Recruiting Vlad had not been on his mind that night. Young music students didn’t make Marley’s target list. Men and women with family ties in the party hierarchy weren’t on the list either; as contacts they could be useful, but the ones who could be recruited as agents were idealists or malcontents. Either type blipped on the security apparat’s radar. Idealists and malcontents who had worked their way into the system over half a lifetime had learned to hide their social illness. They interested Marley and his colleagues.
Vlad recruited himself. “My father is General Zavenyagin,” he said idly. “Careless. Brings satchels full of work home.”
His father had never asked himself a single fundamental question, on any subject, according to Vlad. His mother believed the only questions that mattered were the size of the family’s apartment and whether the General’s next assignment included a chauffeured Zil. The state had not shot generals in many years. The family had a good life.
They were on the sidewalk outside the journalist’s apartment when Vlad dangled the bait. They were alone.
Marley’s first concern was not getting himself ejected from the country by succumbing to a novice provocateur.
When he thought about it, the young man had been selling himself hard all evening. “We’re all edgy now, everyone hoping for true reform. Do you know what it’s like? It’s like seeing everyone having wonderful sex all around, while you wait for word that it’s okay to take part. But in your soul, you know Mikhail Sergeiovich will raise a hand at the last moment and say no, stop, you must wait another fifty years. That is a long time to go without.” And later, when he seemingly was no more drunk: “We can’t hang them all, and whoever’s left will carry on.”
Oleg was right about the boy’s face. Bony, rodent-like in its hunger. Though he listened and watched attentively, Marley found nothing in Vladimir that he had grown to expect from people baiting a trap. There was no instant intimacy. There was little flirtation. When Vlad spoke about politics, it wasn’t to denounce the terror of Stalin, the bromide of the undercover operatives. Instead, he expressed a young man’s half-shaped belief that if Western-style democracy came, his country would flourish.
“I would like to travel then,” he said, “perhaps concertize. The piano.” He held up his broad, long-fingered hands. “A natural, you would say.”
George Proffer, the newspaper writer, was present for the first part of that mutual seduction. Picking at the zakuski, Proffer said, “Vlad can travel. He’s not part of the oppressed masses. Tell Charlie about Paris.”
Rolling his eyes, the young man shaped a silent whistle. “I will go back. But it would be nice not to go by permission. My visa was for only three weeks.”
“Did you perform?” Marley asked. It was an innocent question.
“It was two years ago. I wasn’t ready.”
“He could get bookings in Paris tomorrow,” Proffer said. “Vlad’s from a good family.”
Marley raised a questioning glance.
“Believe it or not,” Proffer said, staring at the bottle in his hand as if it could refute him, “this boy is too principled to take advantage of his connections. Rare anywhere, hmm, Charles? He doesn’t want a career handed to him by Gos Concert.”
“Crap,” said Vladimir with a grin. “The creeps know if I ever got out, I would keep going. Have you ever been to Paris?”
As soon as Marley admitted he had been stationed on Rue de Rivoli in the early eighties, Vladimir peppered him with questions — had he ever been to this or that dive, did he know where Henry Miller had lived, did he know there were still emigre Russians running restaurants near the Odeon? “Seventy-five years after the Revolution,” he said, “they’ve got pictures of Kerensky above the bar. Can you believe it?”
“What’s this about Henry Miller?” Marley said.
“He was the first person to truly understand the twentieth century,” Vlad said with a perfectly straight face. “That it was all going to be about sex.”
Marley, who thought it had been about politics, nodded. He wasn’t the least bit tight, but he thought it would be interesting if he had missed the point that Henry Miller and a young Russian student understood.
“Where did you hang out?” Vlad asked. He named a restaurant where students gathered. “I went there eight nights in a row. Gaulois smoke thick as butter. Pots of nondescript wine. Girls who didn’t live with their parents. I could have stayed, but my education wasn’t finished.”
Proffer pulled a glass away from his nose and chuckled. “Haven’t seen anyone so wide eyed, have you, Charlie, since your first trip to a whorehouse? Poor kid thinks the world outside is a party.”
“Compared to life here, it is,” said Vlad.
“You haven’t met my editor,” Proffer said in a tone that didn’t invite argument.
Charles Marley kept his mind on the hospital board meeting. The other directors knew what he had done before his retirement, but they were all people of the world who refused to be impressed or shocked. Several had worked for government. Only one board member joked in whispers that maybe Charlie still had a hand in. In which case, he added, the videotape of a certain sheik’s colonoscopy had probably made it to Langley.
“Questionable taste, Pruitt,” said the chairman.
Charles Marley stared past both men. Langley would have the sheik’s medical results without his intervention.
“Well then, we’re agreed?”
Of course they were agreed. People of the world didn’t join boards to be disagreeable. On whatever the question was, they were agreed.
“He could be useful,” the Moscow station chief had said. She had studied the profile of Vlad that Charles prepared, asked him questions that she believed were penetrating.
“General Zavenyagin, the boy’s father, is five levels from the top,” he said. “Doesn’t see major stuff.”
“Neither do we,” the station chief said. “He might get promoted.”
“A good man deserves to be,” Charles said. When she didn’t respond to his flippancy, he let his grin slide away. “Zavenyagin won’t know if a coup is coming. He would be a follower, not a leader.”
“We won’t expect much from his son.” The station chief’s attention was moving on to something else, but Charles Marley had received his nod to see if Vladimir Davidovich could be recruited. The station chief looked up suddenly when Charles was at the door. “Maybe he will surprise us,” she said.
“It’s a nom de guerre, a cover name, isn’t it,” Vlad asked him the next time they met. “It’s too literary to be your real name. You know, Dickens. Marley’s ghost?”
“Someone should have told my grandfather — or his grandfather.”
“Everyone knows what a cultural attaché does.”
“When the political climate permits, I arrange exchange visits. Your ballet dancers for our bluegrass pickers.”
“Banjos.”
“Right.”
“Duh-duh-duh DUH duh. The movie’s been here. Must be pretty dull — the world’s in ferment, and you’re escorting hillbillies around Moscow.” They were at Proffer’s apartment again, alone, and Vlad was playing with him, enjoying his moment, knowing he had gotten someone interested — if not in himself, then in his father’s satchels of work.
“What I was thinking,” Marley said, “is I might try to get you some engagements in New York.”