Londongrad

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

“Coffee?” said Bounine when we reached his office in Moscow.

We didn’t speak much on the short ride from the clinic, but now he chatted, made polite small talk while I sat down across from his desk. A secretary brought coffee and a tray of snacks.

Bounine told me he had spent time at the UN in New York, and he had also lived in London. He sipped some coffee and, as if it were a casual thing, assured me that Sverdloff would be well treated.

“When are you letting Tolya out?”

“Please,” he said, gesturing at the snacks on the table, cake, and cheese and cold meats.

“I’m not hungry,” I said, wanting to punch him. I tried to stay cool. I tried not to think about Tolya in the hospital bed.

“I’m sorry we had to pick you up at the Sverdloff dacha like that. I really should have phoned you instead.” He handed me an envelope. Inside was a video.

“What is it?”

“Marina Fetushova said she would send this to you.”

“You know her?”

“Everybody knows everybody here,” he said.

“You’ve looked at it?”

“Yes. It’s just a few low-level officers, all retired now, and some girls, not very nice to watch, but the girls are all over eighteen, we’ve checked. It’s not important, not anymore.”

“And Grisha Curtis? He’s in it?”

“Sadly, yes. But he’s dead, so it doesn’t matter either. You can keep it if you’d like.”

I took the package.

“But you were following me, weren’t you, you followed me all over Moscow, right? How did you spot me?”

“We like to know where our visitors are,” he said.

“You knew I was here almost as soon as I arrived.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

He laughed. “It was accidental. It was my granddaughter.”

“What?”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Sure.”

He got up and went to a table on the other side of his office. He picked up a bottle of Black Label, held it up and I nodded. He poured some in two glasses.

“There’s no ice, I’m sorry.”

“You already knew I drink Scotch?”

“You’re a New York cop. I assumed you might like Scotch. How I miss it.”

“The Scotch?”

“The city.”

“Yeah, well, let’s move on to the subject, I’m not here for nostalgia, am I?”

“My granddaughter’s friend met you on a bus from the airport. I took the girls to the ballet the next night, and young Kim was excited about her trip and the nice American she had met on the bus, and she showed me your picture, the one she took with her cellphone. It was just chance. I saw you, I recognized you.”

“Christ. You breed them young.”

He laughed. “It wasn’t like that. You were from New York. I had told my granddaughter and her best friend so many stories about New York.”

“You have stuff on me? Why? Because I left this miserable country when I was sixteen? Because my mother didn’t like losing her job because she was a Jew? It was in another century.”

“We don’t have stuff on you, Mr Cohen,” he said, using my American name. “All we knew was that you didn’t register at a hotel, but it was your picture on Kim’s phone. After that, I had a few colleagues ask around. And there was the crazy caretaker, Igor, of course. Otherwise, you’d be hard to find in this huge city.”

I drank the Scotch in two gulps, he offered more, I refused. “What are you going to do with Sverdloff?” I looked at the door, an old padded green leather door, the kind the apparatchiks used to have. On the desk was a red plastic phone. My father had a red phone.

“You’re looking at my old phone,” he said, smiling. “I keep it as a souvenir.”

“I see you keep Putin’s picture on the wall, is it a souvenir?”

Putin’s chilly face looked down from over the table with the Scotch. Beside it was a picture of Medvedev, the new president who was only Putin’s puppet. Also very short. You saw him on TV, he looked like a dwarf.

“Yes, but Mr Putin does more good than not,” Bounine said. “People feel safe and they have food to eat.”

“I want my friend out of that place,” I said. “I want him out, and I’ll do what it takes. State department. Anything. He’s a US citizen.”

“He isn’t, in fact,” said Bounine. “He has a Russian passport. He has a UK passport. Nothing from the US. Maybe the Brits will help you. Or maybe there is somebody in the US.”

“Thanks.”

“I think you’re friendly with Agent Roy Pettus, isn’t that right? I met him a couple of times when there was quite a lot of Russian-American friendship after 9/11, when we did some work together. Look, Artie, I could help you, if you like,” he said. He leaned back and stretched out his legs to look at his dark brown loafers.

“I’ve been wearing these for almost forty years,” he said. “I got my first pair of Bass Weejun penny loafers at B. Altmans on 34th Street. I thought it was so stylish, this putting of a shining penny in your shoes. So American.”

I was missing something, and I said, “So you see this picture in your granddaughter’s friend’s phone, how come you were so interested in it, how come you recognized me, how the fuck did you know who I was?”

“I knew your father,” he said. “He was my boss.”

Usually I figured life was mostly random. Unless you were religious and believed in some kind of cosmic pixies, it was random. On the job, you sometimes got lucky, you tripped over something useful, there was an accident; mostly you solved a case this way.

Bounine’s story about the little girl’s phone was the kind of thing that happened. It happened. When he mentioned my father, though, something in me resisted. I tried not to believe him. Not at first.

“It’s true,” he said softly. “I worked for Maksim Stepanovich for several years in New York City. I was a kid. I was just out of language school, my first year in the KGB,” he said. “I was twenty-four and I got lucky. I had good connections. It’s true. Later, in Moscow, we continued to work together, though he was promoted faster then me. He was a brilliant agent, Artemy. I remember your mother, too. She wasn’t in New York. But I met her here in Moscow. She loved France. Isn’t that right?”

I fumbled in my pocket for some cigarettes. Bounine threw me a pack, and I lit one, and sucked in the smoke like a drug.

“And you saw me on the street.”

“Yes. I saw you in the phone, and I thought, my God it’s Max, my old friend, but he’s been dead so long. I ran a few things through the system and I discovered you were calling yourself Max Fielding. It seemed to connect. Max, you see, you used your father’s name.”

I had never thought about it when I picked the name out of the blue, never once thought about the fact that it had been my father’s name. He had been Maksim. Max to his friends. To me he was my father. My dad. The only good thing about this miserable country where I grew up, my father, and my mother, of course. But most of all, him.

“What system?” I said.

“Ours. Yours, too. Why not? We throw bombast at one another, but we’re allies, more or less, your Mr Bush was just here with Mr Putin in Sochi, and from the time he invited his good friend Vladimir at the Texas ranch, we began setting up systems to share certain things.”

“So you shared me? Pettus shared me with you?”

“It’s never that simple.”

“I want Sverdloff out.”

“I understand.”

For a few minutes, Bounine sat, silent, sipping his whisky, as if weighing his thoughts.

The photograph showed my father and Bounine, both very young, both in hipster suits and narrow ties. My father’s arm was around Bounine’s shoulder and they were standing near the arch in Washington Square Park. In the corner of the photograph, my father had written his name and a fond message to his friend, Sam. July, l962.

“Jesus.”

“Yup. We were Max and Sam in New York,” he said. “And when I discovered that you were Sverdloff’s friend, I thought to myself, Artemy will want to help his friend. And I will help him because his father helped me. I have something else for you,” he said, and removed a large envelope from his desk. “Will you have dinner with me? I don’t want to talk about any of this here.”

I nodded.

“Good. We’ll make a plan, you and me. We’ll make a plan to get your friend out.”