Berezovo, who was younger than Gomel, represented the new Soviet executive and resembled a fire hydrant in a run-down neighborhood: short, squat, stained, and seamed, his head seeming to come to a point and his fibrous hair parted in several impossible places, like a coconut’s. Berezovo was all brass; a very important person. Gomel was important, no doubt about that. He had dachi in both Moscow and the Crimea, but there were only two men higher than Berezovo in the entire, exhaustingly delicate business of Soviet security.
Each man had successfully concealed from the other that he was present at the seminar as the personal and confidential representative of Josef Stalin, proprietor.
Yen Lo’s lectures began at 4 P.M. on July 11. General Kostroma was not invited to attend. The group strolled in pairs, not unlike dons moving across a campus, toward the lovely copse which framed that little red schoolhouse wherein Yen Lo had inserted so many new values and perspectives into the minds of the eleven Americans. It was a glorious summer afternoon: not too hot, not too cool. The excessive humidity of the morning had disappeared. The food had been excellent.
The single extraordinary sight in the informal but stately procession led by Yen Lo and Pa Cha, the senior Chinese statesman present, was that of Chunjin, the Korean interpreter hitherto attached to the U.S. Army as orderly and guide for Captain Marco, walking at Berezovo’s side, chewing on and smoking a large cigar which was held in his small teeth at a jaunty angle. Had any member of the American patrol still retained any semblance of normal perspective he would have been startled at seeing Chunjin there, for when natives were captured by a military party of either side their throats were always cut.
Yen Lo had telephoned ahead from the mess so that when the commission entered the auditorium of the Research Pavilion the American patrol had been seated in a long line across the raised stage, behind a centered lectern. They watched the Sino-Soviet group enter with expressions of amused tolerance and boredom. Yen Lo moved directly to the platform, rummaging in his attaché case while the others found seats, by echelon, in upright wooden chairs.
Large, repeated, seven-color lithographs of Stalin and Mao were interspersed on three walls between muscularly typographed yellow-on-black posters that read: LET US STOP IMITATING!!! as a headline, and as text: Piracy and imitations of designs hamper the development and expansion of export trade. It is regrettable that there are quite a few cases of piracy in the People’s Republic. Piracy injures the Chinese people’s international prestige, causes the boycott of Chinese goods, and makes Chinese designers lose interest in making creative efforts. The smell of new paint and shellac and the delicious clean odor of wood shavings floated everywhere in the air of the room, offering the deep, deep luxury of absolute simplicity.
On stage, Ben Marco sat on the end of the line at stage right, in the Mr. Bones position. Sergeant Shaw sat on the other end of the line, stage left. Between them, left to right, were Hiken, Gosfield, Little, Silvers, Mavole, Melvin, Freeman, Lembeck. Mavole was at stage center. All of the men were alert and serene.
The audience was divided, physically and by prejudice. Gomel did not approve of Yen Lo or his work. Berezovo happened to see in Yen Lo’s methods possibilities that would hasten revolutionary causes by fifty years. Five staff members sat behind each of these men who sat on opposite sides of the room, re-creating an impression of two Alphonse Capones (1899–1947) attending the Chicago opera of 1927. The two Chinese representatives sat off to the left, closer to the platform than the others, as bland as two jars of yoghurt. Yen Lo winked at them now and again as he made his address with asides in various Chinese dialects to annoy Gomel.
The stage was raised about thirty inches from the floor and was draped with bunting of the U.S.S.R. and the People’s Republic of China. Yen Lo stood behind the centered lectern. He was wearing an ankle-length dress of French blue that buttoned at the side of his throat and fell in straight, comfortable lines. The skin of his face was lapstreaked, or clinkerbuilt, into overlapping horizontal folds like the sides of some small boats, and it was the color of raw sulphur. His eyes were hooded and dark, which made him seem even older than did the wrinkles. His entire expression was theatrically sardonic as though he had been advised by prepaid cable that the late Dr. Fu Manchu had been his uncle.
Yen Lo instructed the Russians with bright contempt, with the slightly nauseated fixity of a vegetarian who must remain in a closed room with carnivores. He used a pointer to indicate the various U.S. Army personnel behind him. He introduced each man courteously and by name. He explained their somewhat lackadaisical manners by saying that each American was under the impression that he had been forced by a storm to wait in a small hotel in New Jersey where space restrictions made it necessary for him to watch and listen to a meeting of a ladies’ garden club.
Yen motioned to Raymond Shaw. “Pull your chair over here, Raymond, if you please,” he said in English. Raymond sat beside Yen Lo, who placed his hand lightly on the young man’s shoulder as he spoke to the group. Raymond’s bearing was superciliously haughty. His pose, had it been executed in oils, might have been called “The Young Duke among the Fishmongers.” His legs were crossed and his head was cocked with his chin outstretched.
The male stenographer on Gomel’s team and the female stenographer on Berezovo’s squad flipped their notebooks open on their laps at the same instant, preparing to record Yen’s remarks. The shorter Chinese emissary, a chap named Wen Ch’ang, got his hand under his dress and scratched his crotch.
“This, comrades, is the famous Raymond Shaw, the young man you have flown nearly eight thousand miles to see,” Yen Lo said in Russian. “Your chief, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, saw this young man in his mind’s eye, only as a disembodied ideal, as long as two years before he was appointed to head the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Security in 1938, and that was thirteen eventful years ago. I feel I must add at this point my humble personal gratitude for his warm encouragement and fulfilling inspiration. It is to Lavrenti Pavlovich that this little demonstration will do homage today.”
Berezovo nodded his head graciously in silent acknowledgment of the tribute, then the five staff people behind him just as graciously nodded their heads.
Yen Lo told the group that Raymond Shaw was a unique combination of the exceptionaclass="underline" both internally and externally. With oratorical roundness he presented Raymond’s external values first. He told them about Raymond’s stepfather, the governor; of Raymond’s mother, a woman of wealth and celebrity; of Raymond’s uncle, a distinguished member of the U.S. diplomatic service. Raymond himself was a journalist and when this little war was over might even rise to become a distinguished journalist. All of these attributes, he said, made Raymond welcome everywhere within the political hierarchy of the United States, within both parties.
The line of American soldiers listened to the lecture politely, as though they had to make the best of listening to club women discuss fun with hydrangeas. Bobby Lembeck’s attention had strayed. Ed Mavole, who was still firmly convinced that he had just finished the most active three-day pass of his Army career, had to stuff a fist into his mouth to conceal a yawn. Captain Marco looked from Shaw to Yen Lo to Gomel to Berezovo’s recording assistant, a fine-looking piece with a passionate nose who was wearing no lipstick and no brassière. Marco mentally fitted her with a B cup, enjoyed the diversion, then turned back to try to pay attention to Yen Lo, who was saying that as formidable as were Raymond’s external attributes, he possessed internal weaknesses that Yen would show as being incredible strengths for an assassin.
“I am sure that all of you have heard that old wives’ tale,” Yen stated, “which is concerned with the belief that no hypnotized subject may be forced to do that which is repellent to his moral nature, whatever that is, or to his own best interests. That is nonsense, of course. You note-takers might set down a reminder to consult Brenmen’s paper, ‘Experiments in the Hypnotic Production of Antisocial and Self-injurious Behavior,’ or Wells’s 1941 paper which was titled, I believe, ‘Experiments in the Hypnotic Production of Crime,’ or Andrew Salter’s remarkable book, Conditioned Reflex Therapy to name only three. Or, if it offends you to think that only the West is studying how to manufacture more crime and better criminals against modern shortages, I suggest Krasnogorski’s Primary Violence Motivation or Serov’s The Unilateral Suggestion to Self-Destruction. For any of you who are interested in massive negative conditioning there is Frederic Wertham’s The Seduction of the Innocent, which demonstrates how thousands have been brought to antisocial actions through children’s cartoon books. However, enough of that. You won’t read them anyway. The point I am making is that those who speak of the need for hypnotic suggestion to fit a subject’s moral code should revise their concepts. The conception of people acting against their own best interests should not startle us. We see it occasionally in sleep-walking and in politics, every day.”