Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  “How, with such a budget?”

  Not a flicker, not a glance, not a word of explanation. “Take my word for it,” he said. “This operation must continue. It is the hope of the future. You understand?”

  “Yes. But it cannot do so without money. Immediate—”

  “Stop telling me the obvious,” Peter said. “Pay attention to orders.” He gave me a severe look.

  I said, “Yes, Comrade General.”

  “We must disengage, maintain the quarantine,” Peter said, ticking off items as if leaving an order for breakfast before retiring for the night. “Wait these traitors out. They will fail. And if they don’t, we’ll deal with them. Listen. Our time together is limited. I have an assignment for you. It is vital.”

  “At your orders, Comrade General.”

  He turned to face me for the first time. He was smiling. “Faithful Dmitri Alexeyivich,” he said. To me, the vestigial serf, his smile said: In tsarist times men like you were coachmen who froze to death outside while men like me finished dinner and had a virgin for dessert.

  “I want you to go back to America,” he said.

  I was startled. “Why? How?”

  “Be quiet. Everything is arranged. Igor will see you across the frontier. You will travel by a circuitous route.” He smiled at the hackneyed phrase, transforming real drama into false drama.

  “And then what?”

  “Dmitri Alexeyivich, listen.”

  Another rebuke. I lowered my eyes, clasped my hands. We were walking deeper and deeper into the forest on the shoveled path, white birches against white snow, not a footprint except our own. I had been away too long: Russia was far colder than Massachusetts.

  Peter talked on, describing my task. He handed me an envelope. “The instructions are inside. Your contact is Escobar. He will require a recognition phrase, a number, and a name. The name is mine, in Spanish, with honorific. Give him my regards.”

  Peter handed me a tiny slip of paper with a five-digit number written on it. I memorized it.

  When I nodded, signifying I had committed it to memory, Peter pointed to his mouth. I rolled the paper into a pill, put it in my own mouth, salivated, and swallowed it. He handed me another. A phrase in Spanish: Los caballeros quieren beber. “The horsemen want to drink.” I swallowed this too.

  After running the errand that required use of these bona fides, I was to return to the United States.

  “Make contact with Morgan,” Peter said. “Tell her the truth, that the KGB has found me out, that it is hunting down the friends. In its death throes it is trying to destroy me. I must hide. Tell her I am safe, that I am rallying the friends. Then break contact.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forever. Break off. Disappear. Tell them they will be contacted by someone from me. The caller will say, ‘I come from the fisherman.’”

  He was taking Jack away from me. Morgan, too. My lifework. He made no explanation or apology. A wave of nausea rose within me. I smelled it, tasted it. “Igor has a special telephone for Morgan,” Peter said. “She should have it with her at all times.”

  I said, “Very well, Comrade General. Will I see you again?”

  “I think not. But you have done a great thing, Dmitri Alexeyivich, greater than you know, and you will be rewarded. This creature we have created together is very, very valuable. More valuable than even you can guess. We have never had such an asset before, and we will never again have such an opportunity as this. This operation must at all costs be preserved.”

  Now it was noon. An alabaster sun shed milky light on the white forest. We came to a turning in the path. A man in white, dressed like a ski trooper, waited on the trail. I looked behind us. Another one, dressed in the same way, with his back to us. Beyond him, Igor. I thought perhaps Igor was about to be shot. But no, and suddenly I understood why.

  Peter said, “Go, Dmitri Alexeyivich. You do not want to meet these gentlemen.”

  A nod. Our meeting was over. Also our life together. He walked onward with firm tread toward the man ahead—a large man wearing a white ski mask, and under his white hood a sable hat that was even more luxuriant than Peter’s. The man behind—smaller, wearing a sheepskin cap under his hood—walked by me as if I were invisible. Very rhythmically, breathing deeply with every stroke, he was sweeping the path with a broom.

  I turned around to watch him. Beyond him, Peter’s footprints. He swept them away, then disappeared himself. My footprints, Igor’s footprints, did not matter.

  In Russian, flattened like his face by the stocking, Igor called out to me. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  We took Peter’s Mercedes; he would not need it anymore. At first light the next morning we reached the Finnish frontier. For obvious reasons, no advance arrangements had been made. Crossing was a simple matter of dollars for the border guards captain, a Japanese watch for the sergeant, American ballpoint pens for the men, a bottle of French perfume for the female lieutenant. Igor distributed the baksheesh, coin of the revolution. To me he entrusted Morgan’s telephone, a clever instrument no larger than a ballet slipper.

  3 As Peter had promised, my return trip was circuitous. So that you know how such things are done and what a waste of motion and money tradecraft is, I will tell you I flew from Helsinki to Bahrain to Bombay, then to Singapore, Manila, and finally Quito. I continued by boat down the Amazon to Francisco de Orellana, Peru, and finally by motor canoe to my destination, Leticia, a tiny frontier town in Colombia. The famous pink dolphins sported in the brown river, raiding the nets of fishermen and causing Pepe, my guide and boatman, to laugh in fellow-feeling: “¡Banditos!”

  In Leticia, in a little pastel concrete box of a bank, its entire front open to the weather but otherwise windowless, I met Escobar. He was a mestizo, neither Spanish nor Indian. Quite short like his YaWa mother, capaciously intelligent like his European father, and quite noticeably subtle, as people who are neither one thing nor the other often are. All this autobiography he recited while we drank a glass of mineral water before getting down to business. This happened subtly, after I answered to his satisfaction the last of a string of polite, impersonal questions he put to me. On my river trip had I eaten the famous Amazonian tambaquí, most delicious of all fishes, cooked on charcoal? Yes? Good. Had I seen the pink dolphins? The gray ones? “A poet called them the flying horses of the Amazon,” said Escobar. “Los caballeros quieren beber,” I replied. Escobar smiled and sent for coffee the other two people who worked in the bank. They scurried away.

  Escobar was very serious now. I said, “Don Pedro sends his regards.” I recited the magic number. Escobar held out his hand. I placed Peter’s letter in it. He examined the seals, opened it, and read.

  With a fond but baffled smile—That Peter!—Escobar said, “Oh my. Such an amount.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Certainly not. Everything is perfectly in order. But you understand that we do not keep such amounts on hand here in our own safe?”

  An impressive black-and-gilt safe stood in the corner, large and forbidding to any safecracker born before 1885; the bank’s perimeter security system was a steel shutter secured by night with a formidable padlock.

  I said, “How long will the business take?”

  He tapped the letter. “Several different transfers from several different accounts will be required. One does not wish to do it all at once. Six days?”

  “Very well.”

  He looked at his watch. “Then you should be on your way. It isn’t good to be on the Amazon at night, and even with Pepe’s Evin-rudes, you will just make it to Loreto before dark. Excellent tambaquí in Loreto.”

  Others were out at night. The country around Leticia was controlled by guerrillas. Peter’s friends—just like me, but how would they know that? Escobar looked worriedly at the westering sun. “Have you any dollars with you?”

  “A few. Most of my money is in deutsche marks.”

  “You should take some dollars with you,�
� he said. He crouched in front of the safe and twirled the dial. The door of the safe swung open with a rusty squeal. He handed me six envelopes, already stuffed and sealed.

  “Each contains the right amount,” he said. “Give one if they simply show you weapons, two if a weapon is fired. Be very careful if they seem very young. The kids are often on drugs. They grew up in the camps. They don’t know the meaning of restraint.”

  I offered him deutsche marks in exchange for the envelopes.

  “¡Señor!” Escobar spread his hands, looked to heaven. “Permit me, I beg you,” he said in Spanish. His body language said, How could a man with my bona fides make such a suggestion?

  4 By the time I got back to America—Rye, New Hampshire, a handsome Republican stronghold by the sea—Jack had pulled himself up in the polls. With two weeks to go, he was three points behind the front-runner, a war hero who despised him even more than the other candidates did—especially after Danny found a legless New Hampshire man who had been one of Jack’s former patients from Walter Reed and induced him to make a television spot. The media agreed that Jack had the momentum. He became the story, the impossible winner, the underdog. They followed him everywhere. Because Jack was where the cameras were, the other candidates began following him too, hoping for a chance encounter, a spontaneous debate in a diner, exposure.

  Morgan and I met at night in the parking lot of a McDonald’s at the edge of town. Neither of us had eaten; we never did on meeting days until we could eat together. As usual we ordered a Big Mac meal, and I ate the hamburger while she consumed the large fries. We each drank a chocolate shake. Apple pie for Morgan, who had no weight problem. Such tasty food after bony, fishy tambaquí and pulpy Amazonian fruit. Not to mention Aeroflot’s menu. I was glad to be back in the enemy camp.

  Morgan said, “We got the money.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She said, “Now all we have to do is stay out of jail. Are you people out of your minds?”

  “Quite possibly. What do you mean?”

  She said, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with a single deposit of twenty-seven million dollars? From a bank in Colombia, for Christ’s sake. The IRS, the bank examiners, every gumshoe in the world will be electrified by this. How could you do this to us?”

  Twenty-seven million dollars? I was amazed. How could Peter possibly pay such a sum from secret funds a day before he was scheduled to be disgraced? I concealed my feelings. Wiping ketchup from my fingers with a sodden paper napkin, I said, “I thought you said you could handle large amounts.”

  “Five mill, yes. Twenty-seven is a whole different question. Danny is going apeshit. So is the governor. They’re lawyers; they want to know where all this money is coming from. How am I supposed to explain this to them, let alone the bank examiners?”

  I had no idea. To cover my confusion, I went on wiping my fingers. It was hopeless: There was more ketchup on the napkin than on my skin. I have a weakness for ketchup. Morgan opened her large purse and plucked a Wet One from a plastic container. “Use this, for Christ’s sake.”

  The wonderful American invention made me clean in an instant.

  Morgan said, “What the fuck was Peter thinking of?” Tonight she was as profane as the Movement chick she used to be, a bad sign.

  “You asked for money in a hurry,” I replied. “Peter provided it in a hurry. Is the twenty-seven million going to be enough to get Jack through the primaries?”

  “It should be,” she said. “If we can get it out of the mattress and onto the street.”

  “How will you do that?”

  “The governor has an idea.” She smiled, on-off. “He’s very experienced.”

  I did not like this—an outsider fingering our money. I said, “Explain.”

  “The governor’s idea is to resurrect rejected loan applications,” she said. “Change the bank’s mind. Loan the failed applicants, mostly shady business people anyway, more than they asked for—much more.”

  “Why?”

  “To shake loose some cash. If, for example, a real estate venture needs five hundred thousand dollars in capital, we loan it a million and a quarter and take back the extra seven-fifty in cash.”

  I figured in my head. “Using those figures, you’d net only fifteen million. You said Jack needs twenty million. At least.”

  “The governor thinks we can milk the businesses for another five million or so,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Lean on them.”

  “You’d still be throwing seven million dollars away.”

  “What choice do we have? Anyway, it won’t amount to that much in the end. These are business ventures that are designed to fail, understand?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “So after the campaign, they’ll all go quietly bankrupt, a process that takes months, and vanish from sight as if they never existed.”

  “What happens to the bank?”

  “It fails. Vanishes out of our lives. Everything is sterilized.”

  I said, “You actually think you can get away with this?”

  “Why not?” Morgan replied. “Jack’s name doesn’t appear on a single piece of paper connected to the bank.”

  “What about you?”

  “My name will come up, but only as an adviser, not as a responsible officer of the bank. I have possession of all that paper, and it will vanish with the bank.”

  I said, “Did the governor really think this up?”

  Morgan smiled a mysterious smile. “By now he thinks he did. That’s why you sent me to the B School, Daddy.”

  “Could I stop this if I wanted to?”

  “No.”

  “Then I hope you’re as smart as Harvard thought you were. Next subject.”

  “Thank God.”

  With money out of the way Morgan was, as always, calmer. Alas, this would not last. “Morgan,” I said, “I have something to tell you.” Then I delivered Peter’s message, verbatim.

  Morgan said, “This is our last meeting? What do you mean by that?”

  “That we will not meet again.”

  She was stricken. “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to leave me? Now? In the middle of everything? One step from the end? What are you talking about?”

  She was shrieking with anger and pain. I could not have upset her more by announcing my own death. She beat me with her fists. An old couple, walking to their car, heard her through the closed windows and stared. The blue-haired wife clucked. More of those foulmouthed Democrats. She peered into the car. Morgan was not yet as famous as Jackie, but her picture had been in the media. Like an embarrassed husband I pulled her head onto my shoulder and said, “Morgan, calm yourself.”

  Bony skull, elbow in the ribs; there was nothing soft about her.

  “Listen,” I said.

  I delivered Peter’s message, nothing more.

  Morgan was stunned. “What do you mean, the KGB is after Peter, after you? You are the KGB.”

  “No longer. Everything is changing.”

  “Are they after me?”

  “No. They don’t know about you. Or Jack.”

  She stared. No doubt she had imagined that the chaps in Moscow gossiped about her, wondered how a mere American, a female, a romantic, a walk-in, could do such brilliant work. She said, “They don’t know about us? What are you telling me?”

  “That Peter took precautions. That he knew this day might come. That he protected you.”

  She fell into a silence. Then, at last: “Where is he?”

  “I have no idea,” I replied. “And soon you will have no idea where I am.”

  “I’ll be alone?”

  “For the time being.”

  “How long is this ‘time being’ of yours?”

  “As far as I am concerned, forever. But—”

  “No!” She pounded the instrument panel, a single hard blow with both fists.

  I said, “Comrade Major, you know the rules. It
is for your own protection. It is temporary. I am not the only fish in Peter’s sea.”

  I handed her a cell phone, an early model, bulky by later standards. “Keep this with you at all times. It’s your only link.”

  She stared at the phone as if it were an urn that contained her own ashes.

  “The call from Peter will come on this phone. After the nomination. The voice will not necessarily be Peter’s.” I told her the code phrase.

  She said, “‘I come from the fisherman’? I’m supposed to wait for a fucking phone call? That’s it? Jesus!” Stricken to the heart, wide-eyed, she stared at me in shattered disbelief. “Fucked again,” she said. “Thanks a lot, Dmitri.”

  She rolled down her window and gulped air. Stern and fatherly for the last time—what would she do in the future when she needed this?—I said, “Close the window, Morgan. Stop mutilating yourself.”

  “Mutilating myself?” She held up the cell phone. “This is my reward for twenty years of masturbation? Do you know what you’re telling me, Dmitri? You’re telling me that the world is coming to an end.”

  “Yes, but not history. You know it’s true. But that was the reason for you, the reason for Jack. To keep history from coming to an end. To keep life alive.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Her voice broke.

  I said, “Peter is loading the revolution onto Noah’s ark.”

  “Jack is his Noah, for Christ’s sake? You want me to believe that?”

  “In a word, yes. We will start it up again. This time in America. This time correctly. That was always the idea.”

  Tears now. “You really believe that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Because otherwise, as you said in Boston, we have wasted our lives.”

  She was silent. Then she broke into sobs, covering her face, turning on the radio loud, as if it would be fatal if her grief were overheard. She had not felt the same just moments before, when she was shouting instead of weeping—anger was supposed to be audible, otherwise what was the use of it?

  I handed her my handkerchief. “I’m sorry,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “This is very hard.”