The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  Sonya explained that she and her mother, who was to die in the early 1970s, moved to a tiny apartment in the Krasnaya Presnya district, and her mother managed to find a job at the Moscow Underwear

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  Factory Number 6 of the Textile Trust. She made 159 rubles a month working at an ancient Singer sewing machine. People assumed that they had been abandoned by the American, and in the mood of anti-Americanism that dominated Moscow in the 1930s, people at once felt sorry for the mother and child and feared them, as people feared anyone who had been connected in any way with foreigners.

  “But you were permitted to see your father,” Stone said.

  “He was never allowed to come to Moscow, but twice I was allowed to see him in Paris. Only me; never my mother. Two terribly short visits, and always under guard.”

  “Yes. In 1953 and 1956. And Lehman couldn’t have you kidnapped because your mother was still alive, in Moscow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you always wanted to leave this country?”

  “Oh, yes,” she cried. “Oh, God, yes. My mother desperately wanted to leave, all her life. And so did I. And then, when I met Yakov—well, I knew he wanted to emigrate.”

  “Does he know about you?”

  “No.”

  “You kept that a secret from him?”

  She bit her lip again, and looked down.

  “Why?”

  Her reply was anguished. “He couldn’t know. No one could know. If I ever wanted to see my father again, I had to keep silent.”

  Stone considered a moment. “Stalin had something on your father, and your father had something on him.”

  “How much do you know?” she asked warily.

  “Your father had a very damaging document, and Stalin had you. A standoff.”

  She said nothing.

  “You have the document, don’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “That was what my father handed to you, wasn’t it? That was what your father was so concerned about getting to you, so concerned that he would do anything to get it to you, even if it meant having my father discredited, his career destroyed.”

  474 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “Please, I don’t know anything about that!”

  “What is it? I want you to tell me what it is!”

  “I don’t know anything,” Sonya said, in tears.

  “But you do. Your father—through my father—gave you a file, didn’t he?”

  She shook her head, too emphatically, unconvincingly.

  Stone was nodding. He knew now. “Once I thought it was something called the Lenin Testament. But it’s more, it has to be. It has to be some kind of evidence of a secret attempt, years ago, to seize power. Names, specifics—which would blow the present plot out in the open …”

  “Why are you saying all this?”

  “Your contact at the Lubyanka,” Stone said. “A man named Dunayev, am I right?”

  “Please. I know so much less than you think. There were so many go-betweens betu’een me and the Lubyanka. Maybe yes. I don’t know. …”

  Stone stood up, pacing, thinking aloud. “There’s about to be an exchange, isn’t there? How is it going to be done? Where?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Tell me! Where is the exchange going to take place?” Stone stared out the window.

  “Please,” Sonya whispered. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is to get Yakov and his sons and me out of the country, and if you interfere— please! —you will end my last hope.”

  “Your father is in Moscow now, isn’t he?” Stone said, turning around to face her. Things were falling into place. He was beginning to understand.

  “I don’t—”

  “You have no choice, my friend,” Stone said sadly, feeling for this woman’s immense unhappiness. “I need you to tell me how I can get to your father— now. “

  And suddenly Sonya Kunetskaya got up from her chair, came close to Stone, and embraced him. “No,” she pleaded. “Soon everything will make sense to you. Please don’t interfere.”

  Stone held her tighdy, comforting her, realizing how desperately

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 475

  miserable she was. “I’m sorry, ” he said. “We really don’t have a choice.”

  The middle-aged Russian man, his face veined from a life of consuming vodka, mounted the broad marble stairs, weaving from side to side. He was visibly drunk, a bottle of Stolichnaya pertsovka, or pepper vodka, shoved in the pocket of his blue workingman’s coat. It was past midnight, and Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street was dark and empty.

  “Oh,” he said, entering the building and spotting the vakhtyor, the night watchman, who sat at a desk by a telephone. The vakhtyor appeared to be absorbed in an issue of Z<3 Rulyom, the Soviet Union’s version of Car and Driver.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” the vakhtyor yelled. “Get the hell out before I throw you out.”

  The drunk threaded his way across the lobby, toward the desk. “Regards from Vasya.”

  “Vasya?” the vakhtyor asked suspiciously.

  “Hey, is your head up your ass? Aren’t you a friend of Vasya Korolyov? Vasya the Bandit?”

  Now the guard’s curiosity seemed to be piqued. “What do you want?” he asked, a shade less hostilely.

  “Vasya said I should come talk to you. I lost my job today. The damned car factory booted me out on my ass. Vasya said you might be able to help me get a job here as a cleaner.” The drunk sat down clumsily on a chair near the guard. “Mind if I sit?” he asked.

  “Look,” the vakhtyor said tentatively, shrugging. “I don’t know what the hell …” His eyes greedily spied the neck of the Stolichnaya bottle. “Looks like you’ve had about one liter too much, comrade.”

  The drunk cast his eyes around the empty lobby, toward the deserted street, as if afraid someone might come by at any moment. He pulled out the bottle and set it on the watchman’s desk, jarring the phone slighdy. He extended his hand. “Zhenya.”

  The watchman, his spirits buoyed by the sight of the vodka bottle, took the man’s hand, shaking briefly. “Vadim. Where the hell you get that?”

  476 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “Stolichnaya?” The drunk grinned as he divulged his secret. “My cousin Lyuda works in a beryozka,” he said, referring to a hard-currency store. He twisted the bottle open. “Be my guest. I don’t have a glass.”

  Vadim took the bottle and held it to his lips. He took a healthy swig and shoved it toward Zhenya.

  Zhenya grinned again. “If I put any more in this stomach of mine,” he said, patting his ample belly, “I’ll mess up this beautiful floor. Be my guest. Ten minutes, I’ll join you.”

  Vadim took the bottle again and drank deeply, then belched. “Now, how did you say you know Vasya?”

  Yakov Kramer, who had returned to the apartment five minutes earlier, could not believe what he was hearing. It was turning his life inside out, altering the meaning of the last fifteen years of his life. He didn’t know what to say or how to respond or how to begin to understand it. His shock turned into anger and then sorrow.

  “You poor thing,” he said, holding her shoulders.

  “No,” Sonya said. “Don’t feel sorry for me. But accept my apology.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said. “In this life, things happen for reasons we can’t always understand.”

  He felt her warm breath on his neck, felt her tears rolling down his cheek, and then he knew that they were all in terrible, terrible danger.

  Everyone in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow knows the place is bugged. With the exception of the ambassador’s office, and the “bubble,” both of which are regularly swept for electronic listening devices, the embassy’s offices are not used for any significant conversations pertaining to national security. The walls were peppered with electronic radio transmitters, some buried deep in the masonry, which are monitored from a KGB station across the street.

  But, u
nknown to the CIA station, even the bubble is not safe.

  Although it, too, is swept for radio-frequency emissions, sweeping cannot pick up a species of bugs that emit no signals and yet are easily

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 477

  activated from hundreds of feet away. In mid-1988, despite the previous year’s uproar over a few marines’ having admitted female KGB officers to security-classified rooms in the Moscow embassy, the bubble was penetrated. Several passive transmitters were installed into the legs and under the top of the only piece of furniture in the bubble, the conference table.

  As a result, Frank Paradiso’s entire conversation with Charlotte Harper and Charles Stone was transmitted and recorded at a KGB monitoring facility across Tschaikovsky Street.

  The woman who monitored the transmission had received strict instructions from her superior, the head of the Second Chief Directorate, Pyotr Shalamov: the transcript was to go directly to him.

  Within two hours, the transcript, t'ped in triplicate, had gone from the listening post across the street from the U.S. Embassy to the headquarters of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, an anonymous five-story building less than half a mile from the embassy, and then to the Lubyanka, where Shalamov presented it personally to Andrei Pavlichenko.

  The head of the KGB looked up when he had finished reading the document. He looked neither pleased nor displeased.

  “Find Stone,” he said simply.

  Stone drove a few blocks away from Sonya and Yakov’s apartment building to what looked like an American-style bar. He hadn’t seen a legitimate bar in his entire time in Moscow—just the cafe where he had phoned earlier, and the dreary nightclubs that seemed to be peopled by Russian prostitutes. This bar had a plywood counter, a seedy-looking bartender. It served lousy Russian beer. Four Russian men in dark-gray, padded workingman’s jackets sat at the counter blearily drinking and at the same time talking loudly, flashing a few metal teeth.

  Stone entered, and saw that there were a few others, who also looked like laborers—factory workers?—sitting at small tables. As he walked to the telephone on the back wall, every eye in the bar was on him. Everything Stone was wearing, the clothes Jacky had purchased for him in Paris—his dark wool overcoat, his jeans, his heavy Timberland boots—seemed to be an advertisement for Western manufacturers. Everyone in the bar knew that, and the stares were not altogether friendly: this was a crowd that generally feared foreigners. You get a foreigner around and then you get the cops and the Gebezhniki—the KGB—and there’s trouble.

  He dropped a two-kopek piece in the phone and tried Charlotte again. He had tried from Sonya’s apartment, knowing that using her phone was a risk, but he had to hear her voice, know she was safe. She hadn’t answered at her apartment or her office. It was after midnight. Where the hell was she?

  The phone rang and rang at her apartment. He hung up and dialed her office.

  Nothing.

  Please, God. If anything s happened to Charlotte …

  A slender woman slowly climbed the marble staircase of the official-looking Soviet government building. She wore a tattered overcoat, her blond hair covered in a babushka.

  Entering the building’s lobby, she saw the two men.

  “Well done, Zhenya,” Charlotte said.

  Zhenya was sitting with his hands folded over his stomach. The night watchman was fast asleep, snoring loudly, his face pressed into the desk blotter.

  “Go home, Zhenya. I’ll be a while. And thanks.” She gave him a peck on the cheek, then walked over to the desk and pulled out a key.

  She unlocked the main interior entrance and climbed the grand staircase to the reading room. The building was dark, but she made her way without lights, clutching the banister.

  Zhenya was indeed a hard drinker, but he was also an unemployed actor who had once performed at the Moscow Art Theater. Charlotte had met him and his family shortly after moving to Moscow, and he, who harbored no deep affection for Soviet bureaucracy or night watchmen or the police, had easily agreed to help her.

  The bottle of pepper vodka he had so generously offered the night

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  watchman was laced with a few tablets of Halcion, or triazolam, a sleeping pill Charlotte occasionally took. She knew alcohol exacerbated its effects but wouldn’t make the drug deadly. She also knew that Halcion took effect quickly, often inside twenty minutes, and that it would wear off by the next day.

  Earlier in the day, asking around, she’d learned that the watchman was excessively fond of booze, and so the spiked vodka seemed the best strategy. The guy might have an unusually deep night’s sleep, but he would be okay.

  And she was in the military-historical archives.

  When she reached the reading room, she opened the door and saw that it, too, was dark. It wouldn’t do to put the main lights on, which would be visible from the street, so she switched on a small table lamp behind the reference desk.

  She knew exactly where to look: the microfilm records of the Soviet-Polish front, 1939-1945. Many of these records were kept in the open shelves, available to all scholars. The ones she wanted, however, were stored in a locked cabinet. During her morning visit, she had inquired where these would be. The librarian, who was unusually helpful for a Soviet archivist, had pointed at the cabinet but shook her head: you had to get special permission, she warned.

  Or the key. The same key opened four of the cabinets, and Charlotte had glimpsed where it was kept.

  In short order, she had opened the cabinet and pulled out an arm’s length of microfilm spools. She found a microfilm viewer and switched it on. The glow gave the entire dark reading room a grayish tinge.

  The work did not go as quickly as she’d hoped. After an hour, she was still lost in a tangle of Soviet-Polish military records. She rubbed her tired eyes, took a deep breath, and pulled out another reel.

  The Investigation into the Crimes in the Katyn Forest Region.

  Her heart leaped. She turned the spool faster and faster, her eyes skimming over the documents, searching for one in particular. Half an hour later, nothing. A lot of records, some grisly, some dull.

  At two-thirty in the morning, she found it.

  480 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Proceedings in the Court-Martial of the 19th Company of the Infantry Division of the 172nd Regiment on the Polish Front Under the Command of Major A. R. Alekseyev.

  The documents, which went on for page after page, listed the accused. Captain V. I. Sushenko, commanding officer. First Sergeant M. M. Ryzkhov, squad commander. She squinted at the screen, trying to make sense of it. Eighteen men, all soldiers of the Red Army, had rebelled against the instructions of the NKVD to descend into the pit and, with their four-sided bayonets, stab anybody who had miraculously survived the massacre and appeared to be moving. It was horrible. It was inhuman, and the Russian soldiers had fought back, cursing the NKVD men.

  The prosecution had taken testimony from seventy-three NKVD officers, in preparation for the court-martial of the eighteen men.

  And then, on the last page, was—just as Charlie had been told in Paris—an order to terminate. It was a brief form that decreed the proceedings unnecessary, other satisfactory arrangements having been made.

  She skimmed the page, her eyes moving to the signature at the bottom, and for an instant she thought her eyes had gone. It could not be. She let out a short, breathy cry that filled the dark, vacant room.

  It could not be. She squinted again and moved her eyes closer to the screen.

  The name at the bottom of the page was that of Valery Chavadze, one of the legends of Soviet politics. An old Georgian, now retired, who had been one of Stalin’s henchmen. A Georgian, like Beria, like Stalin himself. An elderly man by now, living in grandeur somewhere outside of Moscow. He had been a deputy commissar, later minister, of foreign aflPairs, a member of the Politburo, and—so Charlotte had always believed—an unswervingly loyal Stalinist.

  Chavadze had stayed at the top of
Russia’s leadership, serving in Khrushchev’s Presidium, Brezhnev’s Politburo, only deciding to retire in 1984. Chavadze’s was the longest-running, most successful, most illustrious political career the Soviet Union had ever seen. He was one of the country’s grand old men, a figure who—despite his reputation as one of Stalin’s men—was widely regarded with reverence, almost awe.

  And—if Stone’s information was right—this hard-line Stalinist was the leader of the underground movement called the Old Believers.

  Valery Chavadze was the only man who could stop the terror.

  71

  Stefan arrived at his father’s apartment out of breath, still wearing his ambulance technician’s uniform. He had been summoned by Yakov urgently, and his father’s expression indeed seemed grave.

  “What is it?” Stefan asked.

  “I am very afraid for us,” Yakov said. His voice trembled.

  “We have been found out,” Stefan said, his stomach turning over.

  “Worse, I think. Much worse.”

  “What?”

  Hunched over, Yakov smoked a Stolichnye cigarette. “I learned something today about Sonya, something that is tearing me apart. My Sonya—” He broke off and compressed his lips, trying to gain control of his emotions. After a moment he continued: “My Sonya has been living a lie. She has lied to me. She—she is not the person I thought she was.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Stefan said, wondering what it was about Sonya that could possibly be so terrible.

  “She—she has a father. A very well known man, an American. Winthrop Lehman.”

  Stefan had heard the name Lehman, read about him in Soviet history books. He laughed, quite sure his father was joking, and then, seeing that he was laughing alone, stopped abruptly.

  “Yes,” Yakov said. “I found it hard to believe, too.”