The Charm School (69 page)

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Authors: NELSON DEMILLE

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BOOK: The Charm School
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To the left of the 7-Eleven was a laundromat, a Bank of North America complete with logo, a place called Sweeney’s Liquors, a barbershop called Mane Event, and a beauty parlor named Tresses. To the right of the 7-Eleven was Kruger’s Hardware store; a stationery and tobacco shop, Main Street Pharmacy; a bookstore that also carried audio- and videotapes; and at the end of the row, a sort of luncheonette-coffee shop called Dunkin’ Donuts.
Hollis asked, “Is that a legitimate franchise?”
Poole laughed. “No. But we’re trying to get an American Express travel agency here.”
Hollis walked past the luncheonette and peered into the bookstore.
Poole said, “To varying degrees these stores are all functioning operations. You need camp scrip to buy things at all of them except this book and tape store. Everything there is only for loan. It’s sort of the camp audiovisual department, though it’s set up as a retail bookstore for training purposes. We get a wide selection of publications, videotapes, and some decent cassettes and albums.”
Lisa looked at the window display of recent American and British hardcover fiction and nonfiction. “I couldn’t find some of this stuff in the embassy bookstore.” She saw a copy of John Baron’s classic,
KGB
, and the Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko’s exposé,
Breaking with Moscow
. “And they let you . . . and the so-called students read this stuff ?”
“They don’t have any choice, do they?” Poole replied. “If they don’t read it now, they’ll read it stateside, where it might blow their minds. They’re inoculated here with the truth.”
Hollis peered through the windows of the pharmacy and stationery store. “You men don’t lack for anything here, do you?”
“Not in the material sense, Colonel. You know what we lack.”
Hollis didn’t reply but moved over to the hardware store. “Mostly American brand name goods here.”
“Yes,” Poole replied. “Most of the hardware and housewares in the camp are American. Keeps things standard and easy to fix. That’s why the plumbing works.”
“You do your own repairs?”
“Yes, with our students. Most Soviet men aren’t very handy, as you know. I guess that’s because they all live in government housing that’s falling apart. We teach them how to be weekend handymen.” Poole smiled. “So someday when their American wives nag them to replace a leaky washer, they don’t have to call a plumber.” Poole added, “Or as we say—How many Russians does it take to change a lightbulb? Ten. Nine to fill out the requisition forms for the bulb and one to screw it in.”
Hollis, Lisa, and Poole moved to the plate glass windows of the 7-Eleven. Poole said, “We get most of our packaged and canned food here. Some of it is American, some Finnish, some Soviet. Supplies vary. For fresh meat and produce, we go to a warehouse near the main gate and get whatever is available on a rationed basis.
That
is the same as everywhere else in this country.”
Hollis asked, “But you actually get paid here?”
“Yes. This scrip. . . .” Poole took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to Hollis.
Hollis and Lisa examined it in the dim light of a lamp pole. The note looked like a five-dollar bill and in fact was a color photocopy of one. The only difference was the poor quality paper and the reverse side, which was blank.
Poole said, “That’s part of the psychology of keeping us from becoming complete zombies. We have to balance our personal budget and all that. The students do too. They pay to board with us for instance. Banking transactions and finance are one of the most important parts of the curriculum. It’s more difficult than you might think to teach these people a sense of fiscal responsibility. They’re used to blowing a month’s pay on the first consumer items they see on the way home from work.” Poole added, “It’s still not a completely realistic economic model here. For instance, we don’t pay taxes.” He smiled.
Lisa asked, “Where do they get all the American-style fixtures and such for these stores? The Seven-Eleven sign for instance.”
Poole replied, “That came from Mosfilm. Their prop shop, I guess you’d call it. Same with the Bank of North America accoutrements. The smaller items, consumer goods and so forth, come through the diplomatic pouch or through the International Center for Trade in Moscow. I saw a picture of that place in a magazine. Built by Armand Hammer. Looks like a Trump building in New York. All glass, brass, and marble. Now
that’s
real Little America, isn’t it? You people been there?”
“Yes,” Lisa replied. “It’s quite a place. An opening to the West.”
Poole commented, “More so than you know. They send the students to stay in the hotel there as a graduation present. They spend a month living it up and mingling with Western businessmen and VIPs. Sort of a halfway house. Then they head West.”
Hollis moved down the row past the laundromat and the bank and stopped in front of Sweeney’s Liquors, examining the stock and the window displays of various Western distilleries and vintners. There was a professionally done display of world-class Italian wines with posters of sunny Italy and cardboard Italian flags. A wicker basket held bottles of Principessa Gavi and the Banfi Brunello di Montalcino, both popular wines that were widely imported in America.
Lisa said, “These are very good wines. Can you buy these?”
Poole replied, “We can buy the wines before they turn. Sometimes we can buy the Western liquor. Depends on supply. We can buy all the Soviet stuff we want.” He added, “Everyone here was amused when we started reading that Stolichnaya had become something of a trendy drink in America. I’ll take Kentucky bourbon any day.”
Hollis commented, “I was told there was another training environment here. Kitchens, offices, and so forth.”
“Oh, that’s right here. Below our feet. A large subterranean arcade. There are staircases behind the shops. There is a sort of office suite with a reception room down there. It’s mostly to familiarize the students with office etiquette and office equipment. Word processors, Photostat machines, water coolers, electric staplers. The works. There’s also an auditorium where they show first-run movies that aren’t on videotape yet. I don’t know how they get them. Also, there are two very modern home kitchens, an extensive reference library, a hotel and motel check-in desk, airport customs, and a motor vehicle bureau desk where two nasty Russian women abuse people. They don’t even have to act. They were both government bureaucrats once. The students think it’s funny that a state motor vehicle bureau approximates Soviet life in general.” Poole smiled, then continued, “They also do house closings down there, employment interviews, and so on.” He added, “The most popular amusement down there is the brokerage firm of E.F. Hutton.”
Lisa asked, “You play the stock market here?”
Poole smiled. “The ultimate capitalistic parasitic endeavor. Everybody here plays—the students, the instructors, the wives. The Russians fly in a videotape of the ticker quotes, so the Charm School is two days behind Wall Street. We all got hurt in the crash of ’87.” He laughed without humor. “But I’m up about six thousand dollars now.”
Hollis and Lisa glanced at each other.
Poole continued, “It’s a very wide-ranging curriculum here, but aside from language and social customs, it’s impossible to go into depth, to jam the knowledge and life experiences of a twenty-five-year-old American into the head of a Russian of about the same age within thirteen or fourteen months. That’s how long most of them are here. Of course they come here with good English and some knowledge of America. They’re all graduates of the Red Air Force intelligence school outside Moscow and of the Institute for Canadian and American Studies.”
Hollis nodded. As an intelligence officer, he knew a good program when he saw one. Whereas the American intelligence establishment had shifted the emphasis from spies to satellites, statistical analyses, and other passive means of intelligence gathering, the Soviets still believed very much in the human factor. That, Hollis thought, was ironic, considering the relative values each society placed on the individual. Hollis always believed that the Soviets’ emphasis on the human spy was the correct approach. Alevy too believed in human intelligence gathering; which, Hollis suspected, was why he and Lisa were in the Charm School.
Lisa glanced in the windows of the barbershop and the beauty parlor and asked Poole, “Do the women in the camp actually come here to have their hair done?”
“Oh, yes. The hair stylists in both shops are barbers from the Gulag. All the employees in these places are from the Gulag, most of them women and most of them now married to or involved with American instructors. It’s a strange little world we have here. The milieu is mostly suburban, as you can see. That’s because most of us were suburban, I guess.”
“But no cars or PTA,” Hollis said.
“No. And no travel agency.” Poole seemed lost in thought a moment, then continued, “The population of Anytown is a little over a thousand. There are two hundred eighty-two former American pilots at last count and about an equal number of Russian wives, plus our children. Then there are the six kidnapped American women—seven now—and there are some Russian service people and medical staff also from the Gulag. Then of course there are the students—about three hundred at any given time. And there are about fifty Russian proctors, as they’re called. Control officers, actually, one for each six students. They’re KGB intelligence officers who speak and understand English. Then there is the KGB Border Guard battalion, about six hundred men, living mostly in their own compound and patrolling the perimeter. We don’t really count them as part of the camp population. We never have to deal with them, and they are forbidden to try to communicate with us.”
Poole stayed silent awhile, then took a breath. “So that’s it. One thousand souls, living in this miserable square mile, spending each and every day pretending. Pretending until the pretense seems reality, and the reality we read about and see on videotapes seems like reports from a doppelganger planet. I tell you, sometimes I think I’m a certifiable lunatic, and other times I think the Russians are.” He looked at Hollis, then at Lisa. “You just got here. What do you think?”
Hollis cleared his throat. “I’ll reserve judgment, though I don’t think it matters if you’re all insane. My problem with this place is that it works.”
Commander Poole nodded. “That it does. We’ve hatched thousands of little monsters here. God forgive us.”
They walked through the parking lot back to the main road and continued on.
Lisa said, “Let me ask you something, Commander . . . do you ever get the impression that these students are . . . seduced by our way of life?”
Poole motioned them both closer and replied in a low voice, “Yes. But I think only superficially. The way an American might be seduced by Paris or Tahiti. They don’t necessarily want any of this for
their
country. Or perhaps some of them do, but they want it on their terms.”
Lisa nodded. “The Russians still equate material wealth and good living with spiritual corruption.”
Poole glanced at her as they walked. “You do know your Russians. And yet they are schizoid about it. They have no God, but they worry about their spiritual life; they live in poverty, which is supposed to be good for their Russian souls, yet they buy or steal anything they can get their hands on and want more. And the few who obtain wealth slip quickly into hedonism and drown in it, because they have no guiding light, if you know what I mean.”
Hollis said, “That’s not peculiarly Russian.”
“No,” Poole agreed, “but I’ll tell you what is. Most of them seem to have a dark core, an impenetrable center that will not let in the light around them. It doesn’t matter how many books they read or how many videotapes they watch. They will not hear, and they will not see. Of course, there are a few—more than a few, maybe twenty-five percent of them—who crack open. But when they do, they’re spotted very quickly by the proctors, even though we try to cover for them. The KGB takes them away. Maybe we got a few converts out of here. But I don’t think they get past the oral examination—that’s what we call the marathon polygraph sessions they go through.” Poole, still speaking softly, said to Hollis and Lisa, “We’re always hoping that one of them will get to America and walk right into the nearest FBI office with the spy story of the century.” He asked, “Has that happened yet?”
Hollis shook his head.
“Incredible.”
Hollis was glad to discover through Poole that the men here still had a sense of themselves as American military men and that they still held the Russians in some contempt. Hollis asked, “How many of you have been imprisoned here?”
“It’s hard to say. In the early days from about 1965 to the end of the air war over North Vietnam in December 1973, hundreds of men passed through here. Most of them are dead. We’ve put together a list of about four hundred and fifty fliers who we know were shot, died of neglect, or killed themselves. It was a very turbulent time, and we were not in a position to keep good records.” Poole whispered, “But we do have that list, several copies of which are hidden about the camp.”
Hollis stopped, and the three of them stood close, facing one another. “May I have a list of the dead?”
“Yes, of course.”

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