guidance of the Soviet Press which rejoiced daily.
They also looked around and saw a people who had never known freedom; and tried to forget that they who had known it had relinquished it. Of this they never talked, not even when they met within their own outcast community.
Each cherished the idea that one day he might see again Oxford Street, Times Square, The Champs-Elysées, the Via Veneto; the mansion or cottage where he was born; his school, his sky, his sea. Few ever returned because of the retribution they anticipated or because the Communist Parties in their own countries stopped their visas fearing bad publicity. And, like long-term prisoners who sometimes plead to be kept in jail, they also feared what they would find if they went home—new landscapes, new attitudes, new values; thus many never tried to return; one day, they said, they would go back but they died before the day dawned.
Randall had attended a funeral for an American member of the Brigade. They had all been present like family mourners. There was little grief, just a brooding awareness of futility among them. The dead man, like so many of them, yielded to impetuosity, sought a new meaning to life like a jilted girl fleeing to the monastery; and had found failure in different garb. Together the mourners supported his failure, their failure.
Pressmen attended the funeral, too. Taking pictures and seeking the faces of known defectors who had not yet materialised in Moscow. They mostly talked to Harry Waterman who was less reticent than the others, and that was where Randall met him.
He spoke to Dick Hellier, a youngish agency chief whose face was pinched and aged by feverish dedication to his job. ‘Could you introduce me to Waterman?’ he said. ‘He sounds as if he might be interesting.’
‘He was interesting once,’ Hellier said. ‘And that’s it. Once you’ve heard about Siberia you’ve heard everything. He had a tough time but you can’t be sorry for people all the time.’
‘Why does everyone bother with him then?’
‘He’s useful to us. He knows all the Twilight Brigade and when he’s stoked up with a few vodkas he sometimes drops the odd crumb of information.’
‘That can’t be very healthy for him.’
Hellier shrugged and made some notes: he was always making notes. ‘Maybe he’s told what to let slip. Who knows. Who knows anything in this city.’
Randall said: ‘I thought you did.’
Hellier looked as pleased as he ever did. ‘I got a few contacts,’ he said. ‘I don’t use Waterman all that much. He’s small fry. A bit crazy with it, too, especially when he’s been on the hooch. Gets people to bring him back boxes of British soil and all that sort of crap.’
‘Just soil, I hope,’ Randall said.
‘Huh huh. Now I got to be going to get this junk over before the others.’
‘You mean there’s a story here?’
‘Everything’s a story with a Moscow dateline on it. People in this guy’s hometown will remember him.’
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to Waterman?’
‘Sure. Although I don’t think he’s your line of country. Didn’t you just come as an official mourner?’
‘I guess so,’ Randall said. ‘The Ambassador couldn’t decently find anyone much lower than me. But these people interest me. I’d like to know what makes them tick. Just for my own personal satisfaction.’
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