The Company: A Novel of the CIA (124 page)

The woman managed a valiant smile. "My dear friends, we have our work cut out for us."

There was a moment of silence before the storm of applause broke over the auditorium. The woman shrank back, as if buffeted by the ovation that soon turned into a rhythmic foot-pounding roar of admiration. Eager supporters surrounded her and it was well after eleven before the last few turned to leave. As the speaker collected her notes and slipped them into a tattered plastic briefcase, Yevgeny made his way from the shadows at the back of the auditorium down the center aisle. Expecting more questions, the woman raised her eyes—and froze.

"Please excuse me for turning up suddenly—" Yevgeny swallowed hard and started over again. "If you consent to talk with me you will understand that it might have been dangerous for me, and for you also, if I had phoned you at your home. Which is why I took the liberty—"

"How many years has it been?" she inquired, her voice reduced to a fierce whisper.

"It was yesterday," Yevgeny replied with feeling. "I was catnapping under a tree in the garden of my father's dacha at Peredelkino. You woke me—your voice was as musical yesterday as it is today—with a statement in very precise English: I dislike summer so very much. You asked me what I thought of the novels of E. Hemingway and F. Fitzgerald."

He climbed onto the stage and stepped closer to her. She shrank back, intimidated by the intensity in his eyes. "Once again you take my breath away, Yevgeny Alexandrovich," she confessed. "How long have you been back in the country?"

"Six years."

"Why did it take you six years to approach me?"

"The last time we spoke—I called you from a pay phone—you gave me to understand that it would be better, for you at least, if we never met again."

"And what has happened to make you ignore this injunction?"

"I saw articles about you in the newspapers—I saw an interview with you and Academician Sakharov on the television program Vzglyad—I know that you are close to Yeltsin, that you are one of his aides. That is what made me ignore your injunction. I have crucial information that must reach Yeltsin, and through him, Gorbachev."

At the door of the auditorium a janitor called, "Gospodina Lebowitz, I must lock up for the night."

Yevgeny said, with some urgency, "Please. I have an automobile parked down the street. Let me take you someplace where we can talk. I can promise you, you will not regret it. I am not overstating things when I say that the fare of Gorbachev and the democratic reformation could depend on your hearing me out."

Azalia Isanova nodded carefully. "I will go with you."

Midnight came and went but the bull session in the Sparrow, a coffeehouse downhill from Lomonosov University on the Sparrow Hills (lately residents had taken to calling the area, known as Lenin Hills, by its pre-revolutionary name), showed no sign of flagging. "Capitalist systems have been transformed into Socialist systems but not visa versa," argued a serious young man with long sideburns and a suggestion of a beard. "There are no textbooks on the subject, which is why we need to proceed cautiously."

"We're writing the textbook," insisted the girl sitting across from him.

"It's like swimming in a lake," another girl said. "Of course you can go in slowly but the pain lasts longer. The trick is to dive in and get it over with."

"People who dive into icy lakes have been known to die of heart attacks," a boy with thick eyeglasses pointed out.

"If Socialism dies of a heart attack," the first boy quipped, "who will volunteer to give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?"

"Not me," the girls shot back in chorus.

"Another round of coffee," one of the boys called to the waiter, who was reading a worn copy of
Newsweek
behind the cash register.

"Five Americans, coming up," he called back.

At a small round table near the plate-glass window, Aza mulled over what Yevgeny had just told her. On the avenue outside, the traffic was still thick and the throaty murmur of car motors made it sound as if the city were moaning. "You are certain that Yazov was there?" Aza demanded. "It really would be a stab in the back—Gorbachev plucked him out of nowhere to be Minister of Defense."

"I am absolutely sure—I recognized him from pictures in the newspapers even before someone addressed him as Minister."

"And Oleg Baklanov, the head of the military-industrial complex? And Oleg Shenin from the Politburo?"

"Baklanov introduced himself to me in the dacha before we all trooped out to the lawn for the meeting. He is the one who pointed Shenin out to me."

Aza reread the list of names she had jotted on the back of an envelope. "It is terribly frightening. We knew, it goes without saying, that trouble was coming. Kryuchkov and his KGB friends have not made a secret of their opinion of Gorbachev. But we never anticipated a plot would attract so many powerful people." She looked up and studied Yevgeny, as if she were seeing him for the first time. "They were very sure you would be sympathetic to their cause—"

"I worked for the KGB abroad. They assume that anyone with KGB credentials must be against reforms and for a restoration of the old order. Besides, almost all of the people who have set up private banks are gangsters without any political orientation other than pure greed. The conspirators need someone they can trust to repatriate the money in Germany. And I came highly recommended—"

"Who recommended you?"

"Someone whose name is a legend in KGB circles but would mean nothing to you."

"You are very courageous to come to me. If they were to discover your identity—"

"It is for that reason that I don't want anyone, including Boris Yeltsin, to know the source of your information."

"Not knowing the source will detract from its credibility."

"You must say only that it comes from someone you have known a long time and trust." Yevgeny smiled. "After how I deceived you, do you trust me, Aza?"

She considered the question. Then, almost reluctantly, she nodded. "From the start you have always made me hope—and then you have dashed my hopes. I am afraid to hope again. And yet—"

"And yet?"

"Are you familiar with the American title of Nadezhda Mandelstam's book about her husband, Osip?
Hope Against Hope
. If I were to write a book about my life, it would also be an appropriate title. I am a sucker for hope."

Yevgeny turned over the check and glanced at the amount and started counting out rubles. "I will not drive you home—we must not risk being seen together. You remember the formula for meeting me?"

"You will ring my number at home or at work and ask to speak to someone with a name that has the letter z in it. I will say there is nobody by that name at this number. You will apologize and hang down. Exactly one hour and fifteen minutes after your call I am to walk west along the north side of the Novy Arbat. At some point a gypsy taxicab will pull up, the driver will wind down the window and ask if I want a ride. We will haggle for a moment over the price. Then I will get into the back seat. You will be the driver of the taxi."

"Each time we meet I will give you a formula for the next meeting. We must vary these signals and meeting places."

"I can see that you have had experience in these matters."

"You could say that I am a maestro when it comes to such things."

Aza said, "There are parts of you I have not yet visited, Yevgeny Alexandrovich." She sensed that the conversation had turned too solemn and attempted to lighten it. "I'll bet you wowed the girls when you were a young man."

"I never had a childhood sweetheart, if that's what you mean."

"I never had a childhood."

"Perhaps when all this is over—"

Blushing, she raised a hand to stop him before he could finish the sentence.

He smiled. "Like you, I hope against hope."

Boris Yeltsin, a hulking man with heavy jowls and a shock of gray hair spilling off his scalp, was on congenial territory; he liked giving interviews because it permitted him to talk about his favorite subject: himself. "The first thing journalists always ask me," he told the London reporter, fixing her with a steely stare, "is how I lost the fingers." He raised his left hand and wiggled the stumps of his pinkie and the finger next to it. "It happened in 1942, when I was eleven," he went on. "Along with some friends, I tunneled under the barbed wire and broke into a church that was being used to store ammunition. We came across a wooden box filled with grenades and took several of them to the forest, and like an idiot I tried to open one with a hammer to see what was inside. The thing blew up, mangling my hand. When gangrene set in the surgeons had to amputate two of my fingers."

Yeltsin spoke Russian with a slurred drawl and the British reporter didn't catch every word. "Why did he want to open the grenade?" she asked Aza, who spoke excellent English and often acted as Yeltsins informal translator.

"To see what was in it," she said.

"That's what I thought he said but it sounded so silly." The journalist turned back to Yeltsin. "Is the story about you being baptized true?"

Yeltsin, sitting behind an enormous desk on the third floor of the White House, the massive Russian parliament building next to the Moscow River, shot a quick look of puzzlement in Aza's direction; he had difficulty understanding Russian when it was spoken with a British accent. Aza translated the question into a Russian that Yeltsin could grasp. He laughed out loud. "It is true I was baptized," he said. "The priest was so drunk he dropped me into the holy water." Yeltsin hefted the bottle of vodka to see if the journalist wanted a refill. When she shook her head no, he refilled his own glass and downed half of it in one gulp. "My parents pulled me out and dried me off and the priest said, "If he can survive that he can survive anything. I baptize him Boris."

The interview went on for another half-hour. Yeltsin walked the journalist through his childhood in the Sverdlovsk region ("All six of us slept in one room, along with the goat"), his rise through the ranks of the apparatchiki to become the commissar in charge of Sverdlovsk and eventually the Party boss of Moscow. He described his break with Gorbachev three years before. "I had just visited America," he recounted. "They took me to a Safeway supermarket and I prowled through the aisles in a daze. I could barely believe my eyes—there were endless shelves stocked with an endless variety of products. I am not ashamed to say that I broke into tears. It struck me that all of our ideology hadn't managed to fill our shelves. You have to remember we were in the early days of perestroika and our Communist Party was above criticism. But I stood up at one of the Central Committee meetings and I did precisely that—I criticized the Party, I said we'd gotten it wrong, I criticized Gorbachev's reforms as being inadequate, I suggested that he ought to step down and transfer power to the collective rule of the republican leaders. Gorbachev turned white with rage. For me it was the beginning of the end of my relationship with him. He had me expelled from the Central Committee and the Politburo. All my friends saw the handwriting on the wall and abandoned me. I can tell you that I almost had a nervous breakdown. What saved me was my wife and my two daughters, Lena and Tanya, who encouraged me to fight for what I believed in. What saved me, also, was my election last year to the Russian Republic's Supreme Soviet, and my election by the Supreme Soviet to the position of President of the Russian Republic."

The London journalist, scrawling notes in a rudimentary shorthand, double-checked several details with Aza. Yeltsin, in his shirt sleeves, glanced at his wristwatch. Taking the hint, the reporter stood up and thanked Yeltsin for letting her have an hour of his precious time. Aza saw her to the door and, closing it behind her, returned to Yeltsin's desk. "Boris Nikolayevich, can I suggest that we go for a stroll in the courtyard."

Yeltsin grasped that she wanted to talk to him about something delicate. His office was swept for microphones every week but the people who did the sweeping worked for Kryuchkov's KGB, so his staffers had taken to holding important conversations in the open inner courtyard of the White House. Draping a suit jacket over his heavy shoulders, Yeltsin led Aza down the fire staircase to street level and pushed through the fire door into the courtyard. A large outdoor thermometer indicated that winter had finally broken, but after several hours in the overheated offices of the White House the air outside seemed quite crisp. Yeltsin drew the jacket up around his thick neck; Aza pulled her Uzbek shawl over her head.

"What do I need to know that you dare not tell me upstairs?" Yeltsin demanded.

"By chance I have an old acquaintance who used to work for the KGB. I believe he served abroad for a great many years. He has since become a successful entrepreneur and has opened one of those private banks that are springing up around Moscow. Because of his KGB background and the existence of his bank, he was invited by the wife of the press baron Uritzky to attend a secret meeting in a dacha at the edge of the village of Perkhushovo."

Yeltsin was one of those politicians who squirreled away a great deal of seemingly useless information—the names of the children of his collaborators, their wedding anniversaries and birthdays and name days, the location of their summer houses. He came up with an item now. "Kryuchkov has a dacha at Perkhushovo."

Aza described the meeting as Yevgeny had described it to her. Producing an envelope, she read off the list of those who had attended. She quoted Kryuchkov's
We will have to consent to a state of emergency for him
, and recounted how everyone present had raised their hands in agreement with this proposition.

Yeltsin stopped in his tracks and surveyed the sky as if it were possible to read in the formations of clouds clues on how the future would turn out. Moscow was overcast, as usual; it had been overcast for so long people tended to forget what sunlight looked like, or felt like on the skin. "And who is your old acquaintance?" he asked Aza, his eyes still fixed on the sky.

"He specifically forbids me to reveal his identity. And he asks you not to reveal that you received this information from me."