The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  He said, in a Midwestern twang, “Hi, Mr. Waters. Good morning, Mr. Hubbard. May I join you?”

  Harley ignored him.

  I said, “Pull up a chair. Coffee?”

  “Had mine,” the man said, lifting a finger to the waiter. He must have been a good tipper, well known in this place, because the fellow fairly ran across the room.

  “Mineral water, please, Boris, and keep it coming,” he said in good Russian.

  Our visitor acted and looked like someone who not so very long ago had played quarterback in high school in a town where that mattered a lot. He had one of those American heads on which a German skull combines with an Irish face, untraceable ears, and Mediterranean eyes. His smile was one hundred percent rich-kid American—$15,000 worth of flashing orthodontia.

  I said, “You know our names. What’s yours?”

  “Kevin Clark,” he said. No business card, no offer to shake hands.

  Harley said, “Anything to add to that information?”

  Kevin Clark gave him a charming smile. His mineral water came in the blink of an eye. He drank a full glass before speaking again. The waiter leaped to fill his glass, then hovered within earshot. Kevin paid him no mind.

  “Well,” he said loud and clear, as if barking signals, “I’ve been asked to be your friend while you’re in Moscow.”

  “Really?” I said. “By whom? “

  “By people who are worried about your safety.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “Sorry, no,” our new friend said. “It’s a confidential relationship.”

  “I see. Why are these benevolent folks who want to protect us so worried about us?”

  “It’s the company you keep, Mr. Hubbard. Your recent activities in Xinjiang are worrisome, and the man you visited last night is a dangerous person.”

  “My goodness,” I said, “but you seem to have scouts everywhere.”

  No smile for that one. Boris brought Kevin a second bottle of water.

  “It would be best for everyone,” Kevin said, “if you’d leave Russia before our hosts discover a reason to throw you out.”

  Harley, born before orthodontists were an American institution, replied with a glimpse of his own irregular, yellowing teeth. “We’re not goin’ anywhere, sonny. And you can go back to whoever sent you, like Tom Berger, and tell ’em that. Horace and I are just a couple of senior citizens on vacation, seein’ the sights.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Kevin said. “And I don’t know anybody named Tom Berger. But believe me, I’m just trying to help you.”

  “You don’t work for Tom in the American embassy?” Harley said. “Does that mean you’re not a member of the Outfit?”

  Kevin did not answer the question. He said, “Look, no matter what your friend Mikhail”—he dropped the name casually—“tells you, there are no lost bombs. This is an old KGB disinformation op designed to make people run around like chickens with our heads cut off.”

  “And this you know beyond the shadow of a doubt.”

  “That’s correct. And it would be a great shame if the Russian police somehow found out that you’re a convicted felon who had entered their country without making that known to them.”

  Harley said, “Frankly, son, I don’t think they’d be too surprised or upset by that news. Maybe they’d rather follow Horace, here, around for awhile to see what he’s up to instead of throwin’ him out of the country.”

  “I doubt that. And besides, it’s not the Russian police you should be worried about.”

  “Then who should I be worried about?” I asked. “I’m dying to know.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll know soon enough,” Kevin said. He drank another glass of mineral water—the whole thing, right down. He rose to his feet, leaving a big tip for the waiter, but leaving his check for us to pay. “See you around, gentlemen,” he said.

  Harley pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and dialed a number. He held the instrument away from his ear as if he expected whoever answered to talk too loudly. I could hear it ring, then hear the voice of Tom Berger, the local chief of station.

  “Tom, it’s me, long time since we last spoke,” Harley said in a voice and diction no one could ever forget after hearing it once. “Quick question. Do you know the young fella my old friend and I had breakfast with this mornin’?”

  The voice in the receiver said, “Nope. What’s this all about?”

  “Tryin’ to find that out, Tom. No messenger sent to me from you?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks, Tom,” Harley said. He clicked off. “Sounds like Kevin don’t belong to Tom—supposin’ we can have faith in Tom.”

  Then who did Kevin belong to? It was all very mysterious.

  3

  Harley and I were too tired after our all-nighter to care. We went straight upstairs after signing the bill for breakfast. Following a five-hour nap, a shave and shower and a restorative pot of tea, we went sightseeing. It was too cold to wander around outside, so we took the subway to the Tretyakov Gallery. I had lost track of time, but it must have been a day off because the place was thronged with pink-faced girls in miniskirts, all searching for boys. It seemed odd to be admiring female legs and breathing perfume in Moscow. This happy crowd was a blessing, making it easy to spot a gumshoe among the nymphs and fauns. As a counter-measure to hidden microphones, their giggles were at least the equal of Mikhail’s tinny old radio.

  Sauntering from one long-lost pre-Leninist Russian masterpiece to another, Harley and I talked business. Harley was speaking native New Hampshire now, whole paragraphs speeding by without a final g or r being heard unless a word like tomater cropped up.

  “Could be all this business at breakfast was just new Outfit clumsiness,” he said. “But maybe it’s got some basis in reality. Somebody might actually know somethin’.”

  “Know something about what?”

  “Well, that boy Kevin this mornin’ mentioned the mob.”

  “You think the Russian underworld cares about us?”

  “Might be prudent to acknowledge the possibility,” Harley said. “Remember who those mafia bosses used to be. Might as well call it the KGB alumni association. Which brings us back to Mikhail. Notice anything funny about his story?”

  This was like asking if I’d noticed that the girls in miniskirts had legs, but I replied, “Any number of things. What do you have in mind?”

  “Told us all about the colonels, majors, captains, sergeants and first-class privates he’d put through the wringer, not to mention the scientists and so on who were interrogated. Cast of thousands. Talked about terrorists who may have burglarized the place. However, he never said a word about the likeliest suspects in a thing like this. Namely, the mob.”

  A couple of long-limbed girls moved between us and the painting and posed for a picture. The photographer was one of the boyfriends, and he was equipped with the latest thing in a digital camera. When he lifted the camera I saw that he was wearing a very expensive solid gold, blue-faced wristwatch. We moved on to avoid having our picture taken. The kids moved with us, innocent though their giggles may have been, until we lost them in the crowd, as we were conditioned to do.

  In the next gallery, filled with Kandinskys, we were more or less alone. Then the same two beautiful girls and their boyfriends entered the room. Harley turned to them and said, in his flawless Russian, “Let me borrow your camera, young fella, and I’ll get a kulturny shot of all four of you in front of this fine work of art.”

  The startled boyfriend handed over his camera. Harley took his time focusing and framing the shot—Smile! One more! At last Harley handed back the camera. We turned our backs and walked away.

  “Two shots of us in the camera,” he said. “Not very good likenesses. I let ’em be. Don’t think they got close enough to do much listenin’ or recordin’.”

  Was this street smarts or paranoia? “How would those kids know we were in that particular museum?”r />
  “They got on the subway with us, all bundled up,” Harley said. “Didn’t start skylarkin’ till we all got inside. You’re slippin’, Horace.”

  I wish I could say that Harley was wrong about this but the fact is, I had missed them because I hadn’t been looking for golden boys and girls. I’d had an eye out for the old Peter Lorre type in black alpaca suit and oversize fedora. Obviously the times had moved on without me.

  Not that I confessed my mistake to Harley. Instead I said, “You noticed the photographer’s watch?”

  “Yep. Unless the Russian intelligence service can afford twentyfive grand worth of costume jewelry, looks like those sparrows work for another employer.”

  “And how did they know to follow us?”

  “Two possibilities,” Harley said. “Mikhail or Kevin. Let’s get out of here.”

  It took a moment to collect our coats and hats. Our four young friends were right behind us in line, and they spilled down the steps of the museum behind us, too. It was still snowing. One of the girls, her small round face piquant under its fur hat, ran to us and put her arms around Harley. She opened her burkha-like long coat before doing this, so that there was little between his old bones and her firm young flesh. Eyes dancing, she whispered in his ear. Harley was delighted, but I noticed that he put his hand in the pocket where he carried his money. He whispered an answer in Russian. She pouted and started to whisper a reply, but then her eyes changed, merriment to fear. I followed her glance and saw a man in a long overcoat reading Izvestia in the snowstorm. A little farther down the street were more men—not one but two complete surveillance teams, waiting for us. Harley saw them, too. The girl’s companions were already fading into the falling snow, and she ran after them.

  “Kind of flatterin’, everybody takin’ such an interest in us,” Harley said.

  “What did the little lady say to you?”

  “She said Mikhail wants to see us. Urgently.”

  It was snowing harder now. Wearing his old sable hat and fur-lined coat, Harley blended with the crowd. I wore my brand-new Gore-Tex goose-down parka with the hood up. Slush leaked through my high-tech waterproof hiking shoes and I envied Harley his buckled early-twentieth-century black galoshes. The gumshoes followed us. Whoever they were, cops or robbers, they were glued to us. We ignored them as if we were innocent men; shaking them, even if that were possible, would only make them more suspicious. Besides, there was no reason to make a dash for it. I wasn’t particularly worried about compromising Mikhail.

  Darkness had fallen by the time we arrived at Mikhail’s garret, Harley looking a little wan after the long steep climb up the stairs. Mikhail’s flat was unlocked. And empty.

  “Bad sign,” Harley said.

  We went inside anyway. I looked out the window. Three dark figures lurked in the slushy street—our watchers. A couple of hours passed before we heard footsteps on the stairs. They were unmistakably the tread of a man with a wooden leg. Mikhail opened the door, switched on the buzzing lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, and found Harley and me waiting for him.

  “Ooof! ” he said when he saw us. “Why are you here?”

  Harley said, “You mean you weren’t expectin’ us?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  Harley looked Mikhail up and down. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Waiting. This is still Russia.”

  Mikhail had regained control of himself. He looked less like a man who thought he was going to take a bullet, more like the disillusioned KGB colonel whom history, the thing he had trusted most, had stripped him of medals and uniform, dressed him in rags and locked him up in this rat-trap flat.

  “Waiting for what?” Harley asked.

  “This.”

  Mikhail pulled up his trousers leg and showed us the shiny metal shaft of a brand-new prosthesis. “Titanium, made in Germany,” he said.

  “Looks like a good one,” Harley said. “How much did it set you back?”

  “Every kopek you gave me.”

  “No wonder you need more money,” Harley said. “Is it an improvement?”

  “Anything would be an improvement,” Mikhail replied. “Orphans in Afghanistan have better prostheses than that piece of junk I was given.”

  Mikhail switched off the light and peered out the window. The watchers were still there, small black figures in a field of phosphorescent white.

  “You were followed,” he said.

  “We know,” Harley replied.

  Because I irritated Mikhail so, I was letting Harley do the talking until the Russian calmed down.

  “There are three of them,” Mikhail said. “And now that they’ve seen my light go on, they know I’m home.”

  “But not that we’re here. We didn’t touch the light.”

  “Ha! That’s exactly what they would have noticed.”

  “Does that mean you’re the only suspect in this building that’s got a thousand windows?” Harley said. “Calm down, Mikhail, and turn on the light. We have to talk.”

  “We can talk in the dark.”

  Harley got up, closed the curtain, and pulled the chain on the light fixture.

  “Better to see faces,” he said. “Horace, here, has got a few more questions for you.”

  “What questions?” Mikhail said, registering deep affront. Then greed conquered resentment. “For how much?”

  “You’ll be taken care of in the usual way, honorarium in the dead drop,” Harley said. “You wouldn’t want those roughnecks outside to find you with a pocketful of dollars.”

  He fixed Mikhail with a headmaster’s all-seeing eye. Better think twice, my boy.

  “All right,” Mikhail said. “But it would be quicker to tell me what you want to know and let me summarize.”

  I was not going down that path again. The night before, Mikhail had summarized us to sleep, spouting irrelevant detail like one of those old Steinberg cartoons in which a little man in the corner of the drawing spews nonsense into a balloon that fills up the rest of the frame.

  “The questions won’t take long,” I said, “Just loose ends, really.”

  I handed Mikhail a photocopy of the list of stolen nukes with their serial numbers that Paul Christopher had left for me in his table-leg safe. Charley Hornblower had puzzled out the, to me, illegible signature.

  I said, “Is this an authentic document?”

  Mikhail glanced at it, lips twisting in disdain. How could it be genuine if a cretin like you has it in his possession? But then his expression changed.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “The question was, is it authentic?”

  “That, or a very clever forgery,” Mikhail said. “How much did you pay for this document?”

  “It was a gift. Do you recognize the signature?”

  “Y. A. Kirov,” Mikhail said.

  I went to the gas ring he used for cooking, lit it, and burned the list of nukes. I didn’t want it found on me if I was arrested after I went downstairs.

  Mikhail, hands trembling slightly, throat dry, looked like he needed a drink. We had brought no vodka this time. He had had little sleep the night before, and if his account of his day was correct, he must be worn out.

  I said, “It was not just Kirov who was omitted from our discussions last night.…”

  Mikhail bristled. “Omitted? What are you implying?” “Nothing. But we took longer than we should have to come to the point, so I will come to it now. Did it not occur to you that criminals—what’s now called the Russian mafia—may have been the thieves?”

  “Of course it did,” Mikhail said. “But this was not an American movie where criminals are smarter than the police. Darvaza-76 was a walled city, alarmed and guarded by the KGB with the strictest security measures. How would they get in?”

  “By having a friend inside,” I said. “Just like in the movies.”

  “Impossible. Even if they did get into the city, how could they penetrate the nuclear storage facility, which was the most closely gua
rded section of the installation?”

  “How many people had access to the nuclear storage facility?”

  “Only two could authorize access,” Mikhail said. “The base commander and the head of security.”

  “One of whom is dead. The other is Yevgeny Alexeivich Kirov, whereabouts unknown.”

  “Kirov was an officer of the KGB,” he said.

  “And therefore above suspicion?” I asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Just a man thinking of the future. Playing the game. Putting away a few million toward retirement.”

  Mikhail smiled a long tight-lipped smile. “I see you’re a showoff all the time, not just on television,” he said. “You should be a little more modest about your brilliance.”

  I had gotten under his skin. I made no reply, hoping that he would go on telling me off. I was not disappointed.

  “Moscow used to be the safest city in the world,” Mikhail said. “However, now that these gangsters are in charge and money is everything, that is no longer the case. They use real bullets. People die. You should bear that in mind, my friend Horace. All foolish people should bear that in mind.”

  He turned off the light and looked outside.

  “They are gone,” he said. “Now you should go.”

  4

  By the light of a flashlight, we started down the sixteen flights of stairs. About halfway down, Harley called a halt.

  “Got to sit down for a minute.”

  His voice quavered. He sank onto the stairs, fumbled in an inside pocket, and handed me a bottle of pills. He held up one finger of his left hand. With his right hand he was clutching his heart. I shook a pill out of the bottle and placed it on the palm of his trembling hand. He put it under his tongue. After a moment he seemed to be all right, but his face was pale and his voice weak.

  “Nitroglycerin,” he said. “Helps my angina. Had a little flutter there, nothin’ to worry about, happens all the time. Give me a hand.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He grabbed my arm and pulled himself upright. “Not stayin’ here.”