by Robert Moss
‘I heard something about it — about Beria’s death,’ Sasha prompted him.
The Marshal’s face clouded. ‘Oh, you did? I never realized you had such big ears, Sasha. You hear all sorts of things. What exactly did you hear about Beria’s death?’
‘That perhaps you had something to do with it.’ Sasha backed away a little, realizing he might have gone too far.
Zotov thrust his empty goblet at him. ‘Fill that up for me,’ he said.
*
Out there in the rose garden, alone with his great arms folded across his chest, Zotov could see the whole scene clearly. He was nearly thirty years younger, and could drink a bottle or two of his beloved Akhtamar brandy and still love a woman afterwards.
Stalin was dead, people were weeping openly all over Moscow, and Lavrenti Beria, that twisted sadist, lover ofunderage girls, that Mengrel whom Stalin had brought from his native Georgia to command the secret police and direct his last purges, was preparing to install himself as a dictator. Beria was parading his pretorian guards, with tanks and machine guns, in the heart of the capital to show who was boss. During his night vigils in the Lubyanka— they were all insomniacs, under Stalin — he was drawing up lists of the next of the Party faithful who would be struck down once his succession was rubber-stamped.
Beria was not an idiot; he was aware that he was not universally loved, and was fully alive to the risk of a counterstrike. His spies were watching the ‘court divisions’ the 2nd guards Taman Motorized Infantry Division and the Kantemirov Tank Division — which composed the Moscow garrison. Major-General Zotov, as he then was, was at the headquarters of the Air Defense troops for the Moscow region. It was a good listening post, not least because, in those days, the chekists didn’t seem to think that the Air Defense units were worth spying on too closely.
It was Marshal Zhukov who got wind of the fact that Beria had issued a secret order, bypassing the General Staff, to the southern military districts. Units of Caucasian troops — ‘wild divisions,’ they were called by the high command — were to be rushed to the capital by rail. With these additional troops, who wouldn’t give a shit about firing on Russians and for the most part didn’t even understand Russian, Beria’s power would be unassailable.
Marshal Zhukov started passing the word around, and once Beria’s rivals in the Party leadership found out what was going on, they formed a cabal. Secretly, orders were issued to immobilize Beria’s forces and place the secret police chief under arrest. Marshal Zhukov and the Army were only too happy to oblige. The troop trains from the Caucasus were intercepted near Moscow, and Beria’s ‘wild divisions’ were disarmed at gunpoint.
Inside the capital, the Air Defense units were the spearhead for the countercoup. Zotov personally supervised the group that seized Beria in his office and dragged him away to the Butyrki prison. Beria seemed to be living in some parallel world. During his first hours in his cell, he hectored and shrieked at his jailers, demanding a hot bath, the best food and wine, even girls — very young ones, the way he liked — as if he were still lording it from his suite in the Lubyanka. When the guards refused, he tried threats. ‘You can’t begin to imagine what will be done to you as soon as I get out of here,’ he yelled. Then he tried bribes and blandishments. Over and over, he kept calling for the man in charge.
He got Zotov. Major-General Zotov arrived at Butyrki prison with a document in his pocket, drawn up in the proper way, that recorded that Beria had been tried in absentia and sentenced to death by firing squad. The sentence was confirmed by the rest of the Politburo, including the men Beria had counted on to raise him to Stalin’s place.
When the bull-like Zotov entered his cell, in full uniform with his cap on his head and his pistol at his hip, Beria puffed himself up, the way little men do, and declaimed, ‘I am a full member of the Politburo. Serious illegalities have been committed, and it is your duty as a general of the Soviet Armed Forces to arrange for my immediate release.’
Zotov found this so amusing that he couldn’t refrain from laughing in Beria’s face.
Beria should have known that the worst was in store, or else why was he having to deal with an army general, instead of one of his own Party brethren, or even a fellow checkist? But his mind seemed to veer off into that parallel world of his.
‘Listen to me,’ Beria said. ‘If you help me, you’ll be rewarded beyond your highest ambitions. I don’t know who gave you your orders, but he’s finished. You hear me? They’re washed up, all of them. Just get me out of here, and I’ll remember you. I’ll make you a Marshal of the Soviet Union. Just like that. All it will take is my signature.’
Zotov stopped laughing. He stood there, impassive, feet planted apart, studying this man whose name had sown terror through the whole country.
‘Well then.’ Beria tried a different tack. He leered as he said, ‘You ought to consider your family. You can’t imagine the things I can have done to them — ‘
The reason Beria broke off was that no sooner had he threatened to harm Zotov’s family — which, to Zotov, meant Lydia, then a cherubic little girl in pigtails — than the general went grabbing for his pistol. Everyone in Russia had a friend or a relative who had suffered at the hands of this monster.
‘I’ll make you a Marshal!’ Beria screamed as he looked down the snout of Zotov’s gun. The real world was at last beginning to intrude.
‘Don’t worry yourself about it, Citizen,’ said Zotov in his low, rough voice, the words dragging like boots over gravel. ‘I’ll be a Marshal without any help from you.’
Then he watched the man who had held Russia by the throat rolling around on the stone floor, squealing, squirming, begging for life. The sour smell of urine assailed his nostrils.
Zotov had intended to haul Beria to his feet and hand him over to the guards. But the threat to his family had made him ready to kill. Now the spectacle in front of him filled him with such intense disgust that he resolved to put an end to it.
The former master of the Lubyanka had curled into a fetal position. Zotov stooped over him, jammed the gun into the nape of his neck, and fired once.
Afterwards, nobody criticized him for overzealousness in the execution of his orders. Beria’s rivals were relieved, not only that the monster was dead, but that he had been dispatched in absolute secrecy. Before the year was out, Zotov received a promotion and a new decoration. Thirty years on, there weren’t many men left in Moscow who knew the truth of how Beria had died. Had it been otherwise, Zotov’s further ascent might have been a harder climb. The Party had reason to be wary of a soldier who killed one of its own, even if he had a license.
Marshal Zotov looked around, and found Sasha at his elbow with the brandy.
‘Ah, thank you. So people still talk about Beria, do they? Yes, I had something to do with it. But that’s all ancient history.’ He took Sasha’s arm. ‘Now I want to ask you a few things about the Americans...’
*
When Sasha left Moscow, Lydia stayed behind. Their marriage hadn’t broken down in any definitive way; they were simply taking their distance from each other. On the Black Sea, they had shared the same bed and he had made love to her dutifully. He felt sure that Lydia understood what had happened. Women always do. He was grateful that she didn’t ask any direct questions. But the Marshal, at least, was content. Beneath all the bluster, Sasha suspected, he was a profoundly solitary man, and he was delighted to have repossessed his daughter and his grandson. ‘He’s the spitting image of his grandfather!’ Zotov bellowed, bouncing Petya on his knee. ‘Blood will tell!’ Sasha felt that a new bond had been established between them that first night at Livadia. It was a bond he could build on. Before Sasha left, Zotov said to him, ‘I want you to keep me informed. I want you to be my eyes and ears, even in New York.’ And then: ‘I have great plans for you.’
Back in Manhattan, he waited a couple of days before calling Elaine. She sounded tense and withdrawn.
She said, ‘I’d just about given you up.�
�
She met him at the door to her loft in a diaphanous wrap, and he was desperate to have her. But she fenced with him, slipping away from his embrace, provoking him but holding him in check. He had never wanted a woman so much, not even Tanya.
‘So, how was Oslo?’ she asked, and he had to waste time improvising elaborate fictions about a country he had never visited while she poured wine and taunted him from a distance.
Finally, when it became unbearable, he seized her and pressed her close against him, letting her feel his desire, tearing at the fastening of her wrap. He felt her body arch, fitting the contours of his own. Then she broke away.
‘Elaine?’
‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ she excused herself. But he could sense that there was something more that was holding her back.
She was gone for what seemed like a long time. For a while, he stretched out on the bed, listening to the rush of water from the shower and the muted noise of a party somewhere nearby, the music reduced to a primal thumping. At least they had time tonight, with Lydia in Moscow. The last few times he had been with Elaine, he had been conscious of her growing more and more tense after they made love, as if she sensed time wearing down to his departure like sand running through an hourglass.
He started to play with the TV set, flicking from channel to channel. The variety of American television, like the variety of American brand names, continued to astonish him. He watched a commercial for a product that was supposed to reduce hemorrhoidal pain. Then the network news came on, and Brezhnev’s meaty face loomed up on the screen. Sasha turned up the volume.
‘Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev has reportedly suffered a stroke,’ the newsman was saying. ‘Now, for a special report on the men in line to succeed him.’
The cameras switched to a studio discussion between a network correspondent and a man with a bow-tie and flesh-colored rims to his glasses who was described as an expert on the Soviet scene. The expert explained to the correspondent that there was a secret war going on in the Politburo between hawks and doves, and that the most crucial thing was that the West should not take any action that might assist the hawks. Then came a good deal of talk about who had stood next to whom on the podium during the last big parade in Red Square.
Sasha, frustrated by Elaine’s continued absence, swore under his breath. These so-called Western experts were all alike, he thought. They were forever making the same mistakes, mirror-imaging, using their psychology to explain the Soviets, trying to make everything fit in with their preconceptions.
The studio chat continued while photographs of Brezhnev’s possible successors appeared on the screen.
And there he was, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, with his decorations pinned to his lapel. Why was he only the fourth candidate to be mentioned? What did the expert have to say?
‘Andropov can be safely ruled out at the present time,’ the man in flesh-colored frames said with professorial confidence, ‘because of the stigma associated with running the secret police.’
‘Eto polneyshaya yerunda!’ Sasha exploded in Russian, just as Elaine came back into the bedroom in her terrycloth bathrobe. ‘That’s rubbish!’
‘Is that Norwegian?’ she asked, and he thought there was something wrong about the way she said it.
He switched off the television and opened his arms to her. But she slipped away from him again and turned on the overhead light. It gave the big whitewalled loft a mortuary pallor.
She studied him clinically. Then she said, ‘I don’t even know who you are.’
In the silence, they could hear the beat of the music from the building across the way, blind and insistent.
‘You know all of me,’ she reproached him with a gesture that embraced her one-eyed teddy bear, her framed snapshots of family and college friends, her decoy ducks on the ledge overlooking a converted warehouse. ‘And I don’t even know what language you speak.’
‘I thought you said your family didn’t speak Russian at home,’ he said quietly.
There. It was done. He felt that a burden had been lifted from him.
‘You knew all along, didn’t you?’ he said to her.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Are you telling me you’re Russian?’
Her innocence seemed genuine. ‘Yes, I’m Russian,’ he responded.
‘I’m a Soviet diplomat.’
‘Is that what you were keeping from me?’ Her expression surprised him. She looked almost relieved. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I was afraid — afraid you might be scared away.’
‘I don’t scare all that easily. In case you hadn’t noticed.’
He took her hand and said, ‘I couldn’t be sure, not at the beginning. You know, a lot of Americans seem to think that Russians have tails and cloven hooves. You can’t blame me for thinking you might have been scared if I’d told you right away.’
She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips.
Sasha was amazed by how calmly she was taking it. ‘You understand that I’m breaking the rules,’ he went on unnecessarily. ‘We’re strictly forbidden to get involved with foreigners.’
Her hands moved over his chest. ‘So you weren’t in Oslo,’ she murmured.
‘No, not Oslo.’
‘And your name isn’t Alex.’
‘Almost. It’s Alexander Sergeyovich Preobrazhensky. But you call me Sasha.’
‘What else did you lie to me about?’ Her fingernails pressed into the flesh above his navel. ‘You told me you were separated,’ she reminded him. ‘Was that a lie too?’
‘No. She’s in Moscow. There’s nothing between us.’
‘Except your child. Peter.’
‘Petya,’ he translated.
‘So there’ll always be something between you.’
She looked into his eyes. They never told you what he felt. Instead, they threatened to draw you into a mystery. She said, ‘You’re not going to leave them, are you?’
He met her gaze. ‘I don’t think so. Not in the way you mean.’ He hugged her to his chest. ‘But I’m not going to leave you either.’
*
Colonel Drinov was tremendously excited when he called Nikolsky in to see him.
‘I’ve been studying your reports on Hansen,’ he said. Nikolsky had outlined a plan for using the former CIA man to expose the names of officers and agents of his former organization all over the world.
‘As an active measures operation, it’s first rate,’ Drinov said. ‘Absolutely first rate. But I see two problems.’
You don’t need to drag the nose to the cunt, Nikolsky cursed inwardly. He had an inkling of what was coming.
‘First of all,’ Drinov continued, ‘if Hansen writes the book the way you suggest, without getting approval from Langley — which is naturally out of the question —’
‘Naturally.’
‘He would expose himself to legal reprisals. They might even try to put him in jail.’
‘It’s his lookout,’ Nikolsky observed. He didn’t like or trust Hansen. ‘He can always go and live abroad.’
‘It’s a possibility. But there’s another consideration. Hansen hasn’t gone public yet. I think we should keep it that way. He wasn’t fired from the CIA, he left as an officer in good standing. Isn’t that right?’
‘That’s what he says. We also know he fought with his station chief, and there were those marriage complications.’
‘That happens in the best-regulated families,’ Drinov said beatifically. ‘My point is, we shouldn’t regard Hansen as a burnt-out case. Langley is already reeling from all the scandals and exposes. Another CIA man denouncing his service’s activities...Well, it’s old hat. There are more useful things we can do with Hansen.’
‘For example?’
‘A job with a security clearance. Come on, what do you think?’
‘You mean, ask him to go back to working for the government? I’m not sure the CIA would take him back. Then there’s the problem of the polygr
aph.’
‘The Americans have an exaggerated reverence for lie detectors. Not everybody’s sweat glands work the same. Anyway, it doesn’t have to be the CIA. Some other government department, perhaps. Or one of the congressional committees. In any case, you needn’t trouble yourself about it.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘Feliks, you’ve done an excellent job. I’ll see that you get your share of the credit, don’t worry yourself about that. I’m taking over the case myself. What higher tribute could I pay you than that? Come on, don’t take it like that. You know perfectly well this belongs to KR Line. We’re talking about a possible penetration of the CIA.’
Nikolsky could hardly contain himself. Drinov was a common thief, stealing an agent who didn’t belong to him. An agent, furthermore, of unknown reliability. It was just as well that Feliks’ blood-sugar count was low that morning, otherwise he might have erupted more forcibly. Since he had stumbled out of bed, a couplet from one of Vissotsky’s ballads had been running through his head: ‘My nerves aren’t stretched taut/ My nerves hang down like a washing line.’
He stole a cigarette from the pack on Drinov’s desk.
‘Look, I know I may be sticking my neck out, but I’m sure you’re making a mistake. Hansen hasn’t proven himself yet.’
‘What are you talking about? He’s been meeting you, hasn’t he? He’s already compromised. And I made sure of it, believe me. Kostya was covering you on every one of those meetings. We’re sure Hansen was clean.’
‘How do you know he wasn’t wired?’
‘Now, listen to me, Feliks Nikolayich.’ Drinov’s tone switched from coaxing to something approaching a snarl. ‘That’s my business, not yours. You can complain about it as much as you like, but everything has been settled with the Center. All you have to do is arrange to introduce me.’
‘You’re going to handle this in person?’ Nikolsky burst out, astonished.
‘And why not?’ said Drinov, becoming friendlier again now that Feliks’ protests appeared to have subsided. ‘These Americans are a piece of cake. Did you hear what happened in Mexico?’ He had evidently concluded that taking Nikolsky into his confidence would serve to mollify him. ‘It was a near disaster. Two of our Illegals were picked up.’