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

by David Quammen

  An hour later he notices the time.

  He carries the whiskey bottle, still unopened, back to the kitchen. He takes two sleeping pills and sets an alarm. This time he sleeps in the bedroom.

  By nine-thirty the next morning, after a half hour of imaginative phoning, Kessler has located Sidney Gondelman. He has spoken to Gondelman’s secretary, asking her to arrange an afternoon appointment today and informing her that he will be showing up regardless. By eleven Kessler is on the road toward Cold Spring, New York.

  25

  WHAT HE SAID to the secretary was: Tell him I want a few words with Sidney Gondwana. And then he spelled it. Kessler has no idea what that will get him, if anything.

  Having stopped for directions at a framing gallery in downtown Cold Spring, he finds Gondelman’s institute easily. A mile north of town on the two-lane toward Poughkeepsie, it sits up above the river on the crest of a long sloping meadow of snow, at the apogee of a horseshoe drive, stone gateposts flanking the drive and only a laconic brass plate on one of them to provide identification: JANUS CORPORATION. Remind me, Kessler thinks, not to ask how the name derives. The building itself is a large pile of cut granite in the Romanesque vein, complete with multiple turrets and bartizans, leaded glass and slate shingles and rain-spout gargoyles, balcony parapets notched for crossbow archers. In other words it looks like an early neurosis of the same architect who later went crazy designing Yale. But this Yankee castle seems a little older than all that cut stone back in New Haven; probably it was once the home of some grand nineteenth-century family, the place where a railroad or shipping baron stashed his wife and kids and the rest of his private collection. Hidden up here on the Hudson, it is the sort of estate to which Franklin Roosevelt as a young man might have come to play tennis and flirt. Yet the stonework and the roofs are still in perfect condition and the grounds, despite winter, look carefully groomed. Janus Corporation must therefore be solvent. Gondelman and his colleagues seem to be doing—whatever it is they are doing—quite well.

  “Michael Kessler. To see Sidney Gondelman. I called this morning.”

  “You have an appointment, Mr. Kessler?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out. You can check with his secretary.”

  “Yes. Have a seat, please.”

  But Kessler prefers to hover. Once you deposit yourself into one of those big red leather sofas, you have surrendered advantage, accepted a supplicative posture; you’re liable to sink out of sight and be lost for days. Instead he pretends to inspect the fox-hunting prints. To his surprise, he is left waiting less than five minutes. A matron in gray tweed appears and says: “Mr. Kessler?”

  “Yes.”

  “Follow me.”

  They climb a carpeted stairway as wide as the one at Tara. On the second floor she leads him back up the corridor to a front corner office, overlooking the lawn and the bare trees and, beyond, the river. This turns out to be her own office, merely an antechamber for the boss. Oak paneling and a muted watercolor of a covered bridge and banks of IBM hardware. Kessler is intrigued. He almost wishes he had worn his suit. At the smaller of two desks sits a younger woman, who glances up from her green electronic screen and over her tortoiseshell frames for a peek at Kessler. The peek seems to satisfy her, and she doesn’t lose a beat on the keyboard; he suspects that she is the underling to whom he was brusque by telephone, since the matron’s husky alto isn’t familiar. Kessler expects to be invited again to sit but the matron marches across toward another door, another slab of oak, in this case lined with brass rivets and padded with leather. On the jamb is a buzzer button. The matron ignores that. She knocks twice, then opens the door without waiting, and Kessler is ushered into the presence.

  Gondelman is even larger than he expected: six foot two and just short of obese. He wears a Hutterite beard along his wide round jaw, like the corona of a full solar eclipse. He comes out of his chair with remarkable spring for such a big man, extending his great fat hand to be shaken. But the oddest part, for Kessler, is that he is grinning cordially.

  “Mr. Kessler. My pleasure.”

  “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “Of course. What the devil happened to your arm?”

  “A storm-door accident,” says Kessler. “I did something stupid. Too embarrassing to describe.”

  “That’s a pity. Does it hamper your writing?”

  “Probably not. Just my typing. Why is it your pleasure?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Seeing me.”

  Gondelman stops. For a moment he stares like a stern Santa Claus.

  “You’re direct,” he says. “Good for you. Good.” Smiling again, he waddles away toward the bookshelves lining one wall. Two other walls are also covered ceiling to floor with books. Otherwise Gondelman’s office is done all in high-tech modern, smooth lines of stainless steel and rectilinear Plexiglas, blacks and silvers and whites, a startling contrast to everything just outside. The desk looks to have been cut from a block of obsidian, and except for a single legal pad it is bare. A large organpipe cactus stands in a silver pot. There is a white sofa, a matching white chair, a coffee table with a mirror surface and, beyond this area, what seems inexplicably like a steel spiral staircase twisting up through the ceiling—maybe it’s just some sort of advanced decoration. While Kessler admires the furniture, Gondelman reaches high on the wall for a book. Gets right up on his toes, he does, dainty as a performing elephant. “Because I’m rather a fan of yours, Mr. Kessler. That’s why.”

  Kessler feels warning alarms ringing, but the grin and the cordiality appear to be real. He recognizes the volume that Gondelman has taken down: A Fearful Symmetry, by Michael Kessler. It’s a book about Bengal tigers and a man who loved them, until he was killed by one. A true story, as the careless saying goes. On the back is a photo of Kessler, squinting into sunlight.

  Gondelman clicks a ballpoint pen. He extends the book as ingenuously as he extended his hand. “Would you? And then we’ll go upstairs for a talk.”

  “Sure. Of course,” says Kessler.

  If this is all an elaborate tactic to disarm me and fatten my head, he thinks, I will give you great credit, Gondelman. It seems within the realm of possibility that the man has sent his junior secretary scampering out, two hours ago, to a bookstore. A bizarre notion but not inconceivable. Kessler wants another look at that particular shelf where his book was stashed. Meanwhile he hesitates awkwardly, as he always does, over the title page.

  “If you like, you could make it: ‘To my friend Sidney Gondwana,’” Gondelman coaches him. “Our little joke.”

  So Kessler does. After signing it, he opens the book casually to a middle page and finds the spine already well broken. On the shelf above Gondelman’s head he sees George Schaller and a half dozen other books on the big cats.

  They have climbed the spiral staircase and are now seated in Gondelman’s private aerie, a tiny glass-walled cupola that juts up above the north roof of the building like a conning tower. There is room enough only for two captain’s chairs and a small table, but the view sweeps out grandly in all directions over the Hudson Valley. No telephone jack up here, Kessler notices. No typewriter, no pads or pens, not so much as a sheet of paper. The table is a slab of hardwood, gleaming with spar varnish and just large enough for a chessboard, or perhaps for Gondelman’s two huge feet. “This is where I do my thinking,” he has told Kessler. “The real stuff.” As distinct from what other sort of thinking, Kessler isn’t sure. But it seems clear that pure cogitation, the real stuff, is an important and no doubt highly remunerative part of whatever services Sidney Gondelman offers. Kessler wonders, in passing, whether Janus Corporation does “risk analysis” for the multinationals.

  “So you knew Mel Pokorny.”

  “He was a friend of mine,” Kessler fibs.

  “Awful thing.”

  Kessler waits. Then he says: “You’re talking
about his murder, I assume.”

  “I saw a notice in the Hartford paper. A little one. They gave him two column inches and called him an insurance counselor.”

  “You read the Hartford paper?”

  “I read everything,” says Gondelman. “They described it as a grocery holdup. An unlucky bystander. Tell me what really happened, Mr. Kessler.”

  “What makes you think I know something?”

  “Because you’re here,” says Gondelman. “You either know something or you want to.”

  “Actually, both,” Kessler says.

  For reasons not wholly rational, he has a good feeling about Sidney Gondelman. Maybe that’s just the crude flattery having its calculated effect, but Kessler senses something else. The man seems to be pleasantly forthright—impatient with mystification and more interested in asking blunt questions himself than in maintaining secrets or protocol. He has dragged Kessler up into this tower as though for the first welcome diversion in an otherwise dull week. By appearance Gondelman is merely a three-hundred-pound professional sage, highly paid, highly poised, with a head like a pumpkin and a smirk like Buddha, but down inside all the flesh Kessler detects a thin restless skeptic. Possibly Gondelman, like Pokorny, has discovered the private sector to be a golden bore. No, Mel was no unlucky bystander, Kessler says.

  “He was a target. The grocery was the unlucky bystander.”

  “You have some evidence?”

  “Not a shred,” says Kessler, and Gondelman nods to indicate that his attention has nevertheless been engaged.

  Kessler describes the night Pokorny was killed. He relates in bare outline what Pokorny told him about Viktor Tronko. We had just gotten to the second hostile interrogation, says Kessler, when Mel left the apartment. He mentions the locker key from the attaché case and the empty Grand Central locker. I think that was the Nye Report, says Kessler. I think Mel had a copy that he intended to give me, if I accepted the bait. Kessler tells of his three days with Claude Sparrow. You’ve got to spend money to make money, he has reminded himself, and sometimes it is the same with information. He is betting on Sidney Gondelman—investing in would be putting it too mildly. He omits any reference, though, to what happened to Barry.

  “Sparrow gave you three days?”

  “Yes.”

  “He talked for three days?”

  “Yes. Does that surprise you?”

  Gondelman tips his head noncommittally. “No. I suppose not. Sparrow is complicated, God knows what his purposes were. A brilliant man. And just mad as a goddamn hatter.”

  “It was Sparrow who gave me your name,” Kessler volunteers.

  “Bless his soul.”

  “I wasn’t at all sure you would talk to me. Maybe you won’t.” This sounds like an afterthought but is offered carefully by Kessler in a tone of gentle challenge.

  “Are you here as a bereaved friend of Pokorny or as a journalist?”

  “You should assume it’s the latter. Whether I’ll ever write anything is an open question at this point. But you should assume that I might.”

  “Everything I say is off the record.” Gondelman lifts one hand and his eyes sparkle and he twiddles his fingers like W. C. Fields. “A zephyr whispering through the willows.”

  “Fine.”

  “But I was never a spy, you know. Nor even a counterspy. I sat in a room and shuffled paper.”

  “Exactly,” says Kessler. “The analysts. That’s what I want to hear about. The Schnitzel Group.”

  Gondelman tilts his chair delicately back. He raises his feet one after the other onto the table. The table holds.

  “Three of us,” says Gondelman. “We were brought over from the Office of Strategic Research. That’s way the hell off on a far side of the Agency, OSR is. No connection to Counterintelligence. Part of a whole different directorate, devoted mainly to conventional intelligence processing. By which I mean open sources. Legal. Reading newspapers, scanning the fine print in budget documents, that sort of thing. You don’t care about the organizational chart but we were separate, is my point. Outsiders. Claude Sparrow was never our boss.”

  “We,” Kessler says.

  “Yes, they plucked us up individually and threw us together, for that particular case. We worked as a team. Sort of a special study group. Leo the Dubious, Big Al, and myself.” Gondelman smiles faintly at the recollection. “Sidney Gondwana.” He clasps his hands over his navel. “Actually, I was smaller then. I’ve put on a few pounds.”

  “Nicknames courtesy of Pokorny?”

  “Yes. Mel was the name-giver, that’s right. He had a silly side.”

  The Tronko case was their sole assignment for three years. None of them had imagined it would go on so long. An intense collaborative effort, not quite like anything else Gondelman has ever experienced. Very intense. Just the trio of them, alone together for most of three years, talking and play-acting in a couple of conference rooms. Just them and the script. Occasionally they were called over to meetings with Sparrow and his people—Pokorny and Nye, that is. But not often. Mainly they communicated with Sparrow formally, through their advisory reports. Mainly they stayed away, alone, sequestered. That was the way Eames liked to arrange these things; no contaminating the analysts’ views with extraneous reinforcement or disputation, was the idea. Let them work it out among themselves. See what they might turn up. Gondelman scarcely knew the two others, Leo and Al, when this assignment began, he says. Nor did those two know each other. A nodding acquaintance from the halls of OSR. Then for three years they all shared an intensely centripetal life. And then pop, dispersion again, everyone flying apart. I haven’t spoken with either one of them in a decade, says Gondelman. He sounds wistful.

  “The script?” says Kessler.

  “The transcript of the interrogation. Yes. Pokorny and Tronko. As the tapes came in and were transcribed, we got a copy.”

  “But you did say play-acting?”

  “That’s what I call it. An analytic technique. We took roles and reenacted the whole interrogation, day by day. While it was happening. That’s how we proceeded. Acted it out, like a little courtroom drama, and then discussed what we had seen. Or felt.”

  “So you each got a chance to be inside Viktor Tronko. Or at least, to try to be.”

  “Each? No,” Gondelman says. “No, the roles were permanent.”

  “Who did you play?”

  “Nobody. I was the eye in the sky. I watched the other two. That was important. Sometimes I noticed things that they, in their involvement, had missed. You needed three people.”

  “Who played Tronko?”

  “That was Leo.”

  “And Big Al was Pokorny.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he know Mel personally?”

  “He who?” says Gondelman. “Now you’ve lost me.”

  “Big Al.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mislead you,” says Gondelman. “But Big Al was a she.”

  Her name was Rosalind Alpert. She was one of the more senior analysts within OSR at that time, though she couldn’t have been much past her mid-thirties. A very brainy broad, says Sidney Gondelman in his jokey tone. She had been with the Agency ten or twelve years, having signed on, oh, probably straight out of graduate school. Her doctorate was from Hopkins, if he remembers right. She was a mathematician, that much Gondelman knows for sure. Had been a mathematician, rather. When OSR hired you on, those sorts of specialty were never more than door openers. They liked people who had been trained in the sciences, but often enough they would turn you back into a generalist. Leo had started out as an electrical engineer. I myself was a physicist, says Gondelman, in an earlier incarnation.

  “There was no bias against her within the Agency?”

  “What, for being a mathematician?”

  “No. A woman.”

  “Oh yes. Defi
nitely some of that,” says Gondelman. “Which particular sort did you have in mind?”

  “She was allowed to role-play the Pokorny part. Casting her against gender. It seems a little surprising.”

  “Only because you don’t know Rosalind Alpert.”

  “I would have thought that it might affect the dynamic. A woman analyst, trying to do Mel Pokorny. Or, at very least, that someone else would have raised that objection.”

  “Well, in a general sense you’re quite right. Ordinarily there would have been howls. But not with Big Al. Nary a grumble nor a woof. It testified, I suppose, to the genderless ferocity of her mind.”

  “Why did you call her Big Al?”

  “That was friendly,” says Gondelman. “She was statuesque. Tall. Nothing more.”

  They had a small suite of rooms on the sixth floor, at the far end of one corridor, where people left them alone. And a locking outer door, actually, to guarantee that privacy. The Tronko-Pokorny transcripts were supposed to be very closely held. And so they were, says Gondelman, suddenly emphatic as though someone has questioned his probity. So they by God were. One copy went straight to Claude Sparrow, and one came to us. As a matter of fact it took a special order from the Director’s office to get us permission to make another duplicate. We needed two, you see: reading scripts for Leo and Al. That was a struggle. Finally it was settled by them giving us our own photocopy machine and our own shredder, right there in the suite. And of course we had our own safe, into which both copies went overnight. God help you if even a single page of this leaks, they told us. And by leaking all they meant was that Jed McAtee or some other unauthorized person might catch a glance. Well, no page ever did leak. Not from us, anyway. Not from der Schnitzels, says Gondelman.