The Debriefing Read online

  “I didn’t think you’d want it any longer,” explained Stone. “What was Nadia’s attitude toward the photographs? Did she admit the liaison?”

  “She admitted everything, yes,” Kulakov recalled. His eyes were moist by then, and red-rimmed. “She said she was in love with this … this girl … this Lina. She asked where was it written she had to fall in love with a boy. … She was only nineteen- … only nineteen.”

  “Was it difficult getting her committed?”

  “What do you mean, committed?”

  “You told me”—Stone checked a detail in the folder on his lap—“yes, you said you committed her to an asylum outside Moscow that more or less specialized in people with sexual problems.”

  “Ah, yes, committed. My wife’s brother-in-law had a brother who worked at the hospital. Normally you wait two years to get someone treated, but we pulled strings.” Suddenly Kulakov stood up. “It’s almost noon,” he said dully. “Enough for today.”

  The next day Stone began the session with: “You were saying you pulled strings to get Nadia committed. Did she object to going? Did she object to being separated from her … friend?”

  “At first she wouldn’t consider it.” Kulakov started off briskly. “We had some terrible scenes. The woman we shared the flat with—she was the widow of a wartime comrade of mine, actually—called the militia one night, and I had to take them outside and give them a couple of bottles of vodka before I could convince them it was a family argument. I worked on Nadia for weeks about the asylum. She resisted, but then she became unsure of herself. She knew I loved her more than anyone in the world. In the end she was very nervous. She had bitten her fingernails down to the quicks. She had an ugly rash that wouldn’t go away. She had trouble breathing—a pain deep in her chest. One day she shrugged and said she would go. And so I took her … I took my own daughter—” Kulakov’s voice broke. When he regained his composure, he said, “You know, the only difference for me between one day and the next is that some days are less sad than others.”

  After that session, over lunch, Kulakov turned suddenly to Stone and asked him if he had any children. Stone and Thro avoided each other’s eyes. “A daughter, yes,” he answered softly. Thro quickly changed the subject; she was trying, for the dozenth time, to explain to Kulakov how a checking account worked. Stone, watching them talk, let his mind wander; for no reason at all, he remembered how his daughter used to confuse kissing with making love. When he would come in to say good night, she would giggle and say, “Let’s make love,” and start planting kisses on his mouth. The next morning she would proudly announce in her high-pitched voice that she and her daddy had made love fifteen times the night before.

  That happened when she was six. Now she was eight going on nine. Stone wondered if she still confused kissing and making love. He didn’t know. He hadn’t set eyes on her in two years.

  Thro’s end of it got off to a slow start; for the first few days, all Kulakov wanted to talk about was money. Thro was as reassuring as she could be, but necessarily vague. Kulakov grew suspicious, and then bitter. “What does it depend on?” he wanted to know. “How many secrets I give to your Mr. Simon? How many times must I tell you, I don’t know any secrets?”

  Thro was patient. She explained that he would get a lump sum settlement, and a military pension roughly equivalent to what a retired major, which was Kulakov’s rank, would receive from the United States Army after twenty-eight years of service. He would also receive private medical insurance, and be eligible for Social Security payments when he reached the age of sixty-five. Kulakov remained anxious. “What,” he asked, “is Social Security?”

  Thro questioned Kulakov closely on what he had done in the courier service (“I carried sealed diplomatic pouches from point A to point B for twenty-eight years”); what he had studied in the military academy (“Artillery; I was a specialist on how rifling affected the spin and accuracy of a projectile”); his hobbies (“What,” he asked, “are hobbies?”). She finally wormed out of him that during one of his vacations at a Ministry of Defense rest home on the Black Sea, he had borrowed a secondhand easel and started to dabble in oils. The next afternoon, Thro turned up with a professional easel, oils, brushes and an assortment of canvases. Kulakov smiled weakly and thanked her profusely, but he didn’t go near the easel for two weeks. Then one day, Thro arrived in his room to find him painting furiously near the window. His canvases, which he began turning out at the rate of one every two or three days, were colorful primitives with tiny figures clawing their way up hills or struggling through fields of grass in which ferocious beasts and oversized snakes lurked.

  “It would be my dream to run an art gallery,” Kulakov agreed the first time Thro suggested it. “Is such a thing possible?”

  “We could arrange for you to work at a big gallery for six months to learn the ropes,” Thro told him. “After that, we’ll find a good-sized city that doesn’t have a decent gallery and set you up in business.”

  “It could also be a cultural center,” blurted Kulakov, bubbling with ideas. “I could show art films one night a week and serve tea from a samovar and hold discussions.”

  “You could invite artists to lecture,” offered Thro.

  “I could organize a lending library of art books,” said Kulakov. “I could start an art newsletter.”

  In the sessions that followed, while Thro slowly developed an identity for him to slip into when he left the farm, Kulakov kept coming back to the art gallery. “You make it sound possible,” he commented. “Please don’t build up my hopes if such a thing is not possible.”

  Even Stone noticed the change in Kulakov; the morning sessions, for the Russian defector, became a means to an end: The sooner he gave Stone what he wanted, the sooner he, Kulakov, would be able to realize his new-found dream of opening an art gallery.

  “You were saying that your wife left you for another man,” Stone prompts. “Did you see any signs of what was in the air before the event?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” Kulakov responds almost eagerly. He tilts his head and studies an unfinished canvas on the easel in front of the window: it shows a cat about to spring on a tiny man in a dark forest. “It came like a bolt of lightning.”

  “But you said she had been moody—”

  Kulakov interrupts him with an impatient wave of his hand. “Who wouldn’t have been moody?” he says. “A daughter in an asylum being treated for … problems. A son expelled from the university for using drugs. Her mood had nothing to do with it.”

  “How was your sex life?”

  This gets a snort out of Kulakov. “My sex life was normal, which is to say we made love once every week or two when she rolled over and began to touch me.”

  “She only attempted to stimulate you once every week or so?”

  “My God, do you have to know everything?” Kulakov shakes his head quickly, as if he is clearing it. “She tried to stimulate me more often, of course, but I usually acted as if I was asleep. I also drank a lot, which meant I often was asleep.”

  “How long were you married?”

  Kulakov purses his lips, calculates. “Twenty-two years.”

  “Whom did she run off with?”

  “I don’t know his name,” Kulakov mumbles in exasperation. “She never said. She just told me she couldn’t take any more and was leaving.”

  “Did you try to stop her?”

  “Yes,” Kulakov says, and then corrects himself. “No. Not very hard.”

  Stone lets a moment go by. “What made you think another man was involved?”

  “I asked her. I asked her if there was someone else. She laughed hysterically and started screaming at me that she was going off with some tank commander.”

  “Did you ever hear from her after that?”

  “Indirectly.” Kulakov jams a cigarette into his holder and lights it. “A friend of hers I’d seen occasionally, a typist in one of the ministries named Natalia—”

  “What was her family
name? Her patronymic?”

  Kulakov thinks a moment. “Natalia Viktorovna Mikhailova. Her husband was a captain in the Army transport section. Yes. Mikhailova.”

  “And she came to you—”

  “She turned up one day at the door—”

  “Before or after you were living with the actress?” Stone asks.

  “After,” Kulakov says. “The actress had moved in, but she wasn’t there when Natalia came by.”

  Stone nods encouragingly. “We’ll come back to the actress. Tell me about Natalia.”

  “There’s not much to tell. She said my wife was well. She said she was living in Alma-Ata with this tank commander.” Kulakov closes his eyes, concentrates, and gives Stone the address. “She asked if she could collect my wife’s effects—her clothing, her cosmetics. My wife was very proud of her collection of Western cosmetics. I left Natalia alone in the apartment. When I came back, she was gone, along with my wife’s things.”

  “And you never heard from your wife again?”

  Kulakov is lost in thought, staring out the window. Stone repeats the question. “I got a picture postcard in the mail once,” Kulakov recalls. “On one side was a photograph of the sports stadium outside Alma-Ata. On the other was a note, in my wife’s handwriting but unsigned, that said, ‘You are weighted down, like a diver, by the sense of your own specialness. Come to the surface.’ ” Kulakov is suddenly very intense. “I tell it to you frankly—if she rots in hell, it’s all the same to me.”

  Kulakov, agitated, stares from the strange man, whom he has never seen before, to the array of electrodes and meters in the open suitcase. “I categorically refuse,” he announces. He looks at Stone with a pleading expression. “Why are you humiliating me like this? I’ve told you the truth. I swear it to you.”

  “I believe you,” says Stone. “But the people I work for must have this before they’ll believe you.”

  “Isn’t there another way?” begs Kulakov.

  “There are certain drugs,” Stone says vaguely, “but they are generally used on uncooperative subjects. There is a voice print analysis procedure, and eyelid observation; people tend to blink more often, and more rapidly, when they are lying. We’ve already used both techniques on you, with negative results. But voice printouts and eyelid observation are experimental methods. They will want the lie detector results to confirm the feeling we all have that you are telling the truth.”

  Obviously unhappy at the turn of events, Kulakov allows himself to be led to the chair set up in the middle of the room. The curtain is drawn, the electrodes are attached, a floor lamp is pulled over and placed just next to Kulakov’s elbow. All the other lights are turned off.

  Kulakov squirms uncomfortably. “The peasants say,” he jokes bitterly, “that the darkest place in a room is under a lamp.”

  “The peasants know many things we don’t know,” Stone agrees. Kulakov half smiles at the line, which he used to Stone on the Globemaster.

  The civilian adjusts several dials in the suitcase, starts the printout, nods to Stone, whose voice comes out of the darkness. “All right, let’s begin. Will you state your full name, your age, your rank, your last assignment and your military serial number.”

  “Kulakov, Oleg Anatolyevich. I’m fifty-three years old. I hold … I held the rank of major. I was assigned as a courier attached to the Ministry of Defense. My military serial number is 607092.”

  Again the civilian monitoring the dials nods toward Stone. “That’s fine,” he says. “You can start in now.”

  Stone walks over and hands Kulakov a lighted cigarette. “You all right?”

  “I’m all right,” he says tensely. “Your friend is a painless dentist.”

  “Oleg,” Stone says, “I’d like you to describe the events surrounding Gregori’s dismissal from Lomonosov University. Talk slowly, take it chronologically.”

  Kulakov pulls several times on his cigarette. “The first I knew about my son being in hot water was when the rector of the university sent for me. I thought Gregori had gotten into trouble with the Komsomol again. He had been in difficulty several times before—once for not turning up for a Komsomol work party, another time it was for telling a joke about the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. Each time I had been able to smooth things over—I was, after all, a very trusted member of the Party—so I didn’t expect this one to be any more serious.”

  The civilian says, “So far, so good.”

  Stone says, “And that’s when you found out about the drugs?”

  “Yes,” says Kulakov. “The rector was actually very understanding. He said he had no choice except to expel him. He gave me the name of a doctor I could go to—”

  “Gregori had treatment?” Stone sounds surprised. “You didn’t mention that before.”

  “It didn’t last very long,” Kulakov admits. “In the end, I found out that all the time I thought he was going to the clinic, he was wandering around Moscow with some hooligans.”

  “Is that when the militia picked him up?”

  “It was during that period, yes. The militia thought he was drunk and held him overnight. Then they found the needle marks. And that was the end of his Moscow residence permit. He was sent to work on a Hero Project in Irkutsk—building a railroad spur, I think. About a month before I left, I got a note from him in the mail. He said he couldn’t remember my birthday, but he wanted to wish me happy birthday anyhow. He said he was on his way to live with his mother in Alma-Ata. That was the last I heard from him.”

  The civilian lets the printout run through his fingers onto the floor. He looks up at Stone and nods.

  “Children never remember their parents’ birthdays,” Stone comments.

  “I always remembered my father’s,” Kulakov offers. The civilian behind him leans closer to the printout “He was born September twenty-fourth.”

  The civilian signals with a finger to Stone.

  “You told me your father was dead,” Stone says carefully. His voice is exactly as it was before. “Do you remember the date of his death too?”

  Kulakov answers quickly. “He died in the summer,” he says. “Early August. The fourth, I think it was.”

  The civilian looks across at Stone and shakes his head. Stone says, “I’m sorry, Oleg, but you’re lying!”

  “Why would he lie about his father?” Thro asks. “Why would he say he’s dead when he’s alive?”

  “Because his father is Jewish,” Stone explains. “Kulakov was very ambitious when he was young. When he applied for entrance into the military academy, in 1942 I think it was, he was smart enough to realize he wouldn’t get very far in Stalin’s bureaucracy with a Jewish father on his record. So he bribed someone to change the name of the father on his birth certificate and substitute the name of a family friend who had died in the war. This kind of thing was done all the time. Instead of a Jew for a father, he had a party member and a war hero. In the confusion of the war, with records being lost all the time, nobody caught up with him.”

  “And what happened to the real father?”

  “That’s the odd part,” explains Stone. “He’s still very much alive. His name is Davidov. Leon Davidov. He works as a janitor-handyman in the Ministry of Defense. Kulakov used to see him every now and then in the corridors. Sometimes they met in the men’s room for a few minutes. They would pee at adjoining urinals and exchange a few words. The last time Kulakov saw his father was when he came out of the duty office with the diplomatic pouch chained to his wrist and written orders to take it to Cairo. Davidov was on a ladder changing light bulbs in the hall. It must have been quite a moment. Kulakov passed right next to him, knowing he would never see him again. He gripped the old man’s ankle by way of goodbye. He broke down when he told us about this.” Stone shakes his head sadly. “What a world we live in.”

  Thro asks, “What was the real father like?”

  “Apparently the old man was frightened out of his skin during the Stalin years. He was arrested twice, once bec
ause he shared an apartment with someone accused of being a Trotskyist, another time because he listened, along with several others, to an anti-Stalin joke and didn’t denounce the storyteller. Somebody else did, and the law of the land specified you could be sent to prison for failing to denounce an enemy of the people. Davidov wound up doing what many people did: he was so frightened he’d be accused of being anti-Stalin that he became an ardent Stalinist. In a manner of speaking, he became more Catholic than the Pope. He read Stalin’s speeches in Pravda, memorized them and quoted them back word for word to everyone. Anybody who spoke to him came away convinced he was a great Stalinist. He was just crazy with fear, is all it was.”

  “My God, what a secret for Kulakov to carry around with him all these years,” says Thro.

  “The irony,” recounts Stone, “is that the charge they eventually brought against him was for lying about his family background in official documents—but they had him on the wrong lie. The man who was listed as his father turned out not to have been a war hero at all, at least that’s what the military prosecutor claimed. He showed Kulakov an old divisional war diary proving that the real Kulakov had been executed for desertion under fire. Kulakov denied knowing this so convincingly that the prosecutor gave him a lie dectector test—which he promptly flunked, since he was lying. Kulakov was caught. He couldn’t explain he wasn’t the son of an executed deserter and trot out as proof the Jewish father he’d hidden all those years. It would have only made matters worse.”

  “It’s an incredible story,” says Thro. “Stone, this must prove that he’s a genuine defector. They could never have set all this up.”

  “Oh, Kulakov’s telling the truth, all right,” agrees Stone. “That’s not what’s worrying me.”