by Daniel Silva
Gabriel gave his map another pointless glance as he set out across the Moskvoretsky Bridge. Crimson-and-black banners of the ruling Russian Unity Party hung from the lampposts, swaying drunkenly in the warm breeze. At the opposite end of the bridge, the Russian president smiled disagreeably at Gabriel from a billboard three stories in height. He was scheduled to face the Russian “electorate,” such that it was, for the fourth time at the end of the summer. There was little suspense about the outcome; the president had long ago purged Russia of dangerous democratic tendencies, and the officially sanctioned opposition parties were now little more than useful idiots. The smiling man on the billboard was the new tsar in everything but name—and one with imperial ambitions at that.
On the other side of the river lay the pleasant quarter known as Zamoskvoreche. Spared the architectural terror of Stalin’s replanning, the district had retained some of the atmosphere of nineteenth-century Moscow. Gabriel walked past flaking imperial houses and onion-domed churches until he came to the walled compound at Bolshaya Ordynka 56. The plaque at the gate read EMBASSY OF ISRAEL in English, Russian, and Hebrew. Gabriel held his credentials up to the fish-eye lens of the camera and heard the electronic dead-bolt locks immediately snap open. As he stepped into the compound, he glanced over his shoulder and saw a man in a car across the street raise a camera and blatantly snap a photograph. Apparently, the FSB knew about the ambassador’s dinner party and intended to intimidate the guests as they arrived and departed.
The compound was cramped and drab, with a cluster of featureless buildings standing around a central courtyard. A youthful security guard—who was not a security guard at all but an Office field agent attached to Moscow Station—greeted Gabriel cordially by his cover name and escorted him into the foyer of the small apartment building that housed most of the embassy’s personnel. The ambassador was waiting on the top-floor landing as Gabriel stepped off the lift. A polished career diplomat whom Gabriel had seen only in photographs, he threw his arms around Gabriel and gave him two thunderous claps between the shoulder blades that no FSB transmitter could fail to detect. “Natan!” he shouted, as though to a deaf uncle. “My God! Is it really you? You look as though you’ve been traveling an age. St. Petersburg surely wasn’t as bad as all that.” He thrust a glass of tepid champagne into Gabriel’s hand and cast him adrift. “As usual, Natan, you’re the last to arrive. Mingle with the masses. We’ll chat later after you’ve had a chance to say hello to everyone. I want to hear all about your dreadful conference.”
Gabriel hoisted his most affable diplomatic smile and, glass in hand, waded into the noisy smoke-filled sitting room.
He met a famous violinist who was now the leader of a ragtag opposition party called the Coalition for a Free Russia.
He met a playwright who had revived the time-tested art of Russian allegory to carefully criticize the new regime.
He met a filmmaker who had recently won a major human rights award in the West for a documentary about the gulag.
He met a woman who had been confined to an insane asylum because she had dared to carry a placard across Red Square calling for democracy in Russia.
He met an unrepentant Bolshevik who thought the only way to save Russia was to restore the dictatorship of the proletariat and burn the oligarchs at the stake.
He met a fossilized dissident from the Brezhnev era who had been raised from the near dead to wage one last futile campaign for Russian freedom.
He met a brave essayist who had been nearly beaten to death by a band of Unity Party Youth.
And finally, ten minutes after his arrival, he introduced himself to a reporter from Moskovsky Gazeta, who, owing to the murders of two colleagues, had recently been promoted to the post of acting editor in chief. She wore a black sleeveless dress and a silver locket around her neck. The bangles on her wrist clattered like wind chimes as she extended her hand toward Gabriel and gave him a melancholy smile. “How do you do, Mr. Golani,” she said primly in English. “My name is Olga Sukhova.”
The photograph Uzi Navot had shown him a week earlier in Jerusalem had not done justice to Olga’s beauty. With translucent eyes and long, narrow features, she looked to Gabriel like a Russian icon come to life. He was seated at her right during dinner but managed only a few brief exchanges of conversation, largely because the documentary filmmaker monopolized her attention with a shot-by-shot description of his latest work. With no place to take shelter, Gabriel found himself in the clutches of the ancient dissident, who treated him to a lecture on the history of Russian political opposition dating back to the days of the tsars. As the waiters cleared the dessert plates, Olga gave him a sympathetic smile. “I’m afraid I feel a cigarette coming on,” she said. “Would you care to join me?”
They rose from the table together under the crestfallen gaze of the filmmaker and stepped onto the ambassador’s small terrace. It was empty and in semidarkness; in the distance loomed one of the “the Seven Sisters,” the monstrous Stalinist towers that still dominated the Moscow skyline. “Europe’s tallest apartment building,” she said without enthusiasm. “Everything in Russia has to be the biggest, the tallest, the fastest, or the most valuable. We cannot live as normal people.” Her lighter flared. “Is this your first time in Russia, Mr. Golani?”
“Yes,” he answered truthfully.
“And what brings you to our country?”
You, he answered truthfully again, but only to himself. Aloud, he said that he had been drafted on short notice to attend the UNESCO conference in St. Petersburg. And for the next several minutes he spoke glowingly of his achievements, until he could see that she was bored. He glanced over his shoulder, into the ambassador’s dining room, and saw no movement to indicate that their moment of privacy was about to be interrupted anytime soon.
“We have a common acquaintance,” he said. “Actually, we had a common acquaintance. I’m afraid he’s no longer alive.”
She lifted the cigarette to her lips and held it there as though it were a shield protecting her from harm. “And who might that be?” she asked in her schoolgirl English.
“Boris Ostrovsky,” Gabriel said calmly.
Her gaze was blank. The ember of her cigarette was trembling slightly in the half-light. “And how were you acquainted with Boris Ostrovsky?” she asked guardedly.
“I was in St. Peter’s Basilica when he was murdered.”
He gazed directly into the iconic face, assessing whether the fear he saw there was authentic or a forgery. Deciding it was indeed genuine, he pressed on.
“I was the reason he came to Rome in the first place. I held him while he died.”
She folded her arms defensively. “I’m sorry, Mr. Golani, but you are making me extremely uncomfortable.”
“Boris wanted to tell me something, Miss Sukhova. He was killed before he could do that. I need to know what it was. And I think you may know the answer.”
“I’m afraid you were misled. No one on the staff knew what Boris was doing in Rome.”
“We know he had information, Miss Sukhova. Information that was too dangerous to publish here. Information about a threat of some sort. A threat to the West and Israel.”
She glanced through the open doorway into the dining room. “I suppose this evening was all staged for my benefit. You wanted to meet me somewhere you thought the FSB wouldn’t be listening and so you threw a party on my behalf and lured me here with promises of an exclusive story.” She placed her hand suggestively on his forearm and leaned close. Her voice, when she spoke again, was little more than a whisper. “You should know that the FSB is always listening, Mr. Golani. In fact, two of the guests your embassy invited here tonight are on the FSB payroll.”
She released his arm and moved away. Then her face brightened suddenly, like a lost child glimpsing her mother. Gabriel turned and saw the filmmaker advancing toward them, with two other guests in his wake. Cigarettes were ignited, drinks were fetched, and within a few moments they were all four conversing in rap
id Russian as though Mr. Golani was not there. Gabriel was convinced he had overplayed his hand and that Olga was now forever lost to him, but as he turned to leave he felt her hand once more upon his arm.
“The answer is yes,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“You asked whether I would be willing to give you a tour of Moscow tomorrow. And the answer is yes. Where are you staying?”
“At the Savoy.”
“It’s the most thoroughly bugged hotel in Moscow.” She smiled. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
14
NOVODEVICHY CEMETERY
She wanted to take him to a cemetery. To understand Russia today, she said, you must first know her past. And to know her past, you had to walk among her bones.
She telephoned the Savoy the first time at ten and suggested they meet at noon. A short time later she called again to say that, due to an unforeseen complication at the office, she would not be able to meet him until three. Gabriel, playing the role of Natan Golani, spent much of the day touring the Kremlin and the Tretyakov Gallery. Then, at 2:45, he stepped onto the escalator of the Lubyanka Metro station and rode it down into the warm Moscow earth. A train waited in the murky light of the platform; he stepped on board as the doors rattled closed and took hold of the overhead handrail as the carriage lurched forward. His FSB minder had managed to secure the only empty seat. He was fiddling with his iPod, symbol of the New Russian man, while an old babushka in a black headscarf looked on in bewilderment.
They rode six stops to Sportivnaya. The watcher emerged into the hazy sunlight first and went to the left. Gabriel turned to the right and entered a chaotic outdoor market of wobbly kiosks and trestle tables piled high with cheap goods from the former republics of central Asia. At the opposite end of the market a band of Unity Party Youth was chanting slogans and handing out election leaflets. One of them, a not-so-youthful man in his early thirties, was trailing a few steps behind Gabriel as he arrived at the entrance of the Novodevichy Cemetery.
On the other side of the gate stood a small redbrick flower shop. Olga Sukhova was waiting outside the doorway, a bouquet of carnations in her arms. “Your timing is impeccable, Mr. Golani.” She kissed Gabriel formally on both cheeks and smiled warmly. “Come with me. I think you’re going to find this fascinating.”
She led him up a shaded footpath lined with tall elm and spruce. The graves were on either side: small plots surrounded by iron fences; tall sculpted monuments; redbrick niche walls covered in pale moss. The atmosphere was parklike and tranquil, a reprieve from the chaos of the city. For a moment, Gabriel was almost able to forget they were being followed.
“The cemetery used to be inside the Novodevichy Convent, but at the turn of the last century the Church decided that there were too many burials taking place inside the monastery’s walls so they created this place.” She spoke to him in English, at tour guide level, loudly enough so that those around them could hear. “It’s the closest thing we have to a national cemetery—other than the Kremlin wall, of course. Playwrights and poets, monsters and murderers: they all lie together here in Novodevichy. One can only imagine what they talk about at night when the gates are closed and the visitors all leave.” She stopped before a tall gray monument with a pile of wilted red roses at its base. "Do you like Chekhov, Mr. Golani?”
"Who doesn’t?”
“He was one of the first to be buried here.” She took him by the elbow. “Come, I’ll show you some more.”
They drifted slowly together along a footpath strewn with fallen leaves. On a parallel pathway, the watcher who had been handing out leaflets in the market was now feigning excessive interest in the grave of a renowned Russian mathematician. A few feet away stood a woman with a beige anorak tied around her waist. In her right hand was a digital camera, pointed directly at Gabriel and Olga.
“You were followed here.” She gave him a sideways glance. “But, then, I suppose you already know that, don’t you, Mr. Golani? Or should I call you Mr. Allon?”
“My name is Natan Golani. I work for the Israeli Ministry of Culture.”
“Forgive me, Mr. Golani.”
She managed a smile. She was dressed casually in a snug-fitting black pullover and a pair of blue jeans. Her pale hair was pulled straight back from her forehead and secured by a clasp at the nape of her neck. Her suede boots made her appear taller than she had the previous evening. Their heels tapped rhythmically along the pavement as they walked slowly past the graves.
The musicians Rostropovich and Rubinstein . . .
The writers Gogol and Bulgakov . . .
The Party giants Khrushchev and Kosygin . . .
Kaganovich, the Stalinist monster who murdered millions during the madness of collectivization . . .
Molotov, signer of the secret pact that condemned Europe to war and the Jews of Poland to annihilation . . .
“There’s no place quite like this to see the striking contradictions of our history. Great beauty lies side by side with the incomprehensible. These men gave us everything, and when they were gone we were left with nothing: factories that produced goods no one wanted, an ideology that was tired and bankrupt. All of it set to beautiful words and music.”
Gabriel looked at the bouquet of flowers in her arms. “Who are those for?”
She stopped before a small plot with a low, unadorned stone monument. “Dmitri Sukhova, my grandfather. He was a playwright and a filmmaker. Had he lived in another time, under a different regime, he might have been great. Instead, he was drafted to make cheap Party propaganda for the masses. He made the people believe in the myth of Soviet greatness. His reward was to be buried here, among true Russian genius.”
She crouched next to the grave and brushed pine needles from the plaque.
“You have his name,” Gabriel said. “You’re not married?”
She shook her head and placed the flowers gently on the grave. “I’m afraid I’ve yet to find a countryman suitable for marriage and procreation. If they have any money, the first thing they do is buy themselves a mistress. Go into any trendy sushi restaurant in Moscow and you’ll see the pretty young girls lined up at the bar, waiting for a man to sweep them off their feet. But not just any man. They want a New Russian man. A man with money and connections. A man who winters in Zermatt and Courchevel and summers in the South of France. A man who will give them jewelry and foreign cars. I prefer to spend my summers at my grandfather’s dacha. I grow radishes and carrots there. I still believe in my country. I don’t need to vacation in the exclusive playgrounds of Western Europe to be a contented, self-fulfilled New Russian woman.”
She had been speaking to the grave. Now she turned her head and looked over her shoulder at Gabriel.
“You must think I’m terribly foolish.”
“Why foolish?”
“Because I pretend to be a journalist in a country where there is no longer true journalism. Because I want democracy in a country that has never known it—and, in all likelihood, never will.”
She stood upright and brushed the dust from her palms. “To understand Russia today, you must understand the trauma of the nineties. Everything we had, everything we had been told, was swept away. We went from superpower to basket case overnight. Our people lost their life’s savings, not just once but over and over again. Russians are a paternalistic people. They believe in the Orthodox Church, the State, the Tsar. They associate democracy with chaos. Our president and the siloviki understand this. They use words like ‘managed democracy’ and ‘State capitalism,’ but they’re just euphemisms for something more sinister: fascism. We have lurched from the ideology of Lenin to the ideology of Mussolini in a decade. We should not be surprised by this. Look around you, Mr. Golani. The history of Russia is nothing but a series of convulsions. We cannot live as normal people. We never will.”