The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 43

I will never fully understand the notion of a suicide mission. For us it is relatively simple, entailing only the considerable boredom of youth as its primary consequence. Certainly I regretted how likely it seemed that I was going to have to blow a hole in my own skull to escape the situation I had so effectively talked myself into, but by far the more intimidating prospect would have been capture and questioning, and I considered a few years’ boredom to be infinitely preferable to that.

But I have seen men for whom death truly is the end walk towards their demise for reasons no greater than that it was what they were told to do. On the beaches of Normandy, where the bodies floated in the water beside the falling ramps of the landing craft, I saw men run into machine-gun fire who would say, “Hell, I never thought it would come to this, but now I’m here, what’s a guy to do?” With no going back, and no going forward, they went to their deaths with no better plan immediately to hand, having gambled that their choices would not narrow so far, and having been found to be wrong.

For my part, it seemed likely that I would die in this place for little more than a speculation. For a crystal in a radio which was a few years ahead of its time; for the name of a man who saw the future; for a secret hidden by men with guns.

The commander was so good as to point all of this out to me. “You’re going to die here,” he explained as we sat in his office, waiting for Karpenko to come. “Make it easier for yourself.”

I grinned. “Make it easier for yourself” implied that death was my primary concern, as well as being a phrase I associated with New York policemen rather than Soviet commanders in a hidden base. My levity surprised him, his thin grey eyebrows twitching over his paper face. “You’re handling this very calmly,” I pointed out, “for a man on the wrong end of a gun.”

He shrugged. “I’ve had my time and lived it well. You, though–you are a young man. You will have things which tie you to this world. Are you married?”

“That’s a very pious question,” I answered. “Will it have the same emotional implication if I say that I enjoy living in sin?”

“What else do you enjoy? Perhaps you can enjoy them again.”

“That’s a really nice thought–” I sighed “–and I’m grateful for it, but there comes a point when one realises that gratification of the flesh is only so fulfilling. It’s fantastic while it lasts, but comes with so many questions of emotional baggage and doubt that frankly I begin to question whether the grief involved outweighs the satisfaction gained.”

To my surprise, he raised his eyebrows. “You clearly aren’t having the right sort of gratification.”

“A professional ear masseuse in Bangkok once said exactly those words to me.”

“You’re not Russian,” he suggested.

“Is there something wrong with my accent?”

“No Russian would do this.”

“That’s a terrible indictment of the Soviet spirit.”

“You misunderstand. You do not appear to be in a fragile enough state to have chosen this as your particular suicide, and yet neither do you seem to have an agenda which could further the cause of others. I see in you no clear explanation for what you do…”

“So why assume I’m foreign?”

He shrugged. “Call it instinct.” That was a little distressing. Instinct was one of the few factors which I had no great ability to alter or control. “Comrade,” he went on, “you seem too intelligent to be doing this for nothing. Is there really no other path open to you?”

“None which engages me so much,” I replied. A knock at the door cut short any further soul-searching. I gestured at the commander to be silent behind his desk and, tucking the gun into my coat, slipped on to the one stool besides his desk.

A nod, and the commander called,

“Enter!”

The door opened. The man who came in was already in the middle of a sentence, which had clearly begun for him some several seconds before actually receiving permission to come inside.

“… very busy right now and really can’t be—”

The sentence stopped.

The man looked from the commander to me, and his face broke into a smile. “Good God,” he said, each word dropping like a pebble in a pond. “Fancy seeing you here.”