The Company

by Robert Littell

  Feet pounded up the gravel path behind them.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Sergei.”

  “Me, also, I am being sorry, Manny.”

  There was a glint of smugness in the inquisitor’s unblinking eyes, a know-itall smirk on his colorless lips. “We have been led to believe,” he said in flawless English, “that a CIA officer taken into custody is authorized to answer three questions—his name, his pay grade and his parking space number at Langley.” A thin, middle-aged functionary with a shaven head, steel-rimmed spectacles and bad teeth, he came around to Manny’s side of the large table and stared down at him. “Your name, or at least the one you gave to the traitor Kukushkin, I know. I can take an educated guess as to your pay grade—given your age, given that you were designated to be the controlling officer of the traitor Kukushkin, you are probably GS-15, which is the highest grade for a middle-level CIA officer and roughly equivalent to a colonel in the army. But tell me, if you please, what is your parking space number?”

  Curiously, the fact of his arrest had given Manny a measure of liberation. The worst had happened—it was to be regretted but no longer dreaded. Now he understood what his father had meant when he said that he felt as if he had been sucked into the eye of the hurricane; Manny, too, discovered that the pulse pounding in his temple, the thoughts tearing through his skull, the rotation of the earth on its axis, had all slowed down. Looking up at the inquisitor, he managed a tight smile. “I want to speak to someone from the American embassy,” he announced.

  One of the several telephones on the table rang shrilly. Returning to his seat, the Russian plucked the phone off of its hook. He listened for a moment, murmured “Bolshoe spasibo,” and hung up. He leaned back in the wooden swivel chair, his hands folded behind his head. Light from the overhead fixture glinted off his spectacles like a Morse signal; Manny supposed that if he could decode the message it wouldn’t be good news. “I will tell you something you already know,” the inquisitor said. “The telephone number K 4-89-73 rings in the American embassy guard room manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week by US Marines.”

  Manny understood that the interrogation had taken an ominous turn. His inquisitor could only have gotten the phone number from Kukushkin, which suggested that Sergei had been forced to talk. “The United States and the Soviet Union are obliged by international treaty to allow embassy officials access to citizens who are detained—” Manny started to say.

  “You are not detained, my friend.” The man’s tone had turned patronizing. “You are arrested for espionage. You will be prosecuted and convicted of espionage. The Procurator will demand the supreme penalty. Whether the judge sentences you to execution by hanging will depend on the degree to which you cooperate with our investigative organs.”

  “If you’re trying to frighten me you’ve certainly succeeded,” Manny admitted. He was absolutely determined to play innocent, not only for his own sake but for Kukushkin’s. “Listen, I am who I say I am. If you took the trouble to check up on Immanuel Bridges, you would see that.”

  The inquisitor seemed to enjoy the game. “Tell me again what you were doing in the cemetery of the Novodievitchi Monastery?”

  “I lost sight of my group during a visit to GUM—“

  The Russian rummaged through papers in a file folder. “Trailblazer Travel.”

  “Trailblazer. Exactly. Look, I’ll admit something to you—I lost the group because I was trying to change US dollars on the black market. There was a guy in the GUM doorway. His name was Pavlusha.”

  “Did you change dollars?”

  “No. He was only offering three rubles to the dollar. A waiter at the hotel had mentioned the possibility of four to a dollar—“

  “Three is the correct black market exchange rate. The story of the waiter offering you four-for-one is invented. I know this because the waiters and waitresses all work for our service—when they exchange money at black-market rates or sell caviar, it is reported to us.”

  “Maybe some of the waiters free-lance.”

  The inquisitor only smiled. “What happened after you lost touch with your group?”

  “To tell the truth, I wasn’t sorry. The tour is too organized for my taste. We never get to talk to any honest-to-God Russians. So I decided to strike out on my own for the rest of the day. I took the subway to Kropotkinskaya and walked over to the Pushkin Museum. After that I decided to see the famous tombs in the Novodievitchi cemetery—Stalin’s wife, Bulgakov, Chekhov, Gogol.”

  “And Khrushchev.”

  “Right. Khrushchev.”

  “And you happened to strike up a conversation with a man who was passing next to the tomb of Khrushchev. And this man, by a complete coincidence, turned out to be the traitor Kukushkin.”

  Manny retorted, “He wasn’t wearing a nametag that said ‘the traitor Kukushkin.’ He was just a guy who happened to be there and spoke English. And so we chatted for a few minutes.”

  “About what?”

  “When he realized I was a foreigner he asked what my impressions were of the Soviet Union.”

  “When he saw the police and the militia coming toward him he tried to escape, and you fled with him.”

  “Put yourself in my shoes,” Manny pleaded. “I was talking to a complete stranger. Then suddenly I see an armed gang heading my way and the stranger starts to run. I thought I was going to get mugged so I ran with him. How was I to know these people were policemen?”

  “You and the traitor Kukushkin conversed in English.”

  “English. Right.”

  “Vui gavorite po-Russki?”

  Manny shook his head. “I studied Russian at Yale. For one year, actually. I can catch a word here and there but I don’t speak it.”

  “The traitor Kukushkin told us you speak fluent Russian.”

  “I want to talk to someone from the American embassy.”

  “Who at the embassy do you want to see? The Chief of Station Trillby?”

  Manny glanced around the room, which was on the top floor of Lubyanka and spacious and filled with functional wooden furniture. The jailer who had brought him up from the cell, a bruiser wearing a crisp blue uniform at least one size too small for his bulky body, stood with his back to the wall and his arms folded across his chest. The windows were double-glazed and barred on the outside. A portrait of Lenin and another of KGB Chairman Andropov hung on the wall over a sideboard containing a samovar and bottles of mineral water. Looking back at the Russian, Manny played dumb. “I don’t know anyone at the embassy by name or title, so I don’t know whom you’re talking about.”

  The Russian nodded to himself as if he were savoring a good joke. His inter-office buzzer sounded. The melodious voice of a woman could be heard saying, “Comrade Arkiangelskiy is here.”

  “Send him in,” the Russian ordered. He eyed Manny across the table, shook his head and smiled again. “The game is up, my friend.”

  The door to the office opened and a short man dressed in the white coveralls of a technician pushed a dolly into the room. On it was a bulky tape-recorder. He wheeled the dolly up to the table, then unraveled the electric cord and plugged it into a wall socket. Straightening, he turned to the inquisitor, who said, “Play the tape for him.”

  The technician bent over the machine and pressed a button. The tape began to whir through the playback head and onto the pickup spool. At first the sound was muffled. The technician turned up the volume and increased the treble. A voice became audible. The entire conversation was in Russian.

  “…would debrief me in the apartment of the Ept woman who worked for the Patent Office.”

  “What about the patents that you gave to the rezident?”

  “Manny supplied them.”

  “Did he give you money?”

  “Never. Not a penny. He offered to organize medical treatment for my wife’s heart condition. I accepted that—“

  “Did he promise to give you money when you defected?”

  “There was talk of
compensation but that wasn’t why I—“

  “What were your motivations?”

  Kukushkin could be heard laughing bitterly. “The Americans were also interested in my motivation.”

  “You haven’t responded to the question.”

  “The system under which we live is inefficient and corrupt, the people who preside over this system are unscrupulous. They are only interested in one thing, which is power. It is not an accident that our word for power—vlast—is also our word for authority.”

  “And this distorted reasoning induced you to betray your country?”

  Kukushkin muttered something unintelligible.

  “Of course you betrayed your country. You betrayed its secrets, you betrayed the operatives who are defending it into the hands of the Central Intelligence—“

  “Fast forward to the rendezvous in the cemetery,” the inquisitor ordered.

  Manny said, “Why are you playing this for me? I don’t understand a word he’s saying.”

  Hunched in his chair, concentrating on the tape recorder, the inquisitor remarked, “You understand every word.”

  The technician hit the fast-forward button and regarded the numbers on the counter. When it reached the place he wanted he pressed “Play.” Kukushkin’s voice came on in mid-sentence. “…primary meeting place in the Pushkin Museum at noon on the second and fourth Tuesday of any given month. I went there immediately before the appointed hour but decided it was too crowded. Manny arrived at the secondary meeting place, the tomb of Nikita Khrushchev in the Novodievitchi cemetery. There were nine people in the cemetery but they looked innocent enough and so I went ahead with the meeting.”

  “What did the American tell you?”

  “That the CIA could smuggle my wife and myself and our daughter out of the Soviet Union from the Crimea.”

  “How were you to get in touch with the CIA if you decided to accept?”

  “I was to call a phone number in Moscow—K 4-89-73—and cough twice and hang up. This would activate the primary meeting place in the Pushkin Museum and the secondary meeting place next to Khrushchev’s tomb in the Novodievitchi cemetery on the second or fourth Tuesday of every month.”

  The inquisitor waved his hand and the technician touched another button, cutting off the recording. He unplugged the electric cord and rolled it up and, pushing the cart ahead of him, left the room.

  “As you yourself can see, the traitor Kukushkin has admitted to everything,” the Russian told Manny. “He has agreed to plead guilty in the trial that will start in a week’s time. With this in mind, would you care to make an official declaration that will relieve the judge of the obligation of imposing the maximum sentence when you come to trial?”

  “Yeah,” Manny said. “I guess I ought to.” He spotted the smirk creeping back onto the inquisitor’s lips. “Hotel–twenty-three.”

  The Russian’s eyes flashed with triumph. “Ah, that must be your parking space number at Langley.”

  Curled up in the eye of his storm, Manny thought of the story that had plagued him as far back as he could remember—the one about his father telling the Hungarian interrogators to go to hell. He had heard it as a child, had memorized it and repeated it to himself whenever he found himself in a tight corner. “Hotel—twenty-three is the space assigned to me in the parking lot two blocks down from 44 Wall Street,” he said. “Which is where I work when I’m not dumb enough to come as a tourist to the Soviet Union.”

  For Manny, time slipped past in a series of hazy and curiously detached vignettes. Basic training on The Farm—he’d been locked in an icy room and deprived of food, water and sleep for several wintery days—had not prepared him for the hard reality of a KGB prison. The anxiety he felt wasn’t a result of physical abuse (the KGB actually did lay on a bare minimum of creature comforts); it came from the stifling uncertainty of what would happen next, and how the game would play out. He was decently fed and allowed to shower daily and questioned again and again; the sessions with the persistent inquisitor sometimes lasted into the early hours of the morning, at which point Manny would be led back to his cell and permitted to sleep for six hours. Two days after his arrest he was taken to a room to talk to a Miss Crainworth, who flashed a laminated card identifying her as a vice-counsel from the American embassy. She reported that the Secretary of State had summoned the Soviet embassador in Washington and demanded an explanation for the arrest of an American tourist. The Russians, the vice-counsel explained, were claiming that Manny was an officer of the CIA sent to Moscow to contact a recently returned diplomat who had defected to the American side in the States. The CIA had vehemently denied that it employed anyone named Immanuel Bridges or had had any contact with a Soviet diplomat named Kukushkin. Miss Crainworth said that the embassy had hired an English-speaking Soviet attorney to represent him.

  The attorney, whose name was Robespierre Pravdin, was permitted to spend an hour with his client that evening. Pravdin, an anxious man with a facial twitch and sour breath, assured Manny that the Soviet system of justice would be lenient with him if he admitted what the KGB could prove: that he was, in fact, an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. When Manny persisted in his denials, Pravdin told him, “I have seen a typescript of the traitor Kukushkin’s confession, which implicates you. I will be able to help you get a lighter sentence only if you plead guilty and throw yourself on the mercy of the court.”

  The next morning Manny was roused from a deep sleep as daylight penetrated the open slit of a window high in the wall of his cell. He was permitted to shave with an East German electric razor that worked on batteries and given a clean pair of trousers and shirt. Sitting on the edge of the bunk waiting for the guards to fetch him, he stared at the small porthole to the world high above his head, listening to the jeers and catcalls of prisoners kicking around a soccer ball in the courtyard below. A conversation he’d had with his father when he was very young came back to him; he could hear his father’s voice in his ear and he smiled at the memory. They’d been returning to Manhattan on the subway after an outing to Coney Island.

  Mommy says you work for a Center Intelligence Agency. She says that’s why you spend so much time outside America.

  I work for the American government—

  So what kind of stuff do you do for the government?

  I help protect America from its enemies.

  Why does America have enemies?

  Not every country sees eye to eye on things.

  What things?

  Things like the existence of different political parties, things like honest trials and free elections, things like the freedom of newspapers to publish what they want, things like the right of people to criticize the government without going to jail. Things like that.

  When I grow up, I’m going to protect America from its enemies same as you—if it still has any.

  “When I grow up,” Manny said aloud. He didn’t finish the sentence because he knew the cell would be bugged.

  Soon afterward Manny was handcuffed and taken down in a freight elevator to a basement garage. There he was seated between two guards in the back of a closed bread delivery van, which drove up a ramp, threaded its way through traffic and eventually came to stop in another basement garage. He was escorted up a fire staircase to the second-floor holding room, where his handcuffs were removed and he was offered coffee and a dry doughnut. Before long Pravdin and the vice-counsel Crainworth turned up. Pravdin explained that the traitor Kukushkin’s trial was about to start; that there was a possibility Manny would be summoned as a witness. Pravdin removed his eyeglasses, fogged the lenses with his foul breath and wiped the lenses on the tip of his tie. Manny’s chances of eventually being treated leniently by the Soviet judicial system, he repeated, depended on his cooperating with the prosecution in the Kukushkin case. Manny stuck to his cover story. Miss Crainworth, clearly in over her head, merely looked from one to the other as if she were watching a ping-pong match.

  At five minutes to ten Man
ny was escorted into what looked like a ball-room, an enormous high-ceilinged chamber with glittering chandeliers and white Corinthian columns set against light blue walls. On one side were rows of plain wooden benches filled with working-class people who looked uncomfortable in city clothing. Several seemed to know who he was and pointed him out to the others when he entered. Flashbulbs exploded in his face as he was steered into a pew with a brass railing around it. Pravdin, the muscles in his cheeks atwitch, settled into a seat in front of him. Miss Crainworth squeezed onto a front-row bench and opened a notebook on her lap. Two judges in dark suits sat behind a long table on a raised stage. At the stroke of ten the accused appeared through a narrow door at the back of a wire enclosure. Kukushkin, surrounded by KGB security troops in tunics and peaked caps, looked gaunt and dazed. His face was expressionless, his eyes tired and puffy; he closed them for long periods and conveyed the impression of someone who was sleepwalking. He was dressed in rumpled suit and tie and, judging from the mincing steps he took when he entered the courtroom, wearing ankle cuffs. At one point he looked in Manny’s direction but gave no indication that he recognized him. There was an angry murmur from the crowd when Kukushkin turned up in the prisoner’s box. Flashbulbs burst, causing him to raise a forearm over his eyes. One of the guards gripped his wrist and pried it away. The chief judge, wearing a black robe and a red felt cap, appeared from a door at the back of the stage. Everyone in the courtroom stood. Manny was nudged to his feet. The chief judge, a white-haired man with red-rimmed eyes and the jowls of a heavy drinker, took his place between the assistant judges. “Sadityes pojalusta,” the bailiff called. The audience on the benches, along with the lawyers and stenographers settled onto their seats. The security troops guarding the prisoners continued to stand. The State Procurator, a young man wearing a beautifully-tailored blue suit, climbed to his feet and began to read the charges against Kukushkin.