Lucky Bastard (46 page)

“You asked for money in a hurry,” I replied. “Peter provided it in a hurry. Is the twenty-seven million going to be enough to get Jack through the primaries?”

“It should be,” she said. “If we can get it out of the mattress and onto the street.”

“How will you do that?”

“The governor has an idea.” She smiled, on-off. “He's very experienced.”

I did not like this—an outsider fingering our money. I said, “Explain.”

“The governor's idea is to resurrect rejected loan applications,” she said. “Change the bank's mind. Loan the failed applicants, mostly shady business people anyway, more than they asked for—much more.”

“Why?”

“To shake loose some cash. If, for example, a real estate venture needs five hundred thousand dollars in capital, we loan it a million and a quarter and take back the extra seven-fifty in cash.”

I figured in my head. “Using those figures, you'd net only fifteen million. You said Jack needs twenty million. At least.”

“The governor thinks we can milk the businesses for another five million or so,” she said.

“How?”

“Lean on them.”

“You'd still be throwing seven million dollars away.”

“What choice do we have? Anyway, it won't amount to that much in the end. These are business ventures that are designed to fail, understand?”

“Perfectly.”

“So after the campaign, they'll all go quietly bankrupt, a process that takes months, and vanish from sight as if they never existed.”

“What happens to the bank?”

“It fails. Vanishes out of our lives. Everything is sterilized.”

I said, “You actually think you can get away with this?”

“Why not?” Morgan replied. “Jack's name doesn't appear on a single piece of paper connected to the bank.”

“What about you?”

“My name will come up, but only as an adviser, not as a responsible officer of the bank. I have possession of all that paper, and it will vanish with the bank.”

I said, “Did the governor really think this up?”

Morgan smiled a mysterious smile. “By now he thinks he did. That's why you sent me to the B School, Daddy.”

“Could I stop this if I wanted to?”

“No.”

“Then I hope you're as smart as Harvard thought you were. Next subject.”

“Thank God.”

With money out of the way Morgan was, as always, calmer. Alas, this would not last. “Morgan,” I said, “I have something to tell you.” Then I delivered Peter's message, verbatim.

Morgan said, “This is our last meeting? What do you mean by that?”

“That we will not meet again.”

She was stricken. “You're joking.”

“No.”

“You're going to leave me? Now? In the middle of everything? One step from the end? What are you
talking
about?”

She was shrieking with anger and pain. I could not have upset her more by announcing my own death. She beat me with her fists. An old couple, walking to their car, heard her through the closed windows and stared. The blue-haired wife clucked. More of those foulmouthed Democrats. She peered into the car. Morgan was not yet as famous as Jackie, but her picture had been in the media. Like an embarrassed husband I pulled her head onto my shoulder and said, “Morgan, calm yourself.”

Bony skull, elbow in the ribs; there was nothing soft about her.

“Listen,” I said.

I delivered Peter's message, nothing more.

Morgan was stunned. “What do you mean, the KGB is after Peter, after you? You
are
the KGB.”

“No longer. Everything is changing.”

“Are they after me?”

“No. They don't know about you. Or Jack.”

She stared. No doubt she had imagined that the chaps in Moscow gossiped about her, wondered how a mere American, a female, a romantic, a walk-in, could do such brilliant work. She said, “They don't know about us? What are you telling me?”

“That Peter took precautions. That he knew this day might come. That he protected you.”

She fell into a silence. Then, at last: “Where is he?”

“I have no idea,” I replied. “And soon you will have no idea where I am.”

“I'll be alone?”

“For the time being.”

“How long is this ‘time being' of yours?”

“As far as I am concerned, forever. But—”

“No!” She pounded the instrument panel, a single hard blow with both fists.

I said, “Comrade Major, you know the rules. It is for your own protection. It is temporary. I am not the only fish in Peter's sea.”

I handed her a cell phone, an early model, bulky by later standards. “Keep this with you at all times. It's your only link.”

She stared at the phone as if it were an urn that contained her own ashes.

“The call from Peter will come on this phone. After the nomination. The voice will not necessarily be Peter's.” I told her the code phrase.

She said, “‘I come from the fisherman'? I'm supposed to wait for a fucking phone call? That's
it
? Jesus!” Stricken to the heart, wide-eyed, she stared at me in shattered disbelief. “Fucked again,” she said. “Thanks a lot, Dmitri.”

She rolled down her window and gulped air. Stern and fatherly for the last time—what would she do in the future when she needed this?—I said, “Close the window, Morgan. Stop mutilating yourself.”

“
Mutilating myself?
” She held up the cell phone. “This is my reward for twenty years of masturbation? Do you know what you're telling me, Dmitri? You're telling me that the world is coming to an end.”

“Yes, but not history. You know it's true. But that was the reason for you, the reason for Jack. To keep history from coming to an end. To keep life alive.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Her voice broke.

I said, “Peter is loading the revolution onto Noah's ark.”

“Jack is his Noah, for Christ's sake? You want me to believe that?”

“In a word, yes. We will start it up again. This time in America. This time correctly. That was always the idea.”

Tears now. “You really believe that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Because otherwise, as you said in Boston, we have wasted our lives.”

She was silent. Then she broke into sobs, covering her face, turning on the radio loud, as if it would be fatal if her grief were overheard. She had not felt the same just moments before, when she was shouting instead of weeping—anger was supposed to be audible, otherwise what was the use of it?

I handed her my handkerchief. “I'm sorry,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “This is very hard.”

“Yes. But necessary. This operation must not fall into the wrong hands. They are changing in Moscow, accommodating themselves to defeat. We must not.”

“Suppose they come to me?”

“They may try. Anything is possible. Unless they speak the phrase I have just given you, they are not from Peter. If they are impostors, call the FBI.”

“You're joking.”

“Far from it. What would the wife of any other candidate do if the KGB showed up on her doorstep? Believe me, if you put the feds on them they will go away and stay away.”

We had finished our dinner. As was our invariable custom after one of these picnics, we put the garbage in order, separating it according to fingerprints—the flimsy Big Mac package for me, the more substantial french fries container for Morgan. No sleuth would ever know, by lifting prints from grease and ketchup, that we had shared a final meal before I vanished into the desert and she became first lady.

At last I said—actually said—“This is goodbye.” I said it in Russian.

In Russian, Morgan replied, “This is unbearable. Peter can't ask this of us.”

“He can ask anything and we must do it.”

She seized me—the last thing I expected—and pulled me to her. She kissed me on the lips, a sweet, lingering, undaughterly kiss. I tasted the salt of her tears. Also the french fries, the flavor of childhood. She held me, convulsive with sorrow. I felt the heat of her body through her thin American clothes; she wasn't dressed warmly enough. This worried me, as it had worried me in Boston.

Sexually I felt nothing. How could I when she had been entrusted to me? But in my soul I realized—even though I already knew it—that I loved her. That she loved me. That if we had met as professor and student instead of handler and agent I would have divorced a wife as I could not divorce the mad and inescapable thing I was actually married to. Never before had I allowed myself such a thought. I was shaken by it now. At firsthand, at last, I felt what I had spent my life observing others feel: loss, regret, guilt, the misery of acts never completed. I felt jealousy of my successor. I was angry at him, the son of a bitch.

Without another word, I got out of the car with my paper sack full of Russian fingerprints, walked across the snowy pavement, and deposited my trash in the can. Morgan's headlights flashed twice. She stopped beside me and, for perhaps ten seconds, looked at me longingly—yes, that is the word—before driving away.

In the blinking of an eye, her car vanished. I wept. Yes. Because I understood, and so did she. We were not saying goodbye to each other. We were, each in our own way, saying goodbye to Russia. Like a couple of old Bolsheviks who had outlived their passion, we had been erased from the official photograph.

5
Driving down Interstate 91 through a snowstorm, I pondered the question of the twenty-seven million dollars. The amount staggered me. How could Peter—on the day before he was going to be disgraced, perhaps even tortured, almost certainly shot—disburse such an enormous sum to an asset? It was contrary to all procedures to do what he had done. This suggested two possibilities: (1), he had, improbably, forged the director's signature, stolen twenty-seven million dollars in secret funds and somehow transferred the loot to Escobar's tiny bank in remotest Amazonia; or (2), the sum in question was not the KGB's money.

If the answer was (2), whose money was it?

The truth seemed obvious. I had always assumed, and Peter had encouraged me to assume, that funds for Jack came from his share of the drug trade. But I had also assumed that he ran this money through the KGB mill before distributing it to his operatives. This was only an assumption. Certainly Peter had never told me any such thing. Now it seemed possible that this was not the case, that he had simply deposited all those tainted millions in the most unlikely bank in the world and then spent it, raw and unlaundered, on operations that had not been approved by Moscow and therefore were not controlled by Moscow.

It made the blood run cold. Why? Why would even Peter take such a chance, commit such a folly? If they came to suspect him, they would kill him. But not before he told them everything. And then they would kill me, and everyone else, too.

As if Morgan's kiss had infected me with her naïveté, I was stunned by the realization that I was now alone, utterly alone. Falling snow whirled hypnotically in the headlights of my rented Buick. Driving with the utmost caution, peering into the cone of fragmented light, I fell into something resembling a trance. Faces and figures from the distant past drifted across the bleak landscape of my memory, as across an endless expanse of snow. A dog I had known in childhood, which had somehow escaped being eaten, found me on this vast and empty steppe—just the two of us suspended in a prison of space, a black-and-tan dog with wagging tail, a boy of ten who was walking across Siberia, both with empty stomachs. Why did we walk together instead of one killing and eating the other? We must not have been in Russia after all.

The dog and I entered a birch forest. The dog scented something and ran away. I came upon a man in white, sweeping a path in the snow. It was the man in ski trooper camouflage who had swept away Peter's footprints. I remembered the broom—a big, efficient broom with a varnished wooden stick and wonderfully supple straw. It made the snow fly, it left the path as smooth as powder; it had a life, a purpose, of its own. Like the man who had made this broom, the man who wielded it respected it. This was no Soviet broom. It was an American broom.

Peter! I woke with a spasm of nerves and muscles. My car swerved, nearly hitting another that had been passing me at God knows what speed; the other fellow must have been drunk to be going so fast in such weather. He wore hunter's clothes—camouflage in bright red, how odd. He blew his horn, slammed on his brakes, and barely avoided death for both of us. He shook his fist at me and sped away.

I stopped at the next rest area. Trembling, I closed my eyes and concentrated. The scene in the birch forest returned to me in all its shades of white and I realized who it was that Peter was meeting that day, and why the man was sweeping away Peter's footprints, and why Peter had let me witness all this. Who but a CIA station chief, overdressed egomaniacs every one, would wear such a hat as the big man wore to a secret meeting in a forest? Peter was defecting. The men in white were not his captors. They were his liberators, and they were from the CIA. Peter had let me see this man, wanted me to know who and what he was. But why? Why? Peter would not defect merely to save his own life. He had a greater purpose. He wanted me to know this. But why did I need to know? What was the plan?

In our last moment together he had said to me about Jack, “We have never had such an asset before, and we will never again have such an opportunity as this. This operation must at all costs be preserved.”

Now I understood his meaning. It was an order to me not to interfere no matter how great the threat seemed. There was no threat, no KGB, no CIA. Only Peter. Nothing had changed. He, Peter, carried the next revolution, the true revolution, out of Russia with him. His plan was to tell the CIA every detail of everything he knew about KGB operations—with one exception. About Jack he would tell them nothing. Because Jack was the only thing that mattered. Madness? That is certainly one word for what Peter represented.