The Company

by Robert Littell

  “And what are their superior qualities, Yevgeny?”

  “Americans are bright and open and imaginative and innocent. Their openness makes it relatively easy for an espionage agent to function, since your average American is ready to accept people at face value. Their innocence results in a kind of mental blindness; they are raised to believe that their system is the best in the world, and they are unable to see evidence to the contrary—they don’t see the twenty-five million Americans who go to bed hungry every night, they don’t see how Negroes live in the ghettos, they don’t see how the working classes are exploited for the sake of higher profits for the few who own the means of production.”

  From the garden below came the stifled yelps of girls leaping into the makeshift pool. Starik strolled over to the window and looked down at them. “Your Americans sound curiously like the principal character in the stories I read to my nieces,” he remarked. “She, also, is bright and open and imaginative and innocent.”

  Yevgeny joined his mentor at the window. “Why do you ask me about America?”

  “When you are engaged, as we are, in a conflict, there is a tendency to demonize your enemy.”

  “The Americans certainly demonize the Soviet Union,” Yevgeny agreed.

  “It is a great mistake to reduce your enemy to a demon,” Starik said. “It leaves you at a distinct disadvantage when you are attempting to outwit him.”

  The face of Moscow had been lifted during the years Yevgeny had been away. Gazing down from the small balcony of an apartment perched high on the Lenin Hills, he scrutinized the sprawling cityscape spread out below him. The downtown wart, once renowned for its ponderous Stalin-Gothics, was pock-marked with modern high-rise towers that dwarfed the onion-shaped domes of abandoned churches. The relentless drone of traffic seeping through broad arteries rose from the city. On the drive back from the Apatov Mansion, the Zil carrying Yevgeny had actually become caught in heavy traffic on Gorky near Pushkin Square; drivers, ignoring the several policewomen frantically blowing whistles, leaned on their horns, as if the cacophony itself could magically untie the knot. “In general Russians are a disciplined people,” Yevgeny’s chauffeur, a sleepy-eyed Lithuanian attached to the KGB motor pool, had reflected. “Their idea of rebellion is eating ice cream in the dead of winter. All this changes when they climb behind the wheel of a car. The experience is too new, you see, and so they become slightly crazed.”

  Yevgeny’s visit to his father the next day had come off better than he anticipated, which wasn’t saying much because he had expected the worst. His kid brother, Grinka, had turned up at the clinic with his second wife; Grinka, a Party apparatchik who worked in the superstructure, had grown heavy with importance. He had been carefully briefed by a KGB colonel not to mention Yevgeny’s twenty-three year absence, and so the two brothers shook hands as if they had dined together the week before. “You look well enough,” Grinka said. “Meet my wife, Kapitolina Petrovna.”

  “Do you have children?” Yevgeny asked as they walked toward their father’s room though a hallway that reeked of cooked cabbage.

  “Two by my first marriage. Both girls, thank God. I named the older one Agrippina, after our mother.” Grinka took hold of Yevgeny’s elbow. “Father is dying, you know.”

  Yevgeny nodded.

  “I have been instructed not to ask you where you have been all these years. But you must understand, the burden of caring for him—of driving him back and forth to the dacha, of looking after his pension—fell on me.” Grinka lowered his voice. “What I am driving at is that father’s flat in the Lenin Hills is state-owned, put at his disposal during his lifetime for services rendered. But the dacha in Peredelkino is his. And it cannot conveniently be divided between two families.”

  “If that’s what you are worried about,” Yevgeny muttered, “forget it. I don’t want the dacha. In any case I won’t be in Russia long enough to make use of it.”

  “Ah, Yevgeny, I told Kapitolina you were a sensible man.”

  A male nurse, an Azerbaijan wearing a sooty white knee-length jacket and a colorful skull cap, knocked twice on a door, then threw it open and stood back so the two brothers could enter. “Father, look who has come to visit you,” Grinka exclaimed.

  Aleksandr Timofeyevich’s right eye flicked open and he tried to force through his lips the sounds welling up from the back of his throat. “Yev…Yev…” Saliva trickled from a corner of his mouth. The nurse brought a second pillow from the closet and lifted the old man until his head, which fell over to one side, was raised and he could stare at his elder son. “Sit in this chair,” the nurse instructed Yevgeny. “He will see you better.”

  The soft gray skin clung to the old man’s face, giving it the appearance of a death mask. His mouth sagged open and his lips trembled. Yevgeny reached for one of his hands and, taking it in his own, stroked the back of it. “It seems that Pavel Semyonovich has filled your ears with stories about me…”

  Aleksandr Timofeyevich’s bony fingers dug into Yevgeny’s palm with surprising strength. The only emotion Yevgeny was able to muster was pity for the shipwreck of a man who had foundered on a hospital bed in the special KGB clinic in Pekhotnaya Street. He wondered if his father was hanging on to his son, or to life?

  “Pro…prou…proud,” Aleksandr Timofeyevich managed to say. “Lo…lone…lonely.”

  “Yes, it is a lonely life.” He smiled into his father’s good eye. “But there is satisfaction to be had from it, as you know from your own experience.”

  A corner of the old man’s mouth drooped, almost as if he were trying to work the muscles that produced a smile. “Where?” he managed to say. “Wh…when?”

  Yevgeny understood the question. “The same place as before. Soon.”

  The eye fixed intently on Yevgeny blinked and several tears welled from it. The nurse touched Yevgeny on the shoulder. “You must not tire him,” he whispered. Yevgeny gave a last squeeze to his father’s now limp-hand. The lid closed slowly over the open eye. The only sound in the room was the nasal wheezing of his father sucking air through congested nostrils.

  The days passed quickly. Starik monopolized Yevgeny’s mornings, going over and over every detail of his meetings with SASHA, reviewing the tight security precautions that built a fire wall between the Washington rezidentura and the Polish circuit breaker; between the Polish circuit breaker and Yevgeny; and that kept Yevgeny isolated from SASHA in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. A trusted technician turned up at the Apatov Mansion one afternoon to introduce Yevgeny to a new generation of espionage gadgets: a microdot projector hidden inside a Kodak box camera that was actually able to take photographs; a shortwave transmitter disguised as an electric razor that could send coded messages from perforated tape in bursts; a one-shot pistol hidden in an ordinary lead pencil that fired a 6.35 millimeter bullet straight from the cartridge buried under the eraser.

  Evenings, Yevgeny prowled the streets of Moscow, drifting through the masses of people hurrying home from work, studying their faces—he was curious to see if they were eager to get where they were going, which he took to be a barometer-reading of whether the system worked. Afterward he would catch a bite to eat, dining in the Chinese restaurant in the Hotel Peking one night, the Prague restaurant complex near Arbat Square another. One evening, fresh from a visit to his father in the clinic, Yevgeny was invited to join Starik and a handful of KGB brass at a private restaurant on the top floor of the Ukraine Hotel. Settling down for a banquet that began with bowls of black beluga caviar and French Champagne, Yevgeny found himself sitting next to none other than the illustrious Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, who, as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary in 1956, had masterminded the Russian assault on Budapest and the arrest of Imre Nagy. The conversation was banal enough—Andropov seemed more interested in gossip about American film stars than in the Watergate scandal or Nixon’s chances of being impeached. Was it true that John Kennedy had slept with Marilyn Monroe, he wanted to know.
Had the famous ladies’ man Errol Flynn really lived on a yacht off Cannes with a sixteen-year-old girl? Was there any truth to the rumor that the marriage of so and so—here he named a notorious Hollywood couple—was a sham organized by one of the film studios to obscure the fact that both were homosexuals?

  The dishes were cleared away and a four-star Napoleon brandy was set out, after which the two waiters disappeared and the double door was locked from the inside. Andropov, a tall, humorless man who was said to write melancholy poems about lost love and the regret of old age, climbed to his feet and tapped a knife against a snifter. “Tovarishi,” he began. “To me falls the pleasure—I may say the honor—of celebrating tonight, in this necessarily restricted company, the remarkable career of one of our preeminent operatives. For reasons of security I must keep my remarks vague. Suffice it to say that the comrade sitting on my right, Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin, has blazed a trail through the espionage firmament, equaling, perhaps surpassing, the accomplishments of the legendary Richard Sorge, who, as we all know, played a crucial role in the Japanese theater during the Great Patriotic War. If anything, the stakes are higher today. I can say to you that when the time comes for Yevgeny Alexandrovich to come in, his portrait will take its place alongside other Soviet intelligence heroes in the Memory Room of the First Chief Directorate.” Reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket, Andropov produced a small flat box, which he clicked open. It was lined in blue velvet and contained a Soviet medal and ribbon. He motioned for Yevgeny to rise. “Acting in my capacity as Chairman of the KGB, I award you this Order of the Red Banner.” The general lowered the ribbon over Yevgeny’s head and straightened it around his collar so that the round metal badge rested against his shirtfront. Then he leaned forward and kissed him on both checks. The eight people around the room tapped their knives against their glasses in salute. Yevgeny, embarrassed, looked at Starik across the table.

  His mentor, too, was tapping his knife and nodding his approval. And it hit Yevgeny that his approval meant far more to him than his father’s; that in a profound sense, Starik—who had started out as his Tolstoy—had become the father he always wanted to have: the authoritarian idealist who could point him in the right direction, after which all he had to do was concentrate on his forward motion.

  Grinka phoned Yevgeny at the apartment the next morning to announce the bad news: their father had slipped into a coma during the early morning hours and breathed his last just as the sun was rising over Moscow. The body was to be cremated that morning and the ashes would be entrusted to Grinka, who proposed driving his brother to the dacha at Peredelkino and scattering them in the white birch woods surrounding the house. To Grinka’s brother’s surprise, Yevgeny declined. “I am preoccupied with the living and have little time to devote to the dead,” he said.

  “And when will I see you again?” Grinka asked. When Yevgeny didn’t answer, Grinka said, “You haven’t forgotten about the dacha—there will be papers to sign.”

  “I will leave instructions with people who will arrange things to your liking,” he said. And he hung up the receiver.

  There was one other base that Yevgeny wanted to touch before he left Moscow. For that he needed to get his hands on a Moscow-area phone book, an item that was not available to the general public. One afternoon when he was roaming through the narrow lanes behind the Kremlin, he stopped by the Central Post Office on Gorky Street. Flashing a laminated card that identified him as a GRU officer on detached duty, he asked a functionary for the directories, which were classified as a state secret and kept under lock and key. Which letter do you require? the woman, a prissy time-server, demanded. Yevgeny told her he was interested in the L’s. Moments later he found himself in a private room leafing through a thick volume. Running his thumb down the column filled with Lebowitzes, he came across an A.I. Lebowitz. He jotted the phone number on a scrap of paper, then stuffed kopeks into a public phone on the street and dialed it. After two rings a musical voice came on the line.

  “Is it you, Marina? I have the documentation on your—” The woman answering the phone hesitated. “Who is on the line?”

  “Azalia Isanova?”

  “Speaking.”

  Yevgeny didn’t know how to explain the call to her; he doubted whether he could explain it to himself. “I am ghost from your past,” he managed to say. “Our life lines crossed in a previous incarnation—“

  On the other end of the phone line, Azalia gasped. “I recognize the tentativeness of your voice,” she breathed. “Are you returned from the dead, then, Yevgeny Alexandrovich?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. Would it be possible…can we talk?”

  “What is there to say? We could explore what might have been but we can never go back and pick up the thread of our story as if nothing had happened; as if the thread had not been broken.”

  “I was not given a choice at the time—“

  “To allow yourself to be placed in a position where you have no choice is a choice.”

  “You’re right, of course…Are you well?”

  “I am well, yes. And you?”

  “Are you married?”

  She let the question hang in the air. “I was married,” she said finally. “I have a child, a beautiful girl. She is going to be sixteen this summer. Unfortunately my marriage did not work out. My husband was not in agreement with certain ideas that I hold, certain things that I was doing…The long and short of it is that I am divorced. Did you marry? Do you have children?”

  “No. I have never married.” He laughed uneasily. “Another choice, no doubt. What kind of work do you do?”

  “Nothing has changed since…I work for the Historical Archives Institute in Moscow. In my free time I still like to translate from the English language. Do you know a writer by the name of A. Sillitoe? I am translating something he wrote entitled The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.”

  “The title is intriguing.”

  “Are you a long-distance runner, Yevgeny Alexandrovich?

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  A cement truck roared down Gorky, causing Yevgeny to miss what she said next. He plugged his free ear with a fingertip and pressed the phone harder against the other one. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I asked if you were lonely?”

  “Never more so than right at this moment. My father just died.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. I remember him at the garden party that day at the dacha in Peredelkino—an old man was pressing a bottle filled with bees against the bare skin of his back when Comrade Beria introduced me to him. You must be melancholy…”

  “That’s the problem. I am not at all melancholy, at least not at the death of my father. I barely knew him and barely liked what I knew. He was a cold fish…”

  “Well, at least he lived into old age. My father and mother died after the war.”

  “Yes. I remember your telling me about their disappearance—“

  “They didn’t disappear, Yevgeny. They were murdered.”

  “In his last years, Stalin strayed from the Socialist norm—“

  “Strayed from the Socialist norm! In what ostrich hole have you been hiding your head? He was a murderer of peasants in the early thirties, he murdered his Party comrades in the mid and late thirties, he suspended the killings during the war but resumed them immediately afterward. By then it was the turn of the Jews—“

  “It was not my intention to get into a political discussion, Aza.”

  “What was your intention, Yevgeny Alexandrovich? Do you know?”

  “I only intended…I thought…” He was silent for a moment. “The truth is I was remembering—“

  “Remembering what?”

  “Remembering the gap between your two front teeth. Remembering also how my lust and your desire turned out to be harmonious in bed.”

  “It is indelicate of you to raise the subject—“

  “I mean no offense…”

  “You are from a previous incar
nation, Yevgeny Alexandrovich. I am not the same person who lived in the apartment of Comrade Beria. I am no longer innocent.” And she quickly added, “I am not speaking of sexual matters, it goes without saying. I am speaking of political matters.”

  “I wish things could have been otherwise—“

  “I don’t believe you.”

  A woman waiting to use the pay phone tapped a finger against the crystal on her wristwatch. “How long do you intend to monopolize the line?” she cried.

  “Please believe me, I wish you well. Goodbye, Azalia Isanova.”

  “I am not sure I am glad you called. I wish you had not stirred memories. Goodbye to you, Yevgeny Alexandrovich.”

  A dark scowl passed across Starik’s eyes. “I won’t tell you again,” he scolded the two nieces. “Wipe the smirks off your faces, girlies.”

  The nieces found Uncle unusually short-tempered; they were not at all sure what he did to gain money but, whatever it was, they could tell he was preoccupied by it now. He switched on the klieg lights and adjusted the reflectors so that the beams bathed the bodies of the two angelic creatures posing for him. Returning to the tripod, he peered down into the ground glass of the Czech Flexaret. “Revolución, how many times must I tell you, throw your arm over Axinya’s shoulders and lean toward her until your heads are touching. Just so. Good.”

  The two girls, their long gawky feet planted casually apart, their pubic bones jutting pugnaciously, stared into the camera. “Do take the photograph, Uncle,” Axinya pleaded. “Even with all these lights I am quite chilly.”

  “Yes, take the picture before I catch my death of cold,” Revolución said with a giggle.

  “I will not be rushed, girlies,” Starik admonished them. “It is important to focus correctly, after which I must double check the exposure meter.” He bent his head and studied the image on the ground glass; the klieg lights had scrubbed the pink out of the naked bodies until only the eye sockets and nostrils and oral cavities of the girls, and their rosebud-like nipples, were visible. He took another reading on the light meter, set the exposure, then moved to one side and regarded the girls carefully. They were staring into the lens, painfully conscious of their nudity. He wanted to achieve something incorporeal, something that could not be associated with a particular time and place. He thought he knew how to distract them.