part of my induction into international affairs to be silent about my mother’s Russian Jewish background

I nodded. “Vaguely.” It was a part of my induction into international affairs to be silent about my mother’s Russian Jewish background.

“Zhar Ptitsa doesn’t exist, Firebird files don’t exist. Right?” Volkov again pushing his lips out like a blowfish. “This must have been a Firebird matter.”

This made me think of my strange parents. They never attended meetings with my teachers or read books to me or took me skating and stuff other parents did. But Dad taught me to play chess, which was a passion of his, and Mom enjoyed telling me fairy tales. Not those by the Grimm Brothers or H.C. Andersen, but reciting from memory old Russian tales full of oriental splendor and miraculous exploits. Of course I knew Zhar ptitza. The bird whose song could heal the sick and return vision to the blind. I remember Mom saying, zh, zh, zh? Say zhhh. I rarely responded to her Russian when I was growing up, and outside our home, I’d pretend to have nothing to do with the strange lady who spoke accented English and who—after a lifetime in America—wrote her sevens with lines drawn through them. I used to think when I was a teenager that she was somehow inadequate when compared to other ladies in the Chauteau Avenue neighborhood. Only later I realized my condescending attitude was wrong. She was actually quite smart. Her English was more than sufficient to navigate everyday life, even if sometimes difficult to understand. But at night, when she’d sit on my bed and embellish stories, her Russian was soft and soothing and her inflexion so suggestible as to quickly transport me to a faraway land of green valleys with trees whose fruit were precious jewels and pure gold. Surely it was because of her that I started writing stories. Because of her, I’ve always been suspicious of authorities; I still cringe when I recall how submissive—even obsequious—she’d become in front of uniformed officials. This I believe had something to do with calamities and humiliation experienced in her youth. Perhaps that’s why she was a very private person who knew how to leave many things unsaid. One great thing about America, she’d say, is that it’s up to you to decide how much of yourself you want to reveal. Well, she was like an iceberg—nine tenths of her below the waterline.

“Still doesn’t make sense,” I said.

I saw a shadow briefly pass over Volkov’s face. “Well, yes, I see,” he acknowledged.

“Could we check the archives? There must be a paper trail!”

His face said, that’s a stupid thought, petulant and impossible. “A Firebird operation means no paper trail. Perhaps a few cryptic references Kuzmich wrote down on the chairman’s schedule. Kuzmich was his right hand man.” He was silent for a while. “Mind you, we’re talking about the summer of 1991 when documents were shredded by the ton and the incinerators were going full blast round the clock.”

That was the summer the old order unexpectedly collapsed. I tried to imagine Volkov and his panicked colleagues burning documents and bundling the most sensitive papers into bags to be moved out of sight by a secret underground rail link connecting the Lubyanka and the Kremlin. Outside the Lubyanka, a howling mob unsuccessfully trying to topple the massive statue of Iron Felix—Felix Dzerzhinski, the founder of the Soviet secret police—until a crane, under the glare of klieg lights, lifted a man up to attach a cable around Dzerzhinski’s neck and pull him down. I saw these things not from any vivid recollection but from a thought in my head, as real only as the lines in the newspapers. Perhaps, I wondered, my late father’s passionate anticommunism had transferred itself wholesale to the son?

Volkov must have guessed my thoughts. He said, “How fast a life can get all twisted around.” Then added quickly, “By the way, I was at Yasenovo at that time.” The headquarters of the First Directorate in the southwest suburbs of Moscow. This seemed an important point for him—his way of saying that he had been involved in foreign espionage—not internal repression. The old wolf, as his name implied, knew the KGB was mainly hated for suppressing domestic dissidents, not for spying on foreign governments.

I said, “I want to talk to someone who’s familiar with Emily’s case. That would mean a lot to me. I imagine there are still people like that around.”

I supposed it was my bluntness, or the emotion with which I asked my question, that caught him off guard.

A doubtful smile appeared on his lips. “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’ll be possible,” he said frowning.

“Why?”

The receptionist knocked on the door and opened it.

“Sorry, this is urgent. Line two.”

He turned around in his swivel chair and picked up the receiver. He assumed the calm demeanor of a Buddha. He listened carefully, said yes or no several times, and stared at the phone.

I picked up my tea, finished it, took the opportunity to study him a little. With a hooked nose, a brow that expressed permanent impatience, deep-set dark eyes and thinning dark hair as a fringe to his naked scalp, he reminded me of the actor who plays Inspector Poirot in Agatha Christie’s BBC series.

Volkov hung up and turned back to me, his eyes widening. “I wish I could be of more help,” he said, adding with an air of finality, “All that happened in another country and in another century.” No leads. Nothing. Another dead end.

The trouble is, once you start assuming there was no point in doing what you’re doing, you’re tempted to bring it to an end. I took a gulp, literally and metaphorically, and thought about making one final stab at it.

“It all happened right here in Moscow,” I said, shaking my head dejectedly. “Only eleven years ago. Don’t tell me there’s no one around who might know things.”

He studied me for a moment before answering. “All the people in the know are gone,” he mused with an air of furtive sorrow for the past. The chairman died from cancer of the liver; one top aide died in a Black Sea sailing accident; Churkin’s gone “soft in the head;” two others died of old age; finally Kuzmich had a fatal heart attack while vacationing in Greece.

I realized immediately that something possibly important had happened, that buried within his lengthy explanation was the first nugget of information I was looking for: Churkin. I filed away the name. Maybe I’d finally hit pay dirt, I thought. But what exactly did gone soft in the head mean? Senility? Alzheimer’s? Parkinson’s?

“You mean to tell me only five or six people knew about this case?” My mind flipped through other possible questions.

“Yes,” he said with a knowing air. “In Firebird operations, even cipher clerks were cut out. Take your Aldrich Ames; his case officer communicated directly with the chairman. No intermediaries of any kind. Or take another famous compatriot of yours, Robert Hanssen. Even the chairman himself didn’t know his identity! Nobody here did, yet he was one of the best ever.”

I said, “Okay, I understand that: these are traitors who spied for you. They held high government positions. But how the hell could my wife figure in a Firebird operation?”

He casually flicked his hand. Who knows? “An interesting question,” he said.

“Don’t you know. I mean, you yourself must have been involved in such operations?”

He was silent. Then he nodded—yes.

“In each and every case, I presume, there was a reason,” I said. “So there must have been a reason in this case, too.”

“I think so,” he said.

“Why would the KGB worry about Emily at a time of great upheavals,” I went on. “She was a music teacher and housewife, for crying out loud.” My mind flashed to the time when Emily was the second cello for the Fairfax Symphony, immediately followed by the guilty notion that I had robbed her of a musical career.

He took his time before answering. He started out the window into the distance, and then lit another cigarette. “Honestly, I don’t know.”

“You got a theory?”

For the first time since we started talking, he gave a shout of laughter. “There are lots of people who could spin theories, who claim to know. All former colonels! Believe them all, and you must wonder if the Service had any lower ranks. To have a theory you need a few facts…”

He looked puzzled, and I believed him.

The interview had reached a dead end. I could tell he hadn’t warmed to me, but that didn’t dampen my good mood: I had a lead. I got up. “I hope I haven’t taken too much of your time.”

“Everything’s normal,” he said.

He came around his desk and looked at me, nodding. “A word before you go, my friend,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders to walk me out. “We have a saying—the nail that sticks out gets hammered,” he said and craned his head forward, an anticipatory look on his face. “My advice to you is: don’t rock the boat.”

It took me a couple of seconds to do a mental translation, but I could not decide whether this was a veiled threat.

23

Later that day, I received a message from Tony Scarna, the former press attaché and my occasional tennis partner. After leaving the Foreign Service, Scarna had joined a K Street lobbying firm which, according to a recent Drudge Report story, had been approached by the Kremlin to help refurbish Russia’s image. But the reason for coming to Moscow was the annual Russia Fund board meeting. Also coming were former ambassador Morgan and a few other embassy colleagues. I was invited to meet them at dinner Thursday night. At the Noah’s Ark.

Jennifer’s message was in the form of an inquiry—was I okay and so on—but its tone sounded disapproving, as though I had been wasting my time on some frivolous business. My silence, it seemed, was treated as a capital offense. I knew that I could recoup by promptly confessing my guilt and offering abject apologies. But the truth was that, at that moment, I simply didn’t care. For the first time since arriving in Moscow, I was starting to feel positive about my mission. So I sent a brief, friendly reply, telling Jennifer that she should not expect any messages from me for a while.

When I saw Amanda in the evening, she said: “You look like the cat that got the cream.” She was frightfully perceptive, I thought. I told her that finally I probably had a real lead. She asked a few questions, then she flipped her hair from her eyes with a practiced toss of her head and gestured seductively at the bedroom.

When I awoke, it was dark and I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was. Then I heard her breathing and it all came back to me. For the first time, I remembered, yes for the first time, I had a name of someone who seemed to be the exact type of person I was looking for. I was no longer like a boat without oar and rudder. I knew who to look for. Now I was in full journalism mode. It kicked in whenever I was working on a story I deeply cared about: a single-minded need to get information, to find out. Almost nothing else mattered. Food. Comfort. Nothing.

24

Igor kept glancing up into the rearview mirror. “You just say yes and no in the right places. Otherwise keep quiet and smile.”

It was Joseph who had obtained through his connections two bits of information about Churkin. One was that he spent most of his time playing chess or building telescopes from scratch and grinding the lenses himself. The other was that Churkin was recuperating at the Burning Bush sanatorium. It was a secret police rest home, Joseph said, “something between an old people’s home and a funny farm.”

Joseph had been reluctant at first “Okay, I’ll help you on this,” he finally said.

The plan of action was simple. Igor and I were going to visit the wife of a former KGB electronics wizard named Arkady who had installed surveillance cameras and infrared detectors around Joseph’s property. She was at the Burning Bush in the early stages of dementia. Arkady, who regularly swept Joseph’s house and office for bugs, had mentioned that last couple of times he had gone to see his wife she had failed to recognize him.

“Her name is Larissa Vadimovna,” Igor said, looking up again into the rearview mirror. “She’s my aunt.” He was leaning forward over the wheel to rub clear a spot on the windshield. “Got that? We’re bringing her favorite cookies and chocolates.”

“Yes.” I nodded.

Once we got off the beltway, the traffic immediately thinned out. At first we passed gated dacha communities and new shops and restaurants. After about fifteen minutes we were in the country of back gardens full of weeds and grimy lean-to greenhouses where the telephone and power lines hung like wash lines between shaky poles. We passed a couple of biblical-looking villages with television aerials as the only symbols of the twenty-first century.

“Fuck,” Igor barked, looking up at his mirror. “We’re being tailed! Fuck! Fuck.”

I turned around. The only other vehicle on a two-way tarmacadam road was a yellow SUV. It was a long way behind them.

“I first saw them way back,“ Igor said.

“Cops?”

Igor said, “I don’t think so.”

“There he goes,” Igor said.

He went quiet for a while. “Now,” Igor resumed, “remember: You say yes and no in the right places.”

“But what if she has a lucid moment and says, ‘Hey, who are you? I’ve never seen you before.’” I had considered not coming along on this trip, but Igor had insisted that we’d have no problems.

“Don’t contradict her! Just say she’s right. Remember, she didn’t recognize her own husband the other day.”

Burning Bush was set in a bucolic landscape about twenty miles outside Moscow’s outer ring road. The estate was surrounded by the lush tangle of old forest made nearly impenetrable by ubiquitous ferns, ivy, and the boughs of secondary growth.

The once imposing main building had a hint of Versailles about it, offering a distinct architectural nod toward a French chateau. It had obviously belonged to a Czarist mandarin. Two mutilated marble lions on pedestals flanked the high iron gate.

We were waved in by a guard, a short, bald man with thick jowls and red patches on the cheeks. His expression suggested he was bored to death by his job.

Next to the main building, there was a rectilinear modern structure evidently built after the revolution, when the estate had been taken over by the secret police. It looked fragile, threatened by an enormous poplar that had been allowed to grow to an obscene height. Hurricane weather, I thought, could halve it like cheese wire.

This was where the secret police looked after their own. Still.

The compound had a ten-foot-high chain link fence, which was mostly hidden behind mature evergreen trees and bushes on both sides.

A group of men stood in a semi-circle in the deep green shade of an old chestnut tree.

“Chess,” Igor said.

Igor parked near the base of a wide stone porch. A babushka in a colorless cotton smock stood near the entrance staring at me. She made me feel uncomfortable. I heard the cello drone of insects.

We walked around the building and climbed six steps to a stone terrace.

A pair of French doors gave onto the terrace and we were met by a nurse in white, her ginger-colored hair teased and baked into a stiff beehive. She had chalky skin and appeared so morose that I could imagine real bees buzzing around her head.

“We’re looking for Larissa Vadimovna,” Igor said to her.

“Not possible today,” the nurse frowned. She had a manner of speaking that made questions seem not only unnecessary but also rude.

Igor took her aside. “We came all this way, dearest,” He said ingratiatingly, attempting leverage to guilt her into being more cooperative.

“No, not possible. She’s having a bad day.”

”We’ll wait. Maybe she’ll get better.”

“Not possible,” the nurse said sharply. “You’re disturbing the patients.”

They were now glaring at each other. How Igor planned to get to Churkin was a mystery, but I understood intuitively that we mustn’t cave in. Then I saw Igor fish out what looked like a thousand ruble note from his pocket, fold it into a white kerchief and with lightening speed, slip the kerchief into the breast pocket of the nurse’s white coat and then slowly adjust it as if to achieve a proper esthetic effect. It was a move so brazen and so unexpected that I thought the nurse would scream for help. I was gooseflesh, head to toe.

The nurse had started making a baleful gesture with her finger—that’s it, I thought—but then she quickly glanced to the left and to the right, shook her head and cracked one of those smiles Russian country women crack when pretending that someone has made an improper sexual advance.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said, her face seemed to soften. “Come this way.”

We followed her through poorly-lit, endless corridors of gray walls and brown doors to the apple green common room. A dozen women sat in wooden chairs around an elongated table covered with a plastic tablecloth, talking, laughing, or dragging deeply on cigarettes. When we entered, everybody went quiet.

“You sit down, boys,” the nurse said to us. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Everybody stared at us. Igor stared back. I averted my gaze. Did not want to be reminded; I’d reached uncomfortable territory. Six years earlier, I had left my mother in a nursing home. Well, I had to. Last time I visited her, she was only a shell of who she used to be; the doctor said she was acting more confused every day. She’d forgotten who she was and she no longer recognized her things or knew she had them. Occasionally, her stunted youth would reassert itself like when she insisted she was in a Nazi Strafkamp and spoke German to the nurses. At the end of my visit, I felt so shitty because I was abandoning her. It cut me to the bone, that memory.

“God, it’s depressing,” I said.

He nodded and shrugged. “Keep quiet,” he said.

The nurse reappeared. She was accompanied by a tall, bald, and slightly bowlegged man in a white short-sleeved shirt. There was a red cigarette pack peeking out of his breast pocket behind a plastic protector and a row of pens.

“Our administrator, Gennady Ivanovich,” she introduced him. “These comrades want to wait to see if Larissa Vadimovna comes down for dinner. Is that okay?”

“Is she sleeping now?” the administrator asked.

The nurse nodded—yes.

“They can wait a bit, Zina,” the administrator said. “I’ve got to run.”

The nurse said, “I’ll take them to the library. They can wait there.”

Now that Igor found out her name, he promptly began calling her ingratiatingly by an endearing diminutive: Zinochka—little Zina. We were halfway down the hall when Igor said, casually, “How’s my friend Vassily Petrovich? Is he still grinding lenses for his telescopes or is he playing chess?”

“Churkin?” The nurse gave Igor a strange look, as if searching for a sign of some irregularity. But then she chuckled. “It’s chess under that old chestnut tree— all the time.” She opened the door to the library and showed them in with a wave of the hand.

“He’s a chess fanatic,” Igor said.

“He’s back home now,” she said. “Left two weeks ago.”

“Oh?” Igor said. “Back at Sadovaya-Samotochnaya?”

“He’s on Zubovskaya,” the nurse said.

“That’s right,” Igor responded quickly. “I always get those two mixed up.”

I felt as though I had witnessed what amounted to a coded exchange. “What was that all about,” I asked after Zinochka left us alone.

“We know now where he lives,” Igor said, smiling broadly. There were several relatively new apartment buildings for senior KGB and military, Igor explained. He chose the two in central Moscow. “A shot in the dark. Like Ostap Bender, eh? Not bad, eh?” He winked and uttered a deep guttural laugh referring to the most famous con man in modern Russian literature. “Now we’ve got to get out of here.”

The nurse appeared after a while with two cups of sweet tea.

“Come to think of it,” Igor suddenly said, “we really should come back here another time. You’re such a sweetheart, Zinochka. Really appreciate your help. We’ll phone in advance before we come out next time.” He handed her a plastic bag. “Here’s a little something for Auntie Lara. She loves chocolates.”

The nurse grabbed it and began to rummage through gift-wrapped boxes. “We have to check all gifts,” she said apologetically. “Regulations, you know.”

“Absolutely,” said Igor. “By the way, the big Toblerone is for you.”

25

As soon as we were back in the car, Igor smiled. “I’ll drive by Churkin’s building on the way back so you can take a good look.” He slowed down before turning on to the macadam road. ”Now watch out for the yellow SUV. It’s a Mitsubishi,” he said and glanced at the rearview mirror.

“No tail,” I said, searching the horizon.

“Too early to tell. Let’s see.”

We took a circuitous back road. The sun was about to slip below the western treetops. We were sixteen kilometers from Moscow, the first sign said.

As we came closer to the highway, the scenery began to change. Gas stations and auto repair shops appeared, then car dealerships and diners and nascent suburbs of fancy homes with decks and colorful awnings.

Igor turned onto an access lane, which led onto the inner loop of the Ring. The double highway had a middle strip of grass the width of a basketball court. We headed west for about ten minutes, Igor checking his mirror occasionally.

Jaguars, Toyotas, Volvos and BMWs tore up past us, going one hundred or more. The miles passed with nothing but the whine of tires and the whoosh of cars and my mind drifted into memories that had been stirred by the sight of dementia patients.

Suddenly, Igor said, “Fuck!” He kept glancing at his side view mirror. “Fuck. Those guys are professionals.”

I turned around. The yellow Mitsubishi SUV was some distance behind us, in the slow lane.

“You sure they aren’t cops,” I said.

“Fuck no,” Igor said, and continued cursing.

“I assume…” I began.

Igor interrupted, “Let’s not assume anything for the moment. We’d better let this play itself out. I want to know why they are following me.”

Indeed why! I hadn’t asked because a part of me preferred the illusion that Joseph’s banking business was an above-board enterprise, perhaps slightly crooked but not criminal, and certainly nothing to do with the gang warfare I’d read about. But why all the bodyguards? And guns? Until a few weeks ago, I’d never had any contact with people from the underworld.