An Honorable Man

by Paul Vidich

  “Which bank?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dates?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hotels?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So, it’s someone from headquarters who’s been to Bern in the last five years. That narrows the field,” Mueller said sarcastically. “What good is this? It’s vague, general. We can’t use this.”

  “You’ve been to Bern.”

  Mueller stared at Vasilenko. “I’ll pass that along to my colleagues in case they’ve overlooked it.” Mueller twirled a pencil on his knuckles and considered the man slumped opposite him. “Let’s back up. Tell me about Chernov.”

  “He has two lives, like the philanderer Gurov, one known, open, seen if you want to see it, and the other hidden, a secret. He is GRU and rezident, and a protégé of Malenkov. He joined the Soviet Army, fought at Stalingrad, and was in the first unit to enter Berlin in the last days of the war. He was put in charge of ex-Nazis.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I know. If you don’t believe me, fine. We’re done.” Vasilenko leaned forward. “I know.”

  Mueller considered the story. “Go ahead.”

  “He took charge of all the files Goebbels kept on Jews, American spies, bankers with ties to the black market, all the information he could use against people. Chernov took it all. He is a ruthless man. He took all these Nazi and Abwehr files, everything the German military left behind, including the inventories of art taken from Jews in Berlin and Vienna. He took everything to GRU headquarters in East Berlin. That is what I know.”

  Vasilenko’s cigarette had burned down and he tapped the fragile ash on the saucer he held in one hand. There was a long silence.

  Mueller put aside his pen and notepad. What was true? What was false? How much was rumor, worthless? How much was bad information planted to take the investigation down a rat hole? Mueller didn’t think it worthless or false. Vasilenko had too much at stake—either way. A man with a family whose future was at risk. Mueller felt empathy for him—a man reduced to looking out for himself, for whom ideology was now a luxury, country an accident of birth, who saw his life through the focused lens of survival. He was at the beginning of his betrayal. The easy part was the talking, and the sudden blows would come afterward, and with it would come regret for the moment of weakness when the easy choice to speak showed its terrible consequences. That’s when the other blow hit, coming quietly from within. The slow realization that he’d never have a country again. The first breakdown happened quickly in the chaos of a desperate moment, and the second kind happened slowly over time, as invisibly as dusk.

  “Tell me about this man you call Sasha,” Mueller said. “What do you know? How did he meet Chernov? How was he turned?”

  “I don’t know his name.” Vasilenko said. “I know they met in Vienna in ’forty-eight. How was he turned?” Vasilenko glared at Mueller. “A stupid question. How was I turned!” He snapped his response and slumped into his chair, sullen, lip quivering.

  Upset, Mueller thought. Good. “Who ran him?”

  “Chernov.”

  “From the beginning?”

  “From the beginning.”

  “Was he part of a network?”

  “No. Alone. He was too important to put in a network. Risk being exposed?”

  “His first success? In Vienna?”

  “There were no successes in Vienna. There was only hunger everywhere, in all the zones. The French zone, American zone, British zone, Soviet zone. Misery and hunger and cold. The old Vienna was gone and there were only food lines and rusted tanks no one had moved from the streets. Each side handed out cheap money to buy votes of wild political parties. The terrible winter of ’forty-eight was followed by a disastrous summer. Bodies of the starved floated on the Danube. Then there was May fifth. I remember that day. The terrible food riots that started at the Prater Park Ferris wheel in the second district. Mobs moved to the Innere Stadt.” Vasilenko paused. “Successes? No. Currency manipulation. Starving children. Streetlamps smashed. Who gained? We did. The Allies were blamed.”

  Mueller was quiet. “I remember.”

  “Of course. You were there.”

  Mueller picked up his pad and pen. “Let’s back up again. What do you know about him?”

  Vasilenko was silent again. He looked out the window at the moon hanging in the sky. When his eyes turned to Mueller he was once again calm, deliberate, contemplative. “The thing you most need I don’t have. What have I found? Write this down. I won’t do this again. Fragments. Hints. His real name has an L. That I know from sloppy encryption. He is American, but that you could have assumed so I am not surprising you. Parents or grandparents are German, or maybe Austrian. That’s it. You have everything.”

  They stood. Mueller moved to the window and stood to one side, hidden from view, and looked down into the street. There was a car parked where there hadn’t been one earlier. It idled. Lights on the dashboard illuminated the driver.

  “Your people?” Mueller asked.

  “Yours,” Vasilenko said.

  FBI? Mueller hesitated. “We’ll go out the back.”

  The alley was narrow and dark, cluttered with garbage cans. High up on the walls were small apartment windows. A woman raised her voice at a child. Somewhere a radio played. Their clipped steps on the concrete echoed between the buildings. At the street, Vasilenko looked left, then right. He raised the collar of his bulky overcoat and hurried toward K Street. Mueller watched a minute before he stepped out of the alley and headed in the opposite direction.

  11

  * * *

  DOUBT IS CAST

  ALL THIS is good,” Coffin said, “but it’s vague. Helpful? Yes. Actionable? Perhaps. We can’t take anyone off the list with this.”

  Mueller had gotten a call from the director’s secretary to come to a meeting. He’d arrived to find Coffin, but not Roger Altman or David Downes, and that had surprised him. The director sat in his high-backed leather chair and struggled to relight his pipe, flicking a butane lighter low on fuel. Mueller was on the sofa opposite Coffin and the three men made a triangle.

  Coffin continued. “We are being led to believe Protocol’s last name has an L. Why so precise and yet so incomplete? Are we being played? In offering commend it.” Coffin paused. “Let’s stipulate it’s true. L appears in half the names on the list. Heat on a couple of officers has gone up, but not much. And we’re looking at who went to Austria and Switzerland after the war. Well, everyone did. We were headquartered in Bern.” Coffin looked at Mueller. “We’ve learned one thing: there is good reason to add your name to the list.”

  Mueller nodded. The late-afternoon sun streamed in the window, shading Coffin’s face and deepening the circles on his eyes. His beaked nose gave him a predatory visage.

  “Vienna is the key,” Coffin said. “Our first loss was there, and now we know Protocol was turned there in ’forty-eight. Helpful? Yes. It’s one of two new facts we got. I have a list of questions we need answered that flow from these facts. What was the date? Where did it happen? What was his motive? The circumstances? The bait? We lost Hermann Weisz in June on the train. We never knew how he was compromised, but now we know it was Protocol, so he started working for the Soviets before that. May or April. Not before that. They wouldn’t have waited long to test his usefulness.”

  Mueller could feel Coffin’s mind work through the logic of his speculations. Mueller didn’t like Coffin, but he didn’t go out of his way to show that, and he had come to have a grudgingly settled tolerance for his lecturing way of explaining the theory of intelligence. Parsing the text on a page. Was it interesting? Was it true? Mueller knew Coffin’s world was a dark place of labyrinths, puzzles, and trapdoors. He looked for patterns and goals, and he studied motives—the rationale behind a man’s impulse to act out treason. He lo
oked at language allusively, like a critic, seeking the hidden meanings and the subtext. He understood the importance of a startling detail that could be lost in the surrounding drama of an incident but which drew attention to itself, and Coffin could keep it in the back of his mind for years until he made sense of it. This memory for detail and a deeply questioning intellect were a useful brace of skills for the head of counterintelligence. Mueller knew all this, respected it, tolerated it, but he also knew that Coffin’s flaw was his intensity and single-mindedness. Thinking became doublethink and at its worst careened into the gravitational pull of boundless conspiracy.

  “What if Vasilenko is a plant?” Coffin said. “Leading us to the wrong man.”

  The director lifted his leg and massaged his swollen ankle. He smiled tolerantly. “That’s possible, James. It’s always possible.” He looked over to Mueller. “What’s your view, George? Have you got an opinion on that? You’re the one closest to this Russian.”

  “It’s always a risk,” Mueller said. “He hasn’t led us to anyone yet, so I can’t say we’re onto the wrong man.” Mueller contemplated Coffin and the director. “I find it hard to believe he’s a plant. Twice I gave him bait that he rejected. He wasn’t easy to land.” He addressed Coffin. “You can go down that wormhole, James. I’m not going down with you.” Mueller didn’t hide his impatience.

  Coffin’s eyes were drawn inward, his forehead furrowed, a champion chess player considering his opponent’s move. “George, you’re right. It’s a reasonable reading. Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly reasonable . . . I have a larger concern with security generally of which the list is the most obvious threat.”

  “What?” the director asked. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Men came over from the OSS. We didn’t do background checks. We assumed that they were safe.”

  “What makes them security risks except that we didn’t do backgrounds?”

  Coffin jumped off the sofa. “Jesus, how can I say it? They’re homosexuals. Just like goddamn Ritchie, the one they picked up in the park. If we know about it then I guarantee the Soviets know. And the FBI. If they know, it’s only a matter of time before the senator finds out and he’ll raise it when you testify. You’ll stand accused. That’s what he does.”

  The director stared at the head of counterintelligence. “Sit down, James. We don’t need this drama. I get the point. I know the risk. Sit down.” The director lit his pipe and drew twice. A hint of tobacco and licorice drifted among the three men. “Your note this morning said we should add someone to the list. Who?”

  “I’m not sure this is the right meeting for that.”

  “Of course it’s the right meeting.”

  “With all due respect—”

  The director kept his patience. “What’s his name?”

  Coffin avoided Mueller. “Altman.”

  “On what basis?”

  “He’s homosexual.”

  “You think he is, or you know he is?”

  “People talk.” Coffin looked at Mueller.

  Mueller snapped. “Why are you looking at me?”

  “You’ve known him the longest. He’s your friend.”

  Mueller felt anger begin to corrupt his thinking. He waited until he had mastered his irritation and then he spoke. “He is an acquaintance. An old acquaintance whom I trust, who has never acted against this Agency. I am offended—no, that’s not strong enough—I am appalled that you use this slander against him.”

  The meeting was over. Coffin laid his list of questions for Vasilenko on the coffee table like an offering. Mueller stood at the same time as Coffin, two adversaries locked in a draw, and he grabbed the typed page.

  The director waved Mueller to sit. “Stay for a moment.” The director waited for Coffin to leave the office.

  “There is no room here for that kind of attitude. Is that clear?”

  “No.” Mueller snapped his response.

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “I’ve known Roger since college. He is a friend.”

  The director paused a long moment. “People show you what they want you to see, George. It’s not wise to have friends in this business.”

  Mueller suddenly knew everything that was wrong with his life. Stand up. Quit. Walk out. “I would be surprised.”

  The director asked, “Anything else on your mind?”

  Mueller met the director’s eyes. It’s no way to run a spy agency. Mueller shook his head. “No.”

  “We are alike, you and I,” the director said. “Academics at heart who find ourselves in the thick of things in this nasty world. They’ll fire me one day. We all make mistakes and we pay for them. A new president will come in and I’ll be out. We’re all expendable.” He paused and mused. “I’m thinking of promoting Roger.” The director lifted a copy of the morning Post that lay on the coffee table. “Sometimes a newspaper is just a newspaper.”

  • • •

  Two weeks passed. Vasilenko had more information to provide. They used the agreed signals to indicate the next exchange. A chalk mark on a post office box near the Episcopalian church southeast of Union Station let Mueller know to make his way to a busy clothing store downtown. He found the manila envelope Vasilenko left between the radiator and the wall in the men’s room, and Mueller left an envelope of cash in the same spot. It didn’t surprise Mueller that once Vasilenko tasted money, his appetite grew. What he’d given was only the beginning of what he was willing to offer up, but the new material was of little use. Volume without value. Five thousand dollars a pop. Human nature. The line was crossed once. All that followed was greed and fear.

  12

  * * *

  BETH PAYS A VISIT

  MUELLER FOUND Beth lying in the hallway outside his walk-up apartment. He’d stayed late in the office and then had dinner alone at Harvey’s. He trudged up three flights with his laundry and a bottle of milk, and he found her curled on the floor. She wore a wool overcoat, boots, and her fur hat had slipped off so her hair fell on her face. She was asleep. Soft light from the ceiling fixture made her skin pearly white. Her mouth was open in an exhausted expression.

  “Beth.” He gently shook her shoulder.

  She stirred, eyes opened. She sat bolt upright, embarrassed and speechless.

  “Come inside,” he said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Late.”

  Mueller made tea for her on a hotplate. She sat in her coat on the sofa, boots off, legs curled underneath, and she arranged her tousled hair as best she could. She took the tea with both hands and gingerly sipped from the steaming cup. The room was cold.

  “This is where you live?” she said, astonished.

  Walls were bare. Repeated coats of paint thickened the molding and gave life to the ghosts of tenants past. An upholstered Chesterfield sofa was squeezed beside a mahogany breakfront; a round dining table with two matched chairs held the center of the room. It felt like the contents of a large apartment had been stuffed into a small one, and everything was the wrong size. A bedsheet covered the window. Cardboard moving boxes were packed with books. His large library, which represented a cornucopia of happy times dedicated to pure thinking, was grouped by topic, and then alphabetically. His jewel among the romantics was a Hawthorne first edition, and the grouping of popular fiction had an old Eric Ambler, which he admired for its wisdom within a vulgar yarn spun to showcase a clever plot.

  “It’s temporary,” he said. “I’m moving in a month or two.”

  She looked around. “How long have you been here?”

  “A while.” Too long to mention.

  “I didn’t mean to be found that way,” she said, sipping her tea. “I must have nodded off. Do you always stay out late?”

  “Work.”

  “What time is it?”

  He sat opposite her in one of the
chairs. “After midnight.”

  She nodded, but said nothing.

  “How did you find the place?” he asked casually.

  “Roger told me.”

  So, brother and sister had talked. He contemplated how this link closed a circle among them and made it possible to lower his guard.

  “I came in for the hearings. Father is testifying tomorrow. He’s nervous, but he won’t admit it. They will try to demonize him. And for what?”

  Mueller had an impulse to say something kind, but a false reassurance felt wrong, and there was no way to put a positive light on the red-baiting spectacle in Congress. He nodded.

  She took a tennis ball from her bag. “You left this in my car. I thought you’d want it back, although I don’t know why.” She stepped to the bureau and a porcelain china bowl filled with tennis balls. “Do you play?”

  “Not anymore. In college.”

  “Oh, well, they do make a good display.” She toyed with the ball and suddenly threw it at him, which he caught midair with his fist. She looked around at the cramped apartment and made her judgment. “Art on the walls would brighten the space. A rug would help too. And flowers.”

  And a different mood, he thought. The monastic cell suited his suffering after he’d returned divorced from Vienna and his life was turned upside down. He’d moved in on a temporary basis, but one month became three years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve.

  “Do you have a lot of girlfriends like me?” she asked.

  He was confused.

  “Girls who pick you up on the road and nurse you back to health. And sleep with you?” She laughed self-consciously. “No. This place would scare them off.” She looked at him. “Have you ever cooked here?”

  “Dinner?”

  “Anything.”

  He didn’t answer right away.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said.