Almost before the aeroplane had stopped moving the pilot was out through the door waving a hand for Pike to hurry. ‘Is he all ready?’ the pilot said to Harvey, as if Pike couldn’t be trusted to speak for himself.
‘Set to go,’ Harvey confirmed. Ralph Pike threw his last unfinished cigar on to the ice. The pilot said, ‘He could practically walk across tonight. It’s ice all the way.’
‘It’s been done,’ said Harvey. ‘All you need is a rubber boat to cross the channels that boats have carved.’
‘I wouldn’t trust no rubber boat,’ the pilot said. He tucked Pike into the front passenger seat and strapped him in.
‘They’re just thirty feet wide, that’s all,’ said Harvey.
‘But about two wet miles deep,’ said the pilot. Then he smacked the motor cowling and said, ‘Wagons roll; next stop Moscow.’
We stood back and the motor started with a ripple of yellow fire. Harvey picked up the cigar butt with a tut tut of annoyance. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. We got into the car but I was still watching the plane. It hadn’t left the ice: an ugly skinny sort of structure that looked decidedly unsuitable for flying. It was heading away from me and I could see the twin yellow eyes of its exhaust which dilated as the plane changed its inclination and became airborne. A gust of wind caught it and it slid towards the ground, but only for a moment or so. Then it lifted a little higher, flattened out and set a course at sub-radar altitude.
Harvey was watching the plane too. ‘Next stop Moscow,’ Harvey repeated sarcastically.
‘He could be right, Harvey,’ I said. ‘The Lubyanka Prison is in Moscow.’
Harvey said, ‘Are you mad at me?’
‘No, why?’
‘When you have second thoughts about the kind of business you’re in, you are inclined to bug the nearest person. Tonight I’m the nearest.’
‘I’m not trying to bug you,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said Harvey. ‘Because even if you are leaving we’ll still be working together.’
‘Leaving?’ I said.
‘Don’t snow me. You know that you’re leaving.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Well I’m sorry,’ Harvey said. ‘I thought you knew. The New York office wants you to do a short course.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Well I’m not sure about that.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Harvey,’ I said. ‘I’m not even quite sure who the hell we are working for.’
‘Well, we’ll talk about it later,’ Harvey said. ‘And tomorrow perhaps you’ll let me have a note of your expenses to date and I’ll let you have some money. Will five hundred and fifty dollars for work to date be OK?’
‘Fine,’ I said. I wondered if Dawlish would let me keep it.
‘That’s plus expenses of course.’
‘Of course.’
As we got to Kämp Hotel on the Esplanade Harvey stopped the car and got out. ‘You two take the car and go on home,’ he said through the window.
‘Where are you going?’ Signe asked from the rear seat.
‘Never mind where I’m going. You just do as you’re told.’
‘Yes, Harvey,’ said Signe. Then I moved into the driver’s seat and we drove on. I heard her fidgeting with her handbag.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m putting cream on my hands,’ she said. ‘That icy wind has made them rough, the hand-cream will soften them. I bet you can’t guess who I saw this afternoon. See how soft they are now.’
‘Don’t put your hands over my eyes while I’m driving, there’s a good girl.’
‘The one in the aeroplane. I let him pick me up at the Marski. I thought I would tell him how to spend his money.’
‘That cream,’ I said, ‘have you been putting it on your head?’
Signe laughed. ‘Do you know he pays five marks each for his cigars and if they go out he throws them away?’
‘Harvey?’ I asked in surprise.
‘No; that man. He says they taste bitter if they are relit.’
‘Does he?’ I said.
‘But the money wasn’t for him. That money we left in the taxi. He had to pay it into a blocked bank account. You have to be a foreigner to do that; I couldn’t do it.’
‘Really?’ I said. I swerved to avoid a solitary drunk who dreamily crossed the road backwards.
Signe said, ‘That man who just flew off in the aeroplane taught me some words of Latin.’
‘He does that to everyone.’
‘Don’t you want to hear them?’
‘Very much.’
‘Amo ut invenio. That means, “I love as I find.” He said that all the important things in life are said in Latin. Is that true? Do all Englishmen say the most important things in Latin?’
‘Only the ones who don’t relight five-mark cigars,’ I said.
‘Amo ut invenio. I’m going to start saying important things in Latin.’
‘If Harvey finds out, you’d better start saying “Please don’t blow your stack, Harvey” in Latin. You shouldn’t have even given a signal that you recognized that man. He hadn’t even come to rest.’*
‘Harvey is a terrible old bear lately. I hate him.’ A taxi-cab stopped alongside us at the traffic lights. There was a small-screen TV that some Helsinki taxis fit on to the back of the driving seat. A couple were necking and smiling and glowing with blue reflected light from the TV. Signe eyed them enviously. I watched her face in the rear-view mirror. ‘He’s a terrible old bear. He’s teaching me Russian and when I make a mistake with those awful adjectives he goes mad with rage. He’s a bear.’
‘Harvey’s all right,’ I said. ‘He’s not a bear, he’s not a saint; he has moods sometimes, that’s all.’
‘Just tell me one other person who has moods like him. Just tell me.’
‘There’s no one that has moods like him. That’s what makes people more interesting than machines; they’re all different.’
‘You men. You hang together.’
The lights changed and I let in the clutch. There was no arguing with Signe in her present frame of mind. ‘Who does all the cleaning and cooking and looking after?’ said Signe from the rear seat. ‘Who gets him out of trouble when the New York office is after his blood?’
‘You do,’ I said obediently.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do.’ Her voice went up three tones on the last words, she sniffed loudly and I heard the click of her handbag.
‘And all his money goes back to his wife.’ She sniffed.
‘Does it?’ I said with interest. She searched her handbag for the handkerchief, lipstick and eye pencil that are necessary parts of a woman’s grief. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That thirteen thousand dollars…’
‘Thirteen thousand dollars.’ My surprise gave her renewed energy.
‘Yes, that money that I took to the taxi rank this morning. That was taken by that man and sent to Mrs Newbegin’s account in San Antonio, Texas. Harvey doesn’t think I know that—it’s a secret—but I have ways of finding out. The New York office would like to know that little item of information, I’ll bet.’
‘Perhaps they would,’ I said. We had arrived outside the flats. I switched off the motor and turned round to her. She was leaning well forward in the rear seat. Her loose hair swung forward and enclosed her face like a pair of golden doors. She was wearing the coat with all the buttons and buckles that she had worn the first time I saw her outside Kaarna’s flat.
‘They would,’ she said. The sound came from inside the golden orb of hair. ‘And it’s not the first money that Harvey has embezzled.’
‘Wait a moment,’ I said gently. ‘You can’t throw accusations around without very firm proof of what you say.’ I waited, wondering if that would provoke her into further disclosures.
‘I’ll never throw accusations around,’ Signe sobbed. ‘I love Harvey,’ and little noises came out of the sphere of hair as if a canary was eating a hearty meal of see
ds.
‘Come along,’ I said. ‘There’s no man in the world worth crying for.’
She looked up and smiled dutifully through the tears. I gave her a large handkerchief. ‘Blow,’ I said.
‘I love him. He’s a fool but I would die for him.’
‘Yes,’ I said and she blew her nose.
We all had breakfast together the next morning. Signe had gone to a lot of trouble to make Harvey feel he was back home in America. There was a grapefruit, bacon, waffles, maple syrup, cinnamon toast and weak coffee. Harvey was in a good mood, balancing plates and saying, ‘This is something those Russkies do damn well’ and ‘pip pip’.
I said, ‘Just for your information, Harvey, no Englishman that I have met ever said “pip pip”.’
‘Is that right?’ said Harvey. ‘Well, when I played Englishmen on the stage they said “pip pip” nearly all the time.’
‘On the stage?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you had ever been on the stage.’
‘Well I wasn’t really an actor. I just barnstormed around after I left college. I was serious about acting in those days, but the hungrier I got the more my resolution sagged, until a guy I’d known at college talked me into a job with the Defense Department.’
‘I can’t imagine you as an actor,’ I said.
‘I can,’ Signe said. ‘He’s a cornball from way back.’ It was easy to recognize whole chunks of Harvey’s syntax in Signe’s speech.
Harvey smiled. ‘Boy, did we have great times. We were all so bad. The only guy who knew what he was doing was the manager, and we used to drive him out of his skull. Every morning the whole company would drag-arse on to the stage. He’d say, “You’re going to work your arses off today, the lot of you. Because I’m a tyrannous bastard. The critics are ignorant bastards, the audience mercurial bastards and you are incompetent bastards. The only legitimate thing around here is the theatre.” Every morning he said that. Every morning. Boy, was I happy in those days. I didn’t know it, that’s all.’
‘Aren’t you happy now?’ Signe asked in alarm.
‘Sure, hon, sure,’ Harvey put his arm around her and snuggled close.
‘Wipe your face,’ said Signe. ‘You’ve got peanut butter on your chin.’
‘Romantic broad, ain’t she?’ Harvey said.
‘Don’t call me a broad,’ said Signe. She took a playful swipe at his face, but Harvey caught it on the flat of his hand, then she struck at him with the palm of the other hand and they did a pat-a-cake routine. No matter how much Signe varied the speed, Harvey’s hand was up there providing a wall against which her hand smacked, until he snatched his hand away and she toppled into his arms.
Harvey said, ‘We have to talk business, hon, why don’t you run downtown and buy those shoes you need?’ He peeled a hundred-mark note from a big roll.
Signe took the money gleefully and ran out of the room shouting, ‘I can take a hint. I can take a hint,’ and laughing.
Harvey looked at his bankroll, and put it away slowly. When the door closed Harvey poured more coffee for us both, and said, ‘This has been a spectator sport for you so far, but now you are going to join the men.’
‘What does that entail?’ I said. ‘Circumcision?’
Harvey said, ‘All our operations are programmed on computers. Each stage of the operation is recorded on a tape machine and each operator reports the end of each stage to that machine and the machine will—providing all the agents on that scheme have also reported in—tell you the next stage.’
‘You mean you’re working for a calculating machine?’
‘We call it the Brain,’ said Harvey. ‘That’s how we can be so sure that no slip-ups occur. The machine correlates the reports of all the agents and then relays the next set of instructions. Each agent has a telephone number. He phones that number and obeys the recorded instructions he receives. If the message contains the word “Secure”, that means the words following make up the introductory identification of someone who will contact him and give him orders. For instance: if you phone the number and the tape machine says, “Take a plane to Leningrad. Secure. The face of the city has changed.” That means you fly to Leningrad and stick around for orders from someone who will introduce himself with the words, “The face of the city has changed.”’
‘I’ve got it,’ I said.
‘Good, because those were exactly the orders for both of us this morning. We both go. When the next stage is complete you will be phoning and getting your own instructions. Don’t tell me what they are. In fact, don’t tell anyone.’
‘OK.’
Harvey passed me two New York numbers on the Hanover exchange. ‘Remember those numbers, then burn that paper. The second number is for emergencies and I do mean emergencies, not running low on Kleenex. And always call collect. The phone charges can’t be drawn on your expenses.’
* * *
*Come to rest: The period in which you make sure that a person is not under surveillance. A man who has come to rest can safely be contacted. There is no set time that this expression covers: it lasts until you are sure the man has no tail or until you are sure he has. A man tailed or suspected is said to be ‘spitting blood’.
SECTION 4
Leningrad and Riga
There was a little man, and he had a little gun, And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead; He went to the brook, and shot a little duck, Right through the middle of the head, head, head.
NURSERY RHYME
Chapter 11
Leningrad is the halfway house between Asia and the Arctic. Normally it takes about six days to arrange a visit, even if you cable both ways. Harvey, however, had some way of speeding things, and we got the Aeroflot Ilyushin 18B evening flight from Helsinki just two days later. A Zim motor-car took us from the airport to the Europe Hotel which is just off the Nevsky Prospekt, the wide main street of Leningrad. Inside the hotel it looked as though the nine-hundred-day siege of World War Two was still going on. Pieces of broken plasterboard, old doors, tarpaulins and coils of rope had to be negotiated before we could get to the desk clerk. Harvey said he still had a temperature amd must have something to eat before he went to bed. The desk clerk was a worried, grey-haired man with steel-rimmed glasses and a medal. He showed us into the buffet, and waitresses brought vodka and red caviare and stared at us in that curious but not impolite way that so many people do in Russia.
From the buffet we could see the restaurant where a ten-piece dance band was playing ‘Mambo italiano’ and about thirty couples danced various improvisations on the Western dances according to whether they came from Leningrad, Peking, or East Berlin, where the TV picks up the Western stations. Harvey insisted that he must have coffee as well as brandy, and although the big Espresso machine had been cleaned and stopped the plump waitress went off to fix some for us.
Harvey said that if he had the thermometer that was in his baggage he could show me whether he was ill or not, and that then I wouldn’t think it was so funny.
I helped myself to some more red caviare and that wonderful dark sour bread, and watched the cashier noisily adding the takings on an abacus. Two waiters came into the buffet arguing, and then noticed that it wasn’t empty and went out again. Then a very tall man in an overcoat and an astrakhan hat came in. He walked across to our table. ‘I notice,’ he said in good English, ‘that you have been so bold as to ask for food at this late hour. Are you discussing business, or may I join you?’
‘Sit down,’ Harvey said, and he made a flick of the finger and said, ‘Mr Dempsey from Eire, and my name’s Newbegin. I’m American.’
‘Ah,’ said the man in that open-mouthed way that Italians express polite surprise, ‘my name is Fragolli. I am Italian. A little more of the same,’ he said to the waitress who had come to the table with Harvey’s coffee and was watching Signor Fragolli with close interest. He made a circular motion with closed fingers. The girl nodded and smiled. ‘Stolichnaya,’ he called after her. ‘Is the only vodka I will drink,’ he expla
ined to us.
‘“Hey Mambo. Mambo italiano”,’ he sang quietly to the music.
‘You here on business?’ Harvey asked.
‘Business yes. I have been two hundred miles south of Moscow. You think here it is Russia in winter, but I have been in tiny frozen villages; you have no idea. I sell to the purchasing committees of the many regions. Four days of negotiations to make a deal, always the same amount of time. They make an offer, we argue, then we discuss. I make a price, they say it is too much. I explain that a lower price will exploit my workers. They examine the figures again. I modify a part of the specification. On the fourth day we agree. They keep to their agreements exactly. They never default on a payment. It is a pleasure once agreement is reached.’
The waitress arrived with a flask of vodka and more red caviare. Signor Fragolli was a large man with a deeply lined muscular face and a large hooked nose like a Roman Emperor. He opened a white smile in his dark sun-bronzed face and tapped a knife against the silver champagne bucket in time to the music.
‘What do you sell?’ Harvey said.
He stopped tapping and groped into his black briefcase. ‘This,’ he said. He was holding a lady’s girdle and he swivelled it like moving hips. The suspender clips rattled.
‘This I like,’ said Harvey.
We arranged lunch the next day. Signor Fragolli would meet us at one thirty P.M. outside the Central Naval Museum, which he insisted upon calling the Stock Exchange. The Museum is on the eastern spit of one of the hundred islands that make up the city of Leningrad, and the spit links two of its six hundred and twenty bridges. Here the River Neva is at its incredible widest, and the cold wind screams across the ice to the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Italian was a moment or so late, smiling and bowing apologies. He led the way down the slope to the river, now frozen solid from here to the north bank. Once upon the ice the distance to Kirovsky Bridge seemed even vaster. We followed the well-marked paths across the ice. A woman in a heavy coat, headscarf and fur-lined boots stood patiently holding a string which ran down through a circular hole in the ice. A small boy with her brandished a plastic gun and made banging sounds at us, but the woman admonished him and smiled at us. She had caught no fish, or perhaps she had thrown them back. When we were well past her Signor Fragolli said, ‘The face of the city has certainly changed. Have you got it?’