Alevy looked at Hollis. “Seems so. Everything he’s given you has checked out with my people and yours. Yet…”
Hollis stared down at Alevy’s brightly polished handmade broughams. Italian-tailored blue silk suit. Custom shirt and Liberty tie. Seth Alevy spent a good deal of money on good clothing. And yet someone who knew Alevy in the States said he dressed better in Moscow than in Washington. Hollis suspected that the sartorial splendor was just Alevy’s way of annoying the Russians. Alevy, to the best of Hollis’ knowledge, was the only man who ever showed up at the Bolshoi in a tuxedo. In fact, Hollis was convinced that Alevy owned the only tuxedo in all of Russia.
Alevy finished his second scotch. “Ace’s stuff is good, but he may be setting us up for a nasty sting. You might have handed him the means if you mentioned Borodino.”
“There’s always that possibility.” Hollis regarded the four FSPs. The one with the Toto T-shirt threw a gutter ball and uttered an obscenity. She pulled the front of her T-shirt up and wiped the perspiration from her face, baring her midriff in the process. “Hard fuzzy-belly.”
“What?” Alevy looked. “Oh.”
“What do you do for sex now, Seth?”
“That’s a rather personal question.”
“No, it’s a professional question.”
“Well… I don’t have to remind you, as our Marines have to be reminded daily, that the local devitsas are off-limits. And so, theoretically, are the wives of our coworkers.”
“Theoretically.”
“There are,” Alevy said, ignoring this, “at this moment exactly thirty-two single women in the embassy, and perhaps twenty or more of them have already formed liaisons.”
“Have they? How do you know?”
“I keep a dossier on everyone here. Isn’t that disgusting?”
“No comment.”
“As for the women in other Western embassies, they are off-limits to intelligence types such as us. For you and I the policy is to date only single American women.” Alevy added, “You could hang around the hard-currency bars and find an unattached American tourist.”
“Have you done that?”
“Maybe.” Alevy looked at Hollis. “I assume your wife is not returning. However, until you get a divorce, you have to play by the rules.” Alevy smiled and patted Hollis’ arm, a rare display of intimacy. “You don’t know how to be a bachelor anyway. You were married too long.”
Hollis didn’t respond.
“Did you have someone special in mind?” Alevy asked.
“No, just checking the rules.”
Alevy regarded Hollis for some time, then asked, “Did something happen between you and Lisa? That’s a professional question.”
“Then look in your dossier.”
“Well,” Alevy said in a cooler tone, “I want you to think now about Ace.”
“I have. So I had him meet me in Dzerzhinsky Square. And some K-goons came along, and Ace went pale. Hard to fake skin color.”
Alevy shrugged. “Heard of a similar situation where a guy did fake it with some sort of nitrate substance. Turned him ashen. But Dzerzhinsky Square was an inspired idea. Not bad for a military guy. A little risky though.”
Hollis sipped his beer.
Alevy said, “Regarding Ace, if you cut him loose, we’re ahead of the game whether he’s real or not. If you stay with him, you may find out what he’s up to. But what he’s up to may be murder, and it may be too late.”
“Actually there’s been a new development.”
“What?”
“He wants to head West.”
“Does he?”
“So he says.”
Alevy thought a moment. “Then maybe what he wants is to find out how we get people out of here.”
“Maybe. Maybe he just really wants to defect.” Hollis cradled the beer bottle in his hands and watched the condensation drip. Alevy had a weak spot in his professional makeup: He personally didn’t like most Russians. Not liking the Soviet regime was a job qualification. But Alevy was unable to concede that anyone who had been shaped by the regime was capable of anything but treachery and vileness. Perhaps he was right. Certainly General Surikov was a good example of the New Soviet Man. “I don’t intend to cut him loose or to turn him over to you, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“I’m not suggesting that. He apparently wants to deal with a brother Air Force officer. I couldn’t run him. What’s he offering for the ticket West? The scoop on Borodino?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you planted that in his head. Maybe he’ll make up a crock of shit just to get out of here.”
“We’ll soon know.”
“Are you meeting with him in person again?”
“Yes.” Hollis put his beer bottle on the floor and wiped his hands on his trousers. “But I don’t want company.”
“I want to talk to this joker myself.”
Hollis said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for the CIA station chief, the most important man in Western intelligence in the Soviet Union, to run around Moscow trying to rendezvous with Russian informers. Do you?”
“Let me worry about my job description.”
“Sure.” Hollis considered what little else he knew about Alevy. In Langley, he’d turned out to be a genius at political analysis, and his prophesies regarding Soviet intentions, particularly Gorbachev’s glasnost, had been so accurate that it seemed, some said, he had a friend in the Politboro. Alevy had arrived in Moscow about three years before as third deputy to the CIA station chief. Now he was the station chief. He was not allowed to leave the embassy compound without at least two security men and one cyanide pill. Hollis knew he left without the former but was sure he never left without the latter.
Alevy’s official job with the diplomatic mission was that of political affairs officer, but the cover was thin, as it usually was with this sort of thing. The KGB knew who he was, and so did most of the senior American staff. “Maybe that is Ace’s scam,” Hollis said baitingly. “To draw you out so they can kill you.”
“Even they don’t kill senior American diplomats.”
“In your case they’d make an exception. Anyway, you’re not a diplomat.”
“I am. I have a diplomatic passport. I go to all the receptions and talk like a diplomatic dork.”
Hollis stood. “What were you doing in Sadovniki Friday night?”
Alevy stood also. “A Sukkot party. The harvest festival. Sort of like Thanksgiving.”
Hollis nodded. He had heard that Alevy once lived some months in the Russian Jewish community of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach section. Thus he spoke his Russian with a Moscow-Leningrad accent and was perhaps the only man in the embassy who could actually pass for a Soviet citizen under close scrutiny. Hollis imagined that Alevy had also heard some firsthand accounts of religious persecution from his friends in Brighton Beach, and had also been given quite a few names to contact in Moscow, thus arriving in Moscow with assets no one else had.
Alevy asked, “Do you know anything about Judaism?”
“I know the Soviets aren’t too keen on it. I know that religious observances can attract the K-goons. I know the ambassador would not like you annoying our host government.”
“Fuck his excellency.” Alevy added, “Jews are politically unreliable here, so you can fraternize with them.”
Hollis considered the irony in this. American Jews were once thought politically unreliable by the CIA. Now Alevy was the CIA Moscow station chief partly because he was a Jew. Times change.
As though Alevy had read Hollis’ mind, Alevy said, “Jewish dissidents are our potential fifth column here, Sam. We should build more bridges to that community.”