“Then who?”
“Don’t worry. You won’t have to carry it all the way.”
“I wasn’t thinking of myself, Vassily.”
“I know you weren’t.” Bukov smiled a bit. “One of these days you may begin to agree that my sense of security is as thorough as your own. I’m not a brash youth any longer, Mikhail.”
I was left out of this; watching the two of them I saw they were very old friends, it was more than a political alliance. Neither of them seemed the sort of man who communicated emotion easily but there was a bond of great warmth between them. Possibly Bukov had begun as the older man’s protégé.
Bukov got up to leave us then. On his way to the door he paused. “Perhaps I should mention this—not to terrify you but to make you see things realistically. You can be sure that more than normal pressures have been applied against Sergei Zandor. To lose you would be to risk his position in the KGB chain of command. He has orders to bring you in alive of course—but he may be tempted to exceed those orders. You’ve given him a very bad time. You understand?”
“Yes.” The warning was: do exactly as you’re told and don’t mess things up for us because we could all get killed as a result.
Bukov nodded. Then the two of them left me.
In a little while he returned with a tray of borscht and Beluga caviar—an absurd combination but nourishing enough. He made a list of my clothing sizes.
On his way out he said, “Try to sleep.”
“Yes.”
“I rather approve of you.”
“Do you?”
“How did Nietzsche put it? ‘Audacity is essential to greatness.’ You have the essence of greatness, Harry.”
He went. I prowled the chamber for a while; pulled down a dry tome and read half a page and put it back; finally I rolled my shoes into my jacket to improvise a pillow, switched off the overhead light and lay trembling in the dark with my overcoat for a blanket.
* Director of the KGB in Moscow. These paragraphs (beginning with “I’d accused Karl Ritter …”) again are Bristow’s inserts, afterthoughts to explain his actions.—Ed.
On Tuesday* Pudovkin brought a parcel into my cell and unwrapped it with a certain voila flair—it contained the clothes I was to wear.
“We’ve laid on the truck for tonight,” he told me. “See if everything fits.”
“We’re going out tonight?”
“We’re starting tonight.” He had a dry deflating manner sometimes. I had learned that Pudovkin’s character was summed up largely in his Scandinavian thoroughness and impartiality: a cautious man with the patience for details. It had probably kept him alive. He seemed stolid but he had a good quick imagination; you needed that too if you were to anticipate the opposition’s movements. Pudovkin’s other persona—the visible portion of his iceberg existence—was that of a retired foundry official. Because he was retired from daily employment he enjoyed a certain freedom of time and movement which made him invaluable to Bukov; I gathered Pudovkin rarely had time to relax but that was the way he wanted it. He reminded me of the retired police lieutenant who can’t stand being out of harness and sets up his own security-detective agency—“just to keep a hand in,” but ends up working twice as hard as ever before.
For Pudovkin there was the added spice of illegality and the added strength of having a cause. Like Bukov he was not himself a Jew but to Pudovkin that was beside the point.
He had brought food also and I cut into the fresh loaf; the rich heavy smell invaded my nostrils and I ate while I unfolded the garments.
Several plans had been studied and rejected. At first there was the idea of smuggling me down to the Black Sea resort of Sochi and shipping me out as a deckhand on a tramp, but I had no nautical experience and we had to scotch that one. In any case there were too many checkpoints and bottlenecks; and the constant reinforcement of the Mediterranean Red fleet through the Dardanelles meant the waters would be alive with navy vessels practicing their boarding techniques on every passing freighter.
Our scheme was limited by the variety of OVIR blanks and forged passports available in the Bukov cell’s collections. It was also limited by my physical and linguistic markings: for instance I could not pass as a Cuban or Chilean, nor as a Russian for that matter—not only because of my height and coloring but also because the Soviets are far more meticulous in examining their own citizens who try to leave the country than they are about foreigners.
Bukov was adamant about one thing. I was not to cross through any international checkpoints in the Crimea. In the first place the Crimea was where they were looking for me; in the second place if I were caught too close to home it could bring down Bukov and his entire cell and he was quite right in refusing to take that risk. But it made our planning far more difficult because it meant I had to get to the mainland across the narrow isthmus at Armyansk, or cross Karkinitskiy Bay by small boat, or ride the train across the causeway from Dzhankoy to Genichesk—or, and this was what we settled on, due east across the length of the Crimean peninsula to the Kerch Straits and across to Taman by small boat. Once in the Georgian heights of the Caucasus it would be possible to motor southeast along the mountain roads above the Black Sea to the rugged Turkish border country; slip across into Turkey and escape through Asia Minor.
It meant a journey of nearly two hundred miles across the Crimea by road, followed by a ten-mile boat crossing and then the run down through the Caucasus which would be about five hundred miles of mountain roads to the Turkish border. There were OVIR barriers at several points to check travelers’ internal passports; we would be able to avoid some but not all of them and I had to have papers. Therefore I became Georges Lapautre, a Communist labor-union functionary from the St. Chamond small-arms factory near Lyon. I was visiting the Soviet Union to learn about the fine points of worker organization in small-arms plants, of which there are a great many in the southern part of the USSR.
The suit was a cheap ready-to-wear one of Marseille manufacture; the hat was marked Italie—indicating it had been imported into France—and I asked Pudovkin where the devil they had found it but he only shrugged it off as if the wardrobe department had ten warehouses of clothes for every specification. That was not the case and I knew it and after a while it occurred to me that perhaps they had chosen the French identity because that was the one they had clothes for.
The shirt and underwear were French products but the shoes were Russian. “I’m afraid your feet were the wrong size,” Pudovkin said. “If you are asked, you mistakenly stepped in fresh tar and it ruined your old shoes, and you bought these here. You won’t be asked.”
I had a look at the French passport—the photo was mine, Bukov had taken it. The rest looked completely authentic except for a few details. According to the passport Georges Lapautre was forty-two, where I was thirty-four; Lapautre was some two inches shorter than I, but weighed nearly the same; Lapautre had blond hair.
I considered the evidence before me. Finally I said to Pudovkin, “Georges Lapautre is real, isn’t he.”
“Why?”
“The only false thing about this passport is my photograph in it. And the suit is a little too big in the waist and a little too short in the trousers. And it’s an ensemble—he bought the tan shirt and the brown tie to go with the brown suit. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Pudovkin smiled. “You don’t think we would murder a man merely to provide you with a suit of clothes and a French passport?”