The Mercenary

by Paul Vidich

“Posner asked me to go. His boss, Deputy Chairman Churgin, gave him two invitations. What?” Petrov stared. “Your face went white. You know him?”

  “No.” A lie. “Go on.”

  “Posner said, ‘A big honor.’ For my good work. I asked, ‘Why me?’ He said because I’m a smart fellow. When he appeals to my vanity, I know he has something in mind. I said, ‘But I don’t know English.’ He said it doesn’t matter. ‘You’ve been asked to go. Consider it a privilege.’ ”

  Petrov looked at Garin. “I have no choice but to go. I will be watched. That is why I’m being invited. I assume that you will be there. You must not approach me. You must not look at me. If the KGB suspect something, I’ll be taken for questioning. I must be invisible.

  “I am putting two things together—the change in security at the copier and the invitation. Someone is tightening the noose on my neck. The best way to protect me is to point a finger at someone else.”

  Petrov drew a deep breath. “My wife is a nervous wreck. Last week, someone in our apartment block was taken. No one says he was arrested, but now no one mentions his name. He’s gone, disappeared. The family says he is off visiting relatives, but my wife saw him taken out to a black Volga.” He clenched his hands. “She won’t talk about our escape openly. If we talk at home, it’s simple things—how was your day, did you go to the store? Nonsense. When we talk about our plans, it is in our bedroom with the radio playing loudly.

  “Why am I telling you this? It’s complicated with her. She can’t bear the thought of leaving her parents without saying goodbye. I need to give her reasons to believe our son will be safe if we go.”

  Petrov turned philosophical. “If you submit to the state, it gives you what you need, and for me, in my position, we get an annual holiday at the KGB resort on the Black Sea, health care in a special clinic, monthly rations of milk and butter, and a job from which I can’t be fired.” He smiled grimly. “But if you don’t submit and you resist, the benefits vanish, the rations stop, medicines become unavailable, your friends look away, and you are watched. There is no privacy, even in your own home. If you persist in your questions, you are considered difficult and the State unleashes its full arsenal of vengeance. You are sent to Serbsky Psychiatric Institute, where you are treated for a condition the KGB calls ‘lazy schizophrenia’ whose only symptom is resistance to the State.”

  Petrov stood. “I tell this to my wife. She knows it, but it’s one thing to know this and another to imagine you’ll never see your parents again.” He stopped at the door. “My wife liked the ABBA. Can you get me Queen? And a woman’s two-piece lingerie, cup size C. Any color. Look, my wife’s unmarried sister’s thirtieth birthday is coming up, and my wife wants something to surprise her. It would help me out, okay?”

  “Of course.” Garin also stood and tried to appear upbeat in the face of Petrov’s grim report and gloomy mood. He handed the newly forged passports to Petrov. The documents had been created by the Technical Services Graphics Department, everything meticulously re-created to appear like originals—paper quality, photographs, embarkation stamps that reflected the wear and tear of years of use. The entry stamps were made to emulate the varied pressure that a busy immigration inspector would use when pressing his rubber stamp, some faint, some bolder, and none of the pages with the obvious crispness of an intentional forgery. Only the names were different.

  “Good,” Petrov said, shoving his arms into his coat. “This will help. Now let’s hope no one searches our flat and finds the camera.” Petrov had stepped through the door when he stopped and faced Garin. “Get Posner off my back.”

  “How?”

  Petrov’s eyes narrowed. “You’re clever. Cleverer than you pretend. You’ll find a way.”

  8 HELEN WALSH

  I HEAR YOU’VE BEEN ASKING ABOUT Dmitry Posner.”

  Garin was surprised by Helen Walsh’s comment, coming abruptly in the midst of their casual conversation. They were standing together in her crowded living room among guests who talked over one another to make themselves heard as they smoked, drank, and laughed. Her question implied that his few discreet inquiries into Posner had entered the embassy gossip mill.

  Helen had a pleasant figure and confident smile, and the slightly flirtatious demeanor of an unmarried career professional in her mid-thirties. Her knowledge of Russian was better than most of the other foreign service professionals, and her long tenure in Moscow came with a two-bedroom apartment with a good view of the Kremlin. She hosted a monthly Friday night salon for embassy staff—particularly the young, single staff, who found it hard to lead normal lives in the closed city—and their French, Italian, and English counterparts. The party’s casual atmosphere allowed guests to unwind from a long workweek, free of the watchful eyes of State Security.

  Garin had formed his opinion of his supervisor in their first meeting, when she’d stared at him across her desk with a gambler’s gaze. As was often the case with his judgments of people, his first impression endured and became a lasting impression, and everything that followed simply confirmed his opinion. She belonged to that class of women who took it upon themselves to be familiar with other people’s business—and she knew more than she let on.

  Her comment came after she’d described how she made certain that she knew who had arrived to her parties. If she saw someone she didn’t recognize, she’d get the person’s name and ask what they did and who they came with, and then she’d show them to the bar. That was how she got to know everyone, she’d said.

  They were standing by a bookshelf of abundant memorabilia in exotic disarray. “I’m a hoarder,” she’d said with a laugh when he’d first been struck by the volumes of samizdat first editions and walls crowded with paintings by jailed Soviet artists.

  But now she wasn’t focused on her collection. Garin saw her eyes fix on him, and he knew that the woman who’d avoided him for weeks had a sudden interest.

  “I was told to meet him,” he replied. “Do you know him?” Garin glanced around, looking for an excuse to escape her company.

  “Know Dmitry Posner? Of course. He sold me that painting.” She directed Garin to a canvas of dense black squares set on a background of ivory white. “He got it off Golukov for nothing when he was arrested and sold it to me for a lot of money. It’s a good racket. There’s a market for dissident art in London. What’s your interest in him?”

  “Human rights. Abuses.”

  Helen cocked her head. “A clever answer. Maybe it’s even true.”

  Garin felt Helen’s eyes on him as if she were trying to read his mind. He had turned his head again, looking to get away, and in the moment of distraction he didn’t catch her question.

  “I’m sorry, I was looking for someone. Anything to say about what?”

  “About why Ronnie is motioning toward you,” Helen said. “Go ahead, she looks eager to talk.” She nodded at Garin’s glass. “Another?”

  “Please.” He took the dregs in one swallow and handed her the glass.

  “She’s talking to Rupert Halsey. He comes from a long line of Cambridge communists from the thirties, when it was fashionable among the English upper class, but I know he works for MI6.”

  As he stepped away, he felt her hand on his arm, stopping him.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Vodka martini. Straight up. No olives.”

  “The bartender makes an excellent Moscow Mule. You should try it. Every Russian should.”

  Garin crossed the room to Ronnie, but Helen’s comment echoed in the back of his mind. Later, he recorded the incident in his notebook. Her comment was so casual, so out of nowhere, and so notable for its provocative oddity, that it stuck with him. He didn’t think it was a random shot, and like her earlier comment and others that had come to his attention, he had begun to think that his cover wasn’t as good as he had hoped. Rumors had begun to attach themselves to him like burrs. Garin didn’t know how the rumors started, nor did he have a good way to shut them down. And the v
agueness of the suspicions was a sort of accelerant—imprecision fueling a wildfire of possibilities that sprung from the dry kindling of the embassy’s social confinement. Garin knew he couldn’t quash the rumors, so he resolved to get his work done quickly and hoped that the speculation would burn out.

  “Helen lives well,” Ronnie said when they were alone by the window, away from the crowd. She coddled a drink and had a large cloth bag on her shoulder. “Tenure has its perks.” She pointed at the French Empire furniture and the stunning view of the Kremlin. “She enjoys playing hostess. Everyone wants to come, even the Russians. Look around. Dissidents, poets, physicists, spies. They all want something: a date, to defect, and some want to know who else is in the room.” She sipped her drink. “Everyone wants something.”

  “What did you find on Posner?”

  She handed him a two-page document from her bag. “You’re allowed to read this, but you can’t take it. Orders.”

  “Rositske?”

  She shrugged but didn’t answer.

  Garin scanned the two pages of background: Born October 5, 1938, Moscow. Father a NKVD lieutenant colonel, mother a commercial artist. Attended Moscow Elementary School 130, joined the Young Pioneers at age nine, and transferred to Komsomol at fourteen, becoming head of his high school unit. Entered the Institute of International Relations in 1958. Trained in the KGB institute, School 101, graduating fifth in his class. Served in London, Berlin, and Rome. Spoke fluent English and German.

  Garin turned to the assessment section, written in the conversational style of a trained Agency analyst: “He has a fondness for money and material things, but he hasn’t shown a weakness for women, except the casual attention of a diplomat’s wife, and he doesn’t drink, except the odd glass of wine. He has a harmless, if slightly unusual, streak of vanity. During a posting in London, where his job was to interact with smart City types, he began to imitate their dress, wearing a Savile Row suit with a folded pocket square and a fashionable cravat tied in a Windsor knot. He also adopted a number of English social customs. He arrived at Kensington dinner parties with cut flowers for the hostess and he wrote thank-you notes afterward on monogrammed stationery.”

  Garin pondered the profile of an elite KGB officer with Western affectations.

  “I’ll introduce you,” Ronnie said. “He’s coming to the Spaso House gala next week.”

  “What about the other thing?”

  She pulled a lingerie box from her bag. “C cup, as you requested. It arrived in the pouch this morning. Who is it for?”

  “Don’t reason the need.”

  “Maybe it’s for you.” She smiled mischievously. “If that were true, it would put an end to all the other rumors. People have started to take an interest in you.”

  Ronnie glanced back at the room of flushed faces engaged in animated conversations, everyone noting who was there and who was not. “Helen is looking at us,” she said, turning back to Garin. “Why is there no file on you in Langley?”

  Garin never did answer her question. Helen approached and handed him his vodka martini.

  Garin recorded the incident in his notebook that night. Too many people asking too many questions.

  9 SPASO HOUSE

  GARIN AND RONNIE STOOD IN a long security queue outside Spaso House, the US ambassador’s official residence at No. 10 Spasopeskovskaya Square, a graceful stucco building built in the final years of tsarist Russia. It had snowed that afternoon, the first big snow of March, which was an omen for a long winter.

  Ronnie slapped her hands together for warmth and leaned into Garin. “Rositske will meet you in the bathroom when you’re inside. He has an answer for you.”

  Garin had made Ronnie his drinking partner, and he relied on her to help him navigate the political shoals of embassy life. She nodded at the elegant guests impatiently enduring the cold, some sharing what little they’d been told to expect at the party and what they might actually see.

  “A jazz band, seals, birds flying around,” Ronnie said to Garin, shivering. “I’ve been told it will be bigger than the party Ambassador Bullitt’s wife threw in 1935. Stalin didn’t come to that party, but he sent his defense minister, the foreign minister, top generals, and several Communist Party luminaries, including Karl Radek. Emily Propper wants to honor the fiftieth anniversary of that famous event—and outdo it.” Ronnie laughed.

  Garin had heard the stories of the 1935 Spaso House party: ice blocks in the Chandelier Room, tame bears, birds landing on people’s heads. A German woman in a mink coat in front of Ronnie turned. “And did you know that the tame bear became drunk when Karl Radek gave it champagne?” she asked. Another guest pointed out the Spanish ambassador. And then a whispered rumor swept the queue: two members of the Presidium were coming.

  Ronnie pointed to the front of the queue. “There’s Posner.”

  A tall man without a hat wore a scarf tucked into his sable coat, and he allowed himself to be patted down by a marine guard. His salt-and-pepper hair fell back to his shoulders, like a flamboyant orchestra conductor, and his narrow jaw and aquiline nose, red from the cold, gave his angular face a pleasant appearance.

  Garin had his eye on Posner when he gave his overcoat to the coat-check girl, who placed it among many others hanging on a wheeled rack. He moved to the Chandelier Room, where a perimeter balcony circled the cathedral ceiling and a glistening glass chandelier hung like a jeweled star. Everywhere, people milled, moved past the tame bear borrowed from the Moscow Zoo, or stared at the barking seal. A large, netted aviary of canaries and sparrows drew awed attention from arriving guests, and others ambled past a stand of white birches set in a meadow of tulips. Somewhere, a gleeful saxophone was paired with a mournful trumpet, accompanied by the nimble fingering of a pianist.

  Garin pushed through the ballroom and made his way to the bathroom. He was standing at the urinal when he became aware that a man had entered. Garin moved to the porcelain sink, opening the hot and cold taps, and he felt the man’s presence at the next basin.

  “What’s his name?” Rositske asked.

  “He asked me not to share it.”

  “You don’t work for him.”

  “Actually, I do. Until it’s done.”

  Rositske aggressively splashed water on his face. “Bullshit. You think he trusts you?”

  “He’ll trust me more when I deliver the next batch of his son’s medicine. Where is it?”

  “You’ll have it. When does he deliver again?”

  Garin stared at Rositske through the mirror. “He’s not a banker. He doesn’t work set hours. He’ll get me the film when it’s safe.”

  “Langley is pressuring me.”

  Garin grunted. He glanced under the stalls to be certain they were alone. “The copier he uses is being watched. He thinks there’s a breach on our side.”

  “We checked on Posner,” Rositske said. “He’s a throwaway. Ronnie will introduce you.” Rositske handed Garin a list of typed questions. “Langley wants these answered.”

  Garin looked. “GAMBIT is already nervous. These will scare him off.”

  “It’s not a suggestion. It came from POTUS to the DCI to Mueller to me, and now to you.”

  “I don’t care who wants it.” Garin crumpled the paper. He dropped his voice. “He’s skittish. I’m not asking for much, just the modest use of good judgment. Wait until he’s across the border, then he can answer these, and every other goddamned question they’ve got. Tell Mueller there is a risk he will cut and run.”

  Garin thought his caution was brutally obvious. That the acting chief of station did not speak Russian, or read it, was one of Garin’s gripes. Nothing had changed since his previous posting. Ambitious men dubiously equipped for sensitive assignments made errors of judgment that put lives at risk.

  “I will bring the questions,” Garin said, uncrumpling the page. “I’ll ask how he wants to address them. It would be good if I got the second batch of medicine when I bring up the questions. He might be more incline
d to cooperate.”

  Garin never did present the questions to GAMBIT.

  * * *

  GARIN RETURNED TO the Chandelier Room and took a spot on the edge of the party, nursing his drink. He was both a lone man observing the room and an amateur actor trying to decide what role he should play. The two things—Garin the man and Garin the actor—did not quite go together. The actor seemed a bit too studied, the man cast as the awkward outsider. And the guests who noticed him didn’t know whether to sympathetically approach or to be wary of him. He had the loner’s fortitude for privacy and the detachment of a man who found it convenient to withdraw with a tall glass of vodka, which he had taken without olive or vermouth but still called a martini.

  “There you are,” Ronnie said, appearing beside him. “You drifted off. Let me introduce you.”

  She took Garin’s arm and led him across the ballroom to a pair of Russians standing with an Englishman. The first Russian was shorter, quiet, planted like a bronze statue among a swirl of party guests, and his eyes took in the room. He listened impassively to the taller Russian at his side, who chatted with the Englishman and occasionally leaned down to politely translate. Garin recognized Posner’s long, swept-back hair. He wore a bespoke tuxedo, and he had the animated charm of a man in the company of a boss he wanted to impress.

  “Comrade Posner,” Ronnie said. “I’d like to introduce you to someone.”

  Posner turned away from his Soviet colleague. “We were just talking about the speed limit in Moscow,” he said. “It’s still sixty kilometers per hour, but it was never respected and never enforced, and now the new radar detectors are a big headache. Three convictions and you lose your license. Everyone has the same question. What can we do about it?” He leaned forward to Garin. “I didn’t catch the name.”

  “Aleksander Garin.”

  Comrade Posner bent slightly at the waist and presented his hand. “Garin, you said? A Russian name!” He looked at Garin, taking a measure of the man. “A Russian name with a rich significance. Erast Garin was one of our great stage actors. Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky wrote popular novels. And there is the protagonist in Chekhov’s story, ‘Ward 6.’ Dr. Ragin, a perfect anagram of Garin. Welcome to the Soviet Union, Mr. Garin.”