The Company: A Novel of the CIA (119 page)

1
MOSCOW, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1991

LEO KRITZKY COULD NEVER QUITE GET USED TO THE RUSSIAN WINTER. It had taken him seven years and eight winters to figure out why. It wasn't so much the arctic temperatures or the drifts of dirty snow piled against dirty buildings or the permanent film of black ice on the sidewalks or the enormous stripped chimneys spewing chalk-white smoke into the eternal twilight or the fume of humidity trapped between the double windows of his apartment, making you feel as if you were marooned in a pollution-filled cloud chamber. No, it was more the unrelenting bleakness of everybody in sight—the grim expressions frozen onto the faces of pensioners peddling razor blades on street corners to buy a handful of tea, the emptiness in the eyes of the prostitutes selling themselves in metro stations to feed their children, the resignation in the voices of the gypsy cabbies who weren't sure they could make enough working a fifteen-hour shift to repair their battered cars.

In winter every bit of bad news or bad luck or bad temper seemed to take on tragic proportions. Come spring, so went the saw to which all sensible Muscovites (including Leo) subscribed, life had to get better because there was no way it could get worse.

Thirty-two days to go until All Fools' Day, Leo told himself as he made his way across Taganskaya Square in the flatfooted shuffle that veterans of the Russian winter employed to keep from slipping on the ice. He saw the Commercial Club up ahead on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya—the posh watering hole for the nouveau riche (unofficial motto: better nouveau than never) would have been difficult to miss. Pulled up on the curb in brazen illegality were two dozen or so of the latest model BMWs or Mercedes-Benzes or Jeep Cherokees, their motors running to keep the broad-shouldered bodyguards (almost all of them Afghan veterans) warm as they catnapped in the front seats. Once inside the club, Leo checked his wool-lined duffle coat (a birthday present from Tessa) in the cloakroom and walked across the lobby to the visitors desk, where he was politely but firmly invited to produce an identity card, after which his name was checked against a list on a computer screen. "Gospodin Tsipin is waiting for you in the private baths, door number three," a white-jacketed flunkey said as he led Leo down a freshly painted corridor and, using one of the passkeys attached to a large ring, let him into the bath.

Yevgeny, a soggy sheet wrapped around the lower half of his body, was sitting on a wooden bench, flaying his back with a birch branch. "What kept you?" he cried when he caught sight of Leo.

"The Vyhino-Krasnopresneskaja line was down for half an hour," Leo told him. "People said that a man fell in front of a train."

Yevgeny snorted. "This is Gorbachev's Russia," he said. "Which means there's a good chance he was pushed."

"You used to be a stubborn optimist," Leo said. "Has Russia transformed you into an incorrigible cynic?"

"I spent thirty years fighting for Communism," Yevgeny said, "before I returned home to a Mother Russia run by the vorovskoi mir. What's that in English, Leo?

"The thieves' world."

The smile on Yevgeny's lips only served to emphasize his disenchantment. "It's good to see you again after all this time."

"I'm pleased to see you, too, Yevgeny."

The moment turned awkward. "If I'd known you were coming by metro," Yevgeny said, "I would have sent one of my cars around to fetch you."

"Cars, plural?" Leo asked. Feeling self-conscious, he turned his back on Yevgeny and peeled off his clothes, handing them to the attendant who gave him a white sheet, which he quickly wrapped around his waist. "How many cars do you have?"

Yevgeny, who had put on weight during his seven years in Moscow, filled two small glasses with iced vodka. "Nazdorovie," he said, and he threw his back in one brisk gulp. "Personally, I don't own anything more than the shirt on my back. On the other hand, my organization has several BMWs, a Volvo or two and a Ferrari, not to mention the Apatov mansion near the village of Cheryomuski. Beria kept an apartment there until his execution in 1953, Starik used it as a home and office before his illness; it was in the wood-paneled library on the second floor that he first recruited me into the service. I bought the mansion from the state for one million rubles; with inflation being what it is, it turned out to be a steal."

Yevgeny pursed his lips. "So where have you been hiding, Leo? I heard you'd settled in Gorky after we came back, but by the time I persuaded someone to give me your address you'd moved. Two years ago a friend told me you were living on a houseboat without a telephone at the end of the metro line at Rechnoi Vokzal—I sent one of my drivers around half a dozen times but the boat was always deserted. I figured you were out of the city, or out of the country. Finally I got an old KGB colleague at Lubyanka to tell me where your pension check was being sent. Which is how I found the address on Frunzenskaya Embankment—number fifty, entrance nine, apartment three seventy-three."

Leo said quietly, "I had a lot of ghosts to exorcise. I've more or less become a hermit—a hermit lost in a city filled with hermits."

Yevgeny peeled off the sheet and pulled Leo into the steam room. The thermometer on the wall read eighty-five centigrade. The heat scalded Leo's throat when he tried to breath. "I'm not used to this—don't know how long I can stand it."

Yevgeny, his face growing beet-red, splashed a ladle full of cold water onto the hot coals. A haze of vapor sizzled into the moist air. "You become used to it," he whispered. "The trick is to store up enough heat in your body to see you through the winter months."

Leo abandoned the steam room when the sand ran out of the glass. Yevgeny came out behind him and the two dipped in a tiled pool. The water was so icy it took Leo's breath away. Later, wrapped in dry sheets, they settled onto the bench and the attendant wheeled over a cart loaded with zakuski—herring, caviar, salmon, along with a bottle of iced vodka.

"I'm not sure I can afford this on my KGB pension," Leo remarked. "The ruble doesn't go as far as it used to."

"You are my guest," Yevgeny reminded him.

"How did you get so rich?" Leo asked.

Yevgeny looked up at his friend. "You really want to know?"

"Yeah. I see all these characters in their foreign cars and leather coats with bleached blondes clinging to their arms. I'm curious how they do it."

"It's not a state secret," Yevgeny said. "After I returned to Moscow the Centre gave me a job in the USA section of the First Chief Directorate, but I could see I was going nowhere fast. When Gorbachev came on the scene in 1985, I decided to strike out on my own. All those years I spent in the Mecca of free enterprise must have rubbed off on me. I rented a dilapidated indoor pool and gymnasium for a song—ha! my English is still pretty good—and transformed it into a sports center for the new Russian rich. With the profit I organized a financial information center for foreign investors. With the profit from that I bought a Communist Party printing press and started a financial newspaper. Then I branched out. I started buying and selling raw materials in Siberia and trading them for finished products—Japanese VCRs, Hong Kong computers, American blue jeans—which I imported. Tell me if this is boring you."

"On the contrary."

"I sold the VCRs and computers and blue jeans in Russia for a huge profit. All the while I was working out of the back seat of a car and renting a relatively small apartment behind the Kremlin from an opera singer for a thousand US dollars a month—she'd fired the housekeeper and moved into her attic room. I needed a larger apartment and a corporate center, which is why I bought the Apatov mansion. It solved all my problems. Now people come to me with ideas and I give them seed money in return for a fifty percent interest in the bizness. And I'm in the process of setting up my own private bank. I'm calling it the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce. We are opening our doors this week, with branch offices in Leningrad and Kiev and Smolensk, as well as Berlin and Dresden to plug into the international banking scene." Yevgeny helped himself to some herring on a dry biscuit and washed it down with vodka. "Tell me what you've been doing, Leo."

Leo sniggered in derision. "There's not much to tell. The Centre kept me on ice for several years when I came in. The address in Gorky was a decoy—it was supposed to throw off the CIA if they came looking for me, which of course they didn't. I went through endless debriefings. Case officers would bring me questions, area specialists would seek my opinion on this or that senator or Congressman, they'd ask me to read between the lines of the latest Presidential speech. When my conclusions reinforced the views held in the superstructure they were passed on. When they didn't they were shelved."

Yevgeny said, "It's an old story—an intelligence organization functioning in a country that doesn't tolerate dissent has a tendency to ignore dissenting information."

Leo shrugged listlessly. "The middle-level analysts seemed to think I had a magic key that could unlock American mysteries and kept coming back for more. In the last few years, as Gorbachev opened things up and information began to circulate more freely, they finally began to lose interest in my opinions—"

"And the CIA never acknowledged that you'd been a mole?"

Leo shook his head. "They had nothing to gain and everything to lose by revealing that they'd been penetrated, and on such a high level. The press would have had a field day, heads would have rolled, budgets would have been cut, for all I know the CIA might have been broken up. At one point early on the Centre proposed to trot me out in front of the international press to embarrass the Company, but I managed to talk them out of it—I made them understand that they couldn't count on my cooperating with the debriefers if they went public. Since then the CIA has taken in a handful of KGB defectors without publicly rubbing it in, so I suppose it's a standoff."

"Do you hear from your family?"

For a while Leo didn't respond. "Sorry—what did you say?"

"Your family, the twins—have you been in touch with them?"

"Both girls quit the Company in the aftermath of my... retirement. Vanessa flatly refuses to have anything to do with me. My ex-wife became an alcoholic—one winter night, Adelle drank herself senseless and curled up in a hole on a hill in Maryland not far from where we'd buried my dog and her cat the day we met. A farmer found her body covered with snow the next morning. Vanessa said it was all my fault, which it obviously was, and swore she'd never communicate with me again as long as she lived. She married and had a baby boy, which I suppose makes me a grandfather. I wrote her a letter of congratulations but she never replied. Tessa got a job in Washington covering intelligence agencies for Newsweek. She married a journalist and divorced him three years later. She writes me every month or so and keeps me up to date. I've encouraged her to come over for a visit but she says she's not ready for that yet. I keep hoping Tessa will turn up at my door one day." Leo caught his breath. "I miss the twins..."

The two concentrated on the zakuski. Yevgeny refilled their glasses with vodka. "What's your personal life like?" he asked Leo.

"I read a great deal. I became friendly with a woman who illustrates children's books—she's a widow. We keep company, as they used to say in America. When the weather permits we go for long walks. I've gotten to know Moscow quite well. I read Pravda every day, which improves my Russian and instructs me on what Gorbachev's been up to the last twenty-four hours."

"What do you think of him?"

"Gorbachev?" Leo reflected for a moment. "He's made an enormous difference—he was the first person to openly challenge the Communist establishment and eat away at the power of the Party and build up democratic institutions. But I can't figure out whether he wants to reform the Communist Party or eventually do away with it."

"They want to patch it so that it lasts until their careers are over," Yevgeny guessed "They want an office to go to when they wake up in the morning."

"I wish Gorbachev were a better judge of people," Leo said. "He surrounds himself with right-wingers whom I don't trust—Kryuchkov, the KGB chairman, for instance."

"The Minister of Defense, Yazov, the Interior Minister, Pugo—I wouldn't trust them either," Yevgeny said. "For me, for the new class of entrepreneurs, Gorbachev is the lynchpin to economic reform. If he's overthrown it will set Russia back fifty years."

"Someone ought to warn him—"

"He has been warned," Yevgeny said. "I heard that Boris Yeltsin specifically alerted him to the possibility of a right-wing coup, but Gorbachev despises Yeltsin and doesn't believe anything that comes from him."

"Gorbachev doesn't know who his real friends are," Leo said.

"Well, you can't say we don't live in fascinating times," Yevgeny declared with a low laugh. "I heard on the car radio that the Americans are pulverizing Saddam Hussein's army. Do you think they would have gone to war if the principal export of Kuwait was carrots instead of oil?" He raised his glass and clinked it against Leo's. "Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!"

Leo smiled. For an instant he almost seemed happy. "To the success of our hopeless task!"

Later, outside in the street, Yevgeny signalled for his car. Down the block a polished black BMW backed off the sidewalk onto the street and drew up parallel to the curb. A man with a livid scar running from his ear to his jaw jumped out of the passenger seat and held open the back door.

"Let me drop you someplace," Yevgeny offered.

"I think I'll walk back," Leo said. "I lead a very sedentary life. I could use the exercise."

"I hope our paths cross again," Yevgeny said.

Leo studied his friends face. "I never asked you—are you married?"

Yevgeny shook his head. "There was someone once—but too much time has passed, too much water has flowed under the bridge."

"You could try to pick up where you left off. Do you know where she is?"

"I read about her in the newspapers from time to time—she is one of the reformers around Yeltsin. In certain circles—amongst the reformers, in the ranks of the KGB—she is quite well known."