The Company

by Robert Littell

  The interview went on for another half-hour. Yeltsin walked the journalist through his childhood in the Sverdlovsk region (“All six of us slept in one room, along with the goat”), his rise through the ranks of the apparatchiki to become the commissar in charge of Sverdlovsk and eventually the Party boss of Moscow. He described his break with Gorbachev three years before. “I had just visited America,” he recounted. “They took me to a Safeway supermarket and I prowled through the aisles in a daze. I could barely believe my eyes—there were endless shelves stocked with an endless variety of products. I am not ashamed to say that I broke into tears. It struck me that all of our ideology hadn’t managed to fill our shelves. You have to remember we were in the early days of perestroika and our Communist Party was above criticism. But I stood up at one of the Central Committee meetings and I did precisely that—I criticized the Party, I said we’d gotten it wrong, I criticized Gorbachev’s reforms as being inadequate, I suggested that he ought to step down and transfer power to the collective rule of the republican leaders. Gorbachev turned white with rage. For me it was the beginning of the end of my relationship with him. He had me expelled from the Central Committee and the Politburo. All my friends saw the handwriting on the wall and abandoned me. I can tell you that I almost had a nervous breakdown. What saved me was my wife and my two daughters, Lena and Tanya, who encouraged me to fight for what I believed in. What saved me, also, was my election last year to the Russian Republic’s Supreme Soviet, and my election by the Supreme Soviet to the position of President of the Russian Republic.”

  The London journalist, scrawling notes in a rudimentary shorthand, double-checked several details with Aza. Yeltsin, in his shirt sleeves, glanced at his wristwatch. Taking the hint, the reporter stood up and thanked Yeltsin for letting her have an hour of his precious time. Aza saw her to the door and, closing it behind her, returned to Yeltsin’s desk. “Boris Nikolayevich, can I suggest that we go for a stroll in the courtyard.”

  Yeltsin grasped that she wanted to talk to him about something delicate. His office was swept for microphones every week but the people who did the sweeping worked for Kryuchkov’s KGB, so his staffers had taken to holding important conversations in the open inner courtyard of the White House. Draping a suit jacket over his heavy shoulders, Yeltsin led Aza down the fire staircase to street level and pushed through the fire door into the courtyard. A large outdoor thermometer indicated that winter had finally broken, but after several hours in the overheated offices of the White House the air outside seemed quite crisp. Yeltsin drew the jacket up around his thick neck; Aza pulled her Uzbek shawl over her head.

  “What do I need to know that you dare not tell me upstairs?” Yeltsin demanded.

  “By chance I have an old acquaintance who used to work for the KGB—I believe he served abroad for a great many years. He has since become a successful entrepreneur and has opened one of those private banks that are springing up around Moscow. Because of his KGB background and the existence of his bank, he was invited by the wife of the press baron Uritzky to attend a secret meeting in a dacha at the edge of the village of Perkhushovo.”

  Yeltsin was one of those politicians who squirreled away a great deal of seemingly useless information—the names of the children of his collaborators, their wedding anniversaries and birthdays and name days, the location of their summer houses. He came up with an item now. “Kryuchkov has a dacha at Perkhushovo.”

  Aza described the meeting as Yevgeny had described it to her. Producing an envelope, she read off the list of those who had attended. She quoted Kryuchkov’s We will have to consent to a state of emergency for him, and recounted how everyone present had raised their hands in agreement with this proposition.

  Yeltsin stopped in his tracks and surveyed the sky as if it were possible to read in the formations of clouds clues on how the future would turn out. Moscow was overcast, as usual; it had been overcast for so long people tended to forget what sunlight looked like, or felt like on the skin. “And who is your old acquaintance?” he asked Aza, his eyes still fixed on the sky.

  “He specifically forbid me to reveal his identity. And he asks you not to reveal that you received this information from me.”

  “I will, of course, relay the warning to Gorbachev, but if I cannot identify the source he will shrug it off as another attempt by me to drive a wedge between him and the Party loyalists.”

  Aza said, “But you believe my story, don’t you, Boris Nikolayevich?”

  Yeltsin nodded. “To tell the truth, I am somewhat surprised by the quantity, and quality, of the people aligning themselves with the putschists, but I don’t doubt for a moment that Kryuchkov would oust Gorbachev if he could. You must bear in mind that Kryuchkov had a hand in planning the Red Army assault on Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. He is certainly someone who thinks in the old style—that the correct dose of force, applied in the right spot at the right moment, can stuff the genie back in the bottle.” Yeltsin sighed. “The peasants in the village near Sverdlovsk, where I was raised, used to say that there are fruits which rot without ripening. When I grew older I discovered the same holds true for people. Kryuchkov is an excellent illustration of this axiom. Of course I will not mention your name when I warn Gorbachev. For your part, you must stay in touch with this acquaintance of yours who has penetrated to the heart of the conspiracy. His collaboration will be crucial in the weeks and months ahead.”

  The after-dinner speeches dragged on and on; Russian bureaucrats, fortified with alcohol, tended to get carried away by emotion. And the emotion that carried them away at the Kremlin state dinner honoring Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, the Russian cosmonaut who was the first woman in space, was nostalgia. Nostalgia, if you read between the lines, for the days when the Soviet Union was able to give the United States a run for its money; when hardware produced in the Soviet factories actually worked; when the time servers who minded the Soviet store were still looked on as an aristocracy.

  “Valentina Vladimirovna,” the head of the space agency declared, blotting the beads of sweat glistening on his forehead with a handkerchief, “demonstrated to the entire world what Soviet courage and Soviet technology and Soviet ideology could accomplish in the never-ending struggle to conquer space. To our guest of honor, Valentina Vladimirovna,” the speaker cried, raising his glass in her direction for yet another toast.

  Around the horseshoe-shaped banquet table, chairs were scraped back as the guests lunged to their feet and held aloft their own glasses. “To Valentina Vladimirovna,” they cried in unison, and they gulped down the Bulgarian Champagne that had long since lost any trace of effervescence.

  From her place at the bitter end of one of the wings of the table, Aza studied the ruddy face of Tereshkova, flushed from alcohol and the stuffiness of the Kremlin banquet hall. Aza was careful to merely sip her Champagne at each of the endless toasts, but her own head was growing woozy. She tried to imagine what it must have been like to suit up in a silver cosmonaut outfit and squeeze yourself into a Vostok capsule and be shot, as if from the mouth of a giant cannon, into orbit around the planet earth. Surely there were experiences that, if you survived them, changed your life; nothing could ever be the same afterward. No amount of denying the experience, no amount of trying to diminish it by putting it into some kind of perspective, could alter its effect. Perhaps it was the late hour—the great Kremlin clock had just chimed midnight—or the lack of air or the alcohol content in her blood stream, but Aza understood that the occasional intersection of her lifeline with Yevgeny’s were life-altering experiences. Looking back, she could see that she had never really given her first and only husband a chance to measure up before she began talking about divorce. Measure up to what? Measure up to the epiphany that comes when soul communes with soul and the body, tagging along behind, communes with body, and the woman doesn’t wind up feeling cheated.

  Across the room the speeches and the toasts continued. Aza noticed Boris Yeltsin, stifling a yawn with his f
ist, push himself to his feet and come behind Tereshkova at the head of the table and whisper something in her ear that made her giggle with pleasure. Yeltsin patted her on the shoulder, then casually moved on to where Mikhail Gorbachev was sitting. Stooping so he could funnel words into his ear, he said something that made Gorbachev twist sharply in his seat. Yeltsin gestured with a toss of his large head. Gorbachev considered, then got up and followed him with obvious reluctance to a far corner of the banquet hall. Aza could see Yeltsin talking intently for several minutes. The General Secretary listened impassively, his head tilted to one side, his eyes almost closed. At one point Yeltsin, to emphasize a point, jabbed a forefinger several times into Gorbachev’s shoulder. When Yeltsin finished Gorbachev finally opened his eyes; from her place at the end of the banquet table Aza could see that he was furious. The birthmark curling across his scalp seemed to redden and gleam. His head snapped back and forth in short jerks as he muttered a curt reply. Then he spun away abruptly and strode back to join in another toast to Tereshkova.

  Yeltsin watched him go, then caught Aza’s eye across the room and hunched his heavy shoulders in defeat.

  3

  BASEL, SATURDAY, JUNE 15, 1991

  I WASN’T SURE YOU WOULD SHOW UP.”

  “I almost didn’t. I must have changed my mind twenty times before I booked a ticket, and another twenty times before I boarded the plane.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad to see you, Jack.”

  Currents of moist air from the Rhone ruffled what was left of the once-flamboyant mustache on Jack McAuliffe’s upper lip and the strands of ash-red hair on his scalp as he sized up his companion through prescription sunglasses. Leo, clearly ill at ease in the presence of his one-time friend and former Company colleague, looked pallid and thin and dog-tired; he had been plagued by insomnia since Yevgeny alerted him to the impending putsch. Now he tugged the collar of the windbreaker up around his neck and the peaked worker’s cap down to his ears, and squinted at the two coxed eights skidding on their inverted reflections along the surface of the river.

  “I loved Crew,” Jack remarked. For the space of a moment the two men, gazing at the rowers coiling and uncoiling their limbs inside the sleek sculls, were transported back to that last race on the Thames and the triumph over Harvard. “I loved the blisters and the splinters of pain where my rib had mended and broken and mended again,” Jack added. “You knew you were alive.”

  The faint cries of the coxes counting strokes came to them on the breeze. Leo sniggered. “Coach Waltz used to say that rowing was a metaphor for life.” With a wistful smile he turned on Jack. “What a lot of crap—rowing wasn’t a metaphor for life, it was a substitute. It took your mind off of it for the time you spent rowing. But as soon as you were finished, reality was waiting in ambush.”

  The two men resumed walking along the path that ran parallel to the Rhone. “And what was your reality, Leo?”

  “Stella. Her Soviet handler who gave me my first lesson in one-time pads and dead letter drops and ordered me to stay close to Waltz because he was a talent scout for the Company.”

  “Did the son of a bitch actually call it the Company?”

  Leo smiled grimly. “He called it glavni protivnik, which is Russian for principal adversary.” He walked on for some moments in silence. Then he said, “All that’s water under the bridge.”

  “No it’s not, pal. It’s not water under my bridge. Just because you sign your letter Gentleman-Ranker doesn’t make you one. You’re still a lousy traitor in my book and nothing’s going to change that.”

  “When will you get it into your head that I didn’t betray anybody. All along I was fighting for my side.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, you were fighting for Stalinism. Some side.”

  “Fuck you, too.”

  Jack wouldn’t let go. “I suppose they gave you a medal when they brought you in.”

  “They gave me two, as a matter of fact.”

  The two men, close to blows, glared at each other. Jack stopped in his tracks. “Look, you asked for this meeting. You want to call it off, fine with me.”

  Leo was still angry. “There are things I need to pass on to you.”

  “Pass, buddy, and then we’ll go our separate ways.” Jack dropped his chin and looked at Leo over the top of his sunglasses. “You were pretty god-damn sure we wouldn’t have you arrested and extradited when you showed up in Switzerland, weren’t you?”

  “Who are you kidding, Jack? If you ever brought me in, you’d have to explain why you didn’t inform the Congressional oversight committees about me seven and a half years ago.”

  “You think of all the angles.”

  Leo shook his head. “Not all. I didn’t expect that Adelle would curl up in a ditch on a hill in Maryland to sleep off a hangover.”

  “A bunch of us attended her funeral,” Jack said.

  “The twins must have been…”

  “They were. Sad and bitter and embarrassed, all rolled into one.” Leo’s chest heaved. Jack gave an inch. “All things considered,” he said, “your girls were brave troopers.”

  Up ahead, a street photographer positioned herself on the path and, raising a Polaroid to her eye, snapped their picture. Leo strode forward and caught the woman by the arm. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he cried.

  The photographer, a thin young woman wearing torn jeans and a faded sweatshirt, angrily jerked free. Leo lunged for the camera but the woman was too quick for him. Jack rushed up and grabbed the collar on Leo’s wind-breaker. “Simmer down, pal,” he said. To the photographer, who was backing away from them both, he said, “How much?”

  “Usually it is ten francs. For you and your crazy friend it is double.”

  Jack pulled a crisp bill from his wallet and, advancing slowly so as not to frighten the woman, held it out. She snatched the twenty out of his fingers, flung the snapshot at his feet and scampered off down the path. “American bastards,” she shouted over a shoulder. “Yankee pricks.”

  Jack retrieved the photograph and looked at it. Leo said, “Burn it.”

  “I have another idea,” Jack said. He produced a pen and wrote across the faces on the picture, Jack and Leo before The Race but after The Fall, and handed it to Leo.

  Leo remembered the original only too well. “Another memento of our friendship,” he said sarcastically.

  “Our friendship ended long ago,” Jack shot back. “This is a memento of our last meeting.”

  The two of them entered a café and made their way to the glassed-in veranda cantilevered over the river. Jack draped his safari jacket over the back of a chair and sat down facing Leo across a small table. He ordered an American coffee, Leo a double espresso. After the coffees arrived Jack waited until the waitress was out of earshot, then announced, “Time to get down to the famous brass tacks.”

  Leaning over the table, his voice pitched low, Leo said, “I have reason to believe—” and he went on to tell Jack about the plot being hatched against Gorbachev.

  When Leo finished Jack sank back into his chair and stared sightlessly at the river. “To know what you know, to name the names you name, you must have a source inside the conspiracy,” he finally said.

  Leo shrugged noncommittally.

  “I take it you won’t identify him.”

  “Or her.”

  Jack bristled. “Don’t play games with me, Leo.”

  “I’m not playing games. I have a source but the CIA is the last organization I’d confide in. The KGB had you penetrated in my day. For all I know it still does. And the head of the KGB is masterminding the plot.”

  “What do you expect me to do with this information? Go to the New York Times and say that a guy I know has a guy he knows who says Moscow is heading for the waterfall in a barrel. Fat chance.”

  “For starters we thought—“

  “We?”

  “I thought you could warn the President, and the President could warn Gorbachev. Coming from George
Bush, the word that there is a putsch afoot might impress him.”

  “You ought to be able to get word to Gorbachev inside Russia.”

  “Yeltsin has been warning him in a very general way for months. I’ve been told that he has now warned him in a very specific way, which is to say he’s described meetings and named names. The trouble is that if Yeltsin told Gorbachev it was nighttime, he’d assume he was lying and it was really daytime.” Leo turned his espresso cup round and round in its saucer. “Am I wrong in assuming that the United States has a vested interest in seeing Gorbachev stay in power?”

  “This is a side of you I’m not familiar with—looking out for the vested interests of the United States.”

  Leo kept a rein on his temper. “Answer the question.”

  “The answer is evident. We prefer Gorbachev to Yeltsin, and Yeltsin to Kryuchkov and his KGB chums.”

  “Then do something about it, dammit.”

  “Aside from warning Gorbachev I don’t see what we can do. Unlike the folks you worked for we don’t knock off people.”

  “What about Salvador Allende in Chile? What about General Abdul Karim Kassem in Iraq?”

  “Those days are over,” Jack insisted.

  “They don’t have to be. When the Company wanted to eliminate Castro, it brought in the Sorcerer and he farmed the contract out to freelancers outside the Company. This is important, Jack—a lot is hanging on it.”