The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

  “‘Every time’ what?”

  “I die and go to heaven.”

  I didn’t know whether that was her way of saying “good-bye” or “hello again.” My inventory of uncertainties was growing by the day.

  22

  Dwayne Scoggins, the Bogotá chief of station, wasn’t a bad fellow, but he was no happier to see me on his turf than his counterpart in Buenos Aires had been. He was a ruddy, unsmiling man who seemed to be holding the invisible barking dog of his exasperation at arm’s length.

  He said, “I’m in the dark. Why are you here?”

  I said, “I speak Russian.”

  “Ah-ha. The scales fall from my eyes. You’re tasked to seduce the seducer.”

  I said, “Something like that. Does the young lady know she’s under suspicion?”

  “She’s not smart enough to figure that out.”

  “Has her boyfriend figured it out?”

  “If he has, he hasn’t told her.”

  “We’d know that?”

  “We might. Her cell phone and her apartment and her car and her purse and everything else except her IUD have been bugged.”

  “Has the Bureau been clued in?”

  “Not by me, but diplomatic security, whose case it is, will have to brief the legal attaché pretty soon. I’m curious. How long do you expect to hang around here?”

  “I have no idea. It’s up to Amzi.”

  “And in the meantime, what can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to read the product of all those bugs you mentioned.”

  “Be my guest. You’ll be fascinated.”

  Dwayne looked at his watch, rose to his feet, and put on a jacket.

  He said, “Gotta go. Melanie will show you where to sit. Do you have a place to stay?”

  “I’m at the Holiday Inn.”

  Dwayne pushed a button. Melanie appeared. She was an owlish young woman with a voice full of Mississippi—real friendly even if she hated your guts. It was dress-down Friday in the station. She wore jeans, Keds, and a polo shirt with the Ol’ Miss Rebels logo. With the exception of Dwayne, everyone in the office, including me, was dressed for a backyard barbecue.

  She handed me the file on the suspect, whom I decided to call Sally. In photographs, she resembled a coarser version of the character Sally in When Harry Met Sally, so you could understand why the political officer, who was now quite likely en route to Ouagadougou, had forgotten all about the mother of his children when Sally fell to her knees before him. There were no pictures of her lover.

  There was nothing interesting in the logs, which consisted largely of transcripts of the taps on her phone and her purse. There hardly ever is. People with something to hide, a broad category of humanity that includes Russian intelligence officers, usually are careful about what they say over the telephone.

  The next day I followed Sally when she left the embassy parking lot at quitting time. She drove a centerline-yellow Beetle, so keeping her in sight was not a problem. She went straight home, parked the Bug in its numbered parking space, and went upstairs.

  Eating a tuna sandwich from the embassy cafeteria and an apple for supper and drinking a bottle of water and pissing into a plastic jug, I watched Sally’s door until three in the morning. I did the same, each time in a different car borrowed from the station’s motor pool, the next night and the night after that, catching glimpses of her through the windows of her flat. On the fourth night, at 2:47 A. M., she emerged, wearing a miniskirt. It was raining. She dashed in a clatter of heels to her car and drove away without turning on her headlights, a precaution guaranteed to attract attention. I expected that Sally would soon be stopped by a couple of horny cops who had been hoping that a blond gringa in a miniskirt would happen by with her lights off.

  Out of necessity she stayed on lighted streets, so I had no difficulty keeping her in sight. There was virtually no traffic, and even though she seemed to be oblivious to her situation, I had to stay way back to minimize the risk of being spotted. My own headlights were on. There was nobody behind me.

  I seemed to be the only one following her. After a mile or so, Sally turned on her lights. She drove into a parking lot and pumped the brakes three times, then twice again. A signal! I parked a block away and walked back to the parking lot.

  And there she was in the arms of her Russian. They wasted no time on foreplay. No doubt anticipation had taken care of that for Sally on the drive to the rendezvous. The Russian picked her up, slid her onto his rigid penis, which was indeed impressive, and laid her down onto the slope of the Bug’s hood.

  It was still raining. The Bug’s hood was slippery, and all that kept Sally from sliding off was the feature of the Russian’s anatomy that Amzi had mentioned. I took some video with sound.

  As I watched this pornographic moment through the camera lens, the question was, what to do next? Time was of the essence because Sally would soon be going away for a long time and there was nothing I could do to delay that. The tryst ended as abruptly as it had begun—elapsed time, seven minutes. Sally, disheveled but happy, drove away. I let her go and followed her lover home. If he noticed I was on his tail, as he surely must have done because we were practically the only two cars on the street, he was too professional to give himself away.

  He lived in—or at least entered for my benefit—a large apartment building not far from the Russian embassy. He probably walked to work. I considered bumping into him when he emerged the next morning and starting a conversation—”That was some crazy blonde in the parking lot, Tovarish!”—then told myself to stop kidding around and start thinking.

  Immediately, so as to avoid running into Sally in the embassy corridors the next morning and having her see my new face—she would likely take a good long look at any new man—I visited the station and identified the Russian from a blurred photo taken on the street in Bogotá. The stuff I had read the day before referred to him by the code name Headquarters had bestowed on him, so I didn’t know the cover name he was using in Colombia, only the cryptonym we used in correspondence about him.

  Now I discovered he was calling himself Kirill Sergeivich Burkov. The residential address listed for him was the one he had led me to, so it was possible he actually lived there. I composed a report to Headquarters, attaching the feelthy pictures. The camera, a Nikon I had bought with eight hundred dollars of my own money at the Pentagon City Costco, delivered clear video images despite the dim lighting along with a soundtrack that did justice to Sally’s aria to delight.

  I composed a cable to Headquarters, footage attached, and handed it to Dwayne Scoggins for transmission. He grimaced at the material, and though he clearly didn’t like my stalking one of his targets, he voiced no objection.

  I asked to see anything about Kirill Burkov that the DAS, the Colombian Security Service, had shared with the station. Melanie brought me the all-but-unreadable handwritten files made by sidewalk men. These included photographs, blurrier than the ones made with my Nikon, of open-air encounters with a couple of women—both now missing persons—who had worked for important men in the Colombian government. One of these women, a homely plump person in photos, had been the personal secretary of the minister of foreign affairs. The other, younger and prettier with vacant eyes, was the chica of a general of military intelligence.

  Several of the DAS surveillance reports placed Burkov in a nightspot for singles called El Paradiso in Zona T, the Pigalle of Bogotá, where he trolled for lonely women with interesting bosses. Around midnight I went to El Paradiso, bribed my way in, and found a table in a dark corner. No sign of Burkov. Sex workers of both genders made me offers that might have been of passing interest to him. That night and for two nights afterward, I said no thanks to them all. The bouncers began to look at me as if I might be a candidate for an interview in the back alley. I carried knockout spray and my brand-new as yet unfired .45—after all this was Bogotá, the most dangerous city in the Western Hemisphere. I had no wish to baptize the weapon. On the third nig
ht I left early.

  As I started the car—talk about coincidences—I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw Kirill Burkov crossing the street, holding hands with a laughing woman. She was a blonde and for a moment I thought she might be Sally, but then she turned her face in my direction and I realized that she looked nothing like her. She got into Burkov’s BMW—him gallantly holding the door open for her—ankles demurely together. I followed the car to another deserted parking lot, where the routine with Sally replayed, except this time he seized the hem of the woman’s dress and peeled it off over her head before he went to work. The blonde, her face hidden by the inside-out dress, wearing nothing below the neck but sequined red shoes that somehow stayed on her feet, screamed so wildly in her delight that Burkov had to clap a hand over her mouth.

  Afterward he drove her home to a very small concrete house on a mean street. The next day I checked out her address. The house was occupied by three hairdressers, so unless the Valkyrie was cutting the hair of an in-the-know Colombian, the encounter had been recreational.

  These sightings were leading me nowhere. Though I would have preferred to make do in some other way, I called on Dwayne for assistance. Glumly, he arranged for me to be invited to a reception at the Chilean embassy later in the week. The station had information that Burkov was on the guest list.

  I continued to work the case, but all the while my mind had no room for anything but Luz. Five days had passed since we parted and I hadn’t heard from her. My brain provided a slide show: Luz’s image in the mirror that first day, in the surf in Patagonia, in strips of sunlight that fell through a venetian blind onto her nude body as she slept. On her back under the weight of a man I had never seen in reality.

  So much for the aftereffects of lurking around parking lots and seeing yourself in others.

  Usually I had no trouble standing alone and unnoticed at embassy parties, but the Chilean ambassadress was a conscientious hostess who introduced me into a circle of South Americans who treated me to the customary remorseless first-meeting grilling into my background and status. Then, one by one, they drifted away.

  Soon thereafter Kirill Burkov entered the room. In no time he was deep in conversation with one of the wives, a prematurely gray jolie laide with the figure and complexion of a twenty-year-old who seemed to be lubricating by the syllable. Why? Did she somehow sense Burkov’s endowment? She held herself and dressed and gestured and enunciated like an aristocrat. Burkov was a peasant: watchful pale eyes with epithantic folds and Slavic cheekbones, and almost no facial expression. Years ago I had read a biography of H. G. Wells, who had an enviable sex life though he was physically ugly. One of his mistresses was asked why he was so yummy. “It was the way he smelled,” she replied. Maybe Burkov exuded a similar pheromone and women knew in the primitive brain what that meant.

  When Burkov broke away from the woman, who kept her eyes on his broad back until he melded into the crowd, I broke away and searched for the Russian. He was nowhere to be seen, but apparently he saw me. He entered the men’s room while I was washing my hands, used the urinal, and then stood beside me at the sinks and scrubbed his hands. He seemed to be unaware of my presence. Then he made eye contact in the mirror.

  He said, in English, “Hello again. I have a question. Are you a collector of cars or do you steal a new one every night?”

  A straight answer seemed to be in order.

  “I borrow them,” I said in Russian. “Now I have a question for you. Did you bang that ugly hairdresser for the pleasure of it or to see if someone was watching from the shadows?”

  We were speaking to each other’s mirror images.

  Burkov jerked his head.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll lead. You’ll recognize the car, I think.”

  23

  Burkov’s BMW was parked at the end of the driveway. I followed it to a bar on a dark street in a part of town that tourists were advised to avoid. To understate the reality, the bar, called La Sombra, lived up to its name: “Darkness.” You couldn’t make out the faces of the other customers. The booths were lit by night-lights, one per booth. These tiny bulbs were the only illumination apart from the dull glow of the bar’s small fluorescent tube.

  On the sound system Karen Carpenter sang “Close to You.”

  The waiter, old enough to remember Miss Karen, shone a penlight on the table and said, in Cockney English, “Eat or drink?”

  “One Stoli, one black Jack, both doubles,” Burkov replied in English.

  He waited until the waiter went away.

  Then he said, “That woman sings from the vagina. She’s the one who starved herself to death, am I right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Very American—your women are so unhappy. What’s the problem?”

  “Disappointment.”

  The waiter came back with the drinks—British pub quantities, twenty drops in the bottom of a red wineglass.

  Burkov paid in American dollars and said, “Two more. Doubles.”

  “Those are doubles, sir.”

  “Quadruples, then.”

  “So,” Burkov said to me in English, “why are you following me?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Frankly, I am wondering why you’re being so obvious about it.”

  Burkov was even quicker than Boris to come to the point. The new version of the Cheka must have revised the field manual along with its acronym.

  I said, “Just impetuous, I guess.”

  Burkov lifted his glass and threw the vodka down his throat.

  I didn’t touch my glass. I did not like the idea of drinking, even in the line of duty, with this particular Russian.

  In seconds, the waiter emerged from the dark with the second round. I tried to pay but Burkov was quicker.

  “You can pay next time we meet,” he said.

  “There’s going to be a next time?”

  “Why not? But I’ll have to drink a little more with you to learn to trust you.”

  For the rest of the evening—five quadruple vodkas for Burkov, five undrunk splashes of what purported to be Tennessee whiskey for me—we talked about football. He was a fan of Spartak Moscow—the old great Spartak clubs, not the feeble imitations that now wore the Spartak jerseys. Since the demise of communism, the only world powers with worse teams than post–Cold War Russia were the United States and China. Americans didn’t even know the proper name of the game.

  Sally was not mentioned. The fact that she was being watched—no doubt he had spotted earlier tails as easily as he detected mine—told him all he needed to know. I didn’t think he had serious regrets about losing her. The stuff she was feeding him was junk, so he must have considered the possibility that she was a dangle that the station controlled. That thought had also crossed my mind, but alas for Sally, the fact was that she was in heat but thought she was in love. For Burkov’s purposes, same difference.

  For my own reasons I hoped that the State Department, the Bureau, and Headquarters would jointly decide to let her run a little longer and that Burkov’s masters would let him continue to service her so I would have time to get to know him better. I was as indifferent to Sally’s fate as he was.

  As Burkov and I talked and talked and told each other nothing, Karen Carpenter sang her greatest hits over and over again. After an hour or so the Russian began to feel the vodka and fell silent.

  Around midnight he got up and walked toward the men’s room with the deliberate steps of a man who knows he’s almost drunk. He never came back. He left no tip. Because I did not wish to be remembered by the waiter, I tucked a banknote under his empty glass and left.

  It was at least as dark in the street as it had been inside El Pub. I walked to my parked car with my hand on the .45 and hair rising on the back of my neck. I was somewhat surprised when the car started instead of exploding. It wasn’t Burkov or anyone from his organization I feared, but there were more terrorists per square mile in Colombia than in Iraq and Yemen co
mbined, and no matter where they lived or which splinter cause they served, they all knew about one another and did one another favors as if they were a new unique nationality, and who knew which lunatic might owe a favor to the friends of the Yemenis I had blown away? When you can feel risk as though it is right behind you, expecting the worst is not a bad idea.

  In a certain sense, in certain ways, I had enjoyed the encounter with Burkov. It had been relaxing to spend a quiet hour with a disciplined professional who worked to Cold War rules and killed only people who could not possibly be useful to him or the Motherland.

  What I needed to know now was whether Burkov’s first priority was the Motherland or Burkov or—God forbid—an ideal like the one Boris wanted me to believe motivated him.

  The next morning I drafted a cable to Headquarters reporting the contact. After reading it, Dwayne called me into his office.

  “I was warned that you work in mysterious ways,” he said, “but this baffles me. What are you up to?”

  He was a shade ruddier and his voice was a bit louder than usual. He glowered. I knew why. I was stepping on his toes in a serious way.

  I said, “Just doing what I believe I was sent here to do.”

  “Which is what? Blow your cover to the Russians?”

  I said, “Dwayne, I’m puzzled. I was sent down here to try to work on Burkov. You were informed about this. You arranged the invitations to the Chilean embassy. The whole idea of that was to make it possible for him and me to meet. We met. Were we then supposed to gaze longingly at each other across a crowded room and let it go at that?”

  “This station selects its own targets and works them on its own territory using standard procedures,” Dwayne said in a tightly controlled voice. “We didn’t ask for outside help, we don’t need outside help. This is Bogotá, where people end up dead every day for making smaller mistakes than you seem to make every time you go out to play.”

  I said nothing in return because there was nothing I could say that would mollify him—just the opposite.