by Robert Moss
General Luzhin’s message to the Center had a very speedy effect. His superiors in the GRU immediately lodged a complaint with the Administrative Organs Department of the Central Committee, which supervised the activities of both secret services and banged their heads together when required. Neither Sasha nor Luzhin was informed, naturally, of the reprimand issued to Drinov. But within forty-eight hours, orders were issued for Churkhin’s recall to Moscow.
And Sasha, who had told himself that he could not afford friends, came to look on Feliks Nikolsky in a new light.
Nikolsky was impossible, of course, a drunkard and a womanizer, totally self-indulgent. Yet he proved his capacity for human loyalty. He was a man you could count on in the trenches. Nor did Sasha doubt that he was a good intelligence professional. He was ready to sabotage Drinov for a friend, yet he would flare up in a white-hot rage when anyone started running down the KGB. He always referred to his organization as Kontora, ‘The Service’, meaning the First Chief Directorate, which was responsible for foreign intelligence, and never as The Committee, the common apellation for the KGB as a whole — as if he wanted to draw as thick a line as possible between his own work and that of the hundreds of thousands of officers and agents involved in crushing disaffection at home.
After the Churkhin episode, Sasha actively sought out Nikolsky’s company.
Once, after Sasha had been called to a meeting with some visitors from Moscow, he got back to the Excelsior after midnight, and almost bumped into Nikolsky, who was hurrying out through the lobby.
Feliks raised his hands in surrender. ‘All right, General, I give up! On condition you buy me a drink.’
They found a nearby bar, entirely populated, it seemed, by elderly queers.
‘I don’t like yours,’ Nikolsky commented, jabbing his chin toward a plump gentleman sporting an ascot.
‘I don’t like yours,’ Sasha countered.
‘So you caught me out,’ Nikolsky said after a while. He put his fingers to his nose as if he were sniffing a flower. ‘But she’s worth it!’
‘I got into her bed,’ he rushed on before Sasha could pose any questions, ‘the way that Mephistopheles got into the house of Doctor Faust. You remember Goethe’s version?’
Sasha hesitated.
‘Because of a poodle, a black poodle!’ Nikolsky said impatiently. ‘It was like this. I was walking Kipling in the park, and she appeared from nowhere, like Margarita on a broomstick, with her idiotic little Chinese mutt. Kipling is a sex fiend — he has a problem, a real problem — and he was all over that ball of fluff. It would have been rape in Central Park if I hadn’t pried them apart. She was bashful, of course, but one thing led to another. What could be more respectable, more bourgeois, than to meet while walking the dog?’
Sasha refrained from pointing out that this was a favorite cover for whores all over the world. He had no idea who the girl was.
‘Oh, I was artful, my dear Sasha. Like Mephistopheles, I tempted her with the pleasures of this world. To be perfectly specific, I got her a job in the Novosti office. She said she was bored, sitting around at home all day. Then I kept her late one afternoon and — there you have it.’ He yawned extravagantly. ‘Lack of oxygen, that’s all it is,’ he said by way of apology. ‘Her husband was away tonight. For a fucking Turk, he’s unusually industrious, I must say. Excuse me,’ he called to the barman, ‘could we have the other half?’
Listening to this monologue, Sasha was shaken to realize that there was only one girl Nikolsky could be talking about.
Askyerov’s wife, Maya. He had noticed her more than a few times since they had moved into the Excelsior. It was impossible not to notice her. She was all light and shade, a moon-pale face framed by glossy black hair that she plaited and wound up in a chignon. Her eyes flashed like black diamonds. She was tall, long-legged, with a generous, mobile body.
The Askyerovs lived on the top floor of the hotel. Sasha had never seen the inside of their apartment, but it was probably of penthouse dimensions. After all, Maya’s husband represented the Party elite. His father was not only the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, but a man with a lot of influence in Moscow. Young Askyerov held the rank of Counsellor at the Mission, and everyone seemed to treat him with respect, including the Ambassador. But he did not cut an impressive figure — short and swarthy, with a pocked, bulging face. It was hard to imagine that Maya had married the Turk, as Nikolsky called him, for love.
‘Do you know the risk you’re taking?’ Sasha whispered to Nikolsky.
Feliks affected not to hear. ‘You know the worst thing?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘She wants to go to museums all the time, to look at Great Art. She seems to think that Old Masters improve the soul. Now I can’t stand masterpieces. They have a stupid, complacent look about them, like cows chewing the cud.’
*
The seventh floor of the Soviet Mission was deserted at 4:00 A.M., apart from the security men and the radio operator. In the bowels of the building, Kostya, who was doubling as duty officer, had paused from his sampling of a fresh consignment of Stolichnaya to present a solitary rendition of an Orthodox chant. The radio operator had dozed off before his machine beeped and began to whir into life. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he watched as it spat out the perforated tape. When the transmission was complete, he removed the tape and decoded the first set of digits. Then he got on the phone to Bitov, the cipher clerk.
Bitov, who lived in the Mission building, appeared within a few minutes, wearing a track suit. The man seemed to live for this kind of summons. He whisked the cable away to his strongroom and fed it into his cipher machine. He checked the setting, and then the machine began the automatic translation of the message from the Center.
It was addressed to the KGB Resident and flagged Personal and Extremely Urgent. It conveyed the fact that the Central Committee had approved an active measures operation against a leading American political figure, a man with his eye on the presidency. It contained specific instructions for the use of damaging material that had been prepared by Service A, which specialized in disinformation. The word ‘immediately’ was used repeatedly. ‘Instruct NORMAN to make contact with VASYA immediately.’ The message was signed ‘Alyoshin,’ the standard code for the head of the First Chief Directorate.
Bitov knew very well that at the Center, where it was nearly lunchtime, they couldn’t care less that it was the middle of the night in New York. In any case, it was his duty to pass on a message involving a decision of the Central Committee right away.
The phone rang only three times before the KGB Resident, General Koroviev, answered, his voice thick with sleep.
‘Sorry to disturb you,’ said the cipher clerk. ‘There’s something I have to show you immediately.’
‘Is it really —’
‘Yes, very.’
‘I’m on my way.’
Even at that hour of the morning, Koroviev looked healthy and freshly shaved. Polished and decisive, the KGB Resident was popular throughout the Mission. His own officers called him Ike behind his back because of his strong physical resemblance to Dwight Eisenhower. The professionals respected him as one of their own, a man who, even at his present elevation, was reputed to be acting as case handler for a highly placed mole in the American government.
Koroviev skimmed through the telegram. ‘Get hold of Nikolsky,’ he ordered the cipher clerk. ‘Norman’ was Nikolsky’s current pseudonym.
Bitov dialed Nikolsky’s home number. After a brief exchange, he hung up. ‘His wife says he’s not there,’ he reported.
‘Well, find him,’ the Resident commanded. ‘If I can get up in the middle of the night, so can he. Who’s on duty?’
‘Kostya.’
‘Tell him to sober up and start making the rounds.’
*
Sasha left his apartment earlier than usual, missing breakfast because of a stupid fight with Lydia that he cut short by walking out the door. He didn’t like Petya to see them at each other’s throa
ts. Since her return from Moscow she had been worse than ever, trading on her father’s name. She had actually got herself embroiled in an idiotic feud with the Askyerovs, all because the Counsellor and his wife had been invited to Glen Cove several times and they hadn’t. But he was also aware that the flare-ups between them were symptomatic of another problem he wasn’t ready to face head-on. He had married her out of a mixture of sexual attraction and calculation, making an alliance rather than making love. At some levels, the marriage had worked. It certainly hadn’t hurt his career, and Lydia was a devoted mother, fiercely ambitious both for him and for Petya. But that didn’t always get them through the day. Little things grated, and Lydia seemed shriller than before, probably because there was less between them as man and woman. He took to coming home later, working harder, and certainly drinking more, than was necessary, finding excuses not to go to bed until she was already asleep, sometimes sleeping in the other room. She retaliated by buying more clothes and spending hours at the hairdresser or in front of the mirror. It wasn’t fair to her, he knew. They had common things to protect, but he shared almost nothing of himself with her. Inevitably, she had started suspecting that there was another woman. Maybe she thought it was their neighbour, Maya Askyerova, Feliks’ witch from the park. Maybe that was why she had taken such a savage dislike to the Askyerovs.
Sasha was brooding about this when the elevator creaked to a stop on the ground floor. He was halfway across the lobby when he overheard an unmistakable Russian voice. Even when he was trying to speak in a confidential whisper, Kostya, the KGB driver, sounded like the distant tolling of a bell. He was over to the right of the lobby, his broad back blocking out the door to the coffee shop, explaining something to another Russian who lived in the building.
‘He’ll be in the shit when he shows his face, poor bastard,’ Kostya was saying. ‘I’ve been looking for him half the night. I’ll bet he had one too many and ended up sleeping on the floor somewhere.’
Sasha hurried outside, to avoid being noticed. He stopped short on the pavement in front of the Excelsior. A burgundy Volvo, badly in need of a wash and a paint job, was parked illegally in front of him. There was a press sticker on the windshield. There was no mistaking it; it was Nikoisky’s car.
Kostya must have seen it too, Sasha reasoned. That meant that Feliks’ people knew that he had spent the night at the Excelsior. But they didn’t know with whom. Sasha could guess. If the KGB found out that he’d spent the night with Askyerov’s wife, Feliks would be on a plane back to Moscow before he had time to pack.
Sasha loitered on the far side of the street, under the sycamores, until he saw Kostya come out of the hotel and drive off. Then he walked west, away from his own car, rounded the corner, and stopped at a phone booth. That was one of the beauties of Manhattan. For a dime, you could make an untraceable call from almost any street corner.
*
Something stabbed through his sleep, and Nikolsky woke with a raging thirst. His heart seemed to have risen and expanded, pressing painfully against his rib cage like a cork that refused to be pulled. His eyes were gummed up, and when he got them open, liverish blotches were floating about in front of the darkness. His skin was scratchy and dry. He knew exactly how an oyster must feel when it has just been shucked.
He had to shut off that noise.
Nikolsky went groping for the phone, but struck a lampshade instead.
The woman moaned softly and rolled over, burying her face in the pillows, and he remembered that it wasn’t his bed, and it wasn’t his woman. As he crawled out from under the covers, he saw the silky expanse of her back, the high, firm buttocks, the tangle of blue-black hair.
The phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
‘Mashka.’ He shook her gently.
As she picked up the phone, he padded across to the window and pulled back the heavy drapes. It was full daylight outside, but only a thin, wintry light that bleached the sycamores across the street. Bloody hell. He had meant to leave before dawn. What had happened to the alarm?
He heard the catch in Maya’s voice and turned back to her. ‘He’s not here,’ she said sharply into the receiver.
She wasn’t very practiced at this, Nikolsky noted. The manner of her denial was already a confession.
He sat down next to her on the bed and squeezed her thigh. She was trembling, but in her black eyes he could see only his own reflection.
Maya put her hand over the receiver and whispered, ‘He says he’s a friend. He says he has to talk with you.’
A small dog, all hair and tongue, scampered across the bed and started sniffing and licking at Nikolsky’s crotch. He pushed it away and took the phone.
‘Who is this?’
‘Your people have been looking for you all night,’ Sasha told him. ‘There’s some kind of trouble. Do you remember my old place?’ There was only a short pause before Feliks said, ‘Yes.’
‘Meet me in ten minutes.’
*
They talked in a coffee shop on Amsterdam Avenue, half a block away from the Lucerne. Feliks lacked his usual composure. He all but apologized for ordering a Bloody Mary rather than coffee.
He said, ‘I had a sort of shiver inside. It’s gone now.’
‘They know you were at my hotel,’ Sasha summarized. ‘But nobody asked me about it. So it’s easy enough. Tell them you were drinking with me. I’ll cover for you.’
They both understood the stakes. You did not get caught screwing the daughter-in-law of a Party boss. But Nikolsky cocked his head and asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’
Sasha raised his coffee cup in an ironic toast. ‘Now I can say postavish.’
*
The journalist described in the cables as Vasya was listed in the KGB files as a doverynnoe litso, a ‘trusted person’ — in other words, someone who was considered utterly reliable and could be counted on to perform confidential missions, but was not, in the technical sense, a fully recruited agent. David Frick, otherwise known as Vasya, was not someone with whom Nikolsky, under ordinary circumstances, would have cared to have dinner, even though the man had been to Yale, which Feliks found both surprising and impressive. Frick was lumpish, sloppy around the waist, with lank, unkempt hair that he wore long at the back and sides to compensate for the bald patch on top. He delivered his opinions in a self-important, adenoidal voice, interrupted by asthmatic wheezes. He seemed to have a cigarette for a sixth finger. He smoked even in the middle of the main course, as he was doing now.
Still, Frick had his uses, and he came cheap — a few lunches in one-star restaurants, an occasional plane ticket to Hanoi or Havana, a couple of bottles on his birthday, and, above all, information. On instructions from the Center, and against his own judgment, Nikolsky had pressed Frick to accept a few hundred dollars for a routine chore, collecting State Department handouts. As Nikolsky expected, Frick had turned down the cash. He wasn’t a man who could be bought — not in a straightforward way. Now, a research grant from an institute funded by one of the most successful practitioners of trade with Moscow was a different matter. As Nikolsky explained to his superiors, vanity was the key to Vasya, and it had to be turned carefully. Encouraged by judicious flattery to believe that Nikolsky thought he was a magisterial analyst of America’s ills, he came out with a flow of enlightening tittle-tattle about people in government and the press corps. Thanks to Frick, Nikolsky had found out about a closet homosexual on a powerful Republican committee.
Frick operated on the fringes of the mainstream press. He had a retainer from a West Coast features syndicate that had been founded in the heyday of the antiwar movement and was still guided by the philosophy that American imperialism was responsible for most of the world’s wrongs. Most of what it produced could have been put out, unaltered, by Novosti or Literary Gazette, which Nikolsky thought was a serious mistake. For the sake of credibility, he once advised Frick, they had to run more anti-Soviet stories.
Frick was hungry for headlines, and Nikolsky was somet
imes able to oblige him, although he was frequently embarrassed by the poor quality of some of the stuff that was prepared by Service A for reproduction abroad. He had counseled against giving Frick a clumsy forgery of a State Department document and, after he was ordered to go ahead, he was not surprised when Frick reported back that he had been unable to get any of the major American dailies to use it. The thing had to be rerouted to New Delhi and Mexico City, where it ran on the front pages of papers everyone knew to be Soviet conduits.
The material the Center had sent in the middle of the night — the stuff that resulted in Kostya coming round to the Excelsior, looking for Nikolsky — was more professional. A source had reported some irregularities in the campaign financing of one of the presidential candidates, a reactionary who was no friend of the Soviet Union. That was the right kind of story for the American press. Frick was able to do his own follow-up, and both he and Nikolsky were rewarded with national coverage.
Nikolsky was a great believer in luck, and faithfully observed his personal superstitions, even though he was forever changing the rules. Some days, black cats meant bad luck; other days, white. Some days, strolling New York’s crowded sidewalks, he would veer out into the gutter to avoid treading on a metal grating, as if afraid it would drop open and swallow him up. Other times, he wandered about without caring where he stepped. He was no more consistent than fortune. He knew he’d been lucky after that crazy night with Maya Askyerova. Thanks to Sasha, he got off with a mild reprimand from his boss, General Koroviev. The Resident wasn’t going to grind him to pieces for cultivating a friendship with one of the neighbors in the GRU. That was always interesting for the KGB, and after all, Colonel Drinov had requested him to keep an eye on his friend Preobrazhensky. So Nikolsky just got a slap on the wrist. He was told to make sure the Residency knew where to find him in future, and to get hold of Vasya right away; the Central Committee wanted results.
The episode scared him enough, however, to lead him to break things off with Maya. The girl was a romantic, he discovered, not given to cheating on her husband, but very much given to daydreams about escaping somewhere together. If he could have worked things out the way the French seemed to do so well — a quick embrace entre cinq et sept heures — they might have been able to go on seeing each other. But he had already gone in too deep, and with the Askyerov family to worry about, it just wasn’t worth the danger. Besides, there was Olga to think about, dear, doting Olga. She was a good sort. It was just that Feliks wasn’t made to make do with one woman. So here he was, a few months later, in between girlfriends, watching Frick make a pig of himself, with that blasted cigarette burning at his elbow all the while. Nikolsky briefly speculated on whether Frick had a girlfriend. There was no mention of it in the file, not in all the years the service had followed his precarious career from Saigon to Lusaka to New York. Perhaps he was a pederast. He seemed to know enough of them. Like most Russian men, Nikolsky was a pronounced homophobe. His distaste for Frick increased, but he did not lose sight of the business in hand.
