The firebird affair

Then Holz took out a black and white photograph and held it up between thumb and forefinger. “This is Oleg Vissarionovich Bogumilov,” he said pronouncing the name slowly. “Hector’s KGB case officer.”

It showed a dark handsome man, probably in his late thirties. Mass of curly black hair, long sideburns, big eyes, a prominent nose, and strong chin. The sloppy knot of a tie with a diamond-patterned weave poked up into the frame.

“Oh, the cryptonym of our in-house traitor is Hector.”

“Hector!” The prince of Troy, I thought, who opposed war and yet bravely led the Trojan army against the Greeks to save face and kin. So my nightmare of choice was a man with a code name. What was its significance, if any? If Hector had an honorable way out, I seem to remember, he would have taken it. But he didn’t. In the ancient world, there was no honor or dignity in giving up.

“Bogumilov is obviously not his real name,” Holz said, handing me the photograph.

He had few details about the man. Bogumilov served as a diplomatic courier, frequently traveled to the United States between 1979 and 1988. “We believe he was Hector’s controller in 1991—an important detail. Given the way the KGB operated, it probably meant Bogumilov originally recruited him.”

I got up and was now looking out through the French doors at a Japanese cherry tree in the middle of the backyard. “Is it possible that Hector is dead?”

“No,” Holz said, his nostrils flaring. “Don’t think so.”

“You’re certain?”

“Pretty much. Only Colonel Sokolski is no longer among the living. You remember he was the air attaché.” He shook his head. “There’s no chance in hell a Pollack would work for the Russkies.” Adam Sokolski was of Polish ancestry and a native of Gary, Indiana.

“Okay. What about the rest?”

“I have every single person in the computer. We ran all sorts of Agency traces a number of times, with negative results. We’ve done other types of database mining.” They had done extensive cross-referencing, he added, trying to spot the mole’s tracks and put a name to a traitor. He said this with a hint of self-accusation, as if he were the one at fault to suspect everybody.

“Hell, the US community was so small,” I said.

“Less than four hundred people, which includes wives and kids.”

I said, “I assume all Agency people knew about the operation?”

“Yes, of course.” Holz’s voice suggested that to distrust his staff was to distrust himself.

“How many non-agency people knew about your dealings with Professor Voronov?”

Holz glanced suspiciously at me. Then his face split into a shy smile, a filament of spittle fluttering between his teeth.

“Well, the ambassador had a vague idea. We had to give him a shovel in case the Russkies dumped a ton of shit on his doorstep. The ambassador had to say something to the press attaché, so he couldn’t be ambushed.”

He paused for a while, then added, “You and your wife knew. So did your Russian friend who originally put you in touch with Voronov.”

“Joseph?” I moved away from Holz and fixed him with a defiant look. I was getting angry.

I can read between the lines—in a way that’s the essence of my trade—but I wasn’t sure what Holz was saying. I didn’t know back then, I said, that the Agency had wanted to exfiltrate Voronov to the United States. Nor did Joseph. I suspect that the professor himself had no idea what Holz was preparing for him.

Now, in the silence, Holz began flipping the pages in the file, then pulled another smaller file from his attaché case and appeared to be searching for some specific rebuttal. I watched these histrionics, remaining impassive.

“Let’s not get diverted here,” he said, sounding irked. “Naturally, I had everybody checked out.”

I started at him for a long while as it dawned on me. “Oh, no, you didn’t…”

“Of course I did.”

Holz chuckled the way he chuckled when he was dealing with an uncomfortable matter. He allowed a fake smile. “I must apologize to you. I asked the FBI to put you under surveillance.”

I cut in sharply, loudly, “You were tapping my phones! Jesus H. Christ!”

He shook his head, noncommittally.

My mind flashed to 1992 when Joseph left four voice messages on my office answering machine, suggesting we meet. I had simply ignored them. Later, I had been horrified by my cowardice. Joseph, my friend, teacher, and guide to the mysteries of Russia. I could still hear Joseph’s voice: Hey Old Man, I’m three blocks from your office—at the Madison Hotel. How about that? Want to see you. Ending each message with “tseluyu,” sending kisses. Pure Joseph.

I decided against meeting Joseph to avoid reopening the wounds in my soul that could plunge a man into a deep loneliness for which there is no cure. That’s what I used to tell myself. It’s only now, so many years later, that I can admit that I had construed this narrative because it was a story I could live with. In fact, I’d been influenced by US Embassy investigators who, in a post-mortem on the Voronov debacle, had singled out Joseph as the most likely leaker. Joseph, you see, was their ideal candidate: an independent-minded person who was neither a regime supporter nor a dissident activist. What else could bureaucratic minds think of a brilliant young mathematician with a physics degree from Moscow State who abandons everything for literature?

I said, “You people are too much!”

“I’m sorry about that,” Holz said in a self-deprecating tone. He shrugged his shoulders, turned his eyes heavenward and the palms of his hands up as if appealing to a higher power.

Holz got up, put his hands behind his back, and began pacing. “Let’s have a few facts: in 1992, your friend Joseph was running a high-class prostitution ring in Moscow and mixed with some very, very unsavory types. We knew he’d try to contact you when he came over with the ridiculous Russian business group.”

“But you knew Joseph had ended up in a loony bin because he put me—and indirectly you, I might add—in touch with the professor. Hasn’t he already suffered…”

Holz interrupted. “You know that for sure, eh?” He threw me a hard look. “Let me remind you that people are as honest and truthful as they can afford to be. So it’s safe to conclude that one never knows anything for sure.”

We stopped talking.

Yes, I had to concede privately, friendships in Moscow during the communist dictatorship were tenuous affairs at best. We correspondents moved in and out of people’s lives as easily as we slipped on a fresh shirt each morning. In a dictatorship, meeting an average person is a one-time affair; a second meeting may put that person on the wrong side of the law. Far easier was to develop sources and friends among political dissidents. The fact that I was genuinely sensitive to their plight, that I gave them small gifts, made me feel better about myself. In reality, I’d exploited everybody, especially Joseph. They were sources of information and I was little more than a mercenary with a good eye. While listening sympathetically to the wife of an imprisoned dissident, or a Jew just fired from his job for applying to go to Israel, I kept all along mental notes of details that’d give color to an eventual story—a tear in her eye, the single bare light bulb, peeling paint, three generations living in one room, fear of bugging in the air. A minimum of guile would make them trust you and open their hearts and their minds. That’s why sometimes I wondered about my friendship with Joseph. I was uneasy about my own motives.

I said firmly, “I never had any reason to suspect Joseph of lying to me.”

Holz looked on unmoved as he patrolled the room. I could hear the breath whistling through his nostrils. “We have to consider all the possibilities, disagreeable as they may be,” he said finally. He returned to his seat on the sofa and fidgeted for a moment. “This is all neither here nor there, pal. Let’s get back to Bogumilov. He’s the one lead we have. Not a gilt-edged clue, I grant you, but it’s at least something concrete.”

He went on to speculate that Bogumilov and Hector first met in some unknown capital, where Hector was recruited. If only we had any indication about Bogumilov’s other foreign postings.

I said, “It’s all very thin.”

“You can’t wait for four aces forever when you can win with worse hands,” Holz quipped. “I’m not talking about reckless gambling.”

We sat in silence for about thirty seconds.

“There’s got to be a few old timers around who remember the guy,” Holz said. “There always are.”

“You didn’t find them.” I spread two fingers at Holz’s eyes. “Don’t tell me you haven’t tried all the angles.”

He walked me to the door. “You know, in emergencies we can always deposit funds in your accounts. Or help out on other stuff. All I need is a signal from you.”

“You’re not listening,” I said as I opened the door. I turned around to face him before shutting it. “I’m not working for you, Mac.”

9

I had chosen Jennifer’s favorite restaurant in Dupont circle and asked for a table as far away as possible from the piano and the bar where pudgy men with ruddy faces and dark suits were facing into the lounge, their elbows thrown back behind them onto the counter. I wanted to put her in a good mood; she was going to Los Angeles on business the next day and for all I knew I might be in Moscow by the time she returned.

I was nursing my third Red Label when she showed up, making no apologies for being late and promptly ordering gin and tonic. “Monday night and this place is crowded and noisy.”

“We don’t have to stay here,” I said. “What about that little Greek place around the corner? Or Nora’s?”

“I can’t be bothered.” Jennifer crinkled her nose in distaste. Her face was not so much pretty as unforgettable; full lips, a narrow nose, and a fullness of her cheeks made her look younger than thirty-seven.

In a dark Bill Blass suit, she looked like one of the female attorneys in Law & Order, equipped with a Louis Vuitton bag and a maroon attaché case. She bought her clothes at Neiman Marcus, knew all the best restaurants, and pretended to love golf weekends, a sport her law partners favored. Invariably around the third or fourth hole, she’d look at me, inhale deeply, stretch her arms, and say, “This is the life, baby.” Yeah, yeah, I’d go along, although convinced I was engaged in a mindless activity. Jennifer was a graduate of Stanford Law, a partner in Golden, Stryker, a blue-chip law firm on Eighteenth Street, and she was making more money than I’d ever hope to make. Her estranged husband was a lawyer, too, and had once done something big in the Pentagon before moving to Wall Street. He was always wearing dark suits on TV and barely moved his head even when greeting people. Why Jennifer had never formally divorced him was something of a mystery. I suspected disagreements over the mega mansion in which she lived with a lovely young daughter called Nina and a Salvadoran housekeeper.

In nearly five years we have been together, we’ve had a dozen or so dinners at her house. She cooked only when inspired, and could make surprisingly fine dishes, but she always left the big black granite island in the middle of her kitchen looking like a battlefield—as though she had prepared dinner for forty.

It was getting dark outside and the buildings opposite all had their lights on. For more than a week, ever since my safe house meeting with Holz, I had been distracted and preoccupied with the forthcoming trip.

I motioned to the waiter for a refill as I told her about my travel plans: I’ll fly to Helsinki, buy a package tour to Moscow. But I realized that she wasn’t listening.

“Aren’t you drinking too much,” she suddenly said.

“C’mon, baby. I’m a little tense and this calms me down.” Instead of making me drunk, the scotch seemed to make me more sober, able to see things more accurately.

Once upon a time, our conversations had flowed naturally, gracefully. Like good tango dancers attuned to each other’s moves, we used to intuit responses and avoid confrontations. Now I tried to lift her mood and leaned over to kiss her, but she recoiled. No, not that. I remembered too late that she hated the sweet sour tang of whisky on my breath.

“You’re an alcoholic,” she said. “You’d better be careful, baby.”

“Why do you keep going on about it? I’m not an alcoholic.”

She snorted. “I think you’re on the way to becoming one.”

A waiter appeared like a ghost; an overhead light flashed in his glasses, making his eyes disappear. But his presence ended this particular line of conversation. Jennifer ordered smoked salmon with capers, chopped eggs, and onions; I ordered a steak medium-well done.

I said, eager to move to another topic, “How was your day?”

“Exhausting! Getting ready for LA.” She pursed her lips in annoyance, picked up a thick folder from her maroon attaché case, and flicked through the pages. “How about you?”

“Getting ready for Moscow,” I said.

“Why’s everything done on the sly?” she suddenly said. “You should check up on that man Holz.” As a lawyer, she had little faith in arrangements that were not written down, signed, notarized. “For all your intelligence, honey,” she continued in her raspy voice, “you’re naïve about people, always erring on the side of trusting them.”

“I’m not that naïve,” I said.

“You are being beautifully manipulated,” she went on. “He keeps dropping tantalizing bits of information along a prepared path which leads to the exact place he wants you to be. You just watch.”

I made a surrendering hand gesture to stop bickering. I didn’t want to argue; Jennifer was in one of those moods when she tended to take any dissenting view as a kind of personal affront.

“Tell me then, why are you playing spies, like children,” she said and wiped the corners of her mouth. “What exactly are you doing for him?”

“Nothing.”

“What if something happens to you? Remember those two college students who strayed into Iran and were jailed for months?”

She stopped talking and chewed on her pinky finger. “And who’ll take care of your plants?” she asked later, evidently to make sure I wouldn’t ask her.

“Lisa and Ian,” I mentioned my neighbors.

A little later, while she went to the ladies’ room, a sense of discontent came over me. Perhaps because I had been rummaging through old cardboard boxes where parts of my life had been put away and forgotten—life stored on discs, notebooks and scraps of paper, yellowish clippings and photographs and rolls of undeveloped film, menus, opera programs and ticket stubs. This was my true history and it prompted hundreds of what-ifs and might-have-beens to spin through my mind. I had an uneasy feeling that the world was moving forward and I was stuck in one place.

Old doubts reintroduced themselves as they did recently in my darker moments. I tried to tell myself that these doubts were misplaced, that my annoyance with Jennifer was a passing thing. Like her constant use of an electronic organizer, which she turned on with a twist of the thumb? Or her contrariness; whatever I said, she would quote the Bard, “Nothing is good or bad, only thinking makes it so.”

The truth was Jennifer had become part of a good life I had created for myself. She was not Emily, to be sure, but I wasn’t looking for a woman to replace Emily. I had a well paying job. The publisher’s steadfast support had made me unfireable at the paper. I liked my condo; I took the Metro to work most of the time—the escalator at Rosslyn would whisk me down to the train and a five-minute air-conditioned ride to Farragut Square. It was a predictable, comfortable life. Yet, suddenly tonight, I felt overwhelmed by a sense of deep discontent and all my daily routines for some reason appeared to symbolize everything that was wrong with my life. A shrink would probably tell me that I was entering a midlife crisis.

I had to conceal irritation when Jennifer’s voice jerked me out of my mental meanderings. She was ordering another gin and tonic.

“Two tables over—don’t turn right now—two tables over, that former CBS news anchor is talking to that senator who’s always on TV,” she said in a low voice. “Charlie Gibson is here, too.”

Now we were back to our normal routine: locating fashionable or famous diners. Followed by a long running commentary on office intrigues, rumors of infidelities, and the latest news about the senior partner named Larry, whose wife had filed for divorce after discovering he was banging his secretary.

I was half-listening to her monologue, and found myself unexpectedly aching for sleep.

10

The Boeing’s blue cabin was half-empty. Flight attendants moved in a leisurely way down the aisle with trays of gin and tonics and bloody marys. I had taken a paperback novel for the long overnight flight east, expecting to get through it by the time we landed in Moscow.

Dinner was served somewhere over Newfoundland. I had three small bottles of red with my pasta. Then with eyes closed, I began coming to terms with the strange idea that I was flying directly to Moscow as a Tribune reporter!

It was like a bizarre dream—part of me still found it unreal, expecting to wake up. Last Tuesday, I was suddenly summoned by the chief editor. Conveying the summons his secretary, Pam, didn’t sound particularly friendly. This was enough to send my mind to the darkest places I could imagine: was I really unfireable? Good news is usually conveyed over the phone, I reasoned; bad news required a face-to-face meeting.

I had half expected that at some point, I’d be asked to take early retirement, but not so soon.

I took the steps down to the fifth floor, stopped by the men’s room, splashed my face with water, and adjusted my collar before stepping into the newsroom. A sea of faces seemed like ghosts from another lifetime. Voices floated about. At the far end, there was Kevin Page behind the glass wall, looking very preppy in a sparkling white shirt and polka dot bow tie, leaning back in his swivel chair, his feet up, one hand making sure his hair stayed carefully slicked down. He widened his eyes when he noticed me approaching his office and waved me in and at a seat without interrupting his phone conversation.

Hard to imagine that at one time we’d been rivals and competitors. We held similar editorial positions. He served as a correspondent in the Middle East and Africa, and had done two summers in Moscow as a vacation relief; I was a correspondent in the Middle East and later Hong Kong before going to Moscow. And yet somehow I had stayed in the shadows, while he had gone on to become one of the most powerful figures in Washington. I’m tempted to ascribe this to our different social backgrounds (his father had been secretary of the Navy in a Republican administration; my dad, a clerk with the US Postal Service), but that would only expose my deep dislike of the man from the moment we first met. I was still on the night copy desk at the time when Page waltzed in late one night straight from Beirut, where he had been posted at the time, looking like a foreign correspondent in a white linen suit, light blue shirt, and gold tie. The truth is that I recognized in him all that I wasn’t; he made me feel inferior, if not envious.

But I held a grudge against him for a specific reason. Back in late 1991, as I was recovering from my Moscow ordeal, I got a call one Monday morning from a researcher at the Washingtonian Magazine. Just a quick question, she said sweetly and enthusiastically. “Do you mind if I plug in my tape recorder?” To my amazement, her question was about my Caucasus trip. “Our sources say you’ve been detained there on narcotics charges?”

This was so preposterous that I had no idea how to respond. How do you prove the negative?

Indeed, I had been detained in a war zone in the Caucasus on account of having lost my press card. That’s why I couldn’t be contacted and informed about Emily’s death. After a few days, the local authorities suddenly claimed to have found some narcotics in my luggage and kept me confined to the hotel for two extra days before conceding a mistake. The Soviet Foreign Ministry subsequently issued a statement apologizing for what it termed a “regrettable incident.”

The young lady at the other end of the line appeared satisfied with this explanation. Yet, a week later, the magazine printed the rumor, attributing it to US diplomatic sources. It included my denial. It also quoted Page, deputy editor at the time, as emphatically dismissing the rumor and effusively praising my “superb work” for the Tribune.

Curious how a whiff of scandal excites people inside the Beltway. The word spreads through the buzzosphere like ripples on the surface of a pond. Even a completely false rumor is deeply destructive of the soul; no point in pretending it isn’t. I was already like a living zombie. Emily was dead. I was estranged from my son. Without them, everything fell apart; that’s how I felt. Vulnerable. I couldn’t see the way ahead. To top it all, I was in the midst of one of those odd, inexplicable periods in middle age in which we shun rational explanations. I searched for omens, saw significance in the most innocuous incidents, consulted the daily horoscope. I took yoga classes to learn ujjayi breathing (it is supposed to relax and center you if you breath like Darth Vader), saw a fortune teller on Route 7 in Falls Church, and a Haitian numerologists on U Street, near 14th Street.

Who had it in for me, I kept wondering. Why? In the Washington playbook, you protect your sources by quoting them as dismissing the information they’ve just leaked to you; that’s why for a brief instant I thought of Page, more rival than friend, then promptly but dismissed it as ludicrous.

“I wouldn’t worry about the fucking gossip column,” Page said later when I raised the subject during a lunch at McCormick & Schmick’s. “Who reads the Washingtonian?”

“All my neighbors.”

“They subscribe to it. They don’t read it.”

“Someone in the State Department has it in for me, Kevin.”

“Everybody in Washington has it in for somebody,” he laughed. “Focus on the menu. This is the best seafood place in town. And it’s Phil Binder’s tab.”

I survived the attack of shame. The story was soon over. It became ancient history after a few weeks and was largely forgotten when, three years later, I accidentally discovered that the anonymous source was Kevin Page. My informant was Max Dawson, the recently retired editor of Washingtonian, and his young Korean wife, Betty.

I was introduced to them by Jean Trevisan, wide-eyed star of several popular British movies, who thought that one of the perks of beauty was the freedom to be mischievous. I was interviewing Jean at the Connaught bar in London when she invited the Dawsons to join us. She had recently married a rich Italian industrialist and there were rumors around that she may prematurely end her career. It turned out that the Dawsons had attended her wedding in Venice. After a few drinks, I asked the question which had secretly bothered me for a long time.