The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 80

"Never?"

"Never."

"Did he... express any regrets?"

"He's sorry about Adelle. He's sorry about not seeing the twins." Jack took off his eyegla.s.ses and ma.s.saged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and middle finger. "I suspect he's sorry he spent thirty years of his life fighting for the wrong side."

"Did he say something to make you think that?"

Jack put his gla.s.ses back on. "No."

"So how do you know it?"

"You can't live in the Soviet Union-especially after having lived in the Unites States-and not realize it's the wrong side."

Anthony looked hard at his father; he could see the pain in his eyes. "He hurt you a lot, didn't he?"

"He was my c.o.xswain when I crewed at Yale. He was my best friend then and afterward. He was the best man at my wedding and the G.o.dfather of my son. What the h.e.l.l-I loved the guy, Anthony. And I hate him for betraying the bond that was between us, not to mention his country."

Anthony gripped his father's arm hard, then did something he hadn't done since childhood. He leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. "I was attached to Leo," he said quietly. "But I love you. Dad. You are one great guy."

Jack was rattled. "Jesus H. Christ."

"You can say that again," Anthony agreed.

Laughing under his breath, Jack did. "Jesus H. Christ."

Walking with the aid of two canes, his bad hip thrusting forward and around and back with each painful step, Ezra Ben Ezra, known to various intelligence services as the Rabbi, approached the fence. Harvey Torriti ambled up behind him and the two stood there inspecting the bombed-out ruins of the Fravenkirche, the Church of Our Lady. "Fire and brimstone was the malediction of Dresden," the Rabbi mused. "The city was burned to the ground in fourteen hundred something, again during the seven year war in seventeen hundred something, then Napoleon had a go at it in eighteen hundred something. In February of '44 the allies transformed the city into a burning fiery furnace with their fire bombs. The Germans, being German, built everything in Dresden back up after the war except this church. This they left as a reminder."

"So what does a Jew feel when he looks at the reminder?" the Sorcerer asked his old comrade-in-arms.

Leaning on his canes, the Rabbi considered the question. "Glee is what he feels. Ha! You expected remorse, maybe. Or worse, forgiveness. The reminder reminds me of the six million who perished in German death camps. The reminder reminds me of the churches that did nothing to stop the killing factories. You see before you a man weighted down with more than bad hips, Harvey. I travel with baggage. It's called the Torah. In it there is a formula that instructs victims on how to survive emotionally. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a burning for a burning."

Ben Ezra cranked his body into a hundred and eighty degree turn and started toward the black Mercedes that was circled by Mossad agents busily scrutinizing the rooftops across the street. Torriti winced as he watched his friend struggling with the canes. "I'm sorry to see you in such pain," he said.

"The physical pain is nothing compared to the mental. How many people you know live in a country that may not exist in fifty years? Genug shoyn!-enough already! What am I doing here?"

"You're here," the Sorcerer said, "because Israel is getting some fifteen thousand Jews out of the Soviet Union every month. You're here because you don't want this emigration and immigration to dry up. Which it would if Gorbachev is kicked out by a gang of right-wing nationalist thugs, some of whom happen to be anti-Semites to boot."

Torriti walked the Rabbi through the details of the plot to oust Gorbachev. From time to time Ben Ezra interrupted with pointed questions. Why wasn't the CIA approaching the Mossad on a service-to-service basis? What should the Rabbi read into the fact that the Sorcerer, languis.h.i.+ng in spirituous retirement, had been summoned back to the wars? Was the Company, or an element inside it, contemplating an operation that was outside the CIA's charter?

"Ha!" snorted Ben Ezra. "I thought so-how far outside?"

The two men reached the limousine and the Rabbi, with considerable difficulty, managed to lower his b.u.t.tocks onto the rear seat and then swing his legs in, one after the other. The Sorcerer went around to the other side and, wheezing from the exertion, maneuvered his carca.s.s in alongside Ben Ezra. The Mossad agents remained outside, their backs turned to the car, sizing up through opaque sungla.s.ses the people and cars pa.s.sing on the avenue.

The Rabbi (only months away from retirement; his successor as head of the Mossad had already been designated) sighed. "They are sc.r.a.ping the bottom of the barrel when they recruit us."

"The alcohol at the bottom of the barrel is the most potent," Torriti pointed out.

"Correct me where I have gone wrong," the Rabbi said. "You want us to identify and eventually neutralize a German national known to you only as Devisenbeschaffer.

"For starters, yeah."

"You want us to somehow get a foot in the door of the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce in order to take possession of the a.s.sets the Devisenbeschaffer may have deposited there."

"There's a pretty penny in the bank," Torriti said.

"What do you call a pretty penny?"

"Somewhere between three hundred and five hundred million, give or take."

"Dollars?"

"Would I have come out of retirement for yen?"

The Rabbi didn't blink. "If I succeed in looting the bank we will split the money fifty-fifty, my share going into a fund to finance the continuing immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel via Austria, your share to be deposited in a series of secret Swiss accounts, the numbers of which will be supplied in due time."

One of the Mossad agents rapped his knuckles on the window, pointed to his wrist.w.a.tch and said something in Hebrew. Ben Ezra wagged a fatherly finger at him. The agent turned away in frustration and barked into a tiny microphone on the inside of his right wrist. "This new generation-they are too impatient," Ben Ezra told Torriti. "They confuse motion with movement. In my day I used to stake out houses in Berlin for weeks on end in the hope of catching a glimpse-a mere glimpse, Harvey, nothing more-of a German on Israel's ten most wanted list. Where were we?"

"We are where we always were, my friend," Torriti said with a gruff laugh. "We're trying to figure out how to save the world from itself. There's one more thing you can do for me, Ezra."

"You have arrived at what Americans call your last but by no means least," the Rabbi guessed.

"I hear on the grapevine that there's an underworld in Moscow-a sort of Russian mafia. If it's anything like the mafia in America, which is to say if it's an equal opportunity employer, some of them have got to be Jewish. I figure you could put me in touch with one."

"Exactly what are you're looking for, Harvey?"

"I'm looking for a Russian gangster of Jewish persuasion who is connected with other Russian gangsters who are not afraid of getting their hands dirty."

"Dirty as in dirty or dirty as in b.l.o.o.d.y?"

"Dirty as in b.l.o.o.d.y."

The Rabbi attempted to s.h.i.+ft his weight on the seat. Grimacing in pain, he murmured, "It is Berlin 1951 redux, Harvey." He tapped a ring against the window to get the attention of the bodyguards and motioned for them to come aboard. "Once again we are neighbors with a common ground- your ceiling is my floor."

After a lifetime of battling against the evil empire from the cortex, Harvey Torriti had finally slipped across the frontier into the heart of darkness. Only just arrived from the airport, he was determined to discover the Russian macrocosm by inspecting the Russian microcosm: in this case, room 505 in one of Moscow's Stalin Gothic monstrosities, the thousand-room Hotel Ukraine on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Room service (if that was the correct job description for the hara.s.sed lady who turned up at the door) had finally gotten around to delivering the bottle of Scotch ordered an hour and a quarter earlier. (The frazzled waitress had forgotten ice but the Sorcerer-pa.s.sing himself off as a pleasantly inebriated John Deere salesman from Moline, Illinois named T. Harvey-told her to forget it; he had visions of her returning with a block of ice in the middle of the night.) He carefully filled a cracked tumbler just shy of overflowing and, wetting his whistle, began his survey of Socialism in the bathroom.

The toilet seat, made of thin plastic, declined to remain up unless it was blocked by a knee. The once-transparent shower curtain had turned opaque with a film of yellowish sc.u.m. Sitting on the pitted sink was the smallest bar of soap the Sorcerer had even set eyes on. The taps on the sink and the bathtub worked but what emerged, with an unsettling human gurgle, was a feces-brown liquid that bore only a pa.s.sing resemblance to water. In the bedroom the under sheet wasn't large enough to tuck beneath the mattress; the mattress itself looked remarkably like a miniature cross-country terrain for toy four-wheel drive cars. There was a television set that tuned in snow when it was switched on, an inverted bowl-like overhead light fixture which served as a cinerarium for cremated insects and an armoire that opened to reveal-nothing. Not a rod. Not a hanger. Not a hook or a shelf of any shape or kind. Against one wall, next to a desk with nothing in its drawers except mildew, stood a small refrigerator with an extremely large and very dead waterbug in residence. Torriti, crawling on all fours, was unable to locate anything resembling an electrical cord coming out of the refrigerator, which he supposed accounted for its lack of refrigeration. (In the end he flushed the waterbug down the toilet after three tries and used the refrigerator shelves to store his socks and underwear.) On the back of the door to the room were instructions in Russian and English about what to do in case of fire, and a series of arrows showing how the hapless resident of 505 might navigate through the maze of flaming corridors to a fire door. It was easy to see that if you didn't actually have the map in your hand-an unlikely possibility, since it was behind a pane of plexigla.s.s screwed to the back of the door-escape was inconceivable.

"I have seen the future," Torriti muttered aloud, "and it needs work!" The Sorcerer was still digesting his first impressions-could this really be the Socialist prototype that had threatened to "bury" (to use Khrushchev's term) the Western democracies?-when he thrust his arms into an Aquascutum and ventured out into the cool Moscow evening. He went through some basic tradecraft drills-the KGB was demoralized and underfunded but it was still there!-ducking between two buildings on the Arbat and waiting in the shadows of the garbage bin behind one of them to see if he was being followed, then trudging through labyrinthian alleyways crammed with corrugated private garages until he came to a wide boulevard. He stepped off the curb and raised a forefinger. Sure enough a gypsy cab screeched to a stop within seconds. Torriti had a hard time fitting his bulk through the narrow rear door of the Russian-manufactured Fiat; once inside he produced the index card with an address written in Cyrillic, along with a recently minted ten-dollar bill. The driver, a young man who looked as if he were suffering from terminal acne, turned out to be a Russian kamikaze; he s.n.a.t.c.hed both items out of Torriti's fingers and, cackling at the fury he aroused in other drivers as he corkscrewed through traffic, took his pa.s.senger on as wild a ride as the Sorcerer had ever experienced. Jammed into the back seat, he shut his eyes and fought the queasiness that comes when the viscera slush like bilge water through the abdominal cavity. After what seemed like an eternity, he heard the screech of brakes and felt the automobile skid to a stop. Pus.h.i.+ng open the back door, abandoning s.h.i.+p with an adroitness that came from terror, he sniffed at the burnt rubber in the air. It took a minute or two before he got his land legs back. He heard the faint sound of Vienna waltzes booming from loudspeakers a football field away. Pulling a moth-eaten scarf up around his neck, he started toward the brilliant lights illuminating the Park of Rest and Culture, an immense amus.e.m.e.nt mall on the outskirts of the city where, during the winter months, whole avenues were flooded so that ice skaters could skim along for kilometers on end.

Even after the spring thaw, so Torriti had been informed, there were barnfires blazing on the edge of the avenues every so often. His insteps were aching by the time he shambled over to the fourth fire from the right, burning in an enormous industrial drum. A handful of joggers and roller skaters stood around it, warming their hands, pa.s.sing around a flask, chatting amiably. On the avenue, under the blinding lights, teenage girls in thigh-length skirts and woolen stockings strolled in lock step with other girls, boys walked backward before their girlfriends, small children tottered along hand in hand with a parent. A thin man of medium height, wearing a windbreaker and a peaked worker's cap, came over from the avenue and held his hands over the fire, toasting one side and then the other. After a moment he looked hard at Torriti. Then, turning, he walked away from the drum. The Sorcerer pulled a flask from the pocket of the Aquascutum and fortified himself with a shot of cheap Scotch. Warmed by the alcohol, he backed away from the group and nonchalantly trailed after the figure in the windbreaker. He caught up with him in the penumbra between a stand of pitch-dark fir trees and the blaze of incandescence from a spotlight atop a crane.

"So that you, Kritzky?" Torriti demanded.

Leo was put off by his tone. "You haven't changed," he shot back.

"I've changed, sport. Fatter. Older. Wiser. Lonelier. Nervouser. More afraid of dying. Less afraid of death."

"I remember you in your heyday," Leo said. "I remember you tearing some secret stuff that came over the ticker out of Bobby Kennedy's hand-it was right after the Bay of Pigs. I remember you telling him where he could shove it."

The Sorcerer blew his nose between two fingers onto the ground. "Made a big mistake," he allowed.

"How's that?"

"Bobby was his brother's son of a b.i.t.c.h, okay, but he wasn't a spy for the Russians. You f.u.c.king were. I must have been slowing down not to see it. Ought to have told you where to shove it."

"Yeah. Well, here we are."

"Here is where we are," Torriti acknowledged.

"You still drink your way through the day?"

"You still lie your way through the day?"

Leo managed a forlorn smile. "You always treat your sources this way?"

"My Apprentice said you got ahold of a mole inside this Gorbachev thing. He told me to milk you. He didn't say nothing about climbing into bed with you."

From the loud speakers fixed to telephone poles came the sound of the Red Army chorus bellowing out "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" in what might have been English. Leo stepped closer to the Sorcerer and handed him an old envelope with a grocery list on one side. "I have seven more names to add to the ones I gave Jack," he hollered over the music. "They're written on the inside of the envelope in lemon juice. You pa.s.s an iron over it-"

Torriti was offended. "I wasn't born yesterday, sport. I was developing lemon juice before you went to work for the Russians."

"One of the new conspirators is the commander of the elite paratrooper unit in the Ryazan Airborne Division," Leo went on. "Another is the commander of the KGB's Dzerzhinsky Division."

"The plot sickens," Torriti shouted back with a sneer.

"There's more. It's written inside facing the list of names. Are you sober enough to remember-this is important?"

The Sorcerer leaned toward Leo and exhaled into his face. "I was sober enough to make it to this workers' paradise. Sober enough to find you here."

"The plotters have made contact with right-wing nationalist movements across Europe. For starters there's something called the August 21 Group in Madrid. There's Le Pens National Front in France. There are splinter groups in Germany and Italy and Austria and Serbia and Croatia and Rumania and Poland. They plan to dole out money to these groups, once all the funds have been transferred to the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce. The idea is to orchestrate a wave of international support for the coup against Gorbachev. They plan to present Gorbachev as a bungler who was running Russia into the ground, and the putsch as a patriotic effort to put the country back on its feet. If enough voices across Europe repeat this line the public may begin to think there's some truth in it."

The Sorcerer crumpled the envelope in his fist and stashed it in a pocket. "Where, when do we meet again?" he wanted to know.

"Where are you staying?"

Torriti told him.

"What's your cover?"

"I came armed with a briefcase full of John Deere brochures. Between drinks I'm trying to find someone who wants to import American tractors."

Leo thought a moment. "Okay. If I think we need to meet I'll have a bottle of Scotch delivered to room 505, along with a note thanking you for the John Deere material. The note will be written in ink. Between the lines, in lemon juice, I'll name a time and a place you can find easily."

Torriti started to walk away, then turned back with an afterthought. "Don't send up any of those imported Scotches. I prefer the cheap s.h.i.+t that disinfects the throat."

"Worried about germs?" Leo asked.

"Been inoculated against germs," Torriti snapped. "It's the traitors who make me sick to my stomach."

The Druzhba Hotel made the Ukraine look like the Ritz, or so the Sorcerer decided as he pushed through the mirrored door into the shabby lobby filled with tarnished mirrors and ceiling-to-floor window drapes that must have been put up before the Revolution and hadn't been dry cleaned since. Faded didn't begin to describe them. Pity the poor visitor who might be allergic to dust! Slaloming between ashtrays overflowing with everything but ashes, Torriti approached the main and only desk. "You probably speak English," he told the pasty platinum blonde copying off pa.s.sport numbers onto a ledger.

The woman, wearing a skin-tight dress made of Army surplus camouflage material, replied without looking up. "Not."

The Sorcerer turned to the half dozen men sitting around the lobby. They were all dressed in identical ankle-length belted leather coats, thick-soled black shoes and dark fedoras with narrow brims. It looked like a casting call for one of Torriti's all-time favorite films, James Cagney's The Public Enemy The Public Enemy, circa 1931. "Anybody here speak English?" he called.

The woman answered for them. "Not."

"How am I supposed to ask for information if n.o.body speaks English?" the Sorcerer demanded in exasperation.

"Study Russian," she suggested. "It could be useful in Russia."

"You do speak Englis.h.!.+"

"Not."

"Why do I get the feeling I've fallen through the looking gla.s.s?" Torriti remarked to n.o.body in particular.

The woman raised her heavily made-up eyes. "Anybody you want," she ventured, "is not here."

It dawned on the Sorcerer that the thing to do in an insane asylum is humor the inmates. "I don't want anybody," he announced. "I want somebody named Rappaport. Endel Rappaport."

"Yob tvoyu mat," someone called out.

The platinum blonde translated. "He says you, f.u.c.k your mother."

The others giggled at this. Torriti grasped that he was being incited to riot, and a riot would not bring him closer to Endel Rappaport, so he controlled his temper and forced himself to giggle with them.

"Rappaport is a Jew name," one of the extras sitting around the lobby decided.

Torriti pirouetted on a heel to face the speaker. "Is that right?" he said innocently.

The man, a dark-skinned giant with Central Asian eyes, came across the threadbare carpet. "Which sends you to Endel Rappaport?"

"Which which?" the platinum blonde echoed.