VIII. REVERBERATIONS OF A TRANSIT

In the ensuing weeks, there were ripples in the tight smooth surface of Soviet Far Eastern affairs. The ripples were not large or noticeable. Even the overstaffed secret police of the MVD failed to put the different sets of events together. They were too scattered, too trivial, too patently silly. Altogether, they made up the trail of Michael Andreanov Dugan, zigzagging his way toward a leafy valley.

When he passed from one scene to another, he moved always with a reason. None of them indicated his real purpose. They added up to nothing more than familiar and trivial human failings. Sometimes his disappearance put a petty official into a petty rage; more often, his running away seemed like a hilarious joke. But pursuit was baffled, not by disappearance or mystery, but by the apparent triviality of the surface case. Each place thought that it had its own local mystery and people did not connect the separate events…

BLAGOVESHCHENSK: TWO SECRET POLICE OFFICIALS TALKING

The deputy officer-in-charge of the MVD political police looked out of the office window and, without turning around, spoke to his assistant:

"I think we must have cleaned out Manchuria pretty well. The very last dregs of the deserters are showing up."

"Except, Comrade Captain, for the ones who have gone over to the American Fascists," said the young man portentously. He felt ill at ease in this bare room, with the crude furniture and this old lout of a pre-revolutionary Communist trying to run anti-espionage. This wasn't what they had taught back in Moscow. And there was nobody to talk to. These local people, now, acted as though he were the subversive one instead of welcoming him as their confessor and protector. And this impossible old man, with his rustic wisdom!

The deputy knew what his assistant thought of him. Two previous assistants had had the same attitude when they first arrived. One was now dead. The other had become a senior official in the Special Section of the N.K.A.R., the Narodnii Kommisariat Atomnovo Razvitiya, the People's Commissariat of Atomic Development. It was good to have an old friend in a high place, even if he had been promoted far over you. It made the old friend feel all the more benevolent, and made the world a safer place in which to live. Now this nasty little manlet, he — he wouldn't even remember gratitude.