The firebird affair

It was the same Joseph, except his hair showed flecks of white and was receding deeply. He was also a bit more chubby, a roly-poly guy in a lemon-yellow knit shirt with a monogram woven in blue thread under his left breast, razor-edge pressed gray slacks, and orange-brown Gucci loafers.

He put his arm through mine and led me in.

The heavy wooden door swung open onto a soaring entrance hall with pink marble floors, gilded moldings, and a regal stairway curving up to the second level, the carpet held to the bottom of each riser by a shining brass rod. There were paintings in elaborate gilt frames on the walls. The cathedral ceiling and an immense chandelier gave the place an aura of grandeur. Rather than overwhelmed by this display of extravagant wealth, I wanted to laugh. Is this what happens when a poor man becomes rich? All that’s missing, I was tempted to say, was a phalanx of retainers in blue waistcoats with white trim, black knee britches, and white silk stockings.

Instead I said, “I see you’ve become a tennis player, huh?”

“Ahh. The courts came with the house.” Joseph sounded almost apologetic. “Audrey likes to play,” he waved to a photo, silver framed of a pretty young brunette I assumed to be his Dutch-born wife. Audrey was in Rotterdam visiting her parents, together with their seven-year-old daughter, Zina.

“Drink?” Joseph asked. “I suggest freshly squeezed orange juice with a touch of vodka.”

He fussed about the drinks, placed them on a thick glass coffee table top that was supported by a heavy brass frame. “This thing—” he encompassed everything around him with a wave of his hand “—I bought at an auction.”

Unbidden, there flashed in my mind the mental picture of Joseph’s old room on Yuzhinski Lane: a cast-iron stove in the corner with a long black stove pipe reaching half way up the wall; two tall windows sealed shut for the winter with a homemade paste of flour, glue, and water; a narrow cot with a flattened mattress sagging in the middle; three wobbly chairs, more wooden stools, and a table covered with papers. And yes, the remnants of a beaded curtain, which was supposed to be an imaginary partition between the bedroom and living room. We drank vodka from chipped coffee cups and ate stale bread and dry goat cheese. He must have changed, I thought, what with all that opulence and bodyguards who are de rigueur at the higher levels of Russian society. But was he my friend still? Could I count on his help?

“Let me first get one thing off my chest,” I said. “I never returned your phone calls when you were in Washington.”

“I was really pissed off, starik. You know what I’m saying.”

“Somebody had betrayed Professor Voronov and the science attaché and our security people thought it was you.”

“That’s fucking absurd!” Joseph exclaimed, sliding to the edge of his chair and leaning forward. “Who said that?”

“You were the main suspect, I guess. I was also a suspect.”

“Fuck your mother!” Joseph said bitterly. “You believed it?”

I felt tired and old, my judgment clouded, my will feeble. I found myself sinking in my own estimation. I had no defense. “No I didn’t. But people in the government did. Perhaps you could have inadvertently mentioned something…”

“How could you—”

“Hold it there!” I put my hand up. “We’re both exonerated.”

“Big fucking deal,” Joseph said, shaking his head. “Exonerated by who? The shitheads who accused me in the first place? You know, starik, I don’t like to talk politics, I don’t care who wins elections. I’ll be doing my job whoever wins. So I buy people. In your country, you call it free speech; here we call it bribery. Oh shit, forget it…”

He stood up, went to the liquor trolley and filled two more glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice with a touch of vodka.

“So why are you here?”

I had anticipated the question and had worked hard on the answer. My strategy resembled a chess game: two moves in, and I knew my mind would shut down overwhelmed by many possibilities. That’s why I had honed down a long story into a crisp concept. I’d thought about Emily’s death a great deal and had come to believe—I still can’t prove it, I emphasized—that there’s something fishy about the official version of events. I don’t know what. But I want to find out because I want closure. I was still prey to misgivings and guilt, I said. I’ve had more than my share of nightmares, struggles with depression, popped pills, therapists.

It was important that I convince him. I never asked for his help, but that was implicit. I’d decided not to inquire about Professor Voronov, my other interest, because I knew for certain that subject would arise spontaneously.

I had enough experience to know that a supplicant is always a suspect, even to his friends. I didn’t want to lie, but I couldn’t tell the whole truth either, and that shook my faith in the nobility of my mission. A few weeks earlier, I had derided Holz’s notion that life runs more smoothly with some secrets left undisturbed. Now I found myself carefully parsing words—a misstep or two could allow a man with as agile a brain as Joseph’s to form a plausible picture of just what I was up to.

Joseph had listened, clucking tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk several times. But my doubts must have been written on my face because he suddenly interrupted: “She had a rather lonely life here, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” I had to admit. I’d been away most of the time—away even when I was at home. Emily had her own life. She taught music at the Anglo-American school, she had joined an embassy wives book group and had started a film club.

“So you’re feeling guilty, right?”

I nodded.

He shook his head as if to indicate he understood my motive. Then I saw worry creases on his forehead deepen. “You know, starik, when I heard she was having lunch with Zvonareva I thought there was something fishy about it. Zvonareva was a KGB freelance.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. I remembered that Holz had said the same thing about her. “I’ve tried to phone her, but there was no answer.”

He nodded. Then he stood up and pointed toward the back of the house. “We’ll talk about it later. Let me show you around.”

He led me through the building, his arm over my shoulders. We passed a couple of rooms before reaching a French door that opened into a large living room, one of its walls a wide, floor-to-ceiling window that looked onto a formal garden. We entered a hall with a wall of books on one side rising fourteen feet to the ceiling, and a ladder to reach the upper shelves, and ended up in what he called the “garden” room.

“Wait!” Joseph stopped abruptly. “Something here doesn’t ring right, starik.” A sly gleam flashed across his eyes. “Your editors sent you to investigate Emily’s death?”

“No,” I said hastily. “I’m doing a nuclear proliferation story.” I added, trying to sound cheerful. “Something I can write in my sleep. I’ll give Professor Voronov a call, talk to a couple of think tank people.”

It was a matter of willful positive thinking, I said to myself. Maintain a front, create a mask. I’m pretty good at acting—one of the remaining legacies of more than two decades of interviewing people and pretending to be deeply interested in what they had to say. This time it was hard going. I consoled myself with Holz’s adage that people are as honest as they can afford to be. While I had reservations of my own I recognized the fact that they had to be overridden if I was to unmask the mole.

We settled in the garden room,, in wicker chairs painted white. My entire Rosslyn condo, I thought, could probably fit in this cool conservatory with a checkerboard marble floor and filled with exotic trees in huge ceramic vats.

“The professor’s practically gone nuts,” Joseph said. “His only granddaughter died in a car crash three months ago. A real tragedy.”

“That’s awful.” I had to conceal my satisfaction that Page’s assignment was completed on practically the very first day; now I had free time to concentrate on my own investigation.

“She was twenty-four.”

“Good God.” She was younger than Rick, I thought.

“But even before this tragic accident, Professor Voronov had started acting strange. You know, like those Dostoyevsky characters guzzling vodka and despairing of God. His obsession is coming global holocaust. War is the ultimate fruit of modern technology and its ultimate test. He had worked out a mathematical proof—that’s his claim—that a technological civilization self-destructs after ninety odd years! Something like that. Crazy stuff!”

“You think he’s a bit loopy?”

“No, I think it’s guilt. He’s one of a few fellows still alive who actually made the most terrible weapon. And probably the onset of dementia; he’s getting on in years. I’ve heard he’s become religious, insists that our destiny is in the hands of a Being welling beyond the scope of man’s reason.”

I said I’d like to visit him.

“He’s at his daughter’s dacha in Podmoskovye, not seeing anybody,” Joseph said. “I think he’ll see you, though.”

17
The year-round pool in the back of the house had its Plexiglas roof half way removed for the summer. Beyond the pool and across several acres of blue-green lawn was a guesthouse. It was designed as a German hunting lodge and set in a birch grove. Hidden by the lodge was a low building housing the Tajik gardener and his wife, who was the cook.

A young maid with a broad peasant face, dressed in black and wearing a white apron, wheeled in a tray of canapés and a bottle of vodka in a silver ice bucket. She filled two tumblers. Joseph threw his down in one gulp.

“What happened to you that day?” Joseph leaned back, locking fingers behind his head. “The day Emily died.”

What happened that day? I had lived it, in slow motion playback, a thousand times.

“On the day she died, I was a thousand miles away. In a godforsaken place called Lachin on the edge of Karabakh. Jeff Taubin of United Press and I had arranged to meet with leaders of an Armenian guerrilla group that was fighting the Azeris in the neighboring mountains. These were small-scale battles—got very little press attention—but soon evolved, as you know, into all-out war.

“Lachin was under martial law—for all practical purposes. Phone and telex lines were down. The Soviet army maintained a semblance of normality. I heard hints that the local KGB was no longer under full control of Moscow Center. The border of Karabakh and Azerbaijan was mined and the only way to get to Azerbaijan was enter Armenia, then take a circuitous route to Baku. That’s what we wanted to do after we did the reporting. Alas, I couldn’t find my press credentials. I still had my passport and thought that would be enough. But soldiers at the checkpoint said the lack of press credentials supposedly raised a question whether I had a right to be in Lachin at all. Jeff was free to proceed, but he decided to stay until the situation cleared up. That meant forfeiting the arranged transport to Yerivan. ‘It’s only a formality, I’m sure,’ a heavy-set KGB man with wavy grey hair told me. ‘We’ll sort it out in a day or two.’

“I insisted on phoning the US embassy. The heavyset agent sweating in his cheap brown polyester suit said that was impossible. I asked him to pass a message to my wife or to my office, and he said he’d check whether he’d be allowed to do so using their internal communications. Meanwhile, I was placed into the custody of the hotel manager, a frightened-looking little man with waxy skin who tried to look somebody. But he had not much going in the way of thought. Fortunately his grimy restaurant had a solid supply of Georgian red and plenty of the lavash bread, which looked like parchment.

“When we heard nothing from anyone by the next morning, I urged Jeff to go back to Moscow. But leaving Lachin proved more difficult than we could imagine. Bus communications were cut; some Azeri travelers were massacred not far from the town, there was chaos all around. It was as if a time of pre-civilization had come around again to teach as the meaning of chaos.”

One night, I recalled, we heard a newscast on a neighbor’s radio. It must have been Radio Liberty because it talked calmly about unrests in Baku and Tashkent, armed skirmishes in Nagorno-Karabakh, the use of poison gas in Tbilisi, Islamic rallies in Turkmenistan, miners’ strikes in the Ukraine, railroad stoppages in Siberia. Finally, it said two American journalists were reported missing in the Nagorno-Karabakh area and gave our names. The State Department had been in touch with the Soviet authorities seeking urgent clarification.

“Holy shit,” Jeff said, incredulously. “They don’t even know we are here!”

“We’re in the middle of a three-way civil war,” I said. “No easier place on earth for a reporter to vanish.”

Being under kind of house arrest, I started to protest vigorously. Each time I was assured politely that problems would get resolved any minute, any day.

“It took Jeff four days to find a ride to Yerivan. Six days later, I finally received a phone call from Moscow. From a guy in the consular section who told me about Emily’s death. What can I tell you! That was the worst moment of my life. You could well imagine my state of mind. I no longer cared about anything. The consular man said that since I was reported missing, they had shipped Emily’s remains to California for burial, at her parents’ request.

“A week later, they had a call from Jeff. But then the embassy was told that a stash of hashish was found in my luggage, and that an investigation was under way. Now a consular official was on his way to Yerivan and things are being sorted out. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“To make a long story short, I remained there for another couple of days until the local KGB man said I was free to go. It took me four days to get to Baku and then to Moscow.

“Later, much later, I thought that there was something weird about this whole episode. The Foreign Ministry apologized about the incident and blamed it on a clerical error by local authorities.”

Joseph stared into the distance. He stood up and gave me a sudden bear hug. “What a story,” he muttered.

I felt like I was again talking to my friend the old Joseph. But we sat in silence for almost a minute. “So what about you,” I said.

“Let’s have a swim,” he said.

We stripped off our clothes in the changing room. On a hat rack hung a dozen men’s bathing suits. Beneath were flip-flops in various sizes. “Take one that fits you,” Joseph said.

I dived into the bracing blue water, glided beneath the surface, enjoying the sensation of the cold water on my skin. Then I set off in a splashy crawl to the other end of the pool. After a few laps, I waited in the shallows for Joseph.

“When I heard Professor Voronov was detained, I fled Moscow,” Joseph said. “Just got the hell out. My cousin Petya and his business partner, Vasya, shared a dacha. In the middle of nowhere, so I figured let them find me. You know the feeling. I know shit is about to happen and I can do absolutely nothing to prevent it. Six days later, they raided the place looking for Petya and Vasya, the currency speculators that they were. Found me instead. Jinxed? Know what I’m saying?

“They took me to Butyrka prison and beat the living hell out of me because I couldn’t tell them what they wanted to know. What I didn’t know was that Petya and Vasya and a handful of other fledgling shabashniki (semi-legal businessmen) each month paid the salaries of twelve men—all former KGB types—who were hired to be Yeltsin’s bodyguards. Remember, there were attempts on Yeltsin’s life that year; he had to have security around the clock. But I had no clue. So they transferred me to a psychiatric prison and gave me electric shocks, injections, pills, you name it. After the August coup, Petya gets me out of there. I’m free.”

“Now comes the most interesting part. Yeltsin’s suddenly the top political figure in Russia. As a token of his personal gratitude, he grants Petya and Vasya a license to open the first private bank and handle foreign currency. They are like pigs in shit. I start working for them, you know I’m a mathematician.

“Hell, our bank was a hole in the wall… a glorified money changing stand… but we were raking it in like you can’t believe. Those were the days of total chaos, starik. No rules, no regulations. Everybody wanted dollars and Deutschemarks. Inflation like ten percent a day. The country being auctioned off, piece by piece. The banking system in the Ice Age.

“But, hey, we’re in Russia where the devil never sleeps. Know what I’m saying. Something might happen and you lose everything overnight. So we had to move funds into foreign bank accounts. That meant literally carrying the cash out of Russia. In bags or suitcases. When I flew with Yeltsin to Washington, you remember when I phoned you and you never called back, that time I had a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills. No customs inspection for presidential visits at Andrews Air Force Base!”

I spread my arms as if to embrace everything around me. ”Boy, a long way from Yuzhinski Lane.”

How does one accumulate such wealth? The pool and sauna and general opulence of the place— everything made me uneasy. And yet, a voice in the back of my head kept saying, Don’t rock the boat, you need Joseph’s help. You went into it knowing what you have to do. Why worry?

“Shit,” I said. Hit by a blast of dry heat, my skin turned pink. I climbed onto the upper bench and sat back, felt burning wood against my backside.

I thought about how years ago, I introduced Joseph to his first sauna. He talked about it for months. Emily had prepared snacks and a bottle of ice-cold vodka, which we took to the old czarist Central Bath on Neglinaya. We rented a separate sauna suite for three hours and had a feast.

Joseph poured water from a wooden bucket onto the burning rocks. Hot steam hit me in the face.

Joseph laughed through his nose. “I know you’ve heard rumors that I run a high-class whorehouse and I launder money for major drug dealers. Right?”

I shrugged.

Okay. He said he wanted to set the record straight before I got the wrong idea about him.

He was in London on a business trip in 1992, he said, staying at the Dorchester, when he was first introduced to the concept of escort service. His escort was called Lauren, a blonde with the boyish body of a Paris model and an incredible aura of cleanliness. Twenty-four, very clever, doing graduate work at the London School of Economics.

“Screwing Lauren,” Joseph said, “didn’t feel at all like screwing a whore. Not like in Soviet Russia where prostitution was a sordid business, crude and vulgar. Women were forced into it by poverty, hunger, stupidity, men’s brutality, for the most part making very little money—five to ten dollars a night. Spending a night with someone like Lauren, for a thousand pounds a night, was like participating in an expensive time-share; there was a temporary emotional and erotic bond between us.”

Joseph said he almost felt a sense of camaraderie with her other clients who possessed the same level of good taste and financial standing.

After his third night with Lauren, the idea came to him that this kind of exclusive service could be lucrative in new Russia with its newly minted millionaires and mafia bosses.

“I had nothing to do with the pimping side of the business,” Joseph said. A partner handled that part; he recruited pretty, well-educated girls, mostly from the provinces, and taught them sophistication and grace. “I handled the real estate,” Joseph said.

Joseph looked for apartments in prime locations, bought them dirt cheap, and then fixed them up. Inflation was raging at the time. “I remember the government issued a 5000-ruble note, which was worth forty dollars in September and by December was worth ten dollars.” The ruble stabilized a couple of years later, and Moscow became the most expensive city in the world. “I sold a two bedroom apartment near the Sovremenik Theater for more than a thousand times more than I’d paid for it, no kidding.” He used the proceeds to buy more shares of the Russian Bank of Agriculture and Commerce.

“And your cousin Petya? His partner Vasya?

“They grabbed oil leases and coal and uranium rights. Retain a small stake in the bank.”

I said, “It’s really hot. I’ve had enough.”

I was feeling uncomfortable. I suddenly wanted to be thousands of miles away from Joseph’s palace. His manner was full of charm and deprecation, but I was wary of subtle falsehoods and could smell the odor of corruption. I was about to cross some kind of journalistic Rubicon, but I knew I needed Joseph’s help to get to Bogumilov; Joseph had already solved one of my problems by telling me about Voronov’s whereabouts and the reason for his disappearance.

In essence, I wanted to have my cake, eat it, and have pills ready to cure my indigestion.

Hot and sweaty, we jumped in the pool. After doing a few laps, we climbed out and wrapped ourselves in fluffy white terrycloth robes.

“Ah, yes, the money laundering bullshit. Well, it’s true that I don’t ask our customers where their money comes from. I’m a banker, not a policeman.”

I wanted to turn the conversation toward the events of the summer of 1991; tell him about my suspicions. But the sudden shift in his mood led us toward politics, 9/11, the war in Afghanistan.

A servant rolled in the food: rack of lamb, roasted mixed vegetables, chopped lettuce, and sprouts.

“Igor will be here any minute,” Joseph said after we finished the main course. “I’ve asked him to help you. He works for me.”

A young secretary came in and handed Joseph as brown manila envelope. “Latest business news from Interfax,” he explained leafing through the pages. “They deliver it by a special messenger. Shit, I have to keep track on the prices of gas and oil.”

The driver in his grey outfit appeared in the doorway. “Iosif Davidovich,” he said and stood there silently. Behind him were two young security guards with Skorpion 7.65 mm machine pistols.

“Five minutes, Nikolai,” Joseph said, then turned to me: ”I have work to do, starik. Know what I’m saying.”

“What does Igor do for you?”

“Security. He’s someone I trust.”

“You need all these security types?” I recalled that Igor had served in the spetznaz troops, the Soviet equivalent of the Navy seals, while doing his military service.

Joseph laughed out loud, his lips curling downward, and his head making small circular motions.

“One bad thing about our democracy is when someone doesn’t like you, he gets a gunman. Wham! And you’re gone.” He lifted his right hand, made a ninety-degree angle between his thumb and index finger, and briefly pointed the imaginary pistol at me. “Or sets a bomb under your car. Boom!”

He suddenly produced two silvery metal tubes and handed one to me. “Romeo Y Julieta, your favorite.”

“I stopped smoking,” I said, almost apologetically.

“You have changed!”

Yes, I thought, but perhaps not as much as he had. I was also beginning to have doubts whether he was deliberately ignoring my implicit plea for help.

It was as if he had read my thoughts. After lighting the cigar, he exhaled smoke upward. “Just between you and me, I’ll talk to Volkov about your problem. Radomir Volkov, formerly of the KGB First Directorate, a full colonel, used to be very high up in the hierarchy. Know what I’m saying. I hired him ten years ago.”

“You hired him?”

“Yup! I offered him ten times more than he was making!” Joseph spread his hands.

“He’s still working for you? In security?”