Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) (11 page)

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The Adventures of Cloak and Dagger

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Call me a courageous patriot if you wish, but when my country asks me if I am willing to go on a potentially dangerous mission to a potentially dangerous foreign place where I will run a very real risk of being in potential danger, I do not hesitate. I simply answer, as countless brave, self-sacrificing Americans have answered before me: “Can I fly business class?”

And thus it was that I journeyed to Russia with my fellow author and friend Ridley Pearson as part of the U.S. State Department's American Writers Series program, which is intended to improve our relations with other nations. When I told people I was going to Russia on behalf of the U.S. government, they invariably responded, “They're sending YOU?”

This response made sense, because I have not made my reputation by improving international relations. I have made my reputation by cheap humor stunts such as setting fire to a pair of men's underpants with a Barbie doll. I totally agreed with the people who thought sending me to Russia was a bad idea. But I went anyway, for two reasons:

1. As a taxpayer who has been bitching for decades about how the federal government wastes our money on ridiculous boondoggles, I was excited by the prospect that finally some of this money would be wasted on a ridiculous boondoggle benefiting me personally.
   
2. I have always been fascinated by Russia.
   

I grew up during the Cold War. Back in the fifties, when I was in elementary school, I was one of the millions of kids who were taught that in the event of a nuclear attack—which everybody believed might actually happen—we should crouch under our desks. The idea was that our desks would protect us from the atomic blast. (We had sturdier desks back then.)

There was no question who would be shooting nuclear missiles at us, of course: The Russians. They were the enemy. They were evil. They were Communists who wanted to take over the world and enslave us and make us listen to classical music in minor keys. Russians were the bad guys in the movies, on TV, in James Bond books, in the Olympics, in Rocky-and-Bullwinkle cartoons, everywhere. They talked with thick accents and smoked cheap cigarettes and wore comical fur hats that made them look like frightened wombats were clinging to their heads.

I had reason to dislike the Russians personally, because in 1957, when I was in fifth grade, they beat America into space by launching the first man-made Earth satellite,
Sputnik
.
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This event totally freaked out the American grown-up population, because it meant
the Russians were ahead of us
. All of a sudden there was this big push for American schools to teach more science and math, which did not seem fair to me: It wasn't
my
fault the Russians got ahead. Anyway, for years after that, whenever I was in some dreary classroom listening to a teacher drone on about some hideously boring science or math concept that I clearly would never use in real life—the “hypotenuse,” for example—I held the Russians responsible.

Then (I am skipping some parts here) in the early nineties the Soviet Union collapsed. The winds of freedom blew, and the Russian people were exposed to large quantities of American culture in the form of McDonald's, Burger King, Limp Bizkit, etc. The Cold War was finally over, and we had won!

Or so it seemed.

Apparently, however, many Russians had second thoughts about how things turned out, and now the Cold War has sort of started up again. I will not go into detail on the reasons, because they involve international relations, which for me hold the same fascination as the “hypotenuse.” But basically the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, thinks Russia deserves to be a major world power again, and he sees America as standing in the way.

Putin is not a fun dude. He looks like a Central Casting version of a KGB agent, which is what he once was. In photos, he's almost never smiling: He's usually staring at the camera with the expression of a man who relaxes by strangling small furry animals. He's utterly unlike American presidents, who are always trying to convey sincerity, warmth, responsibility. Putin is trying to convey that he's a badass. He has been photographed engaging in a variety of manly activities such as riding horses bare-chested, catching fish bare-chested, or just generally standing around bare-chested, sending the unspoken but unmistakable message: “My chest is bare.”

As I write this I'm looking at a newspaper picture of Putin striding through some tall grass, bare-chested, holding a rifle. I'm trying to imagine what would happen if an American president ever did that. The
New York Times
editorial board, after recovering from its group faint, would demand, at minimum, his impeachment.

But it works for Putin. A lot of Russians like his tough-guy image. They also like the fact that the Russian economy, helped hugely by rising energy prices, has done well in the years he's been in charge. So his approval ratings are high, which gives him a lot of power, which he is not afraid to exercise. At the risk of being informative, I'll quote here from
New Yorker
editor David Remnick, a former Moscow correspondent for the
Washington Post
and a much-respected expert on Russia:

By 2008, average citizens—far from all Russians, but tens of millions of them—were living better than they had lived at any time in the nation's history. Russian billionaires, like the sheikhs of yesteryear, bought up the prime real estate of Mayfair, Fifth Avenue, and the Côte d'Azur. And with that new wealth and welcome stability came enormous popularity for Vladimir Putin. His compact with the Russian people, however, was stark: Stay out of politics and thrive. Interfere, presume, overstep, and you will meet a harsh fate.

In 2014, relations between Russia and the U.S., which were already strained, got downright bad. The U.S., claiming that Russian actions in Crimea and Ukraine violated international law, imposed economic sanctions on Russia; Russia, claiming it had done nothing wrong—that in fact the United States was behind the trouble in Ukraine—took retaliatory measures. The Russians were making threats; we were making threats. The possibility of direct military conflict suddenly seemed a lot more real.

It was a tense time, a dangerous time, a time when a misstep on either side could have disastrous consequences. It was no time for fools or amateurs.

This is when the U.S. government sent me and Ridley to Russia.

We knew it was a big responsibility, so we prepared thoroughly for our mission. I don't mean “prepared thoroughly” in the sense of learning facts about Russia or memorizing useful Russian words or phrases. I mean it in the sense of giving ourselves Secret Code Names.

Mine was “Dagger.” Ridley's was, of course, “Cloak.” We used these names in our email exchanges with our main State Department guy in Washington, Michael Bandler, who became “Scribe”; and our liaison at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Wendy Kolls, a.k.a. “Lynx.” A typical email I'd send them would look like this:

Scribe, Lynx—

Roger.

Dagger

(Don't be upset if you don't understand this email; that's the whole point of a sophisticated “intel” operation like ours.)

As our travel date approached, Ridley and I wondered if our trip was going to be canceled because of the Ukraine crisis. Maybe we secretly hoped that it
would
be canceled. We'd both heard accounts of Americans in Russia being hassled by the police; we were told that this could happen to us. The State Department sent us each a thick packet of “Alerts & Warnings” for Americans traveling to Russia, which contained this advice:

Travelers should also exercise a high degree of caution and remain alert when patronizing restaurants, casinos, nightclubs, bars, theaters, etc., especially during peak hours of business. Ongoing regional tension associated with events in Ukraine could provoke anti-American actions in an unpredictable location or manner.

Sounds like fun, right? Let's go to a bar during peak hours of business and exercise a high degree of caution! While remaining alert!

I can honestly say, however, that my biggest fear was not that the Russians would hurt me. My biggest fear was that they wouldn't think I was funny. Our schedule had us speaking in a variety of venues—schools, universities, libraries—and about half the talks involved non-English-speaking audiences. This meant we'd be speaking through interpreters. Translating humor into another language can be tricky.

COMEDIAN:
Take my wife. Please.

INTERPRETER:
You are welcome to take my wife.

Anyway, our trip wasn't canceled. Cloak and Dagger went to Russia. Here's my diary of our visit:

Sunday

We arrive in Moscow on an overnight flight from New York that takes, as all overnight flights do, about four days. At the Moscow airport we slog with the jet-lagged mob to passport control. We can't figure out which line we're supposed to be in because the signs are in the Cyrillic alphabet, which I think might actually be an elaborate Russian prank. It has some regular letters—
A
, for example—but it also has (really) a 3, as well as a backward
N
and various random-looking symbols that look like cattle brands for The Mutant H Ranch. Here's an example of what Russian writing looks like:

Eventually we make it through passport control and customs. We are met by a driver named Sergei, who speaks no English.
At least not to us.
Ridley quietly observes to me that Sergei could actually be fluent in English and might just be pretending he's not so he can eavesdrop on us. We have been told that we might be under surveillance while in Russia, and this is definitely on Ridley's mind. He has taken precautions for the trip; his computer has all kinds of anti-hacking software, and he keeps his phone inside a special high-tech bag that takes the phone off the grid so it can't be tracked.

I should note here that Ridley is—and I say this as a close friend—a paranoid lunatic. He's a thriller writer, and he tends to see thriller plots everywhere. He doesn't have a dark corner in his mind; his entire
mind
is a dark corner.

True Anecdote: One time I visited Ridley at his house in Hailey, Idaho, and early on the morning after I arrived we went to a little local market to get breakfast stuff. I need coffee in the morning, so I went straight to the coffee section, where I grabbed a bag of beans and poured them into the grinder. As my beans were being ground into the paper bag, Ridley came over, watched for a few seconds, then said—bear in mind, this was 7 a.m.—“You know, somebody could drop some poison into that grinder, and whoever came along next would pour their beans on top of it, and it would wind up at the bottom of their bag of coffee. They'd take it home, and when they brewed the last pot of coffee, it would kill whoever drank it. Nobody would know who did it.”

Then he walked away, leaving me grinding my beans.

That's the way Ridley thinks.

(And for the record, he's a tea drinker.)

But getting back to the diary: