The firebird affair

Rashidov’s eyes seemed to film over as though he had lost interest in our conversation. “As a rule, I have nothing but contempt for traitors,” he said after a while, apparently to soften the rebuff. “I don’t understand how they can live with themselves.”

Here was an opening—one last chance, I thought—I should seize on. “Then why protect someone worthy of contempt?”

Rashidov shook his head but kept silent. I watched him as he lit a cigarette. Blowing smoke up, he leaned slightly back and with his left hand brushed a flake of ash from the front of his shirt. Very cool, I thought.

I pressed on, swallowing hard. “A traitor is someone who betrays his country, Mr. Rashidov. Russia is not your country.”

“Hah!” He smiled bitterly. “My country!”

“You can’t still feel loyalty to the country that discarded you like a squeezed lemon? Besides, it’s ancient history anyway.” I was openly pleading now. “What difference can it make to you?”

Rashidov kept fingering the worry beads. With great slowness, he then turned his face to me. “You’re asking me to betray a human being. I can’t help you. I imagine it’s easier to betray a country than to betray a friend.”

“You know what it takes to develop an agent, Mr. Martin,” he went on, after a pause. “You have to build a foundation of rapport and trust. Demonstrate concern for his well being. Show understanding for his motives and share at least some of his ideas. Give him as great a sense of security as possible. Yes, initially you’re pretending, but after a while a real human bond develops. The concerns become real. He trusts you and you trust him. I’ve learned to live with that and get a good night’s sleep, if you know what I mean.”

I struggled to get the meaning of his speech through my skull, half knowing that it was an irrevocable NO.

“Your loyalties aren’t clear to me, sir,” I said.

He gave me a look, then put his hand on his forehead for a moment. “My dear Mr. Martin, aren’t we kind of getting off the subject? Ah, yes, my loyalties. That’s something I don’t intend to discuss with you.”

“Right,” I said.

I felt no anger toward this man, I thought. I was angry with myself. I had made a mistake. I had underestimated him. On the way over, I had concluded that the best way of dealing with a man like Rashidov was by being straightforward. I had imagined him helping drug smugglers transport Afghan opium across the border. I could have—should have, I thought—used old techniques to draw him out, make him talk. Why would a thoroughly corrupt former KGB officer, who evidently took bribes from drug traffickers, refuse to reveal the name of a traitor? What right did he have to take the high moral ground?

I had failed to prepare. Not only that. I ended up, I have to admit, feeling sympathy for his position. I secretly admired him for protecting his spy and almost told him that.

But I didn’t. With a surge of faint hope I thought I might salvage something—anything—by changing the subject. So I raised a generic question about money.

“In the end, is it just the money?” I asked, keeping my voice lighthearted.

Rashidov thought about this. “With the Americans, yes, it’s always the money,” he said, taking a deep breath. “We used money, too, especially toward the end when everything was going to the dogs. In Hector’s case, money may have not been the primary motive, I suspect. I’d say it was a classic recruitment, you know, when the reward a man expects is denied, he’s angry, furious. Wants to lash out. A few months after he commits his first betrayal, the promotion comes through.” He paused. “Money? Money became important later on…”

Now Rashidov studied me more closely, as though he was trying to figure out something. “Well, as I recall, we put nearly two million dollars into his Swiss account. Millions of rubles into his Moscow account.” He chuckled, fingering his beads. “I’m sorry, my dear, that you traveled all this way for nothing.”

I said, politely: “I’ve learned a few things.”

He smiled with his mouth but his eyes were probing. They were old eyes, the lids wrinkled, deep pouches beneath them. The man was full of surprises, I thought, as we moved from the living room into the hall.

Mensoor’s shoes were not on the rack.

Rashidov said, “I wish we had met under different circumstances. I wish I could tell you about our struggle against the Karimov dictatorship and about our brave young men who are in the mountains. But that’s neither here nor there…”

36
The return journey turned into a near disaster.

After leaving Rashidov, we retraced our canal journey. Mensoor fell asleep almost immediately. I sat silently, writing down in my notebook all I remembered from my conversation with Rashidov. Then I dozed off.

I had come so close, I thought with a surge of sudden selfishness. If only scenarios—several of them—rolled in my mind’s eyes. Then came questions. Rather one question I couldn’t get out of my head – “Why Rashidov refused to betray his former agent?” – which later took the form of “Was it a matter of his view of himself, a matter of self-esteem.”

I discovered I was clenching a fist. I have to relax, I said to myself, think about something else.

The afternoon was waning fast.

“Did you find what you’re looking for,” Jawid had asked me earlier, squatting Arab-style at my elbow.

“Yes, in a way,” I said, realizing he was instinctively pouting his lips.

“Hmm.” He responded in a non-committal nasal hum.

I could have omitted the “in a way” part, I thought, because the search was over. What did it all add up to? The truth was that I had systematically avoided these questions even in the privacy of my mind. This was futile stuff, I knew, and to keep rehashing things over and over again was bound to drive me crazy.

As far as I—Todd Martin—was concerned, this was it.

Sure, Holz probably won’t give up, I speculated. That’s Holz’s business. But I was at peace. My duty was done. Rick could be proud of me.

Lying on my back at the bottom of the flatboat with my eyes closed, I saw images of Rick; holding the teething baby Rick, Rick falling asleep on my chest, later looking for lady bugs in our backyard on Newark Street, or, completely unselfconsciously, trying to catch pigeons in Farragut Square. The angry teenager who thought I was a selfish bastard (“never been there for us”) and who was as good as lost for several years; at least I felt the grief that comes with losing a child. The grown son with whom I kept in touch by email. The never-ending pain.

At dusk, we had reached Kumkurgan Lake. It was oppressively muggy and hot.

“It’s going to rain,” Jawid said. “Look,” he added pointing at the eastern horizon where dark clouds were gathering fast.

The boat moved in a smooth arc toward the eastern shore. When Jawid dug in his paddle, we snuck into a narrow canal. The crickets bleeped steadily about us. Fireflies darted. A slight breeze from the south brought in a scent of pines.

I felt swept along by a mood of phlegmatic indifference—all I wanted was to go home.

We halted at a ramshackle landing with a sign proclaiming we had reached the First Five-Year Plan collective farm. Decay was what the flaky sign—worn and peeling from the rain, sun, and wind—shouted to the world. It reminded me of a time when such signs were ubiquitous and I had been younger.

We rested at the home of a local grade-school teacher. A group of kids was sitting on a low stone wall around it. Several dirty motorcycles were nosing at its side, evoking neglect and indifference. One of the boys had a radio, which was playing “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.”

The teacher had the long face and tragic eyes of the Middle East. He immediately took Mensoor aside for a conspiratorial chat while his flat-chested wife, looking tired and sullen, silently served lamb roast, round bread, young onions, and mare’s milk.

We ate in silence. When we finished, the wife reappeared, took away my plate, glass, and knife and fork, and disappeared for a long time. Later, she returned to collect other dishes.

“Fatima is very religious,” Mensoor whispered by way of explanation. “Dishes used by infidels have to be washed not once but seven times.”

As we prepared to leave, Mensoor said, “We’re taking a shortcut this time. We’ll go to Khodza-Kulusum and then cross over to Kara-Kuz. There’s an unofficial border crossing, used only by smugglers.” He laughed. “These are dirt roads, no military patrols.”

We bundled ourselves up for a motorcycle ride through the mountains. I noted we were returning with the sidecar again fully loaded. Loaded with what? Raw opium had already been refined into morphine base, which came in the form of brick-sized blocks, which we were now transferring to a heroin lab somewhere outside Kara Kuz in eastern Tadjikistan.

It was a dark night, with the moon hidden by the clouds. I held onto Mensoor as we rode north. I could smell the cigarette smoke on his clothes. My mind was trying to think my way through the conversation with Rashidov. The road was empty. We had seen no other cars. After passing through the sleepy kishlak of Oy Bulak, the road—half dirt half asphalt—rose toward Khodza-Kulusum. We stopped so that Mensoor could smoke and relieve himself.

“Now comes the tricky part,” Mensoor joked confidently and slapped my back. “But it’s easy if we do it right.”

He slowed down when we approached the intersection in the town center of Khodza Kulusum. The main road swung to the right, going due east. The sign read Kara-Kuz, which was a small town on the other side of the border. Mensoor turned right, but after about ten or fifteen seconds, slowed down and then stopped. He mumbled something indistinct as if he were rethinking—reorganizing the trip—all in a brief couple of seconds.

I peered into the distance.

There was a police cruiser on the horizon. I could make out its form: the light bar made a distinctive silhouette even far in the distance.

Mensoor cursed again, made a slow u-turn back to the intersection, and took a sharp right. “We’ll cross at Naubad,” he cried

Now he gunned the engine and we sped now up a narrow dirt road going north, wheels spinning furiously and sending up great clouds of dust and gravel.

Thunder rumbled distantly and lightning glinted along the northern horizon; the rain was approaching. Then I heard a siren somewhere far behind us sounding off.

“Police,” I cried and tightened my grip on Mensoor’s body.

The road had become difficult, full of turns, dips, and rises. I turned my head sideways and glanced back. All I could see through a cloud of dust were the headlights of the police cruiser. Uncanny, to realize that you’re being hunted.

“They’re coming after us,” I shrieked in panic.

“Hang on,” Mensoor yelled as the motorcycle bolted over a hump and into the air. When it came down hard, the springs seemed to be near a breaking point.

I was certain that something had gone wrong, that Mensoor had lost control, but everything was happening too quickly to feel anything but nausea. The tension of the ride was knotting every muscle in my body. I thought of Rick, asleep in a room that used to be his when he was a boy, now waking up and reading the newspaper: TRIBUNE REPORTER JAILED ON DRUG SMUGGLING CHARGE. Or even worse: US REPORTER DIES, SMUGGLED AFGHAN COCAINE. A sort of fear gripped me—fear that these headlines would make my son ashamed of me.

I was dreaming.

The police cruiser was gaining ground. The siren became louder. From the corner of my eye, I caught the muzzle flash of automatic pistols fired from the car. I didn’t hear the sounds of the shots, just an odd smacking noise in the air around my head, which I took to be bullets passing close by.

I looked back again and an icy flood of raw terror spread through my veins. “They are catching up,” I yelled. We’re going to die, I thought.

“My gun!” Mensoor hollered over the roar of the engine. With his left hand, he clumsily thrust the automatic pistol into my hands, which were clutching his body. “Strelyay, blyad!” (Shoot, dammit). “Strelyay!”

I didn’t know what to do. I’ve never fired a pistol in my life.

We were saved by something that approached divine intervention, I thought; at least I believed at that point that providence had extended us a helping hand. Off to the left were open tracks leading to a footpath into the woods. As we lurched sharply to the left and charged through, Mensoor screamed again, “Watch out!” Ten seconds later, and the cops would have caught up with us. Instead, we cut through the thicket. A branch struck me on my left temple and almost knocked me off the bike. Other branches ripped off the upper part of my chapan. I dropped the pistol and clutched Mensoor’s body.

The gunfire followed us. Suddenly, all was black. The whole world for me became the column of light the motorcycle pushed before us. I heard bullets thump into the trunks of trees. Then a volley of bullets hit the sidecar, shredding the outside tire. Shit, shit, shit, I kept saying to myself, wanting to make sure my brain still worked.

“Oh my God,” I cried.

Whenever I had hoped for divine intervention, it had never worked out in the past. But now it did, I thought. We continued to move forward, but at a much slower pace, because the sidecar, having little traction on its rim, kept swerving to the right and pulling us off the path and twigs and branches scraping the skin on my face and arms.

Cursing continuously, Mensoor slowed down even more, as though negotiating each root and undulation in the ground. After a while the, gunfire ceased. Mensoor stopped and cut the engine. Following the wind-rushing roar of the chase, the silence was eerie.

“Fucking morons,” he chuckled as we dismounted, then uttered something in his native tongue and laughed contemptuously. “One cockeyed thing after another.”

He tapped and lit a cigarette and pulled on it, all the while talking about the morons never having a chance. I thought he wanted me to think he was the kind of man who was stimulated by being shot at and being missed.

The dark now seemed complete, as if the world had been switched off. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Allah karim!”

He said after a while, “That wasn’t too bad, now was it?”

I grunted. My eyes were growing used to the darkness.

It started to rain.

Sheltered by a tree, I leaned against its trunk, drawing up my knees against my chest, and covering myself with what remained of my chapan. I felt like we’d been on the run for weeks. The image of that police cruiser with orange lights flashing was in the back of my mind.

“I lost your pistol, dropped it back there,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Inshalah,” he said. “We won’t need it. We’re a few hundred meters away from the border.”

There was so much I suddenly wanted to ask. We had been through a lot tonight: we had shared danger, been shot at.

“We were lucky back there,” I said.

“Nah,” he said dismissively. He was not talkative. “I’ve done this trip many times.”

“Well… for a minute or two I’d worried that my son was going to read in the newspapers that his father died while smuggling Afghan cocaine,” I said.

He said, chuckling, “You forget we’d kept your passport in Dushanbe. There’s no way you’d be identified.”

This made me conscious of my absurd get-up, the torn shirt and those ridiculous trousers clinging to my skin and my muddied sneakers and chapan. My black cap was gone.

“Rest up,” he replied curtly.

The drizzle soon turned into a tropical downpour. It lasted for fifteen minutes or so, and then suddenly stopped. There was a whiff of damp earth in the air, of fresh water and the soft rot under logs. Now the insects were buzzing, the roads and crickets making their noises.

“The smuggler’s moon is out,” Mensoor said, pointing upwards to the thin rays of light, which penetrated through the lush tangle of leaves and ivy and boughs of secondary growth. He checked the spare tire and muttered indistinct curses.

I said later: “How do you know Joseph?”

“I don’t. We met once, a few years ago. But his reputation is golden, I can tell you. Never a kopek missing. Never once.”

After a while, we pushed the motorcycle to a clearing basking in the milky light of the moon. Mensoor worked methodically to detach the sidecar, which I helped him hide in the bushes. We covered it up with loose branches, twigs, and half rotten leaves.

“Just to remember the place,” he said as he marked a tree trunk with his knife. “We’ll have to come back for it.”

We rode later into Tajikistan with lights turned off. Faint fingers of dawn were making cracks in the sky. On the outskirts of Kara Kuz, Mensoor turned on the headlight and became noticeably relaxed. We stopped at a cluster of houses where he checked in with his contacts and presumably informed them about the location of the sidecar.

We rolled through a ruby dawn into the Dushanbe valley.

The chaikhana was closed. We went to the nearby home of Rifat, the manager. He offered to make coffee, but all I wanted was to wash myself and sleep. I discarded my borrowed clothes and stared at myself in the mirror above a tiny sink in the bathroom. My dense beard made me look slightly disreputable; I was beginning to look like a Taliban.

When my head hit the pillow, a blissful exhaustion overcame me immediately.

37
The Russian fall arrived in August.

It was raining when we landed at Domodyedovo in the late afternoon. I shivered while waiting in line for a cab and wondered if I’d catch a cold. The sky was the color of wet cement. The air was damp. People were wearing plastic raincoats and carrying umbrellas.

Moscow’s weather, I knew from experience, was prone to sudden and sharp changes.

The rain followed me, spitting insistently on the windshield as the cab struggled through the rush-hour traffic. The city looked and felt different. Was it the sight of the bleak outskirts? Or was it the grayness that seemed to mirror my mood swing.

It took us more than an hour to reach the Ukraine Hotel. I was happy to be welcomed by small luxuries—bathrobe, heated towel rail, shampoo and body lotion. I felt I needed a drink badly.

On the flight back, I had taken stock of my journey, and concluded that I’d finally reached the end of the line. I thought over what Rashidov had told me. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that the whole journey to Sherabad had accomplished nothing. I was no closer to the mole than I’d been before.

It was a somber thought and it brought me in one swoop back to Page’s idea of using the rumors of Professor Voronov’s disappearances as the starting point for an extended feature examining the new world of nuclear terror. This now appeared as a far more attractive prospect than I thought only yesterday. Yesterday I knew I was mildly deceiving myself in order to salvage something of my vanity. Today, I was excited by the story.

I decided to drive to Podmoskovye to visit the professor the very next day. But almost as soon as I thought this, my mind was jerked away. I thought of Amanda. “Not an easy person to know or to like,” she had said about herself. Which led me to play a game with myself: did she or didn’t she leave a message for me at the desk.

There were no messages from Amanda, but there were several from Barbara asking me to phone her.

First, I called Joseph, but he was out for the evening.

Then I called Voronov’s daughter Vera. Her dad was feeling better and I was welcome to come by the next morning. We talked for a while, and she cautioned me that Voronov had Parkinson’s, which sometimes affected his mind, but, she added, they were temporary lapses. She gave me detailed instructions how to reach her dacha.

“Todd, darling!” Barbara exclaimed when I finally reached her. “Where have you been? The hotel said you’d checked out.”

“Doing some reporting.”

“Oh God,” she gasped. “Are you sitting down?”

“I’m sitting down.”

“You’ve been fired! I’m sorry. Really…”

“I figured that was coming… shit!”

“Should I read you Kevin’s message “

“No. Fuck Kevin.” I knew that I had information Page wanted.

She said cautiously, “He was quite upset when I talked to him Monday.”

“Would you mind sending him a short message?” I used to compose my messages on the telex keyboard—telex was the principal means of transmitting information when I worked in the bureau—then listened to the steel drum cluttering interrupted by the ping at the end of each line. I waited for a moment, imagining I was writing my telex message:

“PROPAGE EXMARTIN: FYI FOUND OLD PROF ALIVE AND KICKING AT HIS DACHA. PLAN TO HAVE LONG TALK WITH HIM BEFORE RETURNING HOME BY LABOR DAY CHEERS.”

I felt a stab of shame. It was not exactly lying; I was merely arranging information to my advantage. Kevin would naturally assume, I figured, that I had found Voronov this very day.

Barbara said, “What does this mean?”

“It means I’ve done what he’d asked me to do.”

“Whew.”

Barbara snorted. “It’ll be late. Chechen guerrillas just shot down a Russian military helicopter with more than one hundred persons on board. Apparently no survivors.”

“So expect lots of saber rattling.”

“Yup. The Russians are talking about taking out Chechen hideouts in Georgia.”

“Okay. I’ll walk over to the office in a little while.”

Standing under the hot shower, hearing the sound of rushing water, I felt cleaner even before I applied soap. Afterward, I toweled, shaved, put on fresh clothes, and glanced at the mirror. I looked fine, I thought, despite the wrinkles and creeping gray hairs.

I watched TV for a while, took the elevator down to the lobby and had a vodka tonic at the bar, and then walked over to the office at a leisurely pace.

Barbara jumped up when I entered the office. “Incredible!” She cried, waving a sheet of telex paper: “Look!”

The message read: PROMARTIN EXPAGE: YOU HIT THE BALL OUT OF THE PARK. COMPLIMENTS ALLROUND. PHIL DELIGHTED. EXCELLENT WORK CHEERS.”

“Boy,” she shook her head in mock amazement. “Last week you’re fired. Now you’re the toast of the town. I don’t get it. But I’m happy for you.”

I laughed and caught her eye. “Does this mean I could use the old Lada for another day or two.”

“That’s what it means, I guess.” She rummaged through her drawer until she found the car keys.

I pocketed the keys and said: “Where shall we have dinner?”

“You’d like the Aerostar Hotel. They fly in fresh lobster from Canada.” In the car she said, “So, when are you going home?”

“Saturday,” I said. “I’ll have a little time to tie up loose ends.”

“Anything I can do for you?”

“Could you ask the translator to book a seat for me on Lufthansa to Frankfurt, and United to Washington.”

Before we reached the restaurant, she said. “Nobody uses telexes anymore or writes that gobbledygook. Except you and Kevin.”

“It’s a lifelong habit, I guess,” I said. Whenever I had to write a message, I automatically used compacted phrases.

“Why cheers,” Barbara sneered.

Cheers always made me smile. It was an expression I never used in everyday life. Never. Yet I invariably signed off messages with cheers.

I shook my head. “I guess it’s something that dates me.”

38
On Thursday, I drove to Podmoskovye to see Professor Voronov. In the morning sunlight, the sounds of the great city retreated and were replaced by the creaking of the branches and the pungent barnyard smells of the soil. Black and white cows grazed by the road. The daily wash hung from clotheslines near wooden houses. I kept a pleasant, sedate pace, wiggling along a river and passing flat potato fields and villages of dark cabins with painted eaves and gardens of tomato poles and sunflowers. I turned right after passing a tiny country church, its azure dome studded with gold stars and found myself on a dirt lane that led to the dacha.