Arctic Noir

Landscape is character.  I had a new subscriber to my Substack column tell me one of the things he really liked about my Cold War spy novel Black Traffic was the evocation of Berlin, which took him back to the time when he was a kid, growing up in the city.  I was very flattered.  I certainly wanted Berlin to be an active presence, not just a backdrop.  I think this is true of the bounty hunter stories, too, the physicality of the country, between the desert and the sown, and the people taking on the character of the unforgiving terrain. 

I’ve been watching some foreign-language policiers on the cable channel MHz.  They carry a wide selection, but the quality isn’t consistent.  You wind up kissing a lot of frogs, on your way to finding a prince.  Tatort, the German show, is reliable.  Here are three more.

Arctic Circle is Finnish, specifically Lapland.  I like the lead actress a lot; the tropes, less so.  She’s chosen to work in her hometown, her mom has cancer, her daughter has Down syndrome, her sister’s a hot mess who makes bad choices in men, and so forth – there’s a little too much of this.  The plot, in the first season, involves Russian girls in the sex trade, trafficked by the mob in Murmansk, but crossing the border into Finland, and carrying an infectious virus that mimics Ebola, which piggy-backs on herpes simplex, possibly the rogue mutation of an old Nazi germ warfare program come back to life, reinvigorated by an unscrupulous pharmaceutical baron.  Whew.  And that ain’t the half of it.  What the show has, in spades, is location.  You’re way up North, maybe 70 degrees latitude, above the Arctic Circle (natch), and it’s winter, with only a couple of hours of daylight, and everything’s snowed in.  It would appear the Finns do a lot of drinking.  Oh, and it’s less than twenty miles from the Russian border, so you’ve got drugs and so forth, coming in from the Kola Peninsula.  The whole atmosphere is bracingly chilly.

Next up, we have Freezing Embrace, also from Finland, but down south, near Helsinki.  This is a more conventional cop shop series, but again, everybody’s squeaking around on packed snow, and boy, they sure do feature pulling a cork.  I don’t know whether this is a recommendation for booze tourism, or what.  Unhappily, the show jumped the shark in Episode 5, or thereabouts, and didn’t quite recover.  The cast is really good, though.  And the same thing, about the environs.  There’s something about being iced in.

The show I liked the best of my recent explorations, though, was Piste Noire.  French, as you might imagine.  On the border with Switzerland, in ski country.  The pistes, in fact, are in both France and Switzerland, the area called the Portes du Soleil, with lifts and gondolas taking you up to crests where you can ski down into the next-door country.  Snow, snowy mountain roads, and snow-covered forests.  Blindingly picturesque.  Some similarly aggravating tropes.  The heroine, yet again, gets pulled back to her hometown, and into family drama, an old flame the murder suspect, yadda-yadda.  The local cop a dry drunk, grumpy, morally compromised, chain-smoker – you get tired of the same-old, and the dynamics.  The two leads, as the odd-couple cops, are actually quite endearing, though, and they save it.  And there’s a very good meet-cute, early on, when the out-of-town cop falls for a local environmental activist, if not the big reveal you might think - lesbians, quel horreur – but very sweet.  There’s not that much of a mystery, in all honesty; it’s telegraphed early on.  What kept me watching was the cast, genuinely charming, and all those aerial shots of the snowy woods. 

So there it is.  It might seem odd, or superficial, to be drawn in by the locations, beautiful or forbidding or exotic, but in these three instances, the sense of place is very much a part of the story.  The characters would be other people - if they inhabited a different physical environment, they’d behave differently.  Maybe this is self-evident, but I think seeing your breath in the frigid air, or feeling yourself draw inward, trying to conserve body heat, say, gives you a stronger imagined connection to where these people live, and who they are. 

Careful What You Wish For

There’s a story Howard Hawks tells, which we might take with a grain of salt, Hawks being known to embroider, when it suited him, but it goes like this.  He’s on a fishing trip with Hemingway, and Hemingway starts bitching that Hollywood can’t seem to make a decent picture out of any of his books.  Hawks says, you didn’t sell the books to the right person.  Meaning it should have been you, Hemingway says.  Oh, hell, Hawks says, breezily, I could make a good picture out of your worst book.  We imagine Hemingway fixing him with a slow stare.  Yeah, and just which of my books is the worst? he asks.  Hawks shrugs.  To Have and Have Not, he says.  OK, wiseguy, Hemingway says.  You got a deal.  And they shake hands on it. 

Hawks took the project to William Faulkner.  Faulkner’s first script had been for Hawks, in 1932, and they worked on six pictures together, the best known being To Have and Have Not, in 1944, and The Big Sleep, two years later.  It’s probably not news that Faulkner and Hemingway took potshots at each other over the course of thirty years, but there doesn’t seem to have been bad blood on Faulkner’s part.  Be that as it may, Faulkner told Hawks that To Have and Have Not would never make a movie.  The censorship problems aside, there’s no story.  Well, we gotta do something, Hawks tells him.  And they did.  They came up with a back story, everything that happened beforehand, and led up to where the book starts.  Faulkner’s script is essentially a prequel to the novel.  Hawks later said they had so much material there was enough left over for another movie.

Actually, there was enough left over for two.

Michael Curtiz cast Garfield in The Breaking Point, in 1950, and Audie Murphy starred in The Gun Runners, in 1958, directed by Don Siegel. I’ve written about The Breaking Point in this space before (in 2019). I’d put it in the Top Ten of any list of Curtiz movies, if not the Top Five. Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Casablanca, Passage to Marseille, White Christmas. The script is credited to Ranald MacDougall, but there’s a lot more Hemingway in it than there is in To Have and Have Not.  Photographed by Ted McCord, who shot an amazing amount of features and TV - most notoriously the delirious Leslie Stevens noir, Private Property – and including Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for Huston, and the early 1960’s Jack Lord series Stoney Burke. Garfield thought it was his best performance, and I wouldn’t argue, only to say that in the last few years of his life, he made Force of Evil, We Were Strangers, and The Breaking Point, and it’s an awful God damn shame he died as young as he did.  Patricia Neal definitely took a sharp turn from nice girls, here; in fact, she never did a character anywhere near as cheerfully careless and predatory before or since. This one broke the mold. And the movie itself is a sort of orphan, not exactly noir, but more overtly political, like We Were Strangers. Garfield isn’t tragic, in the classic sense, he isn’t fated, because of some character flaw, he’s in fact deeply moral. If anything, he believes too much.

The Gun Runners isn’t long on moral context.  Audie Murphy is very good in it, but he isn’t playing somebody who’s conflicted, he’s playing somebody decent.  (I think Audie Murphy’s very underrated; his two best performances are for John Huston, The Red Badge of Courage and The Unforgiven.)  Don Siegel says he didn’t think Audie was right for the part, but Siegel says he didn’t want to do the picture anyway. In any event, it’s a very tight movie, carefully set up, with good support – Everett Sloane, Jack Elam, Dick Jaeckel – but Eddie Albert steals the show as the heavy, full of smiling menace. It might remind you of the dynamic in the Randolph Scott pictures that Scott made with Budd Boetticher: the charming villain, cat-like and purring, the hero out of his depth and treading water.

There is, of course, one more. Islands in the Stream, which is Hemingway’s own remake. The novel was left unfinished, so the script for the movie interpolates not a little from To Have and Have Not, particularly in the third act. This is a class-A picture, no question. The cast, with George C. Scott in the lead, the director, Franklin J. Schaffner, fresh off Papillon, and using the same cinematographer, Fred Koenekamp, the swoony score, by Jerry Goldsmith – the composer’s personal favorite. My chief reservation is that it’s a shade too reverent.  They could have done with a little B-picture subversion, Marie Windsor snapping her gum or her garters.

Maybe that should have been Hemingway’s complaint, that the movies were too respectful.  He’s said to have liked Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but they sure sanitized the crap out of the novel. I think Hawks had the right idea. Take a second-rate book, and turn it into a pretty good picture. Treat it with kid gloves, you’ll only embalm it. Leave out the pretense, keep the mischief.

Circle of Treason

Aldrich Ames died the week before last, and I hope he’s rotting in Hell. For those of you who don’t know who Ames was, he was a career CIA guy who sold out to the Russians late in his tenure, and the dozen or more assets he gave up to KGB were executed. He did it for the money.

I wrote about him, and CIA’s internal manhunt, in a recent Substack column, linked below.

A chronology of what he did and how they caught him, and the poisonous legacy he left.

https://gatesd.substack.com/p/rock-paper-scissors

The story of the counterintelligence team’s mole hunt is very well told by Sandy Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille in their book, Circle of Treason.

Grimes and Vertefeuille were the lead investigators on the case, having worked together in the Soviet/Eastern Europe Division. They were well aware Moscow was rolling up CIA assets at a blistering pace, and their job was to plug the leak.

This, in itself, is fascinating inside baseball, at least for a spy groupie like me, but a couple of things stand out particularly.

One is that Ames was so careless. He was profligate with money, and tracking the cash is how Grimes eventually put him in the headlights. He was tripped up by his own arrogance. Another detail that caught my eye is that, at one point, Ames suggested to KGB that they could frame Jeanne Vertefeuille as the double agent. They’d given up Edward Lee Howard, a couple of years before, to protect Ames, but in that instance, Howard had already been burned.

What was attractive in making Vertefeuille the patsy was that because she worked in counterintelligence, she had access to secure, compartmentalized materials, and there was a certain circular logic to pinning it on her, the spy-hunter being the spy. At the least, it would sow doubts, and compromise her investigation. If later on, she accused Ames, it would look like sour grapes.

L. to R: Sandy Grimes, Paul Redmond,
Jeanne Vertefeuille, Diana Worthen, Dan Payne

If you remember, in le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor – spoiler alert - one the central narrative conceits is that Karla has instructed Bill Haydon to beguile George Smiley’s wife Ann into the sack (not that it takes much), so that George’s credibility is fatally weakened.

Karla knows Smiley is the chief threat to his mole inside the Circus, the canniest, most deliberate, and least assuming of Control’s senior deputies. But if Smiley were to suspect Haydon, and pursue it, he’d be accused of nursing a grudge, his suspicions dismissed as personal enmity.

This, to me, is an interesting meta synchronicity.

Not so much life imitating art, as that it’s so oddly private a gesture. It’s a recurring theme, in all of le Carré’s books, that the most personal, secret undercurrents are a malleable resource, to be manipulated, and put to use. Charlie, in The Little Drummer Girl, is an empty vessel, a mirror of desire, but she’s not allowed her own privacy, she can’t keep anything hidden from her handlers. Karla, in the end, gives himself up to Smiley – spoiler alert, again – but the leverage Smiley uses is the safety of the guy’s crazy daughter, whose life in a state facility would be unspeakable. (And in a twist of the knife, when they meet, Karla drops a cigarette lighter inscribed, from Ann, at Smiley’s feet, the same lighter George had handed him in a cell, twenty years before.) The most directly personal of the novels, from le Carré’s own point of view, and by his own admission, is A Perfect Spy, a brutal portrait of his dad, Ronnie. The hero of the book, Magnus, is a trickster, a shape-shifter, who can’t accommodate all the different shapes and faces and suits he’s worn, the only way he can represent himself to the world, all of them convincing, none of them authentic. Magnus is, perhaps, an avatar of the author, who was known to disguise himself.

I’m not suggesting Aldrich Ames was in any way interesting enough, or had the depth of character, to be reflective, or self-aware.

I just don’t credit him with the imagination. But like many narcissists, he would have thought he was the hero of his own movie. Trying to shift the blame for his criminal delinquency to Jeanne Vertefeuille has elements of dramatic irony, and maybe he saw it as a cute plot twist, but I don’t think he gave it all that much thought. It was just another throw of the dice.

We want, sometimes, to imbue these people with more class or grace than they deserve. Billy the Kid was morally vacant, and probably a mental defective. The romance is all in the telling. Ames is a generic cheap date, his soul for sale, and the Devil already has buyer’s remorse.

One Battle After Another

I haven’t seen every contender, but One Battle After Another is a strong candidate for best mainstream American picture of 2025. Released theatrically late in the year, it’s now available streaming on HBO Max, which is where I caught it.

Basic lineaments are these. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, from the novel Vineland by – get this – Thomas Pynchon. (You might think, reasonably, that Pynchon was impossible to adapt, but no; Anderson already took a shot at it with Inherent Vice, ten or so years ago, and there was apparently a stage production of V., in Berlin, running a little under four hours, and which seems to me a hugely quixotic undertaking.) The proof, however, is in the pudding, and One Battle After Another, quirky though it may be, is a very satisfying thriller. I feel it has a couple of blind spots, and I’ll get to that, but it sets up fast, and doesn’t slow down, and pays off big.

Leo DiCaprio, for those of you who still think he’s too cute for school – even after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – shows off some terrific chops, very understated. Sean Penn, anything but understated, goes even more batshit than you could possibly imagine, as the heavy, and yet manages to convince you the guy isn’t a cartoon. Benicio Del Toro brings some lucid and calming energy to the scene, as a sensei. And the two female leads don’t play it safe, Teyana Taylor, as the radical mom, and Regina Hall, as her bred-to-revolution daughter – both heart-breakers, in their own way, and not always sympathetic.

The plot takes some sudden turns, and I won’t spoil it, but the story is pretty straightforward. A left-wing domestic resistance group, working to spring illegals from custody and move them through an Underground Railroad to safety, is compromised. They break up and go off the radar. ICE, in the person of the aforementioned Sean Penn, tracks them down, over the years, going for kill or capture. Leo, in a state of hallucinatory bliss, imagines he and his daughter are safe, but the devil comes to their door. Much grievous mayhem ensues.

You’ll have to take my word for it, it’s nowhere near as formulaic as this may make it sound. It hits a lot of the tropes you’d expect, but pulls some real surprises. It’s consistently entertaining, and still remains thoughtful.

Here’s the thing I’m not quite sure about.

There are, historically, left-wing groups that have turned to terror, just as there are similar right-wing organizations. The people in the movie might remind you of Edward Abbey’s Monkey-Wrench Gang, in that their intentions are good, but they’ve embraced violence, and like so many others, Left or Right, they think their cause excuses that. There is, of course, no organized AntiFa, not even an umbrella. We might remember, though, that in those damned and debated 1960’s and 1970’s, some of the more radical terror groups did in fact make common cause, the IRA Provos and the Japanese Red Army, the Weather Underground and the Panthers. Not a fever dream of J. Edgar Hoover’s, an actual alliance. Maybe it came to nothing, in the end, out of mistrust, but it was in the collective unconscious.

Their opposite number is the Great Right-Wing Conspiracy.

It features in a lot of over-heated paranoia movies, but is it a real thing? We know they’ve always had a fear of the anarchist Left, going back to the Haymarket, or Sacco and Vanzetti, but in those cases, the power of the state was mobilized. We’re talking about private money, working in the shadows. Sure, they meet behind closed doors, and wield enormous influence, but do they use secret Masonic recognition signals and practice barbaric rituals? Well, the Ku Klux Klan did, but I don’t think these guys have to. The big-money tech oligarchs are right out in the open. They’re not shy about swinging their weight around. That’s the only convention One Battle After Another uses that I’m not convinced of. I don’t think the right wing has to work in secret, or show each other their Capt. Midnight decoder rings. They recognize each other on sight, known predators stalking in the tall grass.

So, a reservation.

I guess you could say it was dramatic convenience. For sure, Thomas Pynchon has long trafficked in weird, all-powerful secret societies – and they seem, unhappily, all too authentic. I think, too, they’ve always been around: think the Jesuits. In other words, it’s an understandable temptation, and neo-Nazis and Aryan Nation supremacists are very definitely crawling around, not even in the underbrush. I wouldn’t argue that these people aren’t wicked, and capable of terrible cruelties, and they probably sit around their clubs with brandy and cigars, and gloat. They just don’t hide it.

Butterfly

I’ve been watching Butterfly, on Amazon Prime.  It only runs six episodes, unfortunately, ending in a cliffhanger, so that’s discouraging.  The ratings fell off, and the show wasn’t renewed.  I happen to like it a lot, but I admit it doesn’t break new ground.  You might find it similar to Citadel, for example.  My opinion, Butterfly is sharper and better acted, but it’s still slight, not chewy. 

Premise.  Private security contractor, with lethal skills, wants out.  Fakes his death, and drops off the radar.  Some ten years later, he resurfaces, to rescue his abandoned daughter, who’s now – you guessed it – an assassin for the same murder-for-hire crew the hero tried to shut the door on a decade before.  He makes contact, but of course her assignment from corporate is to kill him, and drop his body into a deep hole in the ocean. 

That’s the set-up, and what ensues is a lot of escape and evasion, awkward attempts at familial reconciliation, and a plethora of blood squibs.  So, yes, a little too familiar.  On the other hand, the production values are very high, terrific camerawork and fight choreography, very lucid and graceful, and physically intuitive.  The two leads are extremely effective, Daniel Dae Kim (Lost, among others - and he exec produces) and Reina Hardesty, but despite their chemistry, the material is too thin to sustain.

As it happens, there’s a newly restored and marvelously crisp new print of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) out on Kanopy.  [Kanopy is a streaming service available through local public libraries, and probably available through yours; check it out.  Many hard-to-find titles, and art pictures, like Criterion, but free.]  If you’re not aware of the who and what, John Woo was a Hong Kong moviemaker who came to Hollywood in the early 1990’s, but was already an influence on Scorsese, Sam Raimi, and Tarantino.  The producer/director Tsui Hark put together the money for A Better Tomorrow, and it wound up at the top of the box office. 

A Better Tomorrow is the template for the Hong Kong action pictures that came after it.  It doesn’t have the polish or discipline of the feverish Hard Boiled, from 1992, but it established John Woo and made Chow Yun Fat a bankable star.  The stylized, kinetic violence is vivid and visceral, and sets off the quieter, more emotional scenes of male bonding and domestic fracture.  The trope of doubling, or twinning, two main characters who mirror each other, in spite of their antagonisms, a staple of later John Woo films, is fixed here, first.  (It also shows up in many other Hong Kong policiers, such as the Infernal Affairs trilogy, the inspiration for Scorsese’s Departed.)  Like the conventions of Westerns, or screwball, they’re self-referential.

Not to speak disrespectfully of A Better Tomorrow, which was astonishing and original when it came out, but the reason I’m bringing it up, with reference to the more recent Butterfly, is that its execution was head-spinning, it announced a director who was reimagining the way a movie told a story, fragmenting the frame.  (Hard not think of Sam Peckinpah, of course, and hard to imagine John Woo without Peckinpah’s vocabulary to draw on.)  Butterfly is imitative, heated execution and undercooked ideas.  Not the worst thing, of itself, but it suffers by comparison.

Sidney Reilly: The Bottom of the Deck

Although novelty has its rewards, one of the dividends of leafing through the streaming services, PBS Masterpiece, BritBox, Acorn, MHz, and so on, is rediscovering previous favorites, a few of which have held up pretty well.  One is Lovejoy, still lively and clever, Ian McShane very much a treat, as always; and another, if showing its age a bit, is Reilly: Ace of Spies, first broadcast on PBS in 1983.

Reilly was a risk for Thames Television, they’d never done a mini-series, but they got a good return, selling the show in every major market.  Although it’s been outpaced in the export market by Thomas the Tank Engine, Mr. Bean, and Benny Hill, it was a commercial success at the time, and it made Sam Neill a star. 

Sam Neill

Sidney Reilly was a real guy, and while the scripts played a little loose with the facts, the storyline was in many ways less fanciful than the rake’s progress of Reilly’s life.  You could also be forgiven for playing up his charm, and playing down his murderous opportunism.  Reilly was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, based on a book by Robin Bruce Lockhart – Lockhart the son of R.H. Bruce Lockhart, a famous spy in his own right, resident in Moscow after the Bolsheviks came to power, and credibly linked to Sidney Reilly in a 1918 plot to assassinate Lenin.  Half the stuff Reilly got up to never even makes it into the TV show. 

He was born Rosenblum, in Odessa, in 1873.  Or not.  His given name was Sigmund, or Georgy, or Salomon.  He was the illegitimate son of Perla and Mikhail, fathered by the cuckold Mikhail’s cousin Grigory.  Or perhaps the last heir of a Polish-Jewish family with an estate at Bielsk, on the edge of empire, the frontier of Belarus and Poland.  He first shows up in official paperwork in 1892, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he’s arrested by the Okhrana, the secret police, for political indiscretions, and the best guess is that he turns informant to avoid jail time.  This shape-shifting is a pattern that emerges early.  He fakes his death, in Odessa, and beats feet for Brazil.  He claims to have saved the life of a British officer, who rewards him with a passport and 1500 pounds sterling, but when he shows up later in London, in 1895, the money may well have been stolen from two Italian anarchists on the train from Paris to Fontainbleau, who had their throats cut.  How much of this is fiction?  The two Italians are dead enough to make the local paper.  Sidney is clearly inventing himself as he goes along.  In the trade, this is known as a legend, creating a false biography for cover.  It might simply be convenience, but it seems to be a developing habit of mind, Sidney shedding his skin.

Sidney Reilly

He takes a lover, Ethel Boole, later Voynich, who writes a roman à clef about him, The Gadfly, which goes on to enormous success, in Russia!  Because of her Russian émigré connections, it’s suggested Sidney was actually spying on her for Special Branch.  By this time, he’s gone undercover for Scotland Yard’s intelligence chief William Melville, and it’s Melville who comes up with his new cover identity, Sidney George Reilly.

He’s also gotten married.  His wife is the recent widow of a clergyman.  They’d been doing the horizontal mambo before the husband’s death; her husband changed his will a week before he died; his death was certified as influenza by a doctor resembling Sidney, and no inquest was held; the rev was buried thirty-six hours after he died.  The young woman inherited £800,000.  Sidney married her four months later. 

Reilly reconnoiters in the Caucasus, and here’s where the series first picks up his story.  He’s working for the Admiralty, but he’s also being paid by the Japanese, and he eventually shows up in Port Arthur, in Manchuria.  This is later on the first strike of the Japanese against the Russian navy – the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.  Reilly has gained the reputation of an international adventurer.  He makes a deal to secure Persian and Iraqi oil concessions for the Brits.  He infiltrates the Krupp works at Essen, and steals German armament plans.  He spends the war years in New York, selling weapons to both Germany and Russia, until the U.S. enters the war and embargoes the German market, and then the Russian Revolution deposes the tsar.  Sidney keeps an eye on American radicals, reporting to British military intelligence, and takes on some industrial espionage.  It gets him recommended to SIS, in London.

1918.  Sidney Reilly had come full circle, when the Secret Intelligence Service recruited him and sent him back to Russia.  His job was to assess and report on a chaotic situation.  Kerensky’s provisional government had fallen to the Bolsheviks six months before, but civil war had blown up between the Reds and the right-wing Whites.  Reilly immediately put his energies into a counter-revolutionary plot to murder Lenin and overthrow the Communists.  He had support from British Naval Intelligence, Lockhart, acting for the Foreign Office, and SIS.  Allied troops had landed at Archangel and Murmansk.  The coup looked plausible.  But it fell apart when a former anarchist, on her own, made a premature attempt on Lenin’s life, and the Cheka struck back savagely.  Feliks Dzerzhinsky, head of state security, had informants everywhere, and it’s been suggested - even by Lockhart – that Reilly could have been a provocateur, in Dzerzhinsky’s pocket.  Reilly, as it happens, bluffed his way out of Petrograd, and got to London by way of Helsinki.  Others weren’t so lucky.

Lenin, Stalin

He was back, not long after, assigned to reconnoiter the anti-Bolshevik forces in southern Russia, along with Capt. George Hill.  (Hill was another clandestine intelligence operative with nerves of steel and a price on his head, a celebrated agent in both world wars, who’d worked covert with Reilly in Moscow and Petrograd, and helped him escape to Finland.)  They attached themselves to Gen. Denikin’s army, which along with the Cossack cavalries, made up the White resistance in Ukraine and the Caucasus.  Reilly reported back to London that with Allied military support, the Whites stood a chance, but he probably didn’t have that much effect on British policy.  Reilly is really only a footnote in the White story, which is a sad and complicated narrative – well told, most recently, by Antony Beevor, in RUSSIA: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921 – but the problem for the Whites wasn’t half-hearted and inconsistent help from the West.  The problem was that they had no real internal consistency, themselves.  They opposed the Reds, but they were stitched together out of monarchists, and democratic socialists, and conservative Tsarist army officers, along with fanatic anti-Semitic reactionaries like the Black Hundreds.  It was a marriage of convenience, and an inconvenience to everybody it touched.

The most interesting part of Reilly’s story comes at the end, and his undoing came not through his own perfidy, slippery and unscrupulous as he was, but by keeping the faith.  The triumph of Bolshevism was never a foregone conclusion, they could have been strangled at birth, if their adversaries had been ruthless enough – it was Lenin who turned out to have the necessary iron in his pants – but there were a few who banked the fires, even as late as 1925, when the Communists were securely in control, and Stalin had succeeded to power.  One of these was Winston Churchill, who was at this point in and out of government, and another was Sidney Reilly.  Reilly took a meeting in Paris, accompanied by a representative of SIS, with a small cadre of White partisans.  The counter-revolutionaries in exile were disenfranchised, with little political leverage, and no credible intelligence sources inside Russia, but Reilly somehow convinced himself they could organize a grass-roots guerrilla campaign through their underground movement, the so-called Monarchist Union of Central Russia, known colloquially as the Trust. 

It was, of course, a trap.

Dzerzhinsky’s OGPU – the Cheka went by many different worknames, over the years – had developed the Trust as a long-term deception, loading it up with backstory, and peopling it with characters, like salting a worthless mine with gold nuggets.  They fabricated an alternate reality, where a stubborn resistance movement, burning with righteousness, held out against the Communist devils to bring back Holy Russia.  Utter poppycock, but it was constructed to lure in anti-Bolsheviks of exactly Reilly’s stripe, the unrepentant, who dreamt of turning back the wheel of history, and he fell for it.  Smuggled across the Finnish border, he was arrested two days later, the mission compromised from the outset.

Dzerzhinsky

He was interrogated at the Lubyanka, and after a couple of weeks, he was ready to give up any and all, regarding the American and UK spy services.  Even allowing for embroidery on Reilly’s part – the problem with enhanced interrogation being that the subject tells you what they think you most want to hear – this would have proved useful to Soviet espionage, but in spite of his obvious value to the Russian security apparat, he wasn’t persuasive enough.  There was that luckless conspiracy to assassinate Lenin, back in 1918.  It proved the final nail in his coffin.  Dzerzhinsky was overruled by Stalin.  Reilly was taken out and shot. 

The question most of us would ask is, Why did he go back, that last time?  He was never an idealist.  The answer seems to be that he heard what he wanted to hear.  He must have suspected, he knew he was a marked man, but he thought he still had the moves, that he could dazzle the crowds with his footwork.  And there was always the chance it was real, that the Trust was what they claimed, that the days of the Red Terror were numbered, and Sidney Reilly would be the man who frustrated their Destiny. 

Not every story we wish to be true is false, the fabled spy-hunter James Angleton once remarked.  He meant that a deception, to have legs, needs to be more than simply convincing; it needs an element of the unreachable, of the fantastic.  Reilly was drawn to the flame because he read his own story as myth.  A lesser man wouldn’t have believed it, and been able to save himself.

Seize the Day

I changed my regular morning take-out order the other day, after many, many mornings of exactly the same, and it reminded me, out of the blue, of the opening of Heinrich Böll’s postwar novel, Billiards at Half-Past Nine.  The new guy in town, an architect, goes to the local café for breakfast, and since it’s his first time, orders something a little eccentric, trying to make an impression.  But this act of daring comes back to haunt him, because now he’s expected to get the same damn thing for breakfast for the next sixty years.  Böll also goes into a very funny sidebar about how Germans will never ask the price, when it’s not listed on the menu, for fear of embarrassing themselves.  And a common daily routine offhandedly becomes a reflection on the national character. 

Billiards at Half-Past Nine is in some ways an analog of Irwin Shaw’s novel Voices of a Summer Day.  Böll published his book in 1959, Shaw published his in 1965.  Böll was born in 1917, Shaw in 1913.  Both served in the war, Böll with the Wehrmacht, Shaw with the U.S. Army.  Both of them wrote about their experiences in the war, Böll with The Train Was on Time, Shaw with The Young Lions, and both had critical and commercial success.  (Shaw, of course, had enormous commercial success later on, with an extra helping of critical schadenfreude.)  Billiards at Half-Past Nine and Voices of a Summer Day are mid-career novels, the two writers stretching their legs but not showing strain, using a comfortable voice but not falling into lazy habits of mind.  Structurally, very similar, both books generational, but the narrative arc a single day, told in flashback and multiple POV.  In other words, very fluid and fluent, with a lot of grace notes - Dickensian, even, meant very much as a compliment, and not to imply cluttered.  The books are actually terrifically clean, tight and exact and effective, like a good pitcher in the sixth inning. 

Böll is also that generation of German writers who lived through Nazism and the war, and wrote what might be called stories of atonement, although the Germans call it die Trümmerliteratur, literature of the rubble.  Günter Grass is another – born in 1927, Grass was 17 when he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, an admission he made long afterwards – and German historical guilt is his subject.  Hans Hellmut Kirst, author of Night of the Generals, was born in East Prussia in 1914, and was not only in the military, but was a Nazi party-member.  Nobody wants to admit they’re in a club of murderers, he later said.  His books are often comically horrific, with fervent wartime Nazis effortlessly putting on sheep’s clothing for the gullible Yanks. 

 

I’ve talked about German “atonement” before.  We’d do well to remember that an entire generation of younger Germans wanted nothing whatsoever to do with regret, or war guilt, or the whole concept of collective responsibility.  They thought the Nazis were their parents’ problem, not theirs.  In the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, when Baader-Meinhof was active, the young German Left accused the government of being riddled with Nazis – the chancellor, Kurt Kiesinger, had in fact been a party member, so the Left wasn’t all that far wrong.  My point here, is that those kids indulged their own unexamined moral superiority.  We have a similar blind spot in white America about the legacy of black slavery.  The sentiment is expressed the same way, I was never a Nazi, or I never owned slaves.  It’s got nothing to do with me, in other words.  But white Americans are the residual legatees of slavery; we’ve benefited from a system of apartheid and class warfare.  And black Americans have carried the burden of Jim Crow and race hatred.  You can’t wish it away.  American writers like Twain and Faulkner have made the case that slavery is our Original Sin, and I think much the same can be said about the historical weight of Nazism.  Writers like Böll, and Grass, and Kirst have made it their central concern to put it front-and-center in contemporary German consciousness. 

Speaking of Baader-Meinhof – I’ve said this before, too - it’s a sign of maturing political health in the German social psyche, that the toxic hand-me-downs of that era, crocodile tears over the Red Army faction, the culture of betrayal encouraged by the Stasi, the self-satisfaction of bourgeois West Germans and their condescension to Ossis, is all fair game.  I was startled when the movie Downfall was released, about Hitler in the bunker, and even more so by The Lives of Others, about the brute surveillance regime in East Germany.  In a less reflective national mood, they never would have been made.  Germans aren’t much given to inner curiosity or self-doubt, any more than Americans are. 

Only the weak accommodate history.  The bold march on.