She examined the first. “This is just the September 27 report by Kostikov on his immediate discussion with Oswald. It’s been published by Mailer, I have the book. Standard stuff.”
“Would you do me the favor of examining this one for any info that Mailer might not have published or missed?”
“Sure.” She read it carefully. “I don’t see anything.”
“Anything on claims or boasts by Oswald?”
“No. His intensity comes through, his seething anger, his disappointment that they don’t greet him like a brother, but there’s no specific dialogue or claims.”
“You’re sure.”
“Absolutely.”
Swagger considered this carefully. “But is there a transcript?”
“No,” she said. “It’s based on notes, not recordings.”
“Okay, fine. I get it. Let’s go to the next one.” He slid the next file over, and her eyes attacked it.
“This is a report by Nechiporenko, another KGB, the next day, on the disposition of the case, the rejection, Oswald’s anger and unpleasantness.”
“Please read for any indications of boasts or claims.”
“No, nothing. But there is a second page.” She read it, her eyes scanning hard behind her glasses as Stronski tried to keep the light steady. “Okay, this is a summary by a third KGB, I’m guessing the boss, his name is Yatskov, he’s a jock. Oswald comes back a second time, Saturday the twenty-eighth, shows up at the KGB-GRU volleyball game, and Yatskov is there and takes him into his office. Oswald is beside himself by this time. God, he even pulls a gun! Yatskov takes it from him, and the idiot collapses crying on the desk. The only thing that Yatskov can do is tell him to submit for a visa through regular channels, and no, he can’t get in contact with the Cubans for him. Meanwhile, Nechiporenko shows up and pitches in. Then Yatskov gives him the gun back! And leads him out. Pathetic.”
“No boasts, no claims?”
“Why is that important?”
“I have to know what he told them about himself that might be interesting to the James Bond guy I’m looking for.”
“The gun, doesn’t that signify something?”
“Possibly. But no transcripts, no specific language, nothing like that?”
“No.”
“Okay, then, that’s that. Next move: we scan, start to finish, looking for visitors to the embassy; by that I mean intelligence professionals not assigned to it but arriving and departing around the same time, the last week in September. KGB, but also GRU or military as well. SMERSH, even, why not? Maybe there were units of intelligence I don’t know about, connected with the air force or strategic warfare or signals intelligence. Intelligence outfits are like mushrooms.”
“They grow in the dark and thrive in shit?” said Reilly.
“I thought I made that line up, but I guess I didn’t. Are you ready?”
Both nodded.
“Mikhail, you hold the light. I will pull the documents one at a time and turn the pages. Kathy, you tell me when you have the gist of the page, and we can go on.”
That was what they did for three hours, with breaks for sore knees, eye fatigue, backaches, and on and on. It was not fun. It seemed to last six or nine rather than three hours.
Finally, she reached her verdict. “Agriculture reps, diplomats, doctors, lawyers, but nobody is in the official record as a case officer, an agent, a recruiter, nobody who seemed remotely like an operator. Maybe the Russians used codes within their own top-secret documents, and when I see ‘Dr. Menshav the agronomics professor,’ that means ‘Boris Badanov, special assassin,’ but I doubt it.”
“I doubt it too.”
They had done all of September, then the October and November files, through the assassination. That event produced its own tonnage of paper and demanded its own box, but Swagger saw no point in looking at it, since everything after the fact was meaningless.
“No sign of James Bond,” said Reilly. “No sign of any cogitation, activity, meetings, anything that would suggest the embassy was anticipating or knew that someone in its own sphere was involved in what would happen on November 22. No sign of any contact with outside agents from outlier espionage groups, no suggestion of special ‘visitors’ from Moscow.”
“Did you see the name Karly Vary?” asked Stronski. “It’s the Spetsnaz and KGB training site on the Black Sea; all ‘wet’ operators go through there for technical expertise and are held there on downtime.”
“No Karly Vary,” said Reilly. “Not a whisper.”
“Red bastards probably killed your president anyway,” said Mikhail. “They like that shit, they pull it all over the world.”
“If so, it was entirely out of the embassy sphere, and none of the bureaucrats noticed anything out of place or out of norm,” said Swagger.
“Mikhail,” said Reilly, “the reports are consecutively numbered. I kept careful track.” She had noticed something Swagger hadn’t. “That means nothing could be inserted or removed without retyping the entire file that came after. I don’t see any difference in the tone or state of the paper to suggest that new paper was added sometime. Also, the typing is clearly from the same typewriter, and I got so that I recognized the font, particularly since the H was clouded under the bridge. That typewriter – some poor Russian girl had the job of typing more than forty pages a day – was used all the way through. I can recognize her style. She was a little weak on the last two fingers of her left hand, and those letters were always a little lighter. But she had Mondays off, and a much less gifted typist took over, more typos by far, more uncertain on the right side of the keyboard, so I’m guessing the substitute was a lefty.”
“Wow,” said Swagger. “Kathy, you’re in the wrong business. You should have been an intelligence analyst.”
“I’ve looked at a lot of Russian documents, a lot of reports. I get used to the style, the diction, the nomenclature, even the bureaucratic culture. It hasn’t changed all that much since ’63, even if everything else has. This has the feel of the authentic, so I don’t think there’s any suggestion that someone came back to it and tampered with the evidence to hide James Bond’s visit.”
“That damn James Bond,” said Swagger. “He’s never around when you need him.”
The next day, Swagger as “Agent Homan” had his sitdown with the ranking gang specialist of the Moscow police, who, well known on the international circuit and a Moscow rep to Interpol, spoke fluent English. They sat in the inspector’s office, glass-enclosed, off the usual bright, impersonal ward of the organized-crime squad on the third floor of Moscow’s central police station.
“This fellow Bodonski, he was a nephew of the Izmaylovskaya boss, or in their language, avtoritet, also a Bodonski,” said the inspector as they looked over the thick Bodonski file and Swagger saw a photo of the man he’d killed. Bodonski had been handsome, dashing, even, with thick sweeps of dark hair and piercing eyes. He must have had the gangster way with women. The last time Swagger had seen him – which was also the first and only – his face had been pancaked into the steering wheel of his car, and what flesh was visible in the nest of crushed plastic and bent steel looked like the rotting fruit of a watermelon smashed against a brick wall. Too bad for him.
“He was a tough guy, very capable,” the inspector continued. “If someone topped him, whoever did it must have been a tough guy in his own right.”
“Inspector,” said Swagger, “he just shot him. It wasn’t a fight. A gun is always tougher than a man. Even a man in a car.”