All my plans were made by Sunday. I had informed London. I had a visa for Leningrad, and Harvey seemed pleased that I had agreed to go with him. On Sunday morning we got up late. Harvey and I packed our cases slowly. Signe sipped coffee and listened to the English football results, marking her Finnish football coupon. She didn’t win. I think Leeds United lost instead of drawing just as we finished packing. We had a late breakfast at the station. The restaurant is on the first floor and there is a view down the long central hall where the kiosks sell hamburgers, shirts, flowers, souvenir jugs, Mechanix Illustrated and Playboy.
Two fur-hatted policemen in blue mackintoshes were combing the seats for vagrants and another plain-clothes cop was leaning on the twenty-four-hour locker eating a hot dog. The shoe-shine man was studying the shoes of passers-by. Outside in the cold roofless terminus the trains were lined up side by side. The coaches were dark brownish-grey and made of thin vertical wooden slats. They were high and angular, with a dozen big ugly ventilators along the roof. On the rear of the final train there were three red metal carriages. A yellow stripe ran beneath the large windows and on each there was a Soviet Union crest and a white sign that said ‘Helsinki – Moscow’. From the chimney of these carriages came a thin line of black smoke.
There was a Russian conductor standing at the foot of the step to the carriage. He was a huge man in a blue overcoat and fur hat. He took our tickets and watched the embrace of Signe and Harvey with dispassionate interest. There was plenty of snow around and steam and train whistles gave Signe a chance to play Anna Karenina. She had prepared for the part with matching fur hat and muff and a coat with a high collar. I kissed Signe in a brotherly way and she dug her fingernails into that vulnerable place in my spine as I made way for Harvey to do his farewell scene. It was amazing how much they both enjoyed acting. She adjusted the collar of Harvey’s coat like she was sending him to his first day at school. There were tears in Signe’s eyes and I half expected that she would change her mind and climb aboard, if only to do the same scene all over again in Leningrad.
When Harvey finally joined me in the compartment he pressed his nose to the glass and waved and waved until Signe was a tiny dot on the snowy station yard. The conductor had taken off his overcoat and was piling fuel on to a fantastic little stove that stood at the end of the corridor. He soon brought us a cup of weak lemon tea in a nickel-plated sputnik holder, and a packet of Moscow biscuits. Harvey settled back in his seat. His decision was made, he sipped his tea and watched the long trains loaded with timber, oil and paraffin clanking down the same route with us. The smoke scrawled graffiti across the slate-like sky. There was a jolt and a clang and the train stopped. The colourless northern winter lay heavy and inert on either side, and across it, tiny black scratches of civilization – fences, wires, paths and slow trains – moved nose to tail like ants across an ashen corpse.
‘This winter will never end,’ Harvey said and I nodded. I knew that for him it wouldn’t.
There was a hiss of brakes. Some small animals perhaps rabbits – ran out of the trees on the far side of the field, frightened by the sudden noise.
‘You think she’s a whore,’ Harvey said. ‘You can’t understand what I see in her.’
What a pair, I thought, both of them more concerned with seeming to be fools than being foolish.
‘I like her very much,’ I said.
‘But?’
I shrugged.
‘But what?’ Harvey demanded.
‘She’s a child, Harvey,’ I said. ‘She’s a replacement for your children, not for your wife.’ Harvey, his arms folded, stared across the snow and ice. His face moved slightly, perhaps he nodded.
We looked at each other without communicating.
‘It just couldn’t be,’ said Harvey. ‘It was wonderful while it lasted but it was too perfect. Personal happiness must take second place when life itself is threatened.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘I’m glad you see it like that,’ I said.
‘You knew all the time?’ I nodded.
‘He wasn’t an important agent. He was a courier, he’d been working for the Russians a couple of years and they didn’t rate him so highly. Not until Signe killed him. Then they did. After Signe killed him with a hairpin – the Midwinter school taught her how – and stole a couple of documents from him, he suddenly became important and heroic and a martyr. I didn’t know,’ Harvey said. ‘That’s the funny thing. I didn’t know until Signe told me yesterday.’ His arms were tight across his body like hoops around a barrel. ‘They won’t do anything to her as things stand, but if she went to Russia it would be asking for trouble.’
I nodded. ‘Asking for it,’ I agreed.
‘She’s killed four men if you include the Russian courier and Kaarna. She’s the official killer for the Midwinter organization. An amazing girl.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘She’ll marry her cousin now. It will be loveless, just for appearances, he’s a police official. Loveless marriage, poor devil.’ His folded arms relaxed.
‘The husband?’
‘Yes,’ said Harvey. ‘Poor devil. I wish she had told me before. I shall never marry either.’ He produced his cigarettes and offered them but I didn’t accept one.
‘But you are married,’ I reminded him.
‘But not deep down,’ said Harvey. He shook his head in wonder. ‘Poor devil,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Poor devil.’
The train gave a long agonized groan of stretching metal and a plink-plink-plink-plink-plink ran like a shudder up through it.
I said, ‘We’ve known each other a long time, Harvey. I didn’t ever try to give you advice before, did I?’
Harvey didn’t say anything.
I said, ‘When this train gets to the station at Vainikkala we are both going to get off.’
Harvey continued to look out of the window, but this time his face moved enough to indicate that he wouldn’t.
‘What you are trying to do is impossible, Harvey,’ I said. ‘And Washington will have to keep everyone knowing it’s impossible. They’ll squash you like a gnat, Harvey. They might take a year to do it but they will. When an agent has the sort of knowledge you are carrying …’ I shook my head. ‘Parley your situation into a deal with Midwinter. He’ll pension you off for the rest of your life.’
‘And he’ll make sure it doesn’t last too long,’ Harvey said.
‘We can work out details to protect you if that’s what you are scared of. Take a year’s holiday, fish and relax. I’ll work on Signe. She’ll visit you …’
‘She will not. It’s the end. We said good-bye.’
‘There are other girls …’
Harvey shook his head again.
‘If it’s girls …’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Harvey said. ‘You’re talking to me like I’m a cipher clerk in East Berlin. Girls and champagne, roulette and fast cars. Look, I love Signe. Are you incapable of understanding that? I’m pleased that she isn’t with me. She’s too wonderful to be mixed up in this stinking business.’ Harvey made pecking gestures with his fingers and thumb, emphasizing each word as though he was taking them and placing them upon the horizon in a long precarious string. ‘That’s how I love her; I talked her into staying in Helsinki. I don’t want your lousy holidays around the fleshpots of Europe, but most of all I don’t want girls.’
I’d gone wrong. I tried again. ‘All right, Harvey,’ I said. ‘We’ll play it any way you want. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You know what my orders have to be; we are both in the same business. Let’s figure out something that will make Washington happy and make you happy too.’
‘Don’t you ever give up? Can’t you see that I’m not just a defector?’
‘What are you then exactly: a trade commission selling extra-marital sex?’
‘Leave me alone.’ Harvey crammed himself into the corner and took the very tip of his nose between his finger and thumb as though it was another word he was trying to wrench loose.
‘Just what do you think is going to happen when you get across that border?’ I asked. ‘You think that someone is going to be waiting for you with a medal? You think you’re just in time to watch the May Day Parade from Lenin’s tomb? You know what happens to defectors that come to us, what makes you think that you’re going to be different? You’ll end by teaching English at a political school in Kiev. At best, that is; at best.’
‘What do you think I’m defecting for?’ Harvey said scornfully. ‘Because Midwinter wouldn’t give me a fifty-dollar raise?’
‘I don’t know what you’re doing it for,’ I said. ‘But I know that when the train moves out of Vainikkala it’s going to be too late to change your mind. It’ll be goodbye to your kids, good-bye to your wife, good-bye to Signe and good-bye to your country.’
‘It’s not my country any more,’ said Harvey. ‘They tried to make me into an American but they couldn’t do it. I don’t need Walt Disney and Hollywood, Detroit and Madison Avenue to tell me how to dress and think and hope. But they write the script for the American dream. Every night Americans go to bed thinking that when they wake up tomorrow there will be no Red China. They dream that the Russians will have finally seen reason. Time, Life and Reader’s Digest will all have Russian-language editions and Russian housewives will be wearing stretch pants and worrying about what kind of gas stations have clean toilets and whether Odessa will buy the Mets.’
‘Midwinter doesn’t think that.’
‘Sure he does. He just thinks we’ll have to shake a fist at them first, that’s all. Look,’ he said confidentially. ‘I don’t have any strong political opinions but I’m a Russian. My old man was a Russian. I speak Russian nearly as well as Colonel Stok does. I’m just going back home, that’s all.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘But not with the eggs, Harvey. I can get away with not hauling you back feet first, but I can’t let you take the eggs. I mean …’ I opened my hand towards him. Harvey interpreted the movement as a threat.
‘Just don’t get rough,’ he said. ‘I have four fertilized hens’ eggs inside my shirt. They are the few successful ones existing of a batch of twelve hundred. I don’t say your boys can’t reproduce them, they can. But you know that they won’t believe any story you tell them about their being broken.’
I nodded.
‘Well those eggs are against my body. They are alive because of my body heat, those virus samples. I only have to roll against this seat and I’ll be wearing scrambled eggs. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You come to Leningrad with me and I’ll have their boys reproduce that virus and then give you four eggs sealed in exactly the same way to take back to London. How’s that for a deal?’
‘It stinks,’ I said. ‘But just for a minute I can’t think of anything else.’
‘Attaboy,’ said Harvey. He drank the rest of his cold tea and watched the countryside. ‘I’m really pleased you made your pitch; I’d gotten quite tense waiting for it.’
The train stopped and started many times all the way to the border. Harvey stared moodily out of the window as a long freight train went by.
‘Trains,’ he said. ‘They used to be important once. Remember bogie bolsters, borails, refrigerators, ventilated, low-loaders? Remember all those reports?’
‘That’s going back a bit,’ I said. Harvey nodded and said, ‘I’m glad you know about Signe killing that Russian courier.’ He smiled and exhaled smoke very slowly so that he disappeared behind a veil of it. ‘You know what Signe’s like.’
‘You thought she was inventing that story,’ I accused him.
‘Hell no,’ said Harvey. He smoked his cigarette. ‘She was more upset about leaving me than I was about leaving her. Much more upset.’ The snow began again. Harvey said, ‘This must be the most terrible winter of all time.’
‘It is from where you’re sitting,’ I said. The train stopped again.
‘Vainikkala.’ The voices called the name of the Finnish border station.
‘Let’s go and have coffee,’ I said. ‘We have twenty minutes here while they couple up the Russian locomotive. Last cup of real coffee for a little while.’
Harvey didn’t budge. I said, ‘Last cup of real coffee, Harvey. For a lifetime.’
Harvey grinned and put on his overcoat cautiously so as not to disturb the eggs.
‘No funny business,’ Harvey said.
I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender and led the way along the corridor.
‘Too many Finns about anyway,’ I said.
The Russian conductor looked up from his stove and grinned. Harvey spoke to him in Russian and said something about not letting the train go without him and we will have more tea and biscuits when we come back. I said, ‘What do we want tea and biscuits for? We are getting off the train now to go to the buffet.’
‘You don’t have to eat them,’ Harvey said. ‘But the old guy makes a little profit on them so that he has some spending money in Finland.’
‘Looks like he’s doing nicely,’ I said, ‘judging by that bottle of Gordon’s gin he’s clutching.’
‘That was a present,’ Harvey said. ‘He told me that that was a present from someone he hardly knew.’
Harvey was very proud of speaking Russian.
We had coffee in the large station buffet. It was clean, warm and bright and had that hygienic Scandinavian atmosphere that goes so well with the Christmas-card landscape outside. We stood in the falling snow and watched the locomotive: a huge green toy with bright red wheels and a red star on its navel. It clanked gently against the train which now had shed its Finnish coaches.
‘What happens next?’ Harvey asked.
‘Finnish and Soviet customs and immigration get aboard and process us as we go through the border zone. At Vyborg they put a diesel locomotive on to the train and add some extra coaches to take zone traffic to Leningrad.’
‘So once I’m back aboard I’m as good as in Russia?’
‘Or as bad as in Russia,’ I said. I climbed up the steps and into the train.
‘As bad,’ said Harvey. ‘What have you got that the people of Leningrad can’t get?’
‘Speaking personally, a ticket back to Helsinki.’
Harvey punched me in the air but when I went to hit him – equally playfully – he said, ‘Take care now, I’m a nursing mother.’ He thought I had forgotten that he was carrying the eggs, but I hadn’t forgotten.
It was a long journey to Leningrad. The afternoon light was beginning to go. The snow was still falling and the flakes were light against the darkening sky. Harvey took off his coat and settled into the corner seat. There was a white embroidered cloth on the table, and a reading lamp. The train trundled on for what seemed like hours, stopping and starting every few yards for men to do technical things with the switch levers, throw salt on the points and wave flags and lamps. We stopped in a forest. The clearing was as big as a football field and from it an unused timber-siding looped off to a tumbledown shed and weighbridge. Along the firebreak between the trees came a large black Russian motor car. It drove cautiously over the rough track, skirting piles of sleepers and heaps of brushwood. At this point the forest road was about fifty yards from the railway. It was as near as the car could get to us. It stopped.
‘So this is Russia,’ I said to Harvey. I switched on the table lamp, the yellow light reflected our faces in the window.
Harvey said, ‘Are you sure there’s no dining-car, all the way to Leningrad?’
‘Ask them,’ I said. ‘You’re friendly with the management.’
‘Aren’t you going to tell me it’s my last chance?’ Harvey said.
‘It’s too late,’ I told him. ‘The MVD are here.’ I could see them through the half-open door, walking down the corridor as if they owned the train. They slid the door back with an abrupt crash. ‘Papers,’ said the shortest one and he saluted. They wore khaki jackets and shirts, dark trousers and green peaked hats. The sergeant who had saluted examined Harvey’s passport tentatively as though he was having difficulty with the Western script. The captain reached across him and snatched it away. ‘Newbegin?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Harvey.
‘Proceeding to Leningrad?’ Harvey nodded.
‘Come with me, bring your baggage.’ The captain turned to go. The sergeant snapped his fingers at Harvey to hurry him up. They didn’t seem too friendly.
‘I’ll come along too,’ I said.
The captain turned back to the compartment and addressed me. ‘You will stay on the train. Mr Newbegin will be travelling to Leningrad by car. You will stay aboard the train. My orders were especially clear about that.’
The sergeant pushed me back into the compartment and closed the door. From the corridor I heard the captain tell the sergeant not to get near Newbegin. I suppose he didn’t want him to crush the eggs. The train started again and ran forward a few yards. It stopped. I opened the window in time to see the man in captain’s uniform drop to the ground and help Harvey with his case. It was more than forty yards between the timber road and the railway and although the Volga car moved forward to stay abreast of the train it was a long walk across the deep snow. The windscreen had gone grey from the snowfall, but two shiny black triangles were swept clean by the wiper blades. The exhaust rose in an evil-smelling black cloud that Russian petrol gives off and I could almost smell it from where I was leaning out of the train. The three men seemed to be moving very slowly, like athletes in slow-motion films. Harvey looked back at me and smiled. I waved good-bye to him. The two Russians hustled him towards the open door of the car. Perhaps it was because they were in deep snow or perhaps because they were all wearing such thick outer clothing, but they all moved with a slow choreographic grace. Harvey took his overcoat off with a twirl and the sergeant stood behind him with a small cardboard box for the eggs. The car driver was sitting well forward in his seat and I could see him staring fixedly at the train as though it was the first one he had seen and he was a little frightened of it. Harvey took off his overcoat and his jacket to get to the eggs that were under his shirt. The wind was inflating his shirt like a spinnaker and his face was pinched with the pain of the icy gusts. The captain laughed and made motions for him to hurry so that they could all get into the warm car. I don’t know what happened next exactly, but suddenly Harvey – still in shirt-sleeves, with the wind inflating him like a Michelin man – was running. He ran towards the train. His movements were curious: the deep snow made him lift his feet high in the air like one of those horses specially trained for trotting races. He scrambled across the first lot of tracks, slipping and sliding on the icy sleepers and taking his weight briefly on the fingers of his right hand. Pursuing Harvey came a column of ants, tiny red ants. Harvey stumbled and fell forward up to the waist in the snow, but he pushed himself clear and was up and running in strange convulsive movements, weaving and twisting, falling and rolling in the air as he fell, touching the ground with a finger tip and springing up to full height like a jack-in-the-box. All Harvey’s skill was mustered in this one long choreographic routine. All his balance, timing and speed were tested as he jumped, slipped and slithered through the deep snow.
The sergeant had dropped the empty carboard box and was standing in the classic stance of the pistol range, his elbow slightly bent. His arm jerked abruptly as he fired at Harvey. The driver of the car let in the clutch. The car came bouncing forward after Harvey. Harvey was trying to get to the train. The column of red ants was still following him across the snow and I realized that they were tiny drops of blood scattered by the wind. The captain was hanging out of the front door of the Volga car and also firing at Harvey with a large pistol. It seemed unlikely that he would hit him for the car was bounced up and down by the mounds of ice, old sleepers and junk frozen tight into the earth.
The train made a loud clanging and jerked forward. Harvey had been very close to the train but now it was snatched away from him. The car had stopped at the place where the forest tracks curved sharply away from the railway lines. The sergeant had stopped firing. He stood lonely and motionless out there in the snow, his pistol arm outstretched, his head cocked on one side like a perverted statue of liberty. His gun was steady and sighted on the entrance to the train. Harvey would have to climb those metal steps and when his arm reached up to grasp the handrails his body would be fully extended: a large target even for a pistol shot. Harvey reached towards the train. I watched the sergeant as he fired his gun. It jumped in his hand and there was almost no smoke.
He fired three shots in rapid succession, not waiting to see the effect of the first as he put the others into the target area. I don’t think Harvey knew what was waiting for him at the steps to the train; it was one of the few pieces of good luck that he had ever enjoyed. He slipped. He slipped on a sleeper or tripped over a rail or a spike and went down full length into the snow. I couldn’t see him very clearly now but as he picked himself out of the indentation he had made in the snow I could see that one elbow was red with blood and he was wearing a yellow girdle of smashed raw egg. The sergeant took ten seconds to remove the empty pistol clip, find a fresh one in his pocket, insert it and go back to the firing position, but it was long enough for Harvey to fling himself headfirst into the open door of the carriage. When I got down the corridor he was wriggling on his belly like an eel. The train jerked forward with a terrible groan then began to pick up speed. Harvey was breathing slowly in deep noisy gulps and his whole body was shivering. He rolled over very slowly until he could see me. His heavy eyes were only half open. ‘Christ I was frightened,’ he said. ‘Christ.’
‘I can see your yellow belly,’ I said.
Harvey nodded and continued to use every muscle he had to keep his lungs moving. Finally he said, ‘I thought the bastard was going to give me one last volley up the backside as I was lying there.’
I said, ‘You’d better let me look at that arm of yours.’
‘Let you look at it?’ said Harvey. ‘Do you think I don’t know that they were your boys? That railway sign there, about ice on the points, is in Finnish. We’re still on the Finnish side of the frontier. They were your boys dressed up as Russian border men.’
‘They were Americans,’ I said. ‘We would have done it better than that. Let me look at your arm.’
‘What do you want to do, finish the job for them?’
‘Don’t be bitter, Harvey. There were no recriminations when your protégés arranged a violent end for me in Riga.’
‘That had nothing to do with me,’ Harvey said.
‘On your honour, Harvey?’ I said. Harvey hesitated. He couldn’t lie on his honour. He could cheat, steal, have Kaarna murdered and the man in the dentist’s chair. He could even have his boys attempt to kill me, but he couldn’t tell a lie on his honour. Harvey’s honour was important to him.
‘OK. Look at my arm,’ said Harvey. He turned his elbow towards me. ‘I cut it on the car door.’ From the conductor’s room I could hear the snoring of a man in a drugged sleep and out of the corner of my eye I could see the Volga car speeding away down a narrow forest road. Harvey had sticking-plaster in his luggage. I pulled it tight across his cut. ‘It’s only a scratch,’ I said. There wasn’t much time before the real customs men got down to us.