Winter of the World (115 page)

The Western countries he had visited, Germany and Spain in the thirties and forties, were nothing like this.

He was overwhelmed. All his life he had been told that Hollywood movies gave an exaggerated impression of prosperity, and that in reality most Americans lived in poverty. But it was clear to
Volodya, from the day he arrived in the USA, that the movies hardly exaggerated at all. And poor people were hard to find.

New York was jammed with cars, many driven by people who clearly were not important government officials: youngsters, men in work clothes, even women out shopping. And everybody was so well
dressed! All the men appeared to be wearing their best suits. The women’s calves were clad in sheer stockings. Everyone seemed to have new shoes.

He had to keep reminding himself of the bad side of America. There was poverty, somewhere. Negroes were persecuted, and in the South they could not vote. There was a lot of crime –
Americans themselves said that it was rampant – although, strangely, Volodya did not actually see any evidence of it, and he felt quite safe walking the streets.

He spent a few days exploring New York. He worked on his English, which was not good, but it hardly mattered: the city was full of people who spoke broken English with heavy accents. He got to
know the faces of some of the FBI agents assigned to tail him, and identified several convenient locations where he would be able to lose them.

One sunny morning he left the Soviet consulate in New York, hatless and wearing only grey slacks and a blue shirt, as if he were going to run a few errands. A young man in a dark suit and tie
followed him.

He went to the Saks Fifth Avenue department store and bought underwear and a shirt with a small brown checked pattern. Whoever was tailing him had to think he was probably just shopping.

The NKVD chief at the consulate had announced that a Soviet team would shadow Volodya throughout his American visit, to make sure of his good behaviour. He could barely contain his rage at the
organization that had imprisoned Zoya, and he had to repress the urge to take the man by the throat and strangle him. But he had remained calm. He had pointed out sarcastically that in order to
fulfil his mission he would have to evade FBI surveillance, and in doing so he might inadvertently also lose his NKVD tail; but he wished them luck. Most days he shook them off in five minutes.

So the young man tailing him was almost certainly an FBI agent. His crisply conservative clothes corroborated that.

Carrying his purchases in a paper bag, Volodya left the store by a side entrance and hailed a cab. He left the FBI man at the kerb waving his arm. When the cab had turned two corners Volodya
threw the driver a bill and jumped out. He darted into a subway station, left again by a different entrance, and waited in the doorway of an office building for five minutes.

The young man in the dark suit was nowhere to be seen.

Volodya walked to Penn Station.

There he double-checked that he was not being followed, then bought his ticket. With nothing but that and his paper bag he boarded a train.

The journey to Albuquerque took three days.

The train sped through mile after endless mile of rich farmland, mighty factories belching smoke, and great cities with skyscrapers pointing arrogantly at the heavens. The Soviet Union was
bigger, but apart from the Ukraine it was mostly pine forests and frozen steppes. He had never imagined wealth on this scale.

And wealth was not all. For several days something had been nagging at the back of Volodya’s mind, something strange about life in America. Eventually he realized what it was: no one asked
for his papers. After he had passed through immigration control in New York, he had not shown his passport again. In this country, it seemed, anyone could walk into a railway station or a bus
terminus and buy a ticket to any place without having to get permission or explain the purpose of the trip to an official. It gave him a dangerously exhilarating sense of freedom. He could go
anywhere!

America’s wealth also heightened Volodya’s sense of the danger his country faced. The Germans had almost destroyed the Soviet Union, and this country was three times as populous and
ten times as rich. The thought that Russians might become underlings, frightened into subservience, softened Volodya’s doubts about Communism, despite what the NKVD had done to him and his
wife. If he had children, he did not want them to grow up in a world tyrannized by America.

He travelled via Pittsburgh and Chicago and attracted no attention en route. His clothes were American, and his accent was not noticed for the simple reason that he spoke to no one. He bought
sandwiches and coffee by pointing and paying. He flicked through newspapers and magazines that other travellers left behind, looking at the pictures and trying to work out the meanings of the
headlines.

The last part of the journey took him through a desert landscape of desolate beauty, with distant snowy peaks stained red by the sunset, which probably explained why they were called the Blood
of Christ Mountains.

He went to the toilet where he changed his underwear and put on the new shirt he had bought in Saks.

He expected the FBI or Army security to be watching the train station in Albuquerque, and sure enough he spotted a young man whose check jacket – too warm for the climate of New Mexico in
September – did not quite conceal the bulge of a gun in a shoulder holster. However, the agent was undoubtedly interested in long-distance travellers who might be arriving from New York or
Washington. Volodya, with no hat or jacket and no luggage, looked like a local man coming back from a short trip. He was not followed as he walked to the bus station and boarded a Greyhound for
Santa Fe.

He reached his destination late in the afternoon. He noted two FBI men at the Santa Fe bus station, and they scrutinized him. However, they could not tail everyone who got off the bus, and once
again his casual appearance caused them to dismiss him.

Doing his best to look as if he knew where he was going, he strolled along the streets. The low flat-roofed pueblo-style houses and squat churches baking in the sun reminded him of Spain. The
storefront buildings overhung the sidewalks, creating pleasantly shady arcades.

He avoided La Fonda, the big hotel on the town square next to the cathedral, and checked in to the St Francis. He paid cash and gave his name as Robert Pender, which might have been American or
one of several European nationalities. ‘My suitcase will be delivered later,’ he said to the pretty girl behind the reception desk. ‘If I’m out when it comes, can you make
sure it gets sent up to my room?’

‘Oh, sure, that won’t be a problem,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ he said, then he added a phrase he had heard several times on the train: ‘I sure appreciate it.’

‘If I’m not here, someone else will deal with the bag, so long as it has your name on it.’

‘It does.’ He had no luggage, but she would never realize that.

She looked at his entry in the book. ‘So, Mr Pender, you’re from New York.’

There was a touch of scepticism in her voice, no doubt because he did not sound like a New Yorker. ‘I’m from Switzerland originally,’ he explained, naming a neutral
country.

‘That accounts for the accent. I haven’t met a Switzerland person before. What’s it like there?’

Volodya had never been to Switzerland, but he had seen photographs. ‘It snows a lot,’ he said.

‘Well, enjoy our New Mexico weather!’

‘I will.’

Five minutes later he went out again.

Some of the scientists lived at the Los Alamos laboratory, he had learned from his colleagues in the Soviet Embassy, but it was a shanty town with few civilized comforts, and they preferred to
rent houses and apartments nearby if they could. Willi Frunze could afford it easily: he was married to a successful artist who drew a syndicated strip cartoon called Slack Alice. His wife, also
called Alice, could work anywhere, so they had a place in the historic downtown neighbourhood.

The New York office of the NKVD had provided this information. They had researched Frunze carefully, and Volodya had his address and phone number and a description of his car, a pre-war Plymouth
convertible with whitewall tyres.

The Frunzes’ building had an art gallery on the ground floor. The apartment upstairs had a large north-facing window that would appeal to an artist. A Plymouth convertible was parked
outside.

Volodya preferred not to go in: the place might be bugged.

The Frunzes were an affluent, childless couple, and he guessed they would not stay at home listening to the radio on a Friday night. He decided to wait around and see if they came out.

He spent some time in the art gallery, looking at the paintings for sale. He liked clear, vivid pictures and would not have wanted to own any of these messy daubs. He found a coffee shop down
the block and got a window seat from which he could just see the Frunzes’ door. He left there after an hour, bought a newspaper, and stood at a bus stop pretending to read it.

The long wait permitted him to establish that no one was watching the Frunze apartment. That meant that the FBI and Army security had not tagged Frunze as a high risk. He was a foreigner, but so
were many of the scientists, and presumably nothing else was known against him.

This was a downtown commercial district, not a residential neighbourhood, and there were plenty of people on the streets; but all the same after a couple of hours Volodya began to worry that
someone might notice him hanging around.

Then the Frunzes came out.

Frunze was heavier than he had been twelve years ago – there was no shortage of food in America. His hair was beginning to recede, although he was only thirty. He still had that solemn
look. He wore a sports shirt and khaki pants, a common American combination.

His wife was not so conservatively dressed. Her fair hair was pinned up under a beret, and she wore a shapeless cotton dress in an indistinct brown colour, but she had an assortment of bangles
on both wrists, and numerous rings. Artists had dressed like that in Germany before Hitler, Volodya remembered.

The couple set off along the street, and Volodya followed.

He wondered what the wife’s politics were, and what difference her presence would make in the difficult conversation he was about to have. Frunze had been a staunch social democrat back in
Germany, so it was not likely that his wife would be a conservative; a speculation that was borne out by her appearance. On the other hand, she probably did not know he had given secrets to the
Soviets in London. She was an unknown quantity.

He would prefer to deal with Frunze alone, and he considered leaving them and trying again tomorrow. But the hotel receptionist had noticed his foreign accent, so by the morning he might have an
FBI tail. He could deal with that, he thought, though not as easily in this small town as in New York or Berlin. And tomorrow was Saturday, so the Frunzes would probably spend the day together. How
long might Volodya have to wait before catching Frunze alone?

There was never an easy way to do this. On balance he decided to go ahead tonight.

The Frunzes went into a diner.

Volodya walked past the place and glanced through the window. It was an inexpensive restaurant with booths. He thought of going in and sitting down with them, but he decided to let them eat
first. They would be in a good mood when full of food.

He waited half an hour, watching the door from a distance. Then, full of trepidation, he went in.

They were finishing their dinner. As he crossed the restaurant, Frunze glanced up then looked away, not recognizing him.

He slid into the booth next to Alice and spoke quietly in German. ‘Hello, Willi, don’t you remember me from school?’

Frunze looked hard at him for several seconds, then his face broke into a smile. ‘Peshkov? Volodya Peshkov? Is it really you?’

A wave of relief washed over Volodya. Frunze was still friendly. There was no barrier of hostility to overcome. ‘It’s really me,’ Volodya said. He offered his hand and they
shook. Turning to Alice, he said in English: ‘I am very bad speaking your language, sorry.’

‘Don’t bother to try,’ she replied in fluent German. ‘My family were immigrants from Bavaria.’

Frunze said in amazement: ‘I’ve been thinking about you lately, because I know another guy with the same surname – Greg Peshkov.’

‘Really? My father had a brother called Lev who came to America in about 1915.’

‘No, Lieutenant Peshkov is much younger. Anyway, what are you doing here?’

Volodya smiled. ‘I came to see you.’ Before Frunze could ask why, he said: ‘Last time I saw you, you were secretary of the Neukölln Social Democratic Party.’ This
was his second step. Having established a friendly footing, he was reminding Frunze of his youthful idealism.

‘That experience convinced me that democratic socialism doesn’t work,’ Frunze said. ‘Against the Nazis we were completely impotent. It took the Soviet Union to stop
them.’

That was true, and Volodya was pleased Frunze realized it; but, more importantly, the comment showed that Frunze’s political ideas had not been softened by life in affluent America.

Alice said: ‘We were planning to have a couple of drinks at a bar around the corner. A lot of the scientists go there on a Friday night. Would you like to join us?’

The last thing Volodya wanted was to be seen in public with the Frunzes. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. In fact he had been too long with them in this restaurant. It was time for
step three: reminding Frunze of his terrible guilt. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘Willi, did you know the Americans were going to drop nuclear bombs on Japan?’

There was a long pause. Volodya held his breath. He was gambling that Frunze would be wracked by remorse.

For a moment he feared he had gone too far. Frunze looked as if he might burst into tears.

Then the scientist took a deep breath and got control of himself. ‘No, I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘None of us did.’

Alice interjected angrily: ‘We assumed the American military would give
some
demonstration of the power of the bomb, as a threat to make the Japanese surrender earlier.’ So
she had known about the bomb beforehand, Volodya noted. He was not surprised. Men found it hard to keep such things from their wives. ‘So we expected a detonation some time, somewhere,’
she went on. ‘But we imagined they would destroy an uninhabited island, or maybe a military facility with a lot of weapons and very few people.’