“You broke the eleventh commandment,” Manny had remarked.
“I did, didn’t I? Concentrate on your tradecraft and make goddamn sure you don’t.”
Manny had smiled. Ebby had grinned back but his son could see the worry lines distorting the forced smile. And it struck him how courageous his father had been to let him volunteer for this mission. “Thanks, Dad,” he said.
Ebby understood that they were communicating between the lines. “Sure. You’re welcome.”
In the crowded airport hall at Sheremetyevo one of the Trailblazer tourists was prodding Manny. “You’re next,” he whispered. Snapping out of his reverie, Manny walked up to the booth and slid his passport under the glass partition. A woman with badly bleached hair piled on her head and a completely expressionless face, wearing the gray uniform and shoulder boards of the KGB’s elite frontier guards, rifled through it page by page before turning back to the photograph and looking up straight into his eyes to see if he matched the picture. Her gaze flicked over Manny’s right shoulder to the mirror planted above and behind him at a forty-five degree angle to give her a view of his feet; in the mirror she could see if he were trying to make himself shorter or taller. She checked his height in the passport and then looked again at him through the partition. Manny knew that there were calibrations etched into her side of the glass so she could tell his exact height at a glance. She flipped through an enormous loose-leaf binder to make sure his name wasn’t in it, then stamped the passport and the currency form he’d filled out in the plane and, looking to her right, nodded for the next person.
Manny scarcely let himself breathe—he had passed the very stringent Soviet border control and was inside the belly of the whale. A pulse throbbed in his temple; the rotation of the earth on its axis seemed to have speeded up.
For the rest of Saturday and the two days that followed, Manny found himself being whisked by the Trailblazer chaperons from one tourist site to another. Accompanied by Intourist guides who regurgitated the official Soviet version of history, they visited the Kremlin churches, the onion-domed St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square and the Lenin Museum on one side of the square, then were taken to the head of the long queue to file past the wax-like corpse of Lenin in the nearby mausoleum. Across from the mausoleum, the side of GUM, a vast show-case department store that they were scheduled to visit Tuesday morning, was draped with giant portraits of the Soviet leaders: there was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin with a vaguely Kazakh slant to his eyes, Karl Marx hiding behind his unkempt Walt Whitman-like beard, Leonid Brezhnev beaming down like a benevolent alcoholic. The American tourists spent one entire morning at the VDNKh, the Exhibit of the Economic Achievements of the Nationalities (the highlights: Yuri Gagarin’s rocket monument and the colossal ‘Worker and Kolokhoznik’ statue), and an afternoon at a church in Zagorsk that reeked of incense and candle wax. That evening they were taken to the Bolshoi Theater, a stone’s throw from the Metropole, to attend a dazzling performance of Giselle. At mealtimes the tourists were bused back to the Hotel Metropole and seated under the stained-glass dome at tables with small American flags on them; the first course (served by waiters who tried to peddle black market caviar on the side) was invariably half a hard-boiled egg covered with wrinkled peas and mayonnaise that had petrified because the food had been prepared hours in advance.
Manny mingled with the others in his group (there were half a dozen bachelor women who regarded the only single man on the tour with open curiosity), fending off their questions with vague replies, and kept his eye peeled for signs that the KGB were paying special attention to him. He knew that all the Russians who had anything to do with foreign tourists—the bus drivers, the Intourist guides, the clerks at the main desk, the babushkas stationed on each floor of the hotel who kept the keys to the chambers—reported to the KGB. Before leaving his room Monday morning, Manny was careful to commit to memory the precise position of every item of clothing in his valise and plant a human hair on the cuff of a folded shirt. When he returned that afternoon he checked the valise; as far as he could see, the position of the clothing hadn’t changed and the hair was still in place on the cuff.
Tuesday morning a soft rain started falling, turning the streets slick. After breakfast the Trailblazer group followed an Intourist guide with an umbrella held aloft through Red Square and into GUM to visit the department store, two floors of boutiques teeming with Muscovites as well as Russians who came in from the countryside to buy things that weren’t available locally. “You absolutely must stay together,” the guide called nervously as she shooed the Americans past the black-market moneychangers lurking in doorways.
Manny lagged behind to talk to one of them. “How much?” he asked a bearded man with a loud striped shirt hanging outside his jeans.
“I give you six times the official rate, three rubles to the dollar,” the man shot back, barely moving his lips as he spoke. He kept his eyes on the street, looking for policemen or plainclothes detectives who would have to be paid off if he were caught in the act.
“There’s a waiter at the hotel who is offering four-to-one.”
“Take it,” the man advised with a sneer. “You want to sell anything—shoes, blue jeans, wash-and-wear shirts, a wristwatch, a camera? I give you a great price.”
“How much for these shoes?”
The man glanced at Manny’s feet. “Fifty rubles.”
“How much for a pair of jeans?”
“Are they in good condition?”
“Like new.”
“Seventy-five rubles. You won’t get a better deal nowhere else. You can always find me around GUM before noon. Ask anyone where is Pavlusha.”
Manny figured the group would be far enough ahead of him by now. “I’ll think about it, Pavlusha,” he said, and he pushed through the heavy inner door into the store. The last Americans were disappearing down one of the passageways. He trailed lazily after them, stopping from time to time to inspect shop windows filled with Czech crystal or East German appliances; to use the windows as mirrors to see what was going on behind him. Gradually he fell further and further behind the Trailblazer group. At one intersection he looked around as if he were lost, then, moving rapidly, ducked down a side passageway and cut through a fabric store that straddled the area between two passageways and had doors on both; he went in one door and out the other and waited to see if anyone came trotting out after him. Convinced that he was clean, he made his way down another passage and pushed through a door into a side street behind GUM. He looked at his watch—he still had an hour and a quarter before the primary rendezvous, in the Pushkin Museum at noon on the second Tuesday of the month. Mingling with groups of East German tourists, he strolled through Red Square and around the side of the Kremlin Wall. The East Germans stopped to watch the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Hugging the Kremlin Wall, Manny continued on south. When he reached the Borovistkaya Tower at the southern end of the wall, he darted through traffic across the wide boulevard and ducked into the Borovistkaya metro station next to the Lenin Library. He bought two tickets at a machine for ten kopecks—if AE/PINNACLE didn’t turn up at the Pushkin Museum, Manny would take the metro to the secondary rendezvous. He went north one stop, then hurried through a maze of tunnels until he came to the Red Line and took the subway south. He got off at the first stop, Kropotkinskaya, emerging into a drizzle not far from the Pushkin Museum. He still had three quarters of an hour to kill. Concentrate on your tradecraft, Ebby had said; that’s what he did now. He spent the time meandering through a labyrinth of nearly empty back streets behind the Pushkin to see if any individuals or automobiles seemed to be following him. With a quarter of an hour remaining he made his way into the museum, bought a ticket and began wandering through the spacious rooms, stopping now and then to admire a Picasso or a Cézanne. At the stroke of noon he entered the room filled with Bonnards and began to scrutinize the paintings one by one. If Kukushkin turned up at the appointed hour, it would be here in th
e Bonnard room.
Noon came and went, and then twelve thirty. Various scenarios occurred to Manny—Kukushkin had been caught, the time and place of the rendezvous had been forced out of him under torture—as he checked out the adjoining rooms, then returned to the Bonnards. There was still no sign of AE/PINNACLE. At a quarter to one he decided that the rendezvous had been aborted. He retraced his steps to the Kropotkinskaya station and, using the second ticket, headed south again on the Red Line. He got off at Sportivnaya and roamed through the nearly deserted streets in the general direction of the Novodievitchi Monastery. When he finally reached it, he followed the wall around to the left until he came to the cemetery. At the window he purchased a ticket for ten kopecks. Walking through the main gate, he began strolling along the gravel lanes, stopping now and then to read the inscriptions on the tombs. He noticed two young couples off to his right standing around the tombstone of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who had shot herself after a stormy argument with her husband; apologists for Stalin claimed that his grief over Nadezhda’s suicide, in 1932, was what led to the great purges of the thirties and the Gulag prison camps. Passing the tombs of Bulgakov, Stanislavsky, Chekhov and Gogol, Manny returned to the main walkway and headed away from the main gate toward the tomb of Nikita Khrushchev at the far end of the path. Between the tombstones he could make out three men deep in conversation on a parallel path, and two younger men copying the inscriptions off some old tombs with tracing paper and sticks of charcoal. None of them seemed to be paying the slightest attention to him. Reaching Khrushchev’s tomb, Manny gazed at the bust of the late Soviet leader. Etched into the stone were the dates of his birth and death: 1894–1971; his round Ukrainian peasant face stared into the distance and there was a suggestion of bitterness in the faint smile crinkling his eyes.
“He was the one who first denounced the excesses of Joseph Stalin,” a voice said. Startled, Manny turned quickly. Sergei Kukushkin appeared from behind a black marble tombstone. He was bareheaded and dressed in a light raincoat; his hair was disheveled and glistening with rain. “Do you know the story, Manny? It was at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956. Khrushchev stunned everyone by denouncing the crimes of Stalin. According to the story, which is obviously apocryphal, someone passed a note up to the podium which said, ‘Where were you when all this happened?’ Khrushchev, so the story goes—ah, even in apocrypha there is what you Americans call gospel truth—Khrushchev turned livid when he read the note. Waving the scrap of paper over his head, he shouted, ‘Who wrote this? Who wrote this?’ When nobody stood up to acknowledge authorship, he said, ‘That’s where I was, comrades.’” Kukushkin took Manny’s elbow and the two of them began to walk along a narrow path between tombstones. “That’s where I was, too, my friend. From the time I joined the KGB I saw what was going on but I was afraid to raise my voice. Nothing has changed since Tolstoy described life in Russia: ‘Stench, stone, opulence, poverty, debauchery.’” Kukushkin, looking more drawn than Manny remembered him, said, “I knew you would be the one to come, Manny. Thank you for that.”
“What happened in Washington, Sergei?”
“I returned to our quarters to find my wife and my daughter packing their valises. Her father had suffered a stroke and was under intensive care in a Kremlin hospital. An embassy car was waiting to rush them to New York to catch the Friday evening Aeroflot flight. Impossible to delay the trip without arousing the suspicions of the SK people. The next morning I received a cable from the First Chief Directorate saying that Elena’s father had died before she arrived and giving me permission to return to Moscow immediately for the funeral. Once again I could not appear to hesitate for fear the SK would become suspicious of me. My rezident was very considerate—he personally authorized the expenditure of hard currency for the Scandinavian Airline ticket—so I did not believe that they had become suspicious of my activities. I was afraid to call the emergency number you gave me from the embassy. The rezident himself accompanied me to the airport. Once I had checked through the gate I was afraid to use a public telephone—they could have had someone inside watching me.” Kukushkin shrugged. “And so I returned.”
“Since you’re back have you observed anything out of the ordinary?”
Kukushkin shook his large head vigorously, as if he were trying to shake off any last doubts he might have had. “We were given a three-room apartment in a hotel reserved for transient KGB officers. The funeral was held two days after my return—many high-ranking officers from the missile forces attended. They paid their respects to my wife and several, knowing I was in the KGB, made a point of asking my opinion of the attempt to impeach your President Nixon. At the office I was invited to take tea with the head of the First Chief Directorate, who spoke of seconding me to that new Division D. In short, everything seemed normal and my initial fears subsided.”
On a parallel pathway the two young men tracing inscriptions unrolled sheets of paper and attacked another tombstone.
“You had fears initially?”
“I am human, Manny. Like everyone I see ghosts lurking in shadows. But I calculated that, if the story of my father-in-law’s stroke had been invented to lure me home to Moscow, the SK would have sent me back with my wife and daughter, and not afterward.”
“Not necessarily.”
Kukushkin’s English syntax broke down under the strain. “Which isn’t not necessarily?” he demanded angrily. “Where can you be knowing better than me what is not necessarily?”
“Sergei, let’s try to look at the situation coldly,” Manny suggested.
“I am coldly looking,” Kukushkin, clearly agitated, muttered.
“If the SK suspected you, they would have had to devise a scheme to get you back to Moscow without your knowing they suspected you. If they had sent you back with your wife and daughter, the three of you could have asked for political asylum at the airport. The fact that they sent you back separately—“
“You interpret that as a bad omen?”
“I don’t think you can interpret it either way. I’m just trying to explore different possibilities, Sergei.”
Kukushkin considered this. “I hate Russia,” he announced with sudden vehemence. “Everybody I meet is nostalgic for something—for revolution, for war, for snow, for empire, for Stalin even. Would you believe it, Manny? People at the Lubyanka canteen still talk in undertones about the good old days. Roosevelt wore braces on his legs, they say, but he would push himself to his feet when Stalin walked into the room.” He stopped in his tracks and turned on Manny. “I will not spy for you in Moscow, if that is what you have come to ask me to do. I barely had the nerve to do it in Washington. Here it is out of the question.”
“I didn’t come all this way to ask you to work for us here. I came because we owe you something. We can smuggle you out. Exfiltrations have been organized before.”
“From Russia?”
“From the Crimea, where you can easily go on your first vacation.”
“And my wife and my daughter?”
“We can arrange for them to come out also.”
“And my wife’s sister and her son, and their old mother, now a widow?”
The two resumed walking. “We could charter a plane,” Manny quipped dryly.
Neither man laughed.
Manny said, “Think about it carefully, Sergei. It may be years before you are posted abroad again.”
“The competition to go abroad is heavy. I may never again get such a posting.”
“I’ll give you a phone number to memorize. K 4-89-73. Repeat it.”
“K 4-89-73.”
“When someone answers, cough twice and hang up. That will activate the primary and secondary rendezvous on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. The person who meets you will carry a copy of Novi Mir under an arm and tell you simply that he is a friend of Manny’s.”
Kukushkin repeated the number twice more. Then he asked what Manny would do now.
“I came in only to speak to yo
u. I’ll head home as soon as I can.”
The two circled back onto the main walkway leading to the cemetery gate. Kukushkin started to thank Manny again for coming to Moscow. “I will tell Elena that you raised the possibility of an exfil—” The Russian broke off in mid word and caught his breath. Manny followed his gaze. A hoard of men, some in uniform and carrying machine pistols, others in dark civilian suits, had appeared at the cemetery gate. Fragments of thoughts tore through Manny’s skull: they couldn’t have been following me, it just wasn’t possible, which meant that they had followed Kukushkin…if they had followed Kukushkin it meant that they suspected him of working for the CIA…had summoned home his wife and daughter, and then Kukushkin, because of these suspicions…which would, dear God, be confirmed if they caught him with an American.
At the gate the men in uniform trotted off in either direction along side paths, the civilians started up the central walkway toward them. “Quick,” Kukushkin whispered, “I know where is an opening in the fence.” Manny spun around and followed him as Kukushkin dodged between the tombstones of Scriabin and Prokofiev. Behind them a voice over a bullhorn bellowed in broken English, “Stopping where are you. The cemetery is closed by militia on all sides. You are in the impossibility of escaping.” The pulse hammering in Manny’s temple almost drowned out the howl of the bullhorn. Glancing to his left, he saw the two young men who had been copying inscriptions off tombstones running toward them and he could make out dark metallic objects in their hands. The two couples who had been studying the tomb of Stalin’s wife, along with the three men who had been deep in conversation, were racing along parallel paths to cut them off from the fence. Somewhere in the cemetery firecrackers exploded. Only when stone chips splintered off a tomb and scratched his arm did it dawn on Manny that shots had been fired. Ahead, he caught a glimpse of the shoulder-high cemetery fence laced with ivy. Kukushkin, moving with surprising nimbleness for his size, darted toward a segment where one of the uprights had rusted away, leaving a space through which a man could slip. He was about to wedge his body through it when a line of soldiers, machine pistols leveled at their hips, appeared from behind the bushes in the lot on the other side. Kukushkin’s mouth jerked open as if he intended to scream. He turned back toward Manny and said in a wooden voice, “So: it is going to end as I suspected it must—with my execution.”