The Debriefing

  CHAPTER

  8

  “I don’t mind your asking, not at all,” Morning Stalin tells Stone politely. He stops peeling his orange, stares off into space with a sudden watery look. “I came face to face with him once, yes. It was in 1931, just after I had the plastic surgery. He was curious to see if we really looked alike. He circled around me as if he were measuring me for a coffin. Then he smiled that cold smile which I had mastered with some difficulty, and offered me his hand. ‘Stalin,’ he said, as if I didn’t know who he was.”

  Ilyador, polishing a fingernail, guffaws. Stone asks, “And that was all?”

  “Not quite,” Morning Stalin explains. “A sly expression crept into his eye. He rang up Molotov and told him to drop what he was doing and come right down. Molotov came on the run, knocked once, opened the door and stopped dead in his tracks, staring from one to the other. I understood that Stalin was testing to see if it would really work, so I casually turned to Molotov, smiled that cold smile and said, ‘It’s incredible, isn’t it? He could be my twin.’ Molotov immediately assumed I was the real egg, and replied to me with great courtesy. Stalin’s eyes flickered angrily—he must have sensed we were playing a potentially dangerous game—and he dismissed me with a wave of his hand. As I left, I saw Molotov collapsing in a chair in a state of shock.”

  Shaking his head nostalgically, Morning Stalin goes back to his orange and Ilyador, waving his fingernails in the air to dry them, comments, “What an idiot you were. You could have kept up the pretense, shot the other as an impostor, and taken over the country.”

  “I would have lost World War Two,” Morning Stalin says morosely. “I simply can’t support explosions.” He smiles at Stone apologetically. “To this day, there are people who think Stalin panicked and fled Moscow for ten days when the Teutonic cows invaded. Ha! It was me who panicked and skipped town. He never set foot outside the Kremlin.”

  Ilyador, pleased with his nails, says, “I spent the war in Siberia. Conditions were primitive. If we had milk, we kept it outside the window and chipped off pieces when we were thirsty.”

  Katushka returns with a paper and pencil. “I’m ready if you are,” she tells Stone.

  Stone stares for a long moment at the pencil poised over the paper. “I’m trying to find four people. The first is a major attached to the Ministry of Defense courier service in the capacity of a duty officer. His name is Gamov—”

  “Ah, Gamov—that’s why you got excited at the séance,” says Morning Stalin.

  “My Gamov is about sixty,” Stone continues, “is missing his left arm, wears the Order of Stalin on his chest, has dandruff on his shoulders, wears his wrist watch on the inside of his wrist, and has long, delicate fingers like a woman’s.” He pauses to let Katushka, who is scribbling furiously, catch up with him. “The second person I’m looking for is a Jew named Leon Davidov. He works as a combination janitor-handyman for the Ministry of Defense. For reasons I’d rather not go into, I want to meet him outside the ministry building. His home would be ideal. The third is a lesbian named Lina. She may be Polish.” He fishes Kulakov’s photograph from his pocket. “This is what she looks like. The fourth is an actress. All I know about her is that her first name is Galya, she is supposed to be beautiful, she worked for a theater company in Leningrad but came to Moscow about five months ago to try and get a job in one of the theater or movie companies here. She has been described by someone who knew her as being very demanding.”

  Ilyador snickers and says, “That doesn’t narrow it down at all.”

  Katushka asks, “What do you mean, demanding?”

  “She tends to make sexual demands on a man that he can’t fulfill, and then ridicules him for not satisfying her,” Stone says.

  Morning Stalin is very superior. “A man,” he says, looking at Ilyador for confirmation, “would never do that to another man.”

  Stone holds the fort. The others scramble from the apartment after breakfast, reappear to leave urgent notes to each other, then disappear on the run once again. Ilyador phones in and leaves a number where he can be reached for the next half hour and Stone passes the message on to Katushka when she calls in shortly afterward. Toward noon Morning Stalin turns up, collapses into a kitchen chair massaging his feet (he wears the same size shoe Stalin wore, which is one size too small for him), gasping for air. For a moment Stone is afraid he is having a heart attack. When Morning Stalin can speak he says, “The actress’s name is Borisova. Galya Borisova. I got it from the brother of a man who committed suicide over her. She’s back in Leningrad, at the Pushkin Theater.” Morning Stalin holds up a palm as Stone starts to thank him. Tears brim in his eyes. “No one has found me useful in twenty years,” he says. “I’m very grateful to you.”

  Stone, flashing the credentials of an Aeroflot official, bumps a passenger and catches an early-afternoon flight to Leningrad. Driving into the city from the airport in a taxi, he suddenly remembers some lines Mandelstam wrote before he was packed off to Siberia—and his death—with a copy of Pushkin in one pocket and Dante in another. Stone’s mother, who was born in Leningrad when it was still called Saint Petersburg, used to quote them over and over:

  We’ll meet again in Petersburg

  As if we’d buried the sun there, …

  In the black velvet of Soviet night

  In the velvet of universal emptiness.

  Despite the black velvet of Soviet night, Leningrad is still a northern beauty. Peter’s proud window on the West, never quite opened, never quite closed, is colder and calmer than Moscow. The light slanting in from the sun hanging low over the rooftops sucks the orange out of the ocher façades. Mists rise from the canals that lace the city, or drift in from the Neva, where the battleship that really fired a shot heard ’round the world rides at anchor. Youngsters with their arms gaily linked swarm down Nevsky Prospekt, past an ornate cinema showing a Western starring Gregory Peck. Stone pays off the taxi several blocks from the Pushkin Theater, wanders through some side streets, crosses one of the imperial bridges and follows the canal to the next bridge. When he is certain he is clean, he makes his way to the stage entrance of the Pushkin, gently shakes awake the man with the hearing aid dozing in the chair just inside the door.

  “I’m looking for Galya Borisova,” he says loudly, presenting his KGB card.

  The man turns up his hearing aid, squints at the card for a moment, trying to decipher the letters, shakes his head in frustration. “Reading provokes headaches,” he says. Stone nods sympathetically, presses a five-ruble note into his fist. He glances at it, manages without difficulty to make out the number 5, smiles a toothless smile. “She lives in the Haymarket,” he says immediately, waving with his hand in the general direction. He mutters the name of a street, then a number, pockets the fiver, sinks back into the considerable comfort of his afternoon nap.

  It takes Stone a while to find the house in the Haymarket, a neighborhood made famous by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment; the number is missing from the façade and he has to interpolate. The building must have been the city residence of a member of the imperial court; the windows are large, the ceilings are high, the general atmosphere is one of faded elegance. Inside, the banister is made of mahogany, the steps are paved with cracked tiles and covered with a threadbare rug to keep people from slipping. A man in an undershirt answers the plastic bell on the top floor, left apartment. He studies Stone’s KGB card with an absolute minimum of interest, steps back without a word to let him enter. The one room that forms the apartment was once the house’s library; one whole wall is made up of floor-to-ceiling shelves, but instead of books, they are stacked with folded shirts, scarves, winter boots, canned goods and wineglasses (no two of which match). Washing hangs from a line strung between two unlit crystal chandeliers. Galya, looking worn and tired, lounges in a hideous modern easy chair, her legs spread wide, her shirt hanging between her thighs in a way that outlines them. She nibbles absently on dried sunflower seeds, spitting the husks into her
palm and depositing them in a dinner plate that has served as an ashtray for several days. Stone glances at the man in the T-shirt, who is leaning against the wall near the door. “You can disappear,” Stone instructs him. The man doesn’t move a muscle until Galya motions with her chin for him to leave.

  Stone gives her a glimpse of his identification card, but she ignores it. “Who you are is written all over you.” She smiles belligerently.

  “I want to know about Oleg Kulakov,” says Stone.

  “What makes you think I know anyone by that name?”

  Now it is Stone’s turn to smile. “You met him at the Actors Union buffet. You kissed him on the lips. Later you moved in with him. If you’re not willing to discuss this now, and here, we can organize to discuss it at another time, and in another place.”

  Galya takes the hint. “You don’t have to throw your weight around. What do you want to know?”

  Stone puts Galya through the paces, checking Kulakov’s version of the story detail by detail. Yes, she says, they met again by accident in a record store on Gorky street. Yes, she knows that Kulakov defected to America; she was questioned by someone from the Ministry of Defense just afterward. Yes, it was Galya who asked Kulakov if she could move in with him; she was shopping around for a job in Moscow and needed a place to stay, since she didn’t have a Moscow residence permit. “He was very preoccupied,” she explains, “with certain problems he had—something to do with his daughter and his boy. He didn’t pay much attention to me. Sometimes I had the feeling I could have died in bed alongside him and he wouldn’t have noticed.” Yes, she once brought a man back to the apartment, an actor from Leningrad she had run into. If she kissed him on the lips in front of Kulakov, it was in the spirit of playfulness. “I like to keep my men nervous,” she admits, and she adds with a provocative smile, “Nervous men make better lovers.” Galya moistens her lips, leans toward Stone, looks at him in a new light. “You, for instance, look reasonably nervous. What are you doing tonight?”

  Katushka says, “You don’t look nervous to me. If I had to describe you, I’d say you were … alert. Yes. Alert.”

  Stone smirks. “I was lucky to get out of there alive.”

  “You could always have cried rape,” teases Katushka. “The man with the undershirt might have rushed in to save you.” She absently strokes Thermidor, coiled in her lap. “I can see you are disappointed,” she says suddenly. “Things are not working out the way you thought they would.”

  Things are not working out at all the way Stone thought they would. The more people he talks to, the more it seems as if Kulakov’s story is true. And Stone doesn’t want Kulakov’s story to be true. Because if it is true, he will have to go crawling back to Washington with empty hands. But if Kulakov is a Soviet operation, and Stone can find the key to prove it—to prove false a story that everyone in Washington has accepted—he will return home to a whole new ball game. Topology budgets will increase, and the sky will be the limit for Stone. He glances across the room at Katushka, who studies him with her dark eyes. Her face and her voice are expressionless as she asks in a low voice, “And will you go away when you have finished whatever it is you are doing here?”

  There is no expression on Stone’s face either as he answers. “Yes,” he tells her. “I will leave. I will not come back.”

  The next several days are so hectic that Stone loses track of time. He leaves a midmission message with the embassy (a phone call to the naval attaché asking, in a broad American accent, if he is the Bolster who graduated from Cornell in 1956) indicating he is alive and well, and has turned up nothing so far to prove that Kulakov is a fraud. While Katushka, Morning Stalin and Ilyador are tracking down leads on the three missing links, Stone interviews the rector at Lomonosov University who expelled Kulakov’s son, Gregori, for drug abuse, then the doctor who for a short time treated Gregori at a clinic, and finally the militia captain who discovered the needle marks in Gregori’s arm and packed him off to Irkutsk. “His father was well connected,” the militia captain remembers, glancing up from Gregori’s dossier to reply to Stone’s questions. “Involved in some kind of secret work for the Ministry of Defense. We see the same thing all the time these days—the sons and daughters of important comrades, raised with every advantage up to and including foreign travel, and they wind up with puncture holes in their arms. It’s disgusting. Just yesterday we had the daughter of a Georgian Komsomol official in here—”

  Stone interrupts briskly. “Who turned Gregori on to drugs?”

  The militia captain, a tired time-server with an eye tic, shrugs. “He wouldn’t say. During the withdrawal period, he was invited in for another round of questioning; they’re usually more—how to put it?—cooperative when they’re going through withdrawal. But this one, he kept crying over and over that it wasn’t his fault, that they had obliged him to try the stuff.” He smiles knowingly at Stone, one professional speaking to another. “That’s what they all say, isn’t it? It’s never their fault, it’s always someone else’s.”

  On a rainy Wednesday, Stone goes through his usual routine of checking to see if he is being followed. He cuts through the almost deserted alleyway behind the house where Gorky once lived, rounds a corner, waits an instant, then doubles back in his tracks—and spots something. Even as he hurries away, his pulse racing, short of breath, he is not sure what has caught his eye. A shadow receding too rapidly from his field of vision? A flicker of motion where there should have been none? Whatever it was, it is enough to set Stone’s nerves on edge, and he spends the rest of the morning ducking through back doors into obscure alleyways before he comes to the conclusion (tentative; once an alarm goes off, you can disconnect it but it still echoes) that he is jumping at shadows, which is something that occurs to almost everyone who has spent any time at all in the field.

  After lunch, Stone—still keeping a wary eye on his trail—turns up at the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry in Chernyakhovsk, a suburb of Moscow. “Are you expected?” demands the uniformed sentry at the end of the driveway.

  Stone holds up his KGB identity card. “We have a standing invitation,” he says with a wink, and the guard nods knowingly and swings back the heavy steel gate just enough to allow Stone to squeeze through. As he walks up the driveway toward the building, he hears the gate clang shut behind him, and he has to fight down the fear that surges to his throat.

  “Kulakova, Nadia.” Stone repeats the name to the overweight doctor as she flips with a thumb through a stack of file cards.

  “Ah, Kulakova.” She looks up at Stone with new interest, her head slanted to one side, a Bulgarian cigarette bobbing on her lips. “The daughter of the defector Kulakov. She’s already been interrogated, you know.”

  “Not by me,” Stone says with finality, and the overweight doctor has no choice but to lead Stone through the maze of corridors, with guarded iron doors at every turn, to the basement lunchroom, which has been converted into a theater in the round for the afternoon. Dozens of inmates of the institute, all wearing formless gray bathrobes that they clutch to their bodies in the absence of belts, are seated in the chairs that have been drawn up. Some slouch with their heads nodding on their chests, others lean forward following every word spoken by the actors, who are also clutching formless gray bathrobes to their taut bodies.

  “Kulakova is the young one with the short hair,” whispers the overweight doctor. “The play is the latest thing in the way of therapy,” she says apologetically; she obviously expects him to disapprove. “It has only a vague form; a starting point, if you like. The actors make up their lines as they go along. Sometimes things come out, from one of the actors or even from one of the spectators, that are very helpful. …” Her voice starts to trail off. “All the bourgeois countries are doing this kind of …”

  A young man, completely bald but running his fingers across his scalp as if he has a full head of hair, steps away from one of the two groups the actors have divided themselves into. “Every time my
mind snares an event,” he cries, backpedaling toward center stage, “my interest runs out like the string on a reel attached to a kite.” He tries to lift off the ground, to fly, then sinks back dejectedly. “I need more wind,” he sobs. “I need more wind.”

  Nadia Kulakova drifts away from the group she is with, starts to speak with excruciating slowness, as if each word will be the last. “They are making preparations for a birth. My birth. Warm water is brought. Clean sheets too. The midwife is prevailed upon to wash her hands, which is a concession she makes to the master of the house, who is a member of the party in more or less good standing. My mother, who is religious, secretly crosses herself as the ordeal begins. When it is over, the umbilical cord is cut and I am hung on a clothesline in the sun to dry. A neighbor, notified of the joyous event by word of mouth, throws handfuls of artificial snowflakes from the roof of our building. One flake lands in my tiny palm, and I burst into tears because it refuses to melt.”

  Nadia stares at her outstretched hand for a long moment, and then bursts into tears because the artificial snowflake will not melt.

  Stone notices her nails, which are bitten to the quick, and her hair, which is uneven, as if someone had cut off handfuls with a sheep shears. Her voice is singularly without melody, without inflection, as if she is stuck on one wavelength. “They gave me haloperidol and triftazine, and once, after my father left the country, a treatment of sulfur. Sulfur raises the temperature— it’s as if you had a very high fever. You lie in bed and search hour after hour for a position that doesn’t hurt. But you never find one.”

  “What was the play about?” Stone asks.

  “Which play are you speaking of? There are many here.”