New Jerusalem

by John Meaney

  So it was probably for the best that I was trekking in darkness through a freezing wilderness, likely to fall and lie undiscovered until the snow thawed. Probably the beetles would have chewed at my corpse by then.

  Fern would be...

  Sorry, yes. But that was hardly the point.

  Keep going.

  I trudged onwards through the snow. At first the Pole Star and my watch gave guidance – that was Brummie's training – but after a while, a faint grey-green glimmered to the East. There'd been no sleep all night, but so what? Only mental attitude could save me.

  What had Moshe said? "It's fuckin' mental all right."

  Poised a hundred feet above a black winding stream, I began to laugh. Softly, but with real humour, because the whole world was bloody insane, along with me.

  By true dawn there were other figures trudging through the grey light, those with no other means of getting to town. Finally, on a slope some five miles from the centre of Katowice, I reached a point where my cold skin prickled, feeling the coal-specks that filled the air, the stuff that locals sucked daily into their lungs. By eight a.m. I was in the Centrum, waiting at a tram stop. When the tram came, its doors wheezed open, and I was the last one on board, squeezing my way among the standing passengers as we moved off.

  A large woman wearing red lipstick bumped against me when the tram turned. Her handbag, slung over her shoulder, was open. The lipstick was easy to swipe. Holding it inside my pocket, I worked the cap open and dug my thumbnail in, before resealing the lipstick. I dropped it back inside the woman's bag.

  Fern, you'd laugh at this.

  The third stop was mine, and as I descended the steps I rubbed my thumb across my shirt collar. Hotel staff had cleared a path through the snow, and I went inside. My collar bore a blatant indicator as to why I'd been out all night. Of course, they might not even know I'd been gone, and that would be better still.

  I checked for messages. Nothing. More importantly, the clerk's body language was relaxed: if UB officers had been asking about me, he knew nothing of it.

  As I turned away a familiar woman's voice called out: "M'sieur Foucault? Thierry?"

  It was Petra from the mining corporation, a smile growing across her delicate face.

  "Oh... Hi, Petra. I didn't expect to see you here."

  "I'm on my way to work. I thought I'd say hello and wish you..." Her voice trailed off as her gaze shifted to my collar.

  "It's good to see you." Emotion drained from my words. "It's been a productive visit."

  I sound like an arsehole.

  But that was the point, wasn't it? She was an innocent, and the last thing she needed was to get involved with an enemy of her country.

  "Good." Petra blinked twice, three times. "I'm sure our business will proceed very well. I'll let Doctor Słowacki know that everything's on track."

  "Please do."

  We looked at each other for a moment longer.

  Then, "Have a good trip," said Petra. "To Gdansk."

  She turned away.

  Am I going to let you go like this?

  The answer was yes, as Petra walked across the lobby and through the doors, onto the cobblestones and out of my life, and that was that.

  Two hours later I was on a train. Katowice was receding along the track. The roll of inch-wide paper tape nestled inside my shirt, irritating my skin. Outside, implacable snow came down as we wound through the Polish winter.

  You know why a katsa never feels at home? We're never in one place for long enough.

  There was time to think now – about Nazis waiting at the Hamburg docks, maybe for me and Pinchas (yet that had not been predictable, surely), but probably for Moshe who had failed to show. Then here, following Lenin Beard (whatever his real name), betraying him to the Russians but stealing the fake ID... that too, had to be Black Path Nazis. Because they'd used the fake ID intended for me. So they didn't yet have access to Kowary Podgórze, but were actively trying to penetrate the place. A breathing space for us? It might mean they hadn't amassed enough material for the intended bomb. Or perhaps they weren't going to stop with one.

  Pinchas had theorized that Black Path had one or more Soviet assets, moles who were helping them. But there are limitations to what any one agent-in-place can do, so they'd try to subvert my bloody operation, the bastards, hijacking the ID intended for me.

  No one had arrested me when I first arrived at Katowice airport or when I checked out of my hotel. The Soviet authorities didn't know who I was. Moshe and Lenin Beard had been betrayed, but not me. Was this a clue to the mole's identity?

  The Nazis must have a mole inside Branch 7, as well as Soviet intelligence.

  It hadn't happened to us before, not officially, but there had been rumours when a case officer called Kask had disappeared on home ground without farewells.

  The train carriage was warm, and the swaying motion was rhythmic. Call it hypnotic.

  Of course, there was another possibility. Perhaps the mole inside Branch 7 knew exactly who I was, but hadn't betrayed me for a selfish reason. Only a small number of people knew where I was, so backtracking through the paper trail might reveal the mole's identity.

  Does that number include Fern?

  Sometimes the unconscious mind doesn't know when to shut up.

  My rendezvous was for eight p.m. at a Warsaw skate rink called Blade Heaven. With hours to kill, I went to the pictures. The cinema seats smelled musty, and the film was a Russian movie called Smiert Dom – Death House – dubbed into Polish. The lights faded.

  A clean-cut spy with immaculate hair fought his way through scowling villains and got the girls, several in succession. The drama came from appalling tradecraft: the enemy spotted the hero when he attempted surveillance, and a chase scene ensued; later, they caught him when he broke into their headquarters, and he had to shoot his way out. It was hard not to laugh, but it wasn't supposed to be a comedy. When the opposition spy-chiefs got together, hatching their plans, you could see the White House through the windows in the background. Our handsome hero was a captain in the KGB.

  Afterwards, I filed out with the rest of the audience. Were we any better off for having lived through a vicarious adventure? Perhaps we all need heroes to see us through our lives, perhaps that was it. And I wondered whether I still had heroes in reality. Maybe Jean-Paul? A mentor, but was he also a hero to me? Perhaps in a less complicated world.

  I walked for a while, and spotted no one following, so I headed back for the ice rink, Blade Heaven. Ignoring the skate rental counter, I went into the café. There, I drank a glass of bitter tea and stared down at the busy rink. Among the few people in the spectator seats was a woman with greying hair. She was wearing a blue scarf, and sitting beside a pillar.

  My contact.

  Blue-grey intestines upon snow...

  There were no soldiers here. If I caught the faintest vibration of an observer, I would pull out fast. No more deaths, not on my account.

  The woman wore what my mother would have called a pea coat. Her gloves were two different shades of brown, subtly mismatched. As I threaded my way towards her, she spotted me.

  "Mukdam."

  "Tzipur."

  I walked past, and after thirty seconds, she followed, out onto the cold street. Snow covered the pavement, surprisingly fresh...

  Slick intestines, steaming.

  ...and I pretended to slip, allowing the woman, my contact, to walk ahead, taking the lead. She led me through a darkened neighbourhood, past old tenements. It was a while before she stopped at a black front door.

  I joined her, saying nothing.

  We went inside to a hallway where a bulb burned in a burgundy glass shade, like some votive offering. It was an old house divided into flats, and she led the way upstairs to the top landing. Here there was only one door. She opened it and entered, and I followed.

  We were in a cluttered comfortable little sitting-room. The gas fire, when she switched it on, cast a warm orange glow.

/>   "Welcome to Warsaw. Would you like some tea?"

  "Yes... Thank you. And I'd love a cup of tea, thanks."

  My Polish felt more fluent now: sudden immersion and the adrenaline kick of danger can do that. The woman frowned, and I allowed my accent to surface as I added: "You're very kind. We could have stayed at the rink to talk."

  She shook her head, but her expression cleared, her soft skin growing pinker in the room's warmth. Pulling off her hat, she ran her fingers through her grey-shot hair.

  "You'll never find a hotel, not at short notice."

  "When am I—?"

  "The flight is tomorrow, that's all I know."

  We had used no names, and that was fine by me. I certainly wanted to know nothing of her contact, her courier route to the West. Purposely, I'd not looked for street names or even the number on the front door. In the morning, once I was clear, I'd use Manny Silverberg's plughole trick to wipe out the memory of this location: you make the memory-image float on imaginary water, fading as it soaks, then flush it spinning down the drain.

  I could do that with Fern...

  While the woman left to make tea, I pulled off my overcoat and undid my jacket, and sat down on the ancient overstuffed couch, close to the hissing fire.

  For the first time in days, a place to relax.

  She brought back a wooden tray bearing a pot of tea, two cups, a plate of sandwiches, and a thick brown envelope bearing my papers from Berlin. She sat down on a small dark-green armchair that did not match the couch.

  "If you've got something for me," the woman said, "I can make the drop tomorrow."

  "Er... Excuse me." I unbuttoned my shirt, starting from the second button, and pulled out the roll of paper tape. "This is what Berlin needs."

  "All right." When she accepted the tape, she smiled. "It's warm."

  "Yes, well." I did up the buttons again.

  The paper tape was headed, via some roundabout courier route, for Berlin. For home. But my destination was further East.

  "Drink your tea."

  I nodded, sipped, then sipped some more. It was hot and strong, and felt good. Then I opened the envelope and slid out a Russian passport and travel documents, including an air ticket to Moscow.

  "This op's a double header," Schröder had told me, back in Berlin.

  So this was phase two.

  I was about to become Alexandr Fyodorovitch. Later, alone, I would review the biographical details and bring them to fore. It was a combination of Manny's memory techniques with those of Pierre Bertrand, a renowned drama coach and another principal instructor in Branch 7. Pierre follows the Stanislavski method, and whether it works on stage or not, it has certainly saved my life twice over, maybe more.

  I took out my French passport, put it inside the envelope, and handed it to the woman. She nodded, and tucked it behind her on the armchair. How she would send it onward was none of my business.

  When I tried the first cheese sandwich I found I was hungry, and ate very fast. The woman smiled, then retrieved a sandwich for herself, and took a tiny bite.

  Afterwards, I gave her the bad news.

  "Our mutual friend in Katowice..."

  "Oh." Her expression shut down. "Oh, no."

  "He died immediately. Didn't see it coming."

  "You were there?"

  "Yes."

  Orange light from the gas-fire moved across her face, as she sank deep inside her thoughts. I kept my silence. Back in Berlin, I'd memorized a one-time pad. It would be possible for me to write an encrypted note sharing my concerns, for Schröder's eyes only. But moles among us? Whatever I did would have to be face to face, because it was too easy to stir up paranoia and get someone hurt, someone innocent, like Fern.

  "You can sleep on the couch," said the woman. "Keep the fire on, but turn it down low."

  "Thank you."

  Half an hour later, the lights were out and I was lying on the couch with the blankets over me. My suit and tie were draped across the armchair; my overcoat covered me, acting as a too-short blanket. Shadows filled the room, relieved by the hissing of the gas-fire, by the faint light of its orange-and-blue flame.

  I let my imagination play with the basic details of my new identity, allowing everyday episodes to come to me as if remembering real events from Alexandr Fyodorovitch's fictitious life. The playwright gives us only a few minutes, wrote Stanislavski, out of the life of his characters. His point was this: We have to fill out what he leaves unsaid.

  My eyes closed. The hiss of gas was peaceful. Tomorrow there would be more time to work on this.

  I may have dozed.

  When I opened my eyes and saw her standing there, pale skin contrasting with the black nylon slip, she might have been a dream. There was a glass of water in her hand, which she put down when I pushed my overcoat aside and stood.

  Her fingertips touched my lips.

  Then we kissed, and her skin was very smooth, and we both shuddered as our fingers traced patterns across each other's bodies, and then she led me back to her bed and we made love time after time, with periods of languorous exploration between the rising crests of frenzy and the nova-bursts of white-hot brightness that followed each other through the night.

  Eventually, we slept. But at dawn I slipped from the clean sheets, and pulled on my clothes in the sitting-room. Fully dressed, I went back in to see her. Grey-black hair spilled across the pillow, framing a face lined with care but possessed of a tangible beauty no cinematic airhead could ever display.

  I leaned over and kissed her as softly as could.

  Some kind of hero. She didn't deserve someone like me passing through her life.

  There were tears welling beneath her closed eyelids which I pretended not to notice as I left. The front door of her flat clicked shut behind me, and I made no sound descending the stairs and exiting through the door at ground level.

  In the deserted street I walked fast, unable to calm down.

  There was a café-bar already open. I bought strong black tea, and sipped at the glass, staring into nothing. At first it was images of last night that whirled through my mind; then I began thinking about Moscow, and the rest of what Schröder had said during my briefing.

  "Your contact is Colonel Arkady Ignatieff of the Komitet Gosudarstvenoi Bezopasnosti."

  "A KGB colonel?"

  "The deepest mole we have, whose importance goes beyond his rank. He serves on their Strategy Committee."

  Black Path had Soviet assets – and so, it turned out, did we. My contact had information to hand over – about Black Path, or Schröder would have sent somebody else – that he wouldn't entrust to a courier route, to the kind of people who would be transporting the paper tape back home. Assuming he was telling me the truth. Because the alternative was that a KGB colonel had worked out a way to get a Branch 7 agent into the Lubyanka cells without said colonel even leaving home. Call him the spider, and me the fly.

  My tea was growing cold.

  I spent the rest of the morning cursing, toying with the idea of returning to my nameless lover's home – because I hadn't flushed away that memory, not yet – and then rejecting the fantasy, knowing there was a mission to carry out, impossible to abandon. Or was that an excuse for leading a shiftless, screwed-up life?

  Perhaps we get the existence we deserve.

  Shit. Damn it.

  In the bar I drank glasses of tea that were not as good as the woman had made last night. Food would have been good, but the pervasive cigarette smoke and my own emotions killed my hunger. Instead, I bit at my lip and changed my mind a hundred times before going to the bus stop and catching the airport shuttle.

  As Fyodorovitch, my papers were in order, no problems with passport control. No one in the departure area paid unusual attention to me. Dark-grey clouds were closing in by the time we climbed on board and the Tupolev took off. And the night was black and windy, hours later, when we banked hard over the Lenin Hills on final descent into Sheremetyevo, engines whining and wings bucki
ng as the pilot fought with cross-winds and corrected our heading.

  Moscow lay in darkness below.

  Fern. What am I doing here?

  Then the buildings were growing large and we were close to the ground, runway lights streaming past, the plane bouncing hard, rising, and then a second strike and...

  Oh God, I'm a fool.

  ...touchdown.

  TWELVE:

  MOSCOW, December 1962

  It is the quintessential Iron Curtain city, capital of the largest empire in the world, an empire spanning a greater land mass than the United States. The West has advertising and bright-lit shops while here in the East, cities exist in washed-out monochrome: colourless buildings, an architecture of absence, nothing but grey upon grey, with a solitary exception. Above the city's bleak grandeur hang glowing red stars, fixed atop the tallest buildings and shining a baleful scarlet, seeming to float in darkness: the State's demonic eyes.

  There was no conversation during the long bus ride from Sheremetyevo Airport along the great boulevard heading into the city – the Kremlin's red walls briefly visible – until we halted on Nevsky Prospekt before one of the city's largest hotels. We took our luggage and filed inside.

  The foyer boiled with people of every colour and facial type. Westerners forget that the USSR is vast. The subject peoples are Oriental, fair, dark-skinned, copper-coloured. What they had in common was that everyone here wore thick coats and hats if they were going outside: it was twenty below, in Centigrade, and it might grow colder still.

  "Name?"

  "Alexandr Fyodorovitch." I pushed my passport across the counter. "Staying three nights."

  "Fill this in."

  "Of course, comrade."

  My passport bore a Leningrad address, and tucked inside was a top-copy form authorizing my visit here to Moscow. Official-looking but still shallow cover, and if the local KGB rang their Leningrad counterparts to check out the address, it was over. But there were greater dangers, given that my objective was to meet with one Colonel Ignatieff who was allegedly on our side.