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

by David Quammen

“I’m a journalist,” Kessler says, and again he pauses. The idea is to be reassuringly direct, steady stride and both palms showing empty. I’m crowding you but you have your lines of escape; therefore it’s not necessary to use those lines of escape, is it? At least not yet. Kessler waits for a reaction.

  No reaction.

  “I talked with Pokorny last night,” Kessler says. “He came to see me. Then he left. Do you know about what happened?”

  Instead of answering that question, Claude Sparrow asks one of his own: “What happened?”

  “He was killed. Shot. In a robbery. Or what was—”

  “Give me your number,” Sparrow interrupts.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Give . . . me . . . your . . . number.” Sparrow presses the words out with exaggerated precision, the third one among them flattened to a braying yaaa, but he doesn’t elaborate. By now Kessler has heard enough to detect a shading of accent, either genteel Southern drawl or the faintest bit British. He is momentarily befuddled. Then he recites his phone number. The connection is immediately broken.

  Kessler sits at his desk, not daring to move. He decides against even a trip to the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later he takes the phone on its second ring.

  “All right,” says Claude Sparrow from somewhere. “Now.”

  I’d like to talk with you, Kessler tells him. Pokorny gave me some interesting information last night. (Best to be vague for the present, Kessler figures, about how much Pokorny didn’t get time to give him.) I intend to learn more, Kessler says. I’m referring mainly to the Viktor Tronko case. And the events that led to your own resignation. I may write an article and I may not, depending on what I find. (Kessler’s standard disclaimer at this stage in research.) I would like to have your help. If not that, then I’d like at least to hear your side. I’ll be in Washington beginning tomorrow, Kessler says (having only decided that as it came off his lips). I’ll be speaking with a number of other people. (Who? Got to think of some.) I’ve covered CIA matters before, though not recently.

  “Mail surveillance,” says Claude Sparrow.

  “Yes, sir. Your memory is accurate.”

  “August of 1968. All across the magazine’s goddamn cover, as I recall.”

  “Your memory is quite good.”

  “Freedom Airways and the Laotian counterinsurgency movement.”

  “And the Laotian heroin trade. Yes, sir. That was mine also.”

  “I’m mystified that you think I might lift a finger to help you, Mr. Kessler. I give you credit for gall, but I am mystified. In your time, you have caused me a fair parcel of grief.” The word is pronounced paw-sull. The accent, like a fragrance of verbena, is seeping in with the emotion—or else being applied for effect. Kessler thinks he can hear west Tennessee, or perhaps Mississippi.

  “Those weren’t your operations.”

  “It was my Agency, sir,” says Claude Sparrow.

  Another moment of empty air. Too bad, Kessler thinks; it’s not going to happen. What next? If not this guy, then who? He listens for background noises beyond the silence, wondering idly whether Sparrow has called him from a public phone on a street corner. There is no background noise.

  “I will give you three days,” Sparrow says abruptly.

  Kessler crooks his head back against the ear piece. What? The tone sounds more like challenge than generosity, as Sparrow continues: “In that much time I can show you the bare outlines. If you aren’t too dense, in that much time you can grasp them. Anything less would be travesty. Take it all or take nothing.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “No tape recorders. No cameras. But especially no tape recorders,” says Sparrow. “You may make all the handwritten notes that you wish.”

  “All agreed.”

  “After three days, I’ll have nothing further to say. No follow-ups. No further contact.”

  “Agreed. Tell me where and when I can find you.”

  “You tell me where you will be staying, Mr. Kessler.”

  Kessler mentions a hotel on N Street near 17th and then again, instantly, the line is dead.

  He is late for the master’s wife’s tea, but not disastrously so, not enough to claim later in good conscience that he forgot the thing altogether. Kessler grabs a tweed jacket and gallops off for the college. They won’t hold forty-five minutes against him; academic people expect writers to be self-important and rude. Anyway, it seems a good place to begin his search for Fullerton. And sure enough, Fullerton is there, along with the master’s wife and her three-gallon silver teapot and a dozen slick-faced undergraduates. The master himself evidently has a better use for his time. Kessler salutes the master’s good sense.

  He shakes a few hands and answers a few questions about the tiger book, which is what those present have read who have read him at all, and then a couple more general questions about the financial and contractual side of his particular craft, which seems to fascinate them inordinately. These Yale students have already been exposed to an overrich diet of celebrity novelists, shambling world-class poets, and syndicated political oracles; someone like Kessler is a different and more puzzling dish. He is neither wealthy nor famous, not even quietly eminent. He isn’t employed by a newspaper or a magazine or, until recently, a university. He teaches only the single seminar, two hours weekly, and that arrangement is known to be temporary. To them, he has no visible means of support. A marginal figure on this hallowed campus. Doesn’t seem to own any corduroy. The subtext of their gentle probings is: if you are so goddamned independent that you can write what you want, live where you want, tolerate the fact that we’ve never heard of you, what the devil are you doing in New Haven, Connecticut?

  “I came here chasing a woman,” he wants to tell them, but forbears.

  After a decent interval he pulls Fullerton aside and explains that he’s going AWOL for two or three weeks.

  6

  “I THINK HE’S LYING,” says Dexter Lovesong.

  “You always think they’re lying,” says the younger man.

  “What’s wrong with that? You went to college. Didn’t you ever hear of a logarithm?”

  The younger man smiles greasily.

  “I suspect you mean algorithm,” he says. “It’s not a bad line. I congratulate you. Would have been downright good if you’d had the words straight. Algorithm. I say, ‘You always think they’re lying.’ You say, ‘You went to college. Haven’t you ever heard of an algorithm?’ I like it.”

  “He is lying. This time, Buddyboy, I’m right.”

  “That’s another thing you always think.”

  Maybe I’ll just choke him to death right here in the restaurant, Lovesong considers. No, I’ll drag him outside and whop holy hell out of him in the gutter, then choke him to death, and then throw the body in front of a bus. Witnesses everywhere. They’ll put me away, but it will be worth it. Sure. Lovesong shifts his gaze out the window, checking for bus traffic on Chapel Street. He has these thoughts frequently. They help to relax him.

  “Let’s go back to Washington,” says the younger man. “There’s nothing here.”

  “Kessler is here.”

  “But Michael Kessler is not going to lead us to anything. He doesn’t know anything. Pokorny is dead and that’s that. Let’s go home and wash.”

  Lovesong swivels his attention back to the younger man, upon whom it rests coldly. Sometimes, for brief periods, Lovesong allows himself to believe that there may still be hope for Buddyboy. Today isn’t one of those periods. Today it gives Dexter Lovesong heartburn to contemplate what a glorious future he has ahead of him, this kid, among the cretinous Ivy League whooping cranes up on the seventh floor.

  “No,” says Lovesong. “That is not that.”

  7

  KESSLER CULLS A FEW ITEMS from old files. He packs a bag. Then, before leaving town for Washington, he contemplates makin
g one further call: to the woman named Nora.

  He persists in labeling her within his own mind as “the woman named Nora,” despite the fact that he might be considered to know her a good deal better than that phrase suggests. They have shared a hotel bed for one night, after all, amid exotic and even romantic surroundings, although they didn’t manage on that occasion to become lovers. Not then, not later. “Didn’t manage” is another editorial formulation as framed in Kessler’s mind; he realizes that Nora would have her own, a different one. Probably hers would involve words like “hasty” and “my moment of bad judgment” and “what might have been a disastrous mistake” and of course the familiar “I need a bit of time and space.” He can only guess the exact phraseology. Having committed his own piece of bad judgment down there in Ecuador—when he imagined that this Nora Walsh was a straightforward person, decent at heart but slightly jaded, much like himself, and that he could therefore know her quickly and easily—Kessler, like Nora, has latterly withdrawn to a position of caution. But his is epistemological, not emotional. Designating her mentally as “the woman named Nora” helps him to remember that caution, and dampens his expectations. Ecuador was a false start. Ecuador with its low comedy and its tears and its frustration was just a misunderstanding, a mistake, though not the disastrous one that she claims it might have been. This one was easily rectified. She drew back. Denial set in. Their night at the Hotel Alfaro, like the band of paleness around Nora’s fourth finger, has been erased.

  Kessler had gone down there for a glossy magazine, on one of those shameless travel-writing assignments that feel like something halfway between play and prostitution. He had accepted only because it was the Galápagos. He was reading Darwin again when the offer came, by coincidence, and he had never himself seen the islands. For Nora the trip was neither work nor really quite play; for her it was more like therapy. A brief sabbatical, an escape from responsibility and decisions. That had been the intent, anyway, until she met Michael Kessler. Never before having traveled anywhere more exotic than France, she had taken a lump of her divorce settlement and bought a ticket to Quito. Such impulsiveness was uncustomary but it felt (as she eventually told Kessler) overdue. The young daughter, named Emily, had been left with family friends in Boston. Nora and Kessler each boarded the ship at Baltra, along with eighty other strangers, for a week of cruising the archipelago. It was well into the third day before Kessler began to notice her. On the fourth night he got himself seated near her at dinner. The fifth and sixth days, tromping across one island to see blue-footed boobies, climbing another to molest iguanas, they spent entirely in each other’s company. The seventh night, last of the cruise, Kessler and Nora sat up until very late in the ship’s bar, talking. The eighth night they were back on the mainland, at the Hotel Alfaro in Guayaquil. Neither of them, that night, got a great deal of rest. They talked on for hours, to the point of exhaustion, then slept for a while in each other’s arms, woke, talked again until around three in the morning, when Nora was briefly, quietly hysterical. At four she got dressed and went back to her own room.

  When Kessler came down to the lobby at nine, he found that she had checked out, a day earlier than planned. Yes, the signora had gone up to Quito, he was told. He spent a ludicrous afternoon making long-distance calls to Quito hotels, groping his way through the cultural and technological labyrinth of the Ecuadorean telephone system, asking in his clubfooted Spanish about “a gringa named Nora Walsh.” No trace of her in Quito. She had already caught a flight north. Kessler followed. No trace of her at the Miami airport. She had made her connection. Luckily he knew at least her destination; she had told him about returning to graduate school, about the little house in New Haven, about sharing it cozily with the daughter. She was listed in the New Haven directory, last name and initial. When Kessler called her from his own place in Vermont, the first of those numerous times, she sounded pleased and surprised to hear his voice. Momentarily so, anyway. She apologized for what she called her “rudeness.” It was a rather formal apology, sounding like boilerplate. Rudeness? he thought. Hello, what are we talking about? “Never mind. Rudeness? Listen, I want to see you,” Kessler said. No, she said. What? he said. No, no, I think that would probably be a bad idea, she said. The second time Kessler called, half an hour later, she hung up.

  And in five months, since he accepted the offer from Fullerton and moved himself down to New Haven, it hasn’t gotten much better. She is still opaque and changeable and his very proximity seems to make her nervous. He has gotten past the front door of the little house, once. He has been permitted to meet the daughter, once. He has had Nora out for a pleasant if rather stiff evening of dinner and theater, once, and seen her home very properly, said a stiff good night on the front step, and then for two weeks afterward she dodged his calls. So far as Kessler knows, she is seeing no other men. Maybe she is still bitterly, incurably in love with the ex-husband. Maybe she has somehow been grievously hurt. Well, haven’t we all, Kessler thinks. Haven’t we all. Obviously she is a lunatic.

  His interest in this creature remains extremely high but his patience, and his stamina, are finite. In a sulky mood Kessler leaves town on his journey to Washington, the following morning, without phoning the woman named Nora.

  God only knows, maybe she will notice his absence for herself.

  8

  HE HAS DECIDED to travel by train. For this there is an ulterior reason. Pokorny came up by train. Kessler wants to retrace the route: New Haven Station, Grand Central, Union Station in Washington. He is interested in finding that coin-operated locker to which belongs the key—stolen from Mel’s attaché case before Dexter Lovesong could get to it—that now rides in Kessler’s pocket.

  Of course the locker it opens might be out there on some sterile corridor at LaGuardia, or at any other airport in America, or even amid the Styrofoam flotsam of a bus station. But Kessler is betting otherwise. He is betting his optimism. He wants to believe that the key was fresh in Pokorny’s possession. He wants to view the key as a bit of spoor from the very day of the man’s death. And if Mel had stowed something in a coin-op locker just that day, during the course of his journey toward Kessler’s door, acting either premeditatedly or on a desperate spontaneous impulse, chances are it was something more interesting than an overcoat.

  At the New Haven station there are only two dozen lockers and Kessler knows, without needing to peek again, that Pokorny’s key bears the number 553. Also the design is wrong—solid aluminum keys at New Haven, versus a yellow plastic grip on the one in his pocket. He boards an express to New York.

  For ninety minutes he has nothing to do but read the newspaper and think about Viktor Tronko, the poor schlemiel who spent three years alone in a concrete cell in custody of the CIA. And about Mel Pokorny, crashing down dead in a puddle of wine and glass and cashews. Two days ago at this hour Kessler was thinking about termites, and about Eugène Marais, the troubled naturalist whose ghost he has chased for almost three years. Today, so quickly, a new set of ghosts. A new set of hormones awash in his blood. Kessler feels them already, those mood juices, including the one for knee-wobbling fear. On balance, the feeling is good.

  At Grand Central he decides to take a precaution. He climbs to the mezzanine bar near the Vanderbilt Street exit and plants himself there for a cup of coffee, with a commanding view out over the main waiting room.

  In its midmorning lull, the great room is still busy enough. Late commuters striding briskly and college girls who sit on their suitcases and individuals of ambiguous profession, like Kessler himself. He watches people. He recognizes no one. He spots no lurking mysterious characters wearing trench coats or cheap shiny suits who inspire in him a vague sense of alarm; the lurking characters all look relatively benign and, for here, very much standard. So he goes down again to browse the lockers.

  He feels a silent thrill when he sees that the key design matches: yellow plastic grips. For a rather long while, though, he canno
t find 553 or any numbers in that range.

  He crosses the main room to check more banks of lockers tucked in among the train gates and the shops on the east side—no, still not the right numbers—and crosses back again to see what he missed on the west side. Here he finds lockers numbered into the eight hundreds, but no 553. This is aggravating. Kessler walks faster, his bag in one hand and now holding the key clutched in his other fist, that fist pushed down out of sight in a pocket of his overcoat. As though the touch of the key itself will help him home in. His nostrils are wide. He knows he must be very close to discovering something, some significant bit of data, Pokorny’s secreted item. Physical evidence. Certainly it must be in this train station, somewhere, the yellow plastic is too much for coincidence. He must be very close to the path Mel himself followed two days ago. Under the next archway Kessler is going to find something—or else miss something, passing heartbreakingly near. Three hundreds, two hundreds, eight hundreds; four hundreds on the far side. It’s maddening. He goes downstairs to the subway level, where there turn out to be no lockers at all. Back upstairs. The scent of discovery is fading. He shouldn’t have gotten so hopeful. Maybe yellow plastic is standard for this brand of locker everywhere in the United States. He has a discouraging vision of a bus terminal somewhere in Illinois, and Mel Pokorny’s last gift waiting there forever unclaimed. Hold on a minute, though: three hundreds, four hundreds, eight hundreds. What about that?

  Kessler heads back toward the claim-ticket baggage room that he has already passed three times; he’ll ask directions, always just a desperate last resort in New York. But as he passes the mouth of a long marble corridor leading downstairs, a rampway toward the lower level, he glances that way. And stops walking. Thirty yards down the ramp, marked by its sign and its red curtains, is the Oyster Bar. And opposite its doors stands another large bank of lockers. They are neither downstairs nor upstairs but in between, which is how he has managed to miss them.