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

by David Quammen

  “Try me.”

  Kessler sighs. He says: “I really don’t know. But it’s either the CIA or the Russians, I think.”

  The doctor’s smile changes. He looks almost respectful. He is delighted to be brought in on this confidence. “What’re you, some sort of investigative reporter?”

  “Not me,” says Kessler. “I write about termites.”

  23

  HE DRIVES. He is checked out of the Tabard by 1 A.M., and he drives. Somewhere along the Baltimore Beltway he stops for gas, pulling up to the full-service island and then watching furtively from behind a magazine at the station news rack, with the vague notion of seeing if someone has followed him. He feels pathetically amateurish. And he spots no one, not even Lovesong and Buddyboy. He has had a hard time talking himself free of those two, and it wouldn’t surprise Kessler if they were still with him somewhere (well camouflaged, in the cab of a bread truck and wearing false beards and Budweiser caps, maybe), though it is also just possible that they have believed what he told them and gone home. Kessler assured them, as he did the doctor, that he would be available tomorrow. Lovesong wants to show him some file photographs of faces, one of which might belong to the murderous man in the rust-colored jacket. Gladly, Kessler has said. He has promised to meet Lovesong and Buddyboy in his room at the Tabard at nine the next morning. He leaves the gas station with a quart of coffee in Styrofoam on the dashboard and a handful of chocolate bars on the seat, and by 3 A.M. Kessler has passed Philadelphia.

  He pulls into New Haven about the same time Lovesong and Buddyboy are turning up, he hopes, at the Tabard. Dropping the car off in a Budget lot at the airport, he takes a cab to his apartment. Unlocks the door in a state of some trepidation. Pads his way quietly through to the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom, the office, on an inspection tour for lurking intruders. He checks the closets, he glances out onto the fire escape. No one. He walks back to the door, which is already closed and locked; Kessler throws the extra bolt. In the living room, he sinks into the good chair and sets his feet on the coffee table.

  Just exactly the way Mel was sitting, he thinks. Kessler is more exhausted than superstitious so he doesn’t move. But with a small jolt, then, he becomes aware that it is less than seven full days since the evening Pokorny visited him. My God. That was just Tuesday night, this is Tuesday morning. The thought of his past week makes Kessler still more weary until, with a second jolt, he recalls the date with Nora. Wednesday: tomorrow. He has promised to be back in town, so that he can take her to see the film about Eugène Marais. Such a nice little trail of promises Kessler has left. Such a nice little trail of promises and death.

  Pokorny’s murder was bad enough—it was startling and menacing in a cold way—but the matter of Barry Koontz is quite different. Barry was not just a player in some spooky professional gambit, a contact, a source, a person with whom Kessler was dabbling. Barry was an old and treasured friend. Barry was like a brother. He was also, in this Viktor Tronko business, an innocent bystander. His only mistake, the fatal one, was that he knew and trusted Michael Kessler. If Kessler hadn’t called him, hadn’t gone out there to soak up booze and information and then dance away safely back to the Tabard because he found the empty house depressing—if Kessler hadn’t gone visiting, Barry would still be alive. The full impact has been slow in arriving but now Kessler feels it like a hatchet blow to his own chest: Barry is dead. Murdered. A light pistol shoved into his mouth in that cruel, outrageous pantomime of suicide. Barry has been shamelessly used, by Kessler among others, and though nothing is going to put life back into the pathetic lump of meat Kessler found in the basement, still some sort of recompense is demanded. What sort? Personal revenge? Kessler does not even know who pulled the trigger, and anyway physical violence is not his own strong point. Penal justice? Publication of the truth? Maybe. At least. Possibly. But Kessler has small confidence at this point in his own ability to deliver either of those. Justice could never be more than a fortuitous by-product of anything Kessler might write, and the truth is just something to be set atop Barry’s grave, weighty and useless as a headstone. No, what he himself owes Barry in a very personal way, Kessler realizes, is much more straightforward and immediate and difficult. He has got to call Patsy in Colorado and give her the news. Patsy, this is Kessler. Listen. Uh. Barry is dead. Yes. I’m sorry. The police will tell you he killed himself, Patsy, but it’s not so. Take my word. He missed you badly, he was depressed, but not to the point of suicide. He was murdered. Someone killed him for talking to me. I’m sorry. Nice sort of comfort that Michael Kessler can offer his friends.

  Kessler’s arm wound is throbbing fiercely. It seems to have bled again during the mild abuse of driving a car. Furthermore he forgot to stop at a pharmacy for his antibiotic. His brain aches. He pushes off his shoes. He walks out to get a beer and remembers, with the refrigerator standing open, that there has been no beer in the house since Pokorny and he drank the place empty. Kessler considers the bottle of sour mash. But he hasn’t had breakfast and he isn’t that desperate. Maybe he should eat something. Why? He’s not hungry. A cup of coffee? It might cure the headache but, no, better to sleep. He has been up the whole night, after all, and now feels miserable—sore and sick and guilty and lonely and very tired—yet he doubts that his mind will let itself rest. Too much still that has got to be figured out. Too much to decide. Is he going to call Nora at all? Or would that be dangerous for her at this point? Kessler is deeply worried and, dammit, very confused.

  He drops back into the chair. Within five minutes he is asleep.

  But it only looks worse by the light of a Connecticut winter afternoon.

  Now he does make a pot of brutal coffee. He breaks a bagel loose from the package in the freezer and toasts it. After one bite of the bagel, he decides it would be a good idea to take a shower. Clean skin might help him think. He wraps his left forearm in a plastic garbage bag to avoid soaking the dressing and washes himself awkwardly. Afterward he puts on fresh clothes, not from the suitcase but from the closet—his baggiest pleated chinos and a cotton long-underwear shirt, just as though he were staying in for a serious day of work. It’s a bluff. It’s for his morale. He drinks the coffee out of his favorite mug. Kessler is trying to soothe and calm himself. To focus.

  He goes into the office and closes the door and puts himself down in the swivel chair, feet up again, this time on the desk.

  “All right,” he says aloud. “Now.” But it doesn’t help much.

  All of the prospects are terrifying, and all of the options are unsatisfactory. Period. Kessler sees the situation lucidly. The only sensible course of action is panic. Probably he should begin drinking seriously.

  Barry dead, Pokorny dead, both of them murdered by a person or persons unknown. Kessler himself will be next. Clearly he too has earned a place on the list of targets. He wishes he knew just how he has earned it, but obviously he has. He doesn’t know who is after him and he doesn’t know why. Indeterminate strangers require his death because he has learned something important, or else simply because they believe he has learned something important. Kessler on the other hand can’t recall having learned a single damned thing that seems worth dying for. Maybe it’s only a question of what someone fears he might learn. After all, two of his oldest friends have been killed, each of them almost in mid-sentence, evidently to prevent them from talking to him.

  Correction—one of his oldest friends, Barry, and one of his oldest and most unlikely acquaintances. Mel Pokorny. Kessler snaps on the desk lamp. He sits forward. This little move is unfortunate, since it brings his attention onto the pile of typescript that rests accusingly on a rear corner of the desk. He sits back. Mel Pokorny.

  Kessler has long harbored queasy feelings about his early relationship with Mel, despite the fact (and in a sense it’s because of the fact) that that relationship launched Kessler’s career. Mel was his first and best source, back in the time and the pla
ce where confidential sources meant everything to the kind of work Kessler was choosing to do. Sources made stories, on the intelligence-community beat. Sources made careers. Cultivation of a good set of sources wasn’t sufficient alone, of course, not even in that cloistered and melodramatic branch of journalism—not sufficient, no, but certainly necessary. Besides the key sources you still needed tireless ambition, luck, a measure of meticulousness, a boyish joy at the whole game, and some brains. Kessler had all of those, at the time. After quitting law school he had come to Washington for a Detroit newspaper and then gotten on, after less than a year, as a city reporter for the Post. That was the luck. Almost immediately he had begun pressing his case to be allowed to cover Langley or the Pentagon, and at the same time he drove himself to exhaustion trying to do a little magazine freelancing by moonlight. It was hard and it was touchy, because his city editor felt that the Post owned Kessler’s moonlight as well as his daylight; nevertheless he did it, and that was the tireless ambition. But his assignments for the Post remained boring. He was not allowed to cross the river. And his early magazine pieces were modest, marginal, amateurish. He knew he was only playing around the edges of the spy world, the subject that so intrigued him; he was no more than a hobbyist, having never yet gotten inside the great outer wall of conspiratorial clubbishness. He was still only twenty-three years old. Then in early 1968 he got to know Mel Pokorny.

  Kessler couldn’t say at this point whether that was a matter of luck, or of ambition, or of good professional instincts, or just what. Though he does have his suspicions.

  They met sometime that winter or very early spring, before the assassinations. Kessler doesn’t recall the exact time. He doesn’t recall the circumstances. And as a matter of fact this gap in memory became troubling to Kessler later, when he began to reconsider his professional choices, and has continued to trouble him whenever he reflects back—this one small gap especially: his inability to remember just when or how he and Mel Pokorny first met. What the gap means, Kessler suspects, is that the initiative came from Pokorny.

  He liked Pokorny, young Kessler did. Pokorny was funny and he was quick. He played a buffoon’s role sometimes (and he did seem to have a streak in him that was genuinely, incorrigibly unserious) but Kessler prided himself on having recognized fast that the man was really very bright. It would be a mistake to underestimate him, Kessler saw. An easy mistake to make. But only a fellow of uncommon gifts could have risen into the higher levels of CIA governance, as Pokorny had, despite being burdened with the face of a pug and the soul of a clown. He was not a pretentious sobersides like the few other Agency officers Kessler had met, and he was not righteous. He was also not overtly indiscreet—Kessler got almost nothing from him for what seemed, back then, like a long time. Reflecting now, Kessler cannot imagine why it did seem long; it can’t have been more than three or four months. Kessler’s first major story, on the illegal mail-intercept program, ran in Harper’s in August of 1968. As Claude Sparrow so accurately remembered.

  Pokorny of course had been his chief source. Pokorny had almost led him by the hand.

  By that time he and Mel were seeing each other every two or three weeks, for barbecued ribs and beer by the pitcher and shuffleboard bowling, at a roadhouse that Mel had known of on the old Manassas highway. Kessler loved the sense of convivial subterfuge. Ground rules were that Kessler would never show a notebook while they were together in any public place, that Mel would mention no names or code names, that Mel would not introduce subjects but only respond—sometimes—to percipient questions, and that Kessler would publish no single fact heard from Pokorny if he couldn’t confirm it elsewhere. There were some additional rules, equally romantic and meaningless, to all of which young Kessler adhered slavishly. And there was the unvoiced understanding that they would not spend all their time talking about intelligence work, that tired old subject—that Kessler had better make himself a good conversationalist and a congenial drinking pal during those hours when Mel Pokorny was wearied blind by the whole silly realm of spookdom. Kessler did. He loved it all. But he saved his receipts from the roadhouse and used them on his taxes. This was research. This was genuine work. Michael Kessler was cultivating a source.

  Poor dangerous young fool. Who was cultivating whom? is what Kessler has wondered for years.

  These people, the cleverest of them, have a hundred different purposes all on line at once. Total secrecy serves some of their purposes at some times. Talking coyly to journalists, when they choose to do that, serves others. It doesn’t need to be lies. Half-lies are quite useful occasionally and even whole gobbets of truth can be given away to good and well-calculated effect. Witness Jed McAtee’s use of the Joe Delbanco staff against Claude Sparrow. But Michael Kessler was a slow learner. He didn’t begin to appreciate this multiplicity of means and purposes until about 1972. Then he started to measure how much he owed to one man—the mail-intercept thing, the Laotian heroin-trade thing, several others—and to wonder what might eventually be asked in return. He was quietly horrified to realize that, as a respected young journalist specializing in intelligence-agency exposés, he was virtually the creation of Mel Pokorny.

  Then again, maybe nothing would ever be asked in return. Maybe Pokorny’s compensation was already being received. How? Somehow. Kessler didn’t know, but in the meantime his feelings toward Mel changed drastically and he went stiff with dread, a sense of impending ruin and damnation. He passed through a crisis week during which he barely left his Georgetown apartment. He lost the nerve to write up anything from his notebooks, or to follow further along any of his promising leads. He was terrified and, equally, puzzled.

  He no longer viewed Mel in the same naive way he had—as a zealous but disgruntled CIA officer, a conscientious cold-war professional who believed in the Agency’s primary mission but despised certain tactical abuses, and who was willing to act indirectly, risking his own position, to emend those abuses. A nice portrait but, no, not hardly. Mel was too smart and too crafty and he wouldn’t have needed Kessler for that. What other way to see the man? Kessler didn’t know. But he came to suspect that Melvin Pokorny was not nearly so disgruntled, not nearly so divided in loyalty, not nearly so much the impetuous maverick, as he liked to seem. He was above all a deft operator. And Kessler was now tyrannized by the hunch that his own precocious success might be somehow a move in a larger Pokorny operation.

  By then he had heard about this man Claude Sparrow, Mel’s boss. Sparrow was demented. He was paranoid and devious beyond imagining. That was his reputation, anyway, as it reached Kessler. Suddenly Kessler was faced with the entirely plausible notion that this famed Claude Sparrow might have sacrificed certain Agency secrets—thrown them into Kessler’s hungry young jaws, by way of Mel Pokorny—for some greater, more opaque purpose. Entirely plausible. Kessler just didn’t know.

  And still doesn’t. Even now, safe at home in New Haven, it makes him highly uncomfortable to contemplate all this. He would much rather give his attention to man-eating cats, grotesque marine creatures, bird-eating spiders. Termites. Kessler goes out to the kitchen for more coffee.

  There must be something to eat around here, isn’t there? No. Very well, he decides to live dangerously. He walks up to Biaggio’s grocery for salami and pesto. He returns with salami and pesto and beer.

  24

  HE FINISHES THE SIX-PACK in lonely squalor, pitching the last empty bottle down the length of his living room, in imitation of Mel. By then it is midnight and he wants badly to call Nora, or maybe just show up at her door, but he is still sober enough to know that he shouldn’t. Can’t. Not unless he wants to horrify her, make an ass of himself, scuttle whatever small chance he seems finally to have of coaxing her open to his attentions. And not unless he wants to put her in danger.

  With Barry gone, with Nora beyond reach, Kessler feels a heart-chilling loneliness.

  He is weary of the Viktor Tronko case, weary of Claude Sparrow and D
mitri and Pokorny, disgusted with the whole stupid quest and disinclined to continue. It has become a gruesome annoyance. He doesn’t need it. Isn’t interested. Be gone, Satan. Having cost Barry’s life, any possible results of Kessler’s efforts would already be exorbitantly overpriced. Besides which, this thing represents another wedge pushed down between him and Nora. But at least Nora, for the moment, is still alive.

  It would be irresponsible, Kessler realizes, to go anywhere near her. He wants to stumble over there right now. But knows he cannot.

  She is a noncombatant, defenseless, and for Christ sake there is also the little daughter, Emily, myopic and cute and nine years old, shy as an owl. Women with slumbering nine-year-olds are not likely, in Kessler’s experience, to welcome drunken men on their porches at midnight. Especially not this woman. Anyway the last thing that Nora needs, or desires, is to be pulled into the web of Kessler’s cloak-and-dagger capering. She has made that clear: she judges him to be wasting his time and talent. Symptoms of arrested adolescence. One of Nora’s foremost attractions for Kessler, and at the same time a big problem, is that she possesses a sensitive and ruthless antenna for crap. She is unforgiving of moral drift. She knows what she values and what she doesn’t; she knows at all times what she thinks. Such clarity, to Kessler, is mystic and terrible. Methodically raising one foot, he upsets the telephone table onto the floor.

  God forbid that he do anything irresponsible. The phone yammers at him for a moment, then stops. Kessler fetches the sour mash and carries it to the office.

  He picks up the Eugène Marais typescript, flips a few pages, reads a few scattered paragraphs, can barely recall having written them, and sets the pile back.

  Then he forages in his suitcase for the three ring notebooks that should be there. Slaps them onto the desk. Opens the third, flips pages, reads a few lines of his own scrawl. Viktor Tronko appears in these notes as VT. Claude Sparrow also goes by his initials and Dmitri is simply D; everyone else gets at least three or four letters of a last name. Paging on quickly, Kessler lets disconnected phrases catch his eye as they might. Fedorenko dead. Lentzer’s cigarettes. Ivan the friendly ghost. Petrosian bye-bye. Schnitzel Group. Eames bye-bye. Wickes bye-bye. CS bye-bye.