The Charm School by Nelson DeMille
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.”
“And a roster of the men who are here now?”
“Yes.”
“Did Jack Dodson have that information with him?”
“Certainly. Are you saying you may be able to get this information out of here?”
“I’m not saying that, but that is obviously what I have in mind.”
Poole nodded. He said, “Something else you ought to know
Hollis nodded. Not everyone thought it would be good at all.
Poole added, “I got here in June of 1971. I’d been in North Vietnamese prisons for about six months prior to that.” He thought a moment, then said, “As I said, I was flown from Hanoi in a Red Air Force transport on a direct flight to a Soviet air base not far from here. I had no idea where we were going. There were ten of us. We had the idea that the Russians might be acting as brokers between the Americans and the North Vietnamese—that we were going to be exchanged for North Vietnamese POWs or Russian spies or something. Even after we were transported here in sealed trucks, we couldn’t comprehend that we were going to train Red Air Force pilots. But as soon as we realized that, we also knew we would never get out of here with that secret.”
Hollis nodded. The secret was out, but the men remained. He wondered if Poole and the others sensed that.
They began walking again, shoulder to shoulder on the road, speaking in whispers. Lisa asked, “Is there a church here? Do you have services?”
“No. That’s one thing they won’t allow, which is very telling. We can hold Bible study groups now, because we demanded that. But the students are not allowed to participate even as a training exercise. In America, they can become capitalists or right wing politicians if they wish, but I’ve heard that they’re not allowed to join a church unless it’s necessary for their cover.”
Lisa remarked, “That’s not consistent with the idea that you should enjoy American freedoms here.”
Poole replied, “I don’t quite understand that either. They make such a big deal over atheism and bad-mouthing religion, you’d almost think they believed in God.”
They continued their walk along the main road, then turned left into a narrow log-stepped path that climbed a rise in the heavily treed forest. This section of the camp, Hollis noted, seemed uninhabited.
At the end of the log path was a rundown izba with a weak light in its single window and smoke coming from its stone chimney. Poole explained, “One of the last of the original structures. General Austin prefers it to the so-called American houses, though Colonel Burov would prefer it if the general would sell out like the rest of us.”
They approached the door of the log cabin, and Poole continued, “The general has not taken a Russian wife, as he says he is still married to Mrs. Austin. I believe he has remained faithful.” He added, “He has more willpower than I do. Also, you should know that the general refuses to teach classes.”
Hollis asked, “Why hasn’t the KGB gotten rid of him?”
“We made it clear that we would strike or rebel if they did. We have value as a commodity here, like any slaves when the slave trade is cut off. Also, I suspect they don’t mind giving us a small victory to let us think we’re still men.” Poole knocked on the door.
The door opened, revealing a man close to seventy, very fit looking with a grey crew cut and steel-grey eyes. His skin was too pale, but it seemed more a result of too little sun than any unhealthiness. Hollis thought he looked like a man who had borne too much, too long, and had borne it alone.
General Austin regarded them a moment, then showed them in without speaking. He went to a stereo system strewn out on a wobbly bench and placed a record on the turntable. The strings and woodwinds of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” came through the speakers and filled the small room. Austin indicated two facing wooden chairs near the crumbling stone fireplace. Hollis and Lisa sat.
Poole took a similar pine chair facing the fire. Austin lowered himself into a birch rocker.
Hollis looked around the log-walled room. It was about as large as Pavel and Ida’s kitchen, but if anything, more sparse. Aside from the rocker and stereo, there was not a bit of comfort, no easy chair, no rag rug on the floor, and no kitchen facilities. There were, however, shaded reading lamps around the room, their cords all snaking toward a single electrical outlet. A half wall of rough planking separated the sleeping area, where an electric heater glowed on the floor beside an army cot. Beside the cot were stacks of books, magazines, and newspapers.
General Austin spoke in a very soft voice, barely audible above Vivaldi. “It was good of you to come, Colonel.” He looked at Lisa, “And you, Ms. Rhodes.”
She asked, “Would you have preferred that I wasn’t here?”
“If I did, I would have said so.”
She found herself replying, “Yes, sir.”
Commander Poole said to Austin, “Colonel Hollis wishes you to know that he is here voluntarily.”
Austin nodded but made no comment. He addressed both Hollis and Lisa. “You have knowledge of the Major Dodson business?”
Hollis nodded.
“And do you have any news of Major Dodson?”
Hollis replied, “No, General,” preferring to use that form of address rather than “sir.”
Austin asked, “What do you think our government is prepared to do if Major Dodson makes contact with the embassy or a Western reporter?”
“General, I can’t engage in any discussion of that nature with a man I’ve just met. A man who is not a free agent. And, excuse me, a man who has been compromised.”
Austin stared off into space awhile, rocking in his chair. Finally he said, “I understand your reservations. However, I expected from you, at the very least, some message from the outside.”
“I am not the bearer of any message. I am an intelligence officer, and I’ve been trained and instructed not to speak to anyone on matters that they have no need to know, rank notwithstanding.”
“I think I’m in a better position than you to determine if I have a need to know.”
Hollis did not respond directly but said, “General, I have been drugged and interrogated by Burov, and I have so far not divulged more than I absolutely had to in order to establish myself to Burov as a potential traitor. That’s why I’m here and not in a cell. Whatever I know will do you little good anyway.”
Poole asked, “Colonel, can’t you at least tell us if our government knows we’re here?”
“No, I can’t.” Hollis looked at Austin. “I want you to tell me how Dodson got out.”
Austin replied, “Only a handful of men know that. Using your reasoning, you have no need to know.”
Poole added, “If they catch Jack Dodson, they will torture him the way they tortured Captain Romero and make him reveal the names of the men on the escape committee. They will then torture those men to determine if there are others. Two of those men will be me and General Austin. So if we told you how Dodson got out, we might, under torture, be forced to tell the KGB that you know the secret as well. Then they might torture and execute you and Ms. Rhodes. They tolerate a lot from us, but they will not tolerate an escape attempt. So if you still want to know how Jack Dodson got out of here, be advised you might get caught up in the bloodbath to follow his recapture.”
Hollis looked at Lisa, who nodded.
Austin spoke. “All right. A catapult.” He explained, “We cut our own wood for our fires. We designed a catapult, cut the pieces, and scattered them about in the forest. One day a few weeks ago before the cold set in, we assembled the cata
“We don’t need testing, General.”
“I don’t know that. I don’t even know what brought you two here.”
Hollis replied, “Fate and destiny brought us here, General.”
Austin nodded. “We take your presence here as a positive sign.” He leaned toward Hollis in his rocker. “I’ll tell you something, Colonel. As much as we would want to go home, I think we’d all sacrifice our lives if we thought one man could get out of here and tell the world about this place. If you are to be that man, if you have a plan from the outside, you need only give the word. We’re ready for just about anything.”
Hollis nodded in acknowledgment.
Lisa said, “That’s very brave.” She looked at Hollis. “Sam?”
Hollis made no response.
Poole spoke. “As for the catapult, Colonel, it is now behind the headquarters building under twenty-four-hour guard. No one has told us why, but since we can read the Russian mind by now, we know why. Do you know why? You, Ms. Rhodes?”
Neither replied, and Poole continued, “If they catch Dodson, he will be the first—without the padding this time. If they don’t find him and they don’t learn who is on the escape committee, they will just pick ten or so names at random. So even if you find us contemptible as traitors, don’t think we are the Russians’ docile house pets. We did do something that we are prepared to die for.”