The firebird affair

As I moved through the apartment—it was in fact two two-bedroom apartments combined—I found one thing that once belonged to me: the 1968 framed cover of LIFE magazine showing Bobby Kennedy jogging on the Malibu beach a day or two before his assassination. An evocative photo I had kept since college: RFK’s unmistakable silhouette caught against the background of the blue Pacific, a pale blue sky, and yellow expanse of sand.

A suntanned young woman, standing in a group with her back to me, very prim and tall, made me start. It could have been Emily, her yellow dress with narrow spaghetti straps, the sweet line of her calves down to the flats, the way she looked from behind. Same hair pulled into a ponytail. My heartbeat grew erratic. It triggered a memory of the time when I first saw Emily with girlfriends in Café Rondo, at the corner of 19th and Q. It was the last day of April, an exciting day in DC when Nixon’s four top aides resigned and he took personal responsibility for the Watergate scandal but denied any personal involvement. I was at the sidewalk café when the news of four resignations came; Emily and her friends talked about it at the next table. It took three weeks of secret pursuit—I was satisfied just to watch her graceful figure from a distance or stroll past her to get a whiff of her perfume—before I worked up the nerve to ask her out. Don’t tell that to anyone else, I said to myself. Nowadays, people meet online and the coordination is done electronically.

Then the woman in the yellow dressed turned around as if she had become aware I was staring at her and immediately turned back. I registered a slip of her hair curled under, soft little chin, high cheekbones. I approached the group and recognized George something whom I had met years earlier when he worked for the AP in Athens. I exchanged nods with to George, who was busy talking. “The guy’s wife eloped with the Argentine military attaché,” George was saying. “They just took off. Flew to Bali.”

“This is shocking,” George’s wife made a face. “Eww.” She was a rail-thin woman with short platinum hair wearing an aubergine suit.

Tina Turner’s strong voice from another room floated over us: What’s love got to do with it. The woman in the yellow dress turned and smiled at me. “Do I remind you of someone,” she said.

“Not at all,” I said. Had I been staring too hard at her?

The crowd kept growing. The music became louder. People were nibbling cheese bits and crackers with dollops of Russian caviar on top. White wine was served by a waitress; those who wanted hard liquor had to serve themselves in the kitchen.

I made my way to the bar in the kitchen, humming a kiss is just a kiss, ta da dada da, the fundamental things apply, as times goes by. Emily’s favorite tune from Casablanca.

As I worked my way back, a glass of freezing Stoli in hand, I noticed the woman in the yellow dress standing across the room with several men and chatting with one in particular, an athletic thirtyish man with close-cropped blonde hair. I figured he was an American by his scrubbed, healthy complexion and the way he stood, chin cocked up. I moved closer to hear what they talked about, but without success. All I registered was a curt voice and a face self-assured and supercilious.

Something told me that this was not going to be the day when I’d meet people I was interested in. I was interested in Russians. But there’s always hope. Cocktail parties and dinners were a necessary evil of my business, a venue for that peculiar trade in hints, leaks, half-truths and revelations when you can learn state secrets or completely misleading gossip. Circulate, I said to myself. Circulate.
13
The buffet table had been shoved against the rear wall of the dining room; laid out on it were large bowls of pasta, meat sauce, grated Parmesan cheese, mixed salad, baskets with garlic bread, several types of cheese and two cakes iced in black chocolate.

When I joined a line, the woman in yellow squeezed in behind me. “Mind if I come in here,” she said.

“Be my guest,” I said and smiled at her.

“Amanda Paul,” she said, breezily, to my great surprise. “I’m with the YAMA photo agency.” It had taken me years of experience to master the cocktail party art of walking up to complete strangers and introducing myself.

I introduced myself. “I saw you back there. By the way, who eloped with the Argentine military attaché to Bali?”

“Oh,” she laughed, “the wife of a correspondent for the Sun. That’s a big scandal.”

“What happens now?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged her shoulders, then added frivolously, “They live happily in Bali ever after, I guess.”

Something made me wonder why would such an attractive young woman even talk to a middle-aged man with a slightly swelling potbelly. I pulled in my stomach. Was she mocking me? Or just being friendly? I could see that she was used to people volunteering to help her, suggesting she needed this or that thing even when she had no clue what she needed. I usually found myself unnerved by women I found beautiful and mysterious; my way of dealing with it was to be blunt. But I was old enough to know that women didn’t give off the kind of body heat that radiated all over me if they weren’t looking for a hook up. Some women preferred mature partners, I consoled myself while secretly admiring the curve of her throat. Popping a boner was a reflex, I thought, nothing more.

After a pause, I said, “YAMA! That’s a French outfit?”

“Yes. I’m based in Paris.”

“What sort of stuff do you do for YAMA?”

“News photographs only rarely… mainly portraits of top people, or pictures for various art books and stuff. I’ve done a couple of glossy coffee table books.” Her smile was quizzical, perhaps because she was uncertain about its reception.

I said, “Are you staying in this compound?’

“Yes, my company has a one bedroom apartment.” She mentioned the number of her entrance. “And you?”

“I’m at the Ukraine, across the street. I used to live here a long time ago. In fact this used to be my apartment.”

“So what brings you back?”

“I’m on assignment. And you?”

“Same.”

She hoisted her glass in affectionate fashion. The glasses touched. “Here’s to quitting talking shop.” She had that ability to look at you as if you were the only person in the world.

“Are you trying to flatter me?”

“Good Lord no.”

By the time we finished dinner, I had outlined all the main biographical facts—my age, my immigrant parents’ arrival in America, my education, move from St. Louis to Concord, New Hampshire for my first newspaper job, the marriage to Emily. I told her how, until that shrapnel grazed my thigh during the Cyprus war, I was a twenty-three-year-old man destined to grow old on the copy desk of the paper, and turn into a deeply frustrated middle aged man saddled with enough hang-ups to fill a walk-in closet, and how that accident brought me to the attention of the publisher and propelled my Tribune career onto an upward path. Emily’s death in Moscow eleven years ago under somewhat mysterious circumstances and my desire to find out what had happened to her. Finally, becoming a chess columnist, which everybody viewed as a big comedown.

“And was it?”

“I’d thought it might be. But I’d come to love it. Sometimes I struggle a lot, but the end is result is my work, nobody else’s. I own the product I create.” I went on and on about my work and as I did so I suddenly realized that for the last seven years I’d spared the annoyance—perhaps humiliation, too—of looking at a story under my byline which I could barely recognize.

Amanda said wistfully, “I wish I could care about something as much as you seemed to care about chess. Maybe you can tell me what inspires such devotion.”

“I love what I do, I guess. I’m lucky.”

Her story was brief. Both her parents were physicians in Richmond, where she grew up. She talked about graduating from William and Mary and Columbia J-School and about her YAMA job. I imagined her playing lacrosse as a girl; now she probably played tennis. No, she rode horses. She loved horses, she said. That probably explained, I thought, a small scar on the left side of her chin carefully covered by makeup.

Rather smoothly, she moved the conversation to me, so smoothly that I realized it only later.

“Your wife must have been a great lady,” she said.

I nodded—yes.

“Did she mind being dragged around the world on someone else’s whim?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You mentioned amends. What sort of amends? A mystery always surrounds an unwitnessed death. The circumstances are unknowable, don’t you agree?”

“Maybe amends is not the right word,” I said, figuring how much to tell her and where to begin. “Let’s say I’m determined to find out all I can about her last day. How she died. I owe that to her.”

She shrugged her shoulders, as if considering how much we owe dead people, I thought, then shook her head. “How very romantic.” After a while, she added, with a touch of irony, “But then again, men are supposed to be more romantic than women.”

”You may be right.”

“To romantics,” she said. Our glasses clinked.
14
The wine had made me more talkative. “I’m not a romantic,” I said.

Talk about the romantics? I knew I looked like my father, and when I looked in the mirror, I sometimes saw him there. But I certainly didn’t want to be like him. He was a dreamer who dreamed about returning to what he called our country once the Communists were overthrown in Belgrade and always talked about an imminent American invasion of Europe. He always had his suitcases packed, mentally. I kept correcting him: America is our country, dad! But he was a stubborn man and after a while I gave up. Now whenever I call his face to mind, the image that comes up first is one of dad patiently feeding the mail into the canceling machine in the sorting room in the Clayton post office. He and Mom were completely different from each other. In contrast to his Balkan self-confidence, she seemed afraid of her own shadow. Then again, she was from a part of the world that expected nothing good of anybody. As a teenager, she had to fend for herself—all her relatives vanished after the Nazi armies passed through Minsk in 1941. She’d never seen them again and rarely talked about it; she believed many had ended in Treblinka. Her special talent was empathy, and that may have been the reason that she and Dad never argued. Or, perhaps, it was the absence of a common language: they communicated in a mixture of Russian, Serbian, Yiddish, German, and of course English. Growing up in this atmosphere, as you might expect, made it hard to figure out where I belonged—given different nationalities, religions and ethnic backgrounds, and the fact that I was born in exile. No wonder I wanted my parents to settle down somewhere, anywhere. I like to think that the moment when the SS Vulcania entered the New York harbor with hundreds of displaced persons from Eastern Europe on board – I was nine at the time -- I had made the decision to I detach myself from the past, abandon the crucial values of heritage and identity, and embrace America without reservations. Perhaps that’s not exactly how it happened; perhaps I just wanted it to be so. But what is unquestionable is that from the moment we landed, I had an unquenchable thirst to become a genuine part of America. I was certain that my future was wider and broader than the ocean I’d crossed.

I said, “My father had a romantic streak, and he suffered for it.” I sketched the scene for her: my father, a former royal Yugoslav cavalry captain turned postal clerk in Clayton, Missouri. “You don’t want to end up like me,” he’d say. Military types had had time adjusting; his commanding officer with a punctured eardrum worked for the Swift meat-packing plant; another fellow officer was a night guard at a Ladue bowling alley. Come Sunday, they’d meet, all spruced up, addressing each other formally—Mr. Lieutenant Colonel, Mr. Captain, Mr. Lieutenant, whatnot. They all loved Richard Nixon, insisted liberation was always just around the corner—next week, next month, next year.” I could hear my father’s sardonic voice as I sat in front of the television mesmerized by John F. Kennedy’s thrilling campaign rhetoric. “On je luftiguz,” he’d angrily say of JFK (a good for nothing gasbag).

I said, “Funny thing was that once a year, Dad and his friend all had a black tie dinner to celebrate the king’s birthday. Always in the French restaurant in Gaslight Square. Toasting His Majesty’s health.”

Amanda was silent for a moment—startled, it seemed to me, by these exotic details. “They seem fascinating characters,” she said. “Why black tie?”

“To remind themselves of their former status, I guess.”

I thought about my father. Remote, stern, cold. Sometimes cruel. I got seriously whipped several times for minor infractions. Yet I admired his stoic obstinacy, his faith. I loved the old man, not despite his quaint values but because of them.

“This is all so…” she halted.

“Weird? Bizarre?” She couldn’t possibly know how right she was, I thought. “But I’m boring you…”

“Not at all! Honestly.” Her hand was on my arm; her face and her voice seemed animated with sudden interest. “My background is boring. My parents are nice people but nothing romantic about them. They met in college and married. How did your parents meet?”

“That’s a long story. I’m going to have to turn in. It’s been a long day for me. I’ve got work to do tomorrow.”

“Okay, to be continued.” She laughed and squeezed my arm just a little, like a substitute for a hug, I thought. There was something in the way she did it that made me feel I shouldn’t even try to go with her home tonight. She didn’t rebuff my ardor but her body language said, if you think you can fuck me on our first meeting you’ve got another think coming.

I walked back to the hotel. Why was I wasting time with Amanda Paul? I had more important things to do. Whatever her game was, I said to myself, I was too busy to play. I tried briefly to shift my thoughts to Hector. Then again, I thought, she was rather lovely. The way she was playfully swishing her hips. Probably smarter than she appeared, deliberately keeping her lights on dim. There was a slightly prudish quality about her, a reluctance to use profanities, which I found rare among younger women. For a brief moment, a thought crossed my mind that she was trying to get me to like her. I must admit that I went all strange inside that first time I saw her. This is what has happened and might as well admit it. So what, I said to myself, imagining the contours of her sleeveless summer dress, and wild shapeless thoughts filled my head. Dreams are free. She was like a star in a distant orbit, which had nothing in common with my orbit.

The red light was flashing in my room.

“Todd, dorogoy (my dear),” I heard a familiar hoarse voice. Igor always sounded as if he was in the initial stages of laryngitis. “What a pleasant surprise. It’s Igor. I’ll tell Joseph you’re in town. We’ll call in the morning. Welcome. Celuyu (kissing you).”

So Joseph is in town, I sighed with satisfaction. It was a good omen.

“Yeah.” The morning sun was peeping between the curtains. I was hung over.

“Come out to the house for lunch, swimming. It’s going to be the first real scorcher of the summer.”

“Yeah.” I was wet. My t-shirt clung to my body. There was an infectious enthusiasm in Joseph’s voice, which was a good sign. Joseph was still my friend.

“We’ve lots of catching up to do, starik.” Joseph used his old nickname for me: old man.

“Yes, we do.”

“I’ll send a car to pick you up at eleven sharp. See you soon, you fucking guy.”

“Okay.”

It must have taken me twenty minutes to shave, wash, and dress. Once upon a time, a cold shower was enough to clear hangovers, but now they seemed to linger longer.

Downstairs in the restaurant, I picked up coffee, orange juice, two eggs sunny side up, bacon, and two slices of toasted bread. I ate quickly and ravenously. I had a couple of hours to kill before Joseph’s car came to pick me up and I decided to walk to the Tribune bureau. I had bad vibes about the hotel phone and wanted to use bureau phones instead to get in touch with other contacts. Especially Avtandil and Sasha Ivanov—the two guys I thought might steer me in the right direction.

The Tribune bureau was on the fifth floor of a yellow brick building, two flights of stairs up from Barbara’s apartment.

A plump young receptionist with corn-silk hair and milky blue eyes gave me her professional smile and pointed me with her big eyes toward Barbara’s office.

Barbara wore a cream-colored pants suit and a maroon silk blouse. I remembered her as an impeccable dresser when she briefly worked for me on the Foreign Desk.

“I supposed you can use your old office,” she said bleakly. But her body language wanted me out of there. “While Jim Johnson’s on home leave,” she added.

We talked for a few moments about the prices of gas and oil and about Chechnya – two themes that seemed to weigh on Barbara’s mind. It was clear that, while at pains to be pleasant, she was reserved. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

I realized that if I was to get anywhere, I had to take the initiative. I needed Barbara’s help.

“Can we take a walk,” I said, slowly craning my head toward the courtyard. That was an old instinct: always assume places are bugged.

We didn’t speak in the elevator. As we descended slowly, the loud whir and clink of gears reminded me another age.

I had to find some former KGB officers who’d be willing to talk about the past, I said. Someone familiar with details surrounding Emily’s death. I had to get to the bottom of it. At least fill in the blanks.

“Well,” she said in a low voice. “You’ll have to grease the right palms.”

“I know,” I said.

“They call it a consultation fee.” She made the quotation marks with her hands and shook her head. “The going rate is a thousand dollars per hour, I’m told. I’ve never done it myself. What could you expect from an African American woman from South Carolina?”

I was silent for a while.

“Now,” she continued, “this place is full of con artists. Many of them have memories that can be altered if the price is right.”

I needed a fixer, I said. “Or someone who could put me in touch with these characters.”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“Just between you and me,” I said, “this is the reason I’m here. I don’t have much time.”

We stood now outside the entrance lobby.

“I thought you might be spying on us. All these rumors back in DC about buyouts and stuff make you paranoid.” She laughed and blushed slightly and I could see she didn’t believe me. “Besides you never told me last night why you’re here.“

“Good God! Do I look like a spy to you?” I laughed. Yes, I said to myself, I’m something like a spy, but my mission is different.

“I don’t know what a spy looks like,” she said.

It was cool inside. The television was showing a taped soccer match between St. Petersburg Zenith and CSKA Moscow.

The car sped west, riding low and heavy with bulletproof glass and armor. I enjoyed the city’s new skyline from inside the car where the air was filtered and drinks were available in the built-in bar. A tender haze hung over the Triumphal Arch, which from a distance, rose up like an island in the middle of the avenue. Passing it we turned right onto Rublyov Highway and I let my eye slide across the soothing gardens of Kuntsevo and Rublyovka, watching big up-market homes sail past the tinted windows. New homes, many of them mansions built in the past decade, conjuring the image of an affluent Los Angeles suburb.

Finally the car turned left onto a familiar road, which police once guarded as a sacramental aisle. Back then, we called it the government road because it was mainly used by big black limousines carrying top officials to their country homes hidden in the forests along the banks of the Moscow River. The paved road ended at the diplomatic beach, a pitiful, muddy stretch of the river full of sedges and reeds that was set aside for use by foreigners. I remember driving up and down this road hundreds of times, always feeling a chill going up my spine when I passed Stalin’s summer home. It was the only dacha visible from the road, atop a steep incline and looking like a haunted castle, something I imagined Dracula might have lived in. Empty, yet lovingly maintained, its ten-foot-high brick wall, the high steel gate with guard towers on each side. Empty—decades after the dictator’s death. I remember asking Joseph once, how come no Kremlin leader has ever moved into Stalin’s dacha? “Because his successors are still scared shitless of his ghost,” he said.

Before we reached Stalin’s dacha, known as the Dalynaya, the Bentley slowed down, veered sharply to the right, and nosed onto an unpaved road. We were surrounded by the lush impenetrable tangle of birches, ash, broad-leaf beeches, oaks, and spruces that the sun seemed to penetrate only in single rays, which I thought created a sense of peace and timelessness.

The car halted briefly outside a gate of wrought iron railings with spikes like spears. The driver waved to the sentry and the gate swung open automatically.

The car moved up a tree-lined path, past a tennis court, a flower garden with neatly trimmed hedges, and a white gazebo with a green weathervane on top. The path curved, and moments later we faced a stately mansion with elaborate cornices, stucco walls, and red brick chimneys at both end. It was painted a creamy yellow trimmed by white. Tall Ionian columns supported a balcony that ran the entire length of the front.

Holy shit, I thought. Joseph is living in a fucking palace. In Stalin’s old neighborhood! It crossed my mind that Holz may have wanted me to see Joseph right away. Was that so implausible? If Joseph was linked to the Russian underworld, this would make sense, from Holz’s point of view..

Joseph was waiting in front with a small entourage.

“You son of a bitch!” Joseph threw his arms around me, kissed me on both cheeks. “Welcome, my dear! Welcome!” He eyed me as he might a model on the catwalk. “You look the same.”

“You look more prosperous,” I said, looking him up and down. He glowed with health and power.

We both laughed.

“This man once saved my life, I mean literally,” Joseph said, turning to two young men in white shirts behind him—serious men with close-cropped hair who appeared professionally unpleasant. One of them held a gun pointed downward, its barrel parallel to the seam of his black pants.

I shrugged, embarrassed. Once I had given Joseph a thousand dollars to bribe a housing inspector who wanted to throw him out of his apartment. That couldn’t amount to saving someone’s life, but Joseph had always loved the hyperbole.