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From New York I flew to Venice, where my patients were waiting for me. According to the plan that Soviet intelligence had prepared, I was to fly into Venice’s Marco Polo Airport on September 1, for the opening of the film festival. After I took off from JFK Airport in New York, my plane spent several hours over the ocean by night, steadily traversing space to the sleepy hum of the engines. Outside the window was an impenetrable darkness, as if curtains had been drawn over the world, and only the light of the engine exhaust and the stars in the sky above us lent some depth to the night. I had crossed the Atlantic on several occasions in all kinds of weather, fair and foul, on commercial vessels and passenger liners. A ship rocks ceaselessly, and one sails along day and night with seemin
