Q: Of course.
A: Oh, yes, the head of Stalin’s bodyguard, a fellow named Khrustalyov. And one of Stalin’s aides-de-camp, named Osipov, a young guy obviously ver' much trusted by Stalin. Someone else, too. A guy named Trofimov, Viktor Trofi-mov. The one who defected a few years back? He was there.
Q: How^ did Stalin look?
A: Much better, much stronger than I had expected. I heard he had had several operations by then, and of course he’s, what, seventy-one or seventy-two by now. But he looked old all the same. Short fellow. I was surprised at how short he was. Pockmarked face. Very sharp eyes, always watching you.
Q: MentalK’ how was he?
A: Hard to say. Sometimes he was so sharp it was scary. Other times he drifted in and out of what I’d say was senility. He forgot my name, kept forgetting it. I don’t mean that there’s any reason in the world why he should know my name, but he kept looking at me and saying, “You never told me your name.” Like that.
Q: You met at his dacha?
A: That’s right. Earlier in the day, Winthrop went out there to meet with Stalin alone. He also met with Beria. Didn’t bring me or Hal with him. But we were all invited to dinner at the dacha in Kuntsevo. People called it Blizhny; that was the name of the villa.
Q: You had dinner?
A: I was getting to that. You said you wanted all the details. Yes, we had dinner there. Fancy spread, lots of dishes. Stalin sleeps late, past noon, and eats lunch around three in the afternoon, and then he doesn’t eat dinner until around ten at night. So it was late by the time we were driven there, and it was awfully cold. Below zero. We were brought right into the dining room on the ground floor and introduced to Stalin. He told us he lived in that very room. Slept on the sofa. He showed us where. He had a log fire going. But before we could eat, he wanted us to watch a movie. We all went into another room, almost as large, and watched a Charlie Chaplin movie. Modern Times.
Q: Stalin likes Chaplin?
A: Oh, yes. He thought Modern Times was terribly clever. Great fun, he thought; really poked fun at capitalism and assembly lines and all that. Ten of us sitting in the room, watching the movie. And then we went back to the dining room and ate and drank. This was somewhere after midnight.
Stalin said, “Let’s eat. Everyone’s hungry.” Well, of course, no one was hungry at all at that hour, but no one dared to contradict him. Stalin wouldn’t eat anything unless someone tasted it first. He was deathly afraid of being poisoned, I surmise. He kept pointing at food and saying something like, “Lavrentii Pavlovich”—Beria—“the herring looks delicious.” And then Beria would have to eat some of it before Stalin would. Oh, yes, and even before we ate Stalin made us all drink. Quite a bit, actually.
Q: Stalin drank a lot?
A: No, not at all. He mostly sat there, smoking his pipe, watching us. He made us guess how cold it was, how many degrees below zero, and for each degree we were wrong we’d have to drink a shotglass of vodka. Lehman, who must have checked the thermometer before he left his hotel, was almost right on the nose. I didn’t fare so well.
But he’d turn surly and suspicious all of a sudden. He turned to one fellow, I think it was Osipov, who he’d been quite friendly to all night, and he said, quite coldly, “I didn’t invite you here!” This fellow, you could see him shaking in his boots. He said, “Yes, sir, you did.” But Khrustalyov got up and dragged Osipov out. We never saw him again.
Stalin was exceedingly unpredictable. He got up suddenly during dinner and went over to his gramophone and put on a record of someone playing the trumpet badly and a woman laughing. Mostly the record was of this woman laughing uproariously. I remember it was called “The Okeh Laughing Record,” because when I was younger that was quite the big thing. Stalin found this terribly amusing. And—
Q: Do you think Stalin suspected anything about Beria and
[M-3]? ~^
A: No, sir. No reason to believe that.
Q: And how did Stalin happen to bring up the subject of Lenin and the Testament?
A: Well, it was quite natural, actually. Rather far into the dinner, Stalin raised his glass to a portrait of Lenin that hung on the wall and said, “Let us all drink to the memory of our great teacher, our great leader. Vladimir Ilyich!” And we all stood up and toasted the portrait and drank. And then he turned to Hal Bidwell, who hadn’t said a word the whole evening—his function was just to take notes—and said, “You have seen Vladimir Ilyich?”
And Bidwell seemed at first not to know what to say. And then he figured it out—Stalin meant, Have you been to Lenin’s mausoleum? Bidwell said, “Well, sir, I have been to the mausoleum, if that’s what you mean.”
Q: And that was when Stalin lost his temper?
A: Oh, yes. Oh, it was fearsome, I must say. Stalin understood at once what Bidwell was hinting at. You know, that old tale that the body in the mausoleum is made of wax. Stalin pointed a thick finger directly at Lehman and said, “You joke about that. You joke that our Lenin is a wax doll. You have told your people about that, haven’t you?” Lehman just shook his head, and I’ve never seen him so frightened. Stalin said, “Maybe you told your friends why.” He looked at Bidwell, pointing his finger, and shouted, “Has he told you why he knows it is wax? Has he told you?” We were by now all trembling with fear. He pointed the finger at Lehman again and said, “Have you told them about the Testament, too? Have you told them? The Testament belongs here, Mr. Lehman. His Testament belongs in the Kremlin, Mr. Lehman.” He said this with—with contempt, I remember.
Q: But Stalin spoke in Russian, didn’t he? How did you know exactly what he said?
A: Bidvvell told me afterward. He speaks Russian quite well, you know. He used a Russian word, zavyet, which means “testament.” As in “last will and testament.” He said, “The Testament must not be in the West. It must be destroyed.”
Q: And you said Lehman then responded.
A: Yes, but first Beria said something. It was an old Russian proverb. Something like “The paper is patient. The paper never forgets.” Or some such thing. And then Lehman said, “You know it must not be destroyed.”
Q: And what did Stalin say then?
A: He didn’t say anything. He got up and went over to his gramophone and played “The Okeh Laughing Record” once again.
“Charlie,” Charlotte said, “did you notice one of the row of alarm lights is flashing?”
“Hmm?” Stone was not listening.
“One of the rows of lights is blinking now. The blue row. It wasn’t flashing before.”
“What?”
“Do you think it’s possible that the drawers themselves are alarmed, too?”
“That’s impossible,” he said suddenly. He glanced away from the file. “I didn’t see any … Unless the floor … Sometimes they put pressure-sensitive plates on the floor.” He groaned.
“I think you set off an alarm, Charlie,” she said. “You’d better get away from that area.”
He glanced up at the flashing blue lights in the alarm panel. She was right; any moment, someone might decide to investigate. He’d explain that it was an accident, that he’d forgotten about the alarmed section.
But Stone could not take his eyes off the document.
“Charlie, can we please get out of here?”
“We’ll be all right, I’m reasonably certain. I want to look further, now—”
Charlotte gave a long anxious sigh. “Your father was set up by Winthrop, wasn’t he?”
Stone didn’t reply.
“Charlie, what’s ‘M-3’?”
He peered into the copying machine’s dusty works for a long while before he answered. “Probably just some routine FBI designation. Nothing terribly interesting.”
But he was lying. He knew that M-3 was a mole, a penetration agent. The “M” series, he knew, was nomenclature from the early 1950s for penetration agents. The fledgling CIA had more code labels prepared than actual moles to be coded: it wasn’t a very successful program.
Apparently, Alfred Stone had come upon evidence of an American mole in Moscow, and someone or some group of people—who?— was or were afraid that he would reveal the secret.
“I don’t follow this,” Charlotte said, tugging at a strand of hair and tucking it behind her ear. “The FBI interrogated everyone who was at this dinner with Stalin and heard Stalin mention something about a Lenin Testament, which probably meant nothing to anyone there—do I have this right? But clearly it was urgent that word of this document not get out, right? Why?”
Stone shrugged and compressed his lips. “I can only guess.” He hesitated a moment. “I want to ask you to do me a favor. I want you to feel free to say no.”
She looked at him, her face open, inquiring.
“This—this Sonya Kunetskaya that the document mentions. Do you think you might be able to—”
“To track her down, see if she’s alive, right?”
“Right. But if you don’t want—”
“I’ll take a stab at it, sure.” She tucked a lock of hair behind her left ear. “But I’m puzzled about something. If Winthrop betrayed your father, sold him out, why did your father put up with it? Why did he take it?”
“Well, I see you two are still down here.” The voice, high and reedy, yet strong for a man who was almost ninety, startled them.
Winthrop Lehman, supported on his left side by a powerful-looking bodyguard, stood in the door of the archives. The light caught his glasses so that they couldn’t see his eyes. The bodyguard, who had a short, neat haircut and the build of a linebacker, glared menacingly.
“Winthrop,” Charlotte began, and got up quickly from the table.
Lehman advanced slowly toward them, aided by the bodyguard. “You know, the party’s long over,” he said. “Everyone’s gone home. I think it was a success, don’t you?” He came closer, his voice echoing metallically. He seemed short of breath. “When Marjorie told me the blue alarm had gone off, I told her I’d go investigate for myself. I knew it wasn’t a burglar; I knew it was just you two. Always good to see people hard at work.”
The documents lay on the table beside the copying machine, in Lehman’s line of vision. But he was an old man, after all, and it was unlikely he would be able to see them.
“I hope you’re planning to say nice things about me, Charlotte,” Lehman said. “What’s that?”
He was looking at the documents. The red stamp on the folder had attracted his attention, the mark that indicated the file was top-secret. He walked closer, the bodyguard helping him along.
“What’s this?”
He waved a hand weakly at the documents, and then bent over slightly to get a look.
”Where did you get this?”
He snatched them up from the table with a suddenness that startled Stone.
“I may have set the alarm off by mistake,” Stone said blandly, hoping to divert the old man, but Lehman cut him off.
The elderly man’s voice trembled with fear—or was it anger? “I never said you could go into the locked drawers!” With a shaking hand he handed the sheaf to his bodyguard. “How dare you invade my private files!”
“You did him in, didn’t you?” said Stone fiercely. “After all these years, I guess I misunderstood your motives. Guilt—is that right?”
Stone quietly slipped the dossier into his back pocket. Lehman had grabbed the photocopies that Charlotte had made while he was on the phone.
“Get out of here,” said Lehman. His voice quavered with anger. “I did everything I could to help your father. What you think you’re doing, breaking into the locked cabinets with the tools of a burglar, I can’t possibly imagine. You have no business … What do you think you’re doing?” Now his voice rose to a shrill, horrifying shout, and Charlotte put her arm, which was shaking, around Stone’s waist.
“Get out of here,” Lehman rasped. “Get out of here! Damn you! Get out of here!”
He clutched on to the bodyguard. “Get them out of here!” he hissed, with the ferocious, white-hot anger of a man with a great deal to hide.
They spent the night together.
She refused to go to their apartment; he went to her hotel. They talked late into the night, sharing a bottle of wine they’d ordered from room service. They wanted to dance, but there wasn’t a radio, so they put the TV on and found one of those endless late-night ads for cheap-imitation polka records, and they danced distractedly to the lousy music and talked, more honestly than they had in years.
“There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think how stupid I was to do what I did,” Charlotte said. “But I was crazy. I was out of my mind. I needed someone, and you were oflF in Washington.”
“I understand. I forgive you. Do the same for me.”
“Have you been faithful?”
“No,” Stone admitted. “Have you?”
“No. Whatever ‘faithful’ means.”
“Then we’re even.” He shrugged and turned his palms up. “All right … ?”
“All right what?”
He exhaled and shook his head, feigning annoyance to mask his nervousness. “Look, do you want to try again? You know, love among the ruins? Piece it back together?”
Charlotte didn’t know how to answer. She only knew that she’d been changed by what had happened between them, that part of her would never be hurt again because it would never again be accessible. She thought of those sea creatures that scuttle about the ocean floor, naked and vulnerable, until they lodge themselves in a protective shell. Well, she’d grown herself a shell.
Confused now, she was pensive, even tender. Charlie kissed her, first lightly, then with growing passion. Charlotte let him kiss her, let him stroke her breasts, but she felt nothing. Or, more accurately, she wouldn’t allow herself to feel anything. She was immensely attracted to this man, her husband, but some toggle switch inside her had gone oflF. He was her real love, the man she was convinced she’d love forever, and now she didn’t know if she could trust him or anyone else. All she wanted, even a year and a half later, was to be left alone. Was that so crazy?
She wouldn’t make love with him. Charlie was hurt, confused, but soon they both fell asleep, next to each other in the big hotel bed, their bottoms touching, and she cried softly as he slept beside her.
Very early the next morning, they said goodbye at Kennedy Airport, at the Lufthansa terminal, where she was catching the first flight to Munich. A few days visiting friends there, she said, and then back to the Soviet grindstone.
Both of them were tired, worn out from the night before. There were long, silent pauses in their conversation, which neither one rushed to fill. The terminal bustled around them, its frenetic pace a counterpoint to the slow melancholy they both felt.
“Send my love to your father,” Charlotte said, lifting her green leather carry-on bag to her shoulder.
“Charlotte—”
“Thanks for seeing me off. I should go. They’re announcing my flight.”
“Charlotte, this is crazy—”
But she continued briskly, unable to talk about feelings she didn’t understand. “I’ll try to find that Russian woman for you. That Sonya Kunetskaya.”
“Not for me, Charlotte. For my father.”
“Okay. For your father.” She shook her head slowly, sadly. “You know, we had something wonderful. …”
“Jesus, Charlotte, we still do.”
Now, suddenly, she was sobbing, as if she’d been holding back for hours. Probably she had. Stone put his arms around her, squeezing hard. She nestled her chin in the hollow of his shoulder. He felt her tears, burningly hot, run off against his neck, into his open shirt collar. “Be careful, Charlie, will you?”
“I was going to tell you the same thing.”
The amplified voice announced the last boarding call.
Making his way languidly out of the terminal, Stone passed a bank of telephones, and he stopped short. Impulsively, he picked up one of the handsets, dropped a quarter in the slot, a
nd dialed his father’s number.
Three minutes later, he hung up the phone and began to run for a taxi.
Alfred Stone had been rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital.
9
Moscow
The killing of an American girl within the very walls of the Kremlin shook the Soviet leadership to its core, and an urgent session was called at once.
President Mikhail Gorbachev spoke with quiet anger. His fellow Politburo members were used to his flashes of anger, but even his enemies knew that, when he lowered his voice in this way, he was not to be interrupted.
“A bomb thrown by a Russian,” he said tonelessly. “Who was shot dead on the spot. And therefore cannot be linked to any subversive organization.”
He removed his steel-rimmed glasses. He looked around the table, but there was only silence, furrowed brows, here and there a bemused shake of a head.
“Gentlemen, this incident has attracted the attention of the world. This, on top of everything else. We are perceived as a regime that is spinning out of control.”
The silence was unbroken, tense. Gorbachev waited, then gave an acidulous smirk. “Are we?”
The room in which the small group of men who rule the beleaguered Gommunist party of the Soviet Union—the Soviet Politburo— meets has rarely been seen by Westerners. In fact, the inner sanctum is disappointingly plain. It is located on the third floor of the Gouncil of Ministers building in the Kremlin, a baroque yellow-fronted structure, topped with green domes, known as the Old Senate Building, built in the late eighteenth century by the Russian architect Matvei
92 ■ JOSEPH FINDER
Kazakov. One can approach it by means of an ancient elevator, down a parquet hallway carpeted with a pink-and-green runner. The ornate door behind which the Politburo meets is ten feet high.
The room is a long barren rectangle, its walls covered in light-yellow silk, devoid of hangings. The molding and trim are painted with gold leaf. The only clock in the room is located on the conference table, a long highly polished wooden table whose top is covered in green baize. Around this table are fifteen chairs, enough for the entire Politburo and the rare invited guest; against the walls are dozens more chairs for candidate members, ministers, assistants, and others, although today only the full members were present, a portent of the seriousness of the discussion.
The Moscow Club Page 9
