All of which is saddening but acceptable to Kessler. He cannot honestly mourn in a personal way. Pokorny had long since become a stranger. And if any recourse exists, in the name of justice or national security (as the phrase goes) or maybe just truth, certainly the New Haven police do not offer it. Who does offer it? Kessler exerts a conscious effort to avoid thinking in such terms. Blah. Beware of words like “recourse” and “truth.”
At the same time he is altogether fascinated. No use denying that: he is even more fascinated than before. Pokorny has had the bad grace to leave his story tantalizingly incomplete. They moved Tronko to the Vault, okay. Began the second hostile interrogation, okay. Damn it all, what then?
Kessler attempts to stretch his lungs free from the grip of this ambivalence with several deep breaths, which the old man mistakes for bereavement. A hand is laid gently on Kessler’s sleeve. “He shouldn’t have panicked,” says Mr. Biaggio, intending it somehow as solace.
Mr. Biaggio himself is covered with blood, a splotch in his hair that has sent runnels down over the ear and along the jaw line, and across the front of his blue shirt a heavy maroon stain, still sticky as fresh paint. But he seems to feel just fine, thank you. Glad to be alive. The blood is evidently from Mel.
“It was a white man this time,” Mr. Biaggio confides.
A man of medium height and slender build, according to Mr. Biaggio, dressed in faded jeans and a nylon jacket and wearing the obligatory ski mask, navy wool with the eyes and mouth outlined in cheery yellow. Caucasian hands. There was no one else in the store just then, only the two of them, Mr. Biaggio in his chair by the register and the bald fellow, what was his name, down a far aisle by the smoked meats. This white man in the ski mask appeared. Ordered them both over to stand in front of the cooler. Held the gun on them for a minute or two before any move was made toward the cash. Said a few pointless things, like “That’s good” and “Everybody stay easy” and “How much in the till, old man?”—as though the robber just wanted to hear his own voice. All right. Let him hear it. Mr. Biaggio had no inclination to rush him.
“Your friend,” says Mr. Biaggio. “He shouldn’t have panicked. I know. I know about these things.” Mr. Biaggio is by now a postgraduate fellow in the study of urban mayhem: seven shots from a .45 automatic, blood and glass sailing everywhere, and he sneaks through unscathed. “These jittery dope eaters and screwballs. I know. I come up here, it’s six years ago now, from Bridgeport. Whatever you do, you don’t panic. You got to relax. Panic is suicide. Because it’s contagious, see?”
Kessler walks home with that wisdom in his ears. Does it apply to journalists as well as grocers? He wonders what he can do to be granted, in this whole affair, the same magic immunity as Mr. Biaggio.
4
BY NOON THE NEXT DAY the body has already been claimed and is on its way down to Washington in a private hearse. Kessler learns that much from a phone call to the medical examiner. Yes, the hearse was hired locally. Left here about an hour ago. Wasn’t there an autopsy? asks Kessler. Of course there was. Nine o’clock this morning. The medical examiner has that report on his desk. No need to hold the corpse. Massive trauma and bleeding, the result of five shots from a .45-caliber pistol, three of those five each delivering a wound that, alone, was potentially fatal. The report is public record; Kessler can come in and get a copy made for twenty cents. There is no great mystery involved, so far as the medical examiner is concerned, in this death.
“Thanks anyway,” says Kessler. “Who was it that claimed the body?”
Two men from Washington, he is told.
“Who were they? Relatives?” Kessler is a friend of the deceased and he wonders—so he says—about funeral arrangements. These men were government officials, he is told. What sort of government officials? Is this an FBI case for some reason? The medical examiner doesn’t answer that one; still bland and condescending and impatient with questions, like every coroner Kessler has ever talked to, he has come to the limit of required cooperativeness. He refers Kessler to the New Haven police.
Instead Kessler spends a few hours at his desk, leafing his way through a thick pile of typescript, penciling in a few inconsequential revisions and drinking too many cups of coffee. He feels as though he is breaking rock with a sledge hammer. His concentration is bad. He gets nothing much written. He makes a pretense of some meager accomplishment, finally, by retyping several pages grown sloppy with arrows and insertions. This is the work he spoke of to Mel, misleadingly but not too inaccurately, as his termite book. When the doorbell interrupts, Kessler is almost relieved.
The scowling fat man on his threshold waves a leather ID folder in Kessler’s face, snaps it closed before Kessler can read the card, and walks in without saying a word.
A total stranger. This character swaggers toward the living room. His brown checkerboard suit is too long in the legs and looks as though it has been serving him as pajamas. His hair is curly and wild as a pile of meringue, but clipped down short over the ears and gone totally bare on the crown of the pie. He wears oxblood wing tips with tap heels, which clack gratingly against Kessler’s bare hardwood floor. His swagger is really more of a noisy waddle, and he seems to walk bowlegged as a matter of principle, arms held away from his sides as though that way the hands are ready for something, a fast-draw encounter maybe, or perhaps a banana proffered through bars. Halfway down the corridor he turns to tell Kessler:
“Close the door.”
He is not the pear-shaped variety of fat man, however, the lifelong hopeless endomorph, but the sort who gives evidence of having once been an athletic specimen. The belly hangs low yet the chest is still held high, the shoulders arched back militarily. He couldn’t button the brown jacket if he tried. Under one armpit Kessler can see a dark holster and a pistol. The gun’s handle, unless Kessler’s glimpse has deluded him, is some shiny light material the color of ivory. The man has seated himself in the good chair by the time Kessler catches up.
“Everything you can tell me will be useful,” the man says.
“You’re going to have to start over,” Kessler says.
The man only blinks, and scowls harder.
“I’m glad to cooperate. Within reason,” says Kessler. “But you’re making a bad impression. Could I see that identification again?”
The man’s eyes are small and close-set as two finger-pokes in a snowman. He flicks his gaze from Kessler to the room’s far corner, then out the window, back to Kessler. His mouth hangs slightly open for deep breathing after the stair climb, a narrow mouth over a thick lower lip, like a vending slot for quarters. He reaches again for his proof of identity, somewhere back under the jacket, not the holster side but the other. Throws his folder onto the coffee table in roughly Kessler’s direction.
It is a standard CIA credential of the type that Kessler has seen before, sandwiched in plastic and attesting that someone named Dexter Lovesong is an employee of the Office of Security, Directorate of Management and Services, Central Intelligence Agency. The official Agency seal is printed across it in pale gray ink, like a watermark. The photograph seems to show a younger and thinner man, but Kessler is willing to believe that any aging thug claiming the name Dexter Lovesong must certainly have come by it honestly.
“Okay. Thank you,” says Kessler.
“Don’t mention it.”
“You want to know about Mel.”
An exaggerated slow nod from Dexter Lovesong, who sits sideways in the chair, one arm slung over the back, belly stressing his shirt buttons. His face is still empty. At least he has closed his mouth.
Kessler tells him virtually everything. The surprise visit last night, the long acquaintance between himself and Pokorny, the accidental encounter outside Senator Church’s hearing room, then the six-year lapse in contact since Kessler began working a different sort of beat; the talk yesterday about Claude Sparrow, about Viktor Tronko, about the first and second h
ostile interrogations, about the Vault, about the Agency having been turned inside out—even, for good measure, that sensitive part about the dizzying question which Tronko had been expected to settle. Pokorny believed there was a Soviet penetration, Kessler explains. Mel talked as though Sparrow and others believed it too. Tronko was saying no, no mole, and that’s why they distrusted him. Kessler dredges his memory for detail from last night’s conversation, for exact phrases that Mel used. As a preemptive tactic, he hopes to bury this Dexter Lovesong with information. He offers nearly all he has—with only two conscious omissions.
For reasons of professional ethic he does not mention the old mail-interception story, or any of the several others for which Mel served as his primary source; even dead, Pokorny has a right to the protection Kessler once promised him. And he says nothing about the locker key from Mel’s briefcase.
Dexter Lovesong takes no notes. He doesn’t cross-examine. He doesn’t interrupt Kessler, or force him to repeat, or badger him for enlargement in crucial areas. For Lovesong it seems there are no crucial areas. He asks only enough questions to keep Kessler talking—under his own momentum and directing the focus as he wishes—for roughly an hour. During that hour Lovesong shifts restlessly in the chair a few times, sprawling each time at a new angle, and glances once at his watch. Kessler wonders: Am I boring this guy, or what? Lovesong shows no particular interest in the notion of a Russian mole on the seventh floor at Langley—no interest in what Mel Pokorny believed on the subject, nor Claude Sparrow, nor Viktor Tronko. That sort of talk seems only to give the man heavy eyelids. When Kessler comes back around to the attaché case, though, Lovesong sets both hooves on the floor.
“Where is it?”
Kessler brings him the case. Lovesong makes a point of snatching it away before Kessler can release the handle, a willfully rude gesture that seems intended to say that Kessler’s very grip on the thing is illicit. By this bit of crude force, Kessler is faintly amused. Dexter Lovesong seems to be a different subspecies of CIA officer from the others he has known. Laying the case flat on the coffee table, Lovesong hesitates, his hand on the latch. He appears to be thinking. First evidence of this that Kessler has seen.
“Did you open it?”
“It was open,” says Kessler. “Open when I found him here. Open when he left for the grocery.”
“Did you go through it?”
“Yes,” says Kessler. Unless there is some sort of fancy false bottom, he knows exactly what Lovesong is going to find: a train schedule, a wallet, copies of The Wall Street Journal and Business Week, several file folders containing computer printouts that describe such banal matters as the flow of agricultural-technology imports into Saudi Arabia, one lock tool, and one orange wig. He will also, with help from a forensic lab, find Kessler’s fingerprints, so no sense in being too coy. “I was looking for a phone number. Some way to reach his people. That’s still you all, evidently.” The pair of Groucho glasses must have gotten misplaced, perhaps hidden themselves under the sofa. The locker key is in Kessler’s pocket.
“Don’t be so sure,” says Lovesong. His little brown eyes flick up. “Didn’t take anything out, did you?”
“No. Of course not,” Kessler lies.
5
BY FOUR O’CLOCK he has an agreement for the story. It took him three phone calls. The Atlantic has just run a CIA piece, a long one about paramilitary involvement in Central America, so nothing more for a while, thanks; besides, what’s the news value today of a gloss on the Claude Sparrow firing? Kessler didn’t argue. At this point, and over the telephone, he was not offering his most dramatic datum—that Sparrow’s deputy had been shot dead last night almost on Kessler’s doorstep. The new fellow brought in at Harper’s, the latest Bigbrain there, a man younger than Kessler with whom he has never dealt, turned out to be cordial but also uninterested in what Kessler had come to peddle. This one said:
“I thought you wrote nature stories.”
After wincing, Kessler said: “Sometimes. Not always. I broke into this business writing about spooks. For Harper’s.”
“Tigers and that sort of thing,” the man said. “I’ve seen your work. Liked it. Like to get you in the book. Come back to me with something on the environment. Rainforest destruction or the grizzly bear or something.”
“I’m doing this Russian defector thing,” said Kessler. “That’s my current project.”
“Stay in touch,” the man said. “Call me again with three or four ideas. For instance, have you done anything on acid rain?”
“Good-bye.”
Then he dialed a number at Rolling Stone, talked with a managing editor he has known for years by voice but never met in person, and within ten minutes the story was sold. The editor tossed out figures for an expense check, to be in the mail tomorrow, and an article fee payable on delivery—in both cases decent sums but not extravagant. Fine, Kessler said. The money is unimportant. Kessler expects to spend so many days and so many dollars chasing leads around Washington and God knows where else that he will be lucky to break even overall, but that is fine. The demographics of the magazine’s audience are also unimportant. Kessler’s story can be sandwiched amid all the turntable advertisements and drug-bust gossip aimed at teenagers with blue hair but eventually it will get read by a few serious grown-ups anyway. Or at least by a few grown-ups. What is important, in any case, is that Kessler trusts this particular editor to accept collect calls from jail and send someone else out to look for him if Kessler himself should suddenly disappear.
So selling the piece has been relatively easy; the writing shouldn’t be difficult; it’s just that little part in between. His real struggle begins with the fourth phone call.
He has surrendered himself to the main switchboard at Langley and been transferred between extensions more times than he can recall, so far reaching no one authorized to say yes or forthright enough to say no. He knows it is all merely standard treatment, nothing extraordinary or personal, and the name Viktor Tronko has not even been uttered. Nor have the names Claude Sparrow or Mel Pokorny. The name Jedediah McAtee was quite sufficient to bring him up against resistance.
Kessler has spent twenty minutes on hold, spared of Muzak but paying long-distance rates, before the latest new voice in a long series comes on the line to say: “Mr. Kessler?”
“Still here.”
The voice identifies itself in the unctuous tones of someone who has budgeted time for the likes of Kessler, a few minutes anyway, into each efficient workday. At least now we’re up on the seventh floor, Kessler thinks. But what he pictures is a far outer antechamber. “I’m sorry,” says this voice. “The Director is not presently granting requests for interviews.”
“Why not?”
“He simply gets too many. I’m sure you can understand. It isn’t a matter of security. Not entirely. People think so, but no. We do them occasionally. It’s more a matter of his time.”
“I’ll settle for a half hour in his limousine on the way to an NSC meeting,” says Kessler.
“No. I’m sorry. Here’s what you need to do. Put your request in writing. You can submit it to this office. Mark it for my attention. Specify the subject area you want to explore and what publication employs you. Your request will then be routinely considered through channels. When the Director’s schedule allows, some requests will be granted. If yours is one, you would then hear from us.” A subtle shift, Kessler notices, from the future-indefinite tense to the subjunctive-improbable.
He has heard the same speech, years before, from a different but interchangeable flack. It’s what he expected. In fact there may be even now such a letter, from him, written ten years earlier, still making its way through those turbid channels. He says: “Thanks. I’ll be sure to do that.”
With Claude Sparrow he fares better, to his own considerable surprise. On a scrap of notebook paper from deep in his old files he finds a number with the s
ame area code as Langley and the notation “CS” beside it in Kessler’s own hand. He remembers: it was bartered to him once as Claude Sparrow’s unlisted residential line, the sort of precious arcana that journalists covering the intelligence world traded among themselves like contraband icons. Kessler can’t recall anymore what he might have given away to earn this particular treasure. A stray fact that happened to fit nicely into some colleague’s jigsaw puzzle, probably. Or maybe he had offered Mel Pokorny’s unlisted number—a voluble deputy being at least equal in trade value to a chief who was legendarily reticent. Kessler is quite sure he never used the Sparrow number himself, never spoke with the man or even tried to; but again, he can’t recall why not. It must have come into his hands too late, when Kessler was no longer eager, when he was edging away from that whole racket. Even so, the number has got to be almost ten years old. A cold trail. How often do you sweep your tracks, change your telephone number, and perform all the other such routine measures, if you are an unemployed spook with a lifetime accumulation of fanatically secretive habits? Kessler is not optimistic.
But after four rings there is an answer, a soft male voice which says only: “Hello?”
“Mr. Sparrow?”
Not the correct password. For a few seconds Kessler hears nothing but silence and a decision being considered, on the far end, about whether or not to hang up.
“Mr. Claude Sparrow?” Kessler says again. He gives his own name and adds quickly: “I’m a friend of Mel Pokorny. I’m calling from New Haven.” If Sparrow has gotten any news at all through his own sources in the last twelve hours, that pair of facts should catch his attention.
“This is Sparrow.”
The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 5