Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  The Marshal broke off his tirade and started gathering together his papers. He was voicing a litany of complaints that Sasha had heard often enough in touring the military districts since he had joined Zotov’s staff. Everyone seemed to be complaining about a sense of drift, the lack of a helmsman.

  ‘How much longer do you think he’s got?’ Sasha asked discreetly. There was no doubt about who ‘he’ was. At that moment, the General Secretary was lying strapped to his dialysis machine in the modern clinic that had been erected behind the hunting lodge that had once belonged to Stalin.

  ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ the Marshal said grimly.

  ‘I heard that Askyerov has been making some preparations.’ It was a chance to see how far the Marshal could be pushed, Sasha thought. ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘He’s been mending fences with the old crowd, going around saying that these inquiries into corruption among the Brezhnev family are a disgrace and ought to be stopped immediately. He’s picked Andropov’s successor, you can be sure of that.’

  ‘You mean Chernenko?’

  ‘Askyerov has made his calculations. He thinks it’s too soon for any of the younger men to get it. He knows the old crowd will welcome Chernenko because he means business as usual. Askyerov is going to land on his feet, that you can count on. By the way, he’s doing quite well out of the war.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I heard that one of his cronies is collecting pay-offs from the Afghan merchants who are importing boots and uniforms for the army. They pay in afghanis or roubles that Askyerov’s people trade for hard currency in the bazaar. Then they triple their profits by smuggling western goods back into Russia.’

  Zotov looked at him sharply and said, ‘Can you prove it?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  The Marshal swore copiously. ‘That cockroach gets fat while our boys are dying. One day, we’ll make an end of these bitches.’ He stared at Sasha again and added, ‘I suppose I ought to get nervous when my son-in-law is better informed than I am about what’s going on inside the leadership. Where do you get this stuff?’

  ‘I’ve got a very interesting source, Alexei Ivanich. I must tell you about him sometime. One of these days, he’s going to be very useful to us.’

  Moving the Marshal, he reflected afterward, was like shifting an enormous boulder. You had to begin warily, careful to ensure that it would roll in the right direction. Once in motion, it was very nearly unstoppable.

  *

  The second night Sasha spent at Bangladesh, one week later, there were no girls, and Feliks was taking solace in the bottle. His confessions were as remarkable as they had been during the previous conversation. Nikolsky confided that he had taken his baby son to a church to go through the full Orthodox baptism. ‘As you know, I’m not a believer,’ Feliks said, and Sasha was reminded of the night in New York when Nikolsky had abandoned the singles bar to light a candle in church. ‘It never hurts to take out a little insurance,’ Feliks added semi-apologetically.

  Sasha didn’t comment. They both knew what it would mean if Nikolsky were found out. It had been dangerous enough in New York, but here in Moscow, the risk was multiplied a hundredfold.

  Feliks was at the bottle again. When Sasha reached over and pulled it away from him, he was too astonished to resist.

  ‘You know what they say,’ Sasha commented. ‘First you drink the bottle, then the bottle drinks you. I want to talk to you about Calypso. Do you think you can absorb what I’m going to say?’

  Feliks, trying not to appear affronted, lit up a cigarette.

  ‘Has your London posting been confirmed?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘It’s almost definite.’

  ‘I want you to turn it down.’

  ‘You want me —’ Feliks spluttered.

  ‘I was listening to you the other night. I think you meant what you said about not coming back. That’s no way out, Feliks. Not for men like you and me. We belong here. If you transplant yourself somewhere else, it would be like trying to live with an artificial heart. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it myself.’ For a moment, he saw himself lying on Elaine’s bed. She was perched over him, nibbling his lower lip, and her hair grazed the sides of his face like a soft curtain.

  ‘I promise to send my liver home to Moscow for burial,’ Nikolsky said. ‘But honestly, Sasha. What do you expect me to do?’

  ‘I told you already. I want you to go and work for Topchy. Listen.’ He rushed on before Feliks could interrupt. ‘I can’t tell you very much about it, not yet. But there are going to be changes in Moscow.’

  ‘What sort of changes?’

  ‘We’re going to take back the country.’

  ‘We?’ Feliks echoed him mockingly. ‘Kto kogo? Who-whom?’

  ‘Could you just accept that someone very important needs you in the Third Directorate?’ Sasha replied, evading the question.

  ‘Aha! Nikolsky exclaimed theatrically. ‘Now I’m beginning to see. So the Marshal’s still got some life in him, has he? Well, he’d better play his cards close to his chest. They haven’t forgotten who shot Beria. You and your blessed Marshal want me to be a spy for you, is that it? You’re hatching something and you want to make sure you know which of your woodentops at Gogol Boulevard are freelancing for Topchy.’

  ‘What do you say?’

  ‘I ought to tell you to go fuck yourself. You know I can’t stand the stink of high boots. Anyway, you’ll get us all shot.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking about this for some time.’

  ‘Even in New York?’

  ‘Even before New York.’

  ‘I don’t think I know you, Sasha.’

  So Sasha told him the story of Topchy and his father’s death, and then a little of what he had learned from Levin about Russian history. The country could be changed, he argued, but the change must come from above, and it must be sudden, ruthless, and totally unexpected.

  Nikolsky fell silent for a while, understanding that Sasha was not accustomed to sharing these things with others. At last he said, ‘I still know you wouldn’t ask me to work for Topchy if you were drunk. You’re saner when you’re drunk. No, don’t say any more. Just let me ask you this, Sasha. Suppose I agree to play your game. Who would ever believe that I would choose to give up a job in London’ — he smacked his lips, rhapsodizing the girls by the Serpentine — ‘to go and work with an asshole like Topchy?’

  ‘You’ll think of something.’

  ‘I’m not one of your lost soldiers, Sasha. I’m not cut out to be a martyr — although, God knows, I suffer.’ He stared pointedly at the brandy bottle until Sasha relented.

  *

  The next day, Thursday, Nikolsky heard that his London assignment was still under review and that his old nemesis Drinov had been kicked upstairs. Drinov was to become deputy head of the Second Chief Directorate, no less. Feliks left the Village early and sat drinking at the Zhiguli until Pauk hauled him out. The following night, he went back. The doorman didn’t recognize him at first. With his tie askew, wet patches down his front, and his hat falling down over his ears, he looked like a bum who had been out swilling samorgon under a bridge somewhere. The doorman swore when Feliks failed to deposit the usual tip.

  Pauk affected not to notice. But after Feliks had gulped down his first pint, he yelled at the waiter, ‘This beer is half water! I’m not paying for this slop! And I’m not paying for this shit either!’ He stabbed a finger at his plate of shrimps.

  ‘Shut your face, Feliks, you’re pissed. You’d better settle up and go home.’

  Without further discussion, Nikolsky threw his plate at Pauk. Food spattered the crowd at the next table. Pauk dumped his tray on the floor, tossed his napkin over his shoulder, and advanced on Feliks with his fists balled. Nikolsky was swinging his vodka bottle like a bat.

  When Nikolsky brought the bottle crashing down, narrowly missing Pauk’s head, the militiaman on the other side of the room finally bestirred himself.


  ‘You’d better take care of this one,’ the waiter said to him.

  The militiaman swaggered up, the picture of authority, and flashed his identity card.

  ‘Come now, Citizen,’ he said benevolently, ‘you’ve had enough for one night.’

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ Nikolsky spat at him. ‘Go fuck your MVD. Do you know who you’re talking to, you little bitch? You can’t push me around. I’m a lieutenant-colonel in the Committee of State Security.’

  The excited murmur that spread around the room was like the sound of the crowd when a football team had just been awarded a penalty kick. A KGB man squaring up for a fight with a militiaman. Now, that was something that simply didn’t happen, not because the two organizations didn’t hate each other’s guts, but because the first rule of life for a member of Nikolsky’s service was that you didn’t identify yourself except on official business.

  Even the MVD man gaped for a moment. This may have been partly because the militia had been slightly less aggressive about penalizing members of the KGB for peccadilloes like drunken driving since Andropov had appointed one of his old KGB cronies, Fedorchuk, to run the Ministry of Interior. You could almost hear the cogs turning inside the squat militiaman’s head.

  ‘I know you,’ Feliks goaded him. ‘You sit over there on your fat backside, guzzling away like a pig with its snout in the feeding trough. You’re paid off by the swine who run this place. They own you.’

  ‘If you don’t shut up and clear out, I’ll have to arrest you,’ the militiaman warned. He had an audience. He couldn’t ignore what this drunk was saying, even if he was a colonel in the KGB.

  ‘Arrest me?’ Nikolsky screamed. ‘Just try it, fuck your mother. I was risking my life abroad to defend our motherland while you were feeding your gut.’

  The militiaman went for him then. But Nikolsky, remarkably cunning for a drunk, led him a dance round the table, then jumped out when he least expected it and gave him a kick in the groin that left him rolling around on the floor.

  Pauk and another waiter got hold of Feliks and twisted his arms up behind his back.

  ‘You asked for this, don’t forget,’ Pauk whispered to Nikolsky while they waited for the MVD paddy wagon to arrive. ‘I just hope you know what you’re doing, Feliks.’

  They roughed him up inside the van, but not so the marks would show, and just enough to compensate for what he had done to the man in the Zhiguli. They held him at MVD headquarters for a couple of hours, while a full report, backed up by witnesses, was typed up.

  ‘That’s it then, Comrade Colonel,’ the MVD duty officer said to Nikolsky with satisfaction. ‘Go home, drink plenty of coffee, make love to your wife. You’ll be all washed up as soon as this report gets to your superiors.’

  *

  True to form, the militia improved the report of the incident at the Zhiguli. Not content with describing a physical assault on a member of its personnel, the MVD claimed that Nikolsky had tried to kill the man. Nobody worried about that at the Village; revealingly, the MVD had not urged that Nikolsky should be punished for that particular offense. From the point of view of Nikolsky’s superiors, the damning charge was that he had disclosed his identity while intoxicated in a public place.

  Feliks made no effort to deny this. He didn’t even turn up in person in front of the tribunal of inquiry. Instead, he arranged with a girl he knew in a local clinic — his girlfriends were strategically positioned all over the city — to give him a certificate stating that he was prostrate with a highly communicable bug. The wheels revolved without him, and word soon came down that he had been suspended from the First Chief Directorate.

  Soon after, he met Topchy at the racetrack. The deputy chief of the Third Directorate was in an excellent mood that day, after picking two winners in a row. Even so, he wasn’t averse to Nikolsky paying for the drinks.

  ‘I’ve really got myself in the shit this time,’ Feliks told him. ‘They’ve sent my file to Personnel. They’re probably planning to send me to bloody Kazakhstan.’

  ‘Those shitholes at the Village don’t know a good officer when they see one,’ Topchy commiserated with him. ‘Leave everything to me. I’ve got friends in Personnel.’

  Topchy was as good as his word. When Nikolsky’s former chiefs at the Village were asked to approve his transfer to the Third Directorate, they were only too happy to oblige. ‘Just what that alkash deserves,’ one of them remarked.

  *

  ‘I came up with something,’ Feliks reported to Sasha. ‘If I say so myself, it was an exceptional performance. I trust that the Marshal won’t forget what I’m putting myself through. I suppose you know the difference between a photograph and a member of Topchy’s section.’

  Sasha shook his head.

  ‘The photograph is developed.’

  *

  ‘Do you know the origin of the word “intelligence”?’ Luke Gladden was saying. They were sitting in a wood-paneled sitting room in a Park Avenue club that Elaine had never heard of, and the open fire was hotter than it needed to be. It’s derived from the Latin,’ Gladden said. He sounded like a patient schoolmaster. ‘The verb intelligere means “to choose among.” Which is appropriate, don’t you think? I find that the only people who are amusing are those who are able to discriminate, if only between the bad and the worse. Are you still with me, my dear?’

  ‘Uh — I’m sorry.’ She shook herself out of the daze that had come with staring into the flames, the way she had used to do as a child. At school, some romantic scene would come into her head and she would save it up until she got home, and could train herself to see every detail in the fire.

  ‘You have to make your choice, Elaine.’ It was the closest he had come to hurrying her, in the several meetings they had had since he picked her up at the New School. He had told her that he was from Washington, that he had nothing to do with the FBI, but had certain other connections. She could guess what that meant. She hadn’t fled from him the way she had fled from Tom Regan. That was partly because of his gentleness, but more because she was desperate to know something — anything — about Sasha.

  ‘He’s in Moscow,’ Gladden had told her. ‘He’s become an important man, attached to the General Staff.’

  ‘Why did you wait so long before coming to me?’ she had asked him. As the months had turned into years and she heard nothing from either the FBI or Sasha, she had begun to think that they had all forgotten her.

  ‘I wanted you to be ready,’ Gladden replied. It was a half-truth. By taking up her Russian language lessons again and planning a visit to Moscow, Elaine had demonstrated that she was vulnerable. But there had been a problem on the Moscow end. They hadn’t counted on Sasha getting himself posted to Afghanistan, or that he’d be in the field so long. From what Gladden had observed of the girl, her passion for the Russian hadn’t dulled with time. But would that be true of Preobrazhensky too? Well, you played the hand you were dealt. The first thing was to make sure of the girl, this time around.

  ‘I want to put it to you as simply as possible,’ the CIA man was saying. ‘You want to see him again. We both know that. But there is no way you can see Sasha — no way that wouldn’t spell ruin for him — without our help. We’re talking about a meeting inside Russia, not in New York. In Moscow, you have to play by Moscow rules. You’ll have to be patient, and you’ll have to be disciplined. There are things you’ll have to learn.’

  She seemed to pull away from him, and frightened of losing her, Gladden said, ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not asking you to work for us. You won’t be anybody’s agent, except your own. We’ll help you to meet him, that’s all. All I want is for you to tell us what he’s thinking. You won’t go anywhere near the Embassy, or any of our people over there. I have a friend in Moscow, an old buddy of mine. He’s a journalist, a New Zealander who talks like a defrocked bishop. I think you’ll like him.’

  ‘No,’ she formed the syllable with her lips before she spoke it.

  ‘What do you
mean, no? You do want to see him.’

  Gladden’s voice remained soft, but she felt the razor’s edge inside the cotton wool. She was resentful, too, that Luke could read her emotions. It was bad enough that, after more than three years, she still hungered for a man who was almost completely inaccessible, without that being known and documented on some floppy disc in the bowels of Langley. She had turned down a marriage proposal and any number of less binding offers. Among her old social set, she fitted in about as well as a nun in full habit. But she couldn’t allow Gladden’s people to use her need to lay a snare for Sasha.

  ‘I can’t do what you ask,’ she told the CIA man. ‘You’re trying to trap him, and you want me for bait.’

  ‘That’s not it at all,’ Gladden protested.

  ‘You just asked me to find out what he’s thinking. That’s already a betrayal.’

  ‘Not if he needs help. Do you imagine that he’s happy in Moscow?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think happiness is what matters most to him, anyway.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘He’s driven.’ She faltered, nervous of telling Gladden more than she intended.

  ‘That’s not easy. On the woman, I mean.’

  ‘It’s not easy for him.’

  ‘Look, there are no strings attached. We’ll help to put you two together. If you don’t feel like talking about it afterward, then fine. What’s wrong with that?’

  She stared at him, still suspicious. ‘You could use me to compromise him,’ she suggested. ‘Well, that’s what you call it, don’t you? You could take pictures of us together.’