“MAGPIE, as it turned out, was James Tobias Thompson. Certainly I had no idea I was addressing the source himself, since I didn’t know the real name-KGB files are far too compartmentalized for that. And there I was, chirping away about a file I wanted to sell on a sensitive Soviet operation, and there was the agent right there in front of me, listening with great interest as I tried to sell him information that would blow his cover.”
“My God,” I said. “Toby.”
“Suddenly he became violent, this Thompson. He lunged at me, pulled a gun on me, a gun with a silencer, and demanded that I give him the document. Well, I was not so foolish as to bring it with me, not before we had made a deal. He threatened me; I told him I did not have the document with me. And he was about to kill me, I believe, when all of a sudden we both turned and saw a woman come into the room. A beautiful woman in white, in a white nightgown.”
“Yes. Laura.”
“She had heard everything. Everything I said, everything Thompson said. She told us she had been asleep in the other room, ill, and that the noise had awakened her. And now, suddenly, all became confusing. I took advantage of the interruption to get to my feet, try to escape. As I ran, I pulled out my own service revolver to protect myself, but before I could cock the pistol, I felt my leg explode. I looked, and I saw that Thompson had shot me. He had shot me, but he had not killed me, his aim had slipped in his haste, but by then I had my revolver out, and he froze, and I fired at him, out of self-defense. And then I leapt into the hallway, down a landing, and managed to get away before he could kill me.”
All I wanted to do was to sink down onto the floor, cover my eyes, seek refuge in sleep, but I needed my entire reservoir of willpower now. Instead, I lowered myself to a large boxy armchair, clicked the safety back on, and continued to listen in silence.
“And as I ran down the stairs,” Berzin continued, “I heard another silenced shot, and I knew he had either killed himself or had killed the woman.”
The disfigured old woman’s eyes were closed, I noticed; they had been closed for much of his narration. A long, long silence ensued. I could hear the far-off buzz of mopeds, a roar of a truck, the laughter of children.
At last I was able to speak. “A plausible story,” I said.
“Plausible,” Berzin said, “and true.”
“But you have no proof.”
“No? How closely did you examine your wife’s body?”
I didn’t answer. I had not been able to bring myself to look at Laura’s corpse.
“Exactly,” Berzin said gently. “But if someone with expertise in ballistics had inspected the wounds, he would have discovered that the shot had been fired by a gun belonging to James Tobias Thompson.”
“Easy to say,” I said, “when the body’s been in the ground fifteen years.”
“There must have been records.”
“I’m sure there were.” I didn’t add: But none that I had access to.
“Then I have something you will find useful, and if you will let me get it, I will have settled my debt to Harrison Sinclair. Your father-in-law, yes?”
“He’s the one who got you out of Moscow?”
“Who else would have enough influence?”
“But why?”
“Probably so that someday I could tell you this story. It’s on top of the television set.”
“What is?”
“The thing I want to show you. To give you. On the television set.”
I turned my head slightly to look at the television set, which was now playing a rerun of M*A*S*H. Atop its wooden console was an array of things: a bust of Lenin of the sort you used to be able to buy anywhere in Moscow; a lacquered dish that appeared to be in use as an ashtray; a small stack of Russian-language, Soviet-published collections of verse by Aleksandr Blok and Anna Akhmatova.
“It’s in the Lenin,” he said with a smirk. “Uncle Lenin.”
“Stay there,” I said, walked over to the television and lifted the small, hollow iron head. I turned it over. A tag on its base said BERIOZKA 4.31, meaning that it had been purchased from one of the old Soviet hard-currency stores for four rubles and thirty-one kopeks, once a fair amount of money.
“Inside,” he said.
I rattled the bust, and something inside it shifted. I removed a scrunched-up loose ball of what appeared to be scrap paper, and then a small oblong came out. I took it in one hand and examined it.
A microcassette tape.
I looked at Berzin questioningly. From one of the other rooms the dog (which I assumed had been tied up or somehow restrained) began to whimper.
“Your proof,” he said, as if that explained everything.
When I didn’t respond, he went on: “I wore a wire.”
“To the rue Jacob?”
He nodded, pleased. “A tape made in Paris fifteen years ago bought me my freedom.”
“Why the hell did you wear a wire?” An answer occurred to me, but it made no sense: “You weren’t actually defecting, were you? You were working for the KGB even then, right? Planting information?”
“No! It was for protection!”
“Protection? Against whom? Against the people you wanted to defect to? That’s ludicrous!”
“No-listen! This was a microcassette recorder the Lubyanka had given me for ‘provocations,’ entrapments, all of that. But that time I wore it to protect myself. To record any promises, assurances, even threats. Otherwise, if ever there was a dispute about what was promised me, it would be my word against yours. And I knew that if I had a tape recording, it would be useful somehow. What else did I have?” He took his wife’s hand, which I noticed was somewhat disfigured with small tumors, but nowhere near as badly as her face. “This is for you. A tape recording of my meeting with James Tobias Thompson. It is the proof you want.”
Stunned, I approached the two old people, pulled a chair very close to them, and sat. It was far from easy, given how my mind was whirling, but I bent my head and concentrated, focused, until I seemed to be hearing something, a syllable here, a phrase there, and then I was quite sure I could hear something, I was certain I had tuned in on his desperate, anxious thoughts, which fairly shouted at me.
Very quietly, methodically, I said in Russian: “It is very important to me that you are telling the truth about this whole thing-about my wife, about Thompson, about everything.”
He spoke: “Of course I am!”
I didn’t respond; I listened, the quiet of the room broken only by the dog’s loud whimpering, but then something flooded into my consciousness.
Of course I am telling you the truth!
But was he, in fact? Was he thinking this? Or was he instead about to say this-two very different things? What made me think that I possessed the ability to divine the truth?
Clutched by this uncertainty as I was, I was hardly prepared for the next thing I heard.
A woman’s voice, pleasant and deep, a contralto, but not a spoken voice.
A thought voice, calm and assured.
You can hear me, can you not?
I looked up at the woman, and her eyes were once again closed, vanished into that frightful landscape of welts and tumors. Her small mouth appeared to be arched slightly upward into a crude semblance of a smile; a sad, knowing smile.
I thought: Yes, I can.
And, looking at her and smiling, I nodded.
A beat of silence went by, and then I heard: You can hear me, but I cannot hear you. I do not have the ability you have. You must speak aloud to me.
“The tape-” Berzin began to say, but his wife put a finger to her lips to shush him. Puzzled, he fell silent.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I can. How do you know?”
She continued to smile, her eyes still closed.