by William Hood
Key West, August 1991
From the window Broom watched the courier move slowly along the quiet street.
He walked deliberately, pausing to read the numbers and stepping carefully along the broken pavement of the narrow cement sidewalk. He stopped to peer through the ragged hibiscus hedge in front of the shabby white house, and after checking the hand-painted number on the cement gate post, he pushed the gate open and stepped onto the porch.
It was exactly nine-twenty, the specified time, and of course on neither the hour nor the half-hour. The statue of Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky had been decapitated and dragged from the square in front of the Lubyanka. Western journalists had been escorted into the old Moscow Center offices for a sanitized glimpse of a few archives and the museum, but some things had not changed. It was as if the recent management were convinced that the new offices at Yasenevo would collapse if tradition were broken and an agent were to be met on the hour or half-hour.
“Don’t bother with the parole,” Broom said. “You look authentic enough.”
The courier ignored the comment and stepped through the doorway. He glanced into the narrow living room before reciting the prescribed greeting. “I’m a friend of Bruce. He said I should look you up when I got to Key West.”
Broom sighed, and said, “Tell Bruce I’ve missed him.”
“It’s a real pain in the ass meeting here,” the courier said, staring toward the open kitchen beyond the dining table. “To come all this way to meet here, a house fifteen feet from the neighbors and on a narrow street, easy to be blocked. Why couldn’t you come to Miami? Make an easy meet in one of the joints on Miami Beach South?”
Broom ignored the question.
The courier sniffed irritably as his eyes adjusted to the light. He had studied the recognition photographs in the file, but Broom looked younger than he had expected. Many case men neglected to update the filed mug shots, and in most of the courier’s blind meets the intended contacts looked older, sometimes almost suspiciously older, than the file photographs. Broom was the first to seem younger.
“If you feel you have to run for it, head for the cemetery, just down the street. The fence is quite low.” Broom smiled, realizing that it irritated the courier to have missed the chance to spend a few days on special funds while dipping into the high life in a more modish resort than Key West. “It’s one of the few cemeteries in the country like this, all the graves above ground. In the big hurricane, they say the sea washed over the tombs, and the coffins floated out and along the street.” Broom gestured toward the fence, barely visible on the far side of the narrow street. “But not to worry, there’ll be no need to run.”
The courier tugged at the collar of his lisle sport shirt. It was a subtle lavender and went well with his pleated linen trousers and blue blazer. He glanced at the overhead fan. “Is it always this hot?”
“It’s always this hot all summer long.”
“I have letters and bring personal greetings from Vadim Ivanovich Koltsov.” He pulled a copy of Time magazine from the side pocket of his jacket and passed it across the coffee table. “As always, on page twelve.”
The microdots would be imprinted near the binding. The miniature microscopic reading device was concealed in a table cigarette lighter, on the shelf by the heavy wooden easel. There was no one in Moscow, certainly no one from the old days, that Broom could imagine would think to write a personal letter. They would have long since been retired, or sent to some barren, bureaucratic pasture to finish their careers pruning old files, while contemplating writing their memoirs. Broom had never encountered Vadim Koltsov, and could not remember ever having heard his name.
“I know the microdots are a nuisance,” the courier said. “We have what the smart-ass Americans call state-of-the-art communications, but because you’ve been out so long, and there’s no time for training right now, the chief agreed to go along with the old system.”
Broom nodded, leaving it to the courier to decide whether the gesture was polite or merely tolerant.
The courier’s glance held for a moment on the double glass doors leading to a narrow deck, a few feet from the neighboring frame house. “What’s a joint like this sell for down here?”
“Maybe two hundred fifty thousand.” After noting the courier’s surprise, Broom added, “Perhaps even more these days. This is a much more chic part of town than some visitors might imagine.” Broom knew the courier would have studied the briefing notes, and guessed that he had assumed that even in the off-season, Key West would be a cross between the newly stylish South Miami Beach and St. Tropez. Or maybe even Pompeii. Clearly, he had not expected so small an area, or such a jumble of apparently shabby frame houses.
“What the hell do you do here?”
“Sometimes I rent rooms — bed and breakfast in winter, in the tourist season. But that can be a bother if I have to travel.” This came with a smile, acknowledging that the courier knew about Broom’s occasional need to travel. “I also teach sailing, small craft handling, and even cruising, especially for women. It’s fashionable these days, all mixed up with the new feminism.”
The courier’s eyes brightened. “Young women?”
“No, as a rule not very young.”
“Too bad … ”
“And, of course, I paint.” It would have been gratifying to mention to the courier, to anyone in fact, the letter just received from an important New York gallery, praising the work and promising a show in early spring. But it would have been pointless to mention it to this philistine. Broom gave him another appraising glance. Perhaps not a philistine. Just a self-centered, Russian yuppie, enthusiastically proud to be shaking off a discredited culture and convinced he had made a faultless transition to the new. Still, to give him his due, he was steps ahead of the comrades of even a few years ago.
As if he had perceived Broom’s reaction, the courier got to his feet and stepped to the nearest painting. He stood silently studying the vivid colors and bold, impressionist forms that a few years ago he would surely have thought too crude even to fit Broom’s cover as an eccentric amateur artist. “Cézanne?” he asked without turning from the picture.
“If you’re suggesting it’s a knockoff, it would be more nearly a Matisse,” Broom muttered.
“Please, I meant no offense. This is new to me.”
He had studied the file, and knew Broom was the grandchild of a general, one of the most respected operatives of the old service, and that Broom was the sole member of the family to have escaped Stalin’s fury. It was only by special permission of the unlamented Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev that Broom had been allowed to settle in a climate that did not tax a chronic bronchial weakness.
Broom tossed the magazine into a soft wicker basket that slumped sideways with the pressure of newspapers and art journals beside a canvas director’s chair. There would be time enough to recover the microdots. There was no one at Yasenevo, the offices that Broom had never seen, who might write anything of interest, least of all the operations chief of the new service.
“A drink?”
The courier nodded and dropped into one of the canvas sling chairs. As he hitched up his trousers to protect the crease, Broom saw that he wore no socks, a fashionable affectation that would have been more effective had his legs been tanned.
The courier peered toward the bottles ranged along the counter separating the room from the open kitchen. “White wine, a Chardonnay? Otherwise a margarita — if not too much trouble.”
Broom remembered the old days when agents were briefed never to drink vodka in public.
“With a side of chips, or cheese, please,” the courier added, as if ordering french fries with his Big Mac. “It’s to be a robbery,” he said softly as he got up to follow Broom to the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. “I was instructed to tell you that first, and to emphasize it.”
Broom closed the refrigerator door and twisted the plastic tray to spill ice cubes into a drum-shaped ice bucket.<
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“I told them never to send anyone here,” Broom said without looking at the courier. “I said if anyone ever contacted me here I would leave this area and only communicate by letter through Walter.” Broom took a bottle of wine from the refrigerator.
As he had been instructed to do, the courier ignored the threat. “This business is absolutely urgent,” he said, “and it took time to get here.” He took a sip of the wine and held the glass to the light. “California, heavier than the French, but respectable in its own way.” He took another sip and, as if he were making an even weightier observation, said, “This Key West — it’s at the very end of the country. I had to rent a car in Miami, no public transportation to here except by plane.” He took another sip of wine and glanced approvingly at his new, tasseled loafers. “There’d be no way to shake a surveillance if anything happened. I don’t know why the Center insisted I come here in all this heat, unless it was to see that you are all right and fit. You are fit, aren’t you?”
Broom poured more wine and blinked rapidly. “So it must be something vital — something that slipped past Vadim Koltsov — to require you to risk precious cover just to come here at this late date. What is it? Has Vadim Ivanovich perceived a new problem? More chaos at Dom Dva, House Number Two?” Broom’s grandfather had been arrested in the building at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square and probably put to death in the cellar. “What kind of panic can be afoot in these days of guided tours and the peddling of old dossiers to anyone with a fistful of dollars and a book contract?”
Irritated, the courier cut himself a thick slice of cheese and took a deep swallow of wine.
“Are you suggesting that the comrades — change that to our colleagues — at Yasenevo have left some stone unturned?” Broom continued, “That someone has failed to make all the necessary preparations for the new service?”
“That’s why I’m here now,” the courier said. “To tell you that you and one other, also from the old ‘S’ Directorate, the Eighth Department, and a long time abroad, have been taken into the SVRR — the Sluzba Vneshney Razvedla Rossisukoy Federatsii.”
“The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, I am flattered,” Broom said, “but I’m not going to turn bandit at this late date. There are others for that work.”
“You misunderstand, the target is to die in the robbery — a mugging, a gun wound or a knife. You will choose.”
“Just what else is it that the new service has to do these days?” The courier emptied his glass and leaned forward. “You may not think so, sitting on your ass in this sweltering playground, but these are serious times. Our country — Russia — is going through a transition, a desperate transition. Abroad, the old enemies pretend to help, but gloat and wait for us to fail. At home, the self-serving bastards left over from the old days pretend loyalty, but try to sabotage every initiative. More than ever the leadership needs time to make repairs, to find the new way. Now, as never before, they need information. The apparat had rusted under the old crowd, but were moving again. New sources, and now, once again, clandestine well-wishers, it’s like the early days, before our time … ”
“Then what do you need of me, a tired specialist? My time has long passed.”
“It has not,” the courier said, his voice stiff with anger. “Our service is one of the few organs in the country that still functions as well — maybe better now — than before the changes. We’ve done away with the worst of the old apparat, but we’ve got to protect the best of what’s left of it. Some old sources have lost their footing, but can be reestablished — money is available. Others, the foreign well-wishers, who welcome the changes at home, are more active than ever. But they must be protected from the renegades and mercenaries out to serve themselves.”
“And does Koltsov think I have a role in this?”
“He does, of course he does. You and one or two others can help protect old friends — sources whose reports are more precious now than ever.”
They talked until the courier had finished the bottle. “The details are all there,” he said, pointing at the copy of Time in the basket. “Five microdots, the operational plan, letters, and the message from Koltsov as well.” He was clearly irritated that the magazine had been tossed aside so casually.
“I will not accept your reconnaissance, Moscow knows that — or used to know it.”
“It’s a big city, high crimes, these things happen every night … ”
“I will decide on that,” Broom interrupted.
The courier remained silent.
Broom remembered four, maybe five years earlier. For some forgotten security reason, a young woman, a secretary perhaps, had been sent to Broom with messages. Before the girl left, she admitted having read the briefing file. “But you’re not like that at all,” she said. “The file said ‘surly … sometimes the manner of a dilettante … ultra-cautious of cover … difficult to work with.’ But that’s not you at all,” the woman had gushed.
“This is an urgent matter. There’s almost no time,” the courier said. “You must get started quickly — you’ve got to be done with it in ten days’ maximum. That’s a direct order from the Center.” He had disliked Broom from the time he had read the file. Broom was a typical oplaka, a big hat, a lieutenant colonel, but on special service, above all the rules, and always trading on the grandfather’s reputation. The courier would have liked another bottle of wine, but he got up and moved toward the door.
He opened the gate in the waist-high fence and turned to wave an American farewell to Broom in the doorway. The shaft of light reflected in the shock of Broom’s ash-blond hair reminded the courier of an ancient helmet he had seen in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
As he crossed the narrow street and began to hurry alongside the fence bordering the cemetery, he turned for a last glimpse of the narrow house. Seven, maybe ten jobs in fifteen years, he thought. All those years of luxury because of the grandfather and the time in the camps. He shrugged, murmuring in Russian, and then repeated himself in English — “A rotten specialist. They can call it what they want, but it’s just plain murder.”
3
New York, September 1991
Andy Mitgang liked to leave his office in time to reach his East 85th Street apartment by seven. There was rarely even one letter a week he could call personal among the bills and junk mail that crowded the box he shared with his roommate, but Andy always took time to sort through the envelopes before changing into his running gear.
Although his speed was more than adequate, Andy was not an athlete, certainly not a competitive runner. He ran two miles a day, four days a week, because he considered it to be good for him and because it was cheaper than working out in a health club. Depending on his mood, and lately this was pretty much determined by his boss, Thelma S. (“call me T.S.”) McGruder, Andy always tried to average a consistent seven minutes a mile. This, he believed, was enough to keep the cholesterol moving through his arteries, and to help maintain a reasonable emotional balance.
As he crossed Fifth Avenue at 84th Street and headed for the reservoir, Andy’s mind was on his boss. What did it really say about a woman who preferred to be called “T.S.” rather than Ms. McGruder, or even Thelma? It said, he told himself once again, that she saw herself as the classic drill sergeant, brutal to the platoon, but confident that the cruelty she enjoyed so much was for the recruits’ own good and that in some future crisis they would respect and love her for having conditioned them to the rigors of survival. In fact, Andy reassured himself, T.S. McGruder was a desiccated old bitch who had been shunted from the creative side of one of the largest public relations firms in New York to a dead-end administrative job as an archivist and librarian, and who took out her frustration by attempting to terrorize the one trainee assigned to her office. Andy consigned T.S. to purgatory and glanced apprehensively at his watch. It was just after eight, too late really to be running in Central Park even in September.
As he hurried up the broad steps to the cinder track that c
ircled the reservoir, he noticed with pleasure that the thick black clouds scudding across the park had shrouded the topmost floors of the Fifth Avenue apartment buildings and were denying the rich inhabitants their view of the lesser mortals condemned to exist at lower altitudes. It was darker than Andy liked, and he moved out at a slower pace than usual. He would stick to the reservoir until he was warm. There was no point in risking an injury on the uncertain footing of the bridle path below. At the half-mile mark, he was sweating freely as he moved from the reservoir onto the bridle path and began slowly to increase his pace.
He was still running easily as he passed along the gradient at West 91st Street. Glancing back over his shoulder, Andy could see that he was quite alone. He muttered an imprecation about sunshine athletes, and doused a flicker of anxiety by reminding himself that although the Central Park felons liked the dark, they rarely troubled to work in dismal weather. Not entirely convinced by his own logic, Andy pushed up the pace until he could distinguish three figures, at least a hundred yards ahead, and running easily in the dark. As he would later tell the police, two runners were nearly abreast and the third, a hundred or so feet behind.
He was running faster now and breathing more heavily, his glasses lightly fogged.
Later, Andy could not remember whether it was a sound or some slight change in the pattern of the runners ahead that caused him to look up from the path at the moment the leading figure seemed to stumble, and fling his arms forward as if to fend off an unseen obstacle. The runner’s left leg stiffened as if the knee had locked, and he lurched sideways before pitching, face forward, onto the dirt path.
The closest runner, within a stride of the fallen man, took a few uncertain steps forward before slowing sufficiently to wheel about and drop to his knees beside the fallen figure.
Mitgang cursed beneath his laboring breath. Bridle path or not, he knew it was foolish to run flat-out in the near darkness.
There was an incoherent scream, and then, more clearly, a high-pitched shout from the kneeling runner. “There’s an accident … someone call for help … ” The kneeling figure looked up, and with both arms spread in appeal, screamed again. “An ambulance, for God’s sake, we’re going to need an ambulance … ”