The Company Read online

  Ebby realized he had made a mistake the instant the numbers passed his lips. He knew what Oskar’s next question would be before he asked it.

  “So: Please, how do you know that an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency earns six-thousand-four-hundred-dollars a year?”

  Ebby’s shoulders lifted in an irritated shrug. “I must have read it in a newspaper.”

  “And the precise figure of six-thousand-four-hundred lodged in your memory?”

  “I suppose it did, yes.”

  “Why did you give up the thirty-seven-thousand-dollar job to join Sears, Roebuck?”

  “Because Mr. Donovan wasn’t holding out the prospect of a partnership. Because the Sears people were pleased with the contracts I drew up for them when I was working at Donovan. Because they were paying an arm and a leg for legal work and figured they could come out ahead even if they paid me more than Mr. Donovan paid me.”

  “Who do you work for at Sears?”

  Ebby named names and Oskar copied them into his notebook. He was about to ask another question when one of the sailors came into the room and whispered in his ear. Oskar said, “So: Your Coastal Guard has at last given us permission to get underway.” Beneath the feet of the prisoners the deck plates began to vibrate, faintly at first, then with a distinct throb. “It can be hoped none of you suffer from sea sickness,” Oskar said. He switched to Russian and barked an order to one of the sailors. Leo understood what he was saying—Oskar wanted buckets brought around in case anyone should throw up—but he kept his eyes empty of expression.

  Slumped in her chair, Millicent held up better than the others had expected; she seemed to take strength from the tenacity with which they stuck to their legends. Again and again the interrogator returned to the Craw Management course; he even described the class in tradecraft given by a one-armed instructor named Andrews, but Millicent only shook her head. She couldn’t say what the others had been doing at Craw, she could only speak for herself; she had been studying techniques of management. Yes, she vaguely remembered seeing a one-armed man in the room where mail was sorted but she had never taken a course with him. No, there had never been a field trip to Norfolk to try and steal secrets from military bases. Why on earth would someone studying management want to steal military secrets? What would they do with them after they had stolen them?

  And then suddenly there was a commotion in the passageway. The door was ajar and men in uniform could be seen lumbering past. The two interrogators in the room at that moment exchanged puzzled looks. Oskar gestured with his head. They both stepped outside and had a hushed conversation in Russian with a heavy-set man wearing the gold braid of a naval officer on his sleeves. Leo thought he heard “cipher machine” and “lead-weighted bag,” and he was sure he heard “overboard if the Americans try to intercept us.”

  “What are they saying?” Jack growled. He was beginning to wonder if they had been caught up in a Company exercise after all.

  “They talking about putting their cipher machine in a weighted bag and throwing it into the sea if the Americans try to intercept the ship,” Leo whispered.

  “Jesus,” Ebby said. “The last order that reached the Japanese embassy in Washington on December sixth, 1941 was to destroy the ciphers, along with their cipher machines.”

  “Damnation, the Russians must be going to war,” Jack said.

  Millicent’s chin sank forward onto her chest and she began to tremble.

  Oskar, still in the passageway, could be heard talking about “the four Americans,” but what he said was lost in the wail of a siren. The naval officer snapped angrily, “Nyet, nyet.” The officer raised his voice and Leo distinctly heard him say, “I am the one who decides…the Liepaja is under my…in half an…sunrise…by radio…cement and throw them over…”

  Ebby and Jack turned to Leo for a translation. They could tell from the wild look in his eyes that the news was calamitous. “They’re saying something about cement,” Leo whispered. “They’re talking about throwing us into the sea if we don’t talk.”

  “It’s part of the exercise,” Ebby declared, forgetting about the microphones in the bulkhead. “They’re trying to terrorize us.”

  His face ashen, his brow furrowed, Oskar returned to the room alone. “Very unsatisfactory news,” he announced. “There has been a confrontation in Berlin. Shots were fired. Soldiers on both sides were killed. Our Politburo has given your President Truman an ultimatum: Withdraw your troops from Berlin in twelve hours or we will consider ourselves to be in a state of war.”

  Half a dozen sailors barged into the room. Some were carrying sacks of cement, others empty twenty-five-gallon paint cans. Another sailor ran a length of hose into the room, then darted out to hook it up to a faucet in the toilet. Oskar shook his head in despair. “Please believe me—it was never my intention that it should come to this,” he said in a hollow voice. He unhooked his sunglasses from his ears; his bulging eyes were moist with emotion. “The ones we kidnapped before, we frightened them but we always let them go in the end.”

  Tears ran from Millicent’s eyes and she started to shiver uncontrollably despite the stifling heat in the room. Ebby actually stopped breathing for a long moment and then panicked when, for a terrifying instant, he couldn’t immediately remember how to start again. Leo desperately tried to think of something he could tell Oskar—he remembered Mr. Andrews’s saying you had to become the person the enemy would never suspect you of being. Who could he become? Suddenly he had a wild idea—he would tell them he was a Soviet agent under instructions to infiltrate the CIA? Would Oskar fall for it? Would he even take the time to check it out with his superiors in Moscow?

  Water began to trickle from the end of the hose and the sailors gashed open the paper sacks and started filling the four paint cans with cement. Oskar said, “I ask you, I beg you, give me what I need to save your lives. If you are CIA recruits I can countermand the orders, I can insist that we take you back to Latvia so our experts can interrogate you.” Rolling his head from side to side in misery, Oskar pleaded, “Only help me and I will do everything in my power to save you.”

  Millicent blurted out, “I will—“

  Oskar stabbed the air with a finger and one of the sailors untied the rope that bound her to the chair. Shaking convulsively, she slumped forward onto her knees. Between sobs, words welled up from the back of her throat. “Yes, yes, it’s true…all of us…I was recruited out of law school… because of my looks, because I spoke Italian…Craw to take courses…” She started to gag on words, then sucked in a great gulp of air and began spitting out names and dates and places. When Oskar tried to interrupt her she clamped her palms over her ears and plunged on, describing down to the last detail the pep talk the Wiz had delivered at the Cloud Club, describing Owen-Brack’s threat to terminate anyone who gave away Company secrets. Scraping the back of her mind, she came up with details of the courses she had taken at Craw. “The man who taught tradecraft, he’s a great hero at the Pickle Factory—“

  “Pickle Factory?”

  A watery rheum seeped from Millicent’s nostrils onto her upper lip. She flicked it away with the back of her hand. “More, more—I can tell you more. I was supposed to lure them, money, flattery, fuck them, picks and locks, his name is Andrew but, oh God, I can’t remember if that’s his first name or family name.” Oskar tried to interrupt her again but she pleaded, “More, much more, please for Christ’s sake—“

  And she looked up and saw, through her tears, Mr. Andrews standing in the doorway, the sleeve of his sports jacked folded back, his eyes flickering in mortification, and she fell silent and swallowed hard and then screamed “Bastard…bastard…PRICK!” and pitched forward to pound her forehead against the deck plates until Oskar and one of the sailors restrained her. Her body twitching, she kept murmuring something to herself that sounded like “Bread-and-butter, bread-and-butter.”

  Watching Mr. Andrews avert his eyes from Millicent’s near-naked body, Leo suddenly remembere
d what he had said that last day in the seminar on interrogation techniques; in his mind’s ear he could hear Mr. Andrew’s voice. “Believe me, I am speaking from experience when I tell you that anyone can be broken in six hours. Tops. Without exception. Anyone.” An infinitely sad expression had superimposed itself on the ugly scars of Mr. Andrews’s face. “Curiously, it’s not the pain that breaks you—you get so accustomed to it, so accustomed to your own voice yowling like an animal, that you are incapable of remembering what the absence of pain felt like. No, it’s not the pain but the fear that breaks you. And there are a hundred ways of instilling fear. There is only sure one way to avoid being broken: for the love of God, observe the Eleventh Commandment of intelligence work—never, never get caught.”

  There was no postmortem, at least not a formal one. News of the mock-kidnapping had spread, as it was meant to; the Company wanted it clearly understood that the Marquess of Queensberry rules didn’t apply to the great game of espionage. Classmates accosted the three principals in the corridors to ask if it were true and when they said yes, it had happened more or less the way they’d heard it, the others shook their heads in disbelief. Leo discovered that Millicent Pearlstein had been taken away in an unmarked ambulance to a Company clinic somewhere on the Piedmont plateau of Virginia; there was no question of keeping her on board, it was said, not because she had cracked, but because the fault line could never be repaired and the Company needed to weed out the people with fault lines. Mr. Andrews took Leo aside one afternoon and told him he felt terrible about Millicent but he thought it was better this way. She hadn’t been cut out for the life of a field officer; when she was back on her feet she would be paid a small indemnity and steered to another, tamer, government security agency—both the State Department and the Defense Department ran intelligence collecting operations of their own.

  At the end of the week the recruits began packing their bags—they were being accorded a two-week holiday before reporting for their assignments. By chance, a new batch of recruits was checking into the Hilton Inn. Jack and Leo recognized two of them from Yale.

  “Holy shit, you guys look as if you’ve been through the Maytag wringer,” one of them said.

  “So how tough is it?” the other wanted to know.

  “It’s a pushover,” Jack said. “I didn’t work up a sweat.”

  “Easy as falling off a log,” Leo agreed.

  Both of them tried to smile. Neither of them could locate the muscles that did that sort of thing.

  2

  MOSCOW, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1950

  MUSCOVITES COULDN’T REMEMBER ANYTHING LIKE IT IN THIS century. Drifts of heat had clawed their way up from the Kara Kum Desert in Turkmenistan, asphyxiating the sprawling capitol, cooking the asphalt of the streets until it felt gummy under the soles of summer shoes. The sweltering temperatures had driven thousands of Muscovites, stripped to their underwear, into the polluted waters of the Moscow River for relief. Yevgeny found shelter in the bar of the Metropole Hotel near Red Square, where he’d gone for a late afternoon drink with the gorgeous Austrian exchange student he’d flirted with on the flight back from the States. Not for the first time Yevgeny took a mordant pleasure in passing himself off as an American; he thought of it as an indoor sport. The Austrian girl, a dyed-in-the-wool socialist overdosing on Marxism at Lomonosov University, was ecstatic at the daily reports of North Korean victories and American defeats, and it took a while before Yevgeny managed to steer the conversation away from politics and onto sex. It turned out the girl was willing but not able—she was afraid to invite him up to her dormitory room for fear a KGB informer would eavesdrop on their lovemaking and she would be expelled from Russia for anti-socialist behavior. And no amount of coaxing (“In Das Kapital, volume two,” Yevgeny—ad libbing with a straight face—said at one point, “Marx makes the case that chastity is a bourgeoisie vice that will not survive the class struggle”) could convince her otherwise. Yevgeny eventually gave up on her and, suddenly aware of the hour, tried to flag down a taxi in front of the Bolshoi. When that didn’t work out he ducked into the metro and rode it across the river to the Maksim Gorky Embankment and jogged the hundred-fifty meters uphill toward the new nine-story apartment complex where his father had gone to ground after his retirement from the United Nations Secretariat. At the walled entrance to the complex, three high-rise buildings dominating the Moscow River, a militiaman stepped out of the booth and crisply demanded Yevgeny’s internal passport. The complex on the Lenin Hills had been set aside for high-ranking Party secretaries and senior diplomats and important editors and was guarded round the clock, which only added to the aura of the nomenklatura lucky enough to be allotted apartments in any of the buildings. The star resident, so Yevgeny’s father had boasted on the phone, was none other than Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the tubby Ukrainian peasant who had made a name for himself in the ’30s supervising the building of the Moscow metro and was now one of the “kittens” in Stalin’s Politburo; Khrushchev occupied what the Russians (even writing in Cyrillic) called the “bel étage” and had a private elevator that served his floor only. The militiaman examined the photograph in the passport and, looking up, carefully matched it against Yevgeny’s face, then ran a finger down the list on his clipboard until he came to the name Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Tsipin. “You are expected,” he announced in the toneless pitch of self-importance common to policemen the world over, and waved Yevgeny toward the building. There was another militiaman inside the lobby and a third operating the elevator; the latter let the visitor off on the eighth floor and waited, with the elevator door open, until Aleksandr Timofeyevich Tsipin answered Yevgeny’s ring and signalled that he recognized the guest. Yevgeny’s father, still wearing a black mourning band on the sleeve of his suit jacket eleven months after his wife’s death, drew his oldest son into the air-conditioned apartment and embraced him awkwardly, planting a scratchy kiss on each check.

  It was difficult to say who felt more self-conscious at this show of affection, the father or the son.

  “I apologize for not seeing you sooner,” mumbled the elder Tsipin. “There were conferences, there were reports to finish.”

  “The usual things. How is your rheumatism?”

  “It comes, it goes, depending on the weather. Since when have you been cultivating a goatee?”

  “Since I last saw you, which was at my mother’s funeral.”

  Tsipin avoided his son’s eye. “Sorry I was unable to offer you a bed. Where did you wind up living?”

  “A friend has a room in a communal apartment. He is putting me up on a couch.”

  Through the double door of the vast living room, Yevgeny caught a glimpse of the immense picture window with its breathtaking view of the river and of Moscow sprawling beyond it. “Ochen khorosho,” he said. “The Soviet Union treats its former senior diplomats like tsars.”

  “Grinka is here,” the elder Tsipin said, hooking an arm through Yevgeny’s and leading him into the living room. “He took the overnight train down from Leningrad when he heard you were coming. I also invited a friend, and my friend brought along a friend of his.” He favored his son with a mysterious grin. “I am sure you will find my friend interesting.” He lowered his voice and leaned toward his son’s ear. “If he asks you about America I count on you to emphasize the faults.”

  Yevgeny spotted his younger brother through the double door and bounded across the room to wrap Grinka in a bear hug. Tsipin’s longtime servant, a lean middle-aged Uzbek woman with the delicate features of a bird, was serving zakuski to the two guests near the window. A sigh of pure elation escaped her lips when she saw Yevgeny. She cried out to him in Uzbek and, pulling his head down, planted kisses on his forehead and both shoulders.

  Yevgeny said, “Hello to you, Nyura.”

  “Thanks to God you are returned from America alive,” she exclaimed. “It is said the cities are under the command of armed gangsters.”

  “Our journalists tend to see the worst,” h
e told her with a smile. He leaned over and kissed her on both cheeks, causing her to bow her head and blush.

  “Nyura practically raised Yevgeny during the war years when his mother and I were posted to Turkey,” Tsipin explained to his guests.

  “I spent several days in Istanbul on a secret mission before the war started,” the older of the two remarked. “My memory is that it was a chaotic city.”

  Yevgeny noticed that the guest spoke Russian with an accent he took to be German. “It was my dream to be allowed to live with my parents in Istanbul,” he said, “but Turkey in those days was a center of international intrigue—there were kidnappings, even murders—and I was obliged to remain in Alma-Ata with Nyura and Grinka for safety’s sake.”

  Tsipin did the introductions. “Yevgeny, I present to you Martin Dietrich. Comrade Dietrich, please meet my oldest son recently returned from his American university. And this is Pavel Semyonovich Zhilov, Pasha for short, a great friend to me for more years than I care to remember. Pasha is known to the comrades—“

  “Perhaps you will have the good fortune to become one,” Dietrich told Yevgeny with elaborate formality.

  “—as Starik.”

  Yevgeny shook hands with both men, then flung an arm over the shoulder of his younger brother as he inspected his father’s guests. Martin Dietrich was on the short side, stocky, in his early fifties with a washed-out complexion, tired humorless eyes and surgical scars on his cheeks where skin had been grafted over the facial bones. Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov was a tall, reed-like man who looked as if he had stepped out of another century and was ill at ease in the present one. In his mid or late thirties, he had the scraggy pewter beard of a priest and brooding blue eyes that narrowed slightly and fixed on you with unnerving intensity. His fingernails were thick and long and cropped squarely, in the manner of peasants’. He was dressed in baggy trousers and a rough white shirt whose broad collar, open at the neck, offered a glimpse of a finely wrought silver chain. A dark peasant’s jacket plunged to his knees. He stood there cracking open toasted Samarkand apricot pits with thick thumbnails and popping the nuts into his mouth. Half a dozen small silk rosettes were pinned on his lapel. Yevgeny, who had learned to identify the rosettes during a stint in the Komsomol Youth Organization, recognized several: the Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of Aleksandr Nevsky, the Order of the Red Star. Nodding toward the rosettes, Yevgeny said, with just a trace of mockery, “You are clearly a great war hero. Perhaps one day you will tell me the story behind each of your medals.”