The Crossing Read online

  In the late spring of 1940 as the snows were beginning to melt in the forests of Karelia the special document unit of the NKVD had the unpleasant but routine job of checking the corpses that had been buried in the snow, and the log cabins, the homes that had been pounded by Soviet artillery. Documents of any kind were bundled up carefully and despatched to the NKVD’s new Finnish headquarters in Helsinki for the central document unit to process and send on to Moscow.

  4

  The woman stood in the small sunlit kitchen watching the boy as he ate his Jell-o and and ice-cream. He was her sister’s son and she had been pleased to have him. He was a bright, cheerful boy and had done well in his first year at the school. He was no trouble, he did as he was told and the Californian sunshine suited him. The chronic cough had disappeared after a couple of months.

  When she reached for his empty plate she said, “D’you want some more, boy?”

  He shook his head. “No more thank you, aunt.”

  “I had a letter from your mother today. She sends you her love and told me to tell you that she’s very pleased that you’re doing so well at school.”

  “Why isn’t she write to me?”

  “Why doesn’t she write to me.”

  “Why doesn’t she write to me?”

  “There are problems, boy. Government regulations and so on. It’s not her wish, you can be sure of that.”

  “What else she say?”

  “She says there’s still snow in Moscow and she’s sending you photographs of the new apartment. Two rooms she says. She’s very lucky.”

  “Why doesn’t she come and live here too?”

  She walked into the small kitchen with the empty dishes. “They wouldn’t allow that.”

  “Why do they allow it for me then?”

  “I don’t know, boy. All I know is the people in Moscow gave permission and here you are. What homework have you got?”

  “Not much. Can I play with the Carter boys first?”

  “Where?”

  “In the park.”

  “OK. But you’ve got to be back by seven.”

  “Thanks. What does goose mean, aunt?”

  “It’s a bird. You had goose at Christmas.”

  “Tom Carter said old man Field had goosed Jenny and he was reporting him to the sheriff.”

  “That’s a vulgar word, boy. Not a word you should be using nor young Carter neither.”

  “But what’s it mean?”

  “I guess in that case it means grabbing a girl’s backside. Now run on with you or you’ll be back before you’ve started.”

  It wasn’t until 1938 and Konrad Molody was sixteen that he eventually went back to Moscow. It took him a few weeks to settle down. He missed the San Francisco sunshine and his friends, and Moscow seemed grim after the free and easy time in Berkeley with his aunt. But there were compensations. He spoke fluent and almost perfect English, and he had been given a place at Moscow University and that meant a sure career in some government department.

  At the end of his first year at university he had been interviewed by two men. They were both Red Army officers. One a major, the other a lieutenant-colonel. They both spoke excellent English and they had talked English for most of the time, asking him about his five years in the United States. They obviously knew the United States better than he did but they talked as if he were the expert, especially on the details of everyday life. They were unlike any army officers he had talked with before. They were almost like Americans. Easy-going, amused and amusing, and no hint of using their rank. They seemed to know quite a lot about him and his background, but they gave no hint as to why they had talked with him.

  When he saw one of them again, the colonel, the Germans were already into the Ukraine. Five hundred thousand Russians had been killed or captured when they took Kiev. And now an army of a million men, seventy-seven German divisions under Field Marshal Bock, were heading up the open road to Moscow. Molody had been recruited into the Red Army and was driving an ammunition truck for an artillery battery. He had no uniform, just a band round his arm with a red star. A despatch rider had brought him a message to report back to the temporary headquarters in a bombed-out shop by the railway station at Volchonka-zil, one of the southern suburbs of Moscow.

  Molody stood there in the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, his civilian clothes in tatters and his face pale and drawn with hunger and exhaustion.

  “D’you remember me?”

  “Yes, comrade Colonel.”

  “Have you kept up your English?”

  “Yes, Comrade.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “My father died a long time ago. I don’t know where my mother is. Our block was shelled but I heard that she survived.”

  “I’m sending you on a training course. You’ll be leaving Moscow tomorrow.” He looked at the youth’s ragged figure. “Have you got any other clothes?”

  “No, Comrade Colonel.”

  “You’d better come back with me. My car’s outside.”

  “I’ll have to report to my officer.”

  “Don’t bother. He knows. Let’s go before they start the night barrage.”

  The colonel drove him to a villa way out of Moscow on the road to Vladimir. The rooms had been turned into offices and an officers’ mess. He was given a meal and then told to be ready at six o’clock the next morning. He slept on a mattress on the floor of an empty room.

  It was still dark at five o’clock but he was up and waiting. He was driven to an airstrip near Yaroslav. It took ten days by plane and trains to get to Sverdlovsk.

  The training school was outside the city in a clearing in the forest. Rows on rows of wooden huts behind a ten-foot stockade with an outer perimeter of barbed wire. It was to be his home for almost five years. The training he received as a future intelligence officer was thorough and comprehensive, and the extra year had been because he spoke fluent English. He attended lectures with four others on Canadian, US and British history, politics and armed forces. He himself gave several talks on his boyhood in California.

  During all the remaining years of the Great Patriotic War he lived at the training school. Well fed, healthy and cut off from any aspect of the war. The war might not have existed for the students at the school. When he had completed the course Molody was made a captain in the MVD, the Soviet secret service. He was one of the youngest men ever to hold that rank.

  In the aftermath of the war he was sent back to Moscow and in 1949 he married. She was a pretty girl named Galyusha, uncomplicated, amiable and affectionate. He was working in the directorate responsible for controlling and supporting MVD agents in overseas countries, and his own work was in the department responsible for espionage in the USA and Britain.

  In 1953 he was sent to the MVD special training school at Gaczyna. He was away from his wife for six months. There were facilities for wives at Gaczyna but his applications for Galyusha to join him were refused. Moscow wanted him to get used to being away from his wife.

  He was told things at Gaczyna about the MVD’s operations in Britain that made him realise that even though Britain had been an important part of his control area there were many things that he hadn’t been told before.

  There were half a dozen pretty girls on the staff of the training school working as waitresses and housekeepers for the living quarters. Nobody said they were available. Nobody needed to. Molody had regular sex with two of them. He knew it would go down on his file because they wouldn’t have been there if they weren’t already trained MVD operators. But they were there for sex as well as security and Molody liked pretty girls.

  All the time he was at Gaczyna he was only allowed to listen to the BBC. News, entertainment and music. And his newspapers were the London nationals. Two days old. He lived in a single, isolated hut that was furnished with G-Plan furniture with a typically English lower-middle-class, suburban decor.

  When he returned to Moscow he was given a month’s leave and he and Galyusha went
down to the sunshine of the Black Sea, using an MVD rest-house in Sochi as their base.

  Galyusha was conscious of the benefits they got from her husband’s privileged position. “Hard” roubles, shopping privileges and a superior apartment in the centre of Moscow overlooking the river. She was allowed to go with him for the month he had in Leningrad. He spent long hours at the Red Navy base every day but she had been taken around the city by an Intourist girl who showed her the sights, and took her to good restaurants and cafés to eat. Galyusha was not much interested in galleries and museums but she loved the city itself. A few weeks after they went back to Moscow the doctor confirmed that she was pregnant.

  Molody leaned over the rails of the boat where it lay at anchor in Kolsky Bay and looked across to the grey buildings on the dockside. There were nine months of winter in Murmansk and from November to mid-January there were no daylight hours. There were still old people in Murmansk who spoke the ancient local language, Saami. And in the Saami language Murmansk means “the edge of the earth.” Already the town was shrouded in mist and it was still only July. He wondered why they had insisted that he travel by sea and he wondered too why he had to leave from Murmansk. Maybe they thought that if his last memories were of this grim town he wouldn’t feel homesick. He wouldn’t feel homesick anyway. He was a professional and what he was being sent to do was important. He was now a key agent and his new rank of major marked their recognition of his past work and their confidence in him in his new role. It was 1954 and there had been the big purge in the MVD and he had not only survived but benefited. It was now the KGB and its responsibilities were even greater than before.

  He turned and looked at the seamen who were battening down the last of the hatches. It was a grain transporter and there were only three other passengers.

  The ship docked at Vancouver in the late afternoon and the Canadian excise rummage crew came straight on board. Molody made himself scarce and the crew-list for Immigration showed only three passengers. The three legitimate passengers had been cleared through Immigration in twenty minutes.

  It was ten o’clock when Molody and one of the crew showed their shore passes to the security guards at the gate. They were warned that they had to be back by midnight. Molody had talked in broken English with a thick Russian accent and it had been all too easy. He handed over the pass he had used to the crewman and without a word he had walked off alone. A small, worn, cardboard attaché case in his hand.

  Once he was away from the dock area he asked the way to the YMCA. They found him a bed for the night. He joined and stayed for another two weeks, and in that time he found himself an inexpensive one-room apartment and a job as a salesman in a radio shop.

  In the next few weeks he used the genuine birth certificate that he had been given in Moscow and obtained what he most wanted, a genuine Canadian passport. He got a driving licence and a YMCA membership card and several other minor pieces of documentation that provided him with background material.

  He changed jobs twice during the winter. Both moves got him increased pay. He had several girlfriends and his colleagues at work liked his easy-going ways. But behind the casual façade he worked hard, and the shop owner recognised that he was not only a good salesman but ambitious. He made several suggestions at the last shop that increased their turnover and profits and the owner seriously considered giving him a small stake in the business. But before he had formulated a suggestion the young man took a week’s holiday and never came back.

  Molody stood looking across towards Goat Island where the falls were split in two. The American Falls and Horseshoe Falls. Most residents on the American side of Niagara would reluctantly admit that the Canadian side was the pleasanter: commercialisation was not so all-pervading.

  The two governments co-operated to make the formalities of crossing the border from one side to the other as easy as possible, and when Molody presented his Canadian birth certificate and his return bus ticket to Toronto he was passed through without query.

  He didn’t hurry, he joined the crowds and looked at the sights before he caught a bus to Buffalo and found lodgings for the night.

  The following day he took a train to New York. He walked from the station to Fifth Avenue and the New York Public Library. He immediately recognised the girl at the enquiry desk from the description they had given him. When he asked her where he could find biographical material on John Dos Passos she turned to one of the huge reference books before she realised the significance of what he had said. Then she walked from behind the counter and he followed her to the far end of the library.

  She turned to look at him, and said softly, “Doris Hart,” and he said, “Victor Seixus Junior.”

  When he left he had the bundle of money and the key to the luggage locker at Grand Central. In the locker there was just the coded message.

  He booked a room at the YMCA on West 34th Street and sat in the small room and decoded the message. He wondered what Alec would be like. He took a meal at a nearby automat and the evening paper headlined the news that Gromyko had taken over from Shepilov as Foreign Minister. It was February 15, 1957.

  5

  There were a few villas still standing near Łazienki Park. A dozen or so which had escaped both the German and the Russian onslaughts on Warsaw. Some people said that they had been deliberately preserved for the Russian officials to use when it was all over. But in the event they had been used by Polish officials of the new communist regime and one of them had been divided up into ten flats for junior staff who worked for the newly established foreign embassies.

  Harry Houghton had one such flat. A small living room, a bedroom and kitchen and bathroom. Its furnishings were sparse and primitive but despite its size and starkness the minute apartment provided the best accommodation he had had in his life.

  Born in Lincoln he had run away from home at sixteen and joined the Royal Navy. Obsequious and ingratiating, he had made little progress until war broke out. By the end of the war he had become a chief petty officer. A reasonably efficient clerk, he had legitimately used Admiralty regulations to get his officers their marginal extra service payments and had kept the messes supplied with black-market booze. Not liked, but tolerated for his ability to bend and manipulate service regulations on rations and supplies, he had never experienced a day’s service in a battle zone until 1942 when he was assigned to merchant protection vessels on convoys to Malta and Russia.

  He was demobilised in 1945 and joined the civil service as a clerk. For four years he served as an Admiralty clerk in the minor Navy port of Gosport near the big Royal Navy base at Portsmouth. At the end of four years he was assigned as clerk to the British naval attaché in Warsaw.

  A line-shooter and a drunk, Harry Houghton was detested by the rest of the embassy staff. But it was in Warsaw that he spent the best time of his life.

  Harry Houghton sat sprawled on the leather settee in the soft, pink light from the silk-shaded lamp which he had bought on the black market. With an unsteady hand he poured vodka into the deep glass and passed it to the girl on the settee beside him. Then he reached for the empty glass on the table and filled it slowly and carefully.

  The girl was in her late twenties, dark-haired and attractive. Her face was flushed from drinking and as the Englishman lifted his glass to her she touched it with hers and said “Na zdrowie.” She laughed when he tried to respond in Polish.

  “Is easier I say ‘cheers’ for you, Harry.”

  “Cheers, sweetheart. Did you sell the stuff OK?”

  “Yes. No problems at all. They want all you can get.”

  “What do they want?”

  “Any drugs at all. But they pay most for penicillin and sulfa drugs.”

  “How much will they pay?”

  “Fifty US dollars for a tablet.”

  “Jesus. That’s good. How much have we got?”

  She reached over for her worn leather handbag, took out a fat brown envelope and handed it to him.

  “I have
n’t counted it yet.”

  He looked at her, his eyes alert. “Can you stay the night?”

  She laughed and nodded. “Is OK, Harry. If you want that I stay.”

  He grinned. “Let’s count the cash first.”

  For ten minutes he counted out the notes. There were $4,450 in used notes. He counted out a hundred and fifty and handed them to the girl.

  “OK, Krissie?”

  “You’re very good to me, Harry.”

  He smiled. “It’s your turn to be good to me now. Let’s finish the bottle first.” He reached for the bottle and held it up. “Bloody thing’s empty.”

  He stood up unsteadily and lurched across to the shelf of bottles and glasses and the framed photograph that showed him in uniform, grinning, with a glass of beer in his hand. He swore as the corkscrew split the cork and he shoved the cork into the bottle.

  Back at the settee he poured another glass for each of them and drank his down and poured again. With his free hand he leaned over and pulled the girl to him, his mouth on hers, his hand pulling the strap of her dress from her shoulder.

  Despite negative reports from the embassy and strongly critical reports from his immediate superior, Harry Houghton survived two years in Warsaw from 1949 to 1951 and in that time he had accumulated several thousand pounds in his bank account in England. He had lived an extraordinary life in the post-war ruins of Warsaw. Kristina had introduced him to some of the richest people in Warsaw. The black-market operators and the collaborators with the Soviet occupation controllers. Notorious for his crude behaviour at embassy social events, he was frequently seen drunk in broad daylight on the city streets.

  After he was back in England he still sent a few cheap cosmetics to Kristina, but without the diplomatic bag there was no possibility of sending more antibiotics. Despite the fact that he was sent home for chronic drunkenness he was given a security clearance and a job at the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland naval base, a secret installation employing over 20,000 people and concerned only with submarine and antisubmarine research. When Harry Houghton joined the establishment, HMS Dreadnought, the Royal Navy’s first atomic submarine, was being fitted out with its American atomic plant. But Portland’s main task was to improve NATO’s underwater defence programme in detecting and destroying enemy submarines. He joined the base in 1951, and lived in a village just outside Portland itself with his wife Peggy.