The Company: A Novel of the CIA (14 page)

"What I was, was a servant of my country," the elder Tsipin responded in irritation. He turned abruptly and left the room.

Yevgeny saw his brother off at the Leningrad Railway Station, then crossed Komsomolskaya Square to the kiosk with the distinctive red-tiled roof and waited in the shade. As the station clock struck four a black Zil with gleaming chrome and tinted windows pulled to a stop in front of him. The windows were closed, which meant that the car was ventilated. A roundfaced man wearing sunglasses and a bright Kazakh hat rolled down the front window.

Are you from—" Yevgeny began.

"Don't be thick," the man said impatiently. "Get in."

Yevgeny climbed into the back. The Zil turned around the Ring Road and sped out of the city heading southwest on the Kaluga Road. Yevgeny rapped his knuckles on the thick glass partition separating him from the two men in the front seat. The one with the Kazakh hat glanced over his shoulder.

"How long will it take to get where we are going?" Yevgeny called through the partition. The man flashed five fingers three times and turned back.

Yevgeny sank into the cool leather of the seat and passed the time studying the people along the street. He remembered the elation he'd felt as a child when his father had taken him and Grinka for excursions in the attache's car and being chauffeured by one of the uniformed militiamen from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a dark man with slanting eyes and a peach-shaped face who called the boys "Little Sirs" when he held the door for them. Peering from behind the car's curtains, Yevgeny would pretend that he and his brother were heroes of Mother Russia who had been decorated by the Great Helmsman, Comrade Stalin, himself; from time to time the two boys would wave imperiously at some peasants along the route to Peredelkino, where his father had purchased a Ministry dacha. Now, in the Zil, the driver leaned on the horn and pedestrians scattered out of his way. The car slowed, but never stopped, for red lights. When they spotted the Zil, militiamen sweating in tunics buttoned up to the neck brought cross traffic to a standstill with their batons and prevented the swarm of pedestrians from surging across the boulevard. As the car flew by people gazed at the tinted windows, trying to figure out which member of the Politburo or Central Committee might be behind them.

After a time the Zil turned onto a narrow one-lane road with a sign at the edge reading, "Center for Study—No Admittance." They drove for three or four minutes through a forest of white birches, the bark peeling from the trunks like discarded paper wrapping. Through the trees Yevgeny caught sight of a small abandoned church, its door and windows gaping open, its single onion-shaped dome leaning into the heat wave from Central Asia. The limousine swung into a driveway paved with fine white gravel and pulled up in front of a small brick building. A high chain-link fence topped with coils of barbed wire stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. Two gray-and-tan Siberian huskies prowled back and forth at the end of long ropes fastened to trees. An Army officer came around to the rear window. A soldier with a PPD-34 under his arm, its round clip inserted, watched from behind a pile of sandbags. Yevgeny rolled the window down just enough to pass Starik's calling card to the officer. A hot blast of outside air filled the back of the car. The officer looked at the card, then handed it back and waved the driver on. At the end of the gravel driveway loomed a pre-revolutionary three-story mansion. Around the side of the house, two little girls, barefoot and wearing short smock-like dresses, were crying out in mock fright as they soared high or dipped low on a seesaw. Nearby, a mottled white-and-brown horse, reins hanging loose on his neck, cropped the grass. A young man in a tight suit, alerted by the guards at the gate, was waiting at the open door, his arms folded self-importantly across his chest, his shoulders hunched against the heat. "You are invited to follow me," he said when Yevgeny came up the steps. He preceded the visitor down a marble hallway and up a curving flight of stairs covered with a worn red runner, rapped twice on a door on the second floor, threw it open and stepped back to let Yevgeny through.

Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov, cooling himself in front of a Westinghouse air conditioner fixed in a window of the antechamber, was reading aloud from a thin book to two small girls curled up on a sofa, their knees parted shamelessly, their thin limbs askew. Starik broke off reading when he caught sight of Yevgeny. "Oh, do continue, uncle," one of the little girls pleaded. The other sucked sulkily on her thumb. Ignoring the girls, Starik strode across the room and clasped the hand of his visitor in both of his. Behind Yevgeny the door clicked closed.

"Do you have any idea where you are?" Starik inquired as he gripped Yevgeny's elbow and steered him through a door into a large sitting room.

"Not the slightest," Yevgeny admitted.

"I may tell you that you are in the Southwestern District near the village of Cheryomuski. The estate, originally tens of thousands of hectares, belonged to the Apatov family but, it was taken over by the CHEKA in the early 1920s and has been used as a secret retreat since." He gestured with his head for Yevgeny to follow him as he made his way through a billiard room and into a dining room with a large oval table set with fine china and Czech glass.

"The mansion is actually divided into three apartments — one is used by Viktor Abakumov, who is the head of our SMERSH organization. The second is set aside for the Minister of Internal Security, Comrade Beria. He uses it as a hideaway when he wants to escape from the bedlam of Moscow."

Starik collected a bottle ofNarzan mineral water and two glasses, each with a slice of lemon in it, and continued on to a spacious wood-paneled library filled with hundreds of leather-covered volumes and several dozen small gold- and silver-inlaid icons. On the single stretch of wall not covered with bookcases hung a life-sized portrait of L.N. Tolstoy. The painters name—I.E. Repin—and the date 1887 were visible at the bottom right. Tolstoy, wearing a rough peasant's shirt and a long white beard, had been posed sitting in a chair, a book open in his left hand. Yevgeny noticed that the great writer's fingernails, like Starik's, were thick and long and cut off squarely.

A large wooden table containing a neat pile of file folders stood in the center of the room. Starik set the mineral water and glasses on the table and dipped into a seat. He motioned for Yevgeny to take the seat across from him. "Comrade Beria claims that the calm and the country air are an analgesic for his ulcers—more effective than the hot-water bottles he keeps applying to his stomach. Who can say he is not right?" Starik lit one of his Bulgarian cigarettes. "You don't smoke?"

Yevgeny shook his head.

A man with a shaven head, wearing a black jacket and black trousers, appeared carrying a tray. He set a saucer of sugar cubes and another with slices of apple on the table, filled two glasses with steaming tea from a thermos and set the thermos down. When he had left, closing the door behind him, Starik wedged a cube of sugar between his teeth and, straining the liquid through it, began noisily drinking the tea. Yevgeny could see the Adam's apple bobbing in his sinewy neck. After a moment Starik asked, "Do Americans think there will be war?"

"Some do, some don't. In any case there is a general reluctance to go to war. Americans are a frontier people who have grown soft buying on credit whatever their hearts desire and paying off their mortgages for the rest of their lives."

Starik opened the file folder on top of the pile and began to leaf through the report as he sipped his tea. "I do not agree with your analysis. The American Pentagon thinks there will be war—they have actually predicted that it will start on the first of July 1952. A great many in the American Congress agree with the Pentagon forecast. When it was organized in 1947, the CIA was treated as a stepchild in matters of financing; now it is getting unlimited funds and recruiting agents at a feverish pace. And there is nothing soft about the training phase. The Soviet Russia Division, which is our glavni protivnik—how would you say that in American?"

"Principal adversary."

Starik tried out the words in English. "The principal adversary"—and quickly switched back to Russian—"organizes realistic kidnappings of their own officers by Russians on its staff pretending to be KGB agents, who then menace the recruits with death if they refuse to confess that they work for the CIA. The test is shrewd in as much as it establishes which of the new officers can survive the psychological shock of the episode and move on."

Starik looked up from the folder. "I am impressed by the questions you don't ask."

"If I asked how you knew such a thing you would not tell me, so why bother?"

Starik gulped more tea. "I propose that we speak as if we have known each other as long as I have known your father." When Yevgeny nodded assent he continued: "You come from a distinguished family with a long history of service to Soviet intelligence organs. In the twenties, at the time of the Civil War, your father's father was a Chekist, fighting alongside Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky when he created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage. Your father's brother is head of a department in the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB—ah, I see you were not aware of that."

"I was told that he worked for.. .but it doesn't matter what I was told."

"And your father—"

"My father?"

"He has worked for First Chief Directorate for years while he held diplomatic posts, the most recent of which, as you know, was an Under Secretary Generalship in the United Nations Secretariat. For the past twelve years I have been his conducting officer, so I can personally attest to his enormous contribution to our cause. I have been told you take a rather cynical view of this cause. At its core, what is Communism? A crazy idea that there is a side to us we have not yet explored. The tragedy of what we call Marxism-Leninism is that Lenin's hope and Zinoviev's expectation that the German revolution would lead to the establishment of a Soviet Germany were foiled. The first country to try the experiment was not proletarian-rich Germany but peasant-poor Russia. The capitalists never tire of throwing in our faces that we are a backward country, but look where we come from. I hold the view that our Communists can be divided into two groups: tsars who promote Mother Russia and Soviet vlast, and dreamers who promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit."

"My mother spoke often about the genius and generosity of the human spirit."

"I have nothing against expanding Soviet power but, in my heart of hearts I belong, like your mother, to the second category. Are you at all familiar with Leon Tolstoy, Yevgeny? Somewhere in one of his letters he says"—Starik threw back his head and closed his eyes and recited in a melodious voice—'"the changes in our life must come, not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life, but rather from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience.'" When he opened his eyes they were burning with fervor. "Our political system, in as much as it comes from a mental resolution to try a new form of life, is flawed. (I speak to you frankly; if you were to repeat what I tell you I could be prosecuted for treason.) The flaw has led to aberrations. But which political system hasn't its aberrations? In the previous century Americans collected blankets from soldiers who died of smallpox and distributed them to the native Indians. Southerners exploited their Negro slaves and lynched the ones who rebelled against this exploitation. French Catholics tied weights to the ankles of French Protestants and threw them into rivers. The Spanish Inquisition burned Hebrew and Muslim converts to Christianity at the stake because it doubted the sincerity of the conversions. Catholic Crusaders, waging holy war against Islam, locked Jews in temples in Jerusalem and burned them alive. All of which is to say that our system of Communism, like other political systems before it, will survive the aberrations of our tsars." Starik refilled his glass from the thermos. "How long were you in America?"

"My father began working for the UN immediately after the war. Which means I was in the states, let's see, almost five-and-a-half years—three and a half years at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, then my junior and senior year at Yale thanks to the strings my father got Secretary-General Lie to pull."

Starik extracted a folder from the middle of the pile and held it so that Yevgeny could see the cover. His name—"Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Tsipin" was written across it, with the notation: "Very secret. No distribution whatsoever." He opened the folder and pulled out a sheet filled with handwritten notes. "Your father was not the one who got Secretary-General Lie to pull strings. It was me, working through Foreign Minister Molotov, who pulled the strings. You obviously have no memory of it but you and I have met before, Yevgeny. It was at your father's dacha in Peredelkino six years ago. You were not quite fifteen years of age at the time and attending Special School Number 19 in Moscow. You were eager, bright, with an ear for languages; you already spoke American well enough to converse with your mother—it was, I remember, your secret language so that your brother would not understand what you were saying."

Yevgeny smiled at the memory. Talking with Starik, he understood what it must be like to confess to a priest; you felt the urge to tell him things you didn't normally reveal to a stranger. "For obvious reasons it was not something that was spoken of, but my mother was descended from the aristocracy that traced is lineage back to Peter the Great—like Peter she was forever turning her eyes toward the West. She loved foreign languages—she herself spoke French as well as English. She had studied painting at La Grande Chaumiere in Paris as a young woman and it marked her for life. I suspect that her marriage turned out to be a great disappointment to my mother, though she was thrilled when my father was sent abroad."

"That day at Peredelkino six years ago your father had just learned of the United Nations posting. Your mother talked him into taking you and your brother with them to America—he was reluctant at first, but your mother turned to me and I helped convince him. Your brother wound up studying at the Soviet Consulate school in New York. As you were older than Grinka your mother dreamed of enrolling you in an American high school, but the Foreign Ministry apparatchiki refused to waive the standing rules against such things. Once again your mother turned to me. I went over their heads and appealed directly to Molotov. I told him that we desperately needed people who were educated in America and were steeped in its language and culture. I remember Molotov's asking me whether you could survive an American education to become a good Soviet citizen. I gave him my pledge that you would."