The Company Read online

  Starik, puffing on a Bulgarian cigarette with a long hollow tip, eyed his host’s son. “Contrary to appearances, I do not live in the past,” he said flatly.

  “That alone sets you apart from everyone else in Russia,” Yevgeny said. He helped himself to a cracker spread with caviar. “Starik—the old man—was what the comrades called Lenin, wasn’t it? How did you come to be called by such a name?”

  Yevgeny’s father answered for him. “In Lenin’s case it was because he was so much older than the others around him at the time of the Revolution. In Pasha’s case it was because he talked like Tolstoy long before he let his beard grow.”

  Yevgeny, who had acquired the American gift for insouciance, asked with an insolent grin, “And what do you talk about when you talk like Tolstoy?”

  His father tried to divert the conversation. “How was your flight back from America, Yevgeny?”

  Starik waved off his host. “There is no harm done, Aleksandr Timofeyevich. I prefer curious young men to those who, at twenty-one, know all there is to know.”

  He turned a guarded smirk on Yevgeny for the first time; Yevgeny recognized it for what it was—the enigmatic expression of someone who thought of life as an intricate game of chess. Another member of the Communist nomenklatura who climbed over the bodies of his colleagues to get ahead!

  Starik spit a spoiled Samarkand nut onto the Persian carpet. “What I talk about,” he told Yevgeny, articulating his words carefully, “is a state secret.”

  Later, over dinner, Starik steered the subject to America and asked Yevgeny for his impressions. Did he believe racial tensions would lead to a Negro uprising? Would the exploited Caucasian proletariat support such a revolt? Yevgeny responded by saying that he hadn’t really been in America—he’d been in Yale, a ghetto populated by members of the privileged classes who could afford tuition, or the occasional scholarship student who aspired to join the privileged class. “As for the Negroes revolting,” he added, “man will walk on the moon before that happens. Whoever is telling you such things simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “I read it in Pravda,” Starik said, watching his host’s son to see if he would back down.

  Yevgeny suddenly felt as if he were taking an oral exam. “The journalists of Pravda are telling you what they think you should hear,” he said. “If we hope to compete successfully with the immense power of capitalist America we must first understand what makes it tick.”

  “Do you understand what makes it tick?”

  “I begin to understand America well enough to know there is no possibility that its Negroes will revolt.”

  “And what do you plan to do with this knowledge you have of America?” Starik inquired.

  “I have not figured that out yet.”

  Grinka asked his father if he had seen the Pravda story about the TASS journalist in Washington who had been drugged and photographed in bed with a stark-naked teenage girl, after which the American CIA had tried to blackmail him into spying for it. Yevgeny commented that there was a good chance the TASS man had been a KGB agent to begin with. His father, refilling the glasses from a chilled bottle of Hungarian white wine, remarked that the Americans regularly accused Soviet journalists and diplomats of being spies.

  Yevgeny regarded his father. “Aren’t they?” he asked with a laugh in his eyes.

  Starik raised his wineglass to eye level and studied Yevgeny over the rim as he turned the stem in his fingers. “Let us be frank: Sometimes they are,” he said evenly. “But Socialism, if it is to survive, must defend itself.”

  “And don’t we try the same tricks on them that they try on us?” Yevgeny persisted.

  Martin Dietrich turned out to have a mild sense of humor after all. “With all my heart, I hope so,” he announced. “Considering the dangers they run, spies are underpaid and occasionally need to be compensated with something other than money.”

  “To an outsider, I can see how the business of spying sometimes appears to be an amusing game,” Starik conceded, his eyes riveted on Yevgeny across the table. Turning to his host, he launched into the story of a French military attaché who had been seduced by a young woman who worked at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “One night he visited her in the single room she shared with one other girl. Before you knew it he and the two girls had removed their clothing and jumped into bed. Of course the girls worked for our KGB. They filmed the whole thing through a two-way mirror. When they discreetly confronted the attaché with still photographs, he burst into laughter and asked them if they could supply him with copies to send to his wife in Paris to prove that his virility had not diminished during his two years in Moscow.”

  Yevgeny’s eyes widened slightly. How was it that his father’s friend knew such a story? Was Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov connected with the KGB? Yevgeny glanced at his father—he had always assumed he had some sort of relationship with the KGB. After all, diplomats abroad were expected to keep their eyes and ears open and report back to their handlers. Their handlers! Could it be that Starik was his father’s conducting officer? The elder Tsipin had introduced Starik as his great friend. If Starik was his handler, his father may have played a more active role in Soviet intelligence than his son imagined; Zhilov simply didn’t seem like someone who merely debriefed returning diplomats.

  There was another riddle that intrigued Yevgeny: Who was the quiet German who went by the name Martin Dietrich and looked as if his features had been burned—or altered by plastic surgery? And what had he done for the Motherland to merit wearing over his breast pocket a ribbon indicating that he, too, was a Hero of the Soviet Union?

  Back in the living room, Nyura set out Napoleon brandy and snifters, which the host half-filled and Grinka handed around. Zhilov and Tsipin were in the middle of an argument about what had stopped the seemingly invincible Germans when they attacked the Soviet Union. Grinka, a second-year student of history and Marxist theory at Leningrad University, said, “The same thing that stopped Napoleon—Russian bayonets and Russian winter.”

  “We had a secret weapon against both Napoleon’s Grand Army and Hitler’s Wehrmacht,” Aleksandr instructed his youngest son. “It was the rasputitsa—the rivers of melting snow in the spring, the torrents of rain in the autumn—that transform the Steppe into an impassable swamp. I remember that the rasputitsa was especially severe in March of ’41, preventing the Germans from attacking for several crucial weeks. It was severe again in October of ’41 and the winter frost that hardens the ground enough for tanks to operate came late, which left the Wehrmacht bogged down within sight of the spires of Moscow when the full force of winter struck.”

  “Aleksandr is correct—we had a secret weapon. But it was neither our bayonets nor the Russian winter, nor the rasputitsa,” Zhilov said. “It was our spies who told us which of the German thrusts were feints and which were real; who told us how much petrol stocks their tanks had on hand so we could figure out how long they could run; who told us that the Wehrmacht, calculating that the Red Army could not resist the German onslaught, had not brought up winter lubricants, which meant their battle tanks would be useless once the weather turned cold.”

  Yevgeny felt the warmth of the brandy invade his chest. “I have never understood how the Motherland lost twenty million killed in the Great Patriotic War—a suffering so enormous it defies description—yet those who participated in the blood bath speak of it with nostalgia?”

  “Do you remember the stories of the Ottoman sultans ruling an empire that stretched from the Danube to the Indian Ocean?” Starik inquired. “They would recline on cushions in the lush garden pavilions of Istanbul wearing archer’s rings on their thumbs to remind them of battles they could only dimly remember.” His large head swung round slowly in Yevgeny’s direction. “In a manner of speaking, all of us who fought the Great Patriotic War wear archer’s rings on our thumbs or rosettes on our lapels. When our memories fade all we will have left of that heroic moment will be our rings and our medals.”r />
  Later, waiting for the elevator to arrive, Starik talked in an undertone with his host. As the elevator door opened Zhilov turned back toward Yevgeny and casually offered him a small calling card. “I invite you to take tea with me,” he murmured. “Perhaps I will tell you the story behind one of my medals after all.”

  If the dinner had been a test, Yevgeny understood that he had passed it. Almost against his will he found himself being drawn to this unkempt peasant of a man who—judging from his bearing; judging, too, from the deference with which his father had treated him—clearly outranked a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. And much to his surprise he heard himself say, “I would consider it a privilege.”

  “Tomorrow at four-thirty.” Starik wasn’t asking, he was informing. “Leave word with your father where you will be and I will send a car for you. The calling card will serve as a laissez-passer”—Starik used the French phrase—“for the militiamen guarding the outer gate.”

  “The outer gate of what?” Yevgeny asked, but Starik had disappeared into the elevator.

  Yevgeny was turning the card in his fingers when Grinka snatched it out of his hand. “He’s a general polkovnik—a colonel general—in the KGB,” he said with a whistle. “What do you think he wants with you?”

  “Perhaps he wants me to follow in our father’s footsteps,” Yevgeny told his brother.

  “Become a diplomat!”

  “Is that what you were, father?” Yevgeny asked with an insolent smile.

  “What I was, was a servant of my country,” the elder Tsipin responded in irritation. He turned abruptly and left the room.

  Yevgeny saw his brother off at the Leningrad Railway Station, then crossed Komsomolskaya Square to the kiosk with the distinctive red-tiled roof and waited in the shade. As the station clock struck four a black Zil with gleaming chrome and tinted windows pulled to a stop in front of him. The windows were closed, which meant that the car was ventilated. A round-faced man wearing sunglasses and a bright Kazakh hat rolled down the front window.

  “Are you from—” Yevgeny began.

  “Don’t be thick,” the man said impatiently. “Get in.”

  Yevgeny climbed into the back. The Zil turned around the Ring Road and sped out of the city heading southwest on the Kaluga Road. Yevgeny rapped his knuckles on the thick glass partition separating him from the two men in the front seat. The one with the Kazakh hat glanced over his shoulder.

  “How long will it take to get where we are going?” Yevgeny called through the partition. The man flashed five fingers three times and turned back.

  Yevgeny sank into the cool leather of the seat and passed the time studying the people along the street. He remembered the elation he’d felt as a child when his father had taken him and Grinka for excursions in the family’s Volga limousine. His father’s car had been chauffeured by one of the uniformed militiamen from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a dark man with slanting eyes and a peach-shaped face who called the boys “Little Sirs” when he held the door for them. Peering from behind the car’s curtains, Yevgeny would pretend that he and his brother were heroes of Mother Russia who had been decorated by the Great Helmsman, Comrade Stalin, himself; from time to time the two boys would wave imperiously at some peasants along the route to Peredelkino, where his father had purchased a Ministry dacha. Now, in the Zil, the driver leaned on the horn and pedestrians scattered out of his way. The car slowed, but never stopped, for red lights. When they spotted the Zil, militiamen sweating in tunics buttoned up to the neck brought cross traffic to a standstill with their batons and prevented the swarm of pedestrians from surging across the boulevard. As the car flew by people gazed at the tinted windows, trying to figure out which member of the Politburo or Central Committee might be behind them.

  After a time the Zil turned onto a narrow one-lane road with a sign at the edge reading, “Center for Study—No Admittance.” They drove for three or four minutes through a forest of white birches, the bark peeling from the trunks like discarded paper wrapping. Through the trees Yevgeny caught sight of a small abandoned church, its door and windows gaping open, its single onion-shaped dome leaning into the heat wave from Central Asia. The limousine swung into a driveway paved with fine white gravel and pulled up in front of a small brick building. A high chain-link fence topped with coils of barbed wire stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. Two gray-and-tan Siberian huskies prowled back and forth at the end of long ropes fastened to trees. An Army officer came around to the rear window. A soldier with a PPD-34 under his arm, its round clip inserted, watched from behind a pile of sandbags. Yevgeny rolled the window down just enough to pass Starik’s calling card to the officer. A hot blast of outside air filled the back of the car. The officer looked at the card, then handed it back and waved the driver on. At the end of the gravel driveway loomed a pre-revolutionary three-story mansion. Around the side of the house, two little girls, barefoot and wearing short smock-like dresses, were crying out in mock fright as they soared high or dipped low on a seesaw. Nearby, a mottled white-and-brown horse, reins hanging loose on his neck, cropped the grass. A young man in a tight suit, alerted by the guards at the gate, was waiting at the open door, his arms folded self-importantly across his chest, his shoulders hunched against the heat. “You are invited to follow me,” he said when Yevgeny came up the steps. He preceded the visitor down a marble hallway and up a curving flight of stairs covered with a worn red runner, rapped twice on a door on the second floor, threw it open and stepped back to let Yevgeny through.

  Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov, cooling himself in front of a Westinghouse air conditioner fixed in a window of the antechamber, was reading aloud from a thin book to two small girls curled up on a sofa, their knees parted shamelessly, their thin limbs askew. Starik broke off reading when he caught sight of Yevgeny. “Oh, do continue, uncle,” one of the little girls pleaded. The other sucked sulkily on her thumb. Ignoring the girls, Starik strode across the room and clasped the hand of his visitor in both of his. Behind Yevgeny the door clicked closed.

  “Do you have any idea where you are?” Starik inquired as he gripped Yevgeny’s elbow and steered him through a door into a large sitting room.

  “Not the slightest,” Yevgeny admitted.

  “I may tell you that you are in the Southwestern District near the village of Cheryomuski. The estate, originally tens of thousands of hectares, belonged to the Apatov family but, it was taken over by the CHEKA in the early 1920s and has been used as a secret retreat since.” He gestured with his head for Yevgeny to follow him as he made his way through a billiard room and into a dining room with a large oval table set with fine china and Czech glass. “The mansion is actually divided into three apartments —one is used by Viktor Abakumov, who is the head of our SMERSH organization. The second is set aside for the Minister of Internal Security, Comrade Beria. He uses it as a hideaway when he wants to escape from the bedlam of Moscow.” Starik collected a bottle of Narzan mineral water and two glasses, each with a slice of lemon in it, and continued on to a spacious wood-paneled library filled with hundreds of leather-covered volumes and several dozen small gold- and silver-inlaid icons. On the single stretch of wall not covered with bookcases hung a life-sized portrait of L.N. Tolstoy. The painter’s name—I.E. Repin—and the date 1887 were visible at the bottom right. Tolstoy, wearing a rough peasant’s shirt and a long white beard, had been posed sitting in a chair, a book open in his left hand. Yevgeny noticed that the great writer’s fingernails, like Starik’s, were thick and long and cut off squarely.

  A large wooden table containing a neat pile of file folders stood in the center of the room. Starik set the mineral water and glasses on the table and slipped into a seat. He motioned for Yevgeny to take the seat across from him. “Comrade Beria claims that the calm and the country air are an analgesic for his ulcers—more effective than the hot-water bottles he keeps applying to his stomach. Who can say he is not right?” Starik lit one of his Bulgarian cig
arettes. “You don’t smoke?”

  Yevgeny shook his head.

  A man with a shaven head, wearing a black jacket and black trousers, appeared carrying a tray. He set a saucer of sugar cubes and another with slices of apple on the table, filled two glasses with steaming tea from a thermos and set the thermos down. When he had left, closing the door behind him, Starik wedged a cube of sugar between his teeth and, straining the liquid through it, began noisily drinking the tea. Yevgeny could see the Adam’s apple bobbing in his sinewy neck. After a moment Starik asked, “Do Americans think there will be war?”

  “Some do, some don’t. In any case there is a general reluctance to go to war. Americans are a frontier people who have grown soft buying on credit whatever their hearts desire and paying off their mortgages for the rest of their lives.”

  Starik opened the file folder on top of the pile and began to leaf through the report as he sipped his tea. “I do not agree with your analysis. The American Pentagon thinks there will be war—they have actually predicted that it will start on the first of July 1952. A great many in the American Congress agree with the Pentagon forecast. When it was organized in 1947, the CIA was treated as a stepchild in matters of financing; now it is getting unlimited funds and recruiting agents at a feverish pace. And there is nothing soft about the training phase. The Soviet Russia Division, which is our glavni protivnik—how would you say that in American?”