The Company

by Robert Littell

  “Principal adversary.”

  Starik tried out the words in English. “The principal adversary”—and quickly switched back to Russian—“organizes realistic kidnappings of their own officers by Russians on its staff pretending to be KGB agents, who then menace the recruits with death if they refuse to confess that they work for the CIA. The test is shrewd in as much as it establishes which of the new officers can survive the psychological shock of the episode and move on.”

  Starik looked up from the folder. “I am impressed by the questions you don’t ask.”

  “If I asked how you knew such a thing you would not tell me, so why bother?”

  Starik gulped more tea. “I propose that we speak as if we have known each other as long as I have known your father.” When Yevgeny nodded assent he continued: “You come from a distinguished family with a long history of service to Soviet intelligence organs. In the twenties, at the time of the Civil War, your father’s father was a Chekist, fighting alongside Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky when he created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage. Your father’s brother is head of a department in the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB—ah, I see you were not aware of that.”

  “I was told that he worked for…but it doesn’t matter what I was told.”

  “And your father—“

  “My father?”

  “He has worked for First Chief Directorate for years while he held diplomatic posts, the most recent of which, as you know, was an Under Secretary-Generalship in the United Nations Secretariat. For the past twelve years I have been his conducting officer, so I can personally attest to his enormous contribution to our cause. I have been told you take a rather cynical view of this cause. At its core what is Communism? A crazy idea that there is a side to us we have not yet explored. The tragedy of what we call Marxism-Leninism is that Lenin’s hope and Zinoviev’s expectation that the German revolution would lead to the establishment of a Soviet Germany were foiled. The first country to try the experiment was not proletarian-rich Germany but peasant-poor Russia. The capitalists never tire of throwing in our faces that we are a backward country, but look where we come from. I hold the view that our Communists can be divided into two groups: tsars who promote Mother Russia and Soviet vlast, and dreamers who promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit.”

  “My mother spoke often about the genius and generosity of the human spirit.”

  “I have nothing against expanding Soviet power but, in my heart of hearts I belong, like your mother, to the second category. Are you at all familiar with Leon Tolstoy, Yevgeny? Somewhere in one of his letters he says”—Starik threw back his head and closed his eyes and recited in a melodious voice—“‘the changes in our life must come, not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life, but rather from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience.’” When he opened his eyes they were burning with fervor. “Our political system, in as much as it comes from a mental resolution to try a new form of life, is flawed. (I speak to you frankly; if you were to repeat what I tell you I could be prosecuted for treason.) The flaw has led to aberrations. But which political system hasn’t its aberrations? In the previous century Americans collected blankets from soldiers who died of smallpox and distributed them to the native Indians. Southerners exploited their Negro slaves and lynched the ones who rebelled against this exploitation. French Catholics tied weights to the ankles of French Protestants and threw them into rivers. The Spanish Inquisition burned Hebrew and Muslim converts to Christianity at the stake because it doubted the sincerity of the conversions. Catholic Crusaders, waging holy war against Islam, locked Jews in temples in Jerusalem and burned them alive. All of which is to say that our system of Communism, like other political systems before it, will survive the aberrations of our tsars.” Starik refilled his glass from the thermos. “How long were you in America?”

  “My father began working for the UN immediately after the war. Which means I was in the states, let’s see, almost five-and-a-half years—three and a half years at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, then my junior and senior year at Yale thanks to the strings my father got Secretary-General Lie to pull.”

  Starik extracted a folder from the middle of the pile and held it so that Yevgeny could see the cover. His name—“Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Tsipin” was written across it, with the notation: “Very secret. No distribution whatsoever.” He opened the folder and pulled out a sheet filled with handwritten notes. “Your father was not the one who got Secretary-General Lie to pull strings. It was me, working through Foreign Minister Molotov, who pulled the strings. You obviously have no memory of it but you and I have met before, Yevgeny. It was at your father’s dacha in Peredelkino six years ago. You were not quite fifteen years of age at the time and attending Special School Number 19 in Moscow. You were eager, bright, with an ear for languages; you already spoke American well enough to converse with your mother—it was, I remember, your secret language so that your brother would not understand what you were saying.”

  Yevgeny smiled at the memory. Talking with Starik, he understood what it must be like to confess to a priest; you felt the urge to tell him things you didn’t normally reveal to a stranger. “For obvious reasons it was not something that was spoken of, but my mother was descended from the aristocracy that traced is lineage back to Peter the Great—like Peter she was forever turning her eyes toward the West. She loved foreign languages—she herself spoke French as well as English. She had studied painting at La Grande Chaumière in Paris as a young woman and it marked her for life. I suspect that her marriage turned out to be a great disappointment to my mother, though she was thrilled when my father was sent abroad.”

  “That day at Peredelkino six years ago your father had just learned of the United Nations posting. Your mother talked him into taking you and your brother with them to America—he was reluctant at first, but your mother turned to me and I helped convince him. Your brother wound up studying at the Soviet Consulate school in New York. As you were older than Grinka your mother dreamed of enrolling you in an American high school, but the Foreign Ministry apparatchiki refused to waive the standing rules against such things. Once again your mother turned to me. I went over their heads and appealed directly to Molotov. I told him that we desperately needed people who were educated in America and were steeped in its language and culture. I remember Molotov’s asking me whether you could survive an American education to become a good Soviet citizen. I gave him my pledge that you would.”

  “Why were you so sure?”

  “I was not, but I was willing to take the risk for your mother’s sake. She and I were distant cousins, you see, but there was more than a vague family tie between us. Over the years we had become…friends. It was the friendship of what I shall call, for want of a better expression, kindred spirits. We didn’t see eye to eye at all on everything, and most especially on Marxism; but on other matters we saw heart to heart. And then…then there was something about you, a lust lurking in the pupils of your eyes. You wanted to believe—in a cause, in a mission, in a person.” Starik’s eyes narrowed. “You were like your mother in many ways. You both had a superstitious streak.” He laughed to himself at a memory. “You were always spitting over your shoulder for good luck. Your mother always sat on her valise before starting on a voyage—it was something right out of Dostoyevsky. She never turned back once she crossed the threshold or, if she did, she looked at herself in a mirror before starting out again.”

  “I still do these things.” Yevgeny thought a moment. “At Erasmus High we were not sure I would get permission to apply to Yale; not sure, when they accepted me, that my father could raise the hard currency to pay the tuition.”

  “It was me who organized for you to receive permission to apply to Yale. It was me who arranged for your father’s book—From the Soviet Point of View—to be published by left-wing houses in several European and Third World
countries, after which I made sure that the book earned enough for him to afford the tuition.”

  Yevgeny said, in a muffled voice, “What you are telling me takes my breath away.”

  Starik sprang to his feet and came around the table and gazed down at his young visitor. His peasant jacket swung open and Yevgeny caught a glimpse of the worn butt of a heavy naval pistol tucked into his waistband. The sight made his heart beat faster.

  “Have I misjudged you, Yevgeny?” Starik demanded, abandoning the formal “vui,” switching to the intimate “ti.” “Have I misjudged your courage and your conscience? Your command of the American language, your knowledge of America, your ability to pass for an American, give you the possibility of making a unique contribution. You know only what you have read in books; I will teach you things that are not in books. Will you follow in your grandfather’s and your father’s footsteps? Will you enlist in the ranks of our Chekists and work with the dreamers who promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit?”

  Yevgeny cried out, “With all my heart, yes.” Then he repeated it with an urgency he had never felt before. “Yes, yes, I will follow where you lead me.”

  Starik, an austere man who seldom permitted himself the luxury of expressing emotions, reached over and clasped Yevgeny’s hand in both of his large hands. His lips curled into an unaccustomed smile. “There are many rites of passage into my world, but by far the greatest is to demonstrate to you how much I trust you—with the lives of our agents, with state secrets, with my own well-being. Now I will relate to you the story behind my Order of the Red Banner. The tale is a state secret of the highest magnitude—so high that even your father does not know it. Once you hear it there will be no turning back.”

  “Tell me this secret.”

  “It concerns the German Martin Dietrich,” he began in a hoarse whisper. “He was a Soviet spy in the Great Patriotic War. His real name”—Starik’s eyes burned into Yevgeny’s—“was Martin Bormann. Yes, the Martin Bormann who was Hitler’s deputy. He was a Soviet agent from the late twenties; in 1929 we pushed him to marry the daughter of a Nazi close to Hitler and thus gain access to the Führer’s inner circle. When the war started Bormann betrayed Hitler’s strategy to us. He told us which of the German thrusts were feints, he told us how much petrol their tanks had on hand, he told us that the Wehrmacht had not brought up winter lubricants for their tanks in 1941. From the time of the great German defeat at Stalingrad Bormann was instrumental in pushing Hitler, over the objections of the generals, to make irrational decisions—the Führer’s refusal to permit von Paulus to break out of the Stalingrad trap resulted in the loss of eight hundred and fifty thousand Fascist troops. And during all that time I was Martin’s conducting officer.”

  “But Bormann was said to have died during the final battle for Berlin!”

  “Some weeks before the end of the war German intelligence officers stumbled across deciphered intercepts that suggested Martin could be a Soviet spy. They confided in Goebbels, but Goebbels was unable to work up the nerve tell Hitler, who by then was a ranting madman. In the final hours of the final battle Martin made his way across the Tiergarten toward the Lehrter Station. For a time he was pinned down in a crossfire between advance units of Chuikov’s 8th Guards and an SS unit dug in next to the station, but during the night of first to second of May he finally managed to cross the line. I had arranged to meet Martin at the station. Our front line troops were told to be on the alert for a German officer dressed in a long leather coat with a camouflage uniform underneath. I took him to safety.”

  “Why have you kept the story secret?”

  “Martin brought with him microdots containing German files on Western espionage services. We decided it was to our advantage to have the world think that Bormann had been loyal to Hitler to the end and had been killed while trying to escape Berlin. We changed his appearance with plastic surgery. He is retired now but for years he was a high-ranking officer of our intelligence service.”

  Starik released Yevgeny’s hand and returned to his seat. “Now,” he said in a triumphant voice, “we will, together, take the first steps in a long journey.”

  In the weeks that followed, Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin disappeared through the looking glass into a clandestine world peopled by eccentric characters who had mastered bizarre skills. The trip was exhilarating; for the first time in memory he felt as if the attention being showered on him had nothing to do with the fact that he was his father’s son. He was given the code name Gregory; he himself selected the surname Ozolin, which Starik immediately recognized as the name of the stationmaster at Astapovo, the godforsaken backwater where Tolstoy, on the lam from his wife, had breathed his last. (“And what were his last words?” Starik, who had been something of a Tolstoy scholar in his youth, challenged his protégé. “‘The truth—I care a great deal,’” Yevgeny shot back. “Bravo!” cried Starik. “Bravo!”) Without fanfare Gregory Ozolin was inducted into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, card number 01783753 and assigned to a small Interior Ministry safe house on Granovskiy Street, batiment number 3, second entrance, flat 71, which came with a refrigerator (a rarity in the Soviet Union) filled with pasteurized koumis belonging to the Tajik maid with a mustache on her upper lip. Six mornings a week a bread-delivery van fetched Yevgeny from the alleyway behind the building and whisked him to an underground entrance of the First Chief Directorate’s Shkloa Osobogo Naznacheniva (Special Purpose School) in the middle of a woods at Balashikha, some fifteen miles east of the Moscow Ring Road. There Yevgeny, segregated for reasons of security from the scores of male and female students attending classes in the main part of the compound, was given intensive courses in selecting and servicing tayniki (which the Americans called dead drops), secret writing, wireless telegraphy, cryptography in general and one-time pads in particular, photography, Marxist theory, and the glorious history of the Cheka from Feliks Dzerzhinsky down to the present. The curriculum for this last course consisted mostly of maxims, which were supposed to be memorized and regurgitated on demand.

  “What was the dictum of the Cheka in 1934?” the instructor, a zealous time-server whose shaven skull glistened under the neon lamp in the classroom, demanded at one session.

  “A spy in hand is worth two in the bush?”

  Pursing his lips, clucking his tongue, the time-server scolded his student. “Comrade Ozolin will simply have to take this more seriously if he expects to earn a passing grade.” And he recited the correct response, obliging Yevgeny to repeat each phrase after him.

  “In our work, boldness, daring and audacity…”

  “In our work, boldness, daring and audacity…”

  “…must be combined…”

  “…must be combined…”

  “…with prudence.”

  “…with prudence.”

  “In other words, dialectics.”

  “In other words, dialectics.”

  “I honestly don’t see what dialectics has to do with being a successful espionage agent,” Yevgeny groaned when Starik turned up, as usual, at midday to share the sandwiches and cold kvass sent over from the canteen.

  “It is the heart of the matter,” Starik explained patiently. “We cannot teach you everything, but we can teach you how to think. The successful agent is invariably one who has mastered Marxist methodology. Which is to say, he perfects the art of thinking conventionally and then systematically challenges the conventional thinking to develop alternatives that will take the”—his eyes sparkling, Yevgeny’s conducting officer dredged up the English term—“‘principal adversary’ by surprise. The short name for this process is dialectics. You came across it when you studied Hegel and Marx. You develop a thesis, you contradict it with an anthesis and then you resolve the contradiction with a synthesis. I am told that the practical side of the curriculum comes quickly to you. You must make more of an effort on the theoretical side.”

  On the even days of the month, a sinewy Ossete with a clubfoot and incr
edibly powerful arms would lead Yevgeny to a windowless room with mattresses propped up against the walls and wrestling mats on the floor, and teach him seven different ways to kill with his bare hands; the absolute precision of the Ossete’s gestures convinced Yevgeny that he had diligently practiced the subject he now instructed. On the odd days, Yevgeny was taken down to a soundproofed sub-basement firing range and shown how to strip and clean and shoot a variety of small arms of American manufacture. When he had mastered that he was taken on a field trip to a KGB special laboratory at the edge of a village near Moscow and allowed to test fire one of the exotic weapons that had been developed there, a cigarette case concealing a silent pistol that shot platinum-alloy pellets the size of a pinhead; indentations in the pinhead contained a poisonous extract from the castor oil plant, which (so Yevgeny was assured by a short, myopic man in a white smock) invariably led to cardiovascular collapse.

  Evenings, Yevgeny was driven back to his apartment to eat the warm meal that had been set out for him by the Tajik maid. After dinner he was expected to do several hours of homework, which involved keeping abreast of all things American, and most especially sports, by carefully reading Time and Life and Newsweek. He was also ordered to study a series of lectures entitled “Characteristics of Agent Communications and Agent Handling in the USA,” written by Lieutenant Colonel I. Ye. Prikhodko, an intelligence officer who had served in New York under diplomatic cover. Fortifying himself with a stiff cognac, Yevgeny would settle into a soft chair with a lamp directed over his shoulder and skim the Prikhodko material. “New York is divided into five sections,” one chapter, clearly intended for neophytes, began, “which are called boroughs. Because of its isolation from the main city—one can reach the island only by ferry from Manhattan and from Brooklyn—Richmond is the least suitable of the five boroughs for organizing agent communications. New York’s other four sections—named Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens—are widely used by our intelligence officers. Department stores, with their dozens of entrances and exits, some directly into the subway system, are ideal meeting places. Prospect Park in the borough of Brooklyn or cemeteries in the borough of Queens are also excellent places to meet with agents. When organizing such meetings do not specify a spot (for example, the southwest corner of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue) but a route, preferably a small street along which he is to walk at a prearranged time. This permits the Soviet intelligence officer to observe the agent to determine whether or not he is under surveillance before establishing contact.”