Irving did not argue; business was business. “You were once an epistemologist?”
“I studied epistemology in university.” Irving found that intriguing; Clauson, the old Angleton protégé, had once told him that the discipline of epistemology—the study of the nature of knowledge, and the deceptions that limited it—was essential for a spymaster.
Irving tested him: “You read Wittgenstein on Certainty?”
“Yes.”
“You sure? What about Heisenberg on Uncertainty?”
“Maybe.”
The heater shut down with a clank, and Davidov left, smiling. Irving paced the room for a while, wondering whether to stick with Dominick in London or head for Arizona right away.
He decided to call Dominick at Claridge’s and meet him and Mike Shu in front of the fiddle players in the lobby to brief him on the big news about Liana being the sleeper’s daughter. That would arm the impersonator for the session with the mafiya lady; ignorance of that relationship would have been deadly. Then Irving would take the next plane to Phoenix. That could be justified as business, but business was not always just business.
“Madame Nina would have seen through me in a minute,” Dominick said. “Nothing else I’ve boned up on is as important. Thank God you found out in time.”
“Thank Davidov. He wanted us to know Liana is the sleeper’s daughter. Planted it on me very skillfully, if it’s true, which I think it is. The question is, why did he want us to know it?”
“I guess he wants the impersonation to succeed,” Michael Shu offered. “The KGB wants us to fool the Feliks people, their rivals for the money.”
Claridge’s string quartet struck up a Viennese waltz, and Irving got the time-warped sensation that the Franco-Prussian War was about to begin. “You sit tight here in London,” he told Dominick through the protective noise. “I made a deal to get the von Schwebels to deliver Madame Nina here. Be safer for you than in Riga.”
“Von Schwebel is in cahoots with the mafiya?” Dominick seemed to be surprised that a media mogul could be so compromised.
“Right. You met him at Ace’s party. His publishing house is our meal ticket.”
“Wait a minute,” said Michael Shu. “Let’s stop and think about that. It’s a matter of record that von Schwebel owns Globocop, too.”
“Hunh?”
“Our security at the bank.” The accountant looked worried. “You just told us that the guy who is tied in with the Russian mafiya owns the company we hired to prevent anybody from listening to our phones or monitoring our trades. Riga must know everything.”
“Not to worry. The more overhears they rack up, the less they believe us. All those spooks have a looking-glass mentality.”
He hoped Dominick would buy that reassurance; the penetration of the Memphis bank by Madame Nina’s crew meant that she knew all about the impersonation plan. But when the KGB was told the same thing about Memphis, Davidov believed the opposite—that Dominick was indeed the sleeper. So go figure.
Davidov slipped into the front seat of the Bentley. Yelena was driving, wearing a chauffeur’s cap too big for her head, because he did not trust the London station chief’s driver. They drove around Knightsbridge and up King’s Road through Chelsea for about a half hour as he thought through the encounter with the American reporter. When Davidov was ready, he spoke quickly.
“I tipped him to Liana being Berensky’s daughter,” he reported, “which he did not know. At least it gives Dominick a chance with the Feliks people. Then I sent Fein to see Viveca Farr in Arizona, because only he can find out what she knows. Ask me questions.”
“The firefly message?”
“He pretended not to be able to figure it out, but it’s surely what brought him here. Must be a past personal reference, unbreakable as code.” He adjusted the seat belt. “Fein sent the Speigal message to Sirkka, that I’m sure of. Means that Fein wanted Berensky to collect one last grand coup. Probably means that Speigal is turned or dead.”
“Is Fein CIA?”
“He has a subtle, original, daring mind, and is not a drinker. Definitely not CIA. He uses a dialect of reverse meanings—the word for ‘I don’t believe you’ is a double positive, ‘yeah-yeah.’ ”
“Is this a U.S. government plot to destabilize the Russian Federation?”
“No.”
“Is Dominick an impersonator or the real sleeper?”
“Going into this meeting, I could have sworn Dominick was a legitimate fake, though I sent all the signals to the opposite. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Who would know?”
“Not Irving Fein. Maybe Madame Nina. Probably Viveca Farr.”
They drove in Bentley silence through Queen Elizabeth Gate up Park Lane toward Claridge’s. As the car turned into Davis Street, Davidov reached inside his shirt, drew out the small recorder, and passed it, tape and all, to the analyst. “There’s a reference on this to sandwiches that cannibals like, I don’t get it. See if you can figure it out.”
He nodded hello to Roman, the doorman, and trotted up the steps to the lobby. Ahead was a string quartet laboring over a tune popular in the E. Phillips Oppenheim era, and to its left were Fein, Dominick, and the accountant Michael Shu in earnest conversation. He veered off to the elevator and went directly to his suite.
Davidov direct-dialed Sirkka at her private number in Frankfurt. When she answered, he said without identifying himself, “Memphis wants to meet Madame here in London. See if you can get your mutual friend to arrange it. Call me back at Claridge’s as soon as you can.”
He ordered dinner for one in the suite. Two hours later, Sirkka was back on the telephone. “Madame has declined the kind invitation from Memphis to meet in London. She tells my friend she and her committee will see him next week in Riga if he wishes. However, on the day after tomorrow, her organization will send a representative to meet him at Claridge’s for tea in the lobby at four P.M.”
“Who is the representative?”
“Her name is Antonia Krumins. It has been more than twenty years, but the one who sleeps will recognize her. If not, she should be able to recognize him.”
LONDON
“Finger sandwiches, madam?”
Antonia Krumins declined; cucumbers and alfalfa shoots on two inches of trimmed white bread seemed to her all too emblematic of the triumph of Western decadence. She ordered warm scones and thick-cut vintage marmalade with her Earl Grey tea and awaited, in the Claridge’s lobby, the arrival of Aleks Berensky or his impersonator.
Would she recognize the husband of her youth? A quarter-century had passed since Shelepin’s son had abandoned her, eight months pregnant. Soon after, when the rejected wife was eighteen, she was informed by the KGB that she was to be uprooted from family and friends and sent, alone with her infant daughter, to Latvia to aid in its Russification.
Aleks never said goodbye. She received no letter or any form of communication from him, then or ever. That abrupt and final abandonment engendered an abiding hatred of him that helped sustain her throughout a hard and bitter life.
The KGB’s responsibility ended with the arrangement of a marriage to a compliant Latvian, Ojars Krumins. He died some years after serving his purpose of providing a different last name for the wife and child of an agent sent abroad alone on permanent assignment. She felt little animosity toward the KGB, the pervasive presence that had at least bound the Soviet Union together. No; the loathing that permeated her being through the long generation was directed personally at the callous Shelepin and his illegitimate son, her tall and handsome runaway husband, Aleks Aleksandrovich Berensky.
Would he recognize her? For the occasion that she had anticipated all her adult life, Antonia Krumins, the longtime ballet teacher, set aside both the drab costume she wore during most days and the bulky woolen undergarments and grandmotherly dress that she wore on cold, damp evenings in Riga. She chose instead a suit made in St. Petersburg copying a Chanel design, and shoes with heels that accented her lithe
dancer’s legs. In addition to eyeshadow, she had applied a foundation creme that covered her pockmarked cheeks, and finished her makeup with a daring shade of red lipstick. She had washed and set her hair, cut medium-length as was the fashion, adding an auburn rinse to conceal the strands of gray. The steel-rimmed glasses that partially corrected her poor eyesight were replaced on this day by contact lenses, an extravagance that was her major concession to vanity. She stopped short of using perfume.
She knew her associates outside the ballet school would hardly recognize her. Would Aleks Berensky, after all these years? In her estimation, he probably would. The pretty, smiling girl of their youth had developed into a handsome woman, when she wanted to be, with a permanently stern expression but identifiable on close inspection as the same person. Ballet exercise had kept her body supple. Men who wanted to flatter her during the Soviet days would say that she and her daughter, Liana, looked like sisters.
But would an impersonator—a man pretending to be Aleks Berensky—recognize her? She had been thoroughly briefed, just before coming to London, on the details of a surveillance of a Memphis, Tennessee, bank; she knew that Edward Dominick frequently complained of a lack of photographs of his Russian bride. A Western impostor would probably be looking for the plump and plain stereotype of the middle-aged Slavic woman. On the other hand, she noted no other lone woman waiting at any of the tables in the Claridge’s lobby; she was, as the English novelists put it, Hobson’s choice—for whoever came in to meet a woman, it was either her or nobody. She kept her eye on the entrance.
Tea was served. She told the waiter she preferred to wait until it became strong and she would pour it herself. In five minutes, she reached for the pot to pour.
“My name is Aleks Berensky.”
A suitably tall man was standing over her. The voice was familiar, but not enough to make an identification. She half-smiled up at him and indicated a chair to her right. He told the waiter to move the chair around to her left and sat down.
“I would have known you anywhere,” he said in Russian. “You haven’t changed.”
“Of course I have.”
“You dress a lot better, and you make yourself up now, and you’re a woman, not a girl. But you look the same to me.”
“You have changed.” She did not want that to be an accusation or a judgment and added: “You look prosperous. It is hard to think of you as a banker.” If it was indeed Aleks, he must have put on fifty pounds over the years; the face was pudgier and he had obviously been in an accident at one time; the eyes, as well as she could make out, were the same greenish gray, but that was a common color. Her own contacts did not let her focus too closely, but she could see that a puffiness around the eyes replaced the sunken, intense look of cruelty she could never forget. The height was right. He could well be the same man; on physical evidence alone, he could possibly not be, too.
“I got banged up in a car before they invented air bags. You didn’t have a face-lift and I did.” The voice was definitely deeper, but that was to be expected, and his hairline had receded, also predictable. The hair was a little darker than she remembered, but so was hers.
Did he know that the Latvian television reporter tracking him was his daughter? The report and tapes from the Feliks organization’s operatives in America showed no awareness by Dominick of his relationship to Liana. “You left behind more than one of us.”
“I saw Masha at a party in New York. I recognized her because I’ve been getting tapes of her broadcasts—frankly, that’s all the Russian I hear and why my Russian is so rusty.”
“Did you identify yourself to her?”
“Of course not. God, it was awkward, shaking hands with your own daughter after all these years and not being able to embrace her properly. Or even to introduce yourself as her father.”
“Especially when she is searching for you.”
“She’s being used by quite a few people to find me. My job—the meaning of my whole life—has been not to be found.” When she chose not to fill the pause that followed, he said, “She’s a fine young woman. Your mouth, your cheekbones, your dancer’s way of carrying yourself. My eyes, I think; gray, rather than your brown.” He noticed detail, as a trained agent would. “We should be very proud, but you especially.”
“I am ashamed of Liana. She was a traitor and she has become a whore.”
He did not respond directly to that. “And you blame me.”
“I blame you for nothing,” she lied evenly. “I never thought of you until recently, and then only because a woman of great influence summoned me.”
“You speak of Madame Nina. What can you tell me about her?”
“Nothing.” In a low voice, she added, “My purpose here is only to report to her if you are the son of the hateful Shelepin.”
He pulled his chair closer. “I tried to switch around to give you my good ear, but I missed what you just said.”
That had the ring of truth. She remembered his youthful frustration at his hearing loss, and how he would insult her by turning his deaf side to her during an argument. “Is your hearing no better?” She chose not to commit to calling him either Aleks or Edward, and did not use a name. Nor did he, she noticed, use hers.
The tall man, whatever his identity was, dug a flesh-colored device, the size of a marble, out of his right ear. “This is the latest hearing aid, and it helps.” He took a small screwdriver out of his pocket, made an adjustment, and put the device back in his ear. “The Americans have a saying: ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ ”
So cavalier now, and a cultivated gentleman. She remembered the savage way her young husband had forced himself on her, slapping away her shyness, breaking her resistance to break her spirit. As if in fond recall, she asked, “Do you remember our wedding anniversary, Aleks?” If he was an impostor, he would have been briefed to have that date on the tip of his tongue.
“It was in April, I think. Yes, around the time of the mushroom rains. I’m sorry, it’s not a date I have had the occasion to remember.”
“And after the ceremony, in Sokolniki Park?”
“The only time I was in Sokolniki Park was as a boy, to visit the American exhibition in 1959. Khrushchev and Nixon argued in a kitchen. Are you testing me, Antonia Ivanov Berensky Krumins?” He had her names correct. “Remember the glorious time we had on top of the Eiffel Tower?” Then he became serious. “Do you really think I am somebody else, pretending to be Aleks Berensky?”
“That is what you say to your CIA friends in your corner office of a bank in America,” she said carefully. “I am told that you ask your fellow spies for letters that I wrote to your father, Shelepin, begging for him to let you return.” The memory of those early days of enforced isolation began to burn in her again, but she was determined not to let it affect her mission. “You keep demanding some little fact about the sleeper agent’s past in Russia that you could use to prove that you were him.” She waited for him to refute that.
He heaved a sigh, impressive in a big man. “I have been fully aware that Karl von Schwebel’s security company has transmitted to the Feliks people the sound of every flushing of the toilet in my executive bathroom. But you have to remember that every word I said about an impersonation I knew that you and others would hear. In my business, it is called disinformation. You may judge me for a bad husband, but do not take me for a fool.”
“Then your impersonation—”
“—is the greatest impersonation anyone can perform. I am impersonating myself. In the grand looking-glass war, I am pretending to be someone else pretending to be me.” She bore his disappointed glare. “I would have thought that Madame Nina would tell you that.”
She permitted herself a full smile, as she did rarely, and wished that her new lenses permitted her to examine his expression closely. “Let us assume that you are who you say you are, and you are not who you say you are not.” She reached for her purse, drew out a sheet of paper with a message typed on it, and read it to him.
; “ ‘We expect you to be prepared to turn over the investment entrusted to you by your father’s legitimate political heirs.
“ ‘You were sent abroad by Aleksandr Shelepin, last of the legitimate successors to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, for a great national purpose. Five years ago, you were given a certain sum by those of us who were driven from communist stewardship by the so-called reformers, followers of the traitor Andropov and his protégé Gorbachev. You were provided intelligence by members of our organization to make this investment of the people’s capital grow.
“ ‘None of those assets are yours,’ ” she continued to read. “ ‘Nor can the usurpers presently in the Kremlin make any claim upon them. You hold them in trust for us, and there can be no negotiation to get them back where they belong.’ ”
He held out his hand for the paper and read it for himself, then returned it to her. “That may be. But first I must make certain that the Feliks people are a serious political force and not a bunch of hooligans and financial con men and deadwood apparatchiks.”
“Is that for you to decide?”
“It is. And I control the money.”
The waiter came by with a tray of finger sandwiches. “These are good. You want some?” asked Dominick/Berensky. Inwardly seething at the professed spy’s display of insolence, she again declined. He picked up a handful and popped them in his mouth all together.
“Let me pour your tea,” she said, emptying a pitcher of hot water into the bone-china teapot and stirring it, “before you choke.”
He held out his cup without the saucer—apparently he had forgotten his Russian habits—and said, “You still move like a ballerina. Now I’m sorry I put on all this weight. You’re wrong about Masha, though—she may fool around a little, but that’s the modern way. And her politics are a young person’s politics.”
She felt an urge to dash the hot water in his face. Instead, she poured the milk in the cup first, as the English did, and then the strong tea through the strainer, and then a little hot water, and then offered the raw sugar crystals. The ceremony was, as he suggested, a ballet, and she could hear the strains of the tragic theme in Swan Lake.
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