Brian Freemantle - The Bearpit

Yuri used the Marion exit to loop back on to the Interstate and return to New York, but at the Waterbury turn-off he impulsively left the road again and for no other reason than that northwards had been the general direction in which he’d followed the American, Yuri drove towards Torrington.

What were the references that still baffled him? Rooftop verandahs to watch the sea where there is no sea, he remembered. Widow’s walks , which he guessed to be the same thing and of which Petr had written in his last letter. Ledge, which meant granite, but was a definition he could not substantiate. And perhaps the most incomprehensible of all, spies in statues and spies in history. Who was a spy commemorated by a statue and what was the link with a spy in history? Two separate people? Or one and the same?

Because Torrington was the name he’d chosen to follow, Yuri drove into the town. It was early afternoon and very empty. He had a choice of parking meters and stopped in the main street, not immediately getting out of the car. It was, he realized, his first time in small-town America and the comparison with the New York he now knew well and the Washington he’d briefly visited was absolute. There was none of the noise to which his ears were so accustomed that he closed it out, no longer hearing it, and there were no teeth-jarring breaks and holes in the road or any strewn rubbish, at least none that he could see. And the construction seemed to be equally divided, between brick and concrete and wooden clapboard. It occurred to him, as it frequently did on the journey into Manhattan from Kennedy Airport, that wooden buildings always gave the appearance of being insubstantial. So why didn’t he feel the same about such houses in Russia? Yuri shrugged, finally leaving the car: he had enough unanswered questions without encumbering himself with more.

The sign on the side of one of the wooden houses gave him the idea and when it came Yuri grew as annoyed at himself as he had been earlier, because it was so obvious. The place identified as the local historical society was closed, but the adjoining tourist office was open and Yuri pushed his way in to be greeted by a white-haired, apple-cheeked woman around whom clung the vague aroma of lavender and cooking. Adopting his protective persona, Yuri said he was an Englishman touring the area and she said it was late in the year to be doing that and he agreed that it was, but that it was the only time his job allowed. He waited for her to ask about it, but she didn’t.

‘What are you looking for?’ she asked.

‘Nothing particular,’ said Yuri casually. ‘Local colour. History. That sort of thing.’

‘Plenty of history around here,’ said the woman. ‘Connecticut has always been a pretty important state in the Union.’

‘One phrase I have come across that intrigues me is widow’s walk,’ chanced Yuri. ‘I think it’s got something to do with houses.’

‘Sure has,’ she agreed at once. ‘It’s the way the old whaling captains and shipowners used to build their houses, with a walkway around the roof so that the returning sailships could be seen on a horizon and registered home. The story grew that their wives used to walk there, on the day their husbands were due in port, to see whether it had been a safe voyage or not. If it hadn’t been, they would have been widows, wouldn’t they?’

Yuri felt the bubble of hope but balanced it against the phrase: to watch the sea where there is no sea. He said: ‘Built on the coast then?’

‘Still see quite a lot around Boston,’ she assured him. ‘Heard there are some in Providence, too.’

‘None around here?’

‘Oh sure,’ she said. ‘Litchfield. It’s the cutest place: colonially preserved. I guess they just copied the idea.’

The bubble ballooned and then popped. Yuri said: ‘And that’s close?’

‘Fifteen minutes, due south on the 202…’ She gestured through the window. ‘That way.’

‘Save me a journey to Boston, won’t it?’ said Yuri, turning to go and then stopping. ‘What’s the rock called all around here?’

‘Ledge,’ said the woman. ‘It’s granite really but it’s always been called ledge. No one knows why.’

‘You’ve been very helpful,’ thanked Yuri sincerely.

‘Like to buy a local guidebook?’ asked the woman, remembering her function.

‘I’d like very much to buy one of your guidebooks,’ said Yuri, in small but literal repayment.

His car was even pointing in the direction she’d indicated and Yuri got to Litchfield in ten, not fifteen minutes. It was cute and preserved, like she’d promised, a place of all-wooden houses painted in uniform white and set amid barbered lawns around a central grassed area. He thought it looked as if it were kept permanently under the protection of glass. He counted seven rooftop verandahs within a hundred yards of the pointed-roof church and found the tourist office in the middle of the central reservation. He bought the guidebook at once this time, from a waistcoated man with white hair and metal-framed spectacles, but asked about the township’s history without opening it. He heard about it being named, but wrongly, after a town in Staffordshire, in England, and listened patiently about someone called Tapping Reeve who’d opened the first law school ever to exist in America and of another academy that had been the first to provide higher education for women. Then the man pointed to a road he identified as North Street and said it was possible to see the house that had been occupied during the American War of Independence by Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge, who had been chief of intelligence for the American rebels. Who had been, finished the man, a friend of Nathan Hale, who had actually been hanged by the British for espionage. Complete, thought Yuri. Almost.

‘Does it have a school?’ he asked.

‘One of the best,’ assured the man. ‘Forman. Down that street, about three hundred yards. Can’t miss it.’

Yuri didn’t. The boy he recognized as Petr Levin from the photographs with which he had been provided in Moscow was the third to come out when school ended that day, lingering for a moment with a blonde girl and then entering a car in which the driver sat waiting. It was a Buick, blue this time.

The solitary waiting – and not knowing what he was waiting for – got on Willick’s nerves, and the second day he went through what he regarded as the ridiculous charade of lifting the telephone and asking to be allowed to go out of the apartment for a walk at least. The man said, simply, ‘No’, and put the telephone down, and when Willick tried to go out anyway he found that the gates leading from the courtyard were locked. When he turned the man who had earlier refused him was watching from a ground-floor doorway. He didn’t do or say anything and Willick slowly climbed the stairs back to his suite feeling like an admonished child.

A supply of Scotch was maintained and thin red wine was made available at midday and in the evening, and so Willick drank a lot. On the third day the alcohol stopped and when he asked for it the man, whom he’d first thought of as an attendant and now, properly, regarded as his guard, shook his head in refusal, not even bothering to talk this time. On the telephone Willick yelled for someone in charge to come to see him, but nobody did, not for a further four days.

‘Why am I being treated like a prisoner?’ Willick demanded the moment Belov entered the room.

‘Because it is necessary,’ said the American division chief.

‘Why?’

‘Some of the Western correspondents might have tried to find you: it is doubtful they would have succeeded but we had to take precautions.’

‘There’s still a lot of publicity about me?’

‘There was, for a few days. Not any longer.’