That sounded like the Marina I knew and loved, a mixture of righteous indignation and spoiled girlishness.
“I’m sure he’ll be back soon, safe and sound.” I stood up, clumsily, my foot asleep in its cast. Marina caught me as I wobbled, and we kissed, deeply, warmly, as we used to.
Then I held her in the dark room — neither of us had turned on a light — swaying with her, like lovers on an empty dance floor in some movie about the Great Patriotic War, the pretty girl in her simple skirt and white blouse, the soldier in his uniform.…
“I should go.” I was confused by my own feelings, and, in truth, we had worn ourselves out emotionally.
There were tears in her eyes again. “Yes.”
Soon thereafter I was in an empty train heading out of Podlipki Station, trying to rearrange the puzzle pieces of my existence. Maybe I was still angry about Marina’s betrayal, no matter how justified she might have felt. But I was still not ready to tell her the truth of my situation.
Especially since I was completely confused about that situation. What was Uncle Vladimir up to? He had had me targeted for intelligence work long before he had approached me. Had he merely used the Korolev murder as a pretext to “activate” me?
Or was it something worse than that? Uncle Vladimir had been present in the Kremlin Hospital the day Korolev died. No murderer had yet been arrested.
Had Uncle Vladimir killed Korolev? If so, what had he hoped to gain? (Ridiculous… he was not even in the same wing of the hospital as Korolev.)
Or, had Uncle Vladimir somehow arranged for Artemov to take over? But why would he be persecuting him now, if, indeed, he was behind that?
Was there some way to link these events? Or was I feverish, emotionally distraught? Could Katya help me?
Too many questions. I had almost none of the information required for intelligent answers, and I needed to be intelligent, because the penalty for mistakes in this particular game was, indeed, death.
34
The American Film Crew
“They only kept him for a few hours, then let him go,” Shiborin said the next morning, as we made our way — he too slowly for comfort, I too fast for my cast — down the icy sidewalk outside our flat.
“Artemov? Everybody?”
“I guess they sweated the junior guys a little more, knowing they would run to Artemov and complain as soon as they got back to the bureau.”
“Who tells you these things?”
He smiled. “Heroes of the Soviet Union.”
We paused as we came to Building Three, the last of the residential buildings to be finished. A truck was parked here and a young woman I didn’t know was holding a baby while trying desperately to keep soldiers from breaking her furniture. “One of the nearly departed,” Shiborin said. “Back to the squadron after being a cosmonaut. Can you imagine how terrible that would be?”
“Moving out with a small child in the middle of winter would be bad enough,” I said, sensitized to domestic challenges by my meeting with Marina. I realized it was good we were heading for the gym, because otherwise I would have telephoned Marina simply to hear her voice, adding more fuel to the fires of confusion.
When we arrived, one of Belyayev’s deputies was waiting with a message for me: “They need you over at the air base this morning,” he said.
“Why?”
“Your English. They have some foreign visitors there today.”
I was stunned. Foreign visitors at Chkalov? “Are they going to Baikonur next?” I said, joking.
Passing by, Shiborin overheard this. “They were here yesterday, while you were gone. It’s a film crew from America making some kind of documentary on the Soviet space program, in case we beat Apollo to the Moon.” He smiled. “Of course, people like you and I are secret, so they hauled out a couple of doctors and called them ‘student-cosmonauts.’ ”
Even if I hadn’t been able to speak some English, I would have wanted to see this, though I wondered who would request my services. Surely there were better English-speakers available to the State Security escorts. “One more thing,” the messenger told me: “Civilian clothing.”
I hurried back to my flat, and got changed just in time to catch the bus.
As I clomped from the administration building toward the flight line, I saw that Chkalov air base was surprisingly active this gray morning. I quickly realized it was an illusion. Yes, there were more cars parked in view, and perhaps two dozen people standing around. But there were no planes or helicopters taking off, only one MiG-17 out on the taxiway, its engines running.
I looked for the cameras, sound and lighting people, and found them at the center of a crowd at the hangar entrance. As I pushed my way through, I heard a familiar voice call my name: “Yuri, over here!”
It was Katya, her face rosy in the cold. She made no move to kiss me, nor I her: This was not only an official event, it was controlled by State Security. There were undoubtedly more agents present than subjects. In fact, since Katya and I were part-time assets, it was possible that the only people not working for State Security were the Americans themselves! “You got my message.”
“You asked for me?”
“I thought you might enjoy this. Besides, you understand a lot of the technical terms.”
“Glad to be useful.”
I had to subtract two from my estimate of State Security agents present in that group, because Gagarin was there, too, along with Colonel Seregin, the commander of the 70th Squadron. Gagarin was wearing a flight helmet and was being filmed getting ready for a training mission. Seregin was filling the role of a briefing officer, complete with clipboard.
They were not on microphone as they walked toward the MiG-17, and a good thing, too, because rather than discussing the particular quirks of the 17, a high-performance jet which, I was quite sure, Gagarin had never flown, Seregin was saying, “How much longer is this shit going to go on?”
“Now you know what my life is like,” Gagarin said. “I should be at the academy this morning instead of freezing my ass off here.”
Naturally, at that moment Katya and what I assumed to be the American producer asked me what they were discussing. So I made up some plausible nonsense about weather, call signs, and traffic patterns.
The technician who had started up the aircraft engines climbed out, and Gagarin went up the ladder to the cockpit, with Seregin close behind. As the camera crew moved down the runway for some establishing shots (that was the term they used), I edged up to Katya. “What are you going to do? Gagarin can’t fly that thing.”
“I know.” She frowned. “They didn’t tell us until we got here. So he’s not going to fly it. He’s just going to… drive it out onto the runway.”
“Taxi it.”
“Yes. And then they can edit in a shot of the same jet taking off with someone else at the controls.”
From what I knew of the accuracy of such documentaries, the footage would show an entirely different aircraft, possibly American, even an old propeller-driven one. But I kept my mouth shut.
Even taxiing an unfamiliar aircraft was a bit of a trick. I could see Seregin going through the procedures step by step with Gagarin. Then, as satisfied as he was going to get, he climbed down and pulled the ladder away himself.
We all backed away to see the first man in space off on his routine training mission. “Here we go,” Katya whispered to me, quoting Gagarin’s first words at the launch of Vostok 1, though not, I believe, deliberately.
It all seemed to go well. Gagarin was a rusty aviator, but he had the basic skills. Slowly, but smoothly, he rolled the MiG down the taxiway, turned around at the far end, then drove back to the hangar. There he halted.