The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  Either that or he would smash it into a thousand pieces during another tantrum.

  Outside, gusts of soot brushed past the grimy attic window. The Potter glanced at the sliver of Moscow River he could see off in the distance between two buildings. In the old days, when things were going well, when he had been the novator-the man in charge-of the sleeper school, he and Svetochka had occupied an apartment overlooking the river. There had been a bedroom, a living room, a study, a heated workroom for his potter's wheel, a kitchen, even a bathroom-an almost unheard-of eighty-eight square meters-and they had it all to themselves. Then, when Svetochka called him "my Jew," there had been affection in her voice.

  Nowadays they lived in a building with paper-thin walls and shared forty-five square meters with another family. And there was anger in her voice no matter what she called him. Or even worse, boredom. On more than one occasion he had caught her suppressing a yawn when they made love. If he didn't notice her suppressing yawns anymore, it was because he looked up less. With his head buried between her legs, he still managed to forget the unlaundered years (Piotr Borisovich s phrase; from the moment they met, the Potter had been struck by his way with words): the rats scurrying around the labyrinth in the late thirties, when he first joined what was then called the NKVD; the seventeen months spent behind German lines in the early forties; "sanitation" expeditions in the wake of the advancing Red Army in the middle forties; then the endless death watch of the late forties and early fifties as everyone wordlessly waited for the old buzzard in the Kremlin to give up the ghost.

  The Potter could hear the telephone ringing under his feet. He could make out the sound of Svetochka's stiletto heels as she raced to answer it before the people who shared the flat could. In ten minutes the woman whom everyone invariably mistook for his daughter would slip into her imitation fur "soul warmer" and leave. Another rendezvous with another hairdresser, she would say. Another store selling imitation leather gloves that you can't tell from the real thing, she would say. Only when she came back later-much later-her hair wouldn't look any different, and there would be no imitation leather gloves in her pockets. They had run out just before her turn came, she would say

  It occurred to the Potter, not for the first time, that illusions don't die, they rot like fish in the sun. They torture you with ifs: what might have been if one of his sleepers hadn't refused to obey his

  "awakening" signal and disappeared; if a second, happier in America than in Russia, hadn't gone over to the other side; if a third, inside the CIA, hadn't been ferreted out by someone with an astonishing capacity to think the problem through from the Russian point of view. All within a six-month period. The Potter had trained the sleepers in question. He was accordingly rated on how well they performed. When the axe finally fell, there had been talk of exile in Central Asia, talk even of a prison sentence. But his record had been impeccable up to then. So they had put him out to what they thought of, all things considered, as generous pasture: a smaller apartment, a monthly stipend large enough to keep him in clay and vodka, even a self-winding Czechoslovak wristwatch delivered, without ceremony-with a certain amount of embarrassment-on his last day in harness. "For Feliks Arkantevich," the inscription read,

  "for twenty-seven years of service to the state." Service to the state!

  He might have been a street cleaner for all anyone could tell from the inscription.

  Surprisingly, Svetochka had taken his fall in stride. Not to worry, she had said, Svetochka likes her Feliks even without access to the school's warehouse; Svetochka will always be Feliks' little girl. Eventually her last pair of American stockings had gone into the garbage, and her tone had begun to change. The Potter took to waiting on a side street near the warehouse; friends slipped him an occasional American lipstick or eyebrow pencil, and Svetochka would throw her arms around his thick neck and make love to him that night the way she had when he had been the novator. But neither the lipsticks nor her ardent moods lasted very long.

  "Feliks!" Svetochka's high-pitched voice drifted up through the floorboards. "Can you hear me, Feliks? There's a phone call. Someone's asking for you. Feliks?"

  "He's coming," Svetochka assured the caller, afraid that he was one of Feliks' friends from the warehouse and might get impatient and hang up.

  "Only a moment."

  "So: I will wait," the voice said quietly.

  The Potter mumbled into the receiver. He had an instinctive distrust of telephones common to people who came to them relatively late in life.

  "What do you want?"

  A voice with an accent the Potter couldn't quite place replied, "So: if you please, note the number I will give you, yes? If you need a private taxi, dial it and one will come to your corner."

  The Potter's hand, suddenly damp with perspiration, gripped the phone.

  "I don't take taxis. They are too expensive. When I go somewhere, I use the metro or walk."

  "Who is it?" Svetochka whispered.

  "Please note the number," the voice on the other end of the line insisted. "You never know when you will need it. So: B, one-forty-one, twenty-one."

  "What does he want?" Svetochka whispered.

  "You have the number, yes?" the voice asked. "B, one-forty-one, twenty-one."

  "I tell you that I do not use taxis," the Potter blurted out, suddenly frightened. "Go to hell with your number." And he slammed down the receiver.

  "Who was that?"

  "Nobody."

  "How can you say it was nobody? Somebody phones you up and according to you it's nobody." Tears of frustration formed under Svetochka's heavily made-up lids. "Somebody is not nobody!' she cried in that tightly controlled voice that angry Muskovites use in communal apartments.

  The Potter had a good idea of what the call was all about. He had made more than one like it during his four-year stint as KGB resident in New York. It was a contact, an approach, an invitation to what the Merchants at Moscow Center called a treff-a secret meeting. Only it wasn't the Moscow Merchants who had initiated it; on that he would have wagered a great deal.

  Svetochka began struggling into her soul warmer. "Where are you going now?" the Potter demanded.

  "Nowhere," she sneered. "Nobody is who called. And nowhere is where I'm going."

  The Potter sprang across the room and gripping the lapels of her coat in one fist, lifted her off the ground.

  "You are hurting Svetochka, Feliks," she whispered. Seeing the look on his face, she pleaded, "Feliks is hurting his Svetochka."

  The Potter set her down, slipped a hand inside her coat and clumsily tried to embrace her. "I only wanted to know where you were going, ' he remarked, as if it could account for the outburst, the months of tension that preceded it, the conversationless meals, the slow seeping away of intimacy.

  "All you had to do was ask," Svetochka snapped, conveniently forgetting that he had. She fended him off deftly. "Svetochka is going to baby-sit for a girlfriend so she can go birthday shopping for her husband."

  "Children are in school at this hour," the Potter said.

  "Her child is too young for school."

  "There are neighborhood nurseries for babies."

  "This baby has a fever," Svetochka explained quickly. "He can't go out."

  With her teeth clenched, she spit out, "Svetochka doesn't ask you where you are going every time you put on your coat."

  "You are lying," the Potter said simply, tiredly. "There was no hairdresser. There were no imitation leather gloves. There is no sick baby."

  "You have a nerve..." Svetochka was screaming now. Down the corridor, the people who shared the apartment discreetly closed the door to their bedroom. "You didn't never use to..." Her phrases came in gasps; they no longer seemed to be glued together by grammar or sense. . . . " not going to only always take this...”

  "Enough," the Potter muttered under his breath.

  "... think maybe you are doing to Svetochka favors ..."

  '

  "Enough, if you please."
/>
  "Well, it don't even work like you maybe think...”

  The Potter's arm swept out in anger, brushing a glazed bowl, one of the best he had ever made, off a table. It struck the floor, shattering at Svetochka's feet.

  "Enough!" shouted the Potter.

  Svetochka, who fancied herself something of an actress, could change moods in a flash. Now she screwed up her face to indicate that she had been mortally offended. "It is not Svetochka who will clean this up,"

  she observed icily. Pivoting on a spiked heel, leaving the door to the corridor gaping open behind her, she stalked from the apartment.

  The Potter poured himself a stiff vodka. When he had been novator, he had drunk nothing but eighty-proof Polish Bison vodka. Now he had to make do with cheap Russian vodka, to which he added the skin in the interior of walnuts to give it color and taste. Svetochka would come back later than usual to punish him for his outburst. He would mumble vague apologies. They would both act as if everything had been his fault. The Potter would shave for the first time in days, hoping she would notice and take it as a sign that he wanted to make love. He would watch her undress and make a clumsy effort to fondle her breasts. She would put on plastic hair curlers and turn away in bed, complaining about a headache. He would make an awkward declaration of love. Because the Russian language was devoid of articles, it would have the staccato quality of a telegram.

  It was Piotr Borisovich who, during one of his English-polishing sessions with the Potter, had commented on the difference between English and Russian. Where English dallied, meandered, embellished, Russian took the shortest path between two points; Russian political thinking could trace its roots to the Russian language, Piotr Borisovich had said. In what sense? the Potter had asked. In the sense that Communism was essentially a shortcut- are you against shortcuts? the Potter had asked; it had been early in their relationship and he was on the alert for ideological faults. I am all for them, Piotr Borisovich had replied, his head cocked, his eyes smiling, on the condition that they get you there sooner.

  Curious he should think of Piotr Borisovich now. Or shortcuts.

  The Potter shrugged. In his heart of hearts, he understood they were all connected: the phone call, Svetochka, Piotr Borisovich, shortcuts. For the next two days he tried to put it out of his mind. And thought he had succeeded. Then, without premeditation-he wasn't sure whom he was calling until he dialled-he picked up the phone and composed the number.

  He heard the phone ring once. Then the voice with the accent he couldn't quite place said, "B, one-forty-one, twenty-one?" as if it were a question.

  Almost as if he were following a script, the Potter supplied the answer.

  Carroll was spitting a cherry-flavored candy into the wastepaper basket when Mrs. Cresswell poked her head in the door. "Thursday said to tell you he's almost through with it."

  Francis wrung his hands in anticipation. "Tell him to bring it straight in," he instructed her.

  "As it he would do anything else with it," muttered Mrs. Cresswell.

  "Secretarial help," noted Francis, staring directly at her knees, "is not what it used to be."

  The message had arrived that morning on a direct scrambler channel from the BND, the West German Federal Intelligence Service, encoded in a one-time cipher that had been earmarked for the operation when the Sisters had sent the go-ahead. One-time pads represent the last word in compartmentalization. Their beauty, which is to say their security, lies in the fact that only two people on earth hold the key: the person who enciphers on the originating end, and-in this particular case-Thursday, sweating away in his windowless cubbyhole just down the hall from the Sisters' bailiwick.

  "I take it as a bad sign that they're filing so quickly," Carroll mused.

  He scanned the box of candies for a promising shape,

  "I don't know," Francis said. "If they had nothing positive to report they would have let the string run out a bit more before filing a no-show."

  Carroll bit into another piece of candy, made a face and spit it into the wastepaper basket. "The Germans- our Germans-are like schoolchildren, on that tiny point we can agree, I would think," he said. "They will set up their approach with meticulous care, make one pass at the target, then phone in with juicy details of their success or failure. It is part of their sense of insecurity that comes from having lost the wrong war."

  Someone knocked at the door. Carroll sprang to open it, overturning his box of candies. Thursday stood on the threshold, vibrating with excitement. "He has bitten," he giggled. And he read the plain text from his yellow legal pad: "The fish is on the line. "

  Francis took possession of the page from Thursday's legal pad and the original coded message; at the close of the workday he would make sure they wound up in the office shredder. "The trick now," he remarked as if he were dealing with nothing more important than that evening's meal,

  "is to play him in very slowly."

  For reasons of security, the Russians were keeping their distance. It was a Cuban cutout in New Orleans who contacted the Soviet agent known by his code name, Khanda. The cutout was a prostitute who worked a back street full of bars masquerading as nightclubs, so it was the most natural thing in the world for Khanda to saunter up to her and ask how much she charged. When she told him, he said he would be willing to pay twice what she asked if she, in turn, would be willing to accept American Express traveller's checks.

  The cutout recognized this as the code identifying Khanda, and led him up to her room on the fourth floor.

  Khanda had the instincts of a puritan- being with a whore made him uneasy. When the cutout invited him to take off his jacket and loosen his tie, he politely refused. He was in a hurry, he explained. What was it she had for him?

  She rummaged through a sewing basket for her microdot reader, and handed it to him along with a picture postcard she had received from one of her regular clients in Mexico City. The message on it, and the address, had been typed on an old typewriter that had a new ribbon and no R. ". . .

  -eally g-eat time he-e . . ."it said. Khanda held the postcard under a lamp and examined it closely, but he couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. "It's the i in the word 'time,' " the cutout told him, and she handed him an eyebrow tweezers so he could pry the microdot from the dot over the i and insert it in the reader.

  Khanda quickly copied the message onto the back of an envelope. When he had finished, the cutout casually asked him if he would like to make love. There would be no charge, she added, since they were, after all, colleagues. Khanda thanked her profusely but said he was expected somewhere.

  Back in his own apartment, Khanda studied the message on the back of the envelope. His first reaction was to feel extremely flattered. They obviously had a great deal of esteem for him if they were assigning this mission to him. His second sensation was one of exhilaration. If he could pull it off, he would become what, in his wildest dreams, he had always wanted to be: important; a hero, even, in certain circles. He closed his eyes and imagined the blind man fumbling with the Order of Lenin, truing to pin it onto his lapel. He wondered if he would have to put up with a kiss on each cheek, or whether, in deference to his being a foreigner, they would agree to skip that part.

  Khanda didn't like being kissed by men.

  There were four people ahead of the Potter in the queue. Two empty taxis, their checkered doors splattered with dried mud, raced past in quick succession. Moscow was struggling under the heel of an unseasonal cold snap; temperatures had plunged during the night. The Potter pulled down the earflaps of his oushanka and stamped his feet, which were already beginning to feel numb inside his galoshes. A third taxi flashed by at breakneck speed.

  "Bastards!" complained a heavyset man in front of the Potter. "They're warm as hell with their heaters going full blast. They don't give a damn for us stranded out here in the cold."

  A fourth taxi wormed its way toward the corner along Zubovsky Boulevard, coming from the Krimsky Bridge. The skin on the back of the P
otter's neck crawled; his body knew this one was it before he did. The cab pulled up before the queue. The driver, a squirrellike man with a worker's cap pulled low over his eyes and a scarf wrapped around his lower jaw, leaned across and rolled down the passenger window the width of a fist. The man in front of the Potter elbowed his way between the two women at the head of the queue and shouted out his destination. "The Exhibition of Economic Achievements, off Mistra Avenue, comrade." The exhibition was on the other side of the city, normally a profitable run for a taxi driver, because while the meter was running, he could pick up several passengers heading in the same direction and pocket their fares.

  "Nyet, nyet," harked the driver, waving his hand in irritation.

  The women who had been shoved aside smiled smugly. Each offered an address; each was refused in turn.

  "And what about you, comrade fur cap?" the driver called when the Potter failed to come forward with an address. "Where are you heading on this arctic day?"

  "Anywhere," the Potter replied, a sardonic grimace deforming his chapped lips.

  The driver appeared startled. The Potter jumped to the conclusion that he had guessed wrong. And suddenly a sense of relief-of having gotten off a hook- flooded through his nervous system. He started to turn away; he would rethink this whole business.

  Just then, to everyone's astonishment, the driver jerked his head toward the back seat. "Get in," he ordered.

  The Potter hesitated. The heavyset man, the two women, stared at him, straining to place his face. If the driver agreed to take him

  "anywhere," he must be someone important. A member of the Central Committee perhaps. Or a manager of one of those new hard-currency stores that carried Western products.