The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  Sensing the Potter's indecision, the driver reached back and pushed open the rear door. The Potter shrugged-it suddenly seemed easier to go with the current-and ducked into the back seat.

  "Where are you taking me?" the Potter asked as the driver spun his taxi through a maze of side streets behind the Church of St. Nicholas of the Weavers. Ignoring the question, the driver turned into Pirogovskaya Street, then pulled up abruptly. He studied the rearview mirror; the Potter glanced over his shoulder. No one came out of the side street after them. Satisfied, the driver slipped the taxi into gear and headed toward the Novodevichy Monastery. Ahead, the Potter could make out the five gilded bulb-shaped domes of the Virgin of Smolensk Church.

  An image of Piotr Borisovich leapt to his mind. He had been standing next to an open hotel window staring out at Moscow his last night in the country. He had gotten roaring drunk on French champagne, and had started to sing snatches of Mussorgsky's, Khovanshchina, an opera that recounted the story of Czar Peter's revolt against the Regent Sophia; Peter banished her to the Novodevichy Monastery, lynched three hundred of her streltsy under the windows of her cell and nailed the hand of Prince Khovansky, her principal ally, to her door. Piotr Borisovich's voice had been pitched low and surprisingly on-key. Then, suddenly sober, he had stopped singing and cocked his head and smiled the way he always smiled-with his eyes, not his mouth. Little wrinkles had formed at the corners of his eyes, making him appear older than he was.

  Violence is in our blood, he had said, looking out at Moscow but thinking of America. Violence and a passion for plotting. You and I, the Potter had agreed, are the last practitioners of a dying art.

  The way he said the sentence had made it seem as if they were on a holy crusade.

  End of the line, comrade fur cap. The driver braked to a stop in front of the gate leading to the Novodevichy Cemetery.

  The Potter noticed the meter wasn't running, so he nodded and let himself out of the taxi. It roared oft. The Potter stood a moment on the sidewalk savoring the cold-the taxi had been overheated, but in Moscow no one ever complained of being subjected to too much heat-then turned and made his way into the heart of the cemetery, past rows of eroded tombstones. The paths, as far as he could tell, were deserted. In matters like this, the Potter knew from experience, no one hurried. When they were absolutely sure he wasn't being followed, they would come for him. He wandered past a stand of graves-Gogols, Chekhov's, Mayakovsky's, Esenin's (the last two were suicides; the violence, the plotting had been too much for them). His feet were beginning to feel numb again; if the cold snap kept up he would have to start wearing his wool-lined slippers inside his galoshes, as he did at the height of winter. He paused before the glistening white marble bust of Stalin's beautiful young wife. She had stormed out of a Kremlin dinner party one night in I932, gone home, put a pistol to her head and, as Piotr Borisovich once quipped, introduced a foreign object into her brain. Another suicide!

  More violence! "To Nadezhda Alliluyeva," the inscription on the bust read, "from a member of the Communist Party, J. Stalin."

  "Pssssssst!"

  The Potter turned to see a little man with shirred skin squinting at him from several meters away. He must have stepped from behind a tombstone, because he hadn't been there a moment before. The man beckoned with an emaciated finger. The Potter approached. The man removed his hat, an unexpected sign of deference considering who they were and what they were up to. "I have confirmed," he announced, nodding a very bald head,

  "that you are alone. Down that path, through that gate, you will discover another taxi waiting for you."

  "Where will it take me?" the Potter asked, knowing the question would never be answered.

  "Anywhere!" replied the little bald man with a mischievous wink, and planting his hat squarely on his head, he darted with unexpected sprightliness between two tombstones and disappeared.

  Atop the great baroque belfry in the center of the monastery grounds, two men dressed in ankle-length mink coats and mink hats stood with their backs to the wind. Because they were vaguely related (one's mother's brother had been the other's uncle by marriage}, because they directed Department 13 of the First Chief. Directorate, the sabotage and assassination unit of the Komitet Gosudarsrvennoy Bezopasnosti, better known by its initials KGB. their subordinates referred to them as the Cousins- The younger of the two, in his early forties, stared down at the cemetery through binoculars. The other, who was blind, the result of being tortured by the Gestapo during the Great Patriotic War, asked, "Is the bald man one of ours or theirs?"

  "Theirs. Oskar must have pulled him out of a hat for this operation,"

  the younger man answered.

  "We should remember to log him," the blind man said.

  "Small fish, big pond," the man with the binoculars replied. "Oskar will make us a present of him if we ask. In any case, we must be careful not to frighten any of them off before this whole thing becomes history."

  The man with the binoculars watched the Potter enter the second taxi. "I will tell you the truth," he admitted. "I didn't think he would go for it."

  "Did you know him personally?" inquired the blind man. He used the past tense, as if he were speaking about someone dead and buried.

  "I met him years ago just after he came back from New York," the younger man replied. "He was a great hero to us all then." He fitted his binoculars back into their leather case. "He had served Mother Russia well. We looked up to him."

  Below, the driver gunned his motor and the taxi lurched away from the curb. The blind man bent an ear toward the sound, then tapped his long, thin white baton several times on the ground in satisfaction. "He is still serving Mother Russia," he said thoughtfully, and he pressed his lips into what, on his scarred features, passed for a smile.

  The yafka (Russian for "safe house") turned out to be on Volodarskaya Street, down the block from the Church of the Dormition of the Potters.

  When he discovered Feliks' hobby was throwing pots, Piotr Borisovich, sporting an ancient fedora that had seen one too many rainstorms, had hauled him off, one sparkling Sunday before he graduated to the "field,"

  to see the mosaics and decorative brickwork of the church. What do you think? Piotr Borisovich had demanded, delighted to have come up with something in Moscow that the novator didn't know about. What I think, the Potter had responded, is that religion is the opiate of the people.

  Piotr Borisovich had laughed like a schoolboy. But what do you think? he had persisted, trying as usual to get past the cliché. Speaking as an atheist, the Potter had observed, I think that no amount of mosaics can obscure the fact that a church is essentially a lie. Piotr Borisovich had shaken his head. You forget what Spinoza said, he had remarked, his voice unaccustomedly moody: there are no lies, only crippled truths.

  Crippled truths, the Potter reflected now, making his way up a dark staircase, the stench of urine drifting past his nostrils at each landing, may be better than no truths at all. In what sense? he could imagine Piotr Borisovich inquiring encouragingly. In the sense, he could hear himself replying, that if something is worth doing, an argument can be made that it is worth doing badly.

  The Potter struck a match and peered at the number on the door. It was missing, but the outline of where it had been was unmistakable. The Potter shook out the match and deposited it in a trouser cuff and knocked lightly on the door.

  "Come."

  The room had two windows with their shades drawn and an uncomfortably bright electric light and two folding metal chairs and a calendar on a wall set to the previous month.

  "We are September, not August," the Potter observed. He walked over and tore off August and crumpled it into a ball and tossed it onto the floor. As an afterthought, he glanced behind the calendar. All he found was more wall.

  "So," said the man sitting on one of the two folding metal chairs. He was of medium height, unshaven, with a silver-rimmed pince-nez wedged onto the bridge of a long, lean Roman nose. "I thank you for taking adv
antage of our taxi service."

  "Your precautions were impeccably professional," the Potter said.

  The man accepted this with a nod. "Coming from the novator, I take that as a compliment. I shall pass it on to my associates, yes? They too will take it as a compliment."

  He was being buttered up, the Potter realized, by the man with the accent he couldn't quite place. There was a hint of German in it, a hint of Polish; a Ukrainian, perhaps, who had spent his formative years in a German concentration camp in Poland. Or a Pole who had been pressed into the Red Army. Or a bilingual German.

  "So," the man began again, clearing his throat nervously, "for the purpose of this conversation, it may be useful for me to have a name, yes?"

  "It would be useful," the Potter agreed.

  "You will call me Oskar. So: my associates and I are prepared to get you out of the country-

  "I have a wife," the Potter said stiffly.

  "When I speak of you, it goes without saying I mean you and your wife."

  "Such details go with saying," the Potter corrected him grimly.

  "I take your point," Oskar acknowledged affably.

  "You talk of getting us out of the country. Out of the country where?"

  "Initially, you will go to Vienna, yes? The debriefing will be conducted there. In pleasant surroundings, it goes without ... it goes with saying. The representatives of several intelligence services will want to buy time with you. After all, it is not every day that we can come up with a novator, yes?"

  "Yes," the Potter agreed. Buy time. That made Oskar a free-lancer.

  Though in all probability he was a free-lancer on a leash. But whose leash? "It is not every day."

  "After Vienna," Oskar continued, "we will supply you with identities, with a legend, with bank accounts, with a modest business even. A pottery studio might be appropriate. You can live where you want."

  "Could we go to Paris?"

  Oskar smiled for the first time. "You have been to Paris, yes?"

  "Yes." In fact the Potter had passed through Paris on the way back from his tour of duty in New York. "My wife dreams of it."

  "Paris is entirely within the realm of possibility," Oskar said with the tone of someone who considered the matter settled.

  "How do you plan to get us out of the country?" the Potter wanted to know.

  Oskar permitted himself a gesture of impatience. The Potter politely retracted the question. Oskar said, "That brings us to the part of the conversation where you suggest what, specifically, you can otter to us to justify our efforts, not to speak of our risks."

  The Potter suppressed a faint smile. " 'Justify' in the sense of provide financial profit?"

  Oskar knew he had to choose his words carefully. "If we decide to get you out, we will want to be rewarded for our efforts. It is a fact of life that there are organizations in the West that will pay generously for your information. But you misjudge us if you think the money is for us. It will fund projects designed to undermine a regime, a system, a philosophy that we consider odious." Lowering his voice to a whisper, Oskar intoned Dostoevsky's famous phrase, "Where there is sorrow and pain, the soil is sacred, yes?"

  "Yes," the Potter remarked dryly. Somehow he believed Oskar. He had the look of an idealist, which is to say the look of someone with a short life expectancy. "My having been a novator-doesn't that, in itself, justify your efforts, your risks?"

  Oskar shrugged.

  "There were circuits in New York," the Potter said softly. He had been trained to keep secrets; giving them away didn't come naturally. "There was an entire rezidentura. There was an istochnik-a source of information-in the United Nations Secretariat."

  "So: that was all some time ago," Oskar noted. "And you have been out of circulation for six months now."

  "Try it out on your principals," the Potter insisted. "In any case, it is all I have to offer."

  "Of course I will try it out," Oskar said. "But I suspect that your rezidentura, your istochnik, are what the Americans call"-here he switched to English-"old hats." Speaking again in Russian, he added,

  "You are familiar with the expression, yes?"

  "Yes," repeated the Potter, remembering Piotr Borisovich's ancient fedora, wondering what he had gotten himself into; wondering if in the end they would get out of him the thing he valued more than the pupil of his eye. "I am painfully familiar with old hats."

  Oskar inserted a key and let himself in the service door. It was a little-used back entrance to a stuffy transit hotel on Sushchevsky Bank Street, behind the Riga Station. The narrow service stairs hadn't been swept in years, but then the few people who used it generally had other things on their minds besides cleanliness. The doors on all the floors except the fourth were bolted shut. Upstairs, Oskar felt his way along the pitch-dark corridor, one hand on the wall, the other raised protectively before his eyes. It occurred to him that the people who frequented the fourth floor could easily afford to supply light bulbs, but probably felt more comfortable in the dark. At the third door along the corridor wall, Oskar knocked and then entered without waiting for an invitation. He stuffed his scarf into the sleeve of his raincoat, and hung it on the clothes tree alongside the two mink coats. So: if the Cousins were wearing their mink coats now, when it was not even freezing out, God knows what they would do in January when the temperature could drop to minus thirty. Well, everyone had his threshold of pain, or cold, or corruptibility, yes? It remained to be seen what the Potter's was.

  The blind man recognized Oskar's footfall. "You're early," he called,

  "which means things went badly."

  "Things went quickly," Oskar corrected him. "It would have been very curious-suspicious even, yes?-if he had offered us precisely what we wanted the first time around."

  "He needs to marinate," agreed the other man in the room.

  The blind man tapped his baton against his shoe impatiently. "He should be pushed," he insisted. "You could play the tape recording of the meeting back to him. He has already done enough to merit a firing squad."

  "With all respect," the younger Cousin said-he was, after all, dealing with someone who, on paper at least, was his superior-"he needs to be pulled, not pushed."

  "He has a violent temper, yes?" Oskar noted. "If he crosses frontiers, whether physical or psychological, he must have the impression that he is controlling his own destiny."

  "What will you do now?" the blind man asked, conceding to the others the question of pace.

  "So," Oskar said, "I will report back to my German Merchants. Then I will sit by the phone and reflect on what the peasants say-that all things come to those who wait, yes?"

  Carroll and Francis were confirmed bachelors. It wasn't that they didn't like women; they just didn't trust them. And what sex drive either came equipped with at birth had long since been channelled into other pursuits. Carroll lived with an unmarried sister in a rented apartment in Georgetown. Francis lived alone in a downtown residence hotel with a kitchenette crawling with cockroaches. He sprayed once a week, ironed his own shirts, darned his own socks and except on Tuesdays and Fridays made his own dinners. On Tuesdays he grabbed a bite in a delicatessen and went to a motion picture; to a spy film whenever possible. On Fridays he dined out with Carroll. They had been meeting Fridays more or less to review their week's work since they began sharing an office, some twelve years before. For eight of those years they had been faithful to a particular Chinese restaurant. Then they discovered the chef sprinkled monosodium glutamate on all his dishes. Now they ate Chinese health food.

  Francis lifted the metal lid on his dish from Column B and sniffed suspiciously at the contents. The gesture annoyed Carroll. "I don't know how you can be so calm," he whispered fiercely. His own face was a mask of frustration. "After what's happened...”

  "Nothing happened that wasn't expected," Francis said.

  "What if he doesn't have what we want?" Carroll whined.

  For a moment Francis thought his partner might actually burst
into tears. "The Potter was the novator," he reminded Carroll. "He was in charge of the sleeper school. He has it."

  "Imagine offering us a ten-year-old rezidentura, or an istoclinik at the United Nations! What does he take us for, amateurs?"

  "You act as if he meant it as a personal insult," Francis reproached Carroll. "He's dealing with freelancers, remember, not us. He was simply testing the temperature of the water."

  "I hope to God you're right," Carroll said. The muscle in his cheek twitched several times, then stopped of its own accord. "Our whole scheme depends on him."

  Francis eyes narrowed; some music was forming in the back of his brain.

  "I'm just thinking out loud, but it might not do any harm to shake him up a bit. ..."

  Carroll snapped his fingers; lyrics had leapt into his head. "What if we sent him the names of the rezidentura and the istoclinik”?

  "I knew you'd come up with something," Francis remarked, and he tucked the corner of his napkin into his collar to protect his taxicab-yellow bow tie and attacked the plate of whole-wheat noodles, Chinese cabbage and steamed shrimp.

  "Svetochka," moaned Svetochka, kicking off her worn suede boots, collapsing into an easy chair that badly needed recovering, "is dead."

  She had just come back from the store with two tins of salted fish, a kilo of onions, a box of rice. "Seven lines," she moaned, feeling very sorry for herself. "One for the fish, one for the onions, one for the rice. That's three. Then one to pay the cashier. That makes four. Then back to the first line to collect the fish, another to collect the onions, a third to collect the rice. That's seven. You know your Lenin, Feliks, is there something in it about Communism needing lines?"

  The Potter smiled for the first time in days. "There are lines because there are shortages," he explained.

  "And why," Svetochka demanded, massaging the balls of her feet, "if everybody is working according to their ability, do we still have shortages?"

  The Potter helped himself to some more vodka. "In the old days, before the revolution, they used to say that the shortage would be divided among the peasants. Now we are fairer-we divide the shortage among everyone. That's Communism-"