Also by Robert Littell
FICTION
THE COMPANY
WALKING BACK THE CAT
THE VISITING PROFESSOR
AN AGENT IN PLACE
THE ONCE AND FUTURE SPY
THE REVOLUTIONIST
THE SISTERS
THE AMATEUR
THE DEBRIEFING
MOTHER RUSSIA
THE OCTOBER CIRCLE
SWEET REASON
THE DEFECTION OF A.J. LEWINTER
NON-FICTION
FOR THE FUTURE OF ISRAEL
(with Shimon Peres)
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental … the same is true for events.
First published in the United States in 2005 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Woodstock & New York
WOODSTOCK:
One Overlook Drive
Woodstock, NY 12498
www.overlookpress.com
[for individual orders, bulk and special sales, contact our Woodstock office]
NEW YORK:
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright © 2005 by Robert Littell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-59020-832-8
For my muses:
Marie-Dominique and Victoria
“All names are pseudonyms.”
—ROMAIN GARY (writing under the pen name Emile Ajar)
“….one of those individuals with multiple faces—like so many of the great spies of Cold War mythology—who invariably turn out to be different from who they seem and, when we think we have located them at the center of a great riddle, show up as part of another, even greater riddle …”
—BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
Contents
Also by Robert Littell
Copyright
1993: THE CONDEMNED MAN CATCHES A GLIMPSE OF THE ELEPHANT
1997: MARTIN ODUM HAS A CHANGE OF HEART
1994: MARTIN ODUM GETS ON WITH HIS LIVES
1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THAT NOT MUCH IS SACRED
1997: MINH SLEEPWALKS THROUGH ONE-NIGHT STANDS
1997: OSKAR ALEXANDROVICH KASTNER DISCOVERS THE WEIGHT OF A CIGARETTE
1987: DANTE PIPPEN BECOMES AN IRA BOMBER
1989: DANTE PIPPEN SEES THE MILKY WAY IN A NEW LIGHT
1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THAT SHAMUS IS A YIDDISH WORD
1997: MARTIN ODUM MEETS A BORN-AGAIN OPPORTUNIST
1997: MARTIN ODUM PLAYS INNOCENT
1994: THE ONLY FODDER WAS CANNON FODDER
1990: LINCOLN DITTMANN TAKES ON A LIFE OF HIS OWN
1991: LINCOLN DITTMANN WORKS THE ANGLES OF THE TRIANGLE
1997: MARTIN ODUM IS MESMERIZED TO TEARS
1997: MARTIN ODUM IS ACCUSED OF HIGH AND LOW TREASON
1997: MARTIN ODUM REACHES NO-WOMAN’S LAND
1994: LINCOLN DITTMANN SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT
1994: BERNICE TREFFLER LOSES A PATIENT
1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THE KATOVSKY GAMBIT
1992: HOW LINCOLN DITTMANN CAME TO GO TO LANGUAGE SCHOOL
1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS TO INSPECT THE SIBERIAN NIGHT MOTH
1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS THE GET
1997: LINCOLN DITTMANN CONNECTS THE DOTS
1997: LINCOLN DITTMANN FEELS THE RECOIL IN HIS SHOULDER BLADES
1997: CRYSTAL QUEST COMES TO BELIEVE IN DANTE’S TRINITY
1993: THE CONDEMNED MAN CATCHES A GLIMPSE OF THE ELEPHANT
THEY HAD FINALLY GOTTEN AROUND TO PAVING THE SEVEN kilometers of dirt spur connecting the village of Prigorodnaia to the four-lane Moscow-Petersburg highway. The local priest, surfacing from a week-long binge, lit beeswax tapers to Innocent of Irkutsk, the saint who in the 1720s had repaired the road to China and was now about to bring civilization to Prigorodnaia in the form of a ribbon of macadam with a freshly painted white stripe down the middle. The peasants, who had a shrewder idea of how Mother Russia functioned, thought it more likely that this evidence of progress, if that was the correct name for it, was somehow related to the purchase, several months earlier, of the late and little lamented Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria’s sprawling wooden dacha by a man identified only as the Oligarkh. Next to nothing was known about him. He came and went at odd hours in a glistening black Mercedes S-600 sedan, his shock of silver hair and dark glasses a fleeting apparition behind its tinted windows. A local woman hired to do laundry was said to have seen him angrily flick cigar ashes from the crow’s-nest rising like a turret from the dacha before turning back to issue instructions to someone. The woman, who was terrified of the dacha’s newfangled electric washing machine and scrubbed the laundry in a shallow reach of the river, had been too far away to make out more than a few words—“Buried, that’s what I want, but alive …”—but they and the Oligarkh’s feral tone had dispatched a chill down her spine that made her shudder every time she recounted the story. Two peasants cutting firewood on the other side of the river had caught a glimpse of the Oligarkh from a distance, struggling on aluminum crutches along the path behind his dacha that led to the dilapidated paper factory disgorging dirty white smoke from its giant stacks fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and beyond that to the village cemetery and the small Orthodox church with the faded paint peeling away from its onion domes. A pair of Borzois rollicked in the dirt ahead of the Oligarkh as he thrust one hip forward and dragged the leg after it, then repeated the movement with the other hip. Three men in Ralph Lauren jeans and telnyashki, the distinctive striped shirts that paratroopers often continued to wear after they quit the army, trailed after him, shotguns cradled in the crooks of their arms. The peasants had been sorely tempted to try for a closer look at the stubby, hunch-shouldered newcomer to their village, but abandoned the idea when one of them reminded the other what the Metropolitan come from Moscow to celebrate Orthodox Christmas two Januaries earlier had proclaimed from the ambo:
If you are stupid enough to dine with the devil, for Christ’s sake use a long spoon.
The road crew, along with giant tank-treaded graders and steam-rollers and trucks brimming with asphalt and crushed stone, had turned up during the night while the aurora borealis was still flickering like soundless cannon fire in the north; it didn’t take much imagination to suppose a great war was being fought beyond the horizon. Casting elongated shadows in the ghostly gleam of headlights, the men pulled on tar-stiff overalls and knee-high rubber boots and set to work. By first light, with forty meters of paved road behind them, the aurora and the stars had vanished, but two planets were visible in the moonless sky: one, Mars, directly overhead, the other, Jupiter, still dancing in the west above the low haze saturated with the amber glow of Moscow. When the lead crew reached the circular crater that had been gouged in the dirt spur the day before by a steam shovel, the foreman blew on a whistle. The machines ground to a halt.