The Debriefing (10 page)

“Oleg,” Stone says, “I’d like you to describe the events surrounding Gregori’s dismissal from Lomonosov University. Talk slowly, take it chronologically.”

Kulakov pulls several times on his cigarette. “The first I knew about my son being in hot water was when the rector of the university sent for me. I thought Gregori had gotten into trouble
with the Komsomol again. He had been in difficulty several times before—once for not turning up for a Komsomol work party, another time it was for telling a joke about the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. Each time I had been able to smooth things over—I was, after all, a very trusted member of the Party—so I didn’t expect this one to be any more serious.”

The civilian says, “So far, so good.”

Stone says, “And that’s when you found out about the drugs?”

“Yes,” says Kulakov. “The rector was actually very understanding. He said he had no choice except to expel him. He gave me the name of a doctor I could go to—”

“Gregori had treatment?” Stone sounds surprised. “You didn’t mention that before.”

“It didn’t last very long,” Kulakov admits. “In the end, I found out that all the time I thought he was going to the clinic, he was wandering around Moscow with some hooligans.”

“Is that when the militia picked him up?”

“It was during that period, yes. The militia thought he was drunk and held him overnight. Then they found the needle marks. And that was the end of his Moscow residence permit. He was sent to work on a Hero Project in Irkutsk—building a railroad spur, I think. About a month before I left, I got a note from him in the mail. He said he couldn’t remember my birthday, but he wanted to wish me happy birthday anyhow. He said he was on his way to live with his mother in Alma-Ata. That was the last I heard from him.”

The civilian lets the printout run through his fingers onto the floor. He looks up at Stone and nods.

“Children never remember their parents’ birthdays,” Stone comments.

“I always remembered my father’s,” Kulakov offers. The civilian behind him leans closer to the printout “He was born September twenty-fourth.”

The civilian signals with a finger to Stone.

“You told me your father was dead,” Stone says carefully. His voice is exactly as it was before. “Do you remember the date of his death too?”

Kulakov answers quickly. “He died in the summer,” he says. “Early August. The fourth, I think it was.”

The civilian looks across at Stone and shakes his head. Stone says, “I’m sorry, Oleg, but you’re lying!”

“Why would he lie about his father?” Thro asks. “Why would he say he’s dead when he’s alive?”

“Because his father is Jewish,” Stone explains. “Kulakov was very ambitious when he was young. When he applied for entrance into the military academy, in 1942 I think it was, he was smart enough to realize he wouldn’t get very far in Stalin’s bureaucracy with a Jewish father on his record. So he bribed someone to change the name of the father on his birth certificate and substitute the name of a family friend who had died in the war. This kind of thing was done all the time. Instead of a Jew for a father, he had a party member and a war hero. In the confusion of the war, with records being lost all the time, nobody caught up with him.”

“And what happened to the real father?”

“That’s the odd part,” explains Stone. “He’s still very much alive. His name is Davidov. Leon Davidov. He works as a janitor-handyman in the Ministry of Defense. Kulakov used to see him every now and then in the corridors. Sometimes they met in the men’s room for a few minutes. They would pee at adjoining urinals and exchange a few words. The last time Kulakov saw his father was when he came out of the duty office with the diplomatic pouch chained to his wrist and written orders to take it to Cairo. Davidov was on a ladder changing light bulbs in the hall. It must have been quite a moment. Kulakov passed right next to him, knowing he would never see him again. He gripped the old man’s ankle by way of goodbye. He broke down when he told us about this.” Stone shakes his head sadly. “What a world we live in.”

Thro asks, “What was the real father like?”

“Apparently the old man was frightened out of his skin during the Stalin years. He was arrested twice, once because he shared an apartment with someone accused of being a Trotskyist, another time because he listened, along with several others, to an anti-Stalin joke and didn’t denounce the storyteller. Somebody else did, and the law of the land specified you could be sent to prison for failing to denounce an enemy of the people. Davidov wound up doing what many people did: he was so frightened he’d be accused of being anti-Stalin that he became an ardent Stalinist. In a manner of speaking, he became more Catholic than the Pope. He read Stalin’s speeches in
Pravda
, memorized them and quoted them back word for word to everyone. Anybody who spoke to him came away convinced he was a great Stalinist. He was just crazy with fear, is all it was.”

“My God, what a secret for Kulakov to carry around with him all these years,” says Thro.

“The irony,” recounts Stone, “is that the charge they eventually brought against him was for lying about his family background in official documents—
but they had him on the wrong lie
. The man who was listed as his father turned out not to have been a war hero at all, at least that’s what the military prosecutor claimed. He showed Kulakov an old divisional war diary proving that the real Kulakov had been executed for desertion under fire. Kulakov denied knowing this so convincingly that the prosecutor gave him a lie dectector test—which he promptly flunked, since he was lying. Kulakov was caught. He couldn’t explain he wasn’t the son of an executed deserter and trot out as proof the Jewish father he’d hidden all those years. It would have only made matters worse.”

“It’s an incredible story,” says Thro. “Stone, this must prove that he’s a genuine defector. They could never have set all this up.”

“Oh, Kulakov’s telling the truth, all right,” agrees Stone. “That’s not what’s worrying me.”

“What is worrying you?”

“What I’m worrying about,” Stone answers evasively, “is how the world will end. And when.”

“Aside from the fact that you part your hair on different sides, you’re really very much alike,” Thro says out of the blue. She has slipped into his room to see if Stone wants to make love and has found him poring over the reports that came back from Topology.

“How alike?” Stone asks, watching her strip off her bathrobe and climb into his bed. “Alike how?”

“God, these sheets are cold,” she says. “You’re both victims, is how you’re alike. Kulakov once told me he went around for twenty-eight years carrying a sealed pouch from point A to point B. It strikes me as a pretty fair description of what you do, Stone.”

Stone climbs into bed alongside her, presses his knee into her crotch, runs a hand over her breasts. “There’s a difference,” he says. “I know what’s in the pouch.”

“Do you, Stone? Do you really?”

Stone makes it a point to arrive at the motel room early, and routinely goes over it for bugs. As an added precaution, he has rented three rooms in a row, and uses the middle one for the meeting. Mozart arrives, as usual, precisely at the appointed time, lugging a briefcase with a new batch of Topology reports.

“Morning, Stone.” Mozart greets his boss with no visible sign of deference. “How’s our courier holding out?”

“Better than I am,” replies Stone. “What’ve you got for me today?”

“Lots of dirt,” says Mozart, tossing a thick folder onto the bed, “but no nuggets.” And in his maddeningly efficient monotone, he gives Stone a rundown on what the Topology people have come up with. Kulakov, it seems, has gotten several addresses wrong. At one point he mentioned a film he had seen in Moscow, but according to Topology records, it didn’t open until a month after he said he saw it. He made an error in describing
Natalia’s husband as a captain; at last listing, he was still a lieutenant. There is no railroad spur Hero Project in Irkutsk; there were avalanches in the area at the time, and some teams were sent out to reopen lines that had been cut.

“That doesn’t add up to much either way,” muses Stone. “What else have you come up with?”

“On the positive side, we’ve got the Russians trying to close the barn door after the horse has skedaddled,” says Mozart. “There are confirmed reports of military intelligence cleanup teams in Cairo and Athens, and cleanup is what they’ve been the embassy heavies in Athens who let Kulakov slip through their fingers have been flown home and charged with dereliction of duty. The second secretary who was in the car with them has been relieved and brought up on charges. The general in charge of the diplomatic courier service has been relieved. The deputy director of military intelligence has been transferred to the boondocks. Just about everyone who touched Kulakov has been in hot water. The driver who drove him to the airport, a civilian attached to the ministry car pool, was sent packing to a kolkhoz in the Ukraine. The admiral thinks—”

Stone looks up sharply. “You’ve been in to see the admiral?”

Mozart is very cool. “He summoned me,” he says, a pleasant smile spreading across his jowly features. “I didn’t initiate. He’s following this on a day-to-day basis.”

“I’ll bet,” says Stone. “Have you come up with anything on Gamov?”

For once Mozart looks blank. “Gamov?”

“The duty officer who sent Kulakov on a courier run even though his name had been stricken from the active courier list,” Stone explains, not without some satisfaction.

“That Gamov.” Mozart recovers quickly.

“That Gamov,” says Stone, “should be in very hot water indeed.”

Mozart chuckles gleefully. “He may be in the hottest water of all,” he tells Stone. “He’s disappeared without a trace. For all purposes, there simply is no Gamov.”

Mozart also fills Stone in on what Charlie Evans over at the CIA has come up with on the cold paper. “The pouch was a gold mine,” he says. “There’s a series of letters from people at the Ministry of Defense to their Egyptian counterparts listing which spare parts for MIG 17s, 19s and 21s are available, and which aren’t. Working from these lists, the CIA expects to be able to make a very educated guess on how many of the MIGs in Egyptian hands are operational. The Israelis are already talking about some very attractive trade-offs for access to this information; they have an agent in place in Iran that they are offering to make available for starters. Then there is a personal letter to the ambassador’s daughter from a boyfriend of hers, describing bread riots in the city of Nordvik on the Laptev Sea. There’s another note to the military intelligence resident in Cairo, instructing him to tell a certain Ahmid—it’s obviously a code name—that ten thousand Swiss francs have been deposited in his account in the Swiss Bank Corporation in Zurich. There are also several personal letters, two typewritten, two handwritten. One’s a love letter, actually. And there’s a curious item that nobody’s figured out yet. It’s a note from a Russian in Geneva to his brother-in-law, who is a third secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Cairo. The letter, written in longhand, has five words:
‘Ti minyeh dolzhen sto rublei
.’ ‘You owe me one hundred rubles.’ It’s signed, Khrustalev-Nosar.”

“Did you check out the name at Topology?” Stone wants to know.

Mozart nods. “Khrustalev-Nosar is a diplomat at the SALT disarmament talks. Thirtyish. Brilliant. Technocrat. He’s got scientific credentials and specializes in air-to-ground missile systems. There is apparently some suspicion that he’s connected with military intelligence.”

Stone takes all this in. “What are your relations with Charlie Evans’s people?” he asks.

“Cold. Correct.” And he adds sarcastically, “None of us is nicer than he has to be.”

“You were talking about the actress,” Stone reminds Kulakov. “You were saying that it was her idea to move in with you, not yours.”

They are strolling along an unpaved road that winds through the rolling hills near the farm. A civilian with a shotgun cradled in his arms follows discreetly behind. The air is cold, but clear. Kulakov has the collar of his sheepskin coat turned up and his head tucked turtlelike into it. The pace is brisk—too brisk for Kulakov, who has trouble walking and talking at the same time.

“She didn’t have a Moscow residence permit,” Kulakov explains. “It was either move in with me or go back to Leningrad. Naturally, I preferred her in Moscow. So when she asked, I said yes.”

“It didn’t strike you as unusual—her asking, I mean? Normally it’s the man who suggests this kind of arrangement.”

Kulakov actually laughs. “You speak Russian like a native,” he says, “but you don’t really know Russia. There are thousands—maybe even tens of thousands—of people living like Gypsies in Moscow. They have no residence card, and without a residence card they have no right to a job or an apartment. It’s a vicious circle. They can’t get the residence card without the job and apartment; they can’t get the job and apartment without the residence permit. So they move in with friends or lovers and live
na levo
, as we say—on the left. She worked at a theater company in Leningrad, but she wanted to live in Moscow, so she was hunting for a film studio or a theater that would take her on. Meanwhile she had to live somewhere. It’s as simple as that.”

Stone walks on for a while in silence. “How did you meet her?”

“Meet whom? Oh, the actress. I met her at the Actors Union. I was dining there one night with a cousin who is the widow of an actor who looked exactly like Lenin from the back and always played him in films. Galya was at another table—we had exchanged looks two or three times, the way people will. At midnight they turned off the overhead lights to signal everyone to
leave. We were lingering over cognacs. Galya walked straight up to me, leaned down and planted a kiss on my lips.” Kulakov smiles bitterly at the memory. “Just like that. She was very—how to put it?—unconventional. When I ran into her again, purely by accident, in the record store on Gorky Street—I was buying some new records to take to Nadia at the hospital—well, you know how it is. One thing led to another. And she asked if she could move in. I was alone, so I thought, where’s the harm?”