The Secrets We Kept(60)

The Agency wanted to stack its ranks with intellectuals—those who believed in the long game of changing people’s ideology over time. And they believed books could do it. I believed books could do it. That was my job: to designate books for exploitation and help carry out their covert dissemination. It was my job to secure books that made the Soviets look bad: books they banned, books that criticized the system, books that made the United States look like a shining beacon. I wanted them to take a good hard look at a system that had allowed the State to kill off any writer, any intellectual—hell, even any meteorologist—they disagreed with. Sure, Stalin was dead, his body embalmed and sealed under glass, but the memory of the Purges was also preserved.

Like a publisher or editor, I was always thinking of what the next big novel would be and how to get it into as many hands as quickly as possible. The only difference was that I wanted to do it without any fingerprints.

My jaunt to London wasn’t just about a book; it was about the book. We’d been after Doctor Zhivago for months. We had obtained the first printing in Italian and decided it was indeed all it had been cracked up to be. It was deemed an operational imperative to get the manuscript in its native Russian, “lest any of its potency be lost in translation.” I didn’t know if the concern had more to do with ensuring maximal impact on Soviet citizens or preserving the purity of the author’s words. I liked to think it was the latter, or at least a bit of both.

My job was to convince our friends the Brits to hand their Russian-language copy over to us—or at least to let us borrow it for a while. A tentative deal had been made, but they’d been dragging their feet, probably to buy some time so as to determine whether they could do something with it first. I was sent to the Big Smoke to put the matter to bed.

Not that I minded. I needed to get out of the swamp and clear my head. Irina had been distant, whereas I had thought we were headed down the aisle. I’d even asked my mother for my grandmother’s ring and planned to pop the question over Christmas. But after some canceled dates and the feeling that something was off, I wasn’t so sure it was the right move. And when I asked Irina about it, it only seemed to make things worse. I’d never met anyone like her. Up to that point, every girl I’d dated only had ambitions of landing my grandmother’s ring. Irina wanted what I wanted: to move up in the Agency, to be treated with respect, to do her job well and be patted on the back for it. She was my equal, and someone who challenged me. I knew if I married one of the girls I’d dated back in college I’d be bored before the first child was born, and I didn’t want to turn into the cliché Agency man with a woman or two on the side.

And she was Russian! How I loved her Russianness, although she claimed to be even more American than I. Eating homemade pelmeni in their quaint basement apartment; Mama—which she insisted I call her from day one—poking fun at my patrician Russian accent every chance she could get; I loved it all.

But when she pulled away, I’m ashamed to say I even tailed her home once or twice—to see if she was meeting another man. She wasn’t. But still.

So yeah, it was good to get away, and I was happy my destination was London. I loved the city: No?l Coward at the Café de Paris, rain jackets, rain bonnets, rain boots, Teddy boys, Teddy girls. Of course, I also loved the literature. I wished I could stay a week and visit the house where H. G. Wells died or the pub where C. S. Lewis had pints with Tolkien. But if all went according to plan, I’d get the job done in one night and be on a plane back to the States the following morning.



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The friend I was meeting, code name Chaucer, wasn’t really a friend. I knew him, yes, and our lives had crossed over the subject of books several times. He was of medium height and medium build, and unremarkable in the ways we spooks strove to be. The one exception was his teeth: so white and straight you’d think he’d grown up in Scarsdale, not Liverpool. He could also switch accents to suit his company: posh among the posh, working-class among the working-class, Irish if speaking to a redhead. People found him charming, but I could only stand him for an hour or so.

Chaucer was twenty minutes late to our meeting at the George Inn. Making me wait, I was sure, was some sort of MI6 psych shit. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he’d arrived early and been watching me from a distance as I entered the pub, that he’d checked his pocket watch—definitely a pocket watch—and waited twenty minutes before entering. They were always pulling petty stuff like that and were quick to remind us lowly Americans at every opportunity that the Brits had hundreds of years over us in perfecting the craft. As Chaucer would say, he’d been in the game since I was in diapers.

Rumor had it that MI6 had acquired Zhivago in its original Russian when a plane carrying Feltrinelli was grounded in Malta after a sham emergency landing. Word was, officers posing as airport employees escorted Feltrinelli off the plane while another officer photographed the manuscript. I didn’t know if it was true, but it sure made a hell of a story.

I sat at the two-top under the head of a glass-eyed stag and downed two Irish whiskeys—my own psych move, I guess. The barman plunked down my fish and chips and mushy peas just as Chaucer stepped in from the rain, the collar of his black overcoat pushed up to his ears. He took off his hat and shook it, wetting the two French tourists sitting next to the door. He bowed in apology, then lumbered over to my table. I noticed he’d gained a little weight since the last time I’d seen him.