The Yermakov Transfer

by Derek Lambert

  Bridges retreated into the station building and climbed back on to the train: eye-witnesses of a police killing were never welcome. He stood for a while in the corridor, noting that the train pulled out two minutes early, wondering what he had witnessed.

  Every instinct screamed: Story. Even the legendary reporter assigned to cover a speech who didn’t file a story because the town hall was burned down, would have been alerted. Even if it was routine cops-and-robbers it was worth filing when it happened within 100 yards of Varily Yermakov.

  But Bridges suspected that the shooting was more than routine. The black Chaika waiting outside, Razin taking charge, the glances between killer and victim, the Trans-Siberian departing two minutes early.

  But it wasn’t the sort of story the Russians would want him to file. If I break faith, he thought, the exclusive stories will stop; if I break faith I’ll be deported. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke against the window watching it flatten against the glass. If I break faith it’s the end of the great experiment.

  But there were other faiths. The unwritten law to report the truth; suppression of news was merely a by-law of that premise. But have I already broken that law? Bridges wondered, knowing the answer. He hadn’t yet suppressed a story, he hadn’t yet filed a deliberately false story. But there were degrees of journalistic dishonesty. Had he ever tracked down a story that might be detrimental to the Soviet Union? Had he ever pursued a breath of Kremlin scandal?

  Bridges walked along the corridor towards the special coach. But who had filed the most exclusives from Moscow in the past two years? Harry Bridges. While the rest of the American pack got the routine stories from the United States Embassy – swopping them with British correspondents with contacts at their own embassy – Bridges got the big ones from the Kremlin.

  As he approached the two guards at the door of the special coach Bridges had the uneasy feeling that the train was inexorably propelling him towards the biggest story of his life. So now he made a gesture to the professional pride he had once cherished: he made an approach to Colonel Yury Razin.

  He showed his pass to the first guard, a vast man with a shaven skull and a tick in one eye.

  The guard shook his head. “No good.”

  Bridges said: “I want to see Colonel Razin.”

  The name stopped the tick for a moment. “What for? No one is allowed in there.”

  “Tell him to come out here.”

  “Tell him?” The tick was frozen.

  “For your own good tell him. If you don’t want to end up here, that is.” Bridges pointed out at Siberia.

  The guard hesitated, then conferred with his companion. Beyond these two stood two uniformed militia, the holsters of the pistols at their hips unbuttoned.

  The first guard turned to Bridges. “Very well. What shall I say you want?”

  Bridges said: “Tell him it’s about the peasant.”

  “The peasant?”

  “Just tell him.”

  Colonel Razin looked benign enough, but there was a tautness about him – a muscle leaping on his jaw as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. “Mr. Bridges,” he said, extending his hand, “what can I do for you?”

  Bridges said bluntly: “There was a man shot dead at Sverdlovsk.”

  “Was there?” The colonel seemed uninterested. “Let’s go in here.” He gestured towards the small bathroom-lavatory. “My hands are filthy. You’d think it would be different with electric trains, wouldn’t you?”

  Inside, Colonel Razin carefully locked the door. Then he turned on the hot tap and began to wash his hands with the tiny bar of carbolic soap. Looking at Bridges in the mirror above the washbasin, he asked: “What’s all this about a shooting?”

  Bridges said: “Let’s not waste words. I was in the station. I saw a peasant make a break and get shot. What was it all about?”

  Razin rinsed his hands under the cold tap. They were big hands, covered with mats of hair. Finally, he said: “You’re very good at your job, Mr. Bridges. Always there at the right time. I’ve heard quite a lot about you from my friends at Novosti and Tass. Your reports have always been very … reasonable.” He turned off the water and reached for a coarse paper towel. “I believe that we, in our turn, have been co-operative with you. Isn’t that so?”

  “Sure you have,” Bridges agreed.

  Colonel Razin turned, drying his hands. “And, of course, we shall continue to co-operate.…”

  “If I forget the shooting?”

  Razin tossed the sodden towel into a basket. “The shooting isn’t even worth forgetting.” There was a blade in his voice now, although his face was still bland. “It certainly isn’t worth reporting.”

  “Surely I should be the judge of that?” Bridges said.

  “Would your newspaper really be interested in the death in the middle of Siberia of a criminal accused of raping a little girl of ten? I don’t think so, Mr. Bridges. I really don’t think so.” He inspected his hands and found them clean. “Let’s put it this way: your newspaper would hardly thank you for jeopardising their flow of exclusive news.” He moved closer to Bridges. “They would hardly thank you for being forced to leave the Trans-Siberian in the middle of Siberia.” He smiled. “A good story for your rivals, eh? Nor would they thank you for terminating their accreditation in Moscow.” He turned the handle of the door. “You must assess your values. Is the story of the shooting of one child rapist worth all that?”

  Bridges was grateful to him in a way. It wasn’t worth it. Any journalist would agree. It was a question of mature appraisal, of responsibility.

  And it wasn’t till he got back to his compartment and lay on his bunk above the Intourist girl that he thought: Harry Bridges, you hypocritical bastard.

  CHAPTER 4

  Harry Bridges was born at the end of World War II in a village in Upstate New York overlooking a fat curve of the Hudson River somewhere between Princeton and Sing Sing.

  It was a pretty village of white, clapboard houses tucked into the hills dropping down to the river. It contained a lot of people of the same name, a general store that smelled of most things you can eat or smoke, a liquor store, a couple of bars, a neat church and a spooky mansion. In those days its roads were clean of plastic bottles and worn-out tyres, it had its share of loonies and up the road at Bear Mountain the bears had returned in the absence of hunters who had gone to war – or so the children were told.

  Harry’s father hadn’t gone to war. He wrote a syndicated column and, suffering from such occupational ailments as ulcers and high blood pressure, had been exempted from military service. In any case he was almost too old and he was doing a good job boosting morale.

  Harry was happy in his village and never had any doubt that he would become a journalist like his father. At the weekends, when his father brought boozy friends back with him from New York, he hung around listening to their talk which sounded just like movie newspapermen except that his father’s friends didn’t wear snap-brimmed hats and, instead of “dames”, they brought their wives with them.

  Harry’s mother wasn’t so keen on him becoming a journalist. She talked a lot about a decent profession and at nights, when he was in bed, Harry heard her questioning his future. She said things like: “You don’t want him to grow up like you, do you?” and made reference to his father’s rough friends, his long absences from home, his lifelong friendship with Old Grandad, his ulcers. “Leave it to the kid,” said his father. And, because she was that sort of wife and mother, she did; even though she still hoped he might one day study medicine.

  His father wanted Harry to go to University. “Get a degree in journalism,” he said. “That’s the way it’s going to be. Don’t claw your way up the way I did. It takes too much out of you.”

  But Harry had to claw his way up because some time after the war America found that, having helped to beat fascism, they now had to beat communism. Eagerly and masochistically – like a husband hoping to catch his wife being unfaithful – they sear
ched within themselves for The Red Menace. Under the leadership of Senator McCarthy, the witch-hunters sniffed out anyone from dedicated, self-confessed communists to junk-dealers with an old print of Lenin in the attic.

  Among those indicted was Harry’s father. He was found to have knowingly sought the company of communists – “How the hell else do you get stories?” he demanded – and to have published articles propagating communism which turned out to be two columns giving both sides of an industrial dispute in Detroit. Forgotten were the columns once described as “the inspiration behind the United States’ war effort”.

  Harry’s father was one of McCarthy’s first victims and the execution was thorough. He lost his column, hit the bottle and died eighteen months later leaving his wife and son with a mortgaged house and a few thousand dollars. They moved to a dingy tenement on Upper Park Avenue and Harry got a job as a messenger boy on the New York Daily News while his mother cleaned apartments.

  He also went to night school and one evening on the way home he witnessed an armed robbery – which, in those days, was still news – and took pictures with his box camera. It transpired that the victim was an old-time movie star and the Daily News published Harry’s pictures and eye-witness account and put his name above the whole spread. Harry took home six copies and kept one cutting all his life.

  Throughout this period he was never too sure of what communism was: he was merely aware that it was the opposing force to capitalism which was responsible for his father’s humiliation and death.

  When his mother died from overwork – just as much a victim of McCarthyism as his father – he quit his job, paid the rent and took the copy of the Daily News with his story and pictures and headed south to Florida where he found a job as a junior reporter in Orlando. His ultimate destination was always the New York Times.

  When he finished his Army service, he heard about a vacancy in the Miami bureau of the Associated Press and, campaigning with his Florida experience of swamp fires, orange harvests and crooked real estate, he landed the job.

  He was twenty-one, tall, deceptively languid, a little on the skinny side, handsome but not pretty, with brown hair that took on a bleach in the sun. He was popular with the blue rinses and one or two claimed they could get him into pictures; but Harry Bridges wasn’t interested; his father and his boozy friends had set the pattern and, whereas other young men with his looks would have slept with a Florida alligator to get their name in lights, Harry only wanted his at the top of a column in the Times.

  He enjoyed the sun and the girls but Miami wasn’t his town; not with Upstate New York and Upper Park Avenue so close behind him. The opposite poles of the American Dream disturbed him; but not too much because he had his job and Carol Ralston, a dark and beautiful girl with Spanish ancestry way back, who was content to go on dreary assignments with him, wait for him while he banged out stories on a decrepit portable, feed him when he turned up starving after a day chasing hunches, and make passionate but unconsummated love in the back of his second-hand Chev.

  Her father was in his late fifties, an executive with a Chicago company trying to undercut the contractors tendering for the high-rise hotels and apartment blocks creeping along the beach as if they were trying to keep out the sea. Harry thought the family had it made, that their house with its Spanish arches and drapes of bourgainvillea was permanent; that the ice in the cocktail-hour drinks would tinkle for ever. He hadn’t learned that happiness and security is on a mortgage; nor did he know that Carol Ralston’s father despised the mean work he was doing and would have quit if it hadn’t been for his debts.

  One sweltering day a half-built apartment block for which John Ralston’s company had submitted the lowest tender collapsed killing two workmen. Files in Chicago containing records of Ralston’s opposition to the deal were destroyed and he took the blame.

  One month later John Ralston shot himself through the roof of his mouth with a Smith & Wesson.

  The subsequent family pattern was similar to that followed by Bridges and his mother; the combination of the two was to deeply affect his values for the rest of his life. Miami is no place for the impoverished widow of a suicide branded a homicidal racketeer and Mrs. Ralston departed with her daughter to the Chicago suburb where she had once embarked on a glittering future with her young and ambitious husband.

  If Carol Ralston had stayed in Miami Harry might have married her and one day moved to an apartment in Manhattan. But lasting devotion owes much to circumstances and, although the letters continued for more than a year, and although Harry managed one visit to Chicago, their passion didn’t survive.

  Meanwhile Harry returned to night school, learned French and German, and plagued his head office with requests to join the foreign staff. Finally they capitulated after he had filed two exclusive political stories said to be the source of acute embarrassment in Washington – the acme of journalistic distinction. And, as is the way with the house decisions of the Press, they dispatched him to a South American bureau where neither French nor German was of much use. So he learned Spanish.

  From there he went to South Africa and then to the Middle East where he assaulted the Arabic language.

  From Beirut he was frequently taken to areas devastated by Israeli jets and commandos. Conscientiously, he filed factual reports of what he saw without attempting to interpret or moralise because he knew the A.P. would be receiving reports from the Israeli side and could circulate balanced versions of the conflict.

  Then he got the newspaper job; the paper had a style of its own and Bridges had to comply. Thus he described more emotionally the victims of war, realising again that everything he filed would be equated with reports from Israel. If he had been in Israel he would have acted the same way describing the Palestinian attacks and bomb outrages. Harry Bridges was a non-involved professional.

  But there was a persistent query in his life. He wasn’t sure whether it was a strength or a weakness. He wanted to see how communism worked. When he presented it to himself as a strength he told himself: Any self-respecting foreign correspondent operating in a world dominated by capitalism and communism should see both sides of the coin. When he suspected weakness he confessed that, in the light of his experience, equality and common endeavour had a certain allure.

  One day, when heat was bouncing off the concrete and splintering on the sea, he was joined on the verandah of a Beirut hotel, where he was drinking arak, by a Russian correspondent. They had talked before and Harry had expressed a desire to visit the Soviet Union.

  The Russian, named Suslov, ordered a vodka, uncharacteristically made a long drink out of it with tonic and ice, and said: “How are things, Harry?” Like many of his kind he spoke English with an American accent.

  “So so,” Bridges told him. “I’m getting bored with Beirut. It’s too much like Miami.”

  “You’d prefer a more Spartan life?”

  “Maybe. Not too Spartan. I’m growing soft.”

  Suslov, a pale man with soft brown hair whose skin peeled in the sun, considered this. He drank thirstily and said: “No, not too Spartan. Moscow isn’t too Spartan. At least not for the correspondents of Western Newspapers.”

  “Great,” Bridges said. “Except that my paper hasn’t asked me to go to Moscow.”

  “Not yet,” Suslov remarked, ordering another vodkatonic and an arak for Bridges.

  “You know something that I don’t?”

  “Perhaps.” Suslov peeled a little skin from his nose. “I do know that your representative in Moscow has been recalled.”

  “The hell he has. Are you sure? He was doing pretty good.”

  “Quite sure. Perhaps he was doing too well.”

  “You mean the Russians have told him he can’t stay, not that his paper’s recalled him?”

  “Something like that. I’m not in full possession of the facts.”

  Suslov examined his fingernails while Bridges absorbed the information. Bridges stared across the Mediterranean where the Soviet
and Western navies were chasing each other around.

  After a while he asked: “What makes you think my paper will want me to go to Russia? I don’t even speak Russian,” he added.

  “Let’s put it this way,” Suslov said. “As is well known, no Western journalist can get accreditation in Moscow without the consent of the Soviet authorities. Now your paper hasn’t made itself too popular in Kremlin circles. Supposing every name put forward was rejected until yours came up?”

  Bridges gazed at Suslov in astonishment. “Why should your people want me in Moscow?”

  Suslov said: “Perhaps because your reporting has been objective. It has been noted.” He fished the lemon from his drink and bit it daintily. “Believe it or not, that’s all we seek.”

  “Except, of course, that objective reporting is open to several interpretations.”

  Suslov shrugged. “If your name was submitted, would you take the job?”

  “I wouldn’t have any choice,” Bridges said. He gazed around the rich, somnolent city; it reminded him of a gorged millionaire who has dined heavily, belched and gone to sleep. He had a vision of a snow-clean city free of graft and corruption; of pine-covered hills on which skis sang a lonely song.

  Two months later he was in Moscow.

  * * *

  He took over a big apartment in Kutuzovsky with a maid, interpreter, telex and an incoming Tass machine stuttering monotonously in the office.

  He toured the Western cocktail circuit and soon got bored with the scared, stuffy diplomats who talked as though the olive in every vodka martini was bugged. He was handed an exclusive by the Russians – an interview with a defector from the States – and earned the hostility of the other Western correspondents.

  Out of perversity he broke Rule No. I and had an affair with a Russian girl. He waited fatalistically to be compromised but nothing happened. No photographs, no accusation that the girl was under age, no police bursting into the bedroom. In fact, he and the girl spent a delightful summer on the river beaches of Moscow and in his bed.