Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  What about a bump, on-the-fly contact on the street? A supermarket, bookstore, restaurant? Too risky. FBI surveillance of known and suspect SVR officers was random and rotated from target to target, making it hard to plan. Angevine knew this threadbare coverage was a result of agency cuts mandated during the annual congressional budget drama. The FBI’s Foreign Counterintelligence Division (FCI) could field only reduced surveillance coverage and otherwise had to depend on limited technical means to get an inkling of which Russian intel officers were active, when they were operational, and with whom they were interacting. Down deep, the FCI experts grimly knew SVR was aware of exactly how little was arrayed on the street against them—Moscow could read the US budget news in the newspapers too. The Russians knew exactly how weak the Americans were.

  A slim advantage for him. Still, thought Angevine, you could not predict when or on whom FCI surveillance would deploy. Consequently, trying to make public contact with any Russian was to spin a loaded cylinder and play roulette. He brooded the rest of the day, then drove downtown to the Good Guys Club on Wisconsin Avenue to watch the dancers, get a beer, and try to think.

  From the street the club was marked by a neon sign on an otherwise plain brick front of a narrow row house built in the 1820s—just a hint of its former elegant federalist façade remained—in a now-dilapidated commercial district of pizza-slice kitchens and sushi takeout, grocery stores and nail salons. He left the pigeon-and-asphalt world as he pushed into the club, leaving for the time being the dilemma of his stalled career as a Russian mole. The single-room club—Who was he kidding, Angevine thought, it’s a strip joint—was narrow but deep. Angevine nodded to the jaw breaker sitting on a stool by the front door and headed for the back of the room. The place was tight even on a weekday: all three small elevated dancing stages, spaced evenly down the room, were in action. Angevine weaved between the long tables and bench seats filling the length of the room. Each elevated stage had a Lucite floor illuminated from below in soft white light—decadent Weimar Berlin shadows were cast on the bodies of the girls—a Lucite pole refracting light up its length, and a full-length mirror on the wall. The only other lights in the club came from the tracked overhead spots in red, orange, and brilliant white. The stages were lit brighter than any movie set, and the names of the dancers scrolled endlessly on an LED ticker tape above the bar. Multiple speakers filled the club with stripper rock from the 1980s and ’90s.

  Angevine sat down near the back and ordered a beer and one of the small sandwiches available during happy hour, this one a surprisingly good hamburger on toast. One of his favorite dancers was finishing up on stage two and would be rotating to stage three, which was closest to him. She had seen him from down the room, with the acuity of all working girls who dance naked in front of strangers. Angevine appraised her under the spotlights for the hundredth time— she did something to him, those green eyes. And that body didn’t hurt.

  Sitting at the table next to Angevine was a portly man with a big head and an epic comb-over sweating in a shapeless suit—had to be some slumming GS-15 from HHS or HUD—accompanied by a nervous, blinking younger man. Fatso’s neck bulged out over a cheap blue shirt collar with what looked like a miniature-palm-tree pattern. Definitely HHS, thought Angevine. The stripper lights in the ceiling over stage three caught the worn sheen of the shoulders and elbows of his dark suit coat as he hung it off the back of his chair.

  Angevine’s dancer (he liked to think of her as his), whose stage name was Felony, stepped up onto stage three and made an elaborate show of cleaning the full-length mirror behind her with a spray bottle of glass cleaner and a paper towel, bending straight-legged at the waist to wipe the lower half of the glass. This was preliminary Kabuki for every new girl: The mirrors were covered in handprints and lipstick kisses after each set.

  Porky Pig at the next table laughed at Felony’s mirror-cleaning routine and pointed at her buttocks and G-string. Not done. Worse than HHS, thought Angevine. He could even be IRS. Porky elbowed his scrawny companion as “Hotel California” came on and Felony hoisted herself on the Lucite pole halfway up its length, then started sliding headfirst to the floor slowly, infinitely slowly, as smoothly as any mechanical lift. Earthbound again, Felony began dancing for Porky, who had stopped pointing and grinning and was now staring and swallowing. Angevine watched his face shining under the lights as Felony spun on the pole and laid down a cloud of scent—White Shoulders eau de cologne.

  Near the end of the set another Eagles song, “James Dean,” came on and Felony turned on the afterburners. Angevine, astonished, watched the fat guy get up and start dancing like Boris Yeltsin, hunching his shoulders and shaking bunched fists. He began bellowing what sounded like “Cheymes Dyeen.” The bouncer at the door all the way at the other end of the club started to get off his stool, but Felony waved him off. The young companion pulled at Fatso’s arm, and he sat down. After her set, Felony shimmied into her merry widow, discreetly shifting her breasts to fill the cups, and went over to sit between the two men. Off-duty dancers always worked the crowd to soften them up for bigger tips in the next set.

  Angevine could see the younger man doing most of the talking, but Felony kept a long-nailed hand on the inside of Fatso’s thigh, pretty far above the knee. She had an instinct about who the important one was. After the requisite five-minute “meet and greet” and a not-so-discreet tip of a folded bill stuffed between her breasts by Porky Pig, the two got up, shrugged on suit coats, and left the club.

  Felony came over to Angevine, who stood, and she shook his hand—the stripper world was regulated by an idealized protocol of respect and chivalry (and men keeping their hands to themselves). Angevine bought her a ginger ale for champagne prices and smiled at her. “Great dancing, as always,” he said. He knew the girls seldom accept outside dates with customers, so there was no pressure. Besides, she couldn’t stay too long at any given table.

  “Those two guys were Russians,” Felony said, jerking her head sideways. “From their embassy up Wisconsin. The fat guy didn’t speak much English, so he brought the little guy along. Gave me a twenty.”

  Angevine looked up at her sharply. “How do you know they were Russians?” he said over the music. The Russian Embassy compound was two-tenths of a mile up Wisconsin Avenue in the next block. His scalp started creeping over his skull. Felony reached into her stocking top and handed him a calling card: S. V. Loganov, Minister-Counselor, Embassy of the Russian Federation.

  “That’s the fat guy; did you see him dancing?” said Felony, pointing at the card with the nail of her little finger. “But the little guy gave it to me, like he didn’t know what to do, whether he should or not.” She looked up at the LED sign. “Got to get changed. You staying around?” Angevine looked at her blankly, lost in thought.

  He had been racking his brain for a way to connect with SVR for days, and now, here, this sweaty tub of suet had fallen into his lap. Of all the places to bump into a Russian without being spotted by the FBI, he had never considered the Good Guys Club. But no, it was impossible, insecure—someone might see him. Shit, there could have been FBI special agents in here tonight, covering the Russians, looking at any citizen who had talked to them.

  Angevine told himself that this was not the way to get a recontact note to the Russkies. If Fatso was approached amid the strippers and music and liquor, he would suspect an FBI or CIA provocation, a blackmail ambush; he would fear a potential setup in any sealed envelope handed him. But what else was possible? Some desperate attempt on the street? If he screwed up, he’d be as fucked as if he had shown up at the front gate of the Russian Embassy with a “Hi, my name is TRITON” name tag on his lapel. Ce serait mauvais. That would be bad.

  Felony came out of the dressing room in a hot-pink baby doll, garters, and platform heels, winked at Angevine, and weaved her way through the tables on her way to stage one across the room. She stopped frequently to greet familiar customers, her hands in constant motion, patting cheeks, mussing hair,
trailing across shoulders. The other dancers were all doing the same thing. Angevine laughed soundlessly to himself. Dieu pourvoira, God will provide, he thought.

  It was the start of Sebastian Angevine’s combination recruitment operation and covert action. He was in a hurry, so it was going to be quick and dirty. He wasn’t an ops guy, but he knew a lot and read a lot, and the ladies always liked his style—admiring the wrought silver links on his French cuffs and fingering the lapels of his cashmere jacket.

  He set out to recruit Felony as a middleman—if he had known case-officer lexicon better he would have used “cutout”—to contact the Russians right there in Good Guys. If horny, wiggly, moist old Loganov came to the club with any regularity, Felony could give him a sign-of-life note for passage to the rezidentura informing that TRITON was ready for reactivation, or whatever they called it, and designating a meeting site. And comrades, bring money.

  And if the FEEBs were observing Loganov that night, so what? They would be sitting a table away in the darkness, with their sports coats over their laps to hide their boners, watching the show, periodically glancing over, making sure no UNSUB—unknown subject—had any contact with Fatso. But the dancers? They circulated everywhere, sat with everybody, were forever stuffing bills in their bras or garters, putting fragrant hands on patrons’ arms and shoulders—Felony could hand Loganov a fucking toaster without the FEEBs seeing a thing. And Angevine wouldn’t even have to be there.

  There was the small matter of recruiting Felony quickly. She accepted his invitation for dinner—it was made marginally less tricky by the fortuitous timing of the recent breakup with her latest boyfriend, a person she referred to only as Fernandez, who was prone to bouts of depression caused by chronic erectile dysfunction stemming from his glue sniffing. After six months, Felony had thrown him out of her apartment, a modest two-bedroom on Benton Street N.W., in Glover Park. She was ready for a real gentleman friend.

  Angevine’s eyebrows went up when Felony mentioned her address. It was, incredibly, a half mile away from the back wall of the Russian Embassy through leafy neighborhoods of single homes and low apartment blocks. Felony’s apartment could be, with luck and a little finesse, a secure meeting site, or a timed drop, or a signal site, or an electronic letter box, unknown to the feds and with no connection to Angevine. Now Felony’s successful recruitment was trebly important to him.

  At the end of that first date, she told him her real name was Vikki Mayfield. Vikki was twenty-nine, a little old for a stripper, but her stomach and legs rippled when she hoisted herself on the pole. She was tall and had pixie-cut blond hair—she thought it made her look younger—careful green eyes, and perhaps a too-strong jawline. It was a little strange and a little sexy to see her in street clothes, because Angevine had seen her any number of times without a stitch on.

  She did spray-on tan because tan lines were old school. She had MemoryGel High Profile implants because massive beach-ball boobs were no longer industry standard. She’d been dancing for eight years, knew the business, and could pick the big tippers out of the audience—she could instantly assess the men who would tip a fin, or a dub, or sometimes a yard. She had explained the patois (five, twenty, a hundred dollars) to a delighted Angevine, and she thought he was sophisticated and well dressed, and she decided she liked him.

  She was off the next night, so Angevine pressed for another dinner, during which he made good progress. Vikki was smart, had seen life, and knew the difference between a redneck boyfriend and a big-city suitor. She liked to talk, and Seb was willing to listen. She came from tidewater Virginia, not from trash, but she had to work nights. She did a little college—got an in-state ride to the University of Virginia but dropped out (too many mama’s boys who wet their pants) and tried Haverford College up there in Pennsylvania but dropped out (too many weepy, sensitive poets)—then drifted south to Washington, DC. She started nude dancing, amazed at the money—fistfuls of it—and moved in with a succession of guys who slapped her, or wanted her to deal drugs for them, or wanted her to moonlight as an outcall, and she’d had enough and found her own apartment. She still had to deal with loser boyfriends, but at least she could kick them out.

  She had seen Seb at the club numerous times and thought he looked prosperous. At first Vikki expected to find that he was a hot-to-trot middle-aged guy into Nuru massage and pegging. But French-speaking Sebastian was a good listener, he ordered the wine, he worked for the State Department or something, he didn’t try to grab ass, and he was funny when he wanted to be. After the third date (she danced two days on and three off), she invited him to her apartment after dinner and they kissed a little, but he’d had too much wine and she floated a blanket over him and went to bed alone after looking at him asleep on the couch. He woke her up in the morning with a cup of instant coffee, all sweet and stuff, and they took a shower together and did it on the living-room floor, listening to the neighbors clumping down the stairwell, going to work.

  Day six. It was clear that Vikki still had a hidden reserve of wariness about boyfriends, but Seb brought a bottle of wine and she cooked dinner: a steak, Irish mashed potatoes like her grandmother made, store-bought apple pie. He talked a little about his job; he was a pretty senior guy over there at State Department, sort of a diplomat and a specialist or something on Russia, it wasn’t clear exactly. They made love again, this time in bed, and she had her first non-battery-powered orgasm in years—that was a very good sign, she thought. He could be a little goofy for sure, a little stuck up with waiters, and he spent a lot of time combing his hair, but it was better than her former boyfriend Darryl’s motorcycle chain soaking in a bucket of kerosene by the front door all week. To thank her for dinner and sex, Angevine gave her a silver cuff from Eve’s Addiction. It was mail-order jewelry, but Vikki wasn’t going to say no.

  The next morning he was leaning against the vanity in the bathroom, watching her sitting on the rim of the bathtub shaving herself, when he casually said he wanted to take care of her rent, which ran to $2700 a month.

  “Why would you want to pay my rent?” asked Vikki. “I mean, that’s very sweet, but I make enough.”

  Angevine smiled. “I just want to do something for you,” he said. He wanted to move forward and contact the fucking Russians. This was taking too long. “I really like you, Vik.”

  “I like you, too,” said Vikki. Maybe he just wanted to be nice.

  Angevine pushed off from the vanity and bent over to kiss her. “I love watching you shave,” he said, trying to find something naughty to say.

  “Why don’t you sit down and I’ll shave you?” Vikki said.

  “What?”

  “Come on,” said Vikki. “It feels so sexy.”

  “I don’t know,” said Angevine, imagining himself in the Headquarters gym shower room with shaved groin and bald couilles. “It’s different for men.”

  “I’ll be careful,” said Vikki, reaching out her hand. She looked at him playfully. “I’ll do anything you want, if you let me.”

  And Angevine made sure that she did.

  It took a week for Loganov to show at Good Guys, and breathlessly Vikki called Angevine to tell him the Russian had reappeared and to get his ass down there. At the last minute Angevine had decided to be there when Vikki passed him the note: There was no danger that he could be identified in the crowded room, and he didn’t want to leave the envelope with Vikki for her to possibly open and read an inexplicable message signed by a mysterious TRITON. As it was, he had described it as a fun game: He concocted a bullshit story for her about a “reach-out program” from the State Department to selected Russian diplomats, inviting them to private sessions where important global issues would be discussed. Angevine explained that the invitations had to be discreet—delivered in a men’s club by a half-naked stripper, for instance—so the Russian officials would not be “punished” by Moscow if they participated.

  Utter nonsense, of course, and Vikki looked skeptically at him, saying she didn’t want to do
anything illegal (which Angevine glumly registered as her probable unwillingness to be totally co-opted as his witting subagent) but she sat next to Loganov and took the small envelope out of the flowing sleeve of her black satin kimono and slipped it into the Russian’s shirt pocket while leaning in and wrinkling her nose at the sweaty-cooked-cabbage-stinky-trousers bloom of him. From across the room, Angevine could detect nothing of the delivery. Vikki had been as smooth as a top pro.

  There was another reason he wanted to be there. Angevine wanted to observe the Russian’s reaction when he felt Vikki slide the thing into his pocket. Thankfully, the Russian did not react—maybe he didn’t feel the note against his man boobs—but maybe he had been briefed not to react to notes passed to him. His expression would be priceless, however, when, back inside his embassy, he opened the envelope to find the second envelope with DELIVER TO ZARUBINA written on it. No employee of the Russian Embassy in Washington—not even the ambassador—would hesitate for a minute to deliver the note.

  The ball was rolling. Angevine’s spirits were soaring later that evening as they clinked champagne flutes in Vikki’s apartment, and he scooped her up and danced her around the living room when Michael Bolton’s “You Wouldn’t Know Love” from his Soul Provider album came up on Soft Rock 97. The Russian money would be starting again—he already had additional info for Zarubina about continuing debriefings of a GRU officer in Athens. He looked into Vikki’s eyes and kissed her. Maybe with more money he’d meet someone with a little more savoir faire, but tonight, right now, her hard dancer’s body was pressed against him, and she kissed him back, her arms around his neck. His body stirred, but the stubble was growing back on his crotch and he had to stop two-stepping and scratch.