“Sure,” says Kessler. “Thank you.”
Gondelman pours two fingers of brandy into a glass and then plugs the bottle. He fills the other glass with soda. He pushes the brandy glass toward Kessler. Nevertheless he looks more cheerful than ever.
“You’re not joining me?”
Gondelman raises the other glass. “Vicariously,” he says. “My doctor says it will kill me. And my doctor is a smart old man.”
“But you didn’t need to get this for me.”
“I got it for me,” says Gondelman. “You savor it. Please. I’ll watch.”
So Kessler says, “Cheers,” and Gondelman sips sybaritically at his soda. To Kessler’s ignorant but appreciative palate, the brandy seems very fine.
“Tell me the truth,” Gondelman says abruptly, “about your storm-door accident.”
Just as abruptly, Kessler hears himself admit: “Someone tried to kill me.” It’s another matter of impulse and fast character judgment, confiding that fact to Gondelman. “For pursuing this story, I think.”
Sidney Gondelman nods, satisfied.
“So you were outside the room looking in,” Kessler says. “Through a plastic window. Leo the Dubious and Big Al were inside, working their way through the transcripts, like it was a reading rehearsal.”
“That’s right.”
“Leo was trying to summon an empathy with—by the way, how did he get saddled with that nickname? Leo the Dubious.”
“I told you. Pokorny’s little joke.”
“But why Dubious, rather than something else? You were large—Gondwanaland, okay. Rosalind Alpert was tall. What was it in particular about Leo?”
Gondelman ponders this, almost as though for the first time. He puckers his lips and takes a full minute. “Leo . . . Leo was a little strange,” he says finally. “Though I suppose we were all, each of the three of us, a little strange. From the standpoint of someone like Pokorny or Sparrow. Our position was so different. We were analysts—meaning, we were never responsible for results, in the same way as a case officer was. Certainly not in the same way as an interrogator. Or a section chief. We were responsible only for producing ideas. Mere ideas,” Gondelman says ironically. “Of course it’s actually quite a stupendous demand. But not everyone appreciates them, these mere ideas. Our anointed role was to look over people’s shoulders, and to second-guess, and I suppose Mel Pokorny had some sort of feeling about that.”
Kessler waits.
“And of course, there’s the fact that Leo’s last name happened to be Dupuyre,” Gondelman adds.
“Spell that,” says Kessler, and Gondelman does, though Kessler is taking no notes.
Leo was trying, yes, to summon an empathy with Viktor Tronko, Gondelman agrees. For much of three years he sat on that folding chair in that drab little room and gave it the most ferocious concentration. He recited all the same fabulous stories and contradictions and recantations that Tronko (off in the real Vault somewhere) was delivering to Pokorny, and after so very much time it began to seem often that Leo himself truly believed them. He appeared to have hypnotized himself just a little. Some sort of transference had occurred. Or at very least he had succeeded—
Kessler intrudes to say: “You didn’t happen to know where that real Vault was?”
“No. Never did. And if I had, I’m not sure that I could tell you,” says Gondelman, so Kessler is happy to let the subject drop. He inhales the fumes off his brandy.
—or at very least had succeeded, Leo had, in making that leap of empathic imagination. In some sense or another—and I don’t mean this to sound mystical, says Gondelman, because I assure you I have a highly unmystical disposition—in some sense, he had entered into Viktor Tronko’s brain. Leo had. Or maybe you could equally well say Tronko had entered into his.
He would recite still again, for the tenth or the twentieth time under Pokorny’s relentless questioning—Pokorny in our version being Al, you recall—he would recite the story of his career, hitting all the familiar steeplechase jumps that by then everyone knew so well. First meeting with Trofim Filippovich Rybakov, the man who would become his spiritual father and patron. That was roughly two years after the Prague business, when Rybakov finally came home from Berlin. Recruitment to the KGB, and his training in Novosibirsk. Promotion to captain at age twenty-seven. Transfer from the Eleventh Department into Rybakov’s shop. And then that all-important scene over the Lee Harvey Oswald file. You know about that, I assume, says Gondelman. You certainly must, or else none of the rest of this would even hint at making the dimmest sort of sense.
“I know about it,” Kessler says. “That’s the one Sparrow calls Two—”
“Let me guess,” Gondelman interrupts. “Two Russians Contemplating the File of Oswald.”
“Yes. Was it general usage?”
“No. He got it straight from me,” says Gondelman. “Claude Sparrow doesn’t know beans about Flemish painting.”
And the question of Tronko’s rank at the time of defection. And the discrepancies between those early Rome tapes, the ones that McAtee had got, and everything later. And the apparently sudden decision to come across, at Vienna, complete with the telegram of recall which Tronko himself was by now admitting had been a total fabrication. And of course Dmitri—Tronko’s consistent stonewalling on the subject of Dmitri. He had never heard of any such penetration, was what Tronko swore. Almost certainly he would have heard, at least a rumor, a small smug wisp of gossip leaking its way like the perfume of a fancy woman through the upper corridors of the Lubyanka, he claimed. If any such wondrous creature as Dmitri had truly existed. Tronko firmly adhered to the view, therefore, that Dmitri did not. That we were wasting our time and our resources, crippling ourselves, with a great goose chase. Needless to say, this sort of vague disclaimer persuaded no one, says Gondelman. Give us some proof, he was told. He couldn’t. Or he wouldn’t. One cannot prove a negative, Tronko answered—and that’s true enough, says Gondelman, so far as it goes. Believe me, your Dmitri is a fantasy, an imaginary demon, he told us. Well, no one did believe him. Virtually no one. Claude Sparrow certainly didn’t, Pokorny didn’t. Al didn’t. Oddly, though, the polygraph boys gave Tronko rather high grades for sincerity on this matter too, Gondelman says. Anyway we covered it all, all of that and more, in our little game of charades, Gondelman says.
Leo would march through the latest reiteration, under Al’s ungentle goading, maybe five hours’ worth of transcript in an average installment, and then we would adjourn to another room of the suite, with our bag lunches. Sometimes Leo would dodge down the hall for a shower first, and change his shirt; then he would join us, freshened and revived from his trance. We would eat sandwiches and drink cola from cans and discuss, Gondelman says. Just we three. Nobody here but us Schnitzels. The tone was relaxed and dispassionate now. Cerebral. Seated around a conference table in a comfortable room, we would analyze the morning’s drama. Gondelman stretches back in the captain’s chair, clasping his hands behind his head. We would discuss, he repeats. Kessler wonders suddenly whether any other offices along the plush corridor downstairs contain people like Sidney Gondelman. Colleagues. Partners. Maybe not. Maybe there are no other large thinkers at Janus Corporation. Maybe Gondelman is the sole grand and glorious wizard of this outfit. There are no other lookout towers, Kessler has noticed. And Gondelman sounds downright lonely.
“We would discuss. Usually I would propose the first observations, from my notes. Al would comment. She generally had a very strong sense of the points where Tronko seemed vulnerable—where Pokorny had extracted or maybe just come close to extracting some new admission, or even, sometimes, where Mel had failed to pursue an opportunity that looked to her promising. Meanwhile Leo would inject Delphic comments like ‘How in the world could a nice guy like me go from senior lieutenant to colonel in eighteen months? I don’t think I’ve got it in me.’ Or he would announce: ‘I can’t believe
I really forgot about Trofim Filippovich, during those sessions back at Rome. I couldn’t have been that drunk. I think I was protecting him. But why aren’t I protecting him now?’ Or he might gaze straight across at Al and say: ‘You don’t scare me, Pokorny. I know you’re just the personal stooge of Claude Sparrow,’ and then Al and I would have to pounce on him for committing logical fallacy, since it was manifest that Tronko knew nothing of the kind. There was no reason to suspect that he had so much as heard of Claude Sparrow. And then another time, which I remember quite well, Leo simply proclaimed: ‘I feel very strong today. I feel a great deal of inner force.’
“ ‘What do you mean, Leo?’ we asked him.
“ ‘I feel strong,’ he said. ‘I think I’m stronger than all of you. More stubborn. I think I’m going to win.’
“ ‘Stronger than Pokorny?’ we said.
“ ‘Stronger than Pokorny and Sparrow and McAtee, yes.’
“ ‘You don’t know from Claude Sparrow, goddamn it. Remember?’
“ ‘Stronger than Eames. Stronger than Langley and Moscow. I’m a clam. You can crush me but that doesn’t mean you can pry me open.’
“ ‘Come back to earth, Leo, and explain what you mean.’
“He looked blank, then,” says Gondelman. “And he said: ‘I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.’”
That was all during the first twenty months or so, says Gondelman. Leo would snap in and out of the role, and make these cryptic pronouncements off the top of his head, offered for just whatever they might or might not be worth, and then he would return to us, fully and soundly, joining Al and me for prolonged analytical discussions of the character of the testimony thus far. We were working in the realms of psychology and epistemology as well as verifiable factual evidence, and we knew that, says Gondelman. Some of it was verifiable, anyway. And we knew that, I say. Nevertheless we used symbolic logic and a blackboard, sometimes. We chalk-talked at each other, we jawboned, we twirled the body of evidence to expose it from every angle and we peered and we delved. It was the ultimate intellectual puzzle, if you like, says Gondelman: trying to solve the mysteries of just one human soul. Gondelman stares out toward a red band of sky low over the Hudson.
It was quite grand, actually, he says.
After a glance at Kessler’s brandy and a taste of his own soda, Gondelman continues. But as I say, he says, that was earlier on. Toward the end of the second year, there came to be some gradual changes.
God knows, none of us had expected the thing to drag on so long—two years. Let alone three. That’s a piece of time, out of any life. Leo was getting tired. We were all three tired and frustrated, naturally, but for obvious reasons especially Leo. He grew moody. He had always been the quietest of the three of us, says Gondelman, not a bombastic fool like me or quick and trenchant and delicately, murderously bright, like Big Al. Leo had a different style of intelligence. I suspect he would have made a great auto mechanic—and I mean that with no condescension, Gondelman insists—because he was the type, Leo was, who could listen to the sound of an idling engine, his head cocked to one side, and then correctly diagnose that there was an electrical short somewhere between the alternator and the right taillight, if that’s possible.
“I doubt it,” says Kessler.
“But you see what I mean. For the same reason, he might have been a fine veterinarian. Working with patients who can’t talk. I respect those capacities.”
“I think I see, yes,” says Kessler.
He grew moody and then plain sullen, Leo did. He seemed to be suffering an extended funk. He contributed less to the group discussions. And here was another symptom, says Gondelman: he gave up the showers. He came to lunch sticky. He didn’t smell, you understand, says Gondelman. Not especially. But it was a thing I noticed. Like when an old cat finally loses interest in cleaning herself: the first dingdong of mortality. I don’t know whether Leo was even showering, anymore, when he went home.
“Was there something wrong in his personal life?”
“He had no personal life,” says Gondelman. “He was an aging bachelor, like me. He was wedded to the job. Like all of us. He had a collection of jazz records and a ham radio, I think. I never saw his apartment. No, it wasn’t that. It was Viktor Tronko’s personal life that was dragging him down, not his own. Tronko who also, of course, had none whatsoever.”
At one point in the later period, Leo came forth with: “I’ve told you. I don’t know why we didn’t debrief Oswald. I don’t know why we didn’t contact him. But I saw the file. And we hadn’t.” His eyes were fixed on a spot on the floor. The voice was stiff, cold, angry. And this wasn’t a reenactment of the transcript, says Gondelman. This was spoken over lunch.
During the third year it only got worse. Leo never anymore made statements like “I feel strong.” He volunteered little, says Gondelman. He sat hunched at the conference table and deferred languidly, with a wave of his hand, to ideas offered by Al and myself. He left the building promptly at night, sometimes even early, and wouldn’t accept rides from the two of us during a week when his Karmann Ghia was in the shop. He had a friend in Security, Leo said, who would drop him at the bus stop. There was this distance now. As though it had become him against us. As though Leo were truly the clam and we were the ones determined to open him or crush him. Somewhere along the way, he had gone over to Viktor Tronko. I suppose the same sort of thing might happen to an actor who spends too long in a very successful play, says Gondelman.
Much of the interrogation that year was focused on two subjects: Oswald in Russia and Dmitri. What Pokorny liked to refer to, hectoringly, as Tronko’s pair of big lies. More and more, Pokorny left the other unresolved matters swept off to the wayside and concentrated upon just these two. Oswald in the days before Dallas, the days of his expatriate life in Minsk; and Dmitri, the phantom agent. He went after Tronko relentlessly on each of these subjects.
Over and over again they covered the same ground. Pokorny asked the same old questions framed eight dozen different ways and Tronko made over and over again the same responses—or occasionally mixed in a slight variation, by innocent or less innocent mistake, which Pokorny would then instantly seize upon and try to exploit for new leverage. Why do you say so-and-so, if two years ago you said such-and-such? Why do you keep changing your story? Who do you think you’re kidding? It might have been something so potentially crucial as the weather in Minsk on that twenty-third of November, says Gondelman. Or it might have been something minuscule, like the names of Rybakov’s surviving daughters. And when there were no prospects of new leverage for weeks at a time, no variations, then Pokorny would resort to browbeating, psychological bully tactics, strident demands for still further repetition, until a fresh angle might finally turn up. It got to be quite tedious sometimes, let me tell you, says Gondelman. But Pokorny seemed to possess the right talents.
I suppose he made an excellent interrogator, says Gondelman. Certainly he had stamina. He was quick-witted, his memory for detail was impressive, and he could be cruel. Affable and engaging in his clownish way and then, just moments later, cruel. Merciless. Absolutely predaceous. I suppose those are the requisite traits, says Gondelman. Of course all I know is what I saw and heard from the transcript. But even our Al was hard taxed, sometimes, filling the role.
“Mel told me himself that he was a cast-iron asshole, as an interrogator,” says Kessler.
“That was self-knowing.”
We returned endlessly to the Two Russians tableau, for instance, says Gondelman. Pokorny seemed to feel that this was the linchpin to Tronko’s edifice of lies—assuming as he was, Gondelman adds, that it was indeed an edifice of lies. And not just a random garbage heap of lies.
“Or an edifice of truth,” Kessler says.
“Well, that seemed unlikely.”
“All of this seems unlikely to me,” Kessler says.
The Two Russians
tableau was scrutinized minutely, obsessively, like a brilliant art forgery set for auction at Sotheby’s. Tell me again, Pokorny would say. Tell me again about your adventure with Oswald’s file. Wait, what was the layout of the office? he would demand, interrupting before Tronko could get started. Tronko had already described the office layout. He would describe it again, and if he were lucky the words he used would be the same exact words as last time, and he would therefore be allowed to continue. Whose office was it, Rybakov’s or Tronko’s own? Tronko would answer. What sort of lighting in the office? Tronko would answer. Did the table lamp have a shade of green glass? Was the lamp itself made of brass? Was the brass polished? Tronko would answer these things docilely. Why had he called it a table lamp, if it was placed on a desk? Why not a desk lamp? Was it a desk or was it really a table, upon which the file had rested, there in Rybakov’s office—or did Tronko perhaps not know what it was? Tronko would answer: a table lamp that happened to sit on a desk. A desk lamp, in his mind, was different. Though he could be mistaken. How large was it, this file? Was it thick or thin, one volume or several? Tronko would answer and again Pokorny would pounce: why was it one volume now if it had been several volumes last year and again only one volume back when he told the same tale to Sol Lentzer? Where were the missing volumes? What was this—the multiplication and distribution of loaves and fishes? From the transcript as we had it, of course, Gondelman says, you couldn’t tell which of these questions had merely been asked of Tronko and which had been screamed at him. Al had to guess. She had to play from context. If the file was just one thin volume, why did it take you and Rybakov so long to go through it? Tell me again what Rybakov said to you. Tronko would answer, quoting: “We must see, Viktor Semyonovich, whether we have gotten ourselves implicated. Do you pray?” Wasn’t it rather unusual, Pokorny would demand, for a major-general of the KGB to talk like that? Tronko would answer: yes, it was.
The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 39