The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “You like it, Paula? Your job?”

  “Yeah, Stone, I like making about one-tenth what all my friends in private practice make,” she retorted. Her voice softened. “Yeah, I like it. I like it a lot.”

  “Too much work, probably.”

  “Sure. Shit, yeah. Mind-boggling caseload. Barely enough time to interview the witnesses, you know? There’s hundreds of ASAs—

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  assistant state’s attorneys—and all we’re really supposed to care about is numbers. Convictions. Biggest bang for the buck. You got a shithead you know is guilt>’ and your testimony is weak, forget it. Bargain it down.”

  Stone smiled, shaking his head as he listened. He appreciated what she was doing, trying to take his mind off his own trouble.

  “Plus, the place I work in. Like a concentration camp. Really. The big, scary Criminal Courts Building at Twenty-sixth and California, metal detectors, graffiti all over the place, weirdos, and—get this—guards with rifles pointing down at you from towers.”

  “Nice. But you’re doing what you want, more or less, right? Doing some good. I mean, you’re not defending corporations who dump toxic wastes.”

  Paula gave an exasperated sigh. “Yeah. Sometimes. You know me, I’m always fighting battles. I took on this one case last year, against the advice of just about everyone in the office. My boss told me to lay off. State of Illinois v. Patricio, a rape case. A local judge accused of raping a thirteen-year-old neighbor girl, and, goddamn it, he did it, Charlie. I know it. But the goddamned judge had dozens of bigwigs, all these prominent people, ready to testify in his behalf, including some big-deal judges. Major players, even a bishop. My boss said plea-bargain it down to a lesser included offense, to minor assault. Avoid a trial we couldn’t win. He didn’t think our testimony was strong enough; the jury wouldn’t buy it. So I really called in my markers on this one, you know? I said. Look, I’ve been here for you, I’ve done fucking everything you wanted. Now give me this.”

  “And?”

  “And I lost.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me, too.” She hoisted the Scotch bottle and refilled their glasses. “So, hey, how’s Charlotte? She seems to be doing pretty well for herself. You can’t put the news on without seeing her face.”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  “Are you two—I don’t know how to say this, but when I last talked to Charlotte, like a year or so ago—”

  “We’re separated, Paula. We’re still married. I think.”

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  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, although she didn’t sound it. “Who’d have thought she’d do so well? You know what I mean.” She shook her head slowly. “Jesus.”

  “It’s true, she’s really doing great.” There was something double-edged about her compliments—was there still some old rivalry between Paula and Charlotte?

  As the Scotch hit Stone’s empty stomach, he began to find her sexy, and he suspected that she felt the same thing about him. Maybe she had always been attracted to him.

  “You know,” she said, sipping her Scotch deeply, “when you two were in bed, in college, I used to hear everything.”

  She looked at him provocatively. Their faces were only inches apart. There wasn’t any question now what she was thinking. He moved his lips closer, and she did the same. Their lips met tentatively and then came closer still. After a moment, she pulled her mouth away and ran her left hand through his hair. “I always liked your curls,” she said softly.

  “I’m starting to lose them, I think,” he said hoarsely. “Listen, Paula.” His nostrils took in her perfume, something cinnamony and musky. She slipped off her suit jacket. Under her silk blouse he could see her breasts, which were large. Her nipples jutted out against the fabric. He wanted desperately to remove her clothes, to see her naked, and he was embarrassed by his desire.

  “Paula, this is wrong.”

  “Do you think Charlotte’s not seeing people?” Paula whispered, her breath hot against his ear. Her hand moved lightly over his erect penis. For a moment Stone almost lost his balance on the stool.

  Stone didn’t say anything, but, confused and guilty, he returned her kiss, his tongue piercing her mouth, exploring the softness.

  “Hey, listen, Charlie, I’m glad you showed up,” she whispered, and they both got up to move to the other room.

  When they got to the couch, she unbuckled his belt and slipped her right hand, still cold from holding the Scotch glass, into his Jockey shorts and on to his buttocks, then moved it around to the front. He held his breath, and he could hear her breathing heavily. He unbuttoned her blouse, and marveled at her erect nipples, large brown disks.

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  He bent to put his mouth on them, feeHng both very wrong and very right, pleasures he hadn’t felt in a long time.

  Washington

  The first secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., Alek-sandr Malarek, arrived at his office unusually early the next morning. He helped himself to a glass of tea from the seventeenth-century silver samovar he kept in a corner of his spacious office and sat down at his desk to review the overnight cable traffic from Moscow.

  As rezident, or the highest-ranking KGB official in the United States, he oversaw the entire range of KGB operations in the U.S., which were now, in the days of glasnost, directed mostly at the acquisition of high-technology. He was assisted by the four other rezi-dents, in New York and San Francisco.

  But his time in the last weeks had been spent entirely on something his KGB compatriots must never know about.

  Malarek did not consider himself a traitor. He was a faithful servant of the Soiet state: he loved his countrv’, and no longer did he question whether he was being disloyal. No, he believed firmly that he was helping to save his great country.

  But he was increasingly displeased with the Americans, his colleagues—the Sanctum. In their attempts to locate one particular man, the Americans were being far too lax.

  As rezident, Malarek was able to draw upon the KGB’s network of illegals and sleepers dispersed throughout the United States. The illegals, or agents liing under false identities, were controlled by the KGB’s Department Eight, Directorate S, which is responsible for planning assassinations and sabotage. Trained for years outside of Moscow, these men (and a few women) were given forged passports and documents and slipped into the U.S. Here they supported themselves quietly in unremarkable jobs and met as infrequently as possible with their controls in the rezidentura. They were expensive assets, to be used with extreme delicacy. Often they carried out assignments in the Middle East, under the cover of businessmen.

  And a number of them worked not for the KGB but for the Sekretariat. Which meant that, given the present urgency, these particular illegals had had to carry out “wet affairs”—murders.

  It is generally believed that the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union and the United States no longer engage in the taking of human life. In fact, such actions are avoided whenever possible, since they run the risk of exposure, perhaps causing grave political damage.

  But wet affairs do continue, on both the Soviet and the American sides, although rarely directed at each other. Whenever possible, the work is done by proxies—the Cuban Security Service (DGI) or American criminals. The Sekretariat, however—because its existence was so carefully concealed from both Washington and Moscow, as well as the KGB—could not entrust these jobs to anyone but their own.

  At half past eight, there was a knock on the door. It was Malarek’s assistant, the Line PR, in charge of political intelligence. He was Semyon L. Sergeyev, a small, balding man with a graying mustache. He was a few years younger than Malarek, although he looked older and perennially anxious. He, too, was Sekretariat.

  Sergeyev’s face was grave. “The situation with Armitage has been taken care of,” Sergeyev said as he entered and took a seat.

  “Cleanly?”

  Serge
yev explained, and Malarek smiled at the cleverness.

  Malarek took some pride in the elegance of the operation. A code clerk in the State Department’s security-classified-file section, compromised by several years of bribes discreetly channeled by Malarek’s office, had informed Sergeyev that Deputy Secretary Armitage had requisitioned a particular X-classified file. Malarek had immediately dispatched one of his assets, working as a courier at the State Department, to do the job. It had been done with the efficiency Malarek expected.

  Malarek was silent for a long time, pensively smoothing the lapels of his American-made Harris-tweed suit. “What precisely was in the files William Armitage requested?” he said at length.

  “A dossier on a retired agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation named Warren Pogue.”

  Malarek raised his eyebrows. He recognized the name; he was

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  quite familiar with a number of files connected with this matter. “Ah. Is it possible our man intends to contact him?”

  “Sanctum thinks it’s unlikely but possible. By later in the day, they’ll have a team of watchers.”

  “Watching isn’t enough. If this man is contacted by Stone in any way, he obviously has to be killed. Even if contact has already been made. But cleanly. There must be no connection with us.”

  Sergeyev had been nodding steadily. “Yes, sir. There is a way.”

  “And Stone,” Malarek began, distracted, but he did not have to continue. Sergeyev knew perfectly well that decades of scrupulous planning on the part of a few very powerful men in the capitals of the two superpowers must not be undone by a single desperate man, whose location remained unknown.

  38

  Moscow

  Stefan Kramer was about to set off their last bomb.

  Little remained of the explosives that his old cellmate had given him, enough perhaps for one TNT bomb and one plastique.

  He had the night off from work—as an ambulance driver, he usually worked nights—and now he and Yakov sat in his bedroom in the shambling communal apartment in which he lived, assembling the most basic sort of bomb: a few cartridges of dynamite attached to a blasting cap and a chemical pencil. In fact, he did all the work, and Yakov, sitting alongside him on the too-soft bed, kept him company.

  The room was musty; the single bed in the center of the frayed blue rug was covered with a spread that had once been cranberry-red and was now a quilt of bald patches. The walls were a depressing hospital tan.

  “Stefan,” Yakov said, “we’re making a mistake.”

  “Why?”

  “With every bomb, the chances of our being caught increases enormously. The militsiya must be looking for us now, everywhere.”

  “As long as I’m careful—”

  “No. We’ve tried. There’s no response from the authorities. Nothing. Not a word. Avram is still a prisoner.”

  “Be patient. Things take time,” Stefan told his father.

  Yakov shrugged. “You should move out of this apartment. Try to find someplace nicer. We have room, you know. You can move back in with us. …”

  “The Politburo moves slowly,” Stefan continued. “We must give them a decent interval to quarrel among themselves. We can send them another letter. But I think we’ve got to avoid making our motives publicly known. Then our chances of getting Avram released will shrink to almost nothing. Keep it private, and the government can still save face.”

  “I just don’t know,” his father said.

  “This is a package bomb,” Stefan said, holding the contraption up.

  But Yakov shook his head. “I have a ver>’ bad feeling about this,” he said.

  Late that afternoon, wearing a standard blue worker’s uniform that one of his apartment-mates had left lying around unused, Stefan walked to Sverdlov Square, around to the side of the enormous Bolshoi Theater with its portico of eight columns.

  There are many entrances at the side, and during the day none of them is guarded. He selected the one that seemed most likely to be the service entrance and went in. In his blue uniform and, over it, a quilted gray worker’s coat, he looked like a deliveryman of the sort whose deliveries would interest no one. He carried a cardboard box filled with a stack of papers that might have been programs but were actually nothing more than discarded invoices he’d taken from a nearby trash heap.

  “I’m looking for the dressing rooms,” he grumpily told a passerby in the corridor. “You know where they are?”

  The passerby pointed the way, and soon he found a hall that appeared to be where the performers’ quarters were. Actually, any Bolshoi office would have done, but why not aim as high as possible? The hall was deserted, and he began to open the doors, one by one. If he surprised anyone, or anyone surprised him, he would say he had a box of stuff that he was supposed to give to any stage manager, and he’d pretend that he was lost. But the second door he tried was unlocked, and no one was inside. He put down the box and quickly searched the room, and his heart leaped when he found exactly what he wanted, and so quickly, too: a work pass left on a dressing table by

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  one of the ballerinas. It was small and red and embossed with an official golden seal. Quickly he stuffed it into his pocket, picked up the box of forms, and re-entered the hallway. Two ballerinas in tutus and toe shoes passed by, giggling, but did not give him a glance. Part one of the operation was a success, which was not surprising. People in dressing rooms tend to be careless about their possessions.

  That evening, he returned to the Bolshoi.

  The bomb consisted of a chemical pencil inserted into a cartridge of dynamite. It would not be very powerful, but it would cause a tremendously large noise in the huge theater. It was small—seven-eights of an inch by eight inches—so it fit neatly into the large, beautiful bouquet of flowers wrapped in cellophane.

  Any sort of close inspection would reveal the apparatus underneath the flowers, but Stefan calculated that there would not be time for a close inspection. The Bolshoi pass would help with that: he would be seen as an employee of the company making a delivery to some important minister from, perhaps, the director of the theater.

  At night, the Bolshoi Theater is lit up majestically; its portico glows with an almost amber light. In front of the portico’s eight columns is a striking equestrian statue of Apollo at his chariot. Within is a splendid Baroque auditorium, sumptuously appointed in gilt and red plush, which seats an audience of almost three thousand.

  The common Russian usually cannot obtain tickets for a performance unless he is willing to wait in line for endless hours on the chance that the few available tickets will not be sold out. For the most part, the audience comprises the more privileged Russians—members of the Central Committee, KGB, Supreme Soviet, and Congress of People’s Deputies—foreign diplomats, and the like. Often the ornate boxes are occupied by people of Politburo rank and their families.

  The night was cold and rainy. Stefan waited in his car until the crowd in front of the theater disappeared and all the latecomers had gone in. Then he got out of the car, still wearing his blue uniform, and carried the bouquet to the front entrance of the theater.

  Now he handed the stolen red Bolshoi work pass to the fat woman

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  who sat in a chair by the door. Luckily, these passes have no pictures on them; with their calHgraphic script, they look more like tiny, shirt-pocket diplomas.

  In the car, a few minutes earlier, Stefan had squeezed the chemical pencil—it would not do to be seen tinkering with it in public— so he calculated he had ten minutes before the bouquet exploded. He had allowed a minute for admission to the theater and two minutes to find a place to put the bouquet: ideally, a reserved private box that was empt>’, its regular patrons off somewhere on business. There were always several vacant boxes, even if there were rarely any available seats. And then one minute to exit safely from the theater, and it would detonate.

  But the porci
ne-faced woman frowned. “Hold on a minute,” she said suspiciously. “What are these flowers for?”

  Stefan affected the sardonic tone of someone who has been at the bottom of the social hierarchy a long time. “For some big-ass minister or something. I don’t know. He wants to give this to the prima ballerina after the show.”

  Like any good babushka, she was hung up on propriety. “Why don’t you use the chyorny khod?” she demanded, using the old Russian term for “back entrance.”

  He glared at her. Already almost a minute had gone by. Hurry up, you fat bitch! he thought. Or well both go up in smoke!

  “Look, I’m in a hurr',” he told her. “The guy wants it yesterday, you understand?”

  The babushka wagged a pudgy finger at him and got slowly to her feet to consult with another woman, who was sitting at an adjacent entrance.

  His heart beat wildly now. He could imagine the acid inside the chemical pencil eating its way through the threadlike metal wire, a hairsbreadth away from detonating the explosion.

  “All right, come on,” the woman said reluctantly.

  Stefan walked as quickly as he could into the grand entrance to the theater and up two carpeted flights, around to the first box he came to, and found it—locked!

  Of course! He had neglected the most obvious possibility of all—that, if a box weren’t being used tonight, the management would keep it locked!—and now he held in his arms a bomb that would go off momentarily.

  Desperately, he ran down the hall and opened the door to the neighboring box. It was full of people, a well-dressed man and his heavily made-up wife and three well-scrubbed children. He closed it, hoped he hadn’t been seen, although he thought the youngest child had turned around and seen his face, and went on to the next box, and the next.

  The door to the fifth box he came to was open and—thank God— empty. Probably its occupants had informed the theater that they would be arriving quite late, and the management had kept it open pending their arrival. He got to his knees, shoved the bouquet inside, and closed it. He ran down the nearest staircase, his heart now pounding so hard he thought it would fail. Have to get out of here, he thought, but I mustn’t run. Running will alert anyone and everyone that I’m the culprit. Must get to the exit and walk past the old ladies. God help me, he prayed. He had not prayed for decades. God help me.