Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Now, still in his forties, barely older than I was, he was head of a directorate that he himself had invented. Even inside the KGB no one was quite certain what this directorate did, or even what its targets were. With a very small headquarters staff that was absolutely loyal to him, Peter operated outside the usual chain of command, running strange operations for obscure purposes all over the world—but primarily in the United States. He reported directly to the Politburo through his mentor and protector, Andropov, by now the head of the KGB. Through Andropov’s good offices and his own charm, Peter was also a favorite of the somewhat dimwitted general secretary of the time, Leonid Brezhnev. It was said in the KGB canteen that Peter could make Andropov laugh and Brezhnev think. This was enough to make anyone fear him.

  That was Peter’s advantage. Until those two turned on him or died, he was immune to the system. And even then, as we shall see, he was too much for his enemies. Peter could make anyone trust him, though few liked him. He also had a truly Napoleonic instinct for maneuver, timing, and choice of ground. And, of course, he was highly developed politically—utterly ruthless and without scruples or personal loyalty to anyone below him.

  I had been working under him for ten years. He had chosen me, plucked me out of the squirrel cage of espionage operations, because he sensed that he and I were kindred souls. Sensed it? I blurted it out to him on first meeting. I came to his notice when he visited my language school and I was assigned as his guide. From the start we spoke American English together; his was perfect. Within an hour I was saying things to him for which I could have been shot.

  Just before we met, I had been working in West Germany, my first major assignment abroad. I had arranged for the theft of several items of U.S. military technology. Over a period of months, these articles were removed, one by one, from an air base, dismantled, measured, and photographed, then returned. So far as I was able to tell, the Americans never knew that they had been missing. The cost of this operation in hard currency had been enormous, including huge bribes to all concerned and the subsequent murder, by poison, of the drunken American sergeant who had let us into the air base after I had covered him with a heap of boys and money. All the same it had been cheaper than developing the technology ourselves, so my superiors were pleased with me. I was decorated and promoted and selected for assignment to the target of targets, the USA.

  Peter knew all this. As we walked together from one building to another, he asked me what I thought this operation had accomplished. I replied, “The same as all other thefts of American technology, Comrade General! An admission of inferiority!”

  We were outside, fortunately. It was snowing—big wet theatrical flakes falling between us so that I saw him, an unreal figure to me anyway, as through a scrim.

  I was seized—do not ask me why—by an irresistible impulse to tell the truth. I replied, knowing that I was probably writing my own death warrant, that the Soviet intelligence apparatus had spent trillions since 1917 to steal inventions from the West. Had we devoted the same sums to research and development, I said, we might have a modern state capable of doing its own science instead of one that stole and lied about everything to hide its weakness. A state that sought to steal everything rather than go to the trouble of making it itself would surely fall in the end because by its every act of espionage it conceded the superiority of its enemies—correctly, because such a state had no intellectual or moral core and therefore no reason to exist.

  Peter listened intently to these wild words, smiling urbanely under his big snow-covered sable cap as though I had just told him a disarming bit of gossip that he, who knew everyone and everything, had somehow never heard before.

  He said, “Then you believe, Comrade Captain, that all espionage is counterproductive?”

  “In the terms of reference stated, yes, Comrade General.”

  Peter asked no more questions. On the rest of the tour he behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary had been said. I thought that my life was over. But instead of ordering my execution, which was in his power, he hired me—simply took me back to Moscow with him in his personal Ilyushin as if he needed no one’s permission, as if there were no such thing as a bureaucracy that had been planning to send me to America to steal more hardware. On the airplane (we rode side by side) he turned to me and said, “This is our best transport plane, and as I’m sure you are aware, it is a copy of the American Lockheed Electra. A very bad copy. Never, Dmitri, speak to anyone else as you spoke to me earlier today. Unless, of course, you wish to order a Lubyanka breakfast.”

  A Lubyanka breakfast was a cigarette and a bullet. I had placed my life in his hands.

  He preserved it because I suited one of his many secret purposes. He was always trolling for promising disciples. He certainly found one in me. Peter gave me something useful to do with my life. I understood, if only dimly in comparison to him, the opportunity that America represented. From the start—even when he was sending me to China as a means of making me useless to the rest of the KGB—he told me that my future was in America. He believed in America’s future, in its potential for unlimited greatness, as fervently as any chairman of Merrill Lynch had ever done. He loved the United States—everything about it, even its defects—as another man might have loved an unattainable woman who could, if only she could be persuaded to yield, make all his dreams come true.

  Wait a minute, you say. We are talking about a lieutenant general of the KGB. Let me explain.

  To Peter, the Russian Revolution and all that had happened because of it was a mistake. This was not because he was not a true Marxist. On the contrary, he was the truest one I have ever known. He believed in the revolution of the proletariat. He believed in the establishment of socialism and its evolution into communism and in the sunlit era of equality, justice, and universal human happiness that would result from this inevitable historical process.

  He was not, however, a Marxist-Leninist. Peter did not believe that the revolution had happened yet. Or, to put it another way, he thought that it had happened in the wrong country at the wrong time. In his opinion there had never been the slightest chance that a primitive state like Russia, which had always been ruled by criminals and, thanks to Peter the Great, had no culture of its own, could ever inspire the world, much less conquer it. The correct country for revolution in 1917 was Germany, an industrialized nation-state with a disciplined people and a great culture that could easily have become the world culture.

  That opportunity had been lost forever, history had passed it by. And created the country of final revolution, America.

  2 Peter had read Jack Adams’s file that morning and committed it to memory, as was his way. He was interested in him, far more interested than I had expected him to be. Over gray sole Meunière, accompanied by a fifty-dollar bottle of Montrachet, Peter fired questions at me. Did I trust Arthur’s judgment?

  “He’s new at the work,” I said.

  “You’re not,” Peter replied, drinking Montrachet with his eyes wide open above the rim of the glass. “What’s your opinion?”

  “That this boy may have possibilities, but also many negatives.”

  “Such as?”

  “His extreme youth.”

  “He’s twenty-one. Any older would be too old.”

  “His dementia.”

  “All great men are driven by a fixation.”

  “He’s a boy from Ohio.”

  “Napoleon was once a boy from Corsica.”

  “Peter,” I said, “he has possibilities. But I think we should go slowly. This boy is unstable.”

  Peter’s fork, laden with gray sole, stopped midway to his mouth. This was not what he wanted to hear. I was spoiling his appetite.

  “Dmitri, Dmitri,” he said, “don’t tell me reasons not to do things. Your job is to make it possible for me to do what everyone knows cannot be done. You do understand?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and put the forkful of fish into his mouth. At that moment, while he
chewed and cut himself another piece of sole that was exactly the right size and coated with exactly the right amount of sauce, I knew that we were off to the races. Some instinct told Peter that Jack Adams represented a golden opportunity, and he was determined to seize it. He had big things in mind for Jack before he even laid eyes on him. There is no way to explain this on the basis of the objective facts. Very likely Peter himself could not have explained it, because reason and logic were not involved. Peter made all decisions between his pelvis and his collarbone, and this was his great strength. He gave an outward impression of intellectual brilliance—his languages, his knowledge of power, his looks, his flashy methods, his devil-may-care way of speaking. But in fact, conscious thought played almost no part in his life. He operated almost entirely on impulse.

  His impulse now was to see Jack for himself. This does not mean that he actually desired to meet him and talk to him, to show Jack his own face and let him hear his voice. No, that was a needless risk at this early stage. Peter wanted to observe Jack through the oneway mirror of surveillance. He wanted to see him in his natural state, see how he behaved with other people, see how they reacted to him. I told Peter that I had already instructed Arthur to arrange such an inspection.

  “Make it tonight,” Peter said. “Eight o’clock. A restaurant. I will be there.”

  “What kind of food?”

  “Italian. Book me a table for two. You will sit alone.”

  My question about cuisine may seem odd to you, but Peter was going to be in the West for a few days only. He ate very little—at the Côte Basque no more than half his gray sole, one small potato, a single glass of wine, some raspberries. But he wanted to do as much business as possible while eating good food. Readers of thrillers written by English schoolmasters may have imagined that the KGB was composed of ascetics who met their agents in deserted warehouses or on fog-shrouded wharves. The secret archives tell a different story: These men came from a country where everyone was hungry and always had been. They had grown up on barley porridge, the manna of the revolution. Therefore, clandestine meetings usually happened in restaurants. Every great spymaster was also a glutton. According to Peter, who really was an ascetic, Stalin used to make Beria eat at secret banquets until his bowels moved.

  I went immediately to the coin telephone at the back of the Côte Basque and called Arthur at home, where he spent most of his time, writing scholarly papers or tutoring Barnard girls in dialectics while his wife worked in a social agency. He taught only one class a week, which was why he had so much time for conspiracy. As a matter of basic procedure we did not discuss matters of substance on the telephone, but spoke to each other only in double-talk, so when I told him what I wanted in plain English, he panicked. In Cuba we had trained Arthur to assume that any telephone was tapped; he actually believed that his line was bugged, that the FBI and the CIA had been following him ever since he got back from the Sierra Maestra, that they regarded him as a threat to imperialism so serious that they had nothing better to do than listen in twenty-four hours a day while he argued over grades with students or planned orgies with colleagues at female schools: “We can get freshman girls!” (I had tapped his phone for a while before contacting him, as a routine precaution.)

  Arthur was so frightened that I thought he might hang up on me, but instead he argued. The time was too short. He had other plans, a dinner party downtown; how could he explain this to his wife? He didn’t know where Jack was.

  “Find him,” I said.

  He protested, he wheedled. How could I place this impossible burden on him? It was bad, exposing him this way.

  “Arthur, this is not a request,” I said. “Are you refusing me?”

  A silence. “No. Of course not.”

  “Good.” I told him the name under which his table would be booked. “Eight o’clock exactly. Do not be late or early, not even by one minute.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Arthur said.

  “You will do as I say. Exactly as I say.”

  My tone of voice left him with the impression that he had two choices: success or death. At the other end of the line he breathed deeply, as if hyperventilating. I told him where to go, Lombardia on West Fifty-fourth Street, a place frequented by publishers and their more successful writers at lunch but virtually deserted after dark.

  “Soon after I sit down, I will order a glass of pinot grigio,” I said. “That will be the all-clear signal. I will then go to the men’s room. Follow me. Do you understand?”

  In a small voice he said, “Yes.”

  After hanging up on Arthur, I called the restaurant and, posing as a hotel concierge, booked two tables for eight o’clock and a third for eight-fifteen.

  Peter liked Lombardian food, Piedmont wines, and especially tartufa, the dark chocolate ice cream that was a specialty of the house even though it was not a northern Italian specialty. In America, who knew the difference? This restaurant was quiet, no music, a well-lighted place in the Italian style. Peter hated Muzak and candlelight. He liked to see his food, liked to see the other faces in the room—and above all, he liked to hear what was being said.

  3 Just before eight o’clock, as soon as it was dark enough, I took up a position in a deep doorway across the street to await Arthur’s arrival. At a minute or two before eight o’clock he got out of a taxi with two young men. One of them, bony and nervous, was clearly Jack Adams. The other was a muscular fellow with short black hair. He wore a blazer and tie. He glowed with health, and one could tell from the lithe way in which he moved that he was an athlete. But he represented an unforgivable breach of security. Trailed by the boys, Arthur shambled into the restaurant.

  I followed. They were seated in the back, against the wall, next to the kitchen, because Arthur was dressed in his usual tramp’s costume, and had brought along two guests instead of the one I had mentioned when I called. The headwaiter started to seat me up front, far from these rowdies, but to his puzzlement I gave him ten dollars (he would have remembered a twenty) to seat me at a table from which I could see and hear what was going on at Arthur’s table.

  I ordered my pinot grigio in a loud voice, then headed for the men’s room.

  Arthur joined me.

  “Who,” I asked, “is the extra man?”

  Arthur raised his hands in a gesture of apology. “Don’t blame me,” he said. “That’s his old high school buddy Danny Miller, who just hitchhiked in from Ohio. Jack wouldn’t come without him.”

  “Why?”

  “Danny’s been drafted, he leaves for basic training next week, so he drove to New York to say goodbye to Jack. It’s his only night in town. He plans to get drunk.”

  “He’s not a draft dodger like Jack?”

  A sour grimace. Arthur said, “He’s a jock. Glad to go if his country needs him.”

  This was interesting. “When was he drafted?” I asked.

  Arthur sighed. Who cared? “Recently, I guess,” he replied. “His number wasn’t supposed to come up until later, but somehow it did.”

  “Where is Jack’s draft board?”

  “In his hometown. He went back to Ohio for his physical. They don’t see as many starvation cases there as in New York.”

  “These two boys are from the same town, they’re the same age?”

  “Right. So what?”

  “Then it’s quite possible that Danny was drafted in Jack’s place. Does he realize that?”

  Arthur was incredulous. “Drafted in Jack’s place?” he said. “Come on, Dmitri.”

  He changed the subject. “It’s the end of the month,” he said. “I don’t have enough money to pay for this.”

  I handed him a wad of crumpled twenty-dollar bills. And made him sign a receipt with a thumbprint. Immediately afterward he rubbed his eye with his thumb and got ink in it. Crying “Ouch!” he splashed water on himself.

  When he turned blindly from the sink, beard dripping, I handed him a towel.

  “Remember the script,” I said. “Have a lively
conversation. Discuss everything from women to politics. Let Danny get drunk. Draw them out. And don’t ask for the check until after I leave.”

  Back in the dining room, Peter had arrived. He, too, had demanded a table at the back of the restaurant, just across the narrow room from Jack and his friend Danny. Seated beside Peter on the banquette was a sloe-eyed girl wearing a white silk dress that clung to her body. As was then the fashion she wore no bra, and her erect nipples were discernible beneath the fabric. Like all of Peter’s girls all over the world this one was striking, almost a model, with a crackling mane of dark hair in which she wore a large waxy tropical flower. She also wore a wedding ring, a broad gold band. In her shimmering sarong, cut at the knee, she looked like a Tahitian maiden in a Hollywood film. Even I, the enemy of impossible dreams, couldn’t look at her without wanting to fuck her.

  The effect she had on Jack was even more urgent. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She felt him looking at her, and in that slow self-aware way that good-looking women have, she turned her head to return his stare. If she expected Jack to look guiltily away like an ordinary male, she was disappointed. He stared boldly back. Their eyes locked. It became a staring contest. Neither would be the first to break off.

  Jack’s friend Danny watched in the mirror, grinning. Obviously he had seen this happen before, and he was looking for a familiar outcome.

  He did not have long to wait. Suddenly, to my great surprise, the girl blushed. She turned away, hair tossing, and with an ostentatious laugh pretended that Peter had said something witty to distract her.

  Danny laughed. “She had the vision!” he cried. His voice was distinct, flat, midwestern. Penetrating. The girl could hear every word he said even though his back was turned.

  Arthur said, “The what?”

  “She saw Bwana Devil,” Danny said. “The one-eyed lion. Jack looks at a girl, and if she gives him a hard-on, he concentrates on that and looks deeeeep into her eyes. Nothing on his mind except Bwana Devil. After about two minutes, the girl sees it too. Like a vision of the future—the immediate future. No shit. I’ve had ’em admit it. Right, Jack?”