by John Meaney
Chicago nearly exploded in 1943.
During the Manhattan project, the engineers refining the ore were thousands of miles away from the research centre at Los Alamos. Because of secrecy and misunderstanding, the engineers kept lumps of uranium ore submerged inside water for 'safety' – treating radioactive ore as if it were inflammable. And that's why Chicago almost died.
With uranium, it's slow neutrons that cause chain reactions, because fast neutrons just slip through – unless there's water to slow them down. But the engineers knew nothing of radioactivity's true nature. Wartime secrecy nearly brought disaster.
Even now, democracies move atomic material through inhabited cities. Here in the East, the shadow powers would not hesitate to transport uranium through an ordinary railway station, never thinking to inform the populace.
Once I was through the ticket barrier and standing on the concourse, my surroundings felt safer. My sense of dread was lessening as left the uranium train receded behind me, and that was why intuition needs the logical, rational mind: the danger was as great as ever.
There was no sign of Lenin Beard, who was almost certainly my contact. He wouldn't walk up to me here, with soldiers and UB officers everywhere. Our fallback rendezvous was in Kopernik Aleja, in other words Copernicus Alley. And wasn't Copernicus the man who demonstrated a revolutionary truth that flew in the face of the prevailing ideology? I started to smile, then tightened down, because no one else looked happy: this was the Polish winter and they were getting on with life.
So I climbed into a battered taxi and asked for the Hotel Sląski Grand. We moved off through the grey slush with a clunking of the gears, into the sparse traffic.
When I checked in, the receptionist's face was a contemptuous mask. If you're a Westerner in the East, someone who can afford to travel, you're a landowner, right? Swanning around the world while your slaves till the land. No wonder the guy had to shut down his expression as he took my passport – for the duration of my stay – and handed me a key.
I went upstairs to my room, wondering to what extent Poles were the enemy. They were part of the Soviet empire. But during the war, my father's best friend was the man I came to know as Uncle Mikhail. After that day in the headmaster's study, it was Mikhail who came in uniform to fetch me in a borrowed jeep, and took me to Penshurst to meet my mother. My memories of the village were from earlier visits – banana split ice cream and lemonade –but that was before the rationing. None of us had seen a banana for years.
"You read Biggles?" Mikhail asked during the drive. "With his friends Algy and Ginger?"
"Everyone does."
"Your father Al... he helped me learn English. I read those books."
It was some time later that I learned of Mikhail's long desperate escape from his occupied country, crossing from Poland into wild Romania, and finally reaching France. And it was years afterwards, remembering, that I deduced the hidden probe in his question: yes, every English schoolboy read Biggles voraciously, and the books were gung-ho but also starkly cynical in depicting the morality of combat and the fate that awaited wartime pilots.
On that drive, it was startling to hear him call my father Al. No adult had ever used that shortened name in my presence – but this was my first meeting with someone from Dad's squadron. Part of me was thrilled despite the awful reason.
My Mum's expression, when we reached the teashop where she waited, was closed in, clamped shut, unwilling to display her grief.
"David." Mum put a hand on my shoulder. "This is your Dad's friend." As if I didn't know. "He was with" – she looked up at Mikhail – "with Alan when he..."
But her massive self control was exactly like iron: strong yet ultimately brittle. When it broke, it shattered throughout. She let out a wail that had everybody spinning round to look at her. Then she collapsed. The teashop's owners were the first to reach her.
Mikhail wasn't shy, wasn't afraid to help. But he knew that the blue-grey uniform he wore was part of the problem, an immediate association to what had happened to Alan Wolf, my father. So he stood back while the teashop's owners and two other women fussed over my mother, occasionally glancing at Mikhail.
But when he gently explained that he had flown with the lady's husband, been with him on his last mission... after a moment, the expressions cleared, and the women sat Mum down and fetched tea.
"And the boy...?"
No one had to answer that. The boy had lost a father, that was all. I was like so many other lads, knowing that Dad would be a presence always in their memories but only there, and never in the real world where they could hold you and take you to see the football and—
"There. It'll be all right."
Propping me up in a tearoom chair. I might have blacked out myself, just for a second.
"Al... Alan was very brave," said Mikhail, addressing Mum and the onlookers. "His fuel was low but the Heinkel was headed for Edinburgh."
We all knew what had happened to Coventry and elsewhere, what could happen to any city. One of the women made the sign of the cross.
"It was quick," Mikhail added in a whisper, and glanced over at me. "Very quick."
Even then, a decade before Manny Silverberg trained me in the psychological disciplines, I knew how to read a lie. In that brief glance, I read in Mikhail's eyes a very different story: my father screaming as he flew blind, the cockpit filled with soot and debris and the stink of fuel, the Spitfire's long nose obscuring the sight of the Heinkel whose guns had killed him, coughing in the black smoke, desperate to release the smashed canopy, fighting against the slipstream, and the sudden rush as the canopy flew free and the parachute on which he sat came with him as he made the leap, tumbling out but already burning as something set alight the fuel that soaked him, and my father was a screaming, burning torch as he tumbled free from the Spitfire that somehow, miraculously, kept its new course and touched the Heinkel's tailplane with a wingtip and that was that: more men about to die in terror and pain beyond endurance.
But it wasn't until after Mikhail's own death a decade later, when his diary came into my possession, that I learned the complete horror of that day: how my father's parachute had miraculously opened, though flames licked along the supporting lines, suspending him, gently lowering him while two aircraft took an arcing final plunge towards choppy steel-grey waves, and sudden death awaiting the men inside. But my father's death was taking longer than theirs, because the parachute wasn't saving him – there is no saving a man whose skin is eighty percent burned off – it was stretching out his agony.
And that was why his wingleader, his best friend Mikhail, took his own Spitfire on a long high turn and came back in a screaming dive, thumb on the firing button and making sure, even through the sobs and blinding tears, that he got his aim just right.
Now, in my drab room, I stripped off, needing to stop thinking for a while – needing to stop feeling – and eased myself into deep knee-bends and push-ups, then the retzev shadowboxing moves (against huge implacable opponents who came at me, but only in my mind) of the killing art that is New Jerusalem's own, sometimes called krav maga.
I worked silently but hard until my breath was heaving and a layer of hot sweat coated me, blinding me, and if you think that's indistinguishable from sobbing your heart out you might be right. Can anybody spell 'catharsis'?
Then the world was back to normal, ready for me to go to work.
Expecting communal bathrooms, I'd brought a dressing-gown. There was a bottle of lemon-flavoured water in my room – you can't drink from the taps: it isn't safe – so I drank that first, before traipsing down the corridor for the luxury of a hot bath. Afterwards, towelled off and dressed, I exited my room, carrying my overcoat.
Scents of borscht rose up the stairwell.
Beetroot soup would have been nice but there was no time. Instead, reaching the lobby, I turned away from the restaurant and into the dark bar, to order an orange juice. A flat-faced woman was sitting beside me on a stool, her eyes hard wi
th disillusion. Probably a prostitute, though she was making no attempt to pick up business.
From a booth behind me, an American accent drifted.
"—goddamn Democrats," one of two men, a large redhead, was saying, "thinkin' the sun shines outta JFK's goddamn skinny ass. Meanwhile, thousands of our boys are gettin' their asses shot off in Vietnam."
There were US troops in Cambodia, taking over where the French left off, but it wasn't the kind of thing you read about in the papers. I wondered how many deaths it would take before the American public found out was happening.
The smaller man murmured something.
"Yeah, but so what? President shoulda known better."
A chill hand seemed to press between my shoulder blades.
Get out of here.
Local language can make a vital difference, right? We know that, and so do the Russians, which is why we all work at it. Saying President instead of the President might mean the man was drunk, or it might be a linguistic slip, even for a KGB agent whose American-accented English was approximately perfect. Russian has no word for 'the'; and the word, as I thought about it, might save sounded more like pryesidyent.
They were looking in my direction. Shit. They were probably KGB, looking for a bit of harmless language practice or perhaps the chance to recruit a Western visitor. Part of me wanted to fall for the bait and play their game, to see who could out-sneak whom, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Instead I turned away, breaking the possibility of eye contact, drained my juice and left the empty glass on the counter along with some złoty notes.
Outside, in the cold night, the snow was coming down. No vehicles travelled along the road that passed beneath the pointed sign marked Centrum, so I pulled on my overcoat, put my hands in my pockets, and began to walk.
Steam coated the windows of the café. It was a warm room on the ground floor of an apartment block, where tired men drank black tea or vodka while listening to the radio on the counter. Warsaw were playing Moscow Dynamo, and a Polish striker had just failed to score.
I pretended to sip at my vodka.
"No." A man from the next table winked at me. "Like this." He tossed his glass back in a single hit. "See?"
"I've got a bad stomach."
"Ah. Bad luck."
Most of the men kept their attention on the radio; two were muttering quietly about production targets at work. None of them were watching me. On the way in, there had been no visible observers, but there were many darkened windows in the surrounding buildings, impossible to see inside.
Nor was there any sign of Lenin Beard.
After reading the paper and switching from vodka to tea, I ran out of reasons to stay here. Getting into conversation would be dangerous, because right now I might be a local on the way home from work, but prolonged dialogue would reveal me as a foreigner.
Someone groaned, and several men shook their heads. Danger? No... Moscow had scored, that was all. If only life was as simple as putting a ball between goalposts.
Still no Lenin Beard.
We'd failed to meet up on the train, and now here. There was a third and final fallback rendezvous – if I dared to take it – but not tonight. The only sensible thing was to leave, so I did.
The Hotel Sląski Grand might be basic, but they knew how to make beetroot soup, with broad beans for protein. It warmed me up, along with the cheese omelette that followed. Never make decisions on an empty stomach.
My contact – if it was Lenin Beard – wouldn't know where I was staying, but there weren't that many hotels in Katowice. Even the KGB stayed in the Hotel Sląski Grand. If he'd been caught, this place was dangerous.
"Sometimes running away is worse than being beaten." Donaldson, the head boy, told me that on the day the War Office telegram arrived at my school. "That kind of pain" – the physical kind, where Hanratty had cut my mouth – "heals up."
Maybe Lenin Beard was screaming right now as gloved fists broke his teeth or they fastened crocodile clips upon his scrotum before applying the voltage.
There was a tertiary arrangement, a nighttime rendezvous in the yards behind the railway station. If I decided to keep that particular appointment, I'd be bloody early, scouting the ground in advance.
Meal over, I went back out into the lobby, heading for the stairs. But a sudden burst of laughter sounded from the bar, and a crazy decision clicked into place in my mind, remembering the KGB men from earlier.
I entered the bar.
Only the older Russian, the redhead who'd spoken of Cambodia, was there. His earlier companion had been much younger. Perhaps the older man was training a neophyte, much as Jean-Paul might have set his trainees to spy on Fern – and me – in Paris.
Laughter sounded again, from a group of burly men who might, from their accents, be Uzbeki survey engineers. Five empty vodka bottles already stood on their table. I glanced at the redheaded man and we both shook our heads.
"They'll have headaches in the morning," said the redhead in Russian.
I carried my soda and lime over to his table.
"So long as they can still do their jobs." And, in a colloquialism that works well in Russian: "My plans didn't bear fruit tonight." Adding a soupçon of French accent: "Do you know anywhere else to go in town?"
"Not really, and I've billeted here before. Why don't you sit down?"
Army terminology. He was GRU, not KGB. Military intelligence.
"Thanks, comrade." I slid onto the seat opposite him. "I'm Thierry Foucault."
"Fyodor Dyenisovitch."
His gaze was grey and flat, with none of the shifting eye movement that betrays constructive imagination. Either this was his real name or he was better trained in psych techniques than me.
No. Don't do it.
Because a crazy idea had occurred to me. But you can trust your unconscious – you know that now – and there was a reason for slipping into fluent Russian, even though I was not expected to speak it. Not as Thierry Foucault, engineer.
Dyenisovitch was snacking from a bowl of herrings and sour cream. The locals call it śledź w śmietanie, and good luck pronouncing that. But the salt would have made him thirsty, giving me a start point.
Observe the minutiae, Manny says. Watch for feedback.
There were beer mats on the table, as if this were an English pub. One mat was coloured bright orange. As I chatted, subtly matching Dyenisovitch's physiology, I tapped the beer mat with one finger, and asked if he needed a drink.
"I could do with a Stolichnaya," said Dyenisovitch, "and an orange juice."
That's promising.
Subliminally I'd suggested his choice of drink by tapping the orange beer mat. On the other hand, he'd chosen a drink, not offered to defect.
"Cheers, comrade."
Yet I was the one who paid for the drinks and brought them to the table. You have to watch these things: who was manipulating whom?
Crazy. This is crazy.
It required not just flowing conversation, but a level of language control far beyond the reach of most people, even in their native tongue. What a terrific challenge.
There are pioneers in the States, including a medical doctor called Erickson, who use these techniques for therapeutic change. Working with patients for their own good is one thing; subverting a dangerous enemy without his realizing it is another game entirely.
And that was why I'd needed to establish my fluency in Russian, because this would have to be subtle. It's all in how you use your voice, and phase-lock your body language to the other person's.
"It isn't the drink but the way you choose whether to have a choice or don't choose to have no choice about how fast you relax and... how deep you go here as you... fall asleep and just relax..." The tone and rhythm mattered as much as the ambiguous syntax. "That's right..."
Dyenisovitch was intelligent and imaginative: a good hypnotic subject. I lightened my tone because a profound trance was not necessary, not in full view of everyone. Nor was
my own state normal, because the quickest way to induce trance is to lead the way.
"Because whenever we... relax, that's right, wonder at why we... remember what we forget to forget to remember or choose what we choose... to let memory go... and whether you decide consciously or your unconscious relaxes..."
The rambling sentence structure was entirely deliberate.
"...And I'm open to suggestions... as I... look around and become normally... alert."
Dyenisovitch yawned, showing no suspicion that he was aware of coming out of trance. Behind the counter, the bartender had paused in his work, taking the chance for a brief rest, but that was all right : there was nothing for him to see.
Or did you think that hypnosis only works in a quiet therapist's room? But stage hypnotists do it fast in noisy surroundings, and that's the way I'd learned.
My soda and lime tasted more refreshing now.
Just because someone's come awake, doesn't mean they have to stay that way. If you induce trance again soon afterwards, they go deeper and faster the second time in. Except that here, if someone spotted me, I'd end up playing mind games inside a cell, destined to lose.
So I waited for my moment. The risk was insane, but why on Earth do you think I'm in this line of work?
EIGHT:
KATOWICE, December 1962
Our psych instructor in Branch 7 is called Manny Silverberg but he performs in public as The Amazing Armand, with the fake waxed moustache and shining top hat, velvet cape, the full works. His mentalist act always brings the house down.
But for the katsa training, Manny knows that his teachings will have to work under mortal stress with the nerves screaming – clawing for survival, not applause. That is why he begins the first session with new trainees by relating his encounter with the Waffen SS, when he was fifteen years old and terrified: how he persuaded scowling troopers that he was German, Aryan; and how they let him leave.
