Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Jack counted the money: one thousand deutsche marks, worth over five hundred dollars—more money than he had ever held in his hand before.

  Our money, of course. He suspected it might be, even then. But it was money—angel’s wings—and at the moment that was all that mattered.

  2 Manfred’s underground railroad had more than one set of tracks. In fact, the Gl-smuggling operation was nothing more than a branch line, a temporary scheme designed to take advantage of a passing opportunity.

  The main line, a much older and much more useful enterprise, catered to a different class of passengers altogether: sympathetic graduate students, usually but not always Americans, who were on Peter’s short list for recruitment. It ran through Stockholm, where the semifinal selection was made by our agents, then on to Moscow. Inside the Soviet Union, the final, very serious assessment would be made by professionals. Very few were recruited in Moscow. The final act of the drama was quite often staged in Prague, where the various youth organizations financed and controlled by Soviet intelligence were located.

  Although sex was the usual bait—you can’t make a revolution without free love—few candidates required the sort of conditioning that Greta administered to Jack. For one thing, there was only one Greta—and, more to the point, only one Jack. Not many young men would have stayed the course with a psychopath like Greta no matter what the epoch or the sexual rewards.

  In this, as in so many other ways, Jack Adams was the exception. If Greta proved nothing else before she went to meet her Maker, she confirmed that Jack would follow his appetites wherever they led him. He really would do anything for pussy. In nearly all other respects he may have been as fearful as a lamb. But lust made him brave. This is an important thing to know for certain about a human being whom you propose to manipulate on a lifetime basis.

  Jack’s case was unique. In the first place, Peter was managing it personally. In the second, as I have mentioned, it was Peter’s aim to shield Jack from the curiosity of the rest of the Soviet intelligence apparatus. And finally, after Jack’s experiences in Heidelberg, Peter felt that he already knew as much about this particular handful of clay as it was necessary to know. Jack Adams was ready for recruitment if ever anyone was.

  Nevertheless, Jack won high praise from our people in Sweden. He acquitted himself well at the youth rally. Without ever actually uttering such terms, he gave a rousing speech about the struggle by American youth against the Nixonites and their evil war against the Vietnamese patriots. Even so early in life, Jack was a gifted orator who connected instantly with his audience. This was not a matter of substance: Then, as later, Jack hardly ever said anything that anyone could disagree with, and dealt in the tiniest of concepts. No, what worked the miracle was technique—tone, body language, facial expressions, an entire demeanor that was Jack’s alone, inimitable and endearing. The audience listened to Jack as if hearing their own thoughts. Of course they agreed with everything he said. Strangely, they were unable to remember, after the speech was over, exactly what he had said. Jack was good with audiences because to him a speech was just an elaborately developed lie, with all questions forbidden until the end, when it was too late. He loved to speak and his exhilaration showed, bonding him even more firmly to the audience.

  He connected best with his fellow Americans, of course, but his appeal was the same even when the people in the audience were Swedes and other Europeans. The applause at Stockholm was tumultuous, the questions friendly, and if Peter had not given strict instructions to Jack’s nannies in Stockholm that he was not, under any circumstances, to have any sexual contact, he could have been in bed with half the girls in the audience before the sun rose.

  Jack’s host, a lawyer under Party discipline, hustled him off afterward to a dinner party. Greta, the freshest heroine of the cause, and her heroic death were the chief topics of conversation over the smoked salmon, roast duck, and apple tart. She had become famous. One or two had actually met Greta—such an intelligent girl, burning with idealism. Like her, they were all against the war, against capitalism, against American imperialism in all its forms. They explained to Jack, as if teaching him some cabalistic alphabet in which he, as a naïve American, could not hope to read or write, who Greta was and what she stood for. In modest silence, Jack listened, empathized, agreed with everyone, made a good impression. One or two of the guests pressed cards on him before they left.

  By then, as a result of his long uncharacteristic silence, Jack was in a pent-up state. As soon as the guests were out the door, the lawyer found himself listening to an embroidered story of Jack’s life, leaving out JFK and the bank robbery.

  During his two days in Stockholm, Jack bought the German newspapers both mornings; the Greta story was still very much on page 1, the police were still following up clues and leads, arrests were imminent. No mention was made of the Daimler. In his secret panic, Jack took this as a certain sign that the police had, in fact, found the Daimler, that its contents had been analyzed by German science, and that one of the imminent arrests referred to would be his own; Jack panicked. Could they have him extradited from Sweden? Would the American embassy protect him? Could he hide out somewhere, somehow? Claim asylum like the GIs?

  Asylum! Jack went to the lawyer for advice as if to his only friend in the world. By now you know Jack well enough to understand that he breathed not a single word to this dangerous stranger that might connect him to Greta. His aim was absolution, not confession. Consequently he discussed, in a steady voice with a steady eye, his fears about the draft, his hatred of the American system, his moral inability to do harm to a fellow proletarian in Vietnam or anywhere else. Why, his best boyhood friend, the son of workers like himself, was in Vietnam at this very moment, in who knew what danger, perhaps even dead, and so brainwashed by the culture that he imagined that it was his duty to be killed or maimed in defense of the profit system. This friend did not even know that it cost the U.S. Army twenty-five thousand dollars in expended ammunition to kill every single Viet Cong, and that at least twenty thousand dollars of that went into the pocket of some bloated capitalist! Or that the real reason for the war was to gain control of offshore oil fields for the benefit of Nixon’s right-wing friends!

  Every bit of the genuine emotion Jack was feeling about his part in the bank robbery spilled over into this false confession.

  When the lawyer’s sympathies seemed to be fully engaged, Jack asked him about the possibility of asking for political asylum in Sweden. The lawyer, no amateur actor himself, feigned surprise and shock, but this was the opening he had been hoping for.

  “Political asylum is not for you, who can be a great revolutionary,” he said, placing a manly hand on Jack’s trembling shoulder. “No, Jack. That is for people of a different order of abilities—soldiers who can only offer their bodies to the cause. Your battleground is America—its mind, its soul, its future. With your eloquence, your sense of honor, you can do so much for history.”

  As if inspired by a sudden thought, the lawyer offered a suggestion. Obviously Jack needed time to think. How would he like to join an international delegation of student leaders on a visit to Moscow for a friendly unofficial get-together with student leaders from the USSR and Eastern European countries? It was a wonderful opportunity to see the Soviet Union for himself, and to be among like-minded people. Then, afterward, if he still wanted to move to Sweden, perhaps something could be arranged. Political asylum might not be necessary. Perhaps a grant for a graduate degree could be arranged at some Swedish university; the course could be as long as necessary, it could last longer than the war. All wars end; the one in Vietnam would also end.

  “You have more friends than you know, Jack,” said the lawyer with great sincerity. “Friends who believe as you do, friends who will help.”

  Jack had a moment of deep relief, which was almost immediately obliterated by a flash of anxiety. What about his passport? If it had a Soviet visa in it, Soviet customs stamps in it, he would be questioned wh
en he got back to the United States.

  Never mind. The lawyer went to his desk, opened a drawer, and returned with a Canadian passport. “Have a look at this,” he said. “It belongs to a delegate who had to cancel out. Poor fellow was run down by a taxi. He’ll be in the hospital for weeks.”

  This unfortunate Canadian was about Jack’s age and size—and he even looked a little like Jack. Not only that, he had the same first name, so Jack could still be called Jack by his new Russian friends. How remarkable. What luck.

  Jack looked at the passport. The picture did resemble him.

  “Won’t this fellow mind my using his passport?” he asked.

  The lawyer waved an avuncular hand. “Nonsense,” he said. “It will make him happy to do something for a man he would certainly admire.”

  The lawyer studied Jack with warm affection. “So what do you think?”

  Jack was desperate. “I’ll do it,” he said.

  “Splendid,” the lawyer cried. He held out his hand. “Now you must give me your passport.”

  Jack looked at him in shocked surprise, his first unguarded facial expression of the evening. “Give you my passport?”

  “For safekeeping,” the lawyer said. “It would hardly do to carry two different ones into Russia. The Soviets are very thorough at the frontier.”

  Jack swallowed, gazed at the window filled with blackness, felt sweat on his palms.

  “Come, Jack,” said the lawyer. “You must learn to trust your friends.”

  Jack smiled sunnily; he had just realized that he could always go to the American embassy in Moscow and tell them that his passport had been stolen.

  Pictures formed in his mind. His pocket had been picked in the subway! A drunk bumped into him! He hadn’t suspected anything until he got back to the hotel, and then he discovered that the pickpocket had taken not just his passport but his wallet. He heard himself: I have no family. What do you advise?

  Jack handed over his passport and tucked the Canadian passport into his pocket.

  “Good,” said the lawyer. “Very sensible. And this”—he tapped Jack’s U.S. passport against the tabletop—”will be waiting for you safe and sound when you come back.”

  “You would never guess, to look at him in his disguise as a typical American bourgeois, that underneath is such a fierce and implacable enemy of everything the U.S. stands for,” wrote the lawyer in his final report to Moscow. “This is no half-baked student playing radical games because that is the passing fashion; this is a serious revolutionary.”

  The lawyer was deceived, of course. You can imagine how much that pleased Peter.

  3 Jack traveled by ferry to Leningrad. Like so many Soviet products, this vessel, top-heavy and rusty, looked as though it had been built by guesswork before the invention of measurement. In the Gulf of Finland, it sliced clumsily through thin, almost invisible sheets of ice, sometimes upending them. When this happened the morning sun shone through the ice, creating dull rainbows that the steel prow with its Cyrillic lettering immediately shattered.

  On arrival in the USSR an expressionless official opened Jack’s false passport, glanced at his face, stamped and scribbled, and then waved him across the most closely guarded frontier in the world and onto the train for Moscow. Like so many sympathetic pilgrims before him who had expected more romantic scenes, Jack was surprised by what he saw through the windows of the train: the vast threshold to the steppes and budding birch forests in hazy impressionist hues, yes, but also godforsaken villages marooned in a bleak patchwork of mud and unmelted snow. The occasional onion dome, beautiful and symmetrical, suggested the work of a vanished race that had been overrun by barbarians; everything else was ugly. When he smiled at the Russians on the train, they broke eye contact convulsively, as though someone had jerked on an invisible fishhook in their lips.

  At the station in Moscow, Jack was met by two very proper members of Komsomol, who escorted him to his hotel and gave him literature in English about the youth conference. It was Friday; the conference would not start until Monday. After a tasteless dinner served by sullen waiters, Jack wandered through the lobby, trying to strike up a conversation, but once again no one would speak to him. He was afraid to go for a walk with the false Canadian passport in his pocket. What if he was arrested and fingerprinted? He went upstairs and read the copy of Soviet Life that he found in his room.

  At about ten o’clock the phone rang. “Hi, my name is Igor,” said a voice speaking rapid English with Slavic phonetics. “We are waiting for you downstairs. There’s a party, for the conference.”

  Igor turned out to be a smiling youth with a broken nose, a little older than Jack. He looked like a boxer. He was muscular, jovial, slightly contemptuous.

  He led Jack outside. A large black car was parked at the curb. Jack piled into the back with four or five other boys, all Russians as far as he could tell. They ate pickles and drank vodka from a bottle, and when they emptied the first bottle, another was produced. Igor, the driver, peppered Jack with questions as the black car sped over un-lighted roads pocked with potholes. What is the population of Ottawa? Who is the best Canadian hockey player? Is it true what they said about Canadian girls?

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “What do they say?”

  “That they’re really hot. Especially when they go abroad.”

  “That’s a new one on me,” Jack said.

  Their destination was a dacha, glowing with lights in the heart of a forest. Inside, Jack entered the world of the privileged Soviet youth—vodka, strange food, and beautiful girls from all parts of the Soviet Union. At that time Coca-Cola did not exist in Russia, at least not at this level of society. He was offered whiskey, hashish, red pills; he refused them all and drank mineral water.

  It was the girls who interested him, but none of them would talk to him.

  “They’re not allowed to fuck foreigners for pleasure,” Igor said, steering him away from a slender, swan-necked girl who held herself like a ballerina.

  Igor’s friends guffawed. They were very drunk. In fact, Jack and Igor seemed to be the only sober males at the party.

  To Jack’s amazement, the talk in the dacha was not so very different from what he had heard many times before at student parties in America. It was cocksure political talk, directed against the ruling order, against people over thirty, but in this case, against the Soviet Union, against the Communist Party. His friends at Columbia would have been shocked, but these kids sounded just like their American counterparts discussing the older generation, the Establishment, the Republicans. And as in America the most fluent talkers were the children of privilege, the indolent, well-fed, well-dressed, pleasure-seeking sons and daughters of the Nomenklatura—the highest circles of the Party, the government bureaucracy, the military, the arts, and the media. Igor, someone whispered, was the nephew of a general of the KGB. He was untouchable.

  The youths talked incessantly about this uncle of Igor’s, a Russian who seemed to be a mentor to all of them and also to be the lover of most of the beautiful girls. In any case he was a man of mystery. No one knew his true name, or where he was from, or what he did. Only that he was an important figure, close to the top. They were all bound to him, the girls by sex, the boys by awe. They called him Peter.

  Where was Peter now? He was supposed to be at this party.

  Out of the country, said someone. That’s how amazing he is, he’s fucking the Nomenklatura from within, and they let him travel anywhere!

  The party lasted all weekend. Jack could not get near the girls, though others did; Igor was always in between, apologetic but firm. On Monday the conference began—dull meetings during the day, more wild parties in Moscow apartments at night.

  On Jack’s last night in town, at an especially crowded party, he fell into conversation with an elegantly dressed, perfectly behaved man in his forties. The man spoke idiomatic American English in a prep-school drawl. There had been talk at the conference of CIA agents provocateurs, of impostors
and spies; here, as in America, listening devices, hidden cameras, all the underhanded tools of the class enemy, were assumed to be omnipresent.

  The man with whom Jack was conversing was friendly, relaxed; he asked no personal questions. Nevertheless, Jack was overcome by panicky suspicion. Was this a CIA man, someone sent out to catch him up, shanghai him back to be drafted? Or perhaps KGB, trained to impersonate an American. Why was he interested in Jack? Had he sniffed out his false passport? Or worse?

  Jack blurted a question. “Are you an American?”

  The man smiled, as if he had been expecting this question because it had been asked so many times before.

  “No, alas,” he replied. “Are you?”

  “No, Canadian,” Jack said.

  “Ah. I had a feeling that we might be of the same nationality.”

  “You’re Canadian, too?”

  “No.”

  “What are you, then?”

  The man smiled, almost as charmingly as Jack. “I’m Peter,” he said.

  Jack realized that this was the Peter, the hero of the Russian counterculture. He held out his hand. “Jack.”

  “A pleasure,” Peter said. “We must talk about this nationality question. I want to hear your opinions. Where are you staying?”

  Jack told him.

  “Tomorrow night, then. A very small dinner party, quite informal. Six o’clock.”

  Without waiting for Jack to accept and with no word of goodbye, Peter turned on his heels and left. The crowd parted as he walked across the room and vanished out the door.

  The girl with the swan neck gave Jack a long look. She lit a cigarette and exhaled smoke through lips drawn into a perfect O. And then she, too, went through the door, smiling tremulously at someone who waited for her in the hall.