by Robert Moss
He had been flattered when they asked him to join the school. They met once a month, in New York or the Washington suburbs, to play cards with a ten-cent limit and trade shop talk with no limit at all.
Luke Gladden was a charter member of the school, and Tom Regan liked him, despite his Southern accent and a family lineage that reached back to the battle of Shiloh and the sugar plantations. Born and bred in the Mississippi delta, Gladden had the patience and cunning of a riverman.
‘Play it long,’ he advised Regan after he had checked the Agency files. Preobrazhensky isn’t just one of the star operators in the GRU residency. He’s the son-in-law of Marshal Zotov.’
‘Marshal who?’
‘Zotov is one of the most powerful military men in the Soviet Union. He has access to everything. You can see what it means. If it’s played right, this could be more important than Penkovsky or Popov.’ These were two moles that the CIA had recruited and run inside Soviet military intelligence more than twenty years before, spies whose product had never been equalled since.
‘You know Murphy,’ Regan said. ‘He’s gung ho. He wants to move in right away. He’s got a point. The Soviet’s nearly at the end of his tour.’
Gladden looked at him thoughtfully. They were both aware that, once Sasha left the United States, the case would be turned over to the CIA. The territorial imperative would not allow Regan’s boss to let that happen without making every possible effort to bag a defector for the Bureau.
‘Have you got any handle on the girl?’ Gladden asked.
‘Only her job.’
‘It may not be enough if it’s really a romantic attachment.’
They were still talking about it when the others arrived to play poker. Somebody remarked that he had seen the KGB chauffeur from the Mission walking up to the Food Emporium on Third Avenue, tailed by a Chinese.
‘Oh, yeah?’ Regan said. ‘He’s one of ours.’
‘No kidding?’
‘They assigned him to Soviet CI because they figured that if the Soviets spot him, they’ll think the Red Chinese are breathing down their necks. He doesn’t speak Chinese anyway. He’s from San Francisco.’
*
Loving Sasha made Elaine intensely curious about her own roots. She started reading the Russian classics, and one afternoon of torrential rain she called the New School to ask about language classes.
‘The semester has already started,’ she was told. ‘But they’ll still accept you for the course if you show up for the Third Session tonight. You’ll need to register before five.’
At the first hint of rain, every taxi in New York seemed to be either off duty or on radio call. But Elaine managed to hijack one right in front of the X-Tech building, running ahead of a man from the bank next door. Living in Manhattan was a survival course.
The taxi driver was one of the talkative ones, a self-styled expert in palmistry who started displaying sketches he had made of celebrities who had ridden in his cab. Elaine let her mind drift until the driver’s voice was just background static. She didn’t see the car that pulled smoothly away from the curb behind them and kept a steady distance away from the cab as it made the loop and headed downtown.
‘Why don’t we do it, lady?’ said the man at the wheel. ‘It would be dynamic.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Your hands. Let me take a shot of your hands. Then I’ll send you the sketch for framing and the full analysis. Your whole life potential. I’ll make you a special price.’
‘Thanks. I think I’d rather not know my life potential.’
By the time they reached Twelfth Street, it was dark as if the sun had set. The gutters were streaming black rivers. The sidewalks were almost deserted. The rain had come like a storm in the desert, sweeping everything loose away.
The New School was a gray modernist structure where the courses ranged from Puffed Pastry to The Existence of God. Elaine hurried across a courtyard littered with curious bits of sculpture — a headless torso, another with the head of a ram — to a hall where she was shunted from one computer terminal to a second and on to the cashier and finally handed a printout of her course ticket.
The class began at 5:50 in a chalky seventh-floor room under gaunt strip lighting that turned everybody’s face gray. The rain, or the terrors of the course, had washed away all but four of the students. Elaine liked the teacher, a stocky survivor of a Soviet Pedagogical Institute. She wore a voluminous navy print dress and her hair was tied up in a bun. Elaine could imagine her roasting potatoes over a slow fire out on the steppes.
One of the male students complained about the difficulty of mastering certain Russian vowels. ‘Take the letter yerih. We don’t have that sound in English.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said the girl next to him. ‘You oughta come to Brooklyn sometime.’
Elaine had trouble figuring out the cyrillic alphabet, but she had a natural ear for pronunciation. Or perhaps it was the months of exposure to Sasha.
‘Ochen khorosho, Yelena,’ the teacher congratulated her after she recited her first sentence. ‘You can be a good spy.’
There was a false note in Elaine’s laugh, even though she knew this was only the teacher’s routine joke. She had asked Sasha some uncomfortable questions about Russia. Was it true, for example, that dissident writers had been charged with holding the same opinions as their fictional characters, as if Dostoyevsky had been put on trial for the actions of Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment? Was it true that the Soviets were building missiles faster than the Americans? But she had never asked him exactly what he did. If he wanted her to know, he would tell her. If not, well, she preferred not to think about it. But the furtive way that he came and went made her nervous. And lately, she had had the uneasy sensation that she was never completely alone. There was the odd way that Charlie Macdonough, the security man at X-Tech, had dropped by the library when she was working late, tidying her desk. Her ex-boyfriend, the married one, had called her out of the blue to say that someone was asking around about her. And there were those odd clicks on the phone.
The hands of the wall clock swung round to 7:30, and the class said their ritual good-byes in variously accented Russian. There was a jumble of people in the hall. Only one of the elevators was working. Elaine pattered down the stairs, wondering whether Sasha would call tonight. He remained the man on the pay phone. Sometimes he didn’t even call for two or three days at a time. Suppose there was an emergency? she had asked.
‘I’ll try to call you every day,’ he said. ‘But if for some reason I can’t reach you, and it really is an emergency, you can send a postcard to this box number.’ He had made her write it down. ‘Address it to Mister Green. Don’t sign your own name. It doesn’t matter what you write. “Wish you were here” will do fine.’
‘That’s original.’
‘Look, this isn’t a game. Promise me you won’t write unless it’s something really serious.’
‘How about if I need to make love to you?’
Even then, she hadn’t insisted on knowing his real business, although the word ‘spy’ occurred to her. It sounded naughty and glamorous. It made her think of the title of a James Bond movie: The Spy Who Loved Me. The trouble was, nothing was ever like the movies.
As she came out of the New School, she was debating whether to go uptown to Lincoln Center and see the Russian film they had been talking about in class. The teacher said it was mystical. The girl from Brooklyn complained that it was so slow you could see the paint drying on the walls. The pelting rain deterred her. She pulled her scarf over her hair, tightened the belt of her raincoat, and began to walk quickly in the direction of the Union Square subway.
A dark blue Oldsmobile pulled up level with her.
‘Miss Warner.’
She turned to look at the man who was leaning out the window on the passenger side. Under a shapeless hat, he had a face like a road map. She had never seen him before.
‘You’re getting drowned out ther
e. Why don’t we give you a lift?’
She couldn’t see the man who was driving. She felt terribly exposed, with the water sloshing against her overshoes and dripping down the back of her neck.
‘Who are you?’
‘We’re FBI Agents, Miss Warner. We’d like to talk with you. You’d really be more comfortable in the car.’
She started walking on up the street, with the blue Olds nosing along at her heels. But for the storm, the scene must have looked like somebody cruising a hooker.
‘Miss Warner?’ They pulled abreast of her again. ‘Would you rather we came to your office?’ The man on the street side held out his ID.
Oh, shit. She could just see Lisa’s face, and Charlie Macdonough’s, and the prim, straight-up-and-down supervisor’s when the FBI came tramping through the X-Tech library in their polished wingtips.
She got into the back seat of the car.
‘Am I under arrest or something?’
‘No, of course not,’ Tom Regan said. ‘We just need to ask you some questions about a friend of yours.’
*
‘Do the initials GRU mean anything to you, Miss Warner?’
Tom Regan was riding next to her in the back of the car. They were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, and the whirr of the traffic over the corrugated surface was like the noise of the planes in an old war movie.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘But you do know the meaning of the word “spy.”’
She stared out the window at the lights of lower Manhattan, blurred by the rain.
‘We know that Preobrazhensky asked you to obtain confidential company reports from the X-Tech Corporation,’ Regan said. ‘That’s not true!’ she protested.
‘Don’t make it hard on yourself, Miss Warner. You know that X-Tech is involved in sensitive Pentagon contracts.’
‘He never asked me about anything like that,’ she said fiercely, turning to face the FBI Agent. He didn’t insist.
‘How did you two get together?’
She told him the story of the meeting in Bloomie’s.
‘And you think that was just coincidence?’
‘Yes.
Regan looked at her doubtfully. ‘Does that kind of thing happen to you a lot?’
‘No it doesn’t. And if you’re going to ask me any more questions, aren’t you supposed to read me my rights, or something?’
‘This is just a friendly conversation,’ Regan said wearily. ‘Miss Warner, you’re an American citizen. Don’t you accept that you have certain responsibilities?’ In the old days he would have said ‘patriotic duties.’
‘You mean I’m not supposed to go out with a man if he happens to be a Russian?’ she mocked him.
‘Preobrazhensky isn’t any Russian. He’s a spy.’
‘What’s he supposed to have stolen?’
That’s what we’d like to know, Tom Regan thought. But he kept on the offensive. ‘He didn’t tell you his real job, did he? I’ll bet there are quite a few things he didn’t tell you.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Did he tell you he’s got a wife and kid?’
‘They’re in Moscow.’
‘Did he tell you he’ll be sent home in a couple of months?’
That shaft found its mark. She looked thrown. She said, ‘Stop the car.’
Regan looked around. They were in a dismal waterside district near the Brooklyn end of the bridge.
‘It’s not a pretty night to be walking around, Miss Warner.’
‘Please let me out.’
The car slowed to a halt, but Regan squeezed her arm tightly for a moment before releasing her. He said, ‘Ask him about it. He may not want to go home. He could be looking for an out. If he is, you know where to come.’
He gave her his card, with a phone number scrawled on the back.
‘We’ll talk some more,’ he promised. ‘I guess your place would be better than your office.’ The threat was there, beneath the surface of the words. They could get her fired.
But that wasn’t what she was thinking about as she scurried up the street like a water-rat toward the shelter of a drugstore. It was the rospect of Sasha leaving her life for good. And the fact that he hadn’t even told her.
When she got back to the loft, it was late, and she was soaked to the bone. She took a long, steaming hot bath and wondered whether he had called while she was out. She knew that she ought to warn him. She even considered sending a postcard to ‘Mister Green’ at the post office. But if she told him that she had been grilled by the FBI, she would risk scaring him away and losing everything. She took refuge for the rest of the evening in routine, regular things, in fancy soaps and warm towels, in TV commercials and Cheetos and Diet Pepsi — things that avoided strangeness and threw up walls, however thin, between herself and the terrors of Sasha’s world.
*
Luke Gladden said to Regan, ‘Let him go.’
‘But Murphy —’
‘Screw Murphy. Consider what we’ve got. The girl is seriously smitten, right?’
Regan didn’t contradict him.
‘And she’s already fired up by things Russian. Witness her course at the New School.’
‘What are you telling me, Luke?’
‘I’m saying that it doesn’t sound to me like the girl is going to give up. She could go after him.’
‘You mean in Moscow?’
‘Well?’
‘It’s a long shot, Luke. And once the Soviet leaves the States, he’s your bird. I guess that wasn’t something you’d entirely forgotten.’
Luke Gladden busied himself with tamping his pipe. A pipe was a remarkably useful prop when an awkward question came up. By the time you’d finished cleaning or tamping or lighting it, chances were the questioner would have gotten bored with waiting and moved on to something else.
‘I’m going to give it another crack,’ Tom Regan announced. ‘We could have a defector here.’
‘I hope you’re not going to pitch him direct,’ Gladden observed. ‘That might blow the girl’s usefulness. There was one Soviet spy who defected for love,’ he mused. ‘Agabekov. The very first intelligence defector. But he was a cross-eyed Armenian from Istanbul. I’m afraid it’s kind of gone out of style.’
*
The final weeks before his return to Moscow whirred past, as if the pages were being ripped from the calender in whole handfuls. It was hard for him to face what he knew would be the last meeting with Elaine. She had demanded nothing of him, not even false promises. He sensed the depth of her fear of losing him, and it worried him; he stepped warily around it, like a child afraid of a dark, breathing place in the woods.
‘I only live when I am with you,’ she had said, and then slipped away to do indifferent ordinary things so he wouldn’t feel obligated to respond. She was often like that, these past months, offering herself with the solemnity with which Petya might offer a seashell or a drawing he had made with crayons, then tiptoeing away, affecting not to notice how the gift was received.
She made me capable of loving again, he told himself. What was that line in the poem by Robert Frost she had quoted, the line she said reminded her of him? ‘I suffered like a metal being cast.’ Yes, he had been hardened, tempered — had sought to have the cold, clean edge of a blade — but not beyond understanding what he had sacrificed, in himself and in others, in the process.
He barely slept the night before that last rendezvous, and when he woke, his sheets were twisted and damp. He boarded the gray metal bus that shuttled members of the Mission to and from the Sovplex, and as the doors hissed shut, he felt he was already back in Moscow. He spent the morning cleaning out his work satchel, getting rid of everything his successor wouldn’t need. There, in one of the blue notebooks, were the dates of Ibrahim’s birthday and wedding anniversary. If you wanted to bind a man to you, he had learned, you should make sure to remember the day he was born and the day he was married. Agents are often lonely people. Sasha struck a
line across the page and scrawled his name along it, so it could be consigned, with the others, to the special stove that was kept in the referentura for the destruction of classified documents. This mechanical task helped calm him.
He took a walk at lunchtime and visited an Irish saloon, a couple of blocks east of the Mission, that Nikolsky had frequented. A man with a big, corrugated face positioned himself at the end of the bar and glanced at Sasha from time to time over the top of his beer. White shirt, close-cropped hair: the man had FBI written all over him. Sasha looked away, to a framed poster above the cash register recording the names of Republican patriots who had survived sentence of death by the British to become famous men in the New World.
Before Sasha had finished his cocktail, a second appeared, unasked for, at his elbow.
‘What’s this?’ he said to the bartender.
‘Gentleman there says he’d like to buy you a drink,’ said the barkeep.
‘Another time,’ Sasha said.
As he made his way to the door, Tom Regan said, ‘Bon voyage,’ just loud enough for him to hear.
Sasha didn’t pause. That was the FBI’s way, he knew. They liked to trail their coat in front of your face, to make you feel they had your number — and to make sure you knew where to turn if you ever thought of defecting.
Defection. It was a sour word in any language, Sasha thought, as he headed west before turning up Park Avenue, where a sign in front of a church announced a sermon on the theme of ‘Adam and Fallen Man.’ He stared across the wide expanse of the avenue, at the water towers above the rooftops, ranging from functional horrors to rococo follies, that were part of the variety and mystery of Elaine’s city. And the thought flicked at him, like a lizard’s tongue, Can this be my city too?