The Red House

by Derek Lambert

  ‘You mean you made some sort of deal with the Americans?’

  Brodsky shrugged delicately. ‘It really isn’t my business. I can only tell you what I have heard. He was only a boy after all. I suppose he had nothing much to offer the Americans …’ He put away the plastic white bullet. ‘Not like you, comrade. If you were ever in a position to take such foolish action.’

  The song had left his lips. Replaced by the voice of secret authority that served Czars and other dictators and the Party with unswerving treachery; the voice of those who chose murder and intrigue as others choose dairy farming or quantity surveying.

  And here was the voice in a coffee shop on 42nd Street, New York City. Zhukov’s reactions chilled: Grigorenko was the underline, Mikhail Brodsky the boss. Perhaps the boss, with an Ambassador, a Minister Counsellor, counsellors, secretaries, attachés under him.

  ‘If you think I am the sort of person who would take such an action then I should never have been sent here,’ Zhukov said.

  ‘I didn’t make the choice.’ Brodsky lit a mentholated American cigarette. ‘But it was very foolish of you to go wandering around in New York on your first day here.’

  ‘Apparently I was not alone.’

  ‘You could have been mugged.’

  ‘Mugged?’

  ‘Robbed, beaten up. I don’t know how the word came to be. Perhaps because only mugs allow themselves to be robbed.’

  ‘In broad daylight?’

  ‘Certainly in broad daylight. This is a dangerous and decadent society, comrade. A man will knife you in a cinema queue for the money to buy drugs.’ He leaned forward, blinking behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. ‘Like myself you are a sensitive man. You write poetry, I believe?’

  ‘How did you know that? It’s never been published.’

  Brodsky slipped the question. ‘I too write poetry. Some of it has been published in Novy Mir. And once I wrote an amusing little poem about Russian women wearing shorts. Calling them shortiki—an American-derived term—instead of trusiki. It was quite well received.’

  ‘I’m happy for you,’ Zhukov said.

  ‘I’m trying to illustrate that people like ourselves should be both sensitive and realistic. It’s not wise to let sensitivity get the upper hand in this country. Values can become unbalanced in a sensitive mind. You can be dazzled by the abundance of food and drink and clothes and apparent freedom and forget the misery and oppression and violence.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning,’ Zhukov said. ‘I had many like it before I left Moscow.’

  ‘Nevertheless these first impressions can be quite traumatic.’ He sang a couple of bars and relaxed. ‘Now it seems to me that we should go.’

  The woman behind the bar called out, ‘Goodbye, folks. Have a good day.’ And confided to her senile suitor in the Stetson, “English tourists—I can always tell ’em.’

  But Mikhail Brodsky was not quite finished. ‘The safest place to talk,’ he confided, ‘is in a crowded street.’

  They cut down Madison Avenue, turning right down 53rd. Zhukov looked with pleasure at the legs of the mini-skirted girls and surmised that they must have very cold arses.

  Brodsky walked very carefully, despite his rubber overshoes, leaping like a ballet dancer over the street-corner swamps.

  After a while Zhukov asked him what was on his mind.

  ‘I believe certain approaches were made to you in Moscow.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘About your responsibilities in Washington. Above and beyond the call of duty.’

  ‘They told me to keep my eyes and ears open for any information that might be useful to the Soviet Union.’

  ‘A delightfully euphemistic way of putting it.’ Brodsky leaped a small lake on the corner of Lexington. ‘Mr Hoover has estimated that eighty per cent of all personnel at the Soviet Embassy in Washington are spies.’ His gold glasses slipped and he pushed them back with his woolly-mittened hand. ‘Who would have thought that the great Mr Hoover would have indulged in such understatement?’

  While he was waiting for Valentina to powder her nose Zhukov flipped through the Manhattan phone book. One number printed prominently at the beginning startled him. U.S. Secret Service 264–7204. It didn’t seem to Vladimir Zhukov to be very secret.

  3

  THE Red House in Washington is a greyish building on 16th Street a few blocks—two-fifths of a mile maybe—from the White House. It is fairly ornate having been built for a good capitalist, Mrs George M. Pullman, whose husband designed and built Pullman cars for America’s railroads; and one of its first tenants was the Embassy of Czarist Russia. But the building, four storeys high including the ground floor, is a poor place compared with the great mansions of other countries ranged along Embassy Row, Massachusetts Avenue, where many expansive architectural styles vie with each other. (Here Britain seems to score with a statue of Sir Winston Churchill, who looks as if he might be hailing a bus, outside their elegant manor.) The Russians are perpetually aggrieved at the faded modesty of their home, but the Americans decline to do anything about it until they are given a better Embassy in Moscow. Likewise the Russians refuse the Americans more resplendent accommodation until they are given more prestigious premises in Washington; this childish intractability is often said to be symbolic of the two powers’ attitudes towards settling larger issues such as wars.

  A small driveway leads up to the door, only twenty feet from the sidewalk. The windows have balconies; there is an undistinguished tree, pleading to be struck by lightning, in the small front garden, wire netting around the hedge, some interesting aerials on the roof arranged in the sort of art forms that normally outrage the Kremlin. Outside a West German Volkswagen or two, with diplomatic plates, which seems to indicate that ideological differences need not stand in the way of commercial economy.

  Among the Embassy’s neighbours are the National Geographic Magazine and the University Club. The Washington Post lies around the corner.

  A little way down 16th from the Embassy C.I.A. agent Joseph Costello sat at the wheel of his Thunderbird chewing on a dead cigar butt and privately expressing his opinion on what Mother Russia could do to herself. Snow mixed with freezing rain bounded along the street encasing the car in ice. And what’s more he wouldn’t put it past the stupid bastard to walk: he wouldn’t put it past a Russian to break the ice on the Potomac and go for a swim.

  But I know my limitations, Joe Costello, Vietnam veteran and hero, acknowledged. Not for me the cocktail parties with The Beautiful People. I am strictly for surveillance and I am eternally grateful for the opportunities afforded me by my heroism (refusing to act stupid in front of my buddies) under enemy fire. Costello, hairy, squat and honest, further confided to himself: I wish to hell I’d made the grade as a professional football player for the Redskins. Still, I’m lucky to have a job like this, a cut above the F.B.I., two cuts above the precinct.

  But surveillance on a shitty night like this! And for what? All he knew was that he had to follow the Russian and make sure that the meet with the State Department clerk took place as scheduled and that the Soviets didn’t try and hi-jack the clerk or anything. As far as he, Joe Costello was concerned, he would be very happy if they put a bullet in the State Department guy’s guts if he was a traitor. But who was he to express an opinion? Just surveillance.

  Tardovsky, tall and thin and unmistakable, emerged from the embassy. Please get in your nice comfy little Volks, old buddy. But the Russian bent his thin neck into the rain and snow and walked quickly down 16th.

  You sonofabitch! Costello got out of the car quietly and spat the cigar butt on to the sidewalk.

  The meet was supposed to be in a bar on 14th, where pornography and bare flesh prospered alongside the palatial seats of national and world power. Very dark, probably, with a dirty movie grunting along in the background.

  Tardovsky was heading in the right direction. But hadn’t anyone told him that Washington was the worst city in the States for getting mugged? And wha
t the hell did he do if the Russian was jumped? On 14th anything could happen. On this sad street the orifice-filled bookshops and the girlie clip-joints were doing fair trade. A few bums, junkies and sharply-dressed blacks hung around the doorways. Jesus, Costello thought, right on the President’s doorstep.

  Then he became aware that he was maybe not the only tail on Tardovsky. Behind the two of them he sensed another shadow. They were about to play games. But who the hell was the playmate?

  Tardovsky entered the bar just off 14th and sat down at a table. On the screen a long way down the tunnel of the bar a couple stripped and simulated copulation; the girl showed her genitals with abandonment, her lover was more coy—maybe he was ashamed of them, Costello thought.

  Tardovsky ordered a beer and took his hat off. Right, Costello thought—you should take off your hat in the presence of a lady. He sat way behind Tardovsky and glanced at his watch: five minutes till the meet. He ordered a Scotch from the girl in the crotch-high black skirt.

  The second shadow sat down to the left of Costello, three tables away. Costello took a look at him. Very wet, like himself, very cold. Powerful looking, impossible to distinguish his features behind the turned-up collar of his bulky topcoat.

  Why hadn’t they told him more? ‘Just keep your eye on them to make sure nothing goes wrong. Keep in touch.’ But they hadn’t mentioned a third party who could be Russian, American, British, Czech (they were pretty high in the espionage stakes these days). Three minutes to go.

  Tardovsky, who looked bored with the repetitive sex looked at his watch and went to the toilet. The man in the bulky topcoat followed. Which means I have to follow too, Costello decided.

  But the toilet wasn’t designed for espionage or the prevention thereof. With two big men bulging in the confined space behind him, Tardovsky didn’t bother to finish what he was doing at the stall. He zipped up, ducked between them with giraffe agility and was gone.

  ‘Shit,’ said Costello. He turned to follow.

  ‘Not so fast,’ said the other man, his face blond and fierce behind the collar.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Who the hell are you, buddy?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Costello heaved towards the door.

  ‘Oh yes it does. Sure it does.’ The stranger chopped at Costello’s neck but hit his elbow on the wall. Costello got him in the stomach with two karate fingers; although the topcoat blunted the impact.

  They fought savagely for a couple of minutes. But the toilet wasn’t designed for pugilism either. So they identified themselves and, while the faucet over the stall urinated noisily, silently contemplated their plight.

  On the screen in the bar corner the young man indicated facially that orgasm was near while the girl sighed with what could have been ecstasy or frustration.

  The personality of Wallace J. Walden was split down the middle on the subject of his capital city. He revelled in its dignified masonry, smooth lawns, stern statues, its libraries and museums and broad avenues, the stately homes of President and Government, the Washington Monument poised like a stone rocket set for launching. He loved to see tourists patrolling beneath Japanese cherry trees and expressing admiration at such a graceful seat of power. Sometimes he interrupted—‘I couldn’t help overhearing’—and put them straight on historic facts: Washington offered 500 dollars for a design for The Capitol and Dr William Thornton from Tortola in the West Indies won (‘Italian Renaissance, you understand’), the city was originally conceived by Pierre Charles l’Enfant, a protégé of Lafayette, as ‘a capital magnificent enough to grace a great nation’—‘And did you know that Washington who chose the site here in Maryland and Virginia was a surveyor himself? Few people seem to know that …’ Then he gave them the Visitors Information Service number (347–4554) before moving on to survey the Reflecting Pool, pillared palaces of bureaucracy, the spruce, beech and magnolia, with an awe and pride that had survived twenty-five years acquaintanceship.

  The split occurred because Wallace J. Walden detested Washington’s principal industry—politics. Or, more particularly, he disliked intriguing politicians. Which was ironic because Walden’s own job was intrigue.

  He admired ambition but abhorred its crude application; if there was one person he disliked more than a senator peddling a cause with votes in mind, rather than humanity, it was a senator’s wife pursuing the same objective over tea or Martinis. Jesus, he thought this glacial morning as he walked beside the whispering ice on the Tidal Basin, God save us from the women of Washington. (He was both a blasphemous and God-fearing man.) But, like it or not, Washington was a women’s city, every secretary trying to do a Jackie Kennedy. Only last night he had read in the Evening Star that the president of the Democratic Congressional Wives’ Forum was advising freshmen lawmakers to employ professional comedians to spike their speeches with gags. If they had their way, Walden ruminated without humour, Bob Hope would become president. Or Bill Cosby.

  The wind blew eddies of snow across the ice separating Walden from Thomas Jefferson standing on pink Tennessee marble behind the white portico of his dome. ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’ So had Walden. He regretted that the means to his end involved intrigue, subterfuge and murder. But he had no doubts that the means justified the end.

  He gulped down the iced air hungrily, felt the cold polish his cheeks. A lonely figure with heavy pipe gurgling, welted shoes marching firmly on the crusty ground, hat never too firm on the springs of his greying cropped hair.

  Here every morning, after leaving his wife and enigmatic teenage children in Bethesda, Walden assembled his day. Today he was thankful for the ache in the air because, to an extent, it numbed his anger at the stupidity that had once again spoiled an inspired manoeuvre.

  Tardovsky had been a prospective defector. One of the intellectuals who had smelled liberty, nibbled at abundant living, appreciated the ripe fruits of democracy. A patriot, sick of doctrinaire socialism, hesitating on the portals of freedom. Now he was lost for ever.

  Walden had decided that Tardovsky was not the man to be courted with gifts, sleek-limbed girls on Delaware beaches, visits to perfect American homes with gentle and obvious persuasion over blueberry pie. So his honest, devious mind had considered other ploys. A doubter from the Soviet Embassy meeting a doubter from the State Department. Together they would renounce the duplicity of both great powers and seek refuge in some snowbound haven in Canada—where all the American trash found bolt-holes. But even if Tardovsky had ended up in Toronto or Montreal the defection would have occurred in the capital of the United States. A highly prestigious landmark on the road to The Final Solution: universal understanding of the Communist (and atheist) myth.

  The F.B.I. had been pursuing the scheme energetically. A phoney State Department traitor had been established. Then apparently the C.I.A. had got wind of the stool-pigeon’s double-dealing and, never for one second allowing for the possibility of double, double-dealing, had arranged their own surveillance without confiding their plans.

  Result: a fist fight in a men’s room in a dirty movie bar.

  Thus, through the offices of bumbling incompetents, did tyranny survive. Thank God the K.G.B. was also served by incompetents who did everything by the book. If only I had the Mafia on my side …

  Walden left the gaze of Jefferson, entered the spectrum of Lincoln and watched the children skating on the Reflecting Pool: it was their future he was fighting for. A jet rose heavily from the National Airport, keeping ominously low to restrict its noise, labouring over Lincoln’s Colorado marble shrine of freedom, justice, immortality, fraternity and charity. The qualities he had to preserve.

  The grumbling line of traffic on Constitution Avenue opened at a red light and Walden crossed, heading for the State Department where he co-ordinated the various intelligence organizations behind a vague political title. That bum Costello! The heating in the lobby of this throbbing modern b
uilding, the laboratory of American influence, escalated his anger—a menacing, inexorable quantity not unlike the lurking hatreds of the intriguing Church dignitaries of history.

  Walden summoned to his office that morning the heads of Security and Consular Affairs, Intelligence and Research, and Politico-Military Affairs. Also the deputy heads of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Walden, handing around cigars, ‘a fiasco was perpetrated in our city last night. It is probably not necessary for me to say that, to an extent, we are all responsible.’

  The ensuing silence did not imply unqualified agreement.

  ‘It is our joint responsibility, Goddammit!’ He picked up his pipe. ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I’m disgusted at the way this operation has been handled.’

  Jack Godwin from the C.I.A., a shifty egghead in Walden’s opinion, with an irritating habit of detaching morsels of tobacco from the tip of his tongue like a conjurer, ventured an opinion that, as the operation had been Walden’s brainchild, the failure was his responsibility. ‘Just like you would have accepted the plaudits if it’d been a success.’

  Walden turned on him. ‘If you had kept me informed of your suspicions this foul-up would never have happened. Surely to Christ the C.I.A. is aware by now that its primary function is overseas intelligence?’

  ‘Sure we realize that,’ Godwin said. ‘But with practically every foreign country represented in Washington our job begins at home.’

  ‘You could co-ordinate with the Federal men. You could perhaps trust them to pass on to you any information they think you need.’