It was a soft beautiful summer night. The red star on the Kremlin glittered. All around Red Square, ice-cream sellers fixed cones for tourists. A soldier leaned casually against the red granite of Lenin’s tomb and shared a joke with some tourists while a little boy had his picture taken against the mausoleum.
Bounine followed my gaze.
“You see things do change for the better,” he said. “I’m going to have an armagnac, perhaps a really nice one. Will you join me?” He gave a little shrug. “I hope all this lasts,” he added.
“All what?”
“All the good things we have now. Who knows? In a year, two years from now it might all disappear, the whole enterprise might just go bust,” he said. “Maybe capitalism wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” he added, chuckling. “If the economy goes belly up, well, let’s hope for the best, shall we?”
Did he order the armagnac at the cafe overlooking Red Square because it was Sverdloff’s drink? Bounine reached into his briefcase, and said, “I nearly forgot.”
He pulled out the envelope he had taken fom his office and opened it. Inside was an old-fashioned black and white school notebook. Bounine opened it at random. It was covered with my father’s elegant handwriting. Bounine offered it to me.
“Your father’s diary from his years in America,” he said. “When you left Moscow, he was asked to leave his notes behind, of course, but I kept it. ‘One day’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll give this to Max’s son.’ To you. I saved it for you.” He handed it to me.
“What do you want from me in return for the notebook? What’s the price?”
He shook his head.
“It’s for you. I’ve kept it too many years. It’s yours, Artemy, it belongs to you. I was so sorry when I heard your father had died in Israel. I wanted to write, I wanted to send you the diary. I couldn’t, but I mourned for him.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“He was a brilliant agent, he could listen all day and all night. He could get people to tell him anything, usually in the easiest way. But he was also a patriot. He did what he had to do,” said Bounine. “I envied him. I could see that, even when I was a young man. He could have gone all the way. To the top, I mean.”
“Except for my mother.”
“Except that.”
I got up and walked a few yards into the square and away from Bounine. All my life I had kept my father as I had remembered him. I kept the handsome blue-eyed young man who brought me candy and took me fishing and introduced me to jazz and told me, secretly, quietly, about New York City as if it were a paradise just over the horizon.
In those days, we imagined the KGB was a force for good, part of the future of the wonderful socialist state that had sent a man into space first. And even after that, even after I knew it was all lies, I kept my father as I remembered him, the one good thing about this miserable country where I grew up.
In some way I’d built everything on the notion that he was a good man. But Bounine had made me listen to the other truth. “He was a brilliant agent, he could get people to tell him anything. He did what he had to do.” I knew what it meant. Under my feet as I walked back to the table, I felt the cracks between the bricks. The ground seemed uneven.
“What do you want from me?” I said to Bounine. “For Tolya Sverdloff. What do you want?”
“I just thought it would be nice to keep the family contact with you, and I could drop in on you when I’m in New York,” said Bounine. “Nothing much. Sometimes we just need someone who can talk to people in their own language. I don’t mean English, of course, I mean their own lingo, idiom, on their own terms.”
Don’t sell your soul to that devil, Tolya had said. Don’t do that.
“And for that you’ll let Tolya out? You’ll let me take him home?”
He nodded.
“And these things you want help with?”
“There are always people we like knowing about, here and there, in New York, possibly next week or next year,” Bounine said, drinking his armagnac slowly.
I knew what Bounine wanted. He wanted me for an errand boy when he needed one. He wanted a line to me when he needed it. He wanted me to join the family business.
“You want to know how ill Sverdloff is?”
“I can see.”
“He’s tough, you know. He could be treated. I talked to the doctors. He could have some time left.”
“What about his businesses?”
“I don’t know about business, Artie, I never became a good capitalist.”
“Bullshit.”
“He could have time left. He might get well. His businesses are, well, how shall I say it? His own business.” He smiled at the small joke.
“You’re all bastards,” I said, and finished my Scotch, watching him light up a cigar. It was one of Sverdloff’s Cuban brands. The smoke swirled up around us.
“You really look like your dad,” he said. “So what do you think? Do we have a deal?”
I didn’t want to think. I wanted to go home to my other life. But my other life included Tolya who had done something nobody else would have done for me. I owed him.
From the restaurant’s sound system, a lilting Brazilian tune played, something by Joao Gilberto. I looked across Red Square, the last streak of light in the sky above the red star, above St Basil’s and the Kremlin.
And then I saw the horse. A girl rode the animal bareback, pressing her heels against its side, leaning forward to cling to its neck, stroking its mane, galloping across the square, laughing, hair streaming out behind her, skirt billowing in the evening breeze, as she headed for Resurrection Gate. And people looking began to laugh and cheer and blow her kisses. Somebody started an old Russian song and the others joined in. Even a couple of cops laughed before they chased her away.
Smiling, Bounine tossed his American Express card on the table, to pay for dinner, and the drinks. It was a Platinum card. And it was as if the gesture, the tossing it on the table, included me as if he could charge me on his Amex card.
It occurred to me in the pleasant cafe, surrounded by civilized people, savoring good wine, enjoying dinner, laughing merrily at the girl on the horse, that maybe this was how they did it now, maybe now everything was only about money, even spooks charged their thugs and hands-for-hire to American Express.
Bounine followed my gaze. “You’re not imagining it,” he said kindly. “It really is a horse. You see that at night in Moscow.”
I put my coffee cup down.
He took a little sip of the armagnac, held it to the light with satisfaction and said softly, “You’ll help us, then, won’t you, Artie?”
Reggie Nadelson
