The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 141

  For an instant, it looked as if she didn’t understand, until she said, “And we must not have blank spaces,” and smiled playfully. Fleetingly, the wizened face was transformed into that of a coquette of seventeen.

  “It won’t take much more time.”

  “I don’t have much time left,” she said equably, without a trace of self-pity. “Soon you will be able to stop sending me your enormous checks and draining treasury.”

  “It’s not much,” Stone agreed. The Agency was notoriously cheap with defectors.

  “In Russia, they would give me very big pension because of my work for Ilyich,” she scolded, frowning in mock-disgust. “Sometimes I wonder why I left.”

  Stone gave a nod of rueful sympathy, and then began: “If you can help—”

  “Listen,” she said, and leaned her head close to his, as if confiding a great secret. “I am old. More than sixty years ago, I come to this country. If the great American intelligence still did not get from me all what little I know, it can’t be important.” She lifted her head and cocked it to one side, then smiled. “Do not waste your time.”

  “Even if it concerns the Lenin Testament?”

  The old woman was suddenly alert, and it took her several seconds to regain her poise. Then she smiled slyly. “Are you here to talk over old history with me? There are books you can read. Everyone knows about the Lenin Testament.”

  “The one I mean is another Lenin Testament.”

  “Is there another?” she asked, feigning boredom and shrugging. She clutched an empty teacup on the table beside her as if preparing to sip, then set it back down on the saucer with a clatter.

  “I think you know.”

  “I think I do not,” she replied steadily.

  Stone smiled and decided to call an end to the fencing. “It came up in the course of a routine check through the files,” he said.

  He waited for her to respond, and when she didn’t, he asked casually, “They did poison him, didn’t they?”

  142 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  For a long time, she did not reply. When she finally said something, it was almost inaudible. The refrigerator in the kitchen next door switched on with a hum and a gurgle.

  “I think yes,” she said. Her brio had given way to solemnity.

  “What makes you think it?”

  “Because—because he wrote letter about this, and he gave it for me to type. He tells me to make two copies. One for Krupskaya, his wife. The other …” She broke off and looked down at the floor.

  “But the other copy—who was the other for?”

  She waved her hands hopelessly in small circles. “I don’t know.”

  “You know,” Stone said.

  There was a beat of silence, and he continued: “Your contract with us requires you to be cooperative. It’s entirely within my power to cut off all financial support. …”

  She replied hurriedly, her words spilling out now in a torrent: “Oh, it’s so long ago. It’s not important. A foreigner … Lenin was afraid his house was filled with … intrigue. Oh, I think he was right. Everyone, every gardener and cook and chauffeur, was OGPU. The secret police.”

  She was speaking faster now, and Stone didn’t understand fully what she meant to say. “Why?” he said. “Why did he give a copy to a foreigner?”

  “He was afraid of Stalin—of what he might do to Krupskaya. He wanted make sure one copy is brought out of country.”

  “Who was the foreigner?”

  She shook her head.

  “You know, don’t you?” Stone said tranquilly.

  Her hesitation was unbearable. “Tall, handsome American. Businessman. An American he sees several times before his death. Is not important.”

  “Winthrop Lehman.”

  A pause, and then: “He saw Lenin many times,” she said ru-minatively, squinting her eyes. “Lehman.”

  “Did he see Lenin at Gorky?”

  “Yes. Winthrop Lehman.”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 143

  “What did the letter say? It had to do with the poisoning, didn’t it?”

  “No, not quite,” she said. Now she spoke very slowly again. “He writes a—a draft—before he went to Gorky. Already ill. Says many bad things about Soviet state. Said it was a terrible mistake, it is becoming a police state. He said he … like Dr. Frankenstein, is creating a terrible, terrible monster.”

  Stone waited for more, but there was no more.

  “That’s a complete condemnation of the Soviet Union by its founder,” Stone said quietly. The words sounded obvious and foolish. “Lehman has it.”

  “Once he demand to return to Moscow. We tried stop him, but he insisting. ‘Hurry!’ he was shouting to the chauffeur. When he got to Moscow, he went to his office in the Kremlin.”

  “Did you go with him?”

  “No. I hear later. He look in his desk and find a secret drawer was opened. He is looking for a document. He is furious, is shouting at everyone. Never find it. But he … How do you say? He— re-create from memory.”

  “Dictated it to you,” Stone said. “That’s the one you made two copies of.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a copy?”

  “No, of course not. I think lost now.”

  “What about Krupskaya’s copy?”

  “They must take it from her.”

  “And Lehman’s copy?”

  “I don’t know.” The adjacent kitchen gave off the aroma of chicken soup, heavy with garlic.

  Stone inhaled the comfortable yet forlorn smell of the house and looked around the room. How did she know they had poisoned Lenin? he wondered.

  “Who did it?” he asked.

  “Please don’t dig it up,” she pleaded. “Please don’t dig up the past. Let people believe Ilyich died peacefully.”

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  “They did an autopsy, didn’t they? I seem to remember—”

  “Please.” She made a tiny gesture with her hands that signaled acquiescence. “Yes, they did. The day after he die, ten doctors examine the body. Open him up and look at organs and find nothing wrong. They open his skull.” She frowned, pursed her lips in distaste, and continued: “Brain is…” She grimaced, flashed a set of cheap dentures that were stained bright yellow. “Solid. Cal-calcified.” As she spoke the word, she gestured with her forefinger. “Metal instruments are ringing when they strike brain.”

  “Arteriosclerosis. They didn’t look for poison?”

  Stone had switched to Russian; the old woman would no doubt find it much more comfortable. Indeed, she looked up with relief.

  “No, but why would they?” she said.

  “They had no reason to believe he’d been poisoned.”

  “Do you know that Lenin’s personal doctor. Dr. Guetier, refused to sign the autopsy report? He refused! He knew Lenin had been poisoned. This is a matter of the historical record!”

  Stone stared.

  She nodded slowly, significantly. “1 think he knew.”

  “But who? Who poisoned him?”

  “One of the servants, I think. They were all working for the OGPU. Stalin wanted Lenin out of way so he could take over the country. Why are you asking me this again? Why do you ask again?”

  “Again?”

  “You asked me all about this in 1953.”

  “Nineteen fifh’-three?” A bus roared by on the interstate tuo blocks away. “Who asked you about this in 1953?” Stone asked.

  Anna Zinoyeva regarded him for a long moment with her gray-clouded eyes as if she didn’t believe him. Then she got up, slowly, supporting herself with one hand on the aluminum walker, the other on the arm of the couch. “I used to read the newspapers,” she said defiantly. “I was always very good with faces. Ilyich always complimented me for this.” She made her way to a walnut-veneered sideboard and opened the cabinet, removing a heavy green-leather-bound scrap-book, which she set on top of the sideboard’s highly burnished surface. “Come,”
she said.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 145

  Stone walked o'er to the sideboard. She was turning the pasteboard pages slowly, as if they were made of lead, until she found the page she wanted. “Here,” she said, her face almost touching the page.

  She indicated a page on which was mounted an unevenly cut, brownish clipping from a Russian-emigre newspaper published in New York, the Novoye Russkoye Slovo. Only the year—1965—was visible; the month and day appeared to have been lost to a sloppy job of scissoring.

  “I recognize the face, too,” Stone said, trying to conceal his shock. The photograph was of William Armitage, a career State Department employee who the article announced was being named an undersecretary. Armitage, Stone knew, was now the Deputy Secretary of State: a powerful and highly placed man in the administration.

  Bill Armitage, whom Saul Ansbach had spoken with, perhaps only hours before his death.

  “This is the man who talked to you?”

  “Yes, him. This Armitage.”

  Stone nodded. A renegade organization, Saul had believed. How high up did this thing reach? “What did he want to know from you? Why was he interested—in 1953—in something that happened in 1924?”

  The old woman scowled as if Stone had missed her point entirely, her expression asking how simple-minded he could be. “He was interested in what had just happened. The threats.”

  “Threats?”

  She raised her voice. “The threats Yes, the threats.” Her eyes shone with fear.

  “Who threatened you? Not our agents, I hope.”

  “The Russians.” Tears had come to her eyes. “You know all this already! Don’t …”

  “Why did they threaten you?” Stone asked softly.

  “They …” She shook her head again, a slow motion that shifted the course of the tears running down her cheeks. “They were looking for Lenin’s Testament, and they were sure I had it. They tore my house apart, told me they would kill me. I told them I didn’t have it… .”

  146 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “Who were they?”

  “Chekists. Beria’s men.” She sounded as if she were speaking to a simple child. The forerunners to the KGB. Of course. “I was so frightened. They used the word ikonoborchestvo.”

  “Iconoclasm,” Stone translated. The smashing of an icon.

  “Yes. They said, ‘You and your bloody Lenin will be the first to go. Your bloody icon.’ “

  Stone nodded. Yes, anti-Leninists: an old and virulent underground strain in the Soviet Union. “And this American, this Armi-tage—what did he want, exacdy?”

  “He wanted to know what they told me. I told him that they just wanted some document from me that I didn’t have. “

  “You didn’t tell him everything,” Stone said without accusation, understanding.

  “For a long time, he didn’t believe me. Then he told me I must never say anything to anybody about what happened, about these Chekists. That very bad things might happen to me if I said anything. This is why I’m surprised you are asking me again about this.”

  “He wanted to protect a secret,” said Stone.

  “He wanted silence,” she agreed. “He wanted me not to say a word about these Russians. You’re nodding. You must understand.”

  “But the Russians could have gotten this document from Win-throp Lehman, couldn’t they?”

  The old woman’s mouth trembled open slightly as her eyes un-seeingly searched Stone’s face. “No,” she said. “I heard …”

  “What?”

  “I was told … they didn’t need to, because Stalin had a … a control over him. Or maybe they couldn’t, because they had some kind of—arrangement with him. I don’t know.” Her attention seemed to be fading. The woman was tired; her face had grown ashen.

  ‘^ Arrangement?”

  “Stalin—Stalin was so evil. He found a way to control this man, this Lehman.”

  Cowering against the Frigidaire, my mother, her tears turning her eye makeup into blue streams, is shouting: “/ didn’t make you go to prison! Be angry at him, don’t be angry at me!”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 147

  Yes.

  IfStalin was controlling Lehman … , Stone thought, astonished. Could it be? The adviser to Roosevelt and Truman, the man who had sent Alfred Stone to prison—was this the secret Lehman went to such lengths to conceal? Was it conceivable that Lehman had been in the employ of the Soviet government? “What kind of control?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t knowl I have no great secrets. I was only a secretary. Surely you must understand far more than me.”

  “Yes,” Stone admitted, tasting the fear again.

  There was a shout from some children playing down the block, then the sudden acceleration of a car that badly needed a new muffler, and then quiet, in which Stone could hear his heart thudding.

  He thought: I don’t think these Americans wanted anyone to know that they—whoever they are or were—were trying to overthrow the Soviet government.

  He looked around at the gloomy little room, then at the old woman, whose deep-set eyes—eyes that had once gazed upon a man of history—had clouded with age and now were heavy with weariness. He thought: And now they’re trying once again. The car with the bad muffler started up another time, raced by, and then there was nothing but silence.

  18

  Maryland

  Very early in the morning, the limousines and sedans arrived at the secluded Maryland estate one after another, at precise five-minute intervals. At twenty minutes before seven, the last car, a gray Cadillac limousine, proceeded down the private, tree-lined roadway, through the scrolled iron gates that opened automatically.

  It stopped a few hundred feet short of the main house, a sprawling Victorian mansion, and then maneuvered slowly into the wooden structure that appeared, from the outside, to be a large shed. When the limousine was inside and the doors had closed behind it, the steel platform that was the floor immediately hummed to life, dropping slowly and evenly. Within a minute, the floor had lowered seventy-five feet, into the pitch-dark chasm beneath the ground. Then the limousine pulled straight ahead to the oblong alcove whose walls were constructed of concrete finished in some sort of clear resin, joining the four other cars parked there, pulling up neatly alongside a black Saab turbo.

  Fletcher Lansing, the last to arrive, got slowly out of the car with a nimbleness that belied his age. He was one of the great figures of the foreign-policy establishment, a close adviser to John Kennedy, one of what a journalist had once called “the best and the brightest.” Lansing, his creased mouth firmly set beneath his prominent, thin nose, passed through an arch into the conference room, where the others were already seated, sipping coffee.

  “Good morning, sir.” This came from the Director of Central Intelligence, Ted Templeton. Like William Casey before him, Tem-

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 149

  pleton was a veteran of the OSS, but, unlike Casey, he was career CIA, a large, rangy man with a thick head of gray hair, large ears, pouches under his eyes. He owed his job, the directorship, to Lansing, who had lobbied for him over more than one supper with the President in the White House residential quarters.

  But Lansing, whose face was grim, gave only a curt nod to Tem-pleton, and then to the others at the round black-marble-topped table. There was Ronald Sanders, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence: forty-six, a former Notre Dame football quarterback, and a career CIA man as well. To his right was Evan Wainwright Reynolds, considered the chief architect of the National Security Agency and, though long retired, one of its founders, a vigorous, slender man in his early seventies who rarely spoke.

  And to his left, finally, was the youngest man present, Roger Bayliss of the National Security Council. Bayliss, in his late thirties, wore a charcoal-gray Italian sharkskin suit. His career—his very position in the White House—had been maneuvered by the other men in this room. He owed everything to them. As the youngest, he was the secretary, and he
took notes on a yellow legal pad, writing with a Montblanc ballpoint pen. Bayliss would have much preferred to use his Compaq laptop, but no outside electronic equipment was permitted in this ultrasecret enclave.

  Bayliss watched pensively. He jiggled his right knee up and down, a nervous tic that afflicted him at times of great tension. He inspected a chipped thumbnail. It was time for one of his several extravagances of vanity, a manicure. He thought fleetingly of the woman with whom he’d spent last night, a blonde named Caryn. She was a congressional staffer, of course, and she’d been a firebrand in bed, and Bayliss was still a bit sore. She was naturally impressed that he was on the National Security Council—most women were—but if she had any idea of what was about to happen in Moscow, and of Bayliss’s role in it all …

  He glanced around at the room as Fletcher Lansing examined his notes. Everyone waited apprehensively for him to begin.

  What bad news could there possibly be?

  The extreme security precautions—this subterranean, electronically secure conference room beneath a private estate whose existence

  150 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  was unknown even to the most senior members of the American intelHgence community’—were deemed by the five men a necessity’. They were known (the term had been coined by Fletcher Lansing, whose affection for Latinisms was legendary) as the Sanctum Sanctorum, an ultrasecret group of past and present intelligence officials that met infrequently—perhaps once in two or three years—to make decisions that, they were convinced, would soon alter the world’s fate.

  Bayliss’s knee kept jiggling, up and down, up and down, with the rapidit)’ of a hummingbird’s wings. He studied Fletcher Lansing, the old spymaster who had created the Sanctum, with surreptitious in-tensit}’.

  What was wrong?

  Bayliss, an only child who had grown up watching his parents closely, unnervingly, prided himself on his unusual perceptiveness. He had come to realize that there was often some kind of benign pathology in those who were drawn to intelligence work. Part of the lure, of course, was nothing more than insider-itis, that old Washington disease that makes a person ravenous with a desire to be inside the nucleus of power. Once you get to the office early in the morning, and you’re the first one to pore over the overnight cable traffic, you’re hooked, you’re infected.