Sure, there was a lot of talk about the new Russia under Gorbachev. And, indeed, more people were emigrating than in many years. But for every ten who applied to leave, maybe one was allowed to go.
Jews, ethnic Germans, and a few other minorities were officially permitted to leave the country. Yes. The Soviet government had announced to the world that everybody who wanted out was gone. And yet the imprisonment of innocent people continued.
Yes, there was talk about the new Russia, the “glasnost,” and all that. But to Stefan, it was all bald lies.
Stefan, his brother, Avram, and his father, Yakov, had each applied three times, and three times, for the most ludicrous reasons, thev had been turned down. Yakov had served in the Red Army during World War II, and now the authorities were maintaining that he knew state secrets, which hadn’t even been true fort>’ years ago. And the gates had slammed shut. And when Stefan and a few dozen of his friends and acquaintances had attempted a pathetic, scraggly demonstration, the secret police had shooed them away. And arrested only him, Stefan Yakovich Kramer.
What made things even worse was that his father had spent time in the gulag, the Stalinist concentration camps, for little more than being a Jew unlucky enough to have been taken prisoner of war by the Nazis. Although Yakov Kramer had managed, by dint of hard work and some clever politicking, to land a job as an editor at a prestigious publishing house, Progress Publishers, that was all in jeopardy now. Even after applying three times to leave the country, he was fortunate enough to be allowed to keep his job—most people were fired from their jobs the instant they applied to emigrate—but now he had been told that if he applied again he would lose the job, in a country without unemployment benefits.
There were people who were content, even happy, in the Soviet Union, but the Kramers were not among them.
Stefan sat on his cot, leaning against the cracked paint of the cement wall, and read aloud to his cellmate, Anatoly Ivanovich Fyo-dorov. Fyodorov was a rough sort, a tall, gangly, ill-educated guy who enjoyed talking. Stefan liked him. He had managed to pry from Fyodorov his life story. Fyodorov had been a soldier in Afghanistan who’d been disillusioned by the experience, he said, then a machinist in an
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automobile shop who had been caught for petty black-marketeering— moonhghting as a car mechanic. Fyodorov was his third cellmate in three months; the first two seemed to have been “stoolies,” provocateurs, put in to try to wrest information out of him and incriminate him further. But Fyodorov was different; for weeks, he had little but the most elemental interest in the nature of Stefan’s “crime,” and, if anything, he incriminated himself. Obviously the prison authorities did what they could to provoke the political prisoners, and after a while, if their efforts failed, they gave up. Fyodorov was a little crude, but he was genial, and he loved to hear Stefan read poetry. Stefan read aloud:
“Wretched and abundant. Oppressed and powerful, Weak and mighty, Mother Russia!”
He looked up at the ceiling, around the room at the washbasin and the lavatory pan, and eventually over to Fyodorov, who was smiling.
“Who wrote that?” Fyodorov asked.
“Nekrasov. Who Is Happy in Russia?”
“Ah, that’s brilliant. Read it again.”
Stefan did, and when he was done, Fyodorov said, “The answer, my friend, is no one.”
“Anatoly Ivanovich, I don’t think either one of us is a good judge of happiness.”
A few weeks later, Fyodorov was almost killed in a prison brawl during the evening meal. He was saved by Stefan.
Fyodorov had provoked some petty smuggler, who somehow had gotten himself a knife. The guards were talking among themselves, clear across the room. Stefan suddenly glimpsed the flash of steel and slammed his body against the attacker’s, throwing him off-balance, giving Fyodorov just enough time to get to his feet and subdue the smuggler.
“Thanks,” Fyodorov grunted. “I owe you.”
Once a day, the prisoners were allowed to exercise, walking or
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running on the prison’s fenced-in roof under the supervision of the guards. Fyodorov normally used the exercise sessions as an opportunity to tell Stefan the things he would be afraid to say aloud in the cell— afraid because the guards were known to listen at the judas holes in the doors.
‘is your brother as naive as you?” Fyodorov asked, somewhat out of breath from the running.
Stefan easily kept up a pace alongside. “Naive? My brother’s clean. He’s smart; he doesn’t get involved in politics. What do you mean, naive?”
“A tree that falls and isn’t heard falling hasn’t fallen,” Fyodorov said. “You can complain and complain until you turn blue, but if no one hears your complaint, it’s as if it hasn’t been uttered. If you want to be allowed out of the country, you have to make your complaint heard.”
“We tried that already,” Stefan said. “You suggest we do it again— gather together in a public place and stick placards up in the air and get thrown back into prison, is that it?” The rage that he had kept bottled up erupted momentarily. “God damn it all, I was thrown in this stinking place for assembling peacefully and asking for my rights under the Soviet constitution.”
“Ah, fuck that. You’re a bunch of trees that haven’t fallen, you understand? The only thing the Soviet government understands is violence. Everyone knows that. You want to be let out, be a troublemaker. What you need to do is to appeal to world public opinion.”
“A letter to the editor of The New York Times, is that what you mean?” Stefan asked bitterly.
“Come on. The Kremlin is terrified of a breakdown of public order. Don’t you understand that?”
They were silent for a moment as they passed a guard, and then resumed the conversation. “You know nothing about bombs, do you?” Fyodorov asked.
“Bombs?”
“I owe you, man.”
“I don’t want to know anything about bombs.”
“Look. You never know what you might want to know someday.”
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As they began another lap around the roof, Stefan started to protest, but something held him back, and he listened.
Over the next few weeks, Fyodorov taught Stefan all he knew about the making of bombs, about blasting caps and chemical pencils, dynamite and plastic. Each afternoon exercise period on the prison roof became a tutorial session. Fyodorov lectured, then interrogated, conducting his lessons in a Socratic manner. Fyodorov had done this sort of thing in Afghanistan, he explained.
It was teacher and student, master and apprentice, the car mechanic lecturing the young intellectual ambulance driver. Thev grew closer. “You’ve saved my life, ” Fyodorov once told him, in a rare, fleeting moment of emotion. “They could have put me in with any fucking stoolie. The old guy with the crippled hand. Any of those guys. Instead, they put me in with a literate, intelligent man. Me, a lousy black-market car jockey who got caught, with someone like you. I think they expected us to kill each other.”
“It’s nice to have a captive audience,” Stefan said simply. He could not help liking the guy, someone his father would have dismissed as nyekulturnii, an uncultured boor.
It was not easy to describe the working of unseen mechanical objects, but Fyodorov did his best to describe the shape and appearance of the weapons of terrorism that he had learned to use in Kabul. Naturally mechanical, Fyodorov had figured out how to use the things on his own, he said, and although he had no use for them himself, he would teach anyone who wanted to know. Not many in Russia wanted to know. A few years ago, he said, a bunch of Estonians wanted to set off a bomb in the metro, and he managed to turn up some dynamite and some blasting caps from a source in Odessa—who in turn had gotten the stuff from East Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia—and then he taught the Estonians how to use it. The underground trade in explosives in the Soviet Union was tiny and impossible to penetrate if you weren’t well
trusted, but Fyodorov had friends going back a long way.
“Probably you’ll never come across something this sophisticated,”
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Fyodorov told him in one of their last sessions on the prison roof. “I haen’t seen a trembler switch in years, but they exist, and if you can find one you’ve got a fine switch for a car bomb.”
“Trembler switch?”
“Or a vibration switch. Motion or vibration can close the switch, completing a circuit, setting off the bomb. It’s a fairly simple apparatus, and not very big. A cylinder not much more than an inch and a half in diameter, about four inches long. There’s a small copper ball inside a small cup. Around the edges of the cup, but not touching, are vertical copper rods that close to form a cage. Motion causes the ball to roll, bridging the gap between the cup and the cage, closing the switch. Can you envision it?”
“Yes,” Stefan said. “For a car bomb, right?”
“Exactly. When you turn the car’s motor on, it vibrates, and that motion can set the bomb off. Simple but ingenious. The best things are simple. There are other, more complicated things. Accelerometers and transducers that convert mechanical energy into electric energy. But I like the simple things.”
Fyodorov told him about even more sophisticated things. “Hypersensitive fuses,” he announced. “Oh, there’s all kinds of stuff. A couple of years ago, the American CIA sabotaged a Middle Eastern terrorist group by giving them explosives with fuses that go off prematurely when they’re jostled a bit. You see, there are lots and lots of tricks. The technology is fascinating.”
A month later—just days before each of them was to be tried— they were released, suddenly and unexpectedly. Each was called out of the cell, brought before a commander, and given the good news. The two of them returned to their cell and waited for the guards to come and escort them out of the prison, and Fyodorov looked at Stefan Yakoich for a long time. “Hey, comrade,” he said. “You got me through these four months. Your stories, your jokes. The Nekrasov and the Cogol. You got me through. And you saved my fucking life. I owe vou.”
12
New York
Saul Ansbach’s private club was located in an old gray building on West 46th Street. A brass plaque on its white-painted door read phoenix CLUB. Inside the door, a broad staircase led up to a cloakroom, where dark herringbone topcoats hung beneath a long rack of fedoras: this was the kind of place where members wore hats, while the rest of the world walked around bare-headed. It was, of course, all-male: precisely the sort of place Charlotte found offensive.
They were New York’s Brahmins who, some decades ago, had reluctantly admitted to their ranks gentlemen who, though distinguished partners in the right law firms and presidents of good, quiet banks and corporations, were not old-line New York. Saul had been asked to join when he was a partner in the prestigious law firm of Sheffield & Simpson, during a hiatus from his Agency career. No doubt the Phoenix Club’s members enjoyed having among them a man so powerful in American intelligence.
Ansbach had taken Stone to lunch here every few months or so since the first time in New Haven, when he was trying to recruit Stone for Parnassus; they still met here from time to time, whenever Saul wanted to have a long conversation.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Ansbach said. “He’ll get through it with flying colors, though. He’s a strong man.”
“I hope you’re right,” Stone said. He had just taken a cab in from LaCuardia, and he felt peculiar about leaving his father alone in the hospital.
Ansbach put on his reading spectacles, Benjamin Franklin half-glasses, and held the photocopy up about twelve inches away from his eyes. Stone watched him examine the documents. Ansbach’s forehead was creased with tension.
“You’re right,” he said at length. “This ‘M-3’ does refer to a U.S. mole in Moscow. But it’s the first I’ve ever heard of it.”
Stone nodded. A steward cleared away the remains of Ansbach’s prime rib and Stone’s hamburger. “Mr. Ansbach, would you like coffee?” he asked.
Saul nodded. “We both would.” He continued, waving his hands in air}’ circles as if to push his thoughts along: “You think your father gave this Lenin Testament to a woman in Moscow on behalf of Winthrop.”
“He handed over a document. It may have been the Lenin Testament.”
“So Winthrop used your father to convey something, presumably not merely a framed photograph, to this woman, who then conveyed it to an American mole.”
“A theory. But you’re the boss; what do you think?” Stone wondered fleetingly why Ansbach was sweating even more copiously than usual. The room was not especially warm.
“That must be it,” Ansbach said. He took off his half-glasses and put on his black-framed ones. “Jesus. We had a mole in Moscow I’ve never been informed of. Could that be what this whole thing is all about now? Charlie—the man the FBI interrogated—this Alden Cush-ing—you recognize the name?”
The steward returned, set down tuo bone-china cups, and poured coffee in silence.
“Lehman’s business partner from years ago,” Stone said. “He might be someone to talk to, if he’s still around. Saul, what’s the matter? I’ve never seen you like this.”
“Cushing’s dead.” He took a small sip of coffee. His hands were trembling ever so slightly, and he spilled a few drops of coffee on the heavy white linen tablecloth. The drops expanded to large tan circles.
“Well, scratch that idea.”
“No, Charlie. You don’t understand. It was on the AP newswire this morning.”
“This morning? My God!”
Stone shoved his coffee away. “The coincidence isn’t …“He faltered, and began again: “He was at that dinner with StaHn in 1952. Could it be a coincidence that he just died?”
“But what do this mole and the Lenin Testament have to do with each other?” Ansbach said impatiently. “And what the hell does this all have to do with what’s going on in Moscow?”
“Let’s take one thing at a time,” Stone said. “Like the remark Stalin made, to the effect that the esteemed Lenin is made of wax.”
“What are you getting at?” Ansbach examined his fingernails.
“Just this,” Stone said, and, changing his mind, he drew the coffee cup toward himself and took a swallow. “I spent a few minutes on the phone before I left Boston. Doing a little research. You know, it’s entirely possible that Lenin’s body is wax. Apparently the state of the art has gotten so good that a talented restorative artist—not just anyone, I’m saying, but someone really good—can create a replica of a human face so incredible that you couldn’t tell, standing a few feet away, that it’s not the real thing.”
Ansbach drained his coffee cup and signaled the steward for another. “You’re going to connect this to the hedgehog report, I hope.”
Stone continued: “Then there’s the story of Evita.” He closed his eyes to aid his memory. “In 1952 she died, when she was in her early thirties. Cancer. Juan called in an embalming specialist, who knew all the most sophisticated techniques. This fellow had developed a method that used an arterial injection of paraffin and formalin, which prevented dehydration.” He recited: “Alcohol, glycerine, formalin, and thymol. Then he’d immerse a body in a solution of—of nitrocellulose dissolved in trichloroethylene and acetate, to leave a thin plasticlike film on the body.”
“My God, Charlie. This from memory? You’ve got a mind like a goddamned Steinway concert grand, I’d forgotten. Okay, what’s the connection?”
“Juan Peron wanted his beloved Evita to be on permanent display, the way Lenin is in Moscow. He was adamant about this, and even when Evita was on her deathbed they wouldn’t allow her to take any
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drugs that might counteract the embalming chemicals, make embalming impossible.”
Ansbach glanced at Stone sharply. “Chemicals?”
“Quite a number of drugs can act on the tissues in such a way as to b
lock the infusion of the embalming solutions. They break down the body’s capillary system so that when embalming is attempted it doesn’t work. There’s no osmotic pressure, the embalming fluid doesn’t filter adequately, and the electrolytic balance is thrown off. So the embalming is incomplete and won’t last.”
“These drugs—do they include, for example, poisons?”
“Exactly,” Stone said. “Arsenic, strychnine, any number of poisons can block the process. Other stuff, too. It’s often not easy to embalm a man who’s been poisoned.”
“Jesus,” Ansbach said. “That explains …”
“There are stories—just rumors, you know, but fairly widespread—that Lenin was poisoned. That Stalin had him done away with. I remember reading something about that in Trotsky’s memoirs. I mean, nothing more than unsubstantiated blather. But still.”
Ansbach nodded. “I’ve been hearing that rumor around Langley for decades.”
“Do you know of a book called Face of a Victim? It was published in the fifties by a Russian woman named Elizabeth Lermolo. “
“No.”
“In it, I remember this woman said that, while in an NKVD prison, she met an old man who was Lenin’s personal chef in his last years. On the morning Lenin died, the old guy brought in breakfast, and Lenin signaled that he had something to say—he couldn’t speak, but he slipped the guy a note saying he’d been poisoned.”
“The founder of the Soviet Union …” Ansbach said quietly. “If it’s true—then you’re right. My God. The consequences would be enormous. The embalming of Lenin couldn’t possibly have lasted, because he—the very founder of the Soviet state—was poisoned.” He was silent while the waiter refilled his cup. “That’s the last thing Gorbachev needs made public. ” Something was odd, almost automatic, about the way Saul was speaking, as if his mind was elsewhere.
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