An Agent in Place Page 7
AN AGENT IN PLACE
Aida thought about this. "They are about the one subject still taboo in Russia despite glasnost and the new openness in the press, and that is sex. My point of view, it goes without saying, is feminist. I am all for liberating men from the straitjacket of the Party, but I want also to liberate men from the straitjacket of the penis, and women from the straitjacket of men. My future ex claims that I am the founder and only member of the tiniest splinter group in the Soviet Union, which is to say the feminist movement."
Ben said, "How did you become a feminist? How did you become a poet?"
Aida raised a hand and signaled the waiter to bring the check. "I did not become a feminist or a poet," she explained impatiently. In her experience men usually made the same mistake. "I have always been a feminist and a poet. God planted the seed of feminism within my body when He created me. As for poetry, everyone in Russia is a poet in the sense that, for the last seventy years, everything really important has been said between the lines. Even as a small child I was mesmerized by the spaces between the lines, between the words, which is what I meant when I spoke about listening to silence. Poetry is what is hidden in the spaces between the lines, between the words."
A blizzard of snow was falling on Moscow when they pushed through the revolving door to the street. Aida, accustomed to the weather, wrapped her fox tightly around her neck, pulled on her gloves and turned to leave. Ben, squinting into the snow, shouted over the storm. "Can I see you again, Aida?"
She turned back. "That is simply not possible."
"Why?"
Flashing a wistful half-smile, Aida studied the ground, stamped her feet on the thin layer of sanded ice, then raised her eyes to gaze directly into Ben's. Flakes had caked his brows, turning them white. She had a vision of what he would look like as an old man. "My life is complicated enough," she called over the storm. "I do not want to complicate it further by sleeping with an American, and a diplomat to boot."
Ben was not prepared for her bluntness. "I was not proposing that we sleep together. Only that we meet, that we get to know each other."
"I am as direct as Vadim in things that concern bodily functions,"
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A'ida announced. "You are interested in my body, or at least the body you have imagined under all these layers of clothing. I have a garden of lust of my own, which means I am not uninterested in your body." Peering into the pupils of his eyes, two points of darkness in a sea of olive green, she was struck by their feverish alertness. For some reason his eyes seemed familiar. "Your head seems relatively interesting too. If you propose another meeting and I accept, what would it be for except to get involved? The sex act, the act of sex, is what we both have in mind. Why pretend otherwise? So: We would meet again, we would circle each other for a suitable length of time, hunting for points we have in common—'What a coincidence we both love Toscal' —in order to create the illusion of a connivance. You would use every trick in the book to convince me that you were not violent so that I would not be afraid to collaborate in what is essentially a violent act."
"If you really believe all that," Ben shouted, "why did you come with me today?"
"I,came with you because you made me laugh," she called. "You will have guessed by now that I have not laughed in a long time." She sniffed at the air, testing the coldness in her nostrils, then shivered and hugged herself, almost as if she were holding herself together. It dawned on Ben that it was her body language, more than her body, that accounted for her incredible sensuality. "There is another reason I agreed to come with you," she added, elevating her chin a notch. One of the whimsical smiles that Ben was starting to recognize appeared on her lips. "I love the American accent. I love to hear the language of Emily Dickinson spoken as she might have spoken it."
Squinting into the falling snow, Ben studied her broken nose alive with freckles; he decided to memorize one thing about her every time they met—if they ever met. He shouted, "I can make you laugh again."
Aida turned her head into the blizzard and closed her eyes, savoring the icy crystals that melted on her lids. Presently she turned back to Ben. "I would be lying if I said I was not tempted." She offered her hand. "Thank you, but no thank you."
An old man with a scarf wound over his mouth and nose walked between them going toward the revolving door. As soon as he was past Ben grasped her hand in both of his. He noticed traces of what looked like tears on her cheeks, then realized they were melted crys-
AN AGENT IN PLACE
tals of snow. Suddenly he felt himself spiral out of character. A flash flood of words that he might have spoken in a previous incarnation gushed out before he knew what he was saying. "I hope to Christ we do not meet again!"
Ai'da was stunned. What he had said, the ardor with which he had said it, the mystery hidden in the spaces between his words, pierced her chest, and she found herself short of breath. Everything that had gone before had been conversation; seduction. But his valediction had cut to a marrow, bared a nerve. She searched his eyes for the meaning of his cryptic announcement, but all she saw was a feverish alertness amid the traces of a riot of emotions. Accepting his fervor with a delicate smile that for the first time mounted, like a tide creeping in, as far as her gray animal eyes, she snapped a sliver of ice from the revolving door and sucked on it, then leaned forward and brushed her blue lips against his. Before he realized what had happened she had spun away from his clumsy effort to put an arm around her and plunged into the freezing Kuchkovo night.
Adrift on the steps in the suddenly silent storm, Ben watched her white feather vanish among the giant clots of snow drifting lazily through the yellowish beams of street lights.
Aida crouched next to the wicker chair, feeding broth to her father a spoonful at a time, wiping with a kitchen towel the drops that spilled down the stubble on his chin. Ivan's eyes were riveted on her as he ate. When he had finished, she set aside the bowl and picked up a plate of kasha mixed with small bits of fatty sausage. The old man pulled his head back. "Eat some of it," Aida whispered. "It is good for you."
Barely moving his lips, he said in a rasping voice, "Do not lose any part of your body if you can avoid it." He held out his trembling fingers for her to see. The tips of all of them were scarred, deformed, twisted, the nails missing. They had been pulled out, his fingers had been crushed, by NKVD interrogators. "These are not my fingers," the old man said matter-of-factly. "Mine were quite different."
Aida looked out of the window so he would not see her reaction. She remembered the riot of emotions on the face of the strange American she had met that day; she wondered what secret had pushed him to hope they would never meet again. His eyes had
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seemed so familiar. It suddenly came to her where she had seen them before. The American reminded her of her Polish lover—they both had a wall of lucidity that had to be razed before you could get at their lust.
Images wheeled in her brain. She discovered words to describe them.
/ have hung on words you left unsaid,
Been moved to tears by tears you left unshed,
Caught your heart's ache through the snow's
storm,
As proof I tender — my iced lips for you to
warm.
Putting her emotions into poetry made her better able to control them. She turned back to her father. "What about a homemade yogurt to finish off the meal?" When he did not refuse, she began feeding him yogurt by the spoonful. Between swallows he summoned a disturbing memory. "You were a very small girl at the time," he told her. "Not more than five or six. When we rented the room to him we had no idea he had been a White Russian, and an admiral. How could we have been expected to know such a thing? They moved in, the admiral, his wife and his wife's sister, only she wasn't his wife's sister, she was his mistress and they were a menage a trois as the French say, all old, all gray haired, one of the women hobbling on crutches with her face painted, the old admiral scurrying around like a rat trying to find food for them to eat or coal for them to burn."
"I remember them very well," Aida reminded her father. "It was the first time in my life I had ever seen a woman use makeup. The one who claimed to be his wife's sister spent hours every day painting her lips to look as if she were pouting, painting her eyes to look wide and innocent. Once, when I was eleven, I decided to paint my lips with Mercurochrome in order to look like her. When you came home and saw what I had done you slapped my face. Then you scrubbed it."
"They had somehow been overlooked," Ai'da's father droned on, "the old admiral, his wife, the sister who was not a sister. But one day they came and took all three of them away in a bread truck that was not a bread truck. For me it was the beginning of the end." He shook
AN AGENT IN PLACE
his head again and again, trying to figure out how he had allowed it to happen.
Aida wiped her father's chin with the dish towel and got up and set the empty yogurt cup on a table. "I remember I stuttered when I was a child," she said. The woman on crutches, the one with the eyes made up to look innocent, used to imitate my stutter to tease me. 'Zinaid-d-d-da's c-c-come b-b-back,' she would say. The day they took her away she was stuttering for real. 'G-g-god prot-t-t-tect us,' she cried. I remember thinking she had taken my stutter with her. So: I never stuttered again."
From the street came a muffled shout, then the sound of a car door slamming. The old man strained forward, taut in his wicker chair. "Have they finally gotten around to me?" he whispered. He scraped the chair closer to the window and peered into the night that had settled over the city like a lid. Aida was reminded of two lines from the Irish poet Yeats:
When one looks into darkness there is always something there.
She came up behind her father. Through the double panes of the window she could see two men tying a couch onto the roof of a small automobile. She rested a hand on her father's shoulder, felt his muscles relax under her touch.
"Good night to you, Father," she said, knowing that he was just starting his vigil; that the night, like the thousands that had gone before it, would be anything but good for him.
A
F
|lashing what Manny took to be a government-issue smile, Miss Macy thumbed the lever on the intercom. "Your nine o'clock is here, Mr. Inkermann," she announced.
Manny Custer realized that his daily briefing session with the CIA station chief had gotten off to a sour start (again!) when he heard Charlie Inkermann's testy nasal whine spurt over the tiny speaker. "He is ten fucking minutes late," the voice complained.
"What kept you?" Inkermann growled as Manny, casually kicking the door closed behind him, ambled into the shadowy inner sanctum with its sealed Venetian blinds. "In case you have not remarked on it, I run a taut ship."
Inkermann slouched in front of a Teletype machine, the bald spot on the top of his head flashing an indecipherable Morse message as it caught the light from a flickering overhead fluorescent fixture. He scanned the printout, letting the paper uncoil through his stubby fingers, pursing his lips and whistling quietly through them as he took in an item that annoyed him. To Manny's ear it sounded like a kettle coming to a boil.
It was not the first time he had heard this particular kettle approach boil. Their paths had first crossed in the late seventies when Manny returned to the Company's home base in Langley, Virginia,
AN AGENT IN PLACE
after two back-to-back tours in Turkey; with the help of two Cossack smugglers working out of Rostov-on-Don, twins known in the trade as the Brothers Karamazov, he had run more than two hundred agents across the Soviet Union's heavily guarded southern frontier. Even then Inkermann—at Langley, Manny's immediate superior in a long-range intraoffice project evaluating second-echelon Soviet leaders—had liked to say he ran a taut ship, though his idea of a taut ship was to set impossible deadlines and mutter salty obscenities (learned, Manny suspected, while rowing for Harvard) when they were not met. The few grudging words of praise that escaped his lips were invariably sprinkled like salt in open wounds. Things had come to a head in 1979 when Manny flatly refused Inkermann's order to water down his written assessment of a new candidate member of the ruling Politburo named Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Manny saw as a potential Dubcek-like reformer. Inkermann, intent on delivering a more pessimistic evaluation that would support the case for an eternally belligerent Soviet leadership and higher military and intelligence budgets, forced Manny to resign. Manny had made a number of diplomat friends during his years abroad and was quickly picked up by the State Department Security Office an?d posted to Bonn. When the ambassador there was transferred to Moscow he had invited Manny, whom he admired as a no-nonsense security chief who would not tie an embassy in knots looking for security violations, to tag along with him. When the current ambassador came on board he had inherited Manny, by then something of a fixture in Moscow, along with the furniture. Judging from the fitness reports he filed on Manny, he seemed to prefer the furniture to an outspoken security chief who said precisely what he thought.
Delicately running the palm of his hand over his slicked-back hair, Inkermann lowered himself into the swivel chair behind the desk. Out of the corner of an eye he watched Manny pull over a chair and sink into it, his legs stretched out and crossed at his thick ankles, a great expanse of sickly white skin visible above his socks, his hands clasped behind his head, his sports jacket parted like a curtain, the shirt buttons straining in their holes against a swelling stomach, the expression on his martyr's face as arrogant as ever. "The ambassador's wife is going straight up the wall over the piano-string caper," Inkermann said. He rummaged in an oversize in-basket that looked like a compost heap and came up with a handwritten note, which he
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waved at Manny. "She says she's sure the F string didn't break by accident. She says the Russkies knew she had personally invited the piano player. She says they somehow sneaked one of their agents into Spaso House before the concert and weakened the string so that it would break when he started tickling the ivories. She says that it was all part of a scheme to humiliate her husband, the ambassador, and discourage cultural contacts. She says what are you doing to make sure it doesn't happen again?"
Manny snickered. "I could always post an armed marine next to the piano twenty-four hours a day."
Inkermann eyed Manny suspiciously. "How can you be positive the Russkies didn't break the string? I mean glasnost or no glasnost, our friends over at the KGB are still drawing their paychecks. For all we know they have an entire section that does nothing but try to figure out how to annoy the ambassador's wife."
Manny said, "You're not serious."
Inkermann announced gravely, "If the ambassador's wife is serious, J am serious."
"I examined the piano string under a magnifying glass," Manny said tiredly. "There was no sign of it having been clipped or filed."
"You are an expert on such things, I take it."
"We are going to look goddamn silly shipping a piece of piano wire off to Washington for analysis."
"How come you never show up at the Spaso House concerts or lectures?"
Manny brought the back of a hand to his mouth and suppressed a yawn. "The Russians have a word for people like me. It's nekulturnC In his most condescending voice he added, "That means uncultured."
"I don't need a translation," Inkermann remarked stiffly. "I took the same Foreign Service Russian course you did." He plucked a pen from a holder and printed "Action" on the top of the note from the ambassador's wife. Then, reading out the words as his pen scratched across the paper, he wrote, "Custer will personally supervise preparations for all Spaso House cultural events as well as be present at these events."
The station chief scrawled "Ink" for Inkermann in the upper-right-hand corner of the letter and tossed it into an oversize out-basket. "From this moment in time on," he informed Manny, "whatever goes wrong at Spaso House happens on your watch. You check the piano
AN AGENT IN PLACE
before a recital, you check the slide projector before a lecture. You start tomorrow. Some Russian or other has been invited over to read poems. You check the microphone to make sure it's working, you check the radiators to make sure they're hot, you check the drinks to make sure they haven't been spiked, you check the toilets to make sure they flush. You never know, Custer. Someone with your sensitivity could wind up liking poetry."
Manny, never one to let his emotions show, took shelter behind a thin smile. "Whatever," he mumbled. Inkermann, who as chief of station was in overall charge of embassy security, had already reduced him to warning new arrivals that walls had ears, to spinning combination dials after working hours to make sure the safes had been properly locked. Now he was trying to humiliate him further, to push him into retiring before his tour was up. Manny took a grim pleasure from hanging in; from surviving.
If Moscow was going to be Custer's last stand, at least he would go out in style.
Kuchkovo (as A'ida called Moscow) was shrouded in sootlike dusk by the time she reached the Kremlin hospital not far from what she referred to as Trinity Square (the old name for Red Square). Wiping the slush off her galoshes on the pages of Pravda spread on the linoleum floor immediately inside the revolving door, she joined the queue that stretched the length of a dirty-gray corridor, rounded a corner and continued on past the bank of elevators, only one of which was in working condition. No matter how many times A'ida waited on line here—and she had queued once a week every week for the past six years—she never grew accustomed to the odors. Some weeks the corridor reeked of urine or vomit or ether, but most of the time the stench of disinfectant was so sharp it overpowered the other smells, stinging her nostrils, bringing tears to her eyes. Still, nobody who was fortunate enough to be on the line ever uttered a word of complaint—about its length, about the odors. For at the end of the long, dim corridor was the door to the hospital pharmacy, and the unsmiling white-coated women who distributed Western prescription drugs to those well connected enough or rich enough or lucky enough to have the appropriate authorization.