The narrow face mocked the offer. “If I help you, you’ll see I play Carnegie Hall?”
“More like Queens College, if you’re as good as Proffer says. Or places in Iowa. It would be part of an exchange of students. Up to you what you made of it. And whether you stayed. How good are you?”
“Ask Melissa.” She was a young woman who came to some of the gatherings at Proffer’s apartment.
“At the piano.”
“I’m very good.” He grinned confidently, but the look in his eyes wasn’t so sure. “This is the nation of great pianists — and great alcoholics. I’m good enough for your Queens College, not quite ready for Carnegie Hall. In another year, maybe.”
“Proffer says you’re as good as Gilels was at your age.”
Vlad shrugged. “Proffer’s no music critic.”
“But he’s right?”
“Bound to be once in a while.”
“And you want out.”
“Oh, brother. You’ve seen through me.” The young man dragged his hand down his face theatrically. “I thought I kept that hidden.”
“You’ve been shouting it on the street corners,” Marley said.
“It gets lost in the din there. Everybody wants out, more or less. The KGB can’t arrest us all. Anyway, they’re busy plotting against each other.” He got up from the table where they’d been sitting. His elbows had rested on a magazine, Literaturnaya Gazeta. He turned several pages casually, then walked away. A foolscap sheet lay between the pages. With the heel of his hand, Marley swiveled the magazine and read the sheet. Before he finished, Vlad returned with a bottle of pepper vodka. He didn’t bring glasses. “What do you think?” he asked. He tilted the bottle to his lips, then passed it to Marley.
What Marley thought was: Are you sure you want to do this? But he was too professional to ask. He had other words ready. “You’re doing a service to your country, Vladimir Davidovich,” he said.
Vlad laughed and demanded the bottle back.
The station chief was pleased. “James Jesus,” she murmured, an expression she used often, which had nothing to do with divinity but invoked the memory of her favorite counterespionage officer, whose surname was Angleton. “This needs to be verified, of course.”
“Sure.” He had read the foolscap memorandum through twice, taking no notes. It appeared to be what Washington would call a talking paper, outlining the pros and cons of the military recommending a hard line against restive republics that wished to weaken their ties to the Soviet Union.
“It’s not much by itself,” she said.
“No.” Marley was having trouble suppressing a smirk.
“But if General Zavenyagin is privy to those discussions...” She snapped a glance that only caught Marley looking serious. “What does the kid want from us?”
“Vodka and promises,” Marley said. “He wants to tour the West playing Schumann.”
For just a moment, the station chief gave Charles Marley a blank stare, long enough for his mouth to drop open a crack at the discovery she didn’t know Schumann, and then her stare turned scornful because he was so gullible. Not a good quality in an agent, being easily led — her head shake made that plain.
He heard Vlad perform nine days later at the apartment of an apparatchik who liked to pretend she ran a salon. There were a couple of poets in residence, but everywhere Marley went there were poets, or men who planned to become poets and drank seeking inspiration. One of the apparatchik’s poets was a widely acclaimed dissident who had never been arrested. He was middle aged, wore faded jeans and a leather jacket, and had soulful eyes that lingered on young women. The hostess prevailed on him to recite, and when he compared the stars in the American flag to bullet holes, several of the Americans who were present applauded dutifully. One of the young women, with broad Slavic cheeks and a bitter mouth, grabbed her coat and left.
The apparatchik had a baby grand piano in her parlor. The cultural high point of the evening was Vladimir Davidovich’s recital of some of the Études symphoniques, and Marley wondered what was it about Russians and Robert Schumann. The man sitting beside him insisted on humming along, an octave lower than the piano, as if every one of the miniatures was a dirge. Vlad’s playing had maturity beyond his years. The boy kept his technique in check, though there were hints that it could run away if he let it. Much of the time he wore an apologetic smile, as if he knew the listeners had heard better. The young man stopped in the middle of a passage, threw up his wide hands in a shrug. “ ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ would come out better tonight,” he said.
“No, no, Volodya,” his hostess said insincerely, “you will be a great pianist.”
Marley, who had spent half his life in recital halls, thought his young agent already was.
The young man shrugged. “I will play composers who are too dead to object,” he said. He left with the girl named Melissa. Marley tried to remember what he knew about her. Her parents were schoolteachers. She was an art student. She was said to be an informer.
“How well do you know Melissa?” Charles Marley asked. They were sitting in a greasy smelling restaurant on the fringes of the Arbat. Vlad had delivered a parcel of recent memos his father had written, stuffed into a brown envelope, buried in a bag of turnips. If the KGB caught either of them with the bag, Marley thought... and let the thought trail away. He might be beaten, but it wouldn’t be bad.
“She’s a good girl,” Vladimir said. “Very friendly.”
Marley smiled. “That’s important.”
Vlad nodded, looked at Marley with curiosity he wasn’t impudent enough to translate into words. Marley hadn’t encouraged personal questions from Vlad. He could speculate to his heart’s content on whether there was a mistress at the embassy or a wife at the American compound, or some other arrangement best not considered.
“What do you think of the General’s scribbles?” Vlad asked. He had taken to calling his father the General, making the betrayal less intimate.
“That’s for our analysts to say,” Marley answered. “He’s prolific.”
“He doesn’t want to be assigned to Afghanistan. So he keeps busy, nuancing his arguments in favor of whoever he thinks will win. That’s how your analysts should view the material, Charles. A shrewd man’s estimate of how it will all turn out.” His smile could have been worn by a much older person. “A man has only one skin, so he must have a lot of principles. How did you like my playing?”
“Apparently I liked it better than you did.” He almost said he thought it was as crisp and pure as Sofronitsky’s, which he had heard only on old recordings. But one praised agents carefully if one wanted to keep them under control.
Vladimir made the small shrugging motion Marley had seen so often, and it occurred to the American that the young man had enough doubt. He sipped tea that tasted oily. The dump’s proprietor was in the back, arguing with a woman.
“About Melissa,” he said. “One of our people thinks she has ties to the KGB.”
Vlad chuckled. “Who hasn’t?”
Charles Marley slipped on the ice leaving his hospital board meeting and fractured his left ankle. It wasn’t a severe break, but it was painful. For two weeks he was laid up at his townhouse in Foxhall Village, alone except for a thrice-weekly cleaning woman and two well wishers, each of whom visited only once. He rationed his pain medication, read novels that had found their way onto his shelves, and seldom thought about Vladimir.
The station chief’s fervor had cooled as the analysts at Langley concluded that General Zavenyagin was far outside the decision-making loop and his memos contained little real intelligence. Nobody decided to cut Vladimir loose because he was viewed as low cost and low maintenance. But the station chief didn’t invite Marley into her office to review each new packet of memos the young man provided. Marley wasn’t sure she read them. The packets might have gone straight into the bag to Virginia.