Prisoners of Tomorrow (23 page)

Foleda had turned away from the window and was watching her. “The Aeroflot administrator,” he commented. “Dyashkin’s former wife.”

“Yes, I know,” Barbara said.

“Except she’s not with Aeroflot anymore.” Foleda moved to where he could see the screen. “In 2014, three years after she and Dyashkin went separate ways, she remarried, this time to a character by the name of Enriko Dorkas, who’s listed as a foreign correspondent with
Novoye Vremya.”

Barbara pursed her lips silently.
New Times
was a magazine of news and current affairs that had been founded in 1943 for the specific purpose of providing cover for Soviet intelligence officers abroad. “Which presumably means he’s KGB,” she said. “Where are they posted?”

“He’s a colonel,” Foleda confirmed. “They’re both in London, with the Soviet Residency in Kensington. Officially she’s a clerk at the embassy. But it gets more interesting. You see, according to a report that we have on file from SIS, Anita Dorkas—Penkev before she married Enriko—is connected with an underground Soviet intellectual dissident organization known as the Friday Club. As is often the case with senior officers, she and her husband don’t live in the embassy quarters, but have an apartment in Bayswater. A double advantage for somebody mixed up in dissident activities: one, opportunities to travel abroad; and two, a lot of freedom to meet with outside groups and sources of foreign aid. The SIS desk that’s been dealing with her says she’s being extremely cooperative.”

“You mean the British have recruited her?”

“So they claim.”

Barbara nodded and was about to reply, but then she checked herself and sat back to stare at the screen again thoughtfully. “Unless, of course . . . she’s really with the KGB too. The dissident story could be a cover for tracking down the dissidents’ overseas connections.”

Foleda gave a satisfied nod. “And that’s the key question: Did she maneuver her way into marrying an upward-bound KGB man to gain a unique base for her dissident activities? Or is she a loyal Party agent-wife posing as a dissident? Which way round is it?”

“How confident do the British sound about her?” Barbara asked.

Foleda shrugged. “She’s provided personnel lists of embassy staff that they requested, organization charts, the names of some contacts over there who are passing information to the Soviets. It was material that we already had from other sources, so we could tell if what she was producing was authentic. But on the other hand, if the Soviets already figured we had it, they wouldn’t be losing anything by letting her give it to us again. So it doesn’t really prove anything.”

“Hmm . . .” Barbara sat back in her chair. “How long ago did you say she married this Enriko?”

“Three years—since 2014,” Foleda replied.

“If she’s a genuine dissident, she must have set herself up with him that far back. What do our people in Moscow have on her?”

“A lot that corroborates her claim. But then, the Soviets have been known to plant agents with covers long before they’re activated. However, there is evidence that she’s been mixed up with the Friday Club for at least eight years.” Foleda looked at Barbara curiously as he said this, as if inviting her to read the implication.

“Eight years,” she repeated. “That would take us back to 2009 . . . while she was still married to Dyashkin.”

“Ye-es.”

Now Barbara saw the point. “If Anita is genuinely a dissident, and was that long ago, then possibly Dyashkin is too.”

“Right.” Foleda moved around the desk and sat down in his chair again. “Wouldn’t that be a worthwhile thing to find out about him?” And finding out shouldn’t prove too difficult, for Anita was not only accessible outside the Eastern bloc, but was already talking to British intelligence.

“Okay, I get it,” Barbara said. “So what now? Do you want me to start getting questions together for the London people to work on?”

Foleda shook his head. “No, not them.”

“Who, then?”

“When was the last time you had a trip to England?”

Barbara’s eyes snapped wide in surprise. “Me? I haven’t done anything like that for years.”

“Then, let’s get rid of some cobwebs. Don’t you have a pet ideology to save the world or bring in the millennium?”

“Me? No. Didn’t Thoreau say that as soon as something starts ailing people, even constipation, they’re off trying to change the world? I’m happy minding my own business.”

Foleda’s craggy, dark-chinned face split into a grin. “Then, that makes you a natural for the field, like Lew. Maybe we should have left you there in the first place. Let’s just say that I’d like to keep this business in the family for the time being.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

The woman the others called Nasha brought to mind a vision of an obscenely fat toad. Stiff black hairs bristled from the warts on her multiple chins, her arms creased at the joints like columns of boneless brawn, and her piglike eyes darted constantly this way and that in their fleshy slits, pouring disapproval on everything they surveyed. “They’re not even half done yet,” she scolded as she waddled up to deposit another wire basket full of dirty crockery and cutlery on top of the one that Paula hadn’t had a chance to empty yet. An odor of stale perspiration accompanied her. “There’s more to come, and after that the floor needs doing. What’s the matter—haven’t you ever worked before in your life? I suppose you always had oppressed blacks to take care of you in America, eh? Well, here it’s different. Everyone works to eat.” She bustled away with a final remark in Russian that Paula didn’t catch.

Paula lifted a stack of plates from the basket into the sink full of hot, greasy water and poured in more detergent. The scum coated her arms, and her hair clung to her forehead in the clammy air. Her hands were sore, because the gloves they’d given her had holes in them. “There are no others available.” Couldn’t we get some? “That is impossible”—the eternal Russian answer to everything. They could build an artificial world in space with materials mined from the Moon, but they couldn’t make a dishwasher that worked. Why couldn’t the dishwasher be fixed? “That is impossible.” Why? “It is impossible.”

They had brought her to a place on the edge of the urban zone called Novyi Kazan—the women’s section of what was apparently a sizable detention facility located below the surface. After a degrading physical examination and search during the admission process, she had been issued a two-piece tunic of light gray and a few personal effects, and brought to a barred cell that held seven other women in addition to herself. They ate and slept there, and the few amenities they enjoyed were brought there. Life alternated between the cell and the workplace, which in Paula’s case meant the same hot, noisy kitchens for ten hours a day, and the drab-paneled corridors that she walked through from one to the other. She longed to be back in solitary. At least on her own she’d had time to think.

“What do you call this? Do you call this clean?” The toad was back again. “You have to press harder to wipe off the grease. Are people expected to eat off this? What’s the matter—are you worried your arms might ache?”

“The detergent is almost gone. It needs more detergent.”

“There is no more detergent.”

“Why can’t we get some more?”

“That is impossible.”

“Why?”

“It is impossible.”

She ate alone at one end of the cell’s single table, doing her best to ignore the taunts that the novelty of having an American among them provoked from the rest of the company.

“What is the matter with her this evening, do you think?”

“Her hands are chapped. Can’t you see her hands? Obviously she’s not used to working.”

“Why not? Doesn’t anyone work in America?”

“Well, of course somebody has to work. The blacks work, and the oppressed classes work, for their capitalist masters.”

“Then, she must be a capitalist.”

“A capitalist’s princess daughter—much better than the likes of us.”

“Sophisticated, you see.”

“Very noble and haughty.”

“It won’t do her much good here, though, will it?” Giggling.

“Hey, is that right, Princess? Is your father a capitalist? Did you grow up in a big mansion with silk sheets and servants to wipe your nose for you?”

“And her behind!” Shrieks of laughter.

“Now you know how much fun it was for your servants.”

“In Russia, everyone wipes their own nose.”

A small washroom containing two basins and a single, unscreened toilet bowl opened off the rear of the cell. Paula was attempting to clean off the day’s grease with lukewarm water and the gritty, seemingly unlatherable soap provided, when Katherine, a thinly built Byelorussian with long black hair and pale skin, came in. Katherine had a comparatively reserved disposition bordering on aloofness, and said little; but her eyes had a studied look as they took in the surroundings, and her words when she did speak were those of a person with a different background from most of the others. She hung her towel on one of the hooks behind the door and set down a plastic bag that she had been carrying. From it she took a piece of soap, a toothbrush, a tin of tooth powder, and a comb, and then turned on the faucet without saying anything. The faucet shuddered violently, hissed with the release of trapped air, and then began emitting a trickle of yellowish water. Water in the colony was supposed to be recycled through a closed ecological system. Sometimes Paula wondered.

The soap Katherine had laid out was whiter and creamier looking than the gray cake that Paula was holding. Paula looked at it, then she shifted her eyes to catch Katherine’s in the metal mirror and inclined her head. “Where did you get that?”

“It was issued.”

“I got this. Why is it different?”

“Oh . . . sometimes it varies. If the storewoman has preferences . . .”

“Some people are favored, you mean.”

“You have to be accepted.”

“And I take it I’m not.”

“She maybe has something against Americans.”

“But not just her.”

Katherine shrugged and hung her shirt and pants next to the towel. Paula carried on scrubbing her arms in silence for a while. Then she said, “Can I talk to you, Katherine?”

“I cannot prevent you from talking.”

“There’s something I don’t understand. Look,
why
do Russians believe all that propaganda? I mean, they’ve got eyes, haven’t they? They’ve got brains—they can think. Surely you people don’t believe everything they tell you about us. I mean . . .” Paula made a helpless gesture in the air. “After a hundred years of it, you
must
know . . . Our politicians tell us stupid things about Russians, too, but we know that’s just the way they are. We might not like everything the Soviet system stands for, but we don’t confuse that with the
people.
We don’t have anything against you as individuals.”

“You talk about having eyes and brains, and about people, but it is you who serve the system that crushes people.”

“But that’s not true. The things they tell you aren’t true. People are free under our system. It’s—”

“Then, that makes it even worse. If you had no choice because you were forced to be slaves, that would be oppression. But if you are free and choose to be slaves . . . And it is us who you say are propagandized?”

Paula shook her head wearily. “You really believe that every American is hostile to all Russians?”

“America is the heart of capitalism. It is inevitable that the capitalists must try to destroy progressive socialism before they themselves are swept away. Our priority has always been to defend ourselves against this. It had to be. Look how many times you have attacked us. . . . And you accuse
us
of hostility!”

Paula stared at her bemusedly. “We attacked? . . . I don’t understand. What are you talking about? No Western nation has ever attacked you—except Hitler, and then we were all on the same side. No Western democracy ever attacked Russia.”

“You see, they lie to you,” Katherine said. “In the very first year of the nation, in the summer of 1918, the capitalists sent their armies into Russia in an attempt to help treacherous counterrevolutionary forces destroy the new Soviet state. Is that not attacking us?”

History had never been one of Paula’s consuming passions. She shook her head. “I don’t know. . . .I guess I never really looked into that particular period.”

Katherine nodded. “There, you see. Yes, American, British, French, Japanese, they all came. You didn’t know? And even after Russia had been weakened by four years of war in Europe and then torn apart by the Revolution, still the people’s Red Army was invincible. And then you say Hitler was not one of you, because you are the democracies. But it was the so-called democracies that rearmed Germany and allowed Hitler to rise, so they could send him against Russia to fight the war for them that they were too cowardly to fight themselves. They tried to start a war that they would wriggle their way out of like worms, but they underestimated Stalin.”

“I’m not so sure about that. I—”

“Pah! What do you know? You know nothing. And then, when the tiger they had tried to ride about-turned, it was Russia that killed it and saved them. And then it was Russia that drove the Japanese invaders out of China and ended the war. Russia has always defended countries that were invaded. After the war, you Americans and your puppets tried to invade Korea. And you tried to invade the Middle East, you tried to invade Cuba, you tried to invade Vietnam.”

Paula stared. “You mean that’s what they teach?”

Katherine shook her head uncomprehendingly. “And you say we have never been attacked, that we are being paranoid. You think you are victimized, and wonder why. It is we who have
always
been attacked.”

Paula sighed. “I don’t know, your propaganda, our propaganda . . . Who’s to say what’s right? But neither one of us is responsible for whatever really goes on. Why should any of it affect us here, personally? In here of all places, I’d have thought we had enough in common to outweigh all that, whatever the real story is.”

Katherine looked at her coldly. “The reason I’m in here is that my loyalty is in question,” she said. “I used to have a husband. He went to London with a Soviet trade mission, and while he was there he met a reporter from a New York art magazine, and she seduced him. The Americans let him return with her, and now they are living down there somewhere with a family. So, you see, Princess, I do not exactly have strong reason to be fond of Americans, American women in particular, and especially American women journalists. Does that answer your question?”