Leo shook his head. “They had nothing to gain and everything to lose by revealing that they’d been penetrated, and on such a high level. The press would have had a field day, heads would have rolled, budgets would have been cut, for all I know the CIA might have been broken up. At one point early on the Centre proposed to trot me out in front of the international press to embarrass the Company, but I managed to talk them out of it—I made them understand that they couldn’t count on my cooperating with the debriefers if they went public. Since then the CIA has taken in a handful of KGB defectors without publicly rubbing it in, so I suppose it’s a standoff.”
“Do you hear from your family?”
For a while Leo didn’t respond. “Sorry—what did you say?”
“Your family, the twins—have you been in touch with them?”
“Both girls quit the Company in the aftermath of my…retirement. Vanessa flatly refuses to have anything to do with me. My ex-wife became an alcoholic—one winter night, Adelle drank herself senseless and curled up in a hole on a hill in Maryland not far from where we’d buried my dog and her cat the day we met. A farmer found her body covered with snow the next morning. Vanessa said it was all my fault, which it obviously was, and swore she’d never communicate with me again as long as she lived. She married and had a baby boy, which I suppose makes me a grandfather. I wrote her a letter of congratulations but she never replied. Tessa got a job in Washington covering intelligence agencies for Newsweek. She married a journalist and divorced him three years later. She writes me every month or so and keeps me up to date. I’ve encouraged her to come over for a visit but she says she’s not ready for that yet. I keep hoping Tessa will turn up at my door one day.” Leo caught his breath. “I miss the twins…”
The two concentrated on the zakuski. Yevgeny refilled their glasses with vodka. “What’s your personal life like?” he asked Leo.
“I read a great deal. I became friendly with a woman who illustrates children’s books—she’s a widow. We keep company, as they used to say in America. When the weather permits we go for long walks. I’ve gotten to know Moscow quite well. I read Pravda every day, which improves my Russian and instructs me on what Gorbachev’s been up to the last twenty-four hours.”
“What do you think of him?”
“Gorbachev?” Leo reflected for a moment. “He’s made an enormous difference—he was the first person to openly challenge the Communist establishment and eat away at the power of the Party and build up democratic institutions. But I can’t figure out whether he wants to reform the Communist Party or eventually do away with it.”
“They want to patch it so that it lasts until their careers are over,” Yevgeny guessed “They want an office to go to when they wake up in the morning.”
“I wish Gorbachev were a better judge of people,” Leo said. “He surrounds himself with right-wingers whom I don’t trust—Kryuchkov, the KGB chairman, for instance.”
“The Minister of Defense, Yazov, the Interior Minister, Pugo—I wouldn’t trust them either,” Yevgeny said. “For me, for the new class of entrepreneurs, Gorbachev is the lynchpin to economic reform. If he’s overthrown it will set Russia back fifty years.”
“Someone ought to warn him—“
“He has been warned,” Yevgeny said. “I heard that Boris Yeltsin specifically alerted him to the possibility of a right-wing coup, but Gorbachev despises Yeltsin and doesn’t believe anything that comes from him.”
“Gorbachev doesn’t know who his real friends are,” Leo said.
“Well, you can’t say we don’t live in fascinating times,” Yevgeny declared with a low laugh. “I heard on the car radio that the Americans are pulverizing Saddam Hussein’s army. Do you think they would have gone to war if the principal export of Kuwait was carrots instead of oil?” He raised his glass and clinked it against Leo’s. “Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!”
Leo smiled. For an instant he almost seemed happy. “To the success of our hopeless task!”
Later, outside in the street, Yevgeny signalled for his car. Down the block a polished black BMW backed off the sidewalk onto the street and drew up parallel to the curb. A man with a livid scar running from his ear to his jaw jumped out of the passenger seat and held open the back door.
“Let me drop you someplace,” Yevgeny offered.
“I think I’ll walk back,” Leo said. “I lead a very sedentary life. I could use the exercise.”
“I hope our paths cross again,” Yevgeny said.
Leo studied his friend’s face. “I never asked you—are you married?”
Yevgeny shook his head. “There was someone once—but too much time has passed, too much water has flowed under the bridge.”
“You could try to pick up where you left off. Do you know where she is?”
“I read about her in the newspapers from time to time—she is one of the reformers around Yeltsin. In certain circles—amongst the reformers, in the ranks of the KGB—she is quite well known.”
“Get in touch with her.”
Yevgeny kicked at a tire. “She wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
“You never know, Yevgeny.”
When Yevgeny looked up, a sad half-smile was disfiguring his lips. “I know.”
“Turn onto the Ring Road,” Yevgeny told the driver. “There’s less traffic at this time of day.”
He melted back into the leather of the seat and watched the shabby automobiles and shabby buses and shabby buildings parade past the window. At a red light, the BMW pulled up next to a Saab with a chauffeur and a bodyguard up front and two small boys in the back. The sight of the children liberated a flood of memories. As children, Yevgeny and his brother, Grinka, had often been driven out to the dacha in Peredelkino in his father’s shiny Volga. My God, he thought, where have all those years gone to? Nowadays, when he shaved in the morning, he caught himself staring at the image that peered back at him from the mirror. Its face seemed only vaguely familiar, a distant cousin from the Tsipin side of the family tree with a suggestion of his father’s high forehead and squint and stubby chin. How was it possible to be sixty-two years old? Leo, who had always appeared younger than his years, had aged. But Yevgeny, to his own eye, had actually grown old.
In the front of the BMW, Yevgeny’s driver and the bodyguard were busy trashing Gorbachev. It wasn’t his economic or political reforms that annoyed them so much as the sukhoi zakon—the dry laws he’d put into effect to reduce chronic alcoholism in the workplace and boost production. On Gorbachev’s orders vodka factories had been shut down, grapevines in Georgia and Moldavia had been bulldozed. “Under Brezhnev,” the driver remembered, “the standard half-liter bottle of vodka was three rubles sixty-two. The price never went up and it never went down, not so much as a kopeck. It got so that you didn’t use the word vodka—you asked for a three sixty-two and everyone knew what you were talking about. Today people who work in factories can’t even afford ersatz vodka—“
Yevgeny asked jokingly, “How can a Russian get through the day without vodka?”
The bodyguard with the livid scar on his face twisted around in his seat. “They concoct substitutes, Yevgeny Alexandrovich,” he said.
“Tell him the recipes,” the driver insisted.
“In Afghanistan, we used to mix one hundred grams of Zhigulev beer, thirty grams of Sadko the Rich Merchant brand shampoo, seventy grams of a Pakistani anti-dandruff shampoo and twenty grams of insect repellent. The result was rotgut but it would take your mind off the war. The trick was to drink it in quick gulps, otherwise you could burn your throat.”
The driver called over his shoulder, “I have a friend in the militia who says the kids have taken to eating shoe polish sandwiches.”
“And what is a shoe polish sandwich?” Yevgeny asked.
“You spread shoe polish on a thick slice of white bread—“
“If you can find white bread,” quipped the bodyguard.
“You let it sit for fifteen minutes whi
le the bread absorbs the alcohol in the shoe polish. Then you skim off as much of the shoe polish as you can and eat the bread. They say four slices will put you out of your misery for the day.”
The bodyguard glanced over his shoulder again. “Brown shoe polish is supposed to be the best,” he added.
“Thanks for the tip,” Yevgeny remarked dryly.
The two men in the front seats grinned. Yevgeny leaned forward and tapped the driver on the arm. “Turn right after the light—the clinic is on the right at the end of the block.”
The private KGB clinic, set back from the street with a tarnished gold hammer and sickle over the revolving door, was a dingy four-story brick building with a solarium on the roof. Inside, sounds—plaintive cries for a nurse, the shrill ringing of telephones, cryptic announcements on the public address system—echoed through the enormous domed entrance hall. Both elevators were out of order, so Yevgeny climbed the fire staircase to the fourth floor. Two peasant women wearing layers of sweaters and rubber boots were mopping the corridor with filthy water. Yevgeny knocked once on the door with a scrap of paper taped to it marked “Zhilov, Pavel Semyonovich,” then opened it and looked inside. The room—there was a metal hospital bed, a night table, mustard-color paint peeling from the walls, a toilet without a lid and two sleet-streaked windows without shades or blinds—was unoccupied. Yevgeny woke the nurse dozing at a desk at the end of the corridor. She ran her painted thumbnail down a list and pointed with her chin toward the roof. “He is taking the sun,” she said sullenly.
About thirty or so former KGB employees, all of them old and ill, were scattered around one end of the rooftop solarium—the other end was filled with drafts from the panes that had been broken in a hailstorm the previous winter and never repaired. Yevgeny found Starik slumped in a wheelchair, his wispy white beard on his chest, his eyes closed. A tattered blanket with dried vomit stains had slipped down around his ankles and nobody had bothered to tuck it back up to his gaunt neck. Transparent tubes from an intravenous drip suspended from a jury-rigged bar attached to the back of the wheelchair disappeared through a slit in his sweatshirt into a catheter implanted in his chest. From behind the wheelchair came the soft hum of a battery-powered pump. Nearby, two retired KGB colonels who would have groveled before Starik in his prime played backgammon, slamming the checkers down onto the wooden board, indifferent to the racket they were making.
Yevgeny studied the man in the wheelchair. Whoever took responsibility for the intensive-care patients had stripped him of whatever dignity was left to him after he had been diagnosed with primitive arterial pulmonary hypertension and, barely able to breath as his lungs filled with fluid, rushed to the clinic the previous month. Starik was dressed in a pair of faded red sweat pants and a soiled white sweatshirt. There were fresh urine stains around his crotch. As if mocking his glorious record of services to the Motherland, four medals were pinned to his chest. Yevgeny recognized the rosettes—there was the Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of Alexandr Nevsky, the Order of the Red Star. When his father had been dying in the Kremlin clinic, Yevgeny remembered turning away to hide his lack of emotion. But even in decrepitude, the Tolstoyan figure of Starik managed to stir feelings in him.
Yevgeny squatted next to the wheelchair and pulled the blanket up around his mentor’s armpits. “Pavel Semyonovich,” he whispered.
Starik’s eyes twitched open. He stared at his visitor in bewilderment. His jaw trembled when he realized who it was. “Yevgeny Alexandrovich,” he mumbled through one side of his half-paralyzed mouth. Each intake of breath was accompanied by a pained rasp. “Tell me if you can…do cats eat bats…do bats eat cats?”
“Are you feeling any better?” Yevgeny inquired. As soon as he said it he realized what a stupid question it was.
Starik nodded yes but muttered the word no. “Life is torment…since they inject me with this French drug Flolan twenty-four hours a day, I have lost all appetite…unable eat…mealtimes they push carts past my open door… the smell of food nauseates me.”
“I will speak to the director—“
“That’s not worst.” Between phrases sickening sounds gurgled up from the back of Starik’s throat. “I am washed…shaved…diaper changed… ass wiped…by grown women who bathe once a month and menstruate… their body odors are unbearable.” A tear welled in the corner of one of his bloodshot eyes. “The night nurse is a zhid…she flaunts her name… Abramovna…Oh, where…where have my girlies gone to?”
“They were put in orphanages when you took sick.”
One of the KGB colonels rolled double sixes and roared with triumph as he cleared his last pieces off the board.
Grasping Yevgeny’s wrist, Starik swayed toward his visitor. “Is Cold War still being waged?” he demanded.
“It is winding down,” Yevgeny said.
“Who will be seen as the victor?”
“History will record that the Principal Adversary, America, won the Cold War.”
Startled, Starik tightened his grip on Yevgeny’s wrist. “How can this be? We won every battle…beat them at every turn…Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Kritzky—endless list.” Starik swung his skeletal head from side to side in dismay. “Tolstoy turning in grave…Communism betrayed by the Jews.” He gasped for breath. “Cold War may be winding down…but there is an end game. In Tolstoy’s story, the death of the horse KHOLSTOMER serves a purpose—the she-wolf and her cubs feed off of his carcass. We, also, will feed off what is left of KHOLSTOMER. Essential for us to—“
His breath gave out and he wheezed dangerously for a moment. Yevgeny was on the verge of shouting for a doctor when Starik regained control of himself. “Essential to look beyond Communism…to nationalism and purification…must get rid of the Jews once and for all…finish what Hitler started.” Starik’s eyes blazed with wrath. “I have had contacts with…people have come to see me…messages have been exchanged…I have given out your name, Yevgeny Alexandrovich…someone will be in touch.” His slender reserve of energy spent, Starik collapsed back into the wheel chair. “Do you still recall…Tolstoy’s last words?”
“The truth—I care a great deal,” Yevgeny murmured.
Starik blinked several times, pressing tears out onto his parchment-brittle cheeks. “That will serve as a code phrase…whoever speaks it…comes to you with my blessing.”
Looking like a Swiss banker in his three-piece Armani, Yevgeny worked the room.
“Happy you could make it, Arkhip,” he told one of the senior economists from the Central Bank, pumping his hand. He lowered his voice. “How determined is Gorbachev to support the ruble?”
“He’s going to hold the line as long as he can,” the economist said. “The big question mark is inflation.”
“Inflation has an upside,” noted an aide to the Minister of Finance who overheard the conversation. “It weeds out the factories and businesses and banks that don’t have the resources or the will to adapt. It’s like Mao’s Long March—only the strongest survive. Which means that they are better able to cope with the capitalist reality that is imposing itself on the Socialist model.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Yevgeny conceded. “On the other hand, a lot of the new entrepreneurs are struggling to keep their heads above water.”
“Congratulations, Yevgeny Alexandrovich,” gushed a tall man who kept a forefinger on his hearing aide. He carried the business section of Izvestia folded into his jacket pocket. “My father and I wish you every success with your Greater Russian Bank of Commerce.”
“Thank you, Fedya Semyonovich,” Yevgeny said. “I am sorry your father could not make it today. I would like to talk to you both about the hard-currency services we plan to offer import-export companies.”
Several waitresses carrying trays filled with triangles of white bread covered with black caviar from the Caspian Sea threaded their way through the crowded ballroom that Yevgeny had rented for the afternoon. Wondering how many in the room knew about the
existence of shoe polish sandwiches, Yevgeny plucked a triangle from a passing doily and popped it into his mouth. He helped himself to another glass of French Champagne from the long table and looked around. In front of the thick curtains drawn across a high window, two very elegant women in low-cut cocktail dresses were holding court, surrounded by semicircle of men. Yevgeny recognized the older of the two women—she was the wife of a notorious press baron, Pavel Uritzky. Making his way across the room, he leaned toward her and grazed the back of her gloved hand with his lips. A painful image rushed to his skull—he could make out the bird-like figure of Aida Tannenbaum peering up at him through watery eyes in the Barbizon lounge some seven years earlier. Shaking off the vision, he shook hands with the other woman and each of the men. “We are all in agreement,” one of them told Yevgeny, “Russia must have massive doses of outside investment in order to survive. The problem is how to attract capital, given the political and monetary uncertainty—“
“Gorbachev is responsible for both,” the older woman said flatly. “If only we had an iron hand on the helm…”
“If she had her way, Mathilde would have us go back to the Brezhnev era,” one of the men said with a laugh.
“As long as we are going back, I would have us return to the Stalin era,” the woman maintained. “People conveniently forget that the economy worked under Stalin. The shelves in the stores were filled. Nobody went hungry. Everyone who wanted to work was employed.”
“True, nobody in Moscow went hungry,” one of the men said. “But it was different in the countryside. Remember the old aphorism: The shortage shall be divided among the peasants.”
“Under Stalin there was no dissent,” a man said. “Nowadays, there are twenty opinions on every matter under the sun.”
“There was no dissent,” Yevgeny remarked, “because the Gulag camps were filled with the dissenters.”
“Exactly,” said the older woman, misunderstanding which side of the issue Yevgeny was on. She focused her bright eyes on him. “I have heard it said, Yevgeny Alexandrovich, that you were a spy for the KGB in America? Is there any truth to this?”
The Company Page 102