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

by David Quammen

  And the other thing about sleep is that it would allow him to empty his brain, which also might be either good or bad. He would love to make even a brief mental getaway, forgetting Viktor Tronko and Pokorny and Nye and the whole cavalcade of poor judgments by which Kessler has brought himself here; but he has a sense that, right now, this minute, his mind should be bubbling with ingenious ideas for escape. Cut the canvas of the cot into long strips and tie them together and then do something or other with them. But do what? Anyway the canvas is rotten, asshole. Then break a wooden leg off the cot and use it to, um, well, use it to bash Roger Nye’s head open when he steps back into the room. If he ever does step back into the room. If not, there is always suicide by bludgeoning, a fate that Kessler richly deserves. Or he could stand the cot on its end, maybe, and climb up it like a stepladder. Good, but a stepladder to where? These are just a few of the ingenious ideas he would be missing if he were asleep. He sits down again on the cold floor, spine to the wall, coat wrapped up around him, and lowers his head onto his knees.

  Not long afterward the light comes on, blinding him with its cheery glare.

  The man who calls himself Max Rosen consults his watch. He has waited an hour, and there is no sign of Kessler. He has not heard so much as a footfall on the stairs. All right. He is prepared to wait longer—a great deal longer, in fact. He knows how. But it has come time to allow himself to open a fresh pack of cigarettes. By a habit of parsimony, he realizes, he has been unconsciously rationing his supply.

  True, he may be here half the night. No matter. After thirteen years and more of keeping his peace, he can certainly wait another few hours. If the cigarettes run out, they run out. He is indulging a reckless instinct tonight, in disregard for the practices of habit and caution.

  He suspected at first that this Michael Kessler would go away, like the other journalists who over the years have come sniffing. There have been enough. He has spoken with a few of those others himself, and in a single instance the man even knew his identity. His former identity. But that man was the crude slapdash type, a bounty hunter of strident headlines and startling leads merely, a daily reporter with a great reputation and all the worst traits of his breed and not someone to whom any sane individual would entrust delicate personal revelations. Maybe it isn’t sane ever—through even the most carefully chosen conduit—to make that sort of revelation. Maybe it just isn’t. The man who calls himself Max Rosen still feels enormous wariness about this. He feels distrust, cynicism, a remnant of mortal fear. He could probably lose his job simply for being here, in Kessler’s hotel room. Lose the job and he would lose also his protection, such as it is, at exactly the moment he might most need it. But he also feels the same pressure from inside, the same bitterness and frustration at events, at appearances, the same abyssal loneliness, that he has felt for thirteen years and more. He suspected at first that Michael Kessler would just go away like the rest—inconclusively, settling for a lesser though more dramatic truth or even none at all. And that may still be the case. Or maybe not. Maybe Kessler is the one.

  Ask yourself, he told Kessler, why Viktor Tronko was not given more to offer, if he had come on a mission for Moscow. Ask yourself why his dowry of useful secrets was so meager. I have been, Kessler said. The man who calls himself Max Rosen remembers their words precisely.

  I have been, Kessler said. I get nowhere.

  Then ask Claude Sparrow.

  I will.

  He liked that. He liked Michael Kessler for that directness. Of course Kessler will not have learned the answer from Sparrow, if only because Sparrow himself never learned.

  I will, Kessler said. What about you? Do you have an opinion?

  Ask yourself, he said, how could it serve Moscow’s purposes to send a man who lied so poorly? How could it satisfy Moscow, for Viktor Tronko to spend three years in a concrete cell?

  I assume that they wouldn’t have planned on that three years, Kessler said.

  Don’t assume. Ask yourself, he thinks. The man with the habit of patience glances again at his watch.

  Kessler shields his eyes with a hand but still they won’t open. After all these hours of total darkness, the glare of the overhead bulb is like vinegar on his corneas. He only knows by the sound of the door that someone has entered.

  He assumes that the pistol is once again pointed at him and hopes that the damn thing doesn’t have a jumpy trigger. Before this experience Kessler never realized that the mere pointing of a loaded gun in one’s direction does not seem in any sense a formality, a gesture of coercion, but instead itself represents—just the goddamn pointing—an outrageous, life-threatening act. That sucker could go off. It makes him angry. It inspires him with a strong urge to drive his fist, eventually, against Roger Nye’s splintering teeth. Meanwhile of course he is again very scared.

  “What,” Kessler says sullenly.

  “Stand up,” says the voice of Roger Nye.

  Kessler stands.

  “Take off your coat and toss it aside. Not at me. Aside.”

  A careful man. Kessler obeys. Squinting fiercely, he is getting his vision back. Nye tells him to turn toward the wall. He obeys. Lean into it, Nye says. No, not with your hands—brace against your head, arms out wide. Kessler obeys. Obviously Nye knows what he is doing because Kessler feels helpless in this gimpy position, and his forehead hurts against the concrete. Now empty your pockets, Nye says. Kessler moves slowly, dropping his car keys and his pocketknife and his wallet and his handkerchief and about two dollars in change onto the floor. The latest notebook is in his coat.

  “Fine. Arms out again, now.”

  Nye’s hand dodges in to pat over his body thoroughly, searching no doubt for those derringers in trick holsters and switchblades strapped on with duct tape that any sensible journalist carries. Kessler is unarmed. If I were smart enough to have brought a weapon, Mr. Nye, I would have been smart enough not to come. When Nye squeezes the arm bandage, Kessler yelps but does not pull away. Nye squeezes it several times more—not sadistically, merely to assure himself.

  “Nothing in there but gauze and pus,” Kessler says.

  Nye steps back and Kessler stays as he is. This body search has brought Kessler a new small flush of hope, seeming as it does to imply that he will be alive a while longer. You don’t frisk a person right before shooting him dead, correct? Much easier to reverse the order. And there is relief also in knowing that he hasn’t been trapped and abandoned, as he feared. Altogether, Kessler is glad for the attention. He hears the door scrape again.

  But he holds his position dutifully, head forward, rear arched, arms out, like a timorous child caught by the camera’s shutter at the lip of a diving board. He holds it to the point of pain. Then he says: “Can I turn?”

  No answer, so he straightens himself gently and turns. Nye is gone. The door is sealed. For that one too I’ll get you, Kessler thinks. His wallet and his keys and his pocketknife are gone also. Worst of all, so is his coat.

  This time the light stays on.

  It is no more than what he was asking himself, throughout those three years of arduous lying and those thousand lonely confused nights. He had nothing else to occupy his brain, so much of that time, except memory and regret and the unfinished business of solving this grotesque riddle that had been made of his life. So he wondered, yes. He asked. How can it satisfy Moscow for me to rot away here, abused and disbelieved, in a concrete cell?

  He was genuinely bewildered. How can such epic futility be of use to Dmitri, if there is such a person, or to anyone else? The man who calls himself Max Rosen remembers all those pertinent questions which he posed to himself and offered to Michael Kessler, and remembers them verbatim, as precisely as if they were part of his own legend. Ask yourself why Moscow should have chosen so badly. If they chose Tronko at all.

  This last was in fact easy to answer, having never been in doubt. They did not choose him, no.
Viktor Semyonovich was the one who had chosen, and badly. They merely chose to exploit him, after he had delivered himself up.

  He was lost the moment he stepped on the flight to come back from Rome.

  Because in Moscow they knew, somehow, of his first contact with the Americans almost as soon as he had made the decision himself. It took them six days to find out, possibly less. They knew that fast, yet they were cagey. No peremptory telegram (like the one he later concocted, on instructions, in Vienna) had summoned him back, nor was there any ominous hint, and he left on his scheduled flight from the Rome airport. He was understandably nervous as he boarded that plane, but nevertheless confident, still utterly unwitting. Only to be arrested when his foot touched the tarmac at Vnukovo.

  He supposes, in retrospect, that it must have been Dmitri himself who betrayed him so promptly. Six days would have been roughly sufficient, given the famous refusal to use radio. Time enough for a drop to be signaled and made, and then for a courier to travel between Washington and Moscow. That was quick work but not hasty. Anyway Moscow would have had more time if they needed it, since Viktor Semyonovich was returning voluntarily. What difference if they had arrested him in his office a day or two later? He was coming home regardless. Tanya was there; the boy was there. He could fathom treason against the Motherland, perhaps, but not desertion of them.

  It was a routine arrest and a routine interrogation. He spent three days in a cell at the Lubyanka and then close to eleven months at Lefortovo.

  The eleven months of abuse and interrogation were actually rather longer than average, but still this phase could be considered routine in the sense that Viktor Semyonovich was one of the stubborn type, of which there were always a few, and was dealt with the same as other stubborn ones, and his interrogation progressed inexorably albeit slowly to its foredestined conclusion wherein Viktor Semyonovich’s personal interrogator got what was wanted: a complete confession. The confession as written was also routine, even formulaic, for the articles under which Viktor Semyonovich was charged. His interrogator was a certain Morozov, whose first name and patronymic Viktor Semyonovich never knew.

  Morozov was a major and a law graduate with the soul of a thug. Viktor Semyonovich found cause during those eleven months to suspect that Major Morozov was not just grotesquely cruel, sick with evil, but also imbalanced in a more clinical way. Besides the rest, Morozov in moments of raging frustration sometimes spat on him, frenetically, like a hysterical child.

  Of the two prisons, Viktor Semyonovich much preferred the Lubyanka. It seemed horrific at first but after a month in Lefortovo he looked back on it almost fondly. His cell at the Lubyanka was larger, the food ration more nearly adequate; he was allowed use of the toilet whenever he wanted and, most importantly, they were still letting him sleep. Obviously the cells of the Lubyanka, limited in number but conveniently located, were devoted only to temporary uses. Either you were shot there in the basement or in the courtyard, as in the old times, or you were processed on. Viktor Semyonovich was processed on. Another merit of the Lubyanka stay was that there was no Morozov.

  After his three days of benign neglect he was marched back up to the courtyard and put in a van. On the side of this van, Viktor Semyonovich noticed, were painted the words DRINK SOVIET CHAMPAGNE but in the back it carried only himself and a guard. The ride across the city to Lefortovo didn’t take long. He was admitted past a desk at which sat a businesslike officer who required Viktor Semyonovich to sign himself in. He signed a large ledger, writing through a narrow slot in a metal plate that had been clamped into position there over the page, obscuring every name but his own. This and certain other quaint measures, both at Lefortovo and at the Lubyanka, were evidently intended to reinforce the illusion that he was utterly alone in his fate. The strip search was more thorough here at Lefortovo. While Viktor Semyonovich stood watching, naked, the seams of his jacket were slit open, the shoulder padding was pulled out, the cuffs of his trousers undone; his trouser pockets were slashed, not to discover anything there but presumably because he wouldn’t need pockets anymore; his clothes when he got them back were rags and tatters. His belt was impounded. Before he could dress again, they shaved his head and his armpits and his pubic area. Then a doctor was brought in, a curt woman wearing a white coat and rubber gloves. She peered around under his tongue, under his scrotum, between his buttocks, looking for contraband. Finding none, she left without a word. Viktor Semyonovich was taken to his cell, where he immediately learned the rules about sleeping.

  The rules about sleeping were diabolically simple. It was forbidden—nye polozhna!—for the prisoner to lie down or even to close his eyes at any time during the day, from first rousing at six in the morning until ten at night. This was enforced by a guard who glanced at regular intervals through the wolf’s eye in the door—every minute or so, all day long—and shouted minaciously at any sign of napping. Refusal to heed the first shouted warning could lead to a week in a hard-punishment cell, down in the basement. Sleep was permitted only between the hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. That schedule did not seem so bad to Viktor Semyonovich until he realized, after another few days, that the interrogation itself would be conducted chiefly between 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. At about midnight the first night he was shaken awake and led off on a hike, along the catwalk and down a stairway and then through a carpeted corridor, to meet a burly man in uniform.

  “My name is Morozov,” the man said. “I am a major in the Organs of State Security. You will sit there, and then we can begin.”

  So they began.

  Always these sessions took place in the same nondescript room, furnished only with a desk and a comfortable chair and a telephone for Morozov, stark fluorescent lighting, and a straight chair for Viktor Semyonovich. Sometimes Morozov would unholster his Tokarev pistol and let it lie within view on the desk, or even, in more vehement moments, brandish it at Viktor Semyonovich and slap him across the cheekbones with its barrel while threatening to shoot him right there in the room for his intractable refusal to cooperate. Morozov would demand that Viktor Semyonovich sign the statements, the confessional depositions (the “protocols,” as Morozov called them) that the major had written out in his own laborious but sloppy longhand, and before long Viktor Semyonovich was obliging him. He signed a page describing his agreed-upon signal code with the Americans, for instance, which code there had never been time for him to use; and a page confessing the anti-Soviet attitudes that had led him to his act of treason. Unsatisfied by these admissions, Morozov only demanded more, a full confession, a complete account of the conspiracy into which Viktor Semyonovich had supposedly entered—by which the major meant, other names. He wanted other names. Who had recruited Viktor Semyonovich for the Americans? Who had counseled him to make contact through the economic attaché at the embassy in Rome? With whom had he shared his plans and ideas, here in Moscow? Who were his accomplices? “We already have these names, of course,” Morozov would say. “We know these people. We know who they are. Most have already been arrested. But it will go easier on you if you confirm what we know. Such a service to the people’s justice will certainly mitigate your own sentence. For your sake, Viktor Semyonovich, I advise you to confess fully before those others do.” It wasn’t convincing. And, convincing or not, to this Viktor Semyonovich said no. He could not confess any more than he already had. There were no other names. There was no conspiracy—except the pathetic, incipient one between himself and the Americans. No one had recruited him. He had recruited himself: a walk-in. He had chosen the economic attaché at random, there having been no other American in Rome with whom Viktor Semyonovich got an opportunity of contact, and the fact that this man himself proved to be a CIA officer should be understood as a matter of pure luck. Good luck, Viktor Semyonovich had imagined at the time; now he saw that it had been very bad luck indeed. But only luck. There were no other names. If there had been, Viktor Semyonovich would be only too eager by this point to supply them. Morozov
would then embark on a fit of shouting, or lurch to his feet and stride the four steps from his desk to whack Viktor Semyonovich across the face with his pistol.

  Viktor Semyonovich’s nose was broken during the second week and never repaired. No medical attention was given in Lefortovo to such minor complaints. The nose healed or at least fused back on its own, leaving just a lump along the bridge and a slight crook to the left, imperceptible to anyone who didn’t look into his face carefully from straight in front.

  The man who calls himself Max Rosen rubs his fingers down the line of that lumpy bend now in the darkness of Kessler’s room. Morozov was left-handed.

  At first Viktor Semyonovich had resolved to deny everything, to hold firm against all the charges, with a notion that this might somehow protect Tanya and the boy; but he discovered quickly that it wasn’t possible. At least it wasn’t possible for him. Another man, maybe. Or maybe it would have been impossible for anyone. Viktor Semyonovich himself, in any case, was a stubborn type but no prodigy of physical and moral strength. Without sleep and without adequate food, he just couldn’t stand up against the insistence of Morozov. So he broke. He gave Morozov a series of confessions and he signed them. Article 64 of the criminal code: Yes, I did that. Article 58, Section One: Yes, I am guilty. It happened shamefully soon, Viktor Semyonovich felt at the time—within twenty days of his transfer to Lefortovo. He was a weaker wretch even than he had imagined, or else Morozov and the techniques of interrogation were much stronger. Viktor Semyonovich had composed in his dulled fuddled mind a rationalization whereby he could pretend to himself that Tanya and the boy might not be harmed by his admissions of treason and espionage—they might even somehow be helped—and then he offered himself up. Morozov was pleased and complacent. Viktor Semyonovich was rewarded with one full night’s sleep. He fell into a gloom of self-loathing that lasted for only the next day, a long quiet day in his cell, to be jarringly interrupted the next night when it became clear that Morozov was far from satisfied. The confessions of personal guilt were, to Morozov, just a tantalizing start. Now the major wanted those other names. He wanted details of the conspiracy. But Viktor Semyonovich was too stubborn and too stupid to invent any.