An Agent in Place Page 2
A horn shrilled at the corner. Zenkevich, at last! Viktor could see him flinging open the door of the black Zil and waving frantically over the roof of the car. Imagine a chauffeur waving at a lieutenant colonel of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti as if he had forgotten his laundry on the backseat! Viktor rolled his head from side to side in frustration as he delicately picked his way over the icy sidewalk toward the limousine.
Zenkevich, bareheaded, his tangled hair flying off in all directions, his enormous ear lobes beet red, was holding open the front door when he got there. (Viktor had begun his military career as the chauffeur of a general who always rode next to the driver out of a sense of egalitarianism; he did the same.) The comrade colonel won't believe what happened to me this morning," Zenkevich sputtered as he slid behind the wheel. Gunning the motor, grinding gears, he steered the limousine past an orange-and-yellow trolley and headed between enormous banks of dirty snow down Leningrad Prospekt toward the center of Moscow. He stole a glance at Viktor's frozen cheek muscles. Almost shouting so he could be heard over the roar of the car's heater, which was turned on full blast, Zenkevich launched into an account of how his wife's sister-in-law had complained of excruciating stomach cramps; how the ambulance sent to fetch her to the clinic had skidded into a fire hydrant; how his wife's brother had phoned in panic from a booth when a second ambulance failed to arrive; how Zenkevich, knowing the comrade colonel would understand that it had been a matter of life or death, had driven his sister-in-law to the clinic in the comrade colonel's limousine where, at this very moment, she was probably being operated on for a burst appendix. "In my shoes—" here Zenkevich groaned to indicate he was suffering pangs of conscience at having kept the colonel waiting in the —24° temperature—"wouldn't the comrade colonel have done
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the same?" So saying, he plucked a leather-covered flask from the bulging pocket of his overcoat and offered it to his boss, his role model, above all his meal ticket.
Viktor, who was convinced that homo sapiens functioned more efficiently if they kept a reasonable amount of alcohol in their bloodstream at all times, unscrewed the cap and, tilting back his head, took a healthy swig. "Cognac," Zenkevich noted as he spotted the color seeping back into the colonel's cheeks. "Imported from Paris, France. Three stars. I still have the bottle in the trunk compartment—the comrade colonel can count the stars himself if he doesn't believe me."
"I accept your apology," Viktor murmured, wiping his lips on the back of a sniper's mitten.
"And I wholeheartedly offer one," Zenkevich shot back eagerly. He hadn't hoped to squirm off the hook so easily.
Viktor treated himself to another mouthful of Zenkevich's black-market cognac, produced in some basement still, no doubt, and poured into bottles scavenged from garbage bins behind the hotels that catered to foreign tourists. He felt a pleasant warmth in his stomach. "Did you know, Zenkevich, that if it had not been for alcohol," he informed his driver, "Russia would be a Moslem country to this day?"
"How is that, comrade colonel?" Zenkevich asked. He ran the windshield wipers to clear away some slush.
"Didn't they teach you anything in school? It was the Tsar Vladimir who rejected the Moslem faith and converted to Christianity because alcohol was forbidden by Moslems, and who could survive a Russian winter without alcohol?"
"Who?" Zenkevich agreed enthusiastically.
"Nowadays," Viktor went on glumly, "we need alcohol to survive the summers as well as the winters, but thanks to our bureaucrats"— thanks to the Great Helmsman, he thought, but it was not the kind of insight he dared share with a chauffeur—"not enough of it is available. In the sense that everyone in Russia drinks less than they need to, everyone in Russia can be said to be on the wagon."
Zenkevich was impressed by the colonel's logic. "I never looked at it like that," he admitted.
In the street, a traffic policeman wearing several layers of clothing and moving with the awkwardness of a stuffed doll, waved a white baton, stopping traffic. A mob of workers spilling out of the railroad
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station, their faces obscured by frayed collars and hand-knit scarfs, swarmed across the intersection in front of the Zil. After a while the traffic light turned green. The policeman waved his baton and shouted for the workers to stop crossing, but they kept coming, a herd of mindless bulls plunging on, heads bent against the cold, against the authority of the policeman too, grimly pressing forward as if they were walking across an ocean bottom in lead-weighted shoes without the slightest desire, so it seemed to Viktor, to get where they were going.
It dawned on Viktor, observing the scene unfold in front of his windshield as if it were an allegorical play, that the Great Helmsman and the clever young men around him didn't know about the chaos that lurked in the heart of the heart of Mother Russia. The last thing the country needed was perestroika, or restructuring. Let the Great Helmsman restructure rents, which were last raised in 1928, or the price of bread, which had been the same since 1954, and he would wind up with a bloody civil war on his hands. The unrest in Azerbaijan, in the Ukraine, in the Baltic republics, in Armenia, in Uzbekistan, in the Donets Basin, would be nothing compared to it. The insurrection that had ousted Russia's last Tsar and had led eventually to the Bolshevik revolution had started with bread riots. Couldn't the Great Helmsman see that he was trifling with disaster when he talked of glasnost, or transparence? There were things the masses were better off not knowing. Nobody dared speak of it openly, but the absolute necessity of keeping the masses on a short leash was something that Stalin, for all his excesses, had intuitively grasped. Nowadays this was an unfashionable, even dangerous, point of view, but more and more people were coming around to it. Viktor remembered the old general turning up a radio in his corner office one day and pulling his son-in-law over to the window and pointing with his withered fingers to the word Perestroika splashed across a huge banner draped over the facade of the toy store diagonally across the street from the Center. The Frenchman de Tocqueville had a theory about the French revolution," the old man had muttered. "He noticed the oppressed masses had not revolted until the oppression was lifted a bit and expectations were aroused. What do you think, Viktor? Will our norod, our dark masses, get a whiff of the Great Helmsman's stew and take to the streets for their dinner? Will they dine on us?" Then, to Viktor's utter astonishment, the old general had breathed a word
AN AGENT IN PLACE
that, if overheard, would have gotten the speaker and his auditor instantly transferred to some frozen timber collective in the reaches of Siberia. "Pamyat" he had murmured. "Pamyat is our flame. We must fan its embers for the sake of the Motherland. When it is burning bright we will use it to incinerate the kike-intellectuals who are ruining us."
Gunning his engine, honking his horn to intimidate the workers crossing against the light, Zenkevich succeeded in nosing the car through the mob. A few minutes later he pulled up on a narrow side street behind Detsky Mir, the toy store across Dzerzhinsky Square from the massive KGB center. "Will the comrade colonel be needing me again during the day?"
"The comrade colonel will not be needing you," Viktor said, "but that does not mean you are to cruise around picking up private fares."
Zenkevich, who had been Viktor's driver in Kabul in the early 1980s until the assassin's bullet aimed at the colonel had punctured one of the chauffeur's lungs, managed to look hurt. "I was planning to get the comrade colonel's car greased and oiled at a new private garage near the Exhibition of Economic Achievements," he said. "I heard of some Kazakhs there who use German motor oil," he added, as if it were a critical detail.
Viktor knew from long experience that his driver was impervious to sarcasm, but he mumbled something anyway about how he would appreciate Zenkevich being there at six o'clock if his sister-in-law's state of health permitted, and started for the delivery entrance to the toy store. He went down one flight, pushed through a pair of swinging doors marked "Absolutely n
o one admitted" and walked the length of a narrow, well-lit corridor. A uniformed militiaman sitting behind a table at the far end leapt to his feet and snapped off a smart salute at Viktor, who flashed his red identification booklet and leaned over to sign the register. The militiaman inserted the register in a slot so that a camera could read the signature. There was a moment of silence, then a bell rang once and the door next to the table clicked open. Viktor continued down a long brilliantly lit white-tiled tunnel, had his signature and identity booklet checked once more at the subterranean entrance to the Center, then headed down the marble hallway toward the elevator and his fifth-floor office.
His secretary, a prematurely gray-haired middle-aged woman who
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had also been with him in Kabul, was laying out dossiers on his desk when he arrived. "My God, it's hot in here," Viktor noted as he flung his greatcoat over the back of a chair. "I take it the thermostats in the radiators still have not been adjusted." He eyed the pile of dossiers suspiciously. "What world-shaking events are waiting in ambush for us today?" he wanted to know.
The secretary, whose name was Evgeniya Leonovna, handed Viktor a file thick with overnight cables as he settled heavily into a padded swivel chair. "There was a time when you were known as the house optimist, Colonel Prosenko," she remarked.
Viktor removed his eyeglasses and began cleaning the lens with the tip of his tie. "The peasants have a saying," he told her. "An optimist is someone who does not know enough." He hooked the glasses back over his ears and started reading the first cable. It contained the latest gossip from a KGB stukach, or stool pigeon, in the Politburo secretariat; according to the stukach, the Great Helmsman had been overheard telling a visiting regional Communist Party delegation that he was going to institute a system of annual fitness reports for everyone holding positions of importance in the government. Promotions would be based on performance, not on whom you knew or how long you had been in the Party. Those who did not pass muster, the Great Helmsman was reported to have promised, would be pensioned off to make way for younger, more dynamic people.
Evgeniya Leonovna, who harbored a secret vision of herself as the colonel's doting adopted daughter, placed a glass of strong tea on Viktor's desk and stirred in a spoon full of her homemade confiture. Viktor swiveled toward a window, heard the chair squeak under his weight, wondered why something as simple as getting a handyman in the Center to oil a squeaking chair or turn down a radiator so that his office did not feel like a sauna seemed beyond the realm of possibility. He stared morosely out the window, then focused on the window as he noticed the lacelike crystals of snow etched onto the outside of the panes. It reminded him of the embroidered white curtains that had been in his room when he was a child. He reconstructed the room in his head, effortlessly placing objects in their proper places. He enjoyed reconstructing the past; he liked it when things were in order.
Things were far from tidy in the Great Helmsman's Kremlin. Fitness reports today, God knows what other capitalist innovation tomorrow. In fact the Great Helmsman was slowly dismantling the
AN AGENT IN PLACE
Party, which was the bulwark that protected Russia from its own worst instincts. And he was slowly dismantling the KGB along with it; he had already disbanded the Center's Fifth Directorate, which was responsible for unearthing ideological subversion—as if there were no more ideology and no more subversion. Anyone who got in the Great Helmsman's way, anyone who argued the merits of leaving things as they were, quickly found himself posted to some Siberian wasteland. Even the old general, Viktor's father-in-law, felt powerless to stop the tide of reform. "I am looking forward to my pension," he once confided to his daughter in Viktor's presence, "but the way things are going, I very much doubt whether the ruble will buy as much when I get it, whether in fact there will be anything on the shelves to buy."
Having stirred the confiture into the tea, Evgeniya Leonovna edged the saucer toward Viktor. He bent his head to savor the aroma, then lifted the glass and began sipping the sweetened tea as he shuffled through the cables. Each one produced in him a snort of derision, an angry shake of the head. There had been a street fight the night before in a Moscow suburb; youths from the Lefortovo District armed with chains and iron bars had attacked Armenian refugees living in a dormitory behind a textile factory. The so-called progressive faction in parliament had called for the Great Helmsman's ouster on the grounds that his program of reforms was not ambitious enough. There had been tumultuous meetings of separatists in the Baltic region who were claiming that the secret 1940 Hitler-Stalin pact ceding these states to Soviet Russia was null and void. There had been work stoppages in the Ukraine, talk of a general strike in Kazakhstan, skirmishes between marauding groups of'Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Baku, riots in Lithuania and Estonia, an attack on a police station by stone-throwing miners in the Donets Basin. Some Azerbaijani Shiites had been arrested while building bridges across the Araks River to create links with their "brothers" in Iran. Not to mention what was happening in Poland and Hungary and East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. Reading the overnight cables morning after morning had led Viktor to an ominous conclusion: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, created by the blood and sweat of the visionary Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917—Viktor's father and mother had been in the front ranks—and defended by the blood and sweat of subsequent generations of Bolsheviks—Viktor himself had
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been in the front ranks—was coming apart at the seams. And there was absolutely nothing Viktor could do about it.
The telephone on the desk rang once. Scowling at a photograph of his wife set in a silver frame—it had been taken while they were honeymooning at a Black Sea resort eleven years before—Viktor reached for the receiver. His appointments secretary was on the line, reminding the colonel that the section chiefs of Department One had arrived for the regular Wednesday meeting. Viktor, who was the head of the Second Chief Directorate—the internal counterintelligence component of the KGB responsible for intelligence and counterespionage against all foreigners in the Soviet Union—had been astonished to discover, when he returned from Kabul in the mid-1980s to take over his new responsibilities, that the men who ran the various sections of Department One, which kept track of American diplomats, were barely on speaking terms. His first official act had been to replace them with new people and convene a regular weekly meeting in order to coordinate the activities of Department One's sections. In the space of a year, thanks in large measure to this coordination, Viktor had organized the first successful penetration of the American Embassy in Moscow in decades. It happened this way. Section Three, which routinely kept track of Russians who came in contact with American diplomats, had reported that several members of the embassy's marine guard contingent had Russian girlfriends. In short order Section One had dangled a swallow before one of the marines, and he had been hooked. After that it had been child's play for the case officers of the first section, which was responsible for recruiting and running Americans, to blackmail the marine into giving them after-hours access to some of the embassy's restricted areas. The penetration would have reaped even more secrets if it hadn't been for the embassy security officer, an old pro named Custer. He had noticed a dropped stitch, had tugged on it and unraveled the sweater. The swallow had been identified, the marine had been whisked off to a court-martial, the leak had been plugged.
The section heads, settled in seats around Viktor's coffee table, exchanged small talk while Evgeniya Leonovna distributed glasses of tea (she did not put out her confiture, preferring to keep it for Viktor). When she had slipped discreetly out of the office, Viktor nodded at the young officer who was in charge of Department One's
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third section, a captain with tobacco-stained teeth and a distinctly pear-shaped face that conveyed infinite innocence. His mother had died the week before, and he was dressed entirely in black, with a black arm band on the sleeve of his black jac
ket. His lips were compressed in an appropriately mournful expression. Producing a sheet of paper stamped "Very Secret—no distribution outside of Second Chief Directorate," the captain, whose name was Boris Frolov, began to read, in a droning monotone, the list of known contacts between Russians and American diplomats the previous week. The usual writers and directors and editors and artists had had the usual lunches and dinners and drinks with the usual cultural affairs officers; there had been far too many contacts for the operatives in the third section, working under strict budget restraints, to keep track of. Given his meager resources, Frolov had had his people focus on the more curious contacts.
A woman had accosted one of the embassy's political affairs officers while he was shopping at the diplomatic gastronome and had tried to get him to accept a sealed envelope. He had politely, but forcefully, refused. Questioned afterward, the woman had claimed to be sending news of her father's death to a brother who had emigrated to America; the letter in question had in fact been addressed to her brother and described in detail the father's death from cancer. The woman was not employed in a sensitive industry, and was not considered to be in the possession of secret material.
Some prostitutes working the underpasses that led to Red Square (who regularly reported any contacts with foreigners to the third section) had been picked up by two Americans whom they took to be military attaches. But when the ladies had been shown photographs of all 128 males attached to the American Embassy, they had failed to identify their clients.
A young woman speaking Russian with what seemed like an American accent had buttonholed a Soviet journalist at a party and offered to trade a Sony Walkman for an icon. Word of this had caused a stir when the journalist said he thought he had seen the woman at a recent American Embassy reception. A rendezvous had been arranged and the woman had been photographed in the act. Her photo had been given to the ID team in Section One, who identified her as an Australian au pair girl working for a Canadian diplomat. The icon