Anyway they came in late at night Thursday, singing sentimental ballads and weeping copiously. Then they got loose all over the railroad yard. It took two hours to find them. One had climbed halfway up the water tower and would not have been found if he had not started making a Stakhanovite speech. Funny it was, the voice coming drunkenly out of the top of the night.
The sober old chief engineer kept insisting they had lost a man, but the guards, drunk or sober, knew their business. They got all the drunks back on the train, and confiscated all the bottles with liquor. And there weren't any strangers in town the next day…
But the stationmaster's wife found some rags along the right-of-way. They had been soaked with oil, and it took a lot of trouble to clean them. They were good foreign cloth. Khaki in color. She made her three-year-old boy two summer suits out of them. They had been torn rather neatly. Funny that anyone would throw away rags which were that good. But everyone knew how wasteful the train crews were!
* * *
In the Soviet Union, more than a hundred million people strained to be inconspicuous, lest a fanatical and all-powerful police system notice them to their notable harm. Four or five million people did not care whether they were noticed or not; they were working members of the Army, the police, or the Communist ruling cadres. A few hundred thousand, at the tops of their local worlds, basked in the perilous spotlight of personal fame.
Dugan was tempted to ride along with the inconspicuous people on the train; that was what an ordinary spy would have done. But he played his chances fifty moves ahead. What mattered was not what he did do — no, not that, but what the records showed him to be doing. He shuffled his swindled identity cards and selected the card of one Julius Goldfarb, presumably defunct.
Goldfarb could create a stir, obliterating "Andreanov." Andreanov could return and take "Goldfarb" as a minor mystery, to be impressed on the minds of Russian officialdom enough to be remembered, not enough to cause hot pursuit.
And then — the slip sidewise into oblivion.
GUBEROVO: WHAT THE RAILWAY STAFF BELIEVED
A funny little Jew came into the Railway Workers' Club. He said that his name was Julius Goldfarb and that he had been assigned to take charge of the club as manager. We asked him for his papers and he pulled out identification cards and all the rest. Very dirty. All the while he kept on babbling in Russian with so many German or Yiddish words thrown in that it was hard to understand him.