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

by David Quammen

  “Start with what you know.”

  “Everything,” Kessler says.

  He begins quacking about Mel Pokorny, the clown-faced arch deceiver. Mel was Dmitri and he fooled you all, Kessler says. Not just Jed McAtee and Eames but Claude Sparrow and you yourself, Kessler says, who had worked beside him for years. But don’t feel bad because he fooled me too, Kessler says. I think he had plans for me, the gullible young journalist who would be an eager conduit for his leaks. That could have been very embarrassing. I shudder. It might still prove to be. Of course I would never have killed him for it, Kessler says.

  Roger Nye draws his hands out of his pockets and clasps them on his lap.

  Whoever did kill him was someone he knew, Kessler says. I know that from Mr. Biaggio, the old grocer. Mel recognized the voice and he understood what was coming and so he panicked. I know it was a white man in a gaudy ski mask. I don’t know whether or not the man had liver spots on his hands, Kessler says, but I suppose Mr. Biaggio might remember. Kessler grins masochistically.

  Roger Nye folds his arms.

  “I also know about Ivan, in Moscow. McAtee’s own precious bird. I know that Ivan has fallen silent. Missing, presumed dead. The KGB finally caught him and squashed him, evidently.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because otherwise Claude Sparrow would never have told me about him.” It’s a small bit of deduction for which Kessler takes no special pride. “And because, otherwise, Mel himself would still be alive. In a funny way, they were linked. Ivan had scuttled Mel’s career, but Ivan’s own delicate position in Moscow also left Mel with a strange sort of immunity. Immunity from prosecution for espionage. Also from death. Probably Mel never even knew he had been found out. Now we’re into the realm of speculation, admittedly. What I only think I know. You want to hear this too?”

  Roger Nye nods politely.

  “Okay. I think Jed McAtee got something from Ivan. It was something of very exceptional value. Not just an offering of information, most likely, but an actual physical item. An artifact. McAtee paid for it with the life of Daniel Petrosian, the physicist. What it was, I think, was the proof of Dmitri’s identity.”

  Roger Nye makes a stolid audience.

  “A thumbprint on a receipt, for instance. But then Mel didn’t do what he did for money, is my guess, so there probably weren’t any receipts. A photograph, maybe. A grainy old photo of Mel Pokorny and another man, say, conferring together on a park bench in suburban Virginia or Maryland. The date of this photo that I’m imagining would be March of 1958. The other man would be a Russian. He would be a beetle-browed guy in a pair of clunky eyeglasses. His name would be L. V. Nechaev. How am I doing?”

  Roger Nye says nothing. That doesn’t matter because Kessler now has his own manic momentum.

  “Or maybe it wasn’t a photograph. But something. A piece of physical evidence, solid and incontestable. Something damning enough to convince even Claude Sparrow, when McAtee pushed it in front of his face. God, how Jed McAtee must have relished that moment. And how Sparrow must have hated it. Two Americans Contemplating the Identity of Dmitri. The problem then was to get rid of Mel without blowing the game for Ivan. So people had to be sacrificed. Not just Pokorny alone. You all had to be thrown out together. The great purge of Counterintelligence. Forced retirement for everyone in the vicinity, with wiretap abuses as the plausible pretext. I commend you for your self-abnegation, Mr. Nye.”

  “Claude Sparrow didn’t tell you this.”

  “No. Of course not. I’ve got a half dozen sources. Different bits from different people. I’ve left my footprints all over Washington.”

  “I know a little something about your footprints.”

  “Yes. Then you know I’ve been a busy boy. And it’s all in my notebooks,” Kessler says proudly.

  Roger Nye reaches into the side pocket of the flannel jacket. Oh lordy, here comes the pistol again, Kessler thinks. He feels another instant of gut-clutching terror before Nye pulls out the empty notebook and drops it on the concrete beside Kessler’s feet.

  “Three others,” says Kessler. “Those other three are full.”

  “Where are they?”

  The advantage of surrendering so perilously much truth as he has, Kessler hopes, is to buy credibility for one good little lie.

  “I mailed them to myself,” he says. “Registered packet, care of my editor at Rolling Stone. He expects me to show up there sometime Monday. His name is Terry McDonell.” Kessler spells the last name for a touch of verisimilitude, though suddenly Nye doesn’t seem interested. “You can call him and confirm that, if you want.”

  In a half hour it will be dawn. He can’t afford to wait until dawn; he can’t afford to be seen climbing back out over the roof. Evidently Kessler has found female companionship somewhere, or else drunk himself stupid and spent the night asleep in the back seat of his car. The man who calls himself Max Rosen is mildly annoyed. He will have to try again tonight. Maybe this time he should take the chance of making contact by telephone first. Or maybe Kessler is just the wrong person after all.

  He doesn’t really know anything about Michael Kessler. Maybe the prudent thing is to forget Kessler, forget about one journalist versus another, forget about talking to anybody. Go silent to the grave. But he doesn’t want to be prudent—only cautious. And he does want to talk. In any case, he now has another full day to reconsider. He empties ashes and butts from the water glass into the side pocket of his suit jacket. He rinses the glass in the sink, wipes it out with his handkerchief, sets it back exactly where he found it. Of course Kessler will still smell the stale smoke and know that someone has been here, if Kessler has any wit at all.

  He does want to talk. There is so much he has never told anyone, so many large and little things each adding to the pressure within his brain: from the champagne van, to the death of Landau the dentist, to that afternoon of the last year in the Vault when Pokorny forgot himself momentarily and—

  This thought is interrupted.

  As he steps out the door of Kessler’s room he sees a man walking toward him across the landing.

  For an instant in the dim light he thinks of Kessler himself, arriving back. But this man is shorter than Kessler. This man wears a rust-colored leather jacket. This man raises one hand, in which is held a long-barrel .22 pistol, and fires a shot.

  He hears the nasal slap of that shot, despite everything. Then he is on the carpet, twitching and coughing just briefly as disorder pours out into blackness through the raw channel torn in his heart. The amber spectacles have been jarred off his face. The man in the leather jacket leans over his body. The muzzle of the .22 pistol is pressed hard into the socket of his left eye, forcing the eyeball aside. But even before the second shot has been fired, Viktor Tronko is dead.

  31

  KESSLER HAS SLEPT. He doesn’t know how long. Long enough to flatten his right hip against the concrete and put another good cramp into his neck. He sits up again, sullen and desolate, into the corner of the two walls.

  Still no food, still no water, and his body is still quaking in a continuous spasm of cold. He dreads the prospect of spending another day or two in this place—dreads it almost as much as he dreads seeing Roger Nye reappear with the gun. Kessler doesn’t know whether he said the right things or whether Nye believed what he did say. He knows that Nye certainly won’t be foolish enough to call the magazine, and that Terry McDonell wouldn’t tell him anything if he did; but he doesn’t know whether that really matters. He doesn’t know whether he even wants to guess what Nye is likely to do. There is quite a lot that Kessler doesn’t know. He sits for another half hour in his self-piteous stupor before he notices the door of the Vault. The door is slightly ajar.

  Kessler stands, a difficult maneuver in itself. For a long while he simply stares. Then he shuffles across the cell, moving lamely on one good leg and one that has suffered
some temporary neurological outage. The heavy steel door is unlocked, yes, and a crack of daylight showing. Kessler hooks his fingers into the gap. Gently, slowly, he pulls the door open until it makes a small grinding chirp against the floor. He stops. Possibly he should call out. He doesn’t want to startle Nye and be shot unnecessarily. Unnecessarily? Bullshit, it will be highly unnecessary from Kessler’s viewpoint no matter how it happens. He slides through the opening.

  He pads quietly down the corridor. He readies himself to do something exotically daring, like wrestle an old man for a loaded .45 automatic, or break into a hysterical sprint. He wishes suddenly that he had ripped that leg off the cot after all, and brought it along, but too late now. Approaching the archway into the front room, he goes dizzy from forgetting to breathe. Again he stops. Draws some air into his lungs. All right, what now? Feeling idiotic and at the same time scared mightily, he peeks around the corner. The room is bare. Empty of every trace except that, near the front door, draped over the folding chair, is Kessler’s long wool coat.

  My coat. Kessler walks over, picks it up. He looks out the window. Nye’s old Ford is gone. His own car is still parked among the weeds, sunlight banging off its windshield. A crisp and gorgeous February morning has unfolded upon the Virginia countryside.

  Favoring his bandaged arm, Kessler gets himself into the coat. Warmth at last, but now he is shivering worse than ever. He begins to relax. In one pocket he finds his car keys. His wallet and his knife are there also. In the other pocket his hand comes upon a piece of stiff paper, smooth on one side. By touch he knows immediately that this is a photograph. Oh joy, Nye has left him a photographic souvenir. Kessler stands paralyzed with both hands in his coat pockets. For a giddy instant he expects to see the faces of Pokorny and L. V. Nechaev.

  No, not Pokorny, not L. V. Nechaev, not Kessler on a park bench with Claude Sparrow. The photo is of Nora.

  It is a candid shot, black and white, taken with a good camera. Nora is shown talking to an older man whom Kessler does not at first recognize. The man is gaunt; he wears a turtleneck and a goatee. Not her type. Is Kessler supposed to be jealous or something? On the other hand if they had kidnapped her, Nora and the gaunt man wouldn’t be looking so amiable. Then Kessler remembers Athol Fugard, the Afrikaner playwright, who was in town Wednesday with his film about Eugène Marais.

  I know a little something about your footprints, Nye said. The message is clear enough.

  Kessler does not linger to admire the fine country morning. He drives back down the winding gravel and under the trestle and then on through the town of Strasburg without paying much heed to its only stop sign, getting himself onto the interstate and clear of Shenandoah County as quickly and quietly as possible. He is still dazed. His brain is clanging away with a renewed version of the same headache he has had for most of five days; no doubt dehydration and caffeine deprivation have by now added themselves to the causes. He pushes up past the speed limit and opens his window. He drives that way for an hour. At a Dunkin’ Donuts in Fairfax, just a few miles from the Beltway, he stops for coffee. His hand shakes as he raises the cup.

  He asks also for a large glass of water. Gulps that one and asks for a refill. Hunched like a gnome at the counter, he gets several minutes of peace before Dexter Lovesong slides onto the stool beside him and orders coffee and three maple bars.

  “Where were you?” says Kessler.

  Lovesong appears mildly amused by the question. Like Kessler, he hasn’t shaved recently. His nose is still crooked, and shows a small discoloration along the bridge. “I was around. At a distance.”

  “I thought you might stage some sort of dazzling rescue.”

  “No. Really? That’s kind of flattering, but no. This time, Kessler, a dazzling rescue was definitely not in the cards.”

  “I was in serious danger.”

  “Correct.”

  “I could have disappeared permanently. Never a trace.”

  “That isn’t so. If they killed you, I was going straight to the FBI.” Lovesong pushes a maple bar halfway into his mouth and mashes it off. He talks while he chews. “As it is, I’ll just resign.”

  Kessler absorbs that information silently. The coffee is strong and scorched and several hours old and it tastes glorious. He orders a maple bar for himself. “Who do you mean by they? All I saw was Roger Nye.”

  “There was a small confab. Nye and McAtee and that little prick partner of mine. Former partner.”

  “Buddyboy?”

  “Buddyboy, yeah. But he was just there to open doors and run messages. It was Buddyboy who drove McAtee out from Langley.”

  “What about Claude Sparrow?”

  “No. No sign of him. I think Sparrow isn’t part of that club anymore. I think Sparrow these days is only just what he seems: an old guy who sits on park benches a lot.”

  “Talking to any fool who will listen,” says Kessler.

  “Talking to journalists, yeah,” says Lovesong.

  They finish their breakfasts. Kessler lays out a twenty and motions to the waitress that he is paying for both. He leaves her two dollars. He begins struggling into his coat. Lovesong says: “A smart person in your shoes, Kessler, will not go back to that hotel.”

  “Why won’t he?”

  “They had a death there, early this morning. A murder. Cops everywhere right now.”

  Kessler’s shoulders drop. He feels very tired and bruised. He wants the lurching behavior of his stomach to stop. “Anybody I know?”

  Lovesong nods. “Under the name Max Rosen, I suppose. He was coming out of your room. It looks like a piece of professional work. Might of been, he was mistaken for you.”

  Kessler sits back down. He is more upset than he would have expected. It must be cumulative. He thinks of the frigid evening on the rooftops and of the cigarette pack and of the man he takes to have been Sol Lentzer. After a moment he says: “They’ll want to talk with me.”

  “Who?”

  “The police.”

  “That’s being fixed.”

  “They’ll know who I am. I was registered.”

  “Forget about it. Trust me.”

  “My bag is still there.”

  “Anything irreplaceable in it?”

  Kessler considers. “Not really.”

  “Buy a new bag,” says Lovesong.

  So Kessler turns north at the Beltway and keeps driving. He feels barely fit to be on the road. He stops often for more coffee and eats a big greasy lunch and spends an hour asleep on the front seat at a rest area, finally limping into New Haven sometime after dark. It seems a prudent idea to go straight to the hospital and let someone look at his arm. From a phone in the waiting lounge of the emergency room, he dials Nora’s number. He wants to confirm in his mind that she is still safe, still unwitting and unmolested, in the little house on the far side of town. He isn’t sure what he will do if there is no answer. But there is an answer.

  “Are we on speaking terms, you and I?” says Kessler.

  “Of course,” Nora says. “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m sorry I stood you up.”

  “Yes. Right. I was pretty annoyed for a couple of hours.”

  “I have a long woolly excuse, which I’ll spare you for the moment. The short version is, I was working, and I forgot. I’m sorry.” He pulls in a breath and waits.

  “Let’s say you owe me for the babysitter. Roughly equivalent to a spaghetti dinner.”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “That would be nice,” she says. “How was Washington?”

  Kessler says: “Don’t ask.”

  32

  HE SHOULD CALL Patsy Koontz in Colorado. He should call the Rockville police and alert them about Barry’s body. He doesn’t. Kessler faces the new day feeling morally and mentally disheveled. He should make the required phone calls and see Nora and
then disappear on a week’s vacation somewhere for the sake of putting his thoughts in order. He should be good to his body, especially the arm, and rest his brain just enough to restore its usefulness. He should reach some decisions and take some precautions. Instead he drinks two cups of coffee, stares at his mail without opening any, and finally goes out for a long walk, avoiding the vicinity of Biaggio’s grocery.

  Around noon he returns. He remembers to take his antibiotic. He makes a third cup of coffee, this one roughly the consistency of transmission oil, and carries it into the office. Seating himself very straight at his desk, he pulls forward the two-inch pile of typescript.

  The story, as Kessler has been trying to tell it, begins at the end. Eugène Marais killed himself with a shotgun in March of 1936.

  In the course of his sixty-four years he had been a journalist, a newspaper publisher, an important Afrikaans poet, a medical student, a lawyer, a gunrunner during the Boer War, and a morphine addict. He had also spent three years living out of a hut in the Waterberg mountains of South Africa, among a troop of wild chacma baboons, making observations and developing some eccentric ideas about primate behavior. And he studied termites. Marais is mainly remembered today, by those few who remember him at all, as the author of two books, neither of which appeared in print during his lifetime. The first of these two was The Soul of the White Ant, his mad masterpiece about termites, a paperback edition of which caught Kessler’s attention on a rack in a drugstore in Kenya.

  The second book wasn’t published until thirty years after Marais’s death. Either the manuscript had been genuinely lost or it had been placed safely away and there was no interest in finding it. This manuscript had been written in the 1920s but was unfinished; evidently Marais had gotten distracted by morphine and fits of depression, or suffered a failure of confidence, and had never gone back to it. When finally published, in its incomplete form, the second book was titled The Soul of the Ape. It was an essay on the evolution of human consciousness, and it was based on the chacma baboon studies although, notwithstanding the title, a baboon is not strictly an ape. Kessler found his copy at a used-book store in Georgetown after six months of looking. That edition also carried a biographical foreword that told him a tiny bit more about Eugène Marais.