Napoleon Great-Great-Grandson Speaks

by Rafael Grugman

  The previous day, using Grisha's information, the FBI had reviewed the entire suspect database on the personnel of the Russian diplomatic mission at the UN, including embassy workers in Washington and the consulate in New York. Of thickset, short-haired brunets with round faces, corresponding to the description, there were only a few. Five. There were no Mikhails among them.

  Lloyd ordered a lie detector test for Grisha, and after that, to compile a facial composite of the spy. I asked him to put off the interrogation for a day-let Grisha, without straining himself, have his talk with Sophia. If he guessed that he was suspected of lying, or playing on both sides of the game, he would involuntarily betray himself, and the thread leading to Sophia, and through her, to Abdel, would be broken halfway.

  The appointed meeting never took place.

  The corpse found on the morning of July 30, 2003 on Coney Island Beach in the area of 32nd West was not identified right away. Flyers with a drawing of the face of a forty-five-year-old man were hung, not only on the boardwalk and in the entryways of nearby buildings. All the Brighton lampposts were plastered with them right up to Coney Island Avenue. This posthumous popularity was elicited by the fact that the corpse was not a drowning victim, and was larded with bullets like a Ukrainian sausage with fat. Plus-it had a European appearance. In the South Brooklyn area, it would probably be a Russian.

  The speculations of the police were soon justified-by that evening, the weeping widow made a personal appearance at the police station. In the summary of daily events, the «Victims» column was filled with the inscription: «Emigrant from the Ukraine, guard in a private security firm serving La Guardia Airport, Grigory Doroshenko.»

  I had found out about Grisha's death before lunch, and the proposal to hang up the flyers was mine. Hope still remained that a chance witness would show up, or people who had known Grigory Doroshenko in one way or another. I saw no other way to unearth Mikhail. Although, for dealings with Grisha, he might use one of his pseudonyms, and, after committing the crime, leave the country. In that case, it was hardly likely he'd ever to be found. I can't imagine what necessity there was to kill Grisha. A tiny, inoffensive pawn. If Grisha hadn't spilled the beans out of foolishness, there would have been no reason to touch him.

  In spite of the plethora of announcements (Grisha's photo was shown on the evening TV news), no one, aside from his widow, called in on the police contact telephones. His spouse was depressed, and, to the inspector's questions, answered one and the same thing: «He had no friends. Except for my relatives, he didn't see anyone.»

  As the police explained (and, by the way, I knew even without them telling me), in any investigation, Russians refuse to cooperate with the authorities. No matter how infamous a murder happened in Brighton, as always, there were no witnesses.

  Not a single carnival happens in Rio de Janeiro without murders. The ball on the Coney Island boardwalk was no exception. Whatever feelings I might have had-let us lay aside our personal enmity-I was sorry for the dead man. He had lived with a great dream, and perished for nothing. Questions remained, one of the chief ones being: why was Sophia trying to drag Grisha to Damascus?

  After listening to my report, Lloyd corrected me:

  «There are three main questions. First, who is hiding behind the alias of 'Mikhail.' Second, how they found out in Moscow that you work for the FBI. And, third, about Sophia.»

  WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

  At the age of sixteen, we see the world through rosy glasses. They begin to clear up at the age of eighteen, and after that-at different times for different people, some at twenty, some at twenty-five-our vision clears completely, and we begin to see the world as it really is. When I met Sophia, in July 1976, I was three months shy of the age of twenty-the intermediate stage. My vision had not cleared completely, but the world no longer looked so rosy.

  I was a fourth-year student in the Department of Computer Technology at Novosibirsk University, and I had come back to my home town for vacation. I was at an age when the blood flows like fresh wine, and my heart was in anticipation of love, ready to offer itself to the first beauty I met. Two years earlier, at the end of my first year, in a letter to Odessa, I had flippantly asked my mother the question «Would you have any objection if I got married soon?», which nearly gave her a heart attack. My relatives began to worry.

  Irochka, my cousin, began to inquire persistently what sort of girls I liked the best-brunettes, brown-haired or blonds-never suspecting that in my foolishness I was ready to love all of them in succession. She promised to satisfy my ardent heart during the summer vacation.

  My little cousin… Whenever she appeared on the beach, the sea became agitated. Dolphins washed ashore, and ships let down their anchors, not wanting to leave their roadsteads. Her train of admirers stretched to the horizon and disappeared into the clouds. Her retinue of girlfriends surrounded her, each hoping that some suitor would tire and want to take a break, and then she would drag the suitor into the bushes without delay. And if the philanderer was worth it, they would head straight to the Civil Registry Office to get married. Before he noticed that the bride had been switched.

  The girl that Irochka had prepared for me extended her hand modestly-«Sofa»-and lowered her eyes. For a moment I lost the power of speech, when I saw the dimples on her cheeks, and her eyes were like two sparks of lightning. In order to bring me back to my senses, Sofa said tenderly: «I’m studying at the music school like Irochka.»

  Oh my God, what a magical fascination!

  «Zhenya,» I whispered, not able to open my mouth widely.

  «Are you on vacation?» the madonna encouraged me. She had long since learned the simple rule: if you want to conquer a young man, draw him into a conversation. She smiled fascinatingly and prepared to listen.

  «Yes.» My voice sounded firm. Dope had opened the way to stories of student life.

  Like Irochka, this angelic child was two years younger than me (she had just turned eighteen), but unlike my cousin, who had broken many young hearts, Sophia was modest and charming-a model of virtue and perfection. She listened to my stories with a half-open mouth, which did not close even when I gave her a timid kiss. I had fallen in love. Mama sighed with relief and calmed down: the Siberian beauties had vanished from her son’s mind. But after I graduated from the university and began talking about marriage, Mama was not able to change anything. Was it even necessary? The goal had been achieved: her child had returned under his parents’ roof. The long line of girls had remained in distant Siberia.

  Irochka tried to give me a hint that Sophia was no angel, and while I was away-I had studied for two more years-she hadn’t wasted her time, she had flirted with other admirers. But Sophia herself acknowledged that she had begun these inoffensive relationships: «When you left for Siberia, you didn’t propose to me. How was I to know your intentions were sincere?» She was artless and truthful. There was no reason to judge her.

  Twenty-four and twenty-two years old-this is not considered an age for marriage in America. But we were living in Odessa at the time. The sun was hot. It tenderly embraced our buttocks and pushed us towards each other.

  Now is it clear why I am still involuntarily drawn to Sophia, as if by a sailor’s knot? My memory holds me.

  Forty-seven and forty-five years old. Or rather, I was still forty-six. No reason to add extra years. My birthday candles would be lit on October sixteenth. The past was far from cloudless-seven years ago we had crossed the ocean separately. Simple arithmetical calculations will show that we had sailed under one flag for sixteen years. Naturally, we had had quite a few opportunities to start a family. What had prevented us? Sophia’s nature.

  After having an abortion during her first year of married life, she figured that she would wait another couple of years, and from then on, she took precautionary measures, always giving conclusive reasons: lack of an apartment away from her parents, lack of sufficient material resources for creating the best conditions for a child. When the everyday
problems were solved, new ones appeared-an unfavorable position of the stars in the sky, and so forth and so on…

  It turned out that the problem was caused by something else. Perhaps the abortion had produced negative side-effects, perhaps she had acquired some sort of illness over the years, but Sophia could not become pregnant. The Soviet doctors threw up their hands and unofficially advised her to go abroad to treat her sterility-one of the reasons that brought Sophia to America.

  After a lapse of seven years, we were on different sides of the fence. I was an FBI agent whose responsibilities included fighting terrorists, and Sophia-against her will, one would hope-had fallen into the company of the sworn enemies of America.

  THE FOUR-HEADED DRAGON

  Soon after the murder of poor Doroshenko, I felt as if I were the object of constant attention. There were no obvious reasons for my worries, but I had feelings of anxiety every time I appeared in public-on the subway, on the street, or in a store.

  In order to dispel my doubts, I asked Lloyd to set up surveillance on me and deliberately started appearing in places where my pursuers could easily lie in wait for me. My fears were confirmed. The four-headed dragon materialized into the shape of Victor Sviridov, who had been a cultural advisor in the Russian Representation to the United Nations; Alla Ragulina, an employee of Aeroflot in New York; Arkady Perelman, an immigrant from Moscow, a retiree and private taxi driver; and his unemployed fifty-year-old wife Lyudmila Kharchenko, who was on welfare due to disability. What a top-notch team had been assembled! A whole network of spies.

  According to the FBI files on Viktor Sviridov, he had been born in 1959 in Hungary to a regular officer’s family. He himself was an officer of the KGB and had graduated from the Moscow Institute of International Relations. He had worked in the embassies of the USSR in East Germany, Poland and Switzerland as an assistant to the cultural attaché. In the fall of 1993 he was recalled to Moscow. Beginning in 1994 he managed the correspondents’ headquarters of the central television network in the countries of Benelux. In the winter of 2003 he returned to diplomatic work. He was appointed as a cultural advisor in the Russian Representation to the United Nations. He was married and had two children.

  I obtained photographs of the four-headed dragon and began looking around. My life became more cheerful. The calm that had settled in the apartment since Doroshenko’s death contributed to this too.

  The Perelman-Kharchenko couple hovered around my building in turns. I spotted Arkady in the Belarus grocery store on Neptune Avenue. Later we found ourselves in the same subway car, and he smiled cordially like an old friend. I responded in the same way. At first glance it looked like a random coincidence, but soon afterwards I ran into him near the New York office of the FBI. Arkady dived into the crowd and turned me over to Alla, whom I had met in Manhattan. Both times it was at Starbucks; she knew my predilection for good coffee and tried to meet by chance. The video showed that after dinner Alla had waited for me near the cafe, followed me inside and hovered around in the immediate vicinity, trying to attract my attention by her looks.

  I approached her as she wished. When she sat back down at the next table, she pulled a mobile phone out of her bag and began speaking in Russian, scanning her eyes far and wide for Yevgeny Rivilis. I waited until the end of her conversation, then engaged her with a simple joke: «You speak Russian almost without an accent.»

  Five minutes later I was speaking with her as if she were an old friend. Ten minutes later the air resounded with the sounds of gentle flirtation. The second head of the dragon was still a woman. She was a thirty-five-year-old blonde, and if you lowered your eyes, she had a deep décolleté, which revealed a pleasing form of roundness.

  My gaze rested involuntarily on the pointed apexes. Alla knew her merits and emphasized them by wearing a tight-fitting blouse.

  If her bosses had decided to tempt me, they had selected the ideal woman for the seduction, one for whom you would not mind putting out a white flag. However, they had not taken into account the most important thing: Yevgeny Rivilis prefers to break out of an encirclement rather than surrender.

  I remembered the James Bond movies. The valiant intelligence officer’s amorous adventures did not prevent him from performing his official duties. As a rule, his beauties turned out to be spies-was it not the same with me? – who tried to lure the poor Bond into bed and make him the instrument of their vile plots. They even tried to kill him-the American cinema is very bloodthirsty. But Bond, the pride and glory of the British secret service, became renowned on both fronts.

  It is customary to mark victories in air battles by a star on the airplane’s fuselage. If Bond had followed this tradition, his torso would be covered with continuous tattoos.

  In the movies, everything was straightforward-James Bond stood on guard for the national interests of Britain and did not experience any pangs of conscience for being unfaithful to his wife with the next exquisite blonde. However, based on the films I saw, it would be difficult to answer the question of whether the renowned intelligence officer was married. What would one say about me in that situation? My heart had been conquered by Gulya-we were planning to get married after her return from Iraq. Official duties – I lowered my eyes in shame. However, if we assume that flirtation with Alla and the possibility of sex with her are official necessities-a part of my job-then one could allow for indulgences.

  In this game of cat and mouse, the initiative belongs to the cat, except for the first move: the game begins after the mouse wags its tail. The spontaneous acquaintance was the wagging of the tail. I finished drinking my coffee, politely said goodbye and rose from the table-a red-light signal given to the cat.

  Alla was confused. I had the sense she was expecting a continuation-the cat was not used to releasing her victim, a man of any age or color, without his trying to get her phone number, or a bolder attempt-an offer to prolong the pleasure.

  «Have a good day,» she smiled sweetly and languidly lowered her gaze. Just like a student from the Institute for Girls of the Nobility.

  I moved away, firmly convinced that the next day after lunch time she would try to catch me again around Starbucks. Usually I arrived there between three thirty and four o’clock in the afternoon, and if we happened to meet at the café three times in the past week, it might as well be four.

  For two days we didn’t see each other. On Monday I had barely arrived at Starbucks when the cat resumed its hunt-she was the fourth in a short line of three people. She mewed tenderly:

  «Hello, I see we’ve gotten into the habit of having coffee at the same time.»

  Here was a contest of quick-wittedness: what sort of desire arises in a normal man if he is being snared by a sexy woman. In order to avoid putting the one being questioned in an awkward position, I might add that this refers to the basic, uncontrolled desire. Thank you, your answer is accepted. You may remain silent in the presence of wives. Both instincts were working in me, the conscious and the subconscious.

  «We really do have a lot in common.»

  May the adherents of morality forgive me: on the sixth day the cat turned up in the place it was seeking. French perfumes freshened Yevgeny Rivlis’ bedroom. James Bond had been pushed from the pedestal he was on.

  When a man and a woman establish confidential relations-we are not talking about young students who live by different rules, nor about one-time affairs (come together, then run away)-the pressing question comes up: social status. In America it sounds like this: «What do you do for a living?» This information was already well known to me, as it was to her, but since we were painstakingly playing the game of passion of the heart, we were observing the generally accepted laws. I was a journalist for Voice of America radio. Alla was a modest employee of Aeroflot.

  The intrigue developed in an ordinary manner-without the Hollywood script of checking pockets, the disappearance of secret documents, daggers under the pillow and miniature pistols in the lady’s handbag. However, as a precautionary meas
ure, when Alla took a bath, I made a search of her bag and convinced myself that she did not have any hidden video cameras or sound recording devices, and after she left, I thoroughly searched the apartment to see if any «bugs» had been placed.

  A small complication arose the first evening. As she surveyed the bedroom, Alla saw a photograph of Gulya on the bedside table, and then she noticed the photos on the dresser that had been taken in Paris in front of the Eifel Tower and the Palais des Invalides-we had asked a couple from Japan to take our picture there in exchange for a similar service. Alla removed a photo album from the bookshelf, found dozens of other photos, and inquired somewhat jealously:

  «What did you do with your previous girlfriend?»

  I had to lie: «She moved to another state.»

  «Why do you keep her pictures beside your bed?»

  «If you earn it, I’ll hang your pictures in prominent places too.»

  It was said rather roughly, but I thought it would be a good idea to close the subject quickly. I also felt awkward looking at Gulya’s photographs.

  Lovers of adventures become bored-a routine affair, without the splash of emotions. But I had to remember: the producer and director Viktor Sviridov, the «diplomat» and number one head, was not far away. The staging could change unpredictably.

  Viktor did not appear at once. I even had my doubts as to whether he were nearby-although the photographs I had received from Lloyd gave evidence to the contrary. I had to wait, just as I had with head number two, until the producer of the performance announced that he wished to be encountered.

  The opportunity came up quickly. On Sunday morning I went out for a leisurely walk on the boardwalk. As I reached the Tatyana restaurant, I saw Viktor walking nearby, and I walked off to an unoccupied bench. I sat down lazily, shut my eyes and exposed my face to the sun. If the «diplomat» wanted to associate, the ball was in his court. There would not be any obstacles.