The Debriefing (9 page)

“Can’t we break off now?” Kulakov had a habit of complaining, his eyes glued to the Japanese wrist watch Stone had given him the second week they were there.

“It’s only eleven-thirty,” Stone answered. “Let’s give it another half hour.”

“But we’ve been over this before,” Kulakov groaned.

The debriefing, in fact, had reached the point where there was almost nothing they talked about that they hadn’t talked about before. But Stone, poring over the transcripts of previous sessions late into the night, was purposefully leading Kulakov over the same ground again and again, and then once again, looking for a word, a phrase, a hesitation, an inconsistency, a flaw, a discrepancy; looking even for a failure to change wording, which could indicate that a response had been memorized.

“Tell me about your daughter again,” Stone urged him.

“Don’t you get tired of listening to the same thing over and over?” Kulakov whined. He plucked a cigarette from a box and inserted it in the ivory holder that Thro had given him when he had admired hers. “Nadia,” he began—he leaned toward the match that Stone held for him—“was an open book from the day she was born. If she was ever sad, or lonely, or anxious
about something, if she was falling in love or out of love, it was written on her face.” Kulakov sucked on the ivory holder and stared out the window.

“You met some of the boys she fell in love with, didn’t you?” Stone prompted.

“She brought them to the house if she really liked them,” Kulakov said. “She respected her parents. She wanted us to like the people she liked. It was normal.” And more forcefully: “
She was normal.”
Again Kulakov’s gaze was fixed on the rolling hills that surround the farm.

“She also brought girl friends home,” Stone said carefully. “You told me she brought girl friends home.”

“Yes, she brought girl friends to the house,” Kulakov replied quietly. He had himself under tight rein. “But she never thought of them in that way. I tell you, I knew her like a book. I would have known.” Kulakov was talking more for himself than for Stone by then; if he had been rehearsed, Stone thought, it was a brilliant job of acting. “When my wife showed me the photographs—”

Stone cut him off. “Describe the photographs.”

“They were taken with a telephoto lens. They came in the mail. No letter. No return address. Just photographs. One showed her holding hands … one with her arm around the other’s waist, laughing, kissing a shoulder. The black-and-white one was taken head on and said ‘With love, from Lina’ on it. I used to carry it around in my wallet. I had a vague idea about trying to find this … this Lina. I noticed it was gone when you returned my wallet the other day.”

“I didn’t think you’d want it any longer,” explained Stone. “What was Nadia’s attitude toward the photographs? Did she admit the liaison?”

“She admitted everything, yes,” Kulakov recalled. His eyes were moist by then, and red-rimmed. “She said she was in love with this … this girl … this Lina. She asked where was it written she had to fall in love with a boy. … She was only nineteen- … only nineteen.”

“Was it difficult getting her committed?”

“What do you mean, committed?”

“You told me”—Stone checked a detail in the folder on his lap—“yes, you said you committed her to an asylum outside Moscow that more or less specialized in people with sexual problems.”

“Ah, yes, committed. My wife’s brother-in-law had a brother who worked at the hospital. Normally you wait two years to get someone treated, but we pulled strings.” Suddenly Kulakov stood up. “It’s almost noon,” he said dully. “Enough for today.”

The next day Stone began the session with: “You were saying you pulled strings to get Nadia committed. Did she object to going? Did she object to being separated from her … friend?”

“At first she wouldn’t consider it.” Kulakov started off briskly. “We had some terrible scenes. The woman we shared the flat with—she was the widow of a wartime comrade of mine, actually—called the militia one night, and I had to take them outside and give them a couple of bottles of vodka before I could convince them it was a family argument. I worked on Nadia for weeks about the asylum. She resisted, but then she became unsure of herself. She knew I loved her more than anyone in the world. In the end she was very nervous. She had bitten her fingernails down to the quicks. She had an ugly rash that wouldn’t go away. She had trouble breathing—a pain deep in her chest. One day she shrugged and said she would go. And so I took her … I took my own daughter—” Kulakov’s voice broke. When he regained his composure, he said, “You know, the only difference for me between one day and the next is that some days are less sad than others.”

After that session, over lunch, Kulakov turned suddenly to Stone and asked him if he had any children. Stone and Thro avoided each other’s eyes. “A daughter, yes,” he answered softly. Thro quickly changed the subject; she was trying, for the dozenth time, to explain to Kulakov how a checking account worked. Stone, watching them talk, let his mind wander; for no reason at all, he remembered how his daughter used to confuse
kissing with making love. When he would come in to say good night, she would giggle and say, “Let’s make love,” and start planting kisses on his mouth. The next morning she would proudly announce in her high-pitched voice that she and her daddy had made love fifteen times the night before.

That happened when she was six. Now she was eight going on nine. Stone wondered if she still confused kissing and making love. He didn’t know. He hadn’t set eyes on her in two years.

Thro’s end of it got off to a slow start; for the first few days, all Kulakov wanted to talk about was money. Thro was as reassuring as she could be, but necessarily vague. Kulakov grew suspicious, and then bitter. “What does it depend on?” he wanted to know. “How many secrets I give to your Mr. Simon? How many times must I tell you, I don’t know any secrets?”

Thro was patient. She explained that he would get a lump sum settlement, and a military pension roughly equivalent to what a retired major, which was Kulakov’s rank, would receive from the United States Army after twenty-eight years of service. He would also receive private medical insurance, and be eligible for Social Security payments when he reached the age of sixty-five. Kulakov remained anxious. “What,” he asked, “is Social Security?”

Thro questioned Kulakov closely on what he had done in the courier service (“I carried sealed diplomatic pouches from point A to point B for twenty-eight years”); what he had studied in the military academy (“Artillery; I was a specialist on how rifling affected the spin and accuracy of a projectile”); his hobbies (“What,” he asked, “are hobbies?”). She finally wormed out of him that during one of his vacations at a Ministry of Defense rest home on the Black Sea, he had borrowed a secondhand easel and started to dabble in oils. The next afternoon, Thro turned up with a professional easel, oils, brushes and an assortment of canvases. Kulakov smiled weakly and thanked her profusely, but he didn’t go near the easel for two weeks. Then one day, Thro arrived in his room to find him painting furiously
near the window. His canvases, which he began turning out at the rate of one every two or three days, were colorful primitives with tiny figures clawing their way up hills or struggling through fields of grass in which ferocious beasts and oversized snakes lurked.

“It would be my dream to run an art gallery,” Kulakov agreed the first time Thro suggested it. “Is such a thing possible?”

“We could arrange for you to work at a big gallery for six months to learn the ropes,” Thro told him. “After that, we’ll find a good-sized city that doesn’t have a decent gallery and set you up in business.”

“It could also be a cultural center,” blurted Kulakov, bubbling with ideas. “I could show art films one night a week and serve tea from a samovar and hold discussions.”

“You could invite artists to lecture,” offered Thro.

“I could organize a lending library of art books,” said Kulakov. “I could start an art newsletter.”

In the sessions that followed, while Thro slowly developed an identity for him to slip into when he left the farm, Kulakov kept coming back to the art gallery. “You make it sound possible,” he commented. “Please don’t build up my hopes if such a thing is not possible.”

Even Stone noticed the change in Kulakov; the morning sessions, for the Russian defector, became a means to an end: The sooner he gave Stone what he wanted, the sooner he, Kulakov, would be able to realize his new-found dream of opening an art gallery.

“You were saying that your wife left you for another man,” Stone prompts. “Did you see any signs of what was in the air before the event?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Kulakov responds almost eagerly. He tilts his head and studies an unfinished canvas on the easel in front of the window: it shows a cat about to spring on a tiny man in a dark forest. “It came like a bolt of lightning.”

“But you said she had been moody—”

Kulakov interrupts him with an impatient wave of his hand. “Who wouldn’t have been moody?” he says. “A daughter in an asylum being treated for … problems. A son expelled from the university for using drugs. Her mood had nothing to do with it.”

“How was your sex life?”

This gets a snort out of Kulakov. “My sex life was normal, which is to say we made love once every week or two when she rolled over and began to touch me.”

“She only attempted to stimulate you once every week or so?”

“My God, do you have to know everything?” Kulakov shakes his head quickly, as if he is clearing it. “She tried to stimulate me more often, of course, but I usually acted as if I was asleep. I also drank a lot, which meant I often
was
asleep.”

“How long were you married?”

Kulakov purses his lips, calculates. “Twenty-two years.”

“Whom did she run off with?”

“I don’t know his name,” Kulakov mumbles in exasperation. “She never said. She just told me she couldn’t take any more and was leaving.”

“Did you try to stop her?”

“Yes,” Kulakov says, and then corrects himself. “No. Not very hard.”

Stone lets a moment go by. “What made you think another man was involved?”

“I asked her. I asked her if there was someone else. She laughed hysterically and started screaming at me that she was going off with some tank commander.”

“Did you ever hear from her after that?”

“Indirectly.” Kulakov jams a cigarette into his holder and lights it. “A friend of hers I’d seen occasionally, a typist in one of the ministries named Natalia—”

“What was her family name? Her patronymic?”

Kulakov thinks a moment. “Natalia Viktorovna Mikhailova. Her husband was a captain in the Army transport section. Yes. Mikhailova.”

“And she came to you—”

“She turned up one day at the door—”

“Before or after you were living with the actress?” Stone asks.

“After,” Kulakov says. “The actress had moved in, but she wasn’t there when Natalia came by.”

Stone nods encouragingly. “We’ll come back to the actress. Tell me about Natalia.”

“There’s not much to tell. She said my wife was well. She said she was living in Alma-Ata with this tank commander.” Kulakov closes his eyes, concentrates, and gives Stone the address. “She asked if she could collect my wife’s effects—her clothing, her cosmetics. My wife was very proud of her collection of Western cosmetics. I left Natalia alone in the apartment. When I came back, she was gone, along with my wife’s things.”

“And you never heard from your wife again?”

Kulakov is lost in thought, staring out the window. Stone repeats the question. “I got a picture postcard in the mail once,” Kulakov recalls. “On one side was a photograph of the sports stadium outside Alma-Ata. On the other was a note, in my wife’s handwriting but unsigned, that said, ‘You are weighted down, like a diver, by the sense of your own specialness. Come to the surface.’ ” Kulakov is suddenly very intense. “I tell it to you frankly—if she rots in hell, it’s all the same to me.”

Kulakov, agitated, stares from the strange man, whom he has never seen before, to the array of electrodes and meters in the open suitcase. “I categorically refuse,” he announces. He looks at Stone with a pleading expression. “Why are you humiliating me like this? I’ve told you the truth. I swear it to you.”

“I believe you,” says Stone. “But the people I work for must have this before they’ll believe you.”

“Isn’t there another way?” begs Kulakov.

“There are certain drugs,” Stone says vaguely, “but they are generally used on uncooperative subjects. There is a voice print analysis procedure, and eyelid observation; people tend to blink more often, and more rapidly, when they are lying. We’ve already used both techniques on you, with negative results. But
voice printouts and eyelid observation are experimental methods. They will want the lie detector results to confirm the feeling we all have that you are telling the truth.”

Obviously unhappy at the turn of events, Kulakov allows himself to be led to the chair set up in the middle of the room. The curtain is drawn, the electrodes are attached, a floor lamp is pulled over and placed just next to Kulakov’s elbow. All the other lights are turned off.

Kulakov squirms uncomfortably. “The peasants say,” he jokes bitterly, “that the darkest place in a room is under a lamp.”

“The peasants know many things we don’t know,” Stone agrees. Kulakov half smiles at the line, which he used to Stone on the Globemaster.

The civilian adjusts several dials in the suitcase, starts the printout, nods to Stone, whose voice comes out of the darkness. “All right, let’s begin. Will you state your full name, your age, your rank, your last assignment and your military serial number.”

“Kulakov, Oleg Anatolyevich. I’m fifty-three years old. I hold … I held the rank of major. I was assigned as a courier attached to the Ministry of Defense. My military serial number is 607092.”

Again the civilian monitoring the dials nods toward Stone. “That’s fine,” he says. “You can start in now.”

Stone walks over and hands Kulakov a lighted cigarette. “You all right?”

“I’m all right,” he says tensely. “Your friend is a painless dentist.”