Last Call for Blackford Oakes
A Blackford Oakes Mystery
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
For Joseph W. Donner, gratefully and affectionately
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER 1
Ronald Reagan, at ease with himself as ever, satisfied himself yet again on summoning the memory of his dealings with Blackford Oakes in October 1986. He had done the right thing. But now, December 1987, Oakes had put in for another meeting with the president.
Their 1986 meeting had had to do with a plot to assassinate Gorbachev. A group of young Russians, weary and demoralized by the brutal Soviet war against Afghanistan, had planned to kill the Communist leader. Oakes, veteran CIA agent, was in secret and unshared touch with a Soviet defector he had long experienced as antagonist, but who was now a hidden ally.
And so Reagan had had to ponder the agonizing question: Is it the business of the United States to get in the way of a plot by native Russians trying to get rid of Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and dictator?
Reagan had inclined, at first, to do nothing—let the Russians look after their own affairs. Gorbachev was certainly an improvement on his predecessors, true. Yet he was a blooded successor to a line of tyrants that had begun in 1917 with Lenin, followed by Stalin, a thirty-year curse. And then there had been Bulganin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev, another thirty years among them, followed by Andropov and Chernenko (“elderly guys,” Reagan mused, “—about my own age”). They didn’t serve for very long, but they did carry on the bloody Afghan war launched by Brezhnev. A war that Gorbachev, soon after his selection as general secretary, vowed to fight to the end.
Should President Reagan do nothing? Say nothing—when he got word through Oakes that an assassination had been plotted?
Reagan sat on the intelligence. While weighing the question of intervention, he reminded himself that the young conspirators were perfecting their plot. What finally influenced him had been the summit at Reykjavik. This was his second meeting with Gorbachev, and this time he sensed that Gorbachev was different enough from other Soviet leaders to be worth going to undiplomatic lengths to protect. So he called Oakes in and told him to intervene. To abort the assassination. If necessary, even if it meant exposing the ring of youthful plotters. Yes—if necessary—even if it meant exposing the deeply hidden Soviet asset, the clandestine defector who had tipped off Blackford Oakes.
That was fourteen months ago, but Blackford vividly recalled the day the president gave him the order. Reagan had come right to the point.
He told Oakes—his mouth slightly contracted, as was habitual when Reagan was spitting out instructions—that the plot was to be suppressed. Having made the critical decision, Reagan wanted the whole thing to go away. The very last thing he wished ever to be reminded of was that he had once given orders to betray a band of young Russian patriots. After all, weren’t these people to be likened to the July 20th plotters against Adolf Hitler? Likened to, well, the Romans who finally did away with Caligula? He stopped himself from deliberating further along such lines. Sic semper tyrannis! was good stuff, but just not right in dealing with someone who, with the flick of a finger, could dispatch nuclear bombs that would destroy lives by the tens of millions.
Seven weeks after his fateful meeting with Oakes, Reagan received word. “The affair” had been “taken care of.” That could only mean that the young Russian plotters had been frustrated, presumably imprisoned, or executed. Gorbachev was safe on his throne. There had been a moment of high anxiety for Reagan, some while later, when he met with Gorbachev. The premier was in Washington on a state visit, and sat now with his host in the Oval Office, alone except for the two interpreters.
Gorbachev suddenly turned in his chair. He looked Reagan straight in the face. Had the president known anything about the plot of last October to kill him? he asked.
Reagan was eternally grateful for his histrionic training. “Mikhail,” he said, his face redolent of sincerity, “let me give you my personal and most solemn word that no American official was in any way involved in any attempt on your life.” Reagan’s answer was formally correct. Reagan had not connived, and on deliberation would not have connived, even passively, in any attempted assassination.
Gorbachev held his gaze on Reagan, waited a moment, and then nodded, moving on to another subject. He had heard from the president’s own lips what he wanted, and needed, to hear.
But now, in December 1987, would the subject of assassination come up again? Oakes had invoked the oral code over the phone with the critically situated Kathy. “This is about Freckles.” That meant there was extra-institutional urgency in the requested meeting. The president would see again the man in the Central Intelligence Agency whom he had dealt with before, and had trusted for some years.
The code was used sparingly, only three times during the Reagan years so far. It meant that Blackford needed to move outside the ambit of the director of the CIA, even when that had been Bill Casey, Reagan’s closest security adviser until his death in May.
Kathy slotted him in for four forty-five that afternoon.
Neither party wanted routine clerical notice paid to their meeting. The usual approach to the Oval Office was therefore avoided. Kathy led Oakes into the Cabinet Room, and from there knocked on the side door of the Oval Office, bringing Oakes in. The president stayed at his desk and nodded with a friendly smile, pointing to the chair alongside.
“Sir, the business of last October, the plot against Premier Gorbachev—”
“Yes, yes. Why do we need to bring that up?”
“Because there’s a fresh design on his life—we think. Solid enough to bring to your attention. It comes to us from a survivor of the business of last October. But this time we’re not sure, not like last time. This time it’s a real complicated business—”
“I don’t want to hear about it.” Reagan looked down at his desk, arched his eyebrows, and slowed down the tempo of the conversation. “Just do this: Do whatever you can to protect Gorbachev, do it one more time, abort, abort—”
The president winked and leaned back on his chair. “I had a reputation back in California: I was a moderate on the subject of abortion.” His creases broke into a smile. “You know the one about the British serial killer who said he was actually astonished by his moderation? My reaction exactly!” He paused and his eyes went to the painting of George Washington. He said deliberately, “There’s to be no moderation in anything you have to do to protect Gorbachev. And no reporting to me except as absolutely required.”
“I won’t report back anything in detail. It could all be just a bag of wind. But I think I ought to go over there and find out.”
“What do you need from me? Airplane tickets? Come to think of it, Black, the White House has a pretty good travel agent. I guess it does. My plane is always there when I need it. So, what do you need from me?”
“I do need one thing, Mr. President. Back then, last October, I was still director of covert operations for the agency. Since then, I’ve had to … slow down, so I’m just an agent. But as former operations chief, the rules say I’m not allowed inside enemy territory. You’d have to waive that rule.”
The president pulled open his top desk drawer but then slammed it shut again. “I’ve been sitting here for nearly seven years. The things they want me to write an executive order about! Now this.”
“You don’t have to write anything, sir. Just tell me it’s okay—”
“Viva voce?” Reagan was visibly pleased to use an old term of the trade.
“Yes.” Blackford nodded. “Viva voce.”
“Why do they have that rule?”
“Because if an operations chief were captured, he’d have a lot of vital information.”
“Which the enemy could get hold of through torture?”
“That’s the idea.”
“How would you keep that from happening in your case?”
“I’d take precautions. Sir.”
Reagan paused. And then nodded.
“I’ll pass your word on—if I have to,” Blackford continued. “I’ll book a flight through Zurich and enter the Soviet Union under cover. That will also make it harder for the bureaucrats in the CIA to remind me where I can’t go.”
“Okay, okay. You have my word on it. But don’t get me crossed up with your director. He’s a good man.” The afternoon sun broke in through the south window. Reagan’s arm reached back and he felt for the cord, bringing the shades down enough to neuter the sun’s glare.
“I don’t know how it’s all going to end up with Gorbachev. You saw what he said on the seventieth anniversary of their revolution?” Reagan reached into his desk for the clipping. “What he said was”—Reagan’s voice was detached now, at public-speaking level—“that—I’m quoting him—‘In October 1917, we parted the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, the world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.’ Maybe he needs a little prodding.”
“Well, sir, we’ve got a defense budget of nearly three hundred billion. That’s prodding, right?”
“Yes. That’s one way to make our point about road signs. Cap Weinberger would like to hear it put that way. Well, he’s secretary of defense, and secretaries of defense have a right to think that hundreds of billions on defense are a means of prodding people to do the right thing.” He got up from his chair. “If you need to see me again”—he extended his hand—“call Kathy.”
Blackford walked to the side door. “Oh, Mr. President, I forgot. Good luck on the Nicaraguan business.”
“Black, you want to handle that for me while you’re at it?”
Blackford opened the door and left the office.
The meeting he then scheduled with the director had a delicate edge. William Webster, the wise and polished director of the CIA, had never been told about the critical intervention of October 1986. It would have been impossible for Oakes to brief him now in detail on his forthcoming trip without giving him the background on the previous mission. So Blackford, on meeting with Director Webster, said only that he would be away on a confidential mission for the president. He spent an hour with Webster devoted to examining the general political situation in Moscow and Eastern Europe.
“You got any other presidential commissions you’re undertaking?” Unlike some of his predecessors, Webster was not looking for ways to reassure himself of his authority as head of the CIA. He quickly accepted that this new mission was somehow linked to an earlier mission. He raised no questions about Blackford’s going, though he was ill at ease with the hastiness of the cover arrangements the agency would need to undertake.
On the October mission, Blackford had taken with him a young CIA colleague, a Ukrainian-born Iowan called Gus Windels. They had traveled as father and son, “Harry Singleton” and his son, “Jerry,” ostensibly engaged on an innocent mission, tracking down Jerry’s long-lost aunt. It hadn’t been difficult for twenty-eight-year-old Gus to pose as the son of the man he was accompanying. Blackford, at six feet two, was a shade taller than Gus. His hair still showed some of its original dark blond, though it was now mostly gray. Blackford was no longer eye-catchingly handsome, but he was ruggedly attractive, with blue eyes and an inquisitive chin that reinforced the words he spoke, and sometimes energized thoughts that ran through his agile mind. Blackford was spare in frame and moved with habitual ease, though he was not the limber youth he had been, so memorably, for so long. He was plausibly the father of the blond young American at his side on the Pan Am flight to Zurich.
Now, Windels was stationed in Moscow, working under his own name at the United States Embassy. It was he who had alerted Oakes to the suspicion of a fresh plot. He could speak with Blackford in a private shorthand. They had developed a special relationship during the dangerous October days of the exploitation of the covert defector, the preparations to betray the young Russians, and the consummation of a presidential directive. This time, Gus put it all in a discreet few words cabled to Blackford’s private number. What he said was: “It’s come up again, possible threat to #1. No way to upload this through official channels. You must come.”
Blackford trusted Gus Windels’s judgment, trusted it enough to take the case to the president.
CHAPTER 2
Ursina Chadinov was six years old before it occurred to her to wonder about the rule of the house.
The house in question comprised one and a half rooms in the crowded Gostiny Dvor district of Leningrad. During the great siege, just over ten years earlier, the apartment had belonged to a Jewish violinist. He performed with the symphony, until such concerts were simply excluded by the fighting and the starvation. Even after the long postwar years that had gone into the reconstruction of the lustrous city founded by Peter the Great at the turn of the eighteenth century, Gostiny Dvor, like many other living areas, had to put up with inconsistent supplies of water and electricity.
Still, it was home, and welcome to the Chadinovs. The rule of the house, which Ursina now questioned, was that only the English language would be spoken at mealtimes. What had brought her question to the table was the dispensation of the rule the day Josef Stalin died. Dmitri Chadinov thought that some gesture was appropriate, on the death of the general secretary. Chadinov had spent many hours, over two decades, defending Stalin at postings abroad, in England, in Turkey, and in France. He had harnessed his skills as a diplomat to celebrate the accomplishments of the Soviet leader. He was not himself persuaded that the death of Stalin was a terrible event for the Soviet Union, but such thoughts were never shared, not with his wife, Simona, and certainly not with Ursina, his precocious daughter.
“The reason we speak in English during meals is to teach you the language, Ursina. The English language—after Russian—will be the most important language in the world, and not only in diplomacy, but as—” He turned to his wife. “Simona, how do you translate lingua franca?”
The fifty-year-old Lithuanian ran a big spoon around the pot of simmering potato soup and furrowed her wide brow. “You treat me like a Latin–Russian dictionary. It is more than thirty years since I studied at the nunnery. You would translate that, roughly, as ‘universal language.’”
“If it is universal, why don’t my friends also speak English when they eat?”
“Because,” Dmitri Chadinov answered, “you’re more special than other little girls.”
“If I’m so special, why do you take me to dancing classes only one day every week? Tamara goes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”
“Because,” Simona interrupted, “Tamara’s mother is with the Maly Opera and has special privileges.”
“Our teacher, Comrade Uziev, says nobody has special privileges in a classless society. How do you say that in Latin, Mama?”
Dmitri laughed. “Even in a classless society everyone has a responsibility to develop what skills they can. Like mine. I can speak English, you know that, and I can also speak Turkish and Norwegian and French. And your mother can—”
“Teach religion.” Simona served up the potato soup. She smiled at her husband, but it was a tired smile, after three decades of renouncing the religious faith in which she had been trained, but which she could no longer practice. The revolution had ended all that. All that bourgeois superstition.
“Anyway, tomorrow we will resume our rule,” Dmitri concluded the discussion. “Only English at mealtimes.”
Ursina cocked her head and brushed the light blond bangs to one side. “I don’t think I will speak English with you tomorrow.”
The senior Chadinovs stared at her, speechless.
“Well,” said Dmitri, “maybe tomorrow you won’t be eating anything.”
“I don’t care.”
“Leave her alone,” Simona addressed her husband in French. “She’ll have forgotten the whole thing by tomorrow.”
“D’accord,” Dmitri said. And to Ursina, in Russian, “Tomorrow we will attend the memorial ceremony for Comrade Stalin in Palace Square.”
“All right,” Ursina said. “Do you think they will ask me to dance at the celebration?”
Dmitri smiled. “It isn’t a ‘celebration,’ Ursina. It’s a—” he motioned to Simona for help.
“A requiem.”
“No, no, Simona. That is a religious term. It is a … meeting to register our … grief … at the loss of our leader. Do you understand, Ursina?”
“All right. I’ll recite the poem, ‘Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; / All the king’s horses / And all the king’s men—’”
“Ursina!” Simona looked at her daughter and thought: What will she be when she’s sixteen, not six? Whatever else, Simona thought, Ursina would be very beautiful, and her inquisitive eyes would shine very bright.
CHAPTER 3
Ursina was twelve when her father gave himself the lethal dose. She was disconsolate, but also curious as to why he would do such a thing, and she managed, one day when her mother was out shopping, to unearth the folder containing the medical records. She learned that her father had been diagnosed with syphilis.
Simona was surprised and cross on being told by her daughter that she had learned the reason for her father’s suicide.
“I’m going to read up about syphilis,” Ursina said. “I know a library that has all kinds of medical books. How did Papa get syphilis?”
Her mother said that it was a disease her father had contracted while in diplomatic service in Turkey.
“Is Turkey very full of syphilis, Mama?”
Simona knew by now that evasions didn’t work with Ursina. She replied simply, “Yes. It is a deadly and very painful disease. Winston Churchill’s father died from it.”
“Was he in Turkey?”
“Yes,” Simona said. Why not just “yes”? She succeeded. Ursina didn’t come back for more, didn’t ask when the elder Churchill had visited Turkey.
At school, Ursina focused her enormous energies on science, and one day she announced to her mother that she would become a doctor. But she didn’t spend all her afternoons in libraries and laboratories. She was intensely curious about the splendid city she lived in, and bicycled studiously about the city and its outskirts with Tamara, her schoolmate, who had qualified for special training in ballet.
“I must be very careful when bicycling not to do any damage to my legs,” Tamara said.
Ursina teased her. “If you do, I will operate on them.”
Tamara laughed, half-heartedly. The very idea of turning over the care of her legs, destined to be seen in the Kirov Ballet, to Ursina! But after feigning concern, she bicycled along vigorously with her friend on this bright afternoon in early October. It took them nearly an hour to reach the deserted palace at Tsarskoe Selo.
Tamara was reluctant to walk through the tall grass surrounded with NO TRESPASSING signs, toward the old palace, but Ursina persisted.
“This”—Ursina, standing by a tree halfway to the building, looked excitedly about her—“was where the czar and czarina and their four daughters and the little czarevich strolled.” She closed her eyes, conjuring the scene forty-five years ago. Motioning to Tamara to follow her, she walked resolutely toward the deserted mansion.
There was a guard sitting, legs outstretched, in a guardhouse outside. He hailed them to stop. But after a brief conversation with Ursina, he motioned the girls to go ahead and explore, but told them to be back in twenty minutes. “Or I will apprehend you and have you flogged!” Ursina laughed, and the guard laughed with her, wondering if he had ever seen a more beautiful fifteen-year-old than this one, with the oval face, large brown eyes, and mischievous mouth.
The ghostly palace had been mostly living quarters, Ursina remarked as they walked about the ground floor. “But there were public rooms—this was obviously one of those, look how long it is—for the ministers who waited on the imperial presence. They were made ministers because the czar tolerated a lot of parliamentary agencies around him.”
“What did they do?” Tamara asked.
“Not much.” Ursina showed off the knowledge she had picked up from the library book on Leningrad’s palaces. “Remember, the czar was crowned as Autocrat of All the Russias. He did what he wanted—until our people came to the rescue.”
They looked about and then, on the way back across the park to their bicycles, stopped again at the guardhouse, where Ursina gave the old guard a piece of the rock candy she carried. “That was very interesting. Thank you, comrade.” He smiled and took the candy.
Ursina didn’t linger over imperial history and didn’t pause, after her early bicycle tours, to study palaces. Year by year she immersed herself more deeply in her study of science. She took to spending her free hours, after school, at army hospitals, the closest being the hospital at Moskovsky Avenue 1072. It was one of six charged with tending to the broken bodies of four thousand survivors of the long and bloody war with the Nazis, a war that ended the year before Ursina was born. She contrived to look older than seventeen by pulling back her hair, wearing a babushka, and applying a thin layer of lipstick.
She paid special attention to Ward 14. That ward was maintained as a hospice. Its patients were all dying, some more quickly than others. Ursina lingered regularly with Lutz, nearly every part of whom—excepting only his smile, which Ursina thought indestructible—had been shattered by a land mine. He managed to smile even when being fed potions that made other patients gag.
But Lutz was not a smiling scarecrow. He spoke with great absorption of his own story, and his expression was sometimes overtly melancholy.
“You know, Miss Ursina, I stepped on that mine eighteen years and four months ago and have been in hospitals all that time. Yes, I remember the day and the hour and the minute, January 11, 1945, at 1406. But you know what, Miss Ursina, what I remember most was the pain of the weeks before we set out on that road.”
“From another wound?”
“No,” Lutz smiled. “Unless you call hunger a wound. We were eating bark from trees. One day, Miss Ursina, you will permit me to make you a birch stew.… Don’t stick out your tongue on your pretty face! Birch stew can be delicious, if you’re hungry enough, and if you are allowed to sleep after eating it. Sleep was difficult for the Fifth Motorized Rifle Division because the artillery batteries were only a few kilometers behind us.”
What work had he done before he was conscripted?
His face brightened sharply. “I served at the Bistro By-talso. Through the kindness of the great gentleman who played the accordion for the guests, I was myself learning to play. He would stay on after midnight with me for a half hour. I would slip him vodka and some beer—nobody ever noticed the next day—and he would teach me some tunes and show me the chords on the fingerboard.” Lutz held up his right hand. “If I had two fingers back maybe I could show you how to use them—I mean, how the fingers call up the chords.”
Ursina said that nothing would give her more pleasure than to learn something about accordions. “My father hired an accordionist to play on his fiftieth birthday, but the trouble was, he started playing some czarist music.”
Lutz looked over at the patient on his right, his bed eight inches removed. “That would not do,” he whispered, his smile brighter than ever.
“Though I guess,” Ursina smiled coquettishly, “you are not likely to grow back two fingers, Lutz.”
“No,” he said. “But I won’t be hungry again, so why complain? And you—you are very young, I can see that, but you are already a skilled nurse. I wish you would look after me always, Miss Ursina.”
“I promise, I will,” she told him, leaning over to stroke the white hairs left on his head, and moving on to visit other patients, most of whom eagerly awaited their turn with “Babushka Nightingale.” That was what the legless lieutenant who had studied at the university dubbed her one day, explaining to the wounded man on his right why he called her that, and leaving it for him to pass the word, until many of them were calling her Babushka Nakteengill.
Ursina knew that her uncle, Dr. Roman Eskimov, was soon to retire from his work in the urology department of the Moscow University Medical School. Neither she nor her mother knew what this would do to her aunt and uncle’s living arrangements. A few weeks before Dr. Eskimov’s retirement, he was informed by the Citizens’ Housing Authority that he and his wife, being childless, would have to take leave of their two-bedroom apartment, spacious quarters to which he would no longer be entitled once he left his employment at the university. The alternative to moving to a smaller apartment was to take in an approved tenant. Dr. Eskimov filed an application on behalf of his sister-in-law, Simona Chadinov.
The letter Simona received from her sister one Saturday morning was full of news. The application to the housing officials had been approved; the two sisters would soon be reunited. And Uncle Roman had secured a place for Ursina to study in the urology department of the medical school to which he had been attached for forty-five years.
Ursina did not go to Ward 14 to say goodbye. She would not say goodbye to Lutz, because she knew she would cry, and she reasoned that to do such a thing would only add to his pains. She thought to consult with her mother about it, but decided against even doing that, because she knew that tears would flow from the mere telling of her problem of leaving her afflicted friends. They would all be dead soon, was the only comfort she could take.
CHAPTER 4
Ursina Chadinov lived for two years with her mother and the Eskimovs, then moved to the university dormitory. At age twenty-four she was granted her medical degree and took up her work at the university hospital. As her career progressed, she applied for an apartment. After the usual delay, she was assigned to one on Pozharsky Street, to be shared with another young woman, Rufina Pukhov, an economist and editor. Rufina, two years Ursina’s junior, was trim and efficient in manner and in life. She and Ursina became fast friends, and genial sparring partners.
Rufina was nearly thirty-eight when she met and fell in love with an Englishman living in Moscow. Now, a year later, they had finally received the necessary permission to marry. Rufina would soon be leaving her roommate.
“You have never told me, Ursina, why you prefer to read books in English.” They were having tea, late in the afternoon, before going together to the ballet.
“Rufina, dear, there are lots of things I haven’t told you. For instance, I am not going to give you the details on the patients I treated this morning.”
“I don’t want any such details. Well, maybe I would like to hear about some of them. Have they discovered a cure for erectile dysfunction?”
“Yes, but they won’t publish it.”
“Why?”
“The Cold War. Why do you ask?”
“What does erectile dysfunction have to do with the Cold War?”
“Ah, Rufina, you are so naïve.”
“Me? I remind you I am affiliated with the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute.”
“What do they know about the effects of erectile dysfunction?”
Rufina looked pained. She often did when conversing with Ursina. “The Institute is engaged in important research projects that touch down very heavily on the behavior of the bourgeois world.”
“Does your Institute predict the birth rate in the enemy nations?”
“Of course.”
“Well, can you not figure it out? The birth rate, which is a national concern, is influenced by erectile health.”
Rufina decided not to play along. Ursina liked to tease, but she could carry it on longer than Rufina, sometimes, was inclined to do. So, “Never mind, Ursina, never mind. Are all your patients men?”
“Most of them. I have some female patients.”
“What is their trouble?”
“Their lovers’ erectile dysfunctions.”
“Oh shut up, Ursina. I don’t think I will encourage you to meet my fiancé. He is too delicate.”
Ursina laughed. “Too delicate to do what? To work?”
“He does not … work, in the sense you are using the word. He does teach one seminar. Apart from that he is, well, retired.”
“Retired from what? From work?”
“You have a way of twisting things around. Anyway, Andrei Fyodorovich doesn’t talk about his former work.”
“Oh, he too was a urologist?”
Rufina noisily closed her book. “Get back to the question I asked you. Why do you like reading in English?”
“Because Mark Twain does not read convincingly in Russian.”
“Why not?”
“‘Dey’s two gals flyin’ ’bout you in yo’ life. One uv ’em’s light en t’other one is dark. One is rich en t’other is po’. You’s gwyne to marry de po’ one fust en de rich one by en by.’ Is that enough for you, Rufina? Or shall I read more from Tom Sawyer?”
Rufina raised her hand in surrender. “Surely some Russian has tried translating Twain?”
“Yes. Dina Volokhonsky tried, and she failed. Maybe your Andrei will try his hand at translating Mark Twain?”
“I know of course that Mark Twain was an eloquent historian of the depravity of the American South.” Rufina, the economist, thought something serious and productive should be said in this conversation with Ursina.
“Uh-huh.”
“That is correct, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“How is it incorrect?”
“Mark Twain simply recorded what life was like. He was a portraitist, not an ideologue.”
“Artists, we are amply informed, need to serve the truth.”
“Mark Twain did that.”
“How?”
“He spoke about young Negro Americans, and all of America listened, and learned.”
“You can hardly say that. Mark Twain was when?”
“1835 to 1910.”
“They did not have civil rights until … until they felt the pressure from us to treat people equally.”
“Yes. Yes. They learned about human equality from Josef Stalin.”
“Ursina!”
“Just teasing. Can your fiancé read American English? Or just English English?”
Rufina paused. “Yes. Yes, he knows American quite well.”
“Well, ask him, dear. Ask him about Mark Twain.”
“You ask him, dear. Andrei is very approachable.”
CHAPTER 5
Ursina Chadinov looked down lasciviously at the telephone. A private telephone! After years of having to walk downstairs to the building concierge to make a call, or receive a call. “If that phone wanted to make love to me,” she said to Rufina the first time she used it, “I would happily cooperate.”
Rufina was also pleased. She felt herself entitled to a private phone, as an employee of the Economics Institute, but gave credit to Ursina for prevailing over the Soviet bureaucracy. “There are perquisites in being named professor of urology at the University of Moscow, on top of having published a book on urological research,” Rufina acknowledged, fondling the telephone.
“Yes, dear Rufina. And one of those perquisites is the party you are giving for me on Wednesday. I am really looking forward to it.”
“It’s hardly a party. There’ll be just six of us at dinner.”
“I prefer to think of it as a party. And I will get to meet your mysterious fiancé, Andrei Fyodorovich Martins.”
“Of course. Only please, Ursina, don’t start teasing Andrei about his past. It’s this simple: He does not talk about it.
“Now, we’ve invited two students he’s especially taken with in his senior seminar. They are the Gromovs, Maxsim—Maks—and Irina. They are very attractive, and, by the way, you can speak with them in English—they are thoroughly schooled.”
“Does Andrei Fyodorovich lecture to his seminar in English?”
“Yes, it is a part of the school discipline.”
“What exactly does he teach, in his senior seminar?”
“That is another forbidden topic.”
“I understand. Anyway, I’m to talk to Andrei in English. That is a part of his discipline.”
“When he and I are alone together we use both languages. My English is quite advanced, as you well know. In fact, you have my permission to converse with me in English from now on, Ursina, if you wish.”
“Can I use the language of Mark Twain?”
“Or switch back to the language of Aleksandr Pushkin. Suit yourself.”
“What can I bring to the party?”
“Bring along a sedative, Ursina, something that will keep you non-argumentative for a couple of hours. Urologists use sedatives, don’t they?”
“They certainly do when I am operating on them.”
Ursina would bring, as her guest, Vladimir Kirov, a senior professor in the urology department. He had studied under Ursina’s uncle and had in turn taught Ursina at the medical school. She knew him as teacher, colleague, and devoted friend.
Kirov happily pursued studies in non-medical fields and was now taking courses in English literature at the university. He had introduced Ursina to works by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Malcolm Muggeridge. “The first two are Roman Catholics, but even so, they write very well. Muggeridge was once an admirer of the Soviet Union, though he turned against us. But he is a very witty writer. Evelyn Waugh is a critic of manners, and Graham Greene writes mostly about the soul.”
“The what?”
“The soul. If you said ‘the soul of man,’ you’d be talking about the noncorporeal side of man.”
“You don’t have to explain that, Volodya. For instance, you could say, ‘Lenin caught the soul of Marxism,’ couldn’t you?”
Kirov chuckled, and confirmed the time of the party on Wednesday. “I’ll come by in a cab at 1930.”
Ursina had only once before visited Andrei’s flat, shown it by Rufina one afternoon when he was away. Ursina had described it to Kirov. “It is on Uspensky Street, just off Pushkin Square. From the apartment there is a view to the west, east, and south. Rufina tells me that at sunset you can watch, from the kitchen window, the sunlight sliding down the spire of one of those hideous Stalin skyscrapers.”
The one-legged doorman admitted them, and they walked up the narrow staircase adorned with colored prints of work by modern Russian artists.
Rufina was smart looking in early middle age. She wore a jabot blouse, a red rose pinned to one side, and greeted them at the door. They followed her to the little salon, which seemed at first to be simply a burgeoning library. And indeed it served as such—as a study for Andrei—and also as a makeshift dining room.
The dining table was covered with a white tablecloth. Two candles flanked a photograph of Ursina and Rufina, taken the day they both moved into the apartment on Pozharsky Street. Spread on the table were drinking glasses, what seemed a glass manufacturing company’s total output. Ursina, teasingly, began to count them. “Rufina, did the czar lay on more glasses than you have done, at a party for, oh, a friendly count? Liqueur glasses, wine glasses, water glasses—Andrei, are Dr. Kirov and I, as practicing urologists, required also to drink water?”
Andrei, thirty-seven years older than his fiancée, his hair thick but completely gray, his shoulders square, was seated in an easy chair, a book open on his lap. He looked up, taking pains to participate in Ursina’s jocular opening. “Ah, professor. Tell me. Is water a strain on the … system?”
Rufina stepped into the exchange. She said testily, “Too much vodka, Andrei Fyodorovich, is certainly a strain on the system. And you are not to use the wine glasses when pouring out vodka, or”—she laughed—“you will damage not only the body but also the Marxist cause. You will remember, I hope, that Comrade Khrushchev cautioned many years ago against the excessive use of vodka?”
“Yes, Rufina,” Andrei stretched out his hand as he might have done to silence a student exhibiting his ignorance, “but he was talking about the peasantry. It is they who drink too much.”
The hearty knock on the door interrupted the banter. Rufina went to the door and brought in the Gromovs.
Andrei rose from his easy chair. Those fat folk, Ursina thought, will need to enter the room one at a time. And, true, Maksim Gromov’s girth was enormous, his wife’s torso equally so. “Ah, Maksim, Irina, how nice to welcome you other than in a classroom setting. Have a drink of vodka before Rufina consumes it all.”
They drank together and nibbled on the zakuski. Ursina turned to Maksim. “Tell me something you learned this week in class from Andrei Fyodorovich. Oh, I’m sorry—I forgot. I wasn’t supposed to ask about what he teaches. If Rufina correctly describes the scene, we must assume it is very secret. Does it tell us, Andrei Fyodorovich, how we can overcome the West in agricultural production?”
Rufina shot a look of exasperation at Ursina. Andrei’s face was suddenly rigid. He lit a Gauloise cigarette. And then, a mild reproach in his tone of voice, he said, “The Marxist revolution is not about how to make corn grow more plentifully than they evidently manage to do in … Iowa?” His patient smile now resumed, and he reached for his glass. Andrei liked to drink and smoke simultaneously, and frequently.
“Of course, of course. On the other hand,” Ursina took a conspicuous bite of one of the zakuski, “is there anything grander than this smoked salmon? You’re not going to try to trump that as a Soviet accomplishment, this salmon? With what? A peaceful revolution in Nicaragua?”
Rufina sighed resignedly. She turned to Maksim. “Maks, the way Ursina Dmitrievna is going, we won’t get her to talk sense unless we start conversing about men’s genital problems and getting it wrong. That’s the only subject about which I assume she knows something.”
“You want to talk about that?” Ursina laughed. “Well, there was this man called Adam, and this girl called Eve—”
“Oh shut up, Ursina, and have another drink,” Andrei said.
“I’ll gladly help you change the subject,” said Kirov. “I will tell you about three British authors I have been reading. They are Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge. Andrei Fyodorovich, you probably have heard of them.”
“Actually, I have known all three.”
Kirov was stunned to hear this. But he was confronted with the hard stone wall that encircled Andrei Fyodorovich Martins. All Kirov could get from his host was that he had “brushed up against” those British authors while studying in England as a very young man. But whereas Kirov, the elderly and soft-spoken scholar, was willing to retire from the fray, Ursina persisted. “Can’t you tell us anything about these famous British writers, Andrei Fyodorovich? Like—did they fight in the Great Anti-Fascist War?”
“Yes. I think they were all … involved.”
“Were they in favor of the war during the Stalin–Hitler pact?”
The reference brought silence. That episode in Soviet history, when Stalin had joined Adolf Hitler in a mutual security treaty, had stupefied Marxists and fellow travelers around the world. They had been taught that any concession to Hitler was a violation of the faith. The Stalin–Hitler pact was simply not mentioned.
Kirov spoke up, reproachfully. “The Soviet Union, Ursina, was fighting for time, and had to make a truce with the devil.”
Irina Gromov backed him up. “The anti-fascist constancy of the Soviet Union is a matter of record. We fought them, after all, in Spain.”
“As a matter of fact,” Kirov said, “Greene and Muggeridge were actively opposed to Franco. Not so much Waugh—he was a Catholic in his politics and of course Franco’s fascists were Catholics.”
“History obliges us,” Andrei said, faltering a little in finding the Russian words, “to recognize Josef Stalin as a great war leader and sturdy champion of the revolution. But we are not obliged to applaud everything he did.”
“And just now,” Maksim, heretofore silent, observed, “Comrade Gorbachev has furthered the cause of peace by leading the American president to remove intermediate-range missiles from Europe.”
“Yes,” said Ursina. “Comrade Gorbachev is in favor of peace. Everywhere except Afghanistan.”
Rufina’s distress was no longer concealed. “We will not talk politics any more. This is a celebratory dinner. Celebrating Ursina’s celebrated appointment as a professor and the great accomplishments of Soviet science. I present a toast: to Professor Ursina Chadinov and to—”
“Don’t toast to an early end to men’s problems. Vladimir and I would be out of business.”
Everyone laughed, and with some relief, Rufina put on a new recording of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony.
CHAPTER 6
Gus Windels, who had been living and working in Moscow since reporting for duty in April, kept busy in the United States diplomatic legation, as a public-affairs officer. His native fluency in Russian permitted him to scan the day’s papers easily, and his political sophistication put developments rapidly in their ideological place. This morning, the tall, lanky, young American read the welcome news.
A Nobel Prize for Joseph Brodsky! Good stuff! Charlie Wick—Wick was the director of the United States Information Agency in Washington, a keen cold warrior and a personal friend of President Reagan—would eat that up. He’ll have that instead of breakfast, Gus figured.
Inevitably, somebody—maybe Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary, or George Shultz, secretary of state—would be cabling the ambassador asking how come the United States Embassy in Moscow, with its nine hundred employees, hadn’t got wind of this propaganda coup, a Nobel for a prime Soviet target.
Gus thought about it.
Joseph Brodsky, Leningrad Jew, superb poet and essayist. In 1964 they had arrested him and sent him to Gulag. He was there for eighteen months, until General Secretary Brezhnev—successor to Khrushchev—who had carted Brodsky away, decided that detaining the newsworthy young writer wasn’t really worth the cultural uproar.
For all his experience with Soviet culture, Gus sometimes wondered in full voice about the sheer public-relations stupidity of the Kremlin. There were plenty of Russians they could more or less safely torture in Gulag. But Brodsky was (1) a young man (twenty-three), (2) a poet, (3) a Jew, who (4) wrote poetry in Russian and in English, if you please, and had an international fan club—“Everybody is asking, where is Brodsky?” someone had written in Playboy. So what does the dumb Soviet Union do? Charges him with the crime of “parasitism” and sends him to an Arctic labor camp!
The Soviet Union, eight million square miles, was not large enough to contain both the Kremlin and the poet, so the Communists finally deported him, as they would Solzhenitsyn a few years later.
Gus, baptized “Sergei” as an infant in the Ukraine twenty-nine years ago, had escaped, at age fourteen, with his mother. Why did his mother take the name “Windels” for herself and her son? “Because,” Gus had once heard her say in broken English, that name—Win-dels—picked from the Manhattan telephone book, was “zee most un-Russian name I could find.”
Gus and his mother had traveled to Iowa to join her brother, who had got out of the Soviet Union several years before. Gus went to school there and was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency.
His training was technical. He knew all the tricks—and on occasion used them. But for all his technical training he was, first, a Sovietologist. He served the U.S. Embassy openly in the press detachment, where he was occasionally consulted on the language of Soviet fulminations. He knew there would be huge resentment over the Nobel award to Brodsky. But there had been such a record of Soviet fiascos, the Kremlin might just be careful, this time around.
The Kremlin had forced Boris Pasternak to reject his Nobel Prize; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had declined to travel to Stockholm to collect his prize, for fear he would not be allowed to return; following which came the infinitely embarrassing Andrei Sakharov business. The great man of science, principal engineer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was not allowed to travel to Oslo to receive his Nobel Peace Prize—and then was sent to “internal exile” in Gorky.
The Kremlin is not looking for another battle with the Nobel committee, Gus calculated. There wasn’t, after all, anything they could do to Brodsky himself—he had already been exiled as an enemy alien and lived safely abroad. And there was the other point: Every now and again the Nobel committee honored a Russian artist or scientist who was in good standing. The Kremlin liked it when that happened. Categorical denunciations of Nobels diluted the honor for such comrades.
Gus wrote out a note to the deputy chief of mission: “Soviets probably won’t thunder over the Brodsky award. Maybe we shouldn’t, either.”
He got a call two hours later. “The ambassador agrees on Brodsky. We’ll play it down. What he’s most interested in—what everybody’s most interested in—is the International Peace Forum coming up. Keep your eyes on it.”
Gus Windels would do so, of course—he already had it in his sights. The peace forum was a Gorbachev initiative, scheduled to take place after Gorbachev’s visit with President Reagan in December. The announced theme of the peace forum was to be “A Nonnuclear World for the Survival of Mankind.”
Such a forum! Under such auspices!
Surely Pierre Trudeau of Canada would be there. And full-time Soviet apologist Armand Hammer. There would probably be some of the same U.S. celebrities (Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal) who had been assembled two decades earlier to promote Fidel Castro in Cuba. But Gus had heard that this time the Kremlin was going to try for some new blood.