Last Call for Blackford Oakes (5 page)

Gus rather enjoyed the daredevil aspect of it all, and a few minutes later was at 912B. He showed his identification card. The nurse, who spoke within earshot of two other nurses and a male orderly busy assembling medicines on a trolley, asked, “What is the nature of your complaint?”

What could he come up with? Gus Windels was tall and lithe. His face showed a trace of freckles leading to his full head of hair, in childhood almost certainly red, now a rusty blond. He could not suppress his cheerfulness. “Ma'am, if you do not mind, it's rather … personal.”

She looked up at him with condescension. If Gus had been a little older, she'd have scolded him to the effect that one does not have “personal” problems in medicine. If he had been five years younger she'd have told him to act like a grown man and answer her question. But as it was, her expression turned motherly. “All right. Sit over there. You will be called.”

A half hour later, an orderly told him to follow her.

He was led into a small office. Dr. Chadinov was seated, and nodded to Gus to sit down opposite.

Gus spoke his impeccable Russian. “Dr. Chadinov, I hope you will forgive me. But I heard you speak yesterday and I would dearly love it if you would let me take you to dinner.”

She paused for a moment, looking concentratedly at her patient. Then, “I would be delighted to have dinner with you.”

CHAPTER 8

At a few minutes to eight, Gus arrived at the Mussky restaurant and was taken to the table he had reserved for two. Making reservations at that restaurant was not easy to do. It required
blat
—the Russian word for influence, usually exercised in the form of bribes. Gus had
blat
at hand, and used it in talking with the headwaiter. He sat down and ordered a bottle of Russian wine. At eight fifteen, Professor Chadinov had not arrived. At eight thirty, Gus dejectedly concluded that the beautiful, dynamic, bilingual professor had had second thoughts about the date, or perhaps had never intended to keep it.

He lingered on for a moment, looking over at his third glass of wine and wondering whether to order a meal for himself, or take the metro back to his apartment, make a sandwich, and get on with the book on the Okhrana. Then she appeared. Accompanied by an older man, whom she introduced as “my dear old friend and colleague, Dr. Vladimir Spiridonovich Kirov. I knew you would be glad to meet him.”

Gus suppressed his disappointment, and rose to greet the two doctors. He signaled to the waiter. “Professor Chadinov, is this wine,” he pointed to the half-empty bottle, “all right?”

“It's all right if”—she went into English—“if you are unfamiliar with alternatives. I know of an alternative available at the same price. May I?”

The waiter brought the wine she asked for, and they were well into the next bottle before they paused in their conversation to order food.

Ursina addressed Gus familiarly, and appeared genuinely interested in everything he said.

Gus spoke about his mother's life in Kiev and of his early years at school there.

“Why did your mother leave? What year did she leave?”

Gus replied diplomatically. If the question had been asked a fortnight later, after two more visits with Ursina, he might have said, “Why on earth would she
not
have left the Soviet Union?” Tonight he said only that an uncle who had moved to the United States before the war had succeeded as a farmer in Iowa and had arranged to bring his sister and her fourteen-year-old son to live with him. “My father had died—well, we always assumed he had died. Mother didn't hear from him after he was taken away in 1960. When word came from my uncle, we felt we were very lucky.”

“
Very lucky to leave the Soviet Union
.” She turned to her colleague. “Volodya, those are strange words to hear, are they not?”

Kirov came through with an inconclusive giggle. “Ursina, you are always being provocative. Leaving the Soviet Union at age fourteen, Mister Windels—”

“‘Gus,' please.”

“—our host was too young to feel the loss of his motherland.”

“Exactly,” said Gus. “I was just a dumb little boy insensitive to the loss I was sustaining by going to America.”

Ursina looked him hard in the face. He had permitted himself just a trace of a smile, which she reciprocated.

But she gave the impression that attention needed now to be given to assessing the offerings lovingly described in the menu. There were piroshki, three kinds of herring and two of smoked sturgeon, blini, chicken and veal and lamb in various guises, baklava and ice cream. With the food and the wine, the diners cast off the blight of a tedious day, leaving them happy and distracted for a little while.

Ursina and Kirov wanted to know everything about Gus's life in Iowa.

“Was your uncle an overlord?”

“A what?”

“I mean, did he have many farmers who worked for him?”

“Yes. Well, he had a few. He was the owner of a medium-sized farm.”

“Did his serfs earn a living wage?”

Kirov broke in. “Ursina, you are not an interrogator at the Lubyanka.”

“What does Mr.—Gus—know of the Lubyanka?”

What is she up to?
Gus wondered. The Lubyanka was celebrated in book after book about the Soviet Union as the headquarters in Moscow of the KGB, the Soviet Gestapo. Half the Russians who were brought into that massive stone building ended up on trains bound for Gulag. The other half were cremated, after the bullet in the head.

“Dr. Ursina, everybody in the Western world knows about the Lubyanka.” Gus felt he could get away with saying that much, leaving unsaid what it was about the Lubyanka that had been written by such as Arthur Koestler and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

“But, Dr. Ursina” (she had acquiesced in this form of address, stopping short of asking to be called merely “Ursina,” even though the elderly Dr. Kirov had asked to be called “Vladimir”), “you know, because I told you, that I am with the press office of the United States Embassy. We are briefed on all the important landmarks of your country.”

“
My
country?”

Gus smiled. “All right, I was born here, too. My ex-country.”

It was a long evening, and not lacking in warmth, even though Ursina from time to time edged politics into the discussion. She asked if Gus intended to be present at the upcoming International Peace Forum, scheduled for early the following year. “I suppose you will be there to spy on it.”

Gus laughed. “President Reagan also hopes for a world without nuclear weapons.”

“Why then is he sponsoring an anti-missile missile program?”

“That,” said Gus cautiously, “is for the purpose of …
destroying
nuclear weapons transported by missiles.”

Ursina began to answer, but cut her reply off and took another tack. “I suppose I must not ask what exactly you do in the press office.”

“You are free to do so. And am I free to ask what you do in the medical world, besides welcoming so graciously visitors to your university?”

“Dr. Kirov and I are practicing urologists.”

“I see. Well,” he raised his glass, “let's drink to your success in
that
field!”

“And not in other fields of my interest?”

“That,” said Gus, “would require some thought.”

Vladimir Kirov had gone to the men's room, and Gus was counting out bills for the waiter. Ursina took a card from her purse and wrote down a telephone number. “Perhaps we can give it some thought at a future meeting?”

Pocketing the card, Gus smiled broadly. “We must give these matters a great deal of thought.”

CHAPTER 9

Konstantin Chernenko, at age seventy-two, could not be expected to live forever, but he acted as if he intended to do exactly that. On February 13, 1984, when Chernenko was named general secretary, Nikolai Dmitriev was confident that Chernenko would nominate him as successor. Dmitriev had been friends with Chernenko for a long time and was twenty years his junior.

The idea was that when, in due course, Dmitriev became general secretary, he would immediately name General Leonid Baranov as chief of staff. The choice of Baranov, Dmitriev reasoned, would be welcomed by the military court. There was, granted, the problem of his age—Baranov was seventy-six—but his standing with the Politburo was solid. He had weathered all the changes in government from the death of Stalin to the present. “If he could get on with Beria—with Bulganin—with Khrushchev—with Brezhnev—with Andropov,” one colleague had observed, “why he could probably have got along with both Stalin and Hitler simultaneously.”

In fact, over the twenty-two-month duration of the Hitler–Stalin pact, Baranov was able to boast that young though he was in August 1939—a lieutenant colonel at age thirty-one—he had been at Foreign Minister Molotov's side during the negotiations in Moscow leading to the pact between Hitler and Stalin. That chapter in his life was forever forgotten after the Nazis marched into Russia in June of 1941, but Baranov continued to rise in the military order under the patronage of Politburo member Konstantin Chernenko.

Chernenko was an odd duck. When he decided to let a policy decision be known, he would call in not the Presidium, nor the Central Committee, nor the chiefs of staff, but Nika. Nika had been his personal secretary for thirty-five years. She was a woman born to serve. Her only idiosyncrasy was her obstinate concealment of her surname. She was Nika—just that, Nika—in every situation. “Does the KGB know your last name?” the new payroll sergeant asked her, coming in to fill out the roster.

She managed a quick smile. “Oh, I wouldn't reveal any secrets, Sergeant. You can absolutely trust me.” She got away with it.

But General Baranov did not forgive her for failing to call to the attention of the dying premier that he had an important undischarged obligation: to name Dmitriev as his successor. And what happened, of course, in the absence of any testamentary word from Chernenko, was a political dogfight, in which one Mikhail Gorbachev prevailed.

General Baranov had had an agenda. He had communicated parts of it to Premier Chernenko, especially his conviction that the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan should be called off. It was costing too much, in lives, money, and international favor.

There were the hot young military men—there are such in almost every situation—who wished to pursue the military objective with, Baranov argued, the kind of undiscriminating tenacity Hitler had shown even when his fascist war was clearly doomed. There was no prospect that the Afghan adventure would actually doom the Soviet Union, but the high cost of it threatened other state enterprises, including a badly needed reform of the administrative structure. Nikolai Dmitriev, discreetly committed to the same reforms, was sidelined under the new Gorbachev regime.

“Those who lose out in high-powered competition in politics,” General Baranov said to Oleg Pavlov, his son-in-law and closest aide, “are almost always destined to be sidelined in life. There is a large apartment house at Sukharevsky 298 with small apartments in it. One of them was occupied during the last years of his life by Nikita Khrushchev, another was occupied by Vyacheslav Molotov. I do not want to end my days there.”

The general struggled to bring the whole scene into focus. The government was weak, after two years under Mikhail Gorbachev. The Afghan war had stalled, but Gorbachev still resisted bringing it to a close. The general staff—and who should know this better than Leonid Baranov, the senior general in active service?—was demoralized.

It was late in the evening, after many drinks shared with Pavlov, who had the rank of captain. General Baranov talked about how different the prospects would be for a healthy Soviet Union if Dmitriev had been selected as general secretary.

Captain Pavlov spoke now with an odd abruptness in his tone. “General, is a coup d'état proscribed by Marxist … thought?”

The general paused with vodka glass in hand instead of emptying it down his throat, as he had done many times during the long evening.

In measured tones, though there was a slight slur in his speech, he said that the purpose always was to advance the revolution. “If this can be done by deposing the ruler—the wrong ruler—would Lenin have approved of such a movement? Lenin was careful to supervise his own succession. Perhaps you will say, Oleg, that he was not careful enough, because although he warned privately about Stalin, it was Stalin who took command.”

“General”—Pavlov always thus addressed his father-in-law—“we have never spoken about the plot last year against Comrade Gorbachev. You should know that Ivan Pletnev, a boyhood friend of mine, is the brother of one of the conspirators in that plot.”

“Was he himself involved in it?”

“Absolutely not. He was in Afghanistan at the time. But when the plot failed and they had his brother in custody, the KGB summoned him from the front and … interrogated him vigorously. Too vigorously.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“He is crippled, living at home with his mother. He speaks to me with great candor. He tells me that the plot, which almost succeeded, depended heavily on the Americans. If, with Gorbachev out of the way, the Americans proceeded to recognize the government of his successor, everything would fall into place.”

“How did he learn all this, if he was off in Afghanistan?”

“Viktor, Ivan's brother, confided in his oldest friend, a woman called Galina. They grew up as close as sister and brother. And after Viktor's death she confided in Ivan.”

“Was she also questioned by the KGB?”

“Yes. There was brutality, but—nothing crippling.”

“How does one get in touch with her?”

Pavlov swallowed another drink. “She is a lady of the night.”

General Baranov took that in calmly, as he might have taken in the news that one of his regiments had been destroyed. “Can you take me to her?”