The Tristan Betrayal

by Robert Ludlum

  Metcalfe handed the old man a ruble.

  “Ah, vot, spasibo, baryn,” the vendor said, thanking him in the polite, almost groveling language in which peasants of old addressed the gentry. The Russian set down his small pile of booklets on his newsstand so that he could take the ruble, but Metcalfe did not wait to receive the booklet. Instead, he vaulted past the man, toward the curb, leaping onto the moving streetcar. His right foot landed on the steel ledge of the three-car tram as his right hand grabbed a steel ring and he managed to pull himself onto the car. Fortunately, it was not moving so quickly that Metcalfe was hurt. A few shouts came from inside the car: a female voice, likely one of the strelochnitsi, the older women who helped turn the wheels that kept the trams on track.

  He whipped his head around and confirmed that he had made it onto the tram unseen by the watchers. As the streetcar thundered down the road, Metcalfe saw that one of the watchers, the one who had been peering into the plate-glass shoe store window, had not moved from his place. He had noticed nothing. The other watcher was striding around the long limonad line; it was evident from the blank look on the man’s face that he, too, did not perceive that anything was out of the ordinary. As far as this NKVD man knew, his American target was still haggling with the one-armed newspaper dealer. Only the newspaper dealer had observed him jumping onto the tram, but by the time either of the watchers asked him what had just happened, Metcalfe would be long gone.

  Metcalfe shoved his way onto the crowded streetcar and made his way up to the conductor, depositing a handful of kopeks into the coin receptacle. All of the wooden seats were taken—many of them by men, he noticed, while women of all ages stood.

  He had pulled it off—temporarily, to be sure, but he had evaded the watchers. But simply by doing so he had changed the rules. Once they realized that he had evaded them, they would regard him with heightened suspicion. They would step up their surveillance, treat him as hostile. Never again would he evade them quite so easily.

  He got off the tram on Petrovka Street, one of the main avenues in the city center. It was lined with mansions where Russia’s wealthiest merchants had once lived, palaces that had been converted into hotels, embassies, apartment buildings, and shops. He immediately recognized the four-story limestone building with the classical facade. It was where Lana lived with her aging father, Mikhail Ivanovich Baranov, a retired general now employed in the Commissariat of Defense. During his sojourn in Moscow six years ago, Metcalfe had visited her here several times; he could find her apartment by memory.

  But he did not stop in front of the building. Instead, he walked past it, as if heading for the Hotel Aurora, halfway down the block. He passed several shops: a bakery; a store selling meat, although Metcalfe doubted there was much of anything for sale inside; and a women’s clothing shop, whose plate-glass display windows allowed him to monitor foot traffic behind him. Some people had gotten off the tram when he did—several middle-aged women, a woman with two small children, an old man—and none of them raised alarms. He stopped, presumably to inspect the meager wares on display in the clothing shop’s windows, while in fact examining the patterns of the other pedestrians. Reassured that he had not been followed here, he made an abrupt U-turn, crossed the street, pretended to examine a travel poster advertising the splendors of Sochi. The suddenness of his movement would flush out a follower, causing last-minute adjustments. But he saw none. Now he was certain he had not brought a tail to Lana’s apartment building. He walked up a block, crossed back over, then circumnavigated her building.

  At the Bolshoi, Lana was protected, as were all the ballerinas, in particular the prima ballerina. Here, however, she would be far easier to approach; that, at least, was Metcalfe’s plan. He glanced up at the fourth floor, at the row of windows that he knew belonged to Svetlana’s father’s apartment, and saw a shadow.

  Outlined against the sheer curtains in the window was a silhouette that he knew at once, and his breath caught.

  A slender young woman stood by the window, one hand on her hip, the other gesticulating at an unseen interlocutor.

  It was Lana; he was sure of it.

  Even in outline she was extraordinary, achingly beautiful. Suddenly he could not bear to be out here on the freezing, windswept Moscow sidewalk when inside, a few hundred feet away, stood Lana. Last night she had dismissed him scornfully, cast him out with a combination of contempt and—he was sure of it—fear. She would be no less fearful about seeing him now.

  But what did her fear stem from? Was it simply the phobia that all Russians had of foreigners, of being seen to consort with capitalist visitors? Or did her fear derive somehow from her latest entanglement, with von Schüssler? Had she been warned? Whatever the source of her fear, it was something Metcalfe had to acknowledge in speaking with her. He had to let her know he understood. He had to defuse her fear by addressing it head-on.

  Standing several entryways down from Lana’s, he took out a folded copy of Izvestiya and pretended to read it. For a few minutes he stood there, perusing the newspaper, waiting. Finally, when no one was in sight, he went to Lana’s entrance. Once inside the building—there were no guards, since no high-ranking members of the government lived here—he raced up the stairs to the fourth floor.

  The door to her apartment, like all the doors in this and other similar buildings throughout Moscow, was padded and covered with leather. The padding, Metcalfe knew, did more than keep out the cold; it prevented eavesdropping. Always there was a fear that someone might be listening.

  He pushed the buzzer and waited. His heartbeat accelerated, a strange combination of apprehension and anticipation. After a minute or so he could hear a heavy tread approaching from inside. They were not Lana’s footsteps; might they be her father’s?

  The door came open slowly and a face appeared: the ancient, weathered face of an old woman who peered at him suspiciously, her tiny eyes rheumy and all but buried beneath wrinkles. She wore a coarse woolen sweater with a delicate lace collar and over it a heavy linen apron.

  “Da? Shto vyi khotite?” she demanded: What do you want?

  Metcalfe immediately recognized not the face but the type. The old woman belonged to that age-old genus, the Russian babushka, a word that meant “grandmother” but in reality was applied to any elderly woman and carried with it a bevy of meanings. The babushka was the center of the extended Russian family, the stern but loving, hardworking matriarch in a society in which the men so often died prematurely, from war or alcohol. She was mother and grandmother, cook and housekeeper and gorgon all in one.

  But this was not Lana’s grandmother. More likely she was a cook/housekeeper, a rare privilege accorded certain members of the Soviet elite.

  “Good morning, babushka.” Metcalfe spoke gently in Russian. “I’m here to see Svetlana Mikhailovna.”

  “And you are . . . ?” the old lady inquired with a scowl.

  “Please tell her it’s . . . Stiva.”

  The babushka’s permanent scowl deepened even further, and she squinted, her eyes all but disappearing beneath the folds of skin. Abruptly she shut the door. Metcalfe heard the heavy tread moving away into the interior of the apartment, the voice of the housekeeper high and muffled, fading away. Lana and her father had not had a housekeeper previously, Metcalfe reflected. A housekeeper or cook was an increasingly rare perquisite these days, he knew. Was this a privilege accorded Lana since becoming the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina?

  A minute later, the door opened again. “She’s not here,” the old woman said, her voice now peevish and abrupt.

  “I know she’s here,” Metcalfe said.

  “She is not here,” the babushka snapped.

  “Then when will she be back?” Metcalfe said, playing along with her.

  “She will never be back. Not to you. Not ever. Never come here again!”

  And she slammed the door.

  Lana was more than frightened: she was terrified. Once again she had pushed him away, just as she had last night�
��but why? This was not the impetuous reaction of a lover who felt spurned, rejected. No, there was something more complex going on. It had to be something more than the widespread fear of contact with a foreigner. That would not explain why she had sent him away now, when her housekeeper could see that he was alone. Simple curiosity would have led Lana to admit him, to ask what he was after, why he was in Moscow, why he was so insistent on seeing her. He knew Lana. She had always been a woman of insatiable curiosity, endlessly asking about what life was like back in America or on his travels around the world. She was almost like a child that way, her questions never ceasing. No, given the opportunity to find out why Metcalfe was here, trying to see her, she would not have passed it up. He knew, too, that she was not one to hold a grudge long; anger was always a passing emotion with her, appearing quickly and just as quickly gone. It did not make sense that she continued to banish him, and he wondered why.

  The scowling, wrinkled face of the housekeeper came into his mind. Why was there a housekeeper when neither Lana nor her father had had need of one in the past? It was a household of two, and Lana had always done the cooking for her widowed father.

  Was the babushka truly a housekeeper? Or was she in fact some sort of warden, a watcher, a keeper assigned to Lana? Had the old woman been placed in Lana’s household to oversee her, keep her a prisoner?

  But that made little sense; Lana was simply not that important. She was a dancer, nothing more. There had to be a simple, plausible, rational explanation for the presence of this housekeeper: the babushka was nothing more than a perk accorded to such a prominent artist of national stature. That had to be it. And as for Lana’s refusal to see him? Nineteen-forty was a different time from the early thirties. Soviet society had just emerged from the period of the great purges; fear and paranoia were widespread. Didn’t it make sense that Lana’s affair with Metcalfe was known to the authorities, that she had been warned not to make contact with him again? Maybe that was all it was.

  He hoped that was all it was. Because another explanation had begun to suggest itself, an ominous theory Metcalfe didn’t want to think about. Was it conceivable that the Soviet authorities knew why he was here, knew of his secret mission? If that was the case, it was perfectly logical that Lana had been warned not to see him. And if that was the case . . .

  He couldn’t think about that. If that were the case, he would have been arrested as soon as he arrived in Moscow. No, that could not be.

  He descended the stairs, glancing out a narrow window as he passed, and then he saw something that made him freeze. A man was standing in the courtyard outside Lana’s entrance, smoking a cigarette. For some reason he looked familiar. He had a typical Russian face: high cheekbones, chiseled features, a Siberian cast to the eyes; but it was a hard, pitiless face. His hair was a thick blond thatch, his eyes pale.

  Where had he seen the man before?

  It came to him suddenly: Metcalfe now remembered seeing the man standing in front of the Metropole, chatting with another man, so involved in their conversation that Metcalfe took the barest notice of either of them. As was his habit, Metcalfe had taken quick note of the men’s faces and stored them away as he so often did. Neither man had taken any notice of Metcalfe, so he had not given them another thought.

  But it was the same man; he was certain.

  How? Metcalfe was certain he had not been followed here. He had evaded the NKVD thugs from the hotel lobby; that he was sure of. Immediately after getting off of the streetcar, he had taken note of the others who had gotten off with him, watched them go their separate ways. There had been no one lingering in the vicinity—he was absolutely convinced of it!

  Yet he was equally sure that the blond man with the pitiless face was the same one he had barely noticed standing in front of the Metropole.

  Which meant that the man had not followed Metcalfe here. And that was alarming indeed. He remembered the old slogan that Corky liked to repeat: The only thing worse than being followed is not being followed—because they know where you’re going.

  The blond man had come here from the Metropole separately, as if he knew that Metcalfe would be coming here. How? Metcalfe hadn’t told Roger where he was going, so he could not have been overheard in the lobby.

  Obviously the blond man, or his handlers, knew of Metcalfe’s connection to Lana. Unlike the low-level goons from the hotel lobby, this agent had to be operating on instructions from a well-briefed control, someone who had access to Metcalfe’s dossier. That in itself differentiated the man from the run-of-the-mill operatives; he was of another category, a more dangerous category.

  Metcalfe stood in the stairwell, watching the blond man at an angle so that he could not be detected. His thoughts whirled. The agent had not seen him enter the building, he was sure; instead, he had been stationed as an observer, one who knew Metcalfe’s face, knew how he was dressed: that was the point of the man’s loitering in front of the hotel, so that he could catch a furtive glimpse of Metcalfe, establish visual confirmation.

  He did not see me enter, Metcalfe realized. He doesn’t know I tried to visit Lana.

  And he would not, Metcalfe vowed. He was determined to protect Lana as best he could.

  Descending the stairs to the ground floor, he continued on to the basement of the building. The smell of smoke grew stronger: this building was heated not with coal but with wood, as were most buildings in Moscow these days, given the coal shortage and the abundance of wood. A splintered heavy wooden door gave onto a dark dirt-floored cellar. Metcalfe let his eyes become accustomed to the dark, then made his way among the stacks of split wood, between the primitive furnace equipment. The floor became muddy and slimy in one area, where Metcalfe realized a black-market shower had been set up for the building’s residents. Hot baths were forbidden by law these days, at least for most residents of Moscow; hot-water systems were often disconnected, making it impossible to bathe unless one heated water on the stove. Thus an illegal industry had emerged in the cellars of certain of the larger apartment buildings, where Muscovites paid exorbitant sums to gyrate beneath a trickle of warm water.

  The wood had to be brought in some way, he realized. There had to be a service entrance, a sluzhebnyi vkhod. Looking around, he at last found what appeared to be a rudimentary delivery chute, a small set of concrete steps that led up to bulkhead doors. The doors were locked from inside, of course, by means of a hook and eye. He unlocked it quietly, then pushed up slowly on one of the hatches, peering out as he did so at an alley. Metcalfe looked around quickly, establishing that no one was within sight. The blond man was surely still at his observation post, waiting to see whether a foreigner either entered or departed the building. He would not leave his station and risk missing his target.

  Metcalfe stepped out of the bulkhead, closed the doors behind him, and raced through the cobblestone-paved alley. This was something more than an alley, though, he realized quickly; it was a pereulok, a lane between major thoroughfares, used mostly for deliveries. A number of the shops he had passed while walking down Petrovka had service entrances back here. Usually such entrances would be locked, however, making it difficult to gain access. He ran past the rear entrances to the bread shop, the meat shop, the women’s clothing shop, until he reached the back of the Hotel Aurora, where he slowed to a leisurely-seeming stroll.

  Glancing quickly around to make sure he was not being followed, he mounted a set of wooden steps, past garbage cans, and pounded on the steel door with his fist. No response. He pounded again, then tried the knob and was surprised when it turned.

  Inside, a dimly lit corridor that stank of cigarette smoke led to another, broader hallway. A pair of double doors swung open, revealing an immense institutional kitchen. A squat woman with brassy red hair was stirring something in a great cast-iron pot; a middle-aged man in a blue uniform was frying some mysterious kind of cutlets on a griddle. They looked up at him with curiosity, obviously trying to determine what a well-dressed foreigner was doing here, un
sure how to respond.

  “Oh, excuse me,” Metcalfe said in English. “I seem to be lost.”

  “Nye ponimayu,” the red-haired woman said with a shrug: I don’t understand. Metcalfe gave an uncomprehending but polite smile, shrugged in reply, and crossed the kitchen, exiting into a deserted hotel restaurant. Now he continued into a shabby high-ceilinged lobby, paint peeling from its walls, threadbare Oriental rugs strewn across the floor. Stuffed reindeer heads stared from wooden plaques.

  Two officious-looking young men stood at the reception desk. They nodded as he passed. Neither recognized him, but neither would say anything: he was a well-dressed foreigner emerging from the hotel’s interior. Apparently he belonged. He nodded, brusquely but politely, in return, and strode toward the front doors. Here he could simply disappear into the stream of passersby, having left the blond watcher back at Lana’s apartment building.

  Leaning against a streetcar shelter in front of the hotel was a familiar figure.

  The blond man with the pale eyes. Eyes narrowed, he smoked, his body relaxed as if waiting for someone.

  Metcalfe turned his face away, pretending to be looking in the other direction. My God, he thought, the man is good. Whoever he was, wherever he was from, he was of an entirely different caliber from the run-of-the-mill NKVD goons. He was a first-rate operative.

  Why?

  What did it mean that someone of his skill had been assigned? It could mean . . . it could mean any number of things. But one thing was becoming abundantly clear: for some reason Soviet intelligence considered Metcalfe someone to watch with particular scrutiny. They would not devote such top-notch talent to someone they considered a mere foreign businessman.