The Mulberry Bush (2 page)

The KGB's approach came as he sat on a park bench at two in the morning under a flickering light standard. Snow was falling, fat flakes of it tinted yellow by the artificial light. He knew, of course, that there was someone behind him, someone with a different tread and a different feel from the usual gumshoes who shadowed him, and he had chosen this bench because there was light enough for his camera, and because the snow-muffled silence was perfect for his microphone. Father crossed his legs, took off his fur hat, and scratched his head, coughed, as if signaling
the all clear to a contact. When after a long interval no contact appeared, a Russian sat down beside him. He had an un-Slavic face—shaggy eyebrows, large brown eyes, nose like a doge.

“May I join you?” he asked in competent American English.

Father grunted and offered him the silver flask of bourbon he had stowed in an overcoat pocket. The Russian drank it down like vodka. He coughed and made a face.

“
Awful
stuff.”

Father said, “True, but it gets the job done.”

The Russian chuckled. He said, “I am called Vadim.”

Father said, “Bob”—not his true name, but Vadim already knew that.

“I have brought the photographs you ordered,” Vadim said, and handed over a large envelope.

It was already addressed to my mother in McLean, and bore the correct Russian postage.

“Very kind of you,” Father said, tapping the sealed envelope with a forefinger but not opening it. “How much do I owe you?”

Vadim waved a hand in dismissal of this small favor.

“Our pleasure,” he said.

With a smile, Father said, “Mine, actually.”

It began to snow more heavily. Vadim's hat and overcoat were coated with the stuff, so that with his great nose he looked like an emaciated snowman.

At length Father said, “Maybe you'd like to come to the point before they have to shovel us out, Vadim.”

“I would like to ask for a favor in return for the photographs but I do not want to be misunderstood,” Vadim said. “You can refuse of course, but it is a small thing.”

“Don't worry,” said Father. “Spit it out.”

“I have great difficulty remembering American names because they are such a hodgepodge of names from all over the world—English, German,
Spanish, African, Arabic, Jewish, who can count them all? So what I was wondering was this. You work in the American embassy, so could you possibly obtain a copy of the embassy telephone book for me?”

In his first days at the Plantation, Father had learned that this approach had been a fishhook of recruiters since the invention of the telephone: bring me this trivial little thing and Topsy will grow.

Father said, “The phone book? Why?”

Vadim laughed apologetically. “It's a silly hobby, Bob, but I collect foreign telephone books. They fascinate me. Like novels.”

“You like character-driven stories, is that it?”

“Something like that. I just like telephone books. There's a certain romance to them. By the way, I happen to have Natasha's phone number in case you would like to have it.”

“I'd love to have it. Natasha has an amazing twat. It
squeezes.
Do you happen to have that number on you?”

“Unfortunately, not at the moment. But I could bring it next time we meet.”

“Sounds good,” Father said. “When and where would that be, our next meeting?”

Vadim named a different Moscow park. “Same time, eleven minutes after the hour, a week from tonight.”

Vadim took back the envelope containing the pictures. “I will keep this for you so the snow will not blur the ink,” he said.

“Do take good care of it until we meet again,” Father said.

Father played Vadim for the rest of the winter, recording every second, every word of all their meetings with his trick ring and tie clip, but without delivering the embassy phone book or any other secret or official U.S. government document or tidbit of information.

Gradually, subtly, he turned their conversations around, so that by the end of April, Father had become the seducer and Vadim the reluctant virgin. Father offered the Russian the turncoat's equivalent of marriage:
legal sex, security, safety, a new name, escape into a happier, easier life in which the other person paid all the bills and, in case the union did not work out, made a down payment of half his net wealth.

Father had always been good at recruitment. Even the clique that had ruined his career conceded him that. Vadim, whether he was playing a role or playing it straight, wavered like a man who knew that his grip on his most precious possession, his virtue, was loosening with every encounter in the dark and haunted parks where the two men met in the small hours of the morning.

Finally Vadim said maybe, but first he wanted to talk to someone higher up in the chain of command than Father, someone who could make promises that could be kept. Father had not informed the chief of station or anyone else in the Moscow station about this off-the-books operation. Keeping his own counsel had been no great feat, since almost no one in the station or the embassy or in the American community, not even fellow old Blues, had the slightest interest in talking to a drunken outcast like him.

Because the case officer manuals for the KGB and Headquarters and practically every other secret espionage service in the world contain the same hoary truths about handling potential traitors, Father understood that Vadim's behavior—he was a little too compliant, a little too willing to part his knees—was likely to be a theatrical exercise. Routine skepticism suggested that Vadim's masters had seen an opportunity to penetrate Headquarters, to dump a mother lode of false information on the American service, to have a good laugh at the stupid Americans' expense.

That was the beauty of Father's prank. It would present the clique that ran Headquarters, the people who had banished Father into outer darkness, with an all but irresistible temptation. Whichever course they followed, they could never know if they had missed a bet or brought a disaster down upon themselves. In either case, they would remember
Father, they would remember what they had done to him, they would never be rid of him.

As retaliation goes, it's hard to do better than that.

On a night when the silence in Sokolniki Park was so heavy that it seemed that it made you imagine you could seize it like fabric between thumb and forefinger, Father looked deep into Vadim's eyes, which in the feeble light seemed as large as a horse's eyes, and said, “My friend, this flirtation has gone on long enough. This is the moment of truth. Decide now or we forget the whole thing.”

He laid an encouraging hand on Vadim's coat sleeve and said, “Do what's best for you and your family, my friend, whatever that is.”

Vadim tried to speak but like a stutterer reaching in vain for a word he can pronounce without inviting ridicule, he stood mute.

Father shrugged and said, “OK. It's been good to know you.”

Then he spun on his heel and walked away.

In a voice that cracked, Vadim said, “Wait.”

By then, however, Father had turned his back and stepped behind yet another curtain of falling snow. Because they were reading with different eyes from the same sheet of music, both men understood that this was not the end. Whether Vadim was behaving honestly (a possibility, after all) or dissembling, he would not, could not back off. If he honestly wanted to defect, he was already so compromised that he was a candidate for the KGB's standard penalty for treason: to be placed naked in a coffin and cremated alive. If, on the other hand, he was under orders to feign defection and was this close to success, he would have to go through with the operation.

Time would tell. Father and Vadim had the means to get in touch with each other. All either man had to do was chalk the Russian letter that looks like a mirror image of
R
on a certain lamppost on Tverskaya Ulitsa and they would meet at the time and place agreed upon.

Father was ready first thing the following morning to spring his joke on the chief of station. He asked the chief's secretary for an appointment.

In an expressionless voice she said, “I'll tell him you want to see him.”

This happened on a Tuesday. It was Friday, during the last minutes of the workday, when the chief, a famously foulmouthed man who bore the Dickensian name of Amzi Strange, sent for him.

Amzi Strange had never smiled in Father's presence, nor did he smile now.

In a toneless voice he said, “What?”

Father handed him a bulging manila folder. Skilled bureaucrat that he was, he had organized a meticulous file on his mock operation.

Amzi Strange said, “What's this supposed to be?”

Father said, “I think you should read it, and read it yourself instead of handing it off to someone else, and then if you want to talk about it, we can talk.”

Strange tossed the file into his in-basket and said, “Right. We're done.”

It took Amzi Strange more than two weeks to read the file. He called Father on a Sunday at seven in the morning and said, in his grating voice, “My office. Now.”

The chief was already at his desk when Father arrived. He did not invite his visitor to sit down.

He said, “Have you completely lost your mind?”

Father said, “I don't think so, Amzi, but if I have, I guess I'd be the last to know.”

The Vadim file lay on the Strange's otherwise bare desk. He tapped it with a forefinger.

“This is real? It's not some kind of sick joke?”

“It's genuine.”

“You've been meeting a KGB officer clandestinely, in public parks in the middle of the night, and playing along with a recruitment pitch for two fucking months without telling me, without telling anybody what you were up to, with no authorization from Headquarters and without its knowledge?”

“Yep.”

“‘Yep?'
Yep,
you frigging imbecile? Why? What in God's name were you thinking?”

“I didn't know we acted in God's name in this business,” Father said. “But to answer your question, I was thinking that we had a good chance to turn this guy—I still think we will be able to do that if we play him right, and that that would be a feather in the station's cap, inasmuch as we've recruited not one single local asset in the year and a half you've been in charge here. Or for many years before.”

“Thanks for sharing,” Strange said. “You never wondered if this target you found with such ingenuity was a dangle, that this was a KGB operation, a threat to security, a quick feel?”

“Why yes, Amzi, those possibilities did cross my mind. But there was the other possibility, the one where with a little help from us, he could become a threat to
their
security.”

“Pretty fucking slim possibility. So I ask you again, why didn't you let somebody know that you were singlehandedly putting at risk every single operation we're running and every single officer in this station, not to mention the family jewels back home?”

“I just did that.”

“After the fact. I ask you again, what were you
thinking
? Tell me. Please help me understand.”

“Basically, I was trying to keep busy,” Father said. “You haven't asked me to do so much as to sharpen a pencil in the months I've been here, so I figured you'd be unsympathetic to any project I proposed. On this particular one, you'd tell me to cease and desist.”

“You're fuckin' A I would have.”

“And besides that, Amzi, I have no reason to care whether you like this or not. It's an opportunity to run an asset inside Lubyanka—”

“There is no Lubyanka anymore, my dear fellow. They've moved to the country.”

“Well then, I guess Vadim would have to commute, supposing you and Headquarters have the guts to consider this, to take a chance.”

“What chance, you fucking nutcase?”

“Amzi, really. Instead of hurling obscenities at me you should be thinking about the benefits you might reap.”

“Benefits? Like what for example? Dismissal? Disgrace?”

“If all goes well, admiration of the nation, possibly a medal, almost surely a promotion—branch chief, chief of division, eventually. I'm on my way out. You can run this op, reap the glory, without ever mentioning my name.”

Amzi Strange locked eyes with Father. Neither man yielded. By his own account, Father was calm, in control, enjoying himself. Strange was red in the face, breathing audibly, teeth clenched.

Trusting his voice at last, he said, “You're so fucking right about being on your way out. Get your sorry ass out of here. You're toast.”

Father had committed the ultimate Washington sin of baring the ass of the Establishment. His Moscow prank made his betters look foolish, exposed the hesitancy of an agency that was chartered to be bold, and made it the jest of the month at Georgetown dinner parties. At Headquarters, a full internal investigation began. Amzi Strange was summoned home to be debriefed by the inspector general, who was in charge of this exercise. The IG operated on the assumption that everyone at Headquarters except him was a potential if not an actual double agent controlled by the intelligence service of a hostile power. Father thought that the IG was a psychopath in desperate need of treatment. The IG thought that Father was a dangerous saboteur who should long since have been fired—or, better yet, prosecuted for his antics at the Plantation.

Downfall in Washington among the mighty and the obscure alike typically stems from a trivial incident. In a cubbyhole outside the Oval Office, a president undergoes fellatio by a woman not his wife or discusses ways to cover up a Keystone Kops burglary, and thereby provides his enemies with an opportunity to destroy him without revealing their real purpose,
which is to reverse the outcome of an election they lost but should have won if the voters had not been deceived by the political Beelzebub they feel it is their moral duty to overthrow.

The same rule applies to more humble figures, like Father, who discomfit the elite. Whether you are carrying out a coup d'état or the shaming of a nobody, it is essential that you be perceived as the virtuous avenger, and that your victim to be unmasked as the evil person he is and always has been.

In Father's case, kangaroo justice was swift and thorough. He was reduced two civil service grades in rank, fired for cause, and threatened with prosecution for violation of federal espionage laws and for cheating on his expense account. Father was not deprived of his pension, a pittance based on a percentage of his pay and his years of service, but the IG ruled that he had to wait until he reached retirement age to start collecting it. Meanwhile he had no income, and as a result of the divorce, few assets.

He was unemployable in any profession where Headquarters had friends. Former colleagues who had gone into business as government contractors shunned him. So did everyone else he had ever known at Headquarters. He was a fluent writer, but he soon discovered there was no market for his memoirs (which in any case would have to be cleared by Headquarters before publication), so he wrote a comic novel about undercover life, casting the leading character, based on himself, as the Little Tramp of espionage. The manuscript was rejected by twenty different publishers, none of whom read past page ten because they saw nothing funny about the unspeakable doings of the satanic thugs who, they devoutly believed, worked at Headquarters.

Finally, when Father was down to his last few dollars, he got a job working for a shady private investigator, but he had been a spy by trade, not a cop, so this didn't work out and he was let go after the probationary period. In letters to me he joked about buying a used taxicab and becoming a mobile philosopher.

As I have already reported, he and my mother, who was a lawyer at a backwater government agency, had led separate lives for many years. She had long since stopped accompanying him on foreign assignments, so I hardly ever saw him after the age of twelve, though he wrote me monthly letters and every summer he and I got together for two weeks wherever he happened to be posted. We went on safari in Tanganyika (I shot a kudu), hiked in the Himalayas, toured three-star restaurants in France. Among other ancient ruins, we visited Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal and the ruined architecture of the Roman Near East, sailed in the Mediterranean and dived in the Red Sea.

He had real affection for me, I now realize. He made an effort to be amusing. Little shit that I was, I never laughed at his jokes.

When he was home he and Mother slept, while the marriage endured, in separate bedrooms and dined in silence. They never went out as a couple. Mother had an active social life, Father had none in the United States outside of bars. It all ended when, after his return from Moscow, he showed up at the house with his luggage. Mother shut the door in his face. From the Headquarters grapevine she had heard all about his latest outrage. She wanted no part of his disgrace, and besides, because of his heartless neglect, she had fallen in love with someone else.

Under the terms of an estate plan, executed years before, when my parents were still on speaking terms, the house was in her name, and Father's bank accounts were held jointly with her. Mother's own name—she was a lawyer, after all—was the only one on the bank accounts in which she deposited her earnings and the profits on the stocks and bonds she had inherited from her parents. When they divorced, she was awarded alimony and somewhat more than half of what remained of Father's paltry wealth.

When the final decree was handed down, I was studying in Beirut, and when I asked Mother over the telephone what Father was going to do now, she said, “I really have no idea. Maybe roam the world naked with his begging bowl.”

In a way, Mother's quip about the begging bowl came true. Father was not left naked by the combination of disgrace and divorce, but he had exhausted his savings and sold everything of value that he still owned. After Mother and his lawyer took their share of the spoils—including, in Mother's case, thirty-six months of alimony in advance—he was literally penniless. He had three years to wait for his pension to start, and even after that happened, he would be left after taxes and alimony with a net annual income that was only slightly above the poverty line. Meanwhile he was well below it with no prospect of escape because the job market was closed to him. He applied for positions for which he was well qualified—he spoke four languages, had contacts all over the world, and was a capable manager—but never received a reply.

He bagged groceries at the Safeway where Mother's friends shopped, washed dishes in a restaurant and cars in a car wash. He begged for coins on the street, ate in soup kitchens, slept in shelters for the homeless in winter and in doorways in warm weather, and sometimes when the police were rounding up vagrants, spent a night in jail. He stopped writing to me, maybe because he couldn't afford the postage.

All this I learned later on. Mother, my only source of information about him, never mentioned Father in her breezy notes, invariably dashed off on tasteful blank greeting cards from the gift shop of the National Gallery of Art. The handwriting on these missives was slightly askew, as if she had written to me while waiting for traffic lights to change on commutes to and from the office.

Although I knew he was in trouble and adrift, I had little idea what was happening to Father—for all I knew he was dead or in prison—and to be truthful, I was not interested in knowing more. He was long gone from my life. Except for our annual quality time together, he had been absent since I was twelve years old. In theory I knew he loved me, or wanted to love me, but I gave him little encouragement and almost no thought. His face flickered in my memory as if I only had seen it, like that of a
passerby, for a split second. I seldom bothered to read his letters, though I always opened them promptly to see if money was enclosed. Usually I found a twenty, or at Christmas and birthdays, a fifty. The bills were always fresh from the bank, crisp and new and good to smell. I seldom answered his letters. They were, I thought, false, contrived, presumptuous because the intimacy between us that they suggested did not exist and had never existed.

A couple of years passed before I completed my studies and went back to America. I had a knack for languages. Because I spoke and read and after a fashion wrote Arabic and Hebrew and three major Persian languages spoken in Iran and Afghanistan and had lived among Muslims in the Near East and knew a few who were educated and well placed, I was deluged with job offers from multinational corporations and government agencies. Billions were being poured into the war on terrorism, and everyone in Washington, it seemed, wanted to listen in on the enemies of the United States or interrogate them. Among other degrees—I prolonged adolescence for as long as I could—I had a PhD in Islamic studies and a passing acquaintance with a few people who counted in Muslim countries. My ambition was to teach languages and Islamic history and culture at a reputable small college and live in a large gingerbreaded Victorian brick house with a good-looking, good-natured, intelligent wife whose appetite for sex was as insatiable as my own and who wanted no kids.

Soon after I got off the plane in New York, a former professor introduced me to a friend, ostensibly a venture capitalist, who wined and dined me and one night offered me a handsome salary, a rent-free apartment in Washington, a leased car, and the opportunity to travel a lot and do good in the world and for myself in return for, as he put it, encouraging in their own languages certain persons in the Middle East to look kindly on his firm.

We were dining, just the two of us, in a New York restaurant where dinner for two cost five hundred dollars even if you ordered the secondbest wine.

I had about as much interest in accepting this offer as of lying down on the FDR Drive at rush hour. However, my connection with Father had not left me in a state of total naïveté, so after listening to his pitch I said, “By the way, what's the name of your firm? You've never mentioned it.”

“Actually it doesn't have a name, just a reputation. Ambiguity is an asset in my business.”

“I see. Does your nameless firm ever do business with a large ambiguous enterprise with headquarters in northern Virginia?”

He smiled. “You ask the right questions,” he said. “That's one of the things I like about you.”

But he didn't answer the question.

I said, “Let me ask you this, then. Do you know who my father is?”

“I know a little about him. Very able man, as I understand it. A bit too able for some tastes, some say, and that was the problem.”

At that point in the conversation, knowing the little I knew but also knowing what was coming next, I should have laid my silverware on my plate, dropped my napkin on the tablecloth, and left. Instead, because I had been living on kebab for a long time and I wanted to finish this elegant meal.

My suitor smiled. I had given him the key to my room.

“Be patient,” he said. “There are better ways than taxable salary to be compensated for good work.”

I told him I needed time to consider the offer.

As we parted on the sidewalk I said, “These people who talk about my father. Do you think they know how he can be found?”

“Let me get back to you on that,” he replied.

A few days later he called me with the answer to my question.

A couple of weeks after that I found Father outside the Metro station at Gallery Place. He was begging for coins. He had stationed himself at the top of the escalator. When he saw me rise like an apparition from the underground, he took an exaggerated step backward
and, still kidding, looked furtively right and left, as if seeking an escape route.

He was dressed in stained corduroy trousers, runover sneakers, tattered golf cap, worn-out tweed blazer torn at the shoulder. He carried a large khaki rucksack that was much the worse for wear. It was the same one he had bought for our two-week climbing expedition in the Alps when I was sixteen. I still owned its duplicate. I realized that the rucksack contained all his worldly goods—sleeping bag and overcoat, clothes and whatever other street person's essentials he carried around with him because he had no other place to keep them. He had lost weight, he had grown a full beard or let it grow for want of a razor. He looked beyond me, as if expecting someone more interesting to rise into view.

I said, “Hello, Father.”

He said, “Hi. Is this encounter a stroke of fate or are you acting on information?”

“Someone told me you might be here at this time of day.”

“Anyone I know?”

“He says not.”

“He would say that. How do you know this person?”

“A friend introduced us.”

“In that case,” Father said, “beware. What time is it?”

I looked at my watch, an entry-level Rolex he had given me as a graduation present when I was eighteen. “Quarter after twelve.”

“Have a seat over there, will you, and give me half an hour to work the crowd. That's why I'm here, to catch the lunchtime rush. Then
we'll
have lunch.”

Despite the threadbare affect, he was behaving as if he still wore a tailormade suit and shirt, a Sulka tie and Allen Edmonds shoes, and would be taking me to the Metropolitan Club for the midday meal. I sat down on a bench and watched him beg. He was good at it. He looked like what he was, a former somebody who had had a great fall. Most people gave him
quarters. A few who perhaps saw him for what he used to be or what he was now or what they themselves might become, handed him dollar bills.

When the crowd dwindled, we walked down to Constitution Avenue, where lunch wagons were lined up at the curb near the National Gallery. He ordered two of the fat spicy hot dogs that Washingtonians call half-smokes, two bags of chips, and two bottles of spring water. When I tried to pay, he pushed my hand aside and counted out the money in quarters. We found a bench on the Mall and ate our half-smokes and Fritos in silence. Father gathered up our empty bags and plastic bottles and threw them into an overflowing trash basket.

He said, “So what prompted you to look me up?”

“Curiosity. Concern.”

“In that order?”

“I haven't sorted that out.”

Father spread his hands. “Well, here I am. Don't leap to conclusions. This is not such a bad life once you get over the surprise of having ended up a derelict. Simplicity, the absence of possessions, really does have more good points than bad. I used to think that was goody-goody bullshit, but it's true.”