Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“I am not indestructible!”

“Wishing is just the empty air between people.”

“Is it?” My voice was like a piece of lead.

You pushed away from the balcony. “We have to leave some things behind.”

The air smelled of exhaust.

I was looking at you but you did not look back at me. I decided to forget this conversation. I left America.

IN MAY 1945, I completed work on a radio antenna that could be concealed within a small prepared cavity, with a sensitized diaphragm and tuning post. Nearby sounds made the diaphragm quiver; these modified the charge of the antenna. Operators up to 150 metres away could direct radio beams toward the device and record the reflected signal’s modulations. Any modulations could be translated back into sound. Whispers could be stolen.

In July 1945, four young boys from the Lenin All-Union Pioneers attended a presentation by Averell Harriman, American ambassador to the USSR. The boys wore red kerchiefs around their necks. At the end of the reception, after sardines and orange cake, the courteous Pioneers jumbled to the front of the room. Their minders smiled. They lay their sturdy hands on the boys’ shoulders. The boys were holding a huge wooden plaque engraved with the proud eagle of the Great Seal of the United States of America. In one talon the eagle clutched an olive branch. In the other, a bundle of arrows. “In honour of the excellent Ambassador Harriman,” squeaked a bucktoothed Pioneer, “the Moscow detachment of Young Pioneers offers this gesture of friendship and trust.”

Ambassador Harriman was recorded to have answered: “What a kindness.”

His government checked the plaque for conventional eavesdropping devices. There were none. It was just a noble bird of prey.

Harriman hung it in his study.

One hundred twenty-one metres away, a radio emitter, affixed to a window frame, pointed toward Spaso House. Separately, a receiver whirred. It recorded noises onto magnetic tape.

I listened.

After the installation of the emitter and receiver, the bugging of Spaso House did not require much upkeep. Beria had men to check the devices, to chase away pigeons, to observe Averell’s security staff for signs of suspicion. For a little while I returned to my old work at Marenko, finding ways to regulate the fuel in missiles. But then again one morning, the junior lieutenant said I had a visitor; again I was taken to the kitchen in the top-secret section; again Beria sat waiting for me, patient and evil, hands folded in his lap. A tape machine rested at his feet.

There was a problem with the sound, he said. Although my bug was working, the voices it recorded seemed washed over, almost lost in distortion. NKVD audiologists were accustomed to cleaning audio, extracting intonation and syllable, but my bug did not work like other bugs. My recordings could not be scrubbed with the same processes. “Can you make them clearer?” Beria asked.

“No,” I said.

Beria was watching me. He let the moment stretch on. Then he smiled. “Yes, you can.”

“No, sir, I cannot.”

“You can, Termen. I can see that you can.”

“You must be mistaken.”

“Listen,” he said, reaching down toward the tape machine. He pressed a switch and it began: a blurring gasp of noise, submerged voices, like an alien broadcast.

“Well?” he said.

I shook my head.

Beria licked his lips and then as the recording went dead he began to speak in the same kind of incomprehensible sounds, twinned and smothered words. A weak imitation — in another context I would have laughed — but here his impersonation felt joyless, wrong. I felt as if a river were running over me.

“Please stop,” I said.

He stopped. He laughed in a short way.

“When you have made the voices clearer,” he said, “write down what they say.”

I made my return to the top-secret laboratory, where the air still felt pinched, as though the room were held in a set of needle-nose pliers. Every morning an NKVD agent delivered a locked box containing one day’s tapes. I set up a listening station, sat with headset and whispering machine, adjusted dials for Hz, KHz, MHz, aW.

There could be no better operator: the bug’s solemn English-speaking inventor, sentenced to prison. I began my uneasy relationship with Averell and Kathy; and Mr Capaldi, the ambassador’s chief aide; and Snuff, their bearded collie. I listened to Harriman’s conversations with himself, late at night, repeating the words of an upcoming speech. I listened to his small talk with the cook, about capers and brown sugar. I listened to the secrets, the United States’ state secrets, the conversations between our World War allies as they sat with neglected biscuits, glasses of sparkling water, two folded newspapers. “I am frightened,” Harriman muttered one morning. “Jack, I don’t know that this will all shake out.”

YOUR VOICE CAME on a Saturday.

I was sitting in the silent lab. Just two of us there: the free worker and me, paper shifting on paper. I wore a padded, heavy headset. I had a book of lined paper, a typewriter pushed aside. Usually I would transcribe by hand and then retype the pages; the originals went to my guard, who burned them.

For reasons of quiet, the laboratory had no clocks.

I wound back a section of tape that was giving me trouble. Harriman was talking to Capaldi, discussing a meeting with one of Stalin’s marshals. He was summing up their plans but he was doing it as he opened the study’s door, with scraping wood and a rush of air. “I suppose we’ll have to xxxxx xx xxxxx tomorrow,” Harriman said, and went out. I rewound. “… suppose we’ll have to xxxxx xx xxxxx tomorrow.” I rewound. “… xxxxx xx later tomorrow.”

Rewind. “… xxxxx xx later,” “… xxxxx xx,” “… to xxxxx xx later tomorrow.”

I couldn’t make it out. “Resolve”? “Call it off”?

I manipulated a panel of switches and dials. The door scrape deepened and then went treble. The voices became airy, aqueous. Certain frequencies became clearer and others slipped away. I imagined lanterns lashed to a pier, shining dimly through fog. “… we’ll have to susxxxx xx later,” Averell said. “… have to susxxxx,” “… have to suspxxx,” “… have to suspend xx later.”

“ ‘Suspend it later,’ ” I murmured aloud.

The free worker glanced at me.

I wrote down the words.

I wound back the tape for a final pass.

“I understand your point,” Harriman said, “so if they do continue down that track I suppose we’ll have to suspend it later tomorrow.”

And then.

And then there was something else. Buried in the warp and hiss of static.

Suspended like a moonbeam.

After Harriman spoke, or perhaps just ghosted over the grey end of his words, another colour.

Was it the door? Was it Capaldi?

I closed my eyes. I went back and forward.

Distortion?

I went back and forward, searching.

Then, suddenly.

Or maybe it was not suddenly. Maybe it was not suddenly; maybe it was slowly but in the way that only certain changes are slow, slow and very almost, almost sudden. When you stare at a thing that is unfurling and you know it is unfurling, and then finally there is a moment when it is unfurled, strong and present, wide as a sail, or like a new sky, a change that has impossibly slowly suddenly arrived.

It was your voice, unmistakeable and completely hidden, the voice of Clara, who lives in New York City and who said she would not marry me, back when she was young, back before I was wrecked.