The Company: A Novel of the CIA (64 page)

Pushing through the door, Eugene waved to the Greek behind the lunch counter. "Hey, Loukas, how's tricks?"

"Not bad, considering. Where's your lady friend?"

"Sleeping it off."

The Greek smiled knowingly. "You want I should maybe cook you up something?"

Eugene hadn't had anything to eat since lunch. "How about sunnysides over easy with bacon and a cup of coffee."

Loukas said, "Over easy, with, coming up."

Eugene went around the side to the phone on the wall opposite the rest room. He fed a dime into the slot and dialed Bernice's number. Maybe he was jumping at shadows. Philby's nerves had been shot toward the end, he remembered. On the other hand, the last thing he wanted was to finish up like the Russian colonel he'd met in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden when he first arrived in America in 1951. Rudolf Abel's arrest by the FBI six years later had made headlines across the country and sent a shiver up Eugene's spine; unless he were lucky enough to be exchanged for an American spy caught by the Soviets, Colonel Abel would probably spend the rest of his life in prison.

Eugene could hear the phone ringing in Bernice's floor-through. This, too, was bizarre; when she knew he would be coming over and he didn't turn up on time, she always answered on the first or second ring. After the seventh ring he heard her pick up the phone.

"Hello," she said. "Bernice?"

"That you, Eugene?" Her voice seemed strained. There was a lone pause, which Eugene didn't try to fill. "Where are you?" she finally asked.

"I stopped for gas. Everything all right?"

She laughed a little hysterically. "Sure everything's all right. It's all right as rain." Then she yelled into the mouthpiece, "Run for it, baby! They pinched Max. They found the stuff in your closet—"

There was the scrape of scuffling. Bernice shrieked in pain. Then a man's voice came through the earpiece. He spoke quickly, trying to get his message across before the line went dead. "For your own good, Eugene, don't hang up. We can cut a deal. We know who you are. You can't run far. We won't prosecute if you cooperate, if you change sides. We can give you a new iden—"

Eugene slammed his finger down on the button, cutting off the speaker in mid-word. Then he said "Fuck you, mac," to the dead line that surely had a tracer on it. Back at the cash register, he pulled out two dollar bills from his wallet and a quarter from his pocket and put them on the counter. "Something's come up, Loukas," he muttered.

"At my counter you don't pay for what you don't eat," Loukas said, but Eugene left the money next to the cash register anyway. "Next time your over easy is on the house," the Greek called after him.

"I'll remember that," Eugene called just before the heavy door closed behind him.

Outside, the night seemed suddenly icier than before and Eugene shivered. There would be no next time, he realized. Everything that was part of his old life—Max, Bernice, his delivery job, his studio apartment over Kahn's Wine and Beverage, his identity as Eugene Dodgson—had slipped into a fault; the various crusts of his life were moving in different directions now. Even Max's station wagon was of no use to him anymore.

He started walking rapidly. He needed to think things through, to get them right; there would be no margin for errors. A bus passed him and pulled up at the next corner. Eugene broke into a sprint. The driver must have seen him in the sideview mirror because he held the door open and Eugene swung on board. Out of breath, Eugene nodded his thanks, paid for the ticket and lurched to the back of the nearly empty bus.

He looked up at the ads. One of them, featuring the Doublemint twins, reminded Eugene of the twin sisters at Yasenovo, Serafima and Agrippina, drilling him day after day on his two legends: the first one, Eugene Dodgson, he would be using; the second, Gene Lutwidge, he would fall back on if the first identity was compromised. "You must shed your identity the way a snake sheds its skin," Serafima had warned him. "You must settle into each legend as if it were a new skin."

Only a new skin could save him from Colonel Abel's fate. But how had the FBI stumbled across Eugene Dodgson? Max Kahn had severed his ties with his Communist Party friends when he went underground. Still, Max might have run into someone he knew by chance, or telephoned one of them for old times sake. The person he contacted might have become an informer for the FBI or the line may have been tapped. Once the FBI agents latched onto Max they would have become curious about his two employees, Bernice and Eugene; would have taken photographs of them from their panel truck through a small hole in the "0" of the word "Radio." They would have searched Bernice's floor-through and his studio over the liquor store the first chance they got.

"They found the stuff in your closet," Bernice had cried before being dragged away from the phone. Discovery of Eugene's espionage paraphernalia— the Motorola antenna (and, eventually, the short-wave capabilities of the Motorola itself), the microdot viewer, the ciphers, the carefully wrapped wads of cash—would have set off alarm bells. The FBI would have realized that it had stumbled across a Soviet agent living under deep cover in the nation's capitol. They would have assumed that Max and Bernice and Eugene were all part of a larger spy ring. The Feds had probably decided not to arrest them immediately in the hope of identifying other members of the ring. J. Edgar Hoover himself would have supervised the operation, if only to be able to take the credit when the spies were finally arrested. Eventually, when the Soviet spies working out of Kahn's Wine and Beverage didn't lead them to anyone—Max and Bernice had no one to lead them to; Eugene hadn't contacted SASHA in weeks—Hoover must have decided that it would be better to take them into custody and, playing one off against the other with a combination of threats and offers of immunity, break them. By sheer luck Eugene had avoided the trap. And Bernice, courageous to the end, had given him the warning he needed to run for it. Now, grainy mug shots of Eugene Dodgson, taken with one of the FBI's telephoto lenses, would circulate in Washington. They would show an unshaven, longhaired, stoop-shouldered young man in his early thirties. The local police would be covering the train and bus stations and the airports; flashing the photograph at night clerks, they would make the rounds of motels and flophouses. If Eugene was apprehended, the FBI would compare his fingerprints to the samples lifted from the studio over Kahn's liquor store. Eugene's arrest, like Colonel Abel's before him, would make headlines across America.

Eugene had long ago worked out what to do if his identity was blown. As a precaution against the proverbial rainy day he had hidden ten fifty-dollar bills, folded and refolded lengthwise and ironed flat, in the cuffs of his chinos; the $500 would tide him over until he could make contact with the rezident at the Soviet embassy. The first order of business was to go to ground for the night. In the morning, when the city was crawling with people heading for work, he would mingle with a group of tourists, take in a film in the afternoon and then retrieve the box he had squirreled away in the alley behind the theater. Only then would he make the telephone call to alert the rezident, and eventually Starik, that his identity had been discovered and his ciphers had fallen into the hands of the FBI.

Changing buses twice, Eugene made his way downtown to New York Avenue. Prowling the back streets behind the intra-city bus station, he noticed several prostitutes huddled in doorways, stamping their feet to keep them from turning numb.

"Cold out tonight," he remarked to a short, plump bleached-blonde wearing a shabby cloth coat with a frayed fur collar and Peruvian mittens on her hands. Eugene guessed she couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen.

The girl pinched her cheeks to put some color into them. "I can warm it up for you, dearie," she replied.

"How much would it set me back?"

"Depends on what you want. You want to hump and run, or you want to go 'round the world?"

Eugene managed a tired smile. "I've always loved to travel."

"A half century'll buy you a ticket 'round the world. You won't regret it, dearie."

"What's your name?"

"Iris. What's yours?"

"Billy, as in Billy the Kid." Eugene produced one of the folded $50s from his jacket pocket and slipped it inside the wristband of her mitten. "There's a second one with your name on it if I can hang out with you until morning.

Iris hooked her arm through Eugene's. "You got yourself a deal, Billy the Kid." She pulled him into the street and stepped out ahead of him in the direction of her walk-up down the block.

Iris's idea of "around the world" turned out to be a more or less routine coupling, replete with murmured endearments that sounded suspiciously like a needle stuck in a groove ("Oh my god, you're so big... oh, baby, don't stop") whispered over and over in his ear. In the end the prostitute had other talents that interested her client more than sex. It turned out that she had worked as a hairdresser in Long Branch, New Jersey, before moving to Washington; using a kitchen scissors, she was able to cut Eugene's neck-length locks short, and then, as he bent over the kitchen sink, she dyed his hair blond. And for another half-century bill she was talked into running an errand for him while he made himself breakfast; she returned three-quarters of an hour later with a used but serviceable black suit and an overcoat bought in a second hand shop, along with a thin knitted tie and a pair of eyeglasses that were weak enough for Eugene to peer through without giving him a headache. While she was out Eugene had used her safety razor to shorten his sideburns and to shave. At midmorning, dressed in his new finery and looking, according to Iris, like an unemployed mortician, he ventured into the street.

If he had owned a valise he would have sat on it for luck; he had the sensation that he was embarking on the second leg of a long voyage.

Strolling around to the front of Union Station, he made a point of walking past two uniformed policemen who were scrutinizing the males in the crowd. Neither gave him a second glance. Eugene picked up a Washington Post at a newsstand and carefully checked to see if there was a story about a Russian spy ring. On one of the local pages he found a brief item copied from a precinct blotter announcing the arrest of the owner of Kahn's Wine and Beverage, along with one of his employees, on charges of selling narcotics. They had been arraigned the night before; bail had been denied when it was discovered that both the girl and Kahn had been living for years under assumed names, so the article reported.

To kill time, Eugene bought a ticket for a bus tour that started out from Union Station to visit historical houses dating back to Washington's Washington. When the tour ended in mid-afternoon, he ate a cheese sandwich at a coffee shop and then made his way on foot to the Loew's Palace on F Street. He sat through Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which he had seen with Bernice the previous week. Remembering how she had turned away from the screen and buried her head in his shoulder when Janet Leigh was hacked to death in the shower, he had a pang of regret for what Bernice must be going through now. She had been a good trooper and he had become attached to her over the years; chances were she would wind up doing time in prison for aiding and abetting a Soviet agent. Eugene shrugged into the darkness of the theater; the front line soldiers like Max and Bernice were the cannon fodder of the Cold War.

The film ended and the houselights came on. Eugene waited until the neater had emptied and then pushed through a fire door at the back into the alleyway. It was already dark out. Heavy flakes of snow were beginning to fall, muffling the sounds of traffic from the street. Feeling his way along the shadowy alley, he came to the large metal garbage bin behind a Chinese take-out restaurant. He put his shoulder to the bin and pushed it to one side, and ran his hand over the bricks in the wall behind it until he came to the one that was loose. Working it back and forth, he pried it free, then reached in and touched the small metal box that he had planted there when he first came to Washington almost ten years before. He had checked it religiously every year, updating the documents and identity cards with fresh samples provided by the KGB rezident at the Soviet Embassy.

Grasping the packet of papers—there was a passport in the name of Gene Lutwidge filled with travel stamps, a Social Security card, a New York State drivers license, a voter registration card, even a card identifying the bearer as a member in good standing of the Anti-Defamation League—Eugene felt a surge of relief; he was slipping into his second skin, and safe for the time being.

The phone call to the Soviet embassy followed a carefully rehearsed script. Eugene asked to speak to the cultural attache, knowing he would fall on his secretary, who also happened to be the attache's wife. (In fact, she was the third-ranking KGB officer at the embassy.)

"Please to say what the subject of your call is," intoned the secretary, giving a good imitation of a recorded announcement.

"The subject of my call is I want to tell the attache"—Eugene shouted the rest of the message into the phone, careful to get the order right—"fuck Khrushchev, fuck Lenin, fuck Communism." Then he hung up.

In the Soviet embassy, Eugene knew, the wife of the cultural attache would report immediately to the rezident. They would open a safe and check the message against the secret code words listed in Starik's memorandum. Even if they hadn't noticed the item in the police page of the Washington Post, they would understand instantly what had happened: Eugene Dodgson had been blown, his ciphers were compromised (if the FBI tried to use them to communicate with Moscow Centre, the KGB would know the message had not originated with Eugene and act accordingly), Eugene himself had escaped arrest and was now operating under his fallback identity.

Precisely twenty-one hours after Eugene's phone call to the wife of the cultural attache, a bus chartered by the Russian grade school at the Soviet embassy pulled up in front of Washington's National Zoological Park. The students, who ranged in age from seven to seventeen and were chaperoned by three Russian teachers and three adults from the embassy (including the attache's wife), trooped through the zoo, ogling the tawny leopards and black rhinoceroses, leaning over the railing to laugh at the sea lions who ventured into the outdoor part of their basin. At the Reptile House, the Russians crowded around the boa constrictor enclosure while one of the teachers explained how the reptile killed its prey by constriction, after which its unhinged jaw was able to open wide enough to devour an entire goat. Two of the Russian teenagers in the group were carrying knapsacks loaded with cookies and bottles of juice for a late afternoon snack; a third teenager carried a plastic American Airlines flight bag. In the vestibule of the reptile house, the Russians crowded around as the cultural attache s wife distributed refreshments from the knapsacks. Several of the boys, including the one carrying the flight bag, ducked into the toilet. When the boys emerged minutes later the flight bag was nowhere to be seen.