The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  A bomb had gone off that day in the Moscow subway. That by itself would have been an important story, since terrorism occurred rarely in Moscow. Coming so soon after the Borisov asassination, however, it was even more significant.

  But did it really indicate opposition to Corbachev within the Soviet leadership? The first one, the Borisov assassination, yes, possibly. But a bomb in the metro? It just didn’t fit. Soaking, she began slowly to relax, and her mind floated free, until it seized upon an idea.

  She got up, dried herself off, and wrapped herself in a thick purple terrycloth robe.

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  Twenty minutes later, she was unlocking the door to the ABC office, which was in the adjoining entryway in the same building.

  It was half past two in the morning, and the office was dark and vacant. Good: she needed to think in solitude. She switched on the lights, glanced at the ever-chattering teletype, and sat down at her desk. The fluorescent lights buzzed. She thought, chair tipped back, as she examined the ceiling. Momentarily, she wondered, as she usually did in this position, where they planted the electronic bugs. Everyone knew that correspondents’ offices and homes were bugged. She remembered hearing a story about one of the New York Times reporters, years ago, sitting in his office alone on New Year’s Eve and remarking aloud that he wondered what the KGB did on such a night. Then the guy’s phone had rung, and he had picked it up and heard only the sound of a champagne cork popping.

  She got up, walked over to the small reference library, and found a file she’d compiled for herself before leaving for Moscow.

  In a few minutes, she found what she was looking for.

  In her “terrorism/U.S.S.R.” file, she found a brief entry about the death of a man who had occupied the very same position as Sergei Borisov had, only decades earlier. He was named Mironov, and he’d perished in a suspicious airplane crash during the Khrushchev years. He’d been appointed by Khrushchev, and had been hated by certain important enemies of Khrushchev within the KGB.

  So maybe the editor was right. Maybe there was intrigue within the Kremlin.

  Then she found another item, about a wave of terrorist incidents in Moscow in 1977. On January 8, 1977, an explosion went off in the Moscow subway, killing seven people and wounding forty-four. The Soviet authorities charged and eventually executed three Armenian dissidents in the case, although there wasn’t any evidence linking them to the crime. A number of commentators that year believed that the whole thing was a setup, that the regime was just trying to discredit the dissident movement. Could that be what was going on now? Especially with the eruptions in virtually every republic of the Soviet Union?

  Who would know?

  264 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  There was someone who might know. She had a source—a valuable informant she protected carefully, because he worked for the KGB. A technician who secretly loathed his employers, he called himself only “Sergei.”

  It wouldn’t be easy, but she could contact him. It would take a few days to reach him, probably. But maybe he’d know, or else he’d have a useful theory, or he’d know where to look.

  In the meantime, though, she faced the dilemma of how to report what little she knew. How did you cover such a thing? Not one Soviet official was willing to be interviewed on camera about it; it was clear that they hadn’t decided what their public-relations strategy would be. There were rumors—there were always rumors—that the thing wouldn’t have happened had the new head of the KGB, Andrei Pav-lichenko, not been suffering from heart trouble. She made a mental note to try to find one of Pavlichenko’s doctors and check on his prognosis.

  Later that morning, she, her cameraman. Randy, and her producer, a young woman named Gail Howe, drove in the company Volvo to Charlotte’s favorite stand-up site, on an embankment of the Moscow River directly across from the Kremlin.

  The air was cold, and there were a few flurries of snow that whipped across her face and stuck to her coat. She rehearsed her lines a few times, marking the words she wanted to emphasize with a pencil, and then the camera was rolling.

  “For the first time, the official Soviet news agency, Tass, has acknowledged the acts of terrorism that have alarmed so much of Moscow,” she said. “By condemning the subway incident as ‘the work of a band of hooligans and lunatics,’ the Soviet authorities have sought to play down the importance of the bomb. This country fears most of all a breakdown of order, and with the summit fast approaching, these fears are higher than ever. One official here told me, ‘We in the Soviet Union are not free of violent crime, although I must say we are not plagued by the terrorism and the assassinations and the murders that beset the countries of the West.’ Only time will tell.” She paused for

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  dramatic effect, and added, “This is Charlotte Harper, ABC News, Moscow.”

  Right, she thought as the Volvo pulled away from the Moscow River. Another meaningless piece.

  Just give me time, she told herself defiantly.

  Early the next evening, she called the telephone number the babushka had given her. She’d tried it dozens of times over the last few days, with no luck, and she wondered if it were the right one.

  Then a woman’s voice answered.

  “Sonya Kunetsyaka, please?” Charlotte’s Russian was fluent, but she could not disguise her foreign accent. Yet she had to be careful not to scare the woman off.

  A long pause. ‘Tes, this is she.”

  “I have a message for you from a friend.”

  “A friend?” The woman was alarmed. “What friend?”

  “I can’t say over the phone.”

  “Who is this?”

  “The message is urgent,” Charlotte said. It was vital to be cryptic. “I just want to drop it by. But if you’re busy …”

  “I—I’m not— Who are you?”

  “Please,” Charlotte said. “It won’t take any time.”

  Another long pause, and then: “All right, I suppose.” Hesitantly, she gave Charlotte directions to her home.

  Sonya Kunetskaya’s apartment was all the way across town, as it turned out, at the far north, almost at the last metro stop. Charlotte was nervous about taking her car, which, with its foreign-correspondent license plates, was a magnet for KGB tails.

  The metro was jammed. She got off at the stop closest to the Exhibition of Economic Achievement, a large obelisk that swooped up to a point—the sharpest phallus in the world, Charlotte thought. Near it was Ostankino, where a vast czarist estate had once been located, now the site of the Gostelradio, the State Television and Radio headquarters. The area around the metro was sparsely settled.

  The woman lived a few blocks away, in an immense red brick

  266 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  building with endless numbered entrances, a dismal semimodern complex. The door to the entryway swung shut behind Charlotte with a clatter that made her jump, and the lobby, if that was the word for it, was shabby: concrete covered in peeling dark-blue paint, which smelled strongly of urine. A mangy gray cat scurried by, and Charlotte saw to her horror that it had no eyes, just empty sockets. She stifled a small scream, and checked Sonya’s apartment number.

  The door to number 26 was covered with cheap padded Leatherette, punctuated by metal studs. The woman who opened the door was diminutive, in her early sixties. Her brown hair was peppered with gray, cut in a modified pageboy with bangs. She wore a faded floral-print house dress and steel-rimmed glasses. “Come in, please,” she said. “I am Sonya Kunetskaya.” And she extended a bony hand.

  “Charlotte Harper.”

  She led the way down a dark corridor into a sitting room furnished in heavy wooden pieces and sofas covered with a faded pattern. A man who looked about Sonya’s age was sitting in one of the easy chairs. His white hair was combed straight back.

  He was the most horrific-looking man Charlotte had ever seen. It took all of her willpower to meet the man’s eye. His face was a mass of discolored scar tiss
ue.

  “This is my friend Yakov,” Sonya Kunetskaya said. Yakov sat in the chair with a self-possession that seemed to indicate he was no visitor.

  “You said you had an urgent message for me,” the woman prompted.

  “Well, perhaps I overstated,” Charlotte said. She remembered that Charlie had said Sonya Kunetskaya had met with Alfred Stone in Moscow, that she was connected in some way with Winthrop Lehman. What was her connection to Lehman? “I bring you regards from Winthrop Lehman.”

  For a long time, there was silence.

  “Who are you?” Sonya asked.

  “I’m a reporter for ABC News. I was told to look you up.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence. “Is this something you wanted to talk to me about in private?” Sonya asked. “Did Lehman tell you to call me?” There was an edge of desperation about the woman. She looked almost stricken, and her friend—or was it her husband?—looked uncomfortable. What was going on? Charlotte wondered.

  “Yes, that’s right.” I’m stabbing in the dark, Charlotte thought. Why is this woman so nervous? “Have you known him long?”

  “I met him in 1962,” the Russian woman said, seeming puzzled, but more at ease recounting a story she had obviously told many times. “I was an editor for Progress Publishers then.”

  “But how did you get to meet someone as famous as Winthrop Lehman?”

  “I was at a party at Boris Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino. I was Pasternak’s editor on a volume of poetry he was translating, and he invited me to a dinner party. Winthrop Lehman was also there.”

  “Nineteen sixty-two? Pasternak must have been an old man.”

  “Oh, yes. He must have been in his seventies.” She nodded vigorously.

  “And what was Lehman doing in Moscow?”

  Sonya hesitated momentarily, as if deciding precisely what to say. “I don’t know for certain. He visits occasionally.”

  But Charlotte was stuck on something now and wouldn’t give it up. “You were Pasternak’s editor in 1962, is that right?” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Sonya said. “Boris Pasternak. All of you Americans know Doctor Zhivago, but have you read his poems?”

  The question lingered in the air, awkwardly.

  “Yes, I have,” Charlotte replied, “and they’re beautiful. I’m quite impressed that you worked with Pasternak.”

  “He’s considered a great poet in our country,” Sonya said.

  “Pasternak wasn’t alive in 1962. I’m afraid you picked the wrong date. He died in 1960.”

  “So long ago,” Sonya said quietly. “I cannot remember, I’m sorry.”

  And Charlotte knew for certain that the woman was lying.

  37

  Chicago

  Stone arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in mid-afternoon, tense and exhausted.

  The file in Lehman’s archives had led him to Armitage. Pogue’s name was in that file, too.

  Once again he tried directory assistance, but Warren Pogue’s number was unlisted. He called the FBI in Washington, but Pogue had left instructions that he was not to be disturbed in retirement. They refused to give out his address or phone number.

  There had to be a solution.

  He stopped at an airport coffee shop, bought a cup of coffee and a plastic-tasting ham sandwich, which he chewed slowly, considering. He needed some ver>’ specialized help, and he knew precisely where he could get it: a name that had been at the back of his mind from the minute he realized he had to go to Chicago. A woman he’d known since college—a friend of Charlotte’s, actually—who was an attorney. More specifically, an assistant state’s attorney in Chicago, which meant she probably worked closely with the Chicago police. Maybe—probably—she could get an unlisted phone number.

  Paula Singer had been Charlotte’s roommate during freshman year, and she had kept in touch with Charlie and Charlotte over the years. Once, five or so years ago, she had stayed with them for a few weeks in their New York apartment, desperately unhappy over the breakup of a longtime romance, needing solace and companionship.

  If she’d be willing to help now, she’d be inxaluable. Maybe he could find temporary refuge, for a night.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 269

  Her name was not in his Rolodex or address book; she could not be known as a friend. He might be safe with her, at least overnight.

  Stone looked around the coffee shop, instinctively suspicious by now. He desperately needed Paula Singer’s assistance, but the one thing he must not do was to be followed to her.

  Tracking her down was, thank God, easy; she was listed in the phone directory. Her apartment was on Barry Street, on the North Side of Chicago, an area with an especially high density of youngish professionals. She was not home, of course, by the time Stone arrived at her house in the late afternoon. He would have to wait. He lingered in a coffee shop until the waitress made it clear he was no longer welcome.

  As it turned out, Paula did not arrive at her house until almost nine o’clock, wearing a finely tailored burgundy business suit, a black tweed overcoat, and a pair of Reebok running shoes. In college she had worn an unvarying outfit of denim jacket, corduroy skirt, and leggings; now she was all crisp, upwardly mobile professionalism.

  Balancing her briefcase and a stack of mail, Paula inserted her key in the front-door lock, oblivious of Stone, a few feet away in the shadows.

  “Paula,” Stone said quietly.

  She jumped, dropping her briefcase. “]esus, who is it?”

  “Charlie Stone.”

  She looked in Stone’s direction and finally caught sight of him. “Oh, my God. My God. It is you.” Her tone was not one of pleasure. She was terrified. “Please, don’t.”

  He realized with dismay what she meant. “I know what you’ve heard. Paula, it’s a lie. You know me. You have to help me.” He tried to keep the desperation out of his voice, but there it was. “Help me, Paula.”

  Reluctantly, she pushed the door open and motioned him in.

  “You eat yet?” “No,” Stone said.

  “Let me see what I’ve got in the fridge.” Paula’s initial terror had given way to a wary geniality; Stone, apparently, had persuaded her.

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  She’d offered to let him stay with her. “I don’t really do cooking, you know?”

  Her kitchen was a tiny, narrow galley with a window counter through which you could serve food; to eat, you sat on tall stools at a bar on the other side. It reminded Stone of the arrangement Mary Richards had had on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He stood beside her, trying not to get in her way as she stared dolefully into the refrigerator, finding nothing, and at last locating one frozen dinner, a Le Menu chicken-parmigiana entree, in the freezer. “Look, nothing fancy here. Hope you don’t mind if we split this,” she said, popping it into the microwave oven. Beneath her hearty poise, she seemed flustered. “You want booze or something? Sorry, but I don’t have any wine around. Scotch or nothing.”

  “Scotch is fine. Paula, I need you to get an unlisted phone number and an address for me, first thing in the morning. I know you’ve got the resources to do it.”

  She poured out the drinks. “Look,” she said falteringly. “I don’t know how to say this. I heard about what happened. About the stabbing and all that. The papers have been calling you a fugitive. Everyone talks about it.”

  Stone noticed that she was standing some distance away. “You don’t believe it, I hope.”

  “I don’t know what to think. If you tell me not to, I won’t. I mean, you want me to get a number, okay. But I want some facts. Like, what are you doing? And why here? I know you’re here to hide out. I figured that out.”

  “Only for a night or two,” Stone said. “Just until I reach this person who can help me. I don’t want to get you in any kind of trouble. Believe me. But you’re not known to anyone as a friend of mine—”

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You know that.�
�

  “I know. But who are you running from? What the hell really happened, Charlie?”

  The microwave beeped, and she removed the plastic tray. When she pulled back the plastic film, a cloud of steam rose from the chicken.

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  She cut the portion neatly in half, put one piece on a plate for him, and began to eat out of the tray. They alternated bites of chicken with sips of Scotch. She sat very close, and her legs touched his.

  He would not tell her about his connection to Parnassus, to the CIA; she believed he was employed by the State Department, in New York, doing analysis of the Soviet Union, and he didn’t correct her now.

  His story was sanitized, but even so it shocked her. Something in her was moved. She spoke quietly now, her voice almost trembling, rising and falling with anger. “Jesus,” she said. She had stopped eating, and she turned to face him. “If this is all true—this is a goddamned nightmare.”

  Stone looked down at his Scotch glass, nodding.

  “I’ll get the info for you. Stone. I got a guy. One of the cops I worked with, doing witness prep on a really high-profile DWI—a drunk-driving case, you know?—he’s a good guy. Got a crush on me, I think.”

  “Great.”

  “Married with eight kids. Not so great. So he’s got a friend who’s a billing clerk at the phone company, if you really want to know. That’s how even the cops do it, bypassing all the paperwork crap, the court-ordered shit.”

  Stone smiled, slowly allowing himself to unwind. Good old brassy Paula. Charlotte’s college roommate, Paula was smart, unyielding, caustic, often abrasive. In college, she’d seemed absolutely sexless; that had changed, but she was as plainspoken, as alarmingly frank, as ever. Twenty years ago, she’d been overweight, with pudgy cheeks, brown eyes, long brown hair. Now she was much more slender, her hair short and soft around her face: an attractive, magnetic woman.