One Brother Shy

by Terry Fallis

  Rather than reliving the avalanche of information through which we sifted, let me package it up in a more orderly fashion.

  In several articles we dug up, and in three book excerpts we found, Alexei Bugayev was identified as a KGB operative working in North America in the 1980s and early ’90s, usually attached to the Soviet Embassy. From 1981 to 1987, he worked in the embassy in Washington, D.C., holding a variety of titles, including trade attaché and cultural exchange director.

  Then the big moment arrived in the form of an article in the Ottawa Citizen from October 12, 1989. In the story was a quotation about Canada–Soviet trade relations from Alexei Bugayev from an interview he gave at a meeting of the Conference Board of Canada held at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa. He was referred to as an economic advisor at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. And it all made sense. I could see how it all happened. It fit together perfectly.

  “We’ve got him,” I said. “This cinches it.”

  I showed Matt the article.

  “Well, it certainly looks as if we’re on to something,” Matt said. “But I really would like this to be airtight before we claim victory.”

  Oh, it’s airtight right now.

  “I think we’re pretty close to airtight right now. You see, there’s something you don’t know yet,” I said. “I know how Alexei Bugayev met our mother.”

  Matt stopped, closed the lid of his laptop, and gave me his full attention.

  “Pray, enlighten me.”

  “We know from the Citizen piece that he was posted to the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa and worked there at least in 1989. What you don’t know is that the Soviet Embassy, now known as the Russian Embassy, is located on Charlotte Street in Ottawa and that it’s just around the corner from the Cordon Bleu school and the restaurant where Mom worked for most of her adult life.”

  “Go on,” he said, nodding. “Don’t stop now.”

  “If Alexei Bugayev were on crutches, or in a wheelchair, or decided to drag himself by his lips, it still wouldn’t have taken him more than a few minutes to reach the restaurant where our mother worked every weekday. It’s that close to the embassy,” I said. “Matt, Mom often mentioned the Russian diplomats who would come in for lunch. She called them ‘regulars.’ ”

  “Okay, then you’re right. We’ve got him. The circumstantial evidence is bulletproof,” Matt said. “So, we’ve both lost the only parents we ever knew, and we’ve just found the one parent we never knew.”

  “Well, we now know who he is,” I said. “But where is he?”

  “Hang on,” Matt said.

  He opened the lid of his laptop and I watched as he filtered the Google search results, not by relevance, but by time, calling up just the results from the last year. Brilliant. The final piece fell into place.

  A story in the Guardian from two months ago quoted Alexei Bugayev on the state of the Russian economy.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Matt whispered. “He’s been hiding in plain sight.”

  Alexei Bugayev was identified in the article as the senior economist at the Russian Embassy…in London.

  I stayed calm and stock-still – a deer caught in headlights that kept on shining.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Who is Gabriel?”

  I would have flinched had I not just been waking up, with the dull, flat morning light slipping into the room around the window blinds. It took a moment to remember where I was – the sign, for me, of a deep sleep. Maybe I hadn’t heard what I thought I’d heard.

  “Alex? You awake?” Matt asked, standing at the bathroom door.

  Well, I wasn’t, but I am, now.

  “Yeah,” I croaked. “Are we late?”

  “Not quite. I was just awake for some reason.”

  And you thought I should be, too.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “About 6:10.”

  Did you really just say 6:10?

  “Did you really just say 6:10?”

  “I did. Sorry if I woke you. I thought you were already conscious, given that you were talking a while ago,” Matt said.

  Talking?

  “Well, I must have been channelling a voice from one of my insomniac past lives because I was definitely not awake.”

  “Really? So sorry then,” he said. “So who exactly is Gabriel?”

  WTF?

  “Why would you ask me that?”

  “You said his name out loud about four times in kind of an agitated state about twenty minutes ago,” Matt replied.

  Shit. Don’t tell me that. Are you serious?

  I’d been starting to feel better about Gabriel. I hadn’t dreamt about it for a while. Or so I’d thought. But maybe I was still dreaming but just not remembering. Shit.

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “I guess I must have been dreaming, but I don’t remember anything about it. And I said ‘Gabriel’? Weird.”

  “You distinctly said ‘Gabriel,’ ” Matt confirmed. “You were mumbling so I couldn’t make out much else. So again, Alex, who is Gabriel?”

  Shit. Not “who” but “what.”

  I looked at the ceiling and said nothing for a time. Matt seemed to know not to fill the space. He waited.

  “The question is not ‘Who is Gabriel?’ but ‘What is Gabriel?’ ” I said.

  Matt waited. But I was done, at least for the moment. He waited some more, but it was still not time.

  “Right then. What is Gabriel?”

  Not now. Not yet.

  I turned away from him, onto my side, and said nothing.

  “Okay,” Matt said. “When you’re ready.”

  Thanks, bro.

  “Thanks.”

  “You know, for identical twins who have the same DNA, whose mannerisms are astonishingly similar for two people who were separated nearly twenty-five years ago, who seem to think the same way about things, who have gravitated towards the same interests, we certainly have our differences,” Matt said.

  Do we have to go over this tired ground again? Not now. Not yet.

  “Matt, we’ve had this conversation.”

  “Yes, I know, but it was never resolved.”

  Not now. Not yet.

  “I think it was sort of resolved,” I replied. “Remember when I said not all differences are gene-related? Well, shit happens, and well, shit happened.”

  “Yes, but that’s exactly what I mean. The ‘shit,’ as you so delicately put it, is the part we never resolved.”

  Not now. Not yet.

  I lay there in silence for a minute or two more, and he let me.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Right then,” he said, again. “When you’re ready.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You fell asleep last night and I didn’t want to wake you up,” Matt said. “But I changed our Lufthansa flights to this morning. We should get going, soon.”

  —

  I was sitting in the departure lounge at Domodedovo Airport waiting to board our flight, while Matt was standing up, talking to his office on his cellphone. They had a big important meeting with a venture capitalist coming up and it was hard to get ready when Matthew was in Moscow. It was a good thing we were heading back to London.

  I emailed Wendy Weaver to report on our progress and that I’d obviously been dreaming of Gabriel again, though I had no memory of it this time. It was my second email to her since leaving Ottawa. I let her know that I was essentially “inside-out” with Matt, which felt good, but that I hadn’t yet introduced him to Gabriel. She’d strongly suggested in her response to my first email that I bring Matthew into the tent as soon as I felt I could. That was my plan, too. But not now. Not yet.

  I had actually mustered the courage to FaceTime Abby. I left Matt to his phone call and found a relatively isolated corner of the lounge. I stuck in my earbuds, hit her number in the FaceTime sidebar on my iPad, but it just rang and rang. She didn’t pick up. That’s when I realized if it was 11:30 a.m. Moscow time, it was 3:30 a.m. in Ottawa. Oops. Sorry, Ab
by. So instead, I typed out a hasty update email about our failed trip to Yaroslavl and Dimitri’s subsequent revelation about Alexei Bugayev. That was the first time it hit me. I finished my Abby email and hit Send. Then I returned to my seat next to Matt, who was finally off his call to the office. They were about to call our flight.

  “Matthew, I think I may have been named after Alexei Bugayev,” I said. “My birth certificate simply says Alex, not Alexander.”

  “Hmmm,” he replied.

  “They couldn’t give me the formal name, Alexei, as that would be too strong a link to a KGB agent operating in Canada.”

  “And they couldn’t bring themselves to go with Alexander, so they just shortened it to ‘Alex,’ ” Matt said.

  “Wild,” I said. “I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before now.”

  “So just to summarize what we now know, for the forty-seventh time since last night,” Matt began. “Alexei Bugayev, a left-handed member of the 1972 Soviet National Hockey Team, who made the trip to Canada for the big series, joined the KGB in the midst of his less-than-distinguished hockey career, largely due to his gift for languages. When he finished playing hockey, he assumed official roles in Soviet embassies in Washington and Ottawa as a cover for doing whatever KGB agents do in foreign lands. Eventually he worked at the embassy in Ottawa in late 1989 – and we have the documentary evidence to prove that – and so he was probably still in Ottawa in early 1990 for the big moment of our conception. Finally, you could easily throw a cricket ball from his office to the very restaurant where our mother worked during the same period.”

  “Right. Adding to that, we’ve already eliminated every other possible left-handed Soviet hockey playing candidate,” I replied. “Then, when we were born at the end of 1990, I was given the name Alex…just Alex.”

  “That is one big community of coincidences all lined up next to each other.”

  “Except they aren’t coincidences, are they?” I asked.

  “No, they certainly are not,” concluded Matt.

  I lifted my iPad and pulled up the 1972 hockey card photo of Alexei Bugayev. We just looked at it for a moment – the eyes, the nose, the chin, the hairline, the earlobes, the mouth. Perhaps we were seeing what we wanted to see. I concede that possibility. But, still, there was enough to satisfy the eye of at least the mild skeptic.

  “First, you found me,” Matt whispered, as he gently bounced a fist off my thigh. “Now, we’ve found him.”

  Three minutes later, we boarded our flight back to London.

  I dozed off a few times during the flight and hoped I hadn’t been talking in my sleep again. We landed and sailed through customs. Twenty-five minutes after we’d touched down, Matt and I were in a taxi. Courtesy of the three-hour time change, it was still mid-afternoon when the cab turned onto Wild’s Rents and pulled up in front of Matt’s condo.

  “Please wait for us, we’re just dropping off our bags and will be right back down,” Matt said as we piled out of the car and grabbed our luggage. We dumped our bags just inside the door of Matt’s unit and were back in the cab about two minutes later.

  The Hollywood line, “Russian Embassy and step on it!” shimmered in my mind. But I left it there.

  “Russian Embassy, in Kensington Palace Gardens, please,” Matt said, and we were off again.

  “Should we call or just show up?” I asked.

  “On the off chance he’s there, I’m not sure alerting him is wise, given the twenty-five-year effort he’s made to stay out of our lives,” Matt replied.

  It was about 4:15 when the taxi parked in front of the old two-storey stone building. We’d been there to get our visas a couple of weeks before. I wondered if our father had been there at the same time.

  One of the two young women seated behind glass at a reception station just inside smiled when we pushed through the doors and stood before her. Well, Matt stood before her, and I stood behind Matt. Strangely, there appeared to be no one else ahead of us seeking the services of the Russian Embassy. Our lucky day.

  “Can I help you?” she said with just the slightest hint of a Russian accent.

  “Yes, thank you,” Matt said, stepping up and assuming his role. “We’re here to see Alexei Bugayev, if we may.”

  “Do you have an appointment arranged with Mr. Bugayev?”

  “Ah no. It’s kind of a surprise, a rather big surprise,” Matt replied. “We haven’t seen him for a very long time and hoped to see him again, today.”

  “I see. Could you give me your names, please?”

  Matt looked at me. We didn’t really have any choice. Providing false names to the Russian Embassy didn’t seem like a particularly good idea.

  “I’m Matthew Paterson and this is Alex MacAskill,” Matt said.

  “Citizenship?” she asked.

  “British for me, and Canadian for him,” Matt replied.

  She looked puzzled.

  “Are you two not related?”

  No, I’ve never seen this man before in my life.

  “Um, distantly,” Matt said with a smile.

  “If you two could please sit down over there,” she said, pointing to a couch against the wall of the foyer. “I will determine if Mr. Bugayev is available to see you.”

  She opened a door at the back of the reception station and walked out into the hallway. She slipped the wrong way through the X-ray scanner staffed by two large Russian security guards direct from central casting, and escorted us to the couch. She stood there until we both sat down.

  “I do not know how long this will take, so, please, be comfortable here,” she said before heading back through the scanner and disappearing up the staircase.

  I was too keyed up to sit, so as soon as she was out of sight, I stood up and paced around the open foyer.

  Five minutes later, the phone on the security guards’ desk rang. The bigger of the two uniformed guards – and they were both big – answered the phone. He had that classic heavy Brezhnev mono-brow, and appeared rather well suited to his profession. Soon after lifting the receiver to his ear, his eyes met mine. I know that because I was watching him closely. I just had a faint sense that the call was about us. He spoke for a moment longer and then hung up the phone. He stood and walked over to me. His English was not as refined as the receptionist’s.

  “You must please to sit down,” he scolded, waving his hand towards the couch where Matt sat. “This area is secure area. Please to sit down.”

  Well, when you put it that way, so friendly and all.

  I said nothing, but quickly made my way back to the couch. Matt and I sat there not saying anything, just waiting. About half an hour later, the phone at the security station rang again. The same big guard answered, and right on cue, lifted his eyes to Matt and me on the couch. He spoke in Russian for a moment and then hung up. He leaned over to his only slightly less gargantuan colleague and whispered to him, covering his mouth with his hand, presumably to prevent us from lip-reading – a wise precautionary measure given how often I resort to lip-reading Russian. I really didn’t think this was a positive development but Matt didn’t seem troubled at all. When I looked at him, he offered nothing more than a smile and a nod.

  The two guards stood and approached us. Matt and I stood up.

  “Finally, I guess we’re in,” Matt said as we turned to face the advancing guards.

  “Wishful thinking, but I don’t think so,” I replied.

  Brezhnev mono-brow gripped my arm and his colleague gripped Matt’s.

  “Hey!” Matt said.

  “Sorry, but you must to leave now immediately,” he said, guiding Matt towards the door.

  I was similarly led, but I held my tongue, which is my standard approach in most public situations, anyway.

  “Wait. What’s going on? What have we done?” Matt asked in the strained tone of someone being manhandled by a gigantic Russian security guard.

  “We do not know, but do not do it again,” the guard said. “If you apply for visa ag
ain, it will not to be approved.”

  By this time, they had muscled us both out the front door of the embassy, released us, and pointed for us to leave the property. They watched from the steps as Matt and I, affecting the appearance of a normal departure, walked down the stone path to the street. We walked quickly, trying not to run.

  “What the hell was that?” Matt said when we’d moved around the corner and out of sight of our two new Russian friends.

  “Did you notice that the couch was directly in front of the security camera hanging from the ceiling?” I asked.

  “No, but every embassy in the world has security cameras.”

  “Yes, but in our case, I think it means that our father knows who we are, and doesn’t want to see us, wants nothing to do with us.”

  “Or he just didn’t recognize us,” Matt countered. “I mean, he hasn’t seen us since our Kodak moment with him twenty-five years ago.”

  “I think he knows who we are.”

  Thirty minutes later we were back in the condo, crushed and confused.

  “Well, it’s not the end. It’s just another setback,” Matt said. “We’ve had a few since this started.”

  I don’t know why I did it, but I pulled out my laptop and ran another search on the name Alexei Bugayev. I filtered for new results in the last twenty-four hours, just in case there was something new. As luck would have it when all seemed lost, there was one new entry we’d never seen. I saw it had been found by a Google search bot about forty-five minutes earlier. I clicked on it.