Once Randall smelled burning. He told the stewardess and she said she thought it was something to do with the new air-conditioning system that had just been installed. The smell remained with them until they landed.
When the plane touched down—again without instructions about seat-belts or cigarettes—it was dark. But the breeze blowing from the tarmac was fresh and clean.
‘Did you know,’ Randall said, ‘that we’re not so very far from Japan?’
A broad, Wild West main street, a couple of bleak stores, a cinema showing the first part of War and Peace, a youth café, a morose hotel—that was the centre of Khabarovsk. And all around it Army barracks and barrack-block apartments housing several hundred thousand people.
The Intourist car took them to the unfriendly hotel. The foyer was bare of furniture and staff. An old man with yellow stumps in his mouth and sick eyes sat in one corner watching them. After a while a disinterested woman booked them in.
Elaine said: ‘There’s no doubt about it, Luke, you really know how to impress a girl.’
They dined in the noisy restaurant off sturgeon fished out of the River Amur that divides China from Russia and blinis and drank red wine and mineral water.
The restaurant was crowded with soldiers, faces flushed by vodka, flirting with plump blonde girls exerting all the authority of any minority group much in demand. They danced and then returned to their girl friends, drinks and smouldering cigarettes, and sat waiting confidently for the next invitation which they could accept or reject as they pleased. It was good for the girls of Khabarovsk, as good as it is for the girls of any garrison town.
Randall sipped his wine and wondered how he was going to meet the contact. As a tourist he would be accompanied where-ever he went by Intourist guides. He would certainly have to desert Elaine for a while. He had no idea what the contact looked like or what he wanted. All he knew was that he had to meet him at a sanatorium called Friendship about a mile from the Chinese border.
Nothing about the venture appealed to him. He thought of Michele and wished for the first time for many years that he was a diplomat and nothing more.
A Russian soldier stopped in front of Elaine. ‘Dance,’ he said. ‘You dance with me.’ He swayed and held on to the table for support.
Elaine looked appealingly at Randall. ‘Go on, dance,’ he said. ‘He’s only being friendly.’
‘Gallant to the end,’ she said.
The soldier, wearing his long boots, attempted a twist, staggering and winking wildly at Elaine. Randall was surprised to see the rhythm which possessed her thin body.
The soldier brought her back to the table and bowed elaborately.
‘You’ve made his night,’ Randall said. ‘Wait till his commanding officer hears about it. Collaborating with an American broad. He’ll get five years.’
‘He won’t, will he?’
‘Either that or they’ll recruit him for the KGB.’
‘He was sort of nice,’ Elaine said. ‘Drunk but nice with it. It’s sad, isn’t it. We never really meet the Russians.’
‘You meet Russian diplomats.’
‘Diplomats aren’t people,’ Elaine said. ‘Not in the Soviet Union or in the States or anywhere. Apart from a few guys at the embassy and a few waiters and gas station attendants, that’s the closest I’ve ever been to a Russian. We arrive in Russia—and leave without knowing anything about its people.’
‘Do you want to meet them? I never got the impression that you were particularly sold on the Russians.’
‘Not the creeps we meet,’ she said. ‘But suddenly when you come out to places like this you get a glimpse of the real people. And somehow you seem to feel their strength.’
‘They’re strong all right,’ Randall said. ‘They believe, you see. They believe in what they’re doing and what’s being done for them. They and the State are one so if they believe in the State they believe in themselves. You can’t shake them.’
‘They look like a lot of fun, too,’ Elaine said.
The soldier presented himself to her again, grinning fiercely.
Elaine spun and twisted, ducked under his arm, retreated across the floor and rejoined him. The floor cleared. And when the music stopped the soldiers, the civilians in wool shirts and punished shoes, the flushed girls with their collapsible hair, clapped and cheered.
Elaine’s partner brought her back and bowed neatly like a Prussian officer. ‘Gee, I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in years,’ she said. ‘You know what’s the matter with us Americans? We’re stuffy, that’s what’s the matter with us. If you want to have a ball dance with a Russian.’
‘American diplomats may be stuffy,’ Randall said. ‘But not Americans.’
‘Perhaps I’ve been stuck with diplomats too long.’
‘Maybe,’ Randall said. ‘Anyway it’s time to hit the sack.’
‘We’ve only just woken up,’ Elaine said.
‘You wait till we fly back the other way. Then your mind will be reeling.’
They slept in tall musty bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. Randall, remembering previous experiences, brought his own bath plug. He found that the management had provided two.
At first the Intourist guide was enthusiastic about his assignment. ‘In the morning,’ he said, ‘I will show you the suburbs where we are building homes at a tremendous rate. You will see the people themselves planting birch trees in the squares outside. Then I will show you our glorious sports stadium which we have built ourselves. And then I will take you to the museum where you will see many stuffed animals and creatures of interest.’
He was a slim young man with intense short-sighted eyes behind his spectacles and a passionate pride in Soviet achievement. He would gaze at a deep and languorous river and tell you how many bridges crossed it; he would peer through the green slats of a birch wood and dismiss its silent beauty with the information that it was soon to be felled to make room for a factory; he would gaze at a rock and see a foundation stone, he would gaze at a pine tree and see a telegraph pole.
Randall listened to him over breakfast in the hotel, wiped up a liquid fried egg with a slice of sweet bread and said: ‘I want to get as near as I can to the Chinese border.’
The guide looked at him with surprise and polished his spectacles while he thought it over. Finally he said: ‘When we see the fine new homes being built this morning you will be a little nearer the border.’
‘I don’t want to get a little nearer the border, I want to get much nearer,’ Randall said. He drank his lemon tea. Elaine wasn’t up yet and he had slipped a note under her door telling her to amuse herself while he went about his business.
‘You cannot get any nearer than that. In any case it is my wish that you see the fine new sports stadium. Everyone in Khabarovsk made a contribution. You will not be disappointed.’
‘How about this for an idea?’ Randall said. ‘You take my friend, Miss Marchmont, to see these wonders while I hire myself a car and go for a little drive.’
‘That would not be possible I am afraid to say because it seems to me that you are not allowed outside the city. In any case there is not much of interest to see outside. Just the forest, the taiga as we call it.’
‘Okay then,’ Randall said. ‘You come with me—you’re the guide. We’ll leave the lady to her own devices.’
The guide gave his spectacles another polish. ‘You do not seem to understand me,’ he said unhappily. ‘It is impossible for us to go anywhere near the Chinese border.’
‘And I don’t reckon you know what you’re talking about. I want to go to a sanatorium called Friendship. That’s within bounds and you damn well know it is.’
‘Why would you want to see a sanatorium, Gaspadeen Randall?’
‘Because I’m on vacation and no tour of the Soviet Union is complete without a visit to one. What’s your name, by the way?’
‘Andrei Maisky.’
‘Come on Andrei,’ Randall said, ‘let’s go.’
&nbs
p; ‘First we will have to go to my headquarters and see what the manager has to say.’
The manager said many times that it was impossible. But after half a dozen phone calls and a lot of shouting he said of course it was all right for them to go—why on earth should it not be?
The guide drove Randall through stark cubist suburbs where families were planting birch saplings, past steaming factories, to the fringes of the city, like the Yukon, where the dark river glided between matchbox cottages and huts.
Andrei apologised for its unruly homeliness, its friendly wood roofs warming in the spring sunshine. ‘Soon it will all be gone,’ he said. ‘Soon we will have glorious new blocks of apartments everywhere. You must not judge us by this, Gaspadeen Randall. Even in New York you have slums, have you not?’
‘Sure we have. But this is beautiful, Andrei. Why knock it all down?’
‘You would not think it is beautiful in the Siberian winter.’
‘Are you sure everyone wants to move into those damned great apartment blocks?’
Andrei lit a cardboard-tipped cigarette. ‘Only peasants would want to stay,’ he said.
The cottages thinned out and the taiga thickened; silver and green, new leaves and parchment bark illumined with pale light on the fringes, depths a steady, still-water green. Predatory long-haired tigers fused their stripes with bars of sunlight deep in the forest; and not far away the Chinese sharpened their claws.
‘Does it worry you having the Chinese so close?’ Randall asked.
‘Why should it? They would not dare to cause trouble.’ Andrei glanced slyly at Randall. ‘We would bury them. Didn’t someone once say that about the United States?’
‘What do you think about the behaviour of the Red Guards? They’ve roughed up your people, insulted your culture, derided your leaders. Don’t you get just a little angry about it all?’
Andrei lit another cigarette. ‘Gaspadeen Randall,’ he said, ‘we had our glorious Revolution fifty years ago. They are just in the middle of theirs. We shall judge them when it is over. But it seems to me that it is a great pity that they have no dignity.’
‘How far are we from the border?’
‘A few kilometres. Once upon a time shepherds used to cross from one side to the other. But no more. We have found that the shepherds crossing from China these days are spies.’
The black Volga accelerated, just missing an old man carrying two buckets of water on a wooden bar over his shoulder. Andrei said: ‘Soon no one in the Soviet Union will have to carry their own water.’
They stopped outside a small café. ‘There you are, Gaspadeen Randall,’ Andrei said. ‘We can go no further. The frontier guards are just down the road. You have done well to get this far. The sanatorium is behind the café.’
They wandered around the comfortable wooden buildings of the sanatorium set in the woodland, past a huge silver bust of Lenin that dwarfed them. Families were just beginning to arrive at the sanatorium to recuperate from the winter, from hard jobs in hard towns.
‘You seem restless,’ Andrei said. ‘Let us return to the café for some refreshment.’
They ordered vodka, black bread and red caviar plundered from salmon in the Amur.
Randall tossed back a glass of vodka. ‘It’s like drinking smoke,’ he said. He glanced around the café. In the far corner three men with red stupid faces and cropped hair drank brandy and stared at Andrei and his Western companion. It was not often—if ever—that Westerners were seen here.
But where was the contact? For the first time in his life Randall felt uneasy; suddenly it mattered to him that he returned safely to Moscow. Perhaps the contact had taken fright: it wouldn’t be the first time. Perhaps the whole operation had been screwed up somehow. Certainly no one would approach him while he was sitting with Andrei.
He stood up, stretched and walked to the toilet. When he came back he said: ‘I’m going for a stroll.’
‘Then I must come with you.’
‘You sit down and drink your vodka. I’m just going for a stroll in the opposite direction to the border. You stay put and relax, Andrei.’
He strolled around the sanatorium but no one approached him.
When he returned Andrei said: ‘Perhaps it is me you wish to see, Gaspadeen Randall.’
Two of the men in the corner were playing draughts watched by their companions. They were unshaven and sullen. A shotgun leaned against the wall beside them.
Randall thought he had long since lost the capacity to be surprised. Now he shivered; it was as if the cold barrel of an automatic had touched his spine. Once upon a time he would have suspected the Intourist guide because he suspected everyone until he had eliminated them to his own satisfaction. But now his senses were becoming docile and he knew he was losing the qualities which had made him a good CIA man—indifference to his personal safety and his acceptance that he belonged to no one. Now he belonged and he wanted none of this shabby game.
‘You for Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘Why in God’s name did you pick this joint? Are you a member of the local dramatic society or something? And why couldn’t you make contact in Moscow?’
Andrei looked around furtively from behind his spectacles. ‘Keep your voice down, Gaspadeen Randall,’ he said. ‘I could not make contact in Moscow—it would have been far too dangerous. Here the big planes fly to Tokyo. It is easy to reach your people in Washington that way if you have friends on the airlines.’
Randall sighed and poured more vodka. His training began to assert itself: never do business at a rendezvous arranged by a contact. The bugged table, the hidden camera, two sombre men materialising just as papers were changing hands. But you could not reject the informants: Penkovsky had taught them that.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get the hell out of this place.’
‘Do you not want to know the information I have for you?’
‘Sure. But not here.’
‘I assure you it is quite safe. Those men over there cannot hear us. No one could have followed us here without us knowing.’
‘Come off it, Andrei. The entire Khabarovsk police force must be in a turmoil. An American diplomat nosing about a mile from the border.’
‘On the contrary, Gaspadeen Randall, they are quite happy. They know I am looking after you.’
‘If you want to talk you can do it on the way back.’
He paid the bulky woman in a brown dress and stood up. One of the men in the corner made a triumphant sortie across the draughts board. They all stared at Randall with blunt curiosity.
‘As you wish,’ Andrei said.
Half way back Randall told him to stop. ‘Now tell me what you’ve got to sell,’ he said.
‘I have nothing to sell, Gaspadeen Randall. I have information to give you.’
‘You must have a price.’
‘I am very well thought of at Intourist,’ Andrei said. He took off his spectacles and polished them energetically. ‘I speak very good English, do I not?’
‘Not bad. But what the hell’s all this got to do with information?’
‘I have been told that soon I may go to one of our bureaux in the West. When I go to America or Britain I would like to stay there. If I help you now it seems to me that your people will look favourably on me when I ask if I can stay.’
‘It’s possible,’ Randall said. He looked speculatively at Andrei. ‘You never can tell about people, can you? Do you know, Andrei, that only last night I was lecturing a young lady about the belief which all Russians have in their system? Why in God’s name does a person like you want to defect? You’ve spent the morning telling me what great things you’re all achieving. Now you want to leave it all and live in a Capitalist country you’ve never even seen. I just don’t understand you, Andrei. I just don’t understand you at all.’
‘If you worked for the secret police as I do you would understand. I love my people, Gaspadeen Randall. Make no mistake about that. I love my country. I do not like what happens beneath the
surface.’
It was not, Randall thought, the first time he had heard the excuse. ‘So because you’re in the KGB and you’re not happy in your work your solution is to pull out and leave everyone else behind?’
‘I will not be the first to seek freedom. That is all I want—freedom. I think I will be more use to the Soviet Union abroad than I am here.’
‘Okay,’ Randall said, ‘let’s have it. What have you got to offer?’
‘You promise me you will put in a good word for me?’
‘I promise.’
Beside them a breeze moved the delicate new leaves and the sunlight washed across the grass between the spindle-legs of the birch trees. A dog, half wolf, trotted past on important business.
Andrei lit another cardboard-tipped cigarette and blew smoke out through the window. The breeze took it to the forest. ‘I told you about the peasants who cross the border to spy,’ he said. ‘We have intercepted many of them. We, too, have shepherds who cross the border. It seems to me that your employers would be very interested in statistics of the Chinese forces just across the border.’
‘It seems to me they would,’ Randall said. ‘It also seems to me that they would be interested in statistics about the Soviet forces this side of the border.’
‘Ah.’ He considered his conscience and looked sad. ‘I am afraid I have not got those figures for you.’
‘You mean you’re not selling your soul completely. If you know the Chinese figures I’m darned sure you know the Russian figures.’
‘I would prefer that you do not ask me. I am a citizen of the Soviet Union, I am not a traitor.’
‘Okay,’ Randall said. ‘Give.’
Andrei took a folded copy of Pravda from his inside jacket pocket. Inside the newspaper was a sheet of notepaper covered with notes and figures. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the Soviet assessment of the Chinese military strength along this part of the border.’
Randall folded the paper and put it in his wallet. ‘Thanks, Andrei,’ he said. ‘You will be rewarded in the heaven they call the West.’
On the way back, as they passed the wooden cottages sliding towards the river, they saw a platoon of soldiers mending the road.
Angels in the Snow Page 26
