The Debriefing (11 page)

“But things didn’t work out the way you thought they would?”

Kulakov’s head emerges from his collar; his features are drawn, his eyes half closed and moist. “For which of us,” he says quietly, “do things work out the way we thought they would?” He shakes his head sadly. “Galya was a very beautiful woman on the outside, but very warped inside.”

“How warped?” Stone asks.

“Sexually, for one thing,” replies Kulakov. “She made demands that no man could satisfy. And she didn’t hide her lack of satisfaction. She seemed to take pleasure in humiliating me. She boasted about other loves she had known; about what she had done to them, and what they had done to her. She loved to describe things in great detail. No matter how much I tried to please her, it was never enough. She always wanted more.”

They walk on for a hundred yards without saying anything; ahead, the farm comes into view on a rise: a main house, whitewashed clapboard, two stories, and two smaller outbuildings, one in brick, one in wood. The entire complex is surrounded by a whitewashed picket fence. Four cars are parked in various places around the complex, and two men with shotguns can be seen lounging in the shadows of the buildings. Stone knows that two more, also with shotguns, are playing cards inside the brick building, which serves as a storehouse for the farm’s arsenal—an assortment of Uzi submachine guns, grenades and one light mortar.

“Did your actress friend leave before or after the charges were brought against you?” Stone asks.

Kulakov thinks a moment. “I can’t remember,” he says. “It was a bad time for me, you understand. I lost track of the sequence. I remember a vicious argument when she turned up one night with another man and kissed him on the lips in front of me. But I don’t remember if it was before or after the charges.”

“About the charges,” Stone says, “what was the first you heard of them?”

“I had just come back from a run to Paris, and was due for a few days off. I got a phone call from someone at the ministry ordering me not to leave Moscow, and to be available at my phone between nine and six every day. I thought maybe there was another diplomatic run in the works. Two days later, I think it was, though now that I think of it, it might have been three or four, the call came through.”

“But it wasn’t a diplomatic run?”

Kulakov nods. One of the men with the shotguns waves from the farm, and Kulakov and Stone wave back. “I was ordered to report to room 666—I remember the three sixes—at ten the next morning, in uniform. The uniform part made me nervous; I seldom wore a uniform.”

“And that’s when you met Colonel Koptin.”

“Yes.” They are up to the picket fence now, and Stone stops so they can finish before they go in. “He was a decent enough fellow,” Kulakov says. “He seemed sorry to be doing what he was doing. He said that a routine background investigation, which is ordered up periodically for people who have access to very secret material, turned up the fact that I had lied about my father. I must have turned very pale when he said that; you see, I thought they had discovered the truth about my father being Jewish. Koptin came around the desk and brought a seat over for me, and then gave me a glass of water. And he explained that it had come out that my father had not been a war hero after all, but rather a deserter who had been executed for collaboration with the Nazi invaders. He even showed me the handwritten entry in the war diary noting the execution of someone named Kulakov. I denied everything—all this was news to me—and he
noted my denials in the dossier. He even appeared to believe my denials were sincere—he asked me if I would submit to a lie detector test and became openly sympathetic to me when I instantly agreed. Then he showed me a memorandum, signed by his superior, ordering my name stricken from the active courier list. And he advised me to hire a lawyer, as there was a good chance that the case would come to trial. I asked him what the consequence of a guilty verdict would be. He said that for someone in my position, which is to say someone with access to very secret material, a conviction would go very hard. He said I could expect a jail sentence of not less than ten years, along with a dishonorable discharge and loss of all pension rights.”

Thro comes out of the front door of the main house. “Anybody for lunch?” she calls.

“Let’s eat,” says Stone.

Thro’s skin is tingling from the Chinese tea disease. “I read it in
Newsweek,”
she says, pressing her fingers to her cheekbones. “By burning fossil fuels, we’re increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This curtain of carbon dioxide produces a greenhouse effect. So far, so good. Now, if we keep burning fossil fuels at the present rate, the atmosphere will be 5.4 degrees warmer than it is today by the year 2050. And that will turn the corn belt into desert.” Thro giggles hysterically. “The fact that there are enough nuclear weapons around to annihilate the world population 690 times over will be the least of our problems!”

Mozart serves some Cantonese rice to the gorgeous blonde who claims her name is Clyde. She flashes a smile that has been perfected in front of a mirror and bats her false eyelashes at Kulakov as she passes the plate of rice to him.

“Where’d you find her?” Mozart asks in English. (Kulakov doesn’t know she is a high-priced hooker, and Stone doesn’t want him to find out.)

“It’s Thro who organized it,” Stone says.

“You’ll have to fix me up sometime,” Mozart tells Thro.

“Not on company money or time,” remarks Stone.

They have been drinking whiskey and water, and are all slightly drunk.

“Don’t you ever stop playing the boss?” taunts Mozart. “Don’t you ever let go?”

Thro belches delicately into her hand and says, “Fair question.”

The hooker leans closer to Kulakov so that her breast presses into his arm and whispers something in his ear. Stone holds his breath to get rid of hiccups, gazes at Mozart through half-closed eyes. Suddenly his breath spills out, along with a flow of words he can’t stop. “You know something, friend,” he blurts out, his face very close to Mozart’s. “I detest your generation. I really do.”

Mozart takes the assault in his stride. He leans back in his chair and toys with his Phi Beta Kappa key. “What did you do to us that makes you hate us so much?” he asks arrogantly.

“You see,” cries Stone. “That’s exactly the kind of smart-assed response you get from an Ivy Leaguer.” He appeals to Thro. “They’re always turning everything inside out.” Stone sways a bit, turns his gaze directly on Mozart. “My generation has the saving grace that it is honestly and deeply anti-Communist; we did what we did to avert a greater evil. But your generation is without beliefs. You have no center. You do what you do because you enjoy doing it. Espionage is an indoor sport to you. Jesus, you don’t really care about Communism one way or the other. If there were no Communists, you’d invent them to have someone to play with.”

There is an embarrassed silence; Kulakov looks from one to the other, unable to follow the English.

“Stone?” Thro tries to break it up.

“You’ll never get my job, you know,” Stone tells Mozart evenly. He turns to Thro, who is tugging at his arm. “Over my dead body he’ll get my job.”

Kulakov says in Russian, “What means, The victor belongs to the spoils’?”

The hooker hangs on Kulakov’s every word. “What’s he saying?” she asks out of the corner of her mouth.

“I read it in my English lesson yesterday,” Kulakov explains. And he repeats the F. Scott Fitzgerald phrase in halting English: “ ‘The victor belongs to the spoils.’ ”

The hooker laughs at Kulakov’s accent. “He’s cute,” she says.

Mozart says belligerently, “What makes you think I want your stinking job? Topology is a fossil fuel.”

Thro explains the Fitzgerald phrase to Kulakov. “It’s a play on words, Oleg. The original is, ‘To the victor belong the spoils.’ ”

Mozart repeats the phrase in Latin. Stone sneers.

Kulakov says, “To this victor, no spoils. By the time I got to Germany, there was nothing left.” He raises an empty whiskey glass and clinks it against Stone’s bowl of rice. “To tell the truth, I had a great war. I was never bored.”

Stone nods more than he should. “Me too,” he says. “I had a great war. I was sorry when it was over.” And he turns fiercely on Mozart. “How was your war, friend?”

“It’s just started,” says Mozart. “It’s going, thank you for inquiring, very nicely.”

The hooker tiptoes out of Kulakov’s motel room, finds a guard cradling a shotgun on duty outside his door. “Who pays me?” she whispers.

The guard motions with his head to the next door. The hooker raps softly. Stone opens a crack, sees who it is, tells her to wait a moment. He returns and hands her an envelope through the partially open door. “How’d it go?” he asks.

“He performed normally,” she answers. “They almost always do with me. Funny thing,” she adds, not a little touched, “is he cried like a baby afterwards.”

Stone takes the shuttle from Washington, and a taxi from La Guardia Airport to the courthouse, all the time rehearsing pretty speeches—how a daughter needs a father figure in her life,
how he will devote himself to her, how he is not competing with the mother but only complementing her. The lady lawyer, whose first name is Margaret and who signs her letters with an “Ms.” before her name, buttonholes him on the courthouse steps and leads him around the corner for a quick coffee. “Whatever you do,” she instructs him, “no pretty speeches. You keep quiet unless you’re asked a direct question. Remember that the judge has had every pretty speech in the book thrown at him. What he will be impressed with is a quiet, contained man who has his wits about him. Relax. Look confident. Leave everything to me.”

Stone’s ex-wife is there, looking leaner and meaner than he remembered her. “Alice.” He calls her name and moves toward her, but she turns her back and says something to her lawyer, a heavy-set man who looks like a monseigneur in civilian clothes.

The judge, a frail, near-sighted man in his sixties who appears to peck like a bird at the papers in front of him, barely glances on the attorneys. The talk, for the first twenty minutes, is a good-natured exchange of legal mumbo-jumbo—affidavits, jurisdiction, statutes, precedents. Eventually the judge comes to what Stone considers the point.

“If I understand you correctly, Mr. Stone, you are contesting a ruling handed down in this court, by a judge now deceased, prohibiting you from having any contact whatsoever with your daughter, Jessica.”

“Yes, Your Honor. I believe—”

“And you, Mrs. Stone, contend that the original reasons for denying access are still valid.” The judge shuffles through some papers, finds the one he wants, pecks at it for a moment, then looks up again. “Yes, I think I have it now. The original case concerned Mrs. Stone’s allegations that on such and such a day”—the judge is scanning now—“in such and such a place, the father, then exercising weekend custody of the child, was negligent in that he permitted a woman who was his mistress to punish the child by scratching her fingernails across the child’s arm and shoulder, thereby inflicting wounds that required
emergency medical treatment, and subsequent psychiatric therapy sessions for the child, who was badly frightened by the incident.” The judge looks up at the lawyers. “That’s quite a mouthful. Well, where do we start?”

“Your Honor.” Stone is on his feet—they are seated around the judge’s desk in his chamber. “I swear to you it was an accident. We were roughhousing, and—”

“Mr. Stone.” The judge waves him back into his chair. “What’s in question in this new hearing you’ve requested is not the original incident, which led to a ruling denying you access. What’s in question, now as then, is the best interests of the child. Your attorney has represented you as claiming that loss of access for two years has had a profound effect on you
and
the child; that any negligence on your part was unlikely to be repeated, given what was at stake; that the best interests of the child would be served by reinstating reasonable visitation rights. And she has attached various affidavits from child psychiatrists and pediatricians and prominent people who are acquainted with you. Am I correct in assuming that the admiral who put his name to one letter of recommendation is in fact the admiral who is currently serving as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?”

“One and the same,” says Stone’s lady lawyer, obviously content that they have scored a point.

“Well, there’s no getting around it, is there?” The judge appeals good-naturedly to Mrs. Stone’s civilian monseigneur. “That’s a very impressive testimonial.” The judge clears his throat, pecks again at various papers. “Now, your attorney, Mrs. Stone, has represented you as saying you still fear for the physical and emotional well-being of your daughter, inasmuch as the lady who inflicted the original fingernail wound, for which Mr. Stone has been held accountable, is still very much associated with Mr. Stone. Another mouthful! And he has attached various affidavits from child psychiatrists and pediatrians”—Stone thinks he detects a hint of mockery in the judge’s tone—“and the like to support your claim.”

“My client,” the monseigneur says smoothly, “maintains that her daughter has grown accustomed to living without a father, that to reintroduce visitation rights would reopen what in effect has become a closed chapter in the child’s life. In essence, Your Honor, reinstating visiting rights would create a problem for the child where none presently exists.”

The judge fixes his attention on the two attorneys again. “What I would like to do, if it meets with no objections from you, is invite each of the parties to respond to the legal presentation of the other side, in writing, with counterarguments. Secondly, would either side object to my ordering a social inquiry into the private lives of the two parties?”

Stone’s lawyer leaps at the offer. “We’d be delighted to cooperate, Your Honor. My client is a well-respected man making a valuable contribution to his country.”

“Naturally,” chimes in the monseigneur, “we would not object. Mrs. Stone has nothing to hide.”

“Ask the child,” Stone’s ex-wife blurts out. “Ask her if she wants to see him again.”