Tom Smith - Agent 6

Underneath there was a telephone number. Every employer was being asked to spy for the State. So far this year three men had lost their jobs. One had suffered a nervous breakdown as his family, friends and casual acquaintances were brought in for questioning. One woman no longer left the house, certain she was being watched.

Osip paused, glancing back, assessing the people behind him. None of them stopped or looked at him. He crossed the street abruptly then ambled at a slow pace for some hundred or so metres before breaking into a brisk walk. Turning down another street, then another, he’d almost looped back to where he’d started. He reassessed the people behind him before continuing on his way.

The location for the meeting was an ugly low-rise, cooked by the summer sun, filled with beaten-down immigrants, just like him. Maybe not just like him; he doubted many of them were working as spies, although you could never be sure. The entrance area was busy, people lingering outside, squatting on the steps in the balmy evening. Osip’s clothes were appropriately threadbare, his face sallow. No one paid him any attention: maybe he fitted in or maybe they just didn’t care about a down-and-out fifty-seven-year-old man. He entered the apartment building, his shirt becoming sticky with perspiration as he stepped into the corridors. The evening was humid and the putrid muggy air hung around him like a shroud. Climbing the stairs, he wheezed his way up to the seventh floor. Even with the lowest of expectations, he was surprised at how awful this place was. There were stains on the walls as if the whole building were sick, suffering rashlike symptoms. He knocked at apartment 63. The door gave a little.

– Hello?

There was no reply. He pushed the door wide open.

The dregs of sunset, filtered by filthy net curtains, threw skewed shadows about the room. A narrow corridor passed a narrow bathroom leading narrow bedroom. There was a single bed, a fold-down table and a chair. An exposed light bulb hung from the ceiling. The bed linen hadn’t been changed in months, shimmering with grease. The smell was oppressive. Osip pulled out the chair and sat down. In the soupy warm air, he closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep.

Faintly aware of a figure in the room with him, Osip awoke from his sleep, straightening up and closing his mouth. There was a man at the door. The sun had set. The light from the overhead bulb was weak. Osip wasn’t sure whether it had been turned on by the man or whether it had always been on. The man locked the front door. He was carrying a cracked leather sports bag. He surveyed the room, the greasy bed linen. From the disgust on his face it was obvious the apartment didn’t belong to him. The man pulled the comforter across the bed before perching on the edge. He was in his late thirties, or early forties; everything about him seemed substantial, his arms, his legs and chest, his facial features. He rested the bag on his knees, unzipping it, taking out something small – tossing it towards Osip, who caught it. In his palm was a wrap of opium. In a movement perfected over many years, he secreted the wrap into an inside pocket of his jacket with a small hole that enabled it to drop into the lining. Many agents had addictions, some to gambling, some to alcohol. Osip smoked most nights until he passed out, lying on his back and feeling the most wonderful sensation in the world – nothing at all. Dependency on the drug served a secondary purpose. It made his superiors, and those in the Soviet Union reviewing his activities, less suspicious. His addiction allowed them to feel in control of him. They owned him. He depended on them. His code name was Brown Smoke. Though it conveyed a degree of contempt, Osip liked it. It made him sound like a Native American, which for an immigrant spy was an irony, he supposed.

It was doubtful that this man was an FBI undercover agent. He hadn’t said a word. An undercover agent would have already told a hundred nervous lies. He reached into the bag for a second time. Osip leaned forward, anxious to see what he would pull out next. It was a camera, with a telescopic lens. Osip said:

– This is for me?

The man didn’t reply, placing the camera on the table. Osip continued:

– I think there’s been some mistake. I’m not a field operative.

The man’s voice was coarse and low, more like a growl than speech.

– If you’re not an operative, what are you? You provide us with no useful information. You claim that you are developing spies. These spies give us nothing.

Osip shook his head, pretending to be indignant.

– I have risked my life – A calculated risk from a man with nothing to lose. You’re an expert in doing as little as possible. Time has caught up with you. Many thousands of dollars have been paid to you, and for what?

– I am happy to discuss what more I can do for the Soviet Union.

– The discussions have already taken place. We’ve decided what you must do.

– Then I’d counsel that those demands be aligned with my skills.

The man scratched his chest through his shirt then looked at his nails, surprisingly long, and spotlessly clean.

– Something very important is about to happen. For it to succeed two things need to be done. You were given a camera. Let me show you what I was given.

The man placed a gun on the table.

The cloud cover parted as neatly as if a hand had pulled back a theatrical curtain revealing New York City to the audience circling in the sky. The Hudson River split like a tuning fork around the narrow island of Manhattan, on which the fabled skyscrapers were so neat and numerous that the city appeared as a geometric creation composed entirely of straight lines. Raisa had expected New York to be vast, even from the sky, a colossus of steel, with eight-lane roads and cars in ant-like lines that stretched for miles. Regarding the United States for the first time, she found herself holding her breath, an adventurer who’d finally reached a place of lore and legend – comparing myth with reality. This was not only her first glimpse of America, it was her first time in an airliner, the first city she’d ever seen from the sky. The moment was dreamlike although Raisa had never actually dreamt of coming here. Her dreams, modest as they were in scope, had always been confined within the borders of the USSR. The prospect of visiting America had never crossed her mind. Of course, she’d speculated about the nation vilified by her government, posited as their greatest enemy, a society upheld as an example of corruption and moral degeneracy. She’d never believed these assertions outright. Occasionally it had been necessary as a teacher to repeat the statements, striking a tone of anger and outrage, fearful her students would denounce her if she moderated the descriptions of the United States. Yet whether she believed them or not, these lies must have influenced her. This city and this country were a concept, not a real place, an idea controlled by the Kremlin. The Soviet media was only allowed to publish photographs of soup kitchens, lines of the unemployed, juxtaposed beside images of the vast homes of the rich, men whose stomachs strained against the cut of their bespoke suits. After years of mystery, the city was sprawled beneath her, fully exposed, like a patient on a surgical table, ready for her without comment or qualifications, without the accompaniment of a polemical propaganda narration.

Suddenly fearful that she’d made a mistake in bringing her daughters to this strange new world, Raisa regarded Elena, beside her, peering through the small window as the airliner circled.

– What do you think?

Elena was so excited she didn’t hear the question. Raisa tapped her shoulder, suggesting: