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

by David Quammen

  “ ‘We had to,’ ” Kessler quotes from imagination in a voice not his own.

  “We did have to,” Pokorny says blandly. He shrugs. “Sue us.”

  Together Lentzer and McAtee, day after day stretching finally into months, attacked Tronko’s story in its every vagueness and flaw. Hammering at—

  “Oswald in Russia,” Kessler interrupts again. “No KGB interest. What else? What are these famous flaws?”

  “I’m getting to that.”

  “No you’re not. You’re filling my head with crap. Details of the cell. Psychological warfare stuff. Your own methodology. CIA methodology doesn’t interest me that much, Mel. Not even when it’s mildly illegal. I want to know the payoff. Skip ahead. We can always go back.”

  “This is a godawful convoluted story, Michael. I’m trying to give you an overview.”

  “Fog. Fog.” Tracing a diaphanous shape in the air with his beer hand, Kessler notices that the can is empty. “Becloud the man’s mind, spin him around twice, then lead him where you want.” Through fog Kessler gropes his way to the refrigerator and back again safely. “What exactly did you learn from this Russian? And why has it taken seventeen years before you were ready to breathe it out?”

  “Eleanor Roosevelt was a Soviet agent,” says Pokorny. “A man.”

  “Tronko came over. All right. He told a phony story. All right. He was locked up and spat upon and interrogated and broken. All right. Or he wasn’t broken. That’s all right too. Just give me the punch line and then I desperately need to go take a leak.”

  “It isn’t nearly that simple.”

  —hammering at what were then still considered the weakest points, and therefore the most critical points, of Tronko’s story. Had he or had he not held the KGB rank of colonel? Had there or had there not been a recall telegram forcing his hand in Vienna? Did or did not the KGB interview Lee Harvey Oswald during the two and a half years Oswald spent as a lonely expatriate in Minsk? If not, why not? Before Tronko began getting these cushy trade-delegation assignments, had he in truth been a desk man within the Seventh Department of the Second Chief Directorate—also known as the Tourist Department—which was, by great coincidence, that very office of the KGB that would have handled the Oswald file, if one existed? Had he? Or had he not? If so, why was he unable to describe the physical layout of that wing of KGB headquarters? Why had he given the wrong patronymic for the man who had supposedly been his boss’s boss? Who did he think he was trying to fool?

  And in addition to all these minor evidential matters, says Mel Pokorny, there was always a single dizzying question that had to be settled in connection with the Tronko testimony. Even during McAtee’s try, even with LBJ and Earl Warren breathing heavily in the background, despite all the headlines and false leads and preoccupations, this question laid its weight upon every move in the case, every hour of interrogation, every new theory or suspicion applied to Viktor Semyonovich Tronko and all his confusing signals. “It was the real question behind every other question we asked him,” says Pokorny.

  “Of course it was. ‘Did the KGB program Oswald to pull the trigger on Kennedy?’ ” Kessler postulates.

  “Don’t be pedestrian,” says Pokorny. “No. Not that at all. Considerably more dizzying.”

  The September deadline came and passed but Tronko, in spite of the harsh treatment, the snags in his story, the demonstrable falsehoods that were thrown back at him, refused to be broken. He just wouldn’t collapse. Wouldn’t confess. He was the one person involved who was quite indifferent to LBJ’s time line. So the Warren Report was duly issued, containing no mention whatsoever of the name Viktor Tronko or of the perspective he claimed to offer on Lee Harvey Oswald. Better to ignore Tronko entirely, the Commission decided, than to link their conclusion to his credibility. By November, Tronko still wasn’t broken. “But McAtee was,” says Pokorny. “He had become a believer.”

  “In what?”

  “The reality of Viktor Tronko.”

  “How could he?” says Kessler. “With all these inconsistencies and manifest lies you talk about.”

  “White ones, according to Jed. Yes, okay, the man lied about his rank. Lied about his work history. About KGB interest in Oswald, the former U-2 flunky. About certain other personal and professional matters. These were just the predictable falsifications of a desperate defector and an alcoholic, according to Jed. Nothing more. Nothing so very ominous. Tronko is a bit of a liar, yes, all right—McAtee conceded that much. But he’s his own liar, says Jed. Not Moscow’s. He was not sent. He walked across to us under his own power. We can believe part of what he tells us, says Jed. We can believe that part which seems otherwise plausible. Nice? That was the Archangel Jedediah’s carefully measured and supposedly well-informed assessment. Which of course was just fatally dumb. Wrongheaded. Naive. It was the first dingdong of doom. Because part of what Tronko was telling us—and it seemed plausible enough, sure, it just happened to be false—was his answer to that single preeminent question. The dizzying one,” says Pokorny.

  “The one which you, coy bastard, are going to keep from me as long as possible,” says Kessler. “Maybe right up to the moment my hands close around your throat.”

  “I thought you’d never ask. It had to do with a penetration, Michael. Of the Agency. Tronko came over to us with a very curious assertion about the possibility of a high-level penetration. That was the big issue—not Oswald. That was why we were all ripping out handfuls of hair to decide one way or the other about this guy.”

  “Tronko claimed there was a KGB mole way up inside the CIA?”

  “No,” says Pokorny. “He claimed there wasn’t.”

  3

  POKORNY HAS DISAPPEARED toward the kitchen but a few seconds later he is back in the corridor, bracing himself against one wall. He hovers there momentarily, adding what seems to be an afterthought:

  “We had reason to believe otherwise.”

  The television all this while has been flashing and chattering. Kessler notices now that either the late news has begun, the midevening special report hasn’t yet finished, or tonight there is no distinction. Ronald Reagan stands at a dais above the South Lawn saying: “. . . entered the ranks of those who throughout history have undergone the ordeal of imprisonment—the crew of the Pueblo, the prisoners in two World Wars, and in Korea and Vietnam. And like those others, you are special to us.” When Kessler glances up, Pokorny is gone. Not altogether beyond possibility that, for reasons obscure and perverse, he might slink away at just such a juncture, as quietly as he arrived, and one of the nerves in Kessler’s right calf twitches in response to that thought. But Kessler remains seated. Hears the refrigerator door smooch open reassuringly. Pokorny returns to his spot in the corridor, which is narrow enough for the walls to keep a man upright.

  “Fortunately Jed’s view wasn’t the only one. Not the prevailing one, even. Not yet. Herbert Eames was unconvinced.”

  “Eames was still Director then,” Kessler says with the crisp pointless certitude of someone pretending to be sober. Pokorny pays no attention.

  “So Eames turned him over to Counterintelligence for a try. This was November of ’64. Tronko was moved again. To a place that had been built special.” He allows himself a sneer of sadistic nostalgia. “We called it the Vault.”

  “The Vault,” says Kessler. “That sounds just real friendly.”

  “Exactly. Because here we begin the second hostile interrogation. Much different from the first. This one lasted three years. Every bit of three goddamn long years. During all that time Tronko did not get his nose outside this Vault thing. Literally didn’t. Three years of solitary confinement. Surrounded only by concrete and questions. There was nothing else to his life. Concrete and questions. He saw no other human being, practically, except his latest new inquisitor. Almost no one else. Three years, Michael Mikhailovich. Imagine the kind of psychological dependence th
at could foster.” Pokorny squints pityingly at the recollection. “And the new man, he was a genuine asshole. Not smooth and deft like Lentzer, with an ingratiating Mother Russia manner that he could turn on when he wanted. Forget it. None of that filigree. Not as smart as Lentzer either. But tenacious as all hell, this one. Murderously cunning, maybe, in his own way. Tough. Relentlessly unsympathetic. Just a weatherproof, cast-iron asshole. About the last person Tronko would have chosen.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Me,” says Pokorny. “Now I have a piece of truly appalling news for you.”

  “We’re out of beer.”

  “I’ll go,” says Pokorny. “Just tell me where.”

  Kessler gives him directions to a neighborhood grocery on the corner of Chapel and Howe, a place that has earned Kessler’s affectionate loyalty because it combines the best aspects of a convenience mart and a fine Italian deli. The old man who runs it is a widower and evidently sees no reason to rush home at seven. From greed or loneliness, more likely the latter, he stays open till all hours reading Jacob Burckhardt and listening to good music on FM. Get some nosh while you’re at it, Kessler tells Pokorny. Cheese or the artichoke salad or whatever looks good. And there’s one other thing.

  “What?”

  “You should probably take off that wig.”

  Kessler loses himself in a trance of confusion and boozy exhaustion with his eyes on the TV, part of the time even focused there. His brain roams and stumbles. The thing to do now, he senses distantly, is assemble a mental list of the more pertinent questions, then contemplate each in turn, making decisions about which should be asked and which are better just guessed at. Why has Mel come to me with this stuff? He wants an article written, obviously. He wants to use me. Wants the Tronko thing to break into print, finally, as a public stroke in some dark little private battle he happens currently to be fighting. Fine. That’s nothing new. Every disgruntled bureaucrat in Washington has a grudge article of some sort he would like to see written. Mel’s is undoubtedly more juicy than most. What dark little private battle? That’s an easy one too. By his own account, Mel is out on his ass. Risk analysis for the multinationals is deadly boring. His man Sparrow is still in disgrace also. But they haven’t given up. They want back in. Maybe it’s even as Mel has claimed: he might really believe that the Agency has suffered a catastrophic inversion, with Tronko and other nefarious influences now on the inside, and Mel with a brave dream of setting things right. Then why wait eight years? That one is more difficult. The purge of Claude Sparrow and his minions is by now very old news. Why should Mel’s self-interested calculations dictate that this, at last, is the very moment to go public? Why not last month? Why not last year or five years ago? Why, why not, why. And at the tail of the list there is another question, long pending, more important to Kessler personally than any of those others, and which still has the power to make him uncomfortable. Just what IS the mix of perils and satisfactions entailed in dealing with Mel Pokorny?

  Kessler’s own first big CIA story, an exposé of illegal mail interception conducted against certain U.S. citizens, had been virtually a gift from Pokorny. Moderately damning in its portrayal of the Agency—or at least of one part of the Agency—it ran as a cover story in Harper’s and gave Kessler the start of a national reputation. The piece was unexceptional in all but its factual content, no masterwork of elegant prose or sage analysis, yet it greatly increased his professional options. Opened other doors. Kessler was twenty-four years old at the time. He asked himself even then why Mel had done it. Of course he asked. But he didn’t worry much about that until somewhat later.

  The TV has finally moved on to other subjects, and Kessler begins to feel more hungry than drunk. When the ring of the telephone jangles him from his stupor, he thinks at once of the woman named Nora, so ferociously serious and remote, in her little house across town.

  Kessler has only on one occasion gotten past her front door. Made it as far as the living room but wasn’t offered a chair. That was in daylight, and still she seemed flustered by his (admittedly uninvited) presence, pacing away her embarrassment or ambivalence or whatever it was in a circuit between the piano and the stairs, while he leaned in a doorway, watching; she wasn’t rude to him, she wasn’t quite cold, but clearly she didn’t want him to linger. Conflicting emotions seemed to be moving through her like thunderclouds and patches of blue on a gusty afternoon. My daughter, she said nervously, as though it explained something. What about your daughter? he thought. Nora’s daughter is nine years old and rather owlish, he gathers, and evidently must be protected from the trauma of seeing her mother in company with questionable gentlemen, of which Kessler has repeatedly been made to feel one. Nora’s divorce was still recent at that point. The marriage had been stone dead for a couple of years, by Kessler’s understanding of those few facts she had vouchsafed him, but the divorce was recent and Nora believes ardently in formalities, vows, due process. Down in Ecuador, the week they met, she had still carried the pale mark of a wedding ring, lately removed from her finger. That was erased quickly by sun and seawater. The internal marks, as Kessler began learning during their night at the Hotel Alfaro, would be much slower to fade. It seemed that she had only begun, that night, to learn the same thing herself. Then in September, when he appeared on her New Haven doorstep, she seemed thrilled to see him and allowed him the living room, then within ten minutes asked him to leave. A confused and confusing woman. My daughter, she said. Please don’t show up here like this, she said. Reach me by telephone if you like, she said (forgetting all his long-distance tries), but don’t just show up. Or I’ll call you, she said unconvincingly. We’ll talk, yes. Just give me a bit of time and space. I need some time and space. She was gnawing her lip. The door of the little house closed quietly as he went down the walk. That was September and they have spoken only a half dozen times since, once indeed on her initiative. Now, as the phone rings persistently, he imagines a single light burning in, say, the left downstairs window of her place.

  What time has it gotten to be? Too late for Nora to call, even if planets have shifted and her emotional astrology now again favors Kessler—or maybe just the right time of night, because by now the child is asleep. He wonders how Nora would look in a flannel robe. Serenely maternal, no doubt—a nice complement to the oversize T-shirt that kept her modest in Guayaquil. Snatching up the receiver, Kessler warns himself that more likely this is Pokorny, somehow diverted or lost, wandering half sodden in a far neighborhood.

  Neither. It is Fullerton, the dean, calling to remind Kessler of the master’s wife’s tea scheduled for the following afternoon, at which Kessler has agreed to make himself present and answer earnest student questions about the romantic life of globe-trotting journalism, or whatever it is they perceive him as doing. A promise he would have been grateful for the chance to forget. The master’s wife, Kessler asks—does she serve anything stronger than tea? Fullerton laughs politely as though someone has made a joke. The whole conversation lasts three minutes. As he leans to set the phone back, Kessler sees the face of the clock. He hasn’t had lunch or dinner. He can feel his body sinking into a torpor, an edgeless sour limbo, neither drunk nor alert. For God’s sake, Mel, where are you?

  He is aware suddenly that Pokorny has been gone much too long. It does not take forty-five minutes between here and Biaggio’s. Not even for a slaloming drunk.

  By the time Kessler reaches Chapel and Howe it is midnight. A van and two evidence technicians from the New Haven PD are already at the scene, as well as three squad cars (one of those parked up across the sidewalk), a pair of detectives, and a small crowd of gawkers. Aqueous light strobing through red plastic, and the silent keening of a flash camera. Angry and rude, Kessler elbows his way through the crowd. After a brusque exchange with one patrolman he is welcomed inside the little market, among the detectives and Mr. Biaggio, because he can identify the victim. This deceased person in question was carrying a pock
etful of rumpled twenties, a set of house keys, a small Dictaphone, but no wallet.

  Mel’s body lies in a dark marbleized slick of blood and wine near the reach-in cooler, looking as though it arrived there by catapult.

  Legs and arms twisted with the ungainly abandon of the dead. Though his black wing tips are neatly tied, he hadn’t bothered, Kessler notices now, to put on his socks.

  God knows how many times he has been shot but the first official count, otherwise, will be made by the medical examiner. Whoever did it seems to have emptied at least a magazine into Mel in particular and that end of the room generally. Shattered glass from the cooler doors, broken wine bottles, crockery shards from the cheap Liebfraumilch; dry-roasted nuts, of which Mel apparently took down a rackload when he fell. The cash register has of course been looted, a detail that Kessler hears with numb and faraway skepticism. He feels as though he is watching the whole scene from a crane bucket overhead. Beyond supplying a name, he has nothing much to say.

  The dead man was a friend of his, yes. That’s close enough for forensic purposes. Visiting him tonight, yes. A social visit? Kessler hesitates. Then says yes. Pokorny may have had other business in town, or maybe at some corporate headquarters down in Stamford, but the stop to see Kessler was purely social, yes. He had come up that day from Washington. Where he works as a consultant to large corporations. Worked. Well, sort of an insurance and security adviser, Kessler explains. No, he cannot tell them the company’s name. It was a new job since he last saw the man. Yes, he will gladly check his apartment for a wallet or a business card; or they can search it themselves. At this point Kessler recalls—but does not mention—the attaché case. There is no immediate family, no. He tells them the name of Pokorny’s ex-wife, who to the best of his knowledge still lives in the Washington area. One of the two detectives takes notes on a clipboard. Both of them are polite and seem very young. He gives his own name and address, doubting that he will hear from them unless the body goes unclaimed. It’s such an obvious sort of crime, crude and brutal and heartbreakingly banal, and he is not even so much as an eyewitness.