by Dan Pollock
“Good luck.” Taras squeezed more lemon into his tea.
“So, Volodya, you are telling us that you have no specific assignment for Taras?” Kelleher asked, sounding incredulous.
“Don’t misunderstand. There are many things I can suggest. For instance, Colonel Starkov is ready to detail our security arrangements for Potsdam, since that is where President Rybkin will be most vulnerable. Or—”
“Or,” Starkov addressed Taras, “you might also wish to review the interrogations of some of Major Jolly’s Spetsnaz collaborators, whom we are detaining in Lefortovo, or conduct your own interrogations.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Kelleher said. “I think we can rely on your skill in that area.”
Starkov shrugged. “It was just a suggestion.”
“To reiterate,” Biryukov picked up, “Taras Olegovich, you can have anything you want. Name it, and Colonel Starkov will see that you get it.”
“Absolutely,” Starkov said. He looked very competent, Taras thought.
“Well,” Kelleher said to Taras, “looks like the ball’s in your court. What do you want to do?”
“How about going home?”
“Try again.”
“All right.” Taras turned to Biryukov and began ticking points off on his fingers. “I’d like several things. Marcus’ file. An office. A cubicle will do, so long as it’s private and has a good reading light and ventilation. An electric fan, like that one, would be nice. And I’d like a pot of coffee—the real stuff, if you have it.”
Biryukov’s considerable eyebrows arched, like twin cater-pillars getting ready to march. “That is all?”
“For now. I imagine it will take me most of the day to work through the file, so in a couple of hours, maybe somebody could bring me a cold collation—ham, cheese, black bread. Maybe a bowl of okroshka and—what? A Pepsi?”
“We have an excellent restaurant.”
“I’d rather not have the interruption.”
“As you wish. Anything else?”
“There’s something I’d like, Volodya,” the CIA station chief said. “While Taras is studying, what about granting me afternoon reading privileges in your archives?”
“Sorry, Henry, even glasnost has its limits. Unless you’re offering reciprocal privileges at Langley.
Twelve
The office was private, if not spacious, a floor below Biryukov’s, with a view of the square. Some Chekist functionary had undoubtedly been chased out of it. There was ersatz coffee—barely drinkable—and a fan—tiny, shrill and, oddly, made in the PRC—with a jetlike airstream that scattered any unanchored papers in its swath. Discovering no low-speed setting, Taras switched it off and prepared to swelter it out.
On a low, fiddle-shaped table by a settee were the morning Pravda, Argumenty I Fakty, Literaturnaya Gazeta, Novaya Vremya; but also European Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, USA Today, Bunte and the magazine section from the previous Sunday’s Die Zeit. Behind him was a large walnut-veneer cabinet with built-in minibar and, behind a sliding panel, a Grundig shortwave radio—tuned, he noticed, to the bandwidth of the daily BBC Russian-language broadcast. Within distracting peripheral glance a wall calendar featured a bulky, bikinied blonde dipping a toe into the fantail pool of a Soviet cruise ship off some unspecified sun-splashed coast.
And on the green-baize-covered desk before him were several voluminous folders laced together, which had been wheeled into the office inside a lockable metal trolley. The brown pasteboard cover bore several grease stains and the concise title: “Dossier on Markus Dzholly.”
Taras was near the beginning, working his way through the thicket of MVD reports on the murder of Eva Sorokina, a case which, Taras well knew, had never been solved. Kostya, the big trapper, whose full name was listed as Konstantin Igorivich Yakushkin, had not been seen, alive or dead, after disappearing from his cabin that snowy night in Khabarovsk more than fifteen years before. Nor had any of the stolen money or clothing been recovered.
Though all this was familiar to Taras, it was still painful, summoning up the frozen horror of that morning and unburying old griefs. He passed quickly to the next section, which consisted of background checks on Marcus’ youth in the United States.
Here was reason to pause. The information now before Taras did not square with what Marcus had told him—about being reared in Illinois by grandparents and leaving home after a fire took their lives. According to the dossier, assembled mainly, it would seem, from public records, Marcus Jolly was born in 1957 in Wichita, Kansas, and left home after his mother’s death from a barbiturate overdose in 1974. His father had been killed ten years earlier when his gravel truck skidded off any icy road into a culvert; there was a microfilm print of a news story on the accident from the Wichita Eagle. There was no mention of Illinois grandparents.
And there was no documentation of Marcus’ activities between 1974 and his arrival in Khabarovsk in the winter of ’77; but this was entirely consistent with Marcus’ story of becoming a drifter and working odd jobs as he moved across the western states and the Pacific.
The only early photograph of Marcus in the file was an enlargement from a sixth-grade class picture. Blazing sunlight and high-contrast shadows made it impossible to recognize the boy’s features. In an attached memorandum, the KGB case officer requested further corroborative information and photographs, but the dossier yielded no response to this request. Had the indefatigable KGB First Chief Directorate decided, uncharacteristically, not to pursue the matter and to accept the defector’s American background as given?
Taras stared at the hazy photo of a squinting, crew-cut Kansas schoolboy and shook his head. What was going on here? Had the Cowboy lied to Taras all these years, lied even during all-night, vodka-fueled truth sessions? And if so, what possible motive could there have been? Taras might well demand clarification from Biryukov, but decided instead to have Frank Kelleher fax Langley for some quick answers.
In the meantime Taras no longer knew what he was searching for in the file before him—clues as to what his old comrade was up to these days, or clues as to who Marcus really was, these days and those. Had there always been a stranger’s eyes behind the familiar, grinning face? Taras could not accept that, yet the discrepancy in Marcus’ background was puzzling. No, it was worse than that. It left Taras feeling extremely queasy as he turned to the section of the dossier which detailed the American’s arrival in Moscow in the winter of 1977 and his application for political asylum...
*
The grief-and-vodka-soaked comradeship of Taras’ and Marcus’ westward rail journey from Khabarovsk extended to their first few days in Moscow. They were given adjoining rooms in the Berlin Hotel, just off Dzerzhinsky Square behind the Children’s World department store. From here, Taras was able to show his Western friend some of the architectural wonders of central Moscow. They braved the winter winds that scoured the cobblestoned vastness of Red Square, queued with the bundled throngs for Lenin’s Mausoleum and the Kremlin tours, tramped the icy sidewalks of the broad, radial avenues and the embankments of the frozen Moskva. But their first foray each morning was across Dzerzhinsky Square for several hours of questioning by KGB and MVD investigators about Eva’s death, Kostya’s disappearance and Marcus’ reasons for wanting to leave the United States.
Apparently after three days the internal affairs directorate had run out of questions for Taras, and he was told to report back to his class at the military academy. Marcus’ future was still uncertain. He was being temporarily assigned to the Moscow flat of two American defectors—a middle-aged dental surgeon and his wife from Cincinnati—while his application for Soviet citizenship was being considered.
The two comrades said their farewells outside the Berlin. Taras then got into one of the Finnair vans that served hotel guests, to be shuttled to the Byelorussian Railway Station and a train for Smolensk, where his academy class was witnessing bridging maneuvers on the Dnieper. He had a last glimpse of his f
riend through the van’s rear window. Marcus was standing on the slushy sidewalk between two gray-coated militiamen, waving his old cowboy hat in one hand and holding his new cardboard suitcase with the other. Then the van turned off Zhdanov Street onto Pushechnaya, and the Cowboy was gone.
Five months were to pass before the two friends saw each other again—five months with only a few exchanges of notes to apprise one another of current events and whereabouts. And even this was a feat, for each essayed—courteously but clumsily—to write in the other’s language, and by then both were caught up in training regimens that left them exhausted in their bunks only moments before lights out.
But they arranged a meeting by the Ferris wheel in Gorky Park on a May afternoon the following year, when Taras would be on leave and Marcus was scheduled to be in Moscow briefly between trains. Taras arrived early, searching the crowds that flowed by, even checking the gondolas lifting into the warm, golden haze and the boats rowing slowly past on the pond. The hour came, and still no Marcus. Perhaps plans had changed, too late to notify Taras. It was an unthinkably huge country; he might never see or hear from Marcus again. Then there was a tap on Taras’ shoulder.
He whirled, faced a tall, grinning young man in a special forces light-blue beret and blue-and-white-striped jersey, holding two ice cream cones. He thrust one toward Taras, kept the other for himself. It was, of course, Marcus.
The two embraced, laughed, embraced again, talking at once and in different languages. They settled quickly on Russian, at which Marcus had made obvious and impressive progress.
“You are Spetsnaz!” Taras said. “I can’t believe it. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You know how it is, Cossack. Most of what I wrote you was just govno, bullshit.”
“But how did this happen, so fast? I was afraid you’d be working for the KGB forever.”
“I got real lucky,” Marcus said. “Apparently the KGB didn’t know what to do with me. I’m not like some high-level defector they want to put on TV. Like I told them, the only expertise I got is talking colloquial American, sailing, martial arts—aikido, kendo. And I wanted to join the army. Special forces, rangers, whatever they call ’em over here. So they let me talk to this old hot-shit major general in the GRU Second Chief Directorate. Marchenko. Ukrainian. Face like one of those old battle-axes they got in the Kremlin Armory. Used to run the rocket program, helped bring it back after the disgrace of the Cuban missile withdrawal. Had on every fucking medal you can get. I heard he was well connected with the Central Committee. Spoke pretty good English. Old guy took a liking to me. Told me I was a cocky bastard, just the kind they like in Spetsnaz. They also like foreigners, for foreign ops. Especially Americans, you can figure maybe why. Who knows? They’ll probably send me back to America to assassinate the president.”
“You’re really full of it! But the beret looks good.” Taras snatched it and placed it rakishly on his own head. “Even better on me.”
“Oh, shit! I wish you hadn’t done that, Cossack. According to the Spetsnaz oath, I’ve got to kill you now.”
The two friends strolled south along the river embankment, from the Krymsky Bridge to the Andreyevsky, and then slowly worked their way back through the park grounds. They talked a great deal, at first profanely and lustily, matching boast for boast. But their tones softened when they spoke of their lost Eva, whose bounties and virtues had only multiplied after her death, till she had assumed, in idealized recollection, the dual aspect of a martyred and sensuous saint.
The two were full of themselves, their shared past, their veiled but unquestionably heroic destinies. The people and tableaux they passed seemed slightly out of focus, positioned like so many props or film extras around the park to provide background for their traveling encounter. The spring sunshine felt good on their shoulders, and the plane trees and linden and horse chestnut were in full, refulgent foliage. But these things only floated by on the periphery of consciousness, like the silent lovers holding hands on park benches. Or the people drinking tea and eating sweets in an outdoor cafe; the family groups picnicking on parceled cold cuts, black bread, pickled fish, smoked herring; the children queuing for the rocket-sled ride or squealing before an outdoor puppet theater; or the older boys playing soccer and hurling Frisbees.
A rock concert at the big outdoor Zelyony Theater did engage them awhile, while it obliterated their dialogue with the amplified shriek of acid rock. But they stayed critically back, behind the swaying, arm-thrusting, stage-circling throng of teenage faithful in their Western motley. The focus of all the enthusiasm was two emaciated guitarists and a pudgy drummer, all in regulation studded, skin-tight leathers, tattooed, mascaraed and spiky-haired. But costume and makeup meant nothing to Taras and Marcus; could the group really play? After a moment they both decided in the negative and ambled on, into a pavilion where old men sat hunched over rows of chessboards. While they paused again to kibitz, a foul-smelling drunk in grease-stained work shirt lurched into them, offering a half-liter vodka troika. When the drunk refused to step back, Marcus gave him a shove. The man went sprawling on his ass, got up threatening to smash Marcus’ face, took a second look at the smiling young man in the blue beret and wisely staggered off, with only an obligatory fuck-your-mother.
Altogether a glorious day, Taras thought. His amazing friend had done it again, diving recklessly into the vast sea of the Russian continent exactly as he had into the Pacific, and coming up a winner—a member of the elite Spetsnaz fighting forces! And he seemed taller and fitter in his new trappings—his shoulders broader, his jaw more salient, his squinty blue eyes more glittery. Only the flaxen hair had suffered; under his blue beret Marcus was shorn to the scalp just like all the twice-yearly crop of baby-faced prizyvniki, army conscripts. But Marcus obviously didn’t care; he was, as that old general had said, a cocky bastard.
And try though he might, Taras could not convince himself that the many sidelong female glances he’d noticed in the last hour were intended for him. No, it was exactly as it had been in Khabarovsk the winter before, when the Cowboy had cast his spell upon Eva—and, eventually, on Taras himself. Marcus always came out on top. Taras had ridden a crowded train across Russia to reach Eva; but Marcus had sailed clear across the Pacific. Now Taras tried to brag about the rigors of his second year at his military academy; but Marcus was already in special forces.
You couldn’t hate him for it. The swagger went with the grin, and the daredevil spirit, and the cowboy boots, or the shiny paratroop boots he wore now. At twenty-one Marcus Jolly was a seasoned adventurer who bore the stamp of the self-made man and the indefinable aura of the heroic. Taras not only admired and envied him. He wanted to be Marcus.
But they were rapidly running out of afternoon. They made their way to the Oktyabrskaya Metro station and took the circular line to Kievskaya Station, where Marcus collected his gear from a locker and rushed aboard a train for Odessa to report to a Spetsnaz brigade at the Higher Infantry School.
Taras remained on the platform for several minutes after the train had pulled out. He was feeling somehow left behind as he replayed in his mind Marcus’ last jaunty wave while leaning precariously out the carriage window. Taras sensed himself at a crisis point in his life. When he finally pivoted and headed back toward the station concourse, it was with a sudden and grim resolve that he, too, would join the Spetsnaz. And by the time the Metro had tunneled him all the way back to his father’s flat in the Nagatino district in southeast Moscow, Taras Arensky felt his destiny thick about him.
Thirteen
“Bolvan!”
Blockhead! That was how Taras’ father had erupted when he heard of his son’s desire to apply for immediate transfer to the Spetsialnoye Naznacheniye—Spetsnaz, or Special Designation forces. Among other things, Oleg Arensky knew, if Taras’ application was accepted, it would mean the abandonment of his studies at the Supreme Soviet Military Academy, where the young man was finishing his second year with honors.
“Listen ver
y carefully to me, Tarushka,” the older Arensky said after the initial explosion had subsided and he was able to sit down and shakily fill two small tulip-shaped glasses with pertsovka, pepper vodka. “You know we have planned this for years, Uncle Dima and I. Getting you into Suvorov Academy was no easy matter, believe me. We are not big shots. And then into the Supreme Soviet Military Academy—every bit as good as Frunze—where, in two more years, you will come out a lieutenant of motorized infantry. Think, in ten years, if you continue your fine record, you will be a regimental commander. In Spetsnaz you may be dead from parachute jumping in a month. Is this what you want?”
“More than anything.”
“Why? Because of that arrogant American bastard, Marcus? Why do you ape him, a traitor to his homeland? Where are your brains, Tarushka? What are you guys, pansies?”
“Marcus is my friend, Papa. Call me any names you like, but not him. I won’t permit it.”
“Won’t permit it? You think you are running my life now, telling me what I can say and cannot say? Be damn careful, Tarushka. I can still lick you.”
“I don’t think so, Papa.”
“Oh, no? You watch out then, boy, and be ready for me. Maybe you can beat me when it’s all over, but I promise you, those first two minutes will be hell on earth!”
“Calm down, Papa. You know I’m not going to fight you. And I don’t want to run your life. I just want to run my own. And this is my decision, not Marcus’. I’m only asking you to respect it.”
“Respect a crazy thing like that? When my son says he wants to join a band of assassins?”
“Papa, Spetsnaz fighters are heroes, they perform special missions—intelligence, reconnaissance, operating behind enemy lines—”