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

by David Quammen

  The photograph, by all means, said Djevdjevich with slightly more animation. He could tell Barry a little something about that, yes, and he would be glad to.

  The photograph was no fake. On the contrary, it was just too pathetically real. Yes, Djevdjevich had come forward on his own initiative back in 1967, when all the silliness began to be spoken and published (and to be taken seriously by so many people who should have known better, Djevdjevich said) about that notorious photograph. About how it had been manufactured. Pasted together clumsily, toward the purpose of framing Lee Oswald for a crime of which he was innocent. Such nonsense, Djevdjevich clucked. Such perniciously futile silliness. Certainly the photo was genuine, it was self-evidently genuine, and anyone who had known Lee at all would never bother to doubt that. The belligerent bantam-rooster stance, pistol on hip, of the young man in the picture. The Marxist newspapers defiantly displayed, as though to prove God knows what. The shabby little backyard of the Neely Street place. And the rifle too, yes, definitely. No one would need to invent a photo like that in order to frame Lee Oswald: it was too perfectly characteristic of the real man, as Djevdjevich knew him. In fact, Djevdjevich thought, no one else could have composed a photo that so perfectly captured Lee’s self-image. Besides which, Djevdjevich knew it to be genuine—knew that and wished forevermore he could forget it—having kept his own copy of the thing, hidden, in a phonograph-record jacket, for four years. He had been afraid to destroy it and afraid to show it. Until the real lunacy began, in 1967. At which time he came forward with the evidence—as he was pleased to remind Barry—on his own initiative.

  “Did Oswald give it to you in person?” Barry asked.

  “No. Not in person. He enclosed it in the record jacket where it later remained. I had loaned Lee the recording, you see. Mussorgsky. He was trying to improve himself, as always.” Alex Djevdjevich sat very straight in one of those half-comfortable vinyl hotel chairs not made for sitting, Barry opposite him in another just like it. The curtains to the terrace were closed, at Djevdjevich’s request; all the room lights on. Djevdjevich wore a white linen suit that was clean but not new. He was tan. Roughly six foot three, by Barry’s guess, and reasonably trim: a handsome fit white-haired man of sixty-three. Or just sixty, depending. “The photo was a surprise. Lee’s underbred notion of a dashing gesture, you know. Between two men of the world. He said nothing about it. I did not even discover it there until months later, afterward—after everything. When I happened to be in a mood for Mussorgsky.”

  “Tell me the exact inscription,” Barry said.

  “I don’t listen to Mussorgsky anymore,” said Djevdjevich. “Another thing ruined.”

  “Tell me the exact inscription.”

  Djevdjevich lowered his eyelids. He had been over this often before, Barry knew, yet it still took him a moment. He said: “To my good friend Alex, with thanks, from Lee.”

  “Thanks for what?” Barry said harshly.

  “I don’t know,” said Djevdjevich. “I suppose he thought I had been kind to him.”

  They adjourned then, Barry says, with the understanding that Djevdjevich would see to his errands and be back in two hours, bringing with him this time the inscribed Oswald photo. He had already agreed that Barry could take the print back to Washington. He was giving Barry the impression that he wanted to trust someone and that Barry perhaps had been chosen. Definitely he seemed more unguarded than he had to the Warren Commission or, ever, the FBI. Barry for his part had made none of the promises and placations that the Commission’s assistant staff counsel had—though he had also made no threats, except regarding the possibility of a Senate subpoena—and wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to be graced with Djevdjevich’s real or feigned trust. He himself didn’t trust Djevdjevich, not in the least. Even less so when, at four o’clock that afternoon, he was still sitting alone at the Marriott, abandoned.

  “I had a rental car,” Barry tells Kessler. “I knew his home address but not how to find it. I used an Avis map and got caught in the midst of the rush-hour feed to the Causeway. When I finally got to his house, it was after dark. An old place with a porch behind wood lattice, straight out of Tennessee Williams. There were two police cars and a lab van.”

  Kessler is suddenly having less trouble with his concentration. He sits straight.

  “No one heard the shot,” Barry says. “A paper boy came around at about five, doing his monthly collection. I’m not sure what made the paper boy so bold as to let himself in. Maybe he knew Djevdjevich pretty well. The front door was open. Maybe he got tempted to steal something. Maybe there was a strong smell of blood. Does blood smell, Michael? Human blood, in largish quantities?”

  Kessler nods his head stiffly. Yes it does. A strong odor like freshly ground hamburger, he thinks, remembering Biaggio’s grocery.

  “Anyway there wasn’t what you’d call a largish quantity, I suppose. It was all too neat. One bullet from a .22 pistol, through the soft palate and out the top of his skull. The body was still seated in a leather chair in the study. The bullet was in the ceiling. The pistol was legally registered to Djevdjevich.”

  He had sat himself down and bit on the muzzle and fired, Barry says. At least that was the official understanding. The coroner’s jury ruled it a suicide.

  Barry checked out of the Marriott and came home.

  “You shouldn’t drive,” says Barry, hand on the doorknob.

  “I know. But I’m going to,” says Kessler. “So wish me luck.”

  “Stay here. God knows I’ve got plenty of room. Drive back in the morning.”

  “No, Barry. Thank you. I’ve really got to be back there tonight. I’m, uh, there’s supposed to be a message left for me,” Kessler lies, not knowing how guilty he will feel, later, about this particular one. “Time and place of an appointment, for first thing tomorrow.” The craven truth is that, in its hollowed condition, Barry’s house is just too depressing for Kessler and, if at all politely possible, he wants now to get clear of it.

  “That’s stupid. Call them from here and get the message.”

  “Their switchboard closes at ten.” Never before has he lied quite so shamelessly and badly to Barry. Kessler himself is surprised.

  “Well. Then at least drink some coffee.”

  “Do you have fresh beans? Just give me some beans to chew.”

  Barry disappears back toward the kitchen and then is gone for more time than it would seem to take. Kessler, where he leans woozily, becomes slowly aware of not having heard the refrigerator smack open. Finally Barry returns from a different side of the house, handing to Kessler not coffee beans but a manila envelope.

  “We almost forgot. Claude Sparrow and company.”

  “Thank you, Barry. Thank you, I mean it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Call me tomorrow. There’s one other piece you should see. It’s in my safe deposit box, downtown. We’ll meet for a sandwich and go pick it up.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Drive carefully, Michael. God damn it.”

  “Give my—” Kessler stops himself jarringly, mashing his molars together. Give my love to Patsy, he would have said.

  “Give my eyes to science if I don’t make it,” he says.

  18

  MONDAY MORNING IS OPEN, Lord be praised. Kessler spends it in the dining room of the Tabard, drinking large doses of tomato juice and coffee, doing all within his power to avoid loud noises, sudden movements, and daunting thoughts. He feels sure that the evening with Barry must have taken five or ten points off his IQ, possibly inflicted some other permanent physical damage as well. His stomach is not good and his head is worse. It wasn’t worth it, not even for Barry. Certainly not for Alex Djevdjevich. Kessler should know better by now. He vows silently, as his trembling hand clatters cup against saucer, that he is positively not going to take another drink of alcohol until, um, well, until he truly regain
s a yearning for the taste of the stuff. Or, say, tomorrow evening. Whichever comes first. Never mind, this is bitching hard work, this particular project, and he finds himself in a weakened state today, so it’s no time to try to deal with what Nora is pleased to call his “incipient problem.” The intractability of the Viktor Tronko story, compounded by certain people who throw other people off tall buildings, is his real incipient problem, thanks. Meanwhile, fluids. More fluids, waiter. Kessler concentrates in his quiet maimed shaky way on the intake of copious amounts of innocent liquid, hoping to rinse himself clean of poison and stupidity; and he reads. A restorative, meditative morning. He does not plan to leave this wonderful little white-damask-covered table for hours, by God. He reads the Post with maniacal thoroughness, even the editorials. Then after three cups of coffee and a pitcher or so of ice water he is capable of addressing the contents of Barry’s envelope.

  Barry spoke truth: there isn’t much. Clips of the two Joe Delbanco columns that provided occasion (if not necessarily cause) for Claude Sparrow’s firing, eight years ago. A photocopy of a longish article from the New York Times Magazine, dated almost four years ago itself, on the subject of a supposed Soviet penetration agent somewhere in the higher echelons of the CIA, and the fevered search for that agent, which had “rent the Agency in half for much of a decade,” according to what Kessler reads in the article’s breathy subtitle. And, as promised, an intact copy of the Vanderbilt University Alumnus, this one ten years old, with a paper clip guiding Kessler to the short feature on an alum named Claude Sparrow, former undergraduate poet and self-confessed government bureaucrat.

  Government bureaucrat, who are you kidding? thinks Kessler, smiling despite himself.

  Of the four stories, only the one from the Times Magazine includes a photograph of Claude Sparrow, and even that is grainy and bad, evidently taken with a long lens while Sparrow in his familiar camel-hair coat was ducking into a car. But Kessler already knows what the man looks like. He also knows a little something about Sparrow’s notorious phone-tapping operation, against “high U.S. officials, within the National Security Council staff and elsewhere,” as the first of the two Delbanco columns puts it. Glancing over the columns again now, Kessler notices that Joe Delbanco seems to have missed a crucial fact: the “elsewhere” in question had included the CIA itself, and among those “high U.S. officials” were a few of what Pokorny had called the “big boys” of the Agency, possibly even including Jedediah McAtee. All of which presently makes better sense, to Kessler, in light of what he has heard about the search for Dmitri. Sparrow on his last paranoid rampage. Sparrow listening in on everyone, suspecting everyone. The Counterintelligence chief tapping his own DCI. What a madhouse it must have been.

  Kessler sets the columns aside. He can come back to them. For the moment he is interested, rather, in Claude Sparrow’s more distant history.

  History, Kessler remembers. The control of appearances. Well, the Vanderbilt magazine and its literate but too trusting undergraduate correspondent, the young fellow who interviewed Claude Sparrow, class of ’35, seem to have offered Sparrow exactly that: control of the appearances. This was back before Joe Delbanco made him infamous, America’s most renowned unemployed spymaster. Several years before the great publicized purge. It happened in 1970, Kessler gathers, when Sparrow was back for a brief visit in Nashville, ostensibly on the occasion of his thirty-fifth college reunion. Only a small privy circle of folk, back then, knew anything of Claude Sparrow and his role at the CIA. And that was by no accident, Sparrow having always guarded his privacy (or call it his cover) sedulously. His public reputation was still a bare slate. Then the Vanderbilt Alumnus, accommodatingly, invited Sparrow himself to chalk a few things on it. He was interviewed over dinner by the author of this article, a young man from the class of ’70, identified in his by-line as a philosophy major and an aspiring poet. As Kessler reads through the piece he understands that it was those two subjects—philosophy and poetry—and only those that would have seemed to justify any attention at all to this dusty alumnus, Mr. Sparrow, who had risen to be “a mid-level administrator at the National Institutes of Health.”

  The profile is full of lies. Kessler can see that much at a glance. The dinner interview in Nashville was itself a small disinformation campaign conducted by Claude Sparrow, with the collaboration of one unwitting undergraduate who had no way of checking—and no reason to suspect that he should check—these things Mr. Sparrow was telling him. Some of the “facts” are so wide of truth as to be comic. And some are not so far wide. Some read like gentle parables, though Kessler can’t imagine whom Sparrow felt he was addressing. Also, as in any adept campaign of disinformation (Kessler having lately learned this principle from an expert), there seems to be a fair portion of real facts marbled in. Sitting over his coffee, ignorant as he is of Sparrow’s earlier life, Kessler has no better means of sorting fact from lie than that Vanderbilt senior did. Merely a somewhat more skeptical predisposition. Still, he can only read and guess.

  The focus of the piece is not Sparrow himself but his famous teacher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Sparrow appears in the role of acolyte to the historic personage, and as survivor, grave-tender, offering his reverent recollections. There is much talk about Cambridge and Vienna in the 1930s. Sparrow was there, yes. He sat on a folding chair in Wittgenstein’s small crowded room at Trinity College, yes, and struggled to follow while the century’s most original philosopher conducted his seminars. Yes, an incredible privilege, an incredible opportunity, Sparrow told the undergraduate interviewer; of course I had only half an idea, at the time, just how fortunate I was. Otherwise I might not have wasted so much, Sparrow said. I might have struggled harder. Used my brain, such as it was, to better effect. But no, Sparrow said, no, I wouldn’t have stayed with philosophy in any case. No. Wittgenstein was too persuasive on that point. Get out of it, he had told the young Sparrow. Get out. Do something worthwhile. Something real. Become a physician or a cabinetmaker or some such. It wasn’t intended as an insult; it was heartfelt and I suppose loving advice, Sparrow said. He told all of us that—all those of us students who were reasonably close to him, and for whom he seemed to have some modicum of respect. Get out of academic philosophy. Do something useful. “And so finally I took him at his word,” the Alumnus quotes Sparrow as having said. “I went back into microbiology.”

  Kessler smiles again at that one. He can picture Sparrow delivering it, with a face bald of all shame or irony.

  Mind you, biology had never been really a passion for him, Sparrow explained. It had never been an obsession, a sheer transporting obsession, in the way that poetry was, and then later, for its time, philosophy. Nothing like that. Biology was merely an interest, call it. A reasonably stimulating intellectual discipline which happened also, eventually, to offer him a career that fitted the specifications Wittgenstein was urging. Originally he came to it in a rather haphazard way. When he had first arrived at Vanderbilt as a callow sixteen-year-old, Sparrow said, he had seized on biology as a major, though even then his head had been full of poetry, and of dreams of the life of a poet, whatever in God’s name that might have been. He certainly didn’t know. Subsisting on dry bread and rough wine in some Parisian cold-water garret, perpetually dizzy with inspiration and malnourishment, he supposed. But his father back in coastal Georgia was a sternly practical man, an important figure in Savannah law and Tattnall County rice, who had a balance-sheet approach to any enterprise in which he invested money, including his younger son’s education. Therefore poetry could be only a stolen pleasure, Sparrow said, which is what best suits it anyway; and law also was excluded as a profession, based on the coppery bitter taste left in young Claude’s mouth by negative example of the father. Therefore biology. Biology because—if there was any real reason at all—his favorite maternal uncle was a medical doctor. Anyway I was five years too late to be a poet at Vanderbilt, Sparrow said. The Fugitives were all gone. Graduated, dispersed, moved on to teac
hing positions in other universities. I had missed the golden age, barely. I did have one course from John Crowe Ransom, my freshman year, Sparrow said; but Mr. Ransom was distant, he did not seem to care for me personally; or else he thought my poems were just rotten, a distinct possibility, and he was too polite to bring himself to tell me. There was no magical circle of gifted poets, in any case, not anymore then, not when I arrived, Sparrow said. Kessler wonders whether Claude Sparrow, in truth, ever spent a day of his life studying biology.

  The poetry part he does not doubt. The Alumnus’ correspondent has even quoted some lines from a Claude Sparrow lyric, ferreted out from the 1935 Vanderbilt yearbook. The subjects of the poem are love and early death, the principal figures are Harlequin and Pierrot. Kessler is inclined to agree with Mr. Ransom.

  By the time he left Nashville in ’35, Sparrow told the Alumnus, his father the rice planter was dead and so he had a bit of inherited money. By then also he had read himself deep into philosophy and all through the Western canon, from Heraclitus right up through Hegel, which seemed at that time to be the end of the line. Hegel seemed to me then, Sparrow said, smirk if you like, the ultimate modernity. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer I didn’t care for. So, Sparrow said. I had this bit of money. Naturally therefore I took off on the first ship for Europe, which is what a young man did in those days. Maybe these days also, I wouldn’t know. But I wasn’t going just to hitchhike up and down through the wine valleys wearing an orange backpack, Sparrow said. Not that there’s anything necessarily so bad about that, for a young man. But I had an agenda. I had been admitted to read philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. It was just a happy accident, almost, Sparrow told the Alumnus. I knew something about Russell and G. E. Moore and the tradition at Trinity. I had barely heard the name, though, of Ludwig Wittgenstein.