"But they're printed too," said Spesk.
This caused Nathan some confusion. His brow furrowed. His dark Russian face clouded with gloom as he thought, difficult and sticky step by difficult and sticky step. Finally, the pistol killer smiled.
"It is Russian printing that is always the truth because you can read it right. It is American printing that lies because we cannot read it. It can say anything with those funny letters it uses."
"Good, Nathan," said Spesk, but again his bodyguard bothered him with a question so Spesk said he would explain everything about the mission now, why he had come into America personally with an operative who was not familiar with the language.
"But a good shot and a good Communist," Nathan insisted.
"Yes," said Spesk.
"So, may I have my gun?"
"No," said Spesk. "Now listen, because you are getting a rare treat," said the youngest colonel in the NKVD. "You are getting to know what is going on. Even generals don't know that."
Nathan said he knew what was going on. They were righting imperialism. From the borders of Germany where Russian troops were stationed and into Cuba, until Russia had conquered imperialism from one end of the world to the other, where no other flag flew but the hammer and sickle.
"Good," said Spesk. "About ten days ago when you were called in from Vladivostok, a strange thing was happening in America. The CIA, our enemy, was tearing down a building piece by piece. This attracted attention. West German intelligence was interested, Argentine intelligence was interested. They did what we call overload an area and we knew that because we traced them moving large numbers of people-eight and ten, that is a lot in espionage-out of their normal duties to watch one building being torn down. To try to talk to the daughter of a woman who was killed."
"Who killed her?"
"At first we thought muggers."
"What is a mugger?" asked Nathan.
"A mugger is a person who jumps on someone, beats them up, and takes their money. There are a lot of them in New York City."
"Because of capitalist oppression, there are muggers, correct?" asked Nathan.
"No, no," said Spesk, annoyed. "I want you to understand this clearly. Forget everything you've read. In this country, there is no death penalty in many areas. Somehow they got the notion in this country that killing someone for a crime is not a deterrent to more crime. So they took away capital punishment and now they can't walk their own streets. So I have brought you along because now that this land has no death penalty, many people go around killing and you are to protect me. Worse still are the laws regarding those who are less than eighteen years old. They can kill without even going to jail and American jails are warm and give three meals a day, often with meat."
"They must have millions committing crimes to get in," said Nathan in astonishment, because only when he joined the NKVD did he eat meat regularly. That was food for ruling Communists, not for the masses.
"They have millions committing crimes," said Spesk. "But let me warn you about any idea of committing a crime to get into one of their jails. We can exchange prisoners for you and then you will go back to a Russian jail. And we kill, friend. And not all that quickly for defectors."
Nathan said he had no intention of defecting.
"Which brings up, Nathan, why I, personally am here. Now you must already be thinking how stupid Americans are. And this is very true. They are stupid. If you tell Americans something is moral, they will cut their own throats for it. Except, sometimes, certain people stop them."
"Who?" demanded Nathan in the back seat of the car parked under a train that went above them on rails very high up. It was an American elevated train that some of their cities had. Every time a train passed, Nathan trembled because he thought the train might fall. Buildings fell down in Moscow so why shouldn't trains that rattled so much fall also?
"We stop them," Spesk said. "You see, our generals do not want the capitalists to cut their own throats because that would make the generals look unimportant. They want it to appear as if their hands are on the razor. Therefore, they have to do something and every time they do something, they make the capitalists look smarter. Therefore, we come here to the Bronx in America. To this slum."
"It looks all right to me," said Nathan, noticing the shops open, their windows crammed with goods and foods, and how well everyone appeared to dress, without great patches, and with shoes without rags holding them on.
"By American standards it is a slum. There is worse yet, but never mind. I go here myself personally because they would, if I left it to the generals, they would write reports that said everything so no matter what happened, they would have predicted it. Our generals are as stupid as American generals. As a matter of fact, they are identical. A general is a general is a general which is why when one surrenders, he has dinner with his conqueror. They are all identical. So you and I are here to see what all this fuss is about and then we will figure out what we will do about it and when we return to Mother Russia, we will both be heroes of the Soviet Socialist Republics, yes?"
"Yes," said Nathan. "Heroes." And he thought how nice it would be to shoot up between the railroad tracks and get a kneecap or the groin. The groin was a wonderful place to shoot people except that they died only sometimes. The colonel still held his gun. But he would have to give it back when they saw muggers.
"Mugger," said Nathan happily, and pointed at a man with a blue cap and a blue suit who had a whistle in his mouth and wore white gloves and stood in the middle of a very large and wide street with high buildings all around. He would have made a wonderful target. There was even a shiny silver star on his chest. Nathan could hit that star.
"No. That is a black policeman," said Spesk. "You are thinking of nigger, not mugger. Nigger is a word Americans who are black do not like to be called."
"What do they like to be called?" asked Nathan.
"That depends. It is always changing. Once it was Negro and black was bad, then it was black and Negro was bad, then it was Afro-American, but it is never nigger. Many of the muggers are black though. Most are."
"But don't the racist police shoot black nigger Afro-Americans all the time? Negroes?"
"Obviously not," said Spesk. "Or there wouldn't be the mugging problem."
"I hate racists," said Nathan.
"Good," said Spesk. As he calculated, the building they were looking for would be toward the main center of the city which was called Manhattan, yet still in an outlying district called the Bronx.
"I also hate Africans. They are ugly and black. I want to vomit when I see something so ugly and black," Nathan said, and spat out the window. "Someday socialism will end racism and blacks."
The first thing that told Spesk they were near the area was a yellow-striped roadblock. Instead of going closer, he veered off the large American street down a hill into a residential area. If all the reports were true, anyone turning into these roadblocks passed the very casual and very armed American lounging around, would be photographed, and perhaps even stopped and questioned.
There were better ways to penetrate in America. One did not have to have expensive spies worming their way into the innards of the defense establishment. There were cheaper and easier ways. One did not have to play spy all the time in America.
So when Spesk saw the garbage stacked neatly in cans along the curb, he realized he was in a safe enough neighborhood to park. He found a tavern and told Nathan not to talk.
Spesk himself had been one of the bilingual children. Right after the Second World War, the NKVD began nurseries where children learned English and Chinese almost as soon as Russian, so that they would not only speak without accents but would think in the foreign languages also. Children, it had been discovered, learned to duplicate sounds exactly, while grownups could only reproduce sounds they had learned in their childhood. All of which meant Spesk could walk into Winarski's Tavern, just off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx of New York City, America, and sound as if he came from Chicago.