Lucky Bastard (10 page)

“Are you going to tell Jack why we are doing all this for him?”

“Of course not,” Peter replied. “He will be unwitting.”

You blink? You wonder if Peter was mad? Resist the impulse to disbelieve. Peter was not mad. He was something even more unsettling, an original thinker. To Peter, the student of the American psyche, this plan to make the ultimate dream of the KGB come true was not a grandiose objective. It was an obvious operational objective that needed only the right plan, the right touch, and above all, the right asset to succeed.

“Let's swim out a little farther,” Peter said.

As before, he spoke in a conversational voice, but with his back to the shore so that his words would be carried out to sea. Useless precautions are the silent prayers of espionage. Between us and the beach, half a mile away, several swimmers approached, round dark heads bobbing in the swell: the same smiling boys and girls who had driven us into the water earlier by shadowing us, offering delights, as we walked along the sand. These children were no threat to our secrets. All they were interested in was money. But Peter had ordered me to meet him here, at a resort hotel on a remote point of land, so that we would be absolutely alone. He had imagined that we would be undisturbed. And as always, he insisted on having precisely what he had imagined.

Farther out, the surf was higher. We rose and fell several meters each time a sluggish wave rolled in from the open sea. We swam clumsily in our plastic doughnuts. It was quite unsafe to be so far from the grip of the land. Even the little prostitutes, who swam like fishes, thought so; they turned back. I am not at ease in tropical waters. I wonder about sharks, barracuda, treacherous undertows that might sweep one out to sea.

Oblivious to exterior realities, Peter resumed his monologue. He had been thinking about this project for years, looking for the right man, waiting for the right moment. Now the Vietnam War, combined with pathological fear and loathing for that nemesis of the faithful, Richard Nixon, had provided the moment. History had turned America upside down. Golden opportunities were falling out of its pockets.

Jack Adams was just the man to snatch these opportunities; Peter was sure of it.

I said, “The fact that he seems to be a born liar doesn't bother you?”

“Lies are the truth of the Left,” Peter said, flicking my question off the table like a crumb. “The revolution has always lied about everything for its own reasons. So does Jack for
his
own reasons. We will make the reasons the same.”

Peter continued with his main line of reasoning. Jack's humble origins were precisely the thing that made him the ideal lump of clay. With rare exceptions, American presidents came from exactly such origins. Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Carter—all were nobodies from nowhere, poor boys like Jack who escaped from obscurity as a result of highly unlikely combinations of circumstances.

“Almost always they are from families that are not merely humble, but scorned,” Peter said. “Religious fanatics, bankrupts, outcasts. There is always a deus ex machina involved: The unlettered Truman catches the eye of a political boss, the charming athlete Eisenhower is appointed to West Point, the resentful lone wolf Nixon answers a want ad and is elected to Congress. Only in America.”

Jack Adams's deus ex machina would be us—or, rather, Peter.

No one must ever know about our hidden hand. Not even Jack. And especially not Moscow. We would run this operation outside the apparatus. To the rest of the KGB, Jack would be just another ineffectual American asset, another of Peter's wild gambles, a waste of time and money.

I said, “A question. This is going to cost a lot of money. If Moscow knows nothing about this operation, how will we pay for it?”

“Certain arrangements have been made,” Peter said.

That was all he told me, then or later. It was all I needed to know. I assumed he had devised some way to bury the expenses of this operation in the labyrinthine budget of his directorate—called “Peter's Follies” by the rest of the KGB. He pounded into my head the absolute necessity of compartmenting Jack from the espionage directorates. They must never know how important Jack was, they must never be able to touch him, never be able to demand their money's worth, because they would destroy him with their stupidity, just as they had destroyed Alger Hiss.

I said, “Alger Hiss? I thought he belonged to the neighbors.”

The neighbors
is slang for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, to whose Washington network Hiss, an American diplomat, was said to have belonged in the 1930s and 1940s.

“He did,” Peter replied, “but they are all alike. All they can think about is stealing secrets. They destroyed an asset who was in a position to give history a shove by sabotaging U.S. foreign policy—blew their own agent. And why? So that he could rifle wastebaskets in his spare time. They would do it again.”

This Hiss story, said Peter, was a political Passion play, a triumph of faith over reality. Hiss may have been convicted in a court of law on the basis of secrets copied down in his own hand and handed over to the Russians, but the progressive element in the United States adamantly—furiously—refused to believe in his guilt. For half a century—and this was the part that Peter loved because it was such an inspired diversion—they defended Hiss's innocence as if it were their own, which of course it was, since this fallen angel was the archetype of the good liberal. By admitting that he was something other than he seemed to be, they would be admitting that they also had something to hide. They wore his clothes, spoke in his vocabulary, thought his thoughts. To those who were so much like him, Hiss was not a traitor but a prophet sent from the twentieth-century version of heaven—the socialist motherland—only to be condemned before his work was done by an ignorant mob controlled by a corrupt priesthood of reactionaries, the Republican Party.

“It's the Jesus story all over again,” Peter said, “with Marx as the father, Alger as the son, Whittaker Chambers as Judas, the FBI as the Romans, Nixon as Pontius Pilate, and the liberals as the disciples, preaching the word, proclaiming the holiness of the martyr. Do you understand the opportunity, the
power
this puts in our hands? The holy spirit is in them unto the third generation. They are an unconscious underground, demanding no support, requiring no instruction, driven by blind faith and the thirst for revenge. All we have to do is give them another Messiah who reminds them of Alger and this time they will kidnap him from the cross. Alive.”

Gulls circled and cried overhead, as if summoned by Peter's wisdom. He treaded water until they went away. Then he returned to his parable.

“The same people who beatified Alger will discover and love Jack—the Jack we are going to design for them,” Peter said. “They will invest every kopeck of their moral and political capital in him as soon as they hear him speak in parables. To them, Jack's weaknesses will be strengths, his lies truths, his crimes miracles.”

“His masters invisible?”

“Not entirely. We must give them signs. Everything depends on their understanding exactly how this rabbit was pulled out of the hat.”

Peter's contempt for those Americans who loved us was breathtaking, but that is the revolutionary's way. All that mattered to him was the outcome. He would gladly use fools to gain his ends—in fact he could hardly attain his ends without their help. And then he would shoot them before they did to him what they had done to their own country. He would no more let such weaklings survive than he would marry another man's worn-out widow after screwing her for twenty years of secret afternoons in her late husband's bed.

Unlike Hiss, who was never more than the bureaucratic equivalent of a gentleman's gentleman, a valet to the Old Guard, Jack would fight the good fight in the open, proud of his beliefs, always on camera, eager to answer any question, his whole being written on his face. Talking the talk, smiling the smile.

“But first we must bind him to us,” Peter said. “I have made certain arrangements in Heidelberg.”

“Who do we have in Heidelberg?”

“An old friend named Manfred,” Peter said. “He arrives tomorrow, to meet you. Manfred loves beaches.”

Manfred was a lecturer in political philosophy at Heidelberg University, a talent spotter like Arthur, but a more serious person, with more serious resources. Every August he was rewarded for his difficult and valuable work with an all-expenses-paid holiday at a beach. These were working holidays; he always spent a day or two with Peter or one of his men, who gave him his next assignment. Sometimes Manfred went to Tunisia, sometimes to Greece, once to an island in the Indian Ocean—wherever skies were blue and skins were dark.

This year he was recreating himself in Haiti, and I would give him his instructions. To prepare me for this task, Peter sketched in the Heidelberg phase of his plan for Jack Adams. He mentioned individuals, wild young vandals who called themselves terrorists. Their cases were familiar to me.

“Give them latitude,” Peter said. “They're very creative. And they're expendable, as long as Jack is protected.”

I said, “You see the risks. These kids are mad, unpredictable.”

“That will help Jack remember his adventures all the more vividly,” Peter said.

That evening by the swimming pool he introduced me to Manfred.

“You can have absolute confidence in Dmitri,” Peter said. “He is my opposable thumb.”

Manfred, the screwdriver Peter had just handed to me, smiled in quiet satisfaction at the subtlety of the image: revolutionaries as the users of tools, all others as apes.

We made our arrangements. Then I left Manfred among the urchins.

2
Heidelberg, a living postcard, was the first foreign city Jack had ever seen. Arriving by train from Frankfurt, he thought it looked like a set for a Hollywood musical about a prince in disguise—his favorite story line. Manfred met him at the Hauptbahnhof, claiming to be an old friend of Arthur's, who by this time was moldering in a Cuban grave and was in no position to deny it. Manfred took him to lunch in a student hangout, then drove him to the old quarter, where garret rooms had been engaged for Jack. The dormer windows looked out on a narrow cobbled street. All very picturesque: heraldic Teutonic shields carved into the ancient stones, leaning eaves all but touching so as to admit only a thread of light. As if on cue, zither music drifted through a window: the
Third Man
theme, issuing from a television.

As Jack soon discovered, this romantic medieval exterior concealed a bloated capitalistic Heidelberg, awash in the new money of the German economic miracle and drenched in counterculture sex and politics that were far more intense, far darker than anything he had known in the United States. On his second night in town, a Saturday, Manfred invited him to dinner at a cellar restaurant in the old town. Like the city itself, the rathskeller was a peep show into a vanished Germany. Oompah Muzak played in the background. Waitresses in dirndls and white knee socks rushed about serving mugs of beer and having their bottoms patted by hearty fat men who stuffed enormous tips into their aprons.

Most of the girls were pretty in the smooth-skinned German fashion. Jack was immediately alert. A waitress bustled up to the table. Manfred ordered a Pilsner, Jack his usual Coca-Cola.

“No, no. You must have beer,” Manfred said.

Jack held up a hand in firm refusal. “No thanks. I don't drink alcohol.”

“But beer is not alcohol! It is—”

Jack interrupted. “Liquid bread. I know. But I don't want any.”

Jack waited for Manfred to ask him why. This was an opportunity to establish a bond with this new acquaintance by revealing that he had grown up in a house with an alcoholic. However, Manfred's attention was directed elsewhere. Ignoring Jack, he stood up and waved. A red-haired girl, standing on the stairway at the other end of the long, low room, saw him and returned his greeting with a sullen gesture.

She headed toward their table, striding purposefully past parties of old men who gazed at her in astonishment as she passed. The girl wore boots, a miniskirt, a Bundeswehr camouflage field jacket, and a long student scarf. An ancient green rucksack was slung over her shoulder by its one remaining strap. Her red hair was wild, curly, uncombed. She marched as if in uniform—which in a way she was. She could hardly have caused a greater stir if the year had been 1930, and memories of the Kaiser were as fresh in customers' minds as Hitler was now, and she was the first storm trooper any of these people had ever seen.

“Here comes someone I want you to meet,” Manfred said.

Jack pushed back his chair, legs squealing on the stone floor, and stood up.

The girl arrived, a scowling pale face inside a mare's nest of Titian curls.

Up to then, Manfred and Jack had been speaking German—slow, textbook German to accommodate Jack's unpracticed ear and tongue, but German nevertheless. Manfred made the introductions in English. “Greta Fürst, please meet Jack Adams from the United States.”

Greta said, “An Ami? For God's sake, Manfred, why?”

Jack held out his hand. Greta ignored it. In slurred, barely enunciated German, the worldwide accents of youthful scorn, she said, “Don't tell me he can't even speak German?”

Her eyes, heavily made up, were green, intelligent, and icy with contempt.

Jack said, “I like your voice, Greta. You sound like Marlene Dietrich in
The Blue Angel.
”

Greta stared at him in disbelief. “God!” she said.

“Just the voice,” Jack said. “You're much thinner than she was then.”

Manfred said, “Sit down, Greta. Join us for some supper.”

“No thanks. I'm not hungry.”

“Something to drink, then.”

“I'm not thirsty.”

“Then at least sit down.” Greta sat down. To the waitress Manfred said, “Bring her a lager, please. And three mixed sausages.”