The Company

  All night until dawn—who can say?

  “I can identify the witches’ brew,” Yevgeny insisted. “It was lust.”

  Aza turned her grave eyes on the young man. “Lust fuels the passions of men, so I am told, but women are driven by other, more subtle desires that come from…”

  “Come from?”

  “…the uncertainty that can be seen in a man’s regard, the hesitancy that can be felt in his touch, and most especially the tentativeness that can be heard in his voice, which after all are reflections of his innermost self.” She added very seriously, “I am pleased with your voice, Yevgeny.”

  “I am pleased that you are pleased,” he said, and he meant it.

  The following Sunday Yevgeny, using a phone number reserved for high-ranking members of the Foreign Office, managed to reserve rare tickets to the Moscow Art Theater and took Aza to see the great Tarasova in the role of Anna Karenina. He reached for Aza’s hand as the narrator’s opening line echoed through the theater: “All happy families resemble one another but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Afterwards he invited her to dinner in a small restaurant off Trubnaya Square. When the bill came she insisted on paying according to the German principle. Yevgeny told her that the Americans called it the Dutch principle, or Dutch treat, and she jotted down the expression on her pad. After dinner they strolled arm in arm down Tsvetnoy Boulevard into the heart of Moscow. “Do you know Chekhov’s essay, ‘On Trubnaya Square’?” she asked him. “In it he describes the old Birds Market, which was not far from where we are standing now. My grandparents lived in a room over the market when they were first married. I offer you a question, Yevgeny Alexandrovich: Are all things, like the Birds Market, fleeting phenomena?”

  Yevgeny’s mind raced; he understood that she wanted to know if the feelings she had for him—and he appeared to have for her—would suffer the same fate as the Birds Market on Trubnaya Square. “I cannot say yet what is lasting in this world and what is not.”

  “You answer honestly. For that I thank you.”

  On an impulse he crossed to the center strip of the boulevard and bought Aza a bouquet of white carnations from one of the old peasant women in blue canvas jackets selling flowers there. Later, at the door of her building on Nizhny Kizlovsky Lane, she buried her nose in the carnations and breathed in the fragrance. Then she flung her arms around Yevgeny’s neck, kissed him with great passion on the lips and darted off through the doors into the building before he could utter a word.

  He telephoned her in the morning before he left for his rendezvous with the twin sisters. “It’s me,” he announced.

  “I recognize the tentativeness of your voice,” she replied. “I recognize even the ring of the telephone.”

  “Aza, each time I see you I leave a bit of me with you.”

  “Oh, I hope this is not true,” she said softly. “For if you see me too often there will be nothing left of you.” She was silent for a moment; he could hear her breathing into the mouthpiece. Finally she said in a firm voice: “Next Sunday Natasha is voyaging to the Crimea with her father. I will bring you back here with me. We will together explore whether your lust and my desire are harmonious in bed.” She said something else that was lost in a burst of static. Then the connection was cut.

  Gradually Yevgeny became the legends that the sisters had devised—brushing his hair forward into his eyes; speaking in a rapid-fire fashion in sentences he often didn’t bother to finish; striding around the room in loud, sure steps as he spoke; rattling off the details of his life from the cradle to the present. Starik, who was sitting in on the sessions, would occasionally interrupt with a question. “Precisely where was the drugstore in which you worked?”

  “On Kingston Avenue just off Eastern Parkway. I sold comic books—Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman—and made egg creams for the kids for a nickel.”

  The sisters were pleased with their pupil. “I suppose there is nothing left for us to do now except destroy all the loose-leaf books,” Agrippina said.

  “There is still the matter of the second problem,” Serafima said. They looked at Starik, who nodded in agreement. The sisters exchanged embarrassed looks. “You must tell him,” Serafima informed her sister. “You are the one who stumbled across it.”

  Agrippina cleared her throat. “Both of your legends are built around young men who were born in the United States of America, which means that like the overwhelming majority of Americans they will have been circumcised at birth. We have examined your birth records at”—here she named a small and exclusive Kremlin clinic that was used by ranking Party people. “They make no mention of a circumcision. I apologize for posing such a personal question but are we correct in assuming you were not circumcised?”

  Yevgeny pulled a face. “I see where this is leading.”

  Starik said, “We once lost an agent who was passing himself off as a Canadian businessman. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police found the businessman’s medical records and discovered he had been circumcised. Our agent was not.” He pulled a slip of paper from a shirt pocket and read it. “The operation, which will be performed in a private Centre clinic in a Moscow suburb, is scheduled for nine tomorrow morning.” The sisters stood up. Starik signaled for Yevgeny to remain. The two women bid goodbye to their student and left the room.

  “There is one more matter that needs to be cleared up,” Starik said. “I am talking about the girl, Azalia Isanova. You shook the man who was tailing you from across the street, but you did not lose the one who was assigned to follow you from in front. Your street craft needs work. Your faculty of discretion, too. We have been monitoring your telephone calls. We know that you slept with the girl—“

  Yevgeny blurted out, “She can be trusted—she shares an apartment with the daughter of Comrade Beria—“

  Starik, his face contorted, his eyes bulging, blurted out, “But don’t you see it? She is too old for you!”

  Yevgeny was startled. “She is two years older than me, it is true, but what does that amount to? The question of age must be seen as—“

  Starik, hissing now, cut him off. “There is something else. Her surname is Lebowitz. Her patronymic is a version of Isaiah. She is a zhid!”

  The word struck Yevgeny like a slap across the face. “But Comrade Beria must have known about her when he took her in…”

  Starik eyes narrowed dangerously. “Of course Beria knows. A great many in the superstructure are careful to include one or two Jews in their entourage to counter Western propaganda about anti-Semitism. Molotov went too far—he actually married one of them. Stalin decided it was an impossible situation—the Foreign Minister married to a Jewess—and had her shipped off to a detention camp.” Starik’s bony fingers gripped Yevgeny’s wrist. “For someone in your position any liaison with a girl would pose delicate problems. A liaison with a zhid is out of the realm of possibility.”

  “Surely I have a say—“

  For Starik there was no middle ground. “You have no say,” he declared, switching to the formal “vui” and spitting it into the conversation. “You must choose between the girl and a brilliant career—you must choose between her and me.” He shot to his feet and dropped a card with the address of the clinic on the table in front of Yevgeny. “If you do not turn up for the operation our paths will never cross again.”

  That night Yevgeny climbed to the roof of his building and gazed for hours at the red-hazed glow hovering over the Kremlin. He knew he was walking a tightrope; he understood he could jump off one side as easily as the other. If he had been asked to give up Aza for operational reasons he would have understood; to give her up because she was a Jewess was a bitter pill to swallow. For all his talk about the genius and generosity of the human spirit, Starik—Yevgeny’s Tolstoy—had turned out to be a rabid anti-Semite. Yevgeny could hear the word zhid festering in his brain. And then it dawned on him that the voice he heard wasn’t Starik’s; it was a thinner voice, quivering with age and pessimism and panic,
seeping from the back of the throat of someone who feared growing old, who welcomed death but dreaded dying. The word zhid resounding in Yevgeny’s ear came from the great Tolstoy himself; scratch the lofty idealist of the spirit and underneath you discovered an anti-Semite who believed, so Tolstoy had affirmed, that the flaw of Christianity, the tragedy of mankind, came from the racial incompatibility between Christ, who was not a Jew, and Paul, who was a Jew.

  Yevgeny laughed under his breath. Then he laughed out loud. And then he opened his mouth and bellowed into the night: “Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! To the success of our hopeless task!”

  The circumcision, performed under a local anesthetic, was over in minutes. Yevgeny was given pills to ease the pain and an antiseptic cream to guard against infection. He retreated to his apartment and buried himself in the Prikhodko lectures, making lists of neighborhoods and parks and department stores in various East Coast American cities that could be used for meetings with agents. The telephone rang seven times on Saturday, four times on Sunday and twice on Monday. Once or twice the maid plucked the receiver off its hook. Hearing a female voice on the other end of the line she muttered a curse in Tajik and slammed down the phone. After a few days the burning sensation in Yevgeny’s penis dulled to an ache and gradually disappeared. One morning a motorcycle messenger brought Yevgeny a sealed envelope. Inside was a second sealed envelope containing a passport in the name of Gregory Ozolin and a plane ticket to Oslo. There, Ozolin would disappear from the face of the earth and a young American named Eugene Dodgson, who had been backpacking in Scandinavia, would buy passage on a Norwegian freighter bound for Halifax, Canada, the staging area for Soviet illegals bound for assignments in the United States.

  On the evening before Yevgeny’s departure, Starik, smiling thinly, turned up with a tin of imported herring and a cold bottle of Polish vodka. The two talked about everything under the sun late into the night; everything except the girl. After Starik had departed Yevgeny found himself staring at the telephone, half-hoping it would ring; half-hoping there would be a musical voice on the other end saying “I dislike summer so very much.”

  When, just before six in the morning, it finally did ring, Yevgeny leapt from the bed and stood staring at the receiver. With the phone’s discordant peal still echoing through the apartment, his eye fell on the packed valise near the door. He could feel a magnetic force pulling him toward his quest on the American continent. Accepting his destiny with a grudging smile, he sat down on the valise in preparation for a long, long voyage.

  3

  FRANKFURT, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1951

  THE OVERHEAD LIGHTS DIMMED AND THE TWO CHICKEN COLONELS attached to the Joint Chiefs materialized in the spotlight. Endless rows of campaign ribbons shimmered over the breast pockets of their starched uniforms. Company scuttlebutt had it that they’d passed the time on the flight out from Washington spit-shining their shoes until they resembled mirrors. “Gentlemen,” the colonel with the cropped mustache began.

  “Seems as how he’s giving us the benefit of the doubt,” Frank Wisner, his shirtsleeves rolled up, muttered in his inimitable southern drawl, and the officers within earshot, Ebby among them, laughed under their breaths.

  They had gathered in Frankfurt Station’s sloping auditorium on the second floor of the huge, drearily modern I.G. Farben complex in the Frankfurt suburb of Höchst to hear the Pentagon’s latest Cassandra-like forebodings. For Wisner, Allen Dulles’s deputy in the Dirty Tricks Department who was passing through Germany on a whirlwind tour of the CIA’s European stations, the briefing was another installment in the “pissing contest” between the Joint Chiefs and the Company over Cold War priorities. The chicken colonels who had turned up in Frankfurt before had agonized over the Soviet order of battle as if it were the entrails of a slaughtered ram, counting and recounting the armored divisions that could punch on six hours notice through the cordon sanitaire the Allies had strung like a laundry line across Europe. In the great tradition of military mindset, they had made the delicate leap from capabilities to intentions; from could to would. Like Delphic oracles predicting the end of the world, they had even identified D-day (in a top-secret “Eyes Only” memo with extremely limited distribution; the last thing they wanted was for this kind of information to fall into the hands of the Russians). World War III would break out on Tuesday, 1 July 1952.

  Now they had come back with details of the Soviet assault. Tapping a large map of Europe with a pointer, the chicken colonel with the mustache reeled off the names and effective strengths of the Soviet divisions in East Germany and Poland, and asserted that the Kremlin had massed three times as many troops as it needed for occupation duties. A slim, crewcut sergeant major who walked as if he had a ramrod up his butt changed maps, and the colonel briefed the audience on the route the two-pronged Soviet armored blitzkrieg would follow across the northern plain; in a Pentagon war game simulation, the colonel said, the Soviet attack had reached the English Channel in a matter of weeks. Still a third map was thumbtacked to the easel, this one showing Soviet airfields in Poland and East Germany and the western Bohemian area of Czechoslovakia that would provide close air support for the assault. Signaling for the house-lights, the colonel strode to the edge of the stage and looked out at Wisner, who was slouched in the third row next to General Lucian Truscott IV, the Company’s Chief of Station in Germany. “What the Joint Chiefs want,” the colonel announced, his jaw elevated a notch, his eyes steely, “is for you to plant an agent at every one of these airfields before July first, 1952 in order to sabotage them when the balloon goes up and the fun starts.”

  Wisner pulled at an earlobe. “Well now, Lucian, we damn well ought to be able to handle that,” he remarked. There was no hint in his tone or expression that he was being anything but serious. “How many airfields did you say there were, colonel?”

  The chicken colonel had the figure at the tip of his tongue. “Two thousand, give or take half a hundred. Some of them have got tarmac runways, some dirt.” He grinned at his colleague; he was sure they would be returning to Washington with upbeat news.

  Wisner nodded thoughtfully. “Two thousand, some tarmac, some dirt,” he repeated. He twisted in his seat to speak to his deputy, Dick Helms, sitting directly behind him. “I’ll bite, Dick—how does an agent on the ground go about sabotaging a runway?”

  Helms looked blank. “Beats me, Frank.”

  Wisner looked around at his troops. “Anyone here have an inkling how you put a runway out of action?” When nobody spoke up Wisner turned back to the colonel. “Maybe you can enlighten us, colonel. How do you sabotage a runway?”

  The two colonels exchanged looks. “We’ll have to get back to you with an answer,” one of them said.

  When the chicken colonels had wrapped up the briefing and beat a tactical retreat, Wisner settled onto the back of the seat in front of him and chatted with his people. “I’ll be goddamned surprised if we ever hear from them again,” he said with a belly laugh. “Carpet bombing can put an airfield out of action two hours, three tops. What a single agent on the ground could do is beyond me. To turn to more serious matters than planting two thousand agents at two thousand airfields—“

  There were guffaws around the auditorium.

  “Back in the insulated offices of the District of Columbia, the Pentagon is trying to figure out how to blunt a Soviet attack across Europe that is highly unlikely, given our superiority in atomic weaponry and delivery capacity, not to mention that some divisions in the satellite armies are more likely to attack the Russians than the Americans if war breaks out. The Washington civilians, led by our erstwhile specialist on all things Soviet, George Kennan, are rambling on about containment, though nobody has made the case why the Russians would want to add another dozen satellites to their fragile empire. And make no mistake about it—the Soviet empire is a house of cards. One good puff in the right place at the right time and the whole thing will come crashing down. I am not presiding over the clandestine
service in order to sabotage airfields or contain Communism. Our mission is to roll back Communism and liberate the captive nations of East Europe. Am I getting through to you, gentlemen? Our mission is to destroy Communism, as opposed to dirt runways on airfields.”

  Ebby had been deeply involved in Wisner’s roll-back campaign from the day he reported for duty in Germany the previous November. His first assignment, at Berlin Base, had ended abruptly when Ebby’s gripe about a “pathological dipsomaniac” being in charge of a Company base reached the Sorcerer’s ear and he had whipped off one of his notorious “It’s him or me” cables to the DD/O. Bowing to the inevitable, Ebby had put in for a transfer to Frankfurt Station, where he wound up working as an assistant case officer in the Internal Operations Groups of the SE (Soviet/Eastern Europe) Division, cutting his teeth on a new and risky campaign: agent drops into the Russian Carpathians.

  It was the first of these drops that almost broke Ebby’s heart—and led to an incident that came within a hairsbreadth of cutting short his Company career.

  He was unpacking his valise in an upstairs bedroom of a private house in the “Compound,” an entire residential neighborhood commandeered by the Army a mile down the road from the I.G. Farben building, when his immediate superior, a grizzly, curly-haired Russian-speaking former OSS officer named Anthony Spink, came around to collect him. They were off, he explained, gunning the engine of a motor pool Ford as he sped west out of Frankfurt, to meet an agent code-named SUMMERSAULT, a Ukrainian being trained at a secret Army base for infiltration into the denied areas behind the Iron Curtain. Jockeying in and out of heavy truck traffic, Spink briefed Ebby on the agent: he was a twenty-three-year-old from the west-central Ukrainian city of Lutsk who had fought for the Germans under the turncoat Russian General Vlasov during the war. Vlasov himself, along with hundreds of his officers, had been hanged by the Russians after V-E Day. SUMMERSAULT, whose real name was Alyosha Kulakov, had been one of the lucky few who had been able to flee west with the retreating Germans and eventually wound up in one of the Displaced Persons camps teeming with refugees from the Soviet Union and the satellite countries. There he had been spotted by a Company recruiter and interviewed by Spink. SUMMERSAULT had maintained that there were thousands of armed Ukrainian nationalists still battling the Russians in the Carpathian Mountains, a claim supported by a deciphered intercept from the Communist boss of the Ukraine, a little known apparatchik named Nikita Khrushchev, who had cabled Moscow: “From behind every bush, from behind every tree, at every turn of the road, a government official is in danger of a terrorist attack.” The Company decided to train SUMMERSAULT in radio and ciphers, and to drop him into the Carpathians to establish a link between the CIA and the resistance movement.