The Debriefing (21 page)
Stone asks her what happened to Kulakov.
“Disappeared.” She snaps her fingers. “Like that. One day he was here. Next he wasn’t. Don’t have the vaguest idea where he went. Don’t care either. Good riddance. He was gone two, maybe three days when some Army people with fairly clean shoes knocked at the door. They packed up everything that belonged to Oleg—books, papers, clothes, everything—and carted it off.” The widow’s face brightens with a sudden thought. “If you’re calculating compensation,” she tells Stone, “there are things I could tell you about the couple that moved in afterwards.”
Stone, dog tired, sits on the edge of the bed, removes his shoes, massages his calves. Katushka, dressed in faded jeans and an old Eisenhower jacket with a black armband on the sleeve, is talking on the telephone. “Have you tried a spoonful of brown sugar?” she asks. She shakes her head vigorously. “No, no, holding your breath never works. The same for drinking water. No, the thing to do is to have someone rub the bone on the back of your neck in small circular motions. Clockwise is better than counter. Ah, you’re alone. No, it won’t work if you do it yourself. Someone has to do it for you.” Katushka reflects a moment, staring thoughtfully at Stone. “Well, you can always cross the fingers of both hands, and if that doesn’t do it, try hopping on your left foot and drawing circles with a finger around your belly button. Clockwise, yes. Ring me back if that doesn’t work.”
Katushka breaks the connection with a finger, furiously dials another number. “It’s me,” she tells someone on the other end. “I’m having trouble starting the car again.” She listens for a moment, covers the mouthpiece with her palm and whispers to Stone, “Have you ever heard of something called spark plug?” To the phone she says, “If I have a choice, I prefer West German to Czech, and Czech to Russian. Yes. Okay. If I’m not here,
I’ll leave the keys with Morning Stalin. Thanks. I owe you a favor.” She listens for a moment, laughs. “You always want the same thing, don’t you?”
Stone, leaning back against the cushions, asks, “Who died?”
Katushka looks back blankly until he points to the black band on her arm. “Oh, that. I lost a
Ficus benjamina
this morning. It’s very upsetting really. I had it for almost two years. You become attached to a plant, you know. It struggled through the winter, only to give up at the first sign of spring. If only it had hung on for a bit, I would have nursed it back.” She flings a magazine across the room in disgust. “It’s the damn electricity,” she mutters.
Stone, amused, asks, “What’s wrong with the electricity?”
Katushka pours herself a glass of celery juice from a pitcher. “Has it ever occurred to you there is a direct relationship between electricity and sex? The question astonishes you, I can see. It’s like this: the network of wires running through the walls sets up electric fields—poles of attraction and repulsion. That’s why there’s so much frigidity in the world!” She sinks onto the bed alongside Stone. “Think of it this way: we live on a kind of concrete platform, suspended in space over a maze of subway tunnels and sanitation pipes and water mains, surrounded on all sides by a mesh of electric wires. The rhythm of our lives is imposed on us by the pulsating of currents, the flushing of toilets, the dripping of faucets, the vibrations of trains passing underneath. We are cut off from the earth. We are cut off from its seasons.” She catches Stone starting to smile, and says harshly, “You have the habit of mocking things you don’t understand. It is a fault that you should work to overcome.” Katushka changes the subject abruptly. “Morning Stalin, who is a fairly good judge of character, is positive you’re not Latin. He says your polite aggressiveness is a disguise for anger, and the anger is the leading edge of sadness. In his experience, Latins are never sad. He says if he has to guess, he’d guess you’re German. He says you’re too methodical for a Frenchman or an American. As for Ilyador, he thinks you’re Bulgarian because you remind him of a Bulgarian
lover he once had. Something about the shape of the mouth. I suspect Ilyador is attracted to you. I advise you to watch out when the lights go out for the séance.”
“What séance?” Stone wants to know.
The séance, a regular monthly event in the apartment, gets under way as soon as Morning Stalin clears away the dinner dishes. There are five of them seated around the kitchen table: Morning Stalin, Ilyador (dressed again as Ilyador), Katushka (wearing a long Uzbek robe), Stone, and the ancient woman who claims to be Assyrian, has a thick mustache on her upper lip, reads entrails and treats sexual problems with acupuncture. Now, in the flickering light of a single candle, she moistens her forefinger, which has no nail, and rubs the tip around the edge of a brandy glass until it starts to hum. The black cat, Thermidor, observing the proceedings from a kitchen counter, arches its back and bares its fangs in a silent snarl.
“I hear voices,” the old woman mutters, still producing the hum from the glass. Her head falls back like a rag doll’s, her lips move like a ventriloquist’s—and a voice, vague, high-pitched, drifts above her head.
At first it is garbled and it is impossible to make out the words. Gradually the voice becomes more distinct. “I warned them … what would happen … if I was shot,” it says. “It wasn’t a question of saving my skin. It was a question of the officer corps disintegrating. I told them the war would come and we wouldn’t be ready. But they instructed me to confess, so I confessed. When they shot me, in the basement with a smoothbore naval pistol, I looked my executioner in the eye, and he looked away before he pulled the trigger.”
Ilyador, thoroughly frightened, turns to Morning Stalin, who whispers, “It’s Marshal Tukhachevsky. He used to stand beside me for military reviews. He never knew I wasn’t the real mushroom, and treated me with great deference.”
“We paid in blood for—” Tukhachevsky’s voice disappears, as if a needle has been suddenly lifted from a record. The humming
grows louder. Thermidor hisses. Another voice, that of a feeble old man speaking with great effort, can be heard. It says again and again, “Stalin is too rude. Stalin is too rude. Stalin is too rude.”
Tears stream down Morning Stalin’s cheeks, soaking into his mustache. “It’s Comrade Lenin,” he sobs, “composing his last testament.”
Lenin’s voice fades, and another voice comes surging through it. “I always thought they were guilty,” the voice says casually, “though not necessarily of the crime they were charged with. But someone in my position mustn’t quibble. In my defense, it must be noted that they all
acted
guilty.”
Ilyador, terrified now, whispers, “Do you recognize him?”
Morning Stalin, puzzled, asks the voice, “How did they act?”
The hum from the rim of the brandy snifter rises and falls in a curious pulsating rhythm. From above, the voice replies, “They acted as if they had something to be afraid of. It goes without saying, those who were innocent had nothing to be afraid of. They were all wreckers in their hearts, and what was hidden in their hearts was written on their faces, and they knew this and so they were afraid.”
“I’ve got it,” Morning Stalin announces triumphantly. “It’s Stalin’s hatchet man during the ’36 purge. It’s Gamov!”
“Gamov!” Stone lunges for the light switch, flicks on the overhead, grabs the woman who claims to be Assyrian by her shawl, shakes her back into consciousness. She comes awake reluctantly, blinking in confusion, a startled expression on her wrinkled features.
“What do you know about Gamov?” cries Stone.
Katushka pulls him off the woman and Morning Stalin says softly, “For the love of God, she knows nothing. I am the only one who recognizes the voices.”
Stone turns on Morning Stalin. “Who is Gamov?”
Thermidor screeches and leaps in panic from the counter, knocking over a glass, which shatters on the floor. Morning Stalin’s eyes open wide in fright. “Gamov,” he whispers—he looks
at Katushka inquiringly, but she only shrugs—“Gamov was the fig Stalin sent to investigate the Kirov murder in ’34. In ’36 and ’37, he was the principal interrogator of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Yakir and Tukhachevsky. He used to boast that he never lost a client until they confessed. When they confessed, they were shot. Vishinsky was the star of the show trials, but the mushroom behind the scenes was Gamov. That wasn’t his real name. That was his
nom de guerre
he took during the revolution. I don’t remember his real name.”
“Where can I find him?” Stone’s tone is urgent.
Morning Stalin cackles nervously. “In some cemetery,” he says. “His turn came in ’53. As soon as Stalin breathed his last, Gamov was put up against a wall.”
The zebra in heat is strangely quiet during the night. Also Stalin and Ilyador, who squabble earlier than usual and, exhausted, are heard no more. Katushka has difficulty sleeping because of the lack of noise. She sits in a perfect lotus position reading and rereading her favorite “inner émigré”—Akhmatova—into the early hours of the morning. At one point she looks up to find Stone studying her. “I realize you’re not asking me,” she says as if she is simply continuing a conversation that has been going on for some time, “but if you want my opinion, the only thing that will bring a change is if women take over. Men who represent radically different political parties, or radically different points of view, wind up tinkering with the status quo, but they leave things essentially the way they found them. Women, on the other hand, tend to be less corrupted by power, and therefore—”
“I accept,” Stone says abruptly.
Katushka stops in midsentence. “Accept what?” she asks suspiciously.
“I accept being the occasion to which you rise. I accept your help.”
In a bound, Katushka is across the room. “I am extremely pleased with you,” she says. And curling herself into the angles
of his body, pressing her lips to his nipple, she adds in a whisper, “I will demonstrate to you just how pleased I am.”
For a long time no one speaks. The room is afloat in drifting shadows. Outside, a stiff wind whips through the antennas on the roof. Eventually one of the officers shakes his head and says, “Where did we go wrong?”
The senior officer doesn’t look up from the handwritten report on his desk. “You’re ahead of the game,” he quietly chastises the officer. “It’s not clear that anything’s wrong.”
“But one of their people got onto Denisov,” another of the officers says. “The devil only knows what the old fool told him.”
The senior officer produces a cigarette. One of the officers quickly supplies a light. “The old fool”—the senior officer sucks on his cigarette until it is glowing—“told him what he was supposed to tell him. That we turned up at his door one day and borrowed his war diary.”
“How did they get onto Denisov?” the third officer asks
.
“They got Denisov’s name from the prosecutor Koptin,” the senior officer explains. “They’ve also been to see Aksenov.”
“Koptin’s not a weak line,” one of the officers says reassuringly. “Remember, Kulakov really
was
lying about his father.”
“Which one’s Aksenov?” someone asks
.
“Aksenov’s the one with the broken leg,” the first officer explains
.
“Ah, yes, the one who walked in front of a jeep.” The senior officer’s upper lip curls into a suggestion of a sneer. “The question is, why is the KGB suddenly interested in Kulakov at this late date.”
“It can’t be a coincidence,” one of the officers says. “They must be onto something.”
“If they’re onto something,” suggests another, “we’re in water over our heads.”
The three officers look at the senior officer, who turns in his chair to stare broodingly at a wall calendar. “I have a contact in the KGB” he says finally. “I’ll sound him out tomorrow. If the KGB’s onto something, he’ll know about it. For now, the most important thing is not to lose our nerve.” He laughs huskily—a laughter totally without mirth. “They can backtrack from now to eternity. What will they find? We’ve been over every detail a thousand times.”
“I don’t mind your asking, not at all,” Morning Stalin tells Stone politely. He stops peeling his orange, stares off into space with a sudden watery look. “I came face to face with him once, yes. It was in 1931, just after I had the plastic surgery. He was curious to see if we really looked alike. He circled around me as if he were measuring me for a coffin. Then he smiled that cold smile which I had mastered with some difficulty, and offered me his hand. ‘Stalin,’ he said, as if I didn’t know who he was.”
Ilyador, polishing a fingernail, guffaws. Stone asks, “And that was all?”
“Not quite,” Morning Stalin explains. “A sly expression crept into his eye. He rang up Molotov and told him to drop what he was doing and come right down. Molotov came on the run, knocked once, opened the door and stopped dead in his tracks, staring from one to the other. I understood that Stalin was testing to see if it would really work, so I casually turned to Molotov, smiled that cold smile and said, ‘It’s incredible, isn’t it? He could be my twin.’ Molotov immediately assumed I was the real egg, and replied to me with great courtesy. Stalin’s eyes flickered angrily—he must have sensed we were playing a potentially dangerous game—and he dismissed me with a wave of his hand. As I left, I saw Molotov collapsing in a chair in a state of shock.”
Shaking his head nostalgically, Morning Stalin goes back to
his orange and Ilyador, waving his fingernails in the air to dry them, comments, “What an idiot you were. You could have kept up the pretense, shot the other as an impostor, and taken over the country.”
“I would have lost World War Two,” Morning Stalin says morosely. “I simply can’t support explosions.” He smiles at Stone apologetically. “To this day, there are people who think Stalin panicked and fled Moscow for ten days when the Teutonic cows invaded. Ha! It was me who panicked and skipped town. He never set foot outside the Kremlin.”