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

by David Quammen

  “Dead drops, we call them,” says Sparrow. “Prearranged hiding places that serve as mail slots. It might be a crevice in the concrete of a bridge abutment. The ledge behind a girder in a subway station. Any little place that is highly inconspicuous, preferably in the most banal way. Dmitri used dead drops exclusively. A well-trusted courier then carried each report back to Moscow. Directly to Special Two. He was handled from there.”

  “Do you know that part? Or is it deduction?”

  “I know it by deduction.”

  “Did you ever find one of these dead drops? I mean one of Dmitri’s in particular.”

  “No. Those were invisible too.”

  Of course there was a drawback to this extraordinarily cautious arrangement, Sparrow explains: speed. That is, the lack of it. Dead-drop exchanges take time, usually a day or two elapsing from the alert signal that a message is coming, through the actual placement, to the pickup. Separating the two parties in time is precisely what makes that type of transaction safer. And a courier, needless to say, travels to Moscow far slower than a cable or a radio message. In fact Dmitri’s chosen method was drastically slow, and quite clumsy. One might even call it old-fashioned. An antique of espionage tradecraft. The year 1963 was itself not that long ago, Sparrow says; we had a few missiles by then, after all; so did they; the whole world could have ended in the time Dmitri took to drive out to his latest drop and jam a note into a crack. Operating this way, he could be of no conceivable value to the Soviets in any matter requiring a fast alert and an immediate response.

  “But we know that, on the contrary, he was of very great value,” Sparrow says. “And we know it not just from Bogdan Kirilovich Fedorenko, by the way. We know it also from the case of your friend.”

  “My friend? You mean Pokorny?”

  “Viktor Tronko.” Sparrow has stretched his face down derisively but Kessler lets this sally go by.

  Nevertheless, Special Two tolerated the inordinate delay. They let Dmitri choose his own operational methods. They indulged what you are pleased to call his phobias, Sparrow says. Think about it. Here was an agent, an American, telling them that their most guarded channels of internal communication, their own best security measures, were inadequate or worse. Dmitri scorned the Soviets even while helping them, in effect; and he put them to a fat lot of extra trouble. He got his way with the KGB—an exceptional fact in itself, Sparrow says. And this went on for years, while they coddled him and soothed him and continued to use him. There can be only one conclusion. Dmitri was utterly unique and precious to them as a source. His product didn’t go stale. What he gave them, whatever he gave them, it more than justified the wait and the scorn and the trouble, Sparrow says, though Kessler is not sure about the soundness of this whole syllogism.

  “It’s all negative. Negative evidence,” says Kessler. “Proof by what wasn’t there. By what didn’t happen. Seems to me there is an alternate explanation that fits equally well.”

  “Which is what, Mr. Kessler?”

  “Dmitri was invisible because he didn’t exist. Never had.”

  Sparrow lifts his shoulders and drops them again ostentatiously, sighing with the weary but unrelenting patience of a trainer of sea lions for the circus. “No,” he says simply. And now once again, you stupid beast, the song on the bulb horns—and then the beach ball. “No, we had other evidence. Just the sort you want.”

  “Fine, I’d love to hear it.”

  Kessler waits. Sparrow meets his stare for a few seconds, the same game of silence and frozen glances until, uncharacteristically, the older man drops his eyes. He inspects the blacktop. Suddenly he looks even more tired than Kessler feels. Forlorn and regretful, the fragile old pariah. This man, Kessler believes, is a wonderful actor.

  “I told you, at the beginning . . . I said I would speak of two arrivals. You recall?”

  “At last. Yes. All right. And the second of those two was Viktor Tronko.”

  “No, no. Not Tronko. Bogdan Kirilovich was the second. The other was earlier. This one had come to Washington—inconspicuously, for a very short visit—back in March of 1958.”

  “Who was it?”

  “L. V. Nechaev,” Sparrow says.

  The sun is down into the trees and low buildings beyond Old Dominion Drive and Kessler was too stupid, today, to eat lunch.

  10

  THE TABARD INN is full of parlors and the parlors are full of sofas. There must be three dozen of these, the sofas, all of them fine fat Victorian monstrosities of claw-foot carven oak and overstuffed horsehair in faded maroons and olives, shared out among the various little parlors through which Kessler must pass on the long labyrinthine climb to his room, five or six sofas to each parlor, lining the walls, impeding traffic, as though the hotel’s owner had once been offered some desperate low price on an entire warehouseful and in the dizziness of the moment was too foolish to resist. Sofas everywhere. Also horsehair love seats and wing chairs and a great number of tiny precarious one-legged wooden tables, the sort favored for those maddening pen-and-ink decorations in The New Yorker. Kessler sidles carefully to avoid upsetting the table upon which sit the half-empty sherry glasses of two Japanese businessmen and a buxom American woman in tweed; these three suspend their conversation while he passes by. On the next floor are only the two aged matrons he saw in exactly the same spot yesterday. One of these ladies nods over her wineglass to Kessler, graciously, a little daringly, and the other smirks at her friend. Kessler nods back, wondering who will steady them down the stairs. On his own landing is another sofa, this one even uglier but probably also lighter than the rest, otherwise surely it wouldn’t have been carried up three and a half flights to sit empty outside Kessler’s door, flanked by a matched pair of jade-green porcelain elephants the size of young hogs. Kessler immediately takes off his shoes and his pants, stretching out on the bed to reread his latest message.

  Nora called, it says. Termite man in New Haven on Wednesday. The woman downstairs, at the plug switchboard, no doubt took it for a matter of pest extermination. She thought you’d want to know. Below which, evidently an afterthought on the part of the caller, is written Nora Walsh and then the New Haven number, which Kessler has long since committed to memory.

  While his feet evaporate dry he ponders all that, each runic bit in its turn. He pictures Nora, full of misgiving, dialing the Tabard and having her say with the switchboard woman. He smiles broadly. He is on his back, comfortable now and exhausted, high in the air above N Street. He is quietly, cautiously excited. For all its obvious hedging, for all its bareness, this message as he reads it represents an important development.

  Nora called, he reads again.

  And then, goddamn her, she must fall back to: Nora Walsh.

  Lack of confidence, maybe, or merely another measure of that same fierce upright formality. Kessler has found, rare thing, a woman of modern intelligence and implacable candor who nevertheless would have been quite at home in Victorian England, though she was raised in the mountain pastures of Idaho. Who would look smashing, for that matter, in a high lace collar and a bun. He’d love to see it. A woman who operates at her own pace and rhythm, with her own adamantine sense of proprieties and principles; who refuses to rush or to be rushed, to allow or to take any unseemly familiarity; who refuses even to presume that Kessler could correctly supply her last name. She wouldn’t give him credit for having less than a list of Noras in his life. Advance one step and then retreat two—he recognizes again her characteristic pattern. Still, at least she did call. That took initiative and a little nerve. She even traced him here to the Tabard, Kessler knows not how but probably, he supposes, through Fullerton’s office. Kessler is impressed. He is grateful. It is the strongest positive signal he has gotten in weeks.

  Never mind that she found a plausibly impersonal excuse for the call: Termite man in town.

  Never mind that. There is face to be kept, dignity to b
e safeguarded, and by all means—yes—let her exercise a little wile for a change. He likes the notion. As for the precise meaning of this termite man business before it got translated through the switchboard, Kessler is puzzled. He has no idea. Not likely that Eugène Marais will be in New Haven on Wednesday, since the man blew his brains out in 1936.

  “Michael C. Kessler phoning for Nora Walsh,” he says. “Will Miss Walsh speak with Mr. Kessler?”

  “Hello? What?” she says. “Is this collect? Yes, I will.”

  “No, it’s me,” says Kessler. “I was just being dumb.”

  “Oh.” She isn’t humorless or slow, much the contrary; but she is determinedly bad, as if on principle, at patter. “Good. Then it found you. The desk clerk wasn’t sure when you might or might not be back.”

  “Minutes ago.” I spent the afternoon hearing tales from an old man in a very cold park, he would like to tell her, but the professional side knows better. “I came down yesterday on business.”

  “Yes, I heard. Fullerton’s office, they told me you’d gotten emergency leave.”

  “It’s nice of them to put it that way. I didn’t ask. I just informed them, and left.”

  “But nothing’s wrong? They said emergency, so I wondered if . . .”

  Both Kessler and she let that dangle. In the silence he can hear her growing embarrassed, already, at what she takes to be an intrusion; while he thinks again of that garish, angry sight on the floor of Biaggio’s grocery. Is anything wrong? For him right now it is a tricky question. Violent death of an old friend, which friendship was long since lapsed, and which death happens also to have kicked open an interesting door—is anything wrong? Kessler doesn’t want to lie to her, and he won’t. Not explicitly. But he has no doubt that even bending the truth gently will constitute, for Nora Walsh, a matter of consequence.

  “No, well,” she says, backing away. “No, that’s really none of my—”

  “It’s a story,” says Kessler. “Just a story. I’m down here doing research. Something came up suddenly and if I wanted to follow it I had to jump.” A man came to see me and then was murdered. I left without telling you, yes, but not without thinking about you. None of this damn stuff can be talked about over the phone. The truth is all in an escrow account under your name.

  “I’m glad,” she says. “They did say you charged out of town, and I was concerned. Never mind. And I won’t ask what the story is.”

  “Spies,” he says. “Cloak and dagger.”

  “Oh,” she says merely.

  Her former husband was a Washington lawyer, a young hotdog with a Q clearance and a fierce tennis game, who worked on the staff of the NSC. Evidently the fellow had a talent for discretion and clandestine operations that was applicable, also, to his erotic life. Nora loved him and her mind worked very differently, so she was about two years slow to learn that he was having affairs. Of course the betrayal hurt, the deceit hurt, but the humiliation of that prolonged ignorance hurt especially. When she did finally learn, she not only wanted out of the marriage. She wanted out of that world. Well before the divorce was final she had moved Emily and herself to Boston, just for the distance, just for the new air, and then back down to New Haven when she was readmitted for her music degree at Yale. She told Kessler these things at the Hotel Alfaro, during the same marathon conversation in which he spoke about being finished with Washington himself, cured of his own fascination over the American intelligence community and its fetid secrets. Now here he is again. Recidivist. He knows that the very mention of an espionage story will be reviving in Nora all the worst associations, all the panic and pain and nausea from her last bad adventure, all the flight instinct that Kessler has been trying to overcome. She has already gone silent.

  So he changes the subject quickly to Eugène Marais.

  That much of the message got through, he tells her. Something about Marais in New Haven on Wednesday.

  “Yes. Yes, I saw the poster today,” Nora says, coming back alive with enthusiasm, as though it were her own dear demented project, instead of Kessler’s. Not Marais himself of course, she says, for she knows the outline of biographical facts from Kessler. No, it’s a film. A dramatic film based on the life of Eugène Marais, Afrikaner poet and naturalist they called him, Nora says, and it’s showing Wednesday at the Art and Architecture building. Poet and naturalist, in that order. The poster caught her eye, she stopped, she thought at once of Kessler, naturally, and so she copied the information onto a file folder.

  Nora sounds proud and thrilled to have performed this service. Here it is, she says. Wednesday at eight, Art and Architecture, yes. The film and the man who made it. Fugal or something, she says, I can’t read my own scribble. The director, evidently. Whoever it is, he’ll be there to discuss the production, afterward, and answer questions.

  “Fugard,” Kessler says. “Athol Fugard? Isn’t that it?”

  “That’s it. Athol Fugard, yes. Who is he?”

  “A playwright and an actor. An Afrikaner, like Marais. He wrote the film, I think, and played the Marais role himself. I suppose it was made right there in South Africa. Four or five years ago. It’s mainly concerned with the morphine addiction, from what I recall. Fugard’s personal vision of Eugène Marais. Not so much on the scientific ideas. Fugard himself has a special passion about alcoholism, I guess, and that’s the part that engaged him. The travails of addiction.”

  “Oh. Then you’ve seen it.” Her voice is flat with disappointment.

  “No, I haven’t. Only read a review.”

  “Do you have any interest?”

  “I have enormous interest. I’ve wanted to see the thing for three years. And I need to see it. This is only the second U.S. screening I’ve heard about. Also it would be nice to talk to Fugard. Find out how much he really knows.”

  “Will you be back by Wednesday?”

  “That’s hard to say.” But hard in only this sense: he certainly shouldn’t be in New Haven on Wednesday—not with Claude Sparrow talking as Claude Sparrow has never before talked, and other leads demanding quick pursuit—yet he certainly wants to be. “I won’t have finished down here. Not even close.”

  “Then I’ll go to the film and take notes,” she says. “I want to see it myself. You can give me some questions for Athol Fugard, if you like.”

  “No. No, that’s no good. Let’s not do that,” Kessler says. His brain is beginning to try to gauge precise distances between the few important coordinates of his present existence—a park in McLean, an auditorium in New Haven, a big building in Langley, the little house on the end of this phone line, a concrete cell God knows where, oh and yes there’s the serviceable drab apartment off Chapel Street, where a two-inch pile of pages anchors down a desk blotter—but of course that’s a hopeless cause. As he well knows. Measurements of that sort never come out the same way twice.

  “Can you get a babysitter for Wednesday?”

  “Definitely,” Nora says.

  11

  KESSLER’S MEMORY FOR spoken facts is capacious and precise for up to twelve hours so long as inordinate alcohol or further research don’t intervene, so he allows himself only one martini and a glass of red wine over his late dinner at the lonely-man’s table in a basement steak house not far from the Tabard, and then with a second glass of the bad house burgundy mainly ignored at his elbow he begins scratching at the notebook that remained virtually empty all day, gathering fever as he goes. One thing brings back another and he writes fast to catch it all. The check arrives. The waiter passes by impatiently two or three times, but Kessler doesn’t look up. He can’t afford to. Get it down on paper now. Lights are turned off in the adjoining room. Here’s a plastic card leave me alone. Otto Schratt. Ilse what was her name Sjodahl, yes, Norway. Special Service Two. Third floor, three glass doors and a railing. Bogdan Kirilovich was a Ukrainian. Kessler proceeds in no order but free-associative, with no organizing princ
iple but inclusiveness. Get it down now or lose it forever. The blockhouse at Orly, the corporal. Stolichnaya with Robert Kennedy. Chicken Little. Chicken Little. Claude Sparrow despises Scott Wickes. History is the control of appearances, quotes. Counterintelligence is something else, what, damn, Kessler feels so very tired. He takes a gulp of wine. Counterintelligence is the effort to see through appearances, quotes, good work. Another sip of wine as his little reward. Also, a matter of finding congruencies, quotes. The émigré woman spoke no Spanish, says Sparrow, we tested her. I’ll bet you did. Kessler’s cerebral cortex, glory, it’s coming back from the dead. Dmitri hates radio. Dmitri might or might not exist, but if so he hates radio.

  “Sir?”

  “Here. Close out your till, I understand. But I’m staying.”

  “If you would move into the bar?”

  “Sure.”

  Dead-drops, slow but safe. No live meetings, no radio, no evidence. L. V. Nechaev arrived at Idlewild Airport, on a three-month diplomatic visa which was renewable but never renewed, in March of 1958. He was accredited to the UN delegation. Kessler picks up his notebook and his coat and stumbles into the bar. Two minutes afterward the waiter, a saintly middle-aged man, carries in that half-finished glass of wine.

  Accredited to the UN, yet the FBI people on permanent vigil up there in New York claimed they never so much as saw his face. Claimed they had never even opened a file on any L. V. Nechaev, Soviet diplomat and possible KGB man, candidate for serious surveillance, under that name or any other. Claimed they showed no record of any new Russians who fitted the arrival time, March of 1958, and who disappeared again within a couple months. Not months, no, it might have been just weeks, Claude Sparrow had explained to J. Edgar Hoover. Possibly only days. Negative, we did not get a look at him, Hoover had said. Are you sure he disembarked in New York? Who was this man? Give me some more information and I might be able to help. Sparrow had thanked the FBI Director delicately and gotten out of his office fast, coming back empty-handed to Langley. Of course Hoover’s denial proved nothing either way, Sparrow told Kessler as daylight leaked away into a bleak, bone-chilling dusk.