BOOK I (4 page)

to see the mosaics and decorative brickwork of the church. What do you think? Piotr Borisovich had demanded, delighted to have come up with something in Moscow that the novator didn't know about. What I think, the Potter had responded, is that religion is the opiate of the people.

Piotr Borisovich had laughed like a schoolboy. But what do you think? he had persisted, trying as usual to get past the cliché. Speaking as an atheist, the Potter had observed, I think that no amount of mosaics can obscure the fact that a church is essentially a lie. Piotr Borisovich had shaken his head. You forget what Spinoza said, he had remarked, his voice unaccustomedly moody: there are no lies, only crippled truths.

Crippled truths, the Potter reflected now, making his way up a dark staircase, the stench of urine drifting past his nostrils at each landing, may be better than no truths at all. In what sense? he could imagine Piotr Borisovich inquiring encouragingly. In the sense, he could hear himself replying, that if something is worth doing, an argument can be made that it is worth doing badly.

The Potter struck a match and peered at the number on the door. It was missing, but the outline of where it had been was unmistakable. The Potter shook out the match and deposited it in a trouser cuff and knocked lightly on the door.

"Come."

The room had two windows with their shades drawn and an uncomfortably bright electric light and two folding metal chairs and a calendar on a wall set to the previous month.

"We are September, not August," the Potter observed. He walked over and tore off August and crumpled it into a ball and tossed it onto the floor. As an afterthought, he glanced behind the calendar. All he found was more wall.

"So," said the man sitting on one of the two folding metal chairs. He was of medium height, unshaven, with a silver-rimmed pince-nez wedged onto the bridge of a long, lean Roman nose. "I thank you for taking advantage of our taxi service."

"Your precautions were impeccably professional," the Potter said.

The man accepted this with a nod. "Coming from the novator, I take that as a compliment. I shall pass it on to my associates, yes? They too will take it as a compliment."

He was being buttered up, the Potter realized, by the man with the accent he couldn't quite place. There was a hint of German in it, a hint of Polish; a Ukrainian, perhaps, who had spent his formative years in a German concentration camp in Poland. Or a Pole who had been pressed into the Red Army. Or a bilingual German.

"So," the man began again, clearing his throat nervously, "for the purpose of this conversation, it may be useful for me to have a name, yes?"

"It would be useful," the Potter agreed.

"You will call me Oskar. So: my associates and I are prepared to get you out of the country-

"I have a wife," the Potter said stiffly.

"When I speak of you, it goes without saying I mean you and your wife."

"Such details go with saying," the Potter corrected him grimly.

"I take your point," Oskar acknowledged affably.

"You talk of getting us out of the country. Out of the country where?"

"Initially, you will go to Vienna, yes? The debriefing will be conducted there. In pleasant surroundings, it goes without ... it goes with saying. The representatives of several intelligence services will want to buy time with you. After all, it is not every day that we can come up with a novator, yes?"

"Yes," the Potter agreed. Buy time. That made Oskar a free-lancer.

Though in all probability he was a free-lancer on a leash. But whose leash? "It is not every day."

"After Vienna," Oskar continued, "we will supply you with identities, with a legend, with bank accounts, with a modest business even. A pottery studio might be appropriate. You can live where you want."

"Could we go to Paris?"

Oskar smiled for the first time. "You have been to Paris, yes?"

"Yes." In fact the Potter had passed through Paris on the way back from his tour of duty in New York. "My wife dreams of it."

"Paris is entirely within the realm of possibility," Oskar said with the tone of someone who considered the matter settled.

"How do you plan to get us out of the country?" the Potter wanted to know.

Oskar permitted himself a gesture of impatience. The Potter politely retracted the question. Oskar said, "That brings us to the part of the conversation where you suggest what, specifically, you can otter to us to justify our efforts, not to speak of our risks."

The Potter suppressed a faint smile. " 'Justify' in the sense of provide financial profit?"

Oskar knew he had to choose his words carefully. "If we decide to get you out, we will want to be rewarded for our efforts. It is a fact of life that there are organizations in the West that will pay generously for your information. But you misjudge us if you think the money is for us. It will fund projects designed to undermine a regime, a system, a philosophy that we consider odious." Lowering his voice to a whisper, Oskar intoned Dostoevsky's famous phrase, "Where there is sorrow and pain, the soil is sacred, yes?"

"Yes," the Potter remarked dryly. Somehow he believed Oskar. He had the look of an idealist, which is to say the look of someone with a short life expectancy. "My having been a novator-doesn't that, in itself, justify your efforts, your risks?"

Oskar shrugged.

"There were circuits in New York," the Potter said softly. He had been trained to keep secrets; giving them away didn't come naturally. "There was an entire rezidentura. There was an istochnik-a source of information-in the United Nations Secretariat."

"So: that was all some time ago," Oskar noted. "And you have been out of circulation for six months now."

"Try it out on your principals," the Potter insisted. "In any case, it is all I have to offer."

"Of course I will try it out," Oskar said. "But I suspect that your rezidentura, your istochnik, are what the Americans call"-here he switched to English-"old hats." Speaking again in Russian, he added,

"You are familiar with the expression, yes?"

"Yes," repeated the Potter, remembering Piotr Borisovich's ancient fedora, wondering what he had gotten himself into; wondering if in the end they would get out of him the thing he valued more than the pupil of his eye. "I am painfully familiar with old hats."

Oskar inserted a key and let himself in the service door. It was a little-used back entrance to a stuffy transit hotel on Sushchevsky Bank Street, behind the Riga Station. The narrow service stairs hadn't been swept in years, but then the few people who used it generally had other things on their minds besides cleanliness. The doors on all the floors except the fourth were bolted shut. Upstairs, Oskar felt his way along the pitch-dark corridor, one hand on the wall, the other raised protectively before his eyes. It occurred to him that the people who frequented the fourth floor could easily afford to supply light bulbs, but probably felt more comfortable in the dark. At the third door along the corridor wall, Oskar knocked and then entered without waiting for an invitation. He stuffed his scarf into the sleeve of his raincoat, and hung it on the clothes tree alongside the two mink coats. So: if the Cousins were wearing their mink coats now, when it was not even freezing out, God knows what they would do in January when the temperature could drop to minus thirty. Well, everyone had his threshold of pain, or cold, or corruptibility, yes? It remained to be seen what the Potter's was.

The blind man recognized Oskar's footfall. "You're early," he called,

"which means things went badly."

"Things went quickly," Oskar corrected him. "It would have been very curious-suspicious even, yes?-if he had offered us precisely what we wanted the first time around."

"He needs to marinate," agreed the other man in the room.

The blind man tapped his baton against his shoe impatiently. "He should be pushed," he insisted. "You could play the tape recording of the meeting back to him. He has already done enough to merit a firing squad."

"With all respect," the younger Cousin said-he was, after all, dealing with someone who, on paper at least, was his superior-"he needs to be pulled, not pushed."

"He has a violent temper, yes?" Oskar noted. "If he crosses frontiers, whether physical or psychological, he must have the impression that he is controlling his own destiny."

"What will you do now?" the blind man asked, conceding to the others the question of pace.

"So," Oskar said, "I will report back to my German Merchants. Then I will sit by the phone and reflect on what the peasants say-that all things come to those who wait, yes?"

Carroll and Francis were confirmed bachelors. It wasn't that they didn't like women; they just didn't trust them. And what sex drive either came equipped with at birth had long since been channelled into other pursuits. Carroll lived with an unmarried sister in a rented apartment in Georgetown. Francis lived alone in a downtown residence hotel with a kitchenette crawling with cockroaches. He sprayed once a week, ironed his own shirts, darned his own socks and except on Tuesdays and Fridays made his own dinners. On Tuesdays he grabbed a bite in a delicatessen and went to a motion picture; to a spy film whenever possible. On Fridays he dined out with Carroll. They had been meeting Fridays more or less to review their week's work since they began sharing an office, some twelve years before. For eight of those years they had been faithful to a particular Chinese restaurant. Then they discovered the chef sprinkled monosodium glutamate on all his dishes. Now they ate Chinese health food.

Francis lifted the metal lid on his dish from Column B and sniffed suspiciously at the contents. The gesture annoyed Carroll. "I don't know how you can be so calm," he whispered fiercely. His own face was a mask of frustration. "After what's happened...”

"Nothing happened that wasn't expected," Francis said.

"What if he doesn't have what we want?" Carroll whined.

For a moment Francis thought his partner might actually burst into tears. "The Potter was the novator," he reminded Carroll. "He was in charge of the sleeper school. He has it."

"Imagine offering us a ten-year-old rezidentura, or an istoclinik at the United Nations! What does he take us for, amateurs?"

"You act as if he meant it as a personal insult," Francis reproached Carroll. "He's dealing with freelancers, remember, not us. He was simply testing the temperature of the water."

"I hope to God you're right," Carroll said. The muscle in his cheek twitched several times, then stopped of its own accord. "Our whole scheme depends on him."

Francis eyes narrowed; some music was forming in the back of his brain.

"I'm just thinking out loud, but it might not do any harm to shake him up a bit. ..."

Carroll snapped his fingers; lyrics had leapt into his head. "What if we sent him the names of the rezidentura and the istoclinik”?

"I knew you'd come up with something," Francis remarked, and he tucked the corner of his napkin into his collar to protect his taxicab-yellow bow tie and attacked the plate of whole-wheat noodles, Chinese cabbage and steamed shrimp.

"Svetochka," moaned Svetochka, kicking off her worn suede boots, collapsing into an easy chair that badly needed recovering, "is dead."

She had just come back from the store with two tins of salted fish, a kilo of onions, a box of rice. "Seven lines," she moaned, feeling very sorry for herself. "One for the fish, one for the onions, one for the rice. That's three. Then one to pay the cashier. That makes four. Then back to the first line to collect the fish, another to collect the onions, a third to collect the rice. That's seven. You know your Lenin, Feliks, is there something in it about Communism needing lines?"

The Potter smiled for the first time in days. "There are lines because there are shortages," he explained.

"And why," Svetochka demanded, massaging the balls of her feet, "if everybody is working according to their ability, do we still have shortages?"

The Potter helped himself to some more vodka. "In the old days, before the revolution, they used to say that the shortage would be divided among the peasants. Now we are fairer-we divide the shortage among everyone. That's Communism-"

"Well," she replied with a sigh, "Svetochka preferred it when you had your ration privileges at the food center. The people who work there are much more polite." A faraway look crept into her eyes; she might have been talking about heaven. "They even have someone who opens the door for you when your arms are loaded. They recommended things. The lettuce is especially fresh, they say." Tears spilled from her eyes. "Lettuce in winter God knows where it came from. The okra is from Central Asia, they say. The oranges from Cuba. Try-"

"Enough." The Potter cut her off" with an impatient wave of his hand.

"You have one answer for everything, Feliks. Enough! I've had enough of your enough! When we first met you had a ration at the food center and a dacha and a chauffeured automobile when you phoned up for one. You came home from that warehouse of yours with something for Svetochka almost every day. I wore lipstick colors nobody in Moscow ever saw before."

"Enough," muttered the Potter. He felt as if he were being tuned too high.

"You said you would take your Svetochka to Paris one day," she taunted him. "You said we would take the elevator to the top of an enormous steel tower and look out over the world and laugh our heads off."

The Potter tilted his head onto the back of his chair and closed his eyes tiredly. "What if I told you I would still take you to Paris?" he asked quietly.

She flung herself at his feet, hugged his knees. "Oh, Feliks, if only you could! Svetochka doesn't want to grow old without making love in Paris. We'd make love before dinner, the way we used to. Do you remember what an appetite you had afterward?"

"I still have an appetite," the Potter commented bitterly. He opened his legs and felt her nestle between them. "I lost my job and my ration and my dacha and my chauffeured automobile, but I never lost my appetite."

The second meeting took place in the second taxi. Oskar was driving.