by Robert Moss
He considered Sasha for a moment, then went to work on the girl. ‘Well then, Maria,’ he addressed her, ‘have you made up your mind when you’re going to bed with me?’
Sasha felt sorry for the girl when he saw the way the blush mottled her cheeks. She seemed to be coming out in a rash. She scurried out of the elevator when it stopped on the fourth floor.
The mock suitor mimed despair, then shrugged his shoulders in an odd sort of way, depressing them rather than raising them. As the doors closed, he winked at Sasha. At least, Sasha thought that he winked, but it was as quick as a camerashutter, and he couldn’t be sure.
‘Good morning, General,’ the stranger greeted Sasha in a jocular tone. ‘You’re going to the sixth floor, I presume?’
He pushed the button, just to score his point. ‘Nikolsky, Feliks Nikolayich, at your service.’ He clicked his heels like a stage soldier.
Sasha shook hands with him.
They were already stopping at the sixth floor. Nikolsky consulted his Swiss watch. ‘Look here,’ he announced. ‘It’s already April the tenth, and it’s past nine in the morning, and you haven’t bought me a drink yet.’
Sasha stared at him in the way that he might have examined an exotic fish in a tank. As he got out at the sixth floor, he said, ‘Eighth, I presume?’ and pushed the button for Nikolsky.
It was obvious that this joker was one of the far neighbors, as members of Sasha’s Residency referred to their colleagues in the KGB. Nikolsky was far too self-assured to be anything else. But Sasha’s chief frowned on fraternization with the neighbors, for the eminently practical reason that they were constantly seeking to recruit agents inside the GRU and to steal its secrets for themselves.
Sasha hurried up the back stairs to the seventh floor, where he shared a cubicle with Churkhin, a case officer who had already had two postings abroad. But Sasha’s first port of call was the Referentura, the secret core of the Residency, the place where the records and the code machines were housed. It was built like a vault, and behind its steel shell was a constant hum from the equipment installed to baffle electronic eavesdroppers.
The guardian of this inner sanctum was the head cipher clerk. He was the only man who was allowed to communicate with the Center without the permission of the Resident, General Luzhin. The cipher clerk was indispensable, but his life was not exactly enviable. He and his wife were kept locked up in the Mission like captive animals. The main excitement of their tour had been a bus trip to Niagara Falls, in the company of two dozen other Soviet families. They had left at dawn on a Saturday, arrived in time for dinner, had a quick look at the Falls in the morning light, and been promptly herded back on the bus to New York. The cipher clerk didn’t seem to mind. He was a scrawny, bloodless type who reminded Sasha of a plucked chicken.
He grunted at Sasha, unlocked one of his safes, and delivered up the briefcase. Every officer in the Residency had one of these work satchels. Each night it had to be locked away in the Referentura, tied up with string and secured with a gob of wax on which the officer would impress his personal seal with the metal disk he carried on his key ring. The main item inside the satchel was a blue notebook with numbered pages that was used to record every communication to or from the Center, summaries of operations, and agents’ code names.
Along with the satchel, the cipher clerk handed Sasha some routine messages from Moscow that had been flagged for his attention. There was unmistakable pleasure in his sallow face as he added, ‘The boss wants to see you at ten sharp.’
*
General Luzhin, the head of the GRU Residency in New York, was a little man, with a little man’s quirks. He liked his visitors to sit on low-slung easy chairs or on a sofa from which it was almost impossible to rise. This didn’t quite even up the height differential with a man of Sasha’s dimensions, so Luzhin stood behind his desk as he addressed his newest case officer.
‘Well?’ he boomed in a voice too large for him, his throat trembling and distending like a bullfrog’s. ‘Have you settled in? How do you like your hotel?’
‘It’s colorful,’ Sasha replied cautiously.
‘I hope you haven’t finished unpacking.’
‘Sir?’
The Resident yanked open the drawer of his desk, pulled something out, and started brandishing it at Sasha.
‘You see this?’ he roared.
It looked like an airline ticket.
‘This is your ticket back to Moscow. There’s an Aeroflot flight tomorrow. All I have to do is fill in the name.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Sasha said evenly. ‘Is there some emergency?’
‘You’ve been here a whole week,’ Luzhin bellowed. ‘And you haven’t come up with a single recruitment prospect!’
He’s joking, Sasha thought. Any second now, he’ll burst out laughing in my face.
But the Resident’s expression did not relax as he proceeded to deliver a lecture about young men who thought that a foreign tour was a chance to live it up, chase skirts, and go on shopping sprees.
‘Now, I’m a reasonable man,’ Luzhin wound down. ‘I’m giving you one week more. You can start at the Coliseum. At least you know where that is, don’t you? There’s an electronics exhibition opening there this weekend. I expect you to come up with something good. Otherwise’ — he fanned the Aeroflot ticket — ‘you know what’s in store for you.’
Sasha left the general’s office still uncertain whether he was supposed to take the man seriously. The service was keen on body counts. In his orientation course the instructors had drilled in, over and over, that agent recruitment was the beginning and the end of foreign intelligence work. The penalty for failing to hook a couple of productive agents was well understood: no more assignments abroad. But Luzhin was jumping on his back when he had barely had a chance to learn the main streets.
When he reached his own office, Churkhin looked at him slyly. Churkhin seemed a cheerful, easygoing sort. Like Sasha, he was listed as second secretary, but he already held the rank of major in the GRU. Churkhin scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper and pushed it across the desk, like a schoolboy trying to avoid attracting the teacher’s attention. That was a habit Sasha had picked up right away. In the GRU Residency, people were given to exchanging certain personal — and operational — messages in writing, less because of the outside chance that the Americans had found a way to listen in than because of the fear that their KGB neighbors had an ear to the keyhole.
‘Did he show you the airline ticket?’ Churkhin’s note read.
Sasha grinned at his colleague. So the general had merely given him the standard welcome.
*
The Preobrazhenskys and the Churkhins were neighbors in the same residential hotel on the Upper West Side, a short walk away from the river. The Lucerne was a turn-of-the-century triumph in plum-colored stone, with great banded baroque columns on either side of the entrance. It might have been borrowed from the set of an early Hollywood epic. The effect was slightly marred by a tatty blue canopy with white lettering that read, ‘Permanents — Transients.’
One of the permanents, a tiny, elderly Jewish man with a white moustache and bifocals, was taking the air on the porch when Sasha walked up the steps of the Lucerne. He nodded to Sasha, patted the column he was using for support, and spoke around the cigarette that was glued to his lip.
‘Like this, they don’t make.’
There was an echo of Odessa in his voice.
‘You got a dent in your car,’ he went on. They both looked at the white Ford Sasha had left parked on the curb. He had inherited the car, and the dent, from his predecessor. Few people at the Mission were experienced drivers: only a handful had had their own cars in Moscow.
The man on the porch started advising Sasha about a body shop.
‘No, Manny went to Florida,’ he corrected himself. ‘You should have been here in the old days. This neighborhood used to be something.’
It wasn’t easy getting in and out of the Lucerne
unobserved. The older residents, people who had moved out of nearby brownstones as their spouses died off and the muggings increased, spent a good part of the day in silent communion in the lobby. The desk clerk darted about like a woodpecker and had eyes in the back of his head. The FBI manned an observation post in one of the red brick buildings across the street.
There were a score of Soviet families in the Lucerne. Other Mission families were parked in the Orleans, the Esplanade, the Greystone, up on Broadway, and the Excelsior, across the street from the Museum of Natural History. Hotel managements tended to welcome the Soviets. They were quiet tenants who paid their rent on time.
Sasha liked the Lucerne. There was a sense of freedom, whether or not there was a man with binoculars at a window across the street. He could drive himself to the Mission through Central Park. He wasn’t living in a compound, behind closed-circuit cameras and checkpoints, but among foreigners.
Lydia was less impressed. Their small apartment in the Lucerne, with its efficiency kitchen, was a long step down from the splendor of the Visotny Dom. The very first night, after Petya had woken them up for the second time, Lydia announced that they couldn’t possibly stay there. She would write to her father, and he would arrange everything.
‘Leave it for a bit,’ Sasha cautioned her. He didn’t want to alienate his colleagues in the Residency at the very beginning by trading on the influence of his father-in-law, who had just been appointed Marshal and Deputy Commander of the Warsaw Pact. It was better to reserve Zotov’s influence for important things.
For the rest of that week, Lydia had the stores to divert her. The variety was staggering, even to someone who had been accustomed to the best in Moscow. She made the grand tour, with Churkhin’s wife Irina as a willing guide. They went crosstown to Alexander’s and Bloomingdale’s, downtown to Macy’s and Gimbel’s. Lydia would return each afternoon with taxi-loads of clothes and cosmetics and electrical goods. By Friday, when Sasha was called in by General Luzhin for his ritual dressing-down, she had spent the whole of his monthly salary, paid in cash in advance on the first day he reported to the Mission.
They dined with the Churkhins that weekend, in a cosy Italian bistro on Columbus Avenue. Lydia was showing off a new designer outfit, with matching accessories, and Sasha didn’t like the sharp, sidelong glance that Churkhin threw at him while Irina enthused over it. Even before they got to the linguine, Lydia started bitching about the hotel, oblivious to the fact that it had been home for the Churkhins for a year or more.
‘Just wait till next year,’ Irina said. She was large and placid, with an awesome capacity to put away her food, and she didn’t seem to mind Lydia’s airs one bit. ‘We’ll all be moving uptown to the new place.’
‘What new place?’
‘The Sovplex. It’s going to be nineteen stories tall, with a school and a swimming pool and everything.’
‘They’re building it on a hill in Riverdale,’ Churkhin explained. ‘That sounds fancier than saying the Bronx, doesn’t it? The theory is that we’ll all be safer from the Zionist crazies up there.’
‘I see.’ Sasha did not relish the thought of being shut up in a compound behind fences and checkpoints.
‘What really happened,’ Churkhin confided, ‘was they held a snap security inspection after that last defector walked in to the FBI. They found what you’d expect — one of our top officials was spending his evenings in a topless bar in Queens — and the ruling came down from on high that it’s unhealthy to have Soviet citizens exposed to corrupting influences. You needn’t get depressed. They haven’t started construction work yet.’
‘It will be just like home,’ Irina gushed.
The woman wasn’t overly bright, and she was clearly intimidated by Lydia, but she came up with one useful suggestion that evening. ‘You’d better get yourselves fixed up for the summer,’ Irina said. ‘You can’t breathe in this city in July or August. It’s like living on a hotplate.’
‘What do you do?’ Lydia asked.
‘We have a bungalow,’ Churkhin’s wife responded proprietorially. ‘Bungalow’ was one of the few English words in her vocabulary. ‘Nothing fancy, of course. But it’s at the beach. A lot of Mission families spend the summer there. It’s in Far Rockaway.’
Lydia stumbled over the alien syllables, trying to repeat the name. ‘It’s not the Crimea,’ Churkhin observed. ‘But still —’
‘It’s like home,’ Irina rounded out the sentence. This seemed to be her favorite phrase.
‘The reservations have already been made,’ Churkhin went on. ‘But with your connections —’
Lydia had evidently been pulling rank on Churkhin’s wife. Sasha was glad he hadn’t told her about his confrontation with General Luzhin. Who knew what trouble she might try to stir up, through her father.
*
With or without Lydia’s meddling, it was soon plain that something had happened to change the bullfrog’s attitude, because the next time Sasha saw General Luzhin, the man was almost ingratiating. He congratulated Sasha on his success at the trade exhibition at the Coliseum, when both of them were well aware that what he had done was perfectly routine; he had picked up a few brochures and had a casual talk with a salesman from a Massachusetts company who would no doubt have drunk with anyone who would pay. Luzhin did not mention the Aeroflot ticket. Instead, he produced a book as bulky as a Manhattan telephone directory.
‘Have a look through this and tell me what interests you,’ Luzhin said.
It was the annual requirements list of the Military-Industrial Commission, the powerful committee in Moscow that supervised the work of all the dozen ministries involved in the defense industry. Each year, the Commission produced a huge catalog of the military and industrial secrets that it sought to steal or borrow from the West, and a copy went out to all of the GRU residencies. The budget available for this kind of espionage was almost limitless, but, more than once, the GRU had been able to get the key to a process that had cost a billion dollars to develop by buying it for a mere few thousand, thanks to the uninformed greed of a secretary or a disillusioned junior executive. Unlike the KGB, which divided its people into specialities and handed out carefully demarcated assignments, the GRU tended to use its operatives abroad like used-car salesmen. They were all in competition with each other to produce the goods at the best premium.
Marshal Zotov’s name wasn’t mentioned, but Sasha could feel his hulking presence in the room with the Resident asked, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
Sasha seized the chance to bring up the subject of Far Rockaway.
‘Nothing easier,’ Luzhin was only too happy to oblige. ‘Now next summer,’ he went on, ‘I’ll see what we can do for you at Glen Cove.’
The former Platt family mansion at Glen Cove was the country residence of the Soviet Ambassador, and a favorite retreat for the top brass. Some serious work was done there too: Killenworth was equipped with a sliding roof so the KGB team on the top floor could tune into American microwave transmissions and talk to Moscow via satellite.
*
‘So what do you think?’ Churkhin asked as they strolled along the gray, weathered boardwalk beside the beach.
Just like Odessa, Sasha thought. He amended this to Irina Churkhinova’s phrase, ‘Just like home.’
It was a warm June Saturday, and forty or fifty Soviet families were camped along the beach with deck chairs and picnic baskets. They formed separate clusters, diplomats with diplomats, KGB with KGB. But it was impossible to keep the children apart. As Sasha watched, Lydia was leading Petya into the water, where older children were engaged in a rough-and-tumble piggyback fight. There was a big splash as a girl went tumbling into the water, and Petya wriggled out of Lydia’s grip and ran howling back, his small toes raking the wet sand.
It was a fine, clean, quiet beach: a long strip of shining white sand between the boardwalk and the calm seas inside the breakwater of Atlantic Beach, across the causeway. Behind the boardwalk, and a patch
of sawgrass, the houses were all of a kind, small stucco bungalows with a porch out front and a slatted vent up above to let some air in. They were pushed back to back, like railroad cars, with a narrow alleyway between the rows where the women could sit to gossip and watch the kids play ball in the street.
Far Rockaway was a dowdy, mostly Jewish neighborhood on a spit of land between Kennedy airport and the ocean, just inside the borough of Queens. It was less affluent than the leafier suburbs across the Nassau county line, where they fixed the potholes and people had cleaning ladies and gardeners and the local taxes were twice as high. On the far side of Seagirt Boulevard, beyond what a sign described as a ‘Voluntary Home for Old Folks,’ the houses were more elaborate, with a few Victorian survivals, dressed up with chainlink fences and the occasional flowerbed. The Churkhins and the Preobrazhenskys shared a yellow frame house on Caffrey Avenue. Each weekday morning the men would make the one-hour commute through Cedarhurst and up the Van Wyck Expressway to the city, leaving the women and children to their own devices. It was not coincidental that a high proportion of the operational meetings arranged by members of both the GRU and the KGB residencies that summer were held in Queens, conveniently midway between the Mission and the beach.
On weekends, when Sasha and his family made their way down Beach 17th Street to the water, past a children’s playground, they usually found a big, ruddy-faced man in a swimsuit with a towel around his neck, working on his Chevy. He was a fixture. On Saturdays, he would have a can of turtle wax in his hand. On Sundays, he would be simonizing the car. He didn’t miss a face as the Russians trooped past, checking to see who was walking with whom — an easy way to distinguish the intelligence types from routine diplomats. This FBI presence was obvious and unthreatening, but it had the effect of a sheepdog on a herd. You rarely saw the Russians at the beach wandering off by themselves.
Late that summer, Sasha arrived hot and sticky from wrestling with the Friday night traffic, and went straight down to the beach to cool off. Lydia had bought thick steaks from the supermarket in Cedarhurst, but she overcooked them, as usual. Back at the house, he ate in silence, letting her complaints about Irina and the other wives wash over him in a harmless froth.