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

by David Quammen

  He drove Tronko like a sled dog, Gondelman says, through the entire chain of events surrounding that tableau, the entire twenty-hour period leading up to the inspection of Oswald’s file. What time of day was it when Tronko first heard the news out of Dallas? Twelve o’clock midnight. Exactly twelve midnight? No, not exactly; just roughly twelve. How did he hear? Trofim Filippovich called him by telephone, woke him, and told him this horrible news. He had a private home telephone, then? Yes, of course. Did Tronko’s wife wake to the sound of the phone? Yes, she did. Although on another occasion, says Gondelman, Tronko said she did not. Pokorny of course roughed him up over that. Tronko tried to clarify it by explaining that she had slept through the ring but she came awake when she heard the sound of Tronko’s voice, the tone of alarm, as he spoke with Trofim Filippovich about the assassination. Then what? Pokorny was not easily appeased. Then what happened—did Rybakov tell Tronko to get his ass right down to the Lubyanka? No. No, he told Tronko to get dressed but to remain at home, by the telephone, until he, Trofim Filippovich, called back. And did Rybakov call back? Yes, Tronko would say; though a full hour had passed before Trofim Filippovich did call, and that had been the longest hour of Tronko’s life. Was it longer than this one, you lying piece of pickled herring? and here Al’s voice would go deep and quiet with menace, says Gondelman. I can’t speak for how Pokorny himself might have played it. Tronko would answer: yes. It was longer, yes. And what did Rybakov say when he called you back in an hour? He said I must go to Minsk, Tronko would answer. Exact words, Pokorny would demand. “You are going to Minsk,” Tronko would say, quoting.

  “It went on and on like that,” Gondelman says. “Pokorny would take him over the whole story, minute by minute. Word by word. Like a good bastardly trial lawyer conducting a cross-examination. I think perhaps Mel missed his calling.”

  “I don’t,” says Kessler. “I think he found it perfectly.”

  They did the same sort of workout over that Ilyushin-28 transport that had supposedly taken Tronko down to Minsk. How many propellers? asked Pokorny. None, said Tronko, not to be so easily fooled. All right, how many jet engines? demanded Pokorny. Tronko didn’t remember, or remembered wrong, and so they had another tussle. There were similar exchanges about the architecture and the interior layout of the KGB office in Minsk where Tronko had supposedly impounded the file, about the landing conditions at Vnukovo Airport when Tronko’s plane arrived back, about the physical weight of that one volume or those several and the question of how many would have fit into Tronko’s briefcase, about whether Tronko during all these long hours had understood the significance of his mission, about whether he had peeked at the file before delivering it up to Rybakov, about whether anyone else but the two of them had been present in that office when Rybakov began turning the pages and, if not, why not. Tronko contradicted himself on a dozen different points, all of them seemingly small, seemingly meaningless, and Pokorny punished him over each of them. Tronko made minor corrections when he was forced to, but no major recantations concerning this particular episode. Merely brush strokes here and there, says Gondelman. Brush strokes that left the essence of the picture unaltered. Two Russians was still two Russians and the file of Oswald was still that. It was still just a routine surveillance record, a log of the subject’s movements and a sheaf of wiretap transcripts such as would have been collected by local officers of Rybakov’s Tourist Department for any visiting or expatriate American, even a maladjusted and unwelcome young man who had offered himself as though he were some type of important political defector and then been shunted off to help manufacture radio circuits on a production line in Minsk. Nothing more. It was still blessedly empty, the file was, of any evidence that the KGB had ever recruited or even approached Lee Harvey Oswald, for any purpose whatsoever. Tronko’s story in that regard had not been subject to modification. He had not wavered on any of the crucial particulars, Gondelman says.

  But then Pokorny himself didn’t seem truly concerned over the particulars, crucial or otherwise. Those seemed merely to serve him as points of leverage. He seemed to have his own larger theory—or call it a predisposition, Gondelman says, or a bias—about the Two Russians matter. Perhaps it was really Claude Sparrow’s theory. Sparrow’s bias. That’s hard to know. Anyway, Pokorny was not haggling for modifications. He wasn’t exerting himself this hard over a few brush strokes. His goal, evidently, was to knock the whole damn painting down off its easel. He was trying to make Tronko confess that the entire episode of the Oswald file was an utter concoction.

  To admit that, of course, was for Viktor Tronko the same as admitting that he had been sent. That he was a phony defector. A dispatched agent of Soviet disinformation. And Tronko couldn’t or wouldn’t make any such confession—no matter how badly he contradicted himself, no matter how much Pokorny badgered him about General Avvakian.

  “Avvakian?”

  “General Avvakian was the chief of the KGB disinformation department,” says Gondelman.

  “I know. Sparrow told me about him,” says Kessler. “How did Avvakian figure in the Two Russians episode?”

  “There was no evidence that he figured at all. Avvakian was really just a name to blame things on. We knew virtually nothing about the man. But that was the favored hypothesis: if Tronko had been sent, then it must be General Avvakian who had sent him.”

  “Pokorny’s hypothesis?”

  “Pokorny’s or Sparrow’s, yes. And, sure, it was logical enough. There just wasn’t any evidence. No confirmation. Viktor Tronko would never admit to it.”

  Likewise with what Pokorny called the second big lie, says Gondelman: the question of Dmitri. Tronko professed his own total ignorance of any such penetration and claimed adamantly that therefore the penetration did not exist. But how could he be so positive? Well, he bragged about the breadth of his own official access, Tronko did; he bragged about the sensitivity of his antennae for gossip; not to mention that he was the trusted assistant of T. F. Rybakov, a major general who was himself closely associated with KGB Chairman Shelepin. It simply wasn’t plausible that Dmitri could exist and Viktor Tronko not have got wind of him. So said Tronko. To Pokorny, on the other hand, it was quite plausible. Pokorny came back at him with—

  At which point, Kessler feels himself slide.

  Maybe it’s the brandy without lunch, maybe it’s the pain in his arm, maybe the vertiginous view from this glass tower causing Kessler to fear for a bad moment that he might be ill, right here, right now. How embarrassing. Terrible faux pas, to toss Gondelman’s prize vintage up on the carpet. He is woozy. Unsure of head and stomach. He stares down into his glass, as though listening thoughtfully, until these gravitational wobbles begin to fade. Maybe it’s the brandy and the arm and the whole subject of Viktor Tronko. Or maybe, more specifically, it is the single grotesque suspicion that has just flickered through Michael Kessler’s overcrowded brain. Dmitri. How would I hide myself, if I were Dmitri?

  Kessler doesn’t recall exactly what statement by Gondelman triggered this mental derailment; and of course Gondelman was merely quoting Big Al, who had in turn been mouthing the words of Pokorny, who had himself been . . . et cetera. Anyway, whatever, there was some mention again of General Avvakian. Then came Kessler’s sickening thought, his nasty and paranoid notion, passing its way suddenly along arteries and synapses like a jolt of drug-induced nausea.

  How would I hide myself, if I were Dmitri?

  With a riddle of high quality, always go for the least obvious answer. Turn this drawing upside down to locate three chickens, two goats, and a mole.

  After a moment, Kessler feels better. Stable, at least. Those glands at the sides of his jaw have stopped firing their juices. But he finds himself wanting to change the subject. Let his brain and his belly have a chance to settle, please. A chance to adjust. Gondelman’s monologue has meanwhile left him behind.

  “But you weren’t actually there,” Kessler says hap
hazardly.

  “Me? No. Never.”

  “You got it all third hand. Through a plastic window.”

  “That’s right. As I’ve said.”

  “So how was poor Leo the Dubious doing, by this point?”

  Gondelman comes to a full halt. He shakes his head at the memory. “Not at all well.”

  It had been such a long and laborious process, three years’ worth, says Gondelman, yet at the end it seemed to have happened so abruptly. In December of 1967, Herbert Eames decreed that the Tronko interrogation was over. He demanded a final assessment. He appointed a—

  “The Nye Report,” says Kessler.

  “Yes.”

  “Roger Nye and Scott Wickes and you. Eames appointed a panel consisting of you three. Sparrow told me about this too.”

  “He told you a lot.”

  “I think he liked me,” says Kessler. “And you had a rigid deadline. Also decreed by Eames. Sixty days.”

  They did indeed. Gondelman immediately left the suite on the sixth floor and began meeting with Nye and Wickes. The sessions of the Schnitzel Group simply ended, bang, that suddenly. Too suddenly. They were never given the chance to compile a final report of their own. Gondelman had to speak for them all, through the Nye panel. In some ways, though, that was probably for the best. Leo at this stage was barely conversable. Big Al seemed to be turning her attention to other things. After the Nye Report was finished and delivered, Gondelman himself took a month’s vacation, much needed, his first in three years.

  He went to Majorca and then Monte Carlo, on a package tour; played the tables, in a very modest way. When he got back to Langley, Leo Dupuyre was gone.

  Once again Kessler waits. He watches Gondelman take a drink of soda and experiences a vicarious swell of discomfort. His mind is still elsewhere. But he can hear the words and he now expects to be told, perhaps in melodramatic terms, where Leo Dupuyre went, and why. Instead Gondelman says: “Within a month, Big Al was gone too.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Leo left voluntarily. He shook the dust of the place off his feet. Al, on the other hand, was forced out. She was put into a position where she could only resign.”

  Kessler leans forward. “You haven’t told me much about Rosalind Alpert.”

  “No?”

  “No. A tall mathematician. Very bright. A delicately murderous intelligence, I think you said. That’s all. Who was she? Another aging bachelor? Did she have jazz records and a ham radio, like Leo?”

  “I doubt it. She did own a piano, I believe.”

  “A piano. She lived alone with her piano. Lord, you people. And a house full of cats, I suppose.” But then passingly it occurs to Kessler: What would they say about me? He lived alone with a typewriter and a liquor cabinet. Traveled often. Is mourned by his agent.

  “No. No cats, so far as I knew.”

  “And she never married?”

  “No,” says Gondelman.

  “What happened to her?”

  “I couldn’t say. We haven’t spoken—”

  “In a decade, I know. I mean back then. Why was she forced to resign?”

  “Because of tawdry rumors,” Gondelman says. And he has poured a stout refill into the brandy glass before Kessler can flag him away.

  Gondelman himself never knew the real logic behind Rosalind’s plummet from grace, he says. Logic is probably saying too much, actually. He never knew the real reasons. She never confided in him and he didn’t care to pry. He saw her a couple of times, in the hallways of OSR again now, and in each case they exchanged friendly words but no significant personal news. They had scarcely ever exchanged personal news anyway. The second of these hallway encounters occurred, just after he got back from the Monte Carlo trip, on the day she had come to clean out some last private effects from her office. She seemed to be cheerful. She acted shocked and delighted at the incongruity of Gondelman with a tan face. She seemed herself. She fooled him totally. Gondelman had no inkling that she would be leaving, permanently, that day—he wasn’t aware until later, when she had already gone. Only about three hours later, it was. He put his head into her office with a wry comment ready and found the room a shell.

  That was merely the day when she had transferred her things over to the cubicle they had given her in the Office of Finance, but it represented Rosalind’s true departure more than any other moment did. The reassignment to Finance was just a transparent and temporary thing, a humiliation that would lead inevitably to her resignation. As the powers in charge well knew. You don’t consign an extraordinary mind like Rosalind’s to the Office of Finance, says Gondelman, unless you want to drive her away. It was almost a bad joke. With the background she had in mathematics, I mean, says Gondelman. If she were a prize-winning playwright, they could have accomplished the same by exiling her to the typing pool in Personnel. But this joke wasn’t funny at all. They hurt her. That wasn’t easy, with Rosalind. They mortified her. That wasn’t necessary. They could have simply fired her, if they felt so compelled to get her out. But firing would have demanded a measure more of decency and a measure more of moxie, says Gondelman. Kessler is acutely aware that Gondelman has begun finally to use her first name.

  The reassignment to Finance coincided with the end of her security review. She had been allowed to keep her clearance, says Gondelman. That can only mean that she had been found blameless of any willful breaches or careless mistakes. She had come under some degree of suspicion, evidently, but the review officer or the board—if she was given a full board—must have found nothing to fix on. Nothing solid. Nothing supported by even a flimsy bit of evidence. It wouldn’t have taken very much. But no, her clearance was allowed to stand. I never knew whether she did have a full review board, says Gondelman. A person doesn’t gab about those things with one’s workmates. Especially a person doesn’t if a person is soon afterward out the door.

  “How long did she stay in Finance?”

  “Less than a month, I believe.”

  “Then she quit. Left the Agency.”

  Gondelman nods.

  “Was there still any chance for her? I mean, might she have been reinstated? After a period of bureaucratic quarantine or some such? You say she had been allowed to keep—”

  Gondelman wags his head slowly.

  “Why not?”

  Gondelman says nothing. He sits. He flicks an eye toward Kessler’s untouched brandy.

  “Why not?” Kessler repeats. “Because of the tawdry rumors you mentioned?”

  “That was my view, yes,” says Gondelman. “It would have been very hard for Rosalind to do anything but what she did. Very improbable.”

  “These rumors involved something more than a little security breach, didn’t they. Something more than taking classified documents home at night. Didn’t they. Or maybe I should say, something other.”

  “Of course they did.”

  “Her private life.”

  “Mm.”

  “Could you tell me, please,” Kessler says gingerly, “what it is we’re talking about?”

  “Oh, she had been linked romantically with Jed McAtee,” is Gondelman’s pristine formulation. The breezy tone he has applied to it sounds totally artificial.

  “That’s all?”

  “That was all, and it was enough, Mr. Kessler.”

  “Why should it be enough? This wasn’t the Victorian era, this was 1968.”

  “This was also the Central Intelligence Agency. Not a campus somewhere in California. And there were damaging conclusions to be leapt to. Matters of some professional pertinence.”

  “Namely, that she was leaking the Tronko transcripts to McAtee,” Kessler posits. “If she were sleeping with him, she must also be sharing information.”

  Gondelman cringes. He answers: “Yes.”

  “Did the rumors go that far?”

 
“No. Never. Maybe it was addressed by the security board. If it was, they evidently dismissed it. I myself never heard any such accusation made. Not even in a whisper.”

  “But it didn’t need to be. Only that she was”—this time Kessler is more careful—“romantically linked with him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think that was a lie.”

  “What difference if it was a lie?” Gondelman barks, laying his fat palm onto the table with enough force to rattle the glasses.

  Then at once he is milder: “But probably it was, yes. I think so. Based on nothing except my knowledge of human character. Anyway, I always suspected that as the reason she was treated so badly. Getting rid of her was a means of announcing, true or not, that the rumors were false. Possibly McAtee himself was to blame. He may have demanded her head.”

  Gondelman’s arm moves out across the table like a thick graceful python, snatching away Kessler’s brandy. He drinks off half of it in a gulp. Then he swirls the rest, privately admiring its color.

  “There was a double standard in those days, I suppose,” says Kessler. Even to himself, it sounds feeble.

  “Yes, at least two,” says Gondelman.

  The castle below them may be empty by now. Car headlights have gone away down the drive. The river is dark and the sky above it is a dim silver-gray. Cold Spring is a speckling of yellow dots to the south. God, you can see everything from up here, Kessler thinks. Maximum visibility and the illusion of lonely wisdom. Maybe Gondelman’s smart old doctor should have warned him against heights.

  26

  “I HAD A LONG TALK with Sidney Gondelman,” Kessler is saying. “He was very helpful. And he’s very protective of you, by the way.”

  From the far end of the line there is only silence.

  “An extremely loyal man, was my impression. Forthright and loyal. I’m sure he’s also hugely intelligent, in his own way. I liked Gondelman. But I got the sense that he might have missed something.”