Sleeper Spy (20 page)

“Of course, Liana Krumins. That’s why we’re here.”

Despite the violation of her privacy, she would not let him intimidate her. “Move over,” she said. “I want to look.”

First, the old pictures. Her mother and father, Antonia and Ojars Krumins, on their wedding day, a brown picture in an oval mat. She had seen it before, on her mother’s dressing table when she was young, but this was a slightly different pose; the photographer had given the second picture to the KGB. A high school graduation photo that the whole class bought, but another candid shot with her history teacher that she had never seen before; he was the one—gentle, malleable—she had chosen to end her virginity. A woman friend of her mother’s standing at the ballet practice bar; she had come to the house often when Liana was young. A tall man she did not know standing in front of a house she did not recognize; why was that in her file?

The old documents. Application for a driver’s license. A letter to her school director apologizing for leading a demonstration for better food in the cafeteria and asking not to be expelled.

Newer documents. The expulsion order from university, with backup reports from fellow students that she had not been permitted to see. Application, with
DENIED
stamped on top, for a visa to a media conference in Helsinki, where she had hoped to meet Western reporters. She flipped through to see who had informed on her, and her heart sank; her best girlfriend. They were still close; Liana had helped her get a job at the station. Her mind found it hard to accept such continual betrayal.

The arrest papers and booking at the prison in Riga after the rally. The memory of that building seized her: the KGB headquarters had previously been the Nazi headquarters during the war. It was the most dreaded place in Latvia.

“Just a short stay,” he noted, his finger under the date of discharge. “Overnight. The others must have been greater offenders.”

Not so; but she had been the only young woman among the ringleaders. A guard said, “This one needs a bath,” doused her, fully dressed, with a bucket of water, and pushed her into a solitary cell with a harsh overhead light and a chair but no bed. The January night was below freezing. She had to strip off her sweater and shirt and jeans and wring them out and hope they dried before she froze to death. An hour later, exhausted from moving around the tiny room and rubbing her naked skin where it was turning blue, she looked up to see a uniformed KGB officer enter. He said she had the choice of staying in the cold cell or coming upstairs to share a warm bed with him. She accepted his kind of invitation, and even as he brutalized her, she counted herself lucky to survive. Before dawn, she was released. She did not hate him; he had kept his word, and she never forgot her unsolicited instruction on how sex could be useful.

“No,” she told today’s KGB representative, “it’s just that I found a friend.”

“Some friend.” He was reading a document that had been attached to the arrest paper. “Says here you were released because you testified against the others you were arrested with, and provided a list of names to be rounded up.”

She snatched the document and read it, choking with anger at the damning detail, none of it true. “This is a lie. I never gave him any of this. He never even asked for names.”

“Let me see who signed that.”

Reluctantly, she handed the official document back to him. It would follow her the rest of her life. The existence of it in this file was an invitation to blackmail, useful to anyone who wanted to bring her low and besmear her too-early patriotism.

“Ah, I’ve heard of him,” Davidov said. “This was a favorite trick of his to take advantage of women prisoners. It worked, too—none of them ever complained about rape, and none of his superiors wondered
why he released some prisoners early. He’s no longer with the new KGB. I think he’s one of the Feliks people.” He set the document aside.

Liana, livid at the outrage in the past that would threaten her career in the future, continued through the file. Toward the back, where the most recent additions were placed, the handwritten papers changed to typed reports of surveillance. A night spent at the apartment of an incumbent political leader, and the next night in the rooms of the opposition leader; that evidence was true enough, and not immoral or illegal, but might be hard to explain if someone wanted to charge her with using her body to get her information. In truth, she enjoyed the interplay of the two men and never revealed any of one’s political secrets to the other.

There was the last month’s register of all the telephone numbers she dialed from her home. She saw one surveillance document dated only the week before—“Meeting with Michael Shu, defector’s son, now U.S. citizen, accountant and possible CIA investigator”—and leaned back from the table. Now she knew why this man was in the room with her.

“Proceed with your interrogation,” she said with dignity.

He signaled with upraised hands that he was not about to step into that trap. “And have you go back to Riga and go on the air to tell about how you were interrogated by the bullies of the KGB?” He shook his head. “No, thanks, Miss Krumins.” He pointed to the portrait of Iron Feliks on the wall over the fireplace. “His day is over.”

She picked up one of the videotapes, a white label across the back reading
KRUMINS VISIT SHELEPIN FILES
and the date. She put it down and picked up the next:
KRUMINS VISIT BERENSKY FILES, KRUMINS SEARCH BY LUBYANKA GUARDS
. The skin around her neck reddened as she looked directly at him: “You saw these?”

He nodded. She was doing the questioning, which apparently did not disturb him. She hefted the second box of tape in her hand.

“What did this show you?”

“The first part shows a commission of a minor crime, the theft of a document from the files. The second part shows you being searched by the guards, doing their duty after being told of possible theft. They properly offered to detain you until a female guard came on duty, which you declined.”

“A lens like that, was it?” She pointed to his jacket hanging over the lens on the wall. “In front of me? Did you get the full view?”

“From the side. Not the full view.”

“Then you saw I was innocent. I stole nothing.”

“All that could be charged is that you removed a letter from one room—no doubt of that, it’s right on the tape—and left it somewhere else on the premises. It’s a minor infraction, as I said. Don’t worry about it. They won’t even take away your library card.”

“Why are you letting me see my own file? That’s never done. Why are you here with me now? What do you want?”

“I hate interrogations,” he said. “I always confess in the end.”

She smiled nervously. “Stop playing with me. Tell me what you want.”

“You are conducting a legitimate search for a story you can show on television,” Davidov said, his voice gentle, almost as if he were not conducting an interrogation. “The story has to do with a KGB agent you have been told is in America. I cannot say if it is true or not. We don’t discuss those things.” He awaited another question, which she took as an invitation to draw him out.

“What can you discuss about it?”

“What concerns me is that you are letting yourself be used by a group whose interests are not your own. We know, and you know we know”—he indicated the recent surveillance reports—“about the Feliks
organizatsiya
. These are not your people, Miss Krumins. These are the people you fought against ever since you were a schoolgirl.”

“How can you be sure I am not using them?”

“Ah, that’s it—you think you are. But they are manipulating you, sending you in here, arranging for you to meet the American investigator at the Metropole.” He lightened. “Wonderful breakfast buffet, wasn’t it, under the great glass ceiling? More European than Russian, except for the damn herring.”

“You want me to break off contact with one of my sources, is that it?”

He shook his head as if it hurt. “You will do what you want. But won’t you even consider the possibility that you are being used as a pawn by a group whose values you do not share?”

“Their information has been accurate so far. And Nikolai—I am onto a big story.”

She thought she might use his worry about her association with the Feliks people as a lever to pry open the KGB; curiously, his half-smile seemed to say he liked that—unless it was a reaction to her artful first use of his first name, remembered from his credential.

“Perhaps I could persuade my colleagues,” he suggested, “to be more helpful in finding the person you seek. But they would not want to aid the old apparatchiks—Madame Nina, Arkady Volkovich, that whole group of reactionaries. So long as you are with them, you are consorting with the enemy. The world has turned upside down, Liana—the new KGB is not your enemy.”

She touched the second videotape box. “I heard the old KGB had cameras everywhere in the Hotel Berlin next door, taking pictures of foreigners in sexual acts, to compromise them. You say you have changed, then?”

“Unfair. The search of you was a reasonable precaution. And the only copy of that tape is the one you hold in your hand.”

“It does not please me, knowing that these pictures of me with my clothes off may be played for the amusement of your colleagues.”

“Steal it,” he said. “Take a deep breath, stick it in the waistband under the back of your blouse. I understand that’s the best place to hide it. Then walk past the guards. They’ll never notice it.”

At that, she reddened again. “No. You will take it and walk out with me.” She looked hungrily at the release document on the table, set aside from the file. Its lies could ruin her. She knew how she felt about the friend she had discovered had betrayed her; she knew how all her friends in the former underground would feel if that paper were available to searchers of files. “Do you suppose that’s the only copy of that?”

He inspected it closely. “It’s the original. They didn’t have copying machines in Riga then. A handwritten copy wouldn’t be proof of anything.”

She wondered if he was going to offer a warm bed in trade; that was her experience of the KGB way.

“Push over that big ashtray,” Davidov said. He placed the document in it and lit it with his cigarette lighter, and they watched the sheet flare and burn to a crisp. She flicked her fingers along the top of her short hair and wondered what he wanted in return. If it was a night together, that would not be such a humiliation, except for the principle of it; he was an attractive man.

The KGB official lifted his jacket off the wall, made a face in the lens, and replaced the mirror. He beckoned to her to follow him out of the room, tossing an airy salute to the stern face of Iron Feliks. As he led her out of the building, the guards stiffened to attention. He led the way through the X-ray search, tape openly in hand.

Outside, Davidov handed the tape to her with an avuncular admonition: “Think twice about letting the Feliks people use you. If you need me, my numbers are on this card, office and home.” He wrote in his fax number, she presumed for emphasis.

“This cannot be the only copy,” she said, looking at the tape in her hand.

“I do not deny looking at it more than once,” he replied. “It shows that you are in some ways a beautiful woman, and you have a ballerina’s flair for suggestive movements that exquisitely deceive. You can believe me or not, but it is the only copy. And it does not belong in Lubyanka.”

“I choose to believe you.” She did not, but shook his hand firmly. Frowning afterward, she wondered what he meant by “in some ways” beautiful.

He flexed his fingers, liking the memory of the feel of her hand: on the bony side, long fingers, no-nonsense pressure and quick release. He also liked her calculated choice of words in “choosing” to believe him, which she did not, of course.

Davidov crossed his arms at the top of the steps at the front door and watched her walk past the Kazakh street merchants around the square. Hers were the long strides of the purposeful walker, rhythmic but not undulating, a woman certain she was being watched by the man she just left. Davidov knew he was not alone in the watching; he observed the Feliks shadow openly picking her up and the KGB shadow subtly picking up the Feliks shadow.

He felt noble at giving up the tape showing her fine figure in its nudity; as far as he knew, it really was the only copy. He was certain the fake release document he had burned had no copies; Yelena had created it only that morning, at his instructions, to be placed in Liana’s file—a piece of disinformation worthy of Shelepin, the power-purist who had raised that form of deception to a high art
before he was deposed by a General Secretary fearful of his discipline.

Davidov took the elevator back to the Cheka room’s floor. Hands in his pockets, jacket over his shoulders, the economic intelligence chief looked first at the ashes in the glass ashtray and then directed his gaze at the portrait of Iron Feliks, whose Ozymandian statue no longer dominated the square outside, and whose feared name had been obliterated from street signs and maps.

In a sense, the sleeper was Dzerzhinsky’s direct descendant. Willing murderer, ideologue of authority, organizational genius, visionary—the strain ran from Iron Feliks through Shelepin to the man hidden in America assembling the economic power to destabilize a nation and deliver it back to the legatees of the unbroken Cheka line.