The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  Then he returned to the small round table, ordered another espresso, and resumed taking notes.

  Soon he had an explanation that made some sense.

  Winthrop Lehman had had a daughter during his years in Moscow—Sonya—who had taken her mother’s name so that she would never be connected with her famous American father.

  So far, so good.

  Sonya had been a hostage, a tool who had been used against Lehman to force his cooperation. The Soviets had once had a powerful hold on one of the most influential men in America, an aide to several presidents.

  Yet this same man had been given a document by Lenin, something powerful and explosive that, if released, could have caused the Soviet state tremendous damage.

  A document that, for some reason, might also reveal the identity of the mole M-3.

  So Lehman had something of a counter-hold on them.

  And his daughter was dead.

  For some reason, still unclear, Lehman had once cooperated with a number of American officials, and at least two Soviet ones, to overthrow the Soviet government and install Beria. It made sense that Lehman had once gone to great lengths to try to free his daughter. Yet … Beria?

  But that was the past.

  The pieces of the puzzle—of the present puzzle—were at last coming together, and the questions that remained loomed larger than ever.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 357

  Haskell, Michigan

  Chief Randall Jergensen of the Haskell, Michigan, police was just about fed up. Most of the night, he’d been out on the lake with his deputy, Willy Kuntz, and a handful of volunteers, dredging the Haskell shore of one of the goddamn hugest lakes in the entire U.S. of A.

  As if dredging wasn’t bad enough, he had to endure the nonstop yapping from the feds who insisted on coming along, somehow thinking he could maybe do a better job if they were around to ask moron questions and flash their three-piece suits and generally act important. When all Jergensen wanted to do was say, All right, you win, the goddamn accident was a goddamn hoax, and be done with it. Tell the goddamn feds to write up their little reports and go back to their motels, and he could go home and get some sleep. “You just lay off,” he wanted to tell them, “and let me do my job.”

  By half past four in the morning, he finally let them have it.

  “All right, you sumbitch,” he said, “the guy set it up. He’s gone.” Jergensen turned and stormed off for his cruiser.

  On the way home, he stopped by the dark station house and put a quarter in the vending machine around back. A can of Grapettes grape soda, icy cold, came tumbling down to the chute. He popped it open, took a long slug, and walked back to the car wearily.

  That sly bastard, he thought as he drove home, smiling to himself. Whatever the hell the guy did, you gotta admire the smarts.

  He pulled into his driveway, and remembered that his ex-wife, Wendy, wasn’t there, and he smiled again.

  Paris

  Lehman, Stone knew, had visited Paris countless times in his long life, on business and on pleasure. Two of those times. Stone realized, it had been to visit the daughter no one knew he had.

  Suddenly an idea occurred to him. Stone went through the Paris Yellow Pages looking for the names of photo archives, companies that

  358 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  would have extensive photographic files—of historic personages and the not so historic, of eents and moments captured on film by news photographers through the years. New York had quite a few of them, on which magazines, newspapers, and publishers relied heavily.

  He came up with a list of four of the largest photo archives in Paris and visited them one by one. He was looking for photographs of Winthrop Lehman in Paris taken during two specific years.

  Once Beria allowed her to visit Paris… .

  Sonya Kunetskaya.

  When was that?

  In 1953 …

  Was it possible that Lehman’s daughter had been photographed? She had been buried in Paris, her name prominently displayed, engraved in gold. If Lehman, or Beria, had wanted to keep her existence secret, then why bury her in Paris’s most prominent cemetery?

  The woman must have been seen in Paris.

  Yet, after several frustrating hours. Stone had come up with nothing.

  Finally, he walked into the fourth archive on his list, a small storefront on rue de Seine with the name H. ROGER viollet painted on the window.

  The walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with green binders, no doubt filled with photographs.

  “I’m looking for a photograph of someone,” Stone told the young female clerk in French.

  “Historical, diplomatic, scientific … ?”

  “Well, none of those, really. She’s the daughter of an American statesman. Her name is Sonya Kunetskaya.”

  “Let me check.”

  The woman consulted a large card file. A few minutes later, she looked up. “Born 1929, died 1955?” she asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “One moment.”

  She got on a small stepladder against the wall and located a large green album marked histoire etats-unis, k-l. She placed it before Stone, and opened it to a page. The photographs were affixed neatly

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 359

  and captioned with typewriting. Touching one page with her index finger, she said, “I believe it’s that one.”

  It was Sonya.

  The picture had been taken by a well-known French society photographer at a party at the Soviet Embassy in Paris. She stood talking to someone who was not Winthrop Lehman, while a few feet away several dour-looking men watched her.

  “Oh,” the woman said abruptly. “I’m afraid that’s not the right one.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, I don’t think so. This picture is dated 1956.” She laughed nervously. “That would be a year after her death. This can’t be the same person.”

  Nineteen fifty-s/x? Her gravestone had said April 12, 1955.

  It made no sense.

  Unless the very public gravestone, the date chiseled in the marble, was false. If it was a cover-up.

  “Ah, here’s another,” the woman said, turning the page with a moistened finger.

  Stone, his mind reeling, for a moment could not hear the woman.

  “Monsieur?”

  Could Sonya Kunetskaya still be alive?

  “Monsieur?”

  Stone looked up slowly, unable to think. “Yes?” he said thickly.

  “Monsieur, if you like, here is another one. It is dated Paris, December 16, 1953. This one is three years earlier.”

  Stone examined the second photograph, and his astonishment grew still further. He could scarcely believe his eyes.

  It was a picture shot on a street outside the Soviet Embassy. Sonya was, as before, surrounded by menacing-looking guards, but this time her father stood nearby. It was unmistakably Winthrop Lehman.

  And standing next to Lehman, only a few months out of prison, was the gaunt figure of the young Alfred Stone.

  52

  Moscow

  Yakov Kramer sat in his cubicle at Progress Publishers, having done with his editing for the day. He was tired and saddened.

  Stefan had now set off three bombs in the heart of Moscow, and still Avram was not free. There was no reply.

  They had made a terrible mistake.

  He had sent two letters to the Kremlin, both of which made it very clear that the destruction would continue, and that they would soon be forced to go public with their demands. He knew the Politburo could not want such a public humiliation, with the Moscow summit so near.

  And his beloved son Avram remained in a mental hospital, his brain deteriorating by the day.

  The office was almost deserted, and Yakov knew that Sonya was still at work in her cubicle across the large room. Any minute, she would come up to him, wearing her coat and a weary expression, and announce it was time for them to go. He straightened his desk, and got up to find Sonya.


  She was already coming toward him. He took an irrational satisfaction in the innate sense of timing they shared. Somehow she always knew when he’d be ready to leave.

  They did not like to kiss each other in the office, because they weren’t married, and Russians have a Victorian prudishness about public displays of affection; better not to offend people. But when they left, he grabbed her hand and felt a warming surge of affection for Sonya. He loved her, and he loved her increasingly, each day.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 361

  They had met here, at Progress, years ago. Yakov had recently been released from the gulag; Sonya was a fact-checker and researcher, a beautiful woman who kept to herself, shunned friends, a loner. Yakov, who was valued for his skills but ostracized because of his face—because oi fear, really, the horror most people have of physical deformity, he knew that—used to fantasize about this small, dark-haired woman whose eyes were flecked with green. She was a Woman with a Past, he was sure. Why else would someone so beautiful act like a nun? In passing her desk one morning, Yakov said something to her, something reasonably clever, and she looked him directly in the eyes, and smiled, and his heart caught, and he was stuck.

  At lunch that day, she appeared at his desk with a sandwich, cheese on thickly cut black sourdough bread, and asked him to share it with her—she wasn’t hungry. The gesture of a child who wanted a friend. Did she feel sorry for him? he wondered. They talked, she laughed at his jokes, they argued about literature, and that night, when he walked her to her apartment building, where she lived with her widowed mother, he kissed her in the middle of a torrential rain, and she didn’t flinch! What was wrong with her? he wanted to know. As they got to know each other better, she would talk, once in a while and always sketchily, about the traumas in her past, broken love affairs, that sort of thing. He wanted to know everything about this woman, and he would interrogate her— Who were these men, these bastards, who could possibly have left you? —but she would smile wanly, and say nothing. It seemed to Yakov, in the years that they had lived together—as lovers, not as man and wife—that both of them were, in a way, wounded, and that this was the bond between them.

  Now Yakov wanted to tell her everything about what he and Stefan were doing to obtain Avram’s freedom, but that was out of the question.

  Maybe she’d approve of what we’re doing, I don’t know, he thought.

  No. The most selfish thing he could do would be to tell her. She must never be hurt by what he was doing, he’d resolved. She must never know.

  He thought about that American reporter who had come to see her, and wondered what the secrets were that Sonya kept from him.

  362 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Sure, they had talked about her past, but the way she told it everything seemed so normal that Yakov could not help wondering whether she really might be concealing something. Was that any way to think about the one you loved?

  After work, they had to do shopping, wait in line for bread and then for milk and then for chicken (the chickens in the store looked pale and scrawny) and then for vegetables. The whole fucking ritual, Kramer knew, was intentional. Keep the peasants so busy working and then scuttling around to feed their faces that by the end of the day they’ll be so tired they won’t even think of revolting.

  Then there was the long subway ride, and at last they were traversing the muddy courtyard, into the urine-stained building lobby, and home at last.

  Yakov and Sonya dropped the groceries on the kitchen table and looked at each other, mouths agape with frustration and exhaustion.

  “Yakov, I don’t want to cook right now,” Sonya said.

  “Don’t. I’ll cook. You sit down.”

  “No, don’t you cook, either.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, and then he saw what she was hinting at. “Sonya, I may be too tired.”

  “No,” she said, coming up to him slowly and kissing him. She kissed both sides of his face, the good side and the bad, and then his lips.

  Although her looks had faded somewhat with age, there remained something irresistible about her, something poignant, even tragic, in her dark eyes. He found her amazingly erotic. He wasn’t a young man; he could no longer make love with the old frequency, but he invariably found her arousing. There was something about her that made him feel tremendously virile. They didn’t rut like teenagers; they made love less urgently, more tenderly.

  They got up slowly, went into the bedroom, and removed their clothes. Sonya took hers off neatly and folded them and put them on her night table, beside the photograph of her and her father that she loved so much, and they made love.

  When they were done, and they lay in a loose embrace, she began stroking his neck and one of his shoulders.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 363

  “It’s always there, isn’t it?” she asked softly.

  “Hmm?” he grunted.

  “The anger. Even if they let Avram go free, you’ll carry it with you.”

  There was no use in fighting her, so he didn’t reply.

  “I want you to be careful.”

  “What are you talking about, Sonushka?”

  “Sometimes I think they watch me carefully, and so they might see.”

  “You’re not making sense.” He sat up and took hold of her shoulders.

  “Please, Yakov. You don’t have to tell me any more than I know. But I want you to be careful.”

  “Sonya …”

  “I found an envelope on the floor. An empty envelope, addressed to the Kremlin.”

  He stared into her eyes, terrified. How had she found it? He had been so careful.

  “Sonya, I want to explain …”

  “No, Yakov. Don’t explain. Please. I don’t know if you’re doing a good thing or a bad thing, but I understand why you’re doing it. And I’m scared.” Her voice cracked, and she spoke now through tears. “I don’t want anything to happen to you. Someday I’ll tell you something about my life before I met you, but right now I can’t. I’ve made a promise. I just want you to be very, very careful. For both of us.”

  As she cried, tears sprang to his eyes, too. He could not stand to see her unhappy; it tore him up. He wanted to ask her. How can you love me so much? I’m so ugly, inside and out, I’m such a monster, how can you love me? But instead he said nothing and looked at her sadly through his tears, the way you look at something that might be taken away from you at any moment.

  364 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Washington

  Early in the morning, wracked with tension, Roger Bayliss was attempting to relax in the Jacuzzi in the Executive Office Building, next to the White House, when the phone buzzed. He reached up to answer it.

  It was the Director of Central Intelligence.

  “Call me from a secure line,” Templeton said.

  Bayliss got up, wrapped a towel around himself, and walked into the adjoining restroom, where the urinals were equipped with heat-activated flushing devices, installed during Nixon’s time. The heat sensors rarely worked.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was dressed and back in his office, where he returned the director’s call.

  “Yes, Ted,” Bayliss replied. “We’ve got a pretty good sense of the general direction he’s taking. I’d say this report about the murder of the Sekretariat guy in Paris is pretty definitive. More or less places it.”

  He listened to Templeton’s reply, and then said: “Yes. Let’s keep up the passport-customs search plus the normal police fugitive search in the half-dozen or so target cities. But I’d say we should step up Paris. “

  He listened again, and said, “The odds are pretty high he’ll turn up before long. We’ll have him. The stakes are too high to let him live.”

  53

  Moscow

  Sergei F. Abramov of the Special Investigations Department of the KGB had never actually met the chairman. He was, he knew, just about to do so, and the thought of it made him nervous. Forty minutes earlier, his secretary, Dusya, had run up to h
im, her eyes wide, to tell him that the chairman of the KGB himself had actually, personally, sent for Abramov. What did he make of that? A car was sent round to pick Abramov up and take him to Pavlichenko’s office at the Lubyanka.

  Standing in the chairman’s anteroom now, watching his feet and kneading his hands and listening absently to the secretaries answering the telephones, Abramov did not know what to make of it at all.

  Was it possible the chairman himself had read his report, about how the bombs were made from American plastique? No, it hardly seemed likely, and, besides, why would the chairman himself want to talk to a mere technician?

  The horrible thought crossed his mind fleetingly that somehow someone had discovered that he had leaked highly classified information to an American reporter, and that the chairman of the KGB was calling him in for interrogation … but why would the chairman himself be involved? Wouldn’t internal security handle it, swiftly and without a ruckus?

  Please, he thought. Let it not be that.

  But there was no time to think further, because suddenly he looked up and saw Andrei Pavlichenko standing in front of him. He was surprised at how dignified the chairman seemed. Pavlichenko was a man of sixty, but he had a head of thick brown hair that was probably colored.

  “Tovarishch Abramov,” Pavlichenko said, shaking hands.

  “Sir. It’s an honor.”

  “Please.” The chairman led the way toward a white-painted double door. He walked with the springy step of a much younger man.

  Abramov found himself babbling from nervousness. “I’m surprised to find there’s a door here,” he said as the two men entered Pavlichenko’s office.

  Pavlichenko laughed. “You know, before I set foot in this office, in the days of Beria, I had heard the same stories. Everyone said Beria’s office had no doors. And then one day I was summoned to Beria’s office, much as you’ve been today.”