by Joyce Wayne
“Now, now,” Ellery chimed in. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So far it is all conjecture. Homer doesn’t know for certain how far the Americans have gotten decrypting the Soviet code. Perhaps Venona is something of a ruse. Homer seems to be having a bit of a break down. Perhaps he’s over-playing the danger.”
With that he tried to ignore his wife’s calls from the bedroom. “Let’s wait and see what Zabotin says. Let’s make prudent decisions,” Ellery continued. “If you would contact Zabotin today, Miss Linton, I’d be grateful. Warn him. Find out how much information he’s garnered about the bomb. Possibly he can commandeer this defector, this man Gouzenko in the embassy, before anything critical leaks out. Defectors are the worst kind of people.”
“I have contacted him and I’m waiting for his response, but you must mean send Gouzenko back to Moscow before he can do any harm? He’ll be executed first thing,” I reminded them.
Ellery and Grierson exchanged glances, but they did not dispute my claim. Stalin’s enemies, the disappeared, were dragged from their slumber in the middle of the night and charged with treason—if only they could talk. I wondered if Grierson and Ellery knew about the show trials where every prisoner was found guilty. They must. Siberia became an enormous prison camp dotted with thousands upon thousands of graveyards, a nowhere land where the falsely accused were sent to perish. “If Zabotin returns to Russia, he’ll be held accountable as well.”
Ellery nodded in agreement. He clenched his fists and looked down to avoid my gaze. He invited his wife to join us as we moved into the dining room. Patsy became subdued once she was allowed to speak with her husband. She wore a ruffled, champagne-tinted peignoir with the top three buttons of the gown undone. I could see her breasts popping through the ruffles. After a meal of vichyssoise, and smoked ham and cheddar cheese quiche, I was escorted back to Ottawa.
There was no sign of Vine when I arrived at the flat. This time I wondered if he’d fled without me. He’d have escaped through Quebec, up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec City, where he’d book passage on a ship that would carry him across the ocean to the Baltic Sea, and then home. This time he would be travelling alone.
Chapter Fifteen
Sunday morning
September 2, 1945
Ottawa
During the early hours of the morning it stormed, a torrential Ottawa Valley downpour with the branches of the trees tearing at the latch of my bedroom window until it broke open. Rain seeped onto the floor. Shards of lightening, followed by bellowing thunder, turned the night into a violent display of natural force. The electricity went out. I hid under the covers.
After the storm passed, a waft of fresh, dry air streamed into my room. I turned the covers down and inhaled as if it was my first breath. The air smelled sweetly of the green Gatineau Hills on the other side of the river in Quebec. I wondered how Grierson and the Ellerys had weathered the harshest storm of the summer. I imagined Patsy Ellery wandering the rocky shore of Pink Lake under the booming crackles of thunder with a bottle of gin in her shaky hand.
I’d hardly slept during the night. Vine hadn’t called. I considered going to the Party office to see if Zabotin had arranged a drop for me, but thought better of it. What if Gouzenko had already defected?
Instead I took down the wireless transmitter, stored in a suitcase on the top shelf of my closet, behind a box of hair curlers, to send Zabotin a two-line coded message. Meet me at 3 p.m. at the railway station bar, it read. Then I waited. It was impossible for me to fathom what Zabotin would do next, if he’d attempt to talk sense into Gouzenko, or if he’d confront him to frighten him into giving up. I secretly hoped he would alert the Director immediately and be done with the cipher clerk.
My options were limited. Being without Zabotin or Vine to lean on forced me to imagine what it would be like without them. Refreshing, like the northern breeze at my window, but lonely. For hours I felt that I was living in a bubble, disconnected from the tangible objects surrounding me. The desk was not real. The chair, a figment of my imagination. I could melt objects with a touch of my hand. I forced myself to drink a cup of black tea and settle down.
When the transmitter sounded with Zabotin’s reply, I dressed. He would meet me at three at the agreed location. I figured that the train station would be close to empty, but when I arrived tourists were milling around aimlessly.
Zabotin met me at the entrance to the darkened bar. We sat at a table in the far corner of the room above the tracks where the trains pulled into the station. He ordered two double martinis and a plate of warm olives, as he always did. From the second-floor bar, we peered down at the tourists standing at the ticket wicket, clutching their children with one hand and their overstuffed suitcases with the other. How I wished to be one of them.
The tall lead-paned windows in the station were closed after last night’s storm and the air inside was still sultry. Across the road from the station stood the immense Canadian Pacific Hotel, the Château Laurier. For years, Zabotin and I met behind the walls of that great pile of stone, marble and northern Quebec timber. It was the most beautiful building I’d known. There were mirrors lining the great halls and when I looked at myself, I felt beautiful and important, as if I were making a difference. I assured myself that Zabotin and I were on the right side of history and we would come through the war as good, conscientious people in a spectacularly improved world. I thought of myself, then, as a decent person who did what I did for a just cause. We all did, at the time. Until everything changed.
That afternoon in the station bar, Zabotin didn’t act like a good person. He was not in an agreeable mood. At first we smoked cigarettes instead of talking. When Zabotin stubbed out his cigarette to speak, it was to order me to attend the Labour Day celebration. “Cancelling the event is the worst thing we can do,” he said gruffly. “The celebration will be held at the Gouzenko’s as planned. We must behave as if nothing is awry, as if we know nothing about the stolen cables. No cause for suspicion. Correct?”
“I don’t see why we must meet at the Gouzenkos’ apartment. Having us all there at once. It’s too dangerous. What if he alerts the authorities?”
“He won’t. I’ve spoken to him.”
“He has the cables? Is it him?” I wanted to trust Zabotin, but I couldn’t help myself from checking that his story hadn’t changed.
“Yes, it is Gouzenko,” Zabotin said. ”Don’t look so shocked. We knew it would happen one day. That we’d be betrayed.”
“We did, but I didn’t think it would be that little worm.”
“I already know that Homer believes that the Americans are decrypting the Soviet wartime code. The project is called Venona. When the Nazis lost the war and their necks were on the line, they turned over the encryption key to the FBI. That was the bargain between them, the Americans and the Nazis.” Zabotin had a funny way of telling the truth, as if he’d invented it.
“Ellery wants you to understand that Homer is coming undone. If the FBI discovers that you’ve been sending his reports from the Joint Committee on Atomic Advances to Moscow, you’re done for,” I said as calmly as I could. “Ellery knows so much, too much for my taste, and he’s hinting Homer will break down if he’s interrogated.”
Zabotin ordered another martini. “ I’m not concerned about Ellery or what he thinks. We used him when we needed him. Now his career is on the line. I could betray him, and Grierson.” The rezident looked smug.
“Why would you do that?”
“He’s not useful to us anymore.”“
“Useful—I loathe that word,” I said.
“The situation is more complicated than it first appeared. As you guessed, I’m holding back Fuchs’ drawings from Moscow. I’m only trying to protect you. As for Homer’s information, I’m not even certain our Gouzenko has his hands on Homer’s transmissions. I might have kept them out of the cipher room. For my eyes only. What he saw wasn’t very important. I made certain of it. I wanted Gouzenko to have only so much infor
mation.”
Zabotin was vague about details but certain of final outcomes.
“When we were at the safe house, you tried to convince me that Homer’s cables were of utmost importance and that they’d been stolen,” I said.
“Things change,” Zabotin said curtly. He wanted to keep me off balance, shooting at a target shrouded in shadows and fully reliant on his direction. “Keep in mind that Homer did not transmit the technical drawings of the atom bomb. Yes, he kept Moscow updated on the progress at Los Alamos. Yes, he could tell the GRU and the NKVD about the amount of uranium used in the Little Boy bomb, but not the exact formula. He doesn’t have the new drawings for Fat Man and now he won’t receive them, at least not from me.” He was hedging. Not wanting me to see the picture as clearly as he did.
“But you have the formula for Fat Man,” I said. “Vine brought Fuchs’ formula with drawings back from New Mexico.”
“Of course, but I didn’t pass the drawings to Moscow, as I’ve already confessed to you. Gouzenko never saw the drawings. From Homer’s information, the Americans were predicting the number of bombs their factory could build—and from that, the Director would know how many the Soviets needed to build to keep pace with them. Tit for tat,” he said. “I still hold the key to building those bombs. The all-important drawings.”
“Why didn’t you send them to Moscow?” Zabotin was clever. By that time, he realized what mattered were the drawings. What shocked me was how easily he was slipping into a different persona. As the embassy’s rezident, his ultimate duty was to ensure the Soviet Union would have its own atomic arsenal before it became impossible to catch the Americans in the race to world domination.
Zabotin looked at me closely. “Do you wish to survive, my darling? If you do, you must never repeat a word of this to anyone, not to Vine and certainly not to Grierson.”
I drank my martini. I was more terrified than I’d ever been, more than when I was standing in the Vine’s kitchen back in Nesvicz afraid that Zabotin would hurt me.
“I interrogated Gouzenko and I extracted a promise from him,” said Zabotin. “He’ll defect the day after Labour Day. To be exact, in the early morning hours following the celebration. If he refuses, I’ll have our boys pick him up before he can get to the Canadian police.”
“Couldn’t Gouzenko run now?” Zabotin was certain about how it would play out, but I wasn’t so convinced. “How do you know he hasn’t already?”
Zabotin lit a fresh cigarette with the one he was finishing. “Freda, you must understand that Gouzenko has a wife and child. I have his apartment building surrounded.”
I took another cigarette from Zabotin and waited for him to light it.
“The information in his stolen papers is essentially dribble,” he sighed. “It’s enough to incriminate us, but the papers don’t reveal what Moscow really wants. They are Vine’s overblown reports of my operation in Ottawa.”
“Why do you call them overblown?” I asked.
“By the time the Director received Vine’s reports, they were old news. The only piece he wants is the nuclear one. The ins and outs of Canadian Parliament are not that shocking.”
“So why bother with us at all? Have me squeezing information out of petty bureaucrats?” So many wasted years. “Why bring me here from Toronto?”
“Grierson, of course. We needed him.”
“And now?”
Zabotin took a drag on his cigarette. Little people milled around below us. Some were eating sandwiches and drinking milk. They had no idea, no idea. More than ever I wished to go home, back to Nesvicz.
Zabotin placed his good hand on my knee. “You must understand how this will work,” he said. “I ordered Gouzenko never to keep a copy of Homer’s cables in the embassy safe. I made certain of that by making my own handwritten copies and destroying the originals. When he’s debriefed, he’ll remember little of the exact details in Homer’s notes. What he’ll say to the Canadian authorities is that Zabotin was receiving information from a high-placed mole in Washington. That’s all.”
Zabotin’s confidence in his plan told me that he‘d been planning this escapade for months, to trap Gouzenko, who was the most vulnerable person at the embassy. When did he decide to go over to the other side, if that was what Zabotin was doing, after devoting his life to the cause of Marxism and the Soviet state? “Are we safe?” I asked him.
“Don’t be silly. We’re never safe. With or without Homer’s cables both the Canadians and the Russians will want my head, certainly yours and your comrades. Our operation will be exposed and eventually Canada will be forced to take action, however reluctant its sleepy prime minister is.” He looked directly into my eyes. “I’m going to need your help to pull this off. You, too, can make it out of this mess.”
“I’m listening.”
“Your sister, Masha, is alive,” Zabotin said, letting the information sit with me before he continued. “She lives in Kiev.”
“How do you know this?” My eyes clouded over with tears. Masha. Alive.
Zabotin took his handkerchief from his pocket, but I pushed it away. “How do you know?”
“The other night you begged me to help you find your family, so I began the search. She survived.”
“How?”
“Masha remained in Nesvicz. She wasn’t far when the Germans invaded. My family helped her. Without the Zabotins she would have perished as the others did.”
“My mama and papa? My brother, Simcha?” I was wringing my hands.
“I have no idea about them,” he said gently, lifting my hands to his lips. “You can repay me now, for Masha, for all the count and countess did to keep her alive. I need your promise you will not say a word of this to anyone. Not one word about how Gouzenko came to defect. And there is more.”
“What do you need?” I asked, praying that he would leave me be, if just for a minute. I wished to contact Masha, and figure out how I could return to the Soviet Union to be with her.
“You’ve always been clever,” Zabotin said. “Think this through. This is the last mission I will assign you.”
He was forcing me to hold my tongue and to contain my excitement over his news. If Masha was alive, perhaps the others were as well. A million questions welled up inside up, the first being how I could travel to Kiev. I wanted to leave that very day but I understood the game. God knows, I’d been in it long enough to never expect Zabotin’s help until I performed for him. I must stick to the issue at hand and make his plans succeed.
“Where are Fuchs’ drawings?” I asked.
“I have them,” he told me. “If I send them to Moscow now, if Stalin sees them, there will be a war, the magnitude of which we’ve never imagined—a war of total destruction. Comrade Stalin will never hold back, not after what Russia sacrificed to beat back the Germans, and to stay in power. You must agree to join me. You know about the purges and the show trials and the gulags. We all do. We just can’t admit they are real, how our grand experiment has gone wrong. Everyone we admired back home is dead. I haven’t told you, but my brothers are missing, probably sent to the gulags. If Stalin didn’t murder my friends in the Party before the war, the Nazis finished the job. It’s over.” Zabotin drew hard on his cigarette before extinguishing it.
At that moment, I couldn’t distinguish with certainty if Zabotin was betraying his country or if it was something beyond loyalty to one ideology that drove him. Russia had turned into Stalin’s nightmare, fraught with paranoia, an open wound emitting blood and pus. I thought about my own family and how they must have suffered first from the Soviet regime and then from the Germans. Masha would tell me everything once I found her, no matter how painful, and she would forgive me for deserting her and little Simcha, along with our beautiful mother and proud father.
For years they were my private concern and my shame. No matter how many times I convinced myself that what I did for the struggle was admirable, acts of bravery and principle, the gnawing doubt that I agreed to the Party’s t
erms to feed my own desire for recognition, never disappeared.
I looked down to see Oleg standing at the foot of the stairs. I figured that if I didn’t agree to Zabotin’s terms, he’d take me back to the embassy for questioning. I must support Zabotin. If it was true the count and countess helped Masha to live, I owed him that.
“What about Nunn May? Didn’t Vine mention the scientist in his reports?” I asked, trying to focus on what I needed to do.
“I’ll have Nunn May out of Canada as soon as possible. It will take some time for the Canadian authorities to put two and two together. In Vine’s reports there are snippets from the scientists at Chalk River, not much, but enough to implicate Nunn May.” Zabotin’s demeanour toward me changed. He knew he had me. “Together we can pull this off. ”
“What will happen to us?” My life was in his hands.
“Moscow will react to Gouzenko’s defection by recalling me. The Americans will have Homer’s cables if or when Venona decodes them. The crisis will escalate, that is for sure, beyond Nunn May or you and me. The Director will blame me,” he said, pounding his own chest. “He will want to interrogate me in the Lubyanka. I’ll perish there and Lydia can put flowers on my grave.” Zabotin shrugged. “If Venona takes more time, six months or a year, as I believe it will, Moscow will zero in on Gouzenko and the release of his worthless information. We will be able to buy some time. We might be able to escape. Or better still, perhaps I can cut a deal with Moscow.”
“Do you want the Soviet Union to fail?” I asked him plainly and looked away.
Zabotin banged the table with his good hand, but thankfully the bar was deserted and not even the bartender took notice. “If I pleased, I could betray Gouzenko today and he’d be done for, but I don’t wish to. You know that. My men could pick him up and escort him back to Moscow tonight. I have all the evidence to show the Centre that he was about to defect. Instead I prefer to watch how my plan plays out,” he said, satisfied with himself and his manoeuvrings. “In my own way, I’ve given that little cipher clerk enough rope to hang himself. If he defects, he’ll never be a free man. He will spend the remainder of his days in Canadian jail or tucked away in a remote hiding place. If he doesn’t have the nerve, he’ll return to Russia where eventually the GRU will blame him for the loss of Fuchs’ drawings. It’s too bad. I always found him hilarious.”
