A Very Private Plot Page 8

  When Shalamov engaged in such exorcisms there was nothing for the errant student to do except to wait, standing, until dismissed. Shalamov did not pause to ask where Pletnev had got his historical misimpression. He disdained to acknowledge that a perverted version of history, contradicting the correct version, was anywhere extant. It was manifestly a parthenogenic creation of the diseased imagination of the delinquent student.

  After a half hour or so, it was over. Pletnev was told to go back to work.

  He walked across the campus listlessly, moving inertially in the direction of the library, where he might use an hour or two before dinner. He seethed with contempt for Shalamov, in fact for the whole wretched university. He’d have loved to rise from his chair and tell the chairman that he, Shalamov, was a disgrace to the historical discipline, a contemptible courtier to the whims of Kremlin intrigue—Viktor stopped in mid-campus and added aloud to his platonic tirade, “And on top of everything else, Shalamov, you are a corpulent visual mess and I would be ever so grateful, as would everyone you encounter, if from now on you would wear a face mask.” Viktor broke out in the special laughter of retributive satisfaction, and suddenly felt much better.

  Needless to say, he would suppress his feelings, as he had so many times done against the entire communist fraternity, of which Shalamov was only one, noisome example. What mattered most, he knew, was to get his advanced degree. And then.

  And then! Perhaps and then, one glorious day, to travel. If ever he found himself outside the borders of the Soviet Union, Viktor knew he would never come back.

  He passed through the main entrance to the library, intending to spend an hour in the periodical room, when suddenly he thought to pause to see whether the Chambers book Trimov had called for had been returned by the faculty member who had taken it out. He went to the card catalogue in the foreign books section and presented the request card to the clerk at the desk.

  In a few minutes he was handed the volume. He took it to a desk and opened it at the back to trace its recent movements. The card attached to the back cover listed the dates on which the book had been consulted by a student and the dates on which faculty had withdrawn the book from the library. To his surprise there was no notation of the book’s recent withdrawal by faculty from the premises. And it had been called down for examination in the library only once during the month of September. He read the librarian’s notation: “Sept 21 ’85, N. Trimov.”

  Pletnev was perplexed. Nikolai had told him the book had been absent from the library and for that reason he hadn’t been able to examine it. Pletnev had been lied to. What could have been Nikolai’s motive?

  The next day, at the tea break in midmorning, he accosted Nikolai. “You are going to look again next Sunday for the book by Chambers?”

  “Yes, yes, Viktor.”

  “It was not at the library when you went there last Sunday?”

  “I already told you, Viktor. No, it wasn’t there. A faculty member had removed it.”

  Viktor Pletnev sipped his tea. After a moment he said to Nikolai, “It is very kind of you to take the trouble.”

  “I am glad to do so. I am told Chambers was an interesting man.”

  “Yes,” Viktor said. “He was very interesting. He wrote a book which prompted many people to anti-Communist thinking.”

  Nikolai was silent.

  “His book, Witness, is very moving.”

  “Is he still alive?” Nikolai thought it tactically wise to feign ignorance.

  “Alive! He died”—Viktor quickly calculated it—“twenty-four years ago. In 1961.”

  “If he was so ardent an anti-Communist, how is it that we have such easy access to his book?”

  Viktor opened his mouth wide, thought better of it, and asked Nikolai to lunch with him after the late morning classes, which now impended.

  Two hours later, seated with their vegetables, potatoes, and soup, Viktor started in. “Nikolai, on the matter you raised this morning, your surprise that critical books are to be found in the library. You must know that, with very few exceptions, a student could always get such books. Periodicals, no. But it’s also true that things are a little bit different now, you know. The glasnost of Gorbachev is not entirely meaningless.”

  “I saw what he did to Sakharov when Sakharov protested the war in Afghanistan.”

  “Well, yes, I am hardly suggesting that Gorbachev is about to change the policies of the Soviet Union. But it is no longer simple suicide to ask a question or two, or to read more widely than we were permitted to do even a year ago. Sure, you have to follow the official line very strictly—you should have heard my department chairman chew me out just yesterday afternoon. But you have not been in Moscow very long, and perhaps in Kiev it is different, but we can talk, if we want to—to be sure, using sound judgment—about the war, about how misdirected it is.”

  Nikolai found himself uncomfortable even listening to such heresy. “As you may know, Viktor, my interests are exclusively in engineering and in languages. I have never—interested myself in political discussion.”

  “Well, I don’t say that that isn’t the safest course. It probably is. But at least you should know that, here and there, there are people like me, interested for instance in the historical role of the Narodniki. They were, in case you are unaware of it, the true purists of the revolution. They wished to protest against tyranny, not to be catalysts of a fresh tyranny.”

  Nikolai rose. “I’m sorry, Viktor. I don’t want to continue this discussion. My thoughts and concerns are on other matters.”

  Viktor, flushed, looked up at him. “Well, go ahead and concern yourself with whatever you like. But let me tell you this, Nikolai. The line Gorbachev is taking, in speech after speech—in connection with the disarmament talks, in connection with the summit conference with Reagan coming up—is simple, simple, simple. He wishes to arrest the American pursuit of a strategic defense, what they call ‘Star Wars’ in America. That is his line. Don’t involve the Soviet Union in another arms race. We are bleeding in Russia, Nikolai, and the greatest lesion is in Afghanistan. I hardly need to tell you that we are losing the war in Afghanistan. And my bet is that Gorbachev will recognize this before too long for one simple reason. He has no alternative.”

  “Viktor!” Nikolai shot up his hand, palm upstretched. “You must not go on!” He was breathing heavily, his complexion pale. “And I certainly won’t repeat what you have said!” He walked away, leaving his lunch half eaten.

  Viktor Pletnev, his spoon playing with his unconsumed soup, was deep in thought. His eyes followed his colleague. Nikolai’s stride toward the entrance door was interrupted by Tatyana, seated with a companion woman teacher. Nikolai resisted, but was constrained to sit down with them.

  Pletnev resolved to attempt to probe deeply into the character of his colleague, the slim young man with the arresting face and the reputation as a scholarly polymath. Nikolai did not know that Whittaker Chambers was dead? But the book Nikolai had withdrawn from the library last Sunday carried the date of Chambers’s death on the first page.

  CHAPTER 12

  SEPTEMBER 1985

  On the following Monday, Nikolai approached Viktor at the morning break, told him that he had got hold of the Chambers book, had found the passage on the Narodniki, and translated it. He handed him the sheets.

  “That is most awfully kind of you, Nikolai. I shall look for an opportunity to return the favor. Did you find the passage interesting? I am anxious to read it.”

  “Yes,” Nikolai said noncommittally. “It was very interesting. As you will see, it provides a very … passionate view of the Narodniki.”

  Viktor stretched out his arm and touched Nikolai’s shoulder, a gesture of thanks, and sat down at one of the tables to read. Nikolai left the room.

  At three, after classes were finished, Nikolai walked hand in hand with Tatyana, speaking to her in English. They would have time to promenade only once around the block because she had an appointment. There wa
s the nip of autumn in the air and, coatless, Nikolai was glad to reach the shelter of the metro. He would go directly home. He did not need to pause at the library for more books—he had three in his apartment, including a little-used book on the structural work done on the Kremlin when the decision was made in 1901 to electrify the palace. He would devote himself to further study on the morphology of the Kremlin and then share his findings with Andrei when he came in at six from his police work. He took out his key, opened the door to apartment 6K, turned the tap for some water to boil, and was startled to hear a knock on the door. He looked rapidly about him to make sure there was nothing sitting in the room that should be concealed. Of course there wasn’t. He opened the door to Viktor Pletnev.

  Viktor did not give Nikolai an opportunity to be inhospitable. He walked in directly, his tattered briefcase in one hand, a paper parcel in the other. He closed the door behind himself. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Very well, Viktor. Sit down. A cup of tea?”

  “Yes. And,” he struggled with the package, “I have something for you, a little gift to thank you for the trouble you took.” He took from the bag six bananas and a box of dried figs.

  “You didn’t have to do that, Viktor, but thank you. Sit down.”

  “Nikolai, I discovered quite by accident that you … deceived me. You had already seen the book last week. Your name was on the card.” Viktor continued talking without pause. He did not want to prolong the humiliation. “My purpose is to tell you that I was enormously moved by the information you brought me about the Narodniki. And to tell you something more, Nikolai, which is that I flatly disbelieve what you say, that you are not interested in the political cauldron we live in. I know you are some sort of an academic star, that you have mastered several languages and electrical engineering, and that you fought bravely in Afghanistan. But I know also that our country needs help and I believe that in your heart you know that it needs help and that in reading the book by Chambers you were reaching to feel the purity of the experience of a liberated man.

  “I could feel it in the paragraphs you gave me, the way you set down the words, not the translation of an engineer unmoved by what the words said. Even with my poor English, I shall now return to the library and read more in that book, even as I read all of Witness, although it took me almost one month. I am here, Nikolai, to plead with you to join me and two other young people devoted to a freer Russia, a man and a woman, brother and sister. Our goal is the liberation of our motherland—I say it dramatically, and although I know that you are very circumspect, I know also that you know I am not an agent, attempting to snare you. I know that you trust me.”

  Nikolai was rescued by the hissing teapot. He needed desperately to think. To talk with Andrei. To his surprise, he was not in the least frightened. He absolutely believed in the sincerity of Viktor, who sat there, his brown hair falling over one of his eyes, both of which were half closed, staring at the moldy carpet on the floor, waiting for a reaction.

  He was not scared but neither was he prepared to induct Viktor on the spot into the New Narodniki, in which only he and Andrei were members, sworn to give their lives to advance liberty. He poured the tea. He had to say something. What he said was, “What do you propose to do?”

  Viktor was enormously heartened. With that simple statement, Nikolai had dropped his pose. He had jettisoned the unbecoming masquerade that he was indifferent to the atrocities of the world they lived in and unwilling to speak of them. Viktor felt that he needed to reward Nikolai’s act of faith in him. He would do so by communicating his most sacred, most incriminating secret.

  “You should know,” he said, “I am in touch with American intelligence.”

  Nikolai responded quickly: “I am not sure it is wise for you to give me the details.”

  “I won’t. Those are the basic rules of my business. But what I am telling you is that any information I—we—wish to pass on to Washington, to the CIA—I can do that. In fact I have already tested it out.”

  “What on earth could you know, teaching history and studying at the graduate school, that Washington would want to know?”

  “There are always, always, opportunities. I will be concrete. On March 8th, Aaron Sablin—you know Sablin? He teaches physics at Pitkin, and attends, like us, the graduate school—he invited me to his house for dinner. I went and the food was very good. His father lives well. He is a widower and a medical doctor. He had several vodkas, and I had several. The subject came up of the health of Chernenko. All of Moscow was talking about the health of Chernenko after his public appearance in January, you remember. No, you were away, in the army.

  “Anyway, I said, quite matter-of-factly, that from all appearances one would not suppose that Chernenko would last out the year—this was early in March. Dr. Sablin turned to me and said, ‘Viktor, he will not last out the month.’ Aaron looked in my direction and, when his father was not noticing, gave me a wink. Later we went to a bar and he confided to me that his father was a specialist who had been called in to the Kremlin and regularly treated Chernenko.”

  “What did you do with that information?”

  “I gave it the very next day to my contact.”

  “You know that it got to Washington?”

  “I know the ma—person I deal with. If he had been an agent he’d have turned me in long ago.”

  “How many people do you suppose your contact has reporting to him?”

  “I haven’t the least idea. And maybe the information about Chernenko is entirely trivial compared to the information he comes up with himself, or gets from other sources. He is very well placed. And he has been secure for many years. In the post-Beria purge he was sent to Gulag, but after a few months he was released and given back his old job. A few years before that he was sent on a six-month mission to Indonesia. When he returned he could find no trace of his brother or of his aged mother.”

  “Stalin—”

  “Yes, it was in the last days of Stalin. Perhaps one million—no, more—disappeared in the same way. Just no trace of them.”

  “Does your friend have any … more ambitious plans?”

  “If he does, he wouldn’t tell me. He wants to live to see our country free.”

  “I fear he will have to live a very long time.”

  “My friend is already old, but he is healthy.”

  Nikolai stood up and walked the two or three paces one could move in the room without having to turn around. “What, other than to communicate anything to your contact that would be useful to the other side, do you plan to do?”

  “I don’t know. I must do something. And it is less fruitful to work alone. I told you, there are three of us who meet with great caution. Again, you do not need to know who they are. But they trust me, and I trust them. Consider just a little thing: I shall make out of the passages you just finished giving me—Chambers on the Narodniki—a samizdat, and in less than one month those few paragraphs on the Narodniki will have had an impact on hundreds, maybe thousands of students. Imagine how the next issue of a newspaper would sell if it carried just those three paragraphs!”

  Nikolai looked down at his army-issue watch. “Viktor, I need to think. And you need to think. And we must take every precaution. We must not, while at Pitkin, be seen together more than casually. And Viktor …”

  “Yes?”

  “When I next approach you, I will have proposals for regular meetings, and you can make your own proposals to me. It will be a very long time before we can—well, act decisively. We must be patient, but also inventive.”

  Nikolai felt the special intensity of the grip of Viktor’s handshake.

  CHAPTER 13

  SEPTEMBER 1985

  Blackford Oakes reached CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just after eight. At the same time, Director William Casey drove in, secure in his secure limousine, an armed guard sitting in the front seat beside the driver, the windows bulletproof, the route taken from his dwelling circuitous. It infuriated th
e Director to submit to the same disciplines he rigidly enforced on others, such were his carefree ways.

  He had been around a long time; his associates were used to him, they liked and respected him, and they knew that his intimacy with the President guaranteed his tenure as Director. As Deputy Director for Operations, Blackford was indispensable to Casey, in big ways and little ways. There was, for instance, the Director’s incapacity to handle any mechanical object invented after the wheelbarrow. He had mastered the use of the telephone, and it was rumored that while at college he typed his own papers, but no one alive, as far as Blackford knew, had seen Casey handle any mechanical or electronic gadget more complicated than a radio, and sometimes he wrestled with the doorknob, having forgotten that it needed to be turned clockwise in order to function. Blackford regularly opened the Director’s safe for him.

  It amused Blackford to think of Casey’s wrestling with a computer and doing such things as inserting codes and commands and chasing the cursor this way and that. Casey communicated in writing, done by dictation to his secretary, or else orally, imposing a major strain on the listener—Casey spoke indistinctly, requiring of the addressee a kind of onomatopoetic facility to understand what it was the Director was saying. President Reagan’s wisecrack about Casey, that Casey actually contrived his unintelligibility—“That way, whoever he is talking to simply agrees from sheer fatigue with whatever he has said”—was widely circulated.

  Blackford got on well with the Director, and vice versa. Casey respected the field experience of his chief of covert operations, who had been (to be sure, with not uninteresting interruptions) with the Agency ever since graduating from college in 1951. There were many rumors about Blackford’s first tour of duty in England, the details of which were known to only one man, the Director learned on coming into office, the legendary Rufus. And Casey knew that around Blackford Oakes a quiet cult, mostly made up of retired agents, thrived. Oakes never encouraged it, never spoke about his background or his work.