Hardin senior said, ‘Anyway, how’s the C.I.A. master plan coming along?’
‘No master plan,’ Godwin said. ‘Just feelers. We’re making contact. The darndest thing is that Zhukov seems to be trying to contact us. Just as we’re about to arrange meetings between him and Henry Massingham from the British Embassy up he pops, as smooth and fishy as caviar, with Massingham’s wife. Which also makes you wonder if the British are trying to get at Zhukov on their own.’
‘I think,’ Hardin senior said carefully, ‘that you and the British have a common denominator.’
‘And what would that be?’ Godwin didn’t like being manoeuvred so that he had to ask questions.
‘Mrs. Massingham.’
Charlie said, ‘What my father means is that maybe both you and the British want Zhukov to screw her.’ He tried sometimes to shock his father; but it never worked.
‘Cool it, son,’ Walden warned.
‘Well isn’t that what you want? My guess is that if anyone wants to compromise anyone from the Communist bloc they arrange for Mrs Massingham to lay them? Or if they want the guy strictly to themselves they get some dame to pick him up in a bar in Columbia Road in the closed season for Soviet wives when they’ve gone back to Russia with their kids. Or get some doll in a bikini to throw sand on him when he’s sneaked away to a Delaware beach.’
Hardin senior said, ‘Mrs Massingham never seems to object.’ He squashed his little cigar, flicking the ash from his fingernails which looked as if they should have been manicured but weren’t.
‘The whole thing,’ Charlie announced, ‘disgusts me.’
Walden swished brandy in a glass almost as big as a goldfish bowl. There were disgusting aspects of every profession, he reminded Charlie. In banking, real estate, brokerage, law …
‘Not in lumberjacking,’ Charlie said.
‘I suggest,’ said his father, ‘that you lay off the Scotch.’
Walden continued. The maggots of corruption were at their most disgusting in the apples of politics because so often personal ambition was the driving force. In Washington they were surrounded by intrigues rooted in selfishness and greed. Not that he was saying that all politicians were corrupt: the United States of America had the best government set-up in the world. But the politicians’ motives were sometimes confused. This wasn’t the case with Intelligence. They had only one aim: the protection of America and its people. ‘It’s a war we’re fighting, son. Make no mistake about that. It’s another arm of the war against Communism being fought right here in Washington. Not for nothing have the Soviets got nearly one hundred diplomats here plus wives and staff. And they’re waging war in there, boy, just as sure as they’re gun-running to Hanoi and Cairo. War, as someone said, is hell. And its weapons are filthy—no one can deny that. Napalm, gas, missiles … In our war we have our own weapons. Don’t think for one Goddam second that I enjoy our methods. But we have to beat these bastards at their own game.’ He downed the last of his brandy. ‘You’re one of our weapons, son. You with this girl. And we sure as hell have to use you.’
Charlie sat down wearily in a red-quilted Regency chair and watched the cold flames of the plastic logs in the fireplace.
Hardin senior said, ‘I’m sorry, Charlie.’
Charlie didn’t reply because he didn’t believe him.
Hardin senior said, ‘And don’t forget that the Soviets might be using her.’
He spoke, thought his son, as if there was nothing the Soviets wouldn’t stoop to. ‘I don’t understand. How could they be using her when I picked her up?’
‘Maybe she was waiting to be picked up.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Your father’s right in examining every avenue,’ Walden observed. ‘She seems to have been very easy to get on the same wavelength with.’
‘She was just bewildered by Washington. It relaxed her to hear a friendly voice. Speaking Russian,’ he added.
‘Sure she was bewildered,’ Godwin said. ‘So bewildered that she had a tail on her. She must have known she had a tail. She isn’t that stupid.’
‘Jesus,’ said Charlie, ‘you guys suspect everyone. Everything. Of course she had a tail on her. Every new Russian is followed. Especially an eighteen-year-old girl. For Chris’sake, she’s already been caught consorting’—he chose the word with care—‘with some guy who was smuggling anti-Soviet propaganda out of Russia. Do you expect them to let her go walking in Rock Creek Park by herself?’
Walden sat down. ‘Let’s forget it. It’s only speculation. The point is we have to work fast. All our other leaks from the Embassy are closing up. Almost as if someone’s been tipping them off.’ He stared briefly at Charlie, but within that moment Charlie glimpsed the ultimate penalties of betrayal. ‘And we need to get something on their attitude to the North Vietnamese peace talks. The President’s not standing for re-election and he’s halted the bombing. But how serious are the Russians?’
Godwin said, ‘And how serious are the Chinese?’
Walden said, ‘I’m glad you mentioned them. Maybe Comrade Zhukov can enlighten us on how much provocation the Soviets are prepared to take from Chairman Mao.’
Godwin watched a measure of ash fall off his cigar on to the carpet, rubbed it absently into the deep, green and red pile with the toe of his unpolished shoe. He was said to possess a beautiful wife and a brilliant degree. He could have fooled me, Charlie thought.
His father sat motionless, a waxwork dummy with human hair implanted. His hinged jaws moved. ‘I hope the C.I.A. will get questions like that licked by their men in Moscow.’
Godwin sought a reply in the glowing tip of his cigar butt which he would smoke to the last tongue-burning puff. ‘From what I hear you F.B.I. guys in Washington soon won’t have much time for the international scene. The word from the ghetto is that things are coming to the boil.’
‘Okay,’ Walden said, ‘let’s wind it up now.’ He looked at his frogman’s watch. ‘Mrs Hardin will be home from her bridge any minute now. We’ll have a last drink. But before we do I want to make myself plain.’ He aimed his words at Charlie. ‘The atmosphere’s been relaxed. Like it should be when a father and son are together in a private house. We’ve had a few drinks and the atmosphere hasn’t been as formal as it would have been over at the department. But please don’t think that I wasn’t giving orders …’
Charlie said, ‘Okay. I’ll talk it over with my father. But tell me one thing.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Walden, warming the goldfish bowl in his large, competent hands.
‘Why me? Why did it have to be me?’
‘Who else, Charlie boy? To begin with, you speak Russian.’
‘And what else?’
‘You’re the right age. You’re tough. You’re single. You’re Arnold Hardin’s son.’ A note of menace there. ‘It had to be you, Charlie.’
Godwin, holding the wet cigar butt between his fingers, added, ‘And you’re also sexy.’
Across the room the dummy moved, trouser creases staying put. ‘May I make a suggestion?’
‘By all means, Arnold,’ said Walden.
‘Why don’t we persuade the girl to defect?’
Charlie regarded him with distaste. You despised your father but you did what he asked—pleaded rather—because he has sired you, nurtured you, forked out the money to give you the chance to become another Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius. But at the time the whole assignment had seemed like a lot of patriotic fun: sinister intrigue with bugles off-stage. Not any more.
Walden said, ‘You might have something there, Arnold. Talk it over with Charlie. But don’t forget that the main objective is getting intelligence out of the Soviet Embassy,’ he added without conviction.
The discussion was terminated by the sound of Mrs Hardin’s key in the lock.
Charlie lingered amid the cigar smoke while his father saw Walden and Godwin to their cars and his mother, who had lost at bridge, emptied the ashtrays. With dismay he saw himself as the all-A
merican-boy suddenly grown-up; dismay because he hadn’t admitted that such a transition was necessary. Behind him lay college, a few easy girls and one romance of applied sincerity until, with relief, he found her shacked up with one of his buddies. Now, with the liquor burning a protest in his stomach, he saw it all like a series of episodes in the locker room after a game. Also he observed the vagueness of his ambition which was a glass shaft sliding with soap-bubble rainbows, an obelisk owing much to the Lever Brothers building on New York’s Park Avenue, the neighbouring House of Seagram and the icicle of the Inland Steel Building on the corner of Dearborn and Monroe Streets in Chicago. One day, he had thought; but for the time being had contented himself by frequently quoting Minoru Yamasaki: ‘The social function of the architect is to create a work of art,’ and feeling noble. Now all his aspirations seemed immature. All somehow exposed by the advent of Natasha Zhukova.
Steadfastly, resolutely, incorruptibly, he’d tried to assure himself that the girl with the Mongolian cheekbones and unsettling honesty was the enemy. Or, if she wasn’t the enemy, an expendable pawn in a war being fought with guns in Vietnam and the Middle East, with intrigue in Washington. Even now Old Glory fluttered bravely in the background. Nothing had really changed except that I, Charlie Hardin, have fallen in love with the sacrificial lamb and grown up.
His mother took away the empty glasses and his father returned.
‘Fancy a nightcap?’
‘Just now you thought I was drinking too much.’
‘You were acting up a bit in front of Walden.’
‘I don’t have to lick his boots.’
His father poured drinks. ‘Nor do I, son.’
‘Then why can’t you tell him you don’t want your son to go through with this?’
‘You know why. We’ve been through all this before. You did promise …’
‘I don’t know why. You didn’t really explain and it didn’t seem to matter at the time.’
‘Walden could get me fired tomorrow.’ His father’s neat clothes looked like a husk now. ‘Or retired as they would call it.’
‘So you said. But how? He’s in the State Department and you’re in the F.B.I.’
‘Maybe so. But he is supposed to co-ordinate all American intelligence activities.’
‘Then it’s he who should be fired.’ Charlie sipped at the whisky which suddenly looked like medicine. ‘And you don’t mean to tell me that he could over-ride Hoover.’
‘He could advise him.’
‘Advise him about what?’
‘A couple of jobs I loused up. Nothing too serious but clear evidence of senility in this age-conscious country. Only Walden knows the exact details.’ He bowed his head over his Scotch and murmured, ‘We blamed the C.I.A.’
Charlie regarded his father with disappointment. A college flirtation with Communism or an experiment with homosexuality would have stirred his sympathy more. ‘And that’s it, is it? That’s why I have to betray a beautiful young kid?’
‘There’s a little more to it than that, Charlie.’ He paused. ‘You’re making this very difficult for me. A father shouldn’t have to plead with his own son. But I guess it’s part of growing-up, finding that your father’s fallible.’
‘I always knew it,’ Charlie said. He waited.
‘Okay,’ his father said, ‘I’ll lay it on the line. Brief and to the point. The bottom’s fallen out of my investments—and your sister’s still at college. I need money badly, Charlie, and don’t forget what it cost to make you an architect …’
Charlie stood up and swallowed the last of his medicine. ‘Okay, I acknowledge the debt.’ Contempt grated his words. I’ll go through with it.’
‘Thank you, Charlie.’
‘Think nothing of it.’
‘It’s also your patriotic duty, Charlie.’
‘Sure it is,’ Charlie said. Touching her cheek beneath a tree beside the Tidal Basin.
They’d been out once more since the mugging attempt beside the Tidal Basin. To the movies. Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason and George C. Scott in a revival of The Hustler which surprisingly Natasha seemed to understand. ‘We have a game that is very much like that in Russia,’ she confided as Minnesota Fats cracked the balls into the pockets.
He bought her popcorn and a Coke and felt like a teenager on his first date. It was ridiculous and something would have to be done about it; he with his M.G. and bachelor apartment, his drawing-board and stereo, his water-skiing and his way with dry Martinis. Now wondering whether he should put his arm around a girl at the movies; and if he did, whether he should fondle her breast.
Paul Newman sent the balls scurrying round the table and Natasha whispered, ‘He’s very handsome.’
He put his arm around her shoulders. Then felt her breast and she leaned towards him. Just like two kids, he thought. Tenderness stole around them in the flickering darkness, followed by a swelling need for her.
Then he remembered his role. The bastard he was. How much bigger a bastard he’d be if he tried to make love to her later. He kissed her cheek and took his hand away from her breast, leaving his arm around her shoulders. This couldn’t go on: something would have to be done. On the screen Paul Newman won his hollow victory and the lights came on.
‘Your patriotic duty,’ repeated his father.
‘I heard you the first time,’ said Charlie.
10
BESIDE Vladimir Zhukov’s bed there stood a slovenly pile of newspapers. On his dressing table a mound of books of matches. The first grew untended and had to be decimated every two days: the second grew cunningly, like a sand-dune, and was cherished.
To Vladimir Zhukov, who was beginning to embrace America with an affection which he conveyed to no one, the matches were a commentary. He collected them with the perseverance of a philatelist but was grateful to them for their message because, despite his courtship with the West, his beliefs and creed were still anchored on the river beaches of Moscow. The matches reminded him: What peasant living in Appalachia could afford free matches extended with mint digestives and toothpicks at a downtown nighterie or a Howard Johnson’s? And each flap with its fire warning, each phosphorescent wand, was a class distinction in itself: cardboard covers of crude commercialism, covers of shining gold and silver, crenellated miniatures—collectors items for the showcase: and the firesticks themselves: cardboard budded in red or white, little black arrows tipped with dormant gold fire, silver fire.
It was the other pile—the newspapers—that worried him.
The riches of America he could accept. For these he had been prepared, the other side of poverty, racism, violence. It was the Americans’ capacity to project their own troubles that bothered him. A disturbing symptom of muddled honesty.
It was part of his routine job—his front if you like—to read the papers every day. And every day he was bothered a little more.
From her bed, separated by the newspapers, in their Russian tableau of a bedroom, Valentina Zhukova, swallowing the porridge of Pravda and Trud with disciplined appetite, observed her husband with disappointment. ‘You seem to enjoy the bourgeois press.’
‘It’s my job.’
‘I’ve never known you to carry out your duties so avidly.’
‘You should be pleased that I’m applying myself to my new job.’
‘And the nights when you’re away—do you apply yourself then?’
Soon, Vladimir Zhukov thought sadly, a row would erupt. But how long had it been fermenting? ‘You know what I have to do. I do my best.’
‘And these women you meet. These high class whores. Do they apply themselves?’
‘Please,’ he said. ‘It’s for the common cause. You know that. I have never been unfaithful to you.’ Wondering if he protested too much.
He picked up a Sunday newspaper, its weight bulging his muscles. Supplements and sections spilled on the bedclothes. Democrats and Republicans sparring in the early rounds of this Presidential year. Truth and lies bubbling in the test-tu
be of the System.
The smell of the ink and newsprint stirred restless appetites.
Columns about America’s acceptance of the North Vietnam peace-talks offer. Attacking, defending, questioning. Even the President cartooned, lampooned.
He turned the troubled pages. Race riots in the deep south where, in his mind, bosomy belles still beckoned and Mississippi steamboat gamblers cheated. A gang murder in Chicago. A rape near the Capitol, the girl assaulted three times, her boyfriend clubbed unconscious. A high school raided and drugs found. Pollution gathering above the cities, unchecked because big business would have it no other way.
The prosecution rested. But its printed presence presented a passionate defence. By its very existence.
Once Vladimir Zhukov had flown to Georgia where Stalin still lived in statues and portraits. He had seen an anti-Khrushchev riot harnessed by tear-gas and rifle-butts. But when he returned to Moscow he found that the event had gone unrecorded. Valentina claimed she knew nothing about it—although she must have heard through the Party—and had belittled his eye-witness report.
I wonder, he thought, sitting in bed in striped flannel pyjamas which belied his new romantic role, how many Russians ever suspect the truths of the world or truths of the Motherland.
He lit a cigarette with a red-budded match from a restaurant called Le Provençal.
‘Why do you hoard those matches?’ his wife asked.
‘It’s a saving. We don’t have to buy any.’ Fifty-eight books, his statistical department recorded.
He returned to the disquiet of his duty-reading. If the press so blithely chronicled America’s sores then it was possible that their disclosures of injustice in Russia were true. Just possible.
Did I have to come to America to learn the truth of Russia?
This was the greatest disquiet of all. A proposition from which he shrank. He approached Prague down a long column of print. Then withdrew strategically to the colour supplement. To Mohammad Ali, the motels of Miami and advertisements for patterned toilet paper so pretty that it could be pasted on the walls.
Valentina turned out her plastic-shaded lamp. ‘Goodnight, Vladimir. Please don’t believe everything you read.’
The Red House Page 13