An Agent in Place Read online

  ROBERT LITTELL

  had been retrieved, the young woman had been conducted to the frontier and expelled.

  ''Slim pickings," Viktor noted gloomily. He had been hoping for more—the opening gambit of an intricate espionage game, perhaps— if only to take his mind off Ekaterina's endless exploration of infidelity; if only to divert him from the festering boil that was poisoning the Soviet body politic and ruining the morale of its defenders.

  Frolov shrugged his shoulders in reluctant apology. It was not his fault if the political climate lulled Russians who would ordinarily have fallen over each other reporting contacts with Americans into believing that the Cold War was over. On top of everything there was the seasonal element to contend with; in midwinter most contacts tended to take place indoors, out of sight of people who might still be inclined to report these things to the KGB.

  "Another reason to look forward to the end of winter," Viktor commented dryly. The section chiefs nodded appreciatively. Viktor turned his attention to Andrei Krostin, the painfully thin captain who ran Section One. Krostin, who wore a thick hand-knit sweater under his sports jacket to render his thinness less conspicuous, spoke, as he always did, without notes. Absently stroking his neatly trimmed blond beard, he led off with a detailed description of the activities of Charles Inkermann, the CIA station chief at the American Embassy: where he had gone, whom he had seen, what he had said to his wife in the privacy of their bedroom. At one point during the week Krostin had suspected he was on to something important when he eavesdropped on Inkermann telephoning two Russians from a public booth; the calls had been traced to two members of the Central Committee noted for their reformist tendencies. Both men had been "interviewed" (in the current political atmosphere, the Center no longer "interrogated"), both had sworn they thought they were dealing with a cultural affairs officer trying to set up appointments for a visiting New York Times columnist.

  Krostin wound up his presentation with a brief description of the various Americans who had touched base at the embassy during the week: There had been several congressmen and their staffers on a junket, a Congressional Budget Office accountant presumably checking the embassy's books, a delegation of Pentagon aides coming to meet their Soviet counterparts, a handful of visiting journalists, a

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  small army of tourists exhilarated at having traded blue jeans for black beluga caviar. Oh, and there was one other thing. Three new diplomats, two females and one male, had reported to the embassy since Viktor's last weekly session. The first woman was named Esther Easley, age forty-eight, on temporary assignment replacing a stenographer who had been sent back to the United States on maternity leave; Easley was married and her husband, a teacher, was expected to arrive in Moscow at the end of the month. The male diplomat's name was Benedict Bassett. He was single, divorced, thirty-three, a low-level housekeeper for the embassy's Arms Control Inspection Team. Bassett had come to Moscow directly from a four-month tour at the American Embassy in Prague. He had been looked over by the Center's Czech friends while he was in Prague. A swallow had actually made a pass at him, but nothing had come of it and Bassett, a loner who didn't make friends easily, had been written off as an unlikely candidate for blackmail. The third new diplomat was Sabine Harkenrider, age twenty-eight, single, on permanent assignment in Moscow to teach grammar to the American children in the embassy school. Of the three new arrivals, she clearly had the most potential for Krostin and his colleagues in Section One. She was plain looking and single—the archetypical profile of someone who could be seduced by a KGB operative. Because she lived and worked inside the embassy compound, the problem would be to get at her. Chances were she would be coming out, it was hoped before spring, to go to the opera or ballet, or participate in one of the embassy-organized cross-country ski trips. Krostin proposed to take a closer look at her then.

  "About this Bassett fellow," Viktor said thoughtfully, "the four-months' stint in Prague strikes me as a curiously short tour of duty."

  "I noticed that too," Krostin agreed. "As a precaution I have instructed our people in Prague to try and discover what he was doing there, and most especially why he was reassigned after only four months."

  "Is that it?" Viktor asked.

  "I have one other thing that will interest you," Krostin said. He reached into his leather briefcase for a transcript of Custer's security briefing to the three new diplomats. "Here is what he told them."

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  And he read the words that his microphones had recorded. ' 'Consider this,' ' Custer had lectured the newly arrived diplomats. ' 'Every word spoken here is being beamed through hidden microphones to those antennas on the roof across the street, and from there into the ears of some bilingual techint comrade in an overheated office at the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, better known by its initials, KGB.' "

  Krostin looked up with something akin to a leer in his eyes. "How do you think he found out about your office being overheated?" he asked Viktor.

  With a snicker, Frolov remarked, "Perhaps he is listening to us listen to him."

  For the first time that day Viktor managed a smile. He had never met Custer face-to-face, but he had read dozens of transcripts of his conversations—so many that he thought he could detect the insolence in Custer's tone as he baited the ambassador, or badgered newly arrived diplomats with his talk of vaccination, or argued with Inkermann, the CIA station chief who, in a strange twist of fate, had been Custer's superior before Custer was kicked out of the CIA. The truth was that Viktor harbored a grudging respect for Custer—he liked his impetuous orneriness, his imperturbable professionalism, his I-don't-give-a-damn style of dealing with people above him as well as below him in the chain of command. "Custer is not listening to us listen to him," Viktor told his section chiefs. "He is imagining us listening to him. He is the last of a breed, one of those who figures out what the other side is doing by deciding what he would do if he were in their shoes."

  Viktor turned his head to take another look at the lacelike crystals of snow etched onto the outside of the window panes. This time the sight tripped a vision, not of his childhood, but of the corpse frozen into the ice of the German river back in 1945. The body had been that of an unshaven Wehrmacht soldier, bayoneted to death—by Viktor. Something had coursed through Viktor's veins the day he killed the German that he later learned to identify as adrenaline. It was then that destroying an enemy had become his habit, a high to which he was still addicted. Now, in the overheated stillness of his office, his voice came drifting back over his shoulder. "Custer is on his last roll. He thinks that a man needs an enemy to validate his masculinity; to give to all intercourse an urgency that comes only

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  when you confront the possibility that it may be the last. He understands that pretty soon there will be no enemies left, and no Cold War to fight."

  Even as he described Custer, Viktor understood that he was describing himself.

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  the audience as if she mistrusted the entire proceeding. She was one of those rare individuals who took no pleasure from the stir she created when she walked into a room, but she could not prevent it. Big-boned, well-proportioned, somewhere in her early forties, she had ample hips and wide shoulders and a broken, badly set nose alive with freckles. Her mouth was generous, her lips thick, her eyelashes huge, her hair bound in a dirty-blond braid that tumbled halfway to her waist. Enormous, melancholy eyes were her most distinctive feature; Aida had a way of looking at people so intently she appeared to be committing them to memory. The first time the poet Akhmatova, by then an old woman, had peered into Aida's gray eyes, she had announced that they conveyed an animal's innocence, which she cheerfully defined as an innocence capable of killing, but never for pleasure. As for Aida's clothes, they were in complete disarray; there seemed to be a riot of colors and textures and forms pulling her in different directions. (It wasn't that she didn't care; she did, but not enough
to spend time and money and energy to put herself together in what passed for a coherent style.) A 1930s pillbox hat with an enormous white feather spiked through it was planted squarely on her large head. Across her shoulders she had flung a threadbare fox neckpiece with a marble-eyed shrunken fox's head on one end. The fox was worn over a quilted satin jacket, which in turn was worn over a faded purple sweatshirt with "What needs restructuring is the relationship between women and men" embroidered in Russian across the chest. On one of her long, strong fingers she wore a ring that had been given to her by Akhmatova only days before her death because, so the poet had said, Aida "understood the wind better than human speech." Set into the ring's beaten silver was a wedge of agate, a stone that according to Akhmatova was supposed to banish fear. (Aida dearly loved the ring, but did not believe in miracles; she still lived in terror of losing poetry.)

  Now, with the frayed hem of a thick, black, much-mended ankle-length skirt swirling around the tops of her fur-lined galoshes, Aida strode across the stage to shake hands with the woman who had introduced her. Turning toward the audience, she fitted a pair of perfectly round steel-rimmed eyeglasses onto her nose, spread some papers on the lectern and studied them until the applause died away. She glanced at a tiny watch on her wrist. Manufactured in Poland, it had been constructed so that the hour and minute hands ran coun-

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  terclockwise. "If time ran backward," her Polish friend had said when he gave her the watch as a joke, 'you could go back in time and undo the future. You could fix things so that things did not need to be fixed." Smiling at this conceit, Aida made a mental note of the time and looked up abruptly at her audience.

  "I will read for one hour, no more, no less," she announced. "I say this so that those of you who are new to poetry readings do not have to worry about me droning on beyond your lunch break." There was an appreciative titter from the crowd. "If you are bored, or have errands to do, or prefer a sandwich to a poetry reading, feel absolutely free to leave. I will not be offended. I have a thick hide. To be a poet in Soviet Russia, to have been a poet in Tsarist Russia for that matter, a thick hide is only slightly less essential than a gift for images. But that's another story. Or is it? In any case, I will try to give you some background on each poem I read—try, in other words, to set it into time for you. And I will read each poem twice in the hope that I will be saying more than one listening can get at."

  Flashing a self-conscious half-smile, Ai'da reached up to toy with a tiny mother-of-pearl earring. "So: Let us plunge together into poetry. In the late 1970s the bosses, ignoring the fact that I was pregnant, locked me up in the Serbsky Institute for the Criminally Insane. There was no trial, no sentence, only an administrative decision that Mother Russia would be better off if there were one poet less in circulation. They kept me locked up for a relatively short time—two months, six days, nine and a half hours—but it seemed to me like an eternity. When I refused to cooperate I was held down and given injections of sulfur, which caused my body temperature to shoot up five degrees. All you can do in such circumstances is toss and turn in bed in an endless search for a position that does not hurt. I do not remember ever finding one. When you first arrive at this so-called institute you are invited to fill in a questionnaire. It was this questionnaire that inspired the poem I am going to read. The questions were a humiliating invasion of privacy, something like being subjected to a gynecological examination by a drunken veterinarian. I like to think that my interlocutors were not prepared for the answers I gave. So: Here is the poem. I call it Q and A.'"

  And peering through her granny glasses at a scrap of paper she did not really need, Aida began her recitation in a brittle, high-pitched voice.

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  When did you lose your virginity?

  To a man or to a woman?

  Resist the temptation to answer a question with a question. Can you describe your arrest?

  The police were very polite. They brought me tea with cakes. When I had finished, one of them cleared away the cup and saucer and punched me in the nose. Another fitted on a surgical glove and inspected my anus.

  What do women want from men?

  Their dreams and their cocks.

  Why their dreams?

  We are the ones who make the day work — we shop and cook and clean up afterward and remember everyone's birthday and bring in a second salary and rear the children and brew herb tea and watch our weight and make love and make babies. We do not have time to dream.

  Why their cocks?

  To suck on.

  What is in it for you?

  The object of intercourse is intimacy.

  You think you will know men better if you suck their cocks?

  I think I will know myself better. Sensuality is not for the faint of heart.

  Are you afraid of losing your sanity?

  I am afraid of losing my insanity. I am afraid of losing poetry.

  What is in the shortest supply in the Motherland?

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  Smiles.

  What is in the greatest supply?

  Shrugs.

  Shrugs?

  Shrugs. Yes.

  You are full of shit.

  That is not a question.

  I will rephrase it. Did anyone ever tell you you were full of shit?

  Many times.

  Do you agree?

  What I am full of is unshed tears.

  Inebriated with poetry, Aida read the questions and answers a second time to an utterly still audience. Then, suppressing a shiver, she drew a deep breath, as if she were purging a painful memory. The poem seemed to have cast a spell on the assembly; no one dared to applaud for fear of being irreverent. Shuffling through her papers, Aida selected a second poem. "I do not do this in any particular order," she remarked. "I invent it as I go along. In this respect a poetry reading imitates life."

  Aida forged on, explaining the source of each poem, then reading and rereading it in a deliberately flat, undramatic voice. She wanted the words and the spaces between them to convey the moods and meanings, and not her tone; she detested films in which the music told people how to feel. The women in the crowded auditorium, stunned by the audacity of the overt sexual references, mesmerized by what they took to be the echo of their own secret voices, hung on her poems in rapt attention. Reciting one of her older poems, Ai'da forgot a word. Several women who obviously knew the poem by heart called it out to her. Some of the women in the audience could be heard sobbing after she read a poem describing an abortion in such clinical detail that everyone understood it had to be autobiographical. Dozens of heads nodded in agreement when Aida, in eight barbed

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  lines, noted that the KGB had not been disbanded; that its agents, the great majority of whom were men, were even now copying down the names of those who wrote subversive poetry, as well as those who listened to it.

  With the hour almost up Aida glanced at her wrist watch, shuffled her papers, looked out tiredly at the audience. "The last poem I will recite is one I stumbled across last night when I was reading through notes I made years ago. Like most of my poems, it has never been published. I had not set eyes on it for years, so it took me a while to figure out where it sprang from. Eventually it came back to me. I wrote it during the period of stagnation, as our current helmsman calls the Brezhnev years. The poem was inspired by three propositions. The first proposition states that even in the worst of times, and God knows we have had more than our share of the worst of times, sex has been a sanctuary; a place we could retreat to where the state and its police could not follow. The second proposition states that women, like men, have a garden full of lust; but unlike men, we understand that the body can keep people apart as easily as it can draw them together, and that in any case it is never neutral. The third proposition states that women have a central dilemma about which men know nothing, namely how to give yourself freely while holding part of yourself back; how, in other words, to be lu
sty and lucid at the same time. So: I call this poem 'Geography.'

  And she began to read again.

  Beating the air, she lighted like a butterfly

  on the leaf of his lip, her longitude to his latitude.

  Beating the air, she drifted away before he could get a fix.

  There was an incredible stillness as Ai'da finished reading the poem a second time; as if the women in the audience, barely daring to breathe, had penetrated to the eye of a storm. A ripple of applause spread across the auditorium. Then the women were standing and clapping rhythmically and stamping their feet. The floor shook. The

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  chairwoman rushed onto the stage to pump Aida's hand. Blushing self-consciously, Aida smiled and nodded her thanks. Some of the younger women in the crowd swarmed forward to thrust copies of Aida's only published book, a thin volume of poetry titled Stranded, up for her to sign.

  "You were wonderful," one young woman called.

  "Where would we be without your voice?" another cried.

  Worn out but exhilarated, Aida crouched and scratched her name in bold letters across the title pages.

  The postpartum letdown that invariably followed her poetry readings had gripped Aida when she stopped by the office of Novy Mir an hour later to correct the galley proofs of two recent poems and pick up a check from the editor who was proposing to publish them. "If I didn't know you better," the editor, Joseph Mikhailovich, told Aida, eyeing her cheeks flushed with color, "I would think you were wearing makeup. Let me guess. Either you were outdoors too long or you have been reading your poems to unwashed women in a windy hall."

  "Both are true," Aida said. "I walked over from the House of Architects." She hiked herself onto a radiator to soak up some of its warmth.