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

by David Quammen

  Lentzer was not present, of course. Not in the actual room where the test was administered. No one was present there except Tronko and the polygraph examiner. Tronko had been locked up in Annapolis throughout the previous four days, no bar crawling at night with his bodyguards and not a thimble’s worth of liquor in the house. That was at McAtee’s order, delivered in a fit of bombastic exasperation, and quite poignantly tardy, Sparrow says. Anyway it was beside the point, Sparrow says. If we could just wring him out sober and make him know we meant business, Jed thought, we might have something. We might get something. That’s what Jed believed. The examiner had been given elaborate instructions about this particular test and the possible aftermath; he had been given the list of prescribed questions. And now something else, Sparrow says. He turns aside, giving Kessler his profile. Something else you should know about. Things had progressed so desperately far, with Earl Warren pressing Eames and Eames pressing us, LBJ of course pressing Warren and everyone, that McAtee and Lentzer and I were actually there, right there, in another room. Waiting for the results, Sparrow says. In another room of the same Holiday Inn. We were a floor above and several doors down, sitting on our hands like utter imbeciles. Sparrow stares into the grass with shining eyes. Then he smirks. It was droll, he says.

  “Another tableau,” says Kessler. “Three Americans Awaiting Results of a Flutter.”

  They enjoy that together for a moment, before Sparrow continues: “He failed, of course. Howlingly. Thunderously.”

  “The machine said he was lying.”

  “As badly as ever. Worse. Worse than we had imagined. The machine, as you call it, was quite emphatic. The examiner said in his own report that he had never seen such a mess. Spikes on all the charts for virtually every critical question. Spikes that ran off the charts. Spikes everywhere. Tronko began lying—lying wildly, almost randomly, it seemed—during even just the warm-up questions. The harmless ones. The givens. It was absurd. He started lying almost as soon as the examiner asked him his name.”

  “Doesn’t that throw the whole thing into doubt? Don’t some people just react that way? Simply from stress?”

  “No,” Sparrow says. “No. The nervous reaction is different. They can tell. That’s why we have these carefully trained examiners. They interpret. They can tell.”

  Kessler again remembers the émigré woman, of the Mexican vacations, who spoke no Spanish. We tested her. We tested him. He spoke no Czech. The machine said he lied. Such a very great amount of self-confident testing, in Claude Sparrow’s epistemological universe. It makes Kessler uneasy. He has never seen polygraph equipment but he has a vague idea about sensors and graphs for pulse, blood pressure, respiration, maybe galvanic skin response. By disposition, he is skeptical of it. Of both the technology and its carefully trained interpreters. Not a convinced disbeliever, but skeptical. No doubt it works sometimes, on some people. Either or, choose one, and here’s the alarm bell if you lie. It might work on that sort of people, yes, certainly. A perfect fit to their Manichaean minds. But can the thing measure seven types of ambiguity? Do galvanic skin response, blood pressure, and pulse in all cases really offer a window to the soul?

  Then again, there is no point in arguing that issue with Claude Sparrow. Kessler wants to hear specifics. What were those crucial questions that made the needles jump? What were the harmless ones? He is about to ask, when Sparrow says abruptly:

  “That’s enough for today.”

  “Just a minute more.” The rhythm is now wrong for Kessler. “I’m curious ab—”

  “No. I said enough.” This would seem oddly curt for even the likes of Claude Sparrow but Kessler sees the man’s eyes flicking away, back, away again toward a point in the distance beyond Kessler’s left ear, and it registers upon him that Sparrow has been distracted, the mood shattered, by something or other.

  “Stand up.”

  “What’s happening?”

  Looking him straight on, Sparrow presses the words out with exaggerated clarity:

  “Stand up. We have finished our chat, Mr. Kessler, and you are leaving. You stand, and adjust your coat, turning toward me with a few final words. As you do that, look at the man in the parking lot yonder.”

  Obediently, and feeling inane, Kessler stands. He faces Sparrow and casts his glance around casually. “Okay. Okay, here I am. What man?”

  “Beige car.”

  Sparrow has good eyes. Kessler locates the man, forty yards off, seated behind the wheel of a beige LTD, one hand up along the side of his face. Kessler is mildly shocked. At the same time he feels tempted to laugh aloud. He resists the temptation.

  “All right. I’ve got him. Was the visor down when you last looked?”

  “No. It was up,” Sparrow says.

  “Down now.” Nevertheless Kessler can easily enough recognize the rectilinear jaw and pinched mouth of the young man whom Dexter Lovesong called Buddyboy.

  “Do you know him?”

  “I never saw him before,” Kessler says. Pulse and blood pressure normal.

  13

  TONIGHT THERE ARE no messages. There are no visitors waiting, which suits Kessler fine, and no mail or courier-delivered packets, a small disappointment. He asks the desk woman if she is sure. She shoves her slack mohair sleeves up above her bony elbows, waves her hands through the air of the little cubicle, pats them around on a few horizontal surfaces—cluttered desk, switchboard, the top of the bank of pigeonholes, upon which rest several disreputable magazines and an empty yogurt carton with a plastic spoon protruding—and then tells Kessler, not uncivilly, that yes she is sure. No mail, no other deliveries. She parks her hands on her hips for emphasis. Despite the casual chaos, he believes her. Still it’s frustrating. Yesterday and again today, Kessler has expected to receive a manila envelope containing some interesting scraps of paper, contents of a modest background file on Claude Sparrow. Not the sort of thing anyone would kill for, not the key to the story, but a packet that could save Kessler two days of legwork.

  He was promised these scraps on Wednesday evening, during his last phone call before leaving New Haven. The Sparrow file is part of a personal archive kept by a balding young lawyer named Barry Koontz, formerly a staff assistant to the Senate intelligence committee and now a professor at Georgetown Law School. Barry Koontz is Kessler’s oldest friend in Washington, and still also his closest, though they haven’t seen each other five times in the past five years. Chiefly Kessler’s fault. Barry was delighted to hear that Kessler would be in the city and very glad to offer help, within certain limitations dictated by his own sense of the security ethics for a congressional staff person, present or former. The limitations did not seem to apply to old file clips of published material about Claude Sparrow, so the failure of those clips to arrive at the Tabard must reflect some other complication, Kessler supposes. Most likely just bad mail service. Barry Koontz as Kessler knows him is not a man given to lapses of memory, or to reneging upon promises. Upstairs in his room, even before freeing himself from his shoes, Kessler dials the Koontz home number out in Rockville.

  Saturday evening, and probably just in time to interrupt the family dinner. Nevertheless. Kessler has completed the shift back to his peremptory journalistic metabolism.

  Waiting through a few rings, he absently picks up a sheet of notepaper that lies in sight on the little writing desk. A loose sheet from one of his own pads, scribbled upon in ballpoint. File it or throw it away. But at the same moment that he hears Barry’s voice, Kessler realizes that the scribble on this sheet is not his own.

  “It’s me. Kessler. I’m in town now.”

  “Michael, welcome back. How’s it progressing?”

  “Hard to say. I’ve had two fascinating afternoons with your favorite aging spook. He’s been trying to get me totally confused. Fairly successful. Those clippings, by the way, seem to have fallen prey to some sort of mail-intercept operation. And you prob
ably thought that sort of thing went out with the sixties.”

  Barry Koontz laughs. “No, you can’t pin this one on the Agency. I only laid my hands on them today. Perils of a pack rat. I thought they would be with my office papers, but no. They were out here in a box in the basement.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  Barry has been collecting information on American intelligence operations since 1973, the year he went to work for a Senate subcommittee that happened to get interested in the CIA’s role in Chile. When the full Select Committee on Intelligence Operations was created in 1975, Frank Church brought him onto the staff, and Barry stayed with that committee and its successors for four years, long after Church himself was gone. He ran investigations and became the unofficial chief archivist, knew the whole inventory of skeletons in closets better than anyone, but when they wanted to make him staff director, he quit. Didn’t care to be a personnel manager, he told Kessler at the time. Rather be some sort of shambling historian with dust in his lungs. Rather be a private eye in a cheap suit. Rather be anything, Barry said. What he really loved was the quiet excitement of evidence—collecting it, making sense of it. Finding patterns in the carpet. For six years his job was to collect and make sense of evidence on behalf of Church and Inouye and the other men who sat at the hearing-room microphones and asked the pointed questions that appeared almost to be of their own devising. Now Barry teaches a course titled “ ‘National Security’ and Constitutional Safeguards,” and Kessler suspects he is still collecting. They have known each other since Kessler’s single abortive year in law school. Even back then, Barry Koontz was the only twenty-two-year-old of Kessler’s acquaintance who owned his own file cabinet.

  “It was the last box I looked in,” Barry says. “That’s always the way, right? Last of about thirty. I’ve got enough government paper, I think, to keep a shredder going for a long weekend.”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “There isn’t much on Sparrow, though, Michael.”

  “I’ll be grateful for anything at all.”

  “An article from the Times Sunday magazine, four or five years ago. I’m not sure how reliable that one is. Copies of the Joe Delbanco columns that got him fired. And a little profile of Sparrow that evidently ran in the Vanderbilt University Alumnus.”

  “Sparrow the Shy Troll? He let himself be profiled in an alumni rag?”

  “Yes and no. It looks like he fed them a lot of misleading stuff. Who knows what the purpose was, if any. I only read to the point where they describe him, on his word, as a mid-level administrator at the National Institutes of Health. Also there’s one other interesting document that I’ll tell you about when I see you.”

  “When is that?”

  “Come out here tomorrow and have dinner,” says Barry.

  “No. Thank you but no. I don’t want to bring this project anywhere near your home.” Kessler didn’t mention Pokorny’s death when they talked on Wednesday. By now, though, Barry has almost certainly seen a newspaper story and made the obvious connection. “Give my apologies to Patsy and meet me Monday for lunch.”

  “Patsy and the boys are away.” Kessler gathers he means: for the weekend. “I’m batching. Don’t be a jerk. I’ve already bought two T-bones.”

  So Kessler agrees. He will bring wine. The prospect of having a relaxed and entirely sane conversation, about the phenomenology of the CIA or anything else, seems very inviting after two days with Claude Sparrow. But Kessler hasn’t forgotten the piece of notepaper. In fact he hasn’t stopped staring at it through the whole talk with Barry.

  He sets the phone back and reads again:

  Roof. Scaffold.

  Leave the light on, please.

  First Kessler closes the blinds. Buddyboy may still be keeping watch from a cold phone booth or a darkened car somewhere down on N Street. Serves him right if he is. Possibly also Dexter Lovesong, better concealed, armed with his ivory-handled revolver, vigilant and subtle as a middle linebacker. Kessler doesn’t really fancy himself worthy of a full-time, two-man surveillance detail, but the author of the note seems to think he is. Shutting the door behind him, Kessler begins climbing a flight of back stairs, having no idea where they might lead.

  Half a flight above the fifth floor the stairway comes to a dead end. Ten feet overhead is a skylight, and for a moment Kessler worries that he might be expected to hoist himself up through that. He can’t imagine how. Spiderman couldn’t do it. Go back to his room and get a chair to stand on? That will be hard to explain if he runs into the proprietress. Wait for someone to lower a rope? He smells cigarette smoke, distinctly, and in a quick reflex he turns, expecting to face some leering stranger who has crept up behind. No one. Relax, don’t be so jumpy. Then his eyes adjust to the dark and he sees a metal hatchway just off his right shoulder, a covered opening through the wall, giving out toward the back of the building. He pushes. Hinged across its top edge, the hatch is heavy but under firm pressure it moves, lifting away slightly. On the bottom edge, Kessler notices, it can be locked from inside by a simple hook-and-eye latch. The hook is dangling free. He puts his shoulder to the hatch and leans out into night air.

  This feels, as he does it, like somehow a drastic and irreversible act. Kessler rather likes the feeling.

  City lights in the middle and far distance, only darkness closer up, like large bulky shapes cut out of black construction paper and pasted down over a gay painting. The air is a little different, stale with the respiration of whole buildings rather than just cars. No tobacco smell discernible now. The sound is different too, muffled and echoic versions of what he would hear on the street. The atmospheric pressure even seems to be different. Through the looking glass, Kessler thinks. Or at least, halfway through. He climbs over the sill, stepping down onto gravel and tar. There. All the way.

  The hatch thuds shut when his fingers release it. At once he is tempted to check whether the damn thing has somehow contrived to lock itself. He doesn’t. Have a little faith. Journalism of any worth is not a risk-free endeavor, as you well know. Is that what this is, he answers himself: journalism? Kessler is drawn forward less by professional zeal than by a more personal and haphazard curiosity, his eagerness to know who this shy acrobat might be who wants to talk with him. Then he recalls: no one has said that they want to talk with you, dumbbell.

  “Here’s where I get the big bump on the head,” Kessler says aloud to the pigeons.

  The pigeons don’t disagree. In fact they edge away.

  He moves carefully, advancing each foot and finding a place for it before he commits his weight. Not knowing where to go, he shuffles toward the back of the building, since there can be no good in showing his head above the eaves that overlook N Street. Along the building’s rear margin is a chest-high parapet. Kessler is cautious not to lean on it. He peers over into the deep canyon of an alley, seeing nothing down there but darkened windows, loading bays, a dozen garbage cans and a couple of dumpsters, an empty car that looks far too expensive and sporty to be entrusted to Buddyboy, a Volkswagen camper parked beside an aluminum shed, and an old Vespa scooter up on its kickstand, with a ten-pound wheel lock on the front. Clearly an heirloom, the Vespa. He turns back, still half expectant of that heart-stopping apparition, the stranger with deep eyes and long jaw and awful pockmarks who travels soundlessly and without moving his legs. No one. It’s too cold out here to be wasting a lot of time. Kessler gropes along in the direction of 17th Street, up the block, guiding himself with one hand on the parapet until he comes to another wall, this one only reaching his knees. Treacherously low and nearly invisible. Exactly, Kessler thinks. Wonderful. If I had come stumbling blindly out here I would have gone right over, and broken my skull to kibble. He feels a flash of anger toward the author of the note. Tell me to leave the light on, sure, but don’t mention anything about the shin-buster wall that could get a person killed. That’s just irresponsible.

 
Scaffold, he remembers. Scaffold.

  Kessler glances around freshly. Several buildings away and across the alley he sees it now, finally, though it must have been easily visible by the light on its pale planking since he first stepped out onto the roof: a set of scaffolding, risen around the lower five stories of what is destined to be the tallest new building on 17th. Scaffold, yes, thank you. Kessler is over the low wall, not so dangerous an obstacle as he thought, since on the far side a copper mansard slopes gently down to the roof of the adjacent building, only one story lower. He rides the mansard like a slide. The gutter squawks once, but holds. He crosses two more roofs just as easily, striding and climbing with more confidence before he is stopped by the alley.