”

  “I have no opinions about the Soviet Union,” I said.

  “That is an accommodation, Mr. Clancy, but hardly true. Whatever else any American has or has not, we can both be assured he has opinions on the Soviet Union. I might even make it a little broader—there is no Russian who hasn’t opinions on the United States. But that is all beside the point. We face each other in a professional sense and only in a professional sense. We are both of us, deeply concerned with the actions of two irresponsible men. I know who you are. I wonder what you know about me.”

  I was beginning to like Grischov. Consciously or unconsciously, he repudiated stereotypes. Downstairs I had felt like someone who steps on to the stage of a revue and finds himself in the middle of a badly written script about the Soviet Union. Grischov was straightforward, matter-of-fact, and practical.

  “I know your name,” I said to him, “and I know that you are attached to this case. I’m afraid that’s all I know.”

  “We have a little more in common,” Grischov smiled. “For one thing, like yourself, I studied physics. Before the war, I taught physics for two years at a small college in the Ukraine. After the war, I joined the Foreign Service. I spent two years in England and learned to talk the language passably well. It’s a very difficult language—perhaps the most difficult, apart from Russian, that exists. But I listen and I try. Then I was detached from the Foreign Service and brought into our equivalent of your Department of Justice. That has its positive and its negative aspects. As a professional, I don’t sit in judgment. I try to do my job. I was sent here on this case because I speak the language and because I have a background in physics. I would like to work with you if I can help you. On the other hand, I do not wish to be a nuisance. I do not wish to force myself upon you. As I understand it, you have a delicate and difficult job. For my part, I would not like to be in your shoes. On the other hand, in a manner of speaking, I am in your shoes.”

  “You are? I wonder, Mr. Grischov.”

  “At least in this sense. I am here in the city and I’m the only one of my people who knows why I’m here and for what reason. Let us say, that makes me uneasy. Knowing what I know, I would prefer to be in Moscow.”

  “You mean that, don’t you?” I said.

  “It’s not heroics, Mr. Clancy, I mean it. I haven’t taken the time to think through just why I mean it. There are too many things that need thinking through, and I don’t have the time for it now. The fact remains that I am here. I want to be of some service to you. I could say to you that all of the resources of our country in this, your country, are at your disposal. That would be meaningless. The only resources that will do you any good are the resources in your own head. Am I right?”

  “More or less.”

  “Still and all, I could be of some service—possibly.”

  “Possibly,” I agreed.

  “Then we’ll bypass enthusiasm and the formalities. What can I do for you?”

  I took a long moment to look at Grischov before answering him. It had occurred to me that in our own way, whatever the limitations and pressures, he and I were unique. We were engaged in a most peculiar pursuit—perhaps the most peculiar that had involved a Soviet citizen and an American citizen since the end of World War II. There were a thousand things that we could profitably say to each other, a thousand discussions we could profitably engage in, but in all likelihood none of them would come about. We had a professional relationship in terms of a rather dubious profession, yet it occurred to me that perhaps, at the same time, we were opening a unique path in the simple—or complex, as some would have it—practice of civilization.

  “You could begin by telling me something about Simonovsky,” I said.

  “Very well. Peter Simonovsky, Academician, aged fifty-three. Lived in Kiev. Born in a small Ukrainian village where both his parents lived. His parents were alive when the Nazis occupied the territory. Both of them were taken to a concentration camp. They died in the camp. He was married to a beautiful and talented woman, Alexandrova Chamoff. If you were a Russian of my age, you would know the name. Miss Chamoff was a ballet dancer—perhaps as fine a dancer as Ulanova. I saw her once before the war. She was something to see—something to watch. She moved like music, not like flesh and blood, and she was as beautiful as she was graceful. Why she chose to marry Simonovsky I leave to the novelists. I am no authority on why one man prefers one woman or one woman a certain man. Nevertheless, they were married and, from all I can find out, it was a good marriage. Not without difficulties. Personally, I don’t believe that there is any marriage without difficulties, and the ballet dancer with the physicist, that’s in a class by itself. But it was a marriage that worked. In 1942, while Simonovsky was in the Army—he had a commission as a major—his wife and children were killed by a bomb explosion. One child was four years old, and there were twins who were six years old. That was something Simonovsky never recovered from. It put him into a condition of very deep depression. Like many men who did not desire to live, he took large chances during the war. He was wounded twice and each time he recovered and went back into action. He was decorated with the Order of Stalin and my sources tell me that the decoration was meaningless to him and that he regarded it with contempt. That is understandable under the circumstances. In 1946 he underwent drug therapy in Moscow for the condition of depression. It appeared to help him and he was able to do useful and profitable work upon our atomic energy project. So far as we know, he had neither correspondence nor communication of any sort with Alex Horton before meeting him in London last summer. His attitude toward war was negative. He hated war and he hated the bomb, but you must understand, Mr. Clancy, that both of these attitudes are not unusual in our country.”

  “Curiously enough, they are not unusual here,” I said.

  “So there you have him,” Grischov nodded. “All in all, I think he was a very different man from your Horton. It was time, circumstances and a moment in history that brought them together, that provided for a concurrence, so as to speak, of insanity and desperation.”

  “Then I take it that you haven’t found him.”

  Grischov looked at me keenly and then he nodded.

  “Why?”

  “For the same reason that you haven’t found Horton, Mr. Clancy. From what I know about you, your experience has been with criminals—to some extent, mine has also—if criminals of somewhat different background and persuasion. The criminal is a psychopathic mind. He is also, in most instances, ignorant. The legend of the master criminal is a romance. The reason why crime is pursued with so little intelligence is that intelligent people do not pursue crime.”

  “Not petty crime, I agree.”

  “Precisely, and in the world we live in, Mr. Clancy, it is the petty crime that is punishable. When a criminal goes to earth, you can find him. He has his associates, his habits, his neighborhoods. He has behind him a whole history of uninspired criminal activity. With an intelligent man it is something else entirely. An intelligent man who goes to earth in a large city need not ever be found.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Unfortunately, I do,” Grischov nodded. “Don’t you?”

  “It’s meaningless, as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “I have to find Horton; even granting that he can’t be found, I have to find him. I was only thinking that it might help if you found Simonovsky.”

  “It might help,” Grischov agreed, smiling slowly. “But Simonovsky is in
Moscow and you and I are here.”

  “We are here,” I agreed. “In any case, we are here for two weeks more.”

  “Where we’ll be after that is a theological problem and I don’t intend to argue theology with Americans. The point in question is, What can I do to help you? You understand that I am limited. This is not my country. This is not my city. I have certain resources at my disposal, but I can’t use them. I may appear to be critical of some of your methods—that doesn’t help me. I can only help you—if I can in any way.”

  I took out a reproduction of Vanpelt’s picture and handed it to him. He studied it for a minute or two and then raised his eyes inquiringly.

  “Do you know him? Have you ever seen him?”

  Grischov shook his head.

  “His name is John Vanpelt,” I told Grischov. “Fifty years old, professor of physics at Knickerbocker University. That’s a poor picture but, at the moment, it’s the only one we have. Could you check it through your records? I don’t mean only here; I mean could you send it to Moscow? Have it checked out thoroughly? Give me some clue, some lead, to what this ‘ man might have been?”

  “I can try. What are you looking for?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Grischov nodded and put the picture in his pocket. We talked a little more about this and that and then I rose to go. As he shook hands with me, Grischov said,

  “One thing, Clancy, before you go … do you believe they made the bombs?”

  “What I believe is beside the point. We’re dealing with a question of presumption—not of belief.”

  “I would still like to know, if you don’t mind.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Grischov said slowly, “and you will forgive me for speaking about it—but because you have the look of a man who lost something that he can never find again.”

  “Would that make me a personality like Simonovsky or Horton?” I said, with some irritation.

  “Perhaps.”

  “When I find Horton, I’ll answer your question.”

  “If I have offended you with this,” Grischov began.

  “Nothing offends me,” I said shortly. “If I was not offended by your reception committee downstairs, I don’t think anything you said here can offend me.”

  “I’ll see you again—I hope,” Grischov said, almost sadly.

  “I’m afraid you will,” I replied.

  He walked downstairs with me and waited while the overlarge, square-faced man returned my gun and helped me on with my coat. Then I left.

  part four HANS KEMPTER

  IT WAS twelve o’clock when I left the building of the Russian Delegation on Park Avenue. The sun was shining and out of the west there blew the kind of sweet-scented wind that comes not so often in New York City but only now and again, like the perfume of the whole broad continent west-ward of us. It’s a wind that washes the city clean and sharpens the sunlight and the shadows until everything is radiant and polished and gleaming—and parts of the city respond to all man’s dreams and hopes and pretty notions of what a city should be. At such times, if you know the city and love the city, it becomes almost an individual possession of yours; you fill up with the dogged and peculiar pride which is the unspoken armorial asset of New Yorkers and so little understood by anyone who is not a New Yorker.

  It was this feeling that made me wonder whether or not there were Russians who felt the same way about Moscow. It took the threat of an almost senseless destruction of two cities to enable Grischov and myself to talk together without a sense of two worlds and two cultures and two types of arrogance building a wall between us. If, at this moment, I were in Moscow, I might be able to see more precisely how Dmitri Grischov felt about New York. In any case, I had the feeling that he felt a little differently about it than any other Russian ever had.

  For myself, I was full of an unusual and not unpleasant sense of being alive. You have to know what depression is and have lived with it and taken it to you through night after night of empty loneliness to be able to appreciate the feeling of that same depression lifting. You have to carry a thousand years and a thousand tons on your shoulders in the dreary, heartcrushing march of minutes and hours and days and months and years to appreciate the full measure of a desire to live and an appreciation of life. That was how I felt. For the first time in months I wanted to live. Instead of breathing as a part of my body’s function, I took in the air consciously, tasted it, and offered my thanks for it. I felt my body as I walked. I felt the spring in my steps, the tension of my muscles. I felt the wind on my face and I smelled the wind and, instead of the people around me being faceless and nameless, they became personalities—the old and the young, the large and the small, the happy and the unhappy. It happened to me without my being fully aware of what was happening, yet it registered inside of me. I was losing my neutrality. I had an opinion about Grischov. I had an opinion about Alex Horton. I had an opinion about Peter Simonovsky. I had an opinion about Arthur Jackson of Central Intelligence and about Phyllis Goldmark I had more than an opinion—a feeling, a relationship, a need that had been present and now was beginning to grow, to expand, to creep into me as a physical part of me. It had been a long time since I felt a need for any woman except one, who was dead.

  I was hungry. When I crossed Park Avenue I picked up the tail out of the corner of my eye. I walked eastward, turned downtown on Lexington Avenue and stopped in a drugstore for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The tail waited five minutes before he entered the drugstore and then he sat down at the other end of the counter.

  He kept his eyes away from me and I was able to look at him in the long mirror behind the counter. His face was small and pinched. He had no eyebrows, only a blond fuzz, and the bones of his head made smooth loops into his eye sockets. His face was unhappy and determined and afraid.

  I finished my sandwich and went into the phone booth and dialed Centre Street. When I reached my exchange, I told them that I was going to pick up the tail. They asked whether I thought it was wise, and I replied that I thought it was wise. They asked whether I didn’t want to wait until Commissioner Comaday had been consulted. I told them that this was something I had decided and that I did not want to wait until Commissioner Comaday had been consulted. I told them that I would pick him up on Second Avenue between Sixty-second and Sixty-third Street. They were to have two cars there and at least two men on foot. I didn’t look for any trouble, but I wanted the two cars there anyway.

  Then I went back to the counter and ordered another cup of coffee and thought about it a little more. The action I was proposing was probably foolish, impulsive, and illadvised, but there was not enough time left to stretch this thing out; it could not go on without a break. It had to break somewhere and this was probably as good a place as any. Having adjusted the situation to that extent, and having come to several meaningless conclusions, I left the drugstore and walked south on Lexington Avenue. When I crossed Lexington, moving east, the tail was leaving the drugstore.

  Slowly, apparently immersed in my own thoughts, I walked from Lexington to Third and from Third to Second. He remained forty or fifty feet behind me. He was not a good tail, and I decided that tailing people was not his business. He was clumsy and awkward and he knew nothing about what is essentially an art—the ability of a man to blend into a crowd, a building, a street, or even a landscape. For my part, I had begun to be afraid. You will hear it said that cops are not afraid and that they do whatever is called their duty as calmly and as deliberately as a bus conductor collects his fares. From what I know and what I have experienced, that’s hogwash. Of all people who know fear, cops, I would say, in our modern city, have the deepest and the most profound knowledge. They work against it and they eat themselves up with ulcers and coronaries and diabetes.

  When we reached Second Avenue, I had a feeling that I had moved too quickly, but there was no way to slow it up. I walked down Second Avenue and when I came to the corner of Sixty-third Street, I waited. At t
he same time I turned around and watched the tail. My abrupt stop and the fact that I was watching him made him keep on walking. I had expected that this would be the result. If I had not been looking at him, he would have stopped. Since I was looking at him, he decided to go on walking and to pass by me. He passed me without looking at me and, as he walked past, I dropped into step behing him, closed up to him, took my gun out of my shoulder holster, put my hand into my coat pocket, and let him feel the gun in his side through my topcoat. I spoke to him quietly and reasonably,

  “I have a gun in your side, so don’t move and don’t try anything foolish. Just go on walking as you were.”

  He continued to walk. A prowl car moved south along the avenue. A tall man in a brown topcoat appeared from behind us and fell into position at the other side of the tail.

  The tall man said to me, “All right, now, I’ll take him downtown.”

  I increased my pace and walked ahead of them. The prowl car edged over to the sidewalk. I deliberately went on walking without looking behind me. When I reached the corner, the prowl car passed me, with the tail sitting inside between the two officers. Then I stopped a cab and took it down to Centre Street.,

  The prowl car made better time than I did in the cab. When I reached Centre Street, they were waiting for me and told me to go straight up to Comaday’s office. The Commissioner was in his office with Sidney Fredericks, the man from the Justice Department. They nodded as I came in and Comaday motioned for me to sit down.

  “What about it?’ Comaday said to me.

  “He was tailing Miss Goldmark. He switched to me yesterday.”

  “Then he switched to you. You know where he is. What’s the point in picking him up?”

  “I’m on my own, Commissioner. You put a man on his own and you’ve got to let him act on his own.”

  “You didn’t act on your own,” Comaday said. “You involved the Department. You had cops pick him up. How does that make sense? How clear are you at this moment? How do you know one man was tailing you? or two? or three? or five?”