“But how do you know it’s Russian?” she was saying with a toss of her head.
Saul’s voice, barely audible, came back: “I didn’t say that.”
“But you implied it.”
Saul shrugged. “True, but—”
Charlotte, urgently whispering: “Then, if a bomb went off in the Kremlin—”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“But you’ve just admitted your people are looking into it. Which means 1 have a story.”
62 ■ JOSEPH FINDER
“Come on, Charlotte. Go easy on me. What about journalistic ethics?”
“Ain’t no such thing.”
Stone smiled to himself, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Saul muttered, “Charlotte, I’ve been with Langley, on the Soviet account, for thirty-five years. Thirty-five years of studying Moscow. Thirty-five years of infighting at Langley. Thirty-five years of never being sure whether what we know about Russia is right.”
“That’s—that’s a hundred and five years, Saul,” Charlotte said, giving Saul’s shoulder a quick squeeze. “You don’t look half that.”
“You’re a doll.”
“Don’t worry, Saul. I won’t use it—yet. Professional courtesy, let’s call it.”
“Thanks, kid. And if I can ever—Well, it looks like you have an admirer.”
Charlotte turned slowly and saw Stone.
Her face registered in a split-second a range of emotions—surprise, love, sadness, a flash of anger—all melding, in barely a second, into a look of defiant poise.
“Hello, Charlie.”
“Hey, Charlotte. I hope you’re not surprised to see me here.”
She paused and smiled wistfully. “I knew you’d be here. Excuse us, Saul.”
Saul, nodding, departed with a broad smile.
They each stood frozen for a long moment, until Charlie slipped one hand around to the small of her back and said, “Need a little sugar?”
He leaned slightly and touched his lips to hers. She responded almost imperceptibly.
“So?” Stone asked.
“So?” she repeated, shy, awkward, the girl on a first date.
“Been here long?”
“You mean the party, or the country?”
“Both.”
“I just got here, to the party. I’ve been in the States four or five
THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 63
days. Visited my parents, and I happened to be in the city yesterday when I heard about Lehman’s—”
“Were you planning to give me a call?” Stone tried to smile, but couldn’t suppress a note of accusation. Several other men nearby were noticing her, the way men always did. One important-looking older man was giving her a lecherous once-over. Stone shot him a menacing, proprietary glare, followed by a swift deflating smile.
Charlotte sighed and looked down. Stone had never seen this dress on her, and he wondered if she’d bought it for the occasion. How many new outfits had she bought in the last year or so, and what were the occasions at which she wore them? “Yes, I was,” she said at last. She flushed and looked up again.
“You want a drink or something?”
“I’ve given up alcohol. And coffee.”
“Coffee? You were the caffeine queen of Central Park West.”
“Yeah, well, no more. I hate instant, and that’s all you get in Moscow. Nescafe.”
“I like your lipstick.”
“Thanks.” She pursed her lips in a burlesque of Marilyn Monroe. “Diane Sawyer recommended it.” She gave a quick, only-kidding laugh. “Do you still smoke? I don’t smell it on you.”
“I gave it up.”
“Really? When?”
“I don’t remember,” Stone lied.
When you left. Stone thought.
Right after their marriage, they moved to New York, where he attended graduate school at Columbia’s Russian Institute and she worked at a series of temporary jobs. They lived in an awful, dark studio apartment in the Village, but they didn’t mind. After he got his Ph.D., he was asked to join the Georgetown faculty, and they moved to Washington—a move neither one relished. Charlie, whose dissertation on power in the Kremlin was widely lauded, gained immediate recognition as one of the finest Soviet scholars of his generation, and Charlotte, none too happy about not really having a career to speak of, found a job doing rewrite at a Washington newspaper.
64 ■ JOSEPH FINDER
Then Charlie was lured to a tenured job at M.I.T., in Cambridge, and they moed again. And there Charlotte’s career began to take off. She talked her way into a job at a local Boston TV station, rewriting AP newswire copy, and in a matter of months they offered her the position of “weather girl,” which she turned flatly down. She became a reporter, assigned to the lowliest of stories—Cops & Cadavers, she called them—but she learned fast. She learned how to do “cutaways,” reaction shots during interviews, without nodding, which always looked bad. She learned how to look right into the camera with her direct gaze and project sincerity and strength.
Once in a while, she’d wish aloud that someday she’d have a chance to use the Russian she, too, had learned in college, which was even better than Charlie’s (Stone attributed that to her Polish blood). Someday she would. In the meantime, she became first a good reporter, then a terrific one. But of course, since this was television, it was her poise and her looks that attracted all the attention. In the era of Barbara Walters and Jessica Savitch and Diane Sawyer, stations were searching for female anchors, and Charlotte had not only the looks but the authority. The station asked her to anchor a morning news show—grimly early, from six to six-thirty in the morning, a show called “Boston a.m.”
After a network executive happened to be in Boston for a business meeting and happened to be up early one morning watching the news, he called Charlotte and offered her a network news-reporting job on the spot. In New York.
Which was right around the time that Stone had decided to take up Saul Ansbach’s offer to join Parnassus, to leave the academy for the murky world of intelligence. And so they returned to New York, apparently in triumph.
Stone remembered this as the happiest time of their marriage. Both of them, finally, were doing work they loved. Stone plunged himself into the top-secret Kremlinology with a zeal he hadn’t known he possessed. Charlotte applied to her reporting that bulldog tenacity, fierce intelligence, and warmth that had carried Stone away the first time he met her back at Yale. She propelled herself through the large
THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 65
pool of network general-assignment reporters until she was getting a story on the news almost every night. A rising star.
They settled into the easy, old-shoe routines of marriage. They watched TV together, cooked once in a while, went out with friends. Charlotte began to learn photography; Charlie became a weekend “gearhead,” teaching himself everything about how cars worked, working under the hood of his old BMW 2002 more for relaxation than anything else.
There were squabbles, of course. Things didn’t always go smoothly. The feverish, obsessed passion of the early years had settled into something steadier, richer. Stone’s love for Charlotte had, if anything, deepened. From time to time, they spoke of having kids, but never seriously; or it would be serious for a week and then one or the other would back away from it. That would come, when they were ready. Older parents were better anyway, weren’t they?
And then everything came crashing down.
One day late in 1988, the CIA received reliable indicators that Gorbachev was about to be ousted. There was no time for the Agency to put together a courier package for him, so they flew Stone down to Langley and put him up in a nearby hotel to do an emergency analysis, pore over the files at headquarters. No visitors allowed: Agency rules.
The project went on for weeks. Stone and Charlotte called each other every night. Every night Charlotte would ask when he was coming back; every night Stone would say he didn’t know.
Charlie immediately flew to Pennsylvania for the funeral, then went back to New York with Charlotte to comfort her. She didn’t sleep, and hardly cried; she sat in a chair in the bedroom, and stared at a Jane Austen novel without reading it. She seemed inconsolable. After a few days, believing he’d done all he could, he returned to Washington.
That was his mistake. Later he realized he should have stayed on with Charlotte. At first he called her every night, but after a while he was working night and day and he didn’t call but once or twice a week. Perhaps he should have known then how desperate she was for companionship.
66 ■ JOSEPH FINDER
He returned to New York at the end of the month to surprise Charlotte.
He did.
She was coming out of their apartment building arm in arm with a man he’d seen before. He was an executive from another network, a pretty-boy in an Armani suit with a flashing, perfect smile, who made T^ miniseries or some such thing.
The affair had been going on for two weeks, Stone later learned. He confronted Charlotte wildly, furiously, late that night, after letting himself into their apartment. Then he stormed out, got drunk, and called a woman friend who was divorced, a sensuous, bosomy redhead. They spent the night together.
And the golden bowl had cracked.
The next morning, Stone returned to their apartment, his anger cooled, ready to talk. He was just in time to see Charlotte packing her belongings in boxes and suitcases, sloppily and hastily, weeping all the while. She refused to talk. That afternoon, she moved out to a friend’s vacant apartment, and she refused to take Stone’s calls.
A few weeks later, she returned one more time, to gather a few last things. They didn’t talk about what had happened; there was an air of finality that was terrif>‘ing.
She said that the network was sending her to Moscow. Not exactly a widely sought-after position, since it was considered off the traditional career track. But someone at the top of the network had made a decision to “glamorize” coverage of the Soviet Union, and she was certainly glamorous enough.
“I’m taking the job,” she said.
Stone, who knew this was coming, felt his stomach turn inside out, but he didn’t plead with her, and later he wondered whether he should have. “Don’t, Charlotte,” he said. “You’re making a mistake.”
“If we don’t take time off from each other, this marriage won’t survive, ” she said.
Charlie went to kiss her, moving slowly, as if through water, and she turned away, spilling tears.
“Ah, now you want to kiss me,” she said cruelly. “Now you want to kiss me.”
For the first time in his hfe, CharHe, who was never without an apt retort, could think of nothing to say.
Stone held out a hand to Charlotte. “We need to talk,” he said. “Alone.”
“Can’t it wait until after the party?”
“No.” A servant passed by, on her way to the kitchen.
When she was gone. Stone continued. “You remember the story about my father?”
“Which story?”
“The story, Charlotte. The prison, all that.”
“What the hell does that have to do—”
“There’s a document in Winthrop’s personal archives. Down in the subbasement. I think it might explain something about what happened to my father.”
“Charlie, I don’t understand—”
“I need your help. I need you to get us in there.”
Charlotte hesitated, her insatiable curiosity already threatening to overwhelm her. “Winthrop’s your godfather. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I can’t. He’d be suspicious. But you’re a journalist, and Winthrop is a man of considerable ego. You see? Do it for my father, at least. For him.”
“Unfair, Charlie.”
“Winthrop,” Charlotte said to Lehman a few minutes later, placing her small shapely hand atop his large knobby one. “I’m leaving the country tomorrow, but I’m thinking of putting together a television profile on you, your legacy in Russia today.” She watched as Lehman’s vanity took him over. “Charlie’s offered to guide me around.”
Oak wainscoting gave way to plainer oak paneling as the two walked down the narrow corridor. A copper-haired middle-aged woman, probably an employee, passed by and smiled deferentially. The noise of the party grew fainter.
Winthrop Lehman’s archives were located a long walk away, behind a steel door that locked electronically. They comprised some
68 ■ JOSEPH FINDER
ninety filing cabinets in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment, and in those green steel cabinets were some of the most fascinating documents Stone had ever seen—a veritable inside history of twentieth-century American diplomacy.
He had visited Lehman’s personal archives a few times before, as an undergraduate, when he was working on his senior thesis on the formation of American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. Stone was one of the very few people ever allowed to see the archives. There was a historian from Stanford whom Lehman permitted to browse, but most scholar-squirrels and packrats, as Lehman called academics, were politely but firmly turned away. Lehman had decreed that the files were not to be opened to the public until after his death, when they would be given to the Library of Congress. Some of the papers would probably not be declassified for years.
“You’re not really leaving the country tomorrow, are you?” Stone asked. They passed a supply closet, then a dumbwaiter that was filled with dirty dishes.
“I am.”
“Christ, Charlotte. What are the terms of this separation, anyway? Complete and utter exile, is that it? We never see each other?” They passed a room that exuded the strong odor of chlorine bleach. He spoke with a quiet, cool anger. “You know I’d visit you in Moscow if the Agency allowed that. But they don’t.”
Charlotte nodded, her face a mask of neutrality. She scratched at her chin.
“Do you want to just throw our marriage away, is that it?” Stone asked.
She didn’t reply. They walked down a creaky set of wooden stairs.
“How’s your love life?” he asked. His voice echoed in the stairwell.
“Uneventful,” she said. Her tone was too air>’, too offhanded.
The walls were concrete now; the floor was some kind of hard gray institutional stone. He pulled open a door, held it for her, and saw that her blush had still not gone away.
She said, “I don’t know what you’re—”
“Just tell me, Charlotte. Make it easy.”
“Look, Charlie.” They stopped for a moment in front of a small
THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 69
service elevator. “I’ve seen people. You have, too. But there isn’t anyone now. For one thing, there isn’t any time.”
“Or anyone.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“You’re right,” Stone conceded. “You never had a problem attracting men. So why haven’t you?”
“Did it ever occur to you, Charlie, that I might want to be alone for a while?”
He flashed for an instant on the last vacation he and Charlotte had taken together, before she first went off to Moscow. They flew to Barbados, to a rustic, secluded resort on the rock-strewn east coast of the island, where they drank rum and ate flying fish and made love. He remembered her greedily grinding her pelvis against his for more, just once more. He remembered the wind blowing the front door of their bungalow open so that the Canadian woman who lived next to them, who was sunning herself on the deck a few feet away, could suddenly see into their room, see them making love, and she turned away, hotly embarrassed, scowling; and Charlie and Charlotte, after an instant of mortification, both laughed until they thought they’d be sick.
“What’s our arrangement, anyway?” Stone said, pressing the button to summon the elevator. “When are we going to get back together? Not to put too fine a point on it.”
&nbs
p; “I don’t know,” she said.
The elevator arrived with a muted click, and they got in.
“Let me be even clearer.” He wanted to shout, / love you, but he said merely, rationally, “I want us to get back together. We both made stupid mistakes. But that’s the past. We can undo them.”
Charlotte didn’t know how to answer. She turned away from him, staring dumbly at the steel wall of the tiny, close elevator, and she felt a great bloom of feeling, like something physically rising in her, compressing her throat, bringing tears to her eyes. She was glad he couldn’t see her.
But he suddenly grabbed her shoulders and, with an unexpected forcefulness, kissed her. She suffered it at first, warily, as if receiving a vaccination shot.
70 ■ JOSEPH FINDER
Her arms stayed at her side; her eyes remained open, alert. “Don’t—” Her protestation was barely audible. Her lips, trembling, barely moved in response. They parted slightly, almost not at all, and then closed tighdy, for punctuation. The elevator door opened in front of Lehman’s archives.
The archive room was small, with a low ceiling and a highly polished, tiled floor. Its walls were lined with filing cabinets. The chamber went on for fifty feet or so, its rows of cabinets so close together that the place felt uncomfortably cramped.
At the back of the room, in gloomy darkness, was one row of locked cabinets, which contained the classified material. Stone remembered from years ago that you could not turn on the lights in that area without setting off an alarm somewhere upstairs in the main house. The fluorescent lights embedded in the ceiling gave off a bluish glare, their faint buzz the only sound in the chamber’s absolute silence.
“How do you know where to look?” Charlotte asked. She was nervous; they both were. They were poking around areas of the archives where they hadn’t any business, and at any moment someone might come in.
“I remember these drawers are organized by year, and month, and then by subject.”
It was possible, certainly, that Lehman might send a servant after them to make sure things were going all right. To summon them up to the part}’, perhaps, for a toast. Anything was possible. And if he discovered …
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