The two governments co-operated to make the formalities of crossing the border from one side to the other as easy as possible, and when Molody presented his Canadian birth certificate and his return bus ticket to Toronto he was passed through without query.
He didn’t hurry, he joined the crowds and looked at the sights before he caught a bus to Buffalo and found lodgings for the night.
The following day he took a train to New York. He walked from the station to Fifth Avenue and the New York Public Library. He immediately recognised the girl at the enquiry desk from the description they had given him. When he asked her where he could find biographical material on John Dos Passos she turned to one of the huge reference books before she realised the significance of what he had said. Then she walked from behind the counter and he followed her to the far end of the library.
She turned to look at him, and said softly, “Doris Hart,” and he said, “Victor Seixus Junior.”
When he left he had the bundle of money and the key to the luggage locker at Grand Central. In the locker there was just the coded message.
He booked a room at the YMCA on West 34th Street and sat in the small room and decoded the message. He wondered what Alec would be like. He took a meal at a nearby automat and the evening paper headlined the news that Gromyko had taken over from Shepilov as Foreign Minister. It was February 15, 1957.
5
There were a few villas still standing near Łazienki Park. A dozen or so which had escaped both the German and the Russian onslaughts on Warsaw. Some people said that they had been deliberately preserved for the Russian officials to use when it was all over. But in the event they had been used by Polish officials of the new communist regime and one of them had been divided up into ten flats for junior staff who worked for the newly established foreign embassies.
Harry Houghton had one such flat. A small living room, a bedroom and kitchen and bathroom. Its furnishings were sparse and primitive but despite its size and starkness the minute apartment provided the best accommodation he had had in his life.
Born in Lincoln he had run away from home at sixteen and joined the Royal Navy. Obsequious and ingratiating, he had made little progress until war broke out. By the end of the war he had become a chief petty officer. A reasonably efficient clerk, he had legitimately used Admiralty regulations to get his officers their marginal extra service payments and had kept the messes supplied with black-market booze. Not liked, but tolerated for his ability to bend and manipulate service regulations on rations and supplies, he had never experienced a day’s service in a battle zone until 1942 when he was assigned to merchant protection vessels on convoys to Malta and Russia.
He was demobilised in 1945 and joined the civil service as a clerk. For four years he served as an Admiralty clerk in the minor Navy port of Gosport near the big Royal Navy base at Portsmouth. At the end of four years he was assigned as clerk to the British naval attaché in Warsaw.
A line-shooter and a drunk, Harry Houghton was detested by the rest of the embassy staff. But it was in Warsaw that he spent the best time of his life.
Harry Houghton sat sprawled on the leather settee in the soft, pink light from the silk-shaded lamp which he had bought on the black market. With an unsteady hand he poured vodka into the deep glass and passed it to the girl on the settee beside him. Then he reached for the empty glass on the table and filled it slowly and carefully.
The girl was in her late twenties, dark-haired and attractive. Her face was flushed from drinking and as the Englishman lifted his glass to her she touched it with hers and said “Na zdrowie.” She laughed when he tried to respond in Polish.
“Is easier I say ‘cheers’ for you, Harry.”
“Cheers, sweetheart. Did you sell the stuff OK?”
“Yes. No problems at all. They want all you can get.”
“What do they want?”
“Any drugs at all. But they pay most for penicillin and sulfa drugs.”
“How much will they pay?”
“Fifty US dollars for a tablet.”
“Jesus. That’s good. How much have we got?”
She reached over for her worn leather handbag, took out a fat brown envelope and handed it to him.
“I haven’t counted it yet.”
He looked at her, his eyes alert. “Can you stay the night?”
She laughed and nodded. “Is OK, Harry. If you want that I stay.”
He grinned. “Let’s count the cash first.”
For ten minutes he counted out the notes. There were $4,450 in used notes. He counted out a hundred and fifty and handed them to the girl.
“OK, Krissie?”
“You’re very good to me, Harry.”
He smiled. “It’s your turn to be good to me now. Let’s finish the bottle first.” He reached for the bottle and held it up. “Bloody thing’s empty.”
He stood up unsteadily and lurched across to the shelf of bottles and glasses and the framed photograph that showed him in uniform, grinning, with a glass of beer in his hand. He swore as the corkscrew split the cork and he shoved the cork into the bottle.
Back at the settee he poured another glass for each of them and drank his down and poured again. With his free hand he leaned over and pulled the girl to him, his mouth on hers, his hand pulling the strap of her dress from her shoulder.
Despite negative reports from the embassy and strongly critical reports from his immediate superior, Harry Houghton survived two years in Warsaw from 1949 to 1951 and in that
