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The Company

Page 114

by Robert Littell


  Mathilde stepped closer and raised the object in her fist and pointed it at Yevgeny’s forehead. It dawned on him what she was holding and he understood there would be no time left to slow down. “To the success,” he murmured, “of our hopeless—“

  All of Moscow erupted in a paroxysm of jubilation. On the sweating asphalt avenues around the Kremlin, long convoys of tanks and armored personnel carriers headed out of the city, cheered on by women tossing carnations and roses up to the laughing soldiers. Bystanders lining the route applauded the departing troops who, clearly relieved to be heading back to their barracks, applauded back. “Thanks to God, we’re going home,” one officer shouted from the turret of a tank. Outside the Central Committee building, thousands of demonstrators chanted defiantly, “Dissolve the Party” and “Smash the KGB.” Communist functionaries could be seen fleeing from side entrances carting off everything that wasn’t bolted down—fax machines, computers, television sets, video recorders, air conditioners, lamps, desk chairs. Word spread that the apparatchiki still inside were feeding mountains of paperwork into shredders; in their panic to destroy evidence of the putsch the Communists neglected to remove the paperclips, causing the machines to break down. When a portable radio at a kiosk blared the news that Yeltsin was said to be preparing a decree suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party, effectively ending seventy-four years of Bolshevik dictatorship, people linked arms and danced euphorically. In parks and squares around the city, construction workers armed with crowbars pried the statues of Old Bolsheviks from their pedestals and smashed them against the ground. In the great square outside the Lubyanka, a crane lifted the enormous statue of Feliks Dzershinsky off its base. For a few delicious minutes Dzerzhinsky, the cruel Pole who in 1917 created the Cheka, the precursor of the despised KGB, hung from the cable around his neck while the crowd cheered hoarsely.

  Sleepwalking through streets teeming with people celebrating the victory of something they barely understood and the defeat of something they understood only too well, Aza happened to witness what newspapers would call “the execution of the executioner.” But even that brought her no relief from the ache of the emptiness that would fill the rest of her life.

  Only the notion that she might somehow find a way to speed time up gave her a measure of comfort.

  The Uighur’s checked the stairwell off the fifth floor of the Hotel Ukraine and waved to Endel Rappaport to tell him the coast was clear. Rappaport went in first and held the door for the Sorcerer. “We can talk here,” he told Torriti as the heavy fire door swung closed behind him.

  “Who’s he?” asked the Sorcerer, eyeing the short, slender Russian leaning against a wall; in his early forties and dressed in a smart business suit, he certainly wasn’t one of Rappaport’s Uighurs. There was a deadpan expression in his humorless eyes; to Torriti, the stranger looked as if he could be bored to death by an assassin.

  Rappaport chuckled. “Vladimir is a business associate from Dresden.”

  “Hello to you, Vladimir,” ventured Torriti.

  Vladimir didn’t crack a smile or respond.

  Rappaport asked Torriti, “When are you flying out?”

  “This afternoon.”

  Rappaport, wearing a double-breasted blazer with gold buttons and carrying a walking stick with a golden dog’s head on top, waggled his pinkie in the Sorcerer’s face. “The country you are leaving is not the same as the one you came to.”

  “For sure,” Torriti conceded. “Yeltsin will pack Gorbachev off into retirement and destroy the Communist Party, so far so good. Sixty-four thousand dollar question is, what’s going to take its place?”

  “Anything will be better than what we had,” Rappaport contended.

  “Hey, you got to live here, pal, not me.”

  Rappaport cleared his throat. “About those contracts.” When Torriti glanced at the dour Russian against the wall, Rappaport said, “You can speak in front of him—I have no secrets from Vladimir.”

  “About those contracts,” the Sorcerer agreed.

  “Given who you are, given whom you represent, my associates are eager to do the right thing. In light of the fact that the contracts were supposed to be fulfilled before the recent events, they are ready to cancel the contracts and return the sums deposited in Switzerland.”

  The Sorcerer jowls quivered with the comedy of the situation. “In the United States of America,” he said, “people have been heard to say, Better late than never.”

  “Do I understand you correctly, Mr. Sorcerer? Despite the lateness of the hour, you still wish my associates to deliver on these contracts?”

  “Look at the situation from my point of view, friend. My clients want to make sure Yeltsin won’t have the same jokers diddling with him this time next year.”

  The gnome-like Russian looked up at the Sorcerer. “You are one in a thousand, Mr. Sorcerer.” He thrust out a hand and the Sorcerer gave it a limp shake.

  “It’s a pleasure to do business with you, Endel. You don’t mind I call you Endel? I feel as if we’ve know each other for weeks. Listen, I’m concerned about your remuneration. I wouldn’t want you to come away from all this without a little something for your troubles.”

  “I am moved almost but not quite to tears by your concern, Mr. Sorcerer. Rest assured, I have been in touch with the Rabbi, who has been in touch with someone who goes by the appellation of Devisenbeschaffer—“

  Torriti was startled. “You know of the existence of the currency acquirer?”

  Endel Rappaport’s thick lips curled into a sheepish smirk. “The legendary Rabbi Hillel, who made something a name for himself in the second century, is said to have posed the ultimate question: If I am not for myself, who is for me? Vladimir here has been tracking the Devisenbeschaffer’s pecuniary activities in Dresden for me. A third of what the Rabbi gets from the currency acquirer will wind up in Swiss accounts that I control.”

  “People like me do not meet people like you every day of the week,” Torriti said seriously. “A third of what the Rabbi gets is a pretty penny. What are you going to do with all that money?”

  The smirk froze on Rappaport’s face. “Before they cut off my fingers I was a student of the violin. Since then I have not been able to listen to music. What I am going to do with my share of the money is get even.”

  “Even with who?”

  “Russia.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m glad we never got to cross paths during the Cold War. Your premature death would have weighed on my conscience.”

  Rappaport’s brow wrinkled in pain. “I feel the same about you. Do have a good trip back to wherever it is you are going.”

  “I’m heading home,” Torriti said. “The end of the line is East of Eden, a paradise on earth for golfers and/or alcoholics.”

  Merriment danced in Rappaport’s eyes. “I need not ask which category you fall into.”

  Torriti had to concede the point. “No, I don’t suppose you do.”

  The deaths were all listed on police blotters as accidents or suicides.

  Nikolai Izvolsky, the Central Committee’s financial wizard who had siphoned Party funds to the Devisenbeschaffer in Germany, fell to his death from the roof of a Moscow apartment house while taking the air late one night. A crotchety old woman in the next building later told police that she had seen four men on the roof next door moments before she heard the scream and the police sirens. As the woman was well known in the local precinct for inventing stories of Peeping Toms on the roofs of adjacent buildings, the state procurator discounted her testimony and ruled the death an accident.

  The press baron Pavel Uritzky and his wife, Mathilde, were discovered asphyxiated in their BMW parked in the private garage behind their kottedzhi on the edge of Moscow. One end of a garden hose had been inserted into the exhaust pipe, the other end run into the ventilation tubing under the hood. The nurse in the ambulance responding to the frantic call from the couple’s butler broke the car window with a hammer, switched off th
e motor, dragged the bodies outside and administered oxygen, but it was too late. In his subsequent declaration to the authorities, the nurse mentioned having detected the pungent odor of chloroform in the garage. The first policemen on the scene made no mention of this and the question of chloroform was relegated to a footnote in the official report. The state procurator noted that the car doors had been locked on the inside, with the remote door control device attached to the key in the ignition. The second remote device, normally in Mathilde’s possession, was never found but no conclusions were drawn from this. Careful examination revealed no bruises on the corpses and no evidence under the fingernails to indicate there had been a struggle. No suicide note was found. Pavel Uritzky had been one of the ring-leaders of the putsch and deeply depressed at its failure. Mathilde was linked to the shooting of the banking magnet Tsipin and said to be terrified of being prosecuted. The deaths of the Uritzkys were listed as a double suicide and the case was closed.

  Moscow neighbors of Boris Pugo heard what sounded like a shot and summoned the police, who broke down the door and discovered the Interior Minister slumped over the kitchen table, a large-caliber pistol (obviously fallen from his hand) on the linoleum floor and brain matter seeping from an enormous bullet wound in his skull. A note addressed to his children and grandchildren said, “Forgive me. It was all a mistake.” Pugo’s old father-inlaw was found cowering in a clothes closet muttering incoherently about assassination squads, but police psychiatrists decided the father-in-law was suffering from dementia and the state procurator eventually ruled that Pugo’s wound was self inflicted.

  The body of Gorbachev’s military adviser, Marshal Akhromeyev, was found hanging from a noose attached to an overhead lighting fixture in his office. People in adjacent offices told police they had heard what sounded like furniture being moved and objects being thrown on the floor, but had not become suspicious because they knew that, in the aftermath of the aborted putsch, the Marshal had been retired from active duty and assumed he was simply moving out his personal affairs. The various noises were further explained away by Akhromeyev’s typed suicide note, which said: “I am a poor master of preparing my own suicide. The first attempt didn’t work—the cord broke. I will try with all my strength to do it again. My age and all I have done give me the right to leave this life.”

  The foreign ministry apparatchik Fyodor Lomov, one of the key putschists, fled Moscow to avoid arrest and was never heard from again. He left behind a cryptic note saying the only thing he regretted was that the coup against Gorbachev had failed. Clothing later identified as belonging to Lomov were discovered neatly folded on a bank of the Moscow River upstream from the capitol. The river was dragged but Lomov’s body was never found; his disappearance was carried on the police books as a “swimming accident.”

  Newspapers reported other mysterious deaths: two in the city that used to be called Leningrad but had changed its name back to Saint Petersburg (the dead men, killed when their car went over a cliff, were KGB generals who had plotted to oust the elected mayor and take control of the city in the name of the State Committee for the State of Emergency); one in the Crimea (a senior KGB officer from the Ninth Chief Directorate who had commanded the unit keeping Gorbachev prisoner in Foros died in the explosion of a kitchen gas canister); one in the Urals Military District (an Army general who, at the height of the putsch, had ordered the local KGB to round up “cosmopolitans,” a Stalinist code word for Jews, was knifed to death in a banal mugging).

  Alerted by the rash of accidental deaths and suicides, the authorities decided to take extraordinary precautions with the putsch ringleaders already in custody, KGB Chairman Kryuchkov and Defense Minister Yazov being the most prominent among them. Visitors were required to communicate through a glass window; shoelaces, belts and sharp objects were removed from the cells and the accused were put on under round-the-clock surveillance.

  With all eyes on Russia, few noticed the small item that appeared on a back page in the Dresden press: early-morning joggers had discovered the body of the Devisenbeschaffer hanging under a bridge across the Elbe. Sometime before dawn he had attached one end of a thick rope to a stanchion and tied the other end around his neck, and jumped to his death. He was wearing a neatly pressed conservative three-piece suit that showed no evidence of a struggle. A typed and signed note was found in his inside breast pocket; detectives eventually established that the typeface matched the deceased’s computer printer. The note asked his wife and three children to forgive him for taking the easy way out, and went on to say that he had decided to kill himself because he had siphoned funds into Russia to finance the aborted putsch and was now sure he would be exposed and punished. The police report noted that the Devisenbeschaffer had failed to specify which accounts in Russia the money had been sent to, and they held little hope of ever finding out; for all intents and purposes the funds had vanished into thin air.

  Turning their backs on the main drag crawling with narrow trolley cars and lined with banks, the Sorcerer and his Apprentice strolled across the footbridge at the end of Lake Geneva and went to ground in an open air café. Attractive young women wearing white aprons over gauze-thin blouses and peasant skirts waited on tables. Jack summoned one of them and inquired, “What do people order when they’re celebrating?”

  “Champagne cups,” she said without hesitation.

  “Oh, Jesus, not Champagne,” Torriti whined. “The goddamn bubbles give me gas.”

  “Two Champagne cups,” Jack told the waitress. When Torriti pulled a face, Jack said, “You’ve been drinking cheap booze so long you think it’s an elixir. Besides which, we’ve got to launch the Enterprise in style.”

  Torriti nodded grudgingly. “It’s not everybody who waltzes into a Swiss bank and finds out he’s got $147 million and change stashed in a secret account. When you got up to leave I thought the clown in the three-piece suit was going to shine your shoes with his tongue.”

  “It’s so much money I have trouble thinking of it as money,” Jack told his friend.

  “Actually, I thought this Devisenbeschaffer character had squirreled away a lot more in Dresden. You sure Ezra Ben Ezra isn’t holding out on you?”

  “The Rabbi took expenses off the top. To start with, there was your mafia chum in Moscow—“

  “The inimitable Endel Rappaport, who’s going to make Mother Russia pay through the nose for the fingers that got lopped off.”

  “He got a share of the money. Another chunk wound up in the pocket of a shadowy individual who may be sponoring the career of a little known KGB lieutenant colonel named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The individual in question worked with Putin in Dresden and knew his way around well enough to siphon off some of the Devisenbeschaffer’s loot before the Rabbi could get to it.”

  “Funny thing, there was a Russian named Vladimir with Rappaport the last time our paths crossed.”

  “The Rabbi said this Putin quit the KGB the day after the coup against Gorbachev began, then turned up in something called the Federal Security Service, which is the successor to the KGB.”

  “Nimble footwork,” Torriti commented. “Putin.” He shook his head. “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “It will,” Jack said. “With roughly a hundred fifty million to spread around, he’s bound to surface eventually.”

  The waitress set the Champagne cups on the table and tucked the bill under the ashtray. “Here’s to Swiss banks,” Torriti said, and wincing in apprehension, he warily tested his cocktail.

  “Here’s to the Enterprise,” Jack said. He drank off half the Champagne as if it were seltzer water. “You want to know something, Harvey. I feel like Mr. Rockefeller must have felt when he set up his foundation. My big problem now is to figure out how to give away the seven or so million the account generates a year.”

  “Read the newspapers and send out money orders to deserving causes.”

  “How would you define deserving causes?”

  Torriti said with utter seriou
sness, “That’s not complicated—deserving causes knock off deserving people.”

  Sniffing the air, Torriti smiled at a thought. Jack asked, “What is it?”

  “Funny thing, Kritzky cashing in his chips like that. You want a second opinion, he got what was coming to him.”

  Jack gazed at the lake without seeing it. He could make out Leo’s voice in his ear. I’m still sorry, Jack. About our friendship. But not about what I did. “He set out to fix the world,” Jack said. “He didn’t realize it wasn’t broken.”

  Torriti could see that his Apprentice needed cheering up. “Well, don’t let it go to your head, sport, but the fact is I’m proud of you. No kidding aside, I am. You’re the best thing since sliced bread.”

  “I had a great teacher.”

  Torriti hiked his glass. “To you and me, sport, the last of the Cold War Mohicans.”

  “The last of the Cold War Mohicans,” Jack agreed.

  The Company pulled out all the stops for Jack’s official going away bash in the seventh-floor dining room at Langley. A banner bearing the McAuliffe family mantra (“Once down is no battle”) had been strung over the double doors. The Time magazine photo of Jack being rescued from a half-inflated rubber raft off the Bay of Pigs had been blown up larger than life and taped to one wall. Much to Jack’s embarrassment and Millie’s delight, the secret citations that accompanied his many “jockstrap” medals (“…for courage above and beyond the call of duty…highest tradition of the clandestine service…honor on the country and on the Company”) had been printed up poster-size and tacked to the remaining walls. The speeches—beginning with Manny’s tribute and ending with Ebby’s—had been interminable. “All Central Intelligence officers have the right to retire when they’re pushing sixty-five,” the DCI told the several hundred men and women crowded into the executive dining room, “especially after forty years of dedicated service to the flame of liberty. But with Jack’s departure, we’re losing more than a warm body who happens to be the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. We’re losing the heart and the soul and the brain and the expertise and the instincts of a warrior who has fought all the battles, from the rooftops of East Berlin to Cuba to the recent attempt at a putsch in Russia. In the process, he survived the bloodletting and earned the kudos and taught us all that once down is no battle. Forty years ago I sat with Jack in a cabaret in Berlin called Die Pfeffermühle and we drank more than our share of beer and wound up singing the Whiffenpoof song. And there’s a stanza in it—correct me if I screw this up, Jack—that says:

 

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