The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  Then the tanks moved in, the missile launchers with their thick rubber tires, the machine-gun carriages, drawn by four horses—a homage to the old days, surely—all rattled across the cobbled square, which was filled with blue-gray exhaust fumes.

  The crowd, chanting agitatedly but joylessly, red ribbons pinned to their breasts, were unaware of the extensive security precautions, Mathewson knew: the squads of soldiers with automatic rifles gathered in the underground passageways outside the square, the plainclothes-men standing in the bleachers astride the mausoleum, wearing earplugs and bulging guns beneath their coats. Security for the summit was tight.

  Mathewson watched his President up there, waving and smiling broadly, and felt a flush of pride. For the first time, a president was paying respects to the Russian Revolution. The Cold War was definitely over.

  At shortly after eleven, several little girls with bows in their hair climbed the mausoleum steps to hand cellophane-wrapped bouquets of red carnations to the members of the Politburo, bouquets supplied by Gorbachev’s office staff.

  Mathewson watched the Politburo members, looking bored atop the tomb, their right hands extended in a weary salute. A nearby mother—clearly the wife of an important official—was holding up her child and whispering excitedly, “Can you see Corbachev? That’s Gorbachev! And there’s the President of the United States!”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 535

  Colonel Nikita Vlasik of the MVD watched Charlotte Harper with sad gray eyes and decided that maybe he believed her extraordinary story.

  This was the man who had once—it seemed long ago, though it was mere weeks—arrested her. The man who had given her advice on how to stay out of trouble. Charlotte felt a strange kinship with him.

  He nodded without smiling. “You know,” he said, as he gestured to his chief lieutenant, “you remind me even more of my daughter. Only you and she would do something as foolhardy as you’ve just done, breaking through a KGB barricade.

  “Vanya,” he said to his lieutenant, “we have not a second to waste.”

  It was 11:03.

  By 11:05, the KGB guard had locked the arsenal door once again, leaving the dead body crumpled inside. He had orders to follow. Everything smelled like gas, the arsenal and everything outside it, and as the guard stood watch to make sure no one else intruded, he thought he was going to be sick.

  Inside the arsenal, the digital numbers on the electronic detonator indicated that six minutes remained.

  The propane continued to hiss loudly out of the cylinder.

  At 11:07, a team of MVD militiamen, bearing axes, chemical fire-extinguishers, and the assorted other equipment of the bomb squad, emerged from the door in the Kremlin wall directly behind the mausoleum. In order to avoid attracting too much attention, they had swung around into the Kremlin and entered from this side, but even so their presence caused a stir in the reviewing stands on either side of the tomb. There was a line of them—nine militiamen, to be exact— and they ran toward the mausoleum.

  When they reached it, they split up to search.

  But they were not diverted for long. The smell was overpowering now. All of the mausoleum stank of propane, and within forty-five seconds, seven of the militiamen had located the source.

  536 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  The KGB guard saw the mihtiamen running toward him, and he raised his pistol and fired, but he was overwhelmed by gunfire.

  The electronic detonator read 11:09.

  With the aid of an ax they were able to sever the lock and force the arsenal doors open. The place stank.

  The militiamen, experts in their work, at once saw the bomb apparatus and trod over the bodies in their haste to find some way to disconnect it.

  The men coughed, overcome by the fumes.

  There was no time!

  Several of the men collapsed on the floor from inhaling the propane; they hadn’t all brought masks—who could have known? There were seconds remaining, literally seconds, and the wiring was such a mess, such a tangle, that even tearing at it as they did seemed to do nothing to stop the maddening, terrif'ing, hypnotic reddish flashing of the digital readout, the numbers that rushed toward 11:10. They could see the target time on a separate readout, the precise time at which the small black detonator would click the circuit open, and the plastic explosives—

  Tear the wires out of it! Pull the plastique away from the electrical current! But there were too many blocks of explosive.

  It couldn’t possibly be done in eight seconds. The whole thing would detonate and they and the mausoleum and the world leaders who stood unawares, mere yards above, would be incinerated… .

  At 11:09:55, one of the militiamen spotted the connector and dove for the wiring, wrenched the leads apart, end from end.

  Would it … ?

  “Stand back!” a voice shouted.

  The clock’s digits froze. Lying on the floor, surrounded by a tangle of wires, the militiaman gave a deep sigh. The bomb had been dismantled.

  And it was over.

  One of the militiamen spotted a face he recognized, and the two

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  men drew close for an instant. They shook hands, and the first one said under his breath one word: “Staroobriadets.”

  Atop the mausoleum, the President of the Soviet Union and the President of the United States waved at the crowd. On either side of them stood members of the Soviet and the American leadership. Most of the Americans, cold and uncomfortable, their legs weary, wondered how much longer they’d be able to stand it up there. Their Soviet counterparts, more accustomed to very long public ceremonies, gave stiff little waves and stood still to conserve body heat.

  Unnoticeable to observers in Red Square, a small slip of paper was passed from a military guard standing next to the mausoleum, to a civilian security’ officer, and eventually to the Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, who handed it to Gorbachev.

  Gorbachev glanced at it briefly, then looked back to the crowd.

  The President turned to him. “Urgent business?” he asked genially.

  “No,” Gorbachev said. “A little problem, but we’ve taken care of it.”

  Charlotte stood, protected by two guards from the MVD, behind a checkpoint near the Historical Museum, just outside Red Square. The cheers and martial music of the parade were overwhelmingly loud. At last the car pulled up, a rusty Lada, looking like a squashed bug. She’d hoped the MVD would be able to find them, and they had.

  The first face she saw was Stefan’s, then Svetlov’s. She craned her neck, terrified, trying to read their expressions. Was he—?

  And then Charlie got out of the car, crawled out, really, from the back seat, a wounded, very sick-looking man. What happened? his anxious face asked.

  She wanted to jump across the iron railing, hug him, tell him everything was all right. She found herself swelling with emotion, relieved tension, love, fear—a hundred different feelings—and then what little remained of her poise dissolved and she was crying.

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  Charlie Stone struggled to cross the cobblestones toward Charlotte, and then he saw the answer, her smile, the yes, and he began to see concentric circles around everything, doubles and triples, everything getting lighter and brighter, everything becoming wonderfully, comfortingly, white.

  [PI10GU[

  New York: Six Months Later

  Only afterward did things come full circle.

  The first thing Stone became aware of, as he slowly awakened, was the warmth and velvety softness of Charlotte’s naked back, nestled tightly against him. Then: the morning light from the strong May sun, flooding the bedroom.

  Her nearness aroused him, and he slowly reached a hand around to the warmth between her legs. With spread fingers he massaged her downy pubic hair gently and slowly, then closed his fingers and increased the pressure. She was, though not awake, moist. His other hand stroked her breasts; the nipples were erect now. He kissed her neck, nuzzled her shoulder.
She stirred and gave a throaty moan.

  Even months later, the mysteries remained.

  They knew that Sonya had died on Revolution Day, and that Yakov and his sons had been permitted—by direct order from the Politburo—to emigrate to the United States.

  Avram Kramer’s mental health remained tenuous; for him, things would never be normal again.

  They knew that the U.S.-Soviet summit had ended with more promise than substance, as is often the case with summits, and that neither the American leaders nor the Russian leaders, with one great exception, were harmed. The vast majority of American press reports called the summit “bland and uneventful”—the sole exception being the unfortunately timed death, by stroke, of the chairman of the KGB. But the reports, of course, were decidedly wrong.

  542 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Frank Paradiso had been reassigned to the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon. The Director of Central hitelHgence, Ted Templeton, and his deputy, Ronald Sanders, both announced their resignations shortly after the summit, each for various family reasons, each announcing that he had wanted to wait until the Moscow summit was over.

  Each of them also found lucrative employment in the private sector. Of course, the two officials had little choice but to resign, faced with the possibility that their role in the illegal covert operation might someday be revealed, the most damaging evidence being contained in a package that was found in Andrei Pavlichenko’s office safe after his death.

  Unbeknownst to Stone, the extraordinarily secret group that called itself the Sanctum disbanded itself, a mere memory in the minds of its prominent members, who of course said not a word when they ran into one another at parties in Georgetown or panel discussions at the Council on Foreign Relations.

  He was unaware, too, that at this very moment a nurse in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow was, as she’d been ordered, injecting one of her latest patients with a solution of halperidol and a colloidal suspension of sublimed sulfur, which she’d done for several weeks’ running. This solution, the nurse knew, causes the patient to run an extremely high fever and to suffer unbearable discomfort in whatever position he assumes. The nurse knew only that the patient was afflicted with criminal schizophrenia, having been arrested, by Politburo order, in the Soviet Embassy in Washington on November 7 and flown at once to Moscow.

  The patient, a former high-ranking diplomat named Aleksandr Malarek, once an aide to the late chairman of the KGB, was being administered a little lesson designed to impress anyone so foolish as to attempt what Malarek had done. Malarek now suffered a side effect of the medication: he had little more intellectual capacity than a parsnip.

  Charlie refilled their coffee cups and sat down next to Charlotte at the breakfast table.

  Both of them were enjoying the energizing glow of having just

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  made love. Charlotte, who was rapt in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, looked up after a few moments. “Charlie, we need to talk.”

  He groaned. No one ever “needed to talk” about happy, pleasant things.

  “How committed are you to teaching at Columbia?” she asked.

  Immediately after Stone returned to New York, Columbia University had offered him a tenured professorship in Soviet studies, at a respectable academic salary—which wasn’t much. But Stone had plenty sacked away from his days at Parnassus and from the money his father had left in his safe-deposit box, and besides, the apartment and his mountain-climbing equipment were already paid for. And then there would be the Lehman inheritance …

  He was about to publish another book, on the future of the Soviet empire, and was teaching a class on the Soviet empire, or what little was left of it.

  “Committed?” Stone asked, getting up to retrieve the toast, which had just popped up. “Now what are you talking about?”

  “I mean, do you like it? Would you ever consider leaving?”

  “Do I like it?” Quite a bit, he thought. He’d turned away requests from several intelligence agencies, the NSA, and the DIA for his expertise. Intelligence, he’d come to believe, was a little like a snake: slimy, though deceptively dry and inoffensive, even agreeable, to the touch. He said: “Teaching in a university would be wonderful—without the backbiting colleagues and the undermotivated students. And the academic^politics—which are so fierce because the stakes are so small, as someone once said. Charlotte, what are you after?”

  “The network’s offered me a job in Washington I can’t pass up.”

  “Really?”

  “Covering the White House.”

  “Seriously?” Stone stepped forward to throw his arms around her, and then stopped. “Oh, no. Washington.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t be thrilled about going back there.”

  He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “The land of the white sky in the summer. The land of pedestrian malls. The city that teems with lawyers and congressional interns.”

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  “Charlie—”

  “But, then, I suppose I could manage to get a job at Georgetown.” “Charlie, they’d hire you in a second.”

  He turned to face her. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I could do it. Why not?”

  There was a sadness in both of them, but especially in Stone. In some sense, he had found two parents and lost them both. He had learned to kill and knew that he had within him the ability to take a human life, just as so many had been taken from him.

  On the anniversary of his father’s death, he made a pilgrimage to Boston and placed flowers on the grave, in Mount Auburn Cemetery. The epitaph was the verse from Boris Pasternak, bleak and yet at the same time hopeful, that Alfred Stone had liked so much:

  YOU ARE eternity’s HOSTAGE A CAPTIVE OF TIME.

  And it had always meant little to Stone, until things came full circle. It was the key to the final mystery, the astonishing revelation that Winthrop Lehman had made in the last ten minutes of his life.

  Keep your machine on, Winthrop Lehman had said, gesturing weakly at the tape recorder. / have one more thing to tell you. And then Stone had known.

  “You saw the gravestone I had put up in Pere Lachaise to conceal the fact that Sonya was alive,” Lehman said. “She was allowed to come to Paris twice, in 1956 and in 1953. You see, your father was always grateful to me for selecting him to serve in the White House. He looked upon me as a surrogate father of sorts, and so he went to Moscow for me uncomplainingly. And when he was photographed by FBI agents in Moscow, he knew he had to go to prison rather than reveal the truth.”

  Stone, watching Lehman struggle to keep his eyes open, nodded. His head whirled; he could barely speak. “I know,” he said. “I think on some level I’ve always known, although Dad never said anything. My father wanted to protect my childhood. He didn’t want to take from me the one immutable thing. I could never understand why he

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  felt so close to you, so loyal, against all reason. But I think I always had an inkling.”

  Lehman, who was almost dead, could not contain a small, pleased smile. “My daughter was a beautiful woman. I shouldn’t—shouldn’t have been surprised when your father fell in love with her. He would do anything—he was even willing to suffer a great indignity in silence—to get Sonya out—Sonya, who was now pregnant with his child. But he didn’t know that Sonya could never be let out, that she was a hostage. And Sonya—poor Sonya—refused to let her child grow up in a land of oppression. This was 1953, remember, and the terror was at its peak. She made the greatest sacrifice of her life. She said— she said she didn’t want her child to be a slave.”

  “You couldn’t get her out,” Stone said tonelessly. “But you were able to get me out. That was why my father went to Paris in late 1953. To see Sonya one last time, and to take his newborn child. But why—”

  “I had to lie to him. I had to tell him that Sonya had remarried. Otherwise he couldn’t have faced it. A few years later, I told him she had died.
But I did everything I could for him.”

  “Yes.”

  “I got a forged birth certificate for him—for you. I helped him, with money, whenever he’d allow me to do so—”

  “I know. I’m—grateful.”

  “When I saw you in my archives, I was terrified you’d find out, and I didn’t know what you’d do, how you might disturb the delicate arrangement—as much as you had the right. …”

  “Before he died, my father wanted to tell me, but he never got the chance. But I knew.” Somehow Stone had suspected something like this all his life, in the way children can sense things that have no logical explanation: that Margaret Stone was not his real mother. What was it that Alfred Stone had said in a moment of rage, years ago? “You’re the only mother he has!” Yes. The cry of someone who feels at once angry and guilty: I need you to be his mother, since his real mother …

  “Some of us—some of us—we’re caught in traps that aren’t of our own making,” Lehman whispered. “In the Cold War between two

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  superpowers. I was; my Sonya was. At least you are not, Charlie.”

  And the old man closed his eyes.

  Traps. Hostages.

  “You are eternity’s hostage,” Alfred Stone liked to quote. “A captive of time.”

  Charlie had misunderstood. His father hadn’t been referring to his very public tragedy. He’d been referring to his own, private tragedy. To Sonva. To the mother of his son.

  Washington

  Almost a full year after that Revolution Day, Stone received in the mail a registered and insured letter from Yakov Kramer, who was by now living in the Brighton Beach section of New York. He found a comfortable chair and opened the package. Charlotte, her hair tied back with a paint-spattered bandana—their new apartment in Georgetown was a disheveled maze of paint cans, spackling, ladders, and drop cloths—stood over him and gasped.

  The package contained several yellowed sheets of paper.

  Stone pulled them out carefully and, with a peculiar mingling of elation, puzzlement, and shock, examined the documents. They seemed, after all this time, after such a long search, oddly familiar.