Billion-Dollar Brain (9 page)

Harvey smiled. ‘Boy, did we have great times. We were all so bad. The only guy who knew what he was doing was the manager, and we used to drive him out of his skull. Every morning the whole company would drag-arse on to the stage. He’d say, “You’re going to work your arses off today, the lot of you. Because I’m a tyrannous bastard. The critics are ignorant bastards, the audience mercurial bastards and you are incompetent bastards. The only legitimate thing around here is the theatre.” Every morning he said that. Every morning. Boy, was I happy in those days. I didn’t know it, that’s all.’

‘Aren’t you happy now?’ Signe asked in alarm.

‘Sure, hon, sure,’ Harvey put his arm around her and snuggled close.

‘Wipe your face,’ said Signe. ‘You’ve got peanut butter on your chin.’

‘Romantic broad, ain’t she?’ Harvey said.

‘Don’t call me a broad,’ said Signe. She took a playful swipe at his face, but Harvey caught it on the flat of his hand, then she struck at him with the palm of the other hand and they did a pat-a-cake routine. No matter how much Signe varied the speed, Harvey’s hand was up there providing a wall against which her hand smacked, until he snatched his hand away and she toppled into his arms.

Harvey said, ‘We have to talk business, hon, why don’t you run downtown and buy those shoes you need?’ He peeled a hundred-mark note from a big roll.

Signe took the money gleefully and ran out of the room shouting, ‘I can take a hint. I can take a hint,’ and laughing.

Harvey looked at his bankroll, and put it away slowly. When the door closed Harvey poured more coffee for us both, and said, ‘This has been a spectator sport for you so far, but now you are going to join the men.’

‘What does that entail?’ I said. ‘Circumcision?’

Harvey said, ‘All our operations are programmed on computers. Each stage of the operation is recorded on a tape machine and each operator reports the end of each stage to that machine and the machine will—providing all the agents on that scheme have also reported in—tell you the next stage.’

‘You mean you’re working for a calculating machine?’

‘We call it the Brain,’ said Harvey. ‘That’s how we can be so sure that no slip-ups occur. The machine correlates the reports of all the agents and then relays the next set of instructions. Each agent has a telephone number. He phones that number and obeys the recorded instructions he receives. If the message contains the word “Secure”, that means the words following make up the introductory identification of someone who will contact
him and give him orders. For instance: if you phone the number and the tape machine says, “Take a plane to Leningrad. Secure. The face of the city has changed.” That means you fly to Leningrad and stick around for orders from someone who will introduce himself with the words, “The face of the city has changed.”’

‘I’ve got it,’ I said.

‘Good, because those were exactly the orders for both of us this morning. We both go. When the next stage is complete you will be phoning and getting your own instructions. Don’t tell me what they are. In fact, don’t tell anyone.’

‘OK.’

Harvey passed me two New York numbers on the Hanover exchange. ‘Remember those numbers, then burn that paper. The second number is for emergencies and I do mean emergencies, not running low on Kleenex. And always call collect. The phone charges can’t be drawn on your expenses.’

There was a little man, and he had a little gun, And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead; He went to the brook, and shot a little duck, Right through the middle of the head, head, head.

NURSERY RHYME

Leningrad is the halfway house between Asia and the Arctic. Normally it takes about six days to arrange a visit, even if you cable both ways. Harvey, however, had some way of speeding things, and we got the Aeroflot Ilyushin 18B evening flight from Helsinki just two days later. A Zim motor-car took us from the airport to the Europe Hotel which is just off the Nevsky Prospekt, the wide main street of Leningrad. Inside the hotel it looked as though the nine-hundred-day siege of World War Two was still going on. Pieces of broken plasterboard, old doors, tarpaulins and coils of rope had to be negotiated before we could get to the desk clerk. Harvey said he still had a temperature amd must have something to eat before he went to bed. The desk clerk was a worried, grey-haired man with steel-rimmed glasses and a medal. He showed us into the buffet, and waitresses brought vodka and red caviare and stared at us in that curious but not impolite way that so many people do in Russia.

From the buffet we could see the restaurant where a ten-piece dance band was playing ‘Mambo italiano’ and about thirty couples danced various improvisations on the Western dances according to whether they came from Leningrad, Peking, or East Berlin, where the TV picks up the Western stations. Harvey insisted that he must have coffee as well as brandy, and although the big Espresso machine had been cleaned and stopped the plump waitress went off to fix some for us.

Harvey said that if he had the thermometer that was in his baggage he could show me whether he was ill or not, and that then I wouldn’t think it was so funny.

I helped myself to some more red caviare and that wonderful dark sour bread, and watched the cashier noisily adding the takings on an abacus. Two waiters came into the buffet arguing, and then noticed that it wasn’t empty and went out again. Then a very tall man in an overcoat and an astrakhan hat came in. He walked across to our table. ‘I notice,’ he said in good English, ‘that you have been so bold as to ask for food at this late hour. Are you discussing business, or may I join you?’

‘Sit down,’ Harvey said, and he made a flick of the finger and said, ‘Mr Dempsey from Eire, and my name’s Newbegin. I’m American.’

‘Ah,’ said the man in that open-mouthed way that Italians express polite surprise, ‘my name is Fragolli. I am Italian. A little more of the same,’ he said to the waitress who had come to the table with
Harvey’s coffee and was watching Signor Fragolli with close interest. He made a circular motion with closed fingers. The girl nodded and smiled. ‘Stolichnaya,’ he called after her. ‘Is the only vodka I will drink,’ he explained to us.

‘“Hey Mambo. Mambo italiano”,’ he sang quietly to the music.

‘You here on business?’ Harvey asked.

‘Business yes. I have been two hundred miles south of Moscow. You think here it is Russia in winter, but I have been in tiny frozen villages; you have no idea. I sell to the purchasing committees of the many regions. Four days of negotiations to make a deal, always the same amount of time. They make an offer, we argue, then we discuss. I make a price, they say it is too much. I explain that a lower price will exploit my workers. They examine the figures again. I modify a part of the specification. On the fourth day we agree. They keep to their agreements exactly. They never default on a payment. It is a pleasure once agreement is reached.’

The waitress arrived with a flask of vodka and more red caviare. Signor Fragolli was a large man with a deeply lined muscular face and a large hooked nose like a Roman Emperor. He opened a white smile in his dark sun-bronzed face and tapped a knife against the silver champagne bucket in time to the music.

‘What do you sell?’ Harvey said.

He stopped tapping and groped into his black briefcase. ‘This,’ he said. He was holding a lady’s
girdle and he swivelled it like moving hips. The suspender clips rattled.

‘This I like,’ said Harvey.

We arranged lunch the next day. Signor Fragolli would meet us at one thirty
P.M.
outside the Central Naval Museum, which he insisted upon calling the Stock Exchange. The Museum is on the eastern spit of one of the hundred islands that make up the city of Leningrad, and the spit links two of its six hundred and twenty bridges. Here the River Neva is at its incredible widest, and the cold wind screams across the ice to the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Italian was a moment or so late, smiling and bowing apologies. He led the way down the slope to the river, now frozen solid from here to the north bank. Once upon the ice the distance to Kirovsky Bridge seemed even vaster. We followed the well-marked paths across the ice. A woman in a heavy coat, headscarf and fur-lined boots stood patiently holding a string which ran down through a circular hole in the ice. A small boy with her brandished a plastic gun and made banging sounds at us, but the woman admonished him and smiled at us. She had caught no fish, or perhaps she had thrown them back. When we were well past her Signor Fragolli said, ‘The face of the city has certainly changed. Have you got it?’

‘Yes,’ Harvey said. I noticed he kept his head bent downward, for even out here on the ice a parabolic reflector microphone could pick us up.

‘I hope you haven’t broken any of them?’

‘No. I’ve been very careful,’ Harvey said.

That was all I needed to feel sure that Harvey had the half-dozen eggs that were stolen from me at London Airport. I said nothing. They were going to be surprised when they looked more closely at those canteen eggs. Harvey and Fragolli both carried identical black briefcases.

‘Change bags at lunch,’ said Fragolli. He gave a great peal of laughter with lots of teeth flashing. I suppose that was to fool anyone watching us from the river bank. ‘One of you,’ he said, still smiling, ‘is going to Riga.’

‘Dempsey will go,’ said Harvey. ‘I must stay here.’

Fragolli said, ‘I don’t care which.’ He changed his position as we walked so that he could be closer to me. ‘You go to Latvia tomorrow. The 392 flight to Riga at two fifty P.M. Stay at Hotel Riga. You will be contacted.’ He turned to Harvey. ‘You’ve put his photo on the Brain index?’

‘Yes,’ said Harvey.

‘Good,’ said Fragolli. ‘The person meeting you will know what you look like.’

‘But I won’t know what they look like?’

‘Exactly,’ said Fragolli. ‘Is safer that way.’

‘Not for me it’s not,’ I said. ‘I don’t like the idea of my snapshots being found on one of your layabouts.’

Harvey said, ‘There won’t be any pictures floating about. The man who will contact you will probably be the aeroplane passenger.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked. ‘Apply splints and bandages?’

Harvey said, ‘The sooner you get it through your head that this organization doesn’t make slipups the sooner you can relax and stop bugging me.’

Perhaps he said that for the benefit of Signor Fragolli, so I just said, ‘OK.’

Fragolli said, ‘You are going to have to commit two thousand words to memory. Can you do that?’

‘Not verbatim,’ I said, ‘not every word exactly.’

‘No,’ said Fragolli. ‘Only the formulas—quite short ones—need be verbatim.’

‘I can do that,’ I said.

I wondered how they would arrange my visa for Riga, but I didn’t ask.

We reached the ice-locked boat. It was a great slab-sided craft with lots of wooden balconies and curtained windows. We picked our way through crates of beer and lemonade, and a man yelled ‘Tovarich’ at us in a rather threatening way. ‘Tovarich,’ he yelled again.

Fragolli said, ‘It’s because we haven’t left our coats with him. It’s not cultured to enter anywhere in an overcoat.’

The floating restaurant had the same equipment that every other restaurant had. The cutlery was from the same state factory and had the same design and so did the plates, the menu, and the waiters.

We ate
piroshky
and bouillon and Fragolli told us what sort of morning he had had negotiating
the sale of girdles. ‘You have no idea what remarkable minds the Russians have, cautious and devious perhaps, but clever yes. I sell my goods in many western countries, but these Russians…’ He hissed at his fingertips to demonstrate his admiration, and his voice became low and conspiratorial. ‘We make a deal. Other customers just give me a number and a date; eight thousand girdles model 6a in these sizes for this delivery date. The Russians, no. They want this suspender clip to be one inch lower, they want this seam double sewn.’

‘Tricky,’ said Harvey.

‘Yes,’ said Fragolli. ‘By changing the specification they ensure that those garments are made specially for them. Elastic deteriorates, you see. They don’t want garments that have been months in the warehouse. Clever capitalist minds they have.’

‘Capitalist?’

‘Certainly. Those old ladies selling bunches of flowers on the Nevsky Prospekt? Now, no militiaman says anything to them, even though it is against the law. But to sell those flowers long ago, it could be a dangerous thing to do. If I could give one of those women a supply of girdles…’ He stopped. ‘I have calculated that selling the girdles at normal price—and in Leningrad this day I could get double the normal price at least—but at normal price I could still retire at the end of one day’s work. This country is hungry for consumer goods just as Europe was about 1946.’

‘So why don’t you do just that?’ said Harvey.

Fragolli crossed the first two fingers of each hand in the universal Russian sign for prison and everything connected with it.

‘Things will become easier,’ said Harvey. ‘You will soon be selling your girdles; all you can make.’

Fragolli said, ‘There is a saying in Leningrad that a pessimist is a man who says that things were bad in the past, things are still bad, things will always be bad. An optimist says, things were bad in the past, are still bad, but nothing can be worse than this.’

‘So why do they put up with it?’

‘When a baby is born in this country he is swaddled. Swaddled from neck to toe, like a log of wood. When you unwrap him to wash, he cries. He cries because the control and restraint has been removed. He is free. He is alarmed. So he is soon swaddled up again, and mentally he stays swaddled up until he dies.’

‘They don’t do that swaddling so much nowadays,’ said Harvey.

Fragolli said, ‘Look at this waitress, for instance. She just cannot buy proper foundation garments. She has no proper brassière or girdle.’

‘I like it like that,’ Harvey said. ‘I like my broads buttocked both sides.’

‘Non non no,’ said Fragolli. ‘I want to put foundation garments on to every pretty woman in Leningrad.’

Harvey said, ‘My ambition is exactly the reverse.’

Fragolli laughed.

Harvey dropped his
piroshky
into the soup and broke it up with the spoon.

Fragolli said, ‘The Russian style. You eat your
piroshky
in Russian style.’

‘My father was a Russian,’ said Harvey.

‘Newbegin is not a Russian name.’

Harvey laughed. ‘It is the word “new” and the word “begin”. My father used it when he came to America for a new start in life.’

‘I understand,’ said Fragolli. ‘I meet many Americans.’ He lowered his voice. ‘To tell you the truth, my company is forty-nine per cent owned by an American company. The Russians do not like to do business with American companies so this is convenient arrangement for all concerned.’

‘Russians are realists,’ Harvey said.

‘They are realists,’ pronounced Fragolli, and he too dropped a
piroshky
into his soup.

Harvey and I left Fragolli after lunch. Harvey said, ‘Relax. I didn’t really send your photo to Riga. I’ve got my own system for identification but I’m not telling that Fragolli anything.’

‘What’s your system?’

‘They have television telephones in this crazy country. I have a call booked for Riga for three o’clock. We’ll go now and take a look at this guy you are going to contact; it’s a heap better than smudgy little photos.’

Harvey and I took a cab to Pavlov Street. Number 12a is a small building that looks as if it
might house an unskilled worker with a large family. It is really the public video trunk call office. We knocked at the door, and a woman let us in. She parked a pencil in her hair, looked at her wristwatch, compared that with the wall clock, asked us what time we thought it was, then we all went to a small room that housed a phone and an old-fashioned-looking twelve-inch TV set. We sat down and Harvey picked up the telephone. The woman turned a dial on the TV set and the screen flashed blue. Harvey said ‘Hello’ four times, then suddenly he was talking to a bald-headed man who seemed to have four overcoats on at once.

Harvey said, ‘This is Mr Dempsey, he’s coming to see you tomorrow and he’ll be staying at the Hotel Riga.’

The man on the TV screen said, ‘It’s cold here in Riga. Bring plenty of sweaters.’ Then he said would I move a little bit to the right so that he could see me because the edges of the picture distort. Then the man in Riga asked if it was cold in Leningrad, and we said yes it was, and the man in Riga said you had to expect it now, and that the Riga Hotel was modern and well heated as long as it wasn’t damp. Harvey said how much he had enjoyed his last visit to Riga, and how sorry he was that he wouldn’t be going there, and the man at the other end said that Leningrad was one of the most wonderful towns in the world. Then Harvey said yes Leningrad was wonderful, and how it was called the Venice of the North on account of how
wonderful it was. The man at the other end said yes, and how did Mr Dempsey like it, and I said it was wonderful but I hadn’t ever heard anyone call Venice the Leningrad of the South, and then there was a silence. I had spoilt the magic of the moment. That was when the little woman with the pencil in her hair came in and said that was the end of the time unless we wanted to extend it. Harvey said no we didn’t, and then the man in Riga said good-bye, and we said good-bye, so the man in Riga said it again and was still saying it when he melted.

I was alone that last evening in Leningrad.

I went to the Maly Opera Theatre that night and saw Verdi’s
Otello,
and with the voices still occupying my mind I decided to take a subway down the Nevsky and have a drink at the Astoria. I went down the steps at the sign of the big neon M. I put a five-copeck piece into the automatic entrance which won’t prevent non-payers travelling but buzzes in order to embarrass them. A man in a fur hat, long black leather coat, white shirt and silver tie got into the carriage. I wondered if he had enjoyed the opera. I smiled at him and he nodded back without smiling. I reached for a packet of Gauloises, tore open the corner and offered them to him.