The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  He finds 553 at eye level amid the others.

  It occurs to him that the close resemblance between these coin-eating boxes and a wall of mausoleum drawers is in one sense pathetically apt: Mel Pokorny will now speak from his tomb. Kessler experiences a crescendo of curiosity and excitement as he inserts the key; that goes abruptly flat when he opens the door. The locker is empty.

  He slams it and opens it again. Still empty. He brushes his hand across the light film of grit on the floor of the box. Very thoroughly empty. And now after his few seconds of feeling thwarted, cheated, robbed, Kessler begins to worry.

  Someone else has been tracing Pokorny’s path. Yes, well, we knew that from what happened at Mr. Biaggio’s, didn’t we. But this is different. Kessler himself has just walked into the line of fire, possibly. He had wanted to avoid that. His own fault: all at once it seems drastically indiscreet to have marched blithely up to this locker and produced the key. Smug fool, he thought he was one step ahead. Evidently he is one step behind. Grabbing his bag, Kessler moves for the trains.

  He figures to climb aboard his connection for Washington, stay out of sight in the dining car, and then be gone—but after one more trek across the vastness of the waiting room he is met with the disconcerting fact that they haven’t yet opened his gate for boarding. Half an hour still to be killed. No, Kessler thinks, that’s a bad choice of words.

  He swings back, feeling trapped, and the sudden turn brings him around just in time to see a slender young man in a gray suit break stride, diverting himself smoothly into line at a newsstand. Kessler doesn’t like that. He saw the same young man five minutes earlier, he thinks, in line at the baggage window. Kessler returns the way he came. He is stepping briskly.

  He mounts the stairs toward the mezzanine bar and then, halfway up, reverses course: whoops, forgot something. Comes back down as fast as gravity will pull him, his shoes slapping hard on the marble. Out on the waiting-room floor a shape in gray stops suddenly, turns to the information booth, but Kessler only notes this at the corner of his vision and doesn’t twist around to gawk. He doesn’t need to. The charade is now on. Two hours into the first morning, Kessler already being stalked like a victim, and this assignment is getting off to a very damn breathless start. Move, feet. Think, brain. Kessler feels like a high diver with failed nerves standing far above a pool full of cold panic. Move, feet.

  He wants witnesses.

  Lots of people, the safety of companionship—something more than a single Italian grocer.

  He yearns to sprint for the street but now, alas, he is pointed the wrong way. Another reversal on these stairs will tell the man in the gray suit, if the man perhaps doesn’t know, that Kessler is now aware of his presence and duly terrified. Maybe it’s better the man not know that. Kessler keeps moving. He can turn right and streak out toward 42nd, try to lose himself in the sidewalk crowds. Forty-second Street at noon is not the best place to shoot someone dead without arousing notice. But instead Kessler follows his feet, damn them. There is another set of steps, there is an unconsidered impulse, and suddenly he is skittering downstairs to the subway.

  Christ, and I don’t have a token. I don’t even have correct change. Kessler does a slow blink without slackening his pace, astonished by his own stupidity and poor taste. The smooth marble steps and floor have given way to filthy concrete. The air is now steamy and the smell is familiar. The ceiling is low and the posters are vehemently, maniacally defaced. I always knew it, Kessler thinks: I always knew that this place is what death would look like. Truth is, he was always more optimistic than that about death.

  But at least there are people. Kessler shoves past a few and an old lady barks at him obscenely. He finds himself running down a septic gullet of white tile, following signs for the shuttle, sweating lavishly into his cumbersome wool coat. It occurs to him he should drop his bag so as to be able to run faster. Ditch it right here, let it be stolen, who cares? Open your hand, moron, drop the bag. But he doesn’t have the heart to do that because it would truly announce his panic, his total relinquishment of dignity and the pretense of normality and a clean set of underwear for tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow. Let them all think he is just a rude hurried businessman. No one shoots rude hurried businessmen in the back with a .45 automatic. For better or worse, it isn’t done.

  Kessler pauses to glance back. Seeing a flash of gray come off the stairs, again he runs.

  Down the white gullet, around the curve, dodging and weaving in and out, bashing a few folk blind side with his bag, leaping a little riffle of stairs and then thirty yards later another. This labyrinth goes on forever, Kessler realizes; if only he knew how to use it. Run on. Evade. Improvise something ingenious, you’re an imaginative guy. Gack, but what happens when I come to a turnstile? thinks Kessler. Certain death or at least castration and, if not that, then arrest. Instantly Kessler has a brilliant idea, definitely his first today.

  He will vault the turnstile, yes, and then surrender himself at once to the transit police. The guys who jump out of nowhere with choke holds and truncheons when some kid in black sneakers tries to cheat the system. Don’t they also carry guns, the transit police? He believes they do and it is a wonderful, comforting thought.

  Kessler breathes deep. He stretches out his stride, purposeful now, pouring on effort to widen the gap and give himself a couple precious extra seconds. Running literally for his life. Every move will need to be perfect. He leans into the last turn, he kicks for the tape, and he is dropped hard there on the concrete with a roll tackle by Dexter Lovesong, diving out from the doorway of a shop that sells pornographic T-shirts.

  Kessler has lost most of the skin from the palm of his right hand, replacing it with gravel pressed into the raw flesh like cloves in a ham. The left hand may be all right. He isn’t sure, he can’t see that one, because Lovesong has it reefed high up in back between Kessler’s shoulder blades. Kessler’s nose and cheek are squashed against the concrete. He can’t move. This is very unsanitary, he thinks. And all his fear has gone, miraculously transformed to anger.

  “Gimme,” says Lovesong.

  “Give you what?” In immediate response to that question, which is only partially disingenuous, he feels the ball joint of his left humerus rise grindingly toward the lip of the socket as Lovesong levers up on his arm. “Gaaa. Nnnnh. Oh,” Kessler says. He drools on the pavement, can’t help it.

  “Gimme.”

  “It was empty,” Kessler says hoarsely.

  The arm is jacked higher and Kessler departs momentarily to the edge of unconsciousness as though Lovesong were squeezing with two fingers the very base of his brain. With the pressure eased slightly, he comes back. Evidently Lovesong has a fine practiced touch for that threshold. Kessler sees feet. He hears voices, one of which says:

  “Good lord. What did you do?”

  “I stopped him,” Lovesong answers.

  “Clearly. Let him up. Get off him. Jesus, Dexter.” This voice comes from the airspace above a pair of black Italian pumps. The pumps gleam with fresh polish and gray trouser cuffs break gently over them; sharp crease, a good conservative twill, Kessler is in position to notice. The voice belongs to a man who is younger than Lovesong and knows a better tailor. Kessler feels a knee placed in the small of his back as Lovesong turns to address the other man.

  “He had you beat, Buddyboy. Ten steps and he was gone. Plus which you spooked him, upstairs, with your clumsiness. Hell, he was gone.”

  “Does that mean you get to break his arm?”

  Kessler waits with interest for the answer to this one.

  “No.” The leverage releases, blessedly. The weight goes. Kessler’s good arm is taken hold of around the biceps and, with a single smooth and powerful motion, he is hoisted all the way to his feet. He is still shaky but Lovesong, surprisingly strong, supports him. Lovesong brushes some dirt from Kessler’s right knee, a token gesture since the left k
nee is torn and bloody and the trousers are definitely ruined.

  “You’re all right,” says Lovesong.

  “It was empty,” says Kessler.

  “He’s all right,” says Lovesong.

  The man in the gray suit stands back about six feet, wearing a solicitous, queasy expression. He seems to be in his middle or late twenties, with ginger hair and a rectilinear jawline and the same sort of quasi-rugged handsomeness much favored for cologne ads in some of the magazines for which Kessler writes. “Mr. Kessler, I can only apologize. This was a mistake.” Lovesong emits a contemptuous snort but the younger man ignores him. “We just wanted to talk with you.”

  “Never run after a guy like that, Buddyboy,” says Lovesong. “It only makes you conspicuous.”

  “So talk with me,” says Kessler. “The locker was empty. I have a train to catch. Talk with me.” The small covey of onlookers, now that they understand that Kessler is neither a purse snatcher apprehended nor a mugging victim, are moving on. Kessler dabs at his bloody palm with a handkerchief. He looks around for his bag, which Lovesong is holding. “Tackling me doesn’t make you conspicuous?”

  “I know it was empty. I saw,” says the younger man. “Let’s go upstairs. We’d like to take you to lunch.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Kessler says.

  But he allows them to walk him back up the white gullet. When the younger man presents his own credential, Kessler pulls it from his hand to read the name carefully: Matthew Hay Henderson. Office of Security, Directorate of quack quack quack, just like Lovesong. Kessler intends to remember them both. He is almost more annoyed with this younger man, for the terror induced during that run, than he is with Lovesong for crunching him. Almost. And he is already wondering, practical-minded, whether the chase and the bloody palm can be somehow converted to use. “Does the Director know that you boys are up here in New York? Operating on American soil? Assaulting innocent citizens?”

  “Drop dead,” says Lovesong. “It won’t work.”

  “Yes he does, as a matter of fact,” says the younger man. “On a security investigation, we have standing to function domestically. It’s quite legal.”

  “And besides which you were concealing evidence,” says Lovesong.

  “What evidence was I concealing?”

  “A locker key. That you stole from Pokorny’s briefcase. Along with who knows what all else.”

  “Is that part of your security investigation? That locker key?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Why? What was supposed to be in the locker?”

  “Come to lunch. We’ll talk,” says the younger man.

  “If I do, are you going to answer my questions? Or is it supposed to be just me answering yours?”

  “We’ll talk.”

  “We’re talking now. What was it? What was in that locker?”

  “We don’t know any more than you do. We didn’t empty it.”

  “I’m sure you do. Take an educated guess.”

  “Classified material.”

  “Of what sort?”

  The younger man pinches his lips. Kessler watches indecision flicker like heat lightning in his pale blue eyes, but there is no reply. Then Kessler turns to Dexter Lovesong, who puffs up his chest and tries to draw his belly back in under it. Lovesong’s lower jaw shifts forward like an automatic pinsetter. From him also, no answer.

  “Give me my bag,” says Kessler.

  9

  HE CHECKS INTO the Tabard Inn, a little bohemian wren-house squashed between more serious buildings on a quiet block of N Street, a place where they know him from previous stays, and is greeted immediately with Sparrow’s note.

  The woman in the cubbyhole office has had it waiting, propped atop her old plug-and-socket switchboard: a sealed envelope marked only with “Mr. Kessler” in a fine script. No, the woman isn’t able to say when it was delivered, or by whom. Kessler thanks her. He climbs to his room on the fourth floor and spends a monkish evening there reading a few clips he has brought along, groping through a few books, scanning everything he could find from his old files that might contain a mention of Claude Sparrow or of a Soviet defector named Viktor Tronko. There isn’t much. Sparrow in those days was a powerful government baron with an inordinate share of outrageous opinions and bizarre personal habits, true, but he abhorred publicity unambivalently, for plausible professional reasons and no doubt also by disposition, so that even back then, while chasing tales of CIA malfeasance down some very long alleys, Michael Kessler like the rest of America was never much more than vaguely aware of the man’s existence. Kessler stares again, and then later again, at the sheet of cream parchment on which are written a few lines of instruction—a suburban park in McLean, a concrete bench, a time of day. He stares, as though with sufficient concentration he might learn something more about Sparrow from this page itself. What most fascinates Kessler is the grace of the hand.

  By one o’clock the following afternoon, as instructed, he has found his way to that bench in that park.

  Claude Sparrow is a small peach-colored man with the fingers of a concert pianist. He wears a camel-hair overcoat bundled lumpishly around himself and a plaid wool scarf, which give him the look of a doddering alumnus wrapped for an afternoon in the stands of a college stadium at the very worst time of year. He holds one hand clamped tightly on the other wrist, both of those hands turning pink from the cold, which is unusually harsh for Washington even in January. Noticing that pinkness, Kessler wonders how long Sparrow might have been waiting here, and why. The man’s feet don’t reach the ground except when he points his toes. He makes no move to rise or to offer a handshake. When Kessler announces his own name, Claude Sparrow only says:

  “Of course you are.”

  Sparrow glances off toward the wooded end of the park, through which a paved path winds away toward tennis courts and a community center. The trees are bare with the season, the path and the courts are empty of humanity. Absorbing the view, Sparrow looks as if he might be bored or soul-weary. He turns back to inspect the other direction, a browned lawn stretching forty yards to a footbridge, empty, then a sidewalk, and then the moil of traffic along Old Dominion Drive. Cars full of bureaucrats and other suburbanites rushing back from lunch or handball at the health club or a noontime errand at the computer store, thriving and preoccupied folk with better things to do than gape at an old man in a park. Satisfied, Sparrow stands quickly, producing a compact electronic device—like a portable calculator crossed with a bicycle lock—from one coat pocket.

  Though Kessler has experienced these things often, at airport security checkpoints, he doesn’t know a name for them and he doesn’t like them.

  “Raise your arms, please.”

  And with several quick passes it is done, technological verification that Kessler is carrying keys, a pocketknife, loose change, but no concealed recorder or microphone. Without thanks or apology, Claude Sparrow sits back down. Fine, so we know where we stand on the matter of mutual trust. Kessler decides to be amused. He sits too.

  “You’re curious about the Tronko case.”

  “ ‘Curious’ is a good enough word,” Kessler says. “Yes. And about the Sparrow case.”

  Sparrow is silent for a moment, only the first of many. This initial one seems long to Kessler, and discomfiting, though he will be growing accustomed soon to Claude Sparrow’s highly individual sense of conversational rhythms.

  “The Sparrow case,” says Sparrow. “That’s very much more complicated, I’m afraid.” Another stretched pause. “And I’m sure it’s none of your business.”

  Ignoring the second part, Kessler answers: “You said we have three days.”

  “Three days is for the simple version.” And another pause, as Sparrow adjusts the coat back up snug, settling himself like a hen. The hand is again locked on the other wrist, which is delicate, Kessler can see
—a knot of bones standing out through the skin. If Sparrow has gloves he chooses not to wear them. “Are you a student of history, Mr. Kessler?”

  “A student of history. Well, I suppose I’d like to think so.”

  “And what is history?”

  Now it’s Kessler’s turn to be silent. The expression Claude Sparrow presents to him is benign and bland, fit for a parish priest catechizing schoolchildren.

  “According to whose theory?”

  “Choose any you like.”

  “Bunk. Henry Ford.”

  “Is that also your own view?”

  “No,” Kessler says. “If it was, I wouldn’t be here. My own view is less cynical. I believe in the enterprise, if not always the recorded product.”

  “That’s a sensible distinction,” says Sparrow. “What most people think of as history, it’s precisely what you call ‘the recorded product.’ ”

  “I agree. Their mistake.”

  “You agree. Good. Good. Now let me offer you another view. I am quoting. ‘History is a fable agreed upon.’ ”

  “Napoleon,” says Kessler, and for this bit of tenth-grade erudition he earns a small smile from Sparrow. Kessler adds: “I think he was on St. Helena by then. Being secretly poisoned to death by the British.” The smile wanes.

  “Anyway he was wrong, it has nothing to do with agreement,” says Sparrow severely.

  “But you like the fable part, I gather.”

  “Victors write history. A cliché, but it happens to be true. Victors write the books. They shape the popular understanding. Even sometimes in cases where the vanquished remain blithely unaware that they are vanquished. Are you following me?”

  “No.”

  “I’m talking about appearances. Appearances have enormous importance, Mr. Kessler. The creation and maintenance of appearances. Appearances govern. And I don’t mean in merely the civil sense. Now what about this notion: ‘History is the control of appearances.’ ”