The Company

by Robert Littell

  What remained, now, was to test the numbers—and assuming, as he did, that they were correct, to take control of the Devisenbeschaffer’s deposits, divert the funds into various bank accounts in Switzerland and send the prearranged message to Jack McAuliffe informing him the dirty deed was done.

  At which point it would be up to the Sorcerer to fulfill his part of the pact.

  Ben Ezra had received the Sorcerer’s message the previous evening: the putsch was set for 1 September. Using a scrambled telephone in a Mossad safe house, talking cryptically as an added precaution, the Rabbi had passed this detail on to Jack McAuliffe in Washington. Our mutual friend, Ben Ezra had said, reminds us that we must get our applications in before the first of September if we hope to win any fellowships; any later will be too late. The first of September, Jack had noted on his end of the line, doesn’t leave us much time to get recommendations from the eight or ten key figures in Moscow; does our mutual friend think he can contact these people before the deadline? He has started the ball rolling, the Rabbi had replied. He expects to have the eight or ten recommendations in hand by the last week in August. That’s cutting it pretty fine, Jack had shot back; any possibility of speeding up the process? Getting recommendations from eight or ten people at more or less the same time is a complicated process, Ben Ezra had cautioned Jack; and we are obliged, for obvious reasons, to get it right the first time, there’s no going back for a second try. Okay, Jack had said reluctantly, I’ll settle for the last week in August. Now, sitting at a table in the upper floor office of the meatpacking factory, the Rabbi turned the intercom speaker around to unplug the cord. Peering through the thick lenses of his spectacles, his eyes glazed with the pain that was his constant companion, he saw, in the open back of the box, a tiny red-and-black spider dancing across tendrils that were so fine they were invisible to the naked eye. The spider, appearing suspended in space, froze when Ben Ezra touched one of the strands with his thumbnail. It waited with endless patience, trying to determine if the vibrations it had picked up signaled danger. Finally it risked a tentative movement, then swiftly clawed across its invisible web and vanished into the cavernous safety of the intercom speaker.

  Something resembling a scowl surfaced on Ben Ezra’s bone-dry lips. His time was growing short. Soon he, too, would claw his way across an invisible web, his bad hip thrusting forward and around and back with each painful step, and vanish into the cavernous safety of the land that the Lord God had bequeathed to the descendants of the Patriarch Abraham.

  The siren atop the guard tower sounded high noon at the KGB complex in the village of Mashkino, a series of two-story, L-shaped brick satellites connected by covered passageways to the nuclear headquarters building. In the small air-conditioned conference room on the second floor of this building, the KGB Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, in the best of times a testy man who tended to see the cup half empty rather than half full, stared grimly out a window. Behind him the voice of Fyodor Lomov, the foreign ministry apparatchik, droned on as he read aloud from the file that had accompanied the photographs rushed over that morning by motorcycle courier.

  It seemed that the Israeli desk of the Second Chief Directorate had a surveillance team watching a husband and wife of Jewish origin who sold Oriental carpets in a hole-in-the-wall shop on a side street off the Arbat. The couple was known to have provided safe house and communication services for the Israeli Mossad in the past. The surveillance team, working out of a vacant apartment diagonally across the street from the carpet store, systematically photographed everyone going in or out of the shop. These photographs were developed every night and delivered to the Second Chief Directorate’s Israeli desk in the morning. On this particular morning the photographs were still being sorted—the mug shots of visitors who could be identified were labeled and pasted into a scrapbook, the others were stored in a wire basket marked unidentified—when Yuri Sukhanov, the cranky head of the Ninth Chief Directorate, one of the core group of plotters working closely with KGB Chairman Kryuchkov, stopped by with a disturbing photograph that the Dresden rezident had pouched to Moscow Centre. It showed a twisted old man struggling with the aid of two canes toward a limousine surrounded by bodyguards. Dresden had tentatively identified the old man as Ezra Ben Ezra, the infamous Rabbi who was winding up a seven year tour as head of the Israeli Mossad. Walking next to him was a corpulent figure that the Dresden rezidentura had not been able to identify—but Sukhanov, a veteran KGB officer who had begun an illustrious career at the East Berlin Karlshorst rezidentura in the mid 1950s, recognized instantly: the man accompanying Ben Ezra was none other than the Rabbi’s old friend from Berlin, the legendary one-time chief of the CIA’s Berlin Base, H. Torriti, a.k.a. the Sorcerer. The question on everyone’s lips, of course, was: why was the head of the Mossad meeting Harvey Torriti in Dresden? Was it possible that their presence had something to do with the sums of hard currency being transferred by the Devisenbeschaffer to the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce? Or worse still, something to do with the sudden disappearance of the Devisenbeschaffer himself?

  The intriguing subject was being kicked around at an informal brainstorming session when Sukhanov noticed a pile of mug shots in the wire basket labelled unidentified. Absently leafing through them, he suddenly held one up to the light. Where did you get this? he demanded excitedly. The desk officer explained that it had been taken the previous day by the team watching a Jewish couple that from time to time provided field services to the Israelis. But this is the same man photographed with the Rabbi in Dresden! It’s the American Torriti, the head of the Ninth Directorate said. Sukhanov took Torriti’s presence first in Dresden, then in Moscow, as an ominous omen—it could only mean that the CIA, bypassing its Moscow station, had slipped an old professional into the Soviet capitol from the outside. And that, in turn, could only mean that the Americans suspected a putsch was in the works.

  It was at this point that the photographs of Ben Ezra and Torriti in Dresden, and Torriti in Moscow, were biked out to the KGB complex at Mashkino and Kryuchkov was alerted. The premonition of the head of the Ninth Directorate caused consternation among the putschists. A war council with the leading plotters was quickly convened. Lomov finished reading through the file. The Minister of Defense, Yazov, who along with the Interior Minister, Pugo, had originally pushed for a mid-August coup d’état, argued for moving up the date from 1 September in light of this latest information. General Varennikov, the ground forces chief and the man responsible for mustering the troops that would seize control of Moscow, had previously been against the idea because military preparations couldn’t be completed that early. Now, albeit reluctantly, he saw the logic of a mid-August date. The head of the Ninth Chief Directorate, whose agents would be responsible for quarantining Gorbachev during the first hours of the coup, reminded the others that the General Secretary was in his summer residence near the Crimean town of Foros until the twentieth. Which didn’t leave much time.

  Everyone looked at Kryuchkov, who was still staring out the window. He remarked that there was a brownish smog hovering over the fields surrounding the village of Mashkino. It had been there for the better part of a week. Superstitious peasants, he noted, believed that evil spirits lurking in the smog could cause stillbirths in pregnant women who ventured out on days like this. In short, it was not an auspicious moment to launch new projects. Happily, he, Kryuchkov, was not superstitious. Turning to his colleagues, looking particularly somber, he announced that he, too, was now in favor of moving up the date of the uprising, even if it meant that all the preparations—including the importation of large amounts of foreign currency to Moscow in order to stock the stores immediately after the coup—could not be completed in time.

  “How about the nineteenth?” Kryuchkov said.

  “Nineteen August sounds fine to me,” Defense Minister Yazov commented. The others in the room nodded in agreement.

  “So it is decided,” Kryuchkov said. “We will declare a state of
emergency, isolate Gorbachev and take control of the government one week from today.”

  Trying to walk off a chronic angst, Leo Kritzky spent the afternoon exploring the narrow streets behind the Kremlin filled with small Orthodox churches. Over the years he had become so Russian-looking that the ever-present hustlers who waylaid foreigners with offers to buy dollars or sell caviar no longer gave him a second glance. He stopped for tea and a dry cupcake in a workers’ canteen, then queued at a pharmacy for a bottle of Polish cough syrup and dropped it off at his lady friend’s apartment; she’d been battling a chest cold with herbal infusions but it had only gotten worse. He lingered for half an hour looking at the sketches she’d done for a children’s book on Siberian elves and fairies, then took the subway back to Frunzenskaya Embankment. Hanging on to an overhead strap, swaying from side to side as the train plunged through a tunnel, his eyes fell on what he took to be a relic of seventy years of Communism: a small metal plaque at the head of the subway car with the words “October Revolution” engraved on it. He wondered how many people noticed this reminder of things past; how many of those who noticed still believed in the promise of the October Revolution. There were days when he himself thought it might better to start over again; there were other days when he tried not to think about it at all.

  Arriving at Frunzenskaya Embankment number 50, entrance 9, he climbed the steps to the third floor. The janitor still had not gotten around to replacing the light bulb at the end of the corridor near his apartment, number 373. As he crouched to insert the latch key in the lock an agitated voice called from the darkness. “Sorry, sorry, but I don’t suppose you happen to understand English.” When Leo didn’t immediately respond, the person sighed. “I didn’t think so—it would have been too good to be true.”

  Leo squinted into the shadows. “As a matter of fact—“

  “Oh, thank goodness,” the woman exclaimed in relief. She materialized out of the shadows and approached Leo. “Sorry again, but I don’t suppose you’d know which of these apartments Leon Kritzky lives in?”

  Leo’s face turned numb as stone. “Who are you?” he demanded. He raised his fingertips to his cheek and felt only dead skin.

  The woman drew closer and peered at Leo. He could hear her catch her breath. “Daddy?” she whispered in a child’s anguished voice.

  “Tessa? Is that you?”

  “Oh, Daddy,” she moaned. “It is me. It’s me, it’s me.”

  Leo felt time and place and regret and heartache fall away. He opened his arms and Tessa, quaking with sobs, collapsed into them.

  It was a long while before either of them could utter a word. They stood there in the shadows clinging to each other until Tessa’s tears had saturated the lapel of Leo’s windbreaker. Later, neither could remember how they had gotten into the apartment or who had opened the bottle of Bulgarian wine or where the open sandwiches spread with roe had come from. They gazed at each other across the folding table. Every now and then Leo would reach over and touch his daughter and her eyes, riveted on his, would brim with tears. Tessa had checked into a hotel off Red Square but there was no question of her going back to it; they would collect her valise and the package of books she had brought for Leo the next morning. They spread a sheet on the couch for her and propped up pillows on either end of it and talked in soft voices husky with emotion into the early hours of the morning. Tessa, a thin, handsome woman closing in on forty, had just ended another in a series of love affairs; she always seemed to fall for men who were already married or leery of committing themselves to permanent relationships. And as her sister constantly reminded her, the biological clock was ticking. Tessa was toying with the idea of getting pregnant by her next lover even if the affair never went anywhere; she’d at least wind up with a child, which is what she wanted more than anything.

  Vanessa? Oh, she was fine. Yes, she was still married to the same fellow, an assistant professor of history at George Washington University; their son, who had been named Philip after his grandfather, was a strapping four-year-old who already knew how to work a computer. Why hadn’t she warned Leo she was coming? She hadn’t wanted to get his hopes up. Hers either. She was afraid she might chicken out at the last moment, afraid of what she would find—or what she wouldn’t find. She hadn’t even told Vanessa where she was going. Oh, Daddy, if only…

  If only?

  If only you hadn’t…

  He understood what she couldn’t bring herself to say. I had allegiances and loyalties that went back to before I joined the CIA, he told her. I was true to these allegiances and loyalties.

  Do you have any regrets?

  The regrets that had fallen away in the corridor flooded back. Your mother, he said; I bitterly regret what I did to Adelle. Your sister; I regret that she can’t bring herself to talk to me. You; I regret that I can’t share your life and you can’t share what’s left of mine.

  When I first saw you in the hallway, Daddy, I had the terrible feeling that you weren’t glad to see me.

  No, it’s not true—

  I saw it in your eyes.

  Seeing you here is the most wonderful thing that’s happened to me in seven and a half years. It’s only—

  Only what?

  This isn’t the best time to be in Moscow, Tessa.

  With Gorbachev in power, I thought it’d be a fascinating time to be in Moscow.

  That’s just it. Gorbachev may not be in power long.

  Is there going to be a coup d’état? Gosh, that would be fun—to be in the middle of a real revolution. Suddenly Tessa looked hard at her father. Do you know something, Daddy, or are you only repeating rumors?

  A coup is a real possibility.

  Excuse me for asking but do you still work for the KGB?

  He tried to smile. I’m retired. I draw a pension. I get what information I have from the newspapers.

  Tessa seemed relieved. Predicting coups is like predicting the weather, she said. Everybody knows the newspapers get it wrong most of the time. So if they say there’s going to be a coup d’état, chances are things will be quiet as hell. Too bad for me. I could have used some excitement in my life.

  5

  NEAR FOROS ON THE CRIMEAN PENINSULA, MONDAY, AUGUST 19, 1991

  FLYING INTO THE WHITEWASHED BULL’S-EYE HELIPAD IN A GIANT BUG-like Army helicopter, Yevgeny saw the onion-domed Church of Foros clinging to the granite cliffs and the surf breaking against the jagged shoreline far below it. Moments later Mikhail Gorbachev’s compound on the southern Crimean cliffs overlooking the Black Sea came into view. There was a three-story main house, a small hotel for staff and security guards, a separate guest house, an indoor swimming pool and movie theater, even a long escalator to the private beach under the compound. As soon as the helicopter had touched down, the delegation from Moscow—Yuri Sukhanov representing the KGB, General Varennikov representing the Army, Oleg Baklanov representing the military-industrial complex, Oleg Shenin from the Politburo, Gorbachev’s personal assistant and chief of staff Valery Boldin, Yevgeny Tsipin representing the powerful banking sector—was rushed over to the main house in open Jeeps. As the group made its way through the marble and gilt central hall, the head of the compound’s security detachment whispered to Suk hanov that he had cut off Gorbachev’s eight telephone and fax lines at four thirty, as instructed. “When I informed him that he had unexpected visitors, he picked up the phone to see what it was all about,” recounted the officer. “That’s when he discovered the lines were dead. He even tried the direct phone to the commander in chief—the one that’s kept in a box. He must have understood immediately what was happening because he turned deathly pale and summoned his family—his wife, Raisa Maksimovna, his daughter, his son-in-law. They are all with him now in the living room. Raisa was particularly shaken—I heard her say something to her husband about the Bolsheviks murdering the Romanov family after the October revolution.”

  Pushing through double doors, the delegation found Gorbachev and his family standing sh
oulder to shoulder in the middle of the grand living room. There was a breathtaking view of the cliffs and the sea through the picture window behind them. The General Secretary, barely able to control his rage, stared at his chief of staff, Boldin. “Et tu, Brute?” he said with a sneer. Gorbachev eyed the others. “Who sent you?” he asked with icy disdain.

  “The committee appointed in connection with the emergency,” Sukhanov told him.

  “I didn’t appoint such a committee,” Gorbachev shot back. “Who is on it?”

  Yevgeny went up to Gorbachev and handed him a sheet of onionskin on which the names of the members of the State Committee for the State of Emergency had been typed. The Secretary General fitted on a pair of eyeglasses and looked at the list. “Kryuchkov! Yazov—my God, I plucked him out of nowhere to be Minister of Defense! Pugo! Varennikov! Uritzky!” Gorbachev’s head rocked from side to side in disgust. “Do you really think the people are so tired that they will follow any dictator?”

  General Varennikov stepped forward. “You don’t have much choice in the matter, Mikhail Sergeyevich. You must go along with us and sign the emergency decree. Either that or resign.”

  Gorbachev glanced at Raisa and saw that she was shivering with fear. He rested a hand on her shoulder, then told the delegation, “Never—I refuse to legalize such a decree with my signature.”