The Debriefing

by Robert Littell

  “He had a shoulder sack.”

  The man with the pipe shakes his head in annoyance. “Have the photography lab work up some composites of him without the mustache and eyeglasses, and pass them around to the units assigned to the A-list dissidents. There’s always a chance he’ll try to contact one of them.”

  One of the young men says, “You’d think they’d get tired of their little game,” and his companion laughs and says, “They certainly go to a lot of trouble to bring in a few dozen pamphlets.”

  The man with the pipe sucks it back into life. “The thing… that bothers … me is that he … left one copy of … Grani behind in the lining.” The tobacco has caught, and he draws on it thoughtfully. “Almost as if he wanted to make sure we knew he was a Grani courier. Well”—he slides the dossier across the desk and waves impatiently at the two men—“what else do you have for me?”

  CHAPTER

  7

  Stone is having second thoughts, and they keep him up most of the night. Occasionally he drifts off into a troubled sleep, only to be woken by the braying of a zebra in the zoo below, and toward dawn by a taunting argument between Morning Stalin and Ilyador, whispering feverishly to each other in the hallway. A toilet flushes in another part of the building, setting up a rattle of pipes in the walls. Stone, once again trapped on the surface of things, sits up with a start. The strange girl with the enormous dark eyes stirs; the blanket falls away, revealing a thin shoulder, a pale breast. Stone covers her, then lets the cold air bathe his skin for a long moment, thinking of things a world away: of Thro, of his daughter, of the lady lawyer who promised him what he promised Kulakov—that everything would work out in the end.

  In the morning Katushka comes awake with a start, leaps lightly from the bed and, braced by the cold air which she draws in deep gulps, goes through her ritual: she peers at her body in the mirror, trying to see it as she thinks others see it. “When I was a small girl,” she tells Stone, “my mother always told me that somewhere in the world there is someone living the same life as you—a kind of mirror image, the only difference being her hair is parted on the other side.” She looks across at Stone. “You will come to understand that such things can be true,” she announces, and before he can comment either way she asks, “Have you decided to admit what I already know—that you are not Russian? Have you decided to let me help you?”

  Stone makes up his mind on the spot. “I’m not the occasion you’ve been waiting for,” he says. “What I have to do in Moscow, I’ll do by myself. You can help me by staying out of it.”

  “Have it your way,” Katushka says icily. “Don’t forget the twenty-five rubles are payable in advance.”

  At breakfast, Ilyador Aleksandrovich turns up as Isadora Aleksandrovna, wearing a fluffy dressing gown and polish on his nails.

  Morning Stalin paces back and forth behind Ilyador’s chair and talks to the back of his neck. “You are the most naïve fig I have ever laid eyes on,” he says, apparently picking up where they left off the night before.

  “I’m delighted you think so.” Ilyador refuses to rise to the bait. “Naïveté is something I try to cultivate. It’s a quality, when all is said and done, that comes after sophistication.”

  Katushka swallows a spoonful of foul-smelling lavender pollen (supplied, in return for services rendered, by an acquaintance at the free market), taps Stone on the wrist with her spoon. “You should know that I’m not at all pleased with you.” And she adds hopefully, “You can still change your mind.”

  “Change his mind about what?” demands Morning Stalin.

  “I’ll be gone most of the day,” Stone announces.

  Ilyador holds his fingernails to the light and admires them. “Naïveté”—he talks to nobody in particular—“is intoxicating.”

  Stone gets up to leave. Katushka, angry now, watches him go, then flings her teacup against the wall, plastering it with tea leaves, shattering the cup to bits. Ilyador cringes against Morning Stalin. “What did we do?” he asks in a weak voice.

  Stone spends the better part of the morning doing some fairly elementary street work. He lingers at a kiosk studying the headlines in Pravda, suddenly glances at his watch and sprints across a street just as the light changes. No one sprints across behind him. He dashes through an underground passageway, late for an appointment (he doesn’t have), and stops at the far end to look at East German radios in a store window. He leaps from a subway car just as the doors start to close, crosses over and crowds into a train going in the other direction. When he is absolutely sure he isn’t being followed, he enters a sporting goods store on Arbat Street to buy a cheap leather briefcase, then ducks into the men’s room in the Stalin Gothic at the foot of the Arbat to empty the contents of his shoulder bag into the briefcase. On his way out he casually discards the bag (in a very public wastebasket; whoever finds it will keep it). That done, he sets out on foot for the Ministry of Defense canteen, on a side street not far from the Kremlin.

  Moscow is a sprawling scar; people who aren’t used to it tend to hold their breath so they won’t catch whatever it has. Crusts of soot cling to massive buildings like sediment. Stalin Gothics, seven show skyscrapers in all, brutalize the horizon. Twelvelane boulevards cut through the city like geological faults.

  Stone knows Moscow as well as he knows the back of his hand: its alleyways and boulevards, its bus routes and subway lines, its parks and playgrounds, its garbage collection system, its sewer system, its public steam baths and soccer stadiums, its central markets and railroad stations. It was Stone, in fact, who—just starting out in Topology in the early fifties—organized what became known as the Moscow Project. After he was promoted, he handed it on to one of his juniors, but he kept in touch the way someone does with an alma mater—out of a vague feeling that one ought to be nostalgic. But knowing Moscow’s idiosyncrasies—knowing, for instance, that the stores stay open on the last Sunday of every month to fulfill their selling plans—is not the same as knowing its mood or its pulse. And its mood is gray and its pulse is slow; people move as if they have all the time in the world to get where they are going, as if the getting there won’t change anything.

  But Stone makes his way through the streets with a purposefulness that sets him apart. At the ministry canteen he gives the guard at the door a discreet glimpse of his KGB identification card, then lines up to check his coat in the cloakroom.

  “Have you ever been unfaithful to your wife?” the colonel in front of Stone asks his companion, who is in civilian clothes.

  “No. Never.”

  The colonel is incredulous. “You never slept with another woman?”

  The man in civilian clothes says, “Sleeping with another woman has nothing to do with being unfaithful to your wife.”

  Stone checks his overcoat and hat, but keeps his briefcase tucked under his arm as he heads for the dining room. At the entrance, he presses a ruble note into the headwaiter’s hand and tells him, “I’m looking for an old comrade, name of Aksenov. He’s a diplomatic courier with the ministry.”

  “The one on crutches.” The headwaiter nods, rising on his toes to survey the room. “Ah, he’s over there, the second table from the end, next to the bleached blonde.”

  Stone makes his way to the table. “Comrade Major Aksenov?”

  Aksenov looks up from his soup and studies Stone’s face, trying to place it. Puzzled, he asks politely, “Do we know each other?”

  Stone flashes his KGB card at the bleached blonde. “Why don’t you find another table,” he orders her without a trace of politeness. She quickly gathers up her plate, napkin and pocket-book and goes off, with a backward glance, in search of a vacant seat.

  “You must have quite a calling card to send her scurrying like that,” Aksenov comments good-naturedly. “Can I get a look at it too?”

  Stone shows it to him, and Aksenov says, “So that’s how it is. If it’s about Kulakov, I’ve already told the ministry investigators everything I know. Which is nothing.”


  The waiter, an elderly man in an ill-fitting black jacket with food stains on the lapels, offers Stone a menu, but he waves him away. “I’m not eating,” he says, playing the KGB role to the hilt. “I’m asking.” To Aksenov he says, “You were supposed to be on duty the day Kulakov was sent out of the country.”

  Aksenov jerks his head toward his crutches, which are leaning against the wall next to the table. “I was indisposed,” he says sarcastically. “Listen, I went all through this with the military intelligence people. If you got along better with each other you wouldn’t have to go over the same ground a second time.”

  Stone lets the silence build up until it is uncomfortable; Aksenov looks around nervously. Stone, toying with a fork, says quietly, “When we need instructions on how to conduct our investigations, we will come to you for advice. For now, simply tell me how, and where, and when, and under what circumstances, you broke your leg.”

  “I was hit by a jeep as I went out for my morning bread. One second there was no car there, the next it was bearing down on me. I couldn’t get out of the way. The bastard driver never stopped.”

  “Did anybody see the accident? Did anybody note the jeep’s number?”

  “A teen-age girl, a neighbor of mine, thought she did, but she must have got it wrong in the excitement, because it turned out there was no jeep with that number on its plates. And the local militia never found out who it was either.” Aksenov smiles grimly. “If I ever get my hands on the driver—”

  Stone asks, “Who reported you sick?”

  “My wife phoned in from the hospital. They told her not to worry, that nothing was scheduled, and in any case they would find a substitute if a run came up over the weekend.”

  Stone looks hard at Aksenov. “Who was ‘they’?”

  “The duty officer,” explains Aksenov. “I’ve already told all this to the military intelligence cleanup team. Why are you coming back to it now?”

  A very old man at the next table, obviously drunk, taps a scallion against an empty glass. “The cosmonauts go to the moon,” he tells his equally aged, equally drunk, companion, “and everyone pees in their pants in excitement. Here I am about to embark on a voyage to eternity, and nobody takes the slightest notice.”

  The other old man meticulously measures out another vodka from the almost empty bottle. “Departures,” he comforts his friend, “have to be scheduled in order to be interesting.”

  Stone asks Aksenov, “Who was the duty officer?”

  “It was Dedov,” he replies.

  Stone shakes his head. “Gamov was the duty officer who sent Kulakov to Cairo. He has one arm missing, and wears the Order of Stalin on his breast.”

  “Dedov was on duty until nine A.M. Saturday,” Aksenov insists. “I don’t know who came after him. And I never heard of your one-armed Gamov.”

  Stone knocks softly on the polished oak door with the simple porcelain plaque bearing the number 666.

  After a moment a muffled voice calls, “Come.”

  Stone turns the knob, pushes open the door with his left hand. The décor that confronts him is Ministry of Defense Cubbyhole Office, brown, with the only touch of color coming from the bright-red background in the obligatory portrait of Lenin behind the desk. The room itself is long and narrow—it has the atmosphere of a corridor—with shelves full of lawbooks on one wall, and not so much as a picture on the other. A kindly man, fiftyish, balding, wearing the insignias of a colonel on his pressed uniform, looks up from the dossier he has been studying.

  Stone closes the door behind him, slips into the seat across from the colonel without being invited, lays his KGB card face down on the edge of the desk nearest him. The colonel stares at the card for a long moment through narrowed eyes, then breathes deeply and reaches for it. He studies the photograph and compares it to the original across the desk. “What can I do for you?” he inquires finally.

  “You are the Colonel Koptin who conducted the investigation of the defector Kulakov,” Stone announces; it is not put in the form of a question.

  Koptin says, “I’ve already submitted a full report to—”

  Stone stops him with a raised finger. “Comrade Koptin”—he purposefully addresses him by his name and omits his rank—“we will cover the ground again. Now. Verbally.”

  Koptin purses his lips, controls his temper. “I am at your disposal,” he says coldly; there is no love lost between the military prosecutor and a representative of the civilian KGB.

  “You are invited to begin at the beginning,” Stone instructs him. “Why did you reopen Kulakov’s dossier, and what led you to conclude that he had lied about his father being a war hero?”

  Koptin leans back in his chair, taps two fingernails on the dossier open on his desk. “The dossier was reopened routinely,” he explains. “It is our habit to conduct routine background investigations every three years on officers with access to very secret material.”

  Stone asks, “The information that his father had been executed for collaboration with the Nazis turned up during this routine investigation?”

  “Not exactly,” says Koptin. “It turned up coincidentally to the background investigation. It was in the form of an unsigned letter which accused Kulakov of obscuring the truth about his father for careerist motives. The letter suggested that the officer who had actually executed Kulakov’s father for collaboration might still be alive. We tracked him down. He is a retired major general named Denisov. You will want the address, I’m sure. He lives in Moscow.” Koptin searches through the pages of a loose-leaf book. “Malaya Gruzinskaya 33, apartment 118. He remembered the incident, and showed us an entry in his war diary to confirm his version. There is no question that Kulakov’s father was executed for collaborating with the invaders.”

  “Did Kulakov admit knowing this? Did he admit to falsifying his dossier?”

  “As a matter of fact, he vigorously denied it,” Koptin says. “He maintained that he had honestly thought his father died a war hero. I have had some experience in such matters, and I may say he appeared sincere—so much so that I asked him if he would be willing to submit to a lie detector test.”

  “What would it matter?” asks Stone. “If the father was executed for collaboration, the son would not be suitable for service as a diplomatic courier.”

  “That’s true, of course,” Koptin agrees. “But if he sincerely believed his father was a war hero, he would not have faced charges of falsifying his service record. He would not have been threatened with a sentence of ten years in prison. He would simply have lost his assignment, perhaps his rank even. But he wouldn’t have gone to prison.”

  “And so you submitted him to a lie detector test?”

  “I got into a bit of hot water for taking it upon myself to order the test,” Koptin admits. “My superiors were very annoyed at first—”

  “At first?”

  “They were annoyed, until they heard the results of the test. It clearly indicated he was lying about his father. This reinforced our decision to bring him to trial. His name had already been stricken from the active courier list. I myself informed him of this, and advised him to retain a lawyer, as there was every chance he would be court-martialed. I advised him that a guilty verdict would probably bring him a sentence of ten years. Shortly after, to my astonishment, I learned he had been sent out of the country on a courier run, and had defected to the Americans with the contents of a courier pouch.”

  “Were you involved in the follow-up investigation?” Stone wants to know.

  “I was part of a three-officer tribunal that prepared preliminary dossiers on several people involved, yes,” says Koptin.

  Stone waits patiently. Koptin shrugs and supplies the details. “The case involved two embassy guards who were escorting Kulakov in Athens when he defected. In addition, there was a young second secretary in the car with them at the time.”

  “What was the disposition of these cases?”

  “The two guards were tried by court
-martial, convicted of dereliction of duty and sentenced to ten years at a strict regime labor camp. The second secretary, who was actually a military intelligence captain operating under cover out of the Athens embassy, was arraigned on similar charges, but one of his superiors interceded—it was said that the young man came from a family of influence—and the case was shelved.”

  “And what happened to the man who made the mistake of dispatching Kulakov abroad? What happened to the duty officer Gamov?”

  Koptin becomes aware of his fingernails drumming on the dossier, and stops abruptly. “The dossier on the duty officer—you say his name was Gamov, but this is the first time I’ve heard it—was handled on a very high level. I have no idea as to the disposition of the case. I assume he was shot.”

  The street in front of Malaya Gruzinskaya 33 has been torn up to make way for new sewage pipes that have, so far, not even been delivered. During the thaw, the trench has turned into a moat, giving to the sturdy building a fortresslike atmosphere. Stone crosses the moat on one of the dozen or so wooden boards placed there for that purpose, takes the lift to the sixth floor, hunts from door to door until he finds number 118 and a small scrap of paper taped over the bell that reads, “Denisov, V. M.”

  An old man, shabbily dressed in a frayed military jacket, opens the door. “Ah, you came very fast,” he says excitedly, pushing up with his forefinger the bifocals that keep sliding down his long nose. “I only wrote the letter two weeks ago. Come in. Come in. Don’t stand there like a statue. I’ll show you where I calculate the lake is.” The old man limps down the narrow hallway toward the small living room-bedroom that appears, to Stone’s eye, to have been furnished with items that came from a much larger apartment.

  “You’re Major General Denisov?” Stone inquires.

  “Denisov, that’s right,” the old man says. He rolls open a large map of Central Asia on the dining table and starts to weight down the corners with whatever comes to hand—a Soviet encyclopedia, a shoe, a wooden cane, a pitcher of water. “I was flying from Tashkent to Bukhara, to visit my son and his wife. … My son is in the Army—like father, like son. He’s stationed in Bukhara, but expects to be transferred to Lvov. … As I said, I was flying to Bukhara over the Kara-Kum desert when I spotted this lake that wasn’t on my map. Imagine! An entire lake—not a small lake, mind you—that isn’t on any map—”