The firebird affair

Three men, two of them in the traditional Uzbek garb, appeared a short distance ahead.

Mensoor dismounted. He embraced each man, then introduced me.

“Cousin Jawid,” Mensoor said, pointing at the thick-set middle-aged man. “He’s got a boat.” He turned to the other two men. “Munir and Ismet here are going to take the Yamaha off our hands.”

Munir and Ismet untied the canvas cover on the sidecar and made approving noises. They exchanged a few words in Uzbek with Mensoor before they mounted the motorcycle and dashed off.

Cousin Jawid led us to the boat, which turned out to be a sizeable flat-bottom vessel with an outboard motor. Jawid looked like a Moslem terrorist from central casting; a broad, flat, unshaven face, dark piercing eyes, a crooked kind of smile, and a thick mustache. This was quite apart from his breath—the pungent mixture of garlic and tobacco—that nearly knocked me down when I leaped into his boat.

Mensoor cupped his hands and lit a cigarette. Jawid, a chain smoker, began paddling down the river even though he had a small outboard motor. With long even strokes, he steered the boat toward the middle. Once or twice he cursed when its flat bottom brushed a sandbar.

He stopped paddling once we reached the channel of the river. Leaning sideways, he shut one nostril with a finger pressed alongside of it, and from the other expelled a ball of snot.

Now we were being pulled downstream by the current.

“Jawid’s son is a shahid,” Mensoor said. “A martyr.” He turned around and urinated off the stern.

Mensoor continued: Jawid’s son and several other young men were killed in a government ambush. They were carrying food and supplies to the Taliban on the other side of the Amudaria River.

“He was twenty,” said Jawid. “Left a wife and a year-old son.”

“Too young to die, I said.

“It’s not important when we die—only how we die,” said Jawid.

“They all knew he was going to die,” Mensoor said. “An old fortune teller had melted lead in water and held it against the boy’s head. The lead formed the shape of a hand grenade! It was written.”

Jawid said, “He loved Allah.” He wiped the back of his hand over his nose and sniffed.

“They sacrificed a lamb,” Mensoor explained, “to show we are as loyal to God as the prophet Abraham was.”

“We love God so much that for him we give up the thing we love most. And do it without expecting anything in return.”

I said, “Your son must have loved his wife and kid?”

“You can’t love anyone more than you love God,” Jawid said so simply that I understood he had absolutely no doubt about the truthfulness of his statement. “Not your wife, father, children, brothers, other family members. And mind you, you love God without expecting anything in return.”

“What about the heaven and the virgins at the end of it,” I said.

Mensoor now injected a slight tone of doubt. “One might get in trouble. The Holy Koran says you should not expect God’s mercy, if anyone is dearer to you than God, His prophet, and the struggle on the path of His righteousness.”

How do you define the path of righteousness, I wondered. But I kept the thought to myself.

“They are all with Allah now, my son and his buddies,” Jawid said solemnly, a cigarette point glowing in the darkness “Living in the celestial gardens of delight, sitting on thrones adorned with gold and served by youths who never grow old and who go round with jugs filled with pure drink. The drink that will give them no headache, nor will it weaken their bodies. And they will take fruits that please them—whatever they desire—and they will be accompanied by fair virgins with large eyes, beautiful as pearls hidden inside their shells.”

Mensoor coughed. “Do you have children, Mister Todd?”

“One son. He’s a teacher.”

Mensoor nudged me and offered his flask. “Another shot of vodka before we go to sleep?”

I took a couple of swigs and returned the flask. “Mensoor, why are we going by boat?”

“There are checkpoints on the main roads,” Jawid replied. “You never know who we might encounter. Night is the time of unreason, we say, much more so than day.”

After a while, he added: “The government is cruel. In Andijon, the troops mowed down the demonstrators, then removed corpses from the streets during the night. Shot to death the wounded before throwing all in a mass grave.”

I unrolled a blanket that was foul-smelling and soft. I settled myself at the bottom of the squared-off hull and watched a shooting star fall and disappear. It was as if we were in the heart of the middle of nowhere. Lying down and looking at a sky of the palest lavender suggestive of the end of recorded time, I felt separated from whatever was left of my own history.

It was a windless night. I was creeping toward Hector’s former controller and, as I closed my eyes, I fantasized about my capturing the traitor somehow. When I opened my eyes, all I could hear was the soothing babble of the dark river. The sides of the boat blotted all other noises from the outer world.

Then my mind flashed to the last time I had rested at the bottom of a boat looking at the sky. We were on a small lake on the edge of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, Ken and I. The summer after we graduated from McKinley High. We took the boat to the middle of the lake. The world was asleep. Stars were a white dust. We were young and we opened our hearts to each other as I could never do later, even to Emily whom I loved more than all the wealth in the world. We craved fame. Ken as a composer. I wanted to work for the New York Times. Be one of the pundits who questioned important people on Meet the Press on Sunday morning. Where had it all gone—the subsequent years of adventure filled with optimism and excitement? What was I doing floating down the Sukhadria River with two IMU activists?

I dozed off thinking of Emily. Why was it me she chose to marry when so many others had pleaded with her? She had something, not a glow exactly, but some air of mystery that you wanted to penetrate. But was she really beautiful or had I kept her beauty alive only in my eyes? I had no answer because I could no longer see her clearly in my mind’s eye. With my eyes closed, the darks instincts of my mind now took over and composed Amanda’s image from the memory of her warm and compliant body. Abruptly, my emotions swung to longing: the way she’d present herself, arching her back and then move against me, the stifled cries and the thrusts of her buttocks driving me crazy. Surely she could not have faked it all that time.

I woke up shivering with a dawn chill. Wiping off a trail of saliva running down my cheek, I scratched at the skin of my chest, which was tormented by invisible fleas.

The light from the east was creeping into the river valley. I saw Mensoor and Jawid prostrate themselves, facing Mecca for the Morning Prayer.

“There’s a hydro-electric power plant further down,” Mensoor said later, nodding toward the vast expanses of water ahead.

After a while, the Sukhadria River was more than two miles wide, gradually turning into the man-made Kumkurgan Lake.

We approached the mouth of an irrigation canal on the western bank.

“Oy… oy,” cried Jawid. He wiped his nose on his arm. “Inshallah.”

34
I had no idea what to expect, but I kept recalling the photographs Holz had shown me. Bogumilov’s face had sharp features, untamed hair, a prominent nose and a strong chin. Oleg Vissarionovich Bogumilov. A cryptonym? The name the KGB gave to their Uzbek spymaster?

It was the patronymic that had made me suspicious in the first place. Was that gallows humor, I wondered. Vissarionovich was Stalin’s patronymic.

What if Rashidov turned out not to be Bogumilov? It would mean that I had been thrown off the scent. Was there another explanation? Churkin had said that Rashidov was Hector’s KGB control.

As we navigated canals that linked the two rivers in the valley, I asked Mensoor about Rashidov.

“He’s an old man,” Mensoor said in a laconic response.

A few seconds later, Jawid said, “He’s done a lot for the cause. No protection money, no customs or troops to pay off, just a slice of the cake to IMU. ”

“A very good man,” Mensoor said in Russian, then switched briefly to Uzbek.

We reached Sherabad before noon.

The only tense moment came after we disembarked and got into a waiting taxi. Almost immediately, we were caught up in heavy traffic. The bridge in front of us choked and red taillights stretched way ahead into the town. Plumes rose from hundreds of rusty exhaust pipes and their abrasive tang filled the air. Drivers leaned on their horns, cursing furiously.

There was a flashing blue light ahead.

“Checkpoint?” Mensoor said in alarm.

“Just a traffic accident,” the driver said.

I closed my eyes and dreamed of a cold shower and a change of clothes. When I opened them, Sherabad was a mirage. The sun was the deep yellow of an egg yolk. The temperature was over 100.

Few men sat in chairs outside a teahouse, apparently ordering nothing. The sight brought memories of a visit to Central Asia years earlier when I wrote about their Muslim population refusing to accept, even to contemplate, the Soviet way of life. Something happened to communism in the furnace-heat, blinding sun all day long, the seat and the heaviness of the night.

We passed the open market. Black-cloaked women squatted behind large clay jugs. From the sagging porches of shops that lined the street, beneath faded signs in Uzbek, ranged a sea of turbans—white, deep blue, purple, black and pink—some pumpkin-shaped, some flat and broad. And there were beggars around, an army of deformed humans with knobby limbs, some of them moving about on little wooden trolleys.

Soon we entered a warren of mud shacks with corrugated metal roofs. The narrow streets were empty, except for prowling dogs and cats. The people escaped the burning sun.

We came to a stop outside Farooq’s Auto Body shop.

Farooq was a strikingly handsome man with aquiline features and a finely trimmed beard. He embraced Mensoor, shook hands with me.

Farooq pulled his cell phone and flipped it open. The phone emitted a perky bleep and lit up with a light green glow. He pressed once on the keypad and went into the house.

When he came out again, he was carrying a copper tray with three small handle-less cups. He said something in Uzbek to Mensoor, then turned to me. ”We must do this quickly.”

Thirty minutes later, I sat between Mensoor and Farooq in a small pickup truck.

By now it was past two o’clock. The heat was oppressive. I was sweating. The bazaar was deserted.

We headed northwest, up a sharp incline.
35
The house was on the western outskirts of the town. It was hidden by a wall of evergreens and shrubbery. I saw two closed-circuit cameras, one over the main entrance, the other discreetly placed at the corner west of it.

We were admitted by a tall manservant in a flowing white tunic and white baggy shalvar kemeez. He had a long face and a mouthful of outsized teeth. He seemed to be more bodyguard than butler.

The manservant winked to Mensoor who took off his shoes—apparently the rule of the house—and placed them on the family rack next to the entrance.

“You don’t have to do it,” Mensoor said to me. “You’re a guest.”

The manservant winked again and I realized he had an eyelid that was twitching uncontrollably from time to time.

I followed Mensoor’s example.

We were ushered to a large, airy room. Everything about it, I thought—thick oriental carpets, two divans covered with needlework counterpanes, emerald and orange cushions, potted plants sunk into big terra-cotta containers, palms, rubber plants, ferns, whatnot—everything signaled wealth. I thought about the dramatic contrast between the luxurious interior and an unostentatious, perhaps deliberately neglected exterior.

I settled in a sumptuous leather couch.

Scanning the room, my eyes were drawn to several framed photographs on top of a lacquered black cabinet. Only one was black and white, obviously a wedding picture in a silver frame, with all the signature touches of a provincial photographer: the young couple posing next to a vase of roses, their petals hand painted red and the stems green. The groom had his left hand lifted ever so slightly to make sure his watch was showing.

In the center was the color portrait of a pretty women, slightly older than the bride in the silver frame. Here she was a well-groomed lady with mysterious eyes, long eyelashes, and black hair bouffant styled a la Jackie Kennedy. The remaining four photos showed the couple outside the UN headquarters; on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum; in front of the Smithsonian Castle. In the fourth photograph, she was alone, wearing a wide hat and a long floral skirt, her blouse partially unbuttoned, one hand lifted to close the blouse, a breeze playing across her face. Behind her, a big suspension bridge and a couple of minarets on the opposite side of the river.

I concentrated on the man. I got up to take a better look, and my heart began to pound and leap. Was this Bogumilov? Good Lord! I remembered Bogumilov’s steely eyes, the strong chin, facial features, thick unruly black hair and long sideburns fashionable at the time. Could I be wrong?

I closed my eyes and opened them again, concentrating my gaze on the man. God Almighty, I thought, there’s no doubt about it. Bogumilov had been Rashidov’s cryptonym.

I felt I was close now—so close that I could almost see Hector in handcuffs being taken to Leavensworth. So close to be alarmed by the ruthlessness of my desire for revenge.

I looked over my shoulder and said as casually as I was able to manage, “Is this Mr. Rashidov?”

“Yes,” Mensoor said.

I was right. Rashidov and Bogumilov were one and the same person. Get a grip on yourself, I thought. This was the moment I had dreamed about and I could think of nothing else: I had to get the traitor’s name. That was the only thing in life I wanted.

“That’s his wife, Amra,” Mensoor said, pointing at the woman. “A beautiful woman, don’t you think?”

“Mmm… yes, yes, very beautiful,” I said distractedly, without even looking at her.

“She died from cancer.”

“I’m sorry,” I said automatically. “Any children?”

“One girl. Married. Her son drew that black cat,” Mensoor pointed at the child’s sketch of a black cat in a wood frame hanging on the wall.

I glanced at the sketch, then slowly reviewed Rashidov’s photographs. “He was a rather good looking guy,” I said, just to keep the conversation going.

“Ehh, he was much younger then.”

“Yes, much younger,” another voice said. Rashidov had quietly entered the room.

He walked with a cane, slowly, dressed in white linen trousers and maroon silk shirt. He was slightly stooped now, his head bald except for a gray halo. I noted pigmentation changing circles on the pate of his head.

Had I met this man accidentally in the street, I had to admit, I would have never connected him to the young man in the photographs. Not in a thousand years. Not because he was now somehow shorter and older. It was the loss of hair that had altered his appearance much more than the routine ravages of time.

Rashidov gave me a surprisingly firm handshake. He looked briefly at Mensoor and, with a quick nod, indicated that he wanted to speak to me in private.

Mensoor excused himself and walked out.

I stared at the photographs, seeking to reconcile two images. I’d dreamed this scene so many times, but in my dreams, of course, Rashidov was far more expansive and talkative, in fact he was eager to tell everything about Hector. I said, “Your wife was a beautiful woman.”

“Yes,” Rashidov said. “She passed away three years ago.”

“I’m sorry.” I paused a little for reasons of good taste. “I’m happy that you found the time to see me.”

“Actually I didn’t quite understand the purpose of your visit when I was first contacted,” Rashidov said after he settled into a wooden chair with a high back. “But now you’re here and you’re welcome.”

Evidently he was showing me the consideration due to a foreigner in a strange land.

He craned his head toward the door and then turned to face me: “May I offer you green tea with cardamom. Perhaps Turkish coffee?” He picked up the glasses that hung around his neck, lifted them to his nose, and looked at me. “Or perhaps something more potent? Whisky or raki?”

“Scotch, please, and a glass of ice water.” I was dying for a glass of ice water and a shot of whisky.

The manservant must have been somewhere by the door for he appeared almost immediately to take orders.

“Coffee for me,” Rashidov said. “And a small raki on the side. You must think me a hypocrite, Mr. Martin. I’m one of those Moslems who support Moslem tradition—but not religious orthodoxy.”

The servant returned with a glass of cut crystal, a bottle of White Horse, a pitcher of ice water, a small cup of coffee, and a tumbler with raki on a silver tray.

Rashidov dug into his pocket and pulled out a string of amber and silver worry beads. “Now,” he said and fixed his eyes on me.

I found his inquisitive gaze somewhat disconcerting, as was the thumbing of the worry beads.

I quickly summarized why my personal quest for truth had led me to Sherabad. I repeated what Churkin had told me. I wanted to put the whole thing to rest, I said. I owed it to my wife and to my son.

Rashidov sat and listened, nodding from time to time. After I finished, we sat briefly in silence. He lit another cigarette and then started playing with his worry beads. “How old was your son at the time?”

“He was seventeen. Always thought some monkey business was involved.”

“Only one son?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm, seventeen. Difficult age,” Rashidov sighed. “At that age, children always blame the parents, don’t they? I know. When my wife died, my daughter blamed me—not that she’d ever say it, but I could feel it. Why didn’t I fly mom to the Mayo clinic? I’d taken Amra to the best Swiss hospital and had one of the most renowned oncologists from Sloan Kettering fly over to examine her. Too late. All they could recommend was palliative care.”

There was no end to surprises when it came to Joseph, I thought.

I rubbed a palm across my face, feeling stubble. I was heading for a real beard. And I sympathized with Rashidov.

“You have only one child?” I asked.

He nodded—yes. “Here in Central Asia, we have lots of children. Partly due to poor education, partly vanity.”

“Vanity?”

“Yes, vanity. We all secretly seek immortality. Someone to remember you after you’re gone.” He stopped and looked at me deeply. “When you tell me you want to know the truth,” he said, not trying to conceal the sarcasm, “you already know the truth.”

“Well, not quite.”

He was now stirring his coffee for a full minute, I thought.

“I’ll have to disappoint you,” Rashidov said with genuine sorrow. ”I had absolutely nothing to do with your wife’s death. It’s very unfortunate… I’m sorry. I learned about it after the fact. You already know more than I.”

I waited for a while. Be straightforward, said an optimistic voice inside me. “Churkin told me you were the case officer of the agent inside the US embassy.”

“Oh, did he?” He shook his head, neither yes nor no. Then his face became briefly a rictus of annoyance, I thought. “Well, yes. That’s true,” he said.

“In that sense, you were a part of the little plot.”

Rashidov winced. “I worked directly for the chairman. But let me assure you that I had no knowledge of their plans for a coup.”

“I don’t follow.”

“My role was limited. I collected the agent’s reports. I met him a few times. He lived in one of the diplomatic ghettos. All he had to do was slide a manila envelope under the permanently locked doors of the attic in his building. I’d come every day dressed as a maintenance man. My job was to check if there was an envelope waiting for me.” He paused. “Pour yourself another drink, please.”

I wasn’t interested in another drink. I said, “How did my wife fit into all this?”

“Well…. they had photographs of your wife and Professor Voronov at a concert. Evidence of nefarious CIA activities…”

“Why give her a truth drug?”

“As I remember, the chairman had to protect our agent. Believe me, nobody wanted to harm your wife. That’s for sure. I’d swear on my wife’s grave.”

“To protect your agent?”

”Yes. Throw the mole hunters off the scent.”

“Why her?”

Rashidov paused a beat and then shrugged. “There are a number of ways to throw them off. Rumors, clever tricks. Sometimes you let the other side discover”—he made quotation marks with his fingers—“a bug so they’d become convinced that no human intel was involved. This agent was so important that the chairman felt it necessary to mislead our own service.”

“His own service?”

“Yes. What’s the point of having a fabulous agent in place if any two-bit blabbermouth could sink him?”

“So what do you do?”

“You know, people gossip. Nothing sinister, just bragging, you know, over lunch in the canteen. So you have to create illusions. As I already said, there was that photograph of your wife with Voronov. The chairman decided to have that little scene at the Prague just to make sure if there was going to be any gossip it would be about the American woman.”

I choked a bit. After a moment I said, “When you administer these drugs, do you have to have correct dosages?”

“Yes. There’s always a KGB physician present. That’s the rule.”

“What if the dosage is incorrect?”

Rashidov considered for a moment. “Impossible. That’s never happened,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re beating a dead horse, Mr. Martin. Even if there was a mistake made, we’ll never know. All material evidence was immediately destroyed.”

“Like it never took place?”

“Yeah.”

The moment I said it, I sensed all was lost.

“So you think betrayal has a face?” Rashidov thought for a while, busying his hands with serial rearrangements of his coffee cup, saucer and worry beads. When he continued, his voice didn’t turn hostile, but I knew I had crossed into enemy territory. “You’re asking me to betray the man who’s risked thirteen, fourteen years of his life working for me and my service, who gave us some of the best intelligence we’ve ever had. To be utterly frank, I think you’re out of your mind.”

I just looked at him, said nothing.

“Do I look to you like a man who’d blow a friend away, Mr. Martin?” Rashidov blew into the palm of his hand.

He knew all about betrayals—I saw it in his eyes. I knew at that moment I’d never get anything out of him. I felt my very soul shriveling inside me.

Rashidov cleared his throat. “If I could bring your wife back to life, I might even consider your request. But that’s impossible, isn’t it.”

There was firmness in his voice, an indication that he’d made his decision. “Why not let the sleeping dogs alone? I think there must be a statute of limitation on everything under the sun.”

I thought: there’s no statute of limitation on betrayal, on treason. But there was no point in arguing. I cast around for something to say that could lighten the atmosphere. All I came up with was a mumbled, “Maybe.”