by Robert Moss
Nikolsky’s suspicions increased after he spun his line about how he worked for an international news syndicate that was extremely interested in exposing the CIA’s involvement with South Africa and Israel, and would be willing to pay generously for any first-hand insights that Hansen could offer. The ex-CIA man didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even ask for Nikolsky’s credentials. He just said, ‘Sure. Tell me what you need to know.’
At a subsequent meeting, when Feliks raised the subject of Hansen’s book, the American was equally responsive to the idea of inserting a section that would name names of CIA operatives around the world. It was all too easy, Feliks kept thinking. He even wondered if Hansen was wired.
‘You’re quiet tonight,’ Sasha jogged him after a few drinks.
‘Look who’s talking,’ Feliks responded. ‘You usually make the sphinx sound talkative. If you really must know, General, I’m worried about my dog. He hasn’t been meeting any girls lately. He’s horny as hell, and so am I.’
Sasha guessed at once that Feliks must have an operational problem. That was the one kind of secret he would never share. They looked at each other over the rims of their glasses.
‘You remember Mashka? My little witch?’
‘Of course,’ Sasha acknowledged.
‘She’s still working in the Novosti office. Can you believe it? It’s driving me wild.’
‘Why don’t you ask her to go?’
‘I did, but she won’t leave. You know I can’t push.’ He tossed off his drink and called for another. ‘Hell hath no fury,’ he quoted in English, ‘and all that. Well, here’s to you, General. The man without vices.’
They drank, and Feliks said, ‘How’s your Lidochka?’
‘In Moscow.’
‘I thought she left weeks and weeks ago. Oh,’ he interrupted himself, ‘so it’s like that. You haven’t been chasing skirts without telling your Uncle Feliks, have you?’
‘I think I’ll take some leave in Moscow myself,’ Sasha observed, to deflect Nikolsky. He wasn’t going to deliver any hostages, not even to Feliks.
‘I suppose Lydia takes after her father,’ Nikolsky went on. ‘That’s a lot to handle.’
Sasha said nothing.
‘I don’t suppose I told you that Marshal Zotov is one of my heroes,’ Feliks continued, undeterred.
‘Is this another of your jokes?’
‘No, no, I’m completely serious. There are stories about Zotov, you know. They say that when Stalin died — No —’ He put a finger to his lips like a stage ham. ‘You’d better ask him yourself.’
‘Ask him what?’
‘Ask him about Beria.’ After a quarter of a century, the name of Stalin’s secret police chief still cast a shadow. ‘Ask him to tell you how Beria died.’
*
Sasha returned to Moscow to find the Marshal’s apartment in the Visotny Dom deserted. There was a curt note from Lydia to inform him that she had taken Petya to her father’s summer retreat in the Crimea, a villa near the Romanov palace at Livadia. ‘Come if you like,’ the note ended offhandedly. Sasha smelled new trouble.
He had to use his headquarters connections to get a seat on a scheduled flight from Moscow to Simferopol. There were scalpers at the airport quite openly offering to buy confirmed seats. From the city, it was an hour’s ride in a clanking taxi to the coastal resorts. Sasha rolled down his window, loosened his collar, and let the breeze fan his face and neck. Despite the heat, the day was perfect. The air was clean and dry and carried the smell of ripening grapes and magnolias. The contours of mountains and woods were sharply defined. Lombardy poplars marched in lines across the slopes like Tatar warriors in pointed caps.
The palace of white limestone built at Livadia for the last of the Tsars shimmered in the afternoon light. Its columned balconies overlooked the shining waters of the Black Sea and great triangular flowerbeds embellished with ancient Greek marbles. The place where Alexander III had come to die and Nicholas and Alexandra to dance away their fears was now a museum of the people. From the clifftop palace you could take an elevator that descended through tunnels bored in the rock to the beach below.
Few of the villas around Livadia were equally accessible. At nearby Chernomorye was a luxurious establishment used as a hotel by senior officials of the KGB. At Pogranishnik, the KGB Border Guards, a private army charged with preventing anyone leaving or entering the country without permission, had a resort of their own. A short drive away, through the vineyards and rose gardens, was one of the General Secretary’s personal retreats. There was a palatial building without a name or identifying sign that was reserved for members of the Central Committee. There were few signs of security around these pleasure-domes, but a curious visitor who strayed too close to any of them would be met by athletic young men in civilian clothes whose duty was to uphold one of the cardinal rules of Soviet democracy: privilege is not for public show.
The marshals and the generals had not been forgotten. Cadets from Simfi and conscripts supplied by the chief of the Military District were engaged in transplanting trees and laying a new path as Sasha drove up to Marshal Zotov’s villa. He had to leave the taxi at the gate and subject to two identity checks — the first by one of those polite young men in sports clothes, the other by a uniformed guard — before they let him through. There were running fountains on both sides of the drive, and in front of the large, Italianate mansion, stone sphinxes faced each other enigmatically from opposite ends of a wide terrace. The smell of roses was everywhere.
He found Lydia and the child in the glass-walled loggia facing the sea. In no time at all, Petya had his legs around Sasha’s neck and was making his father piggyback him around the garden while he let out Indian war-whoops. Lydia seemed friendly and relaxed, though a little absent. Perhaps the sun and the sea air were helping her to forget the storms of New York.
The Marshal did not appear until dinnertime, and his behavior was ominous.
‘Have you left the army?’ he growled at his son-in-law, who was wearing civilian clothes. The Marshal was kitted out in full summer dress uniform. Most of his face was an angry red; he had the kind of skin that never really tans.
Sasha mumbled an apology.
‘I expect a Soviet officer to look like one at all times,’ Zotov said. ‘I told you that when we first met.’
After this dampener, they ate in silence for most of the meal. There was sturgeon, of course, the Marshal’s favorite dish. Orderlies in white jackets moved back and forth with the regularity of pendulums, adding and removing plates, refilling wine glasses with the excellent local champagne. It was a shame that they hadn’t allowed Petya to stay up, Sasha thought. The child’s presence always seemed to soften the old man.
As soon as the last plates were cleared, Zotov dismissed both his daughter and the orderlies and demanded point-blank: ‘Well, what’s happened between you and Lydia? Is it another woman?’
‘No,’ Sasha said, looking him directly in the eye. That had been true at the outset, anyway.
‘Pizdish?’ the Marshal responded skeptically in his low, rumbling voice. When Zotov was angry, you could hear the earth move.
‘Then what?’ the Marshal roared at Sasha. ‘Lydia came back to Moscow in tears. She went on blubbering until I brought her down here. Is the fat life in America going to your brain? Well? Is it this?’ Zotov took the bottle of Armenian brandy from the sideboard and waved it around in his great paw.
‘We’ve had some differences,’ Sasha began, stepping gingerly out onto the minefield. ‘I think perhaps Lyda expected too much in New York. She wasn’t prepared for the problems of life in a large diplomatic colony. I think she presumed too much on your name.’
‘Ne pizdi!’ the Marshal snorted.
Sasha did not tell the Marshal about the problem he had had with Churkhin, the man propelled by jealousy to denounce him to the KGB. Instead, he mentioned trivial things, like the fact that Lydia, the week before leaving for Moscow, had prevailed upon the wives of two of h
is Residency colleagues to serve as cooks for a dinner party. The Marshal nodded; this was something he understood. You didn’t walk on the faces of brother officers for no good reason.
‘What else?’ he demanded.
Sasha told him how Lydia had been promoting a stupid feud with Askyerov and his wife. During a movie screening, at the Mission, she had actually had the gall to go up to them and tell them they were in the wrong seats, that that was where she normally sat. Sasha had skipped the screening to meet Elaine, pleading operational duties, but he had heard the story later.
‘So what?’ Marshal Zotov remarked.
‘It’s simply not necessary. It creates problems for both of us. This Counsellor is the son of Gussein Askyerov.’
Zotov was not impressed by this reference to the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan.
‘I don’t give a shit about that black-ass,’ he commented. Chernozhopi, ‘black-ass,’ was one of his customary terms of endearment for his Caucasian brethren — Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, the whole patchwork quilt. The Marshal was not a man for fine distinctions.
Quietly, patiently, Sasha attempted to explain that the Azerbaijani Party boss was a man to watch, and that his son commanded a certain amount of respect within the Soviet community in New York because of the family connection.
Zotov was puzzled. After all, Baku was a long way from Moscow. Askyerov had influence, of course, but he wasn’t even an alternate member of the Politburo. In defiance of his doctors, the Marshal poured himself a good slug of Akhtamar brandy. That was one thing you couldn’t fault the Armenians for — their brandy.
‘Allright,’ Zotov said. ‘So Lyda put young Askyerov in his place. Good. No doubt he had it coming. What I can’t fathom is why you want to go crawling to that fucking Turk. You’re a Russian officer.’
This was a slip of the tongue, of course, due to the brandy, perhaps, or the ghosts of Livadia. It wasn’t acceptable to talk about ‘Russian officers.’ Nationalism was supposed to be extinct.
‘I think you may have missed something,’ Sasha said evenly. ‘Gussein Askyerov is a man on the way up. In America, even Lessiovsky, even Dobrynin, speak of him with respect. As for the Committee — well, with Andropov and Tsvigun, he’s like that.’ Sasha knitted his fingers together. ‘And I’ve heard that Brezhnev decided he’s the best administrator in the country since he started sending a special plane loaded up with gifts from Baku to Moscow every week.’
This was a daring shaft, and the Marshal pretended it had gone wide. He had his lapses, but nobody, not even Lydia, had heard him criticize the General Secretary — not in Stalin’s time, not in Khrushchev’s, not in Brezhnev’s. The Marshal’s restraint did not extend to lesser members of the Party hierarchy. He wasn’t frightened of Askyerov. But now he wanted to hear more.
‘How do you know these things?’ he demanded of Sasha.
‘I have a colleague who was in Baku,’ Sasha lied. His information on the Askyerov family came exclusively from Nikolsky, but he was not going to let on that he had a friend in the KGB. Not yet, anyway.
He told the story of the rise of Gussein Askyerov as he had heard it from Feliks. The Azerbaijani’s first claim to office was that he cooked excellent shashlik. At the start of the Patriotic War, Askyerov was a young Komsomol organizer, an Azerbaijani version of Suchko. His experience in keeping card-index files on his comrades made him a natural recruit for the military chekists of SMERSH when they arrived in the region to sniff out spies and traitors in uniform and out of it.
Askyerov made a good impression: eager to please, well groomed, his vivid blue eyes making a striking contrast with his sleek black hair. Tsvigun, the chekist who arrived to take charge of the local SMERSH organization, had a taste for local dishes, especially shash-lik. While he roamed the countryside carrying out his patriotic duties on the ‘invisible front’ — such as herding frightened conscripts into battle by putting machine guns at their backs — young Askyerov cooked his dinner and waited to take dictation. ‘They were as close as two lumps on a skewer,’ was how Feliks had put it. Askyerov’s culinary prowess paid off handsomely. After the war, Tsvigun returned to Azerbaijan as chief of the regional KGB. Within six months, he made Askyerov his number two. And the ascent of the shishkebab man was only beginning.
When Brezhnev came to the top, he called Tsvigun, his in-law and his crony from the old days in the Ukraine, to Moscow to serve as the real power inside the KGB, and Tsvigun, in turn, fixed it for Gussein Askyerov to take over as security boss in Azerbaijan.
‘Askyerov didn’t waste a single day.’ Sasha recounted. He started sending lavish consignments of caviar, fresh sturgeons, silks, and crates of exotic fruits to Moscow every week for the enjoyment of his patrons. When they came south, he arranged hunting trips and banquets worthy of an oriental potentate. He supplied women and ‘business opportunities,’ of which there was no shortage in Baku, the city of souks, oil derricks, and black market millionaires.
At the same time, he thrust himself forward as the arch-enemy of official corruption in Azerbaijan. Week by week, along with the caviar, he sent his protector, Tsvigun, dossiers that demonstrated how his nominal boss, the First Secretary of the Azerbaijani Party, was skimming the profits of the black market trade. This First Secretary was too greedy to be smart. He appropriated government money for construction projects that were never even begun, and used the men and materials to put up country dachas for himself and his friends. Anyone could see what was happening. It wasn’t hard for Askyerov to make his case. After a while, Tsvigun took the files to Brezhnev, who authorized a follow-up investigation, with the indispensable Askyerov in charge. Of course, everyone knew that Askyerov was involved in the same rackets, but he was a lot smarter than his boss. He was the model of discretion. He collected his pay-offs in person, in hard currency and precious stones. He had a special affection for blocks of pressed diamonds, a popular means of exchange amongst the high rollers of Baku.
‘These bloody cockroaches,’ Marshal Zotov interjected. Tarakani, or ‘cockroaches,’ was another of his familiar terms for Soviet Caucasians. The etymology of the word had to do with the wearing of a moustache. As a matter of fact, Gussein Askyerov was clean-shaven.
‘Get on with it,’ the Marshal ordered.
‘Swamped by the flood of paper from Askyerov’s office in Baku,’ Sasha went on, ‘Brezhnev decided to get rid of the local First Secretary. This would demonstrate, after all, that our rulers are determined to stamp out corruption. All that remained to decide was who to make the new Party leader. The power of shashlik was proved again. Tsvigun proposed to elevate Askyerov. Why not? He was a good Party man, loyal to the hand that fed him. So Askyerov became First Secretary, and he proved his loyalty at once. He increased the special flights to Moscow, to carry the tokens of his appreciation to Leonid Ilyich and all his new customers.’
‘Very well, very well,’ the Marshal cut in. He didn’t like these references to the General Secretary. Better to leave him out. ‘I knew some of this already. He’s an oily sonofabitch, no doubt of it. What else does your friend have to say about him?’
‘There are rumors —’
‘What rumors?’
‘It’s said that he has succeeded in making Andropov his friend too.’
‘And if it’s so?’ The Marshal returned to the brandy bottle. Instead of sitting down again, he began to pace the long, marble-floored dining room, hung with nineteenth-century hunting scenes.
‘This is the important thing, Alexei Ivanovich,’ Sasha went on. ‘Everyone can see that the General Secretary is very sick, a dying man —’
‘Are you going to tell him or am I?’ Zotov broke in sarcastically.
‘Suppose that Andropov takes over,’ Sasha pursued.
‘He won’t,’ the Marshal said firmly. Zotov had long been persuaded that the Chairman of the KGB was Jewish. It was reported that, on his mother’s side, Andropov’s family name was Erinshteyin which, if true, would have
made him a Jew in the rabbinical sense, eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. This, however, was not his main objection to the idea of Andropov assuming the General Secretary’s mantle. Andropov, like the others in line for the highest office in the country, was a Party man, not a career KGB official. Yet he also represented the authority of the KGB. His appointment to succeed Brezhnev would profoundly disturb the balance between the triumvirate of Party, KGB, and army.
‘If Andropov takes over,’ Sasha persisted, ‘Askyerov will come to Moscow. That’s why we have to take him seriously. I can’t explain it in detail, because there are things I don’t know yet, bits that are missing. The man has the gift of making others depend on him. Somehow, he’s succeeded with Andropov, just as he succeeded with Tsvigun earlier on. If Andropov takes over,’ he repeated, ‘Askyerov is going to be a force to be reckoned with, perhaps KGB Chairman, perhaps something even more important.’
The thought of a former KGB Chairman running the country, with a former KGB professional at his right hand, was too much for the Marshal.
‘Never again!’ he thundered. ‘Never again!’
This outburst left Sasha somewhat confused. He followed the Marshal, who had flung open the french doors at the end of the room and stormed out into the rose garden. Outside, the moon was bright silver and the sea looked as black as its name.
‘Alexei Ivanovich,’ Sasha addressed him when he had drawn almost level. ‘What did you mean when you said, Never again?’
‘It would be the same as before. The same as with Beria,’ Zotov said slowly, staring out across the water.
Sasha felt a thrill of anticipation. This was what Feliks had hinted at during their last conversation in New York.