The Charm School

laugh. “How about your folks at the Pentagon?”
    Hollis replied, “No one’s hands are clean.”
    “And you personally, Sam?”
    “Peace with honor,” Hollis replied. “How about you? You’re no fan of the Soviets or of détente.”
    Alevy shrugged. “I’m just giving you the party line. I do what they tell me. They tell me not to embarrass the Soviet government with revelations that they might be holding American citizens as prisoners.” Alevy sprawled on the couch. “So I don’t. Then Burov moves the camp or just shoots all those airmen.”
    Hollis said, “That’s why we have to move fast, Seth.”
    Alevy stared up at the ceiling. “Right. Those men would be dead right now, if it weren’t for Dodson. Dodson is living evidence, and Dodson is on the loose. So Burov has the Charm School and its population on hold. If Burov gets Dodson before we do… I keep waiting for Dodson to show up here.”
    Hollis said, “I keep thinking about the thousand missing fliers and the three hundred we know are in the Charm School. I suppose there were more, but through attrition… natural causes, suicide, executions… Three hundred. I think it’s up to us, Seth, to save them. Screw the diplomats.”
    Alevy regarded Hollis a moment, then spoke. “You know, Sam, in the two years I’ve been working with you, I never understood where you were coming from.”
    “Good.”
    “But now I’ve got a handle on you. You’re willing to break the rules on this one, risk your career, world peace, and your very life to get those fliers out. Cool Sam Hollis, Colonel Correct, is a wild jet jockey again, ready to bomb and strafe anything in his way.” Alevy smiled. “Yet everyone still thinks you’re a team player and I’m the rogue. They don’t know what I know about you. That could be useful. Welcome to my world, Sam Hollis.”
    Hollis made no reply.
    Alevy said, “Think of the downside of your goal. Let’s say we got those men out, through negotiations or otherwise. Christ, can you imagine three hundred middle-aged American POWs landing at Dulles airport on a flight from Moscow? Do you know what kind of public outrage that would produce?”
    “Yes, if my outrage is any gauge of American public opinion.”
    “Right. Scrap the summit, the arms talks, trade, travel, the Bolshoi, the works. We might have our honor intact, but I wouldn’t give odds on the peace.”
    “What are you saying, Seth? Washington doesn’t want them home?”
    “You figure it out.” Alevy got up and poured more coffee and brandy from the sideboard. He shut off the tape. “What do you want to hear?”
    “In the last two years I’ve heard every piece of music written since 1685. I really don’t care anymore.”
    “How about bagpipes? Listen to this. The Scots Highland Regiment. A limey at the U.K. embassy gave me this one. He says the Russians hate the sound of bagpipes.” Alevy put on the tape of pipes and drums, and the regiment swung into “The Campbells Are Comin’.”
    Alevy said, “Let’s return to the question of
why
these fliers are still in Soviet hands. After they were wrung dry by the Red Air Force and GRU, why did the KGB come in and co-opt the place?”
    Hollis sipped on his coffee. “Mental labor. A sort of think tank. A KGB think tank. An extension course of the Institute of Canadian and American Studies.”
    “Something like that,” Alevy replied. “But a little more sinister.”
    “Meaning?”
    “We think those POWs are causing us damage, God forgive them. So our concern is not purely humanitarian. If it were, then you’d be correct in your cynical assumption that we’d just as soon let them rot in order to save détente. Fact is, Sam, our concern—my company’s concern—is very deep and has to do with urgent matters of national security.” Alevy walked toward Hollis and said, “To put it bluntly, we think that fucking prison camp is a training school for Soviet agents who talk, look, think, act, and maybe even fuck like Americans. Do you understand?”
    Hollis nodded. “I know that. I’ve known that from the beginning. A finishing school, graduate school, charm school… whatever.”
    “Right. If our theory is correct, a graduate of that place is indistinguishable from a man born and raised in the good old U.S. of A. When an agent leaves there, he has a South Boston accent like Major Dodson or maybe a South Carolina accent or a Whitefish, North Dakota, accent. He can tell you the name of Ralph