The Sisters (15 page)
Only once did Piotr Borisovich have reason to believe that the State Security organs were watching him more closely than he imagined. Did he ever hear anyone criticize the Soviet leadership? he was asked. No, he replied. Did the words "Russia is an intellectual wasteland" strike him as being familiar? He may have heard words to that effect, he admitted.
Where? He didn t remember. Who uttered them? He didn't remember that either. Wasn't it the young professor of American poetry, the one who read Whitman aloud to his class all the time, who the previous week had said this to several students during a coffee break in the cafeteria?
Now that they mentioned it, admitted Piotr Borisovich, it may have been.
Then why hadn't he reported this anti-Soviet remark to the authorities?
Because, Piotr Borisovich explained lamely, it had seemed inconsequential at the time. Don t let a lapse like that happen a second time, one of the tutors warned.
That night Piotr Borisovich got a phone call from his father. An odd thing had happened that day, he said. Two burly men had turned up at his door, flashed a paper he never got a chance to read, and removed his refrigerator. With all his food still in it!
Several days later, mumbling vaguely about how they had mistaken the number on the apartment door, the two moving men returned Revkin's refrigerator. The next time Piotr Borisovich heard an anti-Soviet remark, he reported it immediately to the authorities.
What with his hundred-ruble stipend and his apartment on Lenin Hills, Piotr Borisovich had no problem attracting a steady stream of women to his bed. No sooner had one affair ended than another was under way. At times, affairs overlapped; at times all three shared the same bed.
During his last year at the university, Piotr Borisovich fell in love with an older woman whose husband, a doctor, had been arrested in what would turn out to be Stalin's last purge. Piotr Borisovich managed to talk her into going to bed with him, but when he phoned her to arrange a sequel, she refused. Furious, Piotr Borisovich began calling her up while he was making love with other girls and describing in precise detail what they were doing. He even passed the phone to his bed partners and had them describe events from their point of view. The doctor's wife wasn't turned on-but Piotr Borisovich was. Phoning up one lover while he was making love to another became his fetish, If the tutors knew about it-and it was unthinkable that they didn't-they never brought up the subject at the semiannual review.
Why they had turned a blind eye to his fetish became clear after Piotr Borisovich was graduated from Moscow University. The Moscow Merchant who became his control obviously considered his sexual prowess to be a major part of his qualifications. Coached by his Merchant, Piotr Borisovich assumed the role of a young dissident writer living illegally (without a resident's permit) in a garret off Gorky Street in downtown Moscow. He would hang around the restaurants and hotel bars frequented by Western tourists, coming on as a frustrated literatus famished for any contact with the West, whether in the form of books, records, blue jeans or warm female bodies doused with French perfume. More often than not, within three days of meeting a single woman, Piotr Borisovich had an intense love affair going. The inevitable partings, with Piotr Borisovich vowing to smuggle love poems out of the country and the women promising to smuggle Western novels back to him, were arranged to give the female tourist the sense that she was running risks for love, not to mention puncturing holes in the infamous Iron Curtain. Weeks or months later, the unsuspecting women would receive a note, smuggled out of Russia by a
"friend" of Piotr Borisovich's, saying that he had been arrested by the authorities because of his clandestine contact with the recipient of the letter; that they were now demanding that she cooperate with the Russians by providing relatively inconsequential scraps of information that she might stumble across at work; that he, Piotr Borisovich, preferred to suffer in a damp prison cell than have her run any risk for him; that his love for her would not be affected in the slightest when, as he thoroughly expected, she told the Russians to go to hell.
The ploy didn't always work, but it brought positive results often enough to provide Piotr Borisovich with a unique career in the KGB. When he wasn't operating out of his garret, with its mattress on the floor and its piles of well-thumbed American and English paperbacks strewn haphazardly about, he lived in a well-furnished three-room apartment across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, owned a secondhand Volkswagen, even had the use of a dacha set in a stand of white birches in a bend of the Moscow River an hour and a half down the Smolensk highway from the capital. He had girlfriends galore (who thought he worked as a courier for the diplomatic service, which accounted for the periods when he dropped from sight), more money than he could spend, access to the KGB's department store with its shelves full of Chivas Regal and Chanel No. 5
and Lucky Strike cigarettes (he ordered by phone; unmarked packages were hand-delivered to his door). The months, the years ticked pleasantly, painlessly by. It was difficult to see how life could have been better.
And yet in a remote corner of his consciousness, in a part of himself he had never dared expose, there was a hesitation; a shadow of a doubt; a vague feeling of having missed a boat. The uneasiness was especially strong when, on the rare occasions Piotr Borisovich found himself alone, he thumbed through an American paperback edition of Whitman poems and came again across the lines about the sisters Death and Night. Surely there had to be something more to it all before Death and Night rang down, like a tire curtain, on his life.
It was at this point in Piotr Borisovich's gloriously dull existence that he received the summons to report to a military hotel. It specified a date, an hour, and was signed with the word "novator," the one in charge. A sergeant in civilian clothes led him up to the third floor and opened what looked like a broom closet. It turned out to be the entrance to a secret staircase that led to a spacious apartment on the hotel's top floor. Finding himself alone in the apartment, Piotr Borisovich took a look around. In the middle of a coffee table was a bowl filled with American candy bars. An American record player, a Magnavox, stood on a shelf, along with an enormous collection of American records, everything from Nat King Cole to the latest Broadway musicals. Bookshelves were stacked with American magazines- Newsweek, Time, Life, Esquire, Coronet, The Saturday Evening Post-and copies of The New York Times, which (judging from the wrapper) were flown in daily from Helsinki.
Whoever lived m the apartment was obviously quite an Americanophile.
Piotr Borisovich was surveying the view from the apartment's windows-he could see the Kremlin towers, and Saint Basil's Cathedral rising above the Kremlin wall across the Moscow River-when he heard someone at the door. He turned. A man so short he appeared almost dwarflike threw the bolt on the inside of the door and then faced Piotr Borisovich. The man squinted at him for a moment, then said in English, "Could I trouble you to step away from the window. All I can see is your silhouette. It is not enough." When Piotr Borisovich hesitated, he added, "If you please."
Piotr Borisovich walked to the middle of the room. The newcomer made no move to shake hands. He motioned his guest to a chair, pulled up another one so that it was facing him and sat down. Their knees were almost touching. "I am not a devotee of Dostoevsky," the newcomer announced forthrightly. "But he has had a great influence on me. It happened this way: several hours after Nicholas I countermanded Dostoevsky's death sentence, Dostoevsky wrote a letter in which he said, 'Life is a gift.'
With your combat record in the war, this is something that is surely embedded in the marrow of your bones. All life is a gift, and you are wasting yours."
"You think so?" Piotr Borisovich retorted belligerently. He was put off by the frankness of the approach.
"I know so," the visitor insisted passionately. "I know because I have been watching you-literally watching you!-for the better part of two years now. You are one of those people who thrive on tension; you are addicted to it, as if it were a drug and you needed a daily fix. I suspect that that is what got you through the war in one piece. You are uneasy unless you are living on a limb that could break at any moment.
You are not too imaginative, not at all fanatical; you are a plodder who sees things through once he starts something." The Potter paused for breath. "Because of the execution of your mother, because of your experiences in the war, you tend to ignore the past and live in the present, though to keep your sanity you occasionally throw little hooks into the past-I am referring to your habit of phoning up a previous bed partner while you are making love to someone new." An apologetic grimace deformed the Potter's face. "You see, I have made it my business to figure you out. I know everything there is to know about you. I know about your father; I know how he acquired his refrigerator, and how his spine got that curve in it. And knowing all this, I am going to make you an offer. I am going to propose to you a way of life in which you will do what you do well, not for material rewards, not for the Motherland or the cause, not for the sex, not even for your father's continued well-being, but in order to earn my approval."
Piotr Borisovich stared with new interest at the speaker, who was gripping the arms of his chair with hands that appeared to be incredibly strong. He was no youngster. But there was a steadiness to his regard, a flame in his eyes that commanded instant respect; instant allegiance even.
"I accept," Piotr Borisovich blurted out before he knew he intended to respond.
The other man didn't smile. "This has been a wretched century," he noted, and then he said something that made their line of work seem like a crusade. "You and I are going to try to make the next one better." He stood up and offered Piotr Borisovich his hand. "My name is Feliks Arkantevich Turov," he said formally. "I am the novator of the sleeper school, in which you are now enrolled."
For the next nineteen months, the period during which Piotr Borisovich was under the Potter's wing, he lived in the top-floor apartment of the military hotel. The workload was unrelenting-six days a week, ten hours a day, which didn't include the Sleeper's "free" time, during which he was expected to become acquainted with American popular music (there was usually a disc playing in the background) or dip into the library to familiarize himself with Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dreiser, Jack London, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Formal classwork-courses given by the Potter himself or one of his assistants-generally took up the mornings. These included the theory and practice of espionage, the philosophy of Marx, Engels and Lenin as it applied to intelligence activities, and an intensive study of every facet of the United States: its history, geography, political development, military establishment, FBI organization and methods of law enforcement. There were daily classes given by the Potter on spoken English, which concentrated on polishing the Sleeper's knowledge of colloquialisms; he learned how to curse like a stevedore and to charm someone with slightly off-color jokes. He studied the intricacies of baseball and football from films until he knew what a balk was, and could predict with considerable accuracy whether a quarterback would run or pass.
The thread that ran through all the courses was to develop the Sleeper's professionalism. He memorized the standard operating procedures for sleepers until he could rattle them off in his sleep. Once awakened, for instance, a sleeper must ignore all communications that arrived out of prearranged channels and pretended to come from friends and relatives.
The logic for the rule was obvious: informal messages from friends or relatives might actually have been sent by the enemy in an effort to confuse a sleeper or divert him from his mission. The Americans had succeeded in doing just this in the mid-fifties: an agent received a written message from his wife saying she had defected; when the agent went to meet her, he found the FBI (which had forged the letter) waiting for him. It was a point that the Potter put a great deal of emphasis on.
"What would you do if you were on a mission and got a message from your father?" the Potter asked.
"I'd ignore it."
"What if you got a message from, say, me?"
"I'd ignore that too."
"What if you heard a voice you knew on the phone? My voice, for instance, telling you a mission had been cancelled?"
"I'd assume someone in the American intelligence establishment knew of the connection between us and was imitating your voice. I'd interpret it as a danger signal and take steps to make sure the person pretending to be you couldn't communicate with me again."
Afternoons at the sleeper school were usually devoted to technical subjects. Piotr Borisovich learned microphotography, regular photography, secret writing, how to communicate through dead-letter drops, how to surveille others, how to detect and evade the surveillance of others. Once a week he was driven out to a remote KGB rifle range to familiarize himself with pistols and rifles available in America, and perfect his marksmanship on these unfamiliar weapons.
For every hour of classwork, there was an hour of tradecraft in the streets. Under the watchful gaze of the Potter, who was something of an expert on the subject (he was something of an expert on every subject, Piotr Borisovich would say), the Sleeper, among other things, learned how to scout the route a dignitary would take in order to select the best site from which to assassinate him.
Evenings the Potter personally projected American movies-the sleeper school had an enormous library of Hollywood films that had been captured from the Germans during the war-for the Sleeper in the top-floor apartment of the military hotel. Everything that dealt with police or law-enforcement agencies was generally shown twice. One night they would watch Yul Brynner heading a ring of narcotics smugglers. The next, a police thriller starring Alan Ladd or Edward G. Robinson.
