In fact, what I now discovered seemed to lead in a completely different direction. Sitting up on that knoll, half frozen, I knew that the people I watched through my telescope were connected to Brightman, but the hows and whys now seemed to evaporate.
Still, I did gather some data. There were five men, no women, staying at the camp, and with the help of the telescope I soon learned to distinguish them. The red-haired man, the one I'd seen in Brightman's house, was obviously the leader. Twice I saw him ordering the others about — gesturing, pointing — and they obeyed him without hesitation. But it was equally clear that he wasn't running a hunting camp. Their one visitor came on the third day I watched them, but he was wearing a suit and left after an hour.
By that time, the third day, I was frustrated. My expectation in Washington — that I was on the brink of a solution — had now retreated into the distance. Yet I wasn't sure what to do. Getting closer to the camp wasn't the answer. With the telescope I could see well enough; the trouble was, what I wanted to see wasn't the sort of thing you ever do see: plans, relationships, motives. I thought of breaking into the house and searching it, but on top of all the other risks — and I wasn't sure
I had the nerve — there was the problem of the dogs. These were nothing special, just a couple of sheepdogs, but they were clearly turned out of the house every night to guard it.
That third night, back in my motel room, I decided on something simpler: to follow them when they left the camp in their cars.
From the start, I'd observed them departing on a number of such expeditions. Most had an obvious purpose — carting their garbage to the dump, buying groceries — but others were less clear, and they were frequent enough to arouse my curiosity. For example, on the second day the red-haired man took off in the Scirocco just after nine and still hadn't returned when I came down from the knoll. Where had he gone? What had he done? Following them was the easiest way to find out, and I tackled the problem on the fourth morning, hunting for a spot on RFD 2 where I could keep the gate under observation. I found one, though it wasn't very good. Because of the way the road curved, I had to be almost on top of the gate to see it; and because there was virtually no shoulder here, my car wasn't even remotely hidden — which meant I had to stay very alert to avoid being seen. As soon as someone came down the camp road, I'd pull out, as if I was just passing by, and then watch in my mirror to see which way the car turned. I almost never timed this properly; I'd be around the first curve before the driver got out of the car, opened the gate, and emerged onto RFD 2. Because of this, I'd drive very slowly, waiting to see if he came into sight. If he did, I'd drive on normally and he'd usually pass me; if not — if he turned in the other direction— I'd have to make a fast U-turn and chase after him. All of this sounds clumsy, but it worked. Over the next three days, I followed them on seven separate trips away from the camp. On four occasions I broke away quickly — I was afraid they might spot me — but the other three times I was able to stay with them to their destination.
All of these excursions were completely mundane, and I only learned anything of significance from one of them.
They bought groceries, gas, stamps; they took their clothes in to the cleaner's; the Scirocco was repaired at Al's Garage, despite its enormous sign — WE SPECIALIZE IN JAP CARS — and they picked up a cord of wood from a fanner near Gorham, a little place about ten miles south of Berlin. None of this was very enlightening, though I was rather more comfortable than I'd been up on that knoll. But then, on the fifth day, the pickup took their trash to the dump and I decided to do a little garbage picking. No one saw me: the dump, up a short access road, was just an open spot in the bush. There was a wooden shack, presumably for an attendant, but that morning I only had two hopping crows for company. I could see where the truck had parked and three yellow garbage bags had been tossed nearby. Making like a real CIA man, I began poking through them, thereby discovering that garbage is garbage: orange rinds, eggshells, milk cartons, yuck. But the last of the bags contained newspapers and there I found something: in among the New York Times es and Boston Globes were two old copies of a Russian-language paper, Nasha Strana — Our Homeland. I'd actually heard of it, though I'd never seen a copy before: it was published in Buenos Aires and served the large Russian emigre population there. Both issues were a couple of months old, the paper yellowed and cracked, and though I sat in the car and read them through from beginning to end, I couldn't see anything of particular interest. Nonetheless, it established something important: Travin's connection to the camp hadn't been casual.
An hour later, I made another discovery — also important, even if I couldn't say precisely what its significance was.
I was back in my regular position by the side of the road when a plumpish woman, in an old Toyota, pulled in by the gate and delivered the U.S. mail — one envelope, slipped into their box. As soon as she left, I did the obvious thing: the mailbox was an old one, and though it had a lock, this had long since been broken. The envelope, standard size, was fat, heavy, crinkly. I shoved it into my pocket and headed straight back to the motel.
When I opened it, I discovered three items: a wad of receipts, stapled together; twenty hundred-dollar bills; and a letter from a lawyer in Springfield, Massachusetts. This was addressed to "Mr. Howard Petersen c/o Gerry's White Mountain Camp." It itemized all the paid bills, noted that "your usual remittance is enclosed," and concluded: "After these transactions, your funds held in trust by this firm amount to $22,736.79." It was signed, as per the letterhead, by one Robert Evans.
Robert Evans — whose name was on the camp's deed. Interesting. I flipped through the receipts. They included everything from a county tax bill to an American Express account. The local items were all charged to the camp, the others to something called E. Arnott Travel Ltd. In the case of the Amex account this might even have been genuine — it certainly included plenty of trips: Boston-Montreal, Montreal-Toronto, Toronto-New York, Boston-London, Amsterdam-Frankfurt, Brussels-New York… During the previous month, Mr. Petersen had been moving around and taking certain precautions to cover his tracks: he either hid behind his lawyer or paid up in cash — and indeed it occurred to me now that I'd never seen any of them make a trip to the bank.
It was three o'clock when I made this discovery. Given the sum of money involved, I assumed that Mr. Petersen was expecting his letter, so I drove straight to Springfield and put it back in the mail. It was late by then, so I stayed overnight and didn't head back to Berlin till the next morning.
That was a dreary drive. I had no idea where I stood. Something was going on, and Berlin was one of the centers; but
Brightman, Dimitrov, and Travin revolved around it like unknown, mysterious planets. Above all, I couldn't see where Travin fitted in. Presumably, he'd been living at the camp. Did the people there know what had happened to him? Or had Travin been a renegade, whom they themselves had eliminated? This had to be admitted as a possibility, but if I accepted it I had to reject my previous theory — that the people who had dealt with Travin, and searched that hotel room, were "official." But they had been — I was sure of it. Which meant that I was dealing with two sets of Russians: the KGB — the men who'd killed Travin — and the people I was watching right now. But who could they be? A good question… which I couldn't answer. Yet, as I drove along, I wondered if I didn't have a few clues. They were Russian. They were apparently an organized group, and they might have émigré connections: witness the paper I'd pulled out of the garbage. What seemed to tie these facts together, albeit with a tenuous thread, were some of the remarks Travin had made on the phone in Detroit. At the time, I'd barely noticed them, but now they came back into my mind. "We can talk about the byliny," Travin had said, "or the beguny or the Black Hundreds." I'd taken him to mean: we can talk about anything under the sun — but perhaps he'd revealed more than he'd intended. The byliny are the great medieval folk epics of Russian literature, and their most famous hero — Ilya of Murom — has long been a symbol of Russian power, Russian unity, Russian Christianity, and the greatness of Russia's common man. The beguny—if I remembered correctly — were a crazy nineteenth-century religious sect (the word means "fugitive") who refused to have anything to do with authority (especially the census and passports) and took to the woods, like Robin Hood. And of course the Black Hundreds were a group of anti-Semitic thugs, with connections to the Czarist court, whose program was embodied in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. At this point, you could even make a direct connection to myself. The Protocols were ostensibly the outline of a Jewish plot to conquer the world by subversion. In fact, they'd been concocted by the Russian secret police around 1900, and had continued to be important in anti-Semitic propaganda into the thirties — and even later. For, in September 1972, the Soviet Embassy in Paris had actually issued one version of them, word for word, as a document entitled "Israeclass="underline" A School of Obscurantism." I'd been in Paris at the time, had written a piece on it, and, in consequence, hadn't been able to get a visa back to Moscow for the next year.