“Oh, dear, there I g-g-go again! Sorry, sorry, so very sorry,” Philby muttered. “Ropey thing to ask a spy, isn’t it, old chap?” It was not yet four and Philby’s breath reeked of alcohol. “Starik send you by to see how I was holding up, did he?”
“As a matter of fact,” Yevgeny lied, “I asked him where I could find you. Though it might be fun to compare notes.”
“Right. I’ll b-b-bet. Compare notes with old PARSIFAL.” Squinting, he grabbed a half empty-bottle of Lagavulin and measured out a shot for Yevgeny before refilling his own glass to the brim. “Ice? Water? Both? Neither?”
“Ice, thanks. Lagavulin is what I used to deliver to your door on Nebraska Avenue. How do you manage to find good malt whiskey in Moscow?”
Philby unbuttoned his booze-stained blazer and carefully lowered himself into a shabby armchair that squeaked on its rusty springs. “Find anything I need in Moscow,” he grumbled. “Easy as falling off a log. I draw up a shopping list—m-m-mango chutney from Harrods, custom tailored b-b-blazer from Savile Row, beluga from the shallow end of the Caspian, olives from Italy, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy from Hayward Hill, Times of London seven days late by air mail, you name it, my minders supply it.”
“And do you mind your minders?” Yevgeny inquired, settling onto a ratty settee with an outrageously loud floral pattern. He had come across Philby’s minders when he entered the run-down building on Patriarch’s Pond; the one in the lobby had checked his identity card and ticked his name off a list, the one sitting behind a small table on the fourth floor landing had favored him with a surly nod, the one standing in front of the door of Philby’s seedy three-room flat had wanted to see his ID again.
Philby snickered. “Law of nature, isn’t it, old boy? One always minds one’s b-b-bloody minders. If you get used to them, means you’ve got one foot in the grave, doesn’t it? They tell me I need round-the-clock minding to prevent MI6 from knocking me off. What they’re really afraid of is that Jimbo Angleton may have turned me into a triple agent. Christ, there’s a ripe idea—I managed the double agent stint all right but triple would keep me up nights trying to figure out which side I really worked for.” And he laughed uproariously at what he thought was a joke.
Yevgeny sipped at his whiskey. “What was it like,” he asked, studying Philby over the rim of his glass. “Coming home after all those years.”
“Told you in Gettysburg when you wanted me to run for it. No state secret. England was my home, old boy, not Russia,” Philby said with undisguised bitterness. “Russia was merely where my loyalties were since I saw the light at Cambridge. In my wildest imagination I never dreamed I’d wind up living here. If you can call this living. Mind you, it’s more upscale than your average English slammer.” He forced another laugh through his clenched jaw.
Philby’s new wife—after he’d fled to Moscow in 1963, one jump ahead of the Brits who had finally come up with proof that he had spied for the Soviets, he had courted and married Donald Maclean’s wife—stuck her head in the room. “Will your friend be staying for tea, then, Kim?” she asked. “Do stay,” she said to Yevgeny. Her cheery voice seemed out of place in this dreary setting; she could have been the spouse of a Midlands squire chatting up her husband’s chums.
“Will you, old b-b-boy?” Philby asked hopefully.
“Afraid I’ll have to take a rain check,” Yevgeny said.
“Tea for three, three for tea another time, so the gentleman says,” Philby chirped, waving his wife out of the room. He fixed his bloodshot eyes on his visitor. “They don’t trust me, old boy, do they?”
“Nobody told me.”
“Course they did. B-b-brecht once said something about how a good Communist had quite a few dents in his helmet, and some of them were the work of the enemy.” Philby scrubbed his lips with the back of his hand. “Starik’s on the fence, doesn’t know which way to jump. KGB pinned the Order of Lenin on my b-b-blazer when I came in—at the time I thought it roughly equivalent to one of the better K’s handed out by HM Elizabeth II, but I have my doubts now. The KGB Oberführer, Comrade Chairman Andropov, keeps me at arm’s length—never even had the d-d-decency to give me the rank of a KGB officer. Far as he’s concerned I’m still a lowly agent. Trots me out Friday nights to brief people whose faces are carefully kept in the shadows. I lecture them on what life is like in England and the States; I tell them how to tip; I tell them to be careful to order two for the road when the warning bell rings; I advise them to butter up your average American by talking about money, your average Brit by talking about the last war.” Philby closed his eyes for a moment. “I tell them how James Jesus Angleton’s mind works. I’m the in-house expert on Jimbo, aren’t I, chum? Biggest asset we have in the states is Jimbo Angleton. Thanks to yours truly he suspects absolutely everyone, so nobody takes him very seriously.”
Philby took a swig of Lagavulin, tilted back his head and tossed it down. “Tell you a secret, sport, if you swear you won’t repeat it to too many people. After I came over Jimbo had a note delivered to me—it took the form of a handwritten inscription on the title page of a book I’d ordered from London. Bugger signed it, too—with a big fat J for Jimbo.”
“What did he say in the note?”
“Amicitia nostra dissoluta est. That’s Latin for Our friendship is dissolved. S’what Nero wrote to Seneca when he wanted his old fart of a tutor to bugger off and commit suicide.” Philby giggled like a schoolgirl. “Bit out of touch with the real world, wasn’t he, old boy, if Jim actually imagined I’d slit my wrists because he’d put paid to our friendship?”
Philby fell into a moody silence. After a moment Yevgeny said, “Do you ever think about going back?”
“Wouldn’t tell you if I did, would I, sport? Not stark raving yet.” He gulped down some more alcohol. “Truth is, even if I could, I’d never give the shits the satisfaction.”
They chatted on for another half hour. Philby was following the Nixon impeachment business closely. He was particularly intrigued by the presence of the one-time CIA hand E. Howard Hunt at the heart of the White House “plumbers” who had pulled off the Watergate break-in; he wondered aloud if the CIA didn’t know more about the caper than they let on. Oh, Brezhnev was a jammy b-b-bastard, all right; doesn’t say much for the Communist system when a sod like him makes it to the top of the heap. Yes, he’d read about the Russian dissidents in the English press; he’d ordered a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago from his favorite London bookstore, Hayward Hill, expected it any day now. One of Andropov’s lackeys had come round with a letter condemning dissident writers and invited him to sign but Philby had sent the bugger packing; told them they ought to be fighting real criminals instead of persecuting dissidents.
Later, lumbering down the dark hallway toward the front door, a drink in one soft paw, the palm of the other brushing the wall to steady himself, Philby said in a slurred mutter, “Bit schizo, these Russians, don’t you think? I have a theory about it—I reckon it’s because a Russian, Peter the Great, tried to turn them into Germans, and a German, Catherine the Great, tried to turn them into Russians.” At the door, which had Philby’s original Soviet code name—SYNOK, TOM—written under the apartment number, Philby hung on to Yevgeny’s lapel. “Heard the news? The Brits are thinking of making a film about me. It’s all very hush-hush. They say M-m-michael York’s going to play me. Rotten choice, that’s my view. Don’t see how in b-b-bloody hell he could pull it off. M-m-michael York’s not a gentleman, is he, old boy?”
Yevgeny had been servicing SASHA’s dead drops on the average of once every three or four weeks with such regularity that the possibility of home leave had never crossed his mind. Then one night, a month or so before his reunion with Philby, he’d strung the antenna from picture frame hooks on the walls of his tiny apartment over the garage in Tysons Corner and had tuned the General Electric clock radio to Radio Moscow’s 11 P.M. English-language shortwave quiz program. When he recognized one of his personal code phrases—“I don’
t like belonging to another person’s dream”—he had subtracted the serial number of his lucky ten-dollar bill from the winning lottery number and had wound up with a Washington phone number. At the stroke of midnight he had dialed it from an outdoor pay phone in a local shopping center. The ancient woman who spoke English with a thick Eastern European accent had answered immediately.
“Gene?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Ah, dear boy”—he could hear her exhaling in relief—“it is a comfort to hear your voice, a comfort to know that you are alive and well.”
As a matter of pure tradecraft Yevgeny never liked to stay on the telephone too long; you couldn’t be sure who might be listening in, who might be tracing the call. But his cutout to the rezident had wanted to talk. And he liked the sound of her voice.
“Do you realize, dear Gene, that this will be our seventeenth conversation in twenty-three years?”
Yevgeny had laughed. “I wasn’t counting, to tell the truth.”
“I was,” the woman had said emphatically. “You are all I do, Gene—you are the reason I remain in this godforsaken America. Sometimes I think you are the reason I remain alive. Seventeen conversations in twenty-three years! After each telephone call I am obliged to relocate—to move to another address and another phone number. And I settle in and wait to be contacted; wait to be told you will be calling; wait to be instructed what information to pass on to you.”
“You are a vital link—” Yevgeny started to say, but the woman rushed on.
“Over the years I have come to feel as if I know you, Gene. I have come to think of you as the son I lost to the fascists in Poland a lifetime ago.”
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry for that—“
The woman must have realized that she had been running on. “You must pardon me, Gene—the truth is I am quite alone in the world. The only times I am not alone is when I speak with you.” She cleared her throat abruptly. “I am, I beg you to believe me, very grieved to be the bearer of distressing news. Your father had surgery ten days ago—two knee operations to correct a condition which, uncorrected, would have left him confined to a wheelchair. The anesthesia lasted seven hours. His heart must have been weaker than the surgeons thought because, two days later, he suffered a stroke. His right side is paralyzed. He can hear but he cannot speak. Your mentor, the Old Man, arranged to be alone with him and told him at long last what you were doing. It appears that your father, hearing this, opened his eyes and nodded with pleasure. He was elated to learn that you were following in his footsteps, and—like me, I may add—extraordinarily proud of you.”
Cornered in a foul-smelling phone booth, Yevgeny had started to sort through emotions; he had discovered that the principal emotion was a lack of emotion where there should have been one. He had never loved his father, had barely liked him; he felt closer to the unidentified woman speaking to him on the phone than to his own father. Now that he himself was leading the shadowy life of an undercover agent, he could understand that his father—who had worked undercover for the KGB, for Starik, while posted to the United Nations Secretariat—must have had strong nerves and a certain amount of courage. “For Gene, from his Dad, on his eighth birthday,” the handwritten message on the lucky ten-dollar bill read. As far as Yevgeny could remember, Alexsandr Timofeyivich Tsipin had never given him anything in his life other than criticism: when he did badly at school he had been told he should have done well; when he did well he had been told he should have done better. End of conversation.
“Gene, are you on the line?”
“I’m still here.”
“Please bear with me if I talk business at such a moment.”
“Life goes on.”
“Oh, it must, mustn’t it?” the woman had agreed with quivering vehemence. “There can be no turning back, no alternative but to go forward with the work in progress. We are, both of us, the servants of history.”
“I never thought otherwise.”
“Given the precarious state of your father’s health, given other considerations which neither you nor I can be party to, your mentor has decided that this is a convenient moment for you to return for home leave. Do you hear me, Gene? You are long overdue for a vacation—“
Yevgeny had almost laughed into the phone. The mere mention of a vacation had made it seem as if he held a dull nine-to-five job at a bank. “I’m not sure…It’s been twenty-three years…”
“Oh, dear boy, you must not be afraid to go home.”
“You’re right, of course. In any case I always follow the suggestions of my mentor. Tell me what I must do.”
The extraction had been simple enough: Yevgeny had packed a beat-up valise, spit over his shoulder for luck, then sat on the valise for a moment before heading for the airport and a charter flight to Paris. From there he had caught an overnight train across central Europe to Vienna, then (using a Canadian passport with a new identity) a Hungarian steamer down the Danube to Budapest. In a Pest tearoom near the quai, the Allamvédelmi Hatóság, the Hungarian secret police, had handed him on to the local KGB rezidentura, which had provided him with an Australian passport and had put him aboard an Aeroflot flight bound for Moscow. A black Zil with two men in civilian clothes standing next to it had been waiting at the curb when Yevgeny emerged from the passenger terminal at Sheremetyevo International. One of the men stepped forward and relieved Yevgeny of his valise. “The general polkovnik is waiting for you,” he said.
Forty-five minutes later the car had turned onto the narrow road with a sign at the edge reading “Center for Study—No Admittance.” The armed guards at the small brick gatehouse had waved the car through. Up ahead, at the end of the gravel driveway, loomed the Apatov Mansion that Yevgeny had first come to in the early 1950s. Three little girls in loose-fitting bathing suits were splashing around in a small plastic pool. Their shrieks of pleasure had echoed across the manicured lawns. Moments later, Pavel Semyonovich Zhilov himself had pulled open the second floor door leading to his apartment and had drawn Yevgeny into an awkward embrace.
“Welcome back, Yevgeny Alexandrovich,” he murmured. “Welcome home.”
“Home,” Yevgeny repeated. “The trip back, being here, has the unreal quality of a dream to me.”
Starik had grown more brittle with the passage of time. The skin on his face and neck and on the back of his long peasant hands had become spotted and leathery. His once-pewter beard had turned white and grown sparser. But the flame in his brooding eyes was just as Yevgeny remembered; when his eyes narrowed intently and he concentrated, he made you think he could light the wick of a candle by merely staring at it.
“You have served our cause, and me, nobly,” Starik was saying as he led Yevgeny through several rooms to the spacious wood-paneled library filled with hundreds of leather-covered volumes and several dozen small gold- and silver-inlaid icons.
Two little girls in short cotton dresses were squatting on the parquet playing pick-up- sticks. “Oh, it did move, I swear it,” one of them whined. Frowning, she looked up. “Do stop Axinya from cheating, Uncle.”
“Out, away from here, the both of you,” Starik cried playfully, waving toward the door, swatting Axinya on the rump to hurry her along as they scampered past him. “Peace and quiet at last,” he said to Yevgeny. Pointing to a seat across from him at the large wooden table in the center of the room, he filled two glasses with Narzan mineral water, added a twist of lemon and pushed one across to his guest. “I salute you,” he said, raising his glass in toast. “Few have been as unwavering and as unselfish in the service of our great crusade, few have contributed more to the struggle to preserve and promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit. Few have been as true as you to the vision we share in the capacity of the human race, once freed from capitalist exploitation and alienation, to create a truly egalitarian society.”
“Few are given the opportunity to serve,” Yevgeny declared.
Starik moistened his lips with the mineral water. “Y
ou are certain to be exhausted—“
Yevgeny smiled. “I’m getting my second wind.”
“When you have had time to settle in—there is an apartment at your disposal on the Lenin Hills—we will talk about operational matters at great length. For now, I would like to ask you…”
When Starik seemed to hesitate, Yevgeny said, “Please ask anything you like.”
Starik bent forward, his eyes burning into Yevgeny’s. “What is it like?” he inquired in a solemn voice.
“What is what like?”
“America. What is America really like? I have been to the German Democratic Republic and to Cuba and, once, to Canada, but never to America. Everything I know about that country comes to me filtered. And so I ask you, Yevgeny: describe America to me.”
It struck Yevgeny as a strange question, coming from a man who had access to all kinds of secret intelligence documents; who could read the daily translation of the New York Times circulated by the KGB. “Americans are a great people,” Yevgeny began, “trapped in a terrible system that brings out the worst in them, in the same sense that our system brings out the best in us. The capitalist system emphasizes acquisition and accumulation. People are conditioned to judge themselves and others by the quantity of material wealth they possess; as they know others will judge them the same way, they have a predisposition to flaunt the symbols of their material wealth. This explains the preoccupation, on almost every level of society, with trophies—large and flashy automobiles, diamond engagement rings, Rolex wristwatches, younger and slimmer second wives, suntans in the winter, designer clothing, the psychoanalyst’s couch.”
“And how would you describe the attitude of Americans toward life in general?”
“They laugh at the drop of a hat, and loudly, which I take to mean that they are frightened.”
“Of?”
“Frightened of losing everything they have accumulated, I suppose. Frightened, as a country, of not being the biggest and the best. Nothing in recent years has had more of an impact on the American psyche than when we put Yuri Gagarin into orbit before their John Glenn.”
The Company Page 74