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He went to the Saks Fifth Avenue department store and bought underwear and a shirt with a small brown checked pattern. Whoever was tailing him had to think he was probably just shopping.
The NKVD chief at the consulate had announced that a Soviet team would shadow Volodya throughout his American visit, to make sure of his good behavior. He could barely contain his rage at the organization that had imprisoned Zoya, and he had to repress the urge to take the man by the throat and strangle him. But he had remained calm. He had pointed out sarcastically that in order to fulfill his mission he would have to evade FBI surveillance, and in doing so he might inadvertently also lose his NKVD tail, but he wished them luck. Most days he shook them off in five minutes.
So the young man tailing him was almost certainly an FBI agent. His crisply conservative clothes corroborated that.
Carrying his purchases in a paper bag, Volodya left the store by a side entrance and hailed a cab. He left the FBI man at the curb waving his arm. When the cab had turned two corners Volodya threw the driver a bill and jumped out. He darted into a subway station, left again by a different entrance, and waited in the doorway of an office building for five minutes.
The young man in the dark suit was nowhere to be seen.
Volodya walked to Penn Station.
There he double-checked that he was not being followed, then bought his ticket. With nothing but that and his paper bag he boarded a train.
The journey to Albuquerque took three days.
The train sped through mile after endless mile of rich farmland, mighty factories belching smoke, and great cities with skyscrapers pointing arrogantly at the heavens. The Soviet Union was bigger, but apart from the Ukraine it was mostly pine forests and frozen steppes. He had never imagined wealth on this scale.
And wealth was not all. For several days something had been nagging at the back of Volodya's mind, something strange about life in America. Eventually he realized what it was: no one asked for his papers. After he had passed through immigration control in New York, he had not shown his passport again. In this country, it seemed, anyone could walk into a railway station or a bus terminus and buy a ticket to any place without having to get permission or explain the purpose of the trip to an official. It gave him a dangerously exhilarating sense of freedom. He could go anywhere!
America's wealth also heightened Volodya's sense of the da
nger his country faced. The Germans had almost destroyed the Soviet Union, and this country was three times as populous and ten times as rich. The thought that Russians might become underlings, frightened into subservience, softened Volodya's doubts about Communism, despite what the NKVD had done to him and his wife. If he had children, he did not want them to grow up in a world tyrannized by America.
He traveled via Pittsburgh and Chicago and attracted no attention en route. His clothes were American, and his accent was not noticed for the simple reason that he spoke to no one. He bought sandwiches and coffee by pointing and paying. He flicked through newspapers and magazines that other travelers left behind, looking at the pictures and trying to work out the meanings of the headlines.
The last part of the journey took him through a desert landscape of desolate beauty, with distant snowy peaks stained red by the sunset, which probably explained why they were called the Blood of Christ Mountains.
He went to the toilet, where he changed his underwear and put on the new shirt he had bought in Saks.
He expected the FBI or army security to be watching the train station in Albuquerque, and sure enough he spotted a young man whose check jacket--too warm for the climate of New Mexico in September--did not quite conceal the bulge of a gun in a shoulder holster. However, the agent was undoubtedly interested in long-distance travelers who might be arriving from New York or Washington. Volodya, with no hat or jacket and no luggage, looked like a local man coming back from a short trip. He was not followed as he walked to the bus station and boarded a Greyhound for Santa Fe.
He reached his destination late in the afternoon. He noted two FBI men at the Santa Fe bus station, and they scrutinized him. However, they could not tail everyone who got off the bus, and once again his casual appearance caused them to dismiss him.
Doing his best to look as if he knew where he was going, he strolled along the streets. The low flat-roofed pueblo-style houses and squat churches baking in the sun reminded him of Spain. The storefront buildings overhung the sidewalks, creating pleasantly shady arcades.
He avoided La Fonda, the big hotel on the town square next to the cathedral, and checked in to the St. Francis. He paid cash and gave his name as Robert Pender, which might have been American or one of several European nationalities. "My suitcase will be delivered later," he said to the pretty girl behind the reception desk. "If I'm out when it comes, can you make sure it gets sent up to my room?"
"Oh, sure, that won't be a problem," she said.
"Thank you," he said, then he added a phrase he had heard several times on the train: "I sure appreciate it."
"If I'm not here, someone else will deal with the bag, so long as it has your name on it."
"It does." He had no luggage, but she would never realize that.
She looked at his entry in the book. "So, Mr. Pender, you're from New York."
There was a touch of skepticism in her voice, no doubt because he did not sound like a New Yorker. "I'm from Switzerland originally," he explained, naming a neutral country.
"That accounts for the accent. I haven't met a Switzerland person before. What's it like there?"
Volodya had never been to Switzerland, but he had seen photographs. "It snows a lot," he said.
"Well, enjoy our New Mexico weather!"
"I will."
Five minutes later he went out again.
