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

by David Quammen

  “Torture,” says Kessler. He dips his head in appreciation of Rosen’s candor. “First time anybody has used the word.”

  “Oh of course it was. Even Claude Sparrow, I think, couldn’t deny that.”

  The whole idea, after all, was not simply to incarcerate Tronko while questioning him—not at this stage, not anymore, no—but to demoralize him and break the man’s will, says Max Rosen. Breaking the will would also break open the legend. Expose the truth behind all his implausible falsehoods. At least that was the theory, says Rosen. Will to resist was equated with will to lie, by the theory. Will to lie was equated with performance of a mission concocted in Moscow. Break the man’s will like an eggshell—and find Moscow’s dark purpose inside, voilà, like a baby chick.

  “Or a baby turtle,” says Kessler. “Or maybe a caiman.”

  “Yes. Or just a ruptured yolk. Except the theory itself was inadequate,” says Max Rosen. “In this case, it didn’t serve.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Viktor Tronko was not who we thought.”

  “Not who you thought? Or not who Sparrow and Pokorny thought?”

  “Everyone,” says Rosen. “Everyone.”

  14

  KESSLER SITS ON the edge of his bed, finally now, at what he imagines to be the end of what he knows to have been an arduous, wearisome, brutally chilling day. He is waiting to thaw. The shivers pass up through him in waves, thrumming his rib cage, jiggling his whole body like a Maytag on spin cycle with an unbalanced load. His hands are useless. The notebook rests beside him but Kessler simply must wait, patiently, until his fingers regain enough touch for him to hold and steer a ballpoint. Then as the thaw begins arriving so does the pain, a pulsing ache that makes his fingertips feel as though they have been slammed in a car door—his ears too, if that were possible. Kessler thinks about it. He has already listened to more than a few revelations that certain folk might strongly prefer he had never heard; continue on this course, stretch his ears much wider and, yes, there might be good chance of getting them slammed in a car door.

  Maybe he should buy a watch cap. Definitely he should be careful.

  Now his toes also come painfully back to life. And the earache reaches right down his Eustachian tubes from each side to a midpoint behind his eyes, meeting there like a pair of knitting needles. But at least he can write.

  Amobarbital is the first word Kessler puts down. Proper names and dates always make the best framework for a set of notes, Kessler has found; the finer details and causal connections that will constitute the real story can be filled in later by metonymical recall. Sedative and hypnotic, short-term depressant, treatment of epileptic seizures, he writes. Overdose, he writes. Weakened resistance. Confusion. Psychological vulnerability. Lowered defenses, hypersensitivity. Sizable intramuscular injections. Ass. But Eames said no, Kessler writes.

  He scribbles several more phrases quickly, just whichever come to him, without yet making the mental effort of systematic retrieval. Military base, less than an hour, he writes. No exit for five months, he writes. Label from cot. Complete mental starvation—and Kessler sets that one within quotes. Psychological torture, also within quotes. Backtracking suddenly, at the top of this notebook page he squeezes in today’s date and Max Rosen’s name.

  Then as an afterthought he adds quotation marks, too, around the name.

  Kessler has no trouble recapturing most of what Rosen told him about that nervous, airless time, June to November of 1964, during which Lentzer played grand inquisitor and Claude Sparrow squalled and lathered for permission to put Viktor Tronko through a course of unwholesome drug therapy. For a half hour Kessler is transported—remembering, writing fast, remembering. Arrows and insertions, addenda and still more afterthoughts. Get it now or lose it forever. The single thing he would prefer not to remember is his own trip back across that aluminum ladder.

  Rosen seemed to be quite an authority on the use of drug treatments as a concomitant to interrogation. And not merely amobarbital, but also a couple of other sweet little potions called chlorpromazine and haloperidol. In an impassioned digression, he described to Kessler the sort of effects that could be had from regular injections—say, three or four thousand milligrams daily—of these things, shot in the buttocks of even a strong-minded intelligence professional or a trained soldier.

  Irresistible drowsiness, to begin with, either in combination or alternating with ferocious headaches. Disorientation in time and space, and then a progressive loss of memory—of which the drugged subject will be acutely, frustratingly aware, but which he can do nothing about. The mental functions generally will become slowed and muddled, Rosen said. Emotions, on the other hand, will become more intense and more volatile. Paranoia. Crying fits, and in some cases mild convulsive seizures. Tremors, constant dizziness, fainting, uncontrollable muscular spasms or extreme muscular rigidity, drooling, involuntary jaw and mouth and tongue movements that may go on for hours. The subject will lose control of his face. He will puff out his cheeks, he will grimace and yawn and hoot, barely conscious he is doing it. The psychological sense of security will be very fragile. He will be quite positive that horrible offenses are being committed against his body, against his whole selfhood, Rosen said; and as far as that goes, Rosen said, he will be right. He will believe that he is losing his mind. These drugs can actually induce fear and stupidity, in direct correlation to dosage, Rosen said. With them you can destroy the humanness of a human being. Eventually, as the treatments continue, the subject’s skin will turn dirty gray, the shade of smeared newsprint. Painful nodes, like gravel, will appear in his muscles. The lenses of his eyes will fog over with little star-shaped cataracts. Blind and alone. Probably by now, too, he will be utterly incontinent. No question, then, he is in your power, Rosen said. For whatever that may be worth. He is a cracked egg.

  “Whose power?” Kessler asked.

  “Whoever holds the needle.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense. Destroying the memory, muddling the mental processes. Why do that to a man you’re still trying to debrief?”

  “Exactly. Of course it makes no sense at all. Except now they were not chiefly concerned with debriefing Tronko. As I told you. They were concerned with breaking him. For that, the drug tortures can be quite useful.”

  “But you say Herbert Eames wouldn’t allow it.”

  “No. A small blessing for Viktor Tronko. Eames would not allow drugs. Not any. No physical abuse of any kind, Eames decreed. That was to be the way.”

  “Despite pressure, I suppose.”

  “There was just enormous pressure during this time,” Rosen agreed emphatically. “Just incredible pressure, you wouldn’t believe. Lyndon Johnson himself, for a start. And everyone else. They wanted Tronko to testify before the Warren Commission. By the end of August, no later. They wanted him ready—talking, being believable. Not the confused drunken lies.”

  “Wasn’t he already saying just what they wanted to hear? ‘Oswald was only a crank. A demented loner. Not even the KGB would have anything to do with him.’ Wasn’t that Tronko’s line?”

  “It was exactly Tronko’s line, as you say. And the Commission’s line too, yes. Precisely that is why they couldn’t use him. Couldn’t take his testimony. Not yet. Not until he had been broken and then patched back together. Otherwise people would say: ‘The Warren Commission was fooled. They were fooled by that Russian, that lying Viktor Tronko.’ Do you see? The Commission was very afraid. They were afraid to let Viktor Tronko tell them the one thing that they desperately wanted to believe.”

  “It’s nice to know they were so careful about something,” Kessler said. “Meanwhile, what was Eames telling LBJ?”

  “ ‘We are working on him. But we cannot vouch that he is real.’ ”

  “What about the drug option? Didn’t Johnson try bullying Eames into that?”

  “The President didn’t know that
there was a drug option. It was not his business, Eames would have said. It was an operational detail. A means. Presidents should be answered to in the matters of goals and results, he would have said. They were to be protected from knowledge of means.”

  Kessler was gaining a new respect for the late Herbert Eames, who had always before seemed just a slightly befuddled Colonel Blimp. And the pressure upon Eames, as Rosen made very clear, had come not only from Lyndon Johnson but from inside the Agency as well: namely Claude Sparrow. Sparrow argued perfervidly, all through the summer of 1964, that Tronko was still being coddled. That McAtee and his Soviet Bloc Division were botching the job. Squandering time, and worse. Sparrow argued for the dismantling of Tronko’s personality by pharmaceutical means.

  “But Sparrow was voted down.”

  “Yes. By Herbert Eames. One vote to zero,” said Rosen.

  “McAtee was opposed also, I assume.”

  “McAtee was mainly opposed. Usually. Sometimes he wobbled. Sometimes, I think, he was tempted. He felt all this very enormous pressure himself. If it had not been for Eames’s attitude . . . who knows?”

  “You were opposed?”

  Max Rosen opened his mouth to speak, and then before doing so smiled slyly back at Kessler. “I was not among those consulted.”

  “Lentzer was opposed?”

  “Adamantly. I think,” said Rosen.

  “And it didn’t happen. No circumvention of Eames’s order. Is that right? You’re telling me that, from the moment he set foot on American soil, Tronko was never drugged?”

  “Only with vodka,” said Rosen, pleased at his own wit.

  But vodka, at least in Kessler’s experience, does not turn skin gray or cause star-shaped cataracts. If drug tortures were really forbidden by order of the Director, Kessler wonders, why should Max Rosen know so much about them?

  After forty-five minutes Kessler has recorded every fact and nuance he can recall from the hour with Max Rosen. The afternoon’s session with Sparrow is still to be done, but Sparrow will just have to wait; Kessler needs food. He needs a little respite. Liquor he needs, followed eventually by coffee, a shower, then perhaps more remembering. And there is one other chore he wants to get done, back out in that alley beneath the scaffold, while the spoor is still fresh. He lifts the bedspread and slides his notebook (the first one, now almost full thanks to Sparrow and Rosen) in between the mattress and the box spring, a precaution that seems ludicrous and amateurish even to Kessler, but nonetheless worth taking. Then he goes downstairs to the Tabard’s restaurant, a modest room that owns a small half-secret renown for its duck and its desserts, unfortunately, and is therefore crammed to capacity with sleek young lawyers and their husbands and boyfriends at this hour on a Saturday night. Kessler puts in his name.

  He fetches himself a martini. He stands for a few minutes in the doorway of the bar, staring into the dining room. Watching pairs of heads lean together over white damask, for the passing of little confidences that more likely involve power than romance, though most likely a synergy of both. He hears the quiet laughter, sees the savvy smiles. Large globes of Cabernet are raised. Not a sole human within Kessler’s view seems to be younger than twenty-six or older than, oh, fifty; there is also a dire uniformity of good clothes, good looks, good haircuts. The restaurant has never been his favorite part of the Tabard. Most of the people seated in there are Washington professionals who would never dream of taking a room in the old fleabag if, God forbid, they found themselves somehow transformed to out-of-towners; and the hotel guests, reciprocally, seem to find their food elsewhere. Kessler himself has no energy and no time, tonight, for prowling out across town for his dinner. So instead he gawks, still funky from the day’s exertions and wearing no tie.

  Nora would loathe this roomful of people, he thinks suddenly. Her lips would go white. He isn’t sure how he feels about the scene himself. Everyone in this city has his or her precious little secrets to broker—but then who is he, at the moment, to look down upon that?

  Flagging for another martini, he asks the bartender whether the patio door is locked.

  “Patio is closed,” says the bartender, instead of answering the question. The bartender seems to be a male model fallen on lean times, who wears a ruffled linen shirt and a gold ear stud and believes himself to be very busy. “Lunch only.”

  “Fine. All I want is air,” Kessler says aloud to no one, turning away.

  He moves deliberately, like any innocent tourist wandering where he shouldn’t. He slides out the door onto the red brick patio, threading among the wrought-iron chairs and umbrella tables until he is beyond sight from the bar window. He carries his drink. He strolls, but quickly and purposefully. At the rear of this little interior courtyard he sees that the iron gate out to the alley is held by a heavy padlock; on the other hand, the wall is only chest-high. Kessler rests his elbows over it, sipping gin, gazing down at the same view he had from far above: cobbles, a few vehicles, loading docks, garbage. He glances back toward the bar window, to confirm that he is safely eclipsed. He drinks. Beautiful night, though cold. No stars, no moon, but beautiful. Kessler is posing himself, the lonesome traveler taking air on a patio. All right, enough, let’s get this done fast. He sets his glass on a table. If Lovesong and Buddyboy are watching at all, Kessler figures, they are watching the front. He swings one leg then the other over the wall, hangs, and drops six feet to the alley.

  He is looking for that crumpled cigarette pack.

  He is keen to see what brand Max Rosen smokes because he wants to know who Max Rosen is. Lentzer, he remembers, was addicted to Chesterfields. Do they still even make Chesterfields? If not, what is the modern equivalent? Would an aging Sol Lentzer be the right man, this many years later, to run delicate errands for Jed McAtee—errands that might include meeting with journalists on rooftops? Kessler is inclined to think so.

  No sign of the pack where it should have fallen, in the alley near the base of the building shell. No sign of it there or anywhere. Kessler goes down on hands and knees to peer underneath the Volkswagen camper. He inspects the top of a dumpster, then behind it and under it, finally opens the dumpster lid to frown in at the contents for several minutes. Sees no cigarette pack in there, and he hasn’t the heart, not yet, to climb in and grovel around. He stands on the Volkswagen’s bumper and cranes for a view of the roof of the shed. The shed roof is a long shot, seemingly out of range, but Kessler knows that this sort of thing can sometimes defy reason and probability. Sure enough, the roof is bare. He searches behind garbage cans and in them. Nothing. An immaculate alley, this is, except for all the other and less meaningful trash.

  Now Kessler wants that pack more than ever; the longer he hunts, the more tantalizing it seems. He knows he has not misremembered the act—Rosen crumpling a cigarette pack, tossing it over the edge—because Kessler noted it consciously at the time, forming a mental resolution to come back. In fact his attention had lurched out into space, diving after the pack, and Kessler had covered his twitch with a shift of position so that Max Rosen wouldn’t notice. But maybe he did notice. Maybe Rosen has already been down here, policing up after himself.

  Kessler gazes up again toward the fifth floor of the building shell, estimating positions and distances. Probable trajectories, with a breeze and without. This time he registers the fact that the ladder is gone. Pulled in out of sight, evidently, after Rosen had steadied it for Kessler’s passage back across. Well, that’s not surprising. More foolish would be to have left the ladder in place, inviting troublesome curiosity when the workers returned by daylight. But if Rosen managed that chore alone and without a great clatter of noisy aluminum—lifting the ladder from one end, bringing it in off the alley—he must be stronger than Kessler would have judged him. The alternative, of course, is that he had assistance. A second pair of hands. The alternative is not to be contemplated, since Kessler has enough to worry over already. Neck bent, staring up, Ke
ssler suddenly realizes where the cigarette pack has gone. Possibly. Oh dear.

  It never fell more than one story. Or two. It was blown back into the building shell, somewhere not far below where Kessler and Rosen stood talking. Just the faintest breeze would have been sufficient for that, much less breeze than what Kessler was willing to postulate for getting the damn thing onto the roof of the shed. Tumbling unevenly in the air, nudged by a little gust, it could have stalled back on itself and come to rest on one of those naked ledges. Up on the third or fourth floor. Yes, obviously it had. It must have. Sure proof of the cogency of this new hypothesis is that, having reached it, Kessler discovers that his poor frostbitten body is now leaking sweat. He is hot and queasy with dread, knowing that he has got to go back up there.

  He picks his way through the dark, among pallets of decorative block and mixers and scrap wood and bags of cement, in search of a fire stairway. Naturally there is no fire stairway. Not even a rough framing of one. The crew hasn’t yet got around to putting in a fire stairway because as everyone knows construction workers, like little boys, enjoy climbing up and down scaffolding; part of their professional sense of adventurous competence, no doubt. Kessler himself, personally, has had more than his fill of adventurous competence for tonight. Also, if he were in the building trades it would be as a cement finisher, specializing in sidewalks. He most emphatically does not enjoy climbing, not ladders, not scaffolding, not mountains, not even overly steep sets of stairs. Gravity is one of the last absolutes he believes in. Still, he will climb if he must. Under silent protest, with grave misgivings, feeling like a lunatic, he will climb.

  He climbs.

  Hauling himself up to the second story isn’t difficult, with the cold iron piping of the scaffold frame offering plenty of footholds. Thereafter, harder, because the footholds are merely the same, the reaches and pulls seem longer, and the ground is farther away. In fact the ground has become an enemy again, a distant menace. Kessler clambers. He jams his feet into notches, he hoists, he lays his belly over the coarse planking of another level and huffs, grateful. He is not good at this. His mouth is wide open, his eyes too. He fills one hand with wood splinters. His blood thumps metronomically in his ears. He climbs high—no real great altitude, but sufficient to focus his mind on the dull reality that only his own grip separates him from a splattered skull. At one point the whole scaffold shifts a small bit and he clutches desperately, feeling panic like a jolt of pain, preparing to topple. But he doesn’t and the scaffold doesn’t topple. So when his breath is back he has no excuse but to go higher. In his terror, Kessler is methodical. He places each hand and each foot with individual conscious acts of mad concentration, assuring himself of the grip before he commits weight and life. He ascends this way to the fourth floor of the building shell and sprawls there on the boards like a shipwreck survivor coughed up on a beach. He pants—from exertion and fear in about equal measure. Before the panting has quieted, before his heartbeat steadies, he has begun again to shiver. From cold and fear in about equal measure.