“Yes.”
Danforth saw a glint of the old Russian wolf in Solotoff’s eyes and realized that this was a man whose past had betrayed him and whose once fierce loyalties had faded; now he was simply a poor old man in search of a score, one who had nothing left to sell but his memories.
“Tell me more about Warsaw,” Solotoff said.
“There was a forger named Romanchuk,” Danforth told him. “I had some dealings with him after the war. I think you may have interrogated him in Warsaw.”
“Why would you think such a thing?” Solotoff asked.
“Because one of the interrogators wore the Order of Lenin,” Danforth said. “And he spoke Turkish.” Danforth kept his demeanor entirely casual. “I know you have the Order of Lenin and that you were once very powerful here in Azerbaijan, so you probably speak Turkish. I put that together, and you came up as the man who was most likely to have been in Warsaw when Romanchuk was interrogated.”
“In the first two of these things you are right,” Solotoff said, as if the facts bored him. “But why should I tell you if you are right in the last of them?”
Danforth’s earliest memories of the east returned, the abyss of corruption his father had many times described, along with the eternal miseries of the Balkans. He recalled the bandits on the railway, that long-ago crucifixion, the leader of that ruthless band, how he’d walked among the terrified passengers, nodding at watches, bracelets, cuff links, the glint in his soulless eyes that Danforth now saw in Solotoff’s. He was a dead soul, and dead souls can be bought.
“Because I’ll pay you,” he said. “I’ll pay you if you tell me where Rache is.”
Solotoff took a slow, meditative sip of tea. “What else do you know about this interrogation in Warsaw?”
“There was a woman,” Danforth said. “An American. She was brought in to translate from Ukrainian for Romanchuk.”
Solotoff slowly put down the cup and gazed at it as if he were a pawnbroker studying its every crack and chink. “How much would you pay?”
“Are you the man who was sent to interrogate Romanchuk?” Danforth asked. “Did you speak to the American woman in Turkish?”
Solotoff grinned. “Perhaps. It is a long chain that stretches back so far. I would have to make inquiries. It might take some time. And my contacts are not without needs. I would have to be generous.”
Generous. By which he meant, Danforth knew, there would be many payments.
Solotoff’s smile had a canine sparkle, and at that instant, Danforth recalled the soldiers at Plötzensee, the many border guards whose palms he’d greased, their drunken delight in the power they had over him, and after these, he remembered the long line of interrogators he’d faced beneath a naked bulb, the blows that had rained down upon him in the camp, always with some brute grinning as he delivered them. Russians, he thought with a surging hatred he could barely suppress, and he knew that at that moment, he could cheerfully have killed them all.
Solotoff drained the last of his tea, returned the cup to the table, then sat back and waited. “Twenty thousand American dollars.”
“How would this payment be made?” Danforth asked.
Solotoff laughed. “Oil seeps through many holes in Baku.”
It was a typically metaphorical response, and by it, Danforth understood the great sieve of Soviet corruption, General Solotoff a surly man with many conduits, a rabbit warren of little deals and old favors with an untold number of escape routes.
“I will have to be sure of any information you give me,” Danforth warned him.
“There will be only one piece of information,” Solotoff said as if closing a negotiation with a nervous buyer. “A name. An address. That is all.” His eyes glittered like sunlight on the bloodstained snows of Stalingrad. “Once we have an understanding, you will have to wait. But in the end, you will hear from me.”
~ * ~
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
“And so the arrangements were made, and I returned to New York and waited to hear from this old hero of the Soviets,” Danforth said with undisguised contempt. “I had no doubt that eventually I would.”
Danforth read my incredulity as he had so often done during his narrative, and he immediately provided a corollary tale that made clear that his own was entirely believable.
“Foreign intelligence keeps track of their old agents,” he said by way of proving his story. “Take the case of Engelbert Broda, for example.”
For ten years, from 1938 to 1948, a Soviet spy code-named Eric had sent Britain’s nuclear secrets to the Soviets, Danforth said. During that time, he’d been the Soviets’ main source for information on Britain’s atomic-bomb research.
“MI Five suspected him for years,” Danforth told me. “They opened his mail and watched his every move.”
But they had never caught him, and so it wasn’t until a full seventy years later, when KGB files were finally opened, that the British found out they’d been right all along.
“Bertie Broda had even given the Russians the blueprint for the early nuclear reactor used in the Manhattan Project,” Danforth said. “He single-handedly allowed the Soviets to catch up with the West and in so doing changed the face of foreign policy for decades to come.” He smiled. “So you see, what you’d call a large geopolitical purpose can be brought about by a little spy.”
“What happened when they caught Broda?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Danforth answered. “He was already dead. And he died a very respected scientist. He has a special grave in an honored section of a Vienna cemetery.” He seemed suddenly to drift into some colder region. “Odd, what a cemetery can reveal.” For a moment he remained in that distant place. Then, as he had so many times during our talk, he abruptly returned to the present.
“Anyway, Broda was never discovered,” he said.
“Too bad,” I said, almost lightly, as if treason were a mist easily wiped from a window. “Very clever to have outsmarted everyone for so long.”
“Clever?” Danforth asked. “Perhaps. But the curious thing I’ve discovered about spies is that they must trust so many to keep their secrets. They have handlers, but who handles the handlers? No Soviet spy was ever handled by Stalin personally. There were layers and layers of people who knew this agent or that one, people whose identity the agent never knew.” The irony of what Danforth said next clearly did not escape him. “A spy may never be uncovered, Paul, but he can never be completely hidden either. Deceit always leaves a trail.”
“Which Solotoff was now pursuing?” I asked.
“Undoubtedly,” Danforth said. He looked at me in a way that let me know he’d read my mind. “Ah, you are looking for that big dramatic ending. Perhaps a chase over the rooftops? Or some final scene of two old men grappling with each other, like Holmes and Moriarty slugging it out at Reichenbach Falls? Is that what you want, Paul, at the end of my tale?”
“Frankly, yes,” I said. “And why not? If Rache is a traitor, he deserves to die.”
“Yes, of course,” Danforth said. “And if vengeance cannot be exacted on Rache, perhaps there is someone else. At any rate, I end up the hero, don’t I?”