“Repin sent you?” Andropov said in excellent English.
“Yes.”
“You have been slow getting here.”
“Yes.”
Andropov removed his other glove and put both of them on the mantel. “I have ten minutes,” he said. He put his back to the empty fireplace. “What is it you want?”
“I want information.” When Andropov said nothing, Tarp took his silence for permission to continue. “I want the files of the people who are suspected. I want help with a related matter. And I need to know, for form’s sake: Is it you?”
Even in the bad light Andropov’s face seemed to lengthen, to grow paler. “No.” He tipped his head back slowly and looked Tarp over. In the light from the lamp on the floor, his eyes looked Oriental.
“That leaves six possibilities.”
“Five. Galusha died of a stroke on Monday.” He stated it as fact, allowing no objections.
“Five, then.” Tarp’s tension was gone. He felt now a great sense of well-being. “Can two of them be working together?”
“I do not think so, no. I think we would know about that.”
“Repin wanted me to talk to Telyegin first.”
“Good. Telyegin is dying, you know. Maybe dying men are most likely to be honest.”
“Or deceptive. Dying men have nothing to lose.”
“Have you ever died?”
Tarp let the irony pass. It was the one clear sign that Andropov disliked him — or, perhaps, disliked this process and all it implied.
“Will you tell about them?”
“Very briefly.”
“Telyegin.”
Andropov looked away, as if to gather thought. He and Telyegin were old rivals. Andropov seemed unsentimental, but that was vastly different from being unemotional. “Telyegin,” he said, drawing the name out. “Old. Pitiless. Wily. A European, not an Oriental. A Stalinist. His work is his life.”
“Strisz?”
“Strisz is very intelligent. A deal-maker. He tells jokes, perhaps out of nervousness.” Andropov did not seem to approve of the jokes. “A very promising early career.”
“Beranyi?”
“Quite young. Ambitious. Difficult — stubborn in the way he insists upon first principles. Yet, oddly, a risk-taker. Difficult.”
“Falomin?”
“A man of his time — a brilliant manager. The opposite of Beranyi. Sometimes he gives the impression that he could as easily manage a movie house or a tractor factory as the Jewish program. He has an unfortunate wife.”
Tarp waited for more. Nothing came. “Mensenyi.” Andropov looked at him. He saw something that made him decide to be frank. “A clown. He has already been promoted above his proper level, because of political maneuvering. He will be demoted …” He hesitated. “Soon.”
“Clowns can be dangerous.”
“I did not rule him out.”
“You are convinced that one of the five is Maxudov?” Andropov narrowed his eyes. “I require that one of these five be Maxudov.” He let that sink in. He might as well have said, I am not turning my government upside-down even for this. He had already decided how the matter was to be contained: these five or nobody. It would be very hard on all five five of them if Tarp could not prove that one was Maxudov, because all five would be forever suspect. In fact, they would not last long. Nor would Tarp.
Andropov’s right hand moved to the gloves. Seeing the movement, Tarp said quickly, “There have been four attempts to kill me. There was the crash of Repin’s plane. The manner of them suggests some — incoherence. More than one person, perhaps.”
“I cannot accept that there is more than one.”
“Might somebody else be exploiting it — maybe knowing something, planning to come forward when no solution is found, to benefit from being a hero?”
“Ambition is not unknown in Moscow,” Andropov said. “But I advise you, do not look for complex solutions.”
“What if it is a complex situation?”
“Then give me a simple solution to it.” Andropov took his gloves, and, putting them on, became businesslike. “I want the man who calls himself Maxudov, and I want the plutonium. That seems quite simple. If there are complications …” He shook his head.
“Maxudov may have colleagues in other countries.”
“I want the man who calls himself Maxudov, and I want the plutonium.” He stood with his gloved hands by his sides. The room seemed encased in ice, dead with cold. “I will help you with information and I will not oppose you on any of those little grounds that would normally arise because you are a foreigner. But I remain above it all. Do not expect to communicate with me again. You will be given the means to communicate with appropriate authorities. All of that. Now, before I go: What more do you want from me?”
“I must talk to the others.”
“Of course. Telyegin first, you said. Good; I will arrange it, and the others. Their files? I will give the matter to an assistant; naturally, there will be censorship. You mentioned a ‘related matter.’ What is that?”
“Some German records from the Second World War.”
“I do not see how they relate. However, talk to my assistant about it. I will have the request examined; if it makes sense, you will have it. Now I must go.”
They shook hands again. “If you succeed, you can have a good life here. I would personally be grateful to you.” He seemed to say it as a formality.
“I have made other arrangements.”
Andropov’s eyes hooded over. “So be it. If you do not succeed …”
“Then no arrangements will be necessary.”
“Yes.” Andropov started for the door. The round-faced man darted out of his way, and the tall figure swept out, turning sharply to the left in the corridor and collecting lesser men around him as he passed.
Chapter 29
The next morning early an unmarked truck came and took the old couple away. They had been given thirty minutes to pack up what they wanted.
“Where are we going?” the old woman asked. She was crying again.
“I don’t know, Mama,” the round-faced man said. “It can’t be worse than this, can it?”
He said it without rancor and certainly without any particular pleasure in their pain; yet Tarp winced at this reminder of the system with which he was working. He did not like the old man and woman; he was glad to see them go; but their own lives were so clearly irrelevant to a system that had other plans that he could not ignore the viciousness of it. Tarp did not believe in evil, just as he did not believe in good. He had neither faith nor readily definable politics anymore. He had given up trying to forgive human frailty in favor of overlooking it. But the offhand transplanting of the two old people was like seeing a huge, ugly eye open in what had been an empty sky, seeing it blink, and seeing it disappear again. The eye, like the log that is really an alligator, like the snake that appears under the foot, was obscene, and it made individual existence a pathetic lie.
The round-faced man brought in an exterminator, who sprayed white liquid over the floors where the old people had lived, while another man carried out armloads of their rags and trash, their pathetic belongings that they had guarded with chains and bars, and burned them. When darkness fell that night, the rooms smelled better and there was more space and the fleas were dead, and they might as well have ceased to exist. It was little consolation to Tarp to say that, being what he was, being the man he was with the past he had lived (How many old couples did I move out of their homes in Viet Nam?), he was implicated in the obscenity whether he actively helped the KGB root out its Maxudov or not. There was no consolation for being what he was — such was the executioner’s creed, the torturer’s creed, the agent’s creed. The only consolation in any of it was knowing that, unlike the old man and woman, he would never go without a struggle, and that was not a consolation of morals but of emotions as elemental as the ape’s grunt.
A woman came from Andropov’s staff and listened to his r
equests and went away; a day later the files began to come. She came with them. What Tarp was allowed to see was heavily censored, as if these were files that had already been combed for sensitive material, yet the woman looked over every page before he could read it. The materials that he had requested on the German civilians aboard the Prinz von Homburg “were in the process of research,” she said. He found Russian governmental jargon as difficult to follow as American.
*
Eugen Telyegin was a dying man. Andropov had been quite right about that. Telyegin was “of that generation,” as they said, meaning the ones who had fought in the October Revolution. He had been only fifteen then, but he had fought; he had lived through that first terrible winter close to Lenin, perhaps favored because of his youth by the ideological purists who liked his receptive mind. Tarp got this from the file, from photocopies of letters and newspaper stories from those days.
Telyegin received him in the downstairs room of a dacha outside the city. A car had come for Tarp in the evening and had taken him to a drab apartment in a block of drab apartments; next morning he was driven out to the dacha. Telyegin was in a wheelchair that had been placed between two electric heaters. An armchair had been placed for Tarp opposite him but too far from the electric coils to benefit from the heat.
Telyegin had inoperable cancer. That was in his file, too. It had begun in his lower bowel and it had spread. He had been given six months to live, but that had been two years before, and there were reports of his temporary remissions, as if the body were urged back to life by his commitment to his work. Now, nobody knew when he would die, but he was dying.
Yet his eyes were eager, like the eyes of a young man on the way up. When he could lift his voice above a tired whisper, he was passionate.
“I have not betrayed the Party,” he hissed at Tarp. “Not the Party, not the nation, not the service.” That little effort tired him. “This is an offense to my whole life.” His was a bitter whisper. He struck his chest weakly with a mittened hand. He was wearing a fur-lined coat, a thick scarf, boots, a fur hat. “They should have waited until I was dead to insult me with somebody like you.”
“I am very sorry,” Tarp said. He meant it. He did not like offending this old man, who, in his way, was as defenseless as the couple had been.
“You!” Breath sighed between his yellow lips in an exhalation of disgust. “Keep your being sorry. You — I know who you are.” He glared. “I never took money to serve the enemies of my people!”
But Tarp could not be moved that way. “You know why we are here.”
“Oh, yes, Comrade Andropov told me. Comrade Andropov, who was in short pants when I took a bullet in the leg from a White.”
“You know why we are here.”
“Yes, yes.” Telyegin sank into the clothes. He had a narrow head, which the disease had reduced to pure skull. Chemotherapy had taken his hair. He looked like a baby bird in a nest. “Well, do your filthy work.”
“There have been thefts of plutonium.”
“I know all that. Skip all that. My time is short. Plutonium, submarines, Maxudov — it’s all shit. It isn’t me. What do you think, that I would confess to you even if I was Maxudov?” His mouth moved and a sound like a cat’s sickness came from the throat. He was laughing. “Did they think I would make a sentimental gesture because I am dying and save them trouble? Maybe, if I confess to crimes I didn’t do, they will give me a hero’s burial because I saved them so much trouble.”
Tarp asked about three periods in Telyegin’s life, two when he had worked in departments with Central American connections, the third when he had for six months been posted in London. The questions and the answers both seemed pointless; what he always heard was the old man’s hatred.
“You could have set up a network in Cuba and Central America,” Tarp said after half an hour of wrangling. The old man was getting weak by then.
“So?”
“Maxudov set up a network in those places.”
“Maxudov isn’t me.”
“He could be.”
The eyes merely stared at him as if the face were too weary to show expression,
“Who do you think it is, then?” Tarp pleaded.
A long silence. Then, with a malice that pierced through the weariness, Telyegin said, “Comrade Andropov?”
“It is not Andropov.”
“You mean, even if it is Andropov, it is not Andropov.” He made the ghastly noise that was laughter again. “What has a Cuban network to do with anything?”
“Maxudov tried to kill me in Cuba.”
“Good for him.” The clothes stirred. “I know who Maxudov is,” he whispered.
“Who?”
“He is a character in a book. Did you know that?” The eyes were malicious and gleeful when they saw that Tarp did not know. “Not too bright, are you? Uncultured, yes. Maxudov is a character in a novel. Nobody reads it. It’s a piece of shit. Of course nobody reads it in America — no money in it.” He wanted to laugh, but the words had taken his energy. He sat there, gathering his strength, his breath wheezing over the hum of the electric heaters. “In the Theatrical Novel of Bulgakov. The character of Maxudov. That is who Maxudov is.”
Tarp felt that he had been checkmated. “I am not interested in novels,” he said lamely.
“There is also a character named Strisz in the novel. You find that interesting?”
“Do you think that Strisz is Maxudov?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.” He closed his eyes. He looked like the corpse of a king. “Sixty-four years of service, a devoted Chekist, a full colonel, and I wind up being asked stupid questions by an American. If I had the strength, I’d puke.”
Tarp got to his feet. He tried to say something human, even something as simple as “Thank you” or “Good-bye,” but the old man’s fury was palpable, and he refused any gesture. Before Tarp got out of the room, however, he heard a sound, and he turned to see Telyegin’s eyes open and glaring at him. He had been husbanding his energy for a last statement, and it came in a voice that must have been the voice men had heard in his good days, powerful and deep. “I hope you die this way,” he said. “I hope they all die this way.”
Tarp got into the back of the car without knowing what he was doing. He was shaken by that rage and that curse. He could not answer when the guards spoke to him.
*
“I am not Maxudov. Do you think I really could be Maxudov? Do you think I could really be stupid enough to use a name from a book in which my real name appears? I do not know this novel; I’m not a great reader, especially of fiction, which usually bores me, but … do you think I would be so stupid?”
Strisz was in his fifties and prosperous-looking. Andropov had called him “too social,” and indeed there was something both amiable and sociable in his wide face, as if he were eager to entertain. He looked well fed, more Scandinavian or Dutch than Russian, without the high cheekbones that made many Russians’ eyes look small.
“Some men would pick such a name because they would think themselves clever, because nobody would believe they would be so stupid. Some men would take the risk to enjoy a secret feeling of being smarter than their enemies,” Tarp answered.
“Oh, people would believe that I could do a stupid thing! I have a record of doing stupid things. You’ve seen my file.” He laughed. He seemed absurdly relaxed for such a situation. He seemed guileless, and Tarp believed that no one was guileless.
“If you are not Maxudov, why do you think somebody has used that name?”
“It’s rather witty, isn’t it? A character from a Russian novel, and none of the Russians who are tearing around worrying about it recognizes the name. That’s rather witty.”
“It’s a fairly obscure novel.”
“Have you read it?”
“I glanced through it. Maxudov is the narrator — a stand-in for the author, Bulgakov. He was under KGB surveillance at the time.”
“You see? That’s witty.”
/> “You believe in taking a psychological approach to Maxudov?”
“Well, psychology is often more productive than beatings, which is what some of my colleagues prefer. Naming no names, of course.” He opened a drawer in the desk behind which he sat. It was not his desk, but he seemed curious about what was in it. They were in an office of an annex of the municipal offices — a space borrowed for the purpose by Strisz and as anonymous, for him, as the dacha where Tarp had met Telyegin.
“Do you know Russia?” Strisz was saying.
“Does anybody know Russia?”
Strisz laughed and made a face. His face was very lively, always showing emotional play. Tarp had to resist liking him, and he guessed that Strisz knew the effect he was having. He was a man whom it was easy to like, and it may have been for that, too, that Andropov had seemed to distrust him.
“I mean, do you know us well enough to figure us out?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a little thick, you know, bringing in a capitalist to find a Soviet traitor. I suggested a Chinese, but that was taken as a joke.” He made another face. “Far too much of what I say is taken as a joke.”
“You have had only two foreign postings, is that right?” Tarp said severely. Strisz would recognize the tone — that of the serious man returning to business, rejecting amiability.
Strisz sighed. “Only two, yes. Bulgaria and Hungary. As you must know already.”
“You have never been to Cuba? To Argentina? To England?” Strisz shook his head right through all the questions. It amused him to do so.
“You were passed over for promotion last year.”
“I remember.”
“Three years ago you asked for a transfer.”
“And was refused, yes.”
Under the Freeze Page 27