Bearpit

by Brian Freemantle

  He was certainly due a change of luck after Burrows getting the supervisor post! Burrows, whose guts he couldn’t stand and who couldn’t stand his guts in return and was proving it – and his power – by the transfer. It was the transfer that was worrying Willick most of all. He’d had a value on the Soviet desk: known his worth. How valuable would he be in personnel records? Fucking clerk’s job, after all.

  And then there’d been the switch to Paris of his control, whom he’d only ever known as Aleksandr. Another uncertainty there. He had a kind of trust in Aleksandr. Not friends, of course: more of an understanding. Willick didn’t know what to expect from the new guy – didn’t even know the new guy – and he felt nervous at the unknown.

  Willick had it all worked out, when his luck changed. He’d be straight in six months if he could go on getting the sort of money that Aleksandr paid and the losers became winners, which the law of averages said they had to do soon. Quit then. Explain he wanted to call it a day – say he thought he was under suspicion or something like that – and end the whole episode. No problems. No problem at all, providing he got a bit of luck.

  Willick obeyed Aleksandr’s parting instructions and joined the perpetual queue feeding into the Washington monument – an untidy, disordered man, scuff-shoed, unpressed, yesterday’s shirt fraying at the collar.

  ‘Is this your first visit?’

  Willick twitched at the contact phrase, turning to the man beside him: plump, bespectacled, owl-like.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied dutifully, with his own contact reply. ‘It is strange how you never sightsee in your own city.’

  ‘I didn’t expect such a queue,’ recited the man.

  ‘Neither did I,’ said Willick, filling in his part.

  ‘I think I might come back another time.’

  ‘That would probably be a good idea,’ completed Willick.

  They walked away side by side in the direction of the Reflecting Pool. The Russian said: ‘You must know me as Oleg.’

  ‘My transfer has been confirmed.’

  ‘What division?’

  ‘Personnel,’ disclosed Willick apprehensively. Essential as it was to know if his source of income were going to dry up, he said anxiously: ‘Will that still be of interest to you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ assured Oleg. ‘Of very great interest.’

  Willick’s relief was a physical sensation. He said: ‘There was a regular understanding, between Aleksandr and me.’

  ‘A thousand a month,’ acknowledged the Russian. ‘I know.’

  ‘It will stay at a thousand a month?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t it?’

  It was changing! Willick thought euphorically: at last his luck was changing. He said: ‘What will you want?’

  Oleg looked sideways, briefly, as if he were surprised by the question. ‘The sort of things that are contained in personnel records,’ he said, simply. ‘Names, biographical details, postings, specialities. We’ll want all that, John.’

  Willick swallowed in uncomfortable awareness, the excited relief seeping away. It meant he would be giving away details of people.

  14

  Yuri Vasilivich Malik was not prepared: despite all the defectors’ lectures and all the videos and the itemizing details of the facsimile houses and streets and cities at Kuchino, he was still not properly prepared for New York. There had been no briefing on the me-first aggressiveness against ‘have a nice day’, which anyway had mutated since his instruction to ‘have a nice one’. He had not anticipated the perpetual day and night noises and that fire and police sirens did shrill all the time, like they did in the films he’d sat through, which were not called films but movies. He had not been told about the parting-at-the-seams decay of Harlem, which he drove past on FDR Drive on his way in from Kennedy airport. Or of the holed and cracked streets, like an earthquake aftermath. Or about the permanent, barely moving traffic jam of clogged vehicles, horns wearing out before their engines. The identified-from-photographs skyscrapers (‘the Chrysler Building is the one that goes to a point, the PanAm Building straddles Park Avenue, those two together are called the Trade Towers and more people work in them than live on the entire island of Manhattan, and the UN building where you will work is green-glassed’) were taller and more awesome than he’d been warned to expect. And he was awed. And excited and impressed. He thought it was wonderful. Not in any imbalanced or ridiculous way, like the defector Levin appeared to have regarded it. Although the experience was only of brief hours, to grow to brief days, Yuri knew quite positively – without the slightest doubt – it would never affect him like that. An immediate – and to become lasting – impression was that New York was going to be like a mistress, something to be enjoyed and explored to the full but never once considered as a wife.

  The Moscow-designated position as courier meant Yuri had greater freedom than any other Russian – and certainly any other KGB agent – at the United Nations. Of which he was fully aware. It was still one of the first things Anatoli Granov raised at their initial encounter, conducted of course during a meandering walk around the UN corridors, away from electronic ears. Granov was a grey man – grey hair, grey suit, grey face – with an unsettling mannerism of beginning a sentence and then repeating the start before the conclusion, as if he wanted to reinforce the importance of every statement. He warned against abusing that freedom – without naming Levin – and of the danger of FBI surveillance, actually referring to the United States as the enemy, which Yuri thought overly dramatic, despite having been trained to consider America the same way. The man told Yuri it was essential he orient himself as quickly as possible against the time he had to adopt his false Western identity, but not so quickly as to risk mistakes from which he might be identified. Throughout the guided tour and lecture Yuri showed no annoyance at being so openly patronized, grateful his function would spare him more than most from the schoolmasterly man. Would Granov be any improvement over Solov, in Kabul? The reflection surprised Yuri. Kabul seemed a million miles and a million years away. And it had not been the disaster posting he’d thought it to be, realized Yuri on further reflection. Without Kabul he would not already have a commendation upon his service record. And had he been posted directly to New York his might have been one of the names identified by Levin, resulting in his recall to Moscow. Yuri was no longer sure he wanted a future in Dzerzhinsky Square. What his future would even be: despite the excitement of his new surroundings the unknowns of Moscow and whatever it was between his father and Kazin stayed as a constant nag in his mind. The brief period he’d spent this time in Moscow with his father had left him disoriented too. It had been like going into the room of a house to which he’d never been allowed access before, a locked place of secrets. It seemed for the first time he’d discovered his father to be a person – someone capable of feelings and fears and fallibilities – and not a robot-like provider of any demand, the aloof miracle-maker who could change anything bad, or imagined bad, into something good, or imagined good. Had he been a spoiled little brat, wondered Yuri. The self-recognition was such a surprise that momentarily he lost concentration upon what Granov was saying and had to stumble a half-question before picking up the caution that unless there were an immediate demand he should not attempt to use apartment 415 on 53rd Street. Yuri promised he would not think of it: he was, in fact, thinking of doing so at once, like he wanted to do every thing at once.

  Confident his impatience would be mistaken for enthusiasm, he asked to be allowed immediately to take up his official United Nations post. And when he was ushered into the public relations section by its deputy head, an Englishman called Smallbone whose name was a perfect description of the man’s stature, Yuri decided he was going to enjoy it as much as everything else. The personnel appeared equally divided between male and female and there wasn’t one woman to whom he would not have thrown back the bedclothes in invitation: a predictably blonde, clear-skinned Swedish girl whose name he caught as something like Inya had tits rivalling a Hima
layan mountain range. The men appeared friendly yet curious, but Yuri did not over-interpret their attitude: he’d been warned by Granov during the carousel parade that all Russians were regarded with some curiosity within the UN.

  His desk looked out over the East River with Queens on the other side – with some irony he was never to know it was three floors below but identical by desk position to that which Levin had occupied – but Yuri considered the more important view to be an uninterrupted line-of-sight vision of Inya, whom he knew to be aware of it. Kabul wasn’t a million miles away, he decided; it was light years distant.

  Smallbone was solicitous and painstaking in his briefing, like Granov before him although for different reasons, dealing out folders and fact-files and look-up-in-a-moment loose-leaf binders with advice upon how they could be cross-referenced to provide every and any sort of information about the United Nations. Every and any sort of information except the most important, thought Yuri: its use by the Soviet Union and the KGB. At once he rejected the indulgent intrusion. This was his cover, the protection he had to wrap around himself, the way a black-market rich (and Gorbachov-resisting) Siberian kulak wrapped around himself the best fur coat against the cold of December. Yuri queried and questioned and qualified, surprising Smallbone by his intense determination.

  ‘You’re not expected to assimilate it all in a day!’ said the diminutive Englishman, solicitous still, trying for a joke.

  ‘I expect to,’ said Yuri, not joking.

  He couldn’t, of course. But he came close: very close indeed. In addition to the other material there were prepared speeches and presentations and within three days of his arrival Yuri believed he could have delivered any one of them and, with the benefit of the back-up data manuals, withstood anything but the most demanding of questions.

  Which was not all he did to equip himself. He watched television voraciously, those absurdly frenetic quiz shows and Dynasty and Dallas and 20/20 and Sixty Minutes and Johnny Carson and Oprah Winfrey and Donahue. In the morning he watched Good Morning America and in the evening he dodged between NBC and CBS and ABC news bulletins – favouring Dan Rather of the three presenters – to educate and better prepare himself for an environment in which he had to merge as unnoticeably as snow melting into a jostled stream.

  He swam in that jostled stream, too. Taking advantage of his unrestricted status, he moved about New York, alert for FBI surveillance which at that moment would not have mattered anyway, but seeking out situations where to lose it really would be important. And decided it would not be difficult with the opportunities that abounded. Grand Central and Penn railway terminals were beehives of places, swarmed with people and with so many entries and exits it would have needed an army of pursuers properly to follow. He imagined a catch-me-if-you-can game employing the commuter helicopter base near Waterside Plaza, from which he could zig-zag – sure of his passenger companions (and therefore able to evade them) – to Kennedy airport and from there to La Guardia airport and from there to Newark airport and then, if he were still doubtful, reversing the entire pattern, knowing as he studied the routes and schedules that it would be a game from which he would inevitably emerge the winner. Even those congealed north to south avenues and east to west streets were a bonus. Buses or taxis could be boarded and then abandoned in apparent impatience, trap-setting for any followers forced to feign the same impatience if they wanted to keep him in sight, unknowing they themselves were being fixed between the cross hairs of a mental sight, to be blown away figuratively if not literally.

  And he went to the apartment.

  For the first time reconnaissance became reality as he taxi-hopped to Penn Station, ignored the ticket counters immediately to return to ground level and dodge into Madison Square Gardens. He’d chosen rush hour, not just for street traffic but for theatregoers. Yuri merged with people wanting seats for that night’s performance and for the future, alert to any recognizable face around him and seeing none, easing himself from the queues and back out on to the street. He was lucky with a cab, screwing in his seat for any hurried pursuit or unmarked car pick-up, and didn’t isolate that, either. He staged what the training schools called ‘go to ground’ on 49th Street, midway between Third and Second avenues, intending to finish the journey on foot if he were clean. It was a local bar and he was glad because the reaction to his entry would be the same for any following stranger and be something he could discern. Yuri walked deep into the bar, wanting to keep the entrance fully in view. He ordered beer, a Miller’s Light, not because he wanted such a long drink but because it would give him an excuse to remain there for some time and to study anyone who followed. In fifteen minutes ten people came in and five went out: three entries got the stranger reaction and they were still there when Yuri left. He walked away, but not in the direction of the apartment to which he was heading, openly stopping at the junction with Third Avenue to look for any sudden emergence from the bar or abrupt start-up of a waiting, watching car. Neither happened. Yuri did not walk back the way he came but completed the block, hair-tingling tense for the footfall of pursuit now, finishing the square back on to Second Avenue and then hurrying uptown, to 53rd Street.

  Yuri had expected a high-rise but it was not and at once he realized the reason. The five-storey converted brownstone had no foyer and therefore no monitoring, identifying security guard system. The front door led directly into what had been a spacious lobby in its grander days but was now a neglected and foot-marked area of metal mail boxes and discarded or uncollected newspapers, magazines and mail-order catalogues. There was, of course, no elevator and in the shadow of the circular stairwell there was a bicycle that had both front and back wheels removed and chained protectively to the frame, which Yuri thought hardly protective against theft but rather gift packaging to make it easier. There was a permanent, unshaded bulb lighting the entrance area and by it Yuri located the time switch, punching it to illuminate the stairway. He was tensed for sound, wanting to become more accustomed to the area and his surroundings before meeting any neighbours and being forced into small talk about being a staff writer for the Dutch magazine, utilizing company facilities while on assignment. There wasn’t any and he reached the fourth floor slightly breathless but free from encounter.

  He was pleasantly surprised by the apartment. The American term, he remembered from the Kuchino teaching, was a studio, which meant there was only one main room in which the corner-placed bed was covered to resemble a couch or sitting area during the day. The covering was a blaze of reds and greens and browns on a flamboyant Mexican rug, which fitted the supposed occupation of the apartment. On top was a disorder of cushions and around all the walls were travel photographs and covers of the publisher’s magazines: the titles had been removed to make easier the framing. There was a colour television with what proved to be an ineffective indoor aerial when he tried it, a couch with two matching chairs arranged in viewing positions and another bright and vari-coloured Mexican rug occupying most of the wood-block floor. A sideboard contained a small bureau, with a selection of both plain notepaper and envelopes and others in the name of Amsterdam magazines: on the bottom shelf was a small portable electric typewriter. A side cupboard contained glasses and on top there was a tray with a selection of liquor, all American. Yuri poured himself a Wild Turkey and continued the examination. Between the chairs and the couch was a small coffee table. Again there was a selection of the Dutch titles, the most recent one of a month ago, and there was also a stack of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler publications. Yuri flicked through them, interested: an exposure to Western pornography had naturally been part of his training and he had enjoyed the sessions more than some of the other instructional sessions. In Hustler there was a legs-apart view of a girl who looked remarkably like Inya: it would make for an interesting comparison, later. He arranged the magazines back as they were. Part of the cover for a lived-in ambiance? Or was Granov a masturbator?

  There was an adequate kitchen, with a man-high refrigerator
that contained some milk he immediately poured away down the waste-disposal-equipped sink, some bread going stale and a single stick of limp celery. In the freezer section there were four ice trays which he emptied and refilled and a frozen TV dinner, veal. He threw that away as well. There was some tinned food, mostly chilli, and a bottle of already ground filter coffee. He found the coffee-making machine, and the filters in an adjoining cupboard, and in another cupboard a teapot, a jar of tea and several pots of preserves.

  The bathroom was small but adequate, the shower mounted over the bath which had been badly cleaned after its last use. Yuri, who was a fastidious man, found some cleansing powder in the closet beneath the basin and scoured the bath and basin and then poured some bleach into the toilet bowl. In the bathroom cabinet there was a razor, shaving soap, ordinary soap and an assortment of medicinal aids, things like headache tablets and Band Aids. As with the bath, the razor had not been washed clean after its last use: dried soap and bristles were caked around the blade. He threw everything into the plastic-lined wastebin, not so much offended by Granov’s dirtiness as by his carelessness: the stubble detritus, for instance, could have been forensically linked to the man if the apartment had been discovered by any counter-intelligence agency, confirmation of his presence together with the inevitable fingerprints. Yuri paused at the reflection, realizing that his prints would be all over the place: maybe there wasn’t that much cause to be critical of the rezident.