A Very Private Plot Read online

  “What do you mean, ‘that anybody knew about’?”

  “Those are the words he used—they stopped Dole too, who asked what did he mean, and Oakes just said something about how he was using a common expression. I don’t know what he’s referring to. We all know a lot of those black activities Oakes engaged in were pretty hairy, but they were legal under U.S. law as long as they were okayed by the Director, and the Director checked with the President, and the President within the stated period took select members of the House and Senate into his confidence—”

  “And blah blah blah”—the President wasn’t in the mood to be told what he already knew. It wasn’t as if he were campaigning and had to stroke some junior high school student. “Yeah, I know you know all that. What did Dole say to answer Oakes?”

  “What do you think the old coot came up with? Leave it to Bob Dole. He said, ‘Look, Oakes, you can cite prosecutions in the past under Section 1001—’”

  “What’s Section 1001?”

  “That’s the ‘false testimony’ statute the Special Prosecutor—Walsh—used against North and threatened to use against Elliott Abrams. You remember? 1991? Abrams had been Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs? He tried to conceal that he had got some sultan or sheik or somebody to help out the Contras. The old law says that nobody can, well, sort of hold out on Congress—not tell Congress things the witness really should have known Congress would have been interested in, but wasn’t aware of. It’s a hell of a provision, very old, early this century, but wasn’t ever used except against people who were hiding out on money questions. Dole’s point is that the committee could turn Oakes over to Justice and ask for an indictment not on the grounds of what Oakes told them, but on the grounds of what Oakes didn’t tell them—things they found out about from somebody else, and Oakes’s failure to tell them in the first place is ‘false testimony’ under 1001.”

  “In other words, Oakes could take the Fifth … Hey, that’s good! ‘I plead the Fifth on the grounds that I might forget to tell you something you might think relevant to whatever it is you decide later is relevant …’ Have the courts passed on Section 1001 used like that?”

  “There’s pressure on the Court to clamp down on the Walsh use of it. Get the AG to tell you about the Wohlenberg case, if you want particulars.”

  “Did Oakes cave?”

  “He told Dole he would think about it.”

  “Think about it in jail, or before he goes to jail?”

  “Oakes is tough enough to accept jail. But he doesn’t go in for melodrama, at least so far as we can figure. He thinks the position he’s taken is the correct position for somebody in his shoes, and he doesn’t want to give the impression that he is willing to abandon his position in order to spare himself a month or two in jail.”

  “But how in hell would he be sacrificing his position if he appeared and then didn’t give out his secrets—by taking the Fifth? He would simply have outwitted Blanton, no?”

  “Dole stressed just that. But Dole couldn’t deny the public perception: Oakes would be seen as hiding behind the same Fifth Amendment that sheltered the Commies for a couple of generations and is mostly used by criminals. On the other hand, Oakes says he doesn’t want to go to jail for the purpose of becoming a martyr.”

  “So what’s he going to do?”

  “He’s going to think about it.”

  “How long’s he got?”

  “I imagine the Senate will act within a week.”

  “If the Senate acts on anything within a week, it will make history. Thanks, Mack.”

  That was the signal. The chief of staff got up and left the Oval Office. The President had already started talking over the telephone before he reached the door. Mack shook his head slightly. The President had, in his presence just a moment ago, gone a full three minutes without talking or being talked to. Time spent thinking. Grave stuff. Heady stuff.

  CHAPTER 5

  AUGUST 1975

  Nikolai Trimov was raised by an aunt whose job it was to cook eighteen meals every week for the kolkhoz—collective farm—in Brovary, a half day’s journey from Kiev on bicycle, over mostly flat farm country, lumpy only here and there with groups of glistening birch trees. His aunt was responsible for feeding 112 farmers, and they breakfasted at 6:45. This meant that she had leisure time with Nikolai only on her day off, which was Wednesday; but Nikolai was at school for most of Wednesday, so that it was only late in the afternoon and early in the evening that Nikolai really had time with his aunt.

  He looked forward eagerly to those Wednesday afternoons, when Titka would read to him and talk to him and play chess. She owned only a dozen books, so she went regularly to the library. Nikolai couldn’t remember ever being without reading material. Titka would always ask, when she was still reading out loud to him—he took to reading for himself when he reached six—“What would you like me to read to you about?” His answer was always the same, and Titka loved to hear it from him: “Anything.” That meant, for a year or two, stories about animals or knights or high adventures on sea and on land.

  But one day Titka thought to play a little trick on him. She had brought home from the farmers’ refectory a discarded copy of Pravda, which she privately considered the most boring text in the Soviet Union, in particular the editor’s page.

  “Anything?” she asked teasingly.

  “Yes, Titka. Anything.”

  So Titka opened the paper to the editorial for the day before, August 27, 1968. She read in her usual monotone, but moving along at a good clip, and the words were clearly enunciated. “‘The developments in Chicago yesterday at the Democratic National Convention resulted in a clear collision between the progressives, who were represented by Senator George McGovern, and the warmongering forces represented by Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Mr. Humphrey emphasized the need to bring more armed pressure to bear against the revolutionaries in Vietnam in order to frustrate them from achieving socialist liberty. President Lyndon Johnson, who remained in Washington because he is clearly afraid to expose himself even to his own Party, has thrown his considerable weight in favor of Mr. Humphrey as presidential candidate, in arrant opposition to the popular will. The fascist police of Chicago, who are creatures at the disposal of the Mayor, one Daley, whose public career has consisted in imprisoning and torturing any progressive voice in Chicago, in particular among the oppressed Negro people …’”

  Titka stopped. She had expected to be interrupted after the second or third sentence. She turned to Nikolai, who sat on the floor next to her, his bare legs crossed, his coarse shirt open at the collar—it was warm in August in the Ukraine—and said, “Are you … enjoying this, Nikolai?”

  “Yes,” he had replied. “I do hope that the progressives in Chicago will prevail.”

  Titka blinked. She laid the paper down on her lap. “What do you know about the progressives in Chicago?”

  “Only what you just said, Titka. They are being opposed by the fascist police of one Daley.”

  Titka was flustered, but continued to read through the one-thousand-word-long editorial, right to the end. Then she picked up the volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and read to Nikolai the tale about “Iron John.” His expression did not change.

  But the following Wednesday, after he had returned from school and done his chores in the little patch of vegetable garden, when they sat down he said to her, “Did they win? The progressives in Chicago?”

  Titka said that she did not have that day’s edition of the newspaper but she had scanned it at the collective and in fact they had not won; Mr. Humphrey had been nominated and would pursue his warlike course in Vietnam. Nikolai said that that was truly a pity, and he hoped someday Mr. Humphrey would come to Kiev, and maybe even to Brovary, so that he could see how progressives can live peaceful and orderly and productive lives. Titka turned her head away, her heart pounding, so he would not see the flush she knew betrayed her feelings. She thought fleetingly that perhaps now was the time
to tell Nikolai about his grandparents in the winter of 1933, or about his parents, one month after he was born. No, she stopped herself. Not yet.…

  Now, seven years later, she still had not told him. Titka was prudent, because she had been under regular surveillance by the local KGB ever since … Grigori and The Episode, as the farmers in the village continued to refer to it.

  It had all begun when Nikolai’s father had taken the lead in organizing a protest. With twenty dirt farmers grouped about him, he approached the Chief of Section to request slightly higher hourly pay and shorter hours—a work week of sixty hours instead of sixty-six. The Chief of Section said he would refer the request to a higher authority. At the end of the day, four uniformed officials came to the small cabin—the same cabin in which Titka and Nikolai now lived—and informed Grigori that he was under arrest. He was taken off to spend the night at the collective’s little detention center. The following day, after a half-hour trial before the Chief of Section and two magistrates brought in from the neighboring collective, Grigori was sentenced. He was taken off to ten years of hard labor for counterrevolutionary activity, under Article 70 of the criminal code.

  The following day, Lidya went with her month-old baby to her sister Titka at the collective center and asked her to look after him.

  “I will be back before the end of the day” were her last words as she bent over and lingeringly kissed her baby.

  Lidya then went to the detention center, her husband’s army rifle in her arms, cocked. She walked to the desk, pointed the gun at the startled sergeant, and demanded the release of her husband. The sergeant, wide-eyed, rose and told Lidya to follow him to the cell. While pretending to cope with the key to open the cell, he brushed his holster, pulled out a pistol and shot Lidya, whose finger closed simultaneously on the trigger of the rifle, firing a shot that killed her husband.

  There was wide resentment over the treatment of Grigori and much grief over the fate of Lidya and her husband. The Chief of Section felt a near-mutinous resentment and made a public gesture designed to appease: Instead of sending Nikolai off to an orphanage, he turned the little family cabin over to Titka and the baby. But even now, ten years later, The Episode was memorialized. Every year, on September 11, the 112 farmers in the collective departed after lunch to their living quarters. A half holiday, so to speak.

  Titka knew it was inevitable that the details of The Episode would reach Nikolai before too long. But it would be better coming from one of his schoolmates than from her, because Titka could not trust herself to keep her emotions under control. It wasn’t only Lidya and Grigori, but the memory of her father, Nikolai’s grandfather.

  Titka remembered it all vividly. She had been seven, after all, and many details of her life at that age stayed in the memory. But as she grew older she learned from her reading, and from a cousin who studied psychology, that ugly memories of youth tend to fade away, and sometimes at night she would dream that this memory would fade away, but it never did.

  Central to it was the Red Army’s long log building, squatting a mere thirty meters from where she, her sister, and her mother and father lived, or rather tried to live, through the famine. What was special about the building in which the Soviet officers met when completing their rounds was the smells that came from it. She spent many hours, along with Lidya, just staring at it, and watching officers drive in in their cars and little trucks. It seemed to serve them (there were about sixty, she counted) as a recreation building, a meeting room for staff planning, but above all as a place in which they had their meals, special meals she had supposed, though now she knew that from the perspective of the famine, any meal was special. The smells of soup and chicken and cabbage and pork and turnips seemed to aim at the little cabin in which she and Lidya shared a bedroom with their parents, the second room serving for all other purposes, including the tool shed from which, every day, her father brought out his equipment to wrestle with the planting, which, when it yielded crops, yielded them to the Soviet monitor pacing alongside. He would seize them—barley, wheat, vegetables—roughly and stack them in the truck nearby. She and Lidya shared a single piece of bread in the morning, on which a kind of gruel was poured, something boiled from what seemed like leaves stripped off a neighboring tree. Her mother ate nothing, waiting until the afternoon for hot water and tea leaves, and the dried wheat soaked in water on which she and their father gnawed at sundown.

  It was the day when her mother could not lift her head even to take the cup of tea that her father acted. It was the habit of orderlies from the army detachment in the officers’ recreation room across the road to bring out the leftovers from the midday meal and pour them into a barrel right by the barbed wire that protected the enclosure from the surrounding farmers’ cottages. From their little window, Titka’s father, Fyodor, could see poured into the barrel in a single deposit, as garbage, enough food to keep his family healthy for a month. He looked back at his wife, lying motionless on the cot. He grabbed the pitchfork in the corner, opened the door, and moved with determination toward the barbed wire. He asked the orderlies please to pass him the refuse they were throwing into the barrel. They answered with laughter and taunts. Using his pitchfork as a kind of rough shield, Fyodor threw himself against the barbed wire, seeking to reach a hand into the barrel.

  The rifle sound came from back at the officers’ quarters. A single shot fired by a lieutenant sitting on a bench outside. He had been fondling the rifle, and found now something quite unexpected, something practical to do with it.

  He was a good marksman. Fyodor was dead, straddling the barbed wire. His widow did not have the strength to rise to help pull him away—she did not leave the cot until she was placed in the rude coffin. Titka and Lidya did their best, finally recapturing their dead father with the help of a neighbor who labored with the corpse at half strength because he was weak from starvation.

  … Titka would not be the one to tell Nikolai about the death of his grandparents, though someone in the community of course eventually would. Everyone knew about those terrible days and months in 1933. The grandparents of a half-dozen boys and girls in Nikolai’s class had been victims of the great kulak purge.

  All in good time, Titka reflected, looking over at young Nikolai, buried, as ever, in his books. What, after all, was the hurry?

  Nikolai advanced quickly in school, so much so that when he was fifteen the principal reported to her superiors in Kiev that the boy was two, perhaps three years advanced beyond his fellow students and that she had nothing more to teach him. Either, at age fifteen, he would join the farm work force, or else he would go to Kiev and attend the university.

  He was summoned to an interview. The rector, peering over his eyeglasses, studied him carefully. The boy sat respectfully on the bench at the far end of the office while the rector attended to random paperwork. Nikolai Trimov, like so many Ukrainians, was blond, but his features were not those of the typical peasant. The fine nose and chin were more Mediterranean. His lips were thin, his expression sober. He looked more nearly seventeen or eighteen than fifteen, the rector thought as he lowered his eyes and turned his attention to the folder supplied by the Chief of Section at Brovary.

  It told the story of Nikolai’s parents, of the dramatic events of September 11, 1965. But there had been no adverse notation on the boy’s own record. Nikolai had been elected president of his class, he was skilled in chess—in fact he no longer had a challenger of any age in the village—and the physical education director had written that Nikolai would certainly qualify for special training, should Kiev wish to aim him for Olympic qualification in figure skating.

  The rector summoned the boy to approach, pointed to a chair at the side of his desk, and told him to sit down. Wool cap in hand, Nikolai did so, furtively tightening his tie, though his Adam’s apple protruded through a shirt clearly too small for a boy already grown to five feet ten inches. The rector was an academician by training, not a bureaucrat. While administering the affairs of t
he 15,000 students on his campus he also taught one course in the philosophy department. It was called the Philosophy of the Working Class, taught to the top-rated one hundred students, who were summoned to take that course in their senior year.

  The rector faced a problem he had faced only once before—a fifteen-year-old academically qualified for university training. The time before, it had been a disaster, because the girl could not adjust to the company of young men and women three, four, five years older than she. He had sent her away after two months, back to her village. It would not be easy to predict whether young Nikolai would get along with the older students. The rector decided to begin by probing the boy’s mind and his capacity to handle himself.

  “Is it so, Nikolai, that you have read all the books in the library at Brovary?”

  “I think so, Comrade Rector. At least I cannot find any book I have not read. Of course, I haven’t read every word in the Soviet Encyclopedia, although I consult it often.”

  The rector reflected that a student bent on reading any edition of the entire Soviet Encyclopedia would have to rush to do so before a revised Soviet Encyclopedia came in, according as this revisionist in Moscow prevailed over that one. “Have you read Marx?”

  “Oh yes, Comrade Rector. Although I cannot say that I fully understand him. But of course that must be the reason why Marx is taught all the way up”—Nikolai gestured with his hand pointing to the ceiling—“through graduate school.”

  “Do you have any difficulty in understanding the central thrust of Marx-Lenin historical imperatives?” Perhaps that would slow the boy down, the rector thought.