“Why didn’t you?” he asked.
“The Soviet authorities would not let us,” said Drake. “Of course, I wanted to bring Larissa back to England and marry her and settle down. She applied for permission to leave and was turned down. I kept reapplying on her behalf from the London end. No luck. Then, last July, I did as you just suggested; I went on a package tour to the Ukraine, through Kiev, Ternopol, and Lvov.”
He flicked open his passport and showed Thanos the date stamps at the Kiev airport.
“She came up to Kiev to see me. We made love. Now she has written to me to say she is having our baby. So now I have to marry her more than ever.”
Captain Thanos also knew the rules. They had applied to his society since time began. He looked again at the photograph. He was not to know that the girl was a London lady who had posed in a studio not far from King’s Cross station, nor that the background of the Potemkin Stairway was an enlarged detail from a tourist poster obtained at the London office of Intourist.
“So how are you going to get her out?” he asked.
“Next month,” said Drake, “there is a Soviet liner, the Litva, leaving Odessa with a large party from the Soviet youth movement, the Komsomol, for an off-season educational tour of the Mediterranean.”
Thanos nodded; he knew the Litva well.
“Because I made too many scenes over the matter of Larissa, the authorities will not let me back in. Larissa would not normally be allowed to go on this tour. But there is an official in the local branch of the Interior Ministry who likes to live well above his income. He will get her onto that cruise with all her papers in order, and when the ship docks at Venice, I will be waiting for her. But the official wants ten thousand American dollars. I have them, but I have to get the package to her.”
It made perfect sense to Captain Thanos. He knew the level of bureaucratic corruption that was endemic to the southern shore of the Ukraine, Crimea, and Georgia—Communism or no Communism. That an official should “arrange” a few documents for enough Western currency to improve his life-style substantially was quite normal.
An hour later the deal was concluded. For a further five thousand dollars Thanos would take Drake on as a temporary deckhand for the duration of the voyage.
“We sail on the thirtieth,” he said, “and we should be in Odessa on the tenth or eleventh. Be at the quay where the Sanadria is berthed by six P.M. on the thirtieth. Wait until the agent’s water clerk has left, then come aboard just before the immigration people.”
Four hours later in Drake’s flat in London, Azamat Krim took Drak
e’s call from Piraeus giving bun the date that Mishkin and Lazareff needed to know.
It was on the twentieth that President Matthews received Maxim Rudin’s reply. It was a personal letter, as his had been to the Soviet leader. In it Rudin agreed to the secret meeting between David Lawrence and Dmitri Rykov in Ireland, scheduled for the twenty-fourth.
President Matthews pushed the letter across his desk to Lawrence.
“He’s not wasting time,” he remarked.
“He has no time to waste,” returned the Secretary of State. “Everything is being prepared. I have two men in Dublin now, checking out the arrangements. Our Ambassador to Dublin will be meeting the Soviet Ambassador tomorrow, as a result of this letter, to finalize details.”
“Well, David, you know what to do,” said the President.
Azamat Krim’s problem was to be able to post a letter or card to Mishkin from inside the Soviet Union, complete with Russian stamps and written in Russian, without going through the necessary delay in waiting for a visa to be granted to him by the Soviet Consulate in London, which could take up to four weeks. With the help of Drake, he had solved it relatively simply.
Prior to 1980, the main airport of Moscow, Sheremetyevo, had been a small, drab, and shabby affair. But for the Olympics the Soviet government had commissioned a grand new airport terminal there, and Drake had done some research on it.
The facilities in the new terminal, which handled all long-distance flights out of Moscow, were excellent. There were numerous plaques praising the achievements of Soviet technology all over the airport; conspicuous by its absence was any mention that Moscow had had to commission a West German firm to build the place because no Soviet construction company could have achieved the standard or the completion date. The West Germans had been handsomely paid in hard currency, but their contract had had rigorous penalty clauses in the case of noncompletion by the start of the 1980 Olympics. For this reason, the Germans had used only two local Russian ingredients—sand and water. Everything else had been trucked in from West Germany in order to be certain of delivery on time.
In the great transit lounge and departure lounges, they had built letter boxes to handle the mail of anyone forgetting to post his last picture postcards from inside Moscow before leaving. The KGB monitors every single letter, postcard, cable, or phone call coming into or leaving the Soviet Union. Massive though the task may be, it gets done. But the new departure lounges at Sheremetyevo were used both for international flights and for long-distance internal Soviet Union flights.
Krim’s postcard, therefore, had been acquired at the Aeroflot offices in London. Modern Soviet stamps sufficient for a postcard at the internal rate had been openly bought from the London stamp emporium Stanley Gibbons. On the card, which showed a picture of the Tupolev-144 supersonic passenger jet, was written in Russian the message: “Just leaving with our factory’s Party group for the expedition to Khabarovsk. Great excitement. Almost forgot to write you. Many happy returns for your birthday on the eleventh. Your cousin, Ivan.”
Khabarovsk being in the extreme southeast of Siberia, close to the Sea of Japan, a group leaving by Aeroflot for that city would leave from the same terminal building as a flight leaving for Japan. The card was addressed to David Mishkin at his address in Lvov.
Azamat Krim took the Aeroflot flight from London to Moscow and changed planes there for the Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Narita Airport, Tokyo. He had an open-dated return. He also had a two-hour wait in the transit lounge in Moscow. Here he dropped the card in the letter box and went on to Tokyo. Once there, he changed to Japan Air Lines and flew back to London.
The card was examined by the KGB postal detail at Moscow’s airport, assumed to be from a Russian to a Ukrainian cousin, both living and working inside the USSR, and sent on. It arrived in Lvov three days later.
While the tired and very jet-lagged Crimean Tatar was flying back from Japan, a small jet of the Norwegian internal airline Braethens-Safe banked high over the fishing town of Ålesund and began to let down to the municipal airport on the flat island across the bay. From one of its passenger windows Thor Larsen looked down with the thrill of excitement that he felt whenever he returned to the small community that had raised him and that would always be home.
He had arrived in the world in 1935, in a fisherman’s cottage in the old Buholmen quarter, long since demolished to make way for the new highway. Buholmen before the war had been the fishing quarter, a maze of wooden cottages in gray, blue, and ocher. From his father’s cottage a yard had run down, like all the others along the row, from the back stoop to the sound. Here were the rickety wooden jetties where the independent fishermen like his father had tied their small vessels when they came home from the sea; here the smells of his childhood had been of pitch, resin, paint, salt, and fish.
As a child he had sat on his father’s jetty, watching the big ships moving slowly up to berth at the Storneskaia, and he had dreamed of the places they must visit, far away across the western ocean. By the age of seven he could manage his own small skiff several hundred yards off the Buholmen shore to where old Sula Mountain cast her shadow from across the fjord on the shining water.