Last Call for Blackford Oakes

by Buckley, William F. ;

  “Very lucky to leave the Soviet Union.” She turned to her colleague. “Volodya, those are strange words to hear, are they not?”

  Kirov came through with an inconclusive giggle. “Ursina, you are always being provocative. Leaving the Soviet Union at age fourteen, Mister Windels—”

  “‘Gus,’ please.”

  “—our host was too young to feel the loss of his motherland.”

  “Exactly,” said Gus. “I was just a dumb little boy insensitive to the loss I was sustaining by going to America.”

  Ursina looked him hard in the face. He had permitted himself just a trace of a smile, which she reciprocated.

  But she gave the impression that attention needed now to be given to assessing the offerings lovingly described in the menu. There were piroshki, three kinds of herring and two of smoked sturgeon, blini, chicken and veal and lamb in various guises, baklava and ice cream. With the food and the wine, the diners cast off the blight of a tedious day, leaving them happy and distracted for a little while.

  Ursina and Kirov wanted to know everything about Gus’s life in Iowa.

  “Was your uncle an overlord?”

  “A what?”

  “I mean, did he have many farmers who worked for him?”

  “Yes. Well, he had a few. He was the owner of a medium-sized farm.”

  “Did his serfs earn a living wage?”

  Kirov broke in. “Ursina, you are not an interrogator at the Lubyanka.”

  “What does Mr.—Gus—know of the Lubyanka?”

  What is she up to? Gus wondered. The Lubyanka was celebrated in book after book about the Soviet Union as the headquarters in Moscow of the KGB, the Soviet Gestapo. Half the Russians who were brought into that massive stone building ended up on trains bound for Gulag. The other half were cremated, after the bullet in the head.

  “Dr. Ursina, everybody in the Western world knows about the Lubyanka.” Gus felt he could get away with saying that much, leaving unsaid what it was about the Lubyanka that had been written by such as Arthur Koestler and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

  “But, Dr. Ursina” (she had acquiesced in this form of address, stopping short of asking to be called merely “Ursina,” even though the elderly Dr. Kirov had asked to be called “Vladimir”), “you know, because I told you, that I am with the press office of the United States Embassy. We are briefed on all the important landmarks of your country.”

  “My country?”

  Gus smiled. “All right, I was born here, too. My ex-country.”

  It was a long evening, and not lacking in warmth, even though Ursina from time to time edged politics into the discussion. She asked if Gus intended to be present at the upcoming International Peace Forum, scheduled for early the following year. “I suppose you will be there to spy on it.”

  Gus laughed. “President Reagan also hopes for a world without nuclear weapons.”

  “Why then is he sponsoring an anti-missile missile program?”

  “That,” said Gus cautiously, “is for the purpose of … destroying nuclear weapons transported by missiles.”

  Ursina began to answer, but cut her reply off and took another tack. “I suppose I must not ask what exactly you do in the press office.”

  “You are free to do so. And am I free to ask what you do in the medical world, besides welcoming so graciously visitors to your university?”

  “Dr. Kirov and I are practicing urologists.”

  “I see. Well,” he raised his glass, “let’s drink to your success in that field!”

  “And not in other fields of my interest?”

  “That,” said Gus, “would require some thought.”

  Vladimir Kirov had gone to the men’s room, and Gus was counting out bills for the waiter. Ursina took a card from her purse and wrote down a telephone number. “Perhaps we can give it some thought at a future meeting?”

  Pocketing the card, Gus smiled broadly. “We must give these matters a great deal of thought.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Konstantin Chernenko, at age seventy-two, could not be expected to live forever, but he acted as if he intended to do exactly that. On February 13, 1984, when Chernenko was named general secretary, Nikolai Dmitriev was confident that Chernenko would nominate him as successor. Dmitriev had been friends with Chernenko for a long time and was twenty years his junior.

  The idea was that when, in due course, Dmitriev became general secretary, he would immediately name General Leonid Baranov as chief of staff. The choice of Baranov, Dmitriev reasoned, would be welcomed by the military court. There was, granted, the problem of his age—Baranov was seventy-six—but his standing with the Politburo was solid. He had weathered all the changes in government from the death of Stalin to the present. “If he could get on with Beria—with Bulganin—with Khrushchev—with Brezhnev—with Andropov,” one colleague had observed, “why he could probably have got along with both Stalin and Hitler simultaneously.”

  In fact, over the twenty-two-month duration of the Hitler–Stalin pact, Baranov was able to boast that young though he was in August 1939—a lieutenant colonel at age thirty-one—he had been at Foreign Minister Molotov’s side during the negotiations in Moscow leading to the pact between Hitler and Stalin. That chapter in his life was forever forgotten after the Nazis marched into Russia in June of 1941, but Baranov continued to rise in the military order under the patronage of Politburo member Konstantin Chernenko.

  Chernenko was an odd duck. When he decided to let a policy decision be known, he would call in not the Presidium, nor the Central Committee, nor the chiefs of staff, but Nika. Nika had been his personal secretary for thirty-five years. She was a woman born to serve. Her only idiosyncrasy was her obstinate concealment of her surname. She was Nika—just that, Nika—in every situation. “Does the KGB know your last name?” the new payroll sergeant asked her, coming in to fill out the roster.

  She managed a quick smile. “Oh, I wouldn’t reveal any secrets, Sergeant. You can absolutely trust me.” She got away with it.

  But General Baranov did not forgive her for failing to call to the attention of the dying premier that he had an important undischarged obligation: to name Dmitriev as his successor. And what happened, of course, in the absence of any testamentary word from Chernenko, was a political dogfight, in which one Mikhail Gorbachev prevailed.

  General Baranov had had an agenda. He had communicated parts of it to Premier Chernenko, especially his conviction that the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan should be called off. It was costing too much, in lives, money, and international favor.

  There were the hot young military men—there are such in almost every situation—who wished to pursue the military objective with, Baranov argued, the kind of undiscriminating tenacity Hitler had shown even when his fascist war was clearly doomed. There was no prospect that the Afghan adventure would actually doom the Soviet Union, but the high cost of it threatened other state enterprises, including a badly needed reform of the administrative structure. Nikolai Dmitriev, discreetly committed to the same reforms, was sidelined under the new Gorbachev regime.

  “Those who lose out in high-powered competition in politics,” General Baranov said to Oleg Pavlov, his son-in-law and closest aide, “are almost always destined to be sidelined in life. There is a large apartment house at Sukharevsky 298 with small apartments in it. One of them was occupied during the last years of his life by Nikita Khrushchev, another was occupied by Vyacheslav Molotov. I do not want to end my days there.”

  The general struggled to bring the whole scene into focus. The government was weak, after two years under Mikhail Gorbachev. The Afghan war had stalled, but Gorbachev still resisted bringing it to a close. The general staff—and who should know this better than Leonid Baranov, the senior general in active service?—was demoralized.

  It was late in the evening, after many drinks shared with Pavlov, who had the rank of captain. General Baranov talked about how different the prospects would be for a healthy Soviet Union if Dmi
triev had been selected as general secretary.

  Captain Pavlov spoke now with an odd abruptness in his tone. “General, is a coup d’état proscribed by Marxist … thought?”

  The general paused with vodka glass in hand instead of emptying it down his throat, as he had done many times during the long evening.

  In measured tones, though there was a slight slur in his speech, he said that the purpose always was to advance the revolution. “If this can be done by deposing the ruler—the wrong ruler—would Lenin have approved of such a movement? Lenin was careful to supervise his own succession. Perhaps you will say, Oleg, that he was not careful enough, because although he warned privately about Stalin, it was Stalin who took command.”

  “General”—Pavlov always thus addressed his father-in-law—“we have never spoken about the plot last year against Comrade Gorbachev. You should know that Ivan Pletnev, a boyhood friend of mine, is the brother of one of the conspirators in that plot.”

  “Was he himself involved in it?”

  “Absolutely not. He was in Afghanistan at the time. But when the plot failed and they had his brother in custody, the KGB summoned him from the front and … interrogated him vigorously. Too vigorously.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “He is crippled, living at home with his mother. He speaks to me with great candor. He tells me that the plot, which almost succeeded, depended heavily on the Americans. If, with Gorbachev out of the way, the Americans proceeded to recognize the government of his successor, everything would fall into place.”

  “How did he learn all this, if he was off in Afghanistan?”

  “Viktor, Ivan’s brother, confided in his oldest friend, a woman called Galina. They grew up as close as sister and brother. And after Viktor’s death she confided in Ivan.”

  “Was she also questioned by the KGB?”

  “Yes. There was brutality, but—nothing crippling.”

  “How does one get in touch with her?”

  Pavlov swallowed another drink. “She is a lady of the night.”

  General Baranov took that in calmly, as he might have taken in the news that one of his regiments had been destroyed. “Can you take me to her?”

  “General, I can do that, yes. When?”

  “Tonight.”

  Pavlov looked down at his watch. “It is just past midnight. I suggest you send your driver home, and come discreetly with me in my car.”

  Twenty minutes later, Pavlov’s old Volga sedan pulled up to the curb in the lonely street north of Rozhdestvensky Boulevard. The woman at the desk was not there. Pavlov led the general upstairs to room 48. He knocked several times, but there was no answer.

  “Let’s leave,” the general said, turning away.

  In the car, they did not speak. But shortly before reaching his imposing house, the general turned to Pavlov. “I will think about this whole thing. Think about the advisability of … visiting with the girl. I will let you know my thinking.”

  “Yes, General.”

  CHAPTER 10

  When Gus next met with Ursina, this time at the Preskov, she arrived alone—walking from the metro, he concluded. She sat down without any affected salutation. She said simply, “Well, it’s nice to see you, Gus. You need not call me Dr. Ursina, even though this time I am unchaperoned. At least, not until you appear on my operating table.” She babbled on as Gus poured out the wine she had ordered at their earlier dinner.

  They talked at first about the initiative of Gorbachev to end the testing of nuclear weapons. “Your government has been rather ambivalent on the point.”

  “The Reagan people,” Gus said, “are looking out for any clause in a new treaty that would limit pursuit of our Star Wars program.”

  “Yes, and of course the language of the ABM Treaty is under discussion. Your people are promoting the position that Star Wars experimentation can proceed without violating the treaty.”

  “Unless the explosions take place in the atmosphere.”

  “Oh goodness. When will it end?”

  “I don’t know. But Ursina, should it concern us?”

  “Obviously it concerns us, young idiot.” She began now speaking in English, and Gus replied in English. They moved in and out of the two languages, according as idiomatic references lent themselves better to one or the other language.

  After the first course, he asked her whether she would care to spend the night with him. “You are a dazzling lady.”

  “Well, you are not a dazzling man. You are by my standards a child. Though a well-spoken child. And I rather like your face. I am a little surprised that such a face could have been generated in the Ukraine. Are you certain your parents were Ukrainians?”

  Gus laughed. “I’m sure a Soviet historian doing faithful duty to his boss could find a way of proving that I was actually born and bred in Iowa.”

  “Our scientists can be very ingenious.”

  “Yes. Like Lysenko. He could prove anything that your scientific commissions wanted proved.”

  “For instance, that when you were growing up, whether in the Ukraine or in Iowa, you were taught to be respectful in the company of … middle-aged ladies?”

  “Oh, shit. Forget Lysenko. I’m not sure any phony scientists got in the way of your specialty.”

  “No. There is no party line on the subject of male urological problems.… You know, Gus—maybe you have not lived here long enough to run into it: The official Russians are great prudes. You cannot read pornography here.”

  “But there is no difficulty in Moscow—I am told—in finding prostitutes.”

  “Well done, Mr. Gus. No difficulty—as you tell it. We are left to infer that you never inquired personally into the subject.”

  Gus thought to say, and did, “Well, there was the one occasion, it was very late at night—”

  “I hope you were protected.”

  “Well, at one level I was protected.”

  “What other levels are there? What are you talking about? I forgot to ask, are you CIA?”

  Gus laughed, and poured her some more wine. “You have asked me a lot of questions. I begin by saying you are intelligent enough to know that if I was a member of the CIA, I would not admit it.”

  “Unless it was necessary in order to seduce me.”

  “Ursina, you have a bad habit of trumping every point I make. I am using plain English—trumping every point. Do you understand?”

  “Of course. I have played bridge.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what. If you sleep with me I will tell you that I am a member of the CIA and will report on every detail of the evening.”

  “I suppose I could use you to advance my research, too.” She smiled and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  CHAPTER 11

  At regular intervals, during his visits to the university library, Gus did a special kind of research. He spent a lot of time at the library, collecting data for his book on the Okhrana. But once every week he would call up Volume III of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911 edition). Inside the front cover were the signatures of every library patron who had consulted that volume of the encyclopedia (it was forbidden to remove it from the library). He would scan these looking for the code—the name of Galina Sokolov. When her name appeared, that was the signal, and he would initiate a meeting with her by calling in at the brothel and paying for a half hour with her, putting down forty rubles on the counter. The clerk, a heavily made-up elderly woman, would check upstairs on the intercom connection without removing her cigarette from her mouth. Galina was—or was not—available.

  Galina—short, blonde, with sleepy hazel eyes beneath her bangs—conceived of herself, depending on the patron, as a ravishing sexual object, or a warm den mother, or a sophisticated salon matriarch.

  She collected political gossip. Her tips weren’t always reliable. She trafficked mostly in rumors, but some of these, Gus, whose meetings with her satisfied several of his appetites, listened to with assiduous interest. She had once re
minisced to Gus about General Secretary Chernenko, who had been one of her clients. Already an old man when he succeeded Yuri Andropov in 1984, he had told Galina he was going to inform the Presidium of his recommendation for a successor within a few weeks. Whether he had actually done so she did not know. Chernenko fell seriously ill one week after his last encounter with Galina, and died two months later.

  On this visit, Gus was surprised when Galina spoke with some familiarity about “the plot last year to assassinate Comrade Gorbachev.” Few people knew more about that plot than Gus Windels, who, posing as the son of Blackford Oakes, had traveled to Moscow with Oakes to foil it. Yet Galina spoke knowingly of the plot. She managed to give it an erotic dimension, going on about it even when they were deeply entwined. Now, her formal duties done, she lit a cigarette and returned to the subject with very special information.

  That the attempt a year ago had been made, she said, was widely known by the cognoscenti, though the plot was never officially acknowledged. The insiders, Galina told Gus, knew that a bomb had actually exploded in Gorbachev’s desk, killing an aide. Galina now told Gus that one of the assassins, caught, tortured, and executed, had a brother. And he, seeking revenge, was determined to make a fresh attempt on Gorbachev’s life. To that end, he had lined up support from a disaffected general.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. But the brother—he told me that the general hopes to find financing for the next attempt.”

  “Financing from whom?”

  “Gus. I do not know. From the Americans, one imagines. It is Americans who usually finance things. Perhaps the American Central Intelligence.”

  “Galina, you are in touch with the brother?”

  “I have been in intimate touch with him.”

  “You can find him, then?”

  “No. We don’t have a code system. That’s only for you. And somebody else who is special. But the brother comes back quite often.”