Last Call for Blackford Oakes (11 page)

“Two
A.M.
?” Baranov laughed.

Dmitriev managed a smile. “At eight
P.M.
”

Several hours later, with coffee, cigars, and liqueur on the table, Dmitriev, well along in nostalgia, reaffirmed the special relationship he felt with his guest. “You, Leonya, were commander of the Frunze Academy when I received my commission as a second lieutenant. And in the thirty-five years that have gone by, I have always relied on you for important strategic advice.”

“Is strategic advice what we need to explore this weekend?” Leonid Baranov asked.

Dmitriev replied warily. “Yes. Advice on the strategic challenges faced by our motherland. But not—I prefer not—about contingent measures to be taken if things do not go right. The army remains securely in your hands.

“But let us recapitulate. The general secretary is finally showing some sense on Afghanistan. He has permitted the president we set up there to declare that all Soviet troops will withdraw from Afghanistan in twelve months. At last there is an end in sight to this lesion on our country's morale.

“But Comrade Gorbachev's domestic policies! Perestroika and glasnost are doing to morale in Soviet society what Afghanistan is doing to the military. If he continues on this road, it is impossible to foresee the consequences.

“Quickly, then, my illustrious general and friend: The enemy is, always, the United States. Our leader has proposed a treaty that would prohibit nuclear testing. It is obvious what Comrade Gorbachev has in mind, and here we back him wholeheartedly: Any diplomatic contrivance whatever that succeeds in discouraging active U.S. work on an antimissile system is welcome.”

“But what is by no means plain,” the old warrior broke in, “is what to do if the United States refuses to derail its antimissile program.”

“Yes,” Dmitriev agreed, “by no means plain. There is no way we can spend more on the scientific-military enterprise. We have ten thousand Russian scientists working on antimissile development already.

“The general secretary understands that, too. But he has now met for the third time with the United States president. He seems to be altogether too close to this bourgeois warmonger. Who knows what agreement he will sign with him next?

“Leonya,” Dmitriev paused, and stared down into his brandy. “There is one central problem. And it is a human problem.”

Dmitriev had not seated himself in the principal chair at the dining table. It was there, opposite. Stalin's chair. Empty.

Looking over at it, Vice Chairman Nikolai Dmitriev said, “
He
would have known what to do.”

Dmitriev and his guest left the table.

Major Uliev, his earphones on, waited a minute in the hidden trailer. Then he signaled to the technician at his side. “That's enough. We have what we want.”
He
would have known what to do! Indeed. But Comrade Gorbachev, when he hears this tape, will also know what to do.

CHAPTER 20

Ursina was delighted but not surprised when Rufina told her that not only was she expected at the wedding celebration, “but also your beloved American publisher.”

It was cold that Sunday afternoon, but brilliantly sunny, and Ursina proposed to Blackford that en route to the apartment house on Uspensky Street they should walk through Pushkin Square, which she admired in part because of its beauty, in part because it celebrated “the greatest Russian ever. Pushkin,” she said, “discovered the Russian soul.”

As they approached the stout apartment building with the ornate entrance, Blackford asked, “Who else is invited? Or do you know?”

“Rufina didn't give me a list. There would not, in that apartment, be more than eight or ten, I should think. She knows we're going on to the ballet later, so she won't expect us to stay long. The last time I was there they invited two students of Andrei's, the Gromovs, Maksim and Irina. Two very large middle-aged Russians. I don't know what Andrei teaches them. He speaks not at all—
ever
—about anything to do with his own life. Oh—” she stopped to correct herself. Blackford admired the sunshine on the fur around the blue hat she wore, concealing most of her hair. “Oh, yes, he did reveal that night I was there that, however perfunctorily, he had crossed paths with three British authors. Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Malcolm Muggeridge.”

“That would be good to talk about at the reception, right?”

“No, I don't think so. I remember asking for some details of his friendship, or exchanges, with those people, and getting nowhere.”

“Well, I'll give it a try.”

They climbed the two sets of stairs. Rufina was at the door. Ursina hugged her and handed her the little package, wrapped and tied with yellow ribbon. It was a half kilo of the caviar she knew Rufina especially liked, but could seldom afford to buy.

“Well, darling, this does make it a celebration,” said Rufina in a delighted tone. “That, and of course Andrei's passport coming through, finally. It is odd, after all these months together, that we get officially married only today because we had to wait for Andrei's passport to be renewed. As if that mattered! But come come come in. The Gromovs—you remember them?—are here already, and also the registrar Morosov and his wife, Lidya, who sings. That's all! Andrei has been practicing his toast in Russian—like his marriage proposal, which he did in Russian—and is really quite nervous about it. Imagine!”

They walked through the hallway into the salon/dining room, where the guests milled about. Rufina led Blackford to her husband. “Andrei, you can speak in English all you want with Ursina's special friend.”

Blackford smiled and extended his hand, and managed to say in the Russian language, “My congratulations, Comrade Andrei, and may you both have a long and happy life.”

Andrei acknowledged the greeting and spoke back in his own Russian. Blackford was able to discern the words, to the effect that he and Rufina were very grateful to Ursina, and he was pleased to meet Ursina's good friend and—he lapsed into English—“companion. You are, Mr. Doubleday, from the United States?”

Glasses of wine were pressed into Blackford's hand by Ursina and into Andrei's hand by Rufina.

“Yes. New York. But also Washington. I do occasional service for the United States Information Agency. In fact, I'm here to help plan for the cultural-exchange exhibit in Gorky. And—as a freelance agent—to urge the circulation of some books in the English language.”

“Which books?”

“Above all, your—the great
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. And, from America, the Great Books series. We have a list of individual books, of course, but we have found from the Russians who pass through the USIA library at the embassy that there is considerable interest in primary historical documents. For instance,
The Federalist Papers
.”

Andrei lifted his shoulders, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Yes, I can imagine that there is such curiosity. There is also interest, I would imagine—I have never myself been to that particular library—in other U.S. documents. Perhaps the Emancipation Proclamation? The Sherman Antitrust Act?” He struggled, against the breeze coming in from the window, to light his cigarette, but he did not want to put down his glass.

“Let me light it for you, Comrade Andrei.” Blackford leaned forward and took the match box. Odd, this syllabus of U.S. historical documents his host found interesting. Was there an animus there?

“Thank you, dear boy,” said Andrei, before turning to the Gromovs, who spoke to him in a slow, labored Russian, while eating zakuski hungrily.

Blackford's eyes lit on the overflowing bookcase nearby—where could Andrei fit a single new book? Blackford spotted the three-volume set of Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag Archipelago
. Prohibited in the Soviet Union. Perhaps Rufina—or Andrei—had got special permission. At knee level to one side there were ten or twelve identical paperback books lying on top of one another. Blackford struggled to make out the Russian lettering on the spines.

But the formal festivities were beginning, and Blackford edged back to the celebration. Rufina was speaking in Russian and soon everyone applauded, not easy to do with wine glass in hand. Then Lidya began to sing a song. Blackford watched her, mouth open wide, eyes closed. Everyone was quiet. But Blackford Oakes's mind was racing. He looked hard at his host when the spoon, tapping on the glass pitcher, signaled to the company that Andrei Fyodorovich Martins would now make a toast.

“This is a joyous occasion,” he said speaking the language slowly, yet with some assurance. He had of course memorized the Russian words. “I have been a friend of Rufina for some time, and now I am happy to be recognized as her husband, united son and daughter of the Revolution.” There was applause again.

Blackford lifted his eyes and stared at Andrei as the company applauded him.

He was looking—he suddenly knew, with total clarity of vision—at Harold Adrian Russell Philby.

Kim Philby.

The most illustrious spy of the Cold War.

The realization triggered his professional training. He smiled at Philby, bit into a zakuska, drank his wine, and chatted quietly with the songstress. He must betray no emotion, no sign of recognition.

They had been there two hours when Ursina signaled to him to end the visit. Ursina, one arm around Rufina, leaned over and gave Andrei a little maternal kiss on his broad forehead. Blackford extended his hand to Rufina. He maneuvered so as to submit to the pressure of other departing guests who edged him toward the entrance door, so that he was left able only to nod, with a smile, at Philby, as he reached for Ursina's overcoat, and his own. If his host had been standing on the platform of a gallows, Blackford Oakes would happily have pulled the trap.

CHAPTER 21

Harold Adrian Russell Philby hadn't expected special treatment from the Soviets when he defected formally in 1963. Yet those early years were a little nervous for him. He was an important figure in the spy world. He had, after all, served as the head of Section IX of MI6, the British CIA—Section IX, responsible for monitoring Soviet espionage. And he had been first secretary to the British ambassador in Washington in 1949, assigned to work with the FBI and the CIA in detecting and countering Soviet espionage. While in Washington, he had permitted his old friend Guy Burgess to be his house guest, an uncharacteristically incautious thing to do inasmuch as Burgess was now under direct suspicion of being a Soviet agent.

In a matter of months, Burgess and his collaborator Donald Maclean had slipped away to France and points east, narrowly evading a tightening noose. Inasmuch as only Philby knew that detention threatened if they remained in the West, he presumably had warned them. The question was raised directly: Was Kim Philby himself a loyalty risk? His colleagues looked into the matter, and questioned him. Philby of course asserted his innocence, though he did not make a public protestation of it, dismissing the whole fuss as more of the tawdry business of McCarthyism, the inflammation begotten by Senator Joe McCarthy, who about that time was raising a storm nationally on the question of allegedly lax loyalty and security practices in the U.S. State Department.

But suspicions lingered, and in 1955 a Labour Member of Parliament openly accused Philby of being the “third man.” Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan called for a white paper on the subject, and when it was completed, Macmillan, the leading Conservative voice in England, uttered the most famous exoneration in the postwar history of espionage, advising his colleagues in Parliament that there was “no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country.”

Even so, there was a lot of smoke left swirling about the corridors of MI5 and MI6, and when Philby, who had already left govenment service, announced that he was going to practice journalism in Beirut, a part of the world where he had lived and worked in the 1930s, there was a general sense of relief in security circles. Philby wrote for
The Economist, The Observer
, and
The New Republic
from Lebanon, and spent time with his third wife traveling in the Middle East, which he knew so well from earlier days.

But then George Blake was caught
, with his hands very very deep in Soviet espionage. He was tried and convicted (but escaped from prison). Information gathered from the Blake experience led directly and unmistakably to Harold Adrian Russell Philby, and this time MI6 was not going to let him go. Philby sensed that his time was up and one day disappeared from sight in Beirut, leaving, among others, a thoroughly perplexed wife. A few weeks later he surfaced in Moscow, where the Kremlin announced exultantly that he had been given political asylum. His life in Moscow began with, no less, a three-year-long debriefing by Soviet intelligence.

The Soviet Union conferred honors on him, including the Red Banner Order. But his life was tightly restricted. Successive case officers would meet with him, day after day. He was not officially permitted outside his apartment building without an escort. His quarters were bugged (he simply took this for granted, and his suspicions were later verified), his mail, incoming and outgoing, surveilled.

There was irony in the whole business, Philby later confessed to a friend. “The fact of the matter is,” he said with something bordering on amusement, “the Soviets aren't
one hundred percent
certain that I am faithful!” Perhaps he was a double agent, dispatched by MI6 to penetrate the innermost Soviet circles. If that had been so, the ironic poetry would have been unmatched.

The Kremlin's edgy suspiciousness continued, Philby would report in his uproariously successful memoirs,
My Silent War
. The book was published in Great Britain and America in 1968. As evidence of the Kremlin's suspicions, the memoirs were not published in the Russian language until 1980. The KGB was still harboring that little sliver of doubt.