The Debriefing (24 page)
Stone starts to turn away when the arthritic man says, “I got a passkey if you got an official reason for using it.” He smiles broadly, revealing tar-stained teeth.
Stone supplies the official reason, and the man produces a key ring, selects one, inserts it in the keyhole. The door clicks open. Stone indicates the man is to wait outside, and enters.
The shutters are nailed closed, and what light there is comes from cracks in the boarded-over skylight. The room reeks of dirt and decay. Clothes are strewn across chairs, a dresser drawer has been placed upside down next to the mattress and used as a table. The moldy remains of a meal—an empty sardine tin, crusts of bread—are on it. Tacked to the wall over the mattress, its edges curling with age, is a snapshot of Oleg Kulakov.
Stone has come to the right place.
He edges the bathroom door open with his toes, flicks on the
overhead light with the back of his hand—and finds Gregori, naked, long dead from the look of him, stretched out in a waterless bathtub with rust streaks where the enamel has worn away. The cracked pieces of a syringe lie on the floor where it fell out of his outstretched hand. A necktie that has been tied around his arm and then loosened dangles from his left elbow.
“Looks like he might be dead!” The arthritic man has come up quietly and stares at the body in the bathtub.
Stone’s mind is racing. The death of Gregori will be reported, and it won’t take long for the local militia to zero in on the log with the name of the KGB man who came all the way from Moscow to see him. When they discover they can’t put their hands on the KGB man, cables will go out to Moscow. An answer will come back asking them to verify the name. Soon it will become apparent to everyone—the local militia as well as the KGB people in Moscow—that someone has been impersonating a KGB man. All that should take not less than a day; with luck, it could take two or three.
Stone draws the arthritic man into the hallway, closes the door of the apartment. “You are to stand guard here,” he orders him. “Nobody is to enter until I return with the militia.”
The arthritic man straightens his rounded shoulders. “Count on me, comrade,” he says. “I served in the Great Patriotic War.”
And Stone, with one eye on his wrist watch, starts to put as much distance as he can between himself and the dingy wooden house on the other side of the tracks in Alma-Ata.
The marshal’s lids hang like folds of skin over his angry eyes. He stabs with a stubby finger at the buttons on his desk intercom, and barks orders into the speaker in a gravelly voice. “No pictures. No Bulgarians. No journalists. No veterans. No visitors of any kind. No calls. Understand?” He removes what appears to be a small black portable radio from his desk drawer, sets it on the blotter, raises the antenna and switches it on. A barely audible high-pitched squeal comes from the box. “So much for any microphones,” says the marshal He turns to his visitor, who is fumbling for a cigarette with his only hand. “No cigarettes,” he snaps. “Too much smoke, my eyes start to sting. You’ve got ten minutes. What are we dealing with?”
“It’s definitely not our friends over at the KGB,” says the one-armed officer. His upper lip curls into a suggestion of a sneer as he pronounces “KGB.” “I have a pipeline into the KGB. Well placed. If they were backtracking, he would know about it.”
The marshal nods. “At least that’s something to be thankful for,” he says grudgingly. “But if it’s not the KGB, who is it?”
The one-armed officer shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “My personal guess is it’s the Americans,” he says quietly. “When he questioned the actress in Leningrad, he revealed details—how she met Kulakov, for instance—that could only have come from the defector himself
after the defection.”
“The Americans!” The marshal’s fist comes smashing down on the desk, causing everything on it to jump. “You assured me—” He tries to control his temper; excitement is not good for his blood pressure. “You assured me that the Americans would limit their attentions to the defector and the papers he took with him. “
“It was a miscalculation,” the one-armed officer admits. “We looked at it from every point of view, and concluded that the CIA would never authorize a penetration. They already have enough embarrassing things on their plate without getting into a penetration.” He shakes his head. “I don’t understand the logic of it. …”
The marshal places a small pill on his tongue and downs it with a gulp of mineral water. Calmer now, he asks, “What makes you so sure the man checking up on Kulakov is American? Even if the CIA is behind it, they’d be more likely to farm this kind of thing out to the French or Germans.”
“We managed to place one of our language specialists next to him on the plane to Alma-Ata—”
“He didn’t get suspicious, I hope?”
“No, no,” the one-armed officer assures him. “Our man posed as an artillery expert on an inspection tour. He says the suspect speaks letter-perfect Russian—too perfect, if anything. But he had the impression—I must stress that it was only an impression—that the suspect might have been raised in the White Russian community in China. Something about the way he flattened his a’s when he pronounced certain words. “
“How do we get from China to America?” the marshal demands
.
“If he was raised in a Russian-speaking family in China, nine chances out of ten they were White Russian Jews who fled during or after the Revolution. Almost all the Jews among the Russians in China wound up in America after 1949, and during the fifties many of them drifted into anti-Soviet organizations. It was a natural marriage. They spoke Russian, and they hated Communism.”
“This American—assuming he is, as you speculate, an American—has he been here under deep cover and is just now surfacing, or …”
The one-armed officer absently brushes dandruff from his left shoulder. “I suspect he came in on a one-time assignment,” he explains. “Remember the
Grani
courier who disappeared from his hotel without a trace? Change the part in his hair, add a mustache and eyeglasses, and the description more or less matches our man. “
The marshal takes this all in. “You’re absolutely certain there’s no possibility it’s a KGB operation?”
“None. I’d stake my reputation on it. “
The marshal laughs softly. “You’re staking more than your reputation, Comrade Volkov.” He reflects a moment. “If it is an American, that means the Americans haven’t bought the defection?”
“Not at all,” says the one-armed officer. “If they weren’t buying it, they wouldn’t bother checking it out. No. There may be one faction, or even one man, who hasn’t entirely bought it, and they’re backtracking, as a routine precaution, to see if they can come up with something to indicate Kulakov wasn’t genuine.”
“And will they?” The marshal glances at his appointment calendar, scribbles a note to himself in the margin. “Will they come up with anything?”
“We’ve been over the ground many times,” says the one-armed Volkov. “He can nose around from now to doomsday. There’s nothing to come up with. There was only one weak link—the boy Gregori. We arranged that he will never talk to anyone.”
“I still don’t like it,” says the marshal. “I don’t like the idea of an American digging in our yard. What would happen if he simply disappeared?”
“With all respect, Marshal, that’s the last thing in the world to do at this stage.”
The marshal nods thoughtfully. “If their man disappears,” he thinks aloud, “it will indicate to those in the American establishment who already suspect Kulakov that their field man must have come up with something to support their suspicions.”
“Worse than that, Marshal,” says Volkov. “The Americans won’t take the disappearance of a field operative sitting down. They will raise a very quiet but very efficient storm in intelligence circles. Our KGB friends will be contacted by the Americans and accused of terminating a field man. The KGB will investigate, find that they had nothing to do with it—and turn to us for an explanation. They will want to know why an American agent backtracking on Kulakov disappeared. The answer that will offer itself to their small minds is that Kulakov was, in fact, a fraud; that the American agent discovered this. We must remember, Marshal, that the KGB thinks Kulakov was a genuine defector because we backtracked on him after the defection and assured them he was genuine. No; the disappearance of the American agent will only lead the KGB to our door. The best thing we can do is permit this American field man to check out Kulakov’s story until he is satisfied it is all true, and then let him go quietly back home and convince anyone there who still has doubts.”
There is a soft knock at the door, and a colonel pops his head in
.
“I thought I told you no interruptions,” explodes the marshal. “No interruptions means no knocks at the door.”
“I beg your pardon, Marshal.” The colonel stands his ground. “I have an ‘Eyes Urgent’ for General Volkov that I thought he would want to see. Now.” He stresses the “Now.”
The marshal consents with a toss of his head. The colonel hands the metal clipboard to the one-armed officer and leaves the room. Volkov opens the cover and scans the message. His brow furrows. His eyes are grim as he looks up. “I must report to you that the body of Kulakov’s son, Gregori, has been discovered by someone pretending to be an agent of the KGB. The man who found the body used the name and identification number of a retired KGB agent when he signed a receipt for Gregori’s address at the local militia headquarters in Alma-Ata. The KGB assumes that a
Grani
agent, probably of German nationality, was attempting to locate the son of the defector in order to publish a story on the mistreatment of relatives of a defector. “
The marshal pulls a colorful silk handkerchief from his pocket and mops his brow. When he finally speaks, his voice is not much above a hoarse whisper. “Whatever happens, your American must not be allowed to fall into KGB hands.”
Volkov understands that his ten minutes with the marshal in charge of the Soviet Armed Forces is up. “That doesn’t leave us much room to maneuver in” he says,
rising to his feet
.
“Comrade General Volkov.” The marshal looks him in the eyes. “I had your personal assurances, when we went ahead with this thing, that we were operating under conditions that left absolutely no room for failure. If anyone becomes suspicious now”—the marshal’s tone is even; he is merely noting the obvious—“it will, of course, be
you
they become suspicious of.”
Lounging against the side of a kiosk in the underground passage that runs between Gorky Street and Red Square, Katushka still stands out in the crowd. She is wearing an ankle-length printed skirt and an off-white silk shirt (tied, Cossack-style, around her waist with a belt made of braided horsehair) through which her nipples are clearly visible. And almost everyone who passes looks. Stone, watching from behind another kiosk farther along the tunnel, sees her size up a prospective customer who plants his bulky body before her, throws out his barrel chest as he gives her all the reasons (money aside) why she should sleep with him. She listens politely, her head cocked to one side, then says, “No, thank you,” in a way that leaves no room for argument. The barrel-chested hero scowls, makes an unflattering comment on the size of her breasts and stalks off.
Stone has been keeping an eye on Katushka long enough to be certain that no one else is keeping an eye on her. He steps into the flow of Muscovites and drifts down on her. Unaccountably, he finds his pulse racing. When he is close enough to see her eyes, they widen with unconcealed delight.
“Aren’t you worried about the world ending?” Stone asks, pointing to a poster on the kiosk that says the Americans have enough nuclear warheads to destroy the entire population of the planet several times over.
Katushka smiles warmly, links her arm through his. “The
world will end,” she says happily, “when the people in it stop making love. Where have you been? You disappeared like a cloud. I looked up and you weren’t there. To tell you the truth, I thought I would never see you again.” In a surprisingly shy voice, she adds, “I am pleased with you for coming back.”
Stone starts to explain that he has come back to say goodbye to her, but before he can get the words sorted out she bubbles over with news. “Ilyador went through some old phone directories in the post office basement and found a listing for the Jew you’re looking for—Leon Davidov. I called the number, but Davidov had moved out several years ago.”
“So that’s the end of that,” Stone comments.
“Not quite,” says Katushka. “The man who answered the phone gave me the name of an old Jew who might know where Davidov is.”
“Did you speak to him too?”
“I tried to,” Katushka explains, “but the moment he saw what I wanted, he closed up like a clam. He refused to have anything to do with me. He was very insulting, actually. He accused me of being unclean. I take a bath at least twice a week!”
“Come on,” says Stone. “Let’s see what I can get out of him.”
They cut through a courtyard not far from the Hotel Rossiya and come out on Arkhipova Street, just down from the only active synagogue in Moscow. In the entrance, two old Jews in black fedoras are bickering politely. They stop talking as Stone and the girl enter, stare at Katushka’s nipples, then look at each other with wide eyes and shrug.
“That’s him,” whispers Katushka, indicating an old Jew dovening in the back row of the almost empty synagogue. He wears a black suit that has seen better days, a black yarmulke on his bald head and a tefillin wrapped around his forehead. Stone places his handkerchief over his own head in place of a yarmulke, and slides in alongside the old man, who is talking, his eyes half closed, with God. Once again, Stone feels the sweet nostalgia for things he barely remembers. His own father, and
his father’s father, might have sat on this very same bench talking with this very same God, whom they blamed for everything, and still honored.