The Company: A Novel of the CIA (87 page)

Forty-five minutes later the car had turned onto the narrow road with a sign at the edge reading "Center for Study—No Admittance." The armed guards at the small brick gatehouse had waved the car through. Up ahead, at the end of the gravel driveway, loomed the Apatov Mansion that Yevgeny had first come to in the early 1950s. Three little girls in loose-fitting bathing suits were splashing around in a small plastic pool. Their shrieks of pleasure had echoed across the manicured lawns. Moments later, Pavel Semyonovich Zhilov himself had pulled open the second floor door leading to his apartment and had drawn Yevgeny into an awkward embrace.

"Welcome back, Yevgeny Alexandrovich," he murmured. "Welcome home."

"Home," Yevgeny repeated. "The trip back, being here, has the unreal quality of a dream to me."

Starik had grown more brittle with the passage of time. The skin on his face and neck and on the back of his long peasant hands had become spotted and leathery. His once-pewter beard had turned white and grown sparser. But the flame in his brooding eyes was just as Yevgeny remembered; when his eyes narrowed intently and he concentrated, he made you think he could light the wick of a candle by merely staring at it.

"You have served our cause, and me, nobly," Starik was saying as he led Yevgeny through several rooms to the spacious wood-paneled library filled with hundreds of leather-covered volumes and several dozen small gold- and silver-inlaid icons.

Two little girls in short cotton dresses were squatting on the parquet playing pick-up sticks. "Oh, it did move, I swear it," one of them whined. Frowning, she looked up. "Do stop Axinya from cheating. Uncle."

"Out, away from here, the both of you," Starik cried playfully, waving toward the door, swatting Axinya on the rump to hurry her along as they scampered past him. "Peace and quiet at last," he said to Yevgeny. Pointing to a seat across from him at the large wooden table in the center of the room, he filled two glasses with Narzan mineral water, added a twist of lemon and pushed one across to his guest. "I salute you," he said, raising his glass in toast. "Few have been as unwavering and as unselfish in the service of our great crusade, few have contributed more to the struggle to preserve and promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit. Few have been as true as you to the vision we share in the capacity of the human race, once freed from capitalist exploitation and Allenation, to create a truly egalitarian society."

"Few are given the opportunity to serve," Yevgeny declared. Starik moistened his lips with the mineral water. "You are certain be exhausted—"

Yevgeny smiled. "I'm getting my second wind."

"When you have had time to settle in—there is an apartment at your disposal on the Lenin Hills—we will talk about operational matters at great length. For now, I would like to ask you..."

When Starik seemed to hesitate, Yevgeny said, "Please ask anything that you like."

Starik bent forward, his eyes burning into Yevgeny's. "What is it like?" he inquired in a solemn voice.

"What is what like?"

"America. What is America really like? I have been to the German Democratic Republic and to Cuba and, once, to Canada, but never to America. Everything I know about that country comes to me filtered. And so I ask you, Yevgeny: describe America to me."

It struck Yevgeny as a strange question, coming from a man who had access to all kinds of secret intelligence documents; who could read the daily translation of the New York
Times
circulated by the KGB. "Americans are a great people," Yevgeny began, "trapped in a terrible system that brings out the worst in them, in the same sense that our system brings out the best in us. The capitalist system emphasizes acquisition and accumulation. People are conditioned to judge themselves and others by the quantity of material wealth they possess; as they know others will judge them the same way, they have a predisposition to flaunt the symbols of their material wealth. This explains the preoccupation, on almost every level of society, with trophies— large and flashy automobiles, diamond engagement rings, Rolex wristwatches, younger and slimmer second wives, suntans in the winter, designer clothing, the psychoanalyst's couch."

"And how would you describe the attitude of Americans toward life in in general?"

"They laugh at the drop of a hat, and loudly, which I take to mean that they are frightened."

"Of?"

"Frightened of losing everything they have accumulated, I suppose. Frightened, as a country, of not being the biggest and the best. Nothing in recent years has had more of an impact on the American psyche than when we put Yuri Gagarin into orbit before their John Glenn."

"And what are their superior qualities, Yevgeny?"

"Americans are bright and open and imaginative and innocent. Their openness makes it relatively easy for an espionage agent to function, since our average American is ready to accept people at face value. Their innocence results in a kind of mental blindness; they are raised to believe that their system is the best in the world, and they are unable to see evidence to the contrary—they don't see the twenty-five million Americans who go to bed hungry every night, they don't see how Negroes live in the ghettos, they don't see how the working classes are exploited for the sake of higher profits for the few who own the means of production."

From the garden below came the stifled yelps of girls leaping into the makeshift pool. Starik strolled over to the window and looked down at them. "Your Americans sound curiously like the principal character in the stories I read to my niece," he remarked. "She, also, is bright and open and imaginative and innocent."

Yevgeny joined his mentor at the window. "Why do you ask me about America?"

"When you are engaged, as we are, in a conflict, there is a tendency to demonize your enemy."

"The Americans certainly demonize the Soviet Union," Yevgeny agreed.

"It is a great mistake to reduce your enemy to a demon," Starik said. "It leaves you at a distinct disadvantage when you are attempting to outwit him."

The face of Moscow had been lifted during the years Yevgeny had been away. Gazing down from the small balcony of an apartment perched high on the Lenin Hills, he scrutinized the sprawling cityscape spread out below him. The downtown wart, once renowned for its ponderous Stalin-Gothics, was pockmarked with modern high-rise towers that dwarfed the onion-shaped domes of abandoned churches. The relentless drone of traffic seeping through broad arteries rose from the city. On the drive back from the Apatov Mansion, the Zil carrying Yevgeny had actually become caught in heavy traffic on Gorky near Pushkin Square; drivers, ignoring the several policewomen frantically blowing whistles, leaned on their horns, as if the cacophony itself could magically untie the knot. "In general, Russians are a disciplined people," Yevgeny's chauffeur, a sleepy-eyed Lithuanian attached to the KGB motor pool, had elected. "Their idea of rebellion is eating ice cream in the dead of winter. This changes when they climb behind the wheel of a car. The experience is too new, you see, and so they become slightly crazed."

Yevgeny's visit to his father the next day had come off better than he anticipated, which wasn't saying much because he had expected the worst. His kid brother, Grinka, had turned up at the clinic with his second wife; Grinka, a Party apparatchik who worked in the superstructure, had grown heavy with importance. He had been carefully briefed by a KGB colonel not to mention Yevgeny's twenty-three year absence, and so the two brothers shook hands as if they had dined together the week before. "You look well enough," Grinka said. "Meet my wife, Kapitolina Petrovna."

"Do you have children?" Yevgeny asked as they walked toward their father's room though a hallway that reeked of cooked cabbage.

"Two by my first marriage. Both girls, thank God. I named the older one Agrippina, after our mother." Grinka took hold of Yevgeny's elbow. "Father is dying, you know."

Yevgeny nodded.

"I have been instructed not to ask you where you have been all these years. But you must understand, the burden of caring for him—of driving him back and forth to the dacha, of looking after his pension—fell on me." Grinka lowered his voice. "What I am driving at is that father's flat in the Lenin Hills is state-owned, put at his disposal during his lifetime for services rendered. But the dacha in Peredelkino is his. And it cannot conveniently be divided between two families."

"If that's what you are worried about," Yevgeny muttered, "forget it. I don't want the dacha. In any case I won't be in Russia long enough to make use of it."

"Ah, Yevgeny, I told Kapitolina you were a sensible man."

A male nurse, an Azerbaijan wearing a sooty white knee-length jacket and a colorful skull cap, knocked twice on a door, then threw it open and stood back so the two brothers could enter. "Father, look who has come to visit you," Grinka exclaimed.

Aleksandr Timofeyevich's right eye flicked open and he tried to force through his lips the sounds welling up from the back of his throat. "Yev... Yev..." Saliva trickled from a corner of his mouth. The nurse brought a second pillow from the closet and lifted the old man until his head, which fell over to one side, was raised and he could stare at his elder son. "Sit in this chair," the nurse instructed Yevgeny. "He will see you better."

The soft gray skin clung to the old man's face, giving it the appearance of a death mask. His mouth sagged open and his lips trembled. Yevgeny reached for one of his hands and, taking it in his own, stroked the back of it. "It seems that Pavel Semyonovich has filled your ears with stories about me..."

Aleksandr Timofeyevich's bony fingers dug into Yevgeny's palm with surprising strength. The only emotion Yevgeny was able to muster was pity for the shipwreck of a man who had foundered on a hospital bed in the special KGB clinic in Pekhomaya Street. He wondered if his father was hanging on to his son, or to life?

"Pro... prou... proud," Aleksandr Timofeyevich managed to say. "Lo... lone... lonely."

"Yes, it is a lonely life." He smiled into his father's good eye. "But there is satisfaction to be had from it, as you know from your own experience."

A corner of the old man's mouth drooped, almost as if he were trying to work the muscles that produced a smile. "Where?" he managed to say. "Wh...when?"

Yevgeny understood the question. "The same place as before. Soon."

The eye fixed intently on Yevgeny blinked and several tears welled from it. The nurse touched Yevgeny on the shoulder. "You must not tire him," he whispered. Yevgeny gave a last squeeze to his father's now limp hand. The lid closed slowly over the open eye. The only sound in the room was the nasal wheezing of his father sucking air through congested nostrils.

The days passed quickly. Starik monopolized Yevgeny's mornings, going over and over every detail of his meetings with SASHA, reviewing the tight security precautions that built a fire wall between the Washington rezidentura and the Polish circuit breaker; between the Polish circuit breaker and Yevgeny; and that kept Yevgeny isolated from SASHA in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. A trusted technician turned up at the Apatov Mansion one afternoon to introduce Yevgeny to a new generation of espionage gadgets: a microdot projector hidden inside a Kodak box camera that was actually able to take photographs; a shortwave transmitter disguised as an electric razor that could send coded messages from perforated tape in bursts; a one-shot pistol hidden in an ordinary lead pencil that fired a 6.35 millimeter bullet straight from the cartridge buried under the eraser.

Evenings, Yevgeny prowled the streets of Moscow, drifting through the masses of people hurrying home from work, studying their faces—he was curious to see if they were eager to get where they were going, which he took to be a barometer-reading of whether the system worked. Afterward he would catch a bite to eat, dining in the Chinese restaurant in the Hotel Peking one night, the Prague restaurant complex near Arbat Square another. One evening, fresh from a visit to his father in the clinic, Yevgeny was invited to join Starik and a handful of KGB brass at a private restaurant on the top floor of the Ukraine Hotel. Settling down for a banquet that began with bowls of black beluga caviar and French Champagne, Yevgeny found himself sitting next to none other than the illustrious Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, who, as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary in 1956, had masterminded the Russian assault on Budapest and the arrest of Imre Nagy. The conversation was banal enough— Andropov seemed more interested in gossip about American film stars than in the Watergate scandal or Nixon's chances of being impeached. Was it true that John Kennedy had slept with Marilyn Monroe, he wanted to know. Had the famous ladies' man Errol Flynn really lived on a yacht off Cannes with a sixteen-year-old girl? Was there any truth to the rumor that the marriage of so and so— here he named a notorious Hollywood couple—was a sham organized by one of the film studios to obscure the fact that both were homosexuals?

The dishes were cleared away and a four-star Napoleon brandy was set out, after which the two waiters disappeared and the double door was locked from the inside. Andropov, a tall, humorless man who was said to write melancholy poems about lost love and the regret of old age, climbed to his feet and tapped a knife against a snifter. "Tovarishi," he began. "To me falls the pleasure—I may say the honor—of celebrating tonight, in this necessarily restricted company, the remarkable career of one of our preeminent operatives. For reasons of security I must keep my remarks vague. Suffice it to say that the comrade sitting on my right, Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin, has blazed a trail through the espionage firmament, equaling, perhaps surpassing, the accomplishments of the legendary Richard Sorge, who, as we all know, played a crucial role in the Japanese theater during the Great Patriotic War. If anything, the stakes are higher today. I can say to you that when the time comes for Yevgeny Alexandrovich to come in, his portrait will take its place alongside other Soviet intelligence heroes in the Memory Room of the First Chief Directorate." Reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket, Andropov produced a small flat box, which he clicked open. It was lined in blue velvet and contained a Soviet medal and ribbon. He motioned for Yevgeny to rise. "Acting in my capacity as Chairman of the KGB, I award you this Order of the Red Banner." The general lowered the ribbon over Yevgeny's head and straightened it around his collar so that the round metal badge rested against his shirtfront. Then he leaned forward and kissed him on both checks. The eight people around the room tapped their knives against their glasses in salute. Yevgeny, embarrassed, looked at Starik across the table.