Charm School v1_0

by Nelson DeMille

  “No comment.”

  “As for the women in other Western embassies, they are off-limits to intelligence types such as us. For you and I the policy is to date only single American women.” Alevy added, “You could hang around the hard-currency bars and find an unattached American tourist.”

  “Have you done that?”

  “Maybe.” Alevy looked at Hollis. “I assume your wife is not returning. However, until you get a divorce, you have to play by the rules.” Alevy smiled and patted Hollis' arm, a rare display of intimacy. “You don't know how to be a bachelor anyway. You were married too long.”

  Hollis didn't respond.

  “Did you have someone special in mind?” Alevy asked.

  “No, just checking the rules.”

  Alevy regarded Hollis for some time, then asked, “Did something happen between you and Lisa? That's a professional question.”

  “Then look in your dossier.”

  “Well,” Alevy said in a cooler tone, “I want you to think now about Ace.”

  “I have. So I had him meet me in Dzerzhinsky Square. And some K-goons came along, and Ace went pale. Hard to fake skin color.”

  Alevy shrugged. “Heard of a similar situation where a guy did fake it with some sort of nitrate substance. Turned him ashen. But Dzerzhinsky Square was an inspired idea. Not bad for a military guy. A little risky though.”

  Hollis sipped his beer.

  Alevy said, “Regarding Ace, if you cut him loose, we're ahead of the game whether he's real or not. If you stay with him, you may find out what he's up to. But what he's up to may be murder, and it may be too late.”

  “Actually there's been a new development.”

  “What?”

  “He wants to head West.”

  “Does he?”

  “So he says.”

  Alevy thought a moment. “Then maybe what he wants is to find out how we get people out of here.”

  “Maybe. Maybe he just really wants to defect.” Hollis cradled the beer bottle in his hands and watched the condensation drip. Alevy had a weak spot in his professional makeup: He personally didn't like most Russians. Not liking the Soviet regime was a job qualification. But Alevy was unable to concede that anyone who had been shaped by the regime was capable of anything but treachery and vile-ness. Perhaps he was right. Certainly General Surikov was a good example of the New Soviet Man. “I don't intend to cut him loose or to turn him over to you, if that's what you're getting at.”

  “I'm not suggesting that. He apparently wants to deal with a brother Air Force officer. I couldn't run him. What's he offering for the ticket West? The scoop on Borodino?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe you planted that in his head. Maybe he'll make up a crock of shit just to get out of here.”

  “We'll soon know.”

  “Are you meeting with him in person again?”

  “Yes.” Hollis put his beer bottle on the floor and wiped his hands on his trousers. “But I don't want company.”

  “I want to talk to this joker myself.”

  Hollis said, “I don't think it's a good idea for the CIA station chief, the most important man in Western intelligence in the Soviet Union, to run around Moscow trying to rendezvous with Russian informers. Do you?”

  “Let me worry about my job description.”

  “Sure.” Hollis considered what little else he knew about Alevy. In Langley, he'd turned out to be a genius at political analysis, and his prophesies regarding Soviet intentions, particularly Gorbachev's glasnost, had been so accurate that it seemed, some said, he had a friend in the Politboro. Alevy had arrived in Moscow about three years before as third deputy to the CIA station chief. Now he was the station chief. He was not allowed to leave the embassy compound without at least two security men and one cyanide pill. Hollis knew he left without the former but was sure he never left without the latter.

  Alevy's official job with the diplomatic mission was that of political affairs officer, but the cover was thin, as it usually was with this sort of thing. The KGB knew who he was, and so did most of the senior American staff. “Maybe that is Ace's scam,” Hollis said baitingly. “To draw you out so they can kill you”

  “Even they don't kill senior American diplomats.”

  “In your case they'd make an exception. Anyway, you're not a diplomat.”

  “I am. I have a diplomatic passport. I go to all the receptions and talk like a diplomatic dork.”

  Hollis stood. “What were you doing in Sadovniki Friday night?”

  Alevy stood also. “A Sukkot party. The harvest festival. Sort of like Thanksgiving.”

  Hollis nodded. He had heard that Alevy once lived some months in the Russian Jewish community of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach section. Thus he spoke his Russian with a Moscow-Leningrad accent and was perhaps the only man in the embassy who could actually pass for a Soviet citizen under close scrutiny. Hollis imagined that Alevy had also heard some firsthand accounts of religious persecution from his friends in Brighton Beach, and had also been given quite a few names to contact in Moscow, thus arriving in Moscow with assets no one else had.

  Alevy asked, “Do you know anything about Judaism?”

  “I know the Soviets aren't too keen on it. I know that religious observances can attract the K-goons. I know the ambassador would not like you annoying our host government.”

  “Fuck his excellency.” Alevy added, “Jews are politically unreliable here, so you can fraternize with them.”

  Hollis considered the irony in this. American Jews were once thought politically unreliable by the CIA. Now Alevy was the CIA Moscow station chief partly because he was a Jew. Times change.

  As though Alevy had read Hollis' mind, Alevy said, “Jewish dissidents are our potential fifth column here, Sam. We should build more bridges to that community.”

  “Should we?” But beyond all that, Hollis thought, Alevy was playing a dangerous game, dangerous because it had become a personal game with no official backing or backup. Someday Seth Alevy would find himself alone with his cyanide pill. Hollis found himself saying something he'd thought about in Pavel's izba. “Those people have enough problems, Seth. They don't need you hanging around making things worse.”

  “Bullshit. Things get worse for Jews only when they try to accommodate their persecutors.”

  “Maybe. Look, I don't talk politics or religion—only sex and football. I'm just telling you as a colleague, and yes, you idiot, even as your friend, that the KGB will forgive your spying, but not your Judaism. We need you here, especially now, until this new thing is settled.”

  Alevy did not acknowledge Hollis' words at all, but asked, “So, where and when are you meeting Ace?”

  Hollis knew he couldn't very well refuse to answer. “Gogol's grave. Next Sunday. Three P.M. Give or take a few hours.”

  “Where is Gogol's grave these days?”

  “Beats me.”

  As Alevy and Hollis walked toward the exit, Hollis noticed that the Marines, the three secretaries, and the nurse had joined forces and retired to the lounge. The Horgans must have left without his noticing. The lanes were empty and quiet. And so were the game rooms and the swimming pool and all the other activity centers in the compound except the bars. There was a sort of mass lethargy that gripped this place, especially with the onset of winter. Hollis had never seen this kind of aimlessness and list-lessness in any other American embassy. He didn't know what a behavioral psychologist would make of this maze and its white rats, but Hollis' theory was that the people inside the walls had somehow absorbed the malaise of the people outside the walls.

  Hollis stared at the exit sign above the elevator and a word came to mind: bezizkhodnost. Exitlessness; dead end; futility; hopelessness; going nowhere—all contained within that one expressive word that the Russian people used but Pravda never printed. “Bezizkbodnost.”

  Alevy looked at him and seemed to understand. “That's what's left when you subtract God from man.”

  “
But I see it here too. I think it's catching.”

  “Maybe,” Alevy said, “but not for us. We know what we're about, don't we, Sam?”

  “Indeed we do.”

  “Fuck the Reds,” Alevy said.

  “Each and every day,” Hollis replied, but at the same time thinking that was no longer enough. Thinking that this time he had a chance to do something positive, to put Haiphong harbor to rest in his own mind, and to put the whole MIA question to rest for his country.

  The two elevators came simultaneously. Hollis got in one, and Alevy the other.

  * * *

  16

  Lisa Rhodes picked up the telephone in her office, dialed Hollis' office, then before it rang, hung up. “Damn him.” She dialed Alevy's office, and his secretary put her through. Alevy said, “Hello, Li—”

  “Did you tell Sam Hollis to stay away from me?”

  “No, I wouldn't—”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “No. But to be honest with you, I don't think it's a good idea for you to get invol—”

  “Don't fuck around with my life, Seth.”

  “Just calm down.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. Sorry.”

  “Look, if he's done a disappearing act on you… Anyway, I still love you. Why don't we talk—”

  “We talked.”

  “I should really be angry. What happened out there in that village?”

  “It's in my report.”

  “Lisa—”

  “I have to go. Bye, Seth.” She hung up. “Damn men.”

  Lisa looked at her watch, saw it was five P.M., and poured herself a bourbon. She pulled a press release toward her and worked on it without knowing what she was writing.

  A few minutes later Kay Hoffman walked in and took her favorite seat on the hot-air register. “Ah. You ever try this?”

  Lisa didn't reply and went back to the press release.

  Kay Hoffman picked up a just-arrived copy of the previous day's Washington Post and scanned it, then glanced at Lisa. “You all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Monthly blues?”

  “No.” Lisa struck out a line of the typed copy. She reflected on her job in the United States Information Service. She wrote news releases, but she was also the resident Russophile, responsible for cultural affairs. She arranged for Soviet cultural missions to tour the States. They sent the Bolshoi, and the U.S. sent Van Halen.

  Lisa Rhodes loved Russian poetry in its original language, and Pasternak moved her deeply. She was an expert on icons, enjoyed Russian ballet, traditional Russian cooking, and folk art. She thought she understood the mysticism in the Russian soul—the unsevered link between the Russian race, the land, and the Orthodox church. And since Yablonya, she thought she felt her own Russianness more.

  She sometimes thought of herself as a thin rope bridge between two iron superstructures. But if the Americans and Soviets were determined not to understand each other, that was their problem. One day they'd blow themselves and the rest of the earth into oblivion. Then the two cultures would be similar.

  She made a few more notes on her press release. She usually wrote two releases—one for America, one in Russian for the Soviet news service, Tass. Tass used what they wanted without attribution. In that respect, at least, the Soviet and American press were alike. She looked up at Kay. “Do I have to be nice to Van Halen or to the audience?”

  Kay glanced up from her newspaper. Oh… are you still working on that? That has to go out today. Just sound up.

  “Where do you get your orders from?”

  “I don't get orders, Lisa. Only direction.”

  “From where!”

  “High up.”

  “Someday I'm going to write what I want. What I really saw here.”

  “Some day you can. But today you write what you're told.”

  “That's what some apparatchik is being told at the Tass office tonight.”

  “Maybe. But we won't shoot you if you don't do what we say. So don't tell me we are no different from them.”

  No, I meant… there's more to the story. The whole idea of the Russian youth enthralled by Western pop culture. Every kid there was dressed in blue jeans. They were shouting in English, 'Super,' 'Beautiful, baby.' It was…“She thought a moment.”It was surreal is what it was. But was it revolution?

  Kay Hoffman stared at her awhile, then said, “If it was, that is not what you will write about.”

  Lisa went back to her press release.

  Kay went back to her newspaper.

  Lisa thought, But what was it? What is going on here? Questions such as that, however, were not within the purview of the USIS. Working for the USIS was like working for the Ministry of Truth; when the party line changed, you changed with it.

  At the moment, Soviet-American relations were on the verge of a breakthrough. Thus all this cultural activity was a precursor to the diplomatic activity. Her orders—her directions—were to be positive, upbeat. Think peace.

  Those had been her orders some years back, before Nicholas Daniloff, an American correspondent, had been arrested by the KGB on a trumped-up spy charge. Then new orders came down: cancel all cultural exchanges. And so it went, in an Orwellian about-face, in mid-sentence, the word processors ceased churning out puff pieces and began issuing terse sentences of canceled events. But for the moment, puff was required. Though now there was the Fisher affair. She said to Kay Hoffman, “I don't appreciate you writing that press release about Fisher's death and you putting my name on it.”

  Kay shrugged. “Sorry. Orders.” She asked, “What did happen to that Fisher boy?”

  “Exactly what you said in my press release.”

  “I guess I deserved that.”

  “Maybe I should resign over that.”

  Kay stayed silent, then said, “I don't think you need bother.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Forget it.”

  Lisa finished her cigarette and lit another. Her tour of duty was four years. She had less than two to go. As a Foreign Service Officer, she was assigned overseas duty somewhat as a military officer was. In fact, her rank of FSO-6 was roughly equivalent to an Army captain. Her title was Deputy Public Affairs Officer. Kay Hoffman was the PAO. They had six FSPs—five women and one man—working for them. It was all very exciting, very boring; very easy, very trying.

  Kay looked up from her newspaper. “Are you all right?”

  “No one is all right here,” Lisa replied. “This is what State calls a hardship tour. Do you think the Soviet government is insulted by that?”

  Kay smiled grimly. “They don't give a damn. This whole fucking country is on a lifetime hardship tour, and the government put them there.” Kay added, “It helps if you have a lover.”

  “No, it doesn't.”

  “Yes, it does. Did I ask you what happened to that political affairs guy? Seth.”

  As she gathered her things and contemplated another lonely evening, she thought of Seth Alevy. Embassy romances, she thought, were partly a result of enforced intimacy. There had been talk of marriage, of career conflicts, of two world-traveling spouses on different assignments. They both agreed it wouldn't work unless one of them resigned from service. And there it ended. She answered, “That was nothing.”

  “It must have been something, Lisa. You practically moved into his place.”

  “Embassy life is like living in a small town, isn't it, Kay?”

  “Yes. Population: two hundred seventy-six at last count. Didn't mean to be nosy. Just concerned.”

  “I know.” She smiled. “I'll take a Russian lover. That will complete my understanding of the Russian psyche.”

  “They're awful lovers.”

  “How do you know?”

  Kay winked. She threw down her newspaper and stood. “My ass is hot and so am I. I'm going to the bowling alley lounge. Come along. The Marines are bonkers over you.”

  “No, thanks. I have a headache.”

 
; “Okay. See you at breakfast.” Kay Hoffman went to the door, then said, “Rumor has it that you and that air attache, Hollis, ran off for the weekend.”

  “Nonsense. We went to take care of Gregory Fisher's remains. Everyone here is so small-minded.” Kay Hoffman laughed and left. Lisa stood in the quiet room and stared at the telephone.

  * * *

  17

  Sam Hollis answered the ringing telephone in his office. “Hollis.”

  She imitated a male bass voice. “Hollis.” She asked, “Can you say hello?”

  “Hello, Lisa.” Hollis looked at the wall clock. It was five-thirty, and he hadn't spoken to her since he'd left Alevy and Banks Sunday afternoon. “How are you?”

  “I feel used. You're supposed to call or have flowers delivered or some damned thing.”

  “They don't deliver flowers—”

  “What a bumpkin!”

  “Look, I'm not good at this. I'm a married man. Don't get around much.”

  “That's not what I heard.”

  “Well, then you heard wrong. Can I buy you a drink?”

  “No.”

  “Oh… sorry—”

  “I want dinner. Tonight. Out of the compound.”

  Hollis smiled. “Meet you in the lobby. Half an hour?”

  “Thirty-five minutes.” She hung up.

  Hollis called his aide, Captain O'Shea, on the intercom. “Ed, get me a Moscow cab at the gate in forty-five minutes.”

  “How about a car and driver instead?”

  “No, it's personal.”

  “Personal or not, let me get you a staff car.”

  “A taxi will be fine.” Hollis hung up and went to the window. His office faced east into the heart of the city, and the Kremlin towers offered a magnificent view at night, all alight like perfect jewels in an ordinary setting. “Moscow.” Not old by European standards, it had begun in the twelfth century as a trading post with wooden stockade walls on the slight rise where the Kremlin now stood. It was a nothing town on a nothing river in the middle of a nothing forest. And except for trees, snow, and mud, there were no natural resources. The place had been burned to the ground and put to the sword by a dozen armies, and instead of fading into oblivion like a thousand other villages, it came back, each time bigger and just a little stronger. With nothing going for it, it had become the center of an imperial empire, then a communist empire. The Third Rome, as it was sometimes called, but unlike Rome on the Tiber, Moscow was all shade and shadow, a city of somber moods whose citizens drifted in a void of moral weightlessness.