Field of Blood

I

It was afternoon and the date was December the fourth, that much Paddy Meehan did know. He couldn’t be certain where he was in the world, hadn’t been told where they were flying to, but he had seen the date on a German-language newspaper folded under the arm of a man climbing up the embarkation steps in front of them. Rolf had seen him looking at it and shifted to the side, blocking his view but doing it playfully, smiling back at him.

The plane was busy. Forty boys of all ages in red-and-beige uniforms played a call-and-answer game in Russian across the seats. Rolf stopped at a row of three seats, checking the numbers several times against their ticket before stepping back to let them in. Meehan shrugged out of his stiff gray overcoat, hurrying to get the window seat, but the young lieutenant shouldered him out of the way and ducked in, laughing as he took the seat for himself. Even the upholstery was luxurious. Meehan and the lieutenant put their hands on the back of the seat in front, working their fingernails into the thick blue-and-orange pile, giggling at the delicious depth of it. They were all excited to be on an airplane. Rolf smiled at their games as he carefully folded his coat and placed it on the rack above his head. He sat down in the aisle seat, straightening his hair, his jacket, his small moustache.

The deafening engines revved up to a whine and they taxied to the runway, finally taking off, prompting squeals and cheers of the children.

Once they were in the air and the plane had righted itself from an anxious upward angle, Rolf took a hip flask and three red plastic tumblers from his briefcase. The flask was much dented and loved, an oval curve of peeling silver plate with the brass showing underneath. He poured a stiff, stiff vodka into each tumbler and handed them down the line, first to the lieutenant, then to Meehan, and finally one for himself. Meehan handed around cigarettes as his contribution to the party and they all lit up, flicking open the little ashtrays in the arms, letting the sweet smell of a hundred smoky journeys waft out into the cabin.

“Up yours,” said Meehan jovially, lifting his tumbler in a toast.

Rolf and the lieutenant raised their drinks in response and echoed “Up yours” innocently, as if they didn’t understand. The three men smiled and drank together.

“So, pals, where are we going to now?” asked Meehan.

Rolf frowned at him. “To Scotland Yard with you, my friend.”

The young lieutenant laughed, slapping his thigh for emphasis. He was still excited.

“We’re going to Russia, eh?” said Meehan. “The kids are all chatting away in Russkie. You’re taking me to Russia.”

Rolf raised an eyebrow and shifted in his seat, reaching down, as he often did, to pull the cheeks of his arse apart. It was an odd habit for such a well-groomed man. Meehan wondered if he had hemorrhoids.

“Yes,” said Rolf, “perhaps we will go to Russia. After we have been to Scotland Yard.”

“You, springe aus dem fenster,” said Meehan, pointing the orange tip of his cigarette at the window.

Rolf nodded politely, acknowledging the joke without going to the trouble of laughing. Meehan was still struggling with his German accent despite studying hard for the last nine months. He had nothing else to fill his time with between meals and interrogations.

“Springe aus dem fenster,” he repeated quietly to himself for practice.

He thought about the Gorbals and the Tapp Inn, where he knew every single rogue that came through the doors, or was likely to. He wondered what they would think of him sitting in an airplane from East Germany, chatting in the lingo on his way to Russia. They hadn’t told him why he was being moved; for all he knew he might be on his way to a bullet in the head, and he still couldn’t help but smile.

They drank the vodka down, and very quickly Meehan fell asleep, head lolling forwards on his buckled neck, drooling onto the blue serge suit they had given him to wear.

The landing jerked him awake and he sat up, puzzled and annoyed. He was pleased when he found himself on a plane.

“And so we have landed,” said Rolf unnecessarily.

It was dark outside the window, but occasional lights rolled by on the horizon. The scout troop had slept and were waking up whiny, bickering, looking around the cabin, stretching and yawning. Their miserable, puffy faces reminded Meehan of his own kids, out in Canada, waiting for him with Betty. They had been there for nine months, waiting to start again on a new continent with the money he’d promised to bring back. He’d promised them a home and a small business, a shop maybe, a new beginning where he wasn’t in and out of pokey all the time. He was smarter than the average crim. He’d escaped from Nottingham jail and managed to get himself over to East Germany, but this was a different order of game and his plan was full of holes. They had no reason to give him money for his information. He was an ant, a nothing. They could easily kill him: the British government wouldn’t complain if a small-time safe blower went missing, and he knew he’d be leaving East Germany with his life if he was lucky. He was dreading Canada and Betty’s reproaches, the disappointed, saddened eyes of his children, who knew, long before children should ever know, that their father was fallible.

The plane stopped moving, and Meehan leaned forward to see if he could spot a name on the terminus building, but they were parked nose-first and the view from the window yielded no clues. The uniformed children clambered out of their seats, reaching over and under the chairs for luggage, squabbling and pushing one another in their hurry to get into the aisle.

“We must wait until the others are disembarked,” said Rolf, explaining why he was still sitting down.

At last the plane emptied and Rolf stood up, unfolding his coat and throwing Meehan and the lieutenant theirs. They gathered their things together, and Rolf watched the male steward by the door for a signal.

“Yes,” he said. “Now we go.”

On the steps Meehan noticed that it was colder and windier than the place they had left, but it was night here and day when they departed, so it wasn’t really a useful comparison. A windowless van was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Three men in long overcoats and fur hats stood by it, looking up at them expectantly. Rolf saluted them and introduced Paddy as Comrade Meehan. None of the men saluted or took his outstretched hand. Everywhere he had been in the East they spoke to him as an equal but treated him as a prisoner. At least at home the screws hated you honestly.

Inside the van the rows of seats were bolted to the floor and the cabin was cut off from the driver by a wooden partition. With the van doors shut firmly behind them, they drove a couple of hundred yards, and then they stopped. The noises were different here, they sounded internal; a water drip echoed loudly, a distant whirr, like an outboard motor, bounced between walls, amplifying. The six men waited inside the van, nodding pleasantly at one another, smoking, and checking their watches. A sharp knock on the side of the van caused the driver to shout something, and the man nearest the back opened the doors. They were parked in a hangar. While their luggage from the plane was being handed in, Meehan spotted a fire hydrant on a wall, sitting above a bucket of sand, and he saw that the instructions were in Cyrillic script. He was in Russia.

He had been pacing the small gray cell for ten minutes when a surly female guard of about forty brought in a tray. She had blond hair and very blue eyes but didn’t look at him as she laid the tray on the bed and turned away quickly, locking him in again. The meal consisted of greasy gray salt fish still in the tin, dry black bread, and lemon tea. The fish was inedible, but he ate all the bread and drank the bitter tea. The moment he pushed the tray away along the bed, the same female guard opened the door and gestured for him to follow her out.

The corridor was low and plain with pipes along the top of the wall. Including his own cell, there were only three doors off the corridor. The guard led him to one end, paused at a big gray steel door, and knocked. Metal slid against metal and bolts were pulled into place. The window slid open and a male guard looked them over, checking carefully behind them before opening the door and letting them through. They followed a staircase down one flight, their footsteps sounding tense and shrill, jittering against the concrete. One floor down they stopped at a door, knocked, and waited. A smaller, oblong window opened, also metal, and a handsome guard in a smart pale blue uniform looked out at them. He shut the window abruptly and pulled the heavy metal door open.

When they stepped out of the stairwell they found themselves in what appeared to be a rococo palace. The high-ceilinged hallway was duck blue, trimmed with gilt detailing and white plaster tracery. The floor was a rich mahogany parquet that deepened the noise of their footsteps, making them purposeful and dignified. The woman guard led Paddy across the hallway to a fifteen-foot-high double door flanked by uniformed military guards. She paused outside, pulling her tunic straight, touching her hair.

On her signal the two guards reached across and opened both doors at once, like the start of a Hollywood dance sequence. It was a ballroom. The ceiling was painted with gods and women and fat babies, all set in trompe l’oeil gold frames. Three long windows at the far end of the room would have led out into a garden or a balcony, but they were blocked out with blackout blinds, disguised behind dirty net curtains.

Facing Meehan in the middle of the room sat a long table with seven people at it, all dressed in mufti, their erect posture and cardboard haircuts making it obvious they were military. To his left-hand side sat three typists at a separate table, two of them young and pretty, the third old and dried up. Rolf and the lieutenant, made small by their surroundings, were perched on seats against the other wall. The young lieutenant was not doing the interpreting this time; he had been replaced by a stocky woman in a belted dress with thin black hair scratched up into a bun the size of a small chocolate. A man with a gray complexion and bushy black eyebrows sat in the middle of the center table. His head and body were square, like a cube balanced on a larger cube. He had an air of amused authority about him, like a judge with so much power he didn’t need to be intimidating. He drawled loudly in Russian, his deep voice booming around the large room, and the interpreter turned to Meehan.

“You are invited to sit,” she said, pointing to a dirty canvas-and-metal chair.

Meehan sat down. He felt very exposed. He was in the center of the room, everyone was looking at him, and his chair didn’t have any arms.

The square man nodded at him and spoke for a long moment. The woman said: “You claim that you have come to give us information on British prisons. You want to help us to free imprisoned comrades in the West. Why would you do this?”

“I’m a communist myself,” said Meehan. “I’ve had sympathies that way for many years. Since I worked in the Glasgow shipyards.”

She told the important man what he had said, and he spoke again, holding Meehan’s eye.

“Yet you are not a registered member of the party in your country,” relayed the woman.

“Aye, well,” shrugged Meehan, thinking that, actually, that probably did seem strange. “I’m not much of a joiner.”

When he heard this the man smiled and spoke again, but his smile was forced.

“If you are motivated by political sympathies,” said the woman, “why have you asked us to give you money for this information?”

“I need a new start in Canada. I have a wife and children.”

The woman translated. The square man nodded and spoke again.

“He says…” The woman paused, wondering how to say it. “What are we to think of a communist who will not join the party and wants money for doing his duty?”

Meehan smiled weakly. He glanced at Rolf, but neither he nor the lieutenant would look at him. They were going to kill him. The square man spoke again.

“Do not feel threatened,” the interpreter ordered briskly. “We are friendly to you.”

But Meehan felt sick. He thought of Betty and their disappointed children. He wanted to cry or pray, he didn’t know which. The square man leaned forward, looking furious now, and it took Paddy a minute to work out that he was speaking in English.

“Is ver’ good,” said the man, slurring as he worked his tongue around unfamiliar open English vowel sounds. “Glasgow Rangers- is ver’ good.”

Paddy Connolly Meehan nodded. Whether it was the fear or a loyalty reflex, he felt himself getting hot and said, “Glasgow Celtic better.”

The panel looked puzzled for a moment until the square man laughed, and then they joined in nervously, glancing from side to side, almost believing at one point that they found it funny.

Over the following few weeks they asked him repeatedly about British prison security, made him draw maps of the layouts of all the prisons he had been in and tell them about weaknesses in the window bars and acceptable methods of bribing guards. They presented him with a problem: how to get a two-way radio in to a prisoner who was under constant surveillance. Meehan suggested two identical transistor radios, one with the two-way facility and one without. If they delivered the special one to any other prisoner who wouldn’t be searched thoroughly and had the normal one delivered to the subject, a switch could be effected a few days later by anyone with a pass card. They made him go through the plan over and over again and apply it in detail to the layout of several different prisons.

Three weeks later Rolf and the lieutenant accompanied him back to wherever the hell they had been in the first place. They were in the air before Meehan felt he could relax. He had heard a lot of people come and go from the adjacent cells during the three weeks, heard women keening softly in the night and sobbing men being led away shouting in Russian dialects he didn’t understand, final, desperate words laden with regret- a woman’s name, perhaps, or a place. Meehan knew they wouldn’t be sending him on a plane if they intended to kill him. They would just have popped him there and then.

Rolf took out his old hip flask and gave them a vodka each. They sparked up Meehan’s cigarettes again and drank a toast to Scotland Yard. The young lieutenant looked to Rolf for permission and then he told Meehan that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas a month ago.

II

It was a blindly sunny day and they were standing where half of East Germany wanted to be, on the right side of the Wall at Checkpoint Charlie. Rolf had come too far over, Paddy could tell by the agitated faces of the East German guards. They wanted to challenge him but couldn’t because of his rank. The British consul, a small man with a brown trilby and an ill-fitting camel overcoat, was waiting by a large official car with little flags on the bonnet. He stayed ten feet away, avoiding coming over to them, waiting instead for Paddy to come to him, as if communism were contagious.

In the car on the way there, Rolf had given Meehan a check, cashable only in an East German bank. It wasn’t much money in the East, and outside it worthless. All Meehan had for seventeen months of interrogation was an unusable check, two packets of cigarettes, and a bar of chocolate. Two packets of fags and a bar of chocolate and handed back into the hands of the British authorities, who would question him endlessly before returning him straight to prison to finish his sentence. The communists were sending him back as a carrier pigeon. They had put information his way so consistently he was sure it was wrong. Each of his many East German cellmates carefully passed on the same unsolicited information about guard-changing times and security measures.

They couldn’t drag it out any longer: the guards were getting pissed off and edging towards them. The time had come to part. Meehan put out his hand and Rolf shook it politely.

“You are a clever man, Comrade Meehan.”

Two packets of fags and a bar of chocolate. Meehan saw a turn in his eye. He would never have suspected it before and would lie to himself about it for the rest of his life; but for that small moment, he knew for certain that Rolf despised him. He thought Meehan was a cheap turncoat prick.