The Company

by Robert Littell

  “I’m not sure I understand you,” the Intourist guide replied in puzzlement.

  “So what do you make of it all?” Leo asked when they were alone again.

  “The meeting I attended was not a discussion group,” Yevgeny said. “Kryuchkov is plotting to take power. He is a meticulous man and is slowly tightening the noose around Gorbachev’s neck.”

  “Your list of plotters reads like a who’s who of Gorbachev’s inner circle. Defense Minister Yazov, the press baron Uritzky, Interior Minister Pugo, Soviet ground forces chief Varennikov, Lomov from the foreign ministry, Supreme Soviet Chairman Lukyanov, Prime Minister Pavlov.”

  “Don’t forget Yevgeny Tsipin,” Yevgeny said with a anxious grin.

  “They want to use your bank to bring in enormous sums of money from Germany to finance the putsch—“

  “As well as stock the empty shelves in the food and liquor stores and send out pension checks. The plotters are shrewd, Leo. If they can take over quickly, with little or no bloodshed, and buy off the masses with cosmetic improvements, they can probably get away with it.”

  Leo looked at his friend. “Whose side are we on?” he asked, half in jest.

  Yevgeny smiled grimly. “We haven’t changed sides. We’re for the forces that promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit, we’re against right-wing nationalism and anti-Semitism and those who would obstruct the democratic reforms in Russia. In short, we’re on the side of Gorbachev.”

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  Yevgeny tucked his arm under Leo’s elbow. “There is a possibility that I may be watched by Kryuchkov’s henchmen—Yuri Sukhanov, the boss of the KGB’s Ninth Chief Directorate, the division responsible for Gorbachev’s security, attended the Perkhushovo meeting. The Ninth Directorate has plenty of warm bodies available. My phone could be tapped. The people I employ may be bought off and report on my activities.”

  Leo saw where the conversation was going. “All those years you acted as my cutout. Now you want to flip the coin—you want me to act as your cutout.”

  “You will be freer—“

  “They could be watching us right now,” Leo said.

  “I drove myself into the city and took some tradecraft precautions before I showed up at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.”

  “Okay. Let’s assume I am freer. Freer to do what?”

  “For starters, I think you should pass on what I told you—the account of the secret meeting at Perkhushovo, the list of those who attended—to your former friends at the CIA.”

  “You could accomplish the same thing with an anonymous letter to the Company station in Moscow—“

  “We must work on the assumption that the KGB has penetrated the station. If the Americans discuss the letter and their comments are picked up by microphones, it could lead, by a process of elimination, back to me. No, someone should take the story directly to the Company brass in Washington. Logically, that someone has to be you. They’ll believe you, Leo. And if they believe you they may be able to convince Gorbachev to clean house, to arrest the conspirators. The CIA has a long arm—they may be able to act behind the scenes to thwart the conspiracy.”

  Leo scratched at an ear, weighing Yevgeny’s suggestion.

  “Obviously you can’t let them know where your information comes from,” Yevgeny added. “Tell them only that you have a mole inside the conspiracy.”

  “Say I buy your idea. That doesn’t exclude your trying to get word to Gorbachev directly—“

  “I’m a jump ahead of you, Leo. I know one person I can trust—someone who is close to Yeltsin. I’ll see what I can accomplish through her.”

  The two men stopped walking and stood facing each other for a moment. “I thought the game was over,” Leo said.

  “It never ends,” Yevgeny said.

  “Be careful, for God’s sake.”

  Yevgeny nodded. “It would be too ridiculous to survive America and get knocked off in Russia.”

  Leo nodded in agreement. “Too ridiculous and too ironic.”

  The auditorium, a drafty factory hall where workers had once dozed through obligatory lectures on the abiding advantages of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was jam-packed. Students sat cross-legged in the aisles or stood along the walls. On a low stage, under a single overhead spotlight, a tall slender woman, whose no-nonsense short dark hair was tucked behind her ears, spoke earnestly into a microphone. Her melodious voice made her sound younger than her fifty-nine years. And she pulled off the orator’s hat trick: she managed to convey emotion by playing with the spaces between the words. “When they heard about my index cards,” she was saying, “when they discovered that I was collecting the names of Stalin’s victims, they hauled me into a overheated room in the Lubyanka and let me know that I was flirting with a prison sentence…or worse. That took place in 1956. Afterward, I learned that I had been branded an SDE. It is a badge I wear with pride—I am, from the point of view of the Communist regime, a Socially Dangerous Element. Why? Because my project of documenting Stalin’s crimes—I now have more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand index cards and I’ve only scratched the surface—threatened to return history to its proper owners, which is to say, return it to the people. When the Communists lose control of history, their party—to borrow Trotsky’s expression—will be swept into the dustbin of history.”

  There was loud applause from the audience. Many of those sitting on the folding chairs stomped on the floor in unison. When the noise subsided the speaker forged on.

  “Mikhail Gorbachev has been a leading force behind the return of history to the people—no easy task considering that we, as a nation, never experienced a Reformation, a Renaissance, an Enlightenment. Since Gorbachev came to power in 1985, our television has aired documentaries about Stalin’s brutal collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s, the ruthless purge trials in the mid-1930s, along with details of the millions who were purged without trials, who were summarily executed with a bullet in the neck or sent off to the Gulag camps in Kolyma, Vorkuta and Kazakhastan.”

  The speaker paused to take a sip of water. In the auditorium there was dead silence. She set down the glass and looked up and, surveying the faces in the audience, continued in an even quieter voice. The students leaned forward to catch her words.

  “All that is the positive side of Gorbachev’s governance. There is a negative side, too. Gorbachev, like many reformers, has no stomach for what Solzhenitsyn termed the work in the final inch; he is afraid to follow where logic and common sense and an impartial examination of history would lead. Gorbachev argues that Stalin was an aberration—a deviation from the Leninist norm. Chepukha!—rubbish! When are we going to admit that it was Lenin who was the genius of state terror. In 1918, when the Bolsheviks lost the election, he shut down the democratically elected Constitutional Assembly. In 1921 he systematically began liquidating the opposition, first outside the party, eventually inside the party. What he created, under the sophism dictatorship of the proletariat, was a party devoted to the eradication of dissent and the physical destruction of the dissenters. It was this Leninist model that Stalin inherited.” The woman’s voice grew even fainter; in the audience people barely breathed. “It was a system which beat prisoners so badly that they had to be carried on stretchers to the firing squads. It was a system that broke Meyerhold’s left arm and then forced him to sign a confession with his right. It was a system that sent Osip Mandelstam to the frozen wastelands of Siberia for the crime of writing, and then reading aloud, a poem about Stalin that fell far short of being an encomium. It was a system that murdered my mother and my father and carted off their bodies, along with the nine hundred and ninety-eight others who were executed that day, to the Donskoi Monastery for cremation. I have been told you could often see dogs in the neighborhood fighting over the human bones that they had scratched out of the fields around the monastery.” The speaker looked away to collect herself. “I myself have never gained access to the spetskh
ran—the special shelves in the Soviet archives where secret dossiers are stored. But I have reason to believe there are somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen million files in the archives dealing with arrests and executions. Solzhenitsyn estimates that sixty million—that is a sixty with six zeroes dragging after it like a crocodile’s tail—sixty million people were victims of Stalinism.”

  The woman managed a valiant smile. “My dear friends, we have our work cut out for us.”

  There was a moment of silence before the storm of applause broke over the auditorium. The woman shrank back, as if buffeted by the ovation that soon turned into a rhythmic foot-pounding roar of admiration. Eager supporters surrounded her and it was well after eleven before the last few turned to leave. As the speaker collected her notes and slipped them into a tattered plastic briefcase, Yevgeny made his way from the shadows at the back of the auditorium down the center aisle. Expecting more questions, the woman raised her eyes—and froze.

  “Please excuse me for turning up suddenly—” Yevgeny swallowed hard and started over again. “If you consent to talk with me you will understand that it might have been dangerous for me, and for you also, if I had phoned you at your home. Which is why I took the liberty—“

  “How many years has it been?” she inquired, her voice reduced to a fierce whisper.

  “It was yesterday,” Yevgeny replied with feeling. “I was catnapping under a tree in the garden of my father’s dacha at Peredelkino. You woke me—your voice was as musical yesterday as it is today—with a statement in very precise English: I dislike summer so very much. You asked me what I thought of the novels of E. Hemingway and F. Fitzgerald.”

  He climbed onto the stage and stepped closer to her. She shrank back, intimidated by the intensity in his eyes. “Once again you take my breath away, Yevgeny Alexandrovich,” she confessed. “How long have you been back in the country?”

  “Six years.”

  “Why did it take you six years to approach me?”

  “The last time we spoke—I called you from a pay phone—you gave me to understand that it would be better, for you at least, if we never met again.”

  “And what has happened to make you ignore this injunction?”

  “I saw articles about you in the newspapers—I saw an interview with you and Academician Sakharov on the television program Vzglyad—I know that you are close to Yeltsin, that you are one of his aides. That is what made me ignore your injunction. I have crucial information that must reach Yeltsin, and through him, Gorbachev.”

  At the door of the auditorium a janitor called, “Gospodina Lebowitz, I must lock up for the night.”

  Yevgeny said, with some urgency, “Please. I have an automobile parked down the street. Let me take you someplace where we can talk. I can promise you, you will not regret it. I am not overstating things when I say that the fate of Gorbachev and the democratic reformation could depend on your hearing me out.”

  Azalia Isanova nodded carefully. “I will go with you.”

  Midnight came and went but the bull session in the Sparrow, a coffeehouse downhill from Lomonosov University on the Sparrow Hills (lately residents had taken to calling the area, known as Lenin Hills, by its pre-revolutionary name), showed no sign of flagging. “Capitalist systems have been transformed into Socialist systems but not visa versa,” argued a serious young man with long sideburns and a suggestion of a beard. “There are no textbooks on the subject, which is why we need to proceed cautiously.”

  “We’re writing the textbook,” insisted the girl sitting across from him.

  “It’s like swimming in a lake,” another girl said. “Of course you can go in slowly but the pain lasts longer. The trick is to dive in and get it over with.”

  “People who dive into icy lakes have been known to die of heart attacks,” a boy with thick eyeglasses pointed out.

  “If Socialism dies of a heart attack,” the first boy quipped, “who will volunteer to give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

  “Not me,” the girls shot back in chorus.

  “Another round of coffee,” one of the boys called to the waiter, who was reading a worn copy of Newsweek behind the cash register.

  “Five Americans, coming up,” he called back.

  At a small round table near the plate-glass window, Aza mulled over what Yevgeny had just told her. On the avenue outside, the traffic was still thick and the throaty murmur of car motors made it sound as if the city were moaning. “You are certain that Yazov was there?” Aza demanded. “It really would be a stab in the back—Gorbachev plucked him out of nowhere to be Minister of Defense.”

  “I am absolutely sure—I recognized him from pictures in the newspapers even before someone addressed him as Minister.”

  “And Oleg Baklanov, the head of the military-industrial complex? And Oleg Shenin from the Politburo?”

  “Baklanov introduced himself to me in the dacha before we all trooped out to the lawn for the meeting. He is the one who pointed Shenin out to me.”

  Aza reread the list of names she had jotted on the back of an envelope. “It is terribly frightening. We knew, it goes without saying, that trouble was coming. Kryuchkov and his KGB friends have not made a secret of their opinion of Gorbachev. But we never anticipated a plot would attract so many powerful people.” She looked up and studied Yevgeny, as if she were seeing him for the first time. “They were very sure you would be sympathetic to their cause—“

  “I worked for the KGB abroad. They assume that anyone with KGB credentials must be against reforms and for a restoration of the old order. Besides, almost all of the people who have set up private banks are gangsters without any political orientation other than pure greed. The conspirators need someone they can trust to repatriate the money in Germany. And I came highly recommended—“

  “Who recommended you?”

  “Someone whose name is a legend in KGB circles but would mean nothing to you.”

  “You are very courageous to come to me. If they were to discover your identity—“

  “It is for that reason that I don’t want anyone, including Boris Yeltsin, to know the source of your information.”

  “Not knowing the source will detract from its credibility.”

  “You must say only that it comes from someone you have known a long time and trust.” Yevgeny smiled. “After how I deceived you, do you trust me, Aza?”

  She considered the question. Then, almost reluctantly, she nodded. “From the start you have always made me hope—and then you have dashed my hopes. I am afraid to hope again. And yet—“

  “And yet?”

  “Are you familiar with the American title of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s book about her husband, Osip? Hope Against Hope. If I were to write a book about my life, it would also be an appropriate title. I am a sucker for hope.”

  Yevgeny turned over the check and glanced at the amount and started counting out rubles. “I will not drive you home—we must not risk being seen together. You remember the formula for meeting me?”

  “You will ring my number at home or at work and ask to speak to someone with a name that has the letter z in it. I will say there is nobody by that name at this number. You will apologize and hang down. Exactly one hour and fifteen minutes after your call I am to walk west along the north side of the Novy Arbat. At some point a gypsy taxicab will pull up, the driver will wind down the window and ask if I want a ride. We will haggle for a moment over the price. Then I will get into the back seat. You will be the driver of the taxi.”

  “Each time we meet I will give you a formula for the next meeting. We must vary these signals and meeting places.”

  “I can see that you have had experience in these matters.”

  “You could say that I am a maestro when it comes to such things.”

  Aza said, “There are parts of you I have not yet visited, Yevgeny Alexandrovich.” She sensed that the conversation had turned too solemn and attempted to lighten it. “I’ll bet you wowed the girls when you w
ere a young man.”

  “I never had a childhood sweetheart, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I never had a childhood.”

  “Perhaps when all this is over—“

  Blushing, she raised a hand to stop him before he could finish the sentence.

  He smiled. “Like you, I hope against hope.”

  Boris Yeltsin, a hulking man with heavy jowls and a shock of gray hair spilling off his scalp, was on congenial territory; he liked giving interviews because it permitted him to talk about his favorite subject: himself. “The first thing journalists always ask me,” he told the London reporter, fixing her with a steely stare, “is how I lost the fingers.” He raised his left hand and wiggled the stumps of his pinkie and the finger next to it. “It happened in 1942, when I was eleven,” he went on. “Along with some friends, I tunneled under the barbed wire and broke into a church that was being used to store ammunition. We came across a wooden box filled with grenades and took several of them to the forest, and like an idiot I tried to open one with a hammer to see what was inside. The thing blew up, mangling my hand. When gangrene set in the surgeons had to amputate two of my fingers.”

  Yeltsin spoke Russian with a slurred drawl and the British reporter didn’t catch every word. “Why did he want to open the grenade?” she asked Aza, who spoke excellent English and often acted as Yeltsin’s informal translator.

  “To see what was in it,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought he said but it sounded so silly.” The journalist turned back to Yeltsin. “Is the story about you being baptized true?”

  Yeltsin, sitting behind an enormous desk on the third floor of the White House, the massive Russian parliament building next to the Moscow River, shot a quick look of puzzlement in Aza’s direction; he had difficulty understanding Russian when it was spoken with a British accent. Aza translated the question into a Russian that Yeltsin could grasp. He laughed out loud. “It is true I was baptized,” he said. “The priest was so drunk he dropped me into the holy water.” Yeltsin hefted the bottle of vodka to see if the journalist wanted a refill. When she shook her head no, he refilled his own glass and downed half of it in one gulp. “My parents pulled me out and dried me off and the priest said, If he can survive that he can survive anything. I baptize him Boris.”