Tool of the Trade (17 page)

“But you’d be okay as long as nobody tumbled to it. You’ve kept it secret this long.”

“Because I’ve been able to stay in hiding; only come out on my own terms. How many layers of people do you think I’d have to bluff my way through to get to the president’s ear? And how could I be sure I wasn’t being recorded?”

“Of course you’d have to be careful.”

“Careful as I was with that guy from Watergate? I got him killed because someone was listening.”

She looked out over the city with her mouth set in a stubborn line. “Look,” I continued, “they don’t even have to get the watch. Don’t have to know the frequency. If they just deduce the simple fact that there is a noise that will make people do what you say—”

“I know. They’ll find out what the noise is.”

“In no time. Especially since it’s a pure tone. If it were a chord or a mixture of harmonics, or if it had to be a certain amplitude, it could take them forever. Trial and error. But hell. They could deduce that it was either ultrasonic or subsonic, and they’d just run up and down the scale. Probably find it in a couple of days’ systematic searching.”

“Yeah, maybe. I’m going to open that bottle of wine. Toss the salad.” With a posture of resignation, perhaps calculated, she headed for the kitchen. This is the way she normally wins arguments with me.

Halfway conceding that I’m right, and letting me talk myself over toward her position.

Of course I also had a certain amount of guilt pushing me into a desire to use this power for good, for a change. Not so much the trail of dead pushers, pimps, and muggers; that disturbed me, but more because I didn’t understand it than out of feeling remorse for them. No, the main source of guilt was Valerie’s suffering. I’d proceeded with such a slow pace supposedly to protect her—but had to come in with all the subtlety of a firestorm anyhow. I could have done that the first day I’d seen the message in the paper. I could have done it the night I came home from Paris.

Besides, I’d accepted a small risk of exposure every time I’d used the watch down in the Zone. What if some undercover cop had witnessed me asking a pimp to throw himself in front of a speeding bus? The power would have wound up in the hands of the authorities that way, just as surely as it would if they caught me whispering into the president’s ear. And the payoff could be so much greater, the potential to change things…

Virtually the whole plan came to me in an instant. Valerie returned with the wine and salad, and we served each other in silence. Finally I spoke up.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“So?”

“Leningrad is beautiful in the spring. We should go there.”

President Nixon met the Russians in Moscow and President Ford met them in Vladivostok, and then for a long time the two countries’ leaders stayed off each other’s soil. They communicated by diplomatic pouch and phone in the best of times, and in the worst, only through inflammatory rhetoric in
Pravada
and the
New York Times
.

President Gideon Fitzpatrick wanted to change that. A neoconservative with impeccable anti-Communist credentials, he was safe including in his platform a proposal to get together with the Russians and “try to talk some sense into them.” Their meeting would be more symbolic than substantial, but it would open a new round of formal talks on arms limitation, cultural and scientific exchange, and the possibility of restoring to the Soviet Union “most favored nation” import-export status—which not incidentally would put the fear of God, or at least the Almighty Dollar, into the Chinese and Japanese.

President Fitzpatrick did have one important emotional tie with Russia and, not too indirectly, with the new Soviet premier. On 25 April 1945, as a very young and green lieutenant in the 69th Infantry Division, he waded ashore on the eastern bank of the Elbe, to be greeted by cheers and incomprehensible gibberish and a canteen cup foil of vodka. By dawn he could almost understand Russian. At least he could sing the first few bars of the Soviet national anthem.

He was not so happy with the Russians in subsequent years and decades, though not even the McCarthy era could permanently affect his preference for vodka. (A very junior senator at the time, in public he did drink bourbon for a couple of years.)

Premier Sergei Vardanyan was also a soldier in the Great Patriotic War, a private even younger than Fitzpatrick, and they may possibly have come in sight of one another that April. Vardanyan’s unit arrived at the Elbe the day before Fitzpatrick’s moved on, and they were stationed barely ten miles apart.

The plan was for them to meet again at the Elbe (now part of East Germany), on the anniversary of the historic occasion, and deliver speeches and lay wreaths. Then Fitzpatrick would make
pro forma
visits to various European allies, leading up to his meeting with Vardanyan on April 30. The next day, he would be the first American president to observe May Day on Soviet soil.

To be fair to his predecessors, most American presidents since 1918 couldn’t have stood in that reviewing stand—not with a bellicose procession of tanks and guns and missiles rolling by. But since Brezhnev’s time, May Day has been quite the opposite, a gentle celebration of peace. Every factory and school
has a float done up with doves and rosy-cheeked girls, papier-mâché globes; all presided over by the benevolent hammer and sickle and the word for peace: mir. (Nowadays the guns don’t go on parade until they celebrate the October Revolution, in November.)

The special assistants and secretariats in charge of protocol did a certain amount of horse trading prior to the announcement of the event. The premier and the president would stand together not in Moscow, where the rest of the Presidium, Supreme Soviet, Council of Ministers, Party bigwigs, and other
apparatchiki
would be. Fitzpatrick held out for Leningrad, within breathing distance of non-Warsaw Pact Europe. The Russian protocol people let it be, rather than queer the deal.

Fitzpatrick was also allowed to bring into the country a planeload of people and things that would not have to submit to the indignity of inspection: his family; a cook with a kitchen and a week’s supply of bland, safe food; a veritable gaggle of discreetly but heavily armed Secret Service men and women; and a handful of Soviet specialists and translators.

Chief among the translators, if things worked out right, would be the most dangerous man in the world.

Four Soviet spies found dead, and blood from a fifth person, in a factory building not ten miles from Langley. Nothing about it was made public—the FBI leaned on the press like a huge unfriendly planet—but the next day the Soviet embassy was demanding an explanation, privately but very strongly. There was precedent for a revenge motive, harking back to the Reagan years, if you believe rumors. They murdered one of our spies in cold blood, and we retaliated by killing ten of theirs the next day, in various places around Europe.

But we didn’t do this. Two of the male spies were killed by the same weapon, a.45 automatic, with two accurately placed shots apiece. The other two, a man and a woman, were executed grotesquely, handcuffed together around a chair leg. The woman’s abdomen was slashed open, from the navel down, with a razor—or scalpel. The man was castrated. Whoever did it
had evidently watched their struggles for several minutes and then finished them off by severing the carotid arteries. There’s nothing like that in any CIA handbook I’m familiar with.

Jefferson and I, because of our direct involvement with the Scalpel’s current activities, had to fly down to Washington and stay up all night with a couple of Soviet Affairs people and an espionage woman from the FBI, cobbling together a report for the Soviet embassy. About half truth and half invention, it certainly didn’t tell them anything the KGB didn’t already know, but it did squarely place the blame for the multiple murder on Mikhail Shilkov, a.k.a. the Scalpel. We included a blood-chemistry workup from the fifth person, assuming he was the murderer, suggesting that they compare it with KGB records. It could have been from a fifth victim, though, spirited away for some reason. Like Valerie Foley. (The next afternoon it occurred to me to ask the FBI whether she could have been the victim. They said the sample contained so much testosterone that if it belonged to a woman, she’d shave her face twice a day and sing bass.)

We don’t have a mole deep enough in the KGB to know exactly what the result was—or perhaps we do, and I don’t have the “need to know”—but an East German KGB man who also works for us relayed an order from Moscow that Shilkov, whose whereabouts were unknown, was to be retained for questioning if he showed up, with force if necessary; killed if necessary.

Circumstantial evidence, but good enough for us. The FBI sent out a mailing to every hospital in the country, with a picture of the Scalpel. Did anyone like this show up on February 19 or soon after, seeking
treatment for a serious wound? He’d lost more than a quart of blood.

We did get a positive identification, but by then the trail was cold. A couple of weeks later, a country doctor in Unionville, Maryland, saw the picture on a hospital visit and said sure, he’d treated the guy. The wound was badly infected and had been sutured by an amateur—Shilkov claimed that it had happened during a deep-woods camping expedition; he’d done the stitchery himself. The doctor drained and dressed the wound and wrote a prescription for antibiotics, and gently gave him a psychiatric referral. Then it was ten days before he dropped by the Frederick hospital and saw the picture.

So Shilkov could be anywhere by now, and Foley could be anywhere, and we never have had the faintest idea where Mrs. Foley was. Did they all come together in Cabin John on February 19?

Jefferson pointed out a grisly possibility. The couple who were so characteristically slashed apart may not have been killed by Shilkov, but by someone who wanted to implicate him. The other two could have been killed by anyone who was an accurate pistol shot—such as Nicholas Foley.

Or maybe it was a matter unrelated to the Foley case. A specialist like Shilkov could have come to the United States on multiple assignments. Like the Boston murder, the bloodbath could have been an internal KGB affair, an interrogation that got out of hand. Though in that case you wouldn’t expect the Soviet embassy to press for an explanation. Unless they were trying to misdirect us.

Jefferson and I got to the Cabin John scene after midnight. There was still a
POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS
cordon around the building, but only a couple
of freezing rookies guarding things. The FBI espionage specialist had come along with us.

They’d taken the bodies away, leaving only improbably large frozen splashes of clotted blood and stacks of Polaroid color glossies showing the disposition of the corpses at the time of discovery. The FBI woman made it as far as the pictures of the mutilated bodies and then ran outside to throw up. I felt like following her. Jefferson didn’t look too good, either.

The man at the center of all this is a self-effacing, witty fellow who was the most popular teacher in his department, a family man with impeccable academic, military, and professional credentials. Is it always this way? They interview the neighbors of a mass murderer and he was invariably a nice guy who loved children and took care of his aged parents. He never pulls the wings off flies or brags about his collection of snuff movies.

The expression on the face of the castrated man will stay with me forever. I’ll be eligible for retirement in two years. Will I last that long?

We decided to drive when we left Miami, rather than push our luck with airports. Somewhere in Washington or Boston there might be a picture of James Norwood, not resembling Robert Redford. And of course they had pictures of Valerie.

Valerie pointed out that a “style” disguise would be more effective than any false-wig kind of masquerade. So although it hurt, we each bought a complete tacky-polyester wardrobe from K mart, got absurd haircuts, and made the trip to Mexico in a bright-yellow Mercury station wagon, five years old, with
HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS
stickered on the bumper. Nearly two hundred people loved Jesus between Miami and Zacatecas. We waved and smiled and honked back.

We were going to Mexico to get new faces. What I’d done, in the course of one night, was work my way up the Miami dope-dealing ladder, starting with a smooth-talking cocaine retailer in a notorious disco in
Coconut Grove and winding up in the company of a dark man dressed all in silk, in the Cuban quarter, who dealt only in tens of kilograms. His English was no better than my Spanish, but between the two he understood and answered my question: Where would one go to have a new face constructed surgically and be certain the law wouldn’t know? He told me about the Clínico Libre de Zacatecas—the “free clinic” of Zacatecas—and generously gave me an attaché case full of hundred-dollar bills, because the name was a sarcasm. For some reason I let him live, and all the others who led me to him. Maybe I’m getting soft, and sane. Maybe I just know that when one dies, another has replaced him within an hour. Like malignant cells, or the brooms in
The Sorcerers Apprentice
. Our humanly bottomless capacity for evil. As if I were in a position to pass judgment.

The four-day drive from Miami to the border was pleasant, cruising along the Gulf Coast highway, putting on our lower-middleclass hick act whenever we got out of the car. We were able to keep straight faces most of the time, though I lost it once in a San Antonio souvenir shop, when Valerie bought a pair of sunglasses that looked like a prop from an old Buck Rogers movie. Even the clerk who rang them up was trembling with suppressed laughter.

We crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo after midnight, as I had been advised to do, and palmed the Customs guard a twenty-dollar bill, being deliberately clumsy and obvious. He chalked Xs on all our luggage, letting us pass without opening any of them. On the other side of the border we rested at a Mexican Holiday Inn, where the night clerk converted three of our hundred-dollar bills into pesos, at a creative rate of exchange. We started south at first light.