Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

“If pages full of lies are a memoir, then you are both right.” Oleg squeezed the cup onto its saucer with a rattle. He settled back. It was warm in the hotel dining room, but he wore his expensive overcoat on his shoulders to prevent its being stolen. He had held his cup the same way, Charles Marley thought, and to the publisher’s dismay, Oleg had probably held tightly to his better secrets as well.

After both men had been silent for a minute, Oleg said, “We were onto him early. I’m speaking of Vlad. You only received from him what we intended for you to have.”

“He was never productive,” Marley agreed. The words triggered an unwanted thought that if Vlad had been productive the intelligence service might have taken better care of him. He said, “Is Vlad in your book?”

“No, I would not embarrass you, my old friend.” Sighing, Oleg added, “Besides, this publisher wants tales of adventure, when I am not giving away the dirty little secrets. Vladimir Davidovich was nothing, there was no excitement in capturing him. He was a coward who finally told us everything he knew. Where is the value in such a story? In our time, Charles, we seldom encountered adversaries worthy of us. Don’t you agree?”

“When you saw Vlad, where was he?”

Oleg raised his hands. “Near my publisher’s building. Let me tell you, I was surprised. A taxi had brought me from the train station and when I got out almost the first thing I saw was this bony rat’s face from the old days. He did not notice me. He was operating a vendor’s cart, and a policeman was arguing with him.” Between his fingers, Oleg laughed. “Still getting into trouble, after all these years.”

For a moment, Marley dropped his gaze to his cup. The coffee had gone cold. He thought he could leave.

Oleg shook a finger at him. “Your people were always so sanctimonious about our handling of social parasites. Well, what did you expect? We produced so many of them! Vladimir Davidovich is proof that some people will end at the bottom of whatever society adopts them. Don’t you agree?”

The thought of being locked in a warm taxicab repelled Marley, so he walked to his hospital board meeting. For the first block he managed to focus his mind on the frozen Washington sidewalks. Ribbons of ice curled across the pavement. The streets in Moscow had always been cleared, even after an unexpected October snowfall. Politics might thaw, but not the streets. And the politics hadn’t changed much. Even in a thaw, Marley reflected, we needed something to occupy us, so we went on recruiting. He had met the young graduate student from the Moscow Conservatory four months after the Berlin Wall fell, in the apartment of a journalist. Innocent and fun, the evening had had no agenda except a well-lubricated celebration. Vladimir said it was as if all Europe’s windows had opened at once. “Fresh air makes us giddy,” he said.

I was giddy too, Marley thought. But my job was to muck around. It wasn’t just habit that kept me doing it. We still had to know what was going on in the ruling cliques, how far Gorbachev would go, which way the Army would march. Had the arrests steered off a KGB coup? Important questions. What we thought we could do with the answers wasn’t clear, but I never saw our section as a headless body going on without a purpose. The purpose was as important as it had ever been. It was only after the fact that you knew how things turned out.

Recruiting Vlad had not been on his mind that night. Young music students didn’t make Marley’s target list. Men and women with family ties in the party hierarchy weren’t on the list either; as contacts they could be useful, but the ones who could be recruited as agents were idealists or malcontents. Either type blipped on the security apparat’s radar. Idealists and malcontents who had worked their way into the system over half a lifetime had learned to hide their social illness. They interested Marley and his colleagues.

Vlad recruited himself. “My father is General Zavenyagin,” he said idly. “Careless. Brings satchels full of work home.”

His father had never asked himself a single fundamental question, on any subject, according to Vlad. His mother believed the only questions that mattered were the size of the family’s apartment and whether the General’s next assignment included a chauffeured Zil. The state had not shot generals in many years. The family had a good life.

They were on the sidewalk outside the journalist’s apartment when Vlad dangled the bait. They were alone.

Marley’s first concern was not getting himself ejected from the country by succumbing to a novice provocateur.