Summit (16 page)

"Bunch of snotty-nosed rich kids."

"That's right. It was the fine upstanding Irish and Italian youths versus the snotty-nosed rich kids. I was first-line left wing. Tough game. The Harvard goalie was good, but we thought he had a weakness on the glove side, so we went for that. I nicked the post in the first period and got an assist in the second, but I really didn't get much accomplished. Tight checking all over the ice, Danny, that's the way the big games are played. Anyway, it was three to three at the end of regulation, and that meant sudden-death overtime.

"I tell you, I was beat waiting for OT to start. It isn't your legs so much as your arms and upper body, see, from all the checking. But you gotta go out there again, so you gotta find some energy somewhere. Anyway, play became very conservative in OT—nobody wants to be the one to make the mistake, right? Both teams were running shorter shifts, because everyone was so tired. The crowd was going crazy—you couldn't hear yourself think, even if you had enough energy to use your brain.

"And then, all of a sudden, it happened. That's the way hockey is, Danny—it's a game of sudden opportunities. You win by taking advantage of them. Harvard was changing on the fly, and I saw some open ice in front of me, so I took off. My center, Paul Connell, hit me with a perfect pass just as I crossed the blue line."

"You were in alone," Danny breathed.

"I was in alone." They had stopped walking now. The two of them stood in the sunlight and relived the moment. "I didn't think—there wasn't time to think. But I saw the goalie's eyes, and somehow I knew he was gonna cheat to the glove side. We'd been going for the glove all night, see, and he knew that was his weakness. So I put my head down and faked the shot. And when he made his move, I pulled the puck back in, brought it around him, and tucked a little backhander into the empty corner of the net. Red light. End of game."

"All right!" Danny shouted. "And then what?"

And then what? "Then everyone mobbed me at the face-off circle. I lost my balance, and they all jumped on top of me and geez, it was a little scary there for a second—I couldn't breathe, and no one wanted to get off. But they did finally, and I grabbed the puck, and the BC fans were all still there on their feet cheering and singing 'For Boston,' and I don't think I've ever felt so excited before or since."

"It musta been unbelievable," Danny said. "Too bad nobody plays hockey in Florida. They don't even know how to skate."

"Yeah, that bothers me too. But you know how your mother feels."

"I guess."

They walked in silence through the quiet campus. Sullivan felt a little guilty whenever he told that story to Danny—trading on past glory to impress his son—but not guilty enough to stop telling it. It was glory, and it was real, and no one was going to take it away from him.

"Dad?"

"Yeah, Danny?"

"Was your father at the game?"

"No. He had died by then. You know that."

"Oh. Right. Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"When are we gonna go to that bank?"

"Pretty soon, Danny. Pretty soon."

* * *

The three of them went to Cape Cod, but it was not a success. Danny didn't see what the big deal was; Florida had better beaches, and the water was warmer. Sullivan's mother just wanted to get back home to Dorchester. And Sullivan himself felt out of sorts. He looked pale and flabby in his bathing suit, and he couldn't do more than a couple of laps in the motel pool before giving up, exhausted. At night his mother watched him drink his beers with silent disapproval, and there didn't seem to be much left to say to anyone. They went home a day early.

"Dad, what about the bank?" Danny asked from the backseat as Sullivan drove up Route 3. His mother stared out her window.

"We'll see, Danny. We'll see."

He had a six-pack that night in front of the television set, and stayed up long after Danny and his mother had gone to bed. The next day, while his mother was out shopping, he took Danny for a ride. To West Roxbury, a pleasant tree-lined Boston neighborhood where the Irish moved when they got rich enough to look down their noses at Dorchester. Sullivan parked the car on Centre Street. He took Danny's hand and they walked past a delicatessen, a funeral home, a dry cleaner, a drugstore. They stopped in front of a small brick bank with white wooden shutters. A blue-haired old lady with a cane tottered up to it, and Sullivan held the door open for her. She gave him a smile. Sullivan stayed outside.

"Is this it?" Danny asked.

"This is it. Don't ask for the story, 'cause you already know it."

"Okay."

Danny looked at the drab little building with undisguised awe. Sullivan leaned against a traffic sign and wondered if Danny distinguished between the story of the Beanpot and the story that took place here. Were they just two tales of glory to make him proud of his family? Or did he understand the difference?

Glory. Sullivan's father was just a cop. Your ordinary working-class Irish cop, who drank too much occasionally and thought America was the greatest country on earth and worked extra details whenever he could so his kids could go to parochial school and get a better education than he got.

And one May afternoon the alarm at the First National Bank on Centre Street started ringing. Officers Sullivan and O'Malley responded to the alarm. Officer Sullivan got out of his cruiser at the same time that two ski-masked gun-persons came out of the bank. Officer Sullivan started to draw his weapon, whereupon the two gun-persons opened fire, blowing Officer Sullivan's brains over the side of the cruiser and into the West Roxbury gutter. End of story, Danny.

A life is over in a second, but the consequences last an eternity. Number-one son was already dead, but Veronica was still Sister Theresa, and young Billy hadn't chosen a major yet at the Heights. And suddenly nothing was the same. Glory.

The two bank robbers were from some radical group or other. One black man and one white woman, very nondiscriminatory and ideologically correct. They disappeared into the underground and were never heard from again. Mrs. Sullivan accepted a posthumous medal. A scholarship fund was started in her husband's honor.

Mrs. Sullivan put the medal away and told everyone she didn't want to talk about any of it. Life goes on. God's will be done. Sister Theresa decided God was dead, along with her father and brother, and shacked up with a Pakistani. Young Billy decided to major in Russian instead of Business, with the idea that maybe he could defend his country better than either his father or brother had managed to do.

He hadn't been particularly successful so far. But all he asked for now was what his brother and his father had been denied: another chance. He was beginning to doubt that he would get it. "Seen enough?"

"I guess so," Danny said. He looked a little puzzled. Perhaps the awe had worn off, and he was trying to reconcile the everydayness of the place with the mental image he had created of it. Glory waits for you in the most unlikely places.

Sullivan tried to think of some lesson to teach his son from all this, but he couldn't come up with one.

"Don't tell Nana we came here, okay?"

"Okay."

They walked slowly back to the car.

* * *

Mrs. Sullivan wasn't a crier. Maybe it was her Irish genes; after centuries of oppression, you take what life gives you. But her eyes were wet when her only son and only grandson prepared to leave.

"We'll be back," Sullivan said.

"You never know," she replied.

He couldn't disagree.

"You don't look good," she said while Danny waited in the car. "You should take better care of yourself. Maybe if you and Maureen—"

"Please, Ma."

"Well, maybe you should get out of the government," she suggested. "There's no law says you have to spend your life working for those people."

"I'll think about it," he said. She had never known what he did in the government—had only the vaguest idea who "those people" were; he doubted that she would have approved. "You take care of yourself too."

"It doesn't matter about me," she said. "I'm just an old lady. But you've got your life to live and your son to take care of. Remember that."

He sighed and kissed her on the cheek. He looked around one last time, then went out to the car and headed for the airport.

His eyes were wet too when he said good-bye to Danny. It seemed wrong that they should be taking different flights; he felt as if they were violating some law of nature. But there was nothing he could do about it. They were both going home, and they had different homes.

He couldn't remember afterward what they had said to each other in the waiting area before Danny boarded his flight. The usual things, he supposed. All he remembered was the warm reality of his son's flesh as they hugged and, as Danny disappeared into the walkway leading to the plane, the terrifying thought that he might never see his son again.

It was not a new thought. Sullivan stayed in the waiting area until the plane taxied out of sight, then wandered away. He had nothing to do for a while but remember. There was one last ghost to bring back from his past. It was not hard to bring it back; it was never very far away.

Anatoly Gurenko was the GRU
rezident
in the Soviet embassy in Washington, a stout, hard-drinking man who developed an unaccountable lust for freedom after serving his government well for twenty years. So one day he emptied the contents of his safe into a briefcase and drove out to Langley, where he said a cheery
zdrastvytye
to the guard and asked to see someone in charge. Needless to say, he caused a sensation. Assuming he was on the level, his defection provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to obtain information about Soviet military intelligence. So to interrogate him they brought in two of the best: Lawrence Hill and Bill Sullivan.

No one wanted Gurenko hanging around Langley in case he wasn't legitimate, so they decided to send him and his interrogators to a safe house in Pennsylvania to do their work. Sullivan was excited at the opportunity. He only wished it had come at a better time of year. Gurenko had chosen to defect on December 22—a wonderful Christmas present for his new country, but not for the people who had to be with him night and day until the interrogation was completed. Sullivan had been on leave—at home with Maureen and Danny, buying toys and putting up the tree, having the kind of holidays that people with normal jobs have. It was too good to last, and it didn't.

Maureen tried halfheartedly to start an argument when the call came, but what was the use? Sullivan had to go, and she had to accept it. Danny cried. Sullivan felt like crying himself.

Gurenko, on the other hand, was in a wonderful mood. His wife back in Moscow was a nag, his son was gay, all of a sudden a new life was opening in front of him, and he felt reborn. The only cloud on his horizon was the
spetsnaz
—the elite group of GRU officers who would be sent anywhere in the world to eliminate a traitor like him. "You must protect me at all times," he kept warning Hill and Sullivan. "I am very important. They will go to any lengths to kill me."

Hill and Sullivan did not need to be told that. Culpepper had been clear enough back at Langley: "Protect Gurenko with your lives, boys. Fish like him don't come swimming around every day."

Sullivan had a feeling that everyone was being rather melodramatic. The Soviets always warned their people of the dire consequences if they were to defect, but in practice little ever happened, even to defectors who weren't hidden away and protected by the CIA. Still, you do your job, and he tried to make sure the safe house remained safe.

Everything went well until Christmas Eve. Gurenko was even more informative than anyone dared hope, and there was no evidence that he was the kind of double-agent defector the CIA dreaded, sprinkling disinformation in with a few useless facts to totally confuse the enemy. Hill in particular was suspicious at first—Gurenko seemed too happy, too free of doubts. But even Hill started to come around as the names and dates kept pouring out.

Sullivan felt good about working with Hill again. They had trained together at The Farm—new recruits eager to learn, eager to serve; and later they were both at the Moscow embassy, running agents and filing top-secret reports, scarcely believing it was all for real now—they were spies, risking their lives for their country. Sullivan had always envied Hill; Hill had been a little faster, a little smarter, his agents produced a little more. But Hill had always been quietly friendly to him, and there was never any hint of competition. And here they both were, well along into their careers, sitting together in a nondescript house in rural Pennsylvania, interrogating the most important defector in a decade. Sullivan figured he hadn't done so badly.

Christmas Eve was hard, as Sullivan thought about Maureen and Danny. Hill was already divorced; this kind of career took its toll. So he actually enjoyed working through the holidays—it helped him forget. But Sullivan had someplace better to be than Pennsylvania, and he was homesick.

Gurenko was bored and restless by the end of the day—restless enough to forget about his fear. "Let's go get drunk," he urged them. "I'm tired of reciting facts and figures. I'll help you celebrate your bourgeois religious festival."

Hill was against it. "There's plenty of vodka for you here," he pointed out.