The Sisters Read online

  The ploy didn't always work, but it brought positive results often enough to provide Piotr Borisovich with a unique career in the KGB. When he wasn't operating out of his garret, with its mattress on the floor and its piles of well-thumbed American and English paperbacks strewn haphazardly about, he lived in a well-furnished three-room apartment across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, owned a secondhand Volkswagen, even had the use of a dacha set in a stand of white birches in a bend of the Moscow River an hour and a half down the Smolensk highway from the capital. He had girlfriends galore (who thought he worked as a courier for the diplomatic service, which accounted for the periods when he dropped from sight), more money than he could spend, access to the KGB's department store with its shelves full of Chivas Regal and Chanel No. 5

  and Lucky Strike cigarettes (he ordered by phone; unmarked packages were hand-delivered to his door). The months, the years ticked pleasantly, painlessly by. It was difficult to see how life could have been better.

  And yet in a remote corner of his consciousness, in a part of himself he had never dared expose, there was a hesitation; a shadow of a doubt; a vague feeling of having missed a boat. The uneasiness was especially strong when, on the rare occasions Piotr Borisovich found himself alone, he thumbed through an American paperback edition of Whitman poems and came again across the lines about the sisters Death and Night. Surely there had to be something more to it all before Death and Night rang down, like a tire curtain, on his life.

  It was at this point in Piotr Borisovich's gloriously dull existence that he received the summons to report to a military hotel. It specified a date, an hour, and was signed with the word "novator," the one in charge. A sergeant in civilian clothes led him up to the third floor and opened what looked like a broom closet. It turned out to be the entrance to a secret staircase that led to a spacious apartment on the hotel's top floor. Finding himself alone in the apartment, Piotr Borisovich took a look around. In the middle of a coffee table was a bowl filled with American candy bars. An American record player, a Magnavox, stood on a shelf, along with an enormous collection of American records, everything from Nat King Cole to the latest Broadway musicals. Bookshelves were stacked with American magazines- Newsweek, Time, Life, Esquire, Coronet, The Saturday Evening Post-and copies of The New York Times, which (judging from the wrapper) were flown in daily from Helsinki.

  Whoever lived m the apartment was obviously quite an Americanophile.

  Piotr Borisovich was surveying the view from the apartment's windows-he could see the Kremlin towers, and Saint Basil's Cathedral rising above the Kremlin wall across the Moscow River-when he heard someone at the door. He turned. A man so short he appeared almost dwarflike threw the bolt on the inside of the door and then faced Piotr Borisovich. The man squinted at him for a moment, then said in English, "Could I trouble you to step away from the window. All I can see is your silhouette. It is not enough." When Piotr Borisovich hesitated, he added, "If you please."

  Piotr Borisovich walked to the middle of the room. The newcomer made no move to shake hands. He motioned his guest to a chair, pulled up another one so that it was facing him and sat down. Their knees were almost touching. "I am not a devotee of Dostoevsky," the newcomer announced forthrightly. "But he has had a great influence on me. It happened this way: several hours after Nicholas I countermanded Dostoevsky's death sentence, Dostoevsky wrote a letter in which he said, 'Life is a gift.'

  With your combat record in the war, this is something that is surely embedded in the marrow of your bones. All life is a gift, and you are wasting yours."

  "You think so?" Piotr Borisovich retorted belligerently. He was put off by the frankness of the approach.

  "I know so," the visitor insisted passionately. "I know because I have been watching you-literally watching you!-for the better part of two years now. You are one of those people who thrive on tension; you are addicted to it, as if it were a drug and you needed a daily fix. I suspect that that is what got you through the war in one piece. You are uneasy unless you are living on a limb that could break at any moment.

  You are not too imaginative, not at all fanatical; you are a plodder who sees things through once he starts something." The Potter paused for breath. "Because of the execution of your mother, because of your experiences in the war, you tend to ignore the past and live in the present, though to keep your sanity you occasionally throw little hooks into the past-I am referring to your habit of phoning up a previous bed partner while you are making love to someone new." An apologetic grimace deformed the Potter's face. "You see, I have made it my business to figure you out. I know everything there is to know about you. I know about your father; I know how he acquired his refrigerator, and how his spine got that curve in it. And knowing all this, I am going to make you an offer. I am going to propose to you a way of life in which you will do what you do well, not for material rewards, not for the Motherland or the cause, not for the sex, not even for your father's continued well-being, but in order to earn my approval."

  Piotr Borisovich stared with new interest at the speaker, who was gripping the arms of his chair with hands that appeared to be incredibly strong. He was no youngster. But there was a steadiness to his regard, a flame in his eyes that commanded instant respect; instant allegiance even.

  "I accept," Piotr Borisovich blurted out before he knew he intended to respond.

  The other man didn't smile. "This has been a wretched century," he noted, and then he said something that made their line of work seem like a crusade. "You and I are going to try to make the next one better." He stood up and offered Piotr Borisovich his hand. "My name is Feliks Arkantevich Turov," he said formally. "I am the novator of the sleeper school, in which you are now enrolled."

  For the next nineteen months, the period during which Piotr Borisovich was under the Potter's wing, he lived in the top-floor apartment of the military hotel. The workload was unrelenting-six days a week, ten hours a day, which didn't include the Sleeper's "free" time, during which he was expected to become acquainted with American popular music (there was usually a disc playing in the background) or dip into the library to familiarize himself with Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dreiser, Jack London, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Formal classwork-courses given by the Potter himself or one of his assistants-generally took up the mornings. These included the theory and practice of espionage, the philosophy of Marx, Engels and Lenin as it applied to intelligence activities, and an intensive study of every facet of the United States: its history, geography, political development, military establishment, FBI organization and methods of law enforcement. There were daily classes given by the Potter on spoken English, which concentrated on polishing the Sleeper's knowledge of colloquialisms; he learned how to curse like a stevedore and to charm someone with slightly off-color jokes. He studied the intricacies of baseball and football from films until he knew what a balk was, and could predict with considerable accuracy whether a quarterback would run or pass.

  The thread that ran through all the courses was to develop the Sleeper's professionalism. He memorized the standard operating procedures for sleepers until he could rattle them off in his sleep. Once awakened, for instance, a sleeper must ignore all communications that arrived out of prearranged channels and pretended to come from friends and relatives.

  The logic for the rule was obvious: informal messages from friends or relatives might actually have been sent by the enemy in an effort to confuse a sleeper or divert him from his mission. The Americans had succeeded in doing just this in the mid-fifties: an agent received a written message from his wife saying she had defected; when the agent went to meet her, he found the FBI (which had forged the letter) waiting for him. It was a point that the Potter put a great deal of emphasis on.

  "What would you do if you were on a mission and got a message from your father?" the Potter asked.

  "I'd ignore it."

  "What if you got a message from, say, me?"

  "I'd ignore that too."


  "What if you heard a voice you knew on the phone? My voice, for instance, telling you a mission had been cancelled?"

  "I'd assume someone in the American intelligence establishment knew of the connection between us and was imitating your voice. I'd interpret it as a danger signal and take steps to make sure the person pretending to be you couldn't communicate with me again."

  Afternoons at the sleeper school were usually devoted to technical subjects. Piotr Borisovich learned microphotography, regular photography, secret writing, how to communicate through dead-letter drops, how to surveille others, how to detect and evade the surveillance of others. Once a week he was driven out to a remote KGB rifle range to familiarize himself with pistols and rifles available in America, and perfect his marksmanship on these unfamiliar weapons.

  For every hour of classwork, there was an hour of tradecraft in the streets. Under the watchful gaze of the Potter, who was something of an expert on the subject (he was something of an expert on every subject, Piotr Borisovich would say), the Sleeper, among other things, learned how to scout the route a dignitary would take in order to select the best site from which to assassinate him.

  Evenings the Potter personally projected American movies-the sleeper school had an enormous library of Hollywood films that had been captured from the Germans during the war-for the Sleeper in the top-floor apartment of the military hotel. Everything that dealt with police or law-enforcement agencies was generally shown twice. One night they would watch Yul Brynner heading a ring of narcotics smugglers. The next, a police thriller starring Alan Ladd or Edward G. Robinson.

  The last months at the school were spent working up the Sleeper's legend-the identity under which he would penetrate and live in the United States. (It was at this point that the wild-eyed Uzbek took the Sleeper in hand and taught him how to make mobiles.) Together the Potter and the Sleeper pored over source books compiled over the years by KGB

  agents in the United States, working out addresses where the Sleeper had lived as a child, places he had vacationed at, descriptions of his parents and the location of their tombstones, the names and descriptions of neighbors, of schools he had attended, of jobs he had worked at, of his bosses and coworkers, even of girls he had dated. No item was too small to include in the Sleeper's biography; it was the odd detail, the Potter stressed again and again, that would convince an interrogator that a suspect was telling the truth. The fact that someone lisped when he talked, that a girl wore padded brassieres, that a drugstore where the Sleeper had worked as a fountain clerk specialized in egg creams (which the Sleeper learned how to make in case anyone should ever ask him), were priceless pearls in the necklace of the Sleeper's new identity.

  Through it all the two men developed a relationship that provided the Potter with the son he had never been able to father, and the Sleeper with a surrogate father. As the Potter had predicted, the Sleeper found himself attacking his studies with an ardor designed to impress his mentor and earn his approval. And the Potter discovered in his last, best sleeper the rarest of Soviet birds-a kindred spirit.

  From the moment that they consecrated their budding friendship-when each, in turn, uttered something which, if reported to the authorities, could get him fired or jailed or even shot-there had been an unspoken complicity between them. For each of them, the part of their relationship that had to do with friendship outweighed the part of their relationship that had to do with work.

  Eventually the Potter took the Sleeper to the American warehouse located in the basement of one of the KGB's safe houses, which is the point at which Piotr Borisovich understood that school was almost out. The Potter supplied him with American clothes, and instructed him to wear them so that when he was infiltrated into America they would no longer be new.

  Cracking open a bottle of Bison vodka that night, the Potter presented to his pupil a scroll announcing that he had been appointed a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. The Sleeper was touched, not so much by the rank, but by the fact that he owed the appointment to the novator.

  When it came time to leave, the Potter accompanied the Sleeper to the airport in his chauffeured limousine. In the parking lot near the terminal, they both became tense. They started off toward the terminal together, not daring to look at one another, the Potter walking as if he were following a coffin. The Sleeper indicated with a gesture that it would be better if he went on alone. He could see that the Potter was at a loss for words; was fearful that if he found them, whatever he said would sound foolish. The Sleeper emitted a thin, brittle laugh and turned on his heel and stalked off. He could feel the Potter's eyes boring into him; could sense the depth of the affection in the Potter's regard. But when he gave in and glanced back, the Potter had already turned toward his limousine.

  The Sleeper understood that both of them suspected their paths would never cross again.

  That there was a Man Friday network was due to a peculiar quirk of office egos. The young assistants had the security clearances of their masters, but the status of field mice, which meant that they didn't have the rank to take meals in the senior dining room, or the grace to eat with the groundlings. The result was a cozy Man Friday clubroom on the fourth floor, with a soft-drink vending machine in one corner and a pool table on which many a man Friday sharpened his eye.

  "Eight ball in the side pocket," said the Deputy Director's man Friday, whose name was Harry. "What's this about your Potter skipping town before the farmers could milk him?"

  Thursday watched with bulging eyes as Harry drew a bead on the eight ball. "How did you hear about it?" he asked.

  Harry dispatched the cue ball into the eight ball, and the eight ball into the side pocket. "Four ball straight in," he said. "The Sisters' Op Proposal updater passed through the Deputy Director's in basket, which just happens to be on my desk." With a flick of his wrist, he sank the four ball.

  "Yeah, well, the Austrians were about as amateur as they come," Thursday explained. He giggled at the thought of how amateur they had been.

  "And the Potter, obviously, was an old pro," Harry added with more than a trace of arrogance as he surveyed the table for another shot.

  "That was it exactly,' Thursday agreed quickly. "The amateurs versus the old pro."

  "Seven ball is dead in the corner," announced Harry.

  Thursday squinted at the seven ball. "I've got five bucks says it's not."

  "You're on." Leaning over the table, the Deputy Director's man Friday sent the cue ball into the one ball, and the seven, which was touching the one, was propelled straight into the corner pocket.

  "Shit," said the Sisters' man Friday.

  "You were in Vienna, weren't you?" Harry asked casually. "Fourteen in the side."

  Thursday sensed that some of the blame for the loss of the Potter's warm body might rub off on him. "It was a German show,' he said defensively.

  "I was only there to skim off the cream."

  "Oh?" Harry seemed mildly surprised. "There was no mention of any cream in the Sisters updater.' He shot and missed.

  Thursday shrugged. "I don't know what's in the updater," he said, "but I got what I was sent to get." He studied the table for a shot, but couldn't find one. "I'll play safe," he announced.

  "And what is it you were sent to get?" Harry asked.

  "Listen," Thursday said uneasily, "I work for the Sisters."

  "Just between us," Harry coaxed, "I'm curious to know what the cream was."

  Thursday tapped the cue ball lightly, burying it behind a group of balls next to the cushion. He giggled with pleasure at the shot. "If it'll get no further than this room," he said.

  Two old hags lugging enormous plastic shopping hags were systematically searching through garbage cans in the alley behind the Brooklyn Eagle Building, and the Sleeper had to wait until they finished their scavenging before he could approach the dead-letter drop. He counted down four garages from the corner, then slipped between the wooden fence that marked the limit of the garden behind the Eagle Building and the s
ide of the garage, and began searching for the brick with the word

  "Mother" chalked on it. It will all boil down, the Potter had once told him with an embarrassed smile, to whether, when you search for your first set of instructions, you do so with a sense of urgency. The Sleeper had been struck by the Potter's choice of words at the time. Why urgency? he had asked curiously. Because urgency, the Potter had replied, is what modern war has lost. My principal task as novator, as I see it, is to instil in my sleepers the sense of urgency that was present when the person you were shooting at was also shooting at you.

  The Sleeper found the brick, opened his pocket-knife and began to pry it out with the blade. To his satisfaction, he discovered he was working with a sense of urgency; his pulse pounded, his skin tingled with urgency. For a fleeting moment he thought he might lose control of his bladder in his desire to get to the heart of the dead-letter drop, He worked the brick free and bent to peer into the hole. There was nothing in it; no instructions, no war to go to, shooting or otherwise. He reached in and searched the drop with his fingertips- and found the small, squat metallic capsule wedged into a crack at the back of the opening. The capsule had been dulled with black shoe polish so as not to attract attention. The Sleeper replaced the brick, unscrewed the capsule, removed the scrap of paper and threw the capsule into the space behind the garage full of bottle shards and rusted tins.

  At first glance, the message looked like a printed advertisement for a Brooklyn firm specializing in cleaning coat furnaces. But the paper felt odd to the touch- probably because it had been coated with potassium permanganate, a normal precaution to make sure it would ignite when exposed to the slightest heat.