The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  But Stone didn’t want to think about it. He quickly went through the drawers, looking for that slip of paper his father had seen years ago, while just inches away Charlotte sat on a small steel table, next to a dust' old Canon copying machine, her legs dangling. She was keeping watch on the door.

  “Won’t Winthrop think it’s odd, you rooting around down here while upstairs the party is in full swing?” she asked tensely, watching Stone open drawer after drawer.

  “He thinks it’s you rooting around. Anyway, I think it strikes him

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 71

  as perfectly plausible that someone might want to do a TV retrospective on him. He’s never been a shy man.” A long silence passed, while Stone slid open metal drawers and glanced at the tab indexes.

  A half an hour passed, then an hour. “Getting close,” Stone said. He could sense her staring at his back, and turned to confirm it. She was. “You doing okay?”

  “I’m okay.” Charlotte seemed pensive. “What are these lights for?” She pointed at a small square panel next to the brushed-steel door, on which were rows of pinpoint lights.

  “The alarm system,” Stone replied. “Marjorie used the key to admit us, so the primary system was deactivated.” Marjorie was Lehman’s secretary.

  “But why so many lights? I don’t get it.”

  “You see those cabinets back there?” He pointed without looking, his left hand moving quickly through the files.

  “Where it’s dark?”

  “Right. Those two rows back there are alarmed. Marjorie explained it to me once.”

  “What’s in them? The locked cabinets, I mean.”

  “She said they’re mostly confidential, boring documents—records on Lehman Shipping, legal papers, that sort of thing.”

  “Which is why they’re alarmed.”

  “I didn’t say I believed her.”

  “But if they—”

  “Bingo,” Charlie said.

  “What?”

  “We’re on our way.”

  It was a small, yellowed slip of paper, a memorandum on FBI letterhead, dated April 3, 1953, addressed to Lehman, badly typed:

  BIDWELL, HAROLD. GUSHING, ALDEN. STONE, ALFRED. DUNAYEV, FYODOR.

  Of possible suspects we’ve discussed only above 4 appear to have any knowledge of “Lenin Testament.” Enclosed, security-classified dossier.

  Warren Pogue

  Special Investigator,

  Federal Bureau of Investigation

  At the bottom of the note was a pencil scrawl: “File to 74.”

  Charlotte looked up when she’d finished reading it. “That’s drawer 74, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Over there.” She pointed at the dark row of locked cabinets.

  “That’s it.”

  “One of the locked ones.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  There was a metallic click.

  “What was that?” Stone asked.

  Charlotte didn’t reply. Her eyes were wide. She watched Stone as he glanced around the chamber.

  “Oh,” he said. “The ventilation system just switched on. That’s all.” The chamber’s silence was now intruded upon by a distinct, almost but not quite subsonic whine, a hum, the white noise of finely calibrated instruments filtering the air, removing the moisture, maintaining it at precisely sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

  He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a small square dark-blue velvet case and a tiny black Mag-Lite flashlight.

  “What’s that?”

  “just an old trick I picked up.”

  He walked over to the dark end of the archives.

  “Can you see what you’re doing over there?” Charlotte asked.

  He switched on the Mag-Lite in response. “No sense alerting Lehman’s people. They’ve got their hands full with the party.”

  The small bright-yellow circle from the flashlight located cabinet number 74. It was an old-fashioned filing cabinet painted in somber dark green; very likely it dated from the late 1940s or early 1950s.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 73

  He inserted the two instruments into the lock. One, the torsion wrench, was about six inches long and was shaped Hke an elongated L. The other, the feeler pick, resembled a wig pin or a dental probe. He held the torsion wrench at the bottom of the lock to keep the tension and, with the feeler pick, raised each tumbler pin, one by one. He had practiced on other locks, but this one was his first serious attempt, and it was a little more difficult than he’d anticipated. He felt a slight give on the torsion wrench as each pin lined up. Finally, the lock popped out with a satisfying click.

  “Charlie, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Picking the lock. I had a feeling the good stuff might be locked up.”

  “If anyone sees you—”

  “Charlotte,” Stone said patiently, “Winthrop Lehman is a very stuffy, very old-fashioned man with some very old-fashioned notions of what state secrets are. For God’s sakes, the stuff in here has got to be decades old. Whatever he did to help my father, whatever behind-the-scenes help he gave, I’m sure he considers the matter a closed chapter. …”

  His voice trailed off. For a long time, he was silent.

  “Where’d you learn to pick locks, anyway?”

  “That detective friend of mine,” Stone murmured, but his mind was elsewhere. “Sawyer.”

  “Great,” she said unenthusiastically.

  It felt as if a great mass of ice had suddenly welled up in his stomach. All he could hear was the thudding of his heart, the sibilant rush of his breath.

  “What is it, Charlie?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he managed to say hoarsely. “Here it is.”

  “What?” She got up and walked over to where Stone was standing in darkness, his flashlight beam illuminating a yellowed piece of paper. Looking over his shoulder, she read.

  “Oh, Charlie,” she said two minutes later. Her voice shook. “Oh, my God.” She put her arms around his waist and hugged him. “Oh, God, Charlie, I’m sorry.”

  “There’s a phone in here, Charlotte,” Stone said tightly. He had

  74 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  to reach his father at once: a brief phone conversation was all that was required, a cryptic exchange that would signify nothing to anyone else. “I need to make a call. I want you to switch on that copying machine and make two sets of copies of each of these pages. I need to make a call.”

  In a small rented studio apartment on East 73rd Street, at precisely the same time, a man with a swarthy complexion and dark hair— anyone familiar with the various Soviet nationalities would have noticed the hint of Asiatic in his face—sat monitoring a radio transmission, which was being recorded on a small cassette machine. He listened with the resignedness of one who has been doing a monotonous task for a very long time and resents the monotony; he chain-smoked Marlboros.

  The man was far from good-looking. His face was pitted with the tiny deep round scars of childhood smallpox. He looked out the window, which was grimy with the foul city air, and watched the rain on the slick black streets. The neighborhood was a peculiar mix of well-dressed young people and more settled-in older ones; he watched them scurrying. Someone walked by with a giant radio blasting rap music, if you could call that music, and the man was suddenly filled with great irritation.

  He worked as a security guard at a Russian-emigre newspaper in lower Manhattan. The job was, of course, largely a fiction—the newspaper had no need of security—but he put in enough time to earn a declarable, if pitiful, income. He was known as Shvartz, which sounded Jewish, although it wasn’t his real name; he had been given the name as well as a false career and family background a few months before he had left the Soviet Union, and even a record—fictional as well—of past anti-Soviet activity.

  Shvartz listened to the transmission with little interest. He had been at work since early this morning, nonstop, and after eight hours of this he was close to fed up with what he felt sure was
a pointless exercise.

  The radio transmission emanated from a telephone in a house a few blocks away. So clear was the signal that it was as if he were

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 75

  listening in on an extension in the same house—which in a sense he was. The system before him was equipped to monitor as many as sixteen telephone lines, but it was now monitoring only three, and each of them came from the same house. Clearly the project was a priority.

  He crushed out a cigarette, lit another, and continued listening.

  Then the man noticed that a call was being made on the rarely used third line, and from then on he paid very close attention to the conversation.

  A man was speaking to a woman.

  Frankly, Shvartz had not expected any calls on that line at all. When the decision had been reached a few months ago to place the rich man’s home under telephonic surveillance, the men who took turns sitting in the uncomfortable apartment, listening, knew they were in for a bad time of it, a long dull stretch. An endless, achingly routine assignment.

  Placing a bug or a tap on someone’s premises or telephone requires access, at least in some way, to either the home or the telephone lines. Breaking-and-entering the subject’s townhouse had been rejected immediately as too risky: the man was too rich, too well guarded.

  So the organization had obtained, by means of an untraceable payoflP, a NYNEX phone-company repair van and a set of uniforms and hardhats. The two men designated by the organization located the correct telephone switching box behind 71st Street; one of them opened the fixture and began to test the pairs of wires. He used a piece of equipment familiar to telephone repairmen: a handset with a dialer attached to a miniature computer.

  Tapping into each pair of wires, he repeatedly punched in the code, and the computer’s LCD readout displayed the telephone number of the wires he had selected. After a few trials, he had isolated the three desired lines. Across each line he installed a small high-frequency transmitting device, each of which emitted signals up to a thousand feet away. They relied on the same sophisticated, if now common, technology employed in car telephones.

  Of course, the tap was detectable, by someone using anti-eavesdropping equipment, or by the telephone company, should it be

  inclined to investigate, but it was highly unlikely that either event would occur. The rich man had not ordered a sweep of his telephone lines in many years, since the time he stopped working for the government. Careful surveillance had confirmed this. Although, as a matter of habit, there may have been subjects he didn’t speak about openly over the phone, he had no reason to suspect a tap on his line.

  Shvartz had no idea what this business was all about. He was never told; that was a necessary precaution. He knew that the operation was carefully concealed from the KGB, the GRU, and every other Soviet intelligence agency.

  The long dull stretch was over. The man glanced at the digital readout and copied down the numbers. The call was going to area code 617. Boston area. Interesting. He picked up his own telephone, punched out the number of a local telephone, said a few brief words, and hung up.

  He took the last cigarette from the pack, lit it, then rewound the cassette.

  The dark-haired man thought for some reason about the crude wood-and-iron rat traps he had designed as a boy, remembered watching with dispassionate curiosity as the rats, who knew nothing except the most primal fear, struggled furiously. You could watch a rat die with, not pleasure exactly, but distance, the same sense of distance you felt watching, from a New York skyscraper, the ant-sized pedestrians.

  His job, he now realized with some pleasure, was no longer going to be quite so routine.

  The apartment buzzer sounded, and he got up and walked over to the panel by the door and pressed the button. “Yes?”

  “A package,” came the voice from downstairs over the speaker.

  “Where’s it from?”

  “California.”

  He pressed another button to open the door downstairs, and then watched through the spyglass. About a minute later, the blond Russian stood before the door. The dark-haired man released, one after another,

  the three locks that had been specially installed by the organization, and let the Russian in.

  The Russian was out of breath; his suit was wet with rain. He had been running.

  “So we’ve caught ourselves a fox,” he joked.

  We’ve caught ourselves a rat, the dark-haired man thought, as he pulled the cellophane off a fresh pack of Marlboros.

  8

  “The answering service didn’t know where he was,” Stone said.

  Charlotte looked up and said, puzzled, “Doesn’t he always tell them where he is, where he can be reached?”

  “It’s unlike him,” he conceded. He picked up the papers and read them again, numb with shock and anger. For some reason, he didn’t want Charlotte to know how deeply this discovery affected him, how it was turning his insides to ice. As he read, his face was impassive.

  The file was seven pages long, no more. It consisted of one letter, from an FBI agent to Winthrop Lehman, and one report, filed by this agent—originally, it seemed, for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Joe McCarthy committee; the witch-hunters, as Alfred Stone always called them.

  Suddenly it was clear—almost clear—why Alfred Stone had been imprisoned so many years ago.

  Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation Washington, D.C.

  personal and confidential

  Memorandum

  To: Mr. Winthrop Lehman

  From: Special Agent Warren L. Pogue

  Date: May 20, 1953

  Subject: Alfred Stone Reference is made to Alfred Charles stone, 33, who presently serves as Assistant to the National Security Adviser to the President.

  Conclusion

  Investigation discloses sufficient evidence to warrant concern about possible knowledge by subject of matter we discussed.

  Bureau laboratory analysis of fingerprints on the security report (attached in glassine envelope) confirms that Alfred STONE has handled report.

  I have personally seen to the destruction of all photographs and surveillance reports of Alfred stone during his most recent stay in Moscow, as per your request to the Director. The Bureau will pursue no further investigation.

  Mr. Hoover has asked me to convey to you his sentiments that the House Committee on Un-American Activities, with which he has a close working relationship, is nevertheless not under his control, and will most likely not rest until Stone is jailed, if briefly.

  He shares your concern that, as stone hand-carried the Lenin Testament to the Russian woman whom our agents have identified as sonya kunetskaya, he should be kept from any questioning by the Committee. Although he appears to know nothing of the M-3 operation, there is grave danger, Mr. Hoover feels, that under sustained questioning he may inadvertently reveal the asset’s identity, which will gravely endanger the operation.

  Mr. Hoover recommends that an arrangement be made with the Committee such that stone is imprisoned without further public questioning, until such time as he can be compelled to accept our terms.

  The attached security report is the only extant copy, for your records.

  FBI File No. 97-8234

  “Jesus Christ,” Stone could not help murmuring.

  He reread the memorandum several times, still unable to believe what was so clearly there.

  hi effect, Winthrop Lehman had cooperated with the FBI to put Alfred Stone in jail.

  Why?

  Because he knew something about an extremely secret intelligence operation, was that it?

  Because he had taken this Lenin Testament to a woman in Moscow named Sonya Kunetskaya?

  It had always been an item of faith to him that the spy charges leveled against his father were laughably false. But now … was it possible that they were true? Stone had seen coundess documents from the McCarthy furor, and this memorandum was archetypal. The stilted languag
e, the undercurrent of ominousness, the shred of substance served up into a banquet of allegation.

  But might there be some truth to it?

  “The alarm,” Charlotte said. “Let’s get out of here.” She stood so close to him that he could smell the faint traces of her perfume, which was called Fracas. He remembered: he had always been the one to buy it for her. He could feel her warm breath on his neck as she spoke, and wondered if she, too, sensed a sexual charge, even now, at this tense moment.

  Stone nodded absendy.

  He turned next to the photocopy of the “security report” that had been clipped to the memo. It was a three-page, stapled, single-spaced report, also filed by Warren L. Pogue. The original had been encased in a brown-tinged glassine envelope that felt as if it might crumble beneath even the most delicate handling.

  This was even more remarkable. It told of a meeting several Americans—among them Winthrop Lehman—had had with none other than Joseph Stalin, in 1952: Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation Washington, D.C.

  TOP secret

  Office Memorandum

  To: Director Hoover

  From: Special Agent Warren L. Pogue

  Date: February 2, 1952

  Subject: Stalin Meeting

  Following is a transcript of the recollection of Alden GUSHING, former staff associate of Winthrop LEHMAN, of meeting with Joseph Stalin in Moscow, January 16, 1952:

  Q: Tell me about the trip.

  A: I was asked to accompany Winthrop Lehman to a meeting with Joseph Stalin early in 1952. The occasion was one of official business, although the exact purpose was never made clear to me. I make it my policy not to poke my nose where it doesn’t belong. I was curious as to what sort of official business this might be, since there were no negotiations going on to my knowledge. But I was only there to—

  Q: Who else was there, of the Americans?

  A: Myself, and Harold Bidwell from State. That’s all.

  Q: Who was there besides Stalin?

  A: Quite a number of Russian officials, as I recall. A fellow named Poskrebyshev, if I have his name right. Malenkov, who was … Beria, the, you know, the Minister for State Security, the secret police. And [M-3]. May I consult my notes?