The firebird affair

“Ah, Todd,” he stood up. “Good to see you. Sobered up, I see.”

I ignored his jibe and his outstretched hand and sat down. Holz was unfazed, feigned not to notice. A waiter presented menus, rolled French-accented specials off his tongue.  

I ordered a glass of house chardonnay. He asked for a vodka martini.

“Yes, Mr. Holz,” the waiter ‘d smiled ingratiatingly. “Two slices of lemon. Straight up.”

“Exactly. And a glass of ice water.”

Holz was in his sixties—I could see it around his eyes and a touch of silver at the roots of his hair—but I had noticed last night that there was a bounce to him that was young. His face seemed deceptively benign. He was the type of man who could be easily underestimated, an attribute that must have served him well in his career. Impeccably dressed. His light gray suit and French-cuffed shirt—respectfully elegant, but not overbearingly so—made me feel grubby by contrast. Shabby. 

Grotto-like candles flickered shadows over Holz’s face even though it was daylight and our table had a view over much of the restaurant.  The white-aproned waiters glided around, taking orders, pouring ice water, and bringing fresh rolls. 

Holz pulled out a thin elongated plastic container from an inside pocket. “Pills,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Five different pills each day.”

I didn’t care about his pills. I didn’t even feel smug that the big shot in the clandestine service had to rely on a daily intake of a few little pills. I wanted to hear what he had to say. But he was making me wait and enjoying it, I could see.

A dignified waiter with a thin mustache, hair just over his ears, and an expression of perpetual anxiety took our orders. A small Caesar’s salad followed by broiled grouper for me; the warm monkfish salad and the grilled trout with wild rice and lentils for him; and a bottle of white Burgundy.

Holz began talking about the zealotry of Islamic fanatics, their inhuman dedication and self-discipline. Not a proper enemy for a superpower. Now Russia, with its eleven times zones full of missile silos, was an enemy you could wrap your mind around. But waging war against cavemen that control no territory or hard assets? Who would do anything and everything to win? “In my opinion, things will get worse before they’ll get better.”

I didn’t know how long I could listen to this. I said, sharply, “We didn’t come here to discuss Islamic fundamentalism.”

“No.” Holz summoned a false smile.

He tasted the wine and pronounced it adequate, and the waiter poured it into our glasses. Another waiter set out the food.

After they left us alone, Holz cleared his throat. He looked around to make sure no one was within earshot and leaned across the table. 

“Now,” Holz said, clearing his throat again. “I have some information from a KGB defector.”

He was watching me closely, as if to gauge my reaction, but I kept my cool. But a hard ball of anxiety had formed in my belly and was beginning to grow.

“It looks to me like the KGB was implicated in Emily’s death. In a manner of speaking. She was lured to the restaurant, then given a psychotropic drug.” Holz now briefly scrutinized his finger nails.

A psychotropic drug. My mind stumbled over the word.

“As I understand it, she and her girlfriend were seated in a small intimate dining area on the second floor of the Prague restaurant. The defector says the girlfriend, whose name is Zvonareva, was a KGB freelancer. An agent apparently dressed as a waiter slipped the drug into Emily’s drink. But instead of becoming talkative, Emily collapsed on the floor a few minutes later.”

“Jesus Christ!” I felt a flush begin just inside my collar.

He saw my discomfort, and his face softened. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I said nothing.

“The drug….” Holz pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and peered at it. “Is named SP-117. Highly concentrated alcohol made of natural herbs. Don’t know which herbs. You swallow it, start talking. Afterwards, after they give you black coffee laced with some special substance, you forget everything.”

“Bastards. Fucking, fucking bastards.”

My grief had long gone beyond the tears to a place that had no outlet somewhere in the center of my body, where it had been dormant for years. Now everything was churning, and I imagined thin-lipped, pasty-faced agents slipping the deadly potion into Emily’s drink. Whenever she was frightened, Emily would become quite inarticulate because of her slight stammer.  Now I imagined her collapsing on the floor, writhing in pain, with blood streaking from the edge of her mouth. I wanted to find them, inflict horrible physical torture on them.

“God damn you, Mac. Why do you say in a manner of speaking?” I was gripping my chair tightly. This was a crime that demanded vengeance, I thought. I owed her memory that.

Holz said, “The prospective defector insists it was an accident. They had no intentions to harm her.” He signed. “Look, I’m really sorry.”

“Fuck accidents,” I said.

Holz continued: “They never had a problem with this particular drug. Never once, he said. For whatever it’s worth, big Russian companies nowadays use it to test the loyalty of key corporate officers.” Holz chuckled, looking briefly amused. “What a screwed-up country!”

He stabbed at his fish.

I thought about my son Rick. My then newly-tall, gangly 17-year-old son. All spiky, gelled hair and pencil thin moustache. And… and what? I could see both the young man he was becoming and the little boy I remembered. “Mom was killed,” he had insisted. Over and over. The boy was passionately attached to his mother, who single-handedly carried most of the burden of raising him. I must admit, I never considered myself much of a parent; I wasn’t the cool dad who indulged his only child. Part of it was the times, I thought; fathers were not nearly as involved in parenting as they are today. But the one thing I did know early on was that I’d die to protect Rick. At the time I remember thinking that if I’d gladly die to save him, I should also be willing to bend the truth a bit, right? Why burden the boy with doubts that were hatched in a nest of my own wild imagination and overinterpretation.

“You believe the defector, Mac?”

Holz shrugged, dismissively. “He can’t bullshit us. He gets what he wants only if we get what we need to get.”

“A reward? Like lots of money?”

He nodded tolerantly. “He and his family will be taken care for the rest of his life.”

“And what do you need to get?”

“Hell, he’s not a defector yet, he wants to defect. So we have leverage…”

I interrupted him. “What do you want from him?”

“A lot,” Holz said, leaning toward me and I felt his warm breath as he came closer and began cutting his sentences shorter and shorter. “He also told us about a mole. And I want to get the son of a bitch. I need evidence.”

I could practically hear his brain working. His face changed, became more intense. “I’d always suspected there was a third man,” he said softly. “Because we couldn’t explain everything by blaming it on Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. It turns out I was right. And you know what? The son of a bitch was in the Moscow embassy at the same time when I was there. Imagine?”

I’ve read about Ames and Hanssen, the two great American traitors who have worked for Moscow for many years while holding top position in the US intelligence community. I stared in the middle distance, feeling my brain was suddenly immobilized. Then there slowly crept over me, like a disease, a foreboding of what Holz wanted from me. No, I said to myself, I ‘m not a spy catcher. I don’t care about the third man. The Cold War is a thing of the past.

“I hope you’re not trying to tell me I should help you find your fucking mole?” I said. I looked him squarely in the eye, hoping that my gaze was saying I meant it.

“But I do,” Holz said. “He not only sold out our country, he sold your wife, too. And the professor and your friend Joseph. And me. I told you earlier that the mole worked in our embassy in the spring of 1991.”

I tried to imagine how could a mole betray Emily; the idea itself was disconcerting.

Holz continued: “He’s got blood on his hands.” He kept twirling his reading glasses to give his hands something to do. “Besides, we can’t even begin to guess what stuff the son of a bitch handed over to the Russkies. We do know several agents had been betrayed. All were eliminated….”

“Executed?”

“Yeah.”

“And you still have no clue who it is? After all these years?”

“You must suspect someone?”

We sat in silence for a while.

If the Russians had an agent inside the US Embassy, I thought, why would they want to drug and interrogate Emily who had no access to classified information. I’d have to get to the bottom of this, start turning over rocks.

“There’s a kind of weird logic working here,” I said. “Why Emily? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“There’s got to be some explanation?”

I could see the mental struggle in his face. He had clearly thought about the same thing a great deal, but he had decided to keep that to himself. “Yes.” His brown eyes now looked at me with the calmness of absolute conviction. “Intelligence services are normally quite rational.”

The serving woman interrupted us to clear away crumbs. We waited until she was done.

I said, “Tell me, Mac, what exactly Emily did for you?”

He inhaled sharply, as if he had scented danger. “She took a note to the professor. Gave it to him during the intermission at the Tchaikovsky Hall. It was an Igor Oistrakh concert.”

To the left of Holz, a young woman approaching a neighboring table reminded me of Emily: the slim body, the long flowing lavender skirt, the sunglasses pushed over the mass of long blond curls, the wide green eyes, the self-confidence evident in her every gesture. She had something of Emily about her—Emily back then, frozen in time, breathless, arms outstretched, so comfortable in her body which filled her clothes like the living sea, fluid and beckoning.

“That’s all? One letter?”

“Yes.”

“You and me?” I almost shrieked. I had been expecting something like this, and yet I was taken aback.

He cleared his throat, as if to swallow his annoyance, I thought. “I don’t need an answer now. Just think about it.” Then he raised hands in a gesture of surrender. “It’s up to you, of course.” He hunched forward, the breath again in my ear. “I just assume you’d be interested in helping me find the man…. the mole, I should say, who betrayed her.”

We stopped talking.

I don’t want to appear too Jekyll and Hyde about this, but as the lunch progressed I could feel myself starting to get intrigued by Holz’s idea.

At one time, years ago, lost in my own imaginary world of draconian retributions, I’d close my eyes and fantasize about ways of avenging Emily, and the retribution I had in mind was something like what Charles Bronson did in the Death Wish series. Thinking of creative ways to torture her killers made me forget my pain. But these fantasies were short lived; when I opened my eyes, the old familiar pain returned. There was nothing I could do except suffer my helplessness. No matter how many therapists told me it wasn’t my fault, I thought it was. I knew it. It was useless to try to explain everything in terms of good and evil. I knew it. Yet Rick’s sullen face kept bobbing up in my mind and his silent hostility implied that I had abandoned Emily in her moment of need, that I had failed them both. This did something to our relationship; something that went deep and that has been so poisonous. In the minds of children, a father is expected to move heaven and earth to avenge mother’s death. Make them pay! But who’re them. I had no leads to grab on to. Nothing. But how could you expect a reasonable conversation with a seventeen-year-old whose angry moodiness had taken over his entire personality.

Even so, I often thought later, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble had I leveled with Rick right then and there. That was the moment I should have let my son know of my mistake. Even later, there was still a chance to mend the fraying rope that bound him to me. But I didn’t do it.

Holz interrupted the silence. “You’ve got nothing to lose,” Holz said, and the way he said it sounded as if he was helping me face up to reality. “No more foreign assignments. Out of the Big Boys game, eh?”

It was true. I knew it. I never remarried; I don’t think I had it in me to fall in love again. Well, there was Jennifer, but she was an arrangement. Certainly not a partner; we didn’t lived under the same roof.. I had no family. No career. But I didn’t like to hear from Holz that I had lost the life I had lived..

“What do you mean?” I said with a forced smile. I couldn’t have believed it was possible to feel more miserable than I had felt in years.

“You’re free,” he said.

Fuck you, Mac, I thought. From what did I free myself? From guilt? From duty?

He reached out and touched my arm. “This is strictly between you and me. No Agency role, no need for a finding. The fewer people the better. The problem with this town is that as soon as more than three people know something, it’s impossible to keep it secret.” I noticed his hands were covered with those brown marks, which are said to be signs of approaching death.

I sat for a while, tracing intricate patterns with my fork on the now stained tablecloth. How could this be just between him and me, I wondered. “What about the Agency?”

He gave me a strange look, as if it were the strangest question he’d ever heard. But then a smirk of superiority saturated his features. “The Director is aware, of course. In general terms, that is. He likes it that way because if things blow up he doesn’t get caught in the fallout. Besides, everything we are these days and everything we do is about Nine-Eleven.” He grimaced and shook his head, as if to say that there are situations that don’t fit the usual categories. “Let me put it this way: this is something within my discretionary authority.”

I said, “You’re lying, Mac?”

I felt his eyes boring deeper into me. “Todd. Todd!” His tone changed abruptly and became more personal. “Let me tell you one thing: I don’t like to lie, I don’t want to lie. I lie only when it’s absolutely necessary.”

“But your business is lying.”

His brow corrugated again. “You know what, Todd. Let’s talk about that some other time. What I’m saying now is a straightforward matter. I’d like you to join me, but I can’t make you. That’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself. All I’m saying is that there’s a traitor on the loose. I’m prepared to give you everything I’ve got.”

The waiter brought in two espressos; another began to sweep crumbs away, but Holz waved him to stop.

In the silence, Holz opened a packet of Sweet’ n Low, emptied it into a spoon, added half a spoon into his cup and looked at me with a new interest. “You’ll get leads, information, money. Whatever else you need. I’ll put you on the scent…”

“Why?” I was trying to figure out his game. I feared my curiosity would outweigh my caution.

“There’s this one thing,” he said. “Just this unfinished business I’d like to take care of before retiring.” He suddenly looked tired, a grimace of weariness on his face. “I feel it’s time to call it a day. Jane can’t wait for me to do it. You know how she is, she’s working out plans, wants to start building. We have ocean front property down in Virginia Beach.”

“What about all these rumors about you becoming the new DDO?”

“It’s bullshit. I’m not the right of guy,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I’m a Cold War man and the Cold War’s over.”

“But someone high up is leaking that stuff.”

“It’s black humor, gets Jane all worked up. They know I’m not going to be bullied into providing phony intelligence. The director has no problems with watering down intel, fudging, telling the vice president what he demands to hear instead of what he needs to hear.” He smiled and rolled his eyes. “Going back to your earlier question. I hate to be taken for a sucker, and hatred is a great motivator.”

“Let me make one thing clear, “ I said abruptly. “If I were to do anything, I’d do it in my own way.” I needed a caffeine jolt, but the coffee was lukewarm and sour on my tongue.

“That’s fine with me,” he said softly. “Anyway, once you are out there you’re on your own.”

We stopped talking.

“Let’s settle up,” Holz said and signaled to the waiter for the check.

We emerged from the restaurant and stood in the shade of a huge gnarled oak tree in the front yard. Holz took a few steps and spun around. “Get in here for a second. It’s damn hot.”

It was cool inside. The driver raised a partition between the front and rear compartments. I said, “You never answered my question. You got oodles of people working for you, professionals. Why an amateur?”

“This is a job for an outsider—a very capable outsider, I must add.”

I said, “Cut the shit.”

“No, no, it takes a lot to become a good reporter, to know how to cultivate sources, learn the oblique language of Russia, develop a sixth sense for what’s solid and what’s not. You have to know hundreds of things which are absolutely useless in other walks of life.” He shrugged his shoulders, turned his eyes heavenward and the palms of his hands up. “In short—you,” he said confidently, with that calculating look that suggested he knew exactly what to expect next. Irony, truth in delicate balance, I thought.

“Besides, you and I have a few things in common,” he went on, frowning slightly. “This is something very personal for us. I want to see the motherfucker in prison. He betrayed me, betrayed your wife, betrayed our country.”

Suddenly, he formed a fist with his right hand and slammed it vehemently into the mitt of his left. I thought I saw a hint of torment in his eyes. “You of course want to avenge Emily… you owe it to her.”

I was trying to work something out in my head, but the thought was elusive, sidetracked as I had become by the idea of vengeance. I wanted to look the son of a bitch in the eye, I thought. But Emily’s gone and nothing would bring the scales back in balance. But it would bring closure. The idea’s to atone and go on. Yes, I thought, I’d do it.

I said, “If you think I’m going to be your flunkey and you’re going to run me, then you’re crazy.” I climbed out of the limo and slammed the door shut.

Holz rolled down the window and handed me one of those disposable cell phones, still in its plastic wrapper. “Here, use this if you want to reach me. There’s twenty dollars’ worth of calls on its chip. Otherwise just throw it away.”

4

In the car on my way back home, I tried to methodically analyze the complicated road to recovery from the shock that was Emily’s death. It had taken me years to regain my moorings. I told myself that I was content with my life. What would happen if I went along with Holz? An unease rose up from my stomach, like I was about to dive deeply into something dangerous. A single wrong step could mean disaster.

I sometimes wonder why anyone would want to become chief editor of the Tribune. The chief editor is more a politician than a journalist and I’m not a very good politician. In my case, it was blind ambition. In my last year in Moscow, there were rumors (published in the Washingtonian magazine) that Kevin Page and I were the most likely candidates to succeed the legendary editor Ed Hurd, the avatar of journalistic excellence who had made the Tribune to nearly equal the New York Times and the Washington Post on most days, and sometimes look better than either of them.

Strange what rumors could do to a person. Thinking back, I remember Emily, ever the accountant’s daughter, entertaining fantasies about enlarging the back porch of our Newark Street house. Why not turn it into a large sunroom, something she had often considered in the past when we had no money to do it. I tried to shine in my final months. I scrounged around for scoops. That’s the reason I flew to the Caucasus; burgeoning ethnic wars spelled the doom of the Russian empire.

“Do you really have to go?” Emily had asked. “Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Only for a few days. A war is under way and it’ll get worse.”

For a split second, as she turned her head, I sensed she understood fully that reporters make their careers in wars. Was there a more dramatic venue for capturing the collapse of an empire?

“Yeah, it leads if it bleeds,” she sighed, her bottom lip curved over the upper one. Then she cocked her head thoughtfully. “I sometimes feel you don’t exist outside of your work anymore. Do you have any real friends outside work, baby? We only see people who are connected to your work.”

I had no answer to that. I said, “One last time, honey.”

If I could relive my past, I’d certainly forego the Caucasus trip. But by the time I realized that, it was too late. Emily was gone. Gone from me was the mental vigor that comes from natural happiness. I no longer coveted Hurd’s job. When in the winter of 1992 Kevin Page was appointed chief editor, I astonished myself by sticking out my hand and warmly congratulating him.

Even so, the thought of resigning and finding another job had crossed my mind. But the Tribune was my life. No one ever left in those days; no one was ever fired. This was before the newspaper industry was plunged into a financial crisis and staffers like myself felt fierce loyalty to our employers who, in my case at least, gave me promotions and social prestige that practically crippled me for any other life. How could I quit?

Now, each man has his vanity and mine was about having what the Chinese call chu loo—a graceful way to save face. Mercifully, the publisher, Phil Binder, came to my rescue. In making public Page’s appointment, Binder also announced that I was being promoted. My freshly created new title: the paper’s chief foreign correspondent, based in London.