The Debriefing (19 page)
Stone accepts her hand, which is extended to him in a way that gives him no choice but to kiss the back of it. Bending, he touches his lips to the lace—a gesture his father made him master on the day of his thirteenth birthday.
Katushka laughs, whispers in her mother’s ear. “He is something special. He’s a foreigner!”
Her mother, whose name is Tanya, observes Stone in this new light. “Oh, dear, how very original. He looks normal enough.” She turns brightly to Katushka. “Let’s decide not to hold it against him.”
“Where did you find the gardener?” Katushka asks her mother as they start toward the dacha. Stone, forgotten, trails along behind.
Tanya wipes her shoes vigorously on the mat before the wooden door, surveys the others to make sure they follow suit, heads for the kitchen to put up water to boil. “I heard about the gardener from the cousin of the ridiculous woman who runs the bread shop in Nikolina Gora. He had just moved in with a sister of his there, and was rumored to be looking for work. He has a fantastic story,” she says, licking her lips. And she sets about telling it: “Apparently the amount of lumber a log will yield is determined by the placement of the first cut in the log. A misjudgment of half a centimeter can reduce the yield by as much as a third. My man—you will have guessed it by now—was packed off to Siberia because he didn’t get the first cut right. They called it sabotage and gave him a tenner. He was released six months ago and went back to work as a first-cutter. He was making splendid cuts, but was replaced by a computer that scans the log with an electric eye and automatically positions the saw. Well, their loss is my gain! We’ve organized to grow medicinal plants together. With my know-how and his brawn, we’ll make a fortune. Oh, it’s so thrilling, private enterprise. I adore it, don’t you?” She smiles politely at Stone. “But then, you will have had a great deal of experience with private enterprise.”
Stone says, “Katushka brought me all the way here so you could tell me about her father.”
Tanya looks innocently at Katushka. “Which version am I to give him?”
“The real one, mother. Tell him the truth, and for God’s sake, tell it so he’ll believe it. It’s important.”
They settle into wooden chairs drawn up around the old tiled stove, which is still warm to the touch from the fire the night before. Katushka pours tea; her mother takes hers with slices of green apple in the glass. White lace curtains on the double windows filter the light, soften it. The voices too.
When they leave, two hours later, the sun has set and the air is sharp. The first-cutter is still hoeing; he has set stakes in the ground and tied lines between them to keep his rows straight. From behind a double window, Tanya raises a white-gloved hand; her breath has fogged the window in front of her face, and the fogged window blurs her features. Katushka waves back from the car as they set out in the twilight for Moscow.
“Well?”
Stone, still undecided, watches the birch trees slip past. “Well, what?”
Katushka says, “We have the possibility of a perfect relationship, you and I. You’ll think you are using me. I’ll think I am using you.”
“I still don’t understand,” Stone says, “why you want to help me.”
Katushka looks at him in the darkness. “I don’t want to
help
you,” she explains. “I want to
hurt them.”
Katushka and Stone join the queue for the sausages, which is moving at a painfully slow pace. Muttering about being a seven-month baby who can’t support long periods on his feet, a frail man with a facial tic tries to cut into the line. Stone shrugs and steps back to make room, but Katushka delivers a healthy kick to the man’s shins and pushes him from the line. “The best thing for you, comrade line-jumper”—she laughs good-naturedly—“is to return to the womb for two months!”
Outside the store, the sausages safely tucked into her handbag,
Katushka looks triumphantly at Stone. “That proves you’re a foreigner beyond any possible doubt,” she says. “A real Russian would never let someone cut into line ahead of him!”
In a spacious corner office on the fourth floor of the KGB complex on Dzerzhinsky Square, a quiet, pipe-smoking man of about sixty studies a dossier open on his desk. Finally he looks up at the two young men
.
“The name is obviously false” he says. “How did he get the magazines out of the hotel?”
“He had a shoulder sack.”
The man with the pipe shakes his head in annoyance. “Have the photography lab work up some composites of him without the mustache and eyeglasses, and pass them around to the units assigned to the A-list dissidents. There’s always a chance he’ll try to contact one of them.”
One of the young men says, “You’d think they’d get tired of their little game,” and his companion laughs and says, “They certainly go to a lot of trouble to bring in a few dozen pamphlets.”
The man with the pipe sucks it back into life. “The thing… that bothers … me is that he … left one copy of
… Grani
behind in the lining.” The tobacco has caught, and he draws on it thoughtfully. “Almost as if he wanted to make sure we knew he was a
Grani
courier. Well”—he slides the dossier across the desk and waves impatiently at the two men—“what else do you have for me?”
Stone is having second thoughts, and they keep him up most of the night. Occasionally he drifts off into a troubled sleep, only to be woken by the braying of a zebra in the zoo below, and toward dawn by a taunting argument between Morning Stalin and Ilyador, whispering feverishly to each other in the hallway. A toilet flushes in another part of the building, setting up a rattle of pipes in the walls. Stone, once again trapped on the surface of things, sits up with a start. The strange girl with the enormous dark eyes stirs; the blanket falls away, revealing a thin shoulder, a pale breast. Stone covers her, then lets the cold air bathe his skin for a long moment, thinking of things a world away: of Thro, of his daughter, of the lady lawyer who promised him what he promised Kulakov—that everything would work out in the end.
In the morning Katushka comes awake with a start, leaps lightly from the bed and, braced by the cold air which she draws in deep gulps, goes through her ritual: she peers at her body in the mirror, trying to see it as she thinks others see it. “When I was a small girl,” she tells Stone, “my mother always told me that somewhere in the world there is someone living the same life as you—a kind of mirror image, the only difference being her hair is parted on the other side.” She looks across at Stone. “You will come to understand that such things can be true,” she announces, and before he can comment either way she asks,
“Have you decided to admit what I already know—that you are not Russian? Have you decided to let me help you?”
Stone makes up his mind on the spot. “I’m not the occasion you’ve been waiting for,” he says. “What I have to do in Moscow, I’ll do by myself. You can help me by staying out of it.”
“Have it your way,” Katushka says icily. “Don’t forget the twenty-five rubles are payable in advance.”
At breakfast, Ilyador Aleksandrovich turns up as Isadora Aleksandrovna, wearing a fluffy dressing gown and polish on his nails.
Morning Stalin paces back and forth behind Ilyador’s chair and talks to the back of his neck. “You are the most naïve fig I have ever laid eyes on,” he says, apparently picking up where they left off the night before.
“I’m delighted you think so.” Ilyador refuses to rise to the bait. “Naïveté is something I try to cultivate. It’s a quality, when all is said and done, that comes
after
sophistication.”
Katushka swallows a spoonful of foul-smelling lavender pollen (supplied, in return for services rendered, by an acquaintance at the free market), taps Stone on the wrist with her spoon. “You should know that I’m not at all pleased with you.” And she adds hopefully, “You can still change your mind.”
“Change his mind about what?” demands Morning Stalin.
“I’ll be gone most of the day,” Stone announces.
Ilyador holds his fingernails to the light and admires them. “Naïveté”—he talks to nobody in particular—“is intoxicating.”
Stone gets up to leave. Katushka, angry now, watches him go, then flings her teacup against the wall, plastering it with tea leaves, shattering the cup to bits. Ilyador cringes against Morning Stalin. “What did we do?” he asks in a weak voice.
Stone spends the better part of the morning doing some fairly elementary street work. He lingers at a kiosk studying the headlines in
Pravda
, suddenly glances at his watch and sprints across a street just as the light changes. No one sprints across behind
him. He dashes through an underground passageway, late for an appointment (he doesn’t have), and stops at the far end to look at East German radios in a store window. He leaps from a subway car just as the doors start to close, crosses over and crowds into a train going in the other direction. When he is absolutely sure he isn’t being followed, he enters a sporting goods store on Arbat Street to buy a cheap leather briefcase, then ducks into the men’s room in the Stalin Gothic at the foot of the Arbat to empty the contents of his shoulder bag into the briefcase. On his way out he casually discards the bag (in a very public wastebasket; whoever finds it will keep it). That done, he sets out on foot for the Ministry of Defense canteen, on a side street not far from the Kremlin.
Moscow is a sprawling scar; people who aren’t used to it tend to hold their breath so they won’t catch whatever it has. Crusts of soot cling to massive buildings like sediment. Stalin Gothics, seven show skyscrapers in all, brutalize the horizon. Twelvelane boulevards cut through the city like geological faults.
Stone knows Moscow as well as he knows the back of his hand: its alleyways and boulevards, its bus routes and subway lines, its parks and playgrounds, its garbage collection system, its sewer system, its public steam baths and soccer stadiums, its central markets and railroad stations. It was Stone, in fact, who—just starting out in Topology in the early fifties—organized what became known as the Moscow Project. After he was promoted, he handed it on to one of his juniors, but he kept in touch the way someone does with an alma mater—out of a vague feeling that one ought to be nostalgic. But knowing Moscow’s idiosyncrasies—knowing, for instance, that the stores stay open on the last Sunday of every month to fulfill their selling plans—is not the same as knowing its mood or its pulse. And its mood is gray and its pulse is slow; people move as if they have all the time in the world to get where they are going, as if the getting there won’t change anything.
But Stone makes his way through the streets with a purposefulness that sets him apart. At the ministry canteen he gives the
guard at the door a discreet glimpse of his KGB identification card, then lines up to check his coat in the cloakroom.
“Have you ever been unfaithful to your wife?” the colonel in front of Stone asks his companion, who is in civilian clothes.
“No. Never.”
The colonel is incredulous. “You never slept with another woman?”
The man in civilian clothes says, “Sleeping with another woman has nothing to do with being unfaithful to your wife.”
Stone checks his overcoat and hat, but keeps his briefcase tucked under his arm as he heads for the dining room. At the entrance, he presses a ruble note into the headwaiter’s hand and tells him, “I’m looking for an old comrade, name of Aksenov. He’s a diplomatic courier with the ministry.”
“The one on crutches.” The headwaiter nods, rising on his toes to survey the room. “Ah, he’s over there, the second table from the end, next to the bleached blonde.”
Stone makes his way to the table. “Comrade Major Aksenov?”
Aksenov looks up from his soup and studies Stone’s face, trying to place it. Puzzled, he asks politely, “Do we know each other?”
Stone flashes his KGB card at the bleached blonde. “Why don’t you find another table,” he orders her without a trace of politeness. She quickly gathers up her plate, napkin and pocket-book and goes off, with a backward glance, in search of a vacant seat.
“You must have quite a calling card to send her scurrying like that,” Aksenov comments good-naturedly. “Can I get a look at it too?”
Stone shows it to him, and Aksenov says, “So that’s how it is. If it’s about Kulakov, I’ve already told the ministry investigators everything I know. Which is nothing.”
The waiter, an elderly man in an ill-fitting black jacket with food stains on the lapels, offers Stone a menu, but he waves him away. “I’m not eating,” he says, playing the KGB role to the
hilt. “I’m asking.” To Aksenov he says, “You were supposed to be on duty the day Kulakov was sent out of the country.”
Aksenov jerks his head toward his crutches, which are leaning against the wall next to the table. “I was indisposed,” he says sarcastically. “Listen, I went all through this with the military intelligence people. If you got along better with each other you wouldn’t have to go over the same ground a second time.”
Stone lets the silence build up until it is uncomfortable; Aksenov looks around nervously. Stone, toying with a fork, says quietly, “When we need instructions on how to conduct our investigations, we will come to you for advice. For now, simply tell me how, and where, and when, and under what circumstances, you broke your leg.”
“I was hit by a jeep as I went out for my morning bread. One second there was no car there, the next it was bearing down on me. I couldn’t get out of the way. The bastard driver never stopped.”
“Did anybody see the accident? Did anybody note the jeep’s number?”
“A teen-age girl, a neighbor of mine, thought she did, but she must have got it wrong in the excitement, because it turned out there was no jeep with that number on its plates. And the local militia never found out who it was either.” Aksenov smiles grimly. “If I ever get my hands on the driver—”
Stone asks, “Who reported you sick?”
“My wife phoned in from the hospital. They told her not to worry, that nothing was scheduled, and in any case they would find a substitute if a run came up over the weekend.”