Siro

by David Ignatius

  Aram smiled, as if he knew exactly what Anna’s foundation was all about. Anna plunged ahead.

  “How does that sound?” she asked.

  Still there was no answer from Aram. He just sat there looking composed, a smile still traced on his lips.

  “What do you think?” pressed Anna again, this time almost in a whisper.

  But the Armenian doctor kept his silence. After a few more agonizing seconds, he looked at his watch, remarked on the lateness of the hour, and said he must be heading back to the dormitory at Cité Universitaire. As he stood up to go, Anna felt sick to her stomach. She was convinced that she had bungled her first, and probably last, chance at recruiting the young Armenian. This feeling was in no way lessened when Dr. Antoyan, in parting, gave her a gentle and affectionate kiss on the cheek.

  Aram Antoyan’s response came back a day later. It was a single typed page placed in a sealed envelope that he dropped off at the office of Danielle Marton. Anna was surprised when Danielle called to say that Dr. Antoyan had left a message for her; she had feared she would never hear from him again. But when Anna read the message itself, she was even more surprised. It read, in its entirety, as follows:

  Some Observations on the Soviet Union

  1. Armenian Radio is asked: What is so strange about Rooms 1714 and 2114 at the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow? Armenian Radio answers that they are adjoining rooms.

  2. Armenian Radio is asked whether a commissar should close the door of his office when making love to his secretary. Armenian Radio advises no, as people will think they may be drinking.

  3. Armenian Radio is asked: What happens to Italians who stay too long in the U.S.S.R.? Armenian Radio answers that when they go home, all the bras seem small.

  4. Armenian Radio is asked: Should a woman marry a man who has been sent to prison for murdering his first wife? Armenian Radio answers that this is not a problem, as he is single.

  5. Armenian Radio is asked if it is all right to make love to a woman in Lenin Square in Tbilisi. Armenian Radio says it’s all right, but people will probably stop and give advice.

  6. Armenian Radio is asked: Can we create socialism in France? Armenian Radio answers: Probably, but who needs it?

  Anna’s first thought was that it was a code, pregnant with hidden meaning, or a ruse of some sort. Nobody in his right mind would send a simple list of jokes in response to her query. But as she thought about Antoyan, and the seductive look in his eye when he talked, it seemed possible that the only hidden meaning of his message was that he wanted to sleep with her. Good, she thought. An innocent motive. She called Danielle and asked her to contact the Armenian doctor.

  “Call him yourself,” said the French journalist. “His number is 537-17-77.” There was a note of pique in her voice.

  Anna called Dr. Antoyan that afternoon at his laboratory and suggested that they meet for dinner. “Why not,” was Aram’s response. Anna deliberately chose a fancy restaurant, one that Aram couldn’t possibly afford on his research stipend. It was a small and elegant spot on the Ile St. Louis, which had been a favorite of her father’s many years before. Anna dropped the name of Ambassador Barnes when making the reservation and was promised a table outdoors, overlooking the Seine. She was on her way back to the hotel, to get ready, when it occurred to her that she was sick of everything in her wardrobe. She was staying at the Bristol Hotel, near the fancy dress shops along the Rue du Faubourg-

  St.-Honoré, and on a whim she stopped and browsed in one of the most stylish boutiques. She emerged thirty minutes later wearing a new tweed suit, with a tight skirt and a short, tailored jacket. She also let the salesgirl talk her into a new silk blouse, suggestively open at the neck.

  “Why are you so frank with me?” asked Anna when they were halfway through their first glass of wine. “I thought Russians had to be very careful with foreigners.”

  “I’m an Armenian,” he said. “Not a Russian.”

  “I meant ‘Soviets.’ But it’s the same thing. Aren’t you afraid that someone will see you talking to an American and report you or call you in for questioning?”

  “Not at all. I am a scientist. Working with foreigners is part of my job. I don’t know any secrets, so why should anyone care? My job in Paris is to learn how to diagnose a condition called ‘reflux’ in the urinary tracts of little children. That is why they sent me here. The rest, pfff. Anyway, as I said, I am an Armenian. Everyone in Moscow knows we’re unreliable.”

  “Why are you unreliable?”

  He tilted his head, as if it were a question he didn’t really want to answer, but then went ahead. “There is an old proverb which the esteemed George Orwell quotes in one of his books. ‘Trust a snake before a Jew, and a Jew before a Greek. But never trust an Armenian.’ ”

  “That isn’t fair.”

  “Of course not, but it’s funny. And there is a strange way in which it is true. Armenians are not very trustworthy.”

  “Why not?” asked Anna. She had no idea where the conversation was heading, but she was determined to let him set the pace this time.

  “Because we have suffered too much. We begin with the assumption that the rest of the world hates us, so we don’t care too much about making a few more enemies. In fact, I suspect that Armenians have come to like being so universally despised. It is part of our national identity.”

  “That sounds absolutely crazy,” said Anna. “Have some more wine.”

  “It isn’t crazy. We Armenians are the victims of an accident of geography. It is our great misfortune, a nation of people who like reading Shakespeare and the sonnets of William Wordsworth, to exist on the barren steppes of eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. Think of it! A nation of craftsmen and merchants and poets surrounded by people whose idea of science is inventing new degrees of bastinado to torture their prisoners. What an absurd geographical mistake! But I am sorry. I am talking like an Armenian.”

  “Have some more wine,” she repeated. “What on earth do you mean, ‘talking like an Armenian’?”

  “I mean that I am talking like a victim. That is our great national failing. We Armenians are in love with victimhood. We love it the way an amputee loves his stump. It is our excuse, our reason for being.”

  What a bizarre notion, thought Anna. It occurred to her that nearly everyone she had encountered the last few months was possessed by some crazy idea or another. Stone. Taylor. Now this Armenian doctor. Perhaps even herself.

  “If my friend Ruth Mugrditchian heard you, she would want to punch you in the nose,” said Anna. “She would tell you how the Turks shot her great-grandfather in cold blood and left her great-aunt to die in a ditch on the road to Aleppo. And don’t tell me her grandparents were in love with their victimhood. That’s sick.”

  “Perhaps it’s hard to see in each individual case,” answered Antoyan. “But you must stand back from this pathos and think of all the cases together. It simply isn’t possible for a million people to be destroyed in a few months’ time unless they acquiesced somehow in this fate, unless they embraced martyrdom and death. That is the danger for a nation of romantic poets, like Armenia. Its people fall in love with the idea of suicide. And I am telling you, the Armenians are in love with their pain. They hate to give it up.”

  “But not you?”

  “No, not me. I don’t want to be a victim, and I am not a victim. My father was not a victim, nor his father.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They were fighters. My father fought at Stalingrad against the Germans. My grandfather fought with General Antranik when the Armenian militia and the Red Army stormed Baku and Kokand. He shot many Moslems. I am sure that to Azeris and Uzbeks, he must have seemed like a ruthless Armenian killer.”

  “Does that bother you? That he killed so many Moslems?”

  “Not very much. I would rather be hated as a killer than as a victim.”

  “But people don’t hate victims.”

  “Oh yes, they do,” said Antoyan. “For victims, t
hey actually feel something crueler than hate. They feel contempt. And I want none of it.”

  Anna was going to protest again, but the Armenian had risen from his chair. A family of gypsies had approached the restaurant, hoping to sell flowers to the diners. The maître d’hôtel was trying to shoo them away, and the ruckus was getting louder. Antoyan reached over the maître d’ toward the gypsies with a ten-franc note in his hand and retrieved a bunch of day-old carnations.

  “Please don’t encourage them, monsieur,” said the maître d’.

  The Armenian ignored him and returned to his seat. He handed the flowers to Anna.

  “Back home in Yerevan,” he said, “on a pleasant evening like this, the road into the city would be crowded with women selling carnations from their gardens, far more beautiful than these. So I give them to you as a symbol of what is alive and graceful in my native city. Perhaps you will come there one day and buy some yourself.”

  “Perhaps I will,” said Anna, trying to imagine this strange republic of cognac makers and flowers sellers and brooding tragedians. “But I doubt it.”

  Anna paid the bill, without protest from Antoyan, and they set off for a stroll along the Seine. They tiny Ile St. Louis was awash with people. Anna and Aram joined the stream heading toward Notre Dame and the Place St.-Michel. The river twinkled with the lights of the city and the moonlit sky: a sleek bateau mouche slid by underneath the Petit Pont. Aram put his arm around Anna. She let it rest there. Let him believe that he was seducing her, if he liked, she thought. She could still control the relationship and use it for her purposes.

  Antoyan led her to a bench along the Quai des Orfèvres, away from the crowd of evening strollers. He took Anna’s hand gently in his, opening the palm toward him.

  “I will read your fortune, my dear Miss Morgan,” he said.

  “You are a palm reader?”

  “That is one of my Oriental skills. The reading of palms. The casting of spells. The divination of water. If I were not a medical doctor, I would be a shaman. Here. Relax your hand and I will look.”

  Anna let her palm go limp, while he studied the lines creased across the soft flesh. As he was examining her, Anna looked at his own hands. They were a doctor’s hands. Confident, strong, deliberate. She imagined what his body must look like, without clothes. He was not a lean Thoroughbred, like Taylor. More like a Caucasian horse, close-footed and compact, adept at the narrow paths of the mountains.

  “You are a beautiful woman,” he said.

  “Thank you,” answered Anna. “But what does that have to do with reading my palm?”

  “Everything,” he said. “I can read this hand, and this face, like an open book.”

  “All right, Svengali. Go ahead.”

  “I see in your hand that you have had many love affairs.”

  “Not so many,” said Anna defensively.

  “But the men were all too weak for you. They were selfish boys. They wanted a mother, or a sister, or maybe a girl for one night. But they didn’t want a woman.”

  Anna wanted to pull her hand away, not because he was wrong, but because he was right. “That’s true,” she said. “But you’re not reading it in my hand.”

  “You want to be in love with a man who is mature and confident,” he continued. “A man who knows what love is.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you are not in love now.”

  Anna thought for a long moment about Taylor. “I guess that’s right,” she said.

  Antoyan studied her hand for another twenty seconds. The only sounds were the rush of wind in their ears and the honking of far-off car horns at the Place St.-Michel.

  “You are worried about something,” he said eventually. “In your work.”

  “Yes,” said Anna, becoming more interested and curious. “But what am I worried about?”

  He studied her hand, and then looked up at her from under those black eyebrows. On his face was that trace of a smile that seemed to come over him when they veered toward the true nature of her work.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But you are caught in something from which you cannot escape, from which you do not want to escape. And gradually it is becoming your destiny.”

  Anna felt a chill, as if from a sudden gust of wind along the river. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’m cold.”

  The Armenian removed his coat and put it over Anna’s shoulders. They walked in silence along the quay for fifty yards.

  “You’re no fortune-teller,” she said after a while. “You’re just a good guesser. You could have said those same things about anybody. Everybody wants to be in love. Everybody worries about work.”

  “Perhaps that is true,” said Antoyan. “But the art of the palm reader is to speak to the heart of one person only. And that is not so easy.”

  Anna looked at him, tenderly and warily. In some mysterious way, he was transforming the nature of their interaction, so that it was coming within his control, rather than hers. She could feel the ground slipping from under her feet, and she wanted to reestablish her balance.

  “Listen, Aram,” she said. “When are you going home?”

  “Two weeks, I am sorry to say.”

  “When you get back to Yerevan, would you be willing to stay in touch with me?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I’m interested in what you say about Armenia. So is my foundation. And we’d like to pay you for the help you’ve given us.”

  The Armenian was silent for a long while. He looked at the ground as he walked, lost in thought.

  “Come have dinner with me tomorrow night, and we will talk about it,” he said eventually. “I have some things I must discuss with you also. But no more talk of money, please. I want something from you, but it is not money.”

  “Where shall we meet? At the Cité Universitaire?”

  “No. That is not the place. We would be seen. Perhaps we could meet at your hotel.”

  “Ahh. So you do care whether someone sees us.”

  “Of course I care,” said Antoyan. “I told you, I do not want to be a victim.”

  37

  Anna was staying in a small suite at the Bristol. The rooms were simple and stylish, decorated with fine fabrics in shades of beige and taupe. The suite cost nearly 2,000 francs a night—a small fortune in 1979—but the money seemed to flow endlessly from the bank accounts back in Rockville, and over the past few months Anna had fallen into the comfortable habit of traveling first-class. It was one of the many small corruptions that had entered into her life as she had moved deeper into the realm of unaudited covert operations.

  Aram Antoyan rang from the lobby and proposed that he come upstairs. Anna promptly agreed; she had been hoping he would do just that. Meeting in the room would be more secure, and also more intimate—which Anna reasoned would be good tradecraft on both counts. She had initially taken the precaution of unplugging the lights, just as Hoffman had done in Athens, but then decided it was too dark and turned them back on. She had also, in her ladylike way, tidied the room and dressed herself in another newly purchased outfit from the Rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré, this one a simple black chemise. And finally, she had opened the mini-bar and poured two glasses of vodka, one for Aram and one for herself.

  As she waited for the knock on the door, Anna ran through her mental agenda one last time. The essence of any successful recruitment was control, of her own emotions and those of the target. She recalled what Hoffman had said back in Athens, and what Margaret Houghton had told her so long ago at the restaurant in Washington. The task for a good intelligence officer was to sense what the other party wanted out of life, and then to help him to achieve it. It was, in a strange way, like what a seductive woman tries to do with a man: contrive a world, partly of illusion, in which he can realize his deepest hopes and desires. At first that had sounded to Anna like a very feminine definition of intelligence work, but if she had learned anything in the past year, it was that Margaret’s initial guidance had been r
ight. The male mythology of intelligence was bunk. Except for the occasional bad apple like Ali Ascari, the spy business wasn’t about “burning” people, “busting their balls” or “turning the screws.” It was about stroking people, coaxing them, entering into their dreams and nightmares and translating these private visions into the language of the world; it was about leading people along a path toward a mutually agreed destination, albeit sometimes by a circuitous route.

  Anna’s reverie was interrupted by a sharp rap on the door. Despite her calm rehearsal, she felt a sudden rush of anxiety like an actress about to perform a new play. She needn’t have worried quite so much. For, unknown to her, Dr. Antoyan had come to the Bristol Hotel to act out a drama of his own invention.

  When the Armenian was seated, glass of vodka in his hand, he leaned earnestly toward Anna. The characteristic look of bemused reflection was gone from his face. He was there to talk business. Anna was thinking about how to begin, but Dr. Antoyan beat her to it.

  “There is something I must tell you,” he said.

  “That’s interesting,” said Anna. “Because there is something that I must tell you, too.”

  “I will go first, if you do not mind. That may make it easier for you, or harder. I don’t know. But I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”

  Oh shit, thought Anna. This crazy Armenian is going to tell me that he’s a KGB officer, and that he wants to recruit me.

  But that was not it at all. Antoyan began in a roundabout way—which was unusual for him but, under the circumstances, understandable.

  “How much do you know about the Soviet Union, Miss Morgan?” he said.

  “Some,” she answered. “Not very much.” As she looked at his face, she noticed that he had trimmed his black beard since the previous night. It no longer seemed a mark of creativity, but of camouflage and control.

  “To the rest of the world,” he continued, “the Soviet state probably looks like a colossus that is impregnable and invulnerable. But if you live there, you know that it is quite different. We have, throughout the country, people who are known in the West as ‘dissidents.’ They are everywhere. You cannot find anyone my age, anyone who is the least bit sensible, who does not understand in his heart that the great Soviet Union is a sick and dying animal.”