by Robert Moss
His interest pricked up when she suddenly announced, ‘We’re having lunch with the Nikolskys tomorrow.’
He remembered the humorist he had met in the elevator at the Mission.
‘They’re just around the corner,’ Lydia babbled on. ‘You know, the nice little white house on Plainview Avenue. Petya plays with their boy.’
They heard a car pull up outside, and then Churkhin came rattling into the kitchen with a couple of six-packs, back from the movies.
‘Do you know Nikolsky?’ Sasha asked casually, fielding the can of Budweiser Churkhin threw in his direction.
‘Nikolsky?’ Churkhin grinned as if Sasha had made a joke. ‘Oh, he’s a pyzdobol. A piss-artist from KGB. He works out of the Novosti office.’
Sasha glared at his wife, signaling that they would talk about it later. He didn’t want to make an issue of it in front of Churkhin.
Later, in the bedroom, Lydia scoffed at his objections. Why, she saw Olga, Nikolsky’s wife, almost every day. She was one of the few women in the Soviet colony at the beach who was worth talking to. They had gone together with the boys to an amusement park.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Lydia said. ‘So he’s KGB. So what? It’s just a family lunch. Anything to relieve the boredom. It’s all right for you. You go to the city every day.’
It blew up into one of their domestic spats, which erupted as fast — and were as fast forgotten — as a spark from a match that won’t strike properly.
When Lydia announced that she wanted to go home for a few weeks, Sasha said nothing to discourage her.
He suspected that Nikolsky had arranged the superficially innocuous contact between their wives in order to bring them together. If the man was working under journalistic cover, it seemed unlikely that he was one of Drinov’s people, in counterintelligence. But with the neighbors, you could never be sure. Still, since the lunch invitation had already been accepted, Sasha decided he might as well go along with it and take a look at this pyzdobol from the KGB.
*
The man who threw open the door of the house on Plainview Avenue was wearing a black polo shirt and white jeans, and his tanned face was as bright as a mint penny.
‘Good morning, General!’ Nikolsky boomed. He followed this up with a lopsided salute.
There was a large black poodle in the hallway. Petya darted round the adults to play with it.
‘Allow me to present Kipling,’ said Nikolsky, waving towards his dog.
‘“Take up the white man’s burden,”’ he recited in English at the top of his lungs as he led them into the living room. ‘“Send forth the best ye breed...”’
The main feature of the room was a table crammed with bottles. Nikolsky snapped an index finger against his throat.
‘Davai glaz nalyom,’ he proposed. ‘Let’s put one in the eye.’
Lydia asked for a glass of wine. Sasha hesitated over the battery of bottles. But Nikolsky had decided for him already. He sloshed a liter of gin into a tall jug filled with ice, waved a bottle of vermouth above it ritualistically, like a priest swinging a censer, until a couple of drops fell in. Then he served up the drinks in big funnel-shaped glasses with a twist of lemon peel.
‘The perfect martini,’ he announced. ‘Nu budem!’
‘Budem,’ Sasha chorused politely, taking a cautious sip of his cocktail.
He watched Nikolsky toss down his martini in a couple of gulps. He threw his head back in the air and rubbed his chest in small, descending circles. When his hand reached his stomach, he sighed. ‘Ah, prizjilas,’ and set about replenishing the glasses. He cocked a skeptical eyebrow as he inspected the level of Sasha’s drink, which had barely been touched.
‘What’s the matter, General? You don’t like American cocktails?’
‘No, no, it’s excellent,’ Sasha demurred. He knocked off the rest of his drink like vodka and let Nikolsky fill up his glass. But he did not feel comfortable about being hustled into a Moscow-style drinking session by this humorist from the KGB, and resolved to pace himself. Nikolsky had dispatched his second martini by the time Olga emerged from the kitchen.
She was warm and round and made you think of fresh-baked bread, and she obviously adored Nikolsky. She watched him drink with the same helpless adulation with which an indulgent parent might allow a small child to demolish the living room — which is what Petya and his friend, with some help from Kipling, appeared to have set about doing. After a harmless exchange about life at the beach, Olga and Lydia took the children out to the kitchen.
The jug circulated again.
Nikolsky threw himself down on the sofa, sniffed the air, and exclaimed, ‘That’s good! The sea air drives away the smell of high boots. That or the gin.’
Sasha chose to ignore this friendly insult.
‘I’m told you’re a journalist,’ he said evenly.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Nikolsky. He snatched up a bundle of newspapers at the end of the sofa, ruffled through them, and pulled out a recent edition of a Washington paper.
‘You see this?’ he asked Sasha, his finger on an article about the CIA. ‘My latest literary effort.’
Sasha glanced at the page. He didn’t recognize the American byline. The features syndicate credited at the bottom was equally obscure.
He wondered whether Nikolsky was bluffing. It seemed inconceivable that a professional from a rival service would start boasting to him about a clandestine relationship with an American reporter on their very first meeting. Unless the man was already drunk, or was trying to lead him into similar indiscretions.
Nikolsky threw the newspaper aside and said, ‘Did you hear about Pelepenko?’
Sasha shook his head. Of course, he knew something about Pelepenko. He was a big man in the Soviet community in New York, a senior Party official who had been rewarded with a top job in the United Nations secretariat.
‘There was a big dinner last week,’ Nikolsky reported. ‘For one of our delegations. Pelepenko got drunk, as usual, and started drooling down his shirt front. He recovered for a bit and started stuffing himself again as if he had just arrived. Then he started puking, right there at the table, in front of all the bigwigs. Finally they carried him out. Askyerov was there. He’s no dummy, even if he is a fucking Azerbaijani. He came away saying that our Pelepenko is living proof of Soviet technological innovation. We have perfected the mobile vomitorium.’
Sasha didn’t know whether to laugh or not. He had seen Pelepenko at the UN. The man looked exactly like a pig, pink and moist with sharp little eyes. And this was the senior representative of the Central Committee in New York! The Party recognized its natural allies, he thought, mentally assigning this Pelepenko to the same category as Krisov and Suchko.
Nikolsky took to quizzing him about people at the Mission, and Sasha’s suspicions intensified. In Moscow, this openness would have been incredible. There was no doubt about it, he thought: Nikolsky was mounting a provocation, trying to suck something out of him that the KGB could use. He was angry at Lydia again for getting him into this situation. He could hear the women’s voices from the kitchen, but there was no sign of food, not even a few peanuts, and here was Nikolsky bearing down on him again with the jug. There was a faint throbbing above his eyes. Nikolsky seemed to be feeling no pain.
‘This isn’t your first foreign posting, is it?’ Sasha began, flipping the conversation back to him.
‘My first assignment was in London,’ Nikolsky replied. ‘Oh, the girls beside the Serpentine on a day like this! Or at a Richmond pub, by the river!’ For a moment, he wallowed in nostalgia. ‘Kosygin came over for a visit while I was there,’ Nikolsky went on. ‘He met the government, the opposition, the trade union leaders, the businessmen. But he wasn’t happy. “I want to meet the men who really control Britain,” he insisted. So they introduced him to some lords, hereditary peers who were struggling to keep up the payments on their decaying country seats, and Kosygin was satisfied. Those were the people he expected to be running the
country.
‘Then they took him up to Liverpool, to look at British industry, and he demanded to go to Blackpool, which is near there. He was under the impression that Blackpool was the only place where the British proletariat is allowed to take holidays. Anyway, it was all arranged. They have these lights along the shoreline for a mile or so at Blackpool, the Illuminations, they call them, you know, fantasy animals and castles and so on. Well, Kosygin loved the show. He insisted on driving back the other way so he could see the Illuminations again. They tried explaining to him that it was a one-way traffic system. He wasn’t impressed. For a member of the Presidium, anything can be arranged. Change the direction of the traffic!
‘So they went and found someone from the local police and brought him to Kosygin, and the British Foreign Office people tried explaining about the Presidium and the importance of their guest. When they finished, the Blackpool policemen took a good look at Kosygin and said, “Piss off.” You should have seen the interpreter’s face when he tried to translate that! A nice touch, don’t you think?’
Sasha was grinning despite his reserve.
Then Nikolsky startled him by saying, ‘I hope you’ll have better luck in New York than your predecessor.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What, Churkhin didn’t tell you about it? He was an earnest sort of a fellow, but no genius. His English was terrible. You don’t even hear that accent from Brooklyn taxi drivers.’ To make his point, Nikolsky switched into English, and Sasha realized that his command of the language was excellent. His speech was clipped and precise. He could have read the BBC news. ‘Anyway,’ Nikolsky went on, ‘this chap was used to service an agent, a manager in one of those companies that make spare parts for the Pentagon. He fixed up a nice little dead drop in Fort Tryon Park, up near the bridge. You know, simple and straightforward: a hole in a tree.
‘The arrangement was that the agent would smuggle confidential papers out during his lunch break. Our friend would service the drop, get the documents photocopied, and return them to the same spot an hour or two later. But he was no nature lover. He paid no attention to the time of year. It was nesting season for the squirrels. When our hero went to make his pickup one day, he found hot documents wafting all over the park. You can imagine their condition. Some of the pages had been shredded to line the nest. And there he was, hopping about all over the park, trying to collect every scrap. They had to send everything to Moscow to try and patch it up like new. In the meantime, of course, the missing file was noticed, and your agent was blown. How do you like that?’
Sasha shrugged. He was not amused by the story of the squirrels which, suggested among other things, that Nikolsky knew far more about the activities of Sasha’s service than he had any right to know.
‘It happens to your people too,’ he said to Nikolsky.
Nikolsky looked at him mockingly. He took another gulp at his martini, and let the liquid swill around inside his mouth for a moment, so that his cheeks puffed out.
‘Oh, yes, we have some prize specimens,’ he conceded. ‘Have you met Drinov yet? Well, there you are.’
He broke off without explaining.
Everyone at the Mission knew about Drinov, the head of KR Line, the people who spied on the spies. Churkhin had pointed him out to Sasha in the street — a thick, ugly fellow in an ill-fitting suit. By dropping the name, Nikolsky had skated out into the middle of the ice.
He must have realized it, because now he backed off and started talking about New York, the music, the bars and especially, the girls. He talked with apparent authority about First Avenue singles bars and quieter German saloons in Yorkville where you could meet amateurs who were looking for a good time.
Lunch was served at last, and they carried the last of the martinis through. Nikolsky seemed inexhaustible. He held forth on everything from the private life of Henry Kissinger to his favorite writer, Mikhail Bulgakov. He claimed to have a first edition of The Master and Margarita, a surrealist marvel about Satan’s arrival in Moscow that Sasha, too, had read and reread. Carried away by the sound of his own voice, Nikolsky quoted great chunks from memory. He barely touched his main dish, but called for wine and wolfed down the bread on the table, tearing it into strips, scattering crumbs over the cloth.
He addressed little gallantries to Lydia from time to time, praising her summer frock, her hairstyle. Lydia, usually so critical, seemed to be quite taken with him.
‘You heard the story of the train, I suppose? No? But you’ve just come from Moscow. Well, if you insist.’ Lydia was laughing before he had even begun the joke, which added to Sasha’s rising irritation.
‘The train is running’ — Nikolsky paused to embellish this with his impression of a steam whistle — ‘and in the best compartment are Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. Suddenly the train stops with such a jolt that they spill their drinks in each other’s laps.’ He mimed this bit by banging his glass down on the table.
‘Stalin was furious. He bellowed, “Why has the train stopped?”‘A railroad official rushed in, pulled off his cap, and started stammering excuses.
‘Stalin was decisive. “Shoot the driver!” he ordered.
‘They shot the driver, but the train didn’t move.
‘Then Nikita piped up and said they were going about it the wrong way. “Give everybody a wage increase,” he directed.
‘The train still didn’t move.
‘Then our own Leonid Ilyich said, “Look, Comrades, what does it matter? Let’s draw the curtains and pretend that the train is moving.”
Encouraged by Lydia’s rippling laughter — the wine was too much for her in the heat, Sasha thought — Nikolsky improvised on the story.
‘While all of this was going on,’ he continued, ‘our friend Andropov slipped out of the train, to gather intelligence on the situation for himself. He found a lot of bureaucrats arguing alongside the track. A muzhik approached him, drunk, as you’d expect. He said, “You see, Yuri Vladimirovich, our problem is always the same. All the steam is going up the whistle.”
‘Now, isn’t that so?’ Nikolsky addressed the room. ‘We Russians are the most impractical, the most philosophical people in the world. All our energy goes up the whistle. Saving your grace, General. Nu budem!’
They all drank except Sasha.
Nikolsky leaned toward him and whispered, ‘Ty chto mumu yebyosh? Why are you fucking a cow?’
He produced a liter of French cognac, pulled the cork out, and tossed it aside like the throwaway top of a cheap brand of vodka back in Moscow.
‘Nalivay!’ Nikolsky commanded. He proceeded to pour three fingers of brandy into an outsize snifter for Sasha.
‘Listen,’ Sasha objected. ‘We can’t stay all day. I’ve got work to do.’
‘It’s not your fault, it’s your problem. What’s the hurry, General? A job isn’t a wolf; it won’t run away into the forest. Besides, I want to tell you another story. About Drinov.’
As if on cue, Olga rose from the table, taking Lydia with her. Reluctantly, Sasha’s hand closed around the brandy glass. He had better hear this out.
Nikolsky made him wait, feeding scraps from his plate to Kipling under the table.
‘You can see how it is over here,’ he finally said to Sasha. ‘Back home, they can’t believe their luck. The President resigns because of —‘ He spun his finger in a circle around his ear. ‘They’ve capitulated in Vietnam. And now the Director of the CIA is running up to Capitol Hill every day to make his confession and receive absolution. It all comes of not reading Kipling in school. Every schoolboy in our country knows Kipling. They probably imagine he’s a Soviet author. But the Americans have no talent for imperialism.’
‘You mentioned Drinov,’ Sasha reminded him.
‘Ah, yes, Dri-nov,’ Nikolsky echoed, dragging out the syllables. ‘Well, the Center got so excited by what’s going on over here that they sent out a directive, twenty pages, no less. Guidelines for handling walk-in defectors from the CIA. You se
e, the Center is expecting mass defections from the CIA, what with the newspaper scandals and the sackings and all the rest of it. And who is going to receive all these defectors from the CIA? Our retired soccer star, Drinov!’ Nikolsky snorted. ‘You should just hear him trying to talk English.’
He was swaying perceptibly as he got up to fetch the brandy bottle, and he was painfully off key as he started to recite, “Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet...”’
*
Leaving Nikolsky’s house, Sasha saw a flight of birds winging southward, toward the water. Earlier in the day he had been conscious of the birds flapping about aimlessly. These had formed a perfect V formation, like a fighter squadron at an air show.
‘They must know something we don’t,’ he remarked to Lydia. ‘There’s a whole month of summer left.’
Not much of it was spent at the beach.
Lydia took Petya home to spend a few weeks with her father, and General Luzhin came up with a special assignment for Sasha.
*
If you are looking for the ideal framework for espionage, you can find it ready-made at the United Nations. You put representatives of countries that are serious about spying in the same committee room as their intended targets, then subject them to a routine of excruciating boredom, from which the only relief is a bar or coffee lounge on the same premises. As if this situation were not already more than promising, in New York the glass-walled behemoth on the East River is off limits to the police and the FBI.
An hour away from lunch, Sasha’s head began to slump forward, and he stiffened his back against his chair, trying to jerk himself awake. The committee was debating the punctuation of paragraph three of a resolution that had something to do with mineral exploration in developing countries. The British delegate was wearing dark glasses. It was possible that he was suffering from eye trouble, but the angle of his head suggested that he was sound asleep.