The firebird affair

I thought, where do I go from here? Bogumilov was my only remaining lead, but that was a name I couldn’t even mention to anyone.

I kept calling Joseph until he snapped irritably, “Listen, starik, you’ve got to wait. I’m very busy right now.”

I apologized. “You know,” I said, “a reporter without contacts is like a pilot without a plane.”

“I gave you Igor, starik. I gave you Volkov,” he said. “Volkov’s the best fucking contact there is! Isn’t that enough?”

I had lunch with Volkov at the pricey Sakura restaurant, all on my dime. There was a slight commotion as he arrived in the restaurant; waiters bowing and scraping; guests waving to him as he negotiated his way to the table where I was waiting.

He was wearing a light-weight tailored suit (which he had made on the ground floor of the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong, he told me), navy blue shirt, and a gold tie held in place by what must have been the heaviest gold tie-clip I’ve ever seen.

We were sitting on tatomi mats at a low-black lacquered table, sharing a large warm saki. He smacked his lips when the waiter brought seaweed salad. Then he took a phone call.

The St. Petersburg branch of Joseph’s bank was raided this morning by the local police, he said. He waited for a while, thinking, looking reluctant to elaborate on bad news. “We had a mask show,” he added with forced lightness.

“What’s a mask show?”

“Oh, just a bunch of agents wearing face masks and holding semi automatic weapons. You’ve seen it on TV.”

“Yeah,” I said. I just logged this fact away, not wanting to examine its implications.

“It’s psychological.” Volkov, frowningly thoughtful, pushed his lips out, like a blowfish, then pulled them back in. His face became a puzzled grimace as he dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “Now if they did that to the headquarters here, I’d be worried. It would mean someone was sending us a message. But St. Petersburg? Just local bullshit.”

“What’s local bullshit?”

“Uh, you know, someone didn’t get paid. Some such stupid thing.”

We chatted about the purpose of my trip. I explained my rehearsed goals.

“Joseph Davidovich mentioned something about it,” Volkov interrupted and sighed. “Funny thing about conscience… it’s there when you need it, not there when you don’t, right?”

“I didn’t quite get that,” I said.

“I’m just yakking,” he said. “Don’t worry.” Disoncerting thing about Volkov was that I never had a sense of where I was with him.

I felt strangely depressed by the end of the lunch. But as he walked off, Volkov said I should stop by his office on Saturday. “I can’t promise anything, it all depends.”

I watched him leave, thinking, Was that the hint that a bribe could speed things up?

21

I was rather hoping to see Joseph the next day, but he disappeared for several days.

“Mister Todd. Todd Martin.” The accent was Russian.

“Yes,” I said to the man on the phone. “Who’re you?”

“That’s not important, Mister Todd. I have important information that you’re interested in.”

“What information?” I hesitated now, thinking back. Who in Moscow knew what I was looking for? Barbara knew in vague terms. Perhaps this was her fixer? But I had already spoken with Shishkin, the man recommended by Barbara’s contacts.

The charged silence passed when he cleared his throat. “I have what you’re looking for. I’m waiting for you at a coffee shop near your hotel.”

I said, “Who gave you my phone number?”

“A friend,” he said.

“What’s the friend’s name?”

“I’ll explain later. We shouldn’t do it over the phone.”

I didn’t like the answer. “That’s not good enough.”

“Mister Todd?”

“Yes?”

“As I said, I have information you are looking for. I’m at the coffee shop Rainbow. Across the street from you. Its awning has blue, white, and red stripes. You can’t miss it. Don’t worry, I’ll recognize you.”

“This is very important for you Mister Todd. As I said…”

I interrupted him. “Thanks for calling and please don’t call again.”

“You’ll regret that, Mister Todd. It’ll be too late,” he said rather harshly before I hung up.

Having lived four years in Moscow, I thought I could smell KGB men at some distance. Even sniff them at the other end of the phone line.

*

Shishkin was near the top of my to-do list. He had sounded credible on the phone. Insisted on elaborate precautions: I was to take the metro, get off one stop before the Sokolniki Park station, take a cab to the park’s main entrance, and go the rest of the way on foot.

We met on a bench in the park like in a James Bond movie. He was an unappealing man with dark hooded eyes, ears sticking out either side and the mannerism of someone in the protection business. It took only a few minutes to realize I was dealing with a con man.

But something odd happened on my way back from Sokolniki Park. I was about to grab a taxi outside the main en trance when an old black Volga came round the corner and drove straight at me. I jumped back between two parked cars to escape being run over. Sparked by anger and adrenaline, I managed to thump my fist against the car’s rear panel before it raced away.

“It was a near thing,” the taxi driver said when I hopped into his car. “I saw it. You’d better be careful, little brother.”

I dismissed the remark, but then realized with a start that the driver may have a point. I could see the driver’s eyes; he was staring at me. But the whole thing didn’t make sense. Why would a random driver want to run me over? I was getting paranoid.

That day, I got a handsomely-embossed card inviting me to a garden party at the Peredelkino home of a Russian writer named Kozlov, an acquaintance of mine from the old days. “It’s been a long time,” he had scribbled on the back. “Do come. Bring a friend.”

Once known for his novels about Soviet rural life, Kozlov had recently turned his hand to detective fiction and become very rich. I had contacted him because I wanted to see his wife Dara. Not only because she had been friendly with Emily; they had met on a shopping trip to Helsinki. I thought Dara was somebody who could help me. A former Bolshoi ballet star and a famous beauty whose first husband was a KGB general, she still occupied a unique place in Moscow’s high society and had a wide circle of acquaintances.

Kozlov’s house was on a street thronged with parked cars. I had to turn into a side street to find a space some distance away.

The house was packed. About sixty people were standing there with drinks in hand, laughing and talking as they looked to see who was arriving and who was leaving. The smell of ladies’ heavy perfume and the odor of fried food from the kitchen saturated clouds of cigarette smoke. A detachment of perspiring waiters in white coats soared by with trays of canapés. I was reminded of vastly different Russian parties years ago where intimate thoughts and sophisticated ideas were exchanged. Now the kind of laughter and chatter suggested a very Westernized style with guests milling around and only the elderly sitting down on sofas and chairs in the corners.

We quickly escaped to the verandah overlooking a garden that shimmered with beautiful women, lavishly made up and extravagantly dressed in sleeveless and backless dresses and plunging necklines.

Amanda gave me a look that said, Look at my shabby clothes! I told her she looked very attractive in a tapered black skirt and a green silk blouse.

Suddenly, a pretty young waitress wearing a bow tie appeared with a tray of drinks. Amanda took a glass of white wine. I took a glass of beer. As we stepped onto the verandah, I heard a voice saying “Todd Martin!” We both turned. Kozlov was extending his left arm to embrace me before we went on a brief trip down memory lane.

“Still with the Trib?”

“Yup,” I said. “Still writing books?”

“Yup.”

Kozlov was in his sixties with a craggy face. There was a sparkle in his eyes when he looked at Amanda. If it’s possible for eyes to embrace another person, his embraced her, creating an instant intimacy.

I disliked his showing an undue interest in Amanda, so I said nothing.

“Are there any interesting new writers?” She spoke in a casual way, but there was something in her tone that was anything but casual, as though she was seeking information.

“Well, yes…”

I said, “Now that you don’t have censorship…”

“Well, censorship was not that bad...”

Amanda clicked her tongue in disapproval. “How’s that?”

“You see, the Soviet Union was an empire of deception, so creative impulses came from the need to unmask in some way that deception. The imagination was stimulated by the limitations the state imposed on us.” He turned to me apparently seeking support. “Orwell was wrong when he said that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Quite the opposite! Don’t you think so?”

I grunted.

“That’s why a writer used to be a figure of importance,” Kozlov continued, now again facing Amanda. “Remember Solzhenitsyn saying in The First Circle that for a country to have a great writer is like having another government.”

“Wasn’t he being a megalomaniac?” said Amanda.

I said, “Well, the Soviet government was certainly afraid of him.”

“Now,” Kozlov said, “in modern Russia, nobody gives a hot rat’s tail about writers. We’re now into money,” he said and rubbed thumb and forefinger together. “We’re no longer a Third Rome, or the capital of world communism. We’re now a gas and oil kingdom. Sort of like Saudi Arabia, one could say.”

Amanda jumped in. “Are you sad that you’ve junked all that communist drivel about the struggle to protect the poor and weak, all that deception about the quest for social justice and against tyranny everywhere? It that what you’re saying?”

Kozlov cocked his head. “Yes, my dear lady, there was a lot of lying and we were all corrupt. You’re right. And yet and yet, the idea of socialism was right, fundamentally. “

”That’s absurd,” said Amanda.

I interrupted eager to change the subject. “Where’s your lovely wife?”

He looked around, making a visor with his hand. “She’s out there somewhere.”

I left Kozlov and Amanda as soon as I saw Dara Kozlov in a far corner of the garden. The years seemed to have forgotten her; she was art in perfection, I thought. Every strand of her hair was glossy and in place. She was wearing a two-piece suit, skirt and jacket, with a cream silk shirt. It was hard to believe she had turned fifty. I thought she must be doing Botox and getting some other face plumper.

After cheek kisses, she took me aside. “I’m sorry for what happened. I never had the chance to express my condolences.”

She became silent when I told her that the loss had sucked the life, color and joy right out of me and that I had never come to terms with it. I had been obsessed by the idea, I said, that the official report had been tampered with, or at least was incomplete. I was trying to discreetly inquire into the circumstances of Emily’s death. “Just to clear the air,” I added, and I could tell that she was intrigued.

“So you suspect our security services,” she asked after a pause, her nose twitching as if she wanted to sneeze.

“I don’t exclude anything.”

“Nothing would surprise me?” she said. “ I must say I never heard any gossip about it.” She added after a while, “Let me sleep on it. Now tell me about yourself.”

When she learned that I was writing about chess she said, “I once met Bobby Fischer at a party in the Soviet mission in New York. Where is he now?”

“He’s become a hermit.” I said. “Hiding somewhere. I don’t know.”

She made a little snorting sound at this, but I didn’t pick up on her gesture of slight contempt. I probably should have remained silent. But I said, “I guess he’s living in exile because our tax authorities are after him.”

She snorted again. “What a shame. He was a hero during the Cold War. Now chess is again a boring game.”

Later, before we parted, she suddenly said, “I’ll make some discreet inquiries.“ She gave me her cell number. “Call me before Thursday. I hope to talk to them before we go to Cyprus.”

“Cyprus?”

“Ah, yes, we’ve bought a house not far from Limasol.”

We left the party early, Amanda flushed, even flustered with the attention of Kozlov and other men.

“Kozlov was hitting on me,” she said as we were walking to the car. “Made it clear he was interested.” That bastard didn’t change at all, I thought and remained silent as we drove home. But suddenly I was looking at the city with different eyes; I could not—hard as I tried—stop thinking about the Russia I remembered and the gas and oil kingdom it had become. I liked Kozlov’s insight. Indeed, I thought looking around, this could be Stockholm, or another northern European city where life revolves around practical commercial interests and certainly not around monumental ideas to reshape human societies and the world. I tried to imagine pitching a story about Moscow to the Tribune foreign desk and my mind went blank. How awful!

I called Dara two days later. Both her neighbors, she said, were unfortunately in the countryside.

I was running out of leads. It was demoralizing. One thing was for sure: I was well out of my depth, like the fish you just pulled out of the water and into the boat, thrashing, with the hook still in its mouth.

“You look tired,” Amanda said.

“I hit a dead end every which way I turn.”

“It might help to talk it through,” she said. “There’s no point anticipating failure, is there?”

“I know,” I said, becoming calmer.

It’s only now, so many years later, as I recall this moment in our relationship, that I realize how self-centered I was. I was certain I’d never be able to form deep attachments to women. Amanda was a welcome distraction. She gave me a sanctuary of ordinary life. Each evening, I ended up in her apartment, emptying a bottle of wine and making love. I had made a crude cost-benefit analysis and saw no reason to complain. Every night I’d slip into the bed of a woman who had bathed and powdered and anointed herself in readiness, then slip into her.

I still believed that the last thing in the world I needed was emotional entanglement. This was a passing fling, I had decided at the onset, not an affair of the heart, which was something quite different. Sex, after all, was just another appetite, as natural as hunger or thirst. I was flattered and delighted by a reckless streak in her: sometimes we’d make love in the battered Lada; sometimes she’d be so impatient that she’d start unzipping my trousers while I was driving and I had visions of us being found impaled on a tree or a lamppost. More than once, I’d sensed that she was interested in her own pleasure and that she needed my body, my lips and fingers to discover the pleasure potentials in her body. By the time we returned to her apartment, her impatience would be replaced by a slow and deliberate expertise and she’d give herself over to pleasure completely in a way that always amazed me.

But even casual relationships have an inherent dynamic to them: they are moving up toward a deeper understanding, or they are heading down toward a final disengagement. Ours was static; we remained at the point we reached during that second date when she tugged me by my fingers upstairs to her apartment.

Finally, Saturday. That’s when I first heard of Firebird affairs.

Volkov’s office occupied nearly one half of the eighth floor of a sleek office tower with a glass and stainless steel façade overlooking the muddy Moscow River where it bends west in front of the Byeli Dom, the seat of the Russian government..

The security guard, seated behind a curved black counter in the middle of the lobby, asked me to sign in. I smiled. He smiled back and phoned Volkov’s office.

I took the elevator to the eighth floor and approached it with some apprehension. My last conversation with Joseph had left me with a bad taste in my mouth because he had implied that my whole effort clung to one reed of hope, and that thin reed was none other than Colonel Volkov. Which in turned forced me to consider another unpalatable fact I was hiding from myself: that I was wholly dependent on Joseph. I fell into a kind of daze and was wondering what it was that had brought me to this point when an electronic ping reminded me we had reached the eighth floor.

Volkov’s outer office contained chairs of bright chrome and black leather. A receptionist, a fresh-faced girl who seemed to be suffering from a severe summer cold, was busy on the phone, ignoring the seesaw whine of a fax machine. A big-breasted assistant in a black pantsuit scurried past the reception desk and walked into Volkov’s office, then came out, leaving the door open.

Volkov, on the phone, sat behind a huge desk that enclosed him from three sides, a desk meticulously tidy in the manner of someone who organized his life so as to avoid all surprises. He peered at me as if I were an unexpected visitor, then extended his left arm and beckoned me in with the flick of his hand.

The place had glossy black furniture, soft lights, a battery of phones and electronic gadgets lined up on the left side of the desk, which seemed to me like an aircraft carrier. Russian nesting dolls lined up atop a bookcase. A banana tree in the corner. A brass samovar on a marble and brass sideboard.

When the call ended, Volkov rose to greet me and walked around the desk. We shook hands vigorously. When he resumed his seat, he rubbed a hand over his chin as if he had a beard.

“Great view,” I said looking toward the south window, which revealed acres of blue sky and the steeple of the Ukraine Hotel. I stood up and moved to the window. Down below a tugboat was pulling three blue container barges low in the water, and joggers were punishing themselves along the embankment.

“Well, I appreciate the finer points of capitalism,” he said in a light, ironic tone. I had difficulties imagining him mouthing all that Marxist claptrap in his previous incarnation.

Volkov was one of those Russian secret operatives who would adopt the brisk and hearty approach of America. He was smooth, adept at playing the part of man of the world. Clever enough to pull it off.

When I placed a white envelope on his desk, he sniffed as if his sensibilities had been somehow offended before dropping it in a drawer.

“You’ve got something to tell me,” I said.

“Maybe yes, maybe no. First we have tea.”

He gave me a wide smile and leaned back in his chair, his legs crossed, his hands clasped across his stomach. “Now tell me, how does Moscow look to you after all these years?”

“Very impressive.”

“Better than before?”

“Absolutely.”

More chitchat, more waiting, which I found unnerving. The pauses between his sentences seemed interminable. I wondered: how much information does a thousand dollars buy? The rational part of me knew that the answer was not too much—Volkov probably demanded much more—but the irrational had the upper hand that morning; I felt it was better to make a proper gesture, even though Joseph had not said anything about it. In fact, I had heard Joseph tell Volkov over the speakerphone the other day—after I had told him about my suspicions— “This is something you should really look into, Radomir Pavlovich, for my sake.” Volkov had sounded non-committal. “Don’t worry, Joseph Davidovich, I’ll do my best.”

“If Volkov says he’ll do it, he’ll do it,” Joseph said later that day.

The most important thing about Volkov, Joseph went on with a complicit smile of confidence, is that he belongs to the Club. “ Some people call it the Five Hundred Club, a secret society of movers and shakers, an old boys’ network that includes the very top people in the Kremlin. I mean the very top. No one’s ever quite sure who belongs to the Club since members deny its existence. Everybody knows who doesn’t belong.”

The receptionist brought two cups of tea, sugar and lemon separately.

“I’m not here, Regina,” Volkov said and flashed a broad smile, revealing two gold teeth in the back of his mouth. “Cigarette,” he said turning to me. I declined his offer. He lit one himself, holding it between his middle finger and ring finger, which made him seem slightly effeminate. After the receptionist closed the door behind her, he blew smoke in my direction and said with reluctance, “Well, your instincts are correct…”

The service, as he referred to the KGB, had indeed been involved, but in a very tangential way. Two officers were sent to talk to Emily at the Prague restaurant that day, he went on. “Nobody seems to know why, or what about. There are some operations that are so secret that…” He sighed and casually flicked his hand. “She had a heart attack before they had a chance to approach her. There was a doctor in the restaurant who tried to revive her. He immediately called for an ambulance. It must have been quite a scene.”

“That’s it?”

My over-fertile imagination suddenly kicked in. Emily popped up in my thoughts, writhing on the floor of the Prague restaurant. I was surprised by my own behavior. I’d managed to keep a cool exterior while inside my stomach was in a knot.

He nodded, and raised his eyebrows.

“Something here doesn’t make sense,” I said aggressively, shaking my head to emphasize my skepticism. Volkov had made no mention of psychotropic drugs, I thought. “It just doesn’t sound right.”

Volkov was momentarily distracted by the cigarette ash about to fall on his clothes. He tapped it into his cupped hand, then brushed it into a wastepaper basket. “It’s the truth,” he said and gave a toss of his head.

“Shit,” I snapped.

He seemed to be deliberating whether this rated a response. “Look, no need to get angry,” he said softly. “I’m just telling you what people said. I wouldn’t be even talking to you if Joseph hadn’t asked…”

Angry didn’t even begin to cover the depth of my inner rage. What was the conceivable reason for the Ruskies to want to talk to Emily? All she had done was take one message to Professor Voronov, probably setting up a meeting for Holz, which they knew anyway from their mole. One fucking message. No matter how often I turned it in my mind, I came out at the same place.

“Why would the KGB want to talk to someone like Emily?” I said.

Volkov rose from his seat, sucking in his gut, and walked to the window. He was silent for a full minute, as if processing the meaning of my question.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” he said turning his head around, an expression of extreme discontent on his face. “I could only speculate.”

Sometimes silence is the most potent weapon in a reporter’s arsenal, so I just looked at him.

“What do you call in English the most secret operations that the government would never admit to? Totally off the books? We used to call them Firebird files.” He made quotes with his fingers. “You must have seen Stravinsky’s ballet. Maya Plsetskaya as Zhar Ptitsa… was fabulous. You know, the fairy tale about the czar’s youngest son Ivan finding a kindly bird gifted with magical power… whose feathers shone like gold to illuminate the night like thousands of klieg lights.”