The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “Listen, we’re a little closer to understanding what that hedgehog thing is all about—”

  “Saul, I want this thing to go no further.”

  Ansbach furrowed his brow. “In what—”

  “We’re dropping it, Saul.”

  “What do you mean, ‘dropping it’?”

  “NFA, Saul. No further action.”

  A few minutes later, after they discussed other matters, Saul hung up the phone, puzzled and alarmed. He took off his glasses and massaged his eyes. He had begun to develop a throbbing headache.

  Outside, it was starting to rain.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 53

  One of the small privileges of being the godson of Winthrop Lehman was that, when you went to his townhouse, you never had to suffer a New York taxi ride. Lehman’s Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow picked Stone up in the early evening, in front of Stone’s apartment building on Central Park West, to take him to the party.

  The rain that had begun that afternoon had become a dark, howling torrent, the sort of downpour that, in New York, with its skyscrapers and concrete canyons, always seems like the end of the world.

  The chauffeur, a ruddy-faced red-haired man in a yellow rain slicker, opened the car door for Stone.

  Stone smiled as he got in. “You’d think Mr. Lehman could arrange a nicer day than this for his publication party,” he said as he got in.

  The chauffeur was not to be outdone. “He knows a lot of people, sir,” he called out, “but I don’t know if he’s got any strings to pull up there.”

  Stone chuckled politely.

  Once behind the wheel, the chauffeur said nothing; that was the way Lehman preferred it, and Stone did not try to make small talk. Driving through Central Park, the Rolls’s suspension so good that he could scarcely feel the uneven streets below. Stone felt as if he were in another world. The car’s interior was immaculate, its leather aromatic of some kind of oil, the air cool and dry. Outside, the unfortunate pedestrians struggled with ruined umbrellas and gargantuan puddles and powerful gusts of wind.

  He sat, absorbed by his thoughts. He recalled Lehman, the rich and distinguished man in his expensive bespoke suits, the skin of his head like speckled parchment stretched tight over his cranium. As a child, an adolescent, even a young man, Charlie had felt somewhat elect because of his family’s connection to Winthrop Lehman. If his family had been besmirched by his father’s jail term, the unfair but unmistakable aura of disrepute that surrounded his father—the whispered allegations that Alfred Stone really was, after all, a spy, once— things were almost put right by their association with Lehman. Almost.

  54 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Lehman was the man whose portrait had several times been on the cover of Time magazine, whose photo had hundreds of times been on the front pages of newspapers. He was the man who had gotten Alfred Stone out of jail.

  Stone remembered the first time he had met Winthrop Lehman.

  It was 1962, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, air-raid shelters, and duck-and-cover. Most of the fourth-graders, marching silendy through the halls of the elementary school with the terrifying air-raid-drill siren whooping, believed the bomb might drop at any minute, without warning. Anticommunism was rampant: the sort of grave, vacuous politics at which nine-year-olds excel. Charlie’s mother had just died, a few days earlier; he had suffered the funeral, and the burial at Mount Auburn Cemetery, in silence.

  A kid named Jerry Delgado had grabbed him in the cloakroom outside of Mrs. Allman’s chalk-dust}’ classroom and whispered for the hundredth time a quick, biting insult about Charlie’s father being a commie spy, and Charlie, unable to hold it back any longer, took off after the boy with a brute force he didn’t know he had. A gaggle of nine-year-olds watched, thrilled and fascinated, as Charlie knocked Jerry Delgado to the floor and pummeled him with tightly clenched fists. When Mrs. Allman broke it up, punishing both parties equally by sending them to the principal’s office, Charlie felt a warm, pleasurable glow: being strong was after all so much more effective than being smart.

  After school, Charlie returned home to find, parked in the driveway, a long black Chrysler limousine. His first, scared thought was that it was someone official, the police or the FBI, come to tell his father about Jerr' Delgado, or maybe it was even Jerry Delgado’s parents.

  But it was Winthrop Lehman, the famous Winthrop Lehman, about whom his parents had spoken so often. He and Alfred Stone were in the study talking, and Lehman came out in a dark-blue suit to say hello. The great man shook Charlie’s hand with rapt concentration, as if Charlie were some world leader. Lehman was in town for the day—something to do with giving his collection of Impressionist paintings to the Fogg Art Museum—and after he and Alfred were

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 55

  finished talking, Lehman asked Charhe if he wanted to go for a walk. Charlie shrugged and said sure.

  They walked into the square, had ice cream at Bailey’s, and then walked around the Fogg. Charlie had never been inside, wasn’t much interested in painting, but Lehman pointed his favorites out, telling him about van Gogh and Monet. Lehman noticed a scrape down Charlie’s face, and he asked what had happened. Charlie told him, not without pride. Finally, Charlie brought himself to ask Lehman: “If my dad didn’t give documents to the Russian government, why did they put him in jail?”

  Lehman stopped in the echoey stone courtyard of the museum, leaned over slightly as he placed a large hand on Charlie’s shoulder, and replied: “Your father is a terribly brave man.” He did not explain what that was supposed to mean, and Charlie didn’t pursue it.

  Later, intrigued by his godfather, Charlie went to the library and looked up everything he could find on Winthrop Lehman. He learned that Lehman was an heir to a railroad fortune; that he’d survived two wives and had no heirs; that in the early 1920s he had lived in Moscow for several years, doing business with the Russians, as had Armand Hammer and Averell Harriman; that Franklin Roosevelt had asked him to come to Washington and help guide the country through the New Deal and later to arrange Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union during the war; that Harry Truman had asked him to stay on as a national-security adviser. A cover story in Time in 1950 estimated his wealth at over a hundred million dollars; a picture caption described him as “America’s pre-eminent statesman.”

  Knowing he was connected, even in a small way, with such a famous and powerful man gave Charlie something certain to cling to, at a time when he didn’t have a whole lot else.

  By the time Stone arrived, Lehman’s party was in full swing, if ever a party at Winthrop Lehman’s august townhouse could be said to swing.

  A servant took his coat; Charlie stood for a moment before the mirror in the foyer, smoothing the lapels of his charcoal-gray business suit, straightening his tie, running his hand quickly through his hair.

  56 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  From the other rooms, he could hear the energized babble of cocktail-part}’ conversation, the laughter and the clinking of glasses. A black-and-white-liveried waiter went by, carrying a tray of caviar canapes. Stone smiled: Winthrop Lehman did not skimp. As he entered the main room, he passed a table on which were displayed several copies of Lehman’s memoirs, A Lifetime.

  The interior of Lehman’s endless apartment had been built, in the nineteenth century, to resemble an eighteenth-century French chateau: deep-brown mahogany paneling with elaborately carved pilasters, mammoth fireplaces of black marble, Venetian crystal chandeliers, gold fixtures, sconces, and escutcheons. Empire furniture upholstered in the original beige silk, several large Aubusson rugs. Portraits by Sargent hung on the walls; porcelain Oriental vases mounted in centuries-old ormolu adorned the Baroque giltwood side tables.

  The room in which the party seemed to be centered—where Winthrop Lehman sat holding court, in an overstuffed gold-striped wing chair, surrounded by admirers—was the immense library: high cathedral ceilings, oak wainscoting, floors of rich green marble partly covered by sump
tuous Kirman rugs; great swags of heavy pale-green silk drapery dominating the tall windows.

  Stone spotted a few faces he knew and quite a few more he recognized. The senators from New York and Connecticut were speaking with an elfin real-estate mogul; the Vice-President seemed to be deep in colloquy with the Speaker of the House and the anchorman of a national evening news program.

  The crowd was glittery, old New York society consorting with investment bankers, a handful of fashion designers, the heads of Citibank, ITT, and General Motors, a sprinkling of universit}’ presidents, the directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cooper-Hewitt (both of which had benefited handsomely from Lehman’s contributions over the years). There were a number of very thin-armed, very rich dowagers, including one society matron who had brought her two miniature Chinese dogs, which snarled and snapped at anyone unfortunate enough to brush by.

  “Charlie Stone!”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 57

  Stone winced inwardly at the approach of someone he didn’t particularly like, a terminally dull and self-important investment banker he had met once, a few years earlier.

  The investment banker, who was holding aloft a glass of wine as if he were Madame Curie displaying her first test tube of curium, clasped Stone’s hand heartily, and began to say something tedious about the International Monetary Fund.

  “How’s tricks, Charlie?” he asked solicitously. “Pensions, is that right?”

  Very few people even had an inkling of what Stone did for a living. He told anyone who asked that he was a private consultant. No one knows exactly what a consultant does, and most. Stone found, ask no further. He learned, too, that when he gave the plausible-sounding lie, “pension-fund actuarial analyst,” he could see, with great satisfaction, eyes begin to glaze over. At parties, anyone who asked him out of politeness to explain would receive a stultifying explanation that dampened any curiosity, provoked quick desperate smiles and the sudden urge to excuse oneself and get a refill.

  Stone said something indeterminate about a new development in the pension funds of a Hartford insurance company.

  “Hmph,” the investment banker said. “I suppose anything can seem interesting if you do it for a living, right?” He meant it sincerely.

  “Exactly.”

  The investment banker took another sip of his wine and began telling a story about the Saint-Emilion he was drinking and how it was the favorite wine of Julius Caesar. Stone, who knew that Lehman never served anything but burgundy, smiled and nodded. No reason to puncture the poor man’s affectations. Stone thought.

  Lehman was seated as if on a throne, nodding deliberately in response to something one of the surrounding throng had said. He wore a beautifully tailored dark-gray English suit, but it looked as if it had fit him beautifully decades ago. Now he had shrunk within it.

  Lehman’s eyes were a cool, even chilling, gray. They seemed watery, and they were grotesquely magnified by the lenses of his glasses, whose frames were a pale fleshtone. His nose had once been what was often called aquiline, but now it seemed merely sharp and protruding.

  58 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  As he spoke. Stone could see the oflF-white of his too-perfect false teeth.

  Suddenly he saw Stone, and he extended a liver-spotted hand. “Charles. How good to see you.”

  “Congratulations, Winthrop.”

  “My godson, Charles Stone,” he explained to a dowager at his left. “Come closer, Charlie. It’s good to see you.”

  “You’re looking well.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” Lehman responded lightheartedly, in a reedy voice. He added, with a raised eyebrow: “Your clients are treating you well?”

  “Quite well.”

  “Your clients are lucky to have you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Stone came close to asking about the “Lenin Testament,” but he restrained himself.

  “Is Alfred here?”

  Stone’s attention was momentarily distracted by something he glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, a familiar silhouette.

  “Excuse me?” he said, and turned to see a lovely blond woman in a white low-necked dress with high taflPeta shoulders, huddled in intense conversation with Saul Ansbach, in the adjoining foyer.

  “No, he’s not, Winthrop. Excuse me for a moment, please,” he said, feeling his stomach constrict.

  It was Charlotte.

  At about that time, roughly 150 miles to the north, a young seminarian at the Russian Orthodox monastery in Maplewood, New York, packed a small valise and got into a car that belonged to the seminary.

  After an hour’s drive, he arrived in Saratoga and pulled into the parking lot of the De Witt Clinton Rest Home, a graceful nineteenth-century stone structure, rough-hewn and yet symmetrical, in the architectural style of H. H. Richardson. He found the set of keys secreted exactly as he had been told they would be—magnetically affixed under an iron staircase at the back of the building—and he made his way in.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 59

  When he found the correct room, he checked his bag once again. The 5ml vial of atracurium besylate was there.

  The moonlight illuminated a shriveled figure in a wheelchair, an old man who sat dozing. He had no legs.

  The seminarian recognized the man immediately. He was named Alden Gushing, once one of the most important industrialists in the country. At one time, he had been the business partner of the industrialist and statesman Winthrop Lehman, going back to Lehman’s years in Moscow. The seminarian had studied the file on Gushing and knew that Gushing’s name was usually paired with Lehman’s in old issues oi Fortune magazine from the twenties and thirties. He was often seen in photographs with William Randolph Hearst and John D. Rockefeller the original, playing golf at San Simeon, hunting in West Virginia. The seminarian wondered what could possibly have reduced such an extraordinarily powerful man to such a state, from San Simeon to a small, grimy nursing home in upstate New York, a room that stank of medicines and salves and bad institutional food.

  “Mr. Gushing,” he said quietly in English, opening the door and switching on the light.

  Gushing awoke gradually and seemed disoriented. He shielded his eyes from the light. “Who … ?” he demanded weakly.

  “I’m a priest,” the seminarian said. “We have some mutual friends.”

  “A priest? What—it’s the middle of the night!”

  “Everything is all right. You will be all right.” The seminarian’s gently accented voice had a hypnotic quality to it.

  “Leave me—!” Gushing croaked.

  “Everything will be all right.”

  “I kept my promise to Lehman!” Gushing’s head shook involuntarily. His voice was high and cracked. “I never said a word.” His eyes filled with tears, which gathered at the corners of his eyes and then spilled onto the mottled cheeks in odd rivulets.

  Within a few minutes, the seminarian had found out everything he wanted to know. Then he placed a soothing hand on Gushing’s mottled arm, smoothing back the pale-blue cotton pajama sleeve.

  60 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “You’re obviously very upset, Mr. Gushing,” he said. “I’ve got something to cahn you down a bit.” His voice was soothing.

  Cushing’s eyes were large and round with terror.

  The seminarian held up a small syringe, which he fastidiously knocked against his hand. “This is to keep any air from getting in your bloodstream,” he explained. He tightened the tourniquet on Cushing’s upper arm, deftly located the vein, swabbed the spot with an alcohol pad, and inserted the hypodermic needle.

  Gushing was now looking at him furiously. His mouth worked, opening and closing, but no sound emerged. He could see a slight backwash of his own blood enter the syringe just before the priest injected.

  Gushing’s limbs had gotten heavy. He felt his eyes close.

  “You’ll be feeling fine very soon,” he could hear the priest saying. What kind of accent was that? Nothing made sense. He wanted to
shout, to push him away.

  But Gushing could not have replied, or moved, much as he wanted to.

  He was completely alert—he could hear every word the intruder spoke, every sound in the room—but he realized with a steadily dawning terror that he could not breathe. Or speak. Or move. Or scream.

  A minute later, he began to lose consciousness. Everything darkened, until slowly the room was completely black. Gushing’s body had gone flaccid. Anyone passing by would have thought he had fallen fast asleep.

  The atracurium that had been injected into his bloodstream—a muscle relaxant that is metabolized by body temperature and body pH—acted quickly. Within a very short time, it would be entirely metabolized. There would be no trace, and the presumptive cause of death would be cardiorespiratory arrest. Even if Gushing’s body were subjected to a routine pathological examination—which it would not be, because of his age—the metabolite of atracurium would not be detected. If they found the needle mark in his arm, well, he had asked for a sedatie the day before. Gushing, everyone knew, was a very high-strung man.

  7

  New York

  Stone approached Charlotte and Saul noiselessly, careful not to be noticed. He wanted to see her, hear her for a moment, without his wife’s knowing he was there.

  They were speaking in hushed voices in the dark alcove, Saul shaking his head, Charlotte beaming at him.

  She had changed. Her hair was diflFerent, shorter, but it was becoming. She had aged a bit, too; you could see it around her eyes, but they were laugh lines, and they suited her. She had lost a little weight. She looked spectacular. If she wanted, she could look un-nervingly like Grace Kelly, and tonight she must have wanted.

  Stone realized with a flash of anger that she wasn’t wearing either her diamond engagement ring or her wedding ring. He was embarrassed by the rush of his feelings for her. He considered turning around, not greeting her.

  Instead, he watched, and listened, for the moment unobserved.