The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  Austen and Timmler were standing against the opposite wall. There were only the three of them in the room, which made it crowded enough. Storey regarded them with an expression of mournful apology.

  “How much do you know?” he asked finally.

  Austen merely shrugged. “Enough to have committed a federal crime in bringing you here. Enough to guarantee you’ll never leave this building alive if you can’t be induced to tell me the rest.”

  “Then you might as well just kill me now, because I’m a dead man if I say a word. Diederich will see to that.” He balled his hand into a fist and began beating it weakly against his thigh, all the time shaking with huge, gulping sobs. Austen took a glass of water from the small table next to him, holding it out with the tips of his fingers.

  “Take a drink and compose yourself,” he said quietly. “Tell me the truth, and I’ll see to it you won’t have to worry about Diederich. I don’t care anything at all about you; your safety lies in your unimportance.”

  “Diederich will kill you.”

  “He’s already tried—or don’t you remember?”

  The grin on Austen’s face was perfectly demonic—an effect that was heightened by the huge black bruise sitting over his left cheekbone—and Storey’s eyes grew wide and blank. For a moment he even forgot to cry.

  “I’ll do what I can for you,” Austen continued, suddenly as mirthless as an undertaker. “I won’t make any guarantees beyond simply your life, because I won’t know what’s involved until you tell me. But you have to choose sides now; it’s either me or Diederich, and I’m the one currently in possession. You think about it. We’ll talk again this evening.”

  “Do you suppose he’ll go for it?” Timmler asked as they trudged back up the stairs to the main house. It was like coming up out of a grave.

  “Sure he’ll go for it. He’s the head of one of the largest banks in the country, so he must have some sense of how the world works. And after all, we’re the only game in town.”

  . . . . .

  They were at dinner, just finishing their coffee, when an attendant stood respectfully on the edge of the carpet of the small, elegant wood paneled room where their table had been laid.

  “He’s asked to speak to you, sir,” he said, as soon as Austen glanced in his direction. He looked as if he expected the Director to pitch something at him and was just getting ready to duck.

  “Very well. Put him in a larger room, one where we can all sit down, and make sure he’s had something to eat.”

  “He’s had his dinner, sir, just an hour ago.”

  “Fine.”

  When they went downstairs again, they found Storey seated on a small wooden chair, staring at the tape recorder that had been set up on a table against one wall. There was an attendant with him, standing next to the door, trying to look like he was in the room alone.

  “You can leave us now,” Timmler said flatly. He closed the door behind him after checking the corridor to make sure no one was there to listen. It seemed a reasonable precaution. Then, apparently as an afterthought, he stepped over to the table and snapped on the tape recorder. All the while, Storey watched him through narrow, suspicious eyes.

  “I’ve been thinking it over, like you recommended,” he said at last, several seconds after both Austen and Timmler had taken their seats. “I had a nice life once, but I suppose that’s all finished now. I stopped caring about which side I was on a long time ago; I only wanted to hang on to my nice life. After all, I’d built it. It was mine. At least, it was mine before Howard Diederich found me. Then I guess it reverted to him.”

  “Why don’t you begin at the beginning.”

  He looked up at Austen, and there was a sudden flash of anger in his face, a kind of tightening around the nose and mouth. Then it was gone, and his gaze dropped back down to his hands.

  “It isn’t that easy. You’ll see that—the beginning is hard to find. I just wanted you to understand how tangled up things got. I’m not like Diederich. I’m not a patriot, so there’s no betrayal either way. Or maybe it’s betrayal in both directions. I don’t know. I don’t really care anymore—can you understand that?”

  “No.” Austen shook his head and smiled. “Not until you explain it. “

  “Begin at the beginning?” The question was punctuated by a short syllable of voiceless laughter, as if Storey believed himself to be dealing with the impossible demands of a child.

  “Sure, or you can tell me about ‘soroka’. You could start there.”

  At the sound of the word, Chester Storey drew himself up. It seemed to work like the amphetamine, to bring him back to life.

  “Soroka, “ he said, rather in the manner of someone delivering a lecture, or perhaps a warning, “is the Russian word for ‘magpie,’ a bird notorious as a nest-robber and a mimic. It was his little joke, although it wasn’t until years later that any of us understood. It was what we called him; it was the only Russian word we were allowed to pronounce.”

  Austen and Timmler looked at each other in frank astonishment.

  So “Soroka” was a proper noun, apparently the code name Yegorov had used at some time in the past. Well, that was something.

  But that past had to have been over forty years ago. And where? In Russia? It was the only Russian word we were allowed to pronounce.

  “Are you trying to tell me that the old man recruited you?”

  “Nyet. “

  And then he laughed once more, slapping his thigh with the flat of his hand. He laughed until the tears rolled down his face and Austen began to consider seriously whether they oughtn’t send for the doctor again; it wouldn’t do for Storey to start coming unraveled on them.

  Just as suddenly as it had started, the laughter stopped. “As you see,” Storey said calmly, “there’s one other word I remember.”

  The truth. At long last, they were poised near the edge of something very like the truth.

  Ten little red Indians. After all, it wasn’t the Girl Scouts Yegorov had been working for when the Wehrmacht had snagged him on their way to Stalingrad.

  “Mr. Storey, I can only conclude from what you’ve been saying that you’ve been guilty of espionage at some time or another, and that Yegorov—Soroka—was your trainer, or perhaps your control. Let me ask you again. Is that so? Have you ever been—are you now—a Soviet agent?”

  “I suppose I must be,” Storey answered in a tired voice as he pressed his fingertips against his closed eyelids. “That was the way it started out, at least. I don’t know what I am now.”

  “Tell us about it. Start anywhere you like.”

  It was an odd thing, but all at once Chester Storey looked like a man from whom a great weight had been lifted.

  “I suppose the beginning is as good a place as any,” he said at last, leaning back in the chair, sitting with his hands curled in his lap and his eyes closed, as if he were trying to see some object in his memory. “I was six or seven—more likely seven, but I’m only guessing. My parents had a farm; I can remember the farm, but I have trouble with them. I think my mother had blond hair, but I can’t even be sure of that. It was in the summer; I remember that it was very hot when the officer from the GPU came. He came in a long car; I’d never seen anything like it. And he brought a couple of soldiers with him.”

  “Was that in Russia?” It was a stupid question—where else could it have been? But the whole business was so incredible that Austen found himself wanting to confirm every detail, simply to convince himself that any of it could possibly be true.

  “Yes.” Storey nodded solemnly. “In the Urals. My parents were kulaks, although I had never heard that word, wouldn’t hear it until years after they were dead. Little private farmers—‘enemies of the state,’ I was told later. In a few years they would be liquidated by the millions, all over Russia. Maybe my parents were the beginnings of that, or maybe there was some other reason. There’s no way I’ll ever know.

  “Anyway, I can see them arguing with the GPU of
ficer. I remember standing next to my mother, with the wind gathering her skirts around me, and looking up at him as he and my father talked angrily—I remember he had long, slender nostrils. And then one of the soldiers took me over to their car and the officer went into the barn with my parents. I heard two shots, just muffled little pops, and then the officer came out and we all drove away. I never saw my parents again.

  “I suppose I was just young enough to have avoided ideological contamination, so they let me live. I was sent to a state orphanage near Berezniki; I was probably there for about six months. I can’t remember anything about the place except the iron bedsteads; they were all painted white, and the paint had chipped off so that the iron showed through in an irregular pattern that for some reason reminded me of the backs of snakes. I was terrified to go to sleep at night in case the bed should suddenly fill up with stinging vipers and I’d be trapped there with them in the dark. It was a silly idea, but what is it impossible to believe at that age?

  “And after that, I was sent to the school in Leningrad.

  “That was the first time I met Soroka, only he wasn’t old then. He came and picked me up at the orphanage and we traveled the whole way back to Leningrad together, just the two of us, all by ourselves in a railway compartment. It must have been over a thousand miles. We talked and played chess together—he taught me the game—and he had a big picnic basket that never seemed to get any emptier. He’d give me puzzles to work and nonsense poems to learn—I suppose he was testing me—and if I did well he’d give me an orange to eat as a reward. I’d never even seen an orange before. To this day I love oranges. And I loved Soroka; why shouldn’t I have? He was like a father, and fathers were in short supply just then. All the boys in the school loved him.”

  “When was all this?” Timmler asked. He was sitting with his arms folded across his chest, hardly even moving to breathe. He looked bored, but that meant nothing.

  “Nineteen twenty-nine or thirty.”

  “And you’re quite sure this ‘Soroka’ is the same person you saw here four days ago? There’s no chance you could be mistaken? People change.”

  Chester Storey merely shook his head.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. I saw the man every day of my life until I was seventeen. I could hardly be wrong about a thing like that.”

  “Tell me about the school.”

  Storey looked at Austen with something that could almost have been interpreted as gratitude. “The school—how can I tell you about the school?” he asked slowly, seeming to savor the recollection. “It was in the country, outside Leningrad, on an estate that had once belonged to the Czarina Elizabeth. She must have been a wonderful woman—I wish I could have known her.

  “The house was a palace, all made of pink stone, and the gardens and lawns went on forever. It was a place built to keep people amused and comfortable, and altogether, with the staff, there couldn’t have been more than a hundred of us. We had it all to ourselves.

  “My mother had taught me how to read and I had wanted to go to the village school, but it was too far away. Those were hard times, and in the orphanage they were only interested in keeping us alive, I suppose. But Soroka wanted us to learn everything—games, music, mathematics, dirty jokes, anything and everything. And we all learned English; everything was subordinated to that. ‘Forget about Russia,’ he used to tell us. ‘Speak nothing but English and learn to think of yourselves as Americans.’ We read American history and the comics, and we played baseball in the summer.

  “At night, in winter, we’d watch movies. I’ve probably seen Little Caesar a dozen times, and all the Shirley Temple movies. Soroka used to say you could learn everything there was to know about American life from Shirley Temple.

  “They did a good job on us—maybe too good. We really were in America on that estate. We forgot Russia; we forgot how to be Russians. Over and over again they told us that our final duty was to the motherland, but I think most of us forgot that too. America was to be simply a continuation of life at the school, and our loyalty was to that, and to Soroka—at least, mine was. Apparently it was different with Diederich. I don’t know.”

  “Is that where you met Diederich, at the school?”

  “Oh, yes.” Storey smiled wearily and shrugged, as if he wondered that anyone could ask such a simple-minded question. “He was there; he wasn’t ‘Howard Diederich’ yet, but he was there. We had different names; every six months or so they’d change them, perhaps so we would forget that we were ever anything except that temporary identity. We’d take the names of movie stars and gangsters—when I was thirteen I got to be Thomas Edison; at fourteen I was Clark Gable and Al Capone. I didn’t become ‘Chester Storey’ until I was about sixteen, my last year. By then we were split up into smaller groups for special coaching in regional dialects and, I think, to keep us from finding out too much about any of the others so there would be a limit to what we could betray if we got caught. In the end, we were told, there were only going to be ten of us, and each of us was to operate in ignorance of the others.”

  Timmler still sat with his arms folded, like a man who needed to be convinced. “Were there any others whose current identities you remember?”

  “No.” Chester Storey shook his head. “No, just Howard—he’s supposed to be from eastern Arizona, I believe, and we were the only two of that group to survive the cut. I’ve wondered sometimes what happened to the others, but those were the kinds of questions you never asked.”

  “What was the object of this. . .” Timmler waved the fingers of one hand as if he were trying to summon the right word. “. . .this impersonation? I take it you were supposed to come to the United States—what then?”

  Storey’s eyes were wide with theatrical, contemptuous wonder. “Isn’t it obvious? We were meticulously trained. Identities had been created for us. We were all handpicked for the qualities of success. There wasn’t a single one of us, we were told, with an IQ of less than a hundred and fifty. We were to infiltrate American society and rise inevitably to the top, with a little help now and then. After that, just wait. One day, after we had long since had our hands on the levers of power, Russia would need us and we’d be ready.”

  IX

  One thing about the Russians—they had patience. An operation of that kind, mounted over a period of several decades, and for such limited ends, required a continuity of purpose of which no Western nation would have been capable. In its way, in its sheer selflessness—for who among its planners could have expected to be alive to see it come to completion?—it was awesome.

  And it wasn’t as if they expected to take the joint over. The idea had been simply to have a few reliable people in positions of authority when the crisis arrived. There was no consensus about what form that crisis would take.

  “We heard so many different versions,” Storey went on, smoking a cigarette and stirring a cup of the tea Austen had ordered sent down after the interrogation had passed its second hour. They all had some, and there was even a little plate of cookies; it was turning into something of a social occasion.

  “You have to remember that back then forward-thinking Russians looked to America the way, a hundred years before, they had looked to France. There was a positive mania for anything American—America was democratic, America was progressive, every new wrinkle in art or technology or social thought seemed to come from America. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but Soroka used to tell us about how Lenin saw a screening of Birth of a Nation and was so impressed that he offered D. W. Griffith any money to come over and build the Russian film industry. Needless to say, Griffith turned him down, but Eisenstein was sent to Hollywood to see what he could learn. For the first few years after the civil war, things like that happened all the time.

  “And is it so surprising? Europe was exhausted after 1918, but America just seemed to be waking up. Trying to get some sort of handle on the future there seemed the only thing to do.

  “Even Soro
ka didn’t have a clear idea what would happen to us. We’d get one story one time, another the next. I don’t think it really mattered to him very much. I think his obsession was really just with the country. He had spent some part of his youth here, he told us once. His father had emigrated in 1912 to escape being drafted into the czar’s army and, as soon as he could after the revolution, Soroka went back. But he was infected with the disease, and America remained a kind of beacon for him, a ruling passion to be somehow connected with the mystic religion of Marxism-Leninism—because Soroka was always a model communist.

  “Anyway, at first one of the more popular theories was that the collapse of Western capitalism would begin here, because America was the most advanced and active of the capitalist countries. And when the whole rotten structure was ready to cave in, we would be there to give it the necessary extra little push. And to make sure, of course, that the resulting socialist state saw where its true interests lay and made the proper alliances. Europe would be caught in the middle between us.

  “I don’t know what made him abandon that line—or whether he ever did. But after 1934, when it was obvious that Germany was getting ready for another war in the East—you see, Soroka had read Mein Kampf—Soroka managed to convince Stalin that America was likely to go fascist and that we would be useful as a fifth column within the military-industrial complex. He didn’t call it that, of course; I think his phrase was the ‘war-mongering capitalist establishment,’ but it amounted to the same thing. I imagine he thought the conflict wouldn’t come until sometime in the late fifties. Or maybe he just didn’t care. I always had the impression that Soroka was uncomfortable talking about the purposes of his little project; for him, I think, the thing was an end in itself.

  “As it happened, we didn’t arrive until about a year before the outbreak of the war in Europe. I was in my senior year at Harvard on Pearl Harbor Day; I enlisted in the navy the next morning and was with the Pacific Fleet in time for the Battle of Midway. You have to remember that we were trained to have all the reflexes of good American boys; it seemed the most natural thing in the world to do. I’m sure most of the others reacted in much the same way. I wonder how many of the original ten can still be alive.”