Londongrad

by Reggie Nadelson

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, wanting to punch him. I tried to stay cool. I tried not to think about Tolya in the hospital bed.

  “I’m sorry we had to pick you up at the Sverdloff dacha like that. I really should have phoned you instead.” He handed me an envelope. Inside was a video.

  “What is it?”

  “Marina Fetushova said she would send this to you.”

  “You know her?”

  “Everybody knows everybody here,” he said.

  “You’ve looked at it?”

  “Yes. It’s just a few low-level officers, all retired now, and some girls, not very nice to watch, but the girls are all over eighteen, we’ve checked. It’s not important, not anymore.”

  “And Grisha Curtis? He’s in it?”

  “Sadly, yes. But he’s dead, so it doesn’t matter either. You can keep it if you’d like.”

  I took the package.

  “But you were following me, weren’t you, you followed me all over Moscow, right? How did you spot me?”

  “We like to know where our visitors are,” he said.

  “You knew I was here almost as soon as I arrived.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  He laughed. “It was accidental. It was my granddaughter.”

  “What?”

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “Sure.”

  He got up and went to a table on the other side of his office. He picked up a bottle of Black Label, held it up and I nodded. He poured some in two glasses.

  “There’s no ice, I’m sorry.”

  “You already knew I drink Scotch?”

  “You’re a New York cop. I assumed you might like Scotch. How I miss it.”

  “The Scotch?”

  “The city.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s move on to the subject, I’m not here for nostalgia, am I?”

  “My granddaughter’s friend met you on a bus from the airport. I took the girls to the ballet the next night, and young Kim was excited about her trip and the nice American she had met on the bus, and she showed me your picture, the one she took with her cellphone. It was just chance. I saw you, I recognized you.”

  “Christ. You breed them young.”

  He laughed. “It wasn’t like that. You were from New York. I had told my granddaughter and her best friend so many stories about New York.”

  “You have stuff on me? Why? Because I left this miserable country when I was sixteen? Because my mother didn’t like losing her job because she was a Jew? It was in another century.”

  “We don’t have stuff on you, Mr Cohen,” he said, using my American name. “All we knew was that you didn’t register at a hotel, but it was your picture on Kim’s phone. After that, I had a few colleagues ask around. And there was the crazy caretaker, Igor, of course. Otherwise, you’d be hard to find in this huge city.”

  I drank the Scotch in two gulps, he offered more, I refused. “What are you going to do with Sverdloff?” I looked at the door, an old padded green leather door, the kind the apparatchiks used to have. On the desk was a red plastic phone. My father had a red phone.

  “You’re looking at my old phone,” he said, smiling. “I keep it as a souvenir.”

  “I see you keep Putin’s picture on the wall, is it a souvenir?”

  Putin’s chilly face looked down from over the table with the Scotch. Beside it was a picture of Medvedev, the new president who was only Putin’s puppet. Also very short. You saw him on TV, he looked like a dwarf.

  “Yes, but Mr Putin does more good than not,” Bounine said. “People feel safe and they have food to eat.”

  “I want my friend out of that place,” I said. “I want him out, and I’ll do what it takes. State department. Anything. He’s a US citizen.”

  “He isn’t, in fact,” said Bounine. “He has a Russian passport. He has a UK passport. Nothing from the US. Maybe the Brits will help you. Or maybe there is somebody in the US.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I think you’re friendly with Agent Roy Pettus, isn’t that right? I met him a couple of times when there was quite a lot of Russian-American friendship after 9/11, when we did some work together. Look, Artie, I could help you, if you like,” he said. He leaned back and stretched out his legs to look at his dark brown loafers.

  “I’ve been wearing these for almost forty years,” he said. “I got my first pair of Bass Weejun penny loafers at B. Altmans on 34th Street. I thought it was so stylish, this putting of a shining penny in your shoes. So American.”

  I was missing something, and I said, “So you see this picture in your granddaughter’s friend’s phone, how come you were so interested in it, how come you recognized me, how the fuck did you know who I was?”

  “I knew your father,” he said. “He was my boss.”

  Usually I figured life was mostly random. Unless you were religious and believed in some kind of cosmic pixies, it was random. On the job, you sometimes got lucky, you tripped over something useful, there was an accident; mostly you solved a case this way.

  Bounine’s story about the little girl’s phone was the kind of thing that happened. It happened. When he mentioned my father, though, something in me resisted. I tried not to believe him. Not at first.

  “It’s true,” he said softly. “I worked for Maksim Stepanovich for several years in New York City. I was a kid. I was just out of language school, my first year in the KGB,” he said. “I was twenty-four and I got lucky. I had good connections. It’s true. Later, in Moscow, we continued to work together, though he was promoted faster then me. He was a brilliant agent, Artemy. I remember your mother, too. She wasn’t in New York. But I met her here in Moscow. She loved France. Isn’t that right?”

  I fumbled in my pocket for some cigarettes. Bounine threw me a pack, and I lit one, and sucked in the smoke like a drug.

  “And you saw me on the street.”

  “Yes. I saw you in the phone, and I thought, my God it’s Max, my old friend, but he’s been dead so long. I ran a few things through the system and I discovered you were calling yourself Max Fielding. It seemed to connect. Max, you see, you used your father’s name.”

  I had never thought about it when I picked the name out of the blue, never once thought about the fact that it had been my father’s name. He had been Maksim. Max to his friends. To me he was my father. My dad. The only good thing about this miserable country where I grew up, my father, and my mother, of course. But most of all, him.

  “What system?” I said.

  “Ours. Yours, too. Why not? We throw bombast at one another, but we’re allies, more or less, your Mr Bush was just here with Mr Putin in Sochi, and from the time he invited his good friend Vladimir at the Texas ranch, we began setting up systems to share certain things.”

  “So you shared me? Pettus shared me with you?”

  “It’s never that simple.”

  “I want Sverdloff out.”

  “I understand.”

  For a few minutes, Bounine sat, silent, sipping his whisky, as if weighing his thoughts.

  The photograph showed my father and Bounine, both very young, both in hipster suits and narrow ties. My father’s arm was around Bounine’s shoulder and they were standing near the arch in Washington Square Park. In the corner of the photograph, my father had written his name and a fond message to his friend, Sam. July, l962.

  “Jesus.”

  “Yup. We were Max and Sam in New York,” he said. “And when I discovered that you were Sverdloff’s friend, I thought to myself, Artemy will want to help his friend. And I will help him because his father helped me. I have something else for you,” he said, and removed a large envelope from his desk. “Will you have dinner with me? I don’t want to talk about any of this here.”

  I nodded.

  “Good. We’ll make a plan, you and me. We’ll make a plan to get your friend out.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  GUM, the great department store on Red Square, was outlin
ed in little white lights. It glittered like Christmas on the soft summer night.

  The manager of the small Italian restaurant just to the left of the entrance to GUM appeared as soon as we arrived. He smiled and shook Bounine’s hand, and mine, and showed us to a table on the terrace just outside. All Red Square was spread out in front of us, St Basil’s, the Kremlin, GUM, with its lights. Bounine ordered a bottle of red wine. I asked for Scotch.

  “It’s fine, nobody will bother us here,” said Bounine. “It’s mostly tourists. You seem edgy. I’m not going to arrest you or put some idiotic muscle on you, you don’t believe these myths about us anymore. Do you? The FSB is different. We don’t do those things. We did, once, of course, the KGB had idiots just like the CIA. Well, slightly better educated idiots, but we’re a different country.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s true.” He sipped the wine. “Let’s order. The rabbit lasagna is delicious.”

  I ordered steak. He ordered the pasta. I wasn’t hungry.

  “What do you care about in this new kind of country, as you call it?” I said.

  “We care about our own. We value our people. We encourage people to keep in touch, to act like a family. In our business we often go on vacations together, quite a lot of us have married into each other’s families. We respect the children of the great agents who taught us. Like you.”

  I kept my mouth shut. I was too wrecked to eat much. I lit a cigarette. I didn’t want him to see my hands shake. I had been up against killers and creeps, jerks who beat me up, people who murdered children. This was worse. I wanted Tolya out of the rathole he was in. I’d do anything. Just ask, I thought. Just tell me what it is.

  “It’s okay, Artie, I like that name, I remember your dad saying he was going to call your Artemy and would make your Western name Artie because he adored the way Artie Shaw played clarinet.”

  “So?” I tried for nonchalance.

  “Is your dish okay?” he said, as if it were a social occasion.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Would you like another drink?”

  “Sure.”

  Bounine ordered it for me.

  “We didn’t poison Valentina Sverdloff. Nobody poisoned her, but I think you already know that,” said Bounine. “We don’t do that kind of thing anymore. Not for decades,” he chortled slightly. “Did you know your dad and I were young guys together in New York City, in the early l960s? Yes, I told you, I’m sorry, I repeat myself a bit. We loved it, but he loved it most because of the music. Did you know?”

  “And Sverdloff? The polonium?”

  “My dear boy, of course not,” he said, sounding surprised. “Oh, no, it’s become an explosive urban myth, ever since poor Litvinenko died, but that was a single terrible event. Some idiot had the idea of using polonium-210 on the assumption nobody would trace it. It was, thank God, a one-time blunder.” He smiled and when he smiled it lit up his face and made it charming, like a TV anchor, all sincere intelligence and warmth, and all invented for the moment.

  “So you understand, we had nothing to do with Miss Sverdloff. I promise you,” Bounine added.

  I drank.

  “Unfortunately the young man she married turned out to be a bad egg, as we used to say. He found out he had married a passionate young woman, who spoke her mind, perhaps too much, and he didn’t agree with her, and I think, personally, he went off the rails.”

  “Or one of your creeps told Grisha Curtis to kill her. Or he was yours, this Curtis creep.”

  “You could be right. Grigory Curtis was eager to help us, perhaps too eager. I don’t like zealots. There are, in any system, always one or two loose cannons,” said Bounine, who had a taste in English for clichés.

  “But not you.”

  “No.”

  “What about Larry Sverdloff?”

  “He’s one of those Russians who live in London and think they can make another revolution, it’s almost touching, that they think they can overthrow Putin, using their money to back various dissident groups. It reminds me of the days when Lenin and Trotsky and the rest of them sat around Europe plotting. It won’t come to anything.”

  “What’s wrong with Tolya Sverdloff?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “Yes, but I want you to tell me.”

  “Sverdloff, of course, has heart disease. He had it when this all began. Didn’t you know that in New York? Our doctors say he’s been ill for quite some time.”

  Did I know? Had I seen something in Sverdloff’s face that night in New York on the roof at his club?

  “I’ll give you the number of his doctors in New York, or in London,” Bounine added. “He may need a transplant. We can help. Perhaps it would be good for him to have a strong Russian heart?”

  “Why would I believe you?”

  “Why would you? For Sverdloff’s sake.” He put down his knife and fork and picked up his wine glass and glanced at the crowd in the square. “Things are much better now. People live well, they travel, they read books they like to read, listen to rock music, of course. I saw Paul McCartney play Red Square. Can you imagine? Of course, things are better.”

  “I want him out now. Tolya Sverdloff. I want him to come home with me, to New York.”

  “I understand. And we take care of our family, Artie. We like doing business with people we know. So many of our recruits can trace their lineage all the way back. You’re our family.”

  “You think the FSB or the fucking KGB is some kind of aristocracy? You think the pricks who do your work have lineage?” I was sorry I said it. I was sorry in case in made it worse for Tolya. I bit my lip. I drank the Scotch.

  “You are more like your mother,” he said. “Dessert?”

  “Tell me how I can get Sverdloff out of here?”

  “I have an idea,” said Bounine. “How lovely it is tonight,” he added.

  It was a soft beautiful summer night. The red star on the Kremlin glittered. All around Red Square, ice-cream sellers fixed cones for tourists. A soldier leaned casually against the red granite of Lenin’s tomb and shared a joke with some tourists while a little boy had his picture taken against the mausoleum.

  Bounine followed my gaze.

  “You see things do change for the better,” he said. “I’m going to have an armagnac, perhaps a really nice one. Will you join me?” He gave a little shrug. “I hope all this lasts,” he added.

  “All what?”

  “All the good things we have now. Who knows? In a year, two years from now it might all disappear, the whole enterprise might just go bust,” he said. “Maybe capitalism wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” he added, chuckling. “If the economy goes belly up, well, let’s hope for the best, shall we?”

  Did he order the armagnac at the cafe overlooking Red Square because it was Sverdloff’s drink? Bounine reached into his briefcase, and said, “I nearly forgot.”

  He pulled out the envelope he had taken fom his office and opened it. Inside was an old-fashioned black and white school notebook. Bounine opened it at random. It was covered with my father’s elegant handwriting. Bounine offered it to me.

  “Your father’s diary from his years in America,” he said. “When you left Moscow, he was asked to leave his notes behind, of course, but I kept it. ‘One day’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll give this to Max’s son.’ To you. I saved it for you.” He handed it to me.

  “What do you want from me in return for the notebook? What’s the price?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s for you. I’ve kept it too many years. It’s yours, Artemy, it belongs to you. I was so sorry when I heard your father had died in Israel. I wanted to write, I wanted to send you the diary. I couldn’t, but I mourned for him.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “He was a brilliant agent, he could listen all day and all night. He could get people to tell him anything, usually in the easiest way. But he was also a patriot. He did what he had to do,” said Bounine. “I envied
him. I could see that, even when I was a young man. He could have gone all the way. To the top, I mean.”

  “Except for my mother.”

  “Except that.”

  I got up and walked a few yards into the square and away from Bounine. All my life I had kept my father as I had remembered him. I kept the handsome blue-eyed young man who brought me candy and took me fishing and introduced me to jazz and told me, secretly, quietly, about New York City as if it were a paradise just over the horizon.

  In those days, we imagined the KGB was a force for good, part of the future of the wonderful socialist state that had sent a man into space first. And even after that, even after I knew it was all lies, I kept my father as I remembered him, the one good thing about this miserable country where I grew up.

  In some way I’d built everything on the notion that he was a good man. But Bounine had made me listen to the other truth. “He was a brilliant agent, he could get people to tell him anything. He did what he had to do.” I knew what it meant. Under my feet as I walked back to the table, I felt the cracks between the bricks. The ground seemed uneven.

  “What do you want from me?” I said to Bounine. “For Tolya Sverdloff. What do you want?”

  “I just thought it would be nice to keep the family contact with you, and I could drop in on you when I’m in New York,” said Bounine. “Nothing much. Sometimes we just need someone who can talk to people in their own language. I don’t mean English, of course, I mean their own lingo, idiom, on their own terms.”

  Don’t sell your soul to that devil, Tolya had said. Don’t do that.

  “And for that you’ll let Tolya out? You’ll let me take him home?”

  He nodded.

  “And these things you want help with?”

  “There are always people we like knowing about, here and there, in New York, possibly next week or next year,” Bounine said, drinking his armagnac slowly.

  I knew what Bounine wanted. He wanted me for an errand boy when he needed one. He wanted a line to me when he needed it. He wanted me to join the family business.

  “You want to know how ill Sverdloff is?”

  “I can see.”

  “He’s tough, you know. He could be treated. I talked to the doctors. He could have some time left.”