The
“No, no, Volodya,” his hostess said insincerely, “you will be a great pianist.”
Marley, who had spent half his life in recital halls, thought his young agent already was.
The young man shrugged. “I will play composers who are too dead to object,” he said. He left with the girl named Melissa. Marley tried to remember what he knew about her. Her parents were schoolteachers. She was an art student. She was said to be an informer.
“How well do you know Melissa?” Charles Marley asked. They were sitting in a greasy smelling restaurant on the fringes of the Arbat. Vlad had delivered a parcel of recent memos his father had written, stuffed into a brown envelope, buried in a bag of turnips. If the KGB caught either of them with the bag, Marley thought... and let the thought trail away.
“She’s a good girl,” Vladimir said. “
Marley smiled. “That’s important.”
Vlad nodded, looked at Marley with curiosity he wasn’t impudent enough to translate into words. Marley hadn’t encouraged personal questions from Vlad. He could speculate to his heart’s content on whether there was a mistress at the embassy or a wife at the American compound, or some other arrangement best not considered.
“What do you think of the General’s scribbles?” Vlad asked. He had taken to calling his father the General, making the betrayal less intimate.
“That’s for our analysts to say,” Marley answered. “He’s prolific.”
“He doesn’t want to be assigned to Afghanistan. So he keeps busy, nuancing his arguments in favor of whoever he thinks will win. That’s how your analysts should view the material, Charles. A shrewd man’s estimate of how it will all turn out.” His smile could have been worn by a much older person. “A man has only one skin, so he must have a lot of principles. How did you like my playing?”
“Apparently I liked it better than you did.” He almost said he thought it was as crisp and pure as Sofronitsky’s, which he had heard only on old recordings. But one praised agents carefully if one wanted to keep them under control.
Vladimir made the small shrugging motion Marley had seen so often, and it occurred to the American that the young man had enough doubt. He sipped tea that tasted oily. The dump’s proprietor was in the back, arguing with a woman.
“About Melissa,” he said. “One of our people thinks she has ties to the KGB.”
Vlad chuckled. “Who hasn’t?”
Charles Marley slipped on the ice leaving his hospital board meeting and fractured his left ankle. It wasn’t a severe break, but it was painful. For two weeks he was laid up at his townhouse in Foxhall Village, alone except for a thrice-weekly cleaning woman and two well wishers, each of whom visited only once. He rationed his pain medication, read novels that had found their way onto his shelves, and seldom thought about Vladimir.
The station chief’s fervor had cooled as the analysts at Langley concluded that General Zavenyagin was far outside the decision-making loop and his memos contained little real intelligence. Nobody decided to cut Vladimir loose because he was viewed as low cost and low maintenance. But the station chief didn’t invite Marley into her office to review each new packet of memos the young man provided. Marley wasn’t sure she read them. The packets might have gone straight into the bag to Virginia.
He was getting around on a cane, an improvement on the walker, which made him feel like an old man, when Oleg called and said the publisher had postponed his book.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Marley said.
“Yes, well. Fortunately, I’ve met some people in New York. They import glass. Some of the glass is filled with vodka.” He laughed heartily. “So I will get by. It’s difficult, old friend. You were on the winning side, so you have a pension that is worth something.”
“It doesn’t stretch far,” Marley said, wary that Oleg might ask for a loan.
“By the way, I saw your master spy again. He was on the subway that goes to Brooklyn, shaking a metal cup.”
“Did you speak?”
“I looked around for a policeman, but what is it you say — there’s never one when you want?”