The Company: A Novel of the CIA (13 page)

It was difficult to say who felt more self-conscious at this show of affection, the father or the son.

"I apologize for not seeing you sooner," mumbled the elder Tsipin. There were conferences, there were reports to finish."

"The usual things. How is your rheumatism?"

'It comes, it goes, depending on the weather. Since when have you been cultivating a goatee?"

"Since I last saw you, which was at my mother's funeral."

Tsipin avoided his son's eye. "Sorry I was unable to offer you a bed. Where did you wind up living?"

"A friend has a room in a communal apartment. He is putting me up on a couch."

Through the double door of the vast living room, Yevgeny caught a glimpse of the immense picture window with its breathtaking view of the river and of Moscow sprawling beyond it. "Ochen khorosha, " he said. "The Soviet Union treats its former senior diplomats like tsars."

"Grinka is here," the elder Tsipin said, hooking an arm through Yevgeny's and leading him into the living room. "He took the overnight train down from Leningrad when he heard you were coming. I also invited a friend, and my friend brought along a friend of his." He favored his son with a mysterious grin. "I am sure you will find my friend interesting." He lowered his voice and leaned toward his son's ear. "If he asks you about America I count on you to emphasize the faults."

Yevgeny spotted his younger brother through the double door and bounded across the room to wrap Grinka in a bear hug. Tsipin's longtime servant, a lean middle-aged Uzbek woman with the delicate features of a bird, was serving zakuski to the two guests near the window. A sigh of pure elation escaped her lips when she saw Yevgeny. She cried out to him in Uzbek and, pulling his head down, planted kisses on his forehead and both shoulders.

Yevgeny said, "Hello to you, Nyura."

"Thanks to God you are returned from America alive," she exclaimed. "It is said the cities are under the command of armed gangsters."

"Our journalists tend to see the worst," he told her with a smile. He leaned over and kissed her on both cheeks, causing her to bow her head and blush.

"Nyura practically raised Yevgeny during the war years when his mother and I were posted to Turkey," Tsipin explained to his guests.

"I spent several days in Istanbul on a secret mission before the war started," the older of the two remarked. "My memory is that it was a chaotic city."

Yevgeny noticed that the guest spoke Russian with an accent he took to be German. "It was my dream to be allowed to live with my parents in Istanbul," he said, "but Turkey in those days was a center of international intrigue—there were kidnappings, even murders—and I was obliged to remain in Alma-Ata with Nyura and Grinka for safety's sake."

Tsipin did the introductions. "Yevgeny, I present to you Martin Dietrich. Comrade Dietrich, please meet my oldest son recently returned from his American university. And this is Pavel Semyonovich Zhilov, Pasha for short, a great friend to me for more years than I care to remember. Pasha is known to the comrades—"

"Perhaps you will have the good fortune to become one," Dietrich told Yevgeny with elaborate formality.

"—as Starik."

Yevgeny shook hands with both men, then flung an arm over the shoulder of his younger brother as he inspected his father's guests. Martin Dietrich was on the short side, stocky, in his early fifties with a washed-out complexion, tired humorless eyes and surgical scars on his cheeks where skin had been grafted over the facial bones. Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov was a tall, reed-like man who looked as if he had stepped out of another century and was ill at ease in the present one. In his mid or late thirties, he had the scraggy pewter beard of a priest and brooding blue eyes that narrowed slightly and fixed on you with unnerving intensity. His fingernails were thick and long and cropped squarely, in the manner of peasants'. He was dressed in baggy trousers and a rough white shirt whose broad collar, open at the neck, offered a glimpse of a finely wrought silver chain. A dark peasants jacket plunged to his knees. He stood there cracking open toasted Samarkand apricot pits with thick thumbnails and popping the nuts into his mouth. Half a dozen small silk rosettes were pinned on his lapel. Yevgeny, who had learned to identify the rosettes during a stint in the Komsomol Youth Organization, recognized several: the Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of the Red Banner, the Order ofAleksandr Nevsky, the Order of the Red Star. Nodding toward the rosettes, Yevgeny said, with just a trace of mockery, "You are clearly a great war hero. Perhaps one day you will tell me the story behind each of your medals."

Starik, puffing on a Bulgarian cigarette with a long hollow tip, eyed his host's son. "Contrary to appearances, I do not live in the past," he said flatly.

"That alone sets you apart from everyone else in Russia," Yevgeny said. He helped himself to a cracker spread with caviar. "Starik—the old man— was what the comrades called Lenin, wasn't it? How did you come to be called by such a name?"

Yevgeny's father answered for him. "In Lenin's case it was because he was so much older than the others around him at the time of the Revolution. In Pasha's case it was because he talked like Tolstoy long before he let his beard grow."

Yevgeny, who had acquired the American gift for insouciance, asked with an insolent grin, "And what do you talk about when you talk like Tolstoy?"

His father tried to divert the conversation. "How was your flight back from America, Yevgeny?"

Starik waved off his host. "There is no harm done, Aleksandr Timofeyevich. I prefer curious young men to those who, at twenty-one, know all there is to know."

He turned a guarded smirk on Yevgeny for the first time; Yevgeny recognized it for what it was—the enigmatic expression of someone who thought of life as an intricate game of chess. Another member of the Communist nomenklatura who climbed over the bodies of his colleagues to get ahead!

Starik spit a spoiled Samarkand nut onto the Persian carpet. "What I talk about," he told Yevgeny, articulating his words carefully, "is a state secret."

Later, over dinner, Starik steered the subject to America and asked Yevgeny for his impressions. Did he believe racial tensions would lead to a Negro uprising? Would the exploited Caucasian proletariat support such a revolt? Yevgeny responded by saying that he hadn't really been in America— he'd been in Yale, a ghetto populated by members of the privileged classes who could afford tuition, or the occasional scholarship student who aspired to join the privileged class. "As for the Negroes revolting," he added, "man will walk on the moon before that happens. Whoever is telling you such things simply doesn't know what he's talking about."

"I read it in Pravda," Starik said, watching his host's son to see if he would back down.

Yevgeny suddenly felt as if he were taking an oral exam. "The journalists of Pravda are telling you what they think you should hear," he said. "If we hope to compete successfully with the immense power of capitalist America we must first understand what makes it tick."

"Do you understand what makes it tick?"

"I begin to understand America well enough to know there is no possibility that its Negroes will revolt."

"And what do you plan to do with this knowledge you have of America?" Starik inquired.

"I have not figured that out yet."

Grinka asked his father if he had seen the Pravda story about the TASS journalist in Washington who had been drugged and photographed in bed with a stark-naked teenage girl, after which the American CIA had tried to blackmail him into spying for it. Yevgeny commented that there was a good chance the TASS man had been a KGB agent to begin with. His father, refilling the glasses from a chilled bottle of Hungarian white wine, remarked that the Americans regularly accused Soviet journalists and diplomats of being spies.

Yevgeny regarded his father. "Aren't they?" he asked with a laugh in his eyes.

Starik raised his wineglass to eye level and studied Yevgeny over the rim as he turned the stem in his fingers. "Let us be frank: Sometimes they are," he said evenly. "But Socialism, if it is to survive, must defend itself."

"And don't we try the same tricks on them that they try on us?" Yevgeny persisted.

Martin Dietrich turned out to have a mild sense of humor after all. "With all my heart, I hope so," he announced. "Considering the dangers they run, spies are underpaid and occasionally need to be compensated with something other than money."

"To an outsider, I can see how the business of spying sometimes appears to be an amusing game," Starik conceded, his eyes riveted on Yevgeny across the table. Turning to his host, he launched into the story of a French military attaché who had been seduced by a young woman who worked at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. "One night he visited her in the single room she shared with one other girl. Before you knew it he and the two girls had removed their clothing and jumped into bed. Of course the girls worked for our KGB. They filmed the whole thing through a two-way mirror. When they discreetly confronted the attaché with still photographs, he burst into laughter and asked them if they could supply him with copies to send to his wife in Paris to prove that his virility had not diminished during his two years in Moscow."

Yevgeny s eyes widened slightly. How was it that his father's friend knew such a story? Was Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov connected with the KGB? Yevgeny glanced at his father—he had always assumed he had some sort of relationship with the KGB. After all, diplomats abroad were expected to keep their eyes and ears open and report back to their handlers. Their handlers! Could it be that Starik was his father's conducting officer? The elder Tsipin had introduced Starik as his great friend. If Starik was his handler, his father may have played a more active role in Soviet intelligence than his son imagined; Zhilov simply didn't seem like someone who merely debriefed returning diplomats.

There was another riddle that intrigued Yevgeny: Who was the quiet German who went by the name Martin Dietrich and looked as if his features had been burned—or altered by plastic surgery? And what had he done for the Motherland to merit wearing over his breast pocket a ribbon indicating that he, too, was a Hero of the Soviet Union?

Back in the living room, Nyura set out Napoleon brandy and snifters, which the host half-filled and Grinka handed around. Zhilov and Tsipin were in the middle of an argument about what had stopped the seemingly invincible Germans when they attacked the Soviet Union. Grinka, a second-year student of history and Marxist theory at Leningrad University, said, "The same thing that stopped Napoleon—Russian bayonets and Russian winter."

"We had a secret weapon against both Napoleons Grand Army and Hitler's Wehrmacht," Aleksandr instructed his youngest son. "It was the rasputitsa—the rivers of melting snow in the spring, the torrents of rain in the autumn—that transform the Steppe into an impassable swamp. I remember that the rasputitsa was especially severe in March of '41, preventing the Germans from attacking for several crucial weeks. It was severe again in October of '41 and the winter frost that hardens the ground enough for tanks to operate came late, which left the Wehrmacht bogged down within sight of the spires of Moscow when the full force of winter struck."

"Aleksandr is correct—we had a secret weapon. But it was neither our bayonets nor the Russian winter, nor the rasputitsa," Zhilov said. "It was our spies who told us which of the German thrusts were feints and which were real; who told us how much petrol stocks their tanks had on hand so we could figure out how long they could run; who told us that the Wehrmacht, calculating that the Red Army could not resist the German onslaught, had not brought up winter lubricants, which meant their battle tanks would be useless once the weather turned cold."

Yevgeny felt the warmth of the brandy invade his chest. "I have never understood how the Motherland lost twenty million killed in the Great Patriotic War—a suffering so enormous it defies description—yet those who participated in the blood bath speak of it with nostalgia?"

"Do you remember the stories of the Ottoman sultans ruling an empire that stretched from the Danube to the Indian Ocean?" Starik inquired. "They would recline on cushions in the lush garden pavilions of Istanbul wearing archer's rings on their thumbs to remind them of battles they could only dimly remember." His large head swung round slowly in Yevgeny s direction. "In a manner of speaking, all of us who fought the Great Patriotic War wear archer's rings on our thumbs or rosettes on our lapels. When our memories fade all we will have left of that heroic moment will be our rings and our medals."

Later, waiting for the elevator to arrive, Starik talked in an undertone with his host. As the elevator door opened Zhilov turned back toward Yevgeny and casually offered him a small calling card. "I invite you to take tea with me," he murmured. "Perhaps I will tell you the story behind one of my medals after all."

If the dinner had been a test, Yevgeny understood that he had passed it. Almost against his will he found himself being drawn to this unkempt peasant of a man who—judging from his bearing; judging, too, from the deference with which his father had treated him—clearly outranked a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. And much to his surprise he heard himself say, "I would consider it a privilege."

"Tomorrow at four-thirty." Starik wasn't asking, he was informing. "Leave word with your father where you will be and I will send a car for you. The calling card will serve as a laissez-passer"—Starik used the French phrase—"for the militiamen guarding the outer gate."

"The outer gate of what?" Yevgeny asked, but Starik had disappeared into the elevator.

Yevgeny was turning the card in his fingers when Grinka snatched it out of his hand. "He's a general polkovnik—a colonel general—in the KGB," he said with a whistle. "What do you think he wants with you?"

"Perhaps he wants me to follow in our father's footsteps," Yevgeny told his brother.

"Become a diplomat!"

"Is that what you were, father?" Yevgeny asked with an insolent smile.