In the aftermath of the war he was sent back to Moscow and in 1949 he married. She was a pretty girl named Galyusha, uncomplicated, amiable and affectionate. He was working in the directorate responsible for controlling and supporting MVD agents in overseas countries, and his own work was in the department responsible for espionage in the USA and Britain.
In 1953 he was sent to the MVD special training school at Gaczyna. He was away from his wife for six months. There were facilities for wives at Gaczyna but his applications for Galyusha to join him were refused. Moscow wanted him to get used to being away from his wife.
He was told things at Gaczyna about the MVD’s operations in Britain that made him realise that even though Britain had been an important part of his control area there were many things that he hadn’t been told before.
There were half a dozen pretty girls on the staff of the training school working as waitresses and housekeepers for the living quarters. Nobody said they were available. Nobody needed to. Molody had regular sex with two of them. He knew it would go down on his file because they wouldn’t have been there if they weren’t already trained MVD operators. But they were there for sex as well as security and Molody liked pretty girls.
All the time he was at Gaczyna he was only allowed to listen to the BBC. News, entertainment and music. And his newspapers were the London nationals. Two days old. He lived in a single, isolated hut that was furnished with G-Plan furniture with a typically English lower-middle-class, suburban decor.
When he returned to Moscow he was given a month’s leave and he and Galyusha went down to the sunshine of the Black Sea, using an MVD rest-house in Sochi as their base.
Galyusha was conscious of the benefits they got from her husband’s privileged position. “Hard” roubles, shopping privileges and a superior apartment in the centre of Moscow overlooking the river. She was allowed to go with him for the month he had in Leningrad. He spent long hours at the Red Navy base every day but she had been taken around the city by an Intourist girl who showed her the sights, and took her to good restaurants and cafés to eat. Galyusha was not much interested in galleries and museums but she loved the city itself. A few weeks after they went back to Moscow the doctor confirmed that she was pregnant.
Molody leaned over the rails of the boat where it lay at anchor in Kolsky Bay and looked across to the grey buildings on the dockside. There were nine months of winter in Murmansk and from November to mid-January there were no daylight hours. There were still old people in Murmansk who spoke the ancient local language, Saami. And in the Saami language Murmansk means “the edge of the earth.” Already the town was shrouded in mist and it was still only July. He wondered why they had insisted that he travel by sea and he wondered too why he had to leave from Murmansk. Maybe they thought that if his last memories were of this grim town he wouldn’t feel homesick. He wouldn’t feel homesick anyway. He was a professional and what he was being sent to do was important. He was now a key agent and his new rank of major marked their recognition of his past work and their confidence in him in his new role. It was 1954 and there had been the big purge in the MVD and he had not only survived but benefited. It was now the KGB and its responsibilities were even greater than before.
He turned and looked at the seamen who were battening down the last of the hatches. It was a grain transporter and there were only three other passengers.
The ship docked at Vancouver in the late afternoon and the Canadian excise rummage crew came straight on board. Molody made himself scarce and the crew-list for Immigration showed only three passengers. The three legitimate passengers had been cleared through Immigration in twenty minutes.
It was ten o’clock when Molody and one of the crew showed their shore passes to the security guards at the gate. They were warned that they had to be back by midnight. Molody had talked in broken English with a thick Russian accent and it had been all too easy. He handed over the pass he had used to the crewman and without a word he had walked off alone. A small, worn, cardboard attaché case in his hand.
Once he was away from the dock area he asked the way to the YMCA. They found him a bed for the night. He joined and stayed for another two weeks, and in that time he found himself an inexpensive one-room apartment and a job as a salesman in a radio shop.
In the next few weeks he used the genuine birth certificate that he had been given in Moscow and obtained what he most wanted, a genuine Canadian passport. He got a driving licence and a YMCA membership card and several other minor pieces of documentation that provided him with background material.
He changed jobs twice during the winter. Both moves got him increased pay. He had several girlfriends and his colleagues at work liked his easy-going ways. But behind the casual façade he worked hard, and the shop owner recognised that he was not only a good salesman but ambitious. He made several suggestions at the last shop that increased their turnover and profits and the owner seriously considered giving him a small stake in the business. But before he had formulated a suggestion the young man took a week’s holiday and never came back.
Molody stood looking across towards Goat Island where
