The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

  He shook my hand firmly, looked me straight in the eyes for a count of five, and said, “Congratulations. Brilliant work. The president of the United States has been made aware of your outstanding service to your country.”

  He looked at me as if to let me know that these ritualistic words carried more than their usual weight because, as the media never tired of repeating, he was a friend of the president’s, a kingmaker. He had known him When.

  A champagne cork popped. A waiter in a white jacket materialized. He poured a tablespoon of California champagne into glasses and passed them around. The Director lifted his glass. Everyone else followed suit.

  From his diaphragm the Director said, “To good deeds in the service of this country that we love. And to you, sir.”

  That was all he had time for. The short man opened the door and held it. The Director walked through it. Some but not all of the others shook hands with me and then, like the Director, they had to dash.

  A tall man whom I vaguely remembered from the old days was the last to shake hands.

  He said, “Tom Terhune. Your father would be proud.”

  Terhune was a murmurer, so I had to listen hard to hear him.

  “More likely amused.”

  “Don’t be too sure. He expected great things from you.”

  This was news to me. But a wave of emotion ran through me. Not for the first or the last time, I wondered where this overwhelming love for a man I hardly knew until our last hour together had come from and how it had become the driving force in my life.

  Terhune, a watchful fellow, noticed that his words had had an effect on me.

  He said, “I’d like to renew acquaintances. Are you free for dinner a week from Wednesday?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  I was always free for dinner, and I wanted to find out more about this man whom I was not quite sure I remembered.

  “Seven o’clock then, at Kazan’s in McLean. It’s in a shopping center. Do you remember it?”

  I did. Turkish food. The place had been one of Father’s hangouts. He had taken me there for my birthday a couple of times.

  I said, “It’s still there? Fine.”

  Terhune nodded, glanced at his watch, and left. Like the others, he stepped lively, not a second to waste.

  Outside the door, Amzi was waiting for me.

  He said, “You know Terhune?”

  “Not really.”

  “Good man, but only his dog can hear him. Nice medal. People have killed for it. Just like you did. Or died for it. How come you’re still wearing it?”

  “What else would I do with it?”

  “It’s customary to give it back so they can lock it up in the Director’s safe. They give it to your widow when you die. She can hang it around her neck while she bangs her second husband or melt it down for the next hero.”

  As Amzi spoke the Director’s private door opened and the short man reentered, carrying the empty medal box in his hand. He gave me an expectant look. I took off the medal and handed it to him. I hadn’t had a chance to examine it, so I never did find out what motto, if any, was stamped on the obverse.

  Terhune was known in Kazan’s restaurant. He didn’t have to order because the waiter already knew what he wanted. I ordered the same, lamb stew cooked in yogurt. Terhune ordered a brand of vodka I had never heard of—chilled, no ice. When the waiter asked me what I wanted, I asked for spring water.

  Terhune said, “You don’t drink alcohol?”

  “I gave it up so the Muslims wouldn’t smell it on me.”

  He asked me how my mother was. I didn’t know. While I was in the Middle East, she had sold the house in which I had grown up. She wrote, tersely, that she could not go on living in the wreckage of her old life, meeting people who knew all about her husband’s shame and turned away their faces every time she ran into them in Safeway. She was moving far away to be with her lover. She didn’t specify where. This parting was not so very different from my father’s good-bye to me.

  I said, “My mother and I are not in touch.”

  Terhune, showing no unseemly surprise, dropped the subject.

  He said, “Fill me in. What does Amzi have you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Literally?”

  “Yes.”

  “No busywork while he finds the right slot for you?”

  “So far, no.”

  “The days must go by slowly.”

  “Not really.”

  “No? How do you pass the time?”

  “I study Russian. One of those home study courses.”

  “Why?”

  “In case it comes in handy. And I like learning languages.”

  “Is it any good at this point?”

  “Hard to tell when I have no one to talk to but myself.”

  In Russian, Terhune said, “Can you read it, write it, understand it over the telephone, recognize the words in a song?”

  In the same language I replied, “About half.”

  “How long have you been at this?”

  “About a month.”

  “And already you halfway understand? You must be a quick study.”

  “I watch a lot of Russian movies and listen to audiobooks.”

  “Which books?”

  “So far, Pushkin’s poetry and Chekhov’s short stories.”

  “Good choices. Pure pleasure in the original. Why, really, are you doing this?”

  “I want to run operations against the Russians.”

  “Not the Chinese, the target of the moment?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s beyond us, because it’s pointless, because it has no alphabet. Because no outside power has ever destroyed China, but if you hang around long enough, it always destroys itself.”

  Terhune said, “You should write an op-ed. In English.”

  The waiter reappeared. Terhune ordered two Turkish coffees. Switching to English he asked me how long it had taken me to learn Arabic and Farsi to the point of fluency. I told him the truth: not very long. He looked like he believed me, but given the life he had led, how would you know?

  He said, speaking English again, “What you need now is someone to speak Russian to. I know a native speaker who might help if you’re interested.”

  “I’m interested if he or she is up-to-date on slang.”

  “This fellow is up-to-date on pretty much everything. A Jesuit priest. He was born in Russia of Russian parents and left when he was twelve and emigrated to the States when his mother married an American citizen. His father had been shot for the usual Soviet reasons, which is to say no sane reason. He and his mother always spoke Russian to each other and she had Russian friends, so he kept up on the language. Because he spoke it like a native and knew the culture as if he had never left Moscow, he was sent into the Soviet Union by the Jesuit order and lived there as a hidden priest for twenty years. He worked in mines and factories during the day and at night baptized babies, heard confessions, said mass in secret. And wrote intelligence reports in Aramaic to his father provincial in the USA that the Moscow station transmitted for him.”

  “The Jesuits shared his reports with you?”

  “Sometimes, on their own initiative. Otherwise no, and we didn’t peek.”

  “You must have been tempted.”

  “We were somewhat short of Aramaic speakers. And besides, the Aramaic was encrypted.”

  “I didn’t know there were Roman Catholics in Russia.”

  “There are Roman Catholics everywhere, thanks in good part to the Jesuits, and there were a lot more of them in the USSR after twenty years of Father Yuri.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “When I was chief of station in Moscow, the KGB sniffed him out. Before they could grab him we documented him and helped get him out of the country. When I got back to Washington he looked me up to say thank you. We became friends.”

  “What does he do now?”

  “What Jesu
its do. If you want to meet him, I can introduce you.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “What’s your cell phone number?”

  I told him. Tom didn’t need to write it down.

  He said, “You’ll get a call in a day or two.”

  I said, “I have a question.”

  “Ask it.”

  “How did a son of my father get by the dragons and get recruited?”

  Judging by the look in Terhune’s eyes, this was a question he had expected.

  He said, “It wasn’t complicated. You were qualified.”

  “That hardly seems like enough, given the backstory.”

  “Quiet words were spoken by your good friend Bill Stringfellow, and others followed suit.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Bill was respected and because, believe it or not, your father still has admirers. Some of them thought he paid too high a price for a youthful prank that told Headquarters more about itself than it wanted to know. With his brains and aptitude, he should have made it to the top. A lot of people thought he would. He was prevented from doing so by the fuddy-duddies. Half the organization thought that he had been robbed of his destiny and as a by-product of that, the organization had been robbed of what he might have done for it.”

  “So it happened for sentimental reasons?”

  “There was no cabal, if that’s what you mean. But as far as I know, nobody told the people upstairs whose son you are, but that’s as far as it went. You have a common last name.”

  “Does Amzi know?”

  “Who knows what Amzi knows? But it’s more likely than not. All he has to do is look at you.”

  “Given the history, why would he let such a thing happen?”

  “You’d have to ask Amzi that question, but I wouldn’t necessarily advise you to ask it.”

  There was little left to say. Terhune paid the check. I tried to split it, but he said, “You can leave the tip. Two twenties will do. When you can understand every word Father Yuri speaks or that Pushkin and Chekhov wrote plus the lyrics of ‘Dark Eyes,’ give me a call.”

  In the parking lot he said, “Listen. Whatever you might think you owe anybody because of the past, you don’t. And even if you did, you would have already paid off the principal and interest. You’re even.”

  Not quite yet.

  9

  Father Yuri was a plain man with a brilliant mind. He seldom spoke a word a small child could not have understood or expressed a thought that didn’t turn out to be a Matryoshka doll. On our first day together, we met in the early morning—the mist had not yet burned off—at the twentysixth president’s statue on Theodore Roosevelt Island in the Potomac. As we walked the island’s trails, deer, herds of them, watched us. Father Yuri could not have been less than seventy and looked older—a consequence, perhaps, of two decades on the famously nutritious Soviet diet. He was a sturdy broad-shouldered man with the legs of a fullback. His thick gray hair was cut short. Ruddy complexion, Slavic cheekbones, pug nose. Like Chekhov he was a descendant of serfs and looked it. Clearly his face had been his fortune as he stayed alive and unimprisoned for half a lifetime under the nose of the Soviet apparatus. He walked purposefully, like a pilgrim on his way to Jerusalem, all the while speaking Russian and listening to my lame attempts to speak it in return. When the hike ended he was as fresh as he had been at the beginning.

  In English he said, “You’ve got a quick ear. Your Russian got better in the last ninety minutes. How often do you want to do this?”

  “Every morning. Is that possible?”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “Sundays excepted, yes. Let’s meet by the president’s statue at six-fifteen. Get rid of the home study records, the diction is weak. Stop listening to Chekhov and Pushkin on your iPod or you’ll end up sounding like a prerevolutionary aristocrat. Read contemporary authors, magazines, newspapers. The library where you work has them all. Keep going with the movies but only ones made in the last ten years.”

  I took his advice as gospel. I grew fond of him very quickly. To the degree permitted by his vocation, this seemed to be reciprocated. Father Yuri took pleasure in my progress, and as my capacity improved, we gradually began to exchange small confidences. Although this made me wary, I pushed paranoia aside. What difference did it make if the Jesuits knew all my secrets? They weren’t going to tell anybody but other Jesuits. Father Yuri never mentioned God, but if he had, I would have listened.

  This doesn’t mean I was sidling toward conversion. I did not believe in gods as man has so far imagined them. I could not believe unless the mind of the creator turned out to be the invisible, invincible, omnipresent, immortal bacteria and viruses that collectively drove the evolution of our species over billions of years with the objective of producing an organism intelligent enough to transport the microbes to other planets so they could begin the process all over again. Concomitantly this infinite mind programmed humanity to despoil the planet, so it would have an incentive to leave. In an imaginary deity this would be called God’s plan and be regarded by believers as unquestionable. In the case of bacteria, which are known to have existed on Earth for at least 3.4 billion years and live in and profoundly affect the bodies of every organism on the planet, denial would be automatic.

  This hypothesis made sense to me, but I decided not to discuss it with a Jesuit.

  We encountered almost no one on our early walks apart from the occasional earnest runner, usually a military type, but one morning we came upon a Latino family lost in the woods. They were frantic, but the sight of Father Yuri’s clerical collar calmed them down.

  “God has sent us the good father,” the mother told her children.

  In Spanish—the mother and the children spoke no English—Father Yuri invited them to follow us to the parking lot. On the way he conversed happily with the children. I talked to the parents. They were from Paraguay (the husband, a diplomat, had just been posted to Washington), and in the few minutes we were together they told me what they said was the most interesting thing about their country, that in the late nineteenth century all but about 40,000 Paraguayan males—the few survivors of the gender were mostly old men and small boys—had been killed in a hopeless war with Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. This slaughter turned the country into a land of widows, orphans, and girls who had no one to marry. A carnival of polygyny was the result, so if you fell in love you never knew if you and the object of your affection had the same grandfather. It was not polite to ask.

  After the Paraguayans drove away, Father Yuri asked me where I had learned Spanish and why. I told him and asked him the same questions.

  He said, “I ministered to some Spanish Catholics—the children of Spanish Communists, now grown up, who had been kidnapped by the NKVD, as the Cheka then called itself, during the Spanish Civil War and taken to the Soviet Union. By chance—if anything is by chance—I met a man who wanted to return to God, so I revealed myself. He led me to others and they led me to more, and eventually to secret Catholics from other Spanish-speaking countries. There were a surprising number of them. Some were the half-Russian children of the kidnapped children. They didn’t want to pray in Russian, the language of atheism, so I learned Spanish. They were my teachers.”

  “Dangerous work.”

  “For them, yes, because most of them were married to Russians who didn’t know they prayed in secret and were so terrified of the secret police that they might have denounced them. But they believed that Jesus would protect them. They survived, so who knows, maybe he did.”

  Father Yuri’s references to the Trinity were rare. Nevertheless, or maybe therefore, our conversations became more interesting. After a few days we stopped discussing the day’s news and the weather and baseball and instead talked about living a fictitious life among exotic peoples and speaking their languages as if they were your own. I never learned where exactly Father Yuri had lived and operated in Russia and never asked. Nor did I name the countries in which I had worked or
even the other languages I spoke. I assumed Tom Terhune, who seemed to trust him absolutely, had already supplied him with this information, and maybe more.

  The differences between the life of a Jesuit and that of a spy are not so very great. Each trades in souls. Each belongs to a secret community united by belief and ritual to which, except for rare mutations like me, they are committed heart, mind, and soul. Both play a role designed to blur their reality, both are entrusted by strangers with secrets they have sworn an oath never to reveal, both work against a defined enemy (the same one under different funny names, Father Yuri might have thought) for a clear but unachievable purpose, and derive from their work roughly the same amalgam of guilt and satisfaction, disillusion and moral satisfaction, self-loathing and flagellation. The priest saves souls, the spy preserves illusions.

  We quickly became friends of a sort, and in a limited sense each other’s confessors—what sort of people we had handled, what we had seen, how that affects the mind and the way the world looks. Interest is the key to learning, and as anyone who has ever been in love knows, few things are more interesting than looking into another mind and discovering a simulacrum of oneself.

  At heart, Father Yuri was as much the skeptic as I was, and in my own way I was as much of a believer as he was. As he might have put it if he had been an ordinary teacher, you cannot be a doubter if you didn’t begin as a believer, and vice versa. I learned more from him in a short time than from anyone else I had ever known, yet at the end of the course I could not have described what exactly I had learned any more than I could have recited the details of the process by which my body manufactured new cells.

  I may have been a fast learner by nature, but I had never learned a language so quickly as this. Usually it takes years to be able to see into a foreign language and to hear its echoes. After ten weeks with Father Yuri I could do this, up to a point, with Russian, in which I had not until recently been able to put two words together.

  Then, abruptly, the tutorial came to an end. There was no ceremonial good-bye.