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

by David Quammen

  Only silence.

  “Something that passed almost under his nose,” Kessler adds.

  The woman’s cold voice says: “And?”

  “And so I’d like to see you.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Gondelman knew the name of the town,” Kessler says. “You’ve been there a dozen years now, I gather.”

  “Eleven.”

  “I would take an hour of your time. I’d ask some questions, any of which you could choose not to answer. I wouldn’t harry you. I wouldn’t quote you. I’m just trying to fill in a few gaps. Background. I wouldn’t be intrusive.”

  “Of course you would,” says Rosalind Alpert.

  He is in a booth on the darkened street of downtown Cold Spring, holding the phone with a cramped shoulder and balancing his pad on the shelf. His breath shows in frosty little puffs. Kessler at this moment is desperate not to lose her, but he feels the connection stretched thin, failing. His own silence is like a fatal admission.

  “Let me intrude, then. Briefly.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Maybe you owe it to yourself?”

  Even cast as a question, it is presumptuous and risky. She doesn’t answer.

  “You left Washington abruptly,” Kessler says.

  “Long ago. Without any regrets.”

  “But maybe there was something left unsaid. No one asked you. Or no one could be trusted. Maybe no one would have believed you, at that particular point.”

  Again she doesn’t answer, which this time seems encouraging.

  “Say it to me and be rid of it,” Kessler says.

  “Where are you?”

  “New York. Up on the Hudson. I have a car,” Kessler says eagerly.

  He drives north on the parkway in a state of nervous excitement. For the first time since Pokorny barged in on him last week, Kessler feels his own intuition charging out confidently in advance of the evidence. He can’t clear his mind of Dmitri—Dmitri who now finally seems a real person, not just a name, a phantom, a Siberian wild goose. He can’t forget what Gondelman said about those moments when Tronko argued otherwise. He can’t stop thinking about Leo, who became unconversable, and about Big Al herself, whose attention was turning to other things. Short of Albany, Kessler exits.

  He heads back into western Massachusetts on a two-lane through manicured countryside, a high half-moon making the snowfields glow like lambent ivory. Up here the Housatonic is still a free-stone trout stream. He reaches the town of Great Barrington in time to find room at an egregiously overpriced motor lodge, and then dinner. Coming straight up tonight seemed to make more sense than going back to New Haven. Rosalind Alpert has agreed to meet him tomorrow at noon.

  He takes four aspirin for his arm and sleeps reasonably well, despite a dream pageant of looming menacing faces, like balloons come untethered from a Macy’s parade. Possibly he is running a slight fever. He should get that prescription filled. And he should do something soon about the dirty bandage. But the first thing is to clear his brain of distressing suspicions. He wakes early, feeling manic. Over a long breakfast he reads the Times minutely, absorbing nothing. In late morning he asks directions for walking to the school.

  She came up here a year after leaving Langley—he knows that from Gondelman. It was virtually all Gondelman himself knew. And Gondelman only knew it from the same gossip network that had carried the damaging rumors. This time the gossip said that Rosalind Alpert, horrible to relate, had accepted a job at a finishing school. Teaching mathematics to debutantes, snicker snicker. Gondelman never heard how it actually came about, or whether it was as bad as it sounded, since he never again talked with Rosalind. Presumably it was a job that would not even have been offered to her—because she was grossly overqualified—if she hadn’t made clear to the hiring committee, with some sacrifice of pride, that yes indeed she would grab it if offered. That she would be glad to get it.

  And after eleven years, evidently, she remains glad enough to keep it. Maybe the cloistered, Minervan atmosphere is part of the appeal, Kessler thinks, though not necessarily for the reasons that gossip would have presumed. Maybe she just wanted a drastic change. No question, she got that. The place is hardly to be confused with Langley.

  The buildings are of red brick and cedar shake, genuinely old but impeccably kept, like bond certificates stored in a safe; all the filigreed cast-iron railings have recently been repainted with black enamel. There is a proliferation of ivy. There are paddleball courts and a hockey field, broad snow-covered lawns and rectilinear hedges and a tame creek running through the campus. Kessler notices a huge naked hardwood tree, probably an oak or a catalpa, so ancient and weary that one horizontal limb, thick as a phone pole, has rested its elbow against the ground. The walkways and the lane are deserted, at least until just a few minutes before twelve, when comes a sudden flush of five dozen girls all in plaid skirts and blue blazers. They gabble for a minute and then disappear into other doors. Kessler finds the particular building that has been described to him, unmistakable with its black shutters and its white Doric columns and its widow’s walk. On the wall to one side of the entrance is a brass plaque:

  MISS USSHER’S SCHOOL

  1843

  PUELLAE VENERUNT

  ABIERUNT MULIERES

  I’m sure that much is true, Kessler thinks. It continues with a hopeful brag about the pursuit of truth, knowledge, humanity. Yes, don’t we all like to think so. He goes inside.

  To the frowzy young woman seated at the desk, a matron before her time, he says: “My name is Kessler. I’m expected. Dr. Alpert.”

  This one lifts her head enough to look at him through the lower crescents of bifocals, though she isn’t wearing any. She points down the corridor with a pencil.

  “Miss Alpert,” she says.

  It is a faculty common room, not a private office. Two walls are lined with old books, one wall consists of windows overlooking a back lawn, and one is full of coats hung on hooks. The room smells of cigarettes and, if his nose is right, soggy jelly sandwiches. A coffee urn gurgles listlessly. Kessler expects a half dozen bleary teachers to come stampeding in any moment, escaping their students to this sanctum. He has closed the door behind himself, though, and it stays closed. Rosalind Alpert stands in a corner near the windows. She is not so tall as he imagined her, only about five foot eleven, the same as him. Nevertheless she holds herself straight and, in a pair of spike heels, she might seem to tower. Kessler doubts that this woman has ever owned a pair of spike heels. She is handsome, but not so handsome as to embarrass herself, and if Kessler didn’t know that she is about fifty years old he would guess that she is about fifty. She consents to a handshake. There are chairs but she doesn’t offer him one.

  The lack of guaranteed privacy is clearly no accident. She has chosen this room, for meeting him, as in some way a measure of protection. On the other hand, she could have refused him altogether. She didn’t. So Kessler is optimistic. And he remembers his own promise: he has not come to harry her. He has come to listen.

  But when she opens her mouth, his impression changes radically. She speaks in a warm quiet voice, very alive, almost sympathetic, not the least stiff or edgy. She lets her hands rest in the pockets of her long sweater-vest and leans backward, now, against the window ledge. She has evidently decided in advance of his arrival how much she is willing to say, which turns out to be rather much. She anticipates some of his questions. Her memory for the relevant facts is precise, quick, not noticeably bitter. Occasionally she even pulls a smile. She congratulates Kessler on his own line of deductions, in a tone that seems gently condescending, and then a few moments later she runs a hand up the back of her neck and tosses her brown sleek hair, an extraordinary relaxed gesture. Kessler sees now that the word “handsome,” with its severe and mannish intimations, is all wrong for Rosalind Alpert. She is not what he expected. And s
he seems virtually undamaged by the events of her own life.

  After just five minutes of mild preliminaries, news of Gondelman, the less mild news of Pokorny, he has sensed that this will have been no wasted trip. Veritatem, scientiam, humanitatem hic repperunt.

  They talk for an hour, until a bell rings jarringly.

  27

  BUT IT’S GOING to take at least one more conversation before Kessler has anything that he would ever dare publish.

  Maybe he won’t dare publish it anyway. Or maybe his friendly contact at Rolling Stone will back away and Kessler will have no better luck coaxing anyone else to take the leap. It certainly will be a leap. On a story like this, so provocative, yet by its nature so subterranean, you can never really provide proof beyond doubt—or for that matter beyond plausible action for libel, if someone decides to press it. All you can do is say: Two knowledgeable people told me the same exact damn thing, independently, and I have reason to believe they weren’t lying. After that, reliable sources and carefully dated notes can’t help you; fact-checkers and lawyers definitely can’t help you. After that, it’s more like a religious conversion than an epistemological judgment: you bet that a heaven exists, also a hell, and act accordingly. Kessler himself is almost ready to bet.

  But he still needs that other voice. He needs confirmation. He drives south toward New Haven not quite like a maniac.

  He intends to stop home only long enough to throw clean underwear into his bag and be gone again, but as he elbows the car up Chapel Street in five o’clock traffic there comes another unpleasant jolt.

  “Damn it. Damn it,” he says aloud, thumping his palm against the steering wheel. This new shock is not so grotesquely concussive as the one that hit him in Gondelman’s tower, but still it is bad, yes, and he feels it even more intimately, an assault to the stomach. One casual glance at the Yale Art and Architecture building, here on the corner by the stoplight, has triggered his memory: the Athol Fugard presentation on Eugène Marais. Film, lecture, babysitter, date. At the A and A building, 8 P.M., Wednesday. Last night.

  He has stood her up cold. Without so much as an unctuous last-minute phone call. His ass is grass.

  He tries Nora’s home number as soon as he gets inside his door and of course there is no answer. He tries her office, nothing. She is in transit. Or else this is the day of the week when she chauffeurs little Emily to gymnastics class, ballet, Tae Kwon Do, whatever it is the kid is taking, and they go downtown afterward for mother-and-daughter pizza. Kessler can’t remember the particulars. Today is Thursday, he knows that much. Thursday and he is, ouch, twenty-four hours late. Nora is in transit. Or maybe, too, she has yanked her phone out of the wall.

  No, don’t flatter yourself with that notion. A phone is a phone; if anything has come asunder, Kessler, it is just your own personal connection. I see your lips moving, Mr. Kessler, but I can’t hear a word. He has been in Washington playing cowboy, and he has concealed important facts from her, and now he has stood her up. Kessler realizes what he can expect, whenever he does reach her: merely the cold polite voice and the fast good-bye.

  He makes his other calls. This doesn’t take long, and again Sidney Gondelman’s memory for gossip proves to be very helpful. Gondelman has supplied a suggestion as to where he might find Roger Nye.

  After the great purge of Claude Sparrow and his close accomplices, back in 1973, when McAtee tossed them all out and got himself a new Counterintelligence staff, Nye evidently went off to live in the boondocks of Shenandoah County, Virginia. He had a piece of family land, it was said. A useless but genteel stump farm. So far as Gondelman knew, he stayed out there. “I doubt that he would talk to you, though,” Gondelman said. “From what I’ve heard about his state of mind.” Naturally Kessler pays no attention to that part. And there turns out to be only one Roger Nye with a listed telephone in the county.

  “I don’t know,” says an arid faraway voice that has answered to the name. “No. I don’t know. Talk about what?”

  “Counterintelligence,” Kessler says vaguely. “The reorganization. When you left.” It has come time to be careful about what he says over the telephone; anyway, Nye should be able to read through this language.

  “I can’t speak about that.”

  “Claude Sparrow has.” Kessler’s only point of leverage. Ordinarily he would be much more discreet on behalf of a confidential source. Circumstances are no longer ordinary, but even that is no excuse. I’ll make it up to you somehow, Mr. Sparrow. If not in this life, then the next.

  “Are you calling from Washington?”

  “No. But I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Don’t come down on my account,” says Roger Nye.

  “I’ll be there regardless.”

  “I don’t know,” Nye repeats still again, sounding faintly less negative. “Call me tomorrow, then.”

  28

  GOING BACK TO the Tabard Inn might be a mistake but he does it anyway. If Lovesong and Buddyboy are still eager to find him, let them find him. Kessler doesn’t care. He will gladly take a half hour to look through their mug book, sure, so long as they don’t interfere with his own researches. Let them find him, let them watch him, let them follow him; let them try and stop him.

  The ferocious little man in the rust-colored jacket is another matter. By him, Kessler would much prefer not to be found. Possibly a change of hotels might help. Or not. If Kessler really wanted to be safely invisible, though, he should have stayed up in New Haven and dismissed the whole affair from his attention—and at this point even that might be insufficient. Kessler is not philosophical about the prospect of getting stabbed to death or thrown off another tall building or next time who knows what. Shot, maybe. Like Barry. On the contrary he is quietly, grimly terrified. The danger has made itself too real to be thrilling, and he doesn’t consider mortal peril as any part of the romance of his profession, or even a necessary evil. It ain’t necessary to him. Granted, he feels a strong compulsion over this story and now also a giddy sense of momentum—but to die for it, Kessler judges, would be just dumb. Banal. So conceivably he is making a bad mistake, coming down to Washington again at all. That’s as far as his thoughts on the subject have carried. He intends to be careful. The grebelike woman checks him in and gives him his old room back.

  “I’m not here,” Kessler says.

  She stares across vacantly, so he repeats: “I’m not here. Anyone calls, anyone stops by, you do not have a Michael Kessler registered. Earlier in the week you did, fine. But not now. Is that all right?”

  She shrugs an indifferent yes.

  “I need total privacy this time.”

  “Total privacy,” she echoes him, a little sardonically. Yeah, played this game a hundred times, is the implication. Then she adds: “What if it’s a woman calling?”

  “Same thing,” Kessler says. “Though it won’t be an issue.” He lays out his credit card and three twenties. “I can pay cash if that’ll make things easier. Here’s one night. I’ll go to a bank tomorrow and get more.”

  “Never mind,” says the desk clerk. She takes his card only, and rolls her eyes. “Trust me.”

  Early in the morning he calls the Roger Nye number again.

  Nye still sounds timorous and distant, more distant than just three hours west into the foothills of the Alleghenies; what he really sounds like is a case of bad nerves at the end of a weak party line somewhere in rural Nebraska. But to Kessler’s surprise, to Kessler’s joy, he consents to talk. Evidently eight hours of good country sleep (and very likely a phone consultation with Claude Sparrow, Kessler suspects) have made Roger Nye more willing to share his memories. It pleases Kessler to imagine that Claude Sparrow may have personally endorsed him, Kessler, as an innocent journalistic idler to whom one could safely tell old war stories. Neither Sparrow nor Roger Nye can know that Kessler is now downright dangerous. Or so he fancies.

  Nye propo
ses a time and a place. Fine, Kessler says, though he will have to hurry. By all means, he thinks, I’ll be out there before you can change your mind. He scribbles down the long shaggy-dog set of directions that Nye drawls to him. Then he reads them back and Nye says: “Mm. That should get you here. Unless you get lost.” Half an hour later Kessler stops, just short of a ramp onto the Beltway, for gas and a map of the state of Virginia.

  Then he points himself toward a town called Strasburg, beyond the Blue Ridge, in some halcyon woody hollow of Shenandoah County.

  Kessler is cautiously, breathlessly optimistic. Intuition tells him that Roger Nye could settle this whole chase with a few sentences. With just a nod of the head, possibly. Here’s what I think I’ve discovered, Mr. Nye. Yes or no, Mr. Nye. But will he? It was Gondelman’s guess that Nye would not want to talk, not to a stranger, certainly not to a journalist—and the very fact that Nye is granting Kessler an audience seems therefore promising. When the stones speak, they do not lie. From what Gondelman said, Roger Nye is an embittered man who wouldn’t waste his words, if he chose to offer any at all.

  The gossip, as it reached Gondelman, had suggested that Nye never recovered from being fired. He seemed to have taken it quite hard, harder than others who fell at the same time. The end of Claude Sparrow’s Counterintelligence section was not simply, for Nye, the end of a job. Maybe in some ways he took it harder than Sparrow himself. And certainly he was more affected than the likes of Mel Pokorny, who turned up a lucrative new situation in the private security business within months. Roger Nye merely went off to the country and sulked.

  He had been slightly older than Pokorny and the other deputies, already in his late fifties then, a contemporary of Sparrow, and that could have partly accounted for the difference. Personal history and character explain the rest. Nye was a serious, fastidious, unflaggingly loyal man, by Gondelman’s account, well suited to providing the day-to-day execution under a difficult boss like Sparrow. He was old enough to have been in the Agency all its existence and in the OSS before that. He had done a tour as a desk officer in Covert Action, run agents for a while somewhere in Latin America, then served under Claude Sparrow at the station in Vienna, and come back to join the Counterintelligence staff at the time, in 1955, when Sparrow became its chief. He had family money and a doctorate in economics from Chicago. Without question he could have found consulting work after the purge, if he had wanted to, Gondelman told Kessler; maybe he could have picked up a faculty appointment, if he preferred academia, or a dignified sinecure at some right-wing institute. But none of that happened. He didn’t need the income or, evidently, the further aggravation. He was just purely soured, Gondelman said. He had taken his dudgeon off to the Alleghenies and he stayed out there, devoting his time and his energy and his anger, Gondelman guessed, to reading Seneca and splitting firewood, or whatever it is that country squires do. So far as Gondelman knew, he was alone. Nye’s wife had been an upper-crust Venezuelan woman of half-German extraction, brought back from the duty down there, but she was now dead. Gondelman could say that much for sure because he had gone to the funeral himself, during that period when he and Nye served on the panel together. Nye in his grief had been private and self-contained; he had thanked Gondelman for showing up; Gondelman never did hear what the wife had died from. There were grown children, Gondelman thought, though he didn’t know where or how many. Roger Nye had been much respected and even fairly well liked at the Agency, not just within Counterintelligence but along the other corridors too. Gondelman himself had nothing bad to say. They had worked smoothly together, Nye and himself. Nye was brisk and professional without being a robot, and at least in the early phase of the panel he seemed to be trying hard to produce a report that Scott Wickes would be willing to sign. It was notable that, despite the big schism, even Jed McAtee would usually hear Nye out. Some people were surprised, in fact, Gondelman said, to see Nye’s career get washed out to sea along with Claude Sparrow’s. Some people thought that Nye would be spared. Some even thought that he was the logical replacement, the best choice as a new Counterintelligence chief. Kessler recalls all these potentially useful details as he drives west on the interstate, remembering also one other bit of data that leaves him puzzled.