The firebird affair

This was not something I was eager to do; in practice, it meant spending a lot of time covering ethnic wars in the Balkans. But there was something about Phil that made me not want to let him down. He was one of the last patriarchal newspaper owners in the country and he’d never forgotten that I had taken a bullet while working for him. So I went to London, where I figured I’d soon enough get swallowed up in the exigencies of my job. Three years later, when Page raised the issue of my coming back to DC, I didn’t know what to do. I dreaded the prospect of office politics and petty gossip. I’d seen several of my colleagues, men who had lost the wind and the legs to stay with the pack, return to desk jobs and ending up out on the street within a year. But then I heard that the chess columnist Murrey Bloomberg was about to retire and I phoned Phil to express my interest in the position.

5

All day in the office the next day, trying to do my work, I thought about my lunch with Holz.

I was contemplating the blank screen and its pulsating cursor when I saw Essie Levi’s swaying figure heading toward my cubicle, a clipboard in her hands. She was a pretty woman with black hair, dark brown eyes, and an olive complexion. She wore platform shoes and a light navy blue dress with a gold sash belt that accentuated her slim waist.

Essie was one of those terribly organized people and her cubicle was papered with link charts and schedules in 10-point font. She handled the back pages: the daily horoscope, crossword puzzle, scrabble box, Beetle Baily, Blondie, and other funnies, the weekly chess corner, and the weekly book section. She’d saved me from more missed deadlines than I can count. I also owed to her my Internet skills. I had hated computers with a passion, and they hated me, until Essie taught me how to handle them. Suddenly, I no longer had to drive to Connecticut and S to look for foreign publications with new chess gambits and other puzzles now that they all lived inside the gray box on top of my desk.

On most days, we’d banter—mainly her scolding me for habitual truancy. Today, there was a tremulous note in her voice.

“The management is going to offer buyouts,” she said. “Next week, they say. Everybody on the sixth floor is an endangered species.” She feared that she might be laid off after all these years. I could see it in her eyes.

Rumors of cutbacks had been circulating for weeks—getting closer, squeezing me, and reminding me that my job was not forever. Yap, yap, gossiping all the time, I thought. All that afternoon in the office, in the back of my mind there was one question: what was owed the dead? I had no answer; my thoughts were thick as molasses. My latest column danced on the computer screen. It was a big, fat blank where I should be pontificating about some complicated end game or telling my readers about a Norwegian boy named Magnus Carlsen who was rumored to be a new chess wunderkind.

“The Cassandra of the Tribune,” I joked and imagined the beautiful Cassandra winding through the streets of Troy, banging her gong and calling Listen, Listen.

“Oh, forget it,” Essie snapped and drew her lips into a tight grin. Then she looked at the clipboard and added, “They are asking for the corrections. Want to close the page early.”

As Essie shimmied off to her desk, I wondered how old she was. Same age as Jennifer? Essie’s fresh face flashed through my mind: a one-night stand centuries ago. We went for drinks to the Statler Hilton bar and ended up thrashing around on the carpet in her Vermont Avenue apartment. One of those things: pleasure was demanded, pleasure was given in return, the word love never uttered. I’d always shied away from casual affairs in the office, because what always happened was that colleagues found out, gossiped at the water cooler, gave you meaningful looks in the hallway. I didn’t want any of that. The thing about Essie was that she never once mentioned our brief encounter. That’s how we became friends.

It’s almost funny, when you think about it, that suddenly I felt the urge to talk to Rick. Once I had tried to protect him from the burden of the knowledge, and that had backfired. Now I wanted to tell him everything I learned from Holz. Every single detail and nuance. Everything. The pros and cons in Holz’s proposal; that Holz evidently figured I would have no choice but to agree, that I had had long time to stew and rage.

But when I picked up the phone, I had to repress an irrational fear that my son would not want to speak to me, would never speak to me again. It was the fear that returned again and again—like a toothache.

Rick’s girlfriend answered the phone. I use the word girlfriend because I don’t know what else to call Kate (partner sounded odd in my ears). My mind stumbled over the word fiancé. “Rick and I don’t believe in formal marriage,” Kate had once told me.

Kate and Rick have been living together in California for the past four years, Rick teaching history at a Costa Mesa middle school. This was the extent of my knowledge, due to Rick’s firm desire to keep me at arm’s length (which was preferable to an earlier stage in our relations when he had severed all connections with me.)

Kate and Rick had met as teenagers in Moscow and had been inseparable since boarding school days in Connecticut. Kate was a strong willed young woman, something that Joe and Bev Garment commented each time Emily and I met them at Sheremyetevo airport. Last time was in January 1991. Kate wore a short flaring skirt that showed off her nice legs—under a sheepskin overcoat—and we watched Rick run a bony hand along her hip with such familiarity that I caught my breath. Then he was saying something into her ear, his tongue curling around a strand of her blond, expensive, spoiled brat hair.

“She’s only sixteen,” I whispered to Emily.

“Who cares,” Emily snapped back. I knew she was jealous, if only for a moment.

“Don’t worry, these things don’t last,” I said.

She sighed as we watched the kids go through the passport control accompanied by Joe Grimes who, with his diplomatic passport, could walk them to the gate.

That was a long time ago and I was wrong. Now the main thing to keep in mind, I had to remind myself, was to avoid asking about anything even remotely controversial. Like their relationship. “Mr. Martin,” she had said last time I’d asked about it, “many of our friends had beautiful weddings and were divorced two years later. We’re as married as anybody.”

Now again she called me Mr. Martin, explaining breathlessly that she was rushing to an appointment. I suspect I was a nuisance in Kate’s book.

“No, no. Call me Todd.” I could hear my own voice. It was embarrassing, it sounded whiny, it was thinner than usual as if coming from a different place. Normally I happen to have a rich voice.

“Okay, Todd. Sorry.” She sounded girlishly sassy. “Rick’s out. Why don’t you email him and he’ll call you back, I’m sure.”

So I sent Rick a brief email: “Rick, something has come up that you should know. I have new information about Mom’s death in Moscow. I plan to go to Russia to look into this. Give me a call when you get a chance. Love to Kate.”

6

“This is a ten on the Richter scale of bad ideas,” Alex said after I laid out my plan for him. I had to discuss my secret with Alex or another friend I could trust, so as to release the newly formed obsession from the confines of my mind, where it could only expand. But I needed a sympathetic hearing. Alex Angelides was my best friend since the time we were both freshmen journalists doing the late night shift on the Tribune copy desk. He was lean, angular, relentlessly honest, and unnervingly free with his opinions. “Why don’t you just tell Holz to fuck off?”, he added.

Alex was playing with his coffee cup. “Sounds to me like he’s not just off the reservation—he’s departed the planet earth altogether.”

I made a noncommittal grunt. There was one thing about Alex one had to discount: his tendency to see the gloomy side of life, something that became more pronounced now that his once jet black hair which he brushed back without a parting was showing strains of grey. In the past, I’d often found his bluntness to be reassuring. I appreciated his skeptical and shrewd accounts of what had transpired in the city and at the paper during my frequent forays abroad, Alex being an indefatigable fact-hound with the knack for pungent one-liners. When shrapnel grazed my thigh during the Cyprus fighting, he said: “If scoop is an over-the-wall home run, than taking a bullet is a grand slam.” But there was something oddly annoying today about his strenuous refusal to see my point of view.

“What’re you going to do?”

“I’m thinking seriously about it.”

“You’re nuts,” he said, waving his arms. “What exactly is he saying?”

I said Holz had proposed to give me all the information he has at his disposal, plus whatever else I may need if I’d join forces with him to discover the identity of the mole. It was not going to be a fudge factory operation, it’s something between him and me, I added.

Alex didn’t believe that. What he wasn’t most sure of was Holz himself. He laughed one of his sardonic laughs.

“Well, I imagine he has the authority to run his own irregulars,” Alex said. “So many of the old Cold War types have retired that he’s now a senior man. Technically, he’s number three, I think. The acting DDO is a political appointee and clueless. But that’s not the point here.”

“What’s your point?”

Alex hunched his shoulders and lowered his head almost to the table level before speaking. “First, Holz and such people are poison. They’re liars. You can’t trust anything he says.”

I said nothing. I myself had been wondering about Holz. He had graduated from Yale, breaking away from the southern Indiana farm which had been in the Holz family for four generations and from a gravitational force that bound his people to the Midwestern horizons. Ever since, he had lived a bigger life in a bigger world: in Berlin, Miami, Saigon, Rome, Moscow, London, Washington.

Alex went on: “How can you be sure there’s a new defector? As I said, Holz and his people are congenital liars. Why not check it out with intelligence committee staffers on the Hill. Check your Rolodex…”

“C’mon, Rolodex!”

“Shit, you know what I mean.”

I knew, of course. After two decades on the Tribune, I had good contacts in just about every agency of the government as well as on Capitol Hill. But what exactly was there to check?

Alex continued: “Which brings me to my second point: the conflict of interest. The paper would never approve it. You’d have to quit.” He went on expanding on this point and using as many words as possible, like radio sports commentators. Then he let out a small dismissive laugh. “Remember: if Uncle Sam gives you money, Uncle Sam wants a return on his investment.”

“I’ve no intention of taking Uncle Sam’s money. Period.” I felt I was even entitled to a little bit of moral superiority because I was doing the right thing.

“Man, you don’t have a clue about Holz’s real agenda. These folks operate on several levels.”

I said, “He may be shit, but he’s human. He was Moscow station chief and there was a mole under his very nose. He wants revenge, pure and simple.”

Alex was silent for a moment. “Sounds like you’ve pretty much decided in your own mind to do it.”

“Let’s say I’m almost there.”

“You mean you’d take a leave of absence? What if Page nixes it?”

”I’d do it anyway, I think.”

“You can’t,” Alex cried. “You have too many years in. Your retirement would be toast.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

The talk didn’t go as I imagined it would and I gazed at the TV screen in the distance. The sound was turned off, but I could see congressional grandees striking dramatic poses, looking both grave and indignant. But my mood plummeted and suddenly I was flooded with intense annoyance. Was this my best friend? I was tempted to tell him what I expected more understanding from a friend.

Alex persisted. “Mind you, if push comes to shove, Holz’ll throw you under the first bus. It’s against the law for the Agency to use U.S. reporters. Strictly verboten!” He kept playing with his cup, turning it round with his index finger. I knew all his gestures, the subtle language of his face. He disapproved. Alex was afflicted with an exaggerated sense of right and wrong.

“There’s a big fat 201 file at Langley with your name on it,” Alex said. “There must be a reason for you being headhunted by someone like Holz.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck about his reasons,” I said. But Alex’s argument wasn’t so far-fetched, I had to admit.

And yes, journalism is a never-ending apprenticeship, requiring one to adapt constantly to changing landscape. That’s its reward—the discovery of the diversity of life. But no reporter worth his salt would abandon a good story by contemplating everything that could possibly go wrong. Or succumb to fear. I remember the fear I felt entering a war zone would melt away once I was on the scene.

“Stay away from this one,” Alex said, sighing. “It’s too personal. Your judgment gets clouded, you do things you know you shouldn’t do. I’m just giving you my two cents.”

He got up and picked up the tray with the two cups. “Why don’t you come over to the house,” he said.

“Some other time,” I said. I was worn out; his criticism had left me feeling a bit introverted.

As we walked out of the elevator, he said, “It’s Rick, isn’t it?“ He gave me an odd searching look.

“Well, in part…” I thought, yes, of course it’s Rick.

“I knew it.”

I tried to shut my ears and my mind and concentrate on Rick. But then, suddenly, I became conscious of an extra note in my friend’s cutting remark. Was that an oblique allusion that I was a bad parent? Didn’t I always have Rick’s best interests at heart? True, I had not seen much of him except for the first couple years of his life. I couldn’t claim like other fathers that once upon a time, I used to drive him to school or the late night skating and Little League games, or that I had taken him white-water rafting to show him the larger world. I never had dinner at Chuck E. Cheese’s at five o’clock. I had been working, hustling to make a living. Once Rick went to boarding school, we only saw each other during holidays. The bad blood between us was no secret; Emily used to keep peace in the family. The real break came after her death when he had insisted on going to live with his grandparents in California. I put on the best front I could, insisting for years that the reason was the pursuit of higher education.

Rick evidently saw me differently. Most likely as a self-absorbed man, capable of indifference, deceit and dishonesty. But I am no longer that man, I thought. Now I wanted to make it up to him.

When I was young, the lesson I learned from my mother, as much by slaps as caresses, was that love was action. Love is what you do, not what you feel or say, she’d say. We learn that later in life. I wondered: when you’re no longer thinking about a person, can you still be in love with her? Sometimes I felt as though Emily had existed only erotically for me, as though she had never existed in fact. But I thought about Rick almost every single day, even if only very briefly; I no longer thought of Emily. What kind of love could it be eleven years after her death? I thought frequently about other women, wondered what it would be like to fuck this one or that one. Whatever I now felt toward Emily, it was more like guilt than love. Guilt is a Jewish thing, my Mom insisted before she descended into the abyss of dementia. The reasons for Emily’s death, she said trying to calm a tempest she knew was raging in my soul, the reasons were hidden in the mysterious designs of an inscrutable providence.

What a pity that I couldn’t accept this explanation. Nor could I accept the possibility that it was accidental. What if? Over and over I’d torture myself: She would have been alive today if I had I not traveled to the Caucasus war; if I had sent her home early to prepare the house; if my blind ambition, yes, my ambition…. well, you get the idea.

There was yet another crucial point that could not be disregard: if I had let Emily down, I had let me down too. Could I live with myself if I turned down this opportunity to find out the why and the how?

No. I knew I had to learn about the last hours of Emily’s life before I’d be able to put my soul to rest again. Discover who’s responsible and have them punished. See that justice is done. If I don’t do it, no one else will. I disregarded a new element which Holz had introduced and which over time became my nightmare of choice: the mole.

I went to bed that night and dreamed I was following the mole, first through a maze of snow-covered streets, then in a cab that kept racing down a lonely road until it reach a dead end. When the driver turned around to ask me where I wanted to go, he had Holz’s face.

7
When Rick called the next day, I again found myself tongue-tied and flustered.

I woke shortly after eight. The power shower pummeled me awake. I put NPR on the little kitchen radio. I made coffee, toasted two onion bagels and took them to the tiny balcony off my bedroom. I opened the sliding door and the flimsy white curtains were fluttering as I stepped through them.

It was lovely out there, with the sun climbing up in the sky. A small section of the river shimmered in the distance. I watched a solitary jetliner approaching the Reagan National go into the glare of the sun. I used to watch low-flying silvery birds roar up and down the river as they were landing or taking off. But after 9/11, their frequency had plummeted.

I expected Rick to call before going to work; given the time difference that meant around nine thirty. I was prepared, I thought. I had to be calm. Whenever we talked in the past, it seemed like all the accumulated hostilities reasserted themselves. They say this is only normal. He lived on one coast and I on the other. We hadn’t met in years.

I picked up on the second ring.

“Todd Martin.” Pause.

“It’s me. Rick. Hi.”

“Oh, Rick! Good to hear your voice.”

Silence.

“Well, I bumped into Holz, you remember him, the CIA man in Moscow. He thinks the KGB had something to do with Mom’s death.”

“Shit!”

“Some defector says they gave her a psychotropic drug in that restaurant, you know the stuff that makes you talk. The defector insists it was an accident.”

“Are you there?”

“Where else?”

In the two words I heard all his resentment. There was a snappishness to him. I tried to control my voice, keeping out any hint that I wanted to make up for the wrongs of the past. I could not afford the luxury of being myself, I could not start an argument. “I’m going to Russia to look into this,” I said. “I could email you details as things develop.”

Neither of us said anything for a while.

“I guess I’d like that.”

I said, ”You always thought there’s something fishy about her death.”

“Yeah.”

“Dad?”

“I meant to tell you something…”

“Yes?”

For a brief instant I thought he wanted to wish me luck, or something like it. I held my breath. Whatever he was going to say, he thought better of it.

8

I used the disposable cell to phone Holz the next day. He answered within a few seconds. He gave me the address of a safe house in Tysons Corner and the time.

The safe house was on a quiet, U-shaped cul-de-sac with soothing green lawn trimmed by barbered greenery in front, fenced-off gardens in the back, and waxy privet hedges bordering brick walkways. Scattered azaleas sprouting around gave the scene crimson, pink, and white touches. A dozen or so hundred-year-old poplars and oaks carefully preserved by the developer gave it the look of a long established middle-class neighborhood.

I made my way through the fecund smell of a recent mowing, thinking of all the old movie stars in all the old spy movies that I saw after midnight. Men in big trouble, but boy, could they maneuver around dangerous situations and you knew for sure that they were never going to be hurt by anything or anyone, even when making love to beautiful enemy agents who kept a .22 caliber under the mattress.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the house.

Holz got up from the sofa to greet me. He was wearing a gray striped business suit and a sparkling white shirt with a maroon tie—he was always dressed for an official lunch or a diplomatic cocktail party.

I must admit that I had a prejudiced view of Holz, which stemmed from the unhappy incident in Moscow. But now my view kept changing. Obviously he was a complicated man, in spite of his hard work at making his surface simple. Hard to grab hold of. Last week, I had blamed him for everything that happened in Moscow. But then one night this week, as I struggled to fall asleep, some mental judge in my head ruled in Holz’s favor—absolved him of guilt. It made no sense to blame him for something Emily—my inexhaustibly enthusiastic Emily—had done of her own free will. Something she wanted to do.

“Are we wired?” I made a spinning motion with my hand, pointing at the walls and ceiling.

Holz sneered. “Don’t worry, everything is disconnected.”

As if reading my mind, he said, “I’ve asked you to come here because if we met at the Main Headquarters, you’d have to go through Public Affairs, which means lots of paperwork and a paper trail. We don’t want that, do we?”

The CNBC financial channel was on, but the sound was off. Holz briefly glanced at the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen.

I looked around. Anonymity and impersonality was etched into every feature. The walls were cream. The large living room was furnished with beige leather couches and two sets of sofa tables and easy chairs. The hardwood floors were covered with factory-made oriental rugs. The place smelled of the lemon-scented furniture polish I remembered from my youth, stirring the memory of my parents expecting guests and Mom offering me a lick of the spoon with raisins and sweet farmer’s cheese she mixed in her kugel cake.

I went over to the bookcase and examined the top row of books. The hodgepodge selection was probably bought by the yard by the Agency’s acquisition department.

Holz returned from the kitchen with two steaming mugs, a jar filled with packets of Sweet’n Low, and a plate of doughnuts.

A thick black folder was on the table in front of him. Holz had me sit beside him as we went through the contents. There were the names of the Russian investigating officer; of doctors who signed the death certificate, both of whom had passed away, from natural causes, it was said; the address and phone number of Galina Zvonareva, Emily’s Russian girlfriend. Zvonareva’s photo showed a triangular face tapering to the chin and marked by perpetual sorrow, like the sad face of Virgin Mary on an icon.