The Company

by Robert Littell

  “I skimmed several of the Prikhodko lectures last night,” Yevgeny told Starik one morning. They were in a brand new Volga from the First Chief Directorate’s motor pool, heading out of Moscow toward Peredelkino for a Sunday picnic at Yevgeny’s father’s dacha. As Starik had never learned to drive, Yevgeny was behind the wheel. “They strike me as being fairly primitive.”

  “They are intended for agents who have never set foot in America, not graduates of Yale University,” Starik explained. “Still, there are things in them that can be useful to you. The business about meetings with agents, for example. The CIA is known to favor safe houses because of the possibility of controlling access and egress, and of tape recording or filming what happens during the meeting. We, on the other hand, prefer doing things in open areas because of the opportunities to make sure that you are not being followed.”

  On the car radio, the sonorous voice of a newscaster reporting from the North Korean capitol of Pyongyang could be heard saying that the American aggressors, who had debarked the day before at Inchon, were being contained by the North Koreans.

  “What do you make of the American landing?” Yevgeny asked his conducting officer.

  “I have seen very secret briefings—there is no possibility the Americans will be thrown back into the sea. But this outflanking stratagem of the American General MacArthur is a perilous gambit. In fact the Americans are threatening to cut off the North Korean troops in the south, which will oblige the North Koreans to pull back rapidly if they hope to avoid encirclement. The strategic question is whether the Americans will stop at the thirty-eighth parallel, or pursue the Communist armies north to the Yalu River in order to reunify Korea under the puppet regime in Seoul.”

  “If the Americans continue on to the Yalu what will the Chinese do?”

  “They will certainly feel obliged to attack across the river, in which case they will overpower the American divisions with sheer numbers. If the Americans are facing defeat they might bomb China with atomic weapons, in which case we will be obliged to step in.”

  “In other words we could be in the verge of a world war.”

  “I hope not; I hope the Americans will have the good sense to stop before they reach the Yalu or, if they don’t, I hope they will be able to arrest the inevitable Chinese attack without resorting to atomic weapons. A Chinese attack across the Yalu that eventually fails to defeat the Americans will benefit Sino-Soviet relations, which are showing signs of fraying.”

  Yevgeny understood that Starik’s analysis of the situation was not one that would appear in Pravda. “How would a Chinese setback benefit Sino-Soviet relations?”

  “For the simple reason that it will demonstrate to the Chinese leadership that they remain vulnerable to Western arms and need to remain under the Soviet atomic umbrella.”

  Yevgeny drove through the village of Peredelkino, which consisted mostly of a wide unpaved road, a Party building with a red star over its door and a statue of Stalin in front, a farmer’s cooperative and a local school. At the first road marker beyond the village he turned off and pulled up next to a line of cars already parked in the shade of some trees. A dozen chauffeurs were dozing in the back seats of cars or on newspapers spread out on the ground. Yevgeny led the way along a narrow grassy path to his father’s country house. As they approached they could hear the sound of music and laughter drifting through the woods. Four unsmiling civilians wearing dark suits and fedoras stood at the wooden gate; they parted to let Yevgeny past when they spotted Starik behind him. Two dozen or so men and women stood around the lawn watching a young man playing a tiny concertina. Bottles of Armenian cognac and a hard-to-find aged vodka called starka were set out on a long table covered with white sailcloth. Maids wearing white aprons over their long peasant dresses passed around plates filled with potato salad and cold chicken. Munching on a drumstick, Yevgeny wandered around to the back of the dacha and discovered his father, naked from the waist up, sitting on a milking stool inside the tool shed. An old man with a pinched face was pressing the open mouth of a bottle filled with bees against the skin on Tsipin’s back. “The peasants say that bee stings can alleviate rheumatism,” Tsipin told his son, wincing as the bees planted their darts in him. “Where have you disappeared to, Yevgeny? What hole have you fallen into?”

  “Your friend Pasha Semyonovich has given me work translating American newspaper articles and the Congressional Record into Russian,” Yevgeny replied, repeating the cover story Starik had worked out for him.

  “If only you had a decent Party record,” his father said with a sigh, “they might have given you more important things to do.” He gasped from a new sting. “Enough, enough, Dmitri,” he told the peasant. “I’m beginning to think I prefer the rheumatism.”

  The old man capped the bottle and, tipping his hat, departed. Yevgeny rubbed a salve on the rash of red welts across his father’s bony neck and shoulders to sooth the ache of the stings. “Even with a good record I wouldn’t get far in your world,” Yevgeny remarked. “You have to be schizophrenic to live two lives.”

  His father looked back over his shoulder. “Why do you call it my world?”

  Yevgeny regarded his father with wide-eyed innocence. “I have always presumed—“

  “You would do well to stop presuming, especially where it concerns connections with our Chekists.”

  By late afternoon the nonstop drinking had taken its toll on the guests, who were stretched out on ottomans or dozing in Danish deck chairs scattered around the garden. Starik had disappeared into the dacha with Tsipin. Sitting on the grass with his back to a tree, enjoying the warmth of the sun through the canopy of foliage over his head, Yevgeny caught sight of a barefoot young woman talking with an older man who looked vaguely familiar. At one point the older man put an arm around the waist of the girl and the two of them strolled off through the woods. Yevgeny noticed that two of the unsmiling men at the gate detached themselves from the group and followed at a discreet distance. For a time Yevgeny could see the girl and her companion fleetingly through the trees, deep in conversation as they appeared and disappeared from view. He finished his cognac and closed his eyes, intending only to rest them for a few moments. He came awake with a start when he sensed that someone had come between him and the sun. A musical voice speaking a very precise English announced: “I dislike summer so very much.”

  Yevgeny batted away a swarm of insects and found himself staring at a very shapely pair of bare ankles. He saluted them respectfully. “Why would anyone in his right mind dislike summer?” he responded in English.

  “For the reason that it is too short. For the reason that our Arctic winter will be upon us before our skin has had its provision of summer sunshine. You must excuse me if I have awaked you.”

  “An American would say woken you, not awaked you.” Yevgeny blinked away the drowsiness and brought her into focus. The young woman looked to be in her early or middle twenties and tall for a female of the species, at least five-eleven in her bare feet. Two rowboat-sized flat-soled sandals dangled from a forefinger, a small cloth knapsack hung off one shoulder. She had a slight offset to an otherwise presentable nose, a gap between two front teeth, faint worry lines around her eyes and mouth. Her hair was short and straight and dark, and tucked neatly back behind her ears.

  “I work as a historian and on the side, for the pleasure of it, I translate English language books that interest me,” the girl said. “I have read the novels of E. Hemingway and F. Fitzgerald—I am in the process of translating a novel entitled For Whom the Bell Tolls. Have you by chance read it? I have been informed that you attended a university in the state of Connecticut. I am pleased to talk English with someone who has actually been to America.”

  Yevgeny patted the grass alongside him. She smiled shyly and settled cross-legged onto the ground and held out a hand. “My name is Azalia Isanova. There are some who call me Aza.”

  Yevgeny took her hand in his. “I will call you Aza, too. Are you here with a
husband?” he asked, thinking of the older gentleman she had been talking to. “Or a lover?”

  She laughed lightly. “I am the apartment-mate of Comrade Beria’s daughter.”

  Yevgeny whistled. “Now I know where I’ve seen the man you were with before—in the newspapers!” He decided to impress her. “Did you know that Comrade Beria suffers from ulcers? That he applies hot water bottles to his stomach to ease the pain?”

  She cocked her head. “Who are you?”

  “My name is…Gregory. Gregory Ozolin.”

  Her face darkened. “No, you’re not. You are Yevgeny Alexandrovich, the oldest son of Aleksandr Timofeyevich Tsipin. Lavrenti Pavlovich himself pointed you out to me. Why do you invent a name?”

  “For the pleasure of seeing your frown when you unmask me.”

  “Are you familiar with the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Speaking from a stylistical point of view, I was struck by the dissimilarity of Hemingway’s short, declarative sentence structure and Fitzgerald’s more complex network of interconnected sentences. Do you agree with this distinction?”

  “Definitely.”

  “How is it that two American writers living during the same period and on occasion in the same place—I refer, of course, to Paris—can end up writing so differently?”

  “I suppose it’s because different folks have different strokes.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That’s an American slang epigram—“

  “Different folks have different strokes? Ah, I see what you are driving at. Strokes refers to rowing. Different people row differently. Do you mind if I copy that down.” She produced a fountain pen and pad from her knapsack and carefully copied the epigram into it.

  A black chauffeur-driven Zil drew up to the wooden gate. A second car filled with men in dark suits pulled up right behind it. On the porch of the dacha Lavrenti Pavolovich Beria shook hands with Tsipin and Starik and waved to his daughter, who was deep in conversation with three women. Beria’s daughter, in turn, called, “Aza, come quickly. Papa is starting back to Moscow.”

  Aza sprang to her feet and brushed the grass off of her skirt. Yevgeny asked with some urgency, “Can I see you again?” He added quickly, “To talk more of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.”

  She looked down at him for a moment, her brow creased in thought. Then she said, “It is possible.” She scribbled a number on the pad, tore off the sheet and let it flutter down to Yevgeny. “You may telephone me.”

  “I will,” he said with undisguised eagerness.

  The next morning Yevgeny’s tradecraft classes started to taper off and he began the long, tedious process of creating (with the help of identical twin sisters who didn’t look at all alike) two distinct legends that he could slip into and out of at will. It was painstaking work because every detail had to be compartmentalized in Yevgeny’s brain so that he would never confuse his two identities. “It is vital,” the sister whose name was Agrippina told him as they set out two thick loose-leaf books on the table, “not to memorize a legend—you must become the legend.”

  “You must shed your real identity,” the other sister, whose name was Serafima, explained, “the way a snake sheds its skin. You must settle into each legend as if it were a new skin. If you were to hear someone call out your old name, the thought must flash across your mind: Who can that be? Certainly not me! With time and many many hours of very difficult work you will be able to put a mental distance between the person known as Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin and your new identities.”

  “Why two legends?” Yevgeny asked.

  “One will be a primary operating legend, the second will be a fallback legend in the event the first legend is compromised and you must disappear into a new identity,” Agrippina said. She smiled in a motherly fashion and motioned for Serafima to commence.

  “Thank you, dear. Now, in building each legend we will start from the cradle and work up to the young man who will be roughly your present age, or at least near enough to it so as not to arouse suspicion. To distinguish the two legends from each other, and from your genuine identity, it will be helpful if you develop different ways of walking and speaking for each persona—“

  “It will be helpful if you comb your hair differently, carry your wallet in a different pocket, wear clothing which reflects different tastes,” her sister added.

  “Eventually,” Serafima offered, blushing slightly, “you might even make love differently.”

  Working from their loose-leaf books, the sisters—both senior researchers in Starik’s Directorate S, the department within the First Chief Directorate that ran illegals operating under deep cover abroad—began to set out the rough outlines of what they dubbed “Legend A” and “Legend B.” “A” had spent his childhood in New Haven, which Yevgeny knew well; “B” had grown up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, which Yevgeny—with the help of maps and slides and personal accounts published in the American press—would come to know intimately. In each case, the sisters would use the addresses of buildings that had been torn down so that it would be practically impossible for the American FBI to verify who had lived there. The foundation for the legends would be birth certificates that were actually on record in New Haven and in New York in the names of two young Caucasian males who, unbeknownst to the American authorities, had been lost at sea when the Allies ran convoys to Murmansk during the war. Two frayed Social Security cards were the next building blocks of the legends. Serafima was an expert on the American social security system; the first three digits of the numbers, she explained, indicated the state in which the number had been issued; the middle two digits, when it had been issued. The cards Yevgeny would carry were actually on file with the United States government. As he would be passing for men two or three years older, there would be voter registration cards in addition to the usual paper identification—driver’s licenses, library cards, laminated American Youth Hostel cards with photographs, that sort of thing. The legends would be backstopped by educational records in existence at a New Haven high school and at Erasmus in Brooklyn (which Yevgeny knew well), along with an employment history that would ring true but would also be unverifiable. Medical and dental histories would be built into each legend—they would involve doctors who were dead, which would make the stories impossible to check. And each legend would have a working passport with travel stamps on its pages.

  “You have obviously thought of everything,” Yevgeny commented.

  “We hope for your sake that we have,” Agrippina said. “Still, I must draw your attention to two minor problems.”

  “According to your dental records,” Serafima said, “the majority of your cavities were filled by American dentists in the United States. But you have two cavities that were filled in the Soviet Union, one before you first went to join your parents in New York after the war, the second when you were in Moscow during a summer vacation. These cavities will have to be redone by Centre dentists who are familiar with American dental techniques and have access to American materials.”

  “And the second problem?”

  Starik suddenly appeared at the door carrying sandwiches and a bottle of kvass. “There is no hurry about the second problem,” he said. He was clearly annoyed at the sisters for having raised it now. “We will tell him at a later date.”

  Yevgeny telephoned Aza the first time he had a free evening and the two met (after Yevgeny, trying out his newfound tradecraft, ditched the man who was tailing him from across the street) in Gorky Park. They wandered along a path that ran parallel to the Moscow River, talking of American literature at first, then nibbling at the edge of matters that were more personal. No, she said, she was an orphan; both her mother, a writer of radio plays, and her father, an actor in the Yiddish theater, had disappeared in the late 1940s. No, she couldn’t be more precise because the authorities who had notified her of their deaths had not been more precise. She had been befriended by Beria’s daughter, Natasha, at a summer camp in the Urals. They had becom
e pen pals, had written to each other for years. It seemed only natural, when her application to study history and languages at Lomonosov University was, against all odds, accepted, that she would move in with her friend. Yes, she had met Natasha’s father on many occasions; he was a warm, friendly man who doted on his daughter but otherwise seemed preoccupied with important matters. He had three phones on his desk, one of them red, which sometimes rang day and night. Tiring of the quiz, Aza pulled typed sheets containing several of Anna Akhmatova’s early love poems, along with the first rough draft of her attempts to translate the poems into English, from the pocket of her blouse. She absently plucked wild berries off bushes and popped them in her mouth as Yevgeny read aloud, first in Russian, then in English:

  What syrupy witches’ brew was prepared

  On that bleak January day?

  What concealed passion drove us mad