Londongrad

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

GUM, the great department store on Red Square, was outlined in little white lights. It glittered like Christmas on the soft summer night.

The manager of the small Italian restaurant just to the left of the entrance to GUM appeared as soon as we arrived. He smiled and shook Bounine’s hand, and mine, and showed us to a table on the terrace just outside. All Red Square was spread out in front of us, St Basil’s, the Kremlin, GUM, with its lights. Bounine ordered a bottle of red wine. I asked for Scotch.

“It’s fine, nobody will bother us here,” said Bounine. “It’s mostly tourists. You seem edgy. I’m not going to arrest you or put some idiotic muscle on you, you don’t believe these myths about us anymore. Do you? The FSB is different. We don’t do those things. We did, once, of course, the KGB had idiots just like the CIA. Well, slightly better educated idiots, but we’re a different country.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s true.” He sipped the wine. “Let’s order. The rabbit lasagna is delicious.”

I ordered steak. He ordered the pasta. I wasn’t hungry.

“What do you care about in this new kind of country, as you call it?” I said.

“We care about our own. We value our people. We encourage people to keep in touch, to act like a family. In our business we often go on vacations together, quite a lot of us have married into each other’s families. We respect the children of the great agents who taught us. Like you.”

I kept my mouth shut. I was too wrecked to eat much. I lit a cigarette. I didn’t want him to see my hands shake. I had been up against killers and creeps, jerks who beat me up, people who murdered children. This was worse. I wanted Tolya out of the rathole he was in. I’d do anything. Just ask, I thought. Just tell me what it is.

“It’s okay, Artie, I like that name, I remember your dad saying he was going to call your Artemy and would make your Western name Artie because he adored the way Artie Shaw played clarinet.”

“So?” I tried for nonchalance.

“Is your dish okay?” he said, as if it were a social occasion.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Would you like another drink?”

“Sure.”

Bounine ordered it for me.

“We didn’t poison Valentina Sverdloff. Nobody poisoned her, but I think you already know that,” said Bounine. “We don’t do that kind of thing anymore. Not for decades,” he chortled slightly. “Did you know your dad and I were young guys together in New York City, in the early l960s? Yes, I told you, I’m sorry, I repeat myself a bit. We loved it, but he loved it most because of the music. Did you know?”

“And Sverdloff? The polonium?”

“My dear boy, of course not,” he said, sounding surprised. “Oh, no, it’s become an explosive urban myth, ever since poor Litvinenko died, but that was a single terrible event. Some idiot had the idea of using polonium-210 on the assumption nobody would trace it. It was, thank God, a one-time blunder.” He smiled and when he smiled it lit up his face and made it charming, like a TV anchor, all sincere intelligence and warmth, and all invented for the moment.

“So you understand, we had nothing to do with Miss Sverdloff. I promise you,” Bounine added.

I drank.

“Unfortunately the young man she married turned out to be a bad egg, as we used to say. He found out he had married a passionate young woman, who spoke her mind, perhaps too much, and he didn’t agree with her, and I think, personally, he went off the rails.”

“Or one of your creeps told Grisha Curtis to kill her. Or he was yours, this Curtis creep.”

“You could be right. Grigory Curtis was eager to help us, perhaps too eager. I don’t like zealots. There are, in any system, always one or two loose cannons,” said Bounine, who had a taste in English for cliches.

“But not you.”

“No.”

“What about Larry Sverdloff?”

“He’s one of those Russians who live in London and think they can make another revolution, it’s almost touching, that they think they can overthrow Putin, using their money to back various dissident groups. It reminds me of the days when Lenin and Trotsky and the rest of them sat around Europe plotting. It won’t come to anything.”

“What’s wrong with Tolya Sverdloff?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“Yes, but I want you to tell me.”

“Sverdloff, of course, has heart disease. He had it when this all began. Didn’t you know that in New York? Our doctors say he’s been ill for quite some time.”

Did I know? Had I seen something in Sverdloff’s face that night in New York on the roof at his club?

“I’ll give you the number of his doctors in New York, or in London,” Bounine added. “He may need a transplant. We can help. Perhaps it would be good for him to have a strong Russian heart?”

“Why would I believe you?”

“Why would you? For Sverdloff’s sake.” He put down his knife and fork and picked up his wine glass and glanced at the crowd in the square. “Things are much better now. People live well, they travel, they read books they like to read, listen to rock music, of course. I saw Paul McCartney play Red Square. Can you imagine? Of course, things are better.”

“I want him out now. Tolya Sverdloff. I want him to come home with me, to New York.”

“I understand. And we take care of our family, Artie. We like doing business with people we know. So many of our recruits can trace their lineage all the way back. You’re our family.”

“You think the FSB or the fucking KGB is some kind of aristocracy? You think the pricks who do your work have lineage?” I was sorry I said it. I was sorry in case in made it worse for Tolya. I bit my lip. I drank the Scotch.

“You are more like your mother,” he said. “Dessert?”

“Tell me how I can get Sverdloff out of here?”

“I have an idea,” said Bounine. “How lovely it is tonight,” he added.

It was a soft beautiful summer night. The red star on the Kremlin glittered. All around Red Square, ice-cream sellers fixed cones for tourists. A soldier leaned casually against the red granite of Lenin’s tomb and shared a joke with some tourists while a little boy had his picture taken against the mausoleum.

Bounine followed my gaze.

“You see things do change for the better,” he said. “I’m going to have an armagnac, perhaps a really nice one. Will you join me?” He gave a little shrug. “I hope all this lasts,” he added.

“All what?”

“All the good things we have now. Who knows? In a year, two years from now it might all disappear, the whole enterprise might just go bust,” he said. “Maybe capitalism wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” he added, chuckling. “If the economy goes belly up, well, let’s hope for the best, shall we?”

Did he order the armagnac at the cafe overlooking Red Square because it was Sverdloff’s drink? Bounine reached into his briefcase, and said, “I nearly forgot.”

He pulled out the envelope he had taken fom his office and opened it. Inside was an old-fashioned black and white school notebook. Bounine opened it at random. It was covered with my father’s elegant handwriting. Bounine offered it to me.

“Your father’s diary from his years in America,” he said. “When you left Moscow, he was asked to leave his notes behind, of course, but I kept it. ‘One day’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll give this to Max’s son.’ To you. I saved it for you.” He handed it to me.

“What do you want from me in return for the notebook? What’s the price?”

He shook his head.

“It’s for you. I’ve kept it too many years. It’s yours, Artemy, it belongs to you. I was so sorry when I heard your father had died in Israel. I wanted to write, I wanted to send you the diary. I couldn’t, but I mourned for him.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“He was a brilliant agent, he could listen all day and all night. He could get people to tell him anything, usually in the easiest way. But he was also a patriot. He did what he had to do,” said Bounine. “I envied him. I could see that, even when I was a young man. He could have gone all the way. To the top, I mean.”

“Except for my mother.”

“Except that.”

I got up and walked a few yards into the square and away from Bounine. All my life I had kept my father as I had remembered him. I kept the handsome blue-eyed young man who brought me candy and took me fishing and introduced me to jazz and told me, secretly, quietly, about New York City as if it were a paradise just over the horizon.

In those days, we imagined the KGB was a force for good, part of the future of the wonderful socialist state that had sent a man into space first. And even after that, even after I knew it was all lies, I kept my father as I remembered him, the one good thing about this miserable country where I grew up.

In some way I’d built everything on the notion that he was a good man. But Bounine had made me listen to the other truth. “He was a brilliant agent, he could get people to tell him anything. He did what he had to do.” I knew what it meant. Under my feet as I walked back to the table, I felt the cracks between the bricks. The ground seemed uneven.

“What do you want from me?” I said to Bounine. “For Tolya Sverdloff. What do you want?”

“I just thought it would be nice to keep the family contact with you, and I could drop in on you when I’m in New York,” said Bounine. “Nothing much. Sometimes we just need someone who can talk to people in their own language. I don’t mean English, of course, I mean their own lingo, idiom, on their own terms.”

Don’t sell your soul to that devil, Tolya had said. Don’t do that.

“And for that you’ll let Tolya out? You’ll let me take him home?”

He nodded.

“And these things you want help with?”

“There are always people we like knowing about, here and there, in New York, possibly next week or next year,” Bounine said, drinking his armagnac slowly.

I knew what Bounine wanted. He wanted me for an errand boy when he needed one. He wanted a line to me when he needed it. He wanted me to join the family business.

“You want to know how ill Sverdloff is?”

“I can see.”

“He’s tough, you know. He could be treated. I talked to the doctors. He could have some time left.”

“What about his businesses?”

“I don’t know about business, Artie, I never became a good capitalist.”

“Bullshit.”

“He could have time left. He might get well. His businesses are, well, how shall I say it? His own business.” He smiled at the small joke.

“You’re all bastards,” I said, and finished my Scotch, watching him light up a cigar. It was one of Sverdloff’s Cuban brands. The smoke swirled up around us.

“You really look like your dad,” he said. “So what do you think? Do we have a deal?”

I didn’t want to think. I wanted to go home to my other life. But my other life included Tolya who had done something nobody else would have done for me. I owed him.

From the restaurant’s sound system, a lilting Brazilian tune played, something by Joao Gilberto. I looked across Red Square, the last streak of light in the sky above the red star, above St Basil’s and the Kremlin.

And then I saw the horse. A girl rode the animal bareback, pressing her heels against its side, leaning forward to cling to its neck, stroking its mane, galloping across the square, laughing, hair streaming out behind her, skirt billowing in the evening breeze, as she headed for Resurrection Gate. And people looking began to laugh and cheer and blow her kisses. Somebody started an old Russian song and the others joined in. Even a couple of cops laughed before they chased her away.

Smiling, Bounine tossed his American Express card on the table, to pay for dinner, and the drinks. It was a Platinum card. And it was as if the gesture, the tossing it on the table, included me as if he could charge me on his Amex card.

It occurred to me in the pleasant cafe, surrounded by civilized people, savoring good wine, enjoying dinner, laughing merrily at the girl on the horse, that maybe this was how they did it now, maybe now everything was only about money, even spooks charged their thugs and hands-for-hire to American Express.

Bounine followed my gaze. “You’re not imagining it,” he said kindly. “It really is a horse. You see that at night in Moscow.”

I put my coffee cup down.

He took a little sip of the armagnac, held it to the light with satisfaction and said softly, “You’ll help us, then, won’t you, Artie?”