The Company

by Robert Littell

  In a barely audible voice Raisa asked her husband, “Yeltsin—is his name on the list?”

  Sukhanov said, “Yeltsin will be arrested.”

  Gorbachev and his wife stared into each other’s eyes. Their daughter moved closer to her mother and took her hand. Gorbachev smiled grimly at both of them; they all understood that there was a strong possibility of ending up in front of a firing squad. He turned back to the delegation. “You are adventurers and traitors,” he said in an even voice. “You will destroy the country. Only those who are blind to history could now suggest a return to a totalitarian regime. You are pushing Russia to civil war.”

  Yevgeny, conscious of having a role to play, remarked, “You are the one pushing Russia to civil war. We are trying to avoid bloodshed.”

  Sukhanov said, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, in the end we ask nothing from you. You will remain in Foros under house arrest. We will take care of the dirty work for you.”

  “Dirty work is what you will be doing,” Gorbachev agreed bitterly.

  “There is nothing more we can accomplish here,” Sukhanov told the other members of the delegation. He approached Gorbachev and thrust out his hand; the General Secretary and the head of the KGB’s Ninth Chief Directorate had been on close terms for years. Gorbachev looked down at the hand, then with a contemptuous sneer turned his back on him. Shrugging off the insult, Sukhanov led the way out of the room.

  Heading back in the helicopter to Belbek airport, where a Tupolev-154 was waiting to fly them to Moscow, Sukhanov issued instructions over the radiophone to the head of the security detachment at Foros; the General Secretary and the members of his family were to be cut off from the world. No person and no news was to be allowed in or out. Understood?

  The words Your orders will be carried out crackled over the radio.

  Baklanov produced a bottle of cognac from a leather satchel and, filling small plastic cups to the brim, handed them around. Everyone started to drink. “You have to hand it to him,” General Varennikov shouted over the whine of the rotors. “Anyone else in his shoes would have signed the fucking decree.”

  Sukhanov leaned his head back against the helicopter’s bulkhead and shut his eyes. “Everything now depends on isolating Boris Yeltsin,” he shouted. “Without Gorbachev, without Yeltsin, the opposition will have nobody to rally around.”

  Yevgeny agreed. “Yeltsin,” he said, his thoughts far away, “is definitely the key.”

  Returning to Moscow well after midnight, Yevgeny rang Aza’s apartment from a public phone in the airport parking lot. Using a prearranged code phrase, he summoned her to a quick meeting in a garage across the alleyway from the back door of her building. He found her waiting in the shadows when he got there and they fell into each other’s arms. After a moment Yevgeny pushed her away and, in short disjointed sentences, explained what had happened: the putschists had unexpectedly moved up the date of the uprising; he and some others had flown down to Foros to try to browbeat Gorbachev into signing the decree establishing the State Committee for the State of Emergency; Gorbachev had flatly refused and was being held prisoner in the Foros compound. Even as they spoke, Marshal Yazov was promulgating Coded Telegram 8825 putting all military units on red alert. Within hours detachments of tanks and half-tracks loaded with combat troops would occupy strategic positions in Moscow, at which point the public would be informed that Gorbachev had suffered a stroke and resigned, and all governmental power was now in the hands of the State Committee for the State of Emergency.

  Aza took the news calmly. The events were not unexpected, she noted, only the timing came as a surprise. She would borrow a car from a neighbor and drive out to warn Boris Nikolayevich immediately, she said. Yeltsin would undoubtedly barricade himself inside the massive Russian parliament building on the Moscow River known as the White House and try to rally the democratic forces to resist. If the White House phones were not cut off, Yevgeny might be able to reach her at the unlisted number in Yeltsin’s suite of offices that she had given him. In the darkness she caressed the back of his neck with her hand. Take care of yourself, Yevgeny Alexandrovich, she said, and she whispered a coda from their fleeting romance so many, many years before: Each time I see you I seem to leave a bit of me with you.

  The line, which Yevgeny instantly recognized, left him aching with regret at what might have been; aching with hope at what still could be.

  Aza threaded the small Lada through the deserted streets of the capitol. She turned onto Kutuzovsky Prospekt and headed out of Moscow in the direction of Usovo, the village where Boris Yeltsin had his dacha. She had stopped for a red light—the last thing she wanted was to be pulled over by the police for a traffic violation—when she realized that the ground was shaking under the wheels of the car. It felt like the foreshock of an earthquake. She heard the rumbling at the same moment she saw what was causing it. To her stupefaction, a long column of enormous tanks heading toward downtown Moscow hove into view on the avenue. A soldier wearing a leather helmet and goggles stood in the open turret of each tank. Suddenly the trembling of the earth matched the rhythm of Aza’s heart; until this instant the putsch had been a more or less abstract concept, but the sight of the tank treads grinding along the cobblestones into Moscow made it painfully real. The tankers didn’t stop for the red light, which struck Aza as outrageous. Who did they think they were! And then it hit her; it was preposterous to think that tanks heading for a putsch would obey traffic regulations. One soldier must have noticed there was a woman behind the wheel of the Lada because he made a gallant gesture as he rolled past, doffing an imaginary top hat in her direction.

  The instant the light turned green Aza threw the car into gear and, racing past the line of tanks, sped toward Usovo. On the outskirts of Moscow, the buildings gave way to fields with ornate entrances to collective farms or factories set back from the road. Gorki-9, just before Usovo, was deathly still when she drove down the single paved street and turned onto a dirt lane and braked to a stop in front of a walled compound. The two soldiers on duty, country boys from the look of them, were dozing in the guardhouse when she rapped on the window. One of them recognized her and hurried out to open the gate.

  “Kind of early for you, isn’t it, little lady?” he said.

  “I wanted to put Moscow behind me before traffic jammed the streets,” she replied.

  “If I had a car,” the soldier remarked, “wouldn’t bother me none being caught in traffic. I’d listen to American rock ‘n’ roll music on the radio.”

  Parking around the side of the ill-proportioned wood-and-brick dacha, Aza made her way to the back door inside the screened-in porch. In the woods around the house, the birds had still not started to chirp. She took the skeleton key from its hiding place under a pot of geraniums and let herself into the kitchen. Climbing the wooden steps with the painted balusters, she went down the hallway and knocked softly on the door at the end of it. When there was no response she rapped more insistently. A gruff voice called from inside, “What the devil is going on?”

  “Boris Nikolayevich, it’s me, Azalia Isanova. I absolutely must speak to you.”

  Down the hall, several doors opened and Yeltsin’s daughters, Lena and Tanya, quite frightened to be awakened at this hour, stuck their heads out. “What is happening?” asked Tanya, the younger of the two.

  Yeltsin, wearing trousers with the suspenders dangling and a nightshirt, carrying a large-bored pistol in one hand, pulled open the door of the room. “Go back to bed,” he called over Aza’s head to his daughters. “Come in,” Yeltsin told Aza. He knew that it wasn’t good news that had brought her out from Moscow at dawn. He set the pistol down on the night table next to a nearly empty bottle of cognac. Pointing to a chair, pulling another over to it, he sat down facing her. “So you’ve had word from your informant?” he demanded.

  Aza nodded. “He came to see me around one-thirty,” she said, and she repeated what Yevgeny had told her: the putsch was underway, Gorbachev had refused to cooperat
e and was being held prisoner in the Crimea, Army and paratroop units had been ordered to take up positions in the capitol. She had seen one of them, a long line of giant tanks, heading into Moscow with her own eyes.

  Yeltsin threaded the three thick fingers of his left hand through a shock of graying hair and stared at the floor, brooding. Then he shook his head several times, as if he were arguing with himself. “How did you get out here?” he asked.

  “I borrowed a Lada from a neighbor.”

  He looked away, a preoccupied frown pasted on his face; Aza knew him well enough to realize that he was sorting through scenarios. “It is essential for me to return to the White House,” he finally said, thinking out loud. “I’m sure to be on the KGB’s list of those to be arrested. By now they’ll have set up roadblocks around Moscow. If I go back in my limousine, surrounded by bodyguards, they are bound to recognize me and that will be the end of it. I have a better chance of getting through the checkpoints if I drive back with you. It could be dangerous—are you willing to take the risk?”

  “I am, Boris Nikolayevich.”

  “You are a spunky woman, Azalia Isanova.”

  Yeltsin jumped to his feet and switched on a small radio tuned to an all-night Moscow station. It was playing a recording of Swan Lake, which was a sinister sign; Soviet stations always switched to Swan Lake in times of trouble. Then an announcer, his voice quivering with nervousness, interrupted the music to read a news bulletin: “Mikhail Gorbachev has stepped down for reasons of health. At this grave and critical hour, the State Committee for the State of Emergency has assumed power to deal with the mortal danger that looms over our great Motherland.” Hearing the commotion, Lena and Tanya came flying into their father’s bedroom. Yeltsin waved for them to be quiet. “The policy of reforms, launched at Mikhail Gorbachev’s initiative and designed to insure the country’s dynamic development,” the voice on the radio was saying, “has entered into a blind alley. The country is sinking into the quagmire of violence and lawlessness. Millions of people are demanding measures against the octopus of crime and glaring immorality.”

  Yeltsin snapped off the radio. “Millions of people are demanding democratization, not a new dictatorship of the proletariat,” he declared. Peeling the nightshirt off over his head, he began to strap on a bulletproof vest. He put on a white shirt and adjusted the suspenders, slipped into a brown suit jacket and dropped the pistol into a pocket. Turning to his daughters, he instructed them to phone their mother in the family’s apartment in the city. “The line is certain to be tapped,” he told them. “Say only that I heard the radio and left immediately by car for Sverdlovsk. Nothing more.”

  Outside, a particularly large shooting star etched a fiery path through Ursa Major. “Make a wish,” Yeltsin ordered his daughters. He himself was not a religious man but he did believe in destiny; clearly the moment was at hand to fulfill his. Gazing up at the cloudless August sky he made a wish, then settled into the passenger’s seat of Aza’s Lada.

  “Papa, only keep calm,” Lena said as she closed the car door. “Remember that everything depends on you.”

  At first the ringing seemed far away and Jack McAuliffe integrated it into his dream; through a haze of memory, he could see himself handcuffing Leo Kritzky to a radiator as a bicycle bell reverberated through a dilapidated wooden hulk of a building to remind everyone that coffee and doughnuts were available in the hallway. Surfacing with infinite languidness from the depths of the dream, Jack realized where he was and what was ringing. In the darkness he groped for the telephone on the nightstand. Millie got to it first.

  “Yes?”…“Who did you say you were?”…Out of long habit she murmured, “I’ll see if he’s here.”

  She smothered the mouthpiece in the pillow and whispered to Jack, “It’s the Langley night duty officer, Jack. Are you here?”

  Jack, breaking the surface, grumbled, “Where else would I be in the middle of the night except in bed with my wife.” He found Millie’s shoulder, then followed the arm to her hand and the telephone. Taking it from her, he growled, “McAuliffe speaking.”

  Wide awake now, Jack sat up in bed and shifted the phone to his other ear. “Jesus H. Christ, when did this come in?”…“Okay, dispatch an Action Immediate to Moscow Station ordering all hands off the streets until the situation stabilizes. We don’t want any of our people killed in crossfires. Sign my name to it. Next, track down Director Ebbitt—he’s on a sailboat named Gentleman Rankers somewhere off Nantucket.”…“Alert the Coast Guard if you can’t raise him on the radio. Also notify the DD/O, Manny Ebbitt. Tell him to come straight in to the situation room. I’ll be there in three quarters of an hour. I’ll decide then whether we wake the President immediately or hold it for a morning briefing.”

  Jack felt around in the dark until he found the light switch. The sudden brightness blinded him and he covered his eyes with a forearm as he hung up the phone. “Balloon’s gone up in Russia,” he told Millie. “Leo got it wrong. Goddamn plotters launched their putsch twelve days ahead of schedule. Russian Army’s occupying strategic positions in Moscow. Gorbachev’s either dead or under arrest in the Crimea.”

  “Maybe I ought to go in with you, Jack, to get the public relations angle sorted out—Washington Post’ll be breaking down our door in the morning to know why we didn’t give the President some advance warning of a coup.”

  “As usual we can’t tell them we did.” He glanced at Millie—she looked every bit as appetizing as the day he first laid eyes on her in the Cloud Club. “Anyone ever told you you’re one hell of a beautiful broad?” he asked.

  “You have, Jack.” She reached over and smoothed his disheveled mustache with the tips of her fingers. “Tell me one more time, I might begin to believe it.”

  “Believe it,” he said. “It’s gospel truth.” Frowning in preoccupation, he pushed himself out of the bed. “Fucking Russians,” he groaned. “If this coup succeeds it’ll put them right back into the Bolshevik ice age.”

  Curled up on the couch in the living room, Tessa slept through the sound of Leo’s alarm and the flushing of the toilet and the water cascading through the pipes in the wall. She finally opened an eye when the odor of percolating coffee reached her nostrils.

  “Rise and shine, baby,” Leo called from the kitchenette. “We want to get on the road at a decent hour if we’re going to go to Zagorsk.”

  “I can handle the rise part,” Tessa moaned. “Shine is beyond my diminished capacities.”

  The two of them had been covering Moscow like a blanket (as Tessa liked to say), visiting every nook and cranny of the Kremlin, St. Basil’s Cathedral, the labyrinthian halls of GUM, the Novodievitchi Monastery and cemetery (where Manny Ebbitt had been nabbed seventeen years ago this month), the Pushkin Museum. In the waning light of the late afternoons, they had explored lengths of the Moscow River embankment and segments of the Sadovaya Ring. Leo, at sixty-four, seemed to have a bottomless well of energy to draw on; it was Tessa, at thirty-seven, who ultimately cried uncle and asked if they couldn’t put off seeing the rest of Moscow until tomorrow.

  “Three more days,” Leo said now, buttering a toasted bun (he did all his shopping at a special KGB store whose shelves were filled to overflowing) and handing it across to his daughter.

  “I’ll be back, Daddy.”

  “Will you?”

  “You know I will. Maybe next time I can convince Vanessa…” She let the sentence trail off.

  “I’d like that,” Leo said quietly. “I’d like it a lot.”

  The telephone in the living room rang and Leo got up to answer it. Tessa could hear him talking to someone in urgent tones when a low throaty rumble rose from the street. She went over to the open window and parted the curtains and looked out to see the most startling sight of her life: a long column of monstrously large tanks lumbering down Frunzenskaya Embankment.

  Behind her Leo was almost shouting into the phone. “What happened to the first of September, for God’s sake? Twelve days ahead
of schedule will throw any plans Torriti may have made into the garbage heap.”

  On the avenue, the tanks were splitting up into smaller formations and wheeling off in different directions. Two of the tanks remained behind at an intersection, the barrels of their cannons twitching as if they were searching for something to shoot at.

  Leo could be heard saying, “How do they know Yeltsin fled to Sverdlovsk?” Then: “Without Yeltsin the democratic forces will have no one to lead them.” Coming back into the kitchen, he heard the coughing of diesel motors on the Embankment and joined Tessa at the window.

  “What’s going on, Daddy?” she asked anxiously.

  Shaking his head in disgust, he took in the scene. “The putsch has begun,” he said.

  It wasn’t lost on Tessa that her father seemed to be extremely well informed. “Who’s rebelling against whom?” she asked.

  “The KGB, the military-industrial interests, the Army want to get rid of Gorbachev and set the clock back.”

  Tessa retrieved the 35-mm Nikon from her canvas carryall, fitted on a telescopic lens and took several shots of the two tanks at the intersection. People heading for work had gathered around them and seemed to be arguing with the commanders who stood in the turrets. “Hey, let’s go down there,” Tessa said, throwing some rolls of film and her camera in the carryall.

  “The smartest thing would be for us to stay put.”

  “Daddy, I work for an American newsmagazine. I’m not about to hide in a closet if there’s a real live coup d’état going on.”

  Leo looked out the window again; he, too, was curious to see what was happening. “Well, as long as nobody’s shooting, I suppose we could take a look.”

  Muscovites were streaming into the streets when Leo and Tessa emerged from Number 50 into the brilliant August sunlight. Knots of people had gathered at corners to exchange information. A large group swarmed around the two tanks at the intersection. Student bending under the weight of backpacks filled with textbooks kicked at the treads. “Make a U-turn and go back to your barracks,” one of them cried.