Lucky Bastard
Authors: Charles McCarry
Lucky Bastard
Charles McCarry
Open Road Integrated Media ebook
To the memory of Richard Condon
The Talent Spotter
One
1
The professor thought that I looked like Lenin. He often said so; he had said so the first time we met, years before in Cuba. Now, in a Chinese restaurant in Harlem, he was saying so again.
“The faintlyâforgive meâMephistophelean regard,” he said. “The cheekbones, the forehead. Have you ever considered growing a beard?”
“No.”
Unlike the professor, who cultivated the Che Guevara lookâchestnut beard, green fatigues, romantic pallorâI was not trying to impersonate a terrorist. My goal was to look like a bourgeois intellectual who bought his clothes at Brooks Brothers, ate lunch in mid-town restaurants where the headwaiters knew him by name, and lived on the Upper West Side with a highly intelligent wife and two cats. My speech was Eastern Establishment in tone and word choice. My personal English tutor, Princeton '31, a ruined asset who had fled to Moscow in 1956 after the arrest of his handler, the great Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, had even taught me to write by the Palmer method.
Studying me, the professor said, “It's the eyes, the epicanthic fold. Really, Dmitri, it's uncanny! You and Vladimir Ilyich could have a common ancestor.”
Yes
, I thought,
a rapist on horseback, absentee father of Holy Russia.
The professor was babbling. Our meetings always excited him, but tonight he had other anxieties. He was a member of the underground, a spotter of talent at Columbia University. The last time we met, three months beforeâan eternity for an agentâI had reprimanded him. The young men and women he had recommended to me so far were of no possible interestâbourgeois neurotics who marched in demonstrations, thought in bumper stickers, took LSD, and spoke in tongues. Next time, I had said, bring me the real thing. Besides, he was not comfortable in these surroundings. The restaurant was noisy, smoke-filled, hot. We were the only whites in the place.
I will call him Arthur. From Arthur's point of view, this neighborhood was the heart of darkness. The truth was, my choice of meeting place was a punishment and a warning, and he understood this. He was afraid. He was ashamed of being afraid. He was a man of the Left. In the abstract he loved these loud, merry, downtrodden people. But in reality he was what he was, a nice bourgeois boy from the suburbs, and they terrified him.
The waiter, a dark-skinned Cantonese with wary eyes, gave us menus. In tone-deaf Mandarin (he had memorized one thousand ideograms as an undergraduate), Arthur quizzed him about the specialties of the house. The waiter clearly had no idea that Arthur was speaking Chinese. “Numbah six very spicy; Numbah five very good,” he replied.
Arthur asked me what I preferred. I told him to choose whatever he liked. He smiled approvingly, thinking no doubt that I was too much the Soviet man to eat for pleasure. He ordered Number five, mu shu pork with extra hoisin sauce, and Number six, whole grilled fish in chili sauce, with fried rice. And Chinese beer.
Arthur chattered on about Lenin. He had written his doctoral dissertation on the great man's private life, so he knew many out-of-the-way details. Was I aware that Vladimir Ilyich may have had Kalmyk blood? That he sang baritone in family musicales? Arthur pronounced the Russian forename and patronymic perfectly, with easy familiarity, as if in some earlier life he had sung folk songs with Lenin on that sealed train to the Finland Station, as if he had been entrusted to deliver secret messages for the revolution:
Hang fifty kulaks a day as a demonstration to the peasants.
The real Lenin, hater of romantics, would have added a postscript:
Shoot the bearer.
The food came. Arthur asked for chopsticks. The waiter handed them over and stayed for a moment to watch him take his first mouthfuls. Arthur nodded and spoke the Mandarin word for delicious. The waiter smiled; I wondered if he had spat into the food. I drank my beer, ate a little plain rice.
“Are you sure you don't want anything else?” Arthur asked.
“The MSG keeps me awake,” I replied.
Actually I was afraid of diarrhea, the spy's complaint; I had had a lot of that in Shanghai, my last post, although bad food was not the only reason for loose bowels during the Cultural Revolution. My assignment in China had been to penetrate the Red Guards and baptize a few converts for the future, and also to make certain assurances to old friends who were being taunted and whipped through the streets and exiled to hard labor in mines and farming communes. I gave them what help I couldâwhich is to say, noneâand promised them that the true cause would be waiting for them after the madness passed or (same thing) Mao died. Not many of them lived that long, or ever wanted to see another Russian if they did. But some did, as we shall see.
After that, my target in America, the campus antiwar movement, should have been easy. It was a soft target, in no way frightening or difficult, but I had made little progress. After a year of close observation I had concluded that the counterculture was not composed of serious people. Their rallies were just another form of entertainment, their slogans another kind of cheerleading. Their movement had no ideological core, no vanguard elite, no discipline. It was make-believe, a game, a holiday, a new kind of fraternity party. Combat boots instead of white bucks, drugs instead of beer, but the objectives were the sameâsex and intoxication. The true revolutionary makes revolution to escape from the inescapable. In America, nothing is inescapable. These children knew they could escape any time they wished simply by going home again, by acknowledging the reality of money and choosing it. American capitalism would roll over them like the irresistible ocean that it is. We, the real Left, the eternal Left, would be left holding a second mortgage on their idealism. They could not make revolution, but they could enable it when its moment came, when its leader emerged.
What I required, what I was looking for, was the leader. Once I had found him, history would make the moment. But first, the man. Revolutions almost always begin with one man. One man is all I ever hoped for. Arthur's job was to find him for me. He was not the only talent spotter we had recruited, of course; there were others like him on other campuses. But he was mine, and he was the one whose failures were freshest in my mind.
Arthur finished his food. He put down his chopsticks and said, “I think I've found someone for you.”
I said, “Name?”
This was not the question Arthur expected. He had been trained never to utter names in the presence of strangers. I repeated the question. He cleared his throat and murmured a reply. Music played very loudâa woman saying goodbye to lust. The people at the next table were making a lot of jovial noise. Arthur's voice was weak. I could not hear him. I made an impatient gesture:
Louder.
He paused, looking left and right for secret policemen.
“Speak up,” I said in a loud voice. “It's quite safe. The FBI has very few black agents. That's why we're here.”
Arthur leaned across the table and whispered a name.
I said, “Arthur, I can't hear you.”
He tried again. His voice broke; the words came out as a squeak. I shook my head, made a disgusted face.
At the next table a beautiful fat woman in a low-cut dressâlarge sarcastic eyes, skin the color of aubergineâturned and gazed at us, head to one side like some huge curious bird.
His voice breaking with the effort, Arthur shouted, “
Jack Adams!
”
I said, “Jack Adams? How long have you known this Jack Adams?”
“Two years,” Arthur replied.
“Two years? Two
years
? And this is the first time I hear his name?”
Arthur cleared his throat. “Sorry,” he said. He was deeply agitated nowâaverted eyes, trembling voice.
The fat beauty, bright-eyed and knowing, stared harder at Arthur. What
were
we? It was plain to see what she thought we were. We are taught in the craft that sometimes the best way to divert attention is to draw attention. I lifted Arthur's inert hand from the table and kissed it.
