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

by David Quammen

  “Nineteen forty-three, and he just happened to be in Cairo?”

  “No. He admitted to me that he went out there, specifically, to take another run at the OSS.”

  “Wouldn’t it be damned hard just to get to Cairo in 1943? For a civilian. Even one starting from Newport.”

  “Sure. I’d say it would have.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “Another mystery.”

  “Why would he imagine that OSS-Cairo might want him, if Washington had already said no? Didn’t they talk to each other by cable?”

  “Because he was using a different name,” Barry says.

  For the sake of the Cairo station he had become Ari Delevoreas, another Greek-American, who had supposedly spent the last several years making bales of money as a cloth exporter in Algiers and Tunis, and who now finally felt he should do something for the Allied cause, preferably in conjunction with the liberation of Greece. This time he said nothing about his flying skills. Nor about his Serbian, nor his trapshooting, Barry adds. Yes he would gladly learn to parachute. Yes he was sure he could master the radio work. Yes of course he could pass for a Greek farmer: wasn’t that precisely what he had been until the age of eighteen? Furthermore he professed his willingness to accept any mission, no matter how great the risk, no matter how slim the chances that he could accomplish it and be gotten safely back out. Again he had said just the right thing. OSS-Cairo had need just then of someone reckless but steady to be sent into Greece, on a mission that was figured at chances no better than one in five for survival. They wanted someone to steal a sample of the new German glider bomb from the Luftwaffe airport outside Athens. Good possibility of being betrayed to the Nazis by the first villager who saw his parachute; good possibility of being caught red-handed at the airport, or before he could wagon this unwieldy thing down to the coast and meet his pickup; excellent prospect of torture and death. Yes I would do that, Ari Delevoreas told them. Evidently he projected just the right quiet tone, because the OSS—wary as they were of hot-blooded Mediterranean daring in its more excessive forms—snatched him up for the job. He got five weeks of intensive training there in the desert. He studied the file on these glider bombs and the intelligence reports on the Athens airport. He was ready to jump—waiting only for the completion of support arrangements with Greek resistance. At that point a deputy director of the OSS arrived from Washington on administrative business, and the Cairo chief insisted proudly on introducing him to this man Delevoreas. The deputy director had spent thirty minutes of one staff meeting arguing over the Djevdjevich case, less than a year before, and he had a good memory for faces. Highly embarrassing situation for all concerned, since Delevoreas-Djevdjevich had already been so thoroughly briefed. He was not only dumped by the OSS. He was almost denied reentry to the United States.

  Djevdjevich’s own explanation, of course, portrayed him as just a foolishly overeager patriot who would tell any fib in order to be allowed to fight Nazis. Like the underage kid lying about his birth date to get into the Army. Fine, a reasonable premise—except that, in two years since Pearl Harbor, Djevdjevich had made no effort that anyone was aware of to get into the Army itself. Only the OSS. He wanted to be a spy.

  “Wanted to be.”

  “Sure,” Barry says, agreeing with Kessler’s innuendo. “Oh, definitely, yes: there were plenty of reasons for suspecting, by this point, that maybe he already was one. Acting for the Nazis, perhaps. Or for the Russians. One source later claimed that he had been on retainer to the Free French.”

  “What about you?”

  “I was on retainer only to the U.S. Senate.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Sure. I couldn’t say, Michael. Maybe the Russians. Maybe. During the war—not necessarily later. It was just so hard to know.”

  “I heard once that the KGB has a training module in golf. Their own links and everything. All these future agents out there, soon as the snow is gone, hacking away.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No. Yes.” Kessler smiles.

  After Cairo the FBI reopened its Djevdjevich investigation, which yielded an increasingly thick sheaf of contradictory data, slanders and testimonials, suspicious coincidences, unverifiable claims and accusations but, again, no criminal charges. The Bureau sent a report across to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but that report had been coyly edited by Hoover himself so as not to give away any precious FBI secrets; the INS, consequently, took no action. Djevdjevich might well have been deported just on the basis of the Wright Field and OSS incidents. But he wasn’t.

  Now we jump ahead, says Barry. Slide that bottle over here, says Barry. With clumsy movements Kessler tightens the top and complies.

  Now we jump ahead again, Barry repeats eventually. Next nine or ten years, our Alex has no visible occupation, unless you want to count matrimony or drinking cocktails. He travels the circuit from Newport to New York to Palm Beach. Doesn’t appear to lack for cash or for friends. Marries twice more in that period, each time to a girl under twenty from a rich family. Each time the marriage lasts less than three years. During the first of these two—that’s the second marriage overall, Barry says with the exaggerated concern for clarity of a man who is well pickled—during that second one, he and the girl live in a forty-room mansion, full of butlers and maids and cooks. They throw quite a few parties. Djevdjevich liked it, he told me, says Barry. But the wife was a manic-depressive and a drunk, poor girl. Somewhere along through here he picked up his U.S. citizenship. Also he picked up a daughter—from the third marriage, I think, says Barry. They named her Tatiana. Born around 1949. She was fourteen in 1963, I remember that, says Barry. What’s fourteen from sixty-three? says Barry.

  A moment of silence.

  “Roughly forty-nine,” Kessler says at last.

  Tatiana even had a nurse. There was more travel to Mexico City and Bogotá again now, Rio, Havana, who knows where else. Generally he went alone but on a couple occasions the third wife was with him, no doubt partly because it was her money that bought the tickets. He would say later that these trips involved “hotel investments in Latin America,” close quotes. But according to the third wife—when she was an ex-wife, discussing it with the FBI—that was a joke, ha ha. The only sort of hotel investments in question, she claimed, were the room bills that her accountant paid. The third wife also mentioned a long autobiographical manuscript that Alex somehow found time to write, between the travel and the parties: an account of his youth in Romania and his early flying adventures, evidently. Pages upon hundreds of pages of his creaky grandiloquent English, according to the wife. He had begun to imagine himself as some sort of international adventurer and photojournalist, she said; he took snapshots constantly and kept diaries during his trips; sent a letter to National Geographic once, but never heard back. The autobiography also failed to find a publisher, though he mailed it to six or seven, she said. Djevdjevich himself never mentioned such a manuscript to either the FBI or the Warren Commission. To me he admitted that it had existed, says Barry. The wife was wrong, though: he had only tried three publishers. One was interested but wanted too many idiotic changes, so he had let the project drop. In 1953 he was arrested again.

  This time they laid hands on him near Edwards Air Force Base, in the desert west of Barstow, California, on a day when a test pilot named Scott Crossfield had been scheduled to fly a rocket plane known as the D-558-2, predecessor of the X-15. The flight had been scrubbed that morning because Crossfield had a case of mumps. Djevdjevich of course was just on a picnic. Another inconvenient coincidence. He liked to get out sometimes and watch the planes roar off, yes, admittedly. He loved the outdoors. He was an avid amateur photographer, yes. The young woman who graced his latest set of Brownie snapshots, posing merrily beside Joshua trees in her strapless cantina blouse, was of legal age, barely. Djevdjevich was interrogated, and released the next morning. He was very l
ucky—though the FBI didn’t tell him so—that Crossfield had been sick.

  Deportation proceedings began but were suspended after one hearing, to which Alex Djevdjevich had been accompanied by an extremely eminent Washington lawyer whom he had known for years from Palm Beach.

  By 1956 Djevdjevich was married again and living in New Orleans. This one, the fourth wife, was all of thirty years old, a Greek immigrant from a middle-class Athens family. She had a classical education but no money, no hotels or maids. Her name was Irene. Djevdjevich told Barry: “Irene, this was my true love. At last. A spectacular woman. We were very happily married.” In New Orleans they lived modestly, working elbow to elbow to build up a small travel agency. That was according to the Warren Commission testimony. By another version, in the FBI file, it was “a small flying service” they owned, Djevdjevich as sole pilot and Irene as office manager. Which of those versions was true? Barry asked him. Djevdjevich explained that it was really all the same thing, a semantic distinction merely; and then he slalomed off on another subject.

  “Did Irene talk to the Warren Commission herself?” says Kessler.

  “No. She died of liver cancer in 1962. One of the few indisputable facts.”

  But before that cruel stroke had fallen, as Djevdjevich told it to Barry, he and Irene had been fortunate enough, at least, to have taken their big trip.

  The trip was Alex’s idea. It had been “the dream of a lifetime,” he told Barry—same phrase exactly that appeared in his Warren Commission testimony. The dream of a lifetime. Since even before his first experience in South America, his first view of the jungle canopy as he flew that route between Bogotá and the Colombian coast, he had envisioned this grand adventure, he claimed. Something he had promised himself, something he had vowed. And in Irene he had found the perfect accomplice: she was hardy, she was game, she loved travel and cared minimally about physical comfort, plus she spoke a little Portuguese, which he lacked. Alex himself was not getting younger, he confided to Barry. Already at the time of the trip, in fact, he had been forty-seven. (Or else forty-four, depending, Barry notes.) So why not? Their friends back in Newport and New York began hearing about this scheme, by letter and telephone, about three months before the departure date. Certain arrangements had to be made, good-byes had to be said, because Alex and Irene intended to be gone for most of a year. If anything happened to them, God forbid, there should be some provision for Tatiana, his daughter. They planned to fly to Lima and spend three weeks assembling equipment and supplies, dealing with visa questions, possibly securing a guide or a crewman. Then a train connection to the highlands, an overland portage with the aid of llamas, and they would launch the real journey: a descent of the Amazon River, from very near its headwaters all the way to the mouth at Belém, by raft and small motorized boat. The dream of a lifetime, Barry repeats. Don’t ask me how many other Romanian kids dream of running the Amazon, he says. Djevdjevich was one of a kind.

  “One of several kinds, I’d say,” Kessler offers.

  They were gone for the full year. The New Orleans travel agency had been left in the hands of a salaried manager. Tatiana and some of the friends received letters—only a few—postmarked exotically. Most of these letters were eventually borrowed and returned by the FBI. In one, Alex described how they had lost their beloved German shepherd, who as it turned out was their sole companion on the raft and then later on the boat; the dog went for a swim at dusk one day and was ambushed by an anaconda. In another letter Irene recounted buying a smoked monkey from a woman in a riverside village, first meat they had had in a week and surprisingly palatable. They spent all of one night being swept around in a very large eddy, a whirlpool really, and nearly sank, but were pulled out at dawn by a native man on the bank with a rope and a brace of mules. They ate much fish. Alex was stung nastily on the calf by a fresh-water ray. Both of them suffered severe dysentery, as well as a whole menagerie of repulsive parasites. Having exhausted their own first-aid supplies, they were forced to rely on native pharmaceuticals. But the letters were always cheerful and bully. Then after so many months they were in Belém and, at last, home. An astounding experience, they told everyone. An absolute miserable bitter ordeal, intermittently terrifying and tedious, often disgusting—and yet they professed to count it a glorious success. They wouldn’t have missed it for a fortune; they wouldn’t repeat it for a fortune. Djevdjevich immediately began composing, from his diaries, a long travelogue manuscript. That opus was published the following year, by a vanity publisher who charged him less than a thousand dollars. Every friend and acquaintance on their Christmas-card list received a copy.

  “But it probably never happened,” Barry says.

  “Never happened? What didn’t?”

  “None of it. Smoked monkeys and dog-eating snakes and giant whirlpools. None of it.”

  “He embellished.”

  “No. He invented. From scratch. This isn’t positive, though. Just one theory.”

  “What are you telling me, Barry?”

  “That the trip didn’t happen. It was a hoax. Two separate sources gave the FBI to believe that Djevdjevich and Irene spent the whole year in Colombia. Living quite comfortably, at a borrowed villa near Barranquilla. Like I say, though, that’s just a theory. Call it the skeptic’s view.”

  “What did Djevdjevich say?”

  “He got very indignant when I raised this. The only such time, in my sessions with him. He was furious at being doubted.”

  “That was hardly a new experience for him.”

  “Furious. Really convincingly angry. He started ranting about his famous ray injury—a hole, big as a grapefruit, rotting out of his calf. About these little bugs that lay eggs under your fingernails. Gruesome stuff. I tell you, Michael, you’d never get me to the Amazon.”

  “But he was making it up.”

  “Maybe, I said. A distinct possibility. If so, he did a good job.”

  “And Irene was long since dead. So she couldn’t confirm his story. Or refute it.”

  “Exactly. She died in 1962,” Barry says. “At Parkland Hospital, actually.”

  “Parkland?”

  “Right. When they came back from Brazil, or Colombia, or wherever it was,” Barry says, “they had decided to resettle in Dallas.”

  He told the Warren Commission that he never gave Oswald any money, Barry says. The testimony was under oath, of course—for whatever difference that might conceivably have made. Probably none. Anyway, whether it was true or not, significant or not, Djevdjevich sounded the point rather emphatically: No, he never gave Lee Oswald a cent.

  Nor was there ever a loan, no. Toys for the baby, yes; he did occasionally bring small toys. They were so dreadfully poor, Lee and Marina, and the infant had almost nothing. Groceries, yes; on at least one occasion he had brought a bag of groceries, including some beer and a few jars of baby food, for which Oswald seemed grudgingly grateful. But the man was too proud to accept anything more, Djevdjevich testified. Lee’s stubborn pride alone would have made the giving of money impossible, unthinkable—though Djevdjevich himself confessed (as he put it) that for his own part he felt no great desire to subsidize the Oswalds financially. He had rather liked Lee, yes, he would admit that. Damaging as it might seem now, in the circumstances, he would not deny that. This was April of 1964, remember, Barry inserts, so it was in fact a reasonably courageous, or foolhardy, thing to say. Or maybe just very cunning. Yes, he had liked Lee Oswald, Djevdjevich told them, and had enjoyed his company, sometimes. No question, this angry young fellow had a very good brain. He could be either quite pleasant in conversation, stimulating even—or else utterly obnoxious, boorish. Sometimes very boorish. But in their chats about politics and world travel and foreign cultures—chats that were generally conducted in Russian, though at times too in English—Djevdjevich himself seemed to bring out the better side of the man, if he might be allowed to say so. Politics was boring to D
jevdjevich, so he claimed, but good conversation on any subject at all, even politics, was a rarity to be savored. Also—Djevdjevich added this as an afterthought—like all autodidacts, Oswald was sometimes pompous. Confused and pompous. He would use large words, which one could tell he had taken from his lonely reading but never quite digested, and often as not he would mispronounce them. In English and Russian both, one encountered this trait in Oswald. But he did have a good mind. No, Djevdjevich would never have tried to give the man money, positively not. Djevdjevich had no desire to insult Lee. Nor to be insulted back, as thanks for his good intentions. It was bad enough, Lee’s reaction, when Djevdjevich performed those few small kindnesses for Marina and the baby. That’s what he told the Commission, Barry says.

  One other Dallas samaritan who had helped Marina, though, remembered it differently.

  This woman’s name was Jane Chestnoy. She was a middle-aged American, recently widowed, whose husband had been part of the same circle of Russian émigrés, there in Dallas, among whom Alex Djevdjevich spent much of his time. The émigré group was a loose collection of couples who gathered regularly to speak the language, drink vodka, and trade turns hosting each other to dinners of authentic old-country food. The group’s essence was social, certainly not political, though some of the older members were rather rabidly anti-Soviet. They all clung together with a certain clannishness. Sometimes they joined in doing what Jane Chestnoy described unself-consciously as “good deeds,” small acts of consideration for other Russian émigré families, poorer and less educated people, in the Dallas area. Like an informal benevolent society. Their generosity stemmed from a sense of shared exile and from the large Russian heart, Jane Chestnoy thought. Mrs. Chestnoy was on the fringe of this group, since her husband was now gone and she herself spoke only a little Russian. Chestnoy and she had married late, and she had just begun studying the language when he died. She wanted to continue. She also hoped to remain in touch with the other émigrés. She was a Christian Scientist. It was she who had accompanied Alex Djevdjevich to the Oswald apartment on Neely Street, in March of 1963, after Marina had complained that Lee was beating her.