“Oh, yes,” I lied. “I’m working on my master’s.”
“I thought so,” she said with the authority of one who knows everything, and wheeled her cart away.
The books were all on the California antiwar movement in the late sixties, early seventies. That seemed a good place to start.
I cut to the chase. I flipped to the back of each book and scanned the indexes for familiar names. Since you’re smarter than I am, you probably know the names I was looking for.
I found Zooey Sonnenberg in the first book I tried, a serious, poorly written tome published by an academic press somewhere. I flipped to the pages where her name appeared and read them carefully. She had made a splash in the antiwar movement, that was certain. Passionate and articulate, the daughter of a rich industrialist, she was a natural leader. She did outrageous things, got arrested once, twice, three times… no, five times, according to this author, picked targets for demonstrations, convinced everyone to follow her lead. She even demonstrated against her father’s company, accused them of war crimes. That got a lot of press.
The fifth book in the pile went further into detail, had extensive quotes from manifestos she had written. She was in all the other books I looked at, from a few paragraphs to a chapter or two. I merely scanned the information.
All in all, looking at it from the vantage point of thirty-plus years, it didn’t seem very earth-shattering. She had believed in a cause and fought for it. So? Isn’t that what America is all about?
Then I found another name I was looking for, one Michael O’Shea. Yep, he was there, helping write those manifestos. I even found him in one of the photos standing beside Zooey, who was skinnier and had more hair then than she did now. She wore it long and frizzy in those days and sported a set of granny glasses.
O’Shea was tall, skinny, and intense. Gawky. Had a scraggly mustache and hair down to his shoulders. He looked like your average hippie… until you looked at the eyes. That was a very smart guy. I wondered what he would have done with his life if he had lived. Sometimes life isn’t fair.
Just for the heck of it I tore the photo from the book, folded it, and put it in my shirt pocket.
O’Shea’s wife, the bootlegger’s granddaughter, wasn’t mentioned. Not in the index of any book I examined. Maybe she was there, but she wasn’t famous and didn’t write manifestos or big checks or do outrageous things, and she died soon afterward.
None of the books mentioned O’Shea’s fatal car wreck.
I wondered if I should check on that. All I knew about it was what Dorsey had told me.
With the help of the desk clerk, I got into the microfiche files for the San Francisco Examiner. Found it finally, two paragraphs about O’Shea and his wife, a fatal car wreck in 1972 on the Pacific Coast Highway south of Big Sur.
So what was the link that brought Dorsey to New York for the convention where Zooey Sonnenberg was going to be nominated for the office of vice president of the United States? Correction—might be nominated. I had never heard Dorsey mention Zooey. That might or might not mean anything, although Dorsey had a habit of dropping names left and right.
I stopped in the periodical room and scanned that morning’s papers. Jack Yocke had stirred up a hornet’s nest. Today there was more speculation by a variety of pundits, who claimed the White House was leaking Zooey’s name, running it up the flagpole to see what happened. A number of politicos would welcome the nomination, they said. On the other hand, a lot of politicians of both parties thunderously denounced the possibility of Zooey’s candidacy, accusing the president of wanting to start a political dynasty and attempting to evade the constitutional limit on two terms by setting his wife up to run for president at the end of his second term. One of the Internet companies had done an unscientific poll; seventy-seven percent of the respondents thought Zooey would make a good candidate.
It was raining when I came out of the library. I bought an umbrella from a street-corner vendor and walked ten blocks to a poolroom on the West Side, where I found Joe Billy and Willie Varner bent over a table. I took ten bucks off each of them before we hung up the sticks and went to find some dinner.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“I was the chief archivist for the SVR, the successor to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. With the help of the British, I defected and brought seven suitcases full of notes with me to the West. I was to be debriefed by British intelligence and the CIA when the killers came.” The Russian paused and took a ragged breath. “They killed my wife, Bronislava. I saw her dead.”
After Callie Grafton had translated for her husband, she waited for Goncharov to say more, but he did not.
Jake asked, “When did you first approach the British about defecting?”
“The second week of April. I had taken a train to Vilnius for a holiday. I walked into the British Embassy and asked to speak to an intelligence officer.”
“Wasn’t that a serious risk?”
“Yes.”
“And you had no trouble leaving Russia?”
“You know the bureaucratic mind. They do not watch those who are retired. Before my retirement from the SVR, traveling to the Baltic Republics would have been impossible.”
“How did the British bring you out?”
“It was very simple, really. My wife and I took another holiday to Vilnius, brought all the files with us. The afternoon of our arrival the British flew us to London.”
“Did you come straight to America from London?”
“No. We spent almost a week in Britain — just where I do not know — in intense discussions with intelligence officers. Then we came to America for a thorough, extensive debriefing.”
“Were there any Americans in England during your debriefing there?”
“Yes. At least two. One named Stephen and one named Bob.”
“Did the British copy your notes?”
“No. They wished to do so, but I refused to allow it. I thought that if I didn’t explain the notes, the files, innocent people might be injured by what was in them.”
“You didn’t think the files spoke for themselves?”
“Many did, yes. Many did not. You must understand the conditions under which I made my notes, snatching a few minutes here, a few there, scanning the actual files, trying to summarize what I had learned hours or days later when I had a few moments. The luxury of verbatim copying was not possible except in a few, rare instances when the fates gave me a quiet afternoon.”
“I notice that some of the files are typewritten.”
“After my retirement I finally had the time to attempt to organize my notes, to fill in details that in my original haste had been omitted — details that I still recalled — and to cross-reference them. But after so many years, with so much material, I feared the task would be unfinished at my death. And if my files remained in Russia, they would be destroyed soon after I died, as soon as the authorities learned of them.”
“Who, besides yourself, ever studied the actual files in the archives?”
“No one!” he said bluntly. “No one had the access I enjoyed. An intelligence agency is highly compartmentalized. True, the director of the agency could send for any file he chose, but directors came and went, and they had agendas. They had no time to sit and read. Only I did. The realization came upon me one day a few years after I was appointed archivist that only I was in a position to know the complete story, the awful, blood-soaked story of how the Communists ruled. Lenin, Stalin, Beria, Andropov, all of them. Only I could read every word, every jot and comma, of their crimes.
“That is why my notes are so precious. No person has ever studied the archives as I have. No one else knows as much as I do about the activities of the Soviet intelligence services.”