The Company: A Novel of the CIA (88 page)

His mentor, too, was tapping his knife and nodding his approval. And it hit Yevgeny that his approval meant far more to him than his father's; that in a profound sense, Starik—who had started out as his Tolstoy—had become the father he always wanted to have: the authoritarian idealist who could point him in the right direction, after which all he had to do was concentrate on his forward motion.

Grinka phoned Yevgeny at the apartment the next morning to announce the bad news: their father had slipped into a coma during the early morning hours and breathed his last just as the sun was rising over Moscow. The body was to be cremated that morning and the ashes would be entrusted to Grinka, who proposed driving his brother to the dacha at Peredelkino and scattering them in the white birch woods surrounding the house. To Grinka's surprise, Yevgeny declined. "I am preoccupied with the living and have little time to devote to the dead," he said.

"And when will I see you again?" Grinka asked. When Yevgeny didn't answer, Grinka said, "You haven't forgotten about the dacha—there will be papers to sign."

"I will leave instructions with people who will arrange things to your liking," he said. And he hung up the receiver.

There was one other base that Yevgeny wanted to touch before he left Moscow. For that he needed to get his hands on a Moscow-area phone book, an item that was not available to the general public. One afternoon when he was roaming through the narrow lanes behind the Kremlin, he stopped by the Central Post Office on Gorky Street. Flashing a laminated card that identified him as a GRU officer on detached duty, he asked a functionary for the directories, which were classified as a state secret and kept under lock and key. Which letter do you require? the woman, a prissy time-server, demanded. Yevgeny told her he was interested in the L's. Moments later he found himself in a private room leafing through a thick volume. Running his thumb down the column filled with Lebowitzes, he came across an A.I. Lebowitz. He jotted the phone number on a scrap of paper, then stuffed kopeks into a public phone on the street and dialed it. After two rings a musical voice came on the line.

"Is it you, Marina? I have the documentation on your—"

The woman answering the phone hesitated.

"Who is on the line?"

"Azalia Isanova?"

"Speaking."

Yevgeny didn't know how to explain the call to her; he doubted whether he could explain it to himself. "I am ghost from your past," he managed to say. "Our life lines crossed in a previous incarnation—"

On the other end of the phone line, Azalia gasped. "I recognize the tentativeness of your voice," she breathed. "Are you returned from the dead, then, Yevgeny Alexandrovich?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes. Would it be possible... can we talk?"

"What is there to say? We could explore what might have been but we can never go back and pick up the thread of our story as if nothing had happened; as if the thread had not been broken."

"I was not given a choice at the time—"

"To allow yourself to be placed in a position where you have no choice is a choice."

"You're right, of course... Are you well?"

"I am well, yes. And you?"

"Are you married?"

She let the question hang in the air. "I was married," she said finally. "I have a child, a beautiful girl. She is going to be sixteen this summer. Unfortunately my marriage did not work out. My husband was not in agreement with certain ideas that I hold, certain things that I was doing... The long and short of it is that I am divorced. Did you marry? Do you have children?"

"No. I have never married." He laughed uneasily. "Another choice, no doubt. What kind of work do you do?"

"Nothing has changed since... I work for the Historical Archives Institute in Moscow. In my free time I still like to translate from the English language. Do you know a writer by the name of A. Sillitoe? I am translating something he wrote entitled
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
."

"The title is intriguing."

"Are you a long-distance runner, Yevgeny Alexandrovich?

"In a manner of speaking."

A cement truck roared down Gorky, causing Yevgeny to miss what she said next. He plugged his free ear with a fingertip and pressed the phone harder against the other one. "I didn't hear you."

"I asked if you were lonely?"

"Never more so than right at this moment. My father just died."

"I am sorry to hear that. I remember him at the garden party that day at the dacha in Peredelkino—an old man was pressing a bottle filled with bees against the bare skin of his back when Comrade Beria introduced me to him. You must be melancholy..."

"That's the problem. I am not at all melancholy, at least not at the death of my father. I barely knew him and barely liked what I knew. He was a cold fish..."

"Well, at least he lived into old age. My father and mother died after the war."

"Yes. I remember your telling me about their disappearance—"

"They didn't disappear, Yevgeny. They were murdered."

"In his last years, Stalin strayed from the Socialist norm—"

"Strayed from the Socialist norm! In what ostrich hole have you been hiding your head? He was a murderer of peasants in the early thirties, he murdered his Party comrades in the mid and late thirties, he suspended the killings during the war but resumed them immediately afterward. By then it was the turn of the Jews—"

"It was not my intention to get into a political discussion, Aza."

"What was your intention, Yevgeny Alexandrovich? Do you know?"

"I only intended... I thought..." He was silent for a moment. "The truth is I was remembering—"

"Remembering what?"

"Remembering the gap between your two front teeth. Remembering also how my lust and your desire turned out to be harmonious in bed."

"It is indelicate of you to raise the subject—"

"I mean no offense..."

"You are from a previous incarnation, Yevgeny Alexandrovich. I am not the same person who lived in the apartment of Comrade Beria. I am no longer innocent." And she quickly added, "I am not speaking of sexual matters, it goes without saying. I am speaking of political matters."

"I wish things could have been otherwise—"

"I don't believe you."

A woman waiting to use the pay phone tapped a finger against the crystal on her wristwatch. "How long do you intend to monopolize the line?" she cried.

"Please believe me, I wish you well. Goodbye, Azalia Isanova."

"I am not sure I am glad you called. I wish you had not stirred memories. Goodbye to you, Yevgeny Alexandrovich."

A dark scowl passed across Starik's eyes. "I won't tell you again," he scolded the two nieces. "Wipe the smirks off your faces, girlies."

The nieces found Uncle unusually short-tempered; they were not at all sure what he did to gain money but, whatever it was, they could tell he was preoccupied by it now. He switched on the klieg lights and adjusted the reflectors so that the beams bathed the bodies of the two angelic creatures posing for him. Returning to the tripod, he peered down into the ground glass of the Czech Flexaret. "Revolucion, how many times must I tell you, throw your arm over Axinya's shoulders and lean toward her until your heads are touching. Just so. Good."

The two girls, their long gawky feet planted casually apart, their pubic bones jutting pugnaciously, stared into the camera. "Do take the photograph, Uncle," Axinya pleaded. "Even with all these lights I am quite chilly."

"Yes, take the picture before I catch my death of cold," Revolucion said with a giggle.

"I will not be rushed, girlies," Starik admonished them. "It is important to focus correctly, after which I must double check the exposure meter." He bent his head and studied the image on the ground glass; the klieg lights had scrubbed the pink out of the naked bodies until only the eye sockets and nostrils and oral cavities of the girls, and their rosebud-like nipples, were visible. He took another reading on the light meter, set the exposure, then moved to one side and regarded the girls carefully. They were staring into the lens, painfully conscious of their nudity. He wanted to achieve something incorporeal, something that could not be associated with a particular time and place. He thought he knew how to distract them.

"Girlies, imagine you are innocent little Alice lost in Wonderland— transport yourselves into her magical world for a moment."

"What is Wonderland really like?" Axinya asked shyly.

"Is Wonderland in the socialist camp, Uncle?" Revolucion, always pragmatic, wanted to know. "Is it a workers' paradise, do you think?"

"It is a paradise for little girls," Starik whispered. He could make out the ethereal expressions creeping onto the faces of the two little nieces as they were transported to the whimsical world where, at any moment, the White Rabbit might appear, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other. Satisfied, Starik tripped the plunger. Opening the aperture to heighten the washed-out effect, he took several more shots. Finally he waved toward the door. "Enough for today," he said grumpily. "You may go outside and play until suppertime."

The nieces, only too happy to flee his moodiness, tugged sleeveless cotton shifts over their heads and, arm in arm, scampered from the room. Starik could hear their shrieks as they skipped down the wide steps toward the front door of the Apatov Mansion. He turned off the klieg lights, rewound the film and stuck the exposed roll in the pocket of his long shirt. Deep in thought, he returned to the library and poured himself a glass of mineral water.

What should he make of Philby, he wondered. He liked the man personally; Yevgeny had come away from their meeting saying that the Englishman was an embittered drunk and incapable of the intricate mental compartmentalization that would be required of a triple agent. Andropov, on the other hand, was absolutely convinced that Philby had been turned by Angleton; that somewhere along the way Philby had switched his ultimate loyalties to the CIA. How else explain the fact, so Andropov reasoned, that Philby had never been arrested? How else explain that he had been allowed to slip away from Beirut, where he had been working as a journalist, after the British came up with irrefutable evidence that he had betrayed his country? Starik's gut view, which found few supporters within the KGB hierarchy, was that Angleton would have been only too happy to see Philby escape; might even have made sure whispers of an impending arrest reached the Englishman's ears so that he could head for Moscow one jump ahead of the MI6's agents come to fetch him home to London. The last thing Angleton wanted was for Philby to tell the world about all those lunches with the American counterintelligence chief at La Nicoise, about all the state secrets he'd swiped directly from the man charged with protecting state secrets. When Philby had turned up in Moscow in 1963, Starik had spent weeks screening the serials he'd sent from Washington during the years he'd been meeting regularly with Angleton. All of them had seemed true enough, which meant... which meant what? If Angleton had turned Philby into a triple agent, he would have been shrewd enough to continue feeding him real secrets to keep the KGB from suspecting the truth. That was what Starik had done over the years; was still doing, in fact: sending over false defectors with real secrets and real defectors with false secrets was all part of the great game.

Sipping the mineral water, Starik slipped through the narrow door in the wood paneling into his small inner sanctum. Locking the door behind him, he disabled the destruction mechanism on the large safe cemented into the wall behind the portrait of Lenin, then opened it with the key he kept attached to the wrought silver chain hanging around his neck. He pulled out the old-fashioned file box with the words Soversheno Sekretno and KHOLSTOMER written in Cyrillic across the oak cover, and set it on the small table. He opened the box and extracted from a thick folder the cable that had been hand-delivered to the Apatov Mansion the previous night. The KGB rezident in Rome was alerting Directorate S to rumors circulating in Italian banking circles: The Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Albino Luciani, was said to be looking into reports that the Vatican Bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works, was involved in money-laundering transactions. Luciani, whom some touted as a possible successor to the current Pope, Paul VI, had apparently been alerted to the existence of a fourteen-year-old investigation by a Roman public prosecutor into a money-laundering operation bearing the code name KHOLSTOMER, and had dispatched two priests with accounting skills to review the handwritten ledgers gathering dust in the archives of the Institute for Religious Works.

Starik looked up from the cable, his eyes dark with apprehension. Fortunately, one of the two priests came from a Tuscan family with strong ties to the Italian Communist Party; working closely with the Italian Communists, the rezident in Rome would be able to keep track of what information the priests sent back to Albino Luciani in Venice.

If the Patriarch of Venice came too close to the flame he would have to be burned. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with KHOLSTOMER. Now that the American economy was in a recessionary spiral and inflation was soaring, Starik intended to present the scheme first to KGB Chairman Andropov and, if he approved it, to the secret Politburo Committee of Three that scrutinized intelligence operations. By year's end, Starik hoped that Comrade Brezhnev himself would sign off on KHOLSTOMER and the stratagem that would bring America to its knees could finally be launched.

Starik's thoughts drifted to Yevgeny Alexandrovich. He bitterly regretted his decision to bring him back to Russia on home leave. The fatal illness of Yevgeny's father had clouded Starik's thoughts, lured him into the realm of sentimentality; he owed a last debt to the elder Tsipin, whom Starik had controlled when he worked in the United Nations Secretariat. Now that the debt was paid—Tsipin's ashes had been scattered amid the birches of Peredelkino the previous afternoon—it was time for Yevgeny Alexandrovich to return to the war zone. Time, also, for Starik to get on with his cat-and-bat game with the declining but still dangerous James Jesus Angleton.