The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

  Consequently, Father never became the star at Headquarters or in the field that he had been for that brief moment at the Plantation, or before that in college, home, and school. It is difficult to pinpoint the reasons why a man who seems destined to succeed fails to live up to expectations. Father could have dispelled the mystery by telling his own rollicking story at dinner parties, but he never emerged from his tomb of discretion to set the record straight.

  Never apologize, never explain, he counseled me, his only child, over and over again. I listened to this precept, and as you will learn, it cost me, in the end, almost as much as it had cost him.

  My mother also paid a steep price for his folly. She married Father expecting to become, in due course, the wife of the Director, dining with the world’s most powerful men and playing bridge and gossiping on the telephone with their wives. It was Father’s fault that this did not happen. He had misled her into marriage, he had betrayed her in a way that was a hundred times worse than adultery. Obviously he had something wrong with him, a skeleton in his closet, a genetic defect he had failed to disclose to her. He was imperfect. He had hidden this from her. He deserved no sympathy. The important thing to her, the central fact of her life, was her own crushing disappointment.

  Another of my superiors, who had known Father in his youth and afterward shunned him as damaged goods, summed it up with cruel brevity.

  “Your old man,” he said, “was all sizzle and no steak.”

  Maybe so.

  Father was what he was, and like so many others in all walks of life, he is remembered for his worst or best moments, depending on your point of view. He was living proof that there are no second acts in American lives. If in fact he was incompetent except for that one brief Fitzgeraldian flash of brilliance when he was twenty-three years old, he had plenty of company.

  My own experience of the world of intelligence and the wider world is this: 90 percent of the workforce feigns effort, and of the 10 percent who do put their hearts and minds into the job, no more than one in ten is any damn good.

  My own ambition—and I had no illusions about my chances of success—was to do one great thing to clean up Father’s reputation before I used up my life and its opportunities.

  Like father, like Quixote.

  Father crashed and burned for good when he was about twenty years into his blighted career. His own opportunities, as we have seen, were severely limited. Over time, his fitness reports portrayed his work as acceptable, nothing more, and he had risen in rank in step with those findings. Promotion at Headquarters tends to be fairly rapid in the early years. Headquarters does not use military rank, but most intelligence officers (there were very few women on board in Father’s time) reach a level equivalent to the military rank of major by their early thirties. Some advance to the equivalent of colonel around their fortieth birthday, and then, for most, promotion stops.

  At forty-five Father was posted to Moscow, an assignment in which he had almost no chance of succeeding. He spoke no Russian and had no background in Soviet affairs or expertise in communism, which he regarded as a sham religion, modeled on Christianity, that was mainly interested in controlling the poor as a means of accumulating wealth.

  At the time, Father’s civil service pay grade was that of a lieutenant colonel, the tombstone rank of officers who are neither successes nor failures. The Moscow assignment would be his last before he was shooed out the door. He knew this, and the knowledge that the end was in sight plunged him into a midlife crisis. He who had once, long ago, been a somebody in the fabulous somewhere of his famous university, had become a nobody. His colleagues regarded him as a drone. His wife treated him as if he were invisible and hadn’t granted him access to her body in fifteen years. Other Headquarters wives, who seemed to smell this rejection upon him, treated him like a eunuch. His friends had surpassed him and fallen away.

  He and his only son, myself, had barely a nodding acquaintance. I imagine him, three sheets to the wind after the fourth martini and all alone in his bugged, shabby, underheated Moscow flat, uttering a loud Fuck it! into the empty air and deciding to wing it in whatever time and identity he had left.

  In the months that followed, he drank too much at diplomatic receptions and often showed up at the office smelling of booze and seemingly incapacitated by hangovers. The chief of station ignored him but sometimes gave him a meaningless assignment. When tasked to meet a potential asset, a female Muslim from Kazakhstan in whom the station had no real interest, he embraced her on the street and kissed her moistly on the cheeks and (or so it was said) squeezed her left breast. She fled in outrage and was never seen again.

  He slept with the first sparrow, or trained sex specialist, the KGB put in his way, and was photographed by hidden cameras committing Kama Sutraian acts with her and two of her coworkers, one of whom was male. Father himself told me this story during the brief moments toward the end of his life when after years of estrangement, we became friends. After the encounter with the sparrows, he knew that he had not seen the last of the KGB. In his fertile mind, a plan took shape—he would entrap the Russians who were trying to entrap him. In one last prank, he would turn the tables on them and on his own service and make his enemies at Headquarters shit their pants.

  He began to take long, lonely nighttime walks, knowing that the Russians would take notice and see an opportunity. They would follow him, watch him, and in due course attempt to hook him. What fun.

  To record the approach of the apparatchiks, he wired and miked himself and wore on his tie clip a tiny camera that took clear pictures in very dim light. All of this gear was his own property, not the station’s. He had bought it in a spyware store in a Virginia mall before leaving for Moscow. His plan worked. He was followed, monitored, watched by teams of sidewalk men wearing overcoats that resembled grocery bags with sleeves attached and fur hats like sawed-off shakos pulled down to their eyebrows. In his who-gives-a-shit state of mind, all this amused him tremendously. His intention, fueled by alcohol and disdain for his tormentors at Headquarters and the sheer boredom of having operated at 10 percent of capacity for twenty years, was that this joke would be the way his world would end: not with a howl but with a giggle.

  The KGB’s approach came as he sat on a park bench at two in the morning under a flickering light standard. Snow was falling, fat flakes of it tinted yellow by the artificial light. He knew, of course, that there was someone behind him, someone with a different tread and a different feel from the usual gumshoes who shadowed him, and he had chosen this bench because there was light enough for his camera, and because the snow-muffled silence was perfect for his microphone. Father crossed his legs, took off his fur hat, and scratched his head, coughed, as if signaling the all clear to a contact. When after a long interval no contact appeared, a Russian sat down beside him. He had an un-Slavic face—shaggy eyebrows, large brown eyes, nose like a doge.

  “May I join you?” he asked in competent American English.

  Father grunted and offered him the silver flask of bourbon he had stowed in an overcoat pocket. The Russian drank it down like vodka. He coughed and made a face.

  “Awful stuff.”

  Father said, “True, but it gets the job done.”

  The Russian chuckled. He said, “I am called Vadim.”

  Father said, “Bob”—not his true name, but Vadim already knew that.

  “I have brought the photographs you ordered,” Vadim said, and handed over a large envelope.

  It was already addressed to my mother in McLean, and bore the correct Russian postage.

  “Very kind of you,” Father said, tapping the sealed envelope with a forefinger but not opening it. “How much do I owe you?”

  Vadim waved a hand in dismissal of this small favor.

  “Our pleasure,” he said.

  With a smile, Father said, “Mine, actually.”

  It began to snow more heavily. Vadim’s hat and overcoat were coated with the stuff, so that with his great nose he
looked like an emaciated snowman.

  At length Father said, “Maybe you’d like to come to the point before they have to shovel us out, Vadim.”

  “I would like to ask for a favor in return for the photographs but I do not want to be misunderstood,” Vadim said. “You can refuse of course, but it is a small thing.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Father. “Spit it out.”

  “I have great difficulty remembering American names because they are such a hodgepodge of names from all over the world—English, German, Spanish, African, Arabic, Jewish, who can count them all? So what I was wondering was this. You work in the American embassy, so could you possibly obtain a copy of the embassy telephone book for me?”

  In his first days at the Plantation, Father had learned that this approach had been a fishhook of recruiters since the invention of the telephone: bring me this trivial little thing and Topsy will grow.

  Father said, “The phone book? Why?”

  Vadim laughed apologetically. “It’s a silly hobby, Bob, but I collect foreign telephone books. They fascinate me. Like novels.”

  “You like character-driven stories, is that it?”

  “Something like that. I just like telephone books. There’s a certain romance to them. By the way, I happen to have Natasha’s phone number in case you would like to have it.”

  “I’d love to have it. Natasha has an amazing twat. It squeezes. Do you happen to have that number on you?”

  “Unfortunately, not at the moment. But I could bring it next time we meet.”

  “Sounds good,” Father said. “When and where would that be, our next meeting?”

  Vadim named a different Moscow park. “Same time, eleven minutes after the hour, a week from tonight.”

  Vadim took back the envelope containing the pictures. “I will keep this for you so the snow will not blur the ink,” he said.

  “Do take good care of it until we meet again,” Father said.

  Father played Vadim for the rest of the winter, recording every second, every word of all their meetings with his trick ring and tie clip, but without delivering the embassy phone book or any other secret or official U.S. government document or tidbit of information.

  Gradually, subtly, he turned their conversations around, so that by the end of April, Father had become the seducer and Vadim the reluctant virgin. Father offered the Russian the turncoat’s equivalent of marriage: legal sex, security, safety, a new name, escape into a happier, easier life in which the other person paid all the bills and, in case the union did not work out, made a down payment of half his net wealth.

  Father had always been good at recruitment. Even the clique that had ruined his career conceded him that. Vadim, whether he was playing a role or playing it straight, wavered like a man who knew that his grip on his most precious possession, his virtue, was loosening with every encounter in the dark and haunted parks where the two men met in the small hours of the morning.

  Finally Vadim said maybe, but first he wanted to talk to someone higher up in the chain of command than Father, someone who could make promises that could be kept. Father had not informed the chief of station or anyone else in the Moscow station about this off-the-books operation. Keeping his own counsel had been no great feat, since almost no one in the station or the embassy or in the American community, not even fellow old Blues, had the slightest interest in talking to a drunken outcast like him.

  Because the case officer manuals for the KGB and Headquarters and practically every other secret espionage service in the world contain the same hoary truths about handling potential traitors, Father understood that Vadim’s behavior—he was a little too compliant, a little too willing to part his knees—was likely to be a theatrical exercise. Routine skepticism suggested that Vadim’s masters had seen an opportunity to penetrate Headquarters, to dump a mother lode of false information on the American service, to have a good laugh at the stupid Americans’ expense.

  That was the beauty of Father’s prank. It would present the clique that ran Headquarters, the people who had banished Father into outer darkness, with an all but irresistible temptation. Whichever course they followed, they could never know if they had missed a bet or brought a disaster down upon themselves. In either case, they would remember Father, they would remember what they had done to him, they would never be rid of him.

  As retaliation goes, it’s hard to do better than that.

  On a night when the silence in Sokolniki Park was so heavy that it seemed that it made you imagine you could seize it like fabric between thumb and forefinger, Father looked deep into Vadim’s eyes, which in the feeble light seemed as large as a horse’s eyes, and said, “My friend, this flirtation has gone on long enough. This is the moment of truth. Decide now or we forget the whole thing.”

  He laid an encouraging hand on Vadim’s coat sleeve and said, “Do what’s best for you and your family, my friend, whatever that is.”

  Vadim tried to speak but like a stutterer reaching in vain for a word he can pronounce without inviting ridicule, he stood mute.

  Father shrugged and said, “OK. It’s been good to know you.”

  Then he spun on his heel and walked away.

  In a voice that cracked, Vadim said, “Wait.”

  By then, however, Father had turned his back and stepped behind yet another curtain of falling snow. Because they were reading with different eyes from the same sheet of music, both men understood that this was not the end. Whether Vadim was behaving honestly (a possibility, after all) or dissembling, he would not, could not back off. If he honestly wanted to defect, he was already so compromised that he was a candidate for the KGB’s standard penalty for treason: to be placed naked in a coffin and cremated alive. If, on the other hand, he was under orders to feign defection and was this close to success, he would have to go through with the operation.

  Time would tell. Father and Vadim had the means to get in touch with each other. All either man had to do was chalk the Russian letter that looks like a mirror image of R on a certain lamppost on Tverskaya Ulitsa and they would meet at the time and place agreed upon.

  Father was ready first thing the following morning to spring his joke on the chief of station. He asked the chief’s secretary for an appointment.

  In an expressionless voice she said, “I’ll tell him you want to see him.”

  This happened on a Tuesday. It was Friday, during the last minutes of the workday, when the chief, a famously foulmouthed man who bore the Dickensian name of Amzi Strange, sent for him.

  Amzi Strange had never smiled in Father’s presence, nor did he smile now.

  In a toneless voice he said, “What?”

  Father handed him a bulging manila folder. Skilled bureaucrat that he was, he had organized a meticulous file on his mock operation.

  Amzi Strange said, “What’s this supposed to be?”

  Father said, “I think you should read it, and read it yourself instead of handing it off to someone else, and then if you want to talk about it, we can talk.”

  Strange tossed the file into his in-basket and said, “Right. We’re done.”

  It took Amzi Strange more than two weeks to read the file. He called Father on a Sunday at seven in the morning and said, in his grating voice, “My office. Now.”

  The chief was already at his desk when Father arrived. He did not invite his visitor to sit down.

  He said, “Have you completely lost your mind?”

  Father said, “I don’t think so, Amzi, but if I have, I guess I’d be the last to know.”

  The Vadim file lay on the Strange’s otherwise bare desk. He tapped it with a forefinger.

  “This is real? It’s not some kind of sick joke?”

  “It’s genuine.”

  “You’ve been meeting a KGB officer clandestinely, in public parks in the middle of the night, and playing along with a recruitment pitch for two fucking months without telling me, without telling anybody what you were up to, with no authorization from Headq
uarters and without its knowledge?”

  “Yep.”

  “‘Yep?’ Yep, you frigging imbecile? Why? What in God’s name were you thinking?”

  “I didn’t know we acted in God’s name in this business,” Father said. “But to answer your question, I was thinking that we had a good chance to turn this guy—I still think we will be able to do that if we play him right, and that that would be a feather in the station’s cap, inasmuch as we’ve recruited not one single local asset in the year and a half you’ve been in charge here. Or for many years before.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” Strange said. “You never wondered if this target you found with such ingenuity was a dangle, that this was a KGB operation, a threat to security, a quick feel?”

  “Why yes, Amzi, those possibilities did cross my mind. But there was the other possibility, the one where with a little help from us, he could become a threat to their security.”

  “Pretty fucking slim possibility. So I ask you again, why didn’t you let somebody know that you were singlehandedly putting at risk every single operation we’re running and every single officer in this station, not to mention the family jewels back home?”

  “I just did that.”

  “After the fact. I ask you again, what were you thinking? Tell me. Please help me understand.”

  “Basically, I was trying to keep busy,” Father said. “You haven’t asked me to do so much as to sharpen a pencil in the months I’ve been here, so I figured you’d be unsympathetic to any project I proposed. On this particular one, you’d tell me to cease and desist.”

  “You’re fuckin’ A I would have.”

  “And besides that, Amzi, I have no reason to care whether you like this or not. It’s an opportunity to run an asset inside Lubyanka—”

  “There is no Lubyanka anymore, my dear fellow. They’ve moved to the country.”

  “Well then, I guess Vadim would have to commute, supposing you and Headquarters have the guts to consider this, to take a chance.”