Sleeper Spy (58 page)

Did he know that the Latvian television reporter tracking him was his daughter? The report and tapes from the Feliks organization’s operatives in America showed no awareness by Dominick of his relationship to Liana. “You left behind more than one of us.”

“I saw Masha at a party in New York. I recognized her because I’ve been getting tapes of her broadcasts—frankly, that’s all the Russian I hear and why my Russian is so rusty.”

“Did you identify yourself to her?”

“Of course not. God, it was awkward, shaking hands with your own daughter after all these years and not being able to embrace her properly. Or even to introduce yourself as her father.”

“Especially when she is searching for you.”

“She’s being used by quite a few people to find me. My job—the meaning of my whole life—has been not to be found.” When she chose not to fill the pause that followed, he said, “She’s a fine young woman. Your mouth, your cheekbones, your dancer’s way of carrying
yourself. My eyes, I think; gray, rather than your brown.” He noticed detail, as a trained agent would. “We should be very proud, but you especially.”

“I am ashamed of Liana. She was a traitor and she has become a whore.”

He did not respond directly to that. “And you blame me.”

“I blame you for nothing,” she lied evenly. “I never thought of you until recently, and then only because a woman of great influence summoned me.”

“You speak of Madame Nina. What can you tell me about her?”

“Nothing.” In a low voice, she added, “My purpose here is only to report to her if you are the son of the hateful Shelepin.”

He pulled his chair closer. “I tried to switch around to give you my good ear, but I missed what you just said.”

That had the ring of truth. She remembered his youthful frustration at his hearing loss, and how he would insult her by turning his deaf side to her during an argument. “Is your hearing no better?” She chose not to commit to calling him either Aleks or Edward, and did not use a name. Nor did he, she noticed, use hers.

The tall man, whatever his identity was, dug a flesh-colored device, the size of a marble, out of his right ear. “This is the latest hearing aid, and it helps.” He took a small screwdriver out of his pocket, made an adjustment, and put the device back in his ear. “The Americans have a saying: ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ ”

So cavalier now, and a cultivated gentleman. She remembered the savage way her young husband had forced himself on her, slapping away her shyness, breaking her resistance to break her spirit. As if in fond recall, she asked, “Do you remember our wedding anniversary, Aleks?” If he was an impostor, he would have been briefed to have that date on the tip of his tongue.

“It was in April, I think. Yes, around the time of the mushroom rains. I’m sorry, it’s not a date I have had the occasion to remember.”

“And after the ceremony, in Sokolniki Park?”

“The only time I was in Sokolniki Park was as a boy, to visit the American exhibition in 1959. Khrushchev and Nixon argued in a kitchen. Are you testing me, Antonia Ivanov Berensky Krumins?” He had her names correct. “Remember the glorious time we had on top of
the Eiffel Tower?” Then he became serious. “Do you really think I am somebody else, pretending to be Aleks Berensky?”

“That is what you say to your CIA friends in your corner office of a bank in America,” she said carefully. “I am told that you ask your fellow spies for letters that I wrote to your father, Shelepin, begging for him to let you return.” The memory of those early days of enforced isolation began to burn in her again, but she was determined not to let it affect her mission. “You keep demanding some little fact about the sleeper agent’s past in Russia that you could use to prove that you were him.” She waited for him to refute that.

He heaved a sigh, impressive in a big man. “I have been fully aware that Karl von Schwebel’s security company has transmitted to the Feliks people the sound of every flushing of the toilet in my executive bathroom. But you have to remember that every word I said about an impersonation I knew that you and others would hear. In my business, it is called disinformation. You may judge me for a bad husband, but do not take me for a fool.”

“Then your impersonation—”

“—is the greatest impersonation anyone can perform. I am impersonating myself. In the grand looking-glass war, I am pretending to be someone else pretending to be me.” She bore his disappointed glare. “I would have thought that Madame Nina would tell you that.”

She permitted herself a full smile, as she did rarely, and wished that her new lenses permitted her to examine his expression closely. “Let us assume that you are who you say you are, and you are not who you say you are not.” She reached for her purse, drew out a sheet of paper with a message typed on it, and read it to him.

“ ‘We expect you to be prepared to turn over the investment entrusted to you by your father’s legitimate political heirs.

“ ‘You were sent abroad by Aleksandr Shelepin, last of the legitimate successors to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, for a great national purpose. Five years ago, you were given a certain sum by those of us who were driven from communist stewardship by the so-called reformers, followers of the traitor Andropov and his protégé Gorbachev. You were provided intelligence by members of our organization to make this investment of the people’s capital grow.

“ ‘None of those assets are yours,’ ” she continued to read. “ ‘Nor can the usurpers presently in the Kremlin make any claim upon them.
You hold them in trust for us, and there can be no negotiation to get them back where they belong.’ ”

He held out his hand for the paper and read it for himself, then returned it to her. “That may be. But first I must make certain that the Feliks people are a serious political force and not a bunch of hooligans and financial con men and deadwood apparatchiks.”

“Is that for you to decide?”

“It is. And I control the money.”

The waiter came by with a tray of finger sandwiches. “These are good. You want some?” asked Dominick/Berensky. Inwardly seething at the professed spy’s display of insolence, she again declined. He picked up a handful and popped them in his mouth all together.

“Let me pour your tea,” she said, emptying a pitcher of hot water into the bone-china teapot and stirring it, “before you choke.”

He held out his cup without the saucer—apparently he had forgotten his Russian habits—and said, “You still move like a ballerina. Now I’m sorry I put on all this weight. You’re wrong about Masha, though—she may fool around a little, but that’s the modern way. And her politics are a young person’s politics.”

She felt an urge to dash the hot water in his face. Instead, she poured the milk in the cup first, as the English did, and then the strong tea through the strainer, and then a little hot water, and then offered the raw sugar crystals. The ceremony was, as he suggested, a ballet, and she could hear the strains of the tragic theme in
Swan Lake
.

“I am to tell you that a meeting has been arranged of the Feliks organization’s politburo in Riga next week,” she recited. “Outsiders are never invited, but you are not an outsider, you are considered their agent and financial adviser. At that meeting, you will have the opportunity to ask a few respectful questions about their plans. Be prepared to answer questions about their assets in your care and to cooperate in their transfer.”

“Fair enough, and well remembered, Mrs. Krumins. Will I see you again, in Riga?”

“No. I am not in politics. And for me, Aleks Berensky died a long generation ago. Goodbye.”

“If there is one thing I wish, it is that I had been given the chance to say goodbye.”

That was surely a lie, but she knew it was one her former husband
would tell to stir old emotions and solicit undeserved sympathy. She left him sitting there amid the empty teacups and the sounds of the straining string quartet.

The heavyset woman with iron-gray hair asked the status of the Chechen being held hostage in Lubyanka.

“They are trying psychological torture,” Kudishkin reported. “Playing a recording of a man screaming in the next cell all night. We have gotten word to Leonid, however, that it is just a tape, and to pretend to be terrified. So he won’t break; it is a standoff.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to kill Arkady and send Davidov’s girlfriend the body,” said Ivanenko, the new capitalist.

“It was my idea,” said Madame Nina.

“I’m not second-guessing,” he said hastily, “but it seems to have stirred up the KGB.”

Kudishkin rapped on the table. “We are here to find out about the location of our money.” He looked to the woman in the center. “What is your assessment, Madame Nina—is Edward Dominick the sleeper?”

“No. Von Schwebel’s information was correct,” she reported. “Dominick is a CIA fake. An impressive fake, like a well-made counterfeit bill.”

“The German puts great faith in his eavesdropping,” Kudishkin countered, “but that can be used as a conduit for disinformation if those being overheard are aware of the surveillance.”

The woman in the center fixed her gaze on the former head of a KGB directorate through large glasses whose thick lenses made her eyes seem to protrude. “Your intelligence expertise is always appreciated, Oleg Ivanovich. But I do not rely on a single source for my initial judgment. I found Liana Krumins’s mother, the woman who was married to Berensky before Shelepin sent him to America. I sent her to London to verify or expose him.”

The representative of the Group of Fifty rapped the table in approval. “What was her judgment?”

“She says that, physically, Dominick could pass. Right height, hard
of hearing. The face was supposedly in an accident, which makes the more obvious identification difficult. And he is well briefed about Berensky’s life.”

“What was the giveaway?”

“The real Berensky is his father’s son: ruthless, brutal, a little crazy—a perfect agent. But in this man, the Krumins woman saw a softness and weariness that has nothing to do with age. I trust her judgment that Edward Dominick is not Aleks Berensky. Women can tell these things.” Madame Nina folded her hands. “The impostor is working for the CIA and probably Davidov as well, to find out about our operation. And so I invited him here for our meeting Friday.”

Arlene Paltz was now her name, taken from a missing person. She had a driver’s license issued in Pennsylvania with a vaguely similar face on it, a Social Security number, and a credit reference, all courtesy of a sympathetic used-car dealer. He traded the basis of an identity for $1,000 in cash.

She found Arizona in December to be not at all bad. Although Arlene had planned to keep driving out of the country, through Mexico to the state of Yucatan, she and the car were too worn out after a week to continue. A friendly lady in a pet-supply store in Phoenix, where she picked up a half-dozen extra-large rawhide bones, suggested Sedona to the north. It was a kind of resort for New Age types who believed that Indian spirits and Buddhist philosophies of energy vortexes combined with the clean, dry air to help stressed-out souls find inner tranquillity. She drove up there and found a remote house rental, cheap and dirty, but near a stream necessary for her companion and protector, Spook, who sat half immersed in the cool water much of the time.

She went to one of the many local spas and invested in a massage and a mudbath. The manager needed a clerk-massage-therapist, and a Japanese woman taught her the rudiments of Shiatsu. Within a week, Arlene Paltz had an afternoon job to keep her occupied in a world that knew little about television reporting or supermarket tabloids, and nobody gossiped about the delicious downfall of Viveca Farr. She limited her massages to women, who talked mostly about energy vortexes and real estate values. Their conversations neither involved nor threatened her, and she found the kneading of flesh and digging
into muscle a help in forgetting who she was and what she had done.

In the mornings, she sat on the red rocks or with her feet in the stream with Spook and grieved. She did not pass an hour without at least one stretch of sobbing that left her chest sore and throat raw. To relieve this, the runaway from celebrity sought comfort in the available pot, learned to drink cheaper wine, and counted her resentments until she achieved the respite of a midmorning streamside nap to make up for the hours lying awake at night. Frightened of an unrelenting future, she filled her time retracing in bitterness the systematic way every person in her previous life had let her down.

She kept asking herself what she had done, or not done, to deserve such a savage, gleeful, and universal rejection. No civil libertarians came forward to prevent a rush to condemnation, not even the regular counter-condemners who find exculpatory root causes in the actions of ax murderers. It seemed that everyone was eager to believe the worst about a woman who had had to claw her way up by herself and had come “too far too fast.” Her network colleagues distanced themselves from “a good presenter, but no news person.” The ferocity of the attacks in the media and the paucity of understanding among her associates were incomprehensible to her; she had not risen all that high to be brought so low.