The Debriefing (20 page)

Stone looks hard at Aksenov. “Who was ‘they’?”

“The duty officer,” explains Aksenov. “I’ve already told all this to the military intelligence cleanup team. Why are you coming back to it now?”

A very old man at the next table, obviously drunk, taps a scallion against an empty glass. “The cosmonauts go to the moon,” he tells his equally aged, equally drunk, companion, “and everyone pees in their pants in excitement. Here I am about to embark
on a voyage to eternity, and nobody takes the slightest notice.”

The other old man meticulously measures out another vodka from the almost empty bottle. “Departures,” he comforts his friend, “have to be scheduled in order to be interesting.”

Stone asks Aksenov, “Who was the duty officer?”

“It was Dedov,” he replies.

Stone shakes his head. “Gamov was the duty officer who sent Kulakov to Cairo. He has one arm missing, and wears the Order of Stalin on his breast.”

“Dedov was on duty until nine
A.M.
Saturday,” Aksenov insists. “I don’t know who came after him. And I never heard of your one-armed Gamov.”

Stone knocks softly on the polished oak door with the simple porcelain plaque bearing the number 666.

After a moment a muffled voice calls, “Come.”

Stone turns the knob, pushes open the door with his left hand. The décor that confronts him is Ministry of Defense Cubbyhole Office, brown, with the only touch of color coming from the bright-red background in the obligatory portrait of Lenin behind the desk. The room itself is long and narrow—it has the atmosphere of a corridor—with shelves full of lawbooks on one wall, and not so much as a picture on the other. A kindly man, fiftyish, balding, wearing the insignias of a colonel on his pressed uniform, looks up from the dossier he has been studying.

Stone closes the door behind him, slips into the seat across from the colonel without being invited, lays his KGB card face down on the edge of the desk nearest him. The colonel stares at the card for a long moment through narrowed eyes, then breathes deeply and reaches for it. He studies the photograph and compares it to the original across the desk. “What can I do for you?” he inquires finally.

“You are the Colonel Koptin who conducted the investigation of the defector Kulakov,” Stone announces; it is not put in the form of a question.

Koptin says, “I’ve already submitted a full report to—”

Stone stops him with a raised finger. “Comrade Koptin”—he purposefully addresses him by his name and omits his rank—“we will cover the ground again. Now. Verbally.”

Koptin purses his lips, controls his temper. “I am at your disposal,” he says coldly; there is no love lost between the military prosecutor and a representative of the civilian KGB.

“You are invited to begin at the beginning,” Stone instructs him. “Why did you reopen Kulakov’s dossier, and what led you to conclude that he had lied about his father being a war hero?”

Koptin leans back in his chair, taps two fingernails on the dossier open on his desk. “The dossier was reopened routinely,” he explains. “It is our habit to conduct routine background investigations every three years on officers with access to very secret material.”

Stone asks, “The information that his father had been executed for collaboration with the Nazis turned up during this routine investigation?”

“Not exactly,” says Koptin. “It turned up coincidentally to the background investigation. It was in the form of an unsigned letter which accused Kulakov of obscuring the truth about his father for careerist motives. The letter suggested that the officer who had actually executed Kulakov’s father for collaboration might still be alive. We tracked him down. He is a retired major general named Denisov. You will want the address, I’m sure. He lives in Moscow.” Koptin searches through the pages of a loose-leaf book. “Malaya Gruzinskaya 33, apartment 118. He remembered the incident, and showed us an entry in his war diary to confirm his version. There is no question that Kulakov’s father was executed for collaborating with the invaders.”

“Did Kulakov admit knowing this? Did he admit to falsifying his dossier?”

“As a matter of fact, he vigorously denied it,” Koptin says. “He maintained that he had honestly thought his father died a war hero. I have had some experience in such matters, and I may say he appeared sincere—so much so that I asked him if he would be willing to submit to a lie detector test.”

“What would it matter?” asks Stone. “If the father was executed for collaboration, the son would not be suitable for service as a diplomatic courier.”

“That’s true, of course,” Koptin agrees. “But if he sincerely believed his father was a war hero, he would not have faced charges of falsifying his service record. He would not have been threatened with a sentence of ten years in prison. He would simply have lost his assignment, perhaps his rank even. But he wouldn’t have gone to prison.”

“And so you submitted him to a lie detector test?”

“I got into a bit of hot water for taking it upon myself to order the test,” Koptin admits. “My superiors were very annoyed at first—”

“At first?”

“They were annoyed, until they heard the results of the test. It clearly indicated he was lying about his father. This reinforced our decision to bring him to trial. His name had already been stricken from the active courier list. I myself informed him of this, and advised him to retain a lawyer, as there was every chance he would be court-martialed. I advised him that a guilty verdict would probably bring him a sentence of ten years. Shortly after, to my astonishment, I learned he had been sent out of the country on a courier run, and had defected to the Americans with the contents of a courier pouch.”

“Were you involved in the follow-up investigation?” Stone wants to know.

“I was part of a three-officer tribunal that prepared preliminary dossiers on several people involved, yes,” says Koptin.

Stone waits patiently. Koptin shrugs and supplies the details. “The case involved two embassy guards who were escorting Kulakov in Athens when he defected. In addition, there was a young second secretary in the car with them at the time.”

“What was the disposition of these cases?”

“The two guards were tried by court-martial, convicted of dereliction of duty and sentenced to ten years at a strict regime labor camp. The second secretary, who was actually a military
intelligence captain operating under cover out of the Athens embassy, was arraigned on similar charges, but one of his superiors interceded—it was said that the young man came from a family of influence—and the case was shelved.”

“And what happened to the man who made the mistake of dispatching Kulakov abroad? What happened to the duty officer Gamov?”

Koptin becomes aware of his fingernails drumming on the dossier, and stops abruptly. “The dossier on the duty officer—you say his name was Gamov, but this is the first time I’ve heard it—was handled on a very high level. I have no idea as to the disposition of the case. I assume he was shot.”

The street in front of Malaya Gruzinskaya 33 has been torn up to make way for new sewage pipes that have, so far, not even been delivered. During the thaw, the trench has turned into a moat, giving to the sturdy building a fortresslike atmosphere. Stone crosses the moat on one of the dozen or so wooden boards placed there for that purpose, takes the lift to the sixth floor, hunts from door to door until he finds number 118 and a small scrap of paper taped over the bell that reads, “Denisov, V. M.”

An old man, shabbily dressed in a frayed military jacket, opens the door. “Ah, you came very fast,” he says excitedly, pushing up with his forefinger the bifocals that keep sliding down his long nose. “I only wrote the letter two weeks ago. Come in. Come in. Don’t stand there like a statue. I’ll show you where I calculate the lake is.” The old man limps down the narrow hallway toward the small living room-bedroom that appears, to Stone’s eye, to have been furnished with items that came from a much larger apartment.

“You’re Major General Denisov?” Stone inquires.

“Denisov, that’s right,” the old man says. He rolls open a large map of Central Asia on the dining table and starts to weight down the corners with whatever comes to hand—a Soviet encyclopedia, a shoe, a wooden cane, a pitcher of water. “I was flying from Tashkent to Bukhara, to visit my son and his
wife. … My son is in the Army—like father, like son. He’s stationed in Bukhara, but expects to be transferred to Lvov. … As I said, I was flying to Bukhara over the Kara-Kum desert when I spotted this lake that wasn’t on my map. Imagine! An entire lake—not a small lake, mind you—that isn’t on any map—”

Stone interrupts. “I’m not here about the lake you discovered.” He shows his KGB card to the retired major general.

The old man is puzzled. “You’re not here about the lake, then?”

“No. Not about the lake. I want to ask you some questions about the Kulakov affair. I understand you provided evidence that his father had been executed for collaborating with the enemy.”

The old man sinks slowly into a chair and regards Stone suspiciously. “The collaborator Kulakov was executed,” he says. “I should know. It was me that had him executed.”

“Do you have the court-martial record—” Stone starts to ask, but the old man wags his finger impatiently.

“Was no court-martial. No time for legal trappings. He was caught red-handed. Wearing a German uniform. We were moving through the Ukraine at the time. Racing for the Dnieper, spearheading for Konev’s Second Ukrainian. Noted his name in the war diary. Show it to you if you like. Listened to his pleas, gave him a cigarette, stood him up against a wall. That was how it went in those days.”

“You shot a great many collaborators?” Stone asks.

The old man nods. “They knew what was waiting for them. Mostly wanted to get it over with as quick as possible. So did we.” He laughs viciously, then has a coughing spell; his thin frame shakes as he buries his face in an enormous white handkerchief. Gasping for breath, he adds, “We had a common interest, you might say.”

Stone asks, “Do you personally remember the execution of the collaborator Kulakov?”

Denisov avoids Stone’s eye, busies himself folding his handkerchief and stuffing it back in his hip pocket. “Shot too many to remember every single one of them.”

“Then aside from the entry in your war diary, you have no evidence that you shot a collaborator named Kulakov?”

“Diary doesn’t lie,” the old man insists stubbornly. “You can see for yourself if you got eyes.”

Stone picks up the book, which is yellow with age, and reads the entry. It is written in longhand and dated September 4, 1943. “Near the village of Bilyansk, seven collaborators, caught the previous day wearing Wehrmacht uniforms, summarily executed.” There follows a list of names and, in three cases, serial numbers. Kulakov’s name is the last on the list. There is a serial number after it.

“No doubt about it being the right Kulakov,” snorts Denisov. “Serial number matched.”

Stone returns the diary. “What made you bring this affair up after all these years?”

“Wasn’t me that brought it up,” snaps the old man. He reaches toward his hip pocket for the handkerchief, changes his mind. “Ministry people showed up at the door one day. Spent the morning skimming through the diary till they came to the Kulakov entry. They took the book with them when they left. Very efficient. Gave me a receipt. Got the book back in the mail a month or so later. Don’t know why they were so damn interested in a dead man, do you?”

Stone knocks on the door of Kulakov’s old apartment just off Volgagrad Boulevard. After a while the door is opened to the limit of the chain, and a woman’s eye peers out. “I don’t care who you are,” she croaks. She sizes up Stone, makes no secret that she doesn’t particularly like what she sees. “You’ve got dirty shoes, and you look like you could be a germ carrier. You want to ask questions, ask. The answers don’t get any better if I let you in.”

Stone tries a different tack. “You were treated badly by people you shared the apartment with,” he says soothingly. “It’s a question of compensation.”

“Compensation?” The widow closes the door, removes the safety chain, opens it to let Stone in, glancing all the while at his
shoes. “Compensation, as in money?” she asks, and when Stone nods encouragingly, she says (in a voice that has no relation at all to the one she used before), “I didn’t know this was something you could get compensation for. Oh, dear, wait until my sister hears about this.”

The widow offers Stone tea, refuses to take no for an answer, refuses to talk until he drinks. Once she starts, though, she doesn’t stop. “My late lamented knew Oleg during the war, which I found out after I moved in, not before. A coincidence is what it was. We were looking at some of my old photographs and Oleg said, ‘Who’s that?’ and I said it was my late lamented, and he said he knew him during the war, which is why I put up with as much as I put up with before I decided enough was enough and phoned the militia—”

“What exactly did you put up with?” Stone asks, priming the pump.

It gushes. Hardly pausing to come up for air, the widow describes wild family scenes with the father shouting, the daughter screaming hysterically, the wife collapsing in sobs, people stamping off in all directions, doors slamming behind them. “It got so disgusting, I finally called the militia, but Oleg took them outside and bribed them with some vodka. I swear to you, I only slept during the day, when they were all off somewhere. The girl, Nadia”—the widow smirks—“she was funny, you know.”

“How funny?” Stones asks. “Funny how?”

“Funny,” the widow repeats, “as in weird.” And she whispers, “She liked girls more than she liked boys. It quieted down for a while when she went off to the hospital, but then the boy of theirs got into trouble at the university—he was expelled for taking drugs—and they started in on one another again. No wonder his wife upped and left him. She was a genuine hero for staying around as long as she did, if you ask me.”

“Did you meet the actress who moved in with him later?” Stone wants to know.

The widow snickers. “Actress, my foot! If she ever set foot in a theater, she would have been the usher. If you want my opinion,
she was a whore straight off the street, is what she was. She turned up once with one of her boyfriends in tow. That was too much even for Oleg, and he threw her out, but not before they each had their say. Another row!”