The Debriefing (2 page)
Kulakov was still struggling with the
ifs
when he spotted the embassy heavies who had come to hold his hand between planes. They were waiting just beyond passport control in Athens airport. Their eyes, glazed with a kind of passive professionally, passed over the minister and his aides, the two colonels and the inspector general, and settled on Kulakov and the worn leather diplomatic pouch chained to his left wrist. “You are invited to come with us,” said the one who appeared to be in charge. Then he smiled and thumped Kulakov on the back and added, “There is a hot lunch waiting for you at the embassy.”
The two Mercedeses, moving slowly through heavy traffic, turn into Constitution Square and come to a stop at a red light. Crowds of lunchtime strollers surge across the intersection just ahead.
Now
, Kulakov tells himself,
now or never
. His fingers tug gently at the handle; the door opens a crack. Up front the heavy is concentrating on the red light, waiting for it to change. The pale second secretary is fumbling for another American cigarette.
The light turns green. The heavy jars the Mercedes into gear. Kulakov pushes the door open and leaps into the crowd just as the car starts to roll. Behind him there is a screeching of brakes,
then the sharp sound of doors being flung open against their hinges. Several men jump from the cars after him. “Kulakov,” the pale secretary screams in a hysterical voice. “Do you know what it is you do?”
Kulakov is in full flight now, careening off a kiosk, reeling wildly through the scattering crowd that senses danger but doesn’t know what direction it is coming from, tripping over a baby’s stroller filled with celery stalks, knocking down an old woman, stumbling over the outstretched metal legs of a beggar. Police whistles sound in the distance.
At an intersection, Kulakov casts a quick glance over his shoulder, sees two of the heavies bullying their way through the crowd behind him. One of the heavies catches sight of Kulakov, calls triumphantly to the others, snatches a large-caliber pistol from his jacket and levels it at him. Dozens of people dive for doorways. Kulakov, riveted, peers down the flight path of the bullet, sways on the balls of his feet,
leans toward the bore of the pistol to meet the bullet
. It is suddenly just another solution. Sound ceases, motion slows; Kulakov has the sensation of being under water. Floating on emotionless currents, he waits. It is with a sense of disappointment that he sees the pale second secretary reach out and knock the heavy’s arm up.
“Kulakov,” the pale second secretary pleads in a high-pitched voice. “For the love of God, come back.”
For Kulakov, there is nothing to go back to. He turns almost reluctantly—the game hasn’t been played out yet—and runs across the street, bounces blindly off the fenders of a taxi and just misses being run down by a bus. Gasping for air, fighting the nausea mounting in his throat, he rounds a corner, dashes diagonally across the street and ducks into an alleyway. The pavement pitches under his feet like the deck of a ship. Halfway down the alleyway, he finds the open back door of a hotel kitchen, lumbers through it and the restaurant, knocking over a serving table, scattering waiters, and emerges through a revolving door into another boulevard. The sidewalk is drenched with water gushing from an open hydrant; dirt floats on thin currents
into sewers. A line of taxis is parked in front of the hotel. Kulakov hikes his trousers, tiptoes through the water, climbs into the first taxi on the line.
“Take me,” he says in heavily accented English—and stops because of the fierce pain deep in his chest. With the back of his sleeve he wipes foam from his lips, sweat from his eyes. “Take me,” he begins again, the driver eying him with curiosity, “to the American Embassy.”
Some forty kilometers outside Moscow, near the village of Nikolina Gora, a single-lane macadam road leads off into a forest of snow-covered white birches. An international road sign indicating “No Entrance” is planted at the turnoff, and another marked “50” half a kilometer into the road; it indicates the speed limit for those who decide to ignore the first sign
.
The road, which is cleared of snow and sanded daily, leads to a small military compound surrounded by an electrified fence. There are several wooden buildings in the compound. Smoke rises from chimneys. At the center of the compound is a two-story cement structure with a forest of antennas on the roof
.
Inside the building, a lieutenant colonel with a thin scar over his left eye is patiently decoding, from a one-time pad, a message from a Soviet military attaché in Athens. The decoded message, which will be read by the officer who is decoding it and one other person and then destroyed, says:
“The diplomatic courier Kulakov has defected. Implementing Contingency Plan Bravo.”
Stone is trapped on the surface of things: moisture fogging a plate-glass window, paint peeling from a storefront, fleeting thoughts clinging like a scab to an idea. “Yes … sure … uh huh … no kidding. …” Speaking English with a vague trace of some foreign accent, he inserts comments in Thro’s pauses as if he is slipping coins into a slot to pay for a recorded announcement. His voice is all undertone, his gestures edgy: he hooks a finger over his shirt collar, constructs a tower with blocks of sugar, demolishes it by adding one too many, fidgets in his chair, glances at his watch again without seeing it, stares off into some middle distance, focusing on nothing; on everything.
“You spray fluorocarbons into the atmosphere,” Thro explains patiently, “where they’re bombarded by sunlight—right?—and what do they do when they’re bombarded by sunlight? They break up, releasing atoms of chlorine, is what they do. Then the chlorine atoms react with the ozone, which is a kind of oxygen whose molecules contain three atoms instead of what’s normal, which is two, converting it. … You’re sure I never told you this one before?”
“No, no, this is all new to me.” He thinks:
Everything will be riding on the first contact. That’s the moment when it either goes right or it goes wrong. The first contact
.
“… converting it to conventional oxygen, and there goes your
ozone shield and in pour the ultraviolet rays, and zingo, everyone comes down with skin cancer.”
“My God!” He thinks:
I’ve got to handle him carefully. Any sudden motion, he’ll take off like a panic-stricken pigeon
.
“That’s one possibility,” continues Thro. She laughs nervously. “Then there’s the possibility we’re moving into a new ice age. Indisputable scientific fact number one: The earth is colder than it was ten years ago. Indisputable scientific fact number two: The icecap over the poles is growing thicker each year. Are you listening, Stone? You sure you’re interested to hear this? If that doesn’t finish us off, there’s always the possibility that we’ll use ourselves up.” Thro is becoming agitated by her own story. “We dig out of the earth 2.7 billion tons of minerals a year. Okay. If you figure on the basis of a three percent annual growth rate a year, which figure is modest to say the least, the consumption of minerals in a single year one thousand years from now will be greater than the weight of the earth! Can you imagine that, Stone?
Greater than the weight of the entire earth.”
“Holy cow!” Stone tries to imagine it, but draws a blank. He thinks:
If I went according to the manual, I wouldn’t be doing this myself. I’d send in Kiick or Mozart. But I’m curious to see him—I’m curious to see the face of the man whose life I plan to ruin
.
Thro bites viciously into a croissant, sucks noisily at her cup of American coffee, takes another bite of croissant. “Then there’s the distinct possibility that the Antarctic ice sheet will slip into the ocean, which would raise the sea level twenty feet and flood every coastal city in the world. And you have to confront the fact that someday the sun is going to burn out. And if all that doesn’t get us”—she breaks into a slightly hysterical laugh—“we’ve got to live with the very real likelihood that there is less than one atom for every eighty-eight gallons of space, which means the universe is going to expand forever, with the result that the stars will all fizzle out like candles and we’ll be adrift in an endless empty black graveyard of space.”
“That would be a pity.” Stone thinks:
I hope I don’t like him. I hope to God he rubs me the wrong way. I’m ready to go through with it even if I do like him, but it’ll be easier if I don’t
.
“What worries me sick,” Thro sighs, “is that something will happen that we don’t have enough imagination to imagine.” She bangs down her coffee cup. “You haven’t heard a word I said, Stone. The fact is you don’t give a damn how the world will end.”
“You want to do me a favor,” Stone says in an undertone, irritated at the heads starting to turn their way, “stop flashing that goddamn ring of yours when you talk. It makes me nervous.” He thinks:
What if the heavies refuse to let him out of their sight? What if he tumbles to the microphone? Or the camera? What if?
Thro’s eyes—they look brand-new—suddenly lift and focus on Stone’s face; she looks deathly pale in the cold lilac light sifting through the leafless branches on Boulevard Saint-Germain. “Sometimes,” she says softly—when she is really hurt, she always talks softly—“I can’t believe how aggressive you are.”
“Everyone’s aggressive,” he says sullenly, “except the dead.”
“My aggressions are less violent than yours, Stone,” she retorts. “They’re physical.”
Stone, embarrassed by her stare, shakes his head, waves a hand—vague gestures of apology for his natural acidity, which is the way he responds to pressure. There is a long silence.
Why is it
, he thinks,
that my relationships with women start off in poetry, slip into prose and wind up in strained silences?
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” He is conciliatory now. “It’s just that every time the ring turns black, you have a way of waving it around like a flag.”
An elegant woman at the next table turns quickly away, whispering to her companion in French, and Stone, annoyed at being overheard, switches to what Thro calls his “BBC Russian”; it always manages to get a laugh out of her. “I’ve got an idea for you, Thro. Why don’t you put an ad in the
Tribune
. Or hire yourself a skywriter.” He reaches up and traces a phrase in Cyrillic in the air with the tip of a spoon. “N-y-e-t s-e-x.”
The accent has the desired effect; Thro cannot help but smile. “Love, it’s my way of signaling you,” she answers in a Russian only slightly less fluent than his. “All lovers have signals. I happen to have a gold ring that turns black when I get my period.” She tugs playfully at the hairs on the back of his wrist, leans closer until her mouth is next to his ear, switches into what Stone calls her “BBC sexy.” “Remember,” she says playfully, “our first trip to Paris together?”
As if Stone could ever forget it. He had been scouting the Soviet frontier near Hamina, Finland, for crossing points. Thro, five pounds overweight and wandering around with a degree in psychology she wasn’t sure what to do with, was on her way back from the Hermitage in Leningrad. Their paths crossed in Helsinki, in a hotel sauna, to be exact. Stone was flat on his back, being scrubbed down by an old woman he nicknamed “Mama Wash” when Thro turned up, round and pink and bare and unconcerned by five extra pounds or the bareness, carrying it off as if it were the most natural thing in the world to walk into a sauna stark naked and find yourself alone (Mama Wash soon disappeared) with a strange man trying to will away an erection. Unsuccessfully, as things turned out. They made love in the sauna, showered together, made love again in his hotel room, then took their first long look at each other: Stone with his natural acidity and his brooding way of peering out at the world and his permanent fixture of a frown, as if he were pondering the absence of a great scheme of things; Thro with her run-on sentences describing all the ways the world would end—the list was never-ending. Both of them liked what they saw, and said it, so they teamed up and went on to Paris for what turned out to be a glorious week, with Thro falling in love with an outdoor café in Palais Royal while Stone fell in love with Thro. “Get that company of yours to post you here,” she commanded—it was before she knew what Stone’s company did; before she herself went to work for it—“or at least invent some assignments that will bring us back once in a while.”
Which is why, when Stone got the bright idea to set up a Russian
diplomat, he picked one who was based in Paris.
Stone glances at his watch, sees it this time, calls for the check, argues (in BBC French; another smile from Thro) with the waiter attempting to hold them accountable for four croissants instead of three, counts out change. “I’ve got to get going,” he says in English. “I’ll be back at Kiick’s shop around two-thirty, three maybe, to tie up the loose ends. Which should put me back at the hotel around six at the latest. Did you see what Kiick painted on the window of the showroom? ‘Père et Fils depuis 1977’!”
Thro smiles, but there is a tightness to her lips, and lines at the corners of her eyes. “Traditions have to start someplace.” She hesitates. “This isn’t … dangerous, is it, Stone?” she asks quietly.
Stone shakes his head and smiles, and she smiles back, though the tightness is still there. “I’ll never get used to you with a three-day beard,” she says. “You look like a Polish Jew from the shtetl.”
Stone answers in singsong Yiddish. “A Polish Jew from the shtetl is what I am. Gold rings turned black by your endocrine balance are what I detest.
Sholom aleichem
.”
Thro waves her black ring in his face. “Are you a Hasid,” she taunts him in English—the elegant lady at the next table visibly cringes—“that you’re afraid to have sex during menstruation?”
Stone picks up a
Tribune
at a kiosk, scans the headlines, is mildly surprised to see it is already February. He is all business now, and the first order of business is to tuck the
Tribune
under his arm so that the crossword puzzle is clearly visible.