The firebird affair

He suddenly turned off the highway at the exit leading to a place called Terehovo. “We’ll find out who these assholes are,” he barked, steaming like a locomotive. “An old buddy of mine runs a little beer joint out here.”

It was darkening outside. I could see a few lights on in a square two-story building. A neon sign in Latin reading Starlite Bar was suspended next to a Cyrillic one. Four cars were parked outside. I could hear the clatter of plates and pots.

“Here we are,” Igor said. He rummaged in the trunk, pulled out a pistol, and stuck it in his waistband.

“You need that?” I asked.

“Probably not, but just in case,” Igor said with a thin smile.

The downstairs was paneled in dark brown wood. Small booths with red vinyl seat covering along one wall, a thirty-foot zinc counter complete with chromium footrest and lit by a blue neon strip along the other. Behind the bar was a thirty foot long mirror from which protruded glass shelves supporting every imaginable brand of vodka, whiskey, gin, whatnot. The whole establishment, I thought, was wrapped up in something like Americana diner decor.

The place was nearly empty. A giggling young couple was kissing and embracing in a booth. A pudgy middle-aged man, sitting on the last of the high chromium-legged stools, was watching a soccer match on TV.

“Look who’s here,” a woman from behind the counter cried. Her eyes were rimmed with gothic mascara, her flaming red hair was twisted into a tight chignon, and she held a cigarette in a holder.

“Well, well, well, how’s our sleeping beauty,” Igor said, grinning. “As I told you, whenever you get tired of him, you know where to come…”

She responded with infectious laughter. ”You lecherous bastard,” she said. “Slava’s back in the office.”

We took seats at the bar and ordered beer.

“Slava’s my old army buddy.” Igor explained, looking at the mirror. “Nice place, eh? Downstairs he’s got a sausage menu, upstairs is fancy. White table cloths, wine lists, a classical guitarist.”

Igor got up, signaling he was going to the toilet.

I looked at the mirror and saw the yellow Mitsubishi pull up some distance from the Mercedes SUV.

Igor returned as two men pushed open the heavy wooden door and headed for the bar. One was a tall gaunt man—over six foot, with a heavy five o’clock shadow and a meaty upper lip. His skin was pitted and flecked with red.

The other was a bull, looking like a professional wrestler with a flattened nose and lots of blond hair down his shoulder blades; his neck was wider than his face and rose out of a blue shirt, wide open at the throat.

The tall one coughed loudly, took a bar stool, and ordered a lager. The other asked for double vodka and glanced curiously at me.

“To your health, buddy,” said the wrestler, giving me a goofy grin.

I nodded. These are not cops, I thought.

“Tourists?” he asked after downing his vodka. Somewhere underneath the folds of flesh, an Adam’s apple moved.

“Sort of,” I said nonchalantly, as if I were talking to no one in particular. But the moment I said it, I realized I should not be talking to these ruffians at all.

“What does it mean sort of,” said the gaunt fellow in a rude, grating voice. His eyes were deep-set and shifty.

“Foreigners,” the wrestler butted in.

“You should know,” Igor said, still looking at their reflections in the mirror.

“Huh?” said the wrestler. He turned to his friend. “This clown here’s trying to pick a quarrel.”

“You’ve been tailing me since Kievskoe Shosse,” Igor said calmly, still not turning around. “I’d like to know why.”

The gaunt brute said, “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

The two men quickly exchanged looks, which I thought were openly spelling trouble.

In all the years I had worked as a reporter, I’d never been physically attacked. I don’t count stray shrapnel that grazed me in Cyprus. I had been in the midst of wars, invasions, political shenanigans, crooked elections, strikes, earthquakes, and other conflicts. Observing catastrophe from a safe distance. Always an observer, never a participant. Now I recoiled at the prospect of being pummeled unconscious by a couple of ruffians. For a split second, I was back on Russell Avenue outside McKinley High being beaten unconscious by the class thug named Rex. He had thrown me to the ground and demanded a nifty miniature camera I got for my eleventh birthday.

“Listen—” I tried to conciliate, my heart pounding.

“Shut the fuck up, asshole!” the wrestler exclaimed.

“That’s unnecessary,” I said. In that moment, I knew what was about to happen.

“I said shut up.” The wrestler struck me on the mouth with his left hand before swinging his right fist directly into my chest. I took a step back, but then my body buckled and collapsed. I tried to heave myself upward, but a shuddering blow to the back of my neck pushed me down. I knew that I was out for the count before I hit the floor.

When I came to, I felt my mouth full of blood. I saw the wrestler lying unconscious on the floor next to me and Igor sitting on top of the surly tall man and holding a broken glass bottle to his face.

I heard Slava’s voice, “Let’s clean up the mess.”

“I’m going to give you one more chance,” Igor said to the tall man. “Who sent you and why? Tell me. Or you’ll need plastic surgery.”

The man blinked then shook his head. “MSK,” he mouthed.

“Speak up,” Igor commanded. “MSK what?”

“Moscow Security Consultants.”

“So MSK sent you to spy on us,” Igor said. “And why?”

“We’re subcontractors,” the man moaned.

“Who’s the client?”

“An American security firm subcontracted a London firm which hired MSK.”

“What’s the name of the American firm?”

“Don’t know.” The man squirmed.

“Who did you report to?”

“We gave our reports to a secretary and she would email them.”

“Email them to whom? What’s the email address?

”It’s Jim@yellowflower2.co.uk. We actually never send messages. We only write drafts. That’s all.”

“You don’t send your e-mails! Never?” I said. “Do you CC your boss?”

“No. Our instructions are very specific. Write a draft, then press SAVE.”

“You don’t press SEND?”

“No.”

Igor pondered the matter. “It must be your boss who sends them, I guess.”

Igor said, “And what does Jim want to know about us?”

“He’s interested in your American friend.”

“No shit,” said Igor sounding surprised.

“Me?” I wiped blood off my face and T-shirt. Who in America would go to the trouble of hiring a couple of goons to follow me around Moscow? Why? My mind flashed to the Russian woman with a seductive voice who had called Barbara to inquire whether I had arrived in Moscow.

Igor said, “And what are Jim’s instructions?”

“Try to scare him off.” His voice faltered and his face twisted with anguish.

“Scare him off what?”

“Whatever he’s doing… don’t matter… Make him go home.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Don’t know. Sanctions could get more serious. That’s not up to me.”

Igor got up and threw the broken bottle away. Straightening his shoulders, he wagged his finger. “Now I suggest you don’t come anywhere near this man if you value your life.”

The surly man grunted. He turned to his side and lifted himself up slowly.

“Is he all right?” Slava asked, gesturing toward the wrestler who was now moaning softly. Igor’s pistol was on the bar next to him. “Should I call a doctor?”

“He’s fine,” said the surly man. “No doctor, no police.”

26

“Who in America wants to throw a scare into you?” Igor said as we climbed back into the car. “Why?”

“You’re okay now?”

“I’m fine.” I had washed myself in the upstairs bathroom, which had soap and towels. Slava had also given me a shot of pertsovka for the road and I could feel my movements powered with a new sense of purpose. Meeting Churkin. “Thank God for spetsnaz training,” I added. “You beat the shit out of those two.”

“It’s not good.” Igor shook his head. “Those two thugs don’t come cheap.” He kept tapping the steering wheel with his left hand. “What have you written recently? You know, some journalists here have disappeared suddenly, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “They beheaded a reporter down in Kiev last year. Newspapering is a dangerous business!”

“I write about chess, Igor. Haven’t done it for six years.”

“Then it doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Igor went quiet. “Well, we’ve got the e-mail address. At least something,” he said after a while.

I said. “I have a friend in Washington who should be able to get someone to run a trade.” I had Alex’s friend Bob Pittman in mind.

“I know a few hackers here. One owes me a favor.”

I found myself wondering, as we talked, who could be behind those thugs. But my imagination failed me. Nobody knew my plans—with the exception of Holz and Alex. Obviously, it couldn’t be either of them.

After we left the Outer Ring, we headed north on a wide road cutting through urban blight of shattered warehouses, rundown workshops, aimless packs of dogs in empty lots strewn with garbage and discarded barrels, and worn dwellings with peeling plaster. I could see the streetlamps stretching away in parallel lines like tiny candles in the gloom.

At a traffic light, Igor said, “I don’t think you’ve seen the last of those punks.” He gazed shrewdly at me.

27

I parked the car outside a group of shops with colored canopies in a side street about a block away from Churkin’s high-rise. I had put on a long-sleeved shirt to cover a bruise, the color of an eggplant, on my upper arm. For the first time since arriving in Moscow, I could feel my physical movements were powered by a sense of purpose. This was the interview for which I’d been preparing myself these past few weeks.

I’m researching a book about the last days of the Soviet union, I planned to tell Churkin. I needed to consult him. ”Tell him Volkov gave you his name—which is true,” Igor had said. “What the fuck! And make sure you bring up the matter of compensation.”

This sounded plausible; a strong dramatic narrative requires a colorful account of the coup against Gorbachev. A man like Churkin should understand that.

“I’m not good at bribing people,” I had said.

“The worst that can happen is that he shows you the door. I think you must act quickly.”

“Want to come along?”

“You know Russians don’t talk in front of witnesses.”

I knew that was true. I could think of a few occasions when I’d had to twist myself in knots to elicit even the most mundane information. One time I had practically witnessed a near plane disaster at Vnukovo Airport. An Ilyushin’s landing gear had jammed, and the pilot had just completed an emergency landing. A thick layer of white foam-like stuff covered the runway. The plane rested askew, surrounded by firefighters and ambulances and police cars flashing their lights. “Anyone saw the accident,” I had asked. “What accident?” people responded glumly. “There’s been no accident.”

It was almost eleven o’clock in the morning, and Ring traffic was heavy in both directions. I crossed the vast boulevard, sprinting across twelve lanes and maneuvering between crawling cars, rusted wounded hulks, and trucks loaded with huge tree trunks or long iron bars. As far as I could tell, I was not being followed.

Churkin lived in a tall block of apartments considered luxurious during Soviet times. I hovered for a few minutes outside the lobby entrance. When the doorman, a squat and rumpled middle-aged man, left his post behind a wooden lectern, I leisurely walked in, slowly walked past a row of metal mailboxes until I saw the name Churkin, 7C, then took the cement steps rather than the elevator. All my little subterfuges probably were completely unnecessary, I thought.

The stairwell was dark. I felt uneasy groping my way up, and slightly fearful. As if I was doing something illegal. I remember the incredible tension I had felt ages ago, when I had found myself in a similar dark stairwell with a classified document I had collected from a would-be political dissident. It was hardly deserving of top-secret classification, yet I could have well ended up in jail if police had found it in my possession. I remember thinking: What if the source was an agent provocateur? All my senses, everything in my body, was concentrated on reaching the safety of my car as fast as possible. But once I turned on the ignition, I realized I was scared out of my wits; a steel band seemed to tighten around my chest and I found it impossible to hold down the clutch so I could shift into a gear.

Now, I wasn’t doing anything even remotely illegal. So what it is about Russia that makes one feel guilty when doing the most mundane things?

My breathing became labored when I reached the seventh floor and stepped into a soulless long corridor. Identical flush doors were differentiated only by their numbers.

It was empty and semi-dark. Most of the lights were burned out. The tangy odor of a potent cleanser hung in the air. I could hear the rattle of the elevator doors.

I knocked lightly on Churkin’s door, at first almost wishing not to be heard, then harder.

A little girl with blond pigtails and rosy cheeks opened the door. She looked at me suspiciously, but did not retreat. She was about ten.

I gave her a friendly wave of hand.

“Who is it, Rita?” a man’s voice called.

“A man,” she said quietly.

“Let him in, dear girl,” the voice said.

I hesitated, feeling every bit an unwelcome intruder.

An old man with a sallow malarial complexion sat hunched over an ebony-and-maple chessboard. He was wearing a green robe, frayed around the collar, and brown slippers. Tufts of gray chest hair peeked out. He stared at me for a few moments; I had a feeling I was being judged and the judgment was not favorable.

“Excuse me just for a moment,” he said, holding the White king in a trembling hand and never averting his eyes from the board. He finally put down the king to protect a pawn and thereby keep lines of attack for Black’s rook closed.

I said, “No, not there.”

The old man looked up. “You got a better idea?”

I recalled one of my columns: the queens had been exchanged and the endgame had reached the phase where the king was no longer a liability (to be guarded) but had become a fighting unit (supporting the advancing pawns). With the rook blocked, Black’s position seemed hopeless. The situation called for a textbook sacrifice—the rook for a pawn.

Still standing, I bent toward the board and picked off the Black pawn with a White rook.

“Hmm,” the old man muttered. He had a long bony jaw, sunken cheeks, and his teeth were dark and discolored. His bald head was liver-spotted. I remembered Volkov saying that Churkin used to wear a toupee and tried to imagine what he looked like with it.

“I’ll take the Black rook with my king,” he said, puffing on his cigarette. He flicked a questioning glance at me.

”Then you’re finished,” I said softly. Still standing, I pointed at lines of attack that the sacrifice had opened for Black’s pawns. “In three moves.”

“Hmmm.” The old man looked at me quizzically, shook his head, and then stared at the board for a long time. “Not bad, not bad at all,” he said while his hand signaled for me to sit down.

Pulling up a green vinyl chair, I introduced myself. I spoke rapidly, repeating the points I’d rehearsed on the way over. My words formed themselves into a convincing order, and I felt a small surge of self-confidence.

Churkin looked me over carefully. “You are American, I take it. Who sent you here?”

“An old friend of yours. Colonel Volkov.”

“I’ll be damned.” Churkin went silent. “I know, we are friends now, I mean we’re no longer enemies, but….” His face was now expressionless, immobile. Talk about the consultancy fee, a voice in the back of my mind said. Do it right away, Igor had said.

Churkin tensed up at the mention of a consultancy fee. There was the briefest pause.

“Go to the kitchen, dear girl,” the old man said with a curious flatness in his voice. She spun and left us alone. He opened a silver cigarette box. I declined the offer of a cigarette, and he lit one, drawing the smoke deeply into his lungs.

“Ahh, yes… I do consulting… from time to time.” He leaned back in his chair and exhaled. I thought he had something cruel in his face and a brow that conveyed permanent impatience.

I handed him an envelope with ten Benjamins. He opened it gingerly, felt the notes with his fingertips, then slid it in the pocket of his robe. His hands trembled and I wondered if this was Parkinson’s or merely old age.

“Everything’s off the record,” Churkin insisted.

“Your name will not be mentioned at all,” I assured him. “I’m looking for a dramatic story. Interesting detail and stuff.”

The room was slightly shabby and crowded, like a jungle, full of telescopes of various sizes along walls covered with flowery, faded wallpaper. A sagging pullout sofa was covered with a colorful blanket. A glass-fronted bookcase was shoved into a corner. It was crammed with unpolished trophies from his past: a silver star on a wooden shield, several bronze medals, two glass squirrels, a crystal bear and a whole slew of phials and jars.

As he started his longwinded tale, I took out my notebook. He stopped immediately, looking at me as if I had just pulled out a gun. “No notes,” he said and gave me an unfriendly smile.

“Okay.” Just let the old man talk, I said to myself.

Churkin narrated the chain of events that began with the committee, as he referred to the KGB, originally helping Gorbachev’s rise to power.

“At first we supported perestroika and glasnost. We trusted him, even after he got started with his wrecking ball. There was so much rot around. As you know, he was a protégé of our much beloved chairman, Andropov. But after a while, our top people became convinced that we were witnessing a catastrophic mistake unfolding. We were heading straight for an abyss.”

He paused briefly, lit another cigarette, and waved the match out.

“We’ll have a shot of lemon vodka,” Churkin said. He called Rita— “my granddaughter’s taking care of me”—and issued instructions. “The bottle is in the freezer.”

Rita disappeared into the kitchen.

“Dear girl,” Churkin said. “She comes every morning to check up on me. She blames me for forgetting things, says one day I might forget to go on living. And say people don’t die from forgetting.”

We were silent when Rita returned with the bottle and two glasses.

“You were talking about the spring of 1991,” I said, picking up the thread of the narrative.

“No, no. 1990,” Churkin said. “By then Gorbachev himself was our biggest problem. We feared he’d bring everything crashing down. Truth be said, many of us felt he was hell-bent on making sure we’d all end up in hell. I heard the chairman complain. ‘You can’t turn Russians into Germans,’ the chairman had said. Certainly not overnight. Not in a generation. Gorbachev no longer knew where he was going. The Americans played on his vanity and he’d gotten to believe his own publicity. Fuck your mother! He thought he could walk on water, if you know what I mean. They sang his praises—Gorby, Gorby—but played him for a sucker. They’d not lift a finger for him, let alone lift the economic blockade on Russia. Don’t forget, the blockade was imposed way back in 1917. Gorbachev had to pretend he was making headway, but after his trip to Washington in the spring of 1990, my chairman was alarmed. The crisis deepened; nationalist revolts erupted everywhere.

“We in the committee were still sort of functioning—even though there were serious divisions in the ranks. In late winter, my immediate boss, Kuzmich, asked me to his dacha near Barvikha. Kuzmich had been working for the chairman for more than twenty years, first as chief of staff at Yasenovo, and then at the Lubyanka. I’d been Kuzmich’s personal assistant for sixteen years, you know, and yet he tested my views in a very roundabout way before taking me into his confidence. He had to do it, I guess, either that or move me to another job. After dinner we went for a walk in the woods. A small group of comrades, including the chairman and the marshals, Kuzmich said, were thinking about removing Gorbachev. We had to discredit him first, accuse him of high crimes, quickly arrest him and announce the new government. ‘You know what that means,’ he said.

“This was to be a Firebird operation, of course. Very tricky, because the level of mistrust was so high that a mere whiff of something out of the ordinary could alert Gorbachev loyalists among us. Fuck your mother, there were still people around who were loyal to him. Sp the chairman kept his cards close to the vest as he laid a couple of snares.”

“Is that what the Voronov business was all about?”

“Yes. It was one of the snares. The great man had a fancy new idea—something to do with nuclear waste disposal. Fuck nuclear waste, we said. Who cares about nuclear waste at a time like this?”

“It is a major issue, though,” I said. “Even today.”

“Shit. Russia was broke. Descending into chaos. And here was Voronov asking Gorbachev to divert funds for a fancy new scheme. Fuck your mother!” He paused and lit another cigarette. “To his credit, Gorbachev turned him down. But he suggested Voronov discreetly approach American scientists and propose a joint project. ‘Nuclear waste disposal is a big issue in America,’ Gorbachev said. ‘The Americans don’t want radioactive debris in their backyards.’ He was very imaginative, Gorbachev was. You have to hand it to him. He wanted to open a back channel to Washington and he hoped the Americans might take the bait.”

I said, “How did you know all this?”

“Oh, the committee knew a lot, you know.”

“You telling me the KGB monitors the president’s conversations?”

Churkin sighed. “Phoooh. The equipment was there for the president’s protection.” His face assumed a passive grimace, the pocker-faced mask of a man from a world where deals were made on secure phones, in conversations that never took place, in places that didn’t exist. After a pause he added, “You have no idea how often he used it against his opponent.”

I said, “Why Voronov? “

“He was an ideal man. Like a hero from a folk tale. Fellows like Voronov are usually capricious, arrogant, and have egos like Bolshoi coloratura sopranos. Voronov was a modest and humble man, a sort of Holy Fool. He had stopped working on weapons projects sometime in the late fifties. But everybody assumed he was still doing weapons research because his lab was in Semipalatinsk. And that’s why Kuzmich figured he was irresistible bait! We counted on the Americans to take the bait… end up like hooked fish… get them the moment they tried to snatch Voronov. We also had—I can now tell, I guess—good information from inside the American embassy.”

“Someone inside the embassy!?” I pretended surprise.

“Well, yes, we’d penetrated the embassy.”

“Whoa,” I said, sighing dramatically.

Churkin chuckled. “The plan was to use glasnost to our advantage! Put the professor on national television and have him tell the people that the president himself had urged him to establish a secret contact with the CIA, etcetera, etcetera. You see, Voronov would in effect accuse the president of treason.”