Bannerman's Promise

by John R. Maxim

  The big one sees the fat one watching him. Now comes the confrontation. The big one approaches the fat one. Uncle Pyotr could not hear what he said to him, but he was quite sure that he heard the fat one say that he was “Komitet.”

  Only KGB would dare say this, but the big man was not intimidated. All at once the big one and the young one seize the fat one. Maybe they stick a gun in his ribs—Uncle Pyotr doesn't know--but the fat one goes with them as they take him down 25th October to the alley where the trucks make deliveries.

  Uncle Pyotr can no longer see them, but he hears the sounds of a fight. He hears blows being struck. One minute

  later, the young one and the big one come out alone and they go back into GUM.

  Uncle Pyotr looks in the alley. He sees a dark shape on the ground. He looks closer, strikes a match. Fat man is dead. Head is all smashed up. On his chest are still the photographs. Uncle Pyotr strikes another match. One of the photographs looks like the big man from GUM. Uncle Pyotr becomes frightened. He hurries to the metro and goes home, but after a while he remembers his duty as a citizen.

  Ratmir drained his fourth cognac.

  His nerves were quiet now. He wished that his conscience would shut up as well.

  It was, after all, not his idea to blame the big one and the young one. This was Uncle Pyotr's idea. It came to him after he had made Ratmir tell him again and again what had really happened in every detail. It was only after the second cognac that Ratmir remembered the photographs in that fat thief's hand and the way that the pig had told him to slow down when he saw those other two.

  Don't worry about those two, said Uncle Pyotr. Even if the police find them there will be no evidence. Main thing is to keep the police busy chasing shadows for a while. Let them find out if the big slob who bullied you is really KGB. Very unlikely, but it adds to the confusion. Meantime, stay away from the Savoy for a few weeks in case the doorman remembers that the dead man got into your taxi.

  Uncle Pyotr is very smart.

  But Uncle Pyotr is also Uncle Pyotr. It would be hard for him to remain silent if two innocent men should be arrested and charged. Unless, of course, they were Communists.

  Ratmir would try not to think about that.

  28

  How Leo had anguished about this trip, thought Elena. It was on, then off, then finally on again when she insisted.

  She had no doubt that the invitation, when first offered, was entirely spontaneous, entirely free of covert intent. The news that she was carrying Lesko's child, that they would marry in three weeks, had taken him totally by surprise.

  He had delighted in her happiness. He teased her for blushing. Then, when she asked if he would stand up with Lesko at the wedding, he was overcome. She remembered how he had fumbled for his appointment booklet and, seeing that his schedule for the weekend of the wedding was full, happily crossed out all of it. He turned to the pages for the following week. More appointments. He stared at them, his tongue between his lips, a wide grin forming. Suddenly, he clapped his hands.

  “Your wedding trip,” he blurted. “Where will you go on your wedding trip?”

  She had scarcely given it a thought. But now that the subject arose . . .

  ”A few days in the London flat, perhaps. Or at the house in Antibes. Lesko has never seen either of them.”

  “He has also never seen Russia, no?”

  She blinked. “Russia for a honeymoon, Leo?”

  He pretended to pout. “Russia for a honeymoon,” he repeated. “Did Catherine the Great take this attitude? She was German, you know. Nearest thing to Swiss.”

  Not all Swiss, she thought, would agree with this last. Not many Germans for that matter. She said nothing.

  “Elena the Great and Lesko the Terrible. You see? You even sound Russian.”

  “Um ... all the same, Leo .. ”

  “Very well. Perhaps not for a honeymoon, perhaps not right away. But a visit to my country will be my wedding present. You choose the time and I will arrange everything. I will personally be your guide.”

  Leo was more than a little deflated, although he tried not to show it. His eyes said, I know. You think Russia is nothing. Snow and ice. Long lines and shortages.

  She took his hand. “It is a most generous wedding present, Leo. I would like very much to see your country.”

  She, too, meant later. Perhaps in a year. But the more that she thought of it, the more that the ... eccentricity ... of a Russian honeymoon appealed to her. She enjoyed travel. She especially enjoyed showing Lesko places that he never dreamed he would see.

  ”I will talk to Lesko,” she said.

  She did.

  She was not sure that the conversation actually registered with him, but she did tell him of Leo's gift and she suggested that now, before the baby, might be the best time to take advantage of it. He muttered something in reply, some unclear reference to the South Bronx, but he did not object. It seemed that he was still in shock. More on his mind was the prospect of telling his daughter that she was about to have a brother.

  Leo was thrilled. She told him, however, that her doctor had urged her not to overdo it. A week or ten days. Just Moscow and St. Petersburg, perhaps. Not too much flying, no extended driving on Russian roads, stay within reach of good medical care and use private clinics only. Leo agreed. He would begin making arrangements at once.

  But when next she saw him, over afternoon tea, everything was changed. It was a bad idea, he told her. Impulsive. He had not thought it out. Too much confusion in Russia today. Better to wait. She asked him what had happened to cause such a change of heart. He gave reasons. They all rang false. She insisted, in her disappointment, that he be frank with her.

  He told her the truth. It was Yuri, he said, who had opened his eyes. No one, said Yuri, would believe that this was a wedding trip. One look at these three traveling together and what they will see is the work they did in Zurich now being tried out in Moscow. It will make ... them nervous. It might frighten them. Frightened men do foolish things.

  She had a sense that he'd started to say him—one man in particular—not them. But she let it pass.

  “Ah . . . who are they, Leo?”

  He looked at his hands. “Criminals. Renegades.”

  “Leo, is that not the whole point of what we did here? To frighten criminals?”

  A troubled sigh. “It is surely not the point of a honeymoon, Elena. Antibes is better. Go to Antibes and lie in the sun with your new husband.”

  “What is better is to keep him moving. Antibes would have too many young blondes strolling past him with their flat bellies and bare chests.”

  Belkin didn't smile.

  “Leo.” She gripped his sleeve. “What is it really?”

  He grimaced. Again he looked away. ”I will tell you what kind of friend I am, Elena. When I realized that Yuri was quite right, I considered saying nothing. I saw an opportunity to find a few bad apples.”

  In this, she saw the reason for his pain. “From what barrel, Leo? Your KGB?”

  His jaw tightened. “Not my KGB.”

  Inwardly, Elena rolled her eyes. Not my KGB. My KGB ... we are the good guys. Their KGB . .. they are the oppressors, the Jew hunters, the thought police. My KGB works to improve the lives of our people. Their KGB works only to keep them down.

  She knew Leo. She knew that he was far too sophisticated to reduce the distinction between the First Directorate and all the other directorates to one of good versus evil. They were all chosen by the same criteria. They all took the same oath which, incidentally, had nothing to do with improving lives.

  “Leo ... to the heart of the matter.” She made a vaulting gesture with her hand. “Are you saying that drug traffic in your country is controlled by the KGB?”

  ”I have... reports,” he told her. “And it's not only drugs.”

  “These reports. Have you passed them on to your superiors?”

  He nodded. ”I am told, in effect, to mind my own business.”

&nbs
p; Elena eyed him skeptically. “But that was not the actual language.”

  He shook his head. ”I am told that they are looking into it. If I should come across hard evidence, I should pass it on through channels. Otherwise, it is not my responsibility.”

  “In other words, it's the responsibility of the former Second Directorate. Why do you doubt that they would want to crack down on the drug traffickers before Moscow becomes another New York?”

  ‘The police might want to. But the KGB does not operate that way. They infiltrate. They are very patient. Eventually, they are so woven into an organization at all levels that, yes, they do in fact control it.”

  “So?” To Elena this seemed a sensible course of action. “And, then what?”

  “And then nothing. For them, control is an end in itself.”

  She pursed her lips. Them again. The bad KGB.

  “Forgive me, Leo,” she said. “But this begins to sound like nonsense.”

  He sat back, nodding slowly, wearily. His body language said that she was not the first to make such an assessment.

  “Leo.” She drummed her fingers. “Look at me.”

  He hesitated, then met her eyes.

  “Do you how many lives I have helped to destroy?” she asked him.

  He shook his head impatiently. “That was a different Elena. And you have more than atoned.”

  “The slate is far from clean, Leo. Before I am finished…”

  He raised both hands, stopping her. “You say this to persuade me that you understand. That you do not minimize. But you will also tell me that I am allowing a pathological distrust of my own organization to color my judgment.”

  She lowered her eyes. “That isn't possible, Leo?”

  He grunted. His expression softened. ”I saw this once on the wall of a lavatory: ‘Even paranoids have real enemies.’ ”

  Elena smiled. Her tone was gentle. “And Russia has real problems, Leo. Do I minimize if I say that drugs are not so high on the list?”

  “Not so high?” Belkin sniffed. “Is alcohol a drug?”

  He quickly waved a hand to show that the question was rhetorical.

  “Today,” he said, one finger aloft, “there are at least fifteen million alcoholics in the Russian Republic alone. Nearly one person in ten. Subtract young children and it's one in seven. This rate of alcoholism is twice that of the United States and it does not tell half the story.”

  Elena waited. She was not, she hoped earnestly, about to hear of a KGB plot to keep Russia drunk.

  “Last year”—the finger waved at her—“more than forty thousand died from drinking homemade concoctions and another twenty thousand were blinded. Last year, in Russia, there were over six million arrests for public drunkenness. Why so much drinking, Elena?”

  Broken spirits. Broken hearts. And now the end of dreams. She was beginning to see what was coming.

  “And now for drug abuse.” The finger on his other hand came up. “Two million drug abusers in Russia. This is less than one-fifth the rate of abuse in the United States and in most of Western Europe. Not so high, eh? Not a big problem.”

  Elena worked the numbers in her head. Twice as many alcoholics as in the West. It follows that there should be twice as many drug abusers as well. Not two million. Twenty million. An attractive market for the traffickers. If only these twenty million Russians had any money.

  “How would they pay for the drugs, Leo?”

  “Who? User or seller?”

  “User. The ordinary Russian.”

  “Same as in the West,” he answered. “By stealing.”

  He saw doubt in her expression. He misunderstood it.

  “Even in better times,” he told her, “more than half of all production was vanishing before it could be delivered. This is everything. Food, clothing, building materials, appliances . . . everything. An additional twenty percent is so-called ‘ghost’ production. A farm or factory produces this amount but it never appears on the books. The manager uses it for barter. This is how he gets the materials he needs and it's how he gets food and trade goods for his workers. For some commodities, vodka and caviar, ghosting and stealing account for up to ninety percent of production.”

  “Yes, but if this were stopped ... ”

  “It can't be stopped. This is the economy, Elena. For my lifetime at least, this is how it will function.”

  “You arrest them for being drunk. Why not for stealing?”

  “Then who would be left to work?”

  Belkin paused, reflecting on the taste that he must be leaving in her mouth. “We are not a nation of thieves, Elena. The ordinary Russian does not regard this as theft. For all his life, and for all his father's life, everything has belonged to the state, therefore to everyone and therefore to no one. If they paid him enough to buy, he would buy. If he could find what he needs in the shops, he would buy. But he cannot find it because the best still goes to those who have influence and most of what is left is reserved for export. So he helps himself. Is this theft,” he asked, “or is it Marxism carried to its logical extreme?”

  She tossed her head vaguely, noncommittally.

  Another fine philosophical distinction, she thought. This time between stealing communal property and stealing someone else's property. It made for an interesting conversation over tea, but it did not answer her question. How would they pay for the drugs?

  That Russians stole from each other did not come as a revelation. She knew a British businessman who had lived two years in Moscow. He told the story that for a long time he could not understand why the Russians could not seem to make light bulbs that were capable of lasting more than a few weeks. Always, in his office, they were burning out. He would turn off the lights at the end of a business day and the next morning, guaranteed, several of the bulbs would be dead. Except, he told her, there was a period of about two months when they all seemed to work quite nicely.

  At last, he caught two of his Russian workers in the act. They were standing on chairs, unscrewing his light bulbs, and replacing them with dead ones, which they had brought from their apartments. Why did they steal? Because there were no light bulbs in the shops. Why no stealing for that two-month period? Because the shops had light bulbs.

  Very well, she thought. If a user wants drugs, he will steal or deal for them. This is normal. She still had trouble understanding what the user might steal that the dealer would want.

  “Leo ... if I wish to get high tonight, I go to my dealer. What do I give him in return for my drugs?”

  “Almost anything of value.”

  “Which I've stolen?”

  He shrugged. “Same as in the West. At first, you steal from your family. When they have nothing left or when they throw you out, you steal from others. The dealer tells you what he wants you to bring him.”

  “What does he do with these stolen goods?”

  “He fences them. In Moscow alone, there are thousands of shops and kiosks where stolen goods can be bought.”

  “And paid for with what?”

  “Hard currency if you have it. Jewelry, for example, if you don't.”

  “With which the shop pays the dealer who then buys more drugs?”

  “Precisely.”

  “And the trafficker turns this jewelry—for example—into cash.”

  “One assumes so, yes.”

  Elena groaned within herself. Leo was no fool. But to her this made no sense. She shook her head.

  “Too complicated, Leo,” she said. “Drug trafficking is not a commodities exchange. It is a cash business and your country has no cash. Worse, you speak of hundreds of illegal shops, all of which must be known to the KGB by now. If they know the shops, they know the dealers who supply them.”

  “All true.” He nodded.

  “And all a house of cards. If I were still a trafficker, I would stay far away from it.”

  Belkin raised an eyebrow. “You would turn your back on a country that is potentially the richest in the world? More oil than S
audi Arabia, more gold and emeralds than all of South America, more coal than the United States? Or would you decide to get in on the ground floor as thousands of Western firms are doing already?”

  “And as the KGB, according to you, is doing already.”

  “It is. Believe it, Elena.”

  “As a matter of policy? Or are these the renegades you mentioned?”

  “First comes policy. Infiltrate and control. This is normal. In the meantime, they say, let the people have their drugs. Let them become addicts. Addicts do not riot over the price of sausage. They do not tear down statues.”

  Elena sipped from her cup. She did so to mask her skepticism. He saw through the attempt.

  “With my own ears, Elena, I have heard SCD officers discuss the comparative merits of the various narcotics. Marijuana is bad. Too bulky, hard to ship, too easy for users to grow their own, and, worse, most people can take it or leave it alone. Hashish is more concentrated but, otherwise, shares the same disadvantages. Cocaine is good but is currently too expensive, comes from too far away, and few Russians have yet developed a taste for it. Crack cocaine is out of the question. Crack is nekulturney. Too low-class. Also, addicts too quickly become useless. Best drug for Russians is heroin.”

  “Um . . . why is that?”

  “More easily imported, available from former republics, can be smoked, is already in fashion with boys who served in Afghanistan. Best of all, a heroin addict can function quite normally as long as he is not deprived of it.”

  Elena's expression had become distant.

  In her mind she saw the Indians of Bolivia. She had grown to womanhood there. She had lived in a fine house. The Indians worked the fields. She had been taught, as a young girl, that they were nothing. They swept the streets, they picked the crops, and they had babies. It was all they were good for. And yet she was fascinated by them. These Quechuas and Aymaras, now abysmally poor, almost all of them illiterate, chewing coca leaves to give them false strength and to dull the ache of empty bellies, were all that remained of the proud Inca nation.

  Her mind seemed to want to draw a parallel. But she knew that to do so was absurd. One might compare those Indians to the Russian serfs of eighty years ago but not to the next generation for whom an elementary education, at minimum, was compulsory under the Communists. Surely not to the men and women of Leo's generation who attended university and helped to conquer space and who began, gradually, to think for themselves.