Black Gambit

by Clark, Eric

  Sunnenden’s overpowering desire for status and recognition amused Scott. It also pleased him. Ambition was one thing all his proteges had in common. He did not have to like them, only to trust their judgment and believe they were going to get somewhere.

  Though Scott enjoyed power, he did not want it for its own sake. He genuinely believed in the people, policies or cause for which he worked. The beliefs were often simplistic. He believed in the free world, the United States, the Republican Party, the President — and in Dr. Kissinger and America’s foreign policy under him.

  His convictions were obvious and passionate. Often people yielded simply because they were swept up by his open beliefs in a town where convictions often took second place to survival and ambition.

  His appearance helped: he was a fat man who had once been a fat child and before that a fat baby. He was sure that this had determined his behaviour: a fat boy must go out of his way to get on with other kids to survive and overcome their teasing. He had also found it true that people trusted a fat man — Shakespeare was right. Scott suspected that a disproportionate number of con men were probably fat.

  Now, two days after Kissinger’s return from the Middle East, Scott was sitting in his apartment in Foggy Bottom.

  The apartment — with its furnishings — was the phoniest thing about him. When he had moved into it, he had called an interior designer. His instructions had been brief: ‘Make it look American.’ The result was Colonial furniture, paintings depicting great moments in US history and — Scott’s touch — photographs of a dozen or more American folk heroes, from Billy Graham to John Wayne, all signed. It was all so theatrical, so overstated, that it worked.

  Scott was listening to a tape of his conversation with Sunnenden the previous evening. The voice-activated recorder was built into an ornamental inkstand that stood on the writing desk. Scott taped most of his business conversations at the apartment — which was where much of his real work took place — to listen for nuances or leads that he might have missed during the conversation itself. Quite often, as a result of this practice, he had amended his reading of what the other party really meant.

  Scott had taped Sunnenden, however, for a different reason. He had been so tired that he doubted his ability to absorb what Sunnenden had to tell him. Yet Scott felt he needed to talk to him. The disappearance of the two dissidents, the Zorins, and the refusal of the Soviets even to confirm they were being held in prison, had made a bad situation worse. He gathered from Dunn at the White House that the Jewish pressure groups were leaning a little harder on the President.

  With 1976 not far away, groups that could deliver votes and money were not to be disregarded.

  Scott knew, though, that what Kissinger was doing was right; in his policies lay the only hope for the Middle East — for the Israelis as well as for the Arabs. ‘Now,’ he muttered to himself, ‘all I have to do is convince them.’

  The tape reached the point where, pleasantries over, Sunnenden was answering Scott’s questions. By now Scott had read the various reports, had talked however briefly with Kissinger himself. But what he wanted from Sunnenden was the feel, the asides, the things you never got in memoranda or in briefings.

  Sunnenden was talking about the atmosphere in Israel. ‘I’d expected it to be bleak,’ he said, ‘but nothing prepared me for the way it was.’

  He began listing points and even if Scott had not been present when the recording had been made, he would have known from the clipped nature of Sunnenden’s voice that he was ticking them off as he spoke.

  At first he spoke briefly, confining himself to concise answers to Scott’s questions: yes, he agreed, he had been surprised by the amount of anti-Kissinger feeling in Israel. Gradually he became more expansive.

  ‘The strongest feeling that came across,’ said the taped voice, ‘was the belief that Dr. Kissinger wanted detente with Russia at any price — even if it meant Israel’s paying it. Most of the people I talked with were convinced we’d actually let the fighting go on until it looked as though the Israelis were getting the upper hand. Then we’d moved in — to stop them from getting too strong a position, because we needed a stalemate to make postwar negotiations easier.’

  As the tape went on, the voice began to relax: a consequence of time, the lateness of the hour, and of the drink the two men were sharing.

  Sunnenden told of advertisements in Israeli newspapers, placed to coincide with Kissinger’s visit: ‘Senator Jackson: Stop Kissinger,’ public praise for the Senator’s strong anti-Soviet line, and condemnation of what was seen as Kissinger’s soft and anti-Jewish policies.

  As he grew more expansive, Sunnenden gave Kissinger’s nick-name in the Israeli press: the ‘mini Metternich.’ And he described a conversation with an Israeli broadcaster who spoke with a smile but obviously meant what he said: ‘I wish that man would get married. Then he could start fucking a woman instead of us Jews.’

  Sunnenden turned to the Zorins whose name had also recurred in conversations, ‘It was as if …’ Sunnenden seemed to be forcing himself to think through something he had not considered before. ‘Well, as if people needed to focus on one single understandable thing. You follow?’ There was no audible reply; Scott must have confined himself to nodding his head, ‘It wasn’t that the Zorins mattered. It was the fact that they provided an easily assimilated, a highly emotive, example of what the Russians thought of the Jews — those Russians to whom we, the United States, seemed prepared to give everything provided it wasn’t ours to lose.’

  Scott walked over and switched off the tape. He did not want to hear any more. It made him feel uneasy.

  He was an intuitive operator, and the Zorins’ arrest on top of everything else made him feel uneasy. It provided too much ammunition for the Secretary’s critics. It was potentially embarrassing. Dr Kissinger couldn’t act — officially. Maybe, an unofficial approach …

  He picked up the telephone and dialled the direct line to his office in the White House. He was answered immediately. ‘Helen?’ he said, not introducing himself. He spent two minutes making small talk, asking after her health and her husband even though it was only a day since he had last called.

  ‘I want you to do a small thing for me, Helen. Get hold of whoever knows such things — Protocol, maybe — find when’s the next reception at the Soviet Embassy, and call me back. Okay? After that, give a call to Bob Sunnenden and ask if he could drop by. No rush. Maybe tomorrow sometime.’

  *

  Outside the door, Zorin found himself led along a corridor until he could see a glass door and daylight. A guard produced a sack hood, handed it to Zorin and ordered, not unkindly, ‘Put it on.’

  Zorin wanted to fight, to struggle — at least to make a gesture, no matter how futile. He was too weak, in body and in mind. Wearily, he placed the hood over his head. One of the guards tightened the pull-cords. He found he could breathe easily and, surprisingly, there was a slight glimmer of light, like the coming of dawn.

  Zorin was led down two steps and into a car. It pulled away. His face was itching and he began to lift a hand to scratch it. Immediately both hands were grabbed and he felt the cold of handcuffs forced on to his wrists.

  After perhaps half an hour the car stopped and he heard a clanking of metal. The car moved forward and then halted suddenly again. It must have passed through gates and entered a courtyard.

  He was pulled out with a jerk. Seven stumbling paces, then five steps, then the clank of footsteps on what must have been a corridor.

  The smell seeped through the hood: carbolic acid and food, more like a hospital than a prison. Zorin’s guard turned right, taking the geneticist with him. A door opened and he was pushed into a room. He half fell and then two sets of hands lifted him and placed him down, face upwards though still covered, on what felt like a table.

  The handcuffs were removed. Just at the moment when he felt a brief, irrational pleasure at free hands, they were grasped again. The hands, then his feet were placed i
n clamps, and his whole body pulled into an X.

  He felt heat on his face, more light inside the hood. He knew why when the material was suddenly lifted away: around him was a battery of blinding lights.

  The table he was lying on might have been an operating table. Turning his head to the left he could make out an oxygen mask. There was movement and he realized there were many people in the room.

  Zorin closed his eyes and tried to breathe deeply and steadily. Treat it as you did the dentist when you were a child, he told himself. Focus on other things. He started to remember a poem.

  The voice, muffled like the shape of the person speaking, cut into the poem.

  ‘You are in the Serbsky Institute,’ it intoned, naming the most notorious psychiatric prison hospital in Moscow. ‘A preliminary diagnosis shows that you are suffering from paranoia and megalomania. You seem to suffer from an obsessive delusion that you are a champion of truth and justice. As doctors, it is our duty to help you to overcome that delusion.’

  Two outstretched arms came within the circle of light. One hand held a small pair of scissors which were used to cut a gap in Zorin’s shirt, just below the inside of the elbow. The hand retreated and re-emerged with a swab which was wiped over the skin. It appeared a third time with a hypodermic which the hand held a few inches from his arm. The voice began again. ‘I want to show you that we can help you … if we find the need. You will not like the drug we are about to give you, but if you consider carefully you will realize that it is for your own good. When you have wrong thoughts, we can give you this drug. When your thoughts are good, well … there are rewards.’

  The voice addressed the figure next to it. ‘Go ahead now.’

  Zorin began to struggle, pulling his wrists against the clamps as the needle came nearer and slid in.

  ‘The drug is called succinylcholine,’ the voice said, ‘It … well, you will see in thirty to forty seconds.’

  Zorin knew. Succinylcholine, a derivative of the South American poison curare, was a paralyzing drug, used in major surgery — when the patient was under anaesthetic. It had also been used, Zorin knew, on patients undergoing electro shock treatment to stop their breaking limbs when shocks were administered.

  Zorin thought he felt the numbness in his toes first but perhaps that was anticipation. Knowing what would happen only made it worse. The drug would paralyze his body, starting with the small, rapidly moving muscles and progressing until, finally, it paralyzed the diaphragm and he could no longer breathe. And all the time he would be fully conscious — able to see, hear and feel.

  In short, he was going to feel himself die.

  There was no doubt now: the drug was starting to work. He felt it in his eyes, then almost immediately in his fingers. He tried to move, tensing himself against the clamps, but could not. He took a deep breath, then another. The third time he tried to breathe he couldn’t. He felt his head swelling; there was a tightness, a bursting across his chest. He wanted to scream, to plead, to yell to God. Nothing. He tried to close his eyes; the lids stayed open. There were lights and faces. His temples were pounding now. He could smell blood, high in his nostrils. He was going to split apart like a paper bag. This was what drowning must be like, or death in space, or being buried alive …’God, please, please let me die!’

  He was swimming into unconsciousness now. A relief. Then a hand came out, and a rubber mask was placed over his face. Another hand, palm down, pressed on his chest, forcing his lungs to breathe.

  Gradually he came out of dying. The lights stopped swimming; the shadows of the men took shape again.

  Then, just as he was living, the mask was taken away.

  They did it eight, perhaps nine times. Each time was as bad. The knowledge that they would not let him die, that they would revive him in time, was more than cancelled out by the fear that the torture would go on indefinitely.

  Finally the voice that had first introduced the drug spoke, again clinically.

  ‘I don’t expect you to absorb this — you have other things to worry about. But later, perhaps, you might remember. We are not doing this out of cruelty. If we feel it is necessary we can and will modify your behaviour. When you have mistaken ideas we can do this … when they are right we can reward you.’

  He said ‘Go ahead’ again and again Zorin was forced to die.

  At last, when he felt nothing, there was another injection, then spinning, spinning into blackness, and he thanked God for answering his prayer.

  *

  There was a bed, made of iron slats, with a mattress and one pillow and a blanket. Also a table and stool.

  They must have been watching through a peephole. There was hardly time for him to pull himself up before he was being dragged out, along corridors, up in a life, along more passageways, and finally into the sunlight. Every few seconds Zorin grunted as stabs of pain went through his muscles.

  A grey Volga was parked by the kerb.

  ‘This will take you home,’ said the major who had first arrested him. Zorin, stumbling, was helped into the back seat. His mind started to function.

  ‘Where is my wife?’ His voice rose to a shrill scream. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Please go home. All will be known.’

  The car pulled away. Zorin was still sobbing. He realized he was rubbing his wrists raw and swollen from pulling against the bonds.

  He looked down at them dumbly for a moment. Then he put his head in his hands and let his whole body shake.

  The door had been repaired; otherwise his apartment was as he had left it.

  He opened the door and supported himself against the jamb like a drunk.

  ‘Tanya!’

  There was no reply. He took hesitant, stumbling steps inside. Papers were strewn over the floor, the mattress lay at an angle, pictures were piled against the walls. His papers and books were still in neat stacks. As far as he could see, they had been returned intact. He stumbled through into the bedroom and sat on the end of the bed. His friends found him there shortly afterwards. They broke the news about Tanya gently.

  She had been stripped of her citizenship and deported. Tass had issued a short communiqué, almost a carbon copy of the one issued three weeks before about Solzhenitsyn. But that one had said Solzhenitsyn’s wife and children would be allowed to join him.

  This report included no such reference.

  *

  Sunnenden was a block away from the russian Embassy, near the Statler, when he considered stopping for a drink. The bar was full of cocktail hour drinkers. Had he spotted an empty table through the gloom he would have stayed. He decided to leave. The previous evening he had denied Janet’s gentle criticism that he was drinking more, but it was true. He would have to be careful. He did not have a drinking problem, of course — but Washington was not a town to let anyone get the impression you had.

  He walked to the Embassy to gather his thoughts. There had been little time during the day.

  It had already been decided that he should attend the Soviet Embassy cocktail party and raise the question of dissidents unofficially once the news had come through about the Zorins. She had been released and deported; she was probably arriving in Israel about now. Of her husband there was no firm news, although unconfirmed intelligence reports said that he was undergoing ‘psychiatric treatment’.

  That added urgency to his appointment. Sunnenden reminded himself to call Scott later. He would report to him in detail tomorrow, but Scott had asked for at least an indication of how things had gone that evening.

  The idea of formally raising the Zorin question with the Soviets had been turned down, either by the Secretary himself or, more likely, by Scott’s decision not even to suggest it to his chief.

  ‘It’s not the right way, Bob,’ he had said. ‘We both know that the Ruskies are bound to say ‘no’. So what do we achieve?’

  Which was why Sunnenden would raise the question of the Zorins specifically when he arrived at the Embassy.

  The cocktail
party there was being given in honour of some visiting middle ranking Soviet dignitary. Sunnenden liked to visit the Embassy, which had sparkled under the rule of the Tsars. Now its grim exterior, with shutters almost permanently closed, and its gloomy foyer made it a mysterious place.

  As he approached the building Sunnenden saw cars dropping off visitors. Among the parked cars was an unusually large number of Volkswagens — the unofficial staff car of Soviet diplomats below the top rank.

  He turned into the circular driveway, large enough for no more than two vehicles. One stood there now, the Soviet ambassador’s Cadillac. The Embassy, grey and heavily covered in ivy, lay less than twenty-five feet from the street. The door was open and Sunnenden joined a straggly queue of visitors having their invitation cards checked.

  At the top of the red carpeted stairs was another short queue, this time of people waiting to be presented. The visiting junior minister nodded imperceptibly as Sunnenden was introduced. Sunnenden knew he was being watched. He was not a frequent Embassy party-goer, nor the natural State Department man to be sent to this reception. That he was here for a purpose would be deduced, which would make his task easier.

  Sunnenden was not sure what Scott expected to achieve by this approach. He doubted that he could hope to achieve anything more than further confirmation of the Soviets’ official attitude about dissidents and a hint about Zorin’s whereabouts — which would have no practical benefit. Still, Scott wanted it. ‘I’ve got a feeling, Bob,’ he’d said. ‘I can’t quite finger it, but I think we’ve got a situation that could turn messy if we don’t do something.’

  There was vodka and Russian champagne. Sunnenden took the champagne; he disliked it, but he did not trust himself with hard liquor. He worked around the room, occasionally nodding at half-familiar faces, returned the smile of someone he did not recognize, settled himself into a corner.