He was getting around on a cane, an improvement on the walker, which made him feel like an old man, when Oleg called and said the publisher had postponed his book.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Marley said.
“Yes, well. Fortunately, I’ve met some people in New York. They import glass. Some of the glass is filled with vodka.” He laughed heartily. “So I will get by. It’s difficult, old friend. You were on the winning side, so you have a pension that is worth something.”
“It doesn’t stretch far,” Marley said, wary that Oleg might ask for a loan.
“By the way, I saw your master spy again. He was on the subway that goes to Brooklyn, shaking a metal cup.”
“Did you speak?”
“I looked around for a policeman, but what is it you say — there’s never one when you want?”
After he hung up the phone, Marley wondered if he could get his old colleagues to ask about Vlad in New York. Immigration might have an address. On the way to his desk to look up a phone number at Langley, he decided instead that even though it was only four in the afternoon, he needed another pain pill.
Oleg Ossovsky had called him in to KGB headquarters personally a few days after Vlad was arrested. “Suborning Soviet citizens, Charles! I’m shocked, simply shocked. All these months I believed you were going to poetry readings because you loved Pushkin. Then we have this embarrassment. It’s no good for either of us, you know. I get a black mark for letting you run the little twerp under my nose. You get a black mark when we expel you.” Big head shaking side to side, wide lips curled down in dismay, hazel eyes spilling regret, Oleg sat behind a polished desk, fingers laced across a striped vest, glancing down now and then to admire his own flowered necktie and wonder if the American recognized that it was from New York.
He had sat Marley in a straight-backed chair, suitable for embassy spies who got a dressing down before being ejected. Two years ago, it would have been much rougher. But now people like Oleg were looking ahead, wondering which way the tree was going to fall. If liberalization continued, it would mean the end of the old regime. One couldn’t rule out trials in a post-Soviet Russia. If one needed to relocate, it would be good to be remembered by the Americans as humane and perhaps cooperative.
So Oleg Ossovsky was thinking, as he ordered brandy brought in and joked that he and Charles were both professionals and so he had no hard feelings.
Marley took a slightly harder line. “What ‘little twerp’ are you talking about?”
“General Zavenyagin’s son. Come now, Charles. Vladimir Davidovich, your young friend.”
“The piano player?” Marley asked innocently.
“No, I would say he is no longer a piano player.” Observing Charles Marley’s expression, Oleg waved a hand. “Vladimir will recover. Some of his interrogators were of the old school. Of course, I stopped them as soon as I found out.”
“What did you do?”
Oleg scratched his forehead, decided to ignore the man’s harsh tone. “There was no point in his holding out. We showed him the photographs of your meetings. We played tape recordings.” He held up his palms. “He told everything to this girl he slept with. A total amateur.”
They didn’t expel Marley. The diplomatic thaw had become a small warm stream of goodwill that nobody wanted to disturb. It was six months before Vlad was released from a psychiatric hospital, and three months after that before Marley saw him at the apparatchik’s salon. He understood then why Oleg’s people hadn’t shot the young man. Nobody played the piano that evening.
Marley caught up with Vlad on the stairs. “I’m sorry we couldn’t help.”
Vlad shrugged. He wore a black leather jacket, with his mangled hands hidden in the pockets. He turned away.
“What are you going to do?” Marley asked.
“Journalism.” Looking over his shoulder, Vlad grinned. “There’s an opening on the literary gazette. Another six months, we’ll be exposing what the KGB did for the last seventy years. I think I’m going to be good at it. Nothing like personal experience, is there?”
When his leg was better, Charles Marley took the train to New York, stayed at a friend’s apartment, and arranged dinner with Oleg Ossovsky and two Russians from Brooklyn. In an informal way, Charles was casting himself in Oleg’s old role. He had offered to see what business the Russians were really in, and the person to whom he had made the offer had accepted. Oleg’s friends had been with him in internal security. Both had thick shoulders and heavy faces, close-cut hair, scars on the cheeks or eyebrows. Wrestlers was the term for official thugs that Charles had picked up in Romania. He couldn’t remember the word used in the old Soviet Union. So he thought of the men as wrestlers. Oleg had been a wrestler who no longer smelled of sweat. He teased Charles about Vlad, playing to his companions.
“We’ll have a reunion one of these evenings,” Oleg said. “Your little artist, you, me, plenty of zakuski, vodka.” He spoke expansively, but his eyes were hard. “If I run into Volodya again, we may have a reunion without you, Charles.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen the little shit too often for it to be accidental. Last week, he came into a saloon on Brighton Avenue where I was meeting friends. I know he saw me, because he left quickly. It occurs to me that he may be working for your people.”
“I no longer have people,” Charles said. “I have a pension.”
“Then what happens to him won’t matter to you.”
“I think you’re overreacting. Brighton Beach is full of Russians. Where else would Vladimir hang out?” He reminded Oleg: “You and I met again by accident.”
“At that party, yes. But afterward, I had to pursue you. You didn’t keep turning up.”
“Then I should be suspicious of you,” Marley said.
Oleg laughed. “Unless you’re much better than I remember.”
“I was never good. That’s why I retired.”
“About Vladimir,” said Oleg, who had been thinking. “Perhaps he blames me for his injury. Tells himself I cost him a glorious career.”
“He was never sure about the career. You saved him from having to find out.”
“So he should be grateful.” Nodding, Oleg laid a hand on the shoulder of the large man beside him. “My friend Vassily broke tougher men in much less time. Vladimir held out for hours. There was no reason for it. We needed nothing from him, but it was the principle of the thing that he answer.”
Marley nodded. He understood. “Vassily did the interrogation?”
The wrestler across from him grinned. “If you call snapping fingers an interrogation.”
The wrestlers left around midnight, and Oleg looked after them shaking his head. “What these idiots are doing is far too risky for me,” he said.
“What are they doing?”
“If you still have people, Charles, they may be willing to pay for that information. Do you think?”
Marley was still using a cane but almost as a prop. A middle-aged man in a good topcoat somehow looked better for having a shiny black cane, if he didn’t lean on it too heavily. Leaving the restaurant, Marley took longer than he would have needed a year ago getting into a taxicab, and bent almost double he saw the thin sallow figure waiting in a cold doorway across the street. Oleg Ossovsky tottered onto the sidewalk, closing his coat over a half-zipped fly, and called good-bye to Marley. Oleg headed down the street. The man who had been in the doorway waited until Oleg was half a block ahead before following.