The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

  “Nothing,” Ed argued, “is more valuable than a man’s life.”

  “That,” said Trushenko, “is the fallacy of individualism.” He stood in admonishment, ready to leave. “Society matters. What kind of socialist are you?”

  “One clever enough to fool you, even anger you at will,” Ed said, laughing. “Do you think I am a believer in rampant individualism as in the earliest days of the capitalist era? A Neanderthal?”

  Trushenko sat back down, shaking his head, his left hand stroking his chin. “Why are you willing to help us? You could get into trouble.”

  “If I answered money, you would accept that?”

  “Of course,” said Trushenko.

  “Then read my book, Lenin’s Grandchildren. You respond to capitalist assumptions as they appear in books and not in life. What kind of Neanderthal socialist are you, Comrade Trushenko?”

  “For a young man you are easily insubordinate.”

  “If I work for you, I will take your orders, not before.” Ed hoped his ballsiness wasn’t putting Trushenko off. In Fuller’s company Ed was always the student. In Trushenko’s he could be the teacher. In the next two hours Ed convinced Trushenko that Ed knew more about Marxism and Soviet history than Trushenko did. Trushenko probably considered himself an educated man compared to the police-mentality bureaucrats he often had to put up with. Ed could tell he was winning the older man’s admiration. Trushenko had a weakness. He could be seduced by intelligence.

  “Here,” Ed was saying, “we learn Marxism in three dimensions. From its progenitors, its followers, and its antagonists. You learn the second dimension only.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “I can be valuable to you.”

  “Oh you can shine like a star among the intelligentsia, I’m sure,” Trushenko said, “but when it comes to my kind of work you are a baby.”

  “We shall see, won’t we?”

  How could he not try Ed? To test him, the first thing Trushenko asked him to do was to bring him a page of Fuller’s famous doodling. No harm in that.

  When Ed brought it to him, Trushenko said, “Did Fuller see you take it?”

  Ed assured him not.

  “Did his wife or anyone else see?”

  “No.”

  “Fuller will know it’s missing.”

  “No.”

  “How can you say that with such assurance?”

  “I took it out of the wastebasket.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “You didn’t ask. Why should I reveal my methods if you are not yet ready to accept me,” Ed said, enjoying himself, knowing he had already moved himself closer to acceptance.

  “I don’t know how useful you can be to us. Of course you are there so often. And he obviously respects and likes you. You are a likable sort, I suppose.”

  Ed didn’t hear from him for more than a month. When he did, Trushenko said, “I have read Lenin’s Grandchildren. It is a very clever, very offensive book. It derides Che Guevara, it holds the Arab Marxists up to ridicule.”

  “I deride those who have failed, not those who have succeeded.”

  “Some would say your book is anticommunist.”

  “Would you expect me to be useful to you in Professor Fuller’s household if I had written a procommunist book? I would be useful to nobody.”

  Trushenko stroked his no-longer-existing beard. He said, “My colleagues who have not met you have expressed a certain concern over your attachment to Professor Fuller.” When he saw the ice in Ed’s eyes, Trushenko quickly changed the rhythm of his speech. “Of course, of course, no one is saying anything bad, nothing like that, just worshipful, a very strong bond.”

  “Do you have a wife, Comrade Trushenko?”

  Trushenko was startled. In all his years of service, no one had asked that question. Those who knew him well, knew, those who didn’t, didn’t ask. He did not want to lose this arrogant young pigeon, and so he answered. “I have a wife.”

  “You are attached to her?”

  “Even when she is in Moscow and I am here.”

  “What if you were to find out, Comrade Trushenko, that your wife was working with someone else?”

  “What do you mean ‘working’?”

  “Working.”

  “Why would she be doing that?”

  “You see how you feel right now, Comrade Trushenko? You are full of emotions that redden your face. How do you think I feel after giving my total devotion to Professor Fuller, studying at his feet, and I find he is setting down the most profound elements of his system, the core of his knowledge particularly of the next generation of the Politburo, in a manuscript that he will not let me, his closest young friend, read or even get near, yet when it is finished he will hand it over to some stranger in the government?”

  “I see,” Trushenko said.

  “He is disinheriting me!”

  Trushenko remembered his wife was ironing when he asked her point-blank whether she made love to anyone else while he was in America. She’d left the iron on the collar of his shirt till they both smelled the burning. Then she lifted the iron and held it so that its bottom faced him, as if it were suddenly not something with which to smooth clothes but a fierce weapon that could split a skull. Was that an admission of some sort? Was his own reaction so strong because he himself had been unfaithful to her with a secretary of the embassy? Or was she merely reacting to an unfair accusation? He had never learned the truth. All he took away was the image of the raised iron and the smell of burning.

  To Ed he said, “I need to consult with my colleagues.”

  “Why does everything have to be cleared with Semyonov?” Ed said impatiently.

  “How do you know that name?”

  Ed arranged a slight smile on his face.

  “Is he in Fuller’s manuscript?” Trushenko demanded.

  “I have not read Professor Fuller’s manuscript. Semyonov’s name comes up around the dinner table. All the Columbia people know he’s the KGB’s top dog at the UN.”

  “Why do you use a word like dog?”

  “It’s an expression. Top dog. Chief honcho.”

  Trushenko had to restrain himself from telling the impudent youngster that all of the American experts were wrong, that Semyonov was number two. “We will meet again in a few days,” he said.

  “A few days is acceptable,” said Ed, who felt time racing. Fuller had made a mistake in cutting him off from the manuscript in which he was imbedding things Ed didn’t yet know. If he’d given it to Ed as his rightful heir, Ed could bring to the international barter tables the new generation’s spirit of rapprochement, to replace the system of congenital warfare with the triumph of a socialist peace for all time. Of course he had loved Fuller until he’d seen that Fuller’s method of political analysis was not a process for understanding but a monstrous mechanism for dividing East and West forever. In his head Ed heard the billowing of words to fill the immensity of his feeling: I hate Fuller.

  *

  To Semyonov, Trushenko reported, “The boy is an intellectual, the most dangerous species in the world. He believes ideas are real.”

  Semyonov, a stocky man, laughed with the full expanse of his chest. “You sound like Lenin.”

  Trushenko said, “Thank you, comrade. I was born the year that Lenin died. Perhaps there is some connection.”

  Semyonov laughed harder. “Not enough or you would be party secretary today. What is your assessment of this intellectual in terms of our immediate need?”

  Trushenko had thought carefully. This report could be a turning point for his career. Slowly, he said, “The boy came to sit at Fuller’s feet. To suck his brain. To become his heir. Fuller will not let him read the manuscript. The boy feels betrayed.”

  “Could he kill?” There was no longer a trace of laughter on Semyonov’s face.

  “A man in profound love is untrustworthy.”

  “But you reported Fuller trusts the young man as a son.”

  “That makes it worse. The son exp
ects more. When he gets less, he is a danger to everyone. That is my opinion, comrade.”

  “We must get him to copy the manuscript right away.”

  “It isn’t finished.”

  “I know, I know, but we can then send Porter Sturbridge, whatever you call him, to Europe for a time on some invented errand and let him return when the manuscript is nearly done.”

  “How will we know that?”

  “Clearly you have not inherited Lenin’s brain. As Fuller nears completion, he will have Washington people on his doorstep every day, waiting to snatch his knowledge away to a safe place.”

  “We could have it copied once it reaches Washington.”

  “And risk someone who has been in place so long? Don’t be a complete fool. Better by far to risk the young man.”

  *

  And so at their next meeting, Trushenko pumped Ed’s hand and announced, “Congratulations, comrade. I have your first assignment for you.” He wished the young man’s eyes didn’t dance so. He gave Ed the address of a copying service ten minutes from the Fuller home. “They have a 9200. It can copy a large manuscript in few minutes. Take the front page off or anything else that identifies it. Those people don’t look at what they’re copying. Pay them extra to do it at once if you have to. Make certain it’s the original you put back. If you can manage this, we have even more important work for you to do.”

  *

  Ed believed that almost everyone at one time has a fantasy of fame—an Olympic champion, a film star, a computer king, a political David who slays Goliath. His was to attend a meeting in Geneva or The Hague, a huge room with a horseshoe table for the principal participants, all hushed as Ed opened his briefcase and produced the Two-Part Plan that would cause the stubborn Warsaw Pact delegates and the equally stubborn NATO functionaries to forfeit their obstinate downward plunge to mutual destruction and instead seize the Plan, kiss his cheeks, shake his hand in long lines of grateful delegates. His visionary plan’s two parts consisted of the East’s guide to understanding the naive West, attribution Edward Porter Sturbridge, and the West’s guide to understanding the practical East, attribution to Martin Fuller courtesy of his greatest pupil. The Nobel Peace Prize had sometimes gone to the wrong people, terrorists like Menachim Begin and dictators like Anwar Sadat, but it could now go to the youngest worthy man in history to receive it.

  “Are you well?” Fuller had asked him immediately after Ed returned from his last meeting with Trushenko.

  “Of course,” Ed said.

  “Your eyes look like you have a fever.”

  It wasn’t fever, it was bounding excitement. “I am very grateful to you,” Ed said. “I want to help with your work.”

  “Ah, but you are. Have I neglected to say that our evening discussions, you and Leona and I, and all of us with the others when they visit, stimulate the way I develop my thoughts each day? If I haven’t thanked you, it is an oversight.”

  “No, no, no,” Ed protested, “I mean I want to help directly, perhaps to read behind you, pointing out the small things everyone misses in his own work, let you have memoranda on these points, speed up the process of completion so that when you get to the end little or no revision will be necessary.”

  Ed saw Fuller regarding him without speech. Had he said the wrong thing? Quickly he added, “We could work out a schedule that would not interfere with your hours. When you finish in the late morning, I could work in your study, read behind your work of the day—I could catch up quickly on what you’ve already done—and when I finish you could lock up for the day so that I would never have to have the key and the work would never leave your study. Wouldn’t that be safe and expedient and benefit the time needed for completion so that you and Leona would be free to go off on that long holiday abroad? What do you think?”

  *

  Fuller had sloughed off the offer to help as something to think about and discuss later. But when he was alone with Leona in the kitchen and Ed was in his room upstairs, he said, “What do we know about Ed?”

  Leona seemed surprised by the question. “Too much. The autobiographies of the young are so similar.”

  “Do you think Ed is what he has represented himself to be?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think he wants to read my manuscript very badly.”

  “Of course. So do I.”

  “Not for the same reasons.”

  “I’m sure that in his secret heart he yearns to drain every ounce of your expertise.”

  “Why do you say drain?”

  “A young scholar’s thirst is for the ocean.”

  “I wonder.”

  “Don’t get paranoid.”

  “Something is very wrong. I think we should not invite him frequently. Perhaps not anymore.”

  Since the weather had improved, they went out into the garden for a walk and whatever they then said was not recorded on the voice-activated tape recorder Ed had left behind in the breadbox.

  *

  When Ed retrieved the recorder and listened to the tape upstairs, his euphoria turned into panic. The Russians had at last given him the go-ahead and he was to be cut off from access. And that is when the thought came to him: He will not thwart me. I will stop his work.

  Ed thought Trushenko’s gratitude would be unbounded when he did more than he was asked.

  Never use the phone booth closest to your home, Trushenko had instructed Ed. So he went to a farther one, put in a dime, and called the number. Ed was not to give his name, just say hello. Trushenko would recognize his voice. “Fuller is dead,” Ed said.

  “Of course,” Trushenko bellowed. “We see the newspapers, we hear the radio. Was it an accident? We must meet at the designated place, say four o’clock—”

  “I did it,” Ed said, wanting acknowledgment for the most important act of his life.

  “You fool,” he said, and hung up on Ed.

  Ed never felt more alone in the world.

  Two hours later, the walls of his apartment screaming at him, he went back to the same phone booth. There was a black man vomiting in it. He ran to the next one and dialed the number again from memory.

  The number you have called is not a working number.

  It was working just two hours ago! He dialed carefully, making sure he got every numeral right.

  The number you have called is not a working number.

  He was frantic. They can’t cut me off like that. He hailed a taxi. He had the cab drop him off a block away, then walked to the door of the Soviet UN Mission.

  “Can I help you?” the stout woman said. Ed told her he would like to see Gaspodin Semyonov. He thought the “Gaspodin” would help establish something. What did it matter if he was going over Trushenko’s head. The woman, a wax smile on her tight lips, said, “There is no one with that name at the mission.” Ed thought if this stupid woman knew what he had accomplished she would be smiling as if to a Lenin prize recipient instead of giving him the run-around. “Perhaps Comrade Trushenko can help me locate him?”

  She telephoned someone and spoke in Russian. Did the fool think Ed didn’t understand the language? He didn’t need to be thrown out of there by one of their hoodlums. He left on his own.

  He expected them to get in touch with him. They are loyal to their people. They even get them out of jail if they can’t exchange them for one of theirs. If they weren’t in touch with him, perhaps they had good reason. Maybe Trushenko was under surveillance and didn’t want to compromise Ed. Something like that surely. But Ed couldn’t stand the isolation.

  He knew both Trushenko and Semyonov went to the UN building frequently. That’s when he got the idea he would simply be a tourist, a visitor, and pass them a note in the lobby, arranging for a meeting to receive further instructions. The UN lobby was crowded most of the time. The chances of meeting at least one of them were good. So they didn’t want him seen in the mission. On reflection, he could understand. He had been indicted for a crime they wouldn’t want to be connected
with. Surely they were pleased that Fuller is dead and can’t do any more harm? Ed needed to know why they had cut him off. Could they get him out of the country? All his note said was for Semyonov or Trushenko to meet him at the Forty-second Street station of the Eighth Avenue subway at 5:00 p.m. or as soon thereafter as possible that day. Surely that was an inconspicuous place to meet? That station was always crowded with strange types.

  It rained like a waterfall that afternoon. He is late, Ed thought. He even got solicited while waiting, this man no more than thirty with long blond hair and leather pants. Ed pitied the blond man, but shook his head till he went away. And then the subway cop, who’d been watching Ed, came over and told him, “No loitering.” Ed had never taken any shit from cops. He said to him, “It’s a free country,” and the cop said, “Not down here. Move on or take the next train.” Ed left by the nearest entrance and ran two blocks getting soaked in the rain, and down another entrance, hoping he hadn’t in the elapsed minutes missed Trushenko.

  When eight o’clock came, he felt as if he were coming down with a terrible cold. Why had he waited for three hours? Trushenko would never come. They would not throw him a life preserver.

  All I have left now, he thought, is Thomassy. Then the doorbell rang. They have sent someone to kill me.

  *

  “Who is it?” Ed asked through the door.

  “Open up,” replied Thomassy’s voice.

  Ed took the chain lock off the door to let him in. Oh how beautiful his Armenian face suddenly seemed to him! He put out his hand. Thomassy looked at it, shook it perfunctorily. Doesn’t he shake hands with clients? Ed remembered Thomassy had never shaken hands with him.

  Thomassy sat in the chair Ed usually sat in. Ed sat down opposite.

  “Coffee?” Ed asked him.

  Thomassy shook his head.