The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  “Even so. Even with Jed’s concurrence.” This was a small barb of sarcasm fired into McAtee’s back, latest in a long series, after which the gnomish man’s mouth bent primly up at one corner.

  “We can’t very well turn it down.”

  The gnomish man said nothing, implying his firm but deferential disagreement. Silence was as far as he generally went by way of expressions of deference. The gnomish man was laconic by nature and often too by calculation; since he was also calculating by nature, it was really all one. The mere act of remaining silent, like most else in his life, was seldom done for only a single reason.

  “We can’t. Sorry. That’s definite,” the big man repeated. “We just cannot. Picture me facing Earl Warren and his group a month from now. Telling them we had a source on Oswald, a potential source at least, possibly veracious and very possibly not—from inside the KGB. And we turned it down. Lord. Because the man didn’t smell right. ‘Well, you see, Mr. Chief Justice, we passed on that one. Turned him down. Fellow didn’t smell right. Fishy. We were dubious. Thought he was probably making things up. So we just spun him around and sent him on back home. Sir.’ Christ alive. Picture that for me, would you, Claude?”

  Maybe the gnomish man pictured it, maybe not. He remained silent.

  “What would you do?”

  “Nothing,” said the gnomish man. “Leave him be. Watch. Wait.”

  “That I know. What’s your second choice?”

  “I have none.”

  The big man made a flatulent noise through his lips: acute frustration muted by four decades of bureaucratic composure. That the conversation continued was testimony that this gnome in a camel-hair coat, however abrasive, however unhelpful, could not simply be ignored. Melvin Pokorny sat quite still, willing himself invisible.

  “Jed says bring him across,” said the big man. “Discount everything. Hear the stories and disbelieve them and see where they might lead. Where they might be meant to lead. Extrapolate backward. Then crack him. Crack him right open. What about that?”

  “I wouldn’t,” said the gnomish man. “It’s just what we’re being asked to do. Therefore I wouldn’t.”

  “No it’s not.” A large fist was slapped into a fleshy palm, like a softball landing in mud. “What we’re being asked is to accept him at face value. Open arms. Friendly debriefing, then a house in Bethesda and a consultancy. Paagh. I’m not proposing any such thing, and you know it.”

  “Asked by him, yes,” said the gnomish man. “I mean what we’re being asked by them.”

  “Them. Of course. But in the present instance, Claude, we simply don’t know that they are asking anything.”

  “So we must infer,” said the gnomish man, at which familiar incantation the other rolled his eyes. In Vienna, Jed McAtee was waiting for an answer, and Pokorny was waiting to send it.

  “Infer the look on Earl Warren’s face. Infer that one for me.”

  Both of the standing men already knew precisely what decision would go out. They had known from the start. But it was psychologically necessary to their mutual sense of professionalism that, first, the thing be properly anguished over from all conceivable angles.

  “You are very goddamned hard to please.”

  Silence from the gnomish man this time indicated his total and mildly flattered assent. The skirmish was lost but he had affirmed, for later, his hold on certain high ground. Which was as much as he had hoped for. He began buttoning the camel-hair overcoat; now finally it was possible to leave the building.

  “Then again,” said the gnomish man, “I’m not the Director.” A small careful brush stroke of conciliation.

  “That’s correct,” said the Director.

  Still the gnomish man lingered. It would be rude, exceeding even his standard degree of rudeness, to stalk off before the offending message was sent. Beyond that he was expected for reasons of protocol to remain, to be present during the actual transmission, so that later he could not be tempted to claim suggestively that he hadn’t been. For the record: he had been overruled, but not circumvented.

  “All right, Mel,” said the Director. “Let’s tell Jed to bring the little stinker across. A great big American welcome for comrade Viktor Semyonovich Tronko.”

  So the third meeting was, for the Vienna phase, the last. That one too was hosted by Jed McAtee. The Russian was tucked and zippered into the uniform of an American Army major, best available fit, and assisted in ducking quickly from the door of the safe house into the rear seat of a Buick with diplomatic plates. He stayed squashed on the floor of the car until they were an hour outside the city, speeding westward along the winter-gray Danube Valley. McAtee was right there beside him, for the entire ride over to Frankfurt and then again for the flight back to Washington. McAtee kept himself practically handcuffed to the Russian until they had passed through the gates of a certain Agency compound some fifty miles southeast of Washington along the Chesapeake Bay.

  As the gnomish man had intuited, there was much to be known and much to be doubted about this particular Russian, beyond merely his two startling quanta of news. But the full truth certainly wasn’t offered to Jed McAtee, not in Vienna and not during that sleepless journey west, and not in the months following. Nor was it offered to anyone else, on what might be called (though imprecisely) the American side of the matter, for a very long time thereafter. The journalist Michael Kessler did not come into it, in fact, until seventeen years later.

  2

  MICHAEL KESSLER STANDS frozen in his own doorway. He does not own a gun.

  He is still holding out against that and a word processor, though he recognizes as an ineluctable truth that in both cases the barbarians are at the gates. In his old age—actually it was just after his thirty-sixth birthday—he has relented only so far as to buy a TV. Death of principle, the greased track downward into darkness and entropy, but there you are. Yes I’ve bought a TV. The crucial thing about owning a television, Kessler rationalizes, is to refrain from pretending you got it for the news. That way lies gibbering self-delusion. Besides, it’s not his idea of news, some jasper posing by moonlight on the White House lawn in a Burberry and a razor cut, reciting the day’s official boilerplate in oracular tones. No, Kessler bought his set for the bright colors, which play soothingly across his frontal lobe after a bad day. He has heard by grapevine that a certain precocious vice-president at NBC does all his own watching with the volume turned off. No sound at all. Colors and shapes. Obviously the man has thought a few things through. But right now Kessler is wondering, suddenly, whether he shouldn’t perhaps have gotten the gun instead.

  His keys dangle from the lock. The door is open. Surprising a burglar at work can be more costly than letting him surprise you, Kessler thinks. Possibly it isn’t too late, though, to reverse course and gallop discreetly away down the wooden stairs. One aspect of a television is that, however pernicious, it can’t be used to blast a hole in your face when you stumble home with drastically bad timing. Kessler has been startled on his own threshold by the sight of a burning light, in the kitchen, which was not lit when he left.

  Or was it? No, definitely not. And muted noises now audible from the living room. Kessler advances warily. On the kitchen counter, bare this morning or Kessler is losing his mind, is an empty beer bottle and the sheet of butcher paper that was wrapped around the piece of Stilton cheese that he put away carefully last night. Either an arrogant burglar, then, or a starving one. Some desperate junkie from the alleys of New Haven who has jimmied his way into Kessler’s place for a fast rip-off, a snack, and maybe a few restful minutes of browsing the bookshelves—the sort of calm felon who would pass up five cans of Budweiser in favor of a Beck’s from the door shelf, though the Beck’s would have required a bottle opener, a rifling through drawers. Obviously it’s a case of white-collar crime. Of course there is another possible explanation and by now, breathing easier, Kessler is gropingly i
nclined toward that one. Somebody has come to visit.

  Somebody for whom a door, when locked, is not quite really persuasively locked. Even this doesn’t tell him. The woman named Nora has no key, doesn’t drink beer, and would be highly unlikely to pay Kessler a surprise evening visit, alas. Far out of character that she might let herself into his empty apartment and settle cozily down awaiting him—though the image is enough to make Kessler’s blood hum in his ears. She could be barefoot, shoes cast aside, legs tucked up under her on the sofa. She could be sleeping. He remembers quite vividly what she looks like when she is sleeping. Yes, if only. But he knows that this visitor isn’t Nora. Crazed with her own (incomprehensible, to Kessler) brand of remorse, crazed with caution, she hasn’t let him get within arm’s reach since that first and rather puzzlingly chaste night. Which by now is, what, almost six months back and a hemisphere away? He literally has not touched her since Ecuador. Maybe it was the Coriolis effect that played some sort of magic role, sweeping Kessler and Nora up in its centripetal suck, spinning them so closely together for that short bit of time: don’t vortices all flow in the opposite direction, down on the far side of the equator? Maybe what he should do is kidnap her, drag her back down to Guayaquil, and make his best bid again there. Spanish guitars, fragrance of mangrove, the tropical evening heat raising a light sweat on the nape of her neck, and a candlelight dinner of roast guinea pig with popcorn. Would the Hotel Alfaro even let them back in? Anyway, no—no, the unexpected is always possible and Kessler could win a sweepstakes and die of the shock and be born again as a Hindu cow but this brazen guest, tonight, definitely cannot be Nora.

  Who, then? Who else would come to call?

  No one, not in New Haven at least, a town where Kessler is still the lonely stranger. Not a student, certainly. Not Fullerton, the dean who lured him here, just an acquaintance socially. Kessler’s mind is empty: he has been too long away from the world of Washington and its spookier players and the sort of journalism he used to do down there. Too long since he promised anonymity to a terrified source or lied over the telephone about who he was. His metabolism is different now. His body has made adjustments, no longer producing such quantities of the hormone for suspicion and paranoia. That or his memory is simply failing with age, like his principles. It could only be one person, after all.

  And lo. Seated comfortably in the good chair is Mel Pokorny, wearing an orange mohair wig and a pair of Groucho glasses.

  The glasses are of high quality as those things go, presumably from some strange little shop that only Pokorny would know—real hinges to the frames, real synthetic hair for the mustache and brows. They don’t make them like that anymore, Kessler thinks passingly. On the floor nearby is an attaché case, lid up, in which Kessler can see a Wall Street Journal and a simple professional lock tool.

  Pokorny has taken the liberty, among others, of removing his shoes and socks. A grotesque travesty of the image just savored—Nora, drowsy and soft—and it makes Kessler cringe. Pokorny’s wide naked feet rest on the coffee table, from the far end of which Kessler’s new television is showing highlights of the day’s celebrations in Washington. Fireboats on the Potomac pissing out great rainbow arcs of water, large buses pulling into the White House drive, a festive and emotional crowd on the South Lawn. Fifty-three folding chairs, one for each returned hostage. Ronald Reagan is making a speech of welcome. Pokorny’s suit has endured a long day’s rumpling, probably much of that on the train, but to the conservative gray lapel is affixed a crisp yellow ribbon. He is holding a second Beck’s steadied on his stomach. Now he raises it in salute, whether to Kessler or to the TV isn’t quite clear.

  “It’s a stirring day to be American, Michael.”

  “Wait. Don’t start. Let me get one myself.”

  “Two,” Pokorny calls after him. “Thank you.”

  “Six years, Mel,” and Kessler raises his own beer. “I can honestly say it’s good to see you. What are you doing now?”

  “Plotting,” says Mel Pokorny.

  “Besides that, I mean.”

  “I’m a consultant.” The word is pronounced in italics of self-mockery. “Risk analysis. That’s what they call it in the trade: ‘risk analysis.’ I hire out through a group with a bland name, a name you’ve never heard, to advise multinational corporations. About their assets in the fringe countries.”

  “What’s the bland name?”

  Pokorny shakes his head gently, suppressing a smirk. “One you’ve never heard.”

  “Same old Mel.”

  “I tell them when to start getting concerned. How to shift their weight prudently. When to go further in, when to hunker, when to pull out. Not just plant and employee security, thank God. It’s more a political forecasting role. Tolerably interesting. Only tolerably. Shamefully lucrative.”

  “I’m glad the private sector found a place for you.”

  “Yeah,” says Pokorny. “Believe me, so was I. Forty-nine years old and a résumé with a big empty space where it doesn’t even say CLASSIFIED. Not a situation I recommend.”

  “But the Agency always has friends.”

  Pokorny’s eyes widen earnestly. “Judas, yes. The Agency’s friends. That was part of the problem. I could hardly expect any favors from those boys. I was persona non grata. I had gone out on my ass.”

  “I heard you walked.”

  “On my ass. I went out on my ass. What all else did you hear, exactly?”

  “Bits and scraps,” says Kessler. “Just the Post version, plus a few annotations by word of mouth.” Kessler himself had already been easing away from the whole subject by that time, no longer so avid as once, sated with intrigue, put off at last by the numberless layers of coy machination, the lies and denials and tactical no-comments and more lies, the leaks and exegeses that only turned out to be further lies, all of which had begun to remind him of the glutinous multiple laminations of a hunk of baklava. Still, he recalls being mildly shocked when he heard about Sparrow’s downfall. “Claude Sparrow dismissed summarily,” says Kessler. “Called onto the Director’s own carpet and fired cold, suddenly, one Monday morning, for abuses of his position as Counterintelligence chief. The very same abuses, not coincidentally, that had just been announced to the American public by way of Joe Delbanco’s column. Namely, unauthorized wiretaps against certain U.S. Government officials, in clear violation of the Agency charter. That was the big lead, the sacking of Sparrow. In the gossip a person heard also about Mel Pokorny and a couple other close aides following their boss through the door. As a matter of principle. I’ve seen you once since then, remember?”

  “I like that ‘matter of principle.’ It’s gratifying to hear that. So often the press wants to take only the most cynical view of these things.”

  “We bumped at the Capitol in ’75,” Kessler says. “During the Church Committee uproar. You were haunting the corridor outside the hearing room. Wearing a tweed cap and a toupee, as I recall.”

  “Certainly not testifying. Right. And I gave you a story.”

  “You told me a story,” Kessler corrects him. “A story about a story. About the great purge two years earlier. About the moves behind the moves. You wanted me to know that McAtee, the new DCI, was not such a constipated Boy Scout as he was contriving to seem. That the ghastly breach of security by a relentless adversarial press, which had been so well advertised, was charade. The damage control, the security tightening, the bastardly new rules regarding even innocuous, insignificant leakage to journalists—all charade. So you said. That it was McAtee himself—not the syndicated righteousness of Joe Delbanco, nor even the best muckraking work of Delbanco’s young staff—who had given this story to the world. No breach: on the contrary, an intentional leak. A deliberate and well-calculated leak, from the Director himself. Do I have all this straight?”

  “You sure do.”

  “And that tapping a few phones at the sub-Cabinet level had no
t been the most outrageous of Sparrow’s sins. He had also been listening to some of his own CIA colleagues. Some of the big boys. People in corner offices. For which impudence, Jed McAtee had simply fed your boss Sparrow to the hogs, by way of Delbanco’s column. Revenge. Fratricide. According to Mel Pokorny, at least. That’s what I remember.”

  “Your memory is pretty good.”

  “A case of the CIA biting its own tail, like a demented snake. It sounded intriguing at the time, but I didn’t do anything with it.”

  “You should have.”

  “It was unverifiable. Also self-serving.”

  “So what? Self-serving doesn’t make it false.” Dropping his feet off the table, Pokorny sits forward. “And there’s more.”

  “I’m sure there’s more. There is always more.”

  “Aren’t you even interested, Michael?”

  “Not really. I’m a different sort of writer these days.”

  “I know.” He composes his face to a pitying glower, slightly theatrical like most of Pokorny’s expressions. “I’ve seen some of the stuff you turn out lately.”

  “What was it, Mel? I gather you loved it.”

  “I forget. Something about a tiger. A guy who got eaten.”

  “That was three years ago,” says Kessler. “And for your information it won a goddamn award.”

  “I skimmed it. Very pretty and all, toodle toodle, but I mean who really gives a shit?”