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Page 24.

— ix —

I was able to put his story together from my own notes, and from the words of people I met along my journey to the truth of my life:

—the aged U-boat commander and his beautiful granddaughter in West Berlin;

—the old spy master and his still beautiful wife in Canterbury; we spoke in a tourist diner near the cathedral, while the pealing of the angel bells—of the Oxfords and Dunstans in Arundel Tower—made me sob uncontrollably for their unstinting beauty and my broken heart, while Haywarden’s wife handed me paper napkins from a dispenser;

—my cold and distant aunt in New Haven, who was yet, by time-trained reflex, sworn to Federal secrecy because Stalin’s agents had hunted my father for so many years—she loved him, and trusted nobody; I could have been a spy, sent to assassinate him—that was the magnitude of Stalin’s personal hatred for my father;

—Uncle Viktor himself, caring only for his darkly tattooed and nickel-studded granddaughter in a Moscow slum and glad to get a pound of fresh coffee from the West;

—the one-eyed man near San Francisco who knew the whole story, and drove my soul the last few miles to its light;

—and finally the rest, which will be clear as I finish this journal and its enormous appendix, the story of Tim Nordhall himself, and his women, and his adventures in the global wars of 1939-1991.

Each interview led me to the next, according to a road map I thought had been planned by Jaguar, but in fact was a collaboration with his former deadly enemy, a one-eyed American station chief of whom I have more to tell—who, along with Haywarden, worked for Wild Bill Donovan and OSS, and later for the CIA.