Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow by Paul Gallico Read Free Book Online

of one’s wishes or desires or ambitions moved too smoothly that was the time to watch out. However, she was not clairvoyant and hence could not follow what was happening to the documents she and Mrs Butterfield had left behind them in the Intourist Bureau.

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    A chapter in the forthcoming book by Mr Geoffrey Lockwood and one which the Russians were not going to like stated that the USSR was a nation partially paralysed by a bureaucracy still using methods hung over from the days of the various ‘Greats’ of the past, Peter, Catherine, and so on. They were a vast conglomeration of ignorant, stubborn men, hamstrung as well by terror, a maze turned in upon itself from which there were no exits.
    Not only, wrote Mr Lockwood, was it the left hand, but likewise the left foot that kneweth never what the right ones did. Each department regarded itself as a little independent kingdom answerable to no one, with the chiefs up to Ministry level acting entirely upon royal whim or how they happened tobe feeling on any particular day. The result was that any sensible suggestion or solution of difficulties emanating from the Olympus of The Presidium got bogged down, diluted, reversed or totally lost in the morass of bureaucracy before it had so much as a chance for the breath of life.
    Added to which, according to Mr Lockwood’s acid analysis, not only was there no liaison or co-operation, but the chaos within each bureau due to the ignorance, block-headedness, stupidity and lack of proper training of the civil servants themselves was something to be admired. And thereafter he quoted chapter and verse on some of the larger fiascos which had helped to bring about such disasters as crop failures and equal catastrophes in the attempt to produce ordinary consumer goods.
    One of the Soviet Union’s most important windows to the West was their big travel bureau known as Intourist which as travel bureaus went operated with more efficiency than most except that at home it was hampered by troubles not of its own making. One was the fact that once in Russia their clients were exposed to the slapdash methods of hotels, car pools, taxis, theatre tickets, etc. They were also responsible to some extent to the security branches. It would seem no traveller ever returned from the Muscovite bourne without a tale of some kind of foul-up.
    The two women had hardly left the building whenthe large staff occupying the warren at the back of the office in Upper Regent Street went to work upon the documents deposited by Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield, picking their way through the hen-track replies to the questionnaires which were then photocopied, analysed and digested for dispatch to the various interested departments which would have to deal with them. These were the Consulate, Embassy, their own headquarters in Moscow, including the all-important KGB intelligence service which received an immediate photocopy of the original by electronic transmission.
    The civil servant called upon to cope with a précis of the Harris/Butterfield forms had to deal with the problem posed by their professions, maiden and married names and other vital statistics. Faced with deciphering their aforementioned hen-tracks and further handicapped by myopia and a need for newer and stronger glasses, he dispatched to his superiors a remarkable document revealing that one Lady Ada Harris Char accompanied by her personal maid, Violet Butterfield, had made application for the five-day tourist trip to Moscow.
    Mrs Harris’s elevation to the British aristocracy had been the matter of a simple stroke of the pen. Since the words ‘Char Lady’ meant nothing to the clerk he had judged it to be an error of reversal and so had corrected it immediately to ‘Lady Char’ which made sense to him.
    The case of who and what was Mrs Butterfield gave him considerably more trouble but he solved it by a piece of brilliant deduction which would have met with the highest