The Debriefing

by Robert Littell

  “We ought to play the riots back at them over Radio Free Europe,” comments the senator. “Don’t want to waste anything, do we?”

  “It’s already been played back,” says Evans. “Went out a week ago.”

  “Might have known you wouldn’t let a juicy one like that slip past you.” The senator chuckles.

  “Item: Four personal letters, two typewritten, two handwritten, to embassy staffers in Cairo. One confirmation here. One of the handwritten notes was a love letter from the niece of the minister of heavy armaments to a female translator—”

  “You did say female?” asks Nicholas Toland.

  Evans nods. “We were able to confirm both the handwriting and the homosexuality; both young ladies traveled with a student group to Paris several years ago. The niece of the armaments minister was tagged for possible blackmail on the homosexuality if she ever came out again; the female translator is being approached in Cairo now. Okay, we’re getting down to the bottom of my list. Item: Instructions to the military intelligence resident in Cairo to notify a certain Ahmid that ten thousand Swiss francs has been paid into his numbered account in the Swiss Bank Corporation in Zurich. Here we were able to obtain one hundred percent confirmation. We traced the payment through our sources in Zurich—”

  “Didn’t know you people were into numbered Swiss accounts,” the senator says uneasily. “I reckon nothin’s what’s sacred these days.”

  “The account was in the name of a Liechtenstein holding company, which in turn was controlled by a Panamanian company, and the Panamanian company was totally owned by one Khalid Tawfiq, who worked until the day before yesterday in the Egyptian cabinet secretariat.”

  Prentice whistles. “The Russians had a man in the cabinet secretariat! This material’s got to be genuine—they’d never give that away.”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” says the senator, “you’ve still got one item to go.” He wags his finger playfully at Evans. “I’ve been down the road before with you, Charlie, and I know you save the best for the last.”

  “You’ve got my number, Senator,” admits Evans. “Item: A short handwritten note from someone named Khrustalev-Nosar on the Soviet SALT negotiating team in Geneva to his brother-in-law, a junior diplomat in the Soviet Embassy in Cairo. The note has five Russian words. It translates, ‘You owe me one hundred rubles.’ ”

  The senator squints foxily. “What was the bet?”

  “Well, we had some of our Swiss friends take a peek around one night when Khrustalev-Nosar was attending an embassy reception. We were looking for handwriting confirmation mainly, but I’ve got to admit, I was curious about the bet too. Our young Russian friend kept his letters in a shoe box—”

  “That doesn’t sound too difficult for people with qualifications.” The senator laughs.

  “The shoe box, Senator, was in a safe. The safe didn’t give them much trouble. The problem in these affairs is to get in and out again without leaving a calling card. Which means the lock has to be picked without physically damaging the safe. But more important, the contents has to be put back precisely the way it was found.”

  “The bet,” the senator prompts Evans. “What was it?”

  “In the safe,” Evans explains triumphantly, “was a letter to Khrustalev-Nosar from his brother-in-law in Cairo offering to bet one hundred rubles there would be no SALT agreement before the negotiations adjourned.”

  “I’m not sure I follow all this,” says Nicholas Toland.

  “Me neither, I don’t follow,” says the senator. “There has been no SALT agreement, and there doesn’t look as if there’ll be one before adjournment—what’s that, in six weeks from now?—unless one side or the other gives in on Cruise Missile force levels. …” The senator’s voice trails off. His face lights up. “And your Russian would be in a position to know if they were going to give in to us?”

  “He’s an expert in air-to-ground missile systems,” says Evans. “That’s what he’s in Geneva for.”

  “So his claiming the hundred rubles before there’s an agreement means he knows there will be an agreement. Which means he knows the Russians plan to give in to us on the Cruise. Which means”—the senator slaps the table in excitement—“all we have to do is sit tight, stick to our guns, and we get the new SALT treaty on our terms!” The senator turns to Prentice. “You realize, Al, what you boys over at State are being handed?”

  “It’s even better than it appears,” notes Evans. “It’s usual when you get a gem like this for the other side to know you have it, and that almost always undermines the usefulness of the gem. This time out, we have a gem that they don’t know we have.”

  Prentice is not convinced. “Khrustalev-Nosar will hear about the loss of the pouch.”

  “Sure he’ll hear about the pouch,” agrees Evans, “but he won’t be sure that his letter was in it. Remember, he slipped a private note into the diplomatic bag going to Moscow. It could have gone on to Cairo in a dozen different ways. Even if he thinks we got our hands on his note, he’ll check his safe, see nothing is missing, and figure we could never know what the bet was about. Also, if he tells his superiors what he’s done, he’ll be ruined, or even jailed. No, his instinct will be to sit tight and see what happens.”

  “His brother-in-law in Cairo can’t blow the whistle on him either,” the senator chimes in, “because he couldn’t know the note was coming.”

  “And Khrustalev-Nosar will never tell the brother-in-law he sent the note if he finds out later that he never got it,” says Evans.

  Prentice shakes his head stubbornly. “What if this Khrustalev-Nosar is the patriotic type? What if, rather than see his country lose out in the negotiations, he owns up?”

  “Careful,” the admiral cautions coolly. “You’re using the worst-case contingency.”

  General laughter around the table.

  “Touché, Admiral,” says Prentice, obviously annoyed but trying to hide it. “But where does it leave us?”

  “Fair question, Al,” says Evans. “If he owns up, if he tells his superiors what’s in his five-word note, they will recall him and punish him immediately. First, because they’ll be furious at him. And secondly, they’ll do it to signal us that they are aware of the contents of the note, and hence we can no longer count on it being of value to us.”

  “I take it you’re watching this Khrustalev-Nosar,” comments Prentice.

  “Twenty-four on twenty-four.” Evans smiles. “Last night he had dinner with a woman clerk in the Czechoslovak Embassy. Then he slept with her. This morning he reported for work at nine. Yawning.” Evans glances at his watch. “I don’t know what he had for lunch yet, but I soon will.”

  Evans leans back in his chair, purses his lips thoughtfully. All eyes turn to Stone. “Given all these confirmations,” says Nicholas Toland, “do you still hesitate to accept the defection as genuine?”

  Stone refuses to let himself be intimidated. “It doesn’t feel right,” he says. “The pieces have fallen into place too easily.” He shakes his head briskly. “My instinct tells me to go slow.”

  Toland exchanges looks with Evans and shrugs. The senator snorts. “Looks to me, son, as if you’ve got a terminal case of euphobia.” To the others he explains, “That there means fear of good news.”

  The admiral’s back, straight as a ramrod, is turned toward Stone. He lights up one of his precious Havanas (smuggled in to him from Moscow by the naval attaché at the embassy), lets his head sink back on his shoulders as he enjoys the sensation. Then, slowly, like a main battery searching for a target of opportunity, he swivels one hundred and eighty degrees to face Stone. “Out with it,” he orders, flicking on the microphone jammer. “In ten words or less, what makes you think he’s a phony?”

  Stone, sitting in one corner of the admiral’s leather couch across the room, focuses on the framed clipping from the New York Times. It is dated March 18, 1970. Two sentences have been underlined in red. They represent the author John Barth as saying: “The fact tha
t the situation is desperate doesn’t make it any more interesting. I’m prepared to be bored by the man who murders me.” Stone remembers a framed clipping from Pravda that his grandfather had hung over his desk. It had also been underlined in red. It quoted Stalin, in one of his six-hour marathon speeches, as saying: “Full conformity is possible only in the cemetery.” At the time of the doctors’ purge, in the early fifties, his grandfather shattered the glass with his fist. Stone remembers the old man, his white hair falling over his eyes, switching on the desk lamp and picking out, with a tweezers, splinters of glass from his bleeding hand.

  The admiral sucks patiently on his cigar.

  Stone strides across the room and sinks into a seat across the desk from the admiral. “It seems to me that we can observe the same set of facts,” he says thoughtfully, “yet some of us see the tragedy of the human comedy, while others see the comedy of the human tragedy.”

  “Which do you see, Stone?”

  “I’ve got a foot in both camps, Admiral,” Stone says, smiling self-consciously. “Sometimes I go one way, sometimes the other, depending, I suppose, on what I had for breakfast, or whether the last time I made love, I made it well.”

  “Hmm.” The admiral studies his cigar with admiration. “What you’re saying, if I have it right, is the hell with consistency.”

  “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,” says Stone. “That’s Oscar Wilde.”

  “No one to my knowledge has ever accused you of being unimaginative,” comments the admiral.

  Stone closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them and plunges. “I’ve got a gut feeling, Admiral. Nothing more. No facts. No glaring inconsistency. No chapter and verse.”

  The admiral treats himself to another puff. “I’m listening.”

  Stone leans over the edge of the admiral’s desk. “Everything that happened to Kulakov—to his daughter, his son, his wife running off with someone, the actress violating his sense of manhood, then the business of being accused of lying about how his father died—all this represents enough personal tragedy for two lifetimes. But it all happened to Kulakov during an eight-month period.”

  “Hmm.” The admiral is not overly impressed.

  “Then there’s the duty officer who made the fatal mistake of giving Kulakov an overseas run,” continues Stone. “He was obviously a war hero—he was missing an arm, and wore a chestful of medals, including the Order of Stalin—yet he was still a major.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t politically reliable,” offers the admiral.

  Stone shakes his head sharply. “He wouldn’t have been in a politically sensitive job, dispatching couriers around the world, if he was unreliable. And since the defection, we can’t find any trace of him. He’s disappeared as surely as if he never existed.”

  “Maybe the senator hit the nail on the head,” says the admiral. “Maybe the duty officer was shot.”

  “It’s possible,” Stone admits grudgingly.

  “There’s more, I hope?” asks the admiral.

  “Not much more,” concedes Stone. “The other detail that bothers me is that everybody associated with the Kulakov affair seems to be tied, in one way or another, to the military establishment.”

  “Spell that out for me,” instructs the admiral.

  “Kulakov’s wife ran off with a tank officer. The wife’s friend, Natalia, the one who came to collect her things, is married to an officer in the Army transport section. The rector who expelled Kulakov’s son from the university is a retired Army general. The actress who seduced him is separated from an Air Force pilot. Kulakov was being charged with lying about his father by a military prosecutor. The evidence he was shown consisted of a notation in an Army divisional diary.”

  “Hmm. And the pouch?”

  “It’s the same with the pouch,” says Stone. He is beginning to talk with more confidence, almost as if he is being convinced by the sound of his own voice. “Look what they gave away, Admiral. The night sight on their T-62. A defect in the SAM tracking system. Those are military secrets. The sleeper who supposedly passed our naval code to the Russians that his girl friend swiped worked for military intelligence, not the KGB, which is the party’s intelligence arm. The eighteen letters about MIG spare parts came from Ministry of Defense procurement officers. The letter to the ambassador about Chinese troop movements came from a general. The love letter to the female translator came from the niece of the minister of heavy armaments, who happens to be a former tank general. The instructions to pay ten thousand Swiss francs into a numbered account were sent to the military intelligence resident, and led to exposure of an agent controlled by the military. Even Khrustalev-Nosar, who seems to be one hundred rubles ahead of the game, is suspected of being the military intelligence man on the Soviet negotiating team.”

  The admiral swivels back to face the window, and sits for a long while smoking and gazing out over the Capitol. At last his voice comes floating back over his shoulder. “You’re not giving me much to go on, are you?” Another long pause. “Still, if Charlie Evans is putting his head on the chopping block, I’d be an ass not to take a swing at it.” He swivels briskly back to face Stone, all business. “What if you took another crack at Kulakov?”

  “He’s been wrung dry, Admiral,” says Stone. “Even Evans didn’t bother to ask for a turn. I’ll go back at him if you like, but there’s nothing more to be had.”

  “What about taking a look at the pouch, then?”

  “Same thing,” says Stone. “Evans’s people are very good at what they do. He wouldn’t have put himself on the line if he hadn’t first examined every angle under a microscope.”

  The admiral studies Stone carefully. “What’s left, then?”

  “What’s left,” Stone says carefully, “is to take a closer look at some of the military threads running through Kulakov’s life.”

  “Are you proposing we send someone in?” the admiral asks. The idea seems to amuse him.

  “Not someone,” replies Stone. “Me.”

  Stone sits cross-legged on the sheets, naked and surprisingly unaware of his nakedness. Thro, also naked, also cross-legged, her spine pressed to his, takes another drag on the hand-rolled cigarette, holds the smoke in as she passes what’s left to Stone. The butt burns his fingers as he takes a last puff and drops it into the ashtray. His head angled back, his eyes closed, he grips his ankles to keep from rising like a balloon; it feels as if the top half of his head is about to lift off. “We drift through life,” he says dreamily, slurring some of the words, “with one eye absently on a rear-view mirror. Somewhere ’long about the age of forty—yes, forty is about right—we become aware someone is tailing us.”

  “Who is it?” asks Thro, exhaling. “The angel of death?”

  “It’s us as we might have been,” replies Stone.

  “You see,” cries Thro, turning in slow motion and twining her limbs around his body as if she is a vine. “You talk differently when you smoke. You’d never say something like that if you weren’t high.”

  “I’d never even think it,” admits Stone.

  “I love to make you smoke,” says Thro dreamily. “I love to smoke. The cold becomes colder. The hot is hotter. The lukewarm is lukerwarm—or is it lukewarmer?”

  Stone laughs and folds her in his arms. “Fuck Mozart,” he says. “Fuck Charlie Evans and Senator Howard. Fuck Nicholas Toland and Andrew Horrick and Ohm Berenson. Fuck Oleg Kulakov.”

  “What about me?” Thro asks coyly.

  “Be patient,” orders Stone. “I’ll come to you. Fuck most of all the admiral—”

  “He must have hit the ceiling when you told him your idea,” whispers Thro, her head resting on his shoulder.

  “He didn’t hit the ceiling,” says Stone. “The most dramatic he gets is a loud ‘Hmm.’ ”

  “What’d he say exactly?”

  “He was quiet for a long while.” Stone reconstructs the scene. “Then he swiveled back to me and thanked me for staying after class. Those we
re his exact words—thanks for staying after class!”

  Thro sinks back on her haunches and stares at Stone. “You said you wanted to go into Russia, and he said thanks for staying after class?”

  Stone starts to lean toward her breast, but she fends him off excitedly. “Answer, Stone.”

  “That’s what he said, yes,” says Stone, puzzled.

  “My God!” exclaims Thro. “Don’t you see it?”

  “See what, god damn it?”

  “Stone, he didn’t say no!”

  It is a long moment before Thro’s words penetrate. “He didn’t say no,” Stone repeats thoughtfully.

  “The theory of plausible deniability,” she reminds Stone. “You’ve always assumed the order to go in would never be a written one, or even a direct one, so that if things go wrong, everyone could deny responsibility.”

  “It’s true,” Stone says, suddenly very sober. “He didn’t say no.”

  Stone’s informal note is hand-carried to the admiral. It says: “Due to pressing personal reasons, respectfully request four weeks leave.”

  The note comes back, by messenger, three days later. Below Stone’s request someone has typed: “Accorded. Dictated but not signed, from the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  Kulakov looks as if he expects Stone. “I knew it was too good to be true,” he says gloomily. “I knew it would never end.”

  Stone installs Kulakov in a hotel room that he has already checked for bugs and patiently leads him over certain ground again. He tries to get closer to the identity of his daughter’s lesbian friend. “I had the impression she was Polish,” says Kulakov. “Nadia once spoke vaguely about going to live in Warsaw with her.” Stone is also interested in the identity of his wife’s lover, but Kulakov is unable to add anything other than that he is a tank commander. But most of all, Stone is interested in the duty officer Gamov. “You worked as a courier for twenty-eight years,” he tells the Russian. “How is it possible you never saw him around the ministry before?”