Red Army Spies and the Blackrobes Trilogy

by Patrick Trese

  “No,” he said, “he doesn’t look like the kind of guy you’d easily forget.”

  Herb turned and stared at J. Edgar Hoover’s portrait, drummed his fingers on his desk, then swiveled around to face Father Beck.

  “Okay, Father,” said Agent-in-Charge Herbert J. Coogan. “Let me see what I can do.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Herb Coogan’s secretary was standing by her desk with her steno pad in her hand when he returned from seeing Father Beck to the elevator.

  “Do you want your messages now?” she asked.

  “Give me about five minutes.”

  He sat down at his desk and tried to concentrate, but he couldn’t help thinking about Father Beck’s remark that the FBI men in the general office looked like accountants. True enough, but those with degrees in Accounting were federal investigators and law enforcement officers now, not just CPAs. There was more to them than met the eye. And the same could be said about the Jesuits he had known.

  They all looked like ordinary parish priests: same black suits, same Roman collars, same black cassocks. No special insignia, no special habit, nothing to remind anyone of the order’s blood-soaked history: Edmund Campion, drawn and quartered in Elizabethan England; Isaac Jogues and his band of missionaries tortured and killed by the Iroquois; Father Pro hunted down and killed by a firing squad in revolutionary Mexico. And this was the crowd his son Charley was about to get mixed up with.

  Herb picked up the photographs Father Beck left with him. He stared hard at the priest in Russia. Herb wondered if Father Campion, Father Jogues and Father Samozvanyetz had all joined the Jesuits because their mothers thought it was a swell idea.

  Herb called out to his secretary.

  “Send Dan Webster in, will you? I’ve got some things for him to do.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The airplane carrying Father Beck back to Chicago that afternoon was following the sun and its light shimmered off the wing on his side of the cabin. He lowered the plastic window shade and began to read his Office. The First Lesson was from the First Book of Machabees. Mathathias, the father of Judas Machabeus, was dying and saying to his sons, in Latin:

  “Now have pride and violence grown strong. Now is the time for destruction, wrath and indignation. Now therefore, my sons, be zealous for the Law and give your lives for the covenant of your fathers.”

  Father Beck sighed. It was hard going, like trying to listen to a radio station that kept fading in and out.

  “Abraham, nonne in tentationem ventus est fidelis . . .”

  He reread the passage, letting it flow into English.

  “Was not Abraham found faithful in temptation, and it was credited to him as justice?”

  Father Beck closed his Breviary and lifted the window shade. Enough of that, he thought. He would read his Office later, in privacy and on the ground, not hurtling over the clouds ten thousand feet above the earth.

  He often felt out of place in the Old Testament. He was much more at home on the banks of the Jordan or the shore of the Sea of Galilee. But he was on rocky, unfamiliar ground in much of the Old Testament. He appreciated the poetry and ethics of the ancient scriptures, but he never knew what to make of all the doom and gloom, all the guilt and remorse and despair.

  “Now is the time of destruction, wrath and indignation,” a dying man was telling his sons today. How grim and how typical of that landscape. He simply did not comprehend the emotional world of the Old Testament. He was a young man when he gave himself to the service of God. And God had rewarded him with years of mostly sunny days.

  “Was not Abraham found faithful in temptation?”

  What did God’s testing of Abraham have to do with John Beck? God had never spoken to him directly. Nor had he a son to offer in sacrifice. He had no idea how he would have handled that life and death decision that was forced upon poor old Abraham. So what lesson was there for him to learn?

  As far as he could tell, he had never been tempted to commit a serious sin. But so what? That had to be the case with most people in religious orders and he was indeed grateful that his Jesuit life had delivered him from temptation. But today’s reading made him uncomfortable.

  Just about everybody in the Bible had been tempted, it seemed. The Scriptures were full of stories of temptation. Abraham, Moses, Simon Peter. Even Christ had been tempted by Satan himself. Why not John Beck?

  Looking out across the sunlit clouds, he couldn’t recall one completely dark day. There were days when he was concerned about the difficulties experienced by others, even saddened by their trials. He could commiserate. He could comfort. But he had his faith and nothing ever really troubled him except this vague concern about never having been troubled.

  “Please fasten your seat belt, Father.”

  The stewardess was speaking to him with a look of concern.

  Had it been so difficult to gain his attention?

  Father Beck glanced down at his lap, and then smiled at her.

  “It seems I’ve had it fastened all the way from Cleveland,” he said. “But thanks for the reminder.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The next morning, Agent Daniel Webster, who had done a quick background investigation of the Samozvanyetz family, strolled into Herb Coogan’s office with a show of nonchalance.

  “Good,” said Herb. “You found something?”

  “Only a murder,” said Webster. “Five years ago. Mrs. Charles Vogel, born Natalie Samozvanyetz. Shot and killed when her house was burglarized. A widow. No children. Her husband had been a professor at Penn State. Died of heart failure ten years after he’d retired. The Vogels lived in Bellefonte, a small town near the university. I talked to the police chief there.”

  Herb motioned the agent toward a chair. Webster sat down, crossed his legs and consulted his notes.

  “Mrs. Vogel, an elderly woman living alone, failed to keep a doctor’s appointment. The doctor’s nurse called. Mrs. Vogel didn’t answer her phone. The nurse called a few more times. Got no response. Finally asked the police to look and see if she was okay. They do that sort of thing in Bellefonte. Officers Pendleton and Moore took the call. No one answered the doorbell. They entered through the side door, which was unlocked. That didn’t strike the chief as unusual. I mean, that the door was unlocked or that the officers just went inside. It’s a small town and everybody knows everybody, the chief says. Anyway, officers found Mrs. Vogel’s body in her bedroom. The coroner estimated she’d been dead for at least two days prior. Killed by a single shot to the head. Slug was recovered. Not the murder weapon. The house burglarized. No stolen property has ever turned up. Case still open. No active leads or suspects.

  “I asked about relatives,” said Webster, putting his yellow pad aside. “Mrs. Vogel’s husband had been dead for several years. The police found some family documents that indicated that Mrs. Vogel’s mother and father were dead. Ditto Professor Vogel’s parents. He had no brothers or sisters living. Mrs. Vogel had a sister who was a Poor Clare nun in Omaha, Nebraska. She died in 1954. Natural causes.”

  “What else would a cloistered nun die of?” said Herb.

  “Yeah, what else? But I checked anyhow.” Webster smiled and went on. “The police learned that Mrs. Vogel had one brother, one Alex Samozvanyetz, who left home to study for the priesthood. They made inquiries, found out he was a Jesuit, so they notified the Jesuit office in Chicago.”

  “Father Beck didn’t mention any murder. He just said the priest’s sister died a few years ago.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know she was murdered,” said Webster. He checked his notes. “Detective Paul Mooney made the call. His report said he gave the information to an office worker, one Henrietta Leary. Left his name and phone number. But nobody ever called back for additional information.”

  “That was it?” Herb asked. “No follow up call to the Jesuits?”

  “They didn’t see any reason to, I guess,” said Webster. “There’s not much more. Mrs. Vogel had a small funeral at the local C
atholic church. Some neighbors showed up and a couple of elderly professors and their wives from Penn State. And that was that.”

  “What was missing from the house?”

  “Hard to tell. There was nobody to really inventory the place. Radio. Typewriter. That sort of stuff. Nothing heavy like the TV. There was no cash found in the house. No jewelry. The good silverware was gone, according to a neighbor lady. Professor Vogel had a coin collection, she remembered, but there was no sign of it.”

  “What do the Bellefonte police think?”

  “The chief said he thinks someone was passing through town, saw an opportunity to knock off a house that looked easy, and that Mrs. Vogel got in the way.”

  “That’s what it sounds like,” said Herb. “Well, type it up and put it in the file. And make me a copy for Father Beck. He’ll have to tell this Father Samozvanyetz about his sister’s murder. If we ever get him back, that is.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Herb Coogan decided to make a bold move.

  He sent an “Eyes Only” report as far up the FBI chain of command as he dared “because of the political sensitivity of this new intelligence.”

  In his report, he pointed out that Father Samozvanyetz might be an intelligence asset of the highest order. “Because of his many years in Soviet custody,” he wrote, “and the many high-level political prisoners with whom he may have associated, this priest may know more than he thinks he knows. Without realizing it, he may have some missing pieces that will allow the Bureau to solve puzzles that have baffled CIA analysts for years.” That last line, he thought, would probably do the job.

  J. Edgar Hoover would welcome a chance to diminish the influence of his cloak-and-dagger rivals at Langley. The top FBI managers would know that as well. So Herb was confident that the Director himself would soon be reading his last two sentences: “I believe the Bureau, because of our special relationship with this individual’s religious superiors, would be most effective in gaining his trust and eliciting information. The Bureau, not the CIA, should conduct this debriefing.”

  Herb wasn’t at all surprised to learn that his report made its way from the FBI to the Justice Department and, almost immediately, to the White House. The U.S. Attorney General and his brother, the President of the United States, were Roman Catholics. Herb assumed that the Kennedy brothers would take a personal interest in his report if it was brought to their attention.

  Sure enough, Herb was summoned to Washington and given the assignment he’d been seeking. He was now the agent in charge of the Samozvanyetz case.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Behind the scenes, the repatriation of the Jesuit in the USSR was now moving forward secretly, deliberately but slowly. From the beginning of diplomatic negotiations, the Russians seemed willing to allow Father Samozvanyetz to return to the United States. Even so, it took six months to make the arrangements final. His extraction from the Soviet Union was delayed by Khrushchev’s escalation of the Berlin crisis and the construction of the Berlin Wall.

  The Cold War made it difficult for the two Great Powers to appear to cooperate about anything. But the widely publicized exchange of the Soviet agent Colonel Rudolf Abel for the captured American U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers would provide enough distraction to allow Father Samozvanyetz to be slipped home without fanfare.

  C H A P T E R • 7

  It was April 26, 1962. The weather in Moscow had turned mild at last.

  Wearing civilian clothes, Major Oksana Volkova slid into the back seat of her black sedan. “Hotel Pushkin,” she commanded the soldier driving her vehicle. She said no more during the ride across the city.

  The big parade was still several days off but construction of the spectator stands in Red Square seemed just about finished. Pilgrims from the provinces stood patiently in the long line around the Kremlin wall waiting to enter Lenin’s tomb. Heads turned as her car flashed by. Along the main avenues, workers were covering the walls of buildings with huge portraits and placards emblazoned with party slogans. Tomorrow or the next day, lamp posts and pillars would be draped with red banners. Soon the celebrations would begin. Major Volkova yawned as her sedan sped across a bridge over the river. She had no interest in May Day.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Hotel Pushkin, built before the Revolution, was on a side street just off a broad boulevard in a residential section of the city, a short ride by taxi to the theaters, museums and office buildings of central Moscow. After the Great Patriotic War, it had been redecorated, renamed and rewired. Muscovites living in the neighborhood whispered that the walls of Hotel Pushkin had ears and the eyes of its staff never blinked.

  The hotel did not cater to ordinary tourists. It was reserved for special foreign guests of the state. One such guest had been living at Hotel Pushkin since February, but the matrons at the hall porter’s desk on the third floor who presided over the privacy, comfort and morals of the hotel guests, knew nothing about the man in Suite 307 at the end of the hallway. Nothing except his name: Alex Samozvanyetz. Hotel documents listed no other information.

  Security men, who used the adjoining Room 305 as a lounge, kept watch on the corridor around the clock. Their job, it seemed, was to keep people away from the man in Suite 307. The guest was under guard, obviously, yet he seemed free to come and go as he pleased. But always with an escort. The women at the desk studied the man every time he passed by. That he was a Russian, not a foreign visitor, they had no doubt. But a Russian from a different age, long before the Revolution. He stirred childhood memories. His was the face on an icon in a village church. Such a face could be seen only in museums now. They could not help but wonder about this Alex Samozvanyetz. What business had a saint in Hotel Pushkin?

  Major Oksana Volkova passed through the hotel’s revolving front door and stared directly at the pair of stout men who loitered just inside. Observing her straight back and military stride, they quickly looked away.

  She surveyed the long lobby with its gray marble columns. In a reception parlor off to the left, a party of Cubans waited with their luggage and their shopping bags. They were going home. Farther down the lobby, just beginning their visit, clusters of Eastern Europeans, Africans and Asians stood separated by race, language and distrust. With each group was an attentive Intourist guide and interpreter.

  She marched past guests waiting for the elevators, crossed the lobby and jogged up the marble staircase that rose and split and rose again up through the center of the hotel. On the third floor, eye level with the great crystal chandelier suspended in the stairwell, she paused to catch her breath and then marched toward the hall porter’s desk. She flashed her identification in the face of the woman on duty and then strode on toward Suite 307. A young man emerged from the doorway of Room 305, acknowledged her authority and withdrew.

  She rapped sharply on the door of Suite 307 and walked inside without waiting for an answer. She hung her hat and topcoat on a wooden peg in the foyer and entered the central room where her man sat alone at the large round dining table, reading. The window was open. White curtains fluttered in the breeze.

  “Tomorrow,” said Major Volkova.

  The man closed his book and stood up. He placed his book atop the upright piano standing against the wall.

  “Short notice, Major. After such a long wait.”

  “I just received word myself. Do you wish to converse in Russian or English?”

  “Russian, please. I will have little opportunity to speak the language from now on, I suppose.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I am somewhat melancholy. I did not think I would feel this way.”

  He walked to the china cabinet, opened the glass doors and took out a bottle of vodka and two short stemmed pink crystal glasses. “The Prisoner of Chillon regains his freedom with a sigh,” he said.

  Major Volkova let it pass without comment.

  “Let us sit in the parlor,” he said, gesturing to the door of an adjoining room. “It is more comfortable.”

&nb
sp; “Everything came together all at once,” Major Volkova said brusquely. She sat down in an upholstered armchair and arranged her skirt. “All the arrangements have been made. Your plane leaves for Paris tomorrow morning. You will leave the hotel by six.”

  He sat down on the sofa and placed the bottle and the two glasses on the low table in front of him. “So,” he said as he poured, “tomorrow is the day. I wonder if I shall ever see Russia again.”

  He handed her a glass of vodka. “To Mother Russia, then?”

  Major Volkova drained her glass and placed it on the table.

  “You will leave everything here and take nothing with you.”

  “I know. All my papers are there on the desk,” he said. “And most of the money you gave me, as well. I did not spend much.”

  “It is important that you take nothing with you, you understand. No documents, no souvenirs.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I understand. Just the clothes on my back. A louse on a leash in one pocket, a flea on a chain in the other.”

  “Please spare me your zek talk. I have expressed sufficient regrets for your ordeal, I believe.”

  “You have, of course. There are no hard feelings, Major.”

  “The prisoner-priest is most forgiving.”

  “It is the function of priests to forgive.”

  She accepted a second glass but took only a sip.

  “We have both survived, you must admit.”

  “Yes, we have,” he said. “It has been difficult, but we have both survived.”

  “And your Anya has survived as well. We must never forget Anya.”

  Major Volkova was smiling but her eyes were cold.

  “Will I see Anya before I leave?”

  “I am afraid not.”

  “I had hoped to say farewell.”

  “She is away on an assignment. I could not get her back to Moscow in time. As I said, everything fell into place more quickly than I expected.”