Tool of the Trade (20 page)

Our diplomatic status should have allowed us to bypass Customs, but the KGB man in charge insisted that our papers were not in order. A pity the KGB doesn’t have a secret handshake; perhaps I could have saved us some time and frustration.

They wanted to separate the three of us who knew some Russian from the nonspeakers, but that didn’t work because Valerie and I were on the same passport. After twenty minutes of baleful stares and whispered conference, they evidently decided to treat us normally, i.e., alternating belligerent harassment with stony silence.

There are three kinds of KGB people prevalent in Russia. These flunkies were the border guards who keep the teeming hordes of aliens outside from rushing into the Soviet Union; they wore plain army uniforms with KGB insignia. The second type, the ones who keep an eye on Soviet citizens at home, also wear a sort of uniform, at least in the cities: rumpled dark suit, narrow tie, supercilious expression. Children may be afraid of them, but most Soviet citizens have learned to live with them, like living with mosquitoes or shortages. The third type is dangerous, because you may know one who looks and acts like anybody, and you think he works for the roads commission or the copyright office—until one day you learn that he was otherwise, and you should have been more careful about what you said between the eighth vodka and passing out.

(We—perhaps I should not say
we
—Americans who wax righteously horrified over this sort of thing might try to cast a clear eye on our own police state.

It’s true that most people go through life without knowingly running into a CIA or FBI agent. But our everyday police have guns, which is not the case in Russia, and some of them have too much of an itch about the trigger finger. And the liberties the Bill of Rights guarantees to us may not be available to Russians, but on the other hand, those rights are also routinely violated by the CIA and the FBI when an American citizen is presumed guilty. Anyone who thinks otherwise has his head in the sand.)

I held off using the watch because of the certainty that we were being examined and recorded. Finally I turned it on while a nineteen-year-old private was slowly, insolently, fingering his way through our luggage. I had to go to the bathroom.

“—Comrade,” I said, carefully, “—we are not simple tourists, you know. You must speed up this process. If we are unnecessarily delayed, it could be hard on you.”

He looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “—Yes, Comrade. Of course.” He gave the rest of the bags a cursory jostle and zipped them up.

Waiting for us on the other side were a brace of KGB men in the “civilian” uniform—rumpled dark suit—and a smiling fat man dressed in up-to-date Western business clothes.

“—Welcome to Russia, Dr. Rafferty,” he said, shaking hands. “—I am Anatoly Menenkov, your opposite number. Premier Dr. Vardanyan’s translator.” He took Valerie’s hand, bowed exactly forty-five degrees over it, and switched to English, a bland North Atlantic accent. “Mrs. Rafferty, a pleasure.” He told her who he was. “My extrasensory perception tells me that you do not speak Russian.”

“I’m afraid that’s true.”

“Oh, don’t be apologetic.” Menenkov gestured to the KGB men, and they picked up our luggage. “It puts me ahead of Dr. Rafferty. That much more practice.”

Menenkov’s car was a dark-red Mercedes, at least ten years old but scrupulously maintained, gleaming with many coats of lacquer. The KGB men put our luggage in the trunk, and one of them slid into the front seat while the other ordered us to wait here while he got the other car. Menenkov took the wheel, and we got in back.

“I didn’t introduce my friend,” he said, indicating the KGB man. “This is Filip Ivanov, who will be our companion and guide through the bureaucratic labyrinth. Unfortunately, he speaks little English.”

“Enough,” Ivanov said. “Understand more than speak.” He was looking straight ahead through the windshield, expressionless. “—There is no need for you to speak in Russian for my convenience.”

He had a soft accent, unmistakable. “—Are you from the Ukraine? Kiev?” It was the wrong thing to say.

“Da.” He turned slowly and nailed me with cold black eyes. “—An unusual talent for a foreigner. You have studied the regional accents of the Soviet Union?”

If I say I studied it in college, he’ll ask the name of the professor, and by nightfall I’ll be
… “—Not formal study. Just a hobby.” I demonstrated: “—This is Byelorussia… this is Moscow… this is your Kiev…”

“—And yet you yourself have a Leningrad accent As if you had been born here.”

My God, could they already know?
“—My first Russian teacher was a Leningrader… high school… what was his name…?” Saved by the horn. The other
KGB man pulled up behind us in a small black, dusty Volga and bleated three times. Menenkov put the car in gear and pulled smoothly away.

It was a fairly long drive into the city, during which we occupied ourselves with conspicuously safe conversation. Menenkov had been to both Washington and Helsinki, and we discussed the relative merits of the two places. He wanted us to compare Miami with Washington, and Valerie unleashed her considerable powers of sarcasm. That was handy, because his responses gave me the measure of his grasp of colloquial American: complete.

He was quite a likable man. That could turn out to be a problem. After I finished my performance at the summit, heads would roll.

The Leningrad Hotel is about twenty years old, faded but modern. Decorated by Finns, it could pass middleclass muster anywhere in Europe or America. We were given a suite overlooking the Neva, at the spot where the old cruiser
Aurora
, whose guns signaled the beginning of the October Revolution, sits anchored. The suite had a sunken tub, Japanese style, but the tap water was rusty. Radio in the headboard of the bed, which I assumed was two-way. In spy novels and movies there’s supposed to be one bug you can find right away, one that you have to really search for, and one that only the audience knows about. Concealed in the molar of the glamorous KGB woman you’re taking to bed. Alas, not this time.

But we did assume that everything we said would be monitored, quite possibly by the Americans as well as the KGB. So if we had anything interesting to say, we communicated by note. (I’d brought along a couple of small tablets of cigarette papers for this
purpose; they burn away completely.)

We were free until evening, so we bundled up and strolled along the Neva for a while. Still a few stubborn patches of ice. I ached to point out to her things I remembered from childhood—places I’d last seen as fallen rubble, now miraculously risen. But we had to be circumspect. That parabolic reflector we’d bought for the rebuilt machine could have picked up clear speech from half a mile away, and the KGB has probably surpassed Edmund Scientific in that area.

She started to tire after a couple of miles, because of the previous evening’s excesses. I walked her back to the Leningrad and then returned to the subway station near the bridge. Restlessly manifesting a classic approach-retreat behavior pattern. I wanted to see my home, yet I was desperately afraid of what I would see.

The subway system was much extended from what I remembered as a boy. The map I’d picked up at the hotel was a sketchy abstraction. I chose a new station that had to be in the right part of town, and plunged on down to the train.

The subway was beautiful and scrupulously maintained, perhaps a hundred times cleaner than Boston’s. A thousand times cleaner than New York’s. Of course, a person who was insane enough to pull out a can of spray paint would be summarily tossed onto the tracks, and not by the police. The people are proud of their subway. If you so much as drop a gum wrapper, somebody will growl “
nikulturny
” and drag you back to pick it up.

I got off two stops past Nevsky Prospekt and was disappointed to see new buildings. But there were older ones, vaguely familiar, off the main street. My memory was not as sharp as I’d thought it would be.

There was a cabstand outside of the subway stop; I got in the first car and gave him the address I remembered from a half century before. “—Is it still there, Comrade?” I asked.

He turned and gave me a half smile. He was about my age, grizzled but neat in a frayed way. “—You sound like a Leningrader.”

“—Yes, of course.” In Russian the phrase is ambiguous. I tried to give him a KGB stare, with no answering smile. “—So do you.”

He shrugged and started the car. “—All I mean is… it’s hardly three blocks away.” He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “—Do I take you or give you directions for walking?”

“—Take me. It’s been a very long time.”

The building where I had lived was gone, replaced by a modern box of glass and steel. But Alex’s, the one that Nazi bombs had blasted flat, was standing there again. Like a corpse made up to look alive, rouged in quiet repose. The building glowed in the slanting evening sun, and in a terrible rush of memory I realized it had been this time and this season when I’d heard the crash and run outside—and there in the roiling sparkle of dust and the threnody of the maimed and dying, there was Alex’s father with his bloody burden. He was himself wounded, which I had forgotten for some decades; scalp torn and half of one ear ripped away. Now there was dry dust in the air again, the smell of pulverized concrete, and though it was from construction this time, I still saw ghosts and bursts into tears.

After a minute the driver spoke softly. “—Comrade. Do you want to get out here?”

“—No. Take me back to the Metro.” He had to go three times as far to return, because of one-way
streets and signs forbidding left turns. When he pulled up to the taxi stand, I thrust a handful of rubles at him and tried to get out, but the door wouldn’t open.

He came around and opened the door and helped me out. Then he put his hand on my neck and carefully pushed the rubles deep into my coat pocket. “—It was a very short drive. How are you living?”

In Russian that’s a stock “hello” phrase, but it can be more. “—I’m living well,” I managed to respond, and patted him on the shoulder before fleeing downstairs.

On the subway, the people politely did not stare at my tears. It was not the unusual sight it would have been in America. We Russians are an emotional people. Perhaps I should not say
we
.

When I got back to the Leningrad, I tiptoed by Valerie and tried to take a nap, but woke up after an hour drenched in sweat, an unspeakably bloody nightmare fading away.

Surprisingly, it was not about Alex or my old home. It was something about an arm. A bloody, disembodied arm.

Jefferson and I were making a career out of chasing false Foley leads. Most of them cleared up with a few phone calls, though we did take trips on government expense to Cincinnati, Akron, Lincoln, and fabulous Gary, Indiana. No leads would ever show up in New Orleans or San Francisco, or anyplace else fun.

We were sitting in the Cambridge office, I picking my way through a Soviet journal of behavioral psychology, Jefferson poring over a lurid magazine called
Full Auto
, which was not about cars. It taught you how to use machine guns in various social situations. The phone rang.

It was Langley: Harriet Leusner of the Foreign Resources Division. “Jacob,” she said, “I have a man you’re just dying to meet.”

I sat up, electrified. “You’ve got Foley?”

“Not actually. Someone almost as good. Why don’t you come down and talk to him?”

“Who is it?”

“Let me be mysterious. I want to see your reaction.” She could be infuriating. “Call when you get manifested and we’ll have a car waiting for you.”

I hung up. “Let’s hit the road, Jefferson. The wild goose calls.” He unfolded from his nearly horizontal reading position and loped to the closet. He pulled out our two overnight bags, nowadays always packed and ready, and his heavy artillery and Kevlar vest He always dressed informally around the office, just the.44 Magnum and whatever he had tucked away under his clothing. Probably enough to take out a platoon of Viet Cong. I didn’t want to know.

We had it pretty well figured out by the time we got to Leusner’s office, but seeing the bastard in the flesh was a shock nevertheless. Mikhail Shilkov, a.k.a. the Scalpel. We didn’t offer to shake hands, just stared. He looked like Peter Lorre with Charles Manson’s eyes. Jefferson said his name.

He was sitting in a straight-backed chair with two men flanking him; Leusner sitting behind her large, clean desk. “You may know Herb Stratton, from the FBI,” she said. I nodded at him; we’d talked on the phone a few times. “And this is Andrew Coleman, also from the FBI. His function is similar to Sergeant Jefferson’s.” He was not quite as big as Jefferson, but equally well padded.

Stratton spoke up. “He walked right into Washington headquarters and surrendered. He wanted to make a deal.”

“Come on.” Jefferson put my thoughts into words. “We don’t make deals with this kind of scum. Do we?”

Coleman smiled at that—it was their line of work
this guy was debasing—but Stratton scowled. “For some things we’ll deal with the devil himself. Shilkov said two magic words.”

“Nicholas Foley,” Shilkov said. “I can tell you where to find him.” “I’d rather let him go,” I said to Leusner. “Harriet, this guy is—” “We know what he is. There’s a lot at stake.”

I looked at Shilkov. “What kind of deal do you want? Plea bargaining for torture and mass murder? Mutilation?”

“I did not really do that,” he said in a rasping voice. “Not under my own volition. Foley ordered me to do it. My own… comrades.” He shook his head in a pretty good simulation of controlled grief. “Besides… can you think that I am that stupid? Killing four KGB agents, two of them in cold blood!”

“We don’t think you’re stupid,” Jefferson said in his best Dangerous Black Person accent. “We think you’re crazy as a
bed
bug.” He continued in flowery Russian: “—Compared to your inhumanly cold-blooded evil, even a Rasputin would look like a simpleminded
stilyagi
. Don’t insult us by playing the innocent.”