by Ken Follett
‘No time for that,’ said Ilya. ‘She must come as she is.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Ilya put his nose in the air. ‘A respectable Soviet citizen would not walk around the apartment with no clothes on.’
Volodya wondered briefly how his sister felt being married to this creep. ‘You, the secret police, morally disapprove of nudity?’
‘Her nakedness is evidence of her degradation. We will take her as she is.’
‘No you fucking won’t.’
‘Stand aside.’
‘You stand aside. She’s going to get dressed.’ Volodya stepped into the hall and stood in front of the three agents, holding his arms out so that Zoya could pass behind him.
As she moved, Ilya reached past Volodya and grabbed her arm.
Volodya punched him in the face, twice. Ilya cried out and staggered back. The two men in leather coats stepped forward. Volodya aimed a punch at one, but the man dodged it. Then each man took one of Volodya’s arms. He struggled, but they were strong and seemed to have done this before. They slammed him against the wall.
While they held him, Ilya punched him in the face with leather-gloved fists, twice, three times, four, then in the stomach, again and again until Volodya puked blood. Zoya tried to intervene, but Ilya punched her, too, and she screamed and fell back.
Volodya’s bathrobe came open in front. Ilya kicked him in the balls, then kicked his knees. Volodya sagged, unable to stand, but the two men in leather coats held him up, and Ilya punched him some more.
At last Ilya turned away, rubbing his knuckles. The other two released Volodya, and he crumpled to the floor. He could hardly breathe and felt unable to move, but he was conscious. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the two heavies grab Zoya and march her naked out of the apartment. Ilya followed.
As the minutes went by, the pain changed from sharp agony to deep, dull ache, and Volodya’s breathing began to return to normal.
Motion eventually returned to his limbs, and he dragged himself upright. He made it to the phone and dialled his father’s number, hoping the old man had not yet left for work. He was relieved to hear his father’s voice. ‘They’ve arrested Zoya,’ he said.
‘Fucking bastards,’ Grigori said. ‘Who was it?’
‘It was Ilya.’
‘What?’
‘Make some calls,’ Volodya said. ‘See if you can find out what the fuck is going on. I have to wash off the blood.’
‘What blood?’
Volodya hung up.
It was only a couple of steps to the bathroom. He dropped his bloodstained robe and got into the shower. The warm water brought some relief to his bruised body. Ilya was mean but not strong, and he had not broken any bones.
Volodya turned off the water. He looked in the bathroom mirror. His face was covered with cuts and bruises.
He did not bother to dry himself. With considerable effort, he got dressed in his Red Army uniform. He wanted the symbol of authority.
His father arrived as he was trying to tie the laces of his boots. ‘What the fucking hell happened here?’ Grigori roared.
Volodya said: ‘They were looking for a fight, and I was foolish enough to give them one.’
His father was unsympathetic at first. ‘I’d have expected you to know better.’
‘They insisted on taking her away naked.’
‘Fucking creeps.’
‘Did you find out anything?’
‘Not yet. I talked to a couple of people. No one knows anything.’ Grigori looked worried. ‘Either someone has made a really stupid mistake . . . or for some reason they’re very sure of themselves.’
‘Drive me to my office. Lemitov is going to be mad as hell. He won’t let them get away with this. If they are allowed to do it to me, they’ll do it to all of Red Army Intelligence.’
Grigori’s car and driver were waiting outside. They drove to the Khodynka airfield. Grigori stayed in the car while Volodya limped into Red Army Intelligence headquarters. He went straight to the office of his boss, Colonel Lemitov.
He tapped on the door, walked in, and said: ‘The fucking secret police have arrested my wife.’
‘I know,’ said Lemitov.
‘You know?’
‘I okayed it.’
Volodya’s jaw dropped. ‘What the fuck?’
‘Sit down.’
‘What is going on?’
‘Sit down and shut up, and I’ll tell you.’
Volodya eased himself painfully into a chair.
Lemitov said: ‘We have to have a nuclear bomb, and fast. At the moment, Stalin is playing it tough with the Americans, because we’re fairly sure they don’t have a big enough arsenal of nuclear weapons to wipe us out. But they’re building a stockpile, and at some point they will use them – unless we are in a position to retaliate.’
This made no sense. ‘My wife can’t design the bomb while the secret police are punching her in the face. This is insane.’
‘Shut the fuck up. Our problem is that there are several possible designs. The Americans took five years to figure out which would work. We don’t have that much time. We have to steal their research.’
‘We’ll still need Russian physicists to copy the design – and for that they have to be in their laboratories, not locked in the basement of the Lubyanka.’
‘You know a man called Wilhelm Frunze.’
‘I was at school with him. The Berlin Boys’ Academy.’
‘He gave us valuable information about British nuclear research. Then he moved to the States, where he worked on the nuclear bomb project. The Washington staff of the NKVD contacted him, scared him by their incompetence, and fucked up the relationship. We need to win him back.’
‘What has all this got to do with me?’
‘He trusts you.’
‘I don’t know that. I haven’t seen him for twelve years.’
‘We want you to go to America and talk to him.’
‘But why did you arrest Zoya?’
‘To make sure you come back.’
(ii)
Volodya told himself he knew how to do this. In Berlin, before the war, he had shaken off Gestapo tails, met with potential spies, recruited them, and made them into reliable sources of secret intelligence. It was never easy – especially the part where he had to talk someone into turning traitor – but he was expert.
However, this was America.
The Western countries he had visited, Germany and Spain in the thirties and forties, were nothing like this.
He was overwhelmed. All his life he had been told that Hollywood movies gave an exaggerated impression of prosperity, and that in reality most Americans lived in poverty. But it was clear to Volodya, from the day he arrived in the USA, that the movies hardly exaggerated at all. And poor people were hard to find.
New York was jammed with cars, many driven by people who clearly were not important government officials: youngsters, men in work clothes, even women out shopping. And everybody was so well dressed! All the men appeared to be wearing their best suits. The women’s calves were clad in sheer stockings. Everyone seemed to have new shoes.
He had to keep reminding himself of the bad side of America. There was poverty, somewhere. Negroes were persecuted, and in the South they could not vote. There was a lot of crime – Americans themselves said that it was rampant – although, strangely, Volodya did not actually see any evidence of it, and he felt quite safe walking the streets.
He spent a few days exploring New York. He worked on his English, which was not good, but it hardly mattered: the city was full of people who spoke broken English with heavy accents. He got to know the faces of some of the FBI agents assigned to tail him, and identified several convenient locations where he would be able to lose them.
One sunny morning he left the Soviet consulate in New York, hatless and wearing only grey slacks and a blue shirt, as if he were going to run a few errands. A young man in a dark suit and tie followed him.
<
br /> He went to the Saks Fifth Avenue department store and bought underwear and a shirt with a small brown checked pattern. Whoever was tailing him had to think he was probably just shopping.
The NKVD chief at the consulate had announced that a Soviet team would shadow Volodya throughout his American visit, to make sure of his good behaviour. He could barely contain his rage at the organization that had imprisoned Zoya, and he had to repress the urge to take the man by the throat and strangle him. But he had remained calm. He had pointed out sarcastically that in order to fulfil his mission he would have to evade FBI surveillance, and in doing so he might inadvertently also lose his NKVD tail; but he wished them luck. Most days he shook them off in five minutes.
So the young man tailing him was almost certainly an FBI agent. His crisply conservative clothes corroborated that.
Carrying his purchases in a paper bag, Volodya left the store by a side entrance and hailed a cab. He left the FBI man at the kerb waving his arm. When the cab had turned two corners Volodya threw the driver a bill and jumped out. He darted into a subway station, left again by a different entrance, and waited in the doorway of an office building for five minutes.
The young man in the dark suit was nowhere to be seen.
Volodya walked to Penn Station.
There he double-checked that he was not being followed, then bought his ticket. With nothing but that and his paper bag he boarded a train.
The journey to Albuquerque took three days.
The train sped through mile after endless mile of rich farmland, mighty factories belching smoke, and great cities with skyscrapers pointing arrogantly at the heavens. The Soviet Union was bigger, but apart from the Ukraine it was mostly pine forests and frozen steppes. He had never imagined wealth on this scale.
And wealth was not all. For several days something had been nagging at the back of Volodya’s mind, something strange about life in America. Eventually he realized what it was: no one asked for his papers. After he had passed through immigration control in New York, he had not shown his passport again. In this country, it seemed, anyone could walk into a railway station or a bus terminus and buy a ticket to any place without having to get permission or explain the purpose of the trip to an official. It gave him a dangerously exhilarating sense of freedom. He could go anywhere!
America’s wealth also heightened Volodya’s sense of the danger his country faced. The Germans had almost destroyed the Soviet Union, and this country was three times as populous and ten times as rich. The thought that Russians might become underlings, frightened into subservience, softened Volodya’s doubts about Communism, despite what the NKVD had done to him and his wife. If he had children, he did not want them to grow up in a world tyrannized by America.
He travelled via Pittsburgh and Chicago and attracted no attention en route. His clothes were American, and his accent was not noticed for the simple reason that he spoke to no one. He bought sandwiches and coffee by pointing and paying. He flicked through newspapers and magazines that other travellers left behind, looking at the pictures and trying to work out the meanings of the headlines.
The last part of the journey took him through a desert landscape of desolate beauty, with distant snowy peaks stained red by the sunset, which probably explained why they were called the Blood of Christ Mountains.
He went to the toilet where he changed his underwear and put on the new shirt he had bought in Saks.
He expected the FBI or Army security to be watching the train station in Albuquerque, and sure enough he spotted a young man whose check jacket – too warm for the climate of New Mexico in September – did not quite conceal the bulge of a gun in a shoulder holster. However, the agent was undoubtedly interested in long-distance travellers who might be arriving from New York or Washington. Volodya, with no hat or jacket and no luggage, looked like a local man coming back from a short trip. He was not followed as he walked to the bus station and boarded a Greyhound for Santa Fe.
He reached his destination late in the afternoon. He noted two FBI men at the Santa Fe bus station, and they scrutinized him. However, they could not tail everyone who got off the bus, and once again his casual appearance caused them to dismiss him.
Doing his best to look as if he knew where he was going, he strolled along the streets. The low flat-roofed pueblo-style houses and squat churches baking in the sun reminded him of Spain. The storefront buildings overhung the sidewalks, creating pleasantly shady arcades.
He avoided La Fonda, the big hotel on the town square next to the cathedral, and checked in to the St Francis. He paid cash and gave his name as Robert Pender, which might have been American or one of several European nationalities. ‘My suitcase will be delivered later,’ he said to the pretty girl behind the reception desk. ‘If I’m out when it comes, can you make sure it gets sent up to my room?’
‘Oh, sure, that won’t be a problem,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ he said, then he added a phrase he had heard several times on the train: ‘I sure appreciate it.’
‘If I’m not here, someone else will deal with the bag, so long as it has your name on it.’
‘It does.’ He had no luggage, but she would never realize that.
She looked at his entry in the book. ‘So, Mr Pender, you’re from New York.’
There was a touch of scepticism in her voice, no doubt because he did not sound like a New Yorker. ‘I’m from Switzerland originally,’ he explained, naming a neutral country.
‘That accounts for the accent. I haven’t met a Switzerland person before. What’s it like there?’
Volodya had never been to Switzerland, but he had seen photographs. ‘It snows a lot,’ he said.
‘Well, enjoy our New Mexico weather!’
‘I will.’
Five minutes later he went out again.
Some of the scientists lived at the Los Alamos laboratory, he had learned from his colleagues in the Soviet Embassy, but it was a shanty town with few civilized comforts, and they preferred to rent houses and apartments nearby if they could. Willi Frunze could afford it easily: he was married to a successful artist who drew a syndicated strip cartoon called Slack Alice. His wife, also called Alice, could work anywhere, so they had a place in the historic downtown neighbourhood.
The New York office of the NKVD had provided this information. They had researched Frunze carefully, and Volodya had his address and phone number and a description of his car, a pre-war Plymouth convertible with whitewall tyres.
The Frunzes’ building had an art gallery on the ground floor. The apartment upstairs had a large north-facing window that would appeal to an artist. A Plymouth convertible was parked outside.
Volodya preferred not to go in: the place might be bugged.
The Frunzes were an affluent, childless couple, and he guessed they would not stay at home listening to the radio on a Friday night. He decided to wait around and see if they came out.
He spent some time in the art gallery, looking at the paintings for sale. He liked clear, vivid pictures and would not have wanted to own any of these messy daubs. He found a coffee shop down the block and got a window seat from which he could just see the Frunzes’ door. He left there after an hour, bought a newspaper, and stood at a bus stop pretending to read it.
The long wait permitted him to establish that no one was watching the Frunze apartment. That meant that the FBI and Army security had not tagged Frunze as a high risk. He was a foreigner, but so were many of the scientists, and presumably nothing else was known against him.
This was a downtown commercial district, not a residential neighbourhood, and there were plenty of people on the streets; but all the same after a couple of hours Volodya began to worry that someone might notice him hanging around.
Then the Frunzes came out.
Frunze was heavier than he had been twelve years ago – there was no shortage of food in America. His hair was beginning to recede, although he was only thirty. He still had that solemn look. He wo
re a sports shirt and khaki pants, a common American combination.
His wife was not so conservatively dressed. Her fair hair was pinned up under a beret, and she wore a shapeless cotton dress in an indistinct brown colour, but she had an assortment of bangles on both wrists, and numerous rings. Artists had dressed like that in Germany before Hitler, Volodya remembered.
The couple set off along the street, and Volodya followed.
He wondered what the wife’s politics were, and what difference her presence would make in the difficult conversation he was about to have. Frunze had been a staunch social democrat back in Germany, so it was not likely that his wife would be a conservative; a speculation that was borne out by her appearance. On the other hand, she probably did not know he had given secrets to the Soviets in London. She was an unknown quantity.
He would prefer to deal with Frunze alone, and he considered leaving them and trying again tomorrow. But the hotel receptionist had noticed his foreign accent, so by the morning he might have an FBI tail. He could deal with that, he thought, though not as easily in this small town as in New York or Berlin. And tomorrow was Saturday, so the Frunzes would probably spend the day together. How long might Volodya have to wait before catching Frunze alone?
There was never an easy way to do this. On balance he decided to go ahead tonight.
The Frunzes went into a diner.
Volodya walked past the place and glanced through the window. It was an inexpensive restaurant with booths. He thought of going in and sitting down with them, but he decided to let them eat first. They would be in a good mood when full of food.
He waited half an hour, watching the door from a distance. Then, full of trepidation, he went in.
They were finishing their dinner. As he crossed the restaurant, Frunze glanced up then looked away, not recognizing him.
He slid into the booth next to Alice and spoke quietly in German. ‘Hello, Willi, don’t you remember me from school?’
Frunze looked hard at him for several seconds, then his face broke into a smile. ‘Peshkov? Volodya Peshkov? Is it really you?’
A wave of relief washed over Volodya. Frunze was still friendly. There was no barrier of hostility to overcome. ‘It’s really me,’ Volodya said. He offered his hand and they shook. Turning to Alice, he said in English: ‘I am very bad speaking your language, sorry.’
