The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  In the next few hours. Stone drove, in his rented Chevrolet, from public agency to public agency. He followed a procedure that had once been explained to him by a friend, a fastidiously dressed, high-priced private detective named Peter Sawyer.

  With the information provided in the obituary—Gill’s date of birth, parents’ names, and so on—Stone obtained, for three dollars, a copy of Gill’s birth certificate from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bureau of Vital Records and Statistics. Terrifically easy. Then an interminable wait at the Registry of Motor Vehicles for a copy of Robert Gill’s driver’s license, which he claimed he’d lost, and after an hour and a half Stone had a driver’s license with his own photograph on it.

  Simple.

  Next he went to the Cambridge Post Office in Central Square

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 131

  and filled out an application for a post-office box in his own name and that of Robert Gill.

  ‘That’ll be six to eight weeks,” the postal clerk, a beefy, gray-haired man, said as he looked over Stone’s application, checking off various boxes. The clerk’s eye fell upon a paper clip at the top of the form, and he glanced around to be sure he wasn’t being seen removing the two twenty-dollar bills that Stone had attached. “I think there’s a few that might have opened up recently,” he said, coughingly selfconsciously. “Let me check.”

  Stone next stopped at a passport-photo shop in downtown Boston, in Government Genter, and had two color passport shots made while he waited. Armed with the driver’s license and the birth certificate, he took the photographs to the passport office in the John F. Kennedy Federal Building across the street, where he filed for a replacement passport. His last one, he reported, had somehow gone missing in a recent move. You know how these things happen. Gould you maybe expedite things? he asked: he was planning a trip abroad in a week.

  Yes, he was told, that was possible. The passport would come in about a week or so.

  Stone hoped he’d never have to use it.

  As he got on the plane from Boston to Newark International Airport, he realized he had set himself on a course that had changed his life irrevocably. Now, on a hunt for the old woman who might reveal a decades-old secret—a secret that might explain Alfred Stone’s disgrace, Saul Ansbach’s murder, and perhaps even more—he knew that, whoever these elements were within the Agency, they’d never let him out of their grip.

  Knowledge is power, Saul had told him.

  Yes, but, as a member of Parnassus, surely Stone already had power—the knowledge he stored in his head of some of the GIA’s most closely held intelligence on the Soviet Union. Was that power enough? The answer came with a sickening certainty: No.

  For all the secrets he knew, there was nothing he could use to blackmail the Agency. He couldn’t threaten to reveal anything; the

  132 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Agency would merely shrug. He didn’t know anything about their sources: they had carefully protected the origins of their intelligence even from the Parnassus elite.

  I’m on my own, Stone thought, fastening his seat belt and gazing out the window at the runway.

  When he landed in New Jersey, he immediately called his own line at the Parnassus Foundation. Sherry answered.

  “Charlie!” She sounded surprised to hear his voice. “Where are you?”

  Stone ignored her question. “Did Saul come in today, Sherry?”

  She hesitated, then replied through a muffled sob, “Charlie, Saul’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “He was killed last night, Charlie,” she managed to say, her British accent forgotten. “An accident. Langley is sending in someone to replace him, but we’re all just torn apart. I can’t—can’t—believe it.”

  “You’re quite sure it was an accident. Sherry?”

  “What are you talking about? They told us. I mean, they—”

  They told us. The cover-up had begun. Stone hung up abruptly, inserted another quarter, and called Lenny Wexler’s number. The Foundation’s telephones were secure. Stone knew, but this unprotected incoming line was risky without a scrambler. Yet he had no choice now.

  Lenny himself answered. He sounded curiously distant. “Where’ve you been, Charlie?” he said. “Did you hear?”

  “Lenny, I saw. Saul was shot to death.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Wexler replied cautiously. “He got into a car accident. Charlie, I know you’re upset—”

  “Damn it, Lenny. What kind of bullshit is this? Who are you cooperating with? Where the hell is your loyalty?”

  Now Lenny spoke quickly, softly. “Charlie, stay the fuck away from here. They’ll get you next. Stay away from here, and me, and—”

  And the line went dead. Lenny had been cut off.

  The taste of fear was metallic in Stone’s mouth.

  16

  Moscow

  The day after his late-night garage meeting with Fyodorov, Stefan learned from his father that they would be allowed to visit Avram, Stefan’s older brother, at the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, in which he was imprisoned. Rarely are psikhushka patients permitted to see anyone from the outside world, but Stefan and his father did not question this unusual good luck.

  Instead, they were, both of them, filled with a corrosive anger at the capriciousness of Soviet justice, which could place Avram, a healthy and happy man, into a mental hospital. The world believed that this sort of thing didn’t happen anymore in Moscow, in these days of glasnost and Gorbachev, but apparently they still could.

  ‘Tlease,” Sonya said, standing at the doorway, watching Yakov and Stefan leave. “I want to see Avram.”

  But Yakov insisted that she stay behind—that she not be too closely associated with the Kramer family—and he refused to relent.

  So she bit her lower lip and nodded, and watched these two men she loved so fiercely make their way down the dank stairwell. She wanted to call after them, yet she caught herself just in time, and she listened as the echo from their footsteps grew softer and then disappeared.

  They drove for a few minutes in silence, Stefan poking at a place in the old Volga’s door where the padding had spilled out from a tear in a seam. “I hope they shave off Avram’s stupid beard,” Stefan joked weakly. “It’s always looked awful.” Avram, older by twelve years, was a tall, handsome, strapping man, but Stefan had always teased him about his beard, which made him look like a Talmudic scholar.

  Stefan looked over at his father, who was not laughing. Yakov’s sensitive eyes were filled with pain, accentuated by the horrible scarred flesh that surrounded them.

  It had happened in the gulag. A handsome and vivacious boy, Yakov had joined the army during World War II, or the Great Patriotic War, as it was officially known; and, with millions of his peers, he had fought with great ardor to defend his homeland against the Nazis. He had been captured by the Germans and spent two years as a prisoner of war, until he was liberated by American troops and immediately returned to the Soviet Union—not to a joyous reception but to a labor camp. Stalin did not trust the Soviet POWs. He believed they had been brainwashed by the Nazis or by American intelligence and convinced to return to Russia as spies. So he imprisoned the lot of them.

  Vikhorevka Prison Camp, near Irkutsk, was a hellhole, and Kramer had grown steadily more disillusioned with the system that could have done such a thing to him. Some of his friends had been broken by their years in the camps, but not Kramer; he had established a friendship with some others there, an Estonian and a Lithuanian who shared his hatred for the Kremlin. Still, the tuo Baits kept their mouths shut, while Yakov began to speak out. Some of the other prisoners— thugs whose fury at being jailed made them hate people like Yakov, who dared to speak out—began to resent him. Their reaction was twisted but not uncommon.

  One day, a couple of his fellow prisoners, granted the soft chore of cleaning dut', stole a jar of potent muriatic acid. And, in the middle of the night, they tossed it into Kramer’s face.

  Luck
ily, it had missed his eyes, but it brutally disfigured the right side of his face so badly that he would always resemble a monster more than a human being. There was no one in the camp trained in medicine, so he was treated with rags and alcohol, and his pain, which was unspeakable, grew worse. In time, the horrid red ropes of his facial skin blanched to a more tolerable white.

  Even after he and the other prisoners were released by Khrushchev in 1956, Yakov Kramer was consigned to live with a hideous reminder of his stay in the gulag.

  Many people found it impossible to look him in the face. He managed to get a job as a technical writer, and eventually was hired at Progress Publishers, where he indexed books. Kramer was given a cubicle far removed from the other workers, because his boss anticipated that the others would prefer not to have to look at him. His boss was right.

  Stefan’s father was a man of tremendous, though banked, anger. Now he sat at the wheel of the car in dark fury.

  “We’ll get him out. Papa,” Stefan said, although neither one of them believed it.

  The doctor in charge, a prim middle-aged woman named Dr. Zinaida Osipovna Bogdanova, wore a white coat and regarded the visitors with contempt. Clearly, she felt she was far too busy to have to speak to relatives of crazy people.

  “Your son is schizophrenic,” she was saying. Yakov and Stefan, knowing how futile it was to argue, watched her face with silent hostility. “Officially his diagnosis is criminal paranoid schizophrenia, and the course of treatment may be very long.”

  Stefan could not stop himself from remarking, “I wasn’t aware that ‘criminal paranoid schizophrenia’ was a psychiatric diagnosis. Are you sure you aren’t confusing your medicine with your politics?”

  The doctor ignored him and continued haughtily, “You have five minutes with him. No more. Don’t get him worked up.”

  As she turned to leave, Stefan asked, “Is he on any medication?”

  She responded as if Stefan, too, were crazy. “Of course.”

  “What kind?”

  She paused before saying, “Sedatives.”

  A few minutes later, she escorted Avram out, then left the family alone in the visiting room.

  Stefan and his father did not believe their eyes.

  Avram was a wholly different person, stooped in his hospital gown, gaunt, and he looked at his father and brother as if he didn’t recognize them. Mucus dripped from his nose, sahva from his mouth. His tongue rolled and darted; his lips smacked and sucked.

  “Oh, my Godr Yakov breathed.

  Stefan could only stare, aghast.

  “Avram,” Yakov said, coming up to him slowly. “It’s me, your father.”

  Avram looked at his father, his face betraying no recognition, his tongue rolling.

  “Oh, God,” Yakov said, embracing his son. “Oh, God. What have they done to you?” He held him for a long time, then let him go. Stefan embraced his brother tighdy. All the time, Avram’s face remained impassive, his eyes heavy-lidded, his mouth smacking insanely.

  “Talk to me,” Stefan said. “Can you talk to me?”

  But Avram could not.

  “Oh, God,” Stefan whispered. “I’ve heard of this sort of thing! One of the emergency doctors I work with told me these hospitals give patients terrible drugs.” He knew it had to be the antipsychotic drug haloperidol, which, administered in large doses, could cause Avram’s grotesque, degenerative condition. The doctor had said it was called “tardive dyskinesia.”

  “Can he—can he be cured?” his father asked.

  “I don’t think so. It’s—oh, Christ, it’s—irreversible,” he said, his voice breaking. Both Yakov and Stefan, watching this drugged hulk, could not stop the tears that sprang to their eyes.

  Yakov embraced Avram again, and now the father was openly crying. “You never did anything. You were so—so careful, so innocent. How could they do this to you?”

  Avram onK’ stared and gaped. Somewhere deep down something registered, a tiny flash of anger beneath all the drugs, and now even his eyes brimmed with tears.

  “We hae to get him out of here,” Yakov said very quietly, very firmly, to Stefan.

  Suddenly the doctor was beside them, her voice loud and firm. “I’m afraid time’s up.”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 137

  Very late that night, in a deserted garage in the far south of Moscow, two men spoke by the Hght of a kerosene lamp.

  “I’ve decided to take you up on your offer,” Stefan told his old cellmate. “I hope it’s still available.”

  17

  East Neck, New Jersey

  The old woman who had once been the personal secretary to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lived in a tiny but immaculate ranch-style house with a perfecdy manicured hedge in front and a lawn that resembled Astro-Turf. East Neck, New Jersey, was all even, broad streets lined with neat little square houses of tan stone and precise squares of lawn, which residents doubdess found homey. Stone found it depressing.

  An odd place for such a person to live. Russian emigres of recent vintage mostly coalesced in large cities, congregating in their own bustling, colorful Little Russias or Little Odessas. After a generation or two, once assimilated, they tended to live in cities and new suburbs, where the population turns over with some frequency. Not in tidy, middle-American spots like this, where all the neighbors have known one another for decades. Clearly, Anna Zinoyeva had chosen to distance herself from her compatriots.

  Stone had arrived the night before and spent the evening in a motel where the beds had Magic Fingers massage vibrators built into the box springs. Early the next morning, he took a cab and got out several blocks from Zinoyeva’s street. He walked slowly toward the house, watching carefully. Nothing. After what had happened to Ans-bach, he’d take no chances.

  Checking the street once more, he felt satisfied. In a quick motion he climbed the low porch and rang the bell.

  Anna Zinoyeva, a diminutive woman whose wispy white hair barely covered her scalp, answered the door. She used a metal walker.

  Behind her, easily visible from the doorway, was a tiny sitting room furnished with a few straight-back upholstered chairs and a brown-tweed sofa. Even from here, everything about the room seemed to have been frozen in the late 1950s.

  Her eyes squinted, giving her a slightly Asiatic appearance. Stone thought of her old boss, Lenin, whose eyes were also somewhat Asian.

  “Irene Potter?” Stone asked, using her deep-cover name.

  “Yes?”

  “Anna Zinoyeva,” Stone said calmly.

  The old woman shook her head. “You are mistaken,” she said in broken English. “Please go away from here.”

  “I’m not here to harm you,” Stone said as gently as he could. “I need to talk with you.” He handed her a letter he had typed earlier in the day, on Central Intelligence Agency stationery he had once gotten from Saul. It requested, in bland bureaucratic language, a routine update of her file, a perfectly normal, straightforward questioning. The letter, signed by a fictitious “Assistant Records Chief,” requested her to speak to one Charles Stone.

  Surely it had been years, even decades, since anyone from the American intelligence community had bothered to talk to her; her guard would be down.

  She held the letter a few inches from her eyes, gray with cataracts, scrutinizing the text, the signature. It was obvious that she was almost blind. In a few moments, she looked up.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Just a few minutes of your time,” Stone said cheerily. “Didn’t you receive a call?”

  “No,” she said warily. She shook her head again. “Go away from here.” She made a feeble attempt to raise her walker, to ward off this unwelcome intruder.

  Stone pushed his way into the house. The woman cried out: “Go! Please!”

  “It’s all right,” Stone said gently. “It won’t take more than a few minutes.”

  “No,” Anna Zinoyeva said. “They promised me … They prom-

  140 ■ JOSEPH FINDER
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  ised me no one would ever talk to me again! They said I would be left alone!”

  ‘This won’t take long. A mere formality.”

  She seemed to hesitate. “What do you want from me?” the old woman repeated unhappily, stepping aside to let Stone in.

  In the end, it was Stone’s gentle manner that allayed her suspicions. Sitting on the plastic-slipcovered sofa, she smoothed her faded house dress with gnarled yet somehow delicate hands, and told her stor', haltingly at first, then as fluently as her poor English would allow.

  She had come to work for Lenin when she was just nineteen— her father had been a friend of Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, one of Lenin’s closest friends—and she had never been more than a secretary in its strictest definition. She t'ped copies of Lenin’s voluminous and seemingly endless correspondence and did other paperwork in Lenin’s office in the Kremlin, from 1918 on, when the headquarters of the Soviet government was moved from Petrograd to Moscow. In 1923 she moed from Lenin’s Kremlin office to Gorky, where Lenin was eventually to die.

  Several years after Lenin’s death, she asked permission to emigrate to the United States, and since it was still the 1920s and it was still possible to emigrate—and since she had sered her country so honorably—she was given an exit visa. As one of the youngest secretaries on Lenin’s staff, she had rarely been entrusted with anything of great importance or secrecy, she said. This was not to say that she didn’t hear or see things. She did.

  After she had been talking for half an hour or so, the suspicious squint in the eyes was replaced by a gaze that was in turn gentle and defiant.

  “Twenty-three years I hear nothing from the great American intelligence,” she said mischieviously. She shook her head at the hopeless crudeness of her benefactors. “Nothing. Now you are so very interested in me.”

  “As I said, it’s routine. We’re filling in the blank spaces in your file.”