The Debriefing Page 8

  “What is worrying you?”

  “What I’m worrying about,” Stone answers evasively, “is how the world will end. And when.”

  “Aside from the fact that you part your hair on different sides, you’re really very much alike,” Thro says out of the blue. She has slipped into his room to see if Stone wants to make love and has found him poring over the reports that came back from Topology.

  “How alike?” Stone asks, watching her strip off her bathrobe and climb into his bed. “Alike how?”

  “God, these sheets are cold,” she says. “You’re both victims, is how you’re alike. Kulakov once told me he went around for twenty-eight years carrying a sealed pouch from point A to point B. It strikes me as a pretty fair description of what you do, Stone.”

  Stone climbs into bed alongside her, presses his knee into her crotch, runs a hand over her breasts. “There’s a difference,” he says. “I know what’s in the pouch.”

  “Do you, Stone? Do you really?”

  Stone makes it a point to arrive at the motel room early, and routinely goes over it for bugs. As an added precaution, he has rented three rooms in a row, and uses the middle one for the meeting. Mozart arrives, as usual, precisely at the appointed time, lugging a briefcase with a new batch of Topology reports.

  “Morning, Stone.” Mozart greets his boss with no visible sign of deference. “How’s our courier holding out?”

  “Better than I am,” replies Stone. “What’ve you got for me today?”

  “Lots of dirt,” says Mozart, tossing a thick folder onto the bed, “but no nuggets.” And in his maddeningly efficient monotone, he gives Stone a rundown on what the Topology people have come up with. Kulakov, it seems, has gotten several addresses wrong. At one point he mentioned a film he had seen in Moscow, but according to Topology records, it didn’t open until a month after he said he saw it. He made an error in describing Natalia’s husband as a captain; at last listing, he was still a lieutenant. There is no railroad spur Hero Project in Irkutsk; there were avalanches in the area at the time, and some teams were sent out to reopen lines that had been cut.

  “That doesn’t add up to much either way,” muses Stone. “What else have you come up with?”

  “On the positive side, we’ve got the Russians trying to close the barn door after the horse has skedaddled,” says Mozart. “There are confirmed reports of military intelligence cleanup teams in Cairo and Athens, and cleanup is what they’ve been the embassy heavies in Athens who let Kulakov slip through their fingers have been flown home and charged with dereliction of duty. The second secretary who was in the car with them has been relieved and brought up on charges. The general in charge of the diplomatic courier service has been relieved. The deputy director of military intelligence has been transferred to the boondocks. Just about everyone who touched Kulakov has been in hot water. The driver who drove him to the airport, a civilian attached to the ministry car pool, was sent packing to a kolkhoz in the Ukraine. The admiral thinks—”

  Stone looks up sharply. “You’ve been in to see the admiral?”

  Mozart is very cool. “He summoned me,” he says, a pleasant smile spreading across his jowly features. “I didn’t initiate. He’s following this on a day-to-day basis.”

  “I’ll bet,” says Stone. “Have you come up with anything on Gamov?”

  For once Mozart looks blank. “Gamov?”

  “The duty officer who sent Kulakov on a courier run even though his name had been stricken from the active courier list,” Stone explains, not without some satisfaction.

  “That Gamov.” Mozart recovers quickly.

  “That Gamov,” says Stone, “should be in very hot water indeed.”

  Mozart chuckles gleefully. “He may be in the hottest water of all,” he tells Stone. “He’s disappeared without a trace. For all purposes, there simply is no Gamov.”

  Mozart also fills Stone in on what Charlie Evans over at the CIA has come up with on the cold paper. “The pouch was a gold mine,” he says. “There’s a series of letters from people at the Ministry of Defense to their Egyptian counterparts listing which spare parts for MIG 17s, 19s and 21s are available, and which aren’t. Working from these lists, the CIA expects to be able to make a very educated guess on how many of the MIGs in Egyptian hands are operational. The Israelis are already talking about some very attractive trade-offs for access to this information; they have an agent in place in Iran that they are offering to make available for starters. Then there is a personal letter to the ambassador’s daughter from a boyfriend of hers, describing bread riots in the city of Nordvik on the Laptev Sea. There’s another note to the military intelligence resident in Cairo, instructing him to tell a certain Ahmid—it’s obviously a code name—that ten thousand Swiss francs have been deposited in his account in the Swiss Bank Corporation in Zurich. There are also several personal letters, two typewritten, two handwritten. One’s a love letter, actually. And there’s a curious item that nobody’s figured out yet. It’s a note from a Russian in Geneva to his brother-in-law, who is a third secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Cairo. The letter, written in longhand, has five words: ‘Ti minyeh dolzhen sto rublei.’ ‘You owe me one hundred rubles.’ It’s signed, Khrustalev-Nosar.”

  “Did you check out the name at Topology?” Stone wants to know.

  Mozart nods. “Khrustalev-Nosar is a diplomat at the SALT disarmament talks. Thirtyish. Brilliant. Technocrat. He’s got scientific credentials and specializes in air-to-ground missile systems. There is apparently some suspicion that he’s connected with military intelligence.”

  Stone takes all this in. “What are your relations with Charlie Evans’s people?” he asks.

  “Cold. Correct.” And he adds sarcastically, “None of us is nicer than he has to be.”

  “You were talking about the actress,” Stone reminds Kulakov. “You were saying that it was her idea to move in with you, not yours.”

  They are strolling along an unpaved road that winds through the rolling hills near the farm. A civilian with a shotgun cradled in his arms follows discreetly behind. The air is cold, but clear. Kulakov has the collar of his sheepskin coat turned up and his head tucked turtlelike into it. The pace is brisk—too brisk for Kulakov, who has trouble walking and talking at the same time.

  “She didn’t have a Moscow residence permit,” Kulakov explains. “It was either move in with me or go back to Leningrad. Naturally, I preferred her in Moscow. So when she asked, I said yes.”

  “It didn’t strike you as unusual—her asking, I mean? Normally it’s the man who suggests this kind of arrangement.”

  Kulakov actually laughs. “You speak Russian like a native,” he says, “but you don’t really know Russia. There are thousands—maybe even tens of thousands—of people living like Gypsies in Moscow. They have no residence card, and without a residence card they have no right to a job or an apartment. It’s a vicious circle. They can’t get the residence card without the job and apartment; they can’t get the job and apartment without the residence permit. So they move in with friends or lovers and live na levo, as we say—on the left. She worked at a theater company in Leningrad, but she wanted to live in Moscow, so she was hunting for a film studio or a theater that would take her on. Meanwhile she had to live somewhere. It’s as simple as that.”

  Stone walks on for a while in silence. “How did you meet her?”

  “Meet whom? Oh, the actress. I met her at the Actors Union. I was dining there one night with a cousin who is the widow of an actor who looked exactly like Lenin from the back and always played him in films. Galya was at another table—we had exchanged looks two or three times, the way people will. At midnight they turned off the overhead lights to signal everyone to leave. We were lingering over cognacs. Galya walked straight up to me, leaned down and planted a kiss on my lips.” Kulakov smiles bitterly at the memory. “Just like that. She was very—how to put it?—unconventional. When I ran into her again, purely by accident, in the record store o
n Gorky Street—I was buying some new records to take to Nadia at the hospital—well, you know how it is. One thing led to another. And she asked if she could move in. I was alone, so I thought, where’s the harm?”

  “But things didn’t work out the way you thought they would?”

  Kulakov’s head emerges from his collar; his features are drawn, his eyes half closed and moist. “For which of us,” he says quietly, “do things work out the way we thought they would?” He shakes his head sadly. “Galya was a very beautiful woman on the outside, but very warped inside.”

  “How warped?” Stone asks.

  “Sexually, for one thing,” replies Kulakov. “She made demands that no man could satisfy. And she didn’t hide her lack of satisfaction. She seemed to take pleasure in humiliating me. She boasted about other loves she had known; about what she had done to them, and what they had done to her. She loved to describe things in great detail. No matter how much I tried to please her, it was never enough. She always wanted more.”

  They walk on for a hundred yards without saying anything; ahead, the farm comes into view on a rise: a main house, whitewashed clapboard, two stories, and two smaller outbuildings, one in brick, one in wood. The entire complex is surrounded by a whitewashed picket fence. Four cars are parked in various places around the complex, and two men with shotguns can be seen lounging in the shadows of the buildings. Stone knows that two more, also with shotguns, are playing cards inside the brick building, which serves as a storehouse for the farm’s arsenal—an assortment of Uzi submachine guns, grenades and one light mortar.

  “Did your actress friend leave before or after the charges were brought against you?” Stone asks.

  Kulakov thinks a moment. “I can’t remember,” he says. “It was a bad time for me, you understand. I lost track of the sequence. I remember a vicious argument when she turned up one night with another man and kissed him on the lips in front of me. But I don’t remember if it was before or after the charges.”

  “About the charges,” Stone says, “what was the first you heard of them?”

  “I had just come back from a run to Paris, and was due for a few days off. I got a phone call from someone at the ministry ordering me not to leave Moscow, and to be available at my phone between nine and six every day. I thought maybe there was another diplomatic run in the works. Two days later, I think it was, though now that I think of it, it might have been three or four, the call came through.”

  “But it wasn’t a diplomatic run?”

  Kulakov nods. One of the men with the shotguns waves from the farm, and Kulakov and Stone wave back. “I was ordered to report to room 666—I remember the three sixes—at ten the next morning, in uniform. The uniform part made me nervous; I seldom wore a uniform.”

  “And that’s when you met Colonel Koptin.”

  “Yes.” They are up to the picket fence now, and Stone stops so they can finish before they go in. “He was a decent enough fellow,” Kulakov says. “He seemed sorry to be doing what he was doing. He said that a routine background investigation, which is ordered up periodically for people who have access to very secret material, turned up the fact that I had lied about my father. I must have turned very pale when he said that; you see, I thought they had discovered the truth about my father being Jewish. Koptin came around the desk and brought a seat over for me, and then gave me a glass of water. And he explained that it had come out that my father had not been a war hero after all, but rather a deserter who had been executed for collaboration with the Nazi invaders. He even showed me the handwritten entry in the war diary noting the execution of someone named Kulakov. I denied everything—all this was news to me—and he noted my denials in the dossier. He even appeared to believe my denials were sincere—he asked me if I would submit to a lie detector test and became openly sympathetic to me when I instantly agreed. Then he showed me a memorandum, signed by his superior, ordering my name stricken from the active courier list. And he advised me to hire a lawyer, as there was a good chance that the case would come to trial. I asked him what the consequence of a guilty verdict would be. He said that for someone in my position, which is to say someone with access to very secret material, a conviction would go very hard. He said I could expect a jail sentence of not less than ten years, along with a dishonorable discharge and loss of all pension rights.”

  Thro comes out of the front door of the main house. “Anybody for lunch?” she calls.

  “Let’s eat,” says Stone.

  Thro’s skin is tingling from the Chinese tea disease. “I read it in Newsweek,” she says, pressing her fingers to her cheekbones. “By burning fossil fuels, we’re increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This curtain of carbon dioxide produces a greenhouse effect. So far, so good. Now, if we keep burning fossil fuels at the present rate, the atmosphere will be 5.4 degrees warmer than it is today by the year 2050. And that will turn the corn belt into desert.” Thro giggles hysterically. “The fact that there are enough nuclear weapons around to annihilate the world population 690 times over will be the least of our problems!”

  Mozart serves some Cantonese rice to the gorgeous blonde who claims her name is Clyde. She flashes a smile that has been perfected in front of a mirror and bats her false eyelashes at Kulakov as she passes the plate of rice to him.

  “Where’d you find her?” Mozart asks in English. (Kulakov doesn’t know she is a high-priced hooker, and Stone doesn’t want him to find out.)

  “It’s Thro who organized it,” Stone says.

  “You’ll have to fix me up sometime,” Mozart tells Thro.

  “Not on company money or time,” remarks Stone.

  They have been drinking whiskey and water, and are all slightly drunk.

  “Don’t you ever stop playing the boss?” taunts Mozart. “Don’t you ever let go?”

  Thro belches delicately into her hand and says, “Fair question.”

  The hooker leans closer to Kulakov so that her breast presses into his arm and whispers something in his ear. Stone holds his breath to get rid of hiccups, gazes at Mozart through half-closed eyes. Suddenly his breath spills out, along with a flow of words he can’t stop. “You know something, friend,” he blurts out, his face very close to Mozart’s. “I detest your generation. I really do.”

  Mozart takes the assault in his stride. He leans back in his chair and toys with his Phi Beta Kappa key. “What did you do to us that makes you hate us so much?” he asks arrogantly.

  “You see,” cries Stone. “That’s exactly the kind of smart-assed response you get from an Ivy Leaguer.” He appeals to Thro. “They’re always turning everything inside out.” Stone sways a bit, turns his gaze directly on Mozart. “My generation has the saving grace that it is honestly and deeply anti-Communist; we did what we did to avert a greater evil. But your generation is without beliefs. You have no center. You do what you do because you enjoy doing it. Espionage is an indoor sport to you. Jesus, you don’t really care about Communism one way or the other. If there were no Communists, you’d invent them to have someone to play with.”

  There is an embarrassed silence; Kulakov looks from one to the other, unable to follow the English.

  “Stone?” Thro tries to break it up.

  “You’ll never get my job, you know,” Stone tells Mozart evenly. He turns to Thro, who is tugging at his arm. “Over my dead body he’ll get my job.”

  Kulakov says in Russian, “What means, The victor belongs to the spoils’?”

  The hooker hangs on Kulakov’s every word. “What’s he saying?” she asks out of the corner of her mouth.

  “I read it in my English lesson yesterday,” Kulakov explains. And he repeats the F. Scott Fitzgerald phrase in halting English: “ ‘The victor belongs to the spoils.’ ”

  The hooker laughs at Kulakov’s accent. “He’s cute,” she says.

  Mozart says belligerently, “What makes you think I want your stinking job? Topology is a fossil fuel.”

  Thro explains the Fi
tzgerald phrase to Kulakov. “It’s a play on words, Oleg. The original is, ‘To the victor belong the spoils.’ ”

  Mozart repeats the phrase in Latin. Stone sneers.

  Kulakov says, “To this victor, no spoils. By the time I got to Germany, there was nothing left.” He raises an empty whiskey glass and clinks it against Stone’s bowl of rice. “To tell the truth, I had a great war. I was never bored.”

  Stone nods more than he should. “Me too,” he says. “I had a great war. I was sorry when it was over.” And he turns fiercely on Mozart. “How was your war, friend?”

  “It’s just started,” says Mozart. “It’s going, thank you for inquiring, very nicely.”

  The hooker tiptoes out of Kulakov’s motel room, finds a guard cradling a shotgun on duty outside his door. “Who pays me?” she whispers.

  The guard motions with his head to the next door. The hooker raps softly. Stone opens a crack, sees who it is, tells her to wait a moment. He returns and hands her an envelope through the partially open door. “How’d it go?” he asks.

  “He performed normally,” she answers. “They almost always do with me. Funny thing,” she adds, not a little touched, “is he cried like a baby afterwards.”

  Stone takes the shuttle from Washington, and a taxi from La Guardia Airport to the courthouse, all the time rehearsing pretty speeches—how a daughter needs a father figure in her life, how he will devote himself to her, how he is not competing with the mother but only complementing her. The lady lawyer, whose first name is Margaret and who signs her letters with an “Ms.” before her name, buttonholes him on the courthouse steps and leads him around the corner for a quick coffee. “Whatever you do,” she instructs him, “no pretty speeches. You keep quiet unless you’re asked a direct question. Remember that the judge has had every pretty speech in the book thrown at him. What he will be impressed with is a quiet, contained man who has his wits about him. Relax. Look confident. Leave everything to me.”

  Stone’s ex-wife is there, looking leaner and meaner than he remembered her. “Alice.” He calls her name and moves toward her, but she turns her back and says something to her lawyer, a heavy-set man who looks like a monseigneur in civilian clothes.