would have liked to see Randall take the girl away. As he drove away she walked unsteadily back to the gesticulating Swedes.
The night looked soft and blurred but the air was sharp. Randall breathed deeply and felt it catch in his lungs. It felt clean, as if it had travelled far over frozen seas and white resinous forests.
Back in the apartment he decoded the letter. It was a message reminding him that, as a CIA agent in Moscow, he should not confine himself to seeking the secrets of the Kremlin. The United States was also interested in the intentions of other powers in their dealings with the Soviet Union; in particular those of France who was openly flirting with Russia and, of course, Britain whose policies, if not necessarily perfidious, were usually devious and often incomprehensible. The message pointed out that foreign diplomats, sharing the common bondage of life in Moscow, might talk more freely and indiscreetly than they would in friendlier capitals.
The message reached the point in the last paragraph. It was Randall’s task to investigate and assess British policy and intentions.
He burned the message over the toilet. It was, he thought, all so juvenile. A few officials, their bureaucratic inclinations given licence by the demands of secrecy, revelling in the dispatch of every mundane coded instruction. He considered his new orders and decided that there was little to them. If at any time he had been presented with an indiscretion by a British diplomat he would automatically have sent it to Washington.
On the table stood two glasses, one with a lipstick imprint on the rim. He wiped it clean, undressed and went to the bed where three hours earlier he had made unimpassioned love to a lonely woman. He hoped that by now she was asleep in her room across the frozen city.
Randall regarded his CIA duties as a titillation to the diplomatic routine. He did not treat them as seriously as the official spies among the Service attachés at the embassy; he regarded these attachés as entertainers and observed their efforts with the same quiet enjoyment that he imagined they afforded Soviet counter-intelligence. One of their tasks was to report several days beforehand what weapons would grind across Red Square at the parades in November and on May Day. When the rockets first reached their assembly point in Moscow for rehearsals one attaché took to having morning coffee in a nearby café: and when rehearsals were in progress at night he or one of his colleagues took nocturnal exercises assessing and mentally measuring the shapes of the canvas-covered rockets on the trailers. In dimly-lit streets, the attaché met—and acknowledged with embarrassment—military attachés from other embassies; and the Russians watching the whole pantomime noted with satisfaction that once again their bi-annual exercise in propaganda was succeeding. The attachés then dispatched a laborious report to Washington which was read with cursory interest because Randall, using his own contacts, had several weeks earlier anticipated what they had seen.
Randall also enjoyed his privileged knowledge of the habits of other diplomats in the Kremlin and in the American and other foreign embassies. He knew of a counsellor in his own embassy engaged in currency racketeering, of a homosexual in the British Embassy who had so far managed to contain his inclinations, of an Italian having an affair with an Intourist guide, of a Russian in the Foreign Ministry who hoarded art treasures in his dacha in the country and exported them illegally to the West, of an East German who, when he had finished his daily bottle of whisky, still toasted Hitler before turning in for the night.
He knew the identities of many intelligence agents of other countries and guessed at others. They were not difficult to spot—junior political officers not quite as drearily stereotyped as their colleagues, journalists working for newspapers which could not normally afford a Moscow correspondent, businessmen on hopeless export missions. He knew the identities of two of his fellow CIA agents and was aware that there were others.
Randall was also aware that his way of life, particularly since his wife left him, had aroused the interest of many men in Moscow and Washington. If he had been an ordinary diplomat then there would have been a rebuke from the Ambassador, possibly a recall to Washington. But his other masters had decided that he might have his uses in his present role. They realised that it was too obvious to send a bachelor to Moscow to go whoring for secrets—diplomats were never so extrovertly lecherous. But his marriage break-up and his return to bachelor pursuits seemed perfectly natural. He was now ideally established to corrupt—or be corrupted. Randall suspected that there would have been disappointment in Washington if he had not seduced their last courier.
In Moscow his fellow diplomats regarded him with suspicion and envy. Suspicion that he had influential friends—the Ambassador, maybe, or someone even higher in Washington—and not that he worked for the CIA because few took the department seriously; envy that he had discarded a bitch of a wife and seemed to be able to fornicate freely without reprimand.
The Ambassador accepted Randall and his unorthodox behaviour because he knew he had to. No one had ever positively identified to him the agents on his staff—and he was grateful that officially he had not been informed. But he thought he knew most of them and he certainly had no doubt about Randall. He despaired of Randall as a diplomat and resented his cynicism towards a profession in which he believed; he admired him in his other role because he suspected that the big sardonic man might be very good at it; he liked him as a man; he treated him with respect as a poker player because he had never forgotten a certain evening when Randall had relieved him of several hundred dollars. He tried to convince his Minister that Randall was really a very able diplomat but the Minister only smiled knowingly implying that he was aware that even the United States foreign service was susceptible to nepotism.
Randall tried to make friends with some of the Twilight Brigade—Communists from the West, traitors, misguided innocents and retired idealists who formed a shy, restless community of their own in Moscow. Men like Donald Maclean, the defector from the British Foreign Office, who used the name Fraser; Kim Philby, his mentor, also from the British Foreign Office; old Len Wincott from Britain who fought the Germans in the Red Army in the last war and was rewarded by Stalin with ten years in a labour camp; Joe Melia, a Communist and United States patriot who had been converted to disloyalty by Senator McCarthy; Harry Waterman, the pathetic Cockney who fled from the military police after a brawl in Berlin after the war and presented himself to the Russians reciting Communism which he had not understood then or now.
Most of them worked in the State publishing houses, translating or writing propaganda; some represented foreign Communist newspapers in Moscow; some lived in uneasy leisure. But it was not easy to gain their trust. They were suspicious of everyone; aware that they were regarded with pity by their compatriots and contempt by the Russians. And as far as the journalists were concerned the Russians seemed to have more respect for newspapermen from the Capitalist Press than they did for foreign reporters who were as predictable as their own.
All members of the Brigade were reticent about their predicament: wary of criticising a regime which had betrayed their ideals in case the secret police were listening, wary of praising it in case they jeopardised their remote chances of returning to their homelands. Only those treacherous beyond redemption allowed their praise of the Soviet Union to be published abroad.
Those who had retained their nationality were sometimes invited to official functions by their embassies. They attended defiantly but were as embarrassed as their hosts. They were courteously squeezed to the corners of rooms where they discussed the weather with the more simple wives, asked about life back home, and departed for their flats leaving behind only relief at their departure.
Under the influence of drink, or the cameraderie of meeting fellow countrymen, these men whose passports ensured that they might one day return home sometimes went to parties and joked about Soviet life. About fat generals, abortions, Khrushchev, queues and the KGB. But not those who had discarded their birthright: for them there was little to joke about.
