by Robert Moss
Frick sometimes came up with a scoop unaided. The one that had just come to Nikolsky’s attention was a source of possible embarrassment. Fortunately, it had run in a radical bulletin that specialized in digging up dirt on the CIA, and it was unlikely to have reached the Center yet. One of Nikolsky’s jobs was to select material from this and similar publications — some of which he supplied — for replay in the Soviet media. From a service viewpoint, Frick’s article was first rate: an exposé of underhand CIA operations in Angola, clearly based on an inside source. The difficulty was that Nikolsky hadn’t known about it in advance. The Center expected to be forewarned. It would also want to know the source.
‘Why didn’t you let me know, Dave?’ Nikolsky asked Frick as the journalist helped himself to the second bottle of Bardolino.
‘I was going to. You didn’t show for our last lunch date, remember?’
Nikolsky did. They usually lunched on alternate Fridays, but that day he had had a splitting headache and the thought of Frick’s adenoidal monotone was too much, so he had called to cancel.
‘You didn’t say what you thought of the piece,’ Frick prodded him.
‘I think it’s remarkable, really a major breakthrough. It could lead to a new congressional investigation. I must say I hadn’t realized that the CIA had been quite so inept in Angola. But of course, you’re an expert on Africa.’
‘Those fuckheads —’ Frick began. Sufficiently stroked, he could be relied on to deliver a lecture on any subject at all.
‘You obviously had an excellent source,’ Nikolsky interrupted after a few minutes. ‘Somebody in the CIA?’
‘Ex-Agency,’ Frick responded, without skipping a beat. ‘He’s terrific. He was stationed in Lusaka. I met him when I was out there, a few years back.’
‘Oh, yes. Hansen. Seymour Hansen.’ Nikolsky had done some homework since he received Frick’s article.
Frick looked mildly surprised.
‘What are his plans now?’ Nikolsky pursued.
‘Sy’s? Well, he’s got his pension from the Agency, of course, as long as he doesn’t do something they can sue him for. I think he wants to write a book. That’s what all of them seem to do.’
‘Cognac?’
‘Sure.’
Nikolsky waved for the waiter. ‘And we’ll have some of your fascist cigars, Luigi,’ he instructed him. Like a number of New York restaurants, this one kept a stock of Havanas, allegedly pre-1959 vintage, for favored patrons. Nikolsky’s spirits had lifted considerably since he had confirmed his suspicions about Frick’s informant. A CIA man, just retired, who was sufficiently embittered about his former employers to talk to an asshole like Frick. Now, that was something worth pursuing.
Fortified by the brandy and the cigar, Nikolsky decided to be reckless.
He leaned across the table and said, ‘Dave, will you do me a favor? As a journalistic colleague?’
Frick wasn’t a complete fool. He waited for the rest.
‘I want you to introduce me to Seymour Hansen,’ Nikolsky said.
Frick wrestled with him for a while, and required pacifying with continued doses of brandy.
When Frick said grudgingly, ‘You’d better make this worth my while,’ Feliks knew he had the beginnings of a very interesting report.
*
It was stifling inside the subway car, and Sasha got off sooner than he intended, at 14th Street. He loped up the steps and found himself in Union Square. He paused to buy the late edition from the corner newsstand, then crossed the road and began a leisurely stroll through the park. It was not like the Alexander Gardens, that park. Small knots of drug pushers and derelicts sprawling out on the benches stared speculatively at the big man wearing a light raincoat over his gray suit, then decided to give him a wide berth. Sasha rambled on up to Madison Square, the old potters’ field where, under the melancholy memorial to Admiral Farragut, junior executives from nearby insurance companies were buying small pouches of pot from the kind of men they would normally cross the street to avoid. The scene would make a good article for one of the Moscow magazines, Sasha thought; he must suggest it to Nikolsky.
He doubled back to Lexington Avenue and boarded an uptown train at 23rd Street. He was almost certain that he was not being tailed. But he had plenty of time to make sure before he kept his rendezvous with Ibrahim at a restaurant across the river, in Queens. The meet had been fixed for 6:30. He had more than two hours to kill before then.
Sasha routinely spent between three and five hours making sure he was not under surveillance before meeting Ibrahim. Not all his colleagues in the Residency took these dry-cleaning runs so seriously. There was a tendency to get sloppy in a city of endless hiding places, a city so ethnically diverse that you could come from anywhere in the world and still pass yourself off as a native. Besides, the few dozen FBI Agents assigned to counterespionage were ludicrously outnumbered by the Soviet community. It was mathematically impossible that more than a handful of the Soviet operatives in New York could be under observation round the clock. Still, Sasha never cut corners. This was partly professional instinct. But he also enjoyed these laundry runs. They gave him a chance to get inside the bloodstream of this diseased but exhilarating city.
He had come to enjoy his meetings with the West African Ambassador. The man had a dry sense of humor, mocking himself as much as others. He was a valuable source on many things, especially what the Americans were up to in his part of the world. He talked readily enough about his contacts with the CIA, and the questions the Americans were putting to him. Sasha wondered at times whether George Afigbo wasn’t playing all of them for suckers. He took the money readily enough, but he never counted it, and Sasha knew that, beneath that shell he couldn’t penetrate, the African was more than a mercenary. Ibrahim had his own agenda, and he wasn’t sharing it with either the Soviets or the Americans.
Sasha got off the subway at 59th Street, realizing too late that he was uncomfortably close to his point of departure, and wandered east. At a Korean greengrocer’s he bought some apples that looked as if they had been polished by hand. Next door was a must store selling old prints. He went inside and inspected some vintage movie posters. There was one he considered buying for Feliks, Ray Milland starring in The Lost Weekend. But perhaps Feliks, penitent after that interlude with Maya, wouldn’t appreciate it.
He came out of the store empty-handed and lingered to take a second look at a chunky man near a hot-dog stand who bore a passing resemblance to someone he had seen in Madison Square.
Then he saw her.
It was the hair that caught his eye — thick, dark, lustrous, giving back the afternoon light. But she had done something to it. Instead of hanging loose over her shoulders, it was chopped off in a severe, straight line across the nape of her neck, and parted on the left side.
The clothes were unfamiliar too. She was wearing a soft-knit dress with a curious pattern of white, tawny gold, and browns that might have been an abstract painter’s conception of a family of tigers. The dress clung to her body, accentuating the feline grace of her movements.
He had seen her in profile for only a second, but he knew her at once: the long slope of her neck, the bold, arching eyebrows, the slender, undulating body, the miraculous hair, now carved into geometric planes.
He almost called out, Tanya! But the word snagged in his throat. She was already half a block away, walking west on the far side of the street.
He saw her rounding the corner, and was seized with unreasonable panic as she was lost from view. He spotted a gap in the line of traffic and darted out into the street. As the light at the intersection changed from yellow to red, a cabdriver gunned his taxi forward as if Sasha was his target. Sasha dodged the cab, and then a biker who was fast-pedaling the wrong way, no hands, and made it to the other side.
He could not seem to control his breathing; he was panting as if he had been winded. He was vaguely aware that people were giving him odd looks as he plowed through the crowd, searchin
g for the girl. He collided with a fat-bellied man, who spilled his groceries and started to swear and gesticulate. Sasha shouldered his way forward, uncaring. All his tradecraft was forgotten. His whole being seemed to be concentrated in a single purpose.
I’m not going to lose her a second time.
Everything Zhukovsky, the walking dead, had told him about how Tanya had been driven to suicide in the labor camp came flooding in on him. Had Zhukovsky invented the whole story, just to punish him! He had been able to picture the horror of the camp so clearly — even the whirring blade of the power saw under Tanya’s throat — as clearly as he had seen her an instant ago, across a Manhattan street. Had he been dreaming then — or now?
He pushed his way through a gaggle of secretaries at a bus stop, and then he could see her mane of dark hair again. She was standing in front of a plate-glass window. He slackened pace until he was only a yard or two away, almost close enough to touch her. Then he stopped and peered through the same window. He half-expected her to turn and greet him.
Instead, she fished around in her bag and brought out a pack of cigarettes — one of those menthol brands, he noticed — and a yellow throwaway lighter. He studied her as she flicked the lighter with her thumb, her right thumb, and suddenly he knew she wasn’t Tanya.
Tanya would have used her left hand.
But, even as close as he was standing to the woman, the resemblance was extraordinary, even to the swell of the lower lip, the way the lashes drooped over the dark, liquid eyes. She wasn’t Tanya — how could she have been? — but she might have been Tanya’s twin sister.
So he was compelled to follow her as she walked toward Lexington Avenue, in the perfect light of autumn in New York, when the excesses of the city’s intolerable winters and summers seem almost forgiveable.
Now he shadowed her smoothly, fluidly, again the trained stalker. He watched her toss away her cigarette after only a couple of puffs — something that Tanya, seasoned to Moscow’s shortages, would never have done — and breeze into a busy department store. It was Bloomingdale’s. Sasha had been there with Lydia, but he didn’t use it on his laundry runs. It was too close to the Mission.
He hovered round the cosmetics counters for a while, and a pretty girl in a miniskirt and an off-the-shoulder blouse flounced up and invited him to sniff the cologne on her wrist, a new product the store was promoting.
He saw her take the escalator, down to the lower level.
When he caught up with her again, she was sifting through the nighties in the lingerie department. She inspected him casually as he crossed the floor, and the mocking tilt of her eyebrows, the way the corners of her mouth turned down as if she were suppressing a smile, were Tanya’s too. He felt the giddiness returning, and wheeled away to find himself confronting a dummy in bra and panties that had been arranged in a bizarrely suggestive squatting position, torso flung backwards, legs spread wide. This was not a part of the store where Sasha could easily melt into the background.
He smiled and mumbled, ‘Just browsing’ when a salesgirl came up and asked if he needed help. His accent wasn’t flawless like Nikolsky’s, but he sounded foreign in a nonspecific way. He could pass for a Dutchman, a Norwegian, a German. Only a trained ear might have detected, from the way he occasionally dropped the definite article, that he was Russian.
He consulted his watch. He still had nearly ninety minutes before his rendezvous in Queens. He stared at the girl and knew one thing for certain: he was not going to leave without speaking to her, without finding out who she was.
He grabbed a couple of negligées from a rack, one black and filmy, the other screaming pink and fluffy, and marched over to her.
He said, ‘Excuse me,’ and cleared his throat.
Her look was composed and noncommittal. It seemed to take in all of him, from the scuff on the toe of one shoe to the spot on the side of his chin where he had nicked himself shaving.
‘I have no experience of these things,’ he said to her. ‘I have to buy a present — it’s for my sister, actually — she looks quite a lot like you. Would you tell me which one you like best?’
Her glance shifted from Sasha to the negligées he was clutching in either fist like fish he had just landed. Her nose wrinkled at the spectacle of the pink one.
She frowned slightly, and a tiny line, like an exclamation mark, appeared between her eyebrows. She made a show of inspecting the labels. The corners of her mouth turned down, then up.
‘I’d say it all depends on whether your sister is going to wear this before or after her diet,’ she said.
‘Please?’ Sasha asked, genuinely baffled.
‘Spread them out,’ she told him. ‘Go on, spread them out.’
When he did so, he saw what she meant. The black negligee was at least four sizes bigger than the pink one.
Her laugh was light and bubbling, like Tanya’s. And just as infectious.
Sasha said, ‘I don’t suppose I could buy you a drink?’
She said, ‘My God, you didn’t take that course, did you?’
‘What course?’
‘Oh, I got a brochure in the mail. It’s an option in one of the adult education programs. “How to Pick Up Lovers in Bloomie’s.”’ Seeing the bewilderment in his face, she took pity on him. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I think you’re a live one. I just suppose we might have that drink.’
Chapter Four – Elaine
‘Passion cannot be beautiful without excess; one either loves too much, or not enough.’
Pascal, Pensées
Elaine Warner found nothing threatening in the way the stranger approached her in Bloomingdale’s. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Besides, this one appealed to her. She sensed a raw, primitive strength, yet his manners, and his clothes, were impeccable. He was intense, but in no way pushy. He was more than a head taller than her, although she was no shrimp, and she rather liked the sense of being enveloped. Lisa, her friend at the office, asked her once what she was looking for. ‘A civilized caveman,’ she replied, shocking Lisa, who had mild feminist inclinations. But Elaine hadn’t been making much progress. She spent the previous weekend by herself, following the sunlight around her loft like a cat, trying to find the words to finish a short story that was her way of cauterizing the wound left by her last wretched affair. It would probably never get finished; there wasn’t much of a story to begin with.
So she was glad to sit with this attractive stranger in the chi-chi eatery around the corner that seemed made for assignations arranged in Bloomie’s.
‘Elaine,’ she took the lead in introducing herself.
‘Alex.’ He shook her hand as formally as if she were standing in a reception line.
‘White wine spritzer,’ she said to the waiter. ‘With my head, that’s already serious business,’ she added for her companion’s benefit. There was an awkward pause.
‘At this stage,’ she said, ‘I think we’re supposed to ask what each other does for a living.’ The man’s eyes hadn’t moved from her face. It was such an odd look, as if he knew her already. ‘Why don’t I go first?’ Elaine went on. ‘I’m a librarian, sort of. I work for the X-Tech Corporation. I guess you heard of it? And I’m a writer, would be. As you’re aware, the population of Greater New York is entirely composed of writers and actors, most of them waiting for work. But I did get a piece published in New York magazine last month. On classic put-downs for use by single girls.’ This was shaping the truth a little. Her article had been entitled ‘On Growing Up Jewish in Great Neck.’ She wanted to see how he would react. He didn’t. He sat there stirring his cocktail, watching her.
‘Well,’ she prompted him. ‘How about you? Where are you from, anyway? I love your accent.’
‘Norway,’ he said, gambling that she hadn’t been there.
‘Oh, I’ve heard it’s beautiful.’
‘It’s extraordinary,’ he responded, trying to remember what Kolya Vlassov had said about his two years in Norway. ‘
There are as nearly as many boats as people in Oslo, and on Midsummer’s Night you can see them all in the fjord, lit up like Christmas trees, under the midnight sun.’
‘Is it like Sweden, all saunas and free love?’
‘Not quite like Sweden.’ He smiled at her.
‘Are you just visiting New York?’
‘I work at the United Nations.’
‘I’ve often wondered what goes on there.’
‘It’s really very dull,’ Sasha said. He parodied a recent committee session on the Law of the Sea, which he knew something about since Nikolsky had been the case officer for one of the Norwegian negotiators. He tried to be funny enough to hold the girl’s interest, without provoking too many questions.
Then he took the lead, drawing her out on her family, her ambitions to write the Great American Novel, her unsatisfactory relations with men.
‘My parents are divorced,’ she told him. ‘Twenty-six years of marriage, time to put the kids through college, then they quit. They weren’t exactly made for each other. My father grew up on the Lower East Side. The family was so poor they used to get hold of old phone books and tear them up for toilet paper. They came from Russia after one of the pogroms.’