Free The Redhunter by William F. Buckley Page B

is—was?—he doesn’t know whether she’s alive—English. His father
     married her in Copenhagen. She was with the Red Cross, her parents with the foreign service. Usalov was on a Russian freighter
     that stalled there for over a month during the Russian Revolution—the captain kept getting conflicting instructions from the
     shipping line and from Soviet headquarters. He met her, they fell in love, got married by the captain, who was frustrated
     not knowing what to do. Anyway, they sailed eventually on back to Leningrad and went back to Usalov’s home near Kiev, where
     Dmitri was brought up, speaking English, of course, to his mother. How he ended up at Plattling is a story you might want
     to hear—from him.”
    Harry met Dmitri on the Sunday and after an hour said he had better leave. “Major Chadinoff will court-martial me if I stay
     any longer. He said you have to rest. You have to ‘rest heavily,’ was how he put it.”
    Dmitri laughed weakly, his bright teeth shining in his bearded face. “Will you come again? I have so much liked talking with
     you.”
    “Yes, I can be here on Tuesday. Before I go, when last did you hear from your family?”
    “Not since February 1942. Four years ago. On my eighteenth birthday. That was the day I became eligible for the Soviet draft
     and that was two weeks before the Nazis came. In a little wallet sewn by my mother inside my winter coat I had one hundred
     twenty British pounds. That would have been more than enough to board a freighter from Odessa to Egypt and Egypt to London,
     and I had theletter to my mother’s sister in Sussex. But I told you what happened.” Dmitri closed his eyes, and Harry left, resolved to
     go back on Tuesday.
    He met with Chadinoff for Monday night chess. “He is technically a traitor, right?”
    “Yes. He was eighteen, should have stayed in Kiev, should have been captured by the invading Nazis, and if he had survived
     the Nazis, should have gone into the Soviet army to be killed for Stalin. Instead, he got to Odessa, which was blockaded,
     and then weaved westward, was thrown into a camp by Romanian Nazis, escaped, worked his way through Poland and now was dodging
     the Red army, and finally he lands in Stuttgart, where the Nazis use him as an interpreter. He escapes from them and: ends
     up in the warm embrace of the Allies here at Plattling. All we intend to do, after I cure him from pneumonia, is send him
     back to Russia so he can be shot or sent to one of those glacial camps—why do I save him from pneumonia now when he will someday
     soon, thanks to Western diplomacy, die of the cold in Siberia?”
    Harry visited with his prisoner-patient on Tuesday, as promised, and again on Saturday before Usalov’s dismissal from the
     hospital. Dmitri was three years older than Harry, but his voice was from another world, the world of Europe, the cradle of
     political death plots against human beings on a truly massive scale. Harry had known now for the first time, really, someone
     who had experienced both the great demonic worlds of the century. And was now to be packaged and shipped back to the eastern
     division.
    Late that night in February, Chadinoff was less than decisive in his movements. Reporting to the lounge as had been arranged
     that morning, Harry sat down at the usual table in the long room with a bar at the corner, a half dozen card tables, and service-model
     couches and chairs, mostly lit by one thoughtlessly unfocused incandescent light in the middle of the room. Chadinoff walked
     in, passed by the other card tables and through the thick cigarette smoke. He leaned over to Harry. “I must speak with you.
     In private. Can you follow me to my quarters?”
    Chadinoff led Harry out through the cold, down the roadway to the hospital ward, and into the warmth of his office. He opened
     his cigarette pack and without thinking extended it to Harry.
    “No thanks, Erik.”
    “Yes, of course. I remember—you don’t smoke.”