The Mulberry Bush (15 page)

The look on Luz's face asked what was I going to do about this. What was I supposed to do—throw him out of another man's house?

I said, “It's too late to worry about it. I'm going to take a shower before dinner. Want to join me?”

In English Luz said, “I don't fuck when there's a gorilla in the next room.”

For dinner Diego made thick spaghetti with a peppery red sauce that had chunks of pancetta in it. Boris knew what it was and named it in Italian:
Bucatini all'Amatriciana.
He scarfed it down.

Italian food was his favorite, he said. Did he get much of it in Moscow? I asked.

“Not like this, but you can get what Russians call Italian food,” Boris said. “Now, not before.”

I took a plate of pasta and a glass of Argentinian Primitivo to Luz, who was still hiding out in the bedroom. She didn't say thank you. Diego had brought Italian pastries. Would she want some later, and coffee? No reply. She was seething. Her silence was scolding. It was
my
responsibility that Boris had walked in on our happiness. I should have protected her from becoming an entry in a file in Moscow. The fact that she had been in a Russian file all her life simply because she was her father's daughter seemed not to have occurred to her.

At the table, neither Diego nor Boris mentioned her absence. Boris was somewhat gloomy but kept up his end of the conversation. His Spanish was better than I had thought, heavily accented but nimble. We talked about—you guessed it—football. Diego was a great fan. He loved AC Milano. If Italy and Argentina played in the World Cup, he wouldn't know which team to root for. At around nine, after the second grappa, Boris said a perfunctory good night.

Before disappearing he said, “Chess in the morning, the usual time?”

Taking Luz's mood into account, there was no reason to say no.

Just after dawn we played a couple of games—one win apiece. Because Boris was also in a mood, there wasn't much joy in it.

Skidding into English (anything but Spanish), he said, “Let's skip the rubber and run on the beach.”

He was already dressed in his running clothes. When I went into the bedroom to change into mine, Luz pretended that she wasn't awake.

Boris and I, all alone on the beach, ran for about an hour on the hard wet sand. After taking his last stride, Boris kicked off his shoes and peeled off his socks and plunged into the surf. He was a strong swimmer. He
swam out through the crashing waves until his head was a dot, then tread water for a while before backstroking to shore.

Boris put on his shoes before he got sand on his feet. While he did this I started back to the house, which was still a long way off.

He caught up and said, “Wait. I want to ask you a question.”

I stopped and turned around and waited for him to speak. We were maybe ten steps apart. There was a brisk wind, so Boris had to raise his voice in order to be heard.

He said, in Russian, “What are we really up to, you and I?

I said, “I don't follow your meaning.”

But I was pretty sure I did.

Boris stood between me and the sun. He could see my face, but his was a blur. For a full minute, perhaps longer, the only sounds were wind, gulls, and surf.

He said, “You don't understand? Then let me simplify. I am not trying to recruit you.”

“You're not? Then what
are
you doing, volunteering to be recruited?”

“That is not possible. I am offering an arrangement that will permit me to go on working for my country by helping yours.”

I said, “A novel idea. How exactly would that work?”

Boris's face changed, as if he had peeled off his gorilla mask because he wanted me to see the real him.

He said, “I will first tell you why. I fear the future—not personally, what does one man matter? But I fear for my country.”

He was using a voice that was stronger than the one I was used to.

I said, “Go on.”

Boris said, “It is quite simple, a matter of personalities, a difference of opinion about what is Russia.”

“And?”

“Listen and I will tell you,” Boris said. “I knew our current president when we were both young officers posted to Berlin just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. He hated Gorbachev. A lot of people in our organization hated him because they knew that perestroika was a virus that had infected the Soviet apparatus and for which maybe there was no cure. They were worried about their futures. They knew what had happened in Russia under Bolshevism—men like themselves had helped make it happen—and they knew what could happen to them if reform got out of control. Some seriously thought Gorbachev was working for the Americans, that he had been turned long ago, that he had received his final marching orders when he met with Reagan in Reykjavik and came home covered with shame.”

He paused. He stared at me, making sure I was hearing what he was saying to me.

He said, “Our future president was always saying what a great leader Comrade Stalin had been, how admirable his style of leadership was, how he had transformed the Motherland from a backward medieval kingdom into a modern state, a new kind of power that was the only rationale, the only possible model for the future of the world. He was so enthusiastic about the good old days of Bolshevism with its forty million murders of our own people and the suffering it imposed on everybody of every nationality except Stalin's murderers and torturers, mostly Georgians like himself who hated Russians, that at first I thought he was making a sick joke.”

I tried not to blink. Boris's reckless words couldn't have been more astonishing if he had suddenly lapsed into fluent Sanskrit. The transformation did not awaken in me an eagerness to believe. Had he really known Vladimir Putin as an equal? This had to be a trap. How could it be anything else? Unless, of course, it was genuine. But how to tell the difference? Maybe his specialty was pouring out his heart to gullible targets. He was good at it. Practice really does make perfect.
No one can spend half a lifetime as an intelligence officer without acquiring the skills of an actor. If Boris was faking this outburst, he was a Barrymore.

I said, “Boris, I already know all about that. So does everybody else who reads the newspapers.”

Boris said, “Please. Of course you know. I am trying to make you understand. I want to prevent, or at least make it harder, for this lunatic to re-create the Soviet Union, to push Russia back into the dark closet of history. The United States of America, although it is also led by a corrupt
nomenklatura
that pretends to love the common people in order to repress them and pick their pockets, is still the only force in the world that is strong enough to stand in the way. Therefore I want its help. And to buy that help I must help the United States.”

I said, “Isn't that treason under Russian law?”

“To the people in power, perhaps. Not to eternal Russia.”

I said, “If you are so loyal to your country, it's your country, right or wrong, yes?”

“Naturally, but it has been wrong long enough. Treason does not interest me. Patriotism does.”

That's what they all say. The most eager turncoats generally insist—believe—that they are acting as patriots. The real reason for their actions might lie elsewhere—money, resentment, guilt—but they didn't always realize that, and if that was the case, they would endure torture, even death, to keep their illusion alive.

Boris said, “So this is what I am saying to you: I will help your country if it will help mine.”

“I heard you the first time. Tell me, how, precisely, would you go about helping America?”

“By telling it much it does not know and will never know if it lets this opportunity pass. By making things happen it cannot make happen.”

“And in return you, Boris not Holy Russia, wants exactly what?”

“We'll get to that. First, my conditions. I will swear no oath, sign no agreement, accept no discipline. You and only you must be my contact.”

“Until death do us part?”

Boris brushed that off.

“I do not wish to meet anyone else in your organization under any circumstance whatsoever,” he said. “I do not wish to see the faces of your colleagues, ever, or know their names. I will accept no money or other benefit. If I break contact you will not attempt to reestablish it. If I get into trouble and you hear about it you will not attempt to—what a word!—exfiltrate me. You will have nothing in your files that could be used to identify me even a hundred years after you and I are dead—not my true name or any other name by which I may be called, not a photograph, not my physical description, not my personal history. Nothing.”

These were not onerous conditions. It would be easy enough to find a way around them, because how would he know? Boris's birth name was certainly not Boris Gusarov, and there was little or no prospect of ever knowing who he really was, because like the rest of our breed he had been many different people according to the situations in which he found himself, and also because neither Headquarters nor I had the means to control what he did or where he went or to catalog the contents of his memory. What he proposed was unusual. But the usual isn't the currency of the parallel universe in which spies operate under different laws of moral physics. He had, after all, just changed into somebody else right in front of my eyes.

I couldn't believe my luck. His idea fitted perfectly into my design for the perfect, the complete revenge I sought.

I said, “Are there others in your service who feel as you do?”

“I suppose so,” Boris said. “How could there not be? But we don't get together and drink vodka and sing songs about it.”

“But if you were asked to make a suggestion to the others, would you agree?”

“Perhaps. It would depend on the suggestion and who made it. No more questions.”

“Just one. What is your rank?”

“I am the resident here. I am like a colonel. When I go back to Moscow, which will happen quite soon, I will be promoted or not promoted, but if I am not promoted I will still be a colonel in the Russian foreign intelligence service and I will still be trusted.”

“And if you are promoted, you will be like a general.”

“Yes. Like you.”

I understood the message: He knew more about me than I thought, that quite possibly he had someone inside Headquarters who was senior enough to know all about me.

I said, “You understand I have no authority to say yes or no to this bolt from the blue.”

“I know that, despite your high position. You will need a green light and the switch is in Virginia. Diego and I will go back to the city this afternoon. Before we go I will give you a package. Your people can examine the contents of the package, which must be returned to me in its original condition because I must return it to the registry. Do not attempt to photocopy it. If you do, invisible but indelible security markings will be created. Your superiors have three Saturdays, beginning on the next Saturday after they receive the package, to make up their minds. On the final Saturday, when we play chess, you can tell me what is their decision. They must accept these conditions in their entirety and make no conditions of their own.”

Fat chance. But Boris already knew that.

I said, “One final question. Your present posting doesn't seem appropriate to your rank and experience.”

“Another similarity in our situations.”

“How long have you been in Buenos Aires?”

“Somewhat longer than you.”

Full stop.

This time Boris was the one who abruptly turned his back and stepped out of the conversation. I followed, making no attempt to catch up. He had made his pitch. I had thoughts of my own to think.

Boris said nothing more about the package before he and Diego left, but after Luz had gone to sleep—she reinstated our usual sexual routine as soon as the gorilla had departed—I found it in the car. It consisted of about fifty cables and other top secret documents from the files of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, hence “SVR” in the Roman alphabet. SVR was the Russian equivalent of Headquarters—or if you were a creative thinker, vice versa.

It took me much of the night to make my way through the gobbledygook. Boris had not handed over the crown jewels of the latest version of the Cheka, but what he had provided was tantalizing enough.

There was no point in showing this to Luz, since she didn't read Russian and I had no time to translate, so at breakfast I told her the bare facts. It took a moment for her to realize what I was telling her and what it meant. Her sleepy brown gaze, which had been swimming because I had awakened her with an orgasm, suddenly changed. I saw no sign of rejection, but neither did I behold the glee I had expected. She didn't clap her hands or dance around the room, but she understood as well as I did that from the point of view of our plot or prank or purposes or whatever, we now possessed the keys to the kingdom.

This wasn't an unmixed blessing, and Luz was not the only one to realize that. What I thought I saw in her eyes was uncertainty, anxiety, the realization that danger had just sat down at the table with us.

She and I took the first commercial flight to Buenos Aires. I went straight to the embassy and sent a flash cable to Headquarters. Within the hour I received a reply signed by Tom Terhune ordering me to pouch the material by special courier and take the next available flight to Washington.

That flight left in less than three hours. Luz met me at the airport. In her demeanor I detected not one single point of light. It was raining all over the world.

She said, “Will you ever come back?”

What possible answer could I make to that question? I had not expected what I now saw in her face and heard in her voice. All of a sudden Luz was consumed by apprehension. Did she think the devils I worked for were going to assassinate me, as if I were a second Alejandro?

I should have felt sympathy and I should have found a way to reassure her, but there was no time and what I felt, unforgivably, was exasperation.

I said, “Luz, get a grip.”

She gasped like a woman wronged. How could I say such a cruel thing to the woman I loved at such a moment? Did I really love her? Looking into her face was like reading these words in headline type.

The final call for my flight came over the loudspeakers. When I reached for Luz, she stepped back, out of my reach. She walked away, heels clicking, not quite running. I had no time to watch her go out of sight. I cleared security and ran for the flight. I hadn't slept a wink the night before.

I was unconscious before the plane rose into the air.