by Joyce Wayne
Her question startled me. “I stand no chance of making it out of here without being caught. You’d track me down and then I’d be in trouble.”
Irina tied a wool scarf around her curls. The cabin grew colder every minute. “Don’t be so certain. Two women, alone, we’d find someone to take us in. We could hide until the spring melt.”
Irina was testing me. She would report back to Zabotin if I agreed.
“You have no idea how bad conditions are back home,” she whispered. “You won’t survive.”
For a moment, I considered she was telling me the truth. I was her ticket to freedom if we managed to escape in the dead of night in the middle of this frozen wasteland. I reached into my purse for Fuchs’ drawings. Nunn May could deliver the plutonium himself, but the sample was worthless without the diagrams. Undoubtedly Zabotin would be blamed for my disappearance and he’d abandon Vine. They would be imprisoned or worse, as soon as they returned to the Soviet Union.
“Is Nunn May flying with us to London?” I asked, making it clear that I was determined to finish this mission and return to the Soviet Union.
“Yes. You’re travelling as man and wife. We’re staying overnight in Montreal at the Princess Elizabeth Hotel. Not even the Mounties will suspect you, such a well-heeled couple, with Dr. May, speaking in his best Canadian accent. Then we go on to Halifax and across the pond to London.”
Irina liked to imitate the English, but I was more concerned with Zabotin, who’d already altered our escape route. I’d understood that Vine would be accompanying me on the train to Halifax and then the flight to London. I still didn’t know where he was.
“I’ve never stayed in a fine hotel. Have you?” Irina asked.
“Oh yes,” I replied, leaving out the details.
“With Zabotin?”
She knew more than I suspected.
“At the Château Laurier. Many times.”
“He admires you,” Irina whispered. “Lucky girl.” Irina acted as if she hadn’t mentioned her intention to escape.
“Is that why you are here, to ensure my luck holds?”
“In a manner of speaking. It’s more that Zabotin wants to ensure your safety. Harry Vine will meet us in Halifax. It’s safer than in Montreal, where he’s known to the RCMP. I’ll be travelling with him, posing as his wife. Two fine-looking couples off to England.”
“Two bourgeois couples, dressed in mink and cashmere,” I joked, but Soviet Irina didn’t respond.
I fell asleep a little more confident that Zabotin would keep his word and that Irina’s escape plan was just a momentary lapse in judgment.
The sun didn’t rise until after 8:30 a.m. Jack Brown lit the fire, and the room filled with smoke. Everyone was wearing the same clothes from the night before, although we were now entirely coated in a fine layer of soot. He carried in two pails of snow, which he melted on the stove. A bar of carbolic soap was floating in one bucket and we were invited to wash our face and hands in the icy water.
Coffee was brewed with the melted snow from the other bucket. “The lumberjack method,” Brown remarked, throwing a handful of coarsely ground chicory into a pot of water.
Our driver went out to start the Pontiac and kept it running until we were ready to depart. “I make it warm for ladies,” he said with uncharacteristic politeness.
Irina brushed my hair and pinned it up around my face like a halo. I looked like a Hollywood star, at least from the shoulders up. She fixed her hair in the same style, only hers was longer and not dry and frizzy as my dyed hair was. No matter that she’d slept on the floor in her clothes in a freezing cabin in the bush, she was a beautiful woman, young and vibrant.
Nunn May ate his oats and asked Brown if there was tea. Our host ignored him, and when Nunn May grimaced, the driver passed him his flask.
The scientist ignored the offer and walked over to where I sat waiting to leave. He reached into his suit pocket and handed me a tiny capsule of plutonium embedded in a titanium locket. I placed the locket over my head and snapped shut the clasp. On one side of the locket was a picture of Masha; on the other, plutonium. Irina made certain that the clasp was closed. She asked me if the drawings were in my handbag and I assured her that they were. No one bothered to bid goodbye to our host.
The snowstorm had stopped during the night, so we hiked to the car without being tied to ropes. The snow was up to my knees. In the Pontiac, Nunn May joined me in the backseat, while the driver and Irina rode upfront. Irina was animated. She confessed that she loved the great northern shield, the limestone, the pine trees and the wildlife. She felt sorry that I’d never have the opportunity to explore it. Four car lengths, out in the field, a red fox was keeping pace with us. We crept behind a farmer’s Massey Ferguson tractor with a snowplow attached to the front. The back end of the tractor sprayed slush over our windshield, but our Russian driver said it was safer to follow the plow than try to make tracks after yesterday’s heavy snowfall.
On the radio, we heard that Fred Rose was refusing to vacate his office on Parliament Hill. The Mounties encircled it, and two officers held guns to Fred and Sybil’s heads. Everyone else had been evacuated from the building. Louis St. Laurent, the Minister of Justice, was standing outside Parliament beside a statue of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. The Justice Minister was quoted as saying he vowed “to punish Rose and others of his ilk for spying for a foreign power.” No one from the Soviet Embassy was available for comment.
About half way to Montreal, we began careening down the rocky hilled road to the flatlands beside the St. Lawrence River. The driver was drinking from his flask. The road was covered in black ice and the three of us were holding onto the passenger straps above the windows. Irina was becoming increasingly fidgety. She opened and closed the latch on her handbag over and over. Finally she begged the driver to stop. She needed to pee, she said. At first, he refused, but when I joined in, he agreed. He pulled off the highway, onto a dirt road, leading to a farmhouse surrounded by a fence constructed entirely of rocks.
“I’ll go into the farmhouse,” she said, but the driver held her back.
“Plenty of space. Go behind the bushes,” he ordered.
“Okay, okay!” she said, as she grew increasingly frantic. “Let me go.”
The doors of the car would only open if the driver unlocked them.
“Could we stretch our legs?” Nunn May asked.
There were no lights burning in the farmhouse and the fields were bare with bunches of brown mullions peaking up above the mounds of melting snow. A scarecrow left over from the summer harvest was pressed against the frozen earth.
Irina, who was sitting beside the driver, told the scientist to be quiet. She turned to look at me, motioned to the door handle, but I shook my head. The second the driver extinguished the engine, Irina leaped from the car and began running across the field toward the rock fence. When she fell, she picked herself up and continued running. It was after four in the afternoon and a dusky gloom was settling over the grey landscape. She was serious about wanting to stay in Canada. Nunn May and I got out of the car to watch her escape. I wanted her to break free
The driver shouted at her in Russian, ordering her to stop, but she kept going, never looking back. From under his seat, he pulled a rifle, aimed and shot at Irina, piercing her shoulder. She tumbled forward, staggering to keep on. The next bullet pierced the back of her head and she fell forward in the snow. We could see the bright red blood streaming across the grey snow. I wanted to check if she was alive, to get her to a hospital, but the driver motioned us into the car with his rifle. Nunn May and I leaned against the doors, unsteady on our feet. “What have you done?” I screamed.
“Get in car,” the driver ordered, pointing the end of the barrel in my face.
I stood my ground beside the car, not willing to abandon her. “Please,” I begged the driver. “If she’s alive.”
Nunn May was stunned into silence.
The driver placed the rifle next to
my temple. “Get in car,” he ordered again.
Nunn May tugged at my arm and pushed me into the back seat of the Pontiac. Neither of us spoke. I grabbed for Nunn May’s hand, but he pulled away. The Russian continued driving until we reached the outskirts of Montreal. “No one discover her ‘til spring melt when won’t be much left to find,” said the driver. “The bears.”
For years, I’d been pushing the danger out of my mind, trying to keep the fear at bay. Of course, I understood that I put my informants in harm’s way, but I never believed I would be punished, or worse. I still wanted to be the invincible girl who rushed the waves in Lake Ontario, who swam until she couldn’t catch her breath. If the driver could do away with Irina without a moment’s thought, what about Nunn May or me, why not get rid of us now that the plutonium was in hand? Just tear the locket from around my neck and be done with us. And what about Vine? He was to meet me, to travel alongside Irina. How could I save him, if I couldn’t protect myself?
“Where’s Vine?” I asked. My voice shook. “Are we meeting him in Montreal? Do you expect him to travel on his own?”
The driver remained silent. He parked the car at a Texaco station, retrieved an over-sized Eaton’s bag from the trunk and handed it to me, without speaking. Inside was a full-length mink coat with a matching pillbox hat. Nothing was forgotten, even a hatpin attached by a pink pearl to the veil.
I was instructed to remove the flat-soled winter boots Zabotin gave me at the embassy and replace them with fashionable ankle booties trimmed with fur that matched my mink. The driver took a diamond wedding ring from his pocket and put it on my finger. “You look nice, like married woman.” He’d murdered Irina, not an hour earlier.
To Nunn May, the driver handed a camel-haired coat, matching fedora and polished brown brogues. We changed in the service station washrooms. In our coat pockets were new passports. As Irina predicted, Nunn May and I were travelling as a Canadian husband and wife to London. Dr. and Mrs. Craig Asselstine, from Toronto. The doctor was attending an infectious disease conference in London. Under no circumstances was I to remove the locket or the diamond ring, and Nunn May was to “talk with Canadian voice.”
I asked the driver again when we would be meeting Harry Vine and this time, he admitted, we wouldn’t. We weren’t going to Halifax. “Plans change. You meet Vine in Moscow. No problem.”
I sunk into my seat. No problem for him.
Nunn May remained silent beside me. This time he grabbed my hand in his clammy one, and I didn’t pull away. At this point I didn’t know if Zabotin was running me, or the GRU was directing him. In any case, there was no one to blame for this disastrous turn of events but myself.
Chapter Twenty-Two
At the hotel desk the driver asked the clerk for adjoining rooms. Nunn May and I in one room, posing as the doctor and his wife, and he in the other. He declined help from the porter with my small case and Nunn May’s larger one, carrying both up the elevator himself.
The room was on the sixteenth floor, high enough to view the city of Montreal, the mountain and the St. Lawrence River. In truth, I had no idea where Vine was, if he was travelling alone to Halifax, as Irina believed, or if he would meet me in Moscow. It was possible that Zabotin had concocted this mission to trick me.
“Do you know what will happen in London? How will we make it through customs?” I asked Nunn May. “The Canadians must have alerted the Brits by now. They must realize we are missing.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said, steadying his voice.
In the hotel room there was one double bed and two upholstered chairs. Nunn May reclined on the chair and offered me the bed. I hung my mink coat in the closet and removed my boots. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I could see the traces of soot from the night before smeared across my forehead and my chin. My hands were covered in the same black grime.
In the washroom, there was an array of expensive soaps, shampoos and thick towels. I undressed, throwing my filthy clothes in a pile on the floor. In the shower, I turned on the water as hot as it would go, until I felt it might scald my skin, but I didn’t cry. If I did I would be done.
After changing, I suggested to Nunn May we head down to the dining room for a bite. It was Murray’s, a small restaurant chain serving traditional English food. I knew it from previous assigments in Montreal.
“I don’t believe that’s possible. We’re not to leave,” he said, handing me the room service menu. “Are you actually hungry?” He was surprised that I could eat after what had happened to Irina. How could he know that I’d seen worse in Nesvicz?
“This could be our last good meal for some time. You’d best take full advantage,” I advised.
We both ordered T-bone steaks rare, with Caesar salads, baked potatoes and lemon meringue pie. Nunn May suggested wine and I didn’t object. When the bellhop arrived with the rolling table for our meal, he dropped coins in his hand and the boy grinned. The steak was perfectly done and the wine full-bodied and aromatic.
“My roots are already showing a tiny bit,” I said, touching the locket around my neck. Both of us were dead tired but tried to keep up a conversation during dinner. “Why do you do it?” I asked. “You could be in England, safe and sound, working on atomic theory rather than sitting here with me, wondering if you’ll be detained at Heathrow or if you’ll even be alive tomorrow.”
Nunn May stretched his long legs under the table. He was reclining on the chair. I used the bed as a bench.
“Look,” he said. “Heisenberg was a hair’s breath away from building the bomb in Germany. If he’d been successful, the Nazis would have won the war. Heisenberg failed because the Dane Niels Bohr refused to come over to the German side when Heisenberg invited him. He wouldn’t budge even after the Wehrmacht offered him free rein in the laboratory with a gargantuan budget. You know, Bohr did the foundational work on atomic structure and quantum theory. Without him, the Manhattan Project wouldn’t exist.”
I cut into my steak. “I can’t stop imagining Irina’s face as she fell in the snow,” I said. “We only saw her from behind.”
“Try not to think about what happened,” Nunn May advised. He relied on science to keep sane. He saw himself as an ethical man, a hero like Bohr. During the war every man I met wanted to be a hero, particularly those who weren’t on the battlefield. My choices were limited. If I contacted Zabotin to tell him about Irina, he’d only order me to continue. One life was expendable for this mission.
“I met him, you know, in London,” Nunn May said. “In 1939, Bohr did the right thing, the only thing a civilized man could do.”
“Do you believe that’s what you’re doing now?” I asked. “For Bohr it was a choice between FDR and Hitler. Your choice is Stalin.”
“Truman is no FDR,” Nunn May countered. “I’m surprised at you, Freda, if I may call you that. Zabotin assured me you’ve been on our side since the Party was founded in Canada.”
“You could put it that way. Is that all Zabotin reported about me?”
“I’m a scientist, Freda,” he replied, avoiding my question. “It’s my responsibility to ensure that the atomic bomb is never used as a threat against the Soviet Union.”
“Of course,” I said. “And you trust Stalin not to exercise the bomb against his enemies?”
“Yes, I do. Entirely. I’ve come too far to change my mind. I was at Los Alamos before Chalk River, and at the Cambridge-based nuclear lab before that. Only the equilibrium between world powers will stop an all-out nuclear confrontation. Nuclear deterrence. The Manhattan Project has made it all too easy to destroy our planet.”
“Stalin could use the bomb against the West,” I countered.
“The Soviet Union must be able to defend itself. You appear to have forgotten the Americans have already used it.”
I pushed my dinner plate away. There were scraps of bone sitting in congealed fat. Nunn May was like Grierson, naïve and trusting. He’d never lived in Russia. He didn’t know what happens
to people on the battlefield. He’d concocted an alibi, in his own mind, for Irina’s death, no matter how spurious. Somewhere along the line, so many comrades convinced themselves that a single life was expendable. Brilliant as he was, Nunn May was no different. His dream of a world run by the proletariat was the ultimate goal. If someone as insignificant as Irina died, so be it.
After the wine bottle was empty, he pulled two chairs together, took down the extra pillow and blanket from the closet and settled in. “I’m married,” he said by way of explanation. He was the only man I’d ever spent the night with in a hotel room who didn’t intend to share the bed with me.
I could have told him then that Zabotin was playing both sides against the middle and that our mission was much more complicated that he’d been led to believe, but the driver was in the adjoining room and probably listening in. He wouldn’t hesitate to shoot us if forced to and find another means of getting the plutonium and the atomic diagrams to Russia.
The room was warm, but I was shivering. Nunn May pulled a blanket over my shoulders and looked down at me sitting cross-legged on the bed.
“Look, I used to believe in the purity of science—science for science sake. Progress. Positivism. That’s what I was trained to believe. But these eighteenth-century ideas have not stood the test of time. Not after two world wars and millions dead. Science must be based on ideology.”
I pulled the blanket tightly around my neck and touched the titanium locket. My handbag with Fuchs’ drawings was tucked beside me, concealed under the bedspread. I wanted to turn off the light and sleep, but Nunn May needed to defend himself.
“Everything is political, science more so than anything. The twentieth century will go down in history as the epic battle between ideologies. Fascism versus democracy. Capitalism versus Communism. Releasing energy by splitting atoms is political. We must endeavour to do right for the majority of people. Atomic power can liberate humankind, or destroy it.”
I switched off the light. Nunn May’s reasoning was a refrain I would hear over and over until the meltdown at Chernobyl, when no one made arguments like that anymore.
