The Sisters (2 page)

"We learned about it from the Germans," Carroll said reluctantly; he had a journalist's instinct for sources.

"Our Germans or their Germans?" the Deputy Director wanted to know.

"Ours. It was buried in one of their Y summaries about a month ago,"

Francis added. "I suspect no one picked up on it because they identified him by his real name, Feliks Arkantevich Turov, as opposed to his working name, and not too many people put the two together."

"But you put the two together," the Deputy Director's man commented dryly. He was one of those who favoured terminating the Sisters with medical discharges.

"That's correct' Carroll shot back without looking at him. "We have a head for names."

Francis added, "And faces. And places." And he beamed a smile of pained innocence in Harry's general direction.

The Deputy Director closed the lemon-colored folder with an irritated snap-he didn't mind dissension as long as it took place behind his back-and slipped it into a file drawer labelled "Current.' "How do you propose to get at him?" he asked.

Carroll treated himself to a deep breath; they were almost home. "We'll use the Germans as cutouts," he said. "They'll farm the contract out to some free-lancers. If he's not buying, he's not buying from the freelancers."

"If he buys," Francis chimed in, "we will plant our man Friday on the receiving line when he comes over. He will skim off the cream while it is still fresh and leave the milk for the farmers to market."

"You'll have to give the Germans something for their trouble," the Deputy Director commented unhappily.

"Maybe money," suggested Carroll. "Maybe access to the cream."

"Maybe only brownie points," offered Francis. "They wag their tails every time we toss them a bone,"

The Deputy Director glanced quickly at his wrist-watch. "Work linear' he advised. "Limit this to you two. Me. My man Friday. Your man Friday. We can circulate the product later to our clients without saying where it came from.

"We always compartmentalize,' Carroll said matter-of-factly. "It is our trademark."

The Deputy Director cleared his throat nervously. "Just so long as you don't compartmentalize me out of the picture."

Everyone smiled at the utter absurdity of the idea.

Carroll had one hand on the doorknob when the Deputy Director called after them. "By the way, what is it you expect to get from him if he buys?"

The Sisters exchanged looks. "Odds and ends," Francis said, smiling innocently.

"Ends and odds," Carroll agreed, and he brought a palm up to his cheek to still his wildly twitching muscle.

Under the angled beams of his attic workshop, in a cone of pale light cast by a naked bulb dangling overhead, the Potter, Feliks Arkantevich Turov, rinsed his small, powerful hands in a pan of lukewarm water, then kicked the wheel and leaned over the turntable. The fingers of his right hand curled around the outside of the damp clay. His left hand dipped delicately into the cylinder, the thumb hooked back over the lip so that it rested lightly on his right hand. The act of touching transformed the two hands into one perfectly coordinated pincerlike instrument. Wedging the clay cylinder between the tip of one finger and the joint of another, he brought up the wall.

The Potter had learned the art at the feet of a Japanese master who claimed that throwing a beautiful pot was as difficult as printing your shadow on the sidewalk. In the end, potting represented a classic case of mind over matter. Some days were better than others, but when the Potter was very good, he could overcome the natural tendency of the clay to become what it wanted to become; he could tame it, channel its power, control its pulse; he could force it to flower under his fingers into a form that already existed in his head.

If only he could control his life the way he controlled the clay! At fifty-six, the Potter already felt as if he were "tied up to the pier of old age" (Turgenev's phrase, first quoted to him by Piotr Borisovich, his last, his best sleeper). Turov's face resembled nothing so much as wax about to melt, giving him a distinctly blurred look; people who didn't know him well often had difficulty bringing him into focus. He was short to begin with-five feet, four inches. Since his obligatory retirement earlier in the year, his shoulders had gradually sagged, as if laboring under a great weight; his body had taken on a dwarfish appearance, underscoring its essential awkwardness. Only his forearms and his hands, conditioned by hundreds of hours of kneading clay, retained anything resembling youthfulness. To his own eye, he looked like one of those worn-out government functionaries visible in the streets at the start of any workday; they never seemed to hurry, eloquent evidence that they had precious little enthusiasm for getting where they were going. Like the bureaucrats, the Potter seemed to be living off emotional capital instead of income, the way a starving man lives off the protein already stored in his body.

The Potter fixed the lip of the cylinder, braked the wheel to a stop with a scuffed boot, then reached for the length of piano wire Piotr Borisovich had once fashioned for him and cut the vase off the wheel. He turned it upside down and tapped on the base, then set the vase on a shelf next to his electric kiln. When the spirit moved him, he would glaze it and fire it and offer it to some neighbors who always brought him a handful of mushrooms when they came back from their country dacha.

Either that or he would smash it into a thousand pieces during another tantrum.

Outside, gusts of soot brushed past the grimy attic window. The Potter glanced at the sliver of Moscow River he could see off in the distance between two buildings. In the old days, when things were going well, when he had been the novator-the man in charge-of the sleeper school, he and Svetochka had occupied an apartment overlooking the river. There had been a bedroom, a living room, a study, a heated workroom for his potter's wheel, a kitchen, even a bathroom-an almost unheard-of eighty-eight square meters-and they had it all to themselves. Then, when Svetochka called him "my Jew," there had been affection in her voice.

Nowadays they lived in a building with paper-thin walls and shared forty-five square meters with another family. And there was anger in her voice no matter what she called him. Or even worse, boredom. On more than one occasion he had caught her suppressing a yawn when they made love. If he didn't notice her suppressing yawns anymore, it was because he looked up less. With his head buried between her legs, he still managed to forget the unlaundered years (Piotr Borisovich s phrase; from the moment they met, the Potter had been struck by his way with words): the rats scurrying around the labyrinth in the late thirties, when he first joined what was then called the NKVD; the seventeen months spent behind German lines in the early forties; "sanitation" expeditions in the wake of the advancing Red Army in the middle forties; then the endless death watch of the late forties and early fifties as everyone wordlessly waited for the old buzzard in the Kremlin to give up the ghost.

The Potter could hear the telephone ringing under his feet. He could make out the sound of Svetochka's stiletto heels as she raced to answer it before the people who shared the flat could. In ten minutes the woman whom everyone invariably mistook for his daughter would slip into her imitation fur "soul warmer" and leave. Another rendezvous with another hairdresser, she would say. Another store selling imitation leather gloves that you can't tell from the real thing, she would say. Only when she came back later-much later-her hair wouldn't look any different, and there would be no imitation leather gloves in her pockets. They had run out just before her turn came, she would say

It occurred to the Potter, not for the first time, that illusions don't die, they rot like fish in the sun. They torture you with ifs: what might have been if one of his sleepers hadn't refused to obey his

"awakening" signal and disappeared; if a second, happier in America than in Russia, hadn't gone over to the other side; if a third, inside the CIA, hadn't been ferreted out by someone with an astonishing capacity to think the problem through from the Russian point of view. All within a six-month period. The Potter had trained the sleepers in question. He was accordingly rated on how well they performed. When the axe finally fell, there had been talk of exile in Central Asia, talk even of a prison sentence. But his record had been impeccable up to then. So they had put him out to what they thought of, all things considered, as generous pasture: a smaller apartment, a monthly stipend large enough to keep him in clay and vodka, even a self-winding Czechoslovak wristwatch delivered, without ceremony-with a certain amount of embarrassment-on his last day in harness. "For Feliks Arkantevich," the inscription read,

"for twenty-seven years of service to the state." Service to the state!

He might have been a street cleaner for all anyone could tell from the inscription.

Surprisingly, Svetochka had taken his fall in stride. Not to worry, she had said, Svetochka likes her Feliks even without access to the school's warehouse; Svetochka will always be Feliks' little girl. Eventually her last pair of American stockings had gone into the garbage, and her tone had begun to change. The Potter took to waiting on a side street near the warehouse; friends slipped him an occasional American lipstick or eyebrow pencil, and Svetochka would throw her arms around his thick neck and make love to him that night the way she had when he had been the novator. But neither the lipsticks nor her ardent moods lasted very long.

"Feliks!" Svetochka's high-pitched voice drifted up through the floorboards. "Can you hear me, Feliks? There's a phone call. Someone's asking for you. Feliks?"

"He's coming," Svetochka assured the caller, afraid that he was one of Feliks' friends from the warehouse and might get impatient and hang up.

"Only a moment."

"So: I will wait," the voice said quietly.

The Potter mumbled into the receiver. He had an instinctive distrust of telephones common to people who came to them relatively late in life.

"What do you want?"

A voice with an accent the Potter couldn't quite place replied, "So: if you please, note the number I will give you, yes? If you need a private taxi, dial it and one will come to your corner."

The Potter's hand, suddenly damp with perspiration, gripped the phone.

"I don't take taxis. They are too expensive. When I go somewhere, I use the metro or walk."

"Who is it?" Svetochka whispered.

"Please note the number," the voice on the other end of the line insisted. "You never know when you will need it. So: B, one-forty-one, twenty-one."

"What does he want?" Svetochka whispered.

"You have the number, yes?" the voice asked. "B, one-forty-one, twenty-one."

"I tell you that I do not use taxis," the Potter blurted out, suddenly frightened. "Go to hell with your number." And he slammed down the receiver.

"Who was that?"

"Nobody."

"How can you say it was nobody? Somebody phones you up and according to you it's nobody." Tears of frustration formed under Svetochka's heavily made-up lids. "Somebody is not nobody!' she cried in that tightly controlled voice that angry Muskovites use in communal apartments.

The Potter had a good idea of what the call was all about. He had made more than one like it during his four-year stint as KGB resident in New York. It was a contact, an approach, an invitation to what the Merchants at Moscow Center called a treff-a secret meeting. Only it wasn't the Moscow Merchants who had initiated it; on that he would have wagered a great deal.

Svetochka began struggling into her soul warmer. "Where are you going now?" the Potter demanded.

"Nowhere," she sneered. "Nobody is who called. And nowhere is where I'm going."

The Potter sprang across the room and gripping the lapels of her coat in one fist, lifted her off the ground.

"You are hurting Svetochka, Feliks," she whispered. Seeing the look on his face, she pleaded, "Feliks is hurting his Svetochka."

The Potter set her down, slipped a hand inside her coat and clumsily tried to embrace her. "I only wanted to know where you were going, ' he remarked, as if it could account for the outburst, the months of tension that preceded it, the conversationless meals, the slow seeping away of intimacy.

"All you had to do was ask," Svetochka snapped, conveniently forgetting that he had. She fended him off deftly. "Svetochka is going to baby-sit for a girlfriend so she can go birthday shopping for her husband."

"Children are in school at this hour," the Potter said.

"Her child is too young for school."

"There are neighborhood nurseries for babies."

"This baby has a fever," Svetochka explained quickly. "He can't go out."

With her teeth clenched, she spit out, "Svetochka doesn't ask you where you are going every time you put on your coat."

"You are lying," the Potter said simply, tiredly. "There was no hairdresser. There were no imitation leather gloves. There is no sick baby."

"You have a nerve..." Svetochka was screaming now. Down the corridor, the people who shared the apartment discreetly closed the door to their bedroom. "You didn't never use to..." Her phrases came in gasps; they no longer seemed to be glued together by grammar or sense. . . . " not going to only always take this...”

"Enough," the Potter muttered under his breath.

"... think maybe you are doing to Svetochka favors ..."

'

"Enough, if you please."

"Well, it don't even work like you maybe think...”

The Potter's arm swept out in anger, brushing a glazed bowl, one of the best he had ever made, off a table. It struck the floor, shattering at Svetochka's feet.

"Enough!" shouted the Potter.

Svetochka, who fancied herself something of an actress, could change moods in a flash. Now she screwed up her face to indicate that she had been mortally offended. "It is not Svetochka who will clean this up,"

she observed icily. Pivoting on a spiked heel, leaving the door to the corridor gaping open behind her, she stalked from the apartment.