PART ONE

PRIMING THE GUN

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

Snapshot: a three-by-five-inch black-and-white photograph turned sepia with age. Hand-printed across the scalloped white border is a faded caption: "Jack and Leo de Stella after The Race but before The Fall. " There is a date but it has been smudged and is illegible. In the photograph two men in their early twenties, brandishing long oars draped with the shirts they won off the backs of the Harvard crew, are posing in front of a slender racing shell. Standing slightly apart, a thin woman wearing a knee-length skirt and a man's varsity sweater has been caught brushing the hair out of her wide, anxious eyes with the splayed fingers of her left hand. The two young men are dressed identically in boating sneakers, shorts, and sleeveless undershirts, each with a large Y on the chest. The taller of the young men, sporting a Cossack mustache, clutches an open bottle of Champagne by its throat. His head is angled toward the shirt flying like a captured pennant from the blade of his oar but his eyes are devouring the girl.

NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT, SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1950

RACING NECK AND NECK BETWEEN THE BUOYS, THE TWO SLEEK-SCULLED coxed eights skidded down the mirror-still surface of the Thames. Languid gusts impregnated with the salty aroma of the sea and the hoarse shrieks from the students on the bank of the river drifted across their bows. Rowing stroke for Yale, Jack McAuliffe feathered an instant too soon and caught a grab and heard the cox, Leo Kritzky, swear under his breath. At the four-fifths mark Leo pushed the pace to a sprint. Several of the oarsman crewing behind Jack started punctuating each stroke with rasping grunts. Sliding on the seat until his knees grazed his armpits, Jack made a clean catch and felt the blade lock onto a swell of river water. A splinter of pain stabbed at the rib that had mended and broken and mended again. Blinking away the ache in his rib cage, he hauled back on the haft of the oar slick with blood from a burst blister. Slivers of sunlight glancing off the river blinded him for an instant. When he was able to see he caught a glimpse of the Harvard eight riding on its inverted reflection, its oars catching and feathering and squaring in flawless synchronization. The cox must have decided the Harvard boat was slipping ahead because he notched up the strokes to forty-eight per minute. Balanced on the knife edge of the keel, coiling and uncoiling his limbs in long fluid motions, Jack abandoned himself to the cadence of pain. When the Yale scull soared across the finish line just ahead of the Crimson's hull, he slumped over his oar and tried to recollect what whim of craziness had pushed him to go out for Crew.

"Rowing," Skip Waltz shouted over the din of the New Haven railroad station, "is a great training ground for real life in the sense that you're taking something that is essentially very simple and perfecting it."

"In your view, Coach Waltz, what's the most difficult moment of a race?" called the reporter from the Yale student newspaper.

Waltz screwed up his lips. "I'd say it's when you reach for the next stroke, because you're actually going in one direction and the hull's going in the opposite direction. I always tell my men that rowing is a metaphor for life. If you're not perfectly balanced over the keel the boat will wobble and the race will slip through your fingers." The coach glanced at the station clock and said, "What do you say we wrap this up, boys," and made his way across the platform to his crew, who were pulling their duffle bags off a low baggage cart. Waltz rummaged in his trouser pocket for a dime and gave it to the Negro porter, who touched the brim of his red cap in thanks. "Anyone for a Green Cup down at Mory's?" Waltz said.

"Mind if I take a rain check, coach?" one of the oarsman asked. "I have a philosophy oral at the crack of eleven tomorrow and I still haven't read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason."

One after another the rowers begged off and headed back to college with their duffel bags slung from their shoulders. Only Jack and Leo and Leo's girl, Stella, took the coach up on his invitation. Waltz collected his Frazer Vagabond from the parking lot down the street and brought it around to the station entrance. Leo and Jack tossed their duffle bags into the trunk and the three of them piled in.

Mory's was nearly deserted when they got there. Two waiters and a handful of students, all wearing ties and jackets, applauded the victory over the arch enemy, Harvard. "Green Cups for my people," the coach called as the four of them pulled up high-backed wooden chairs around a small table. For a while they talked about scull weights and blade shapes and the ideal length of the slide along which the oarsman travels with each stroke.

"Is it true that Yale rowers invented the slide?" Jack inquired.

"You bet," Coach Waltz said. "It was back in the 1880s. Before then oarsmen used to grease their trousers and slide their butts up and back along a wooden plank set in the hull."

When the Green Cups arrived Coach Waltz raised his glass and saluted the two crewmen. Cocking his head, he casually asked them if they spoke any foreign languages. It turned out that Jack was fluent in German and could get by in Spanish; Leo, an ardent, angry young man who had been raised in a family of anti-Communist Russian-Jewish immigrants and was majoring in Slavic languages and history, on a full scholarship, spoke Russian and Yiddish like a native and Italian like a tourist. The coach took this in with a nod, then asked whether they found time to keep up with the international situation, and when they both said yes he steered the conversation to the 1948 Communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia and Cardinal Mindszentys recent death sentence in Red Hungary. Both young men agreed that if the Americans and the British didn't draw a line across Europe and defend it, Russian tanks would sweep through Germany and France to the English Channel. Waltz asked what they thought about the Russian attempt to squeeze the allies out of Berlin.

Jack offered an impassioned defense of Truman's airlift that had forced Stalin to back down on the blockade. "If Berlin proves anything," he said, "it's that Joe Stalin understands only one thing, and that's force."

Leo believed that America ought to go to war rather than abandon Berlin to the Reds. "The Cold War is bound to turn into a shooting war eventually," he said, leaning over the table. "America disarmed too soon after the Germans and Japs surrendered and that was a big mistake. We should be rearming and fast, for Gods sake. We need to stop watching the Cold War and start fighting it. We need to stop pussyfooting around while they're turning the satellite countries into slave states and sabotaging free elections in France and Italy."

The coach said, "I'm curious to know how you men see this McCarthy business?"

Jack said, "All right, maybe Joe McCarthy's overstating his case when he says the government is crawling with card-carrying Commies. But like the man says, where there's smoke, there's fire."

"The way I see it," Leo said, "we need to put some pizzazz into this new Central Intelligence Agency that Truman concocted. We need to spy on them the way they're spying on us."

"That's the ticket," Jack heartily agreed.

Stella, a New Haven social worker seven years older than Leo, shook her head in disgust. "Well, I don't agree with a word you boys are saying. There's a song on the hit parade... it's called, 'Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think).' The title says it all: we ought to be enjoying ourselves because it is later than we think." When everyone looked at her she blushed. "Hey, I'm entitled to my opinion."

"Coach Waltz is talking seriously, Stella," Leo said.

"Well, so am I. Talking seriously, I mean. We'd better enjoy ourselves before the war breaks out because after it breaks out we won't be able to— the ones who re still alive will be living like worms in underground fallout shelters."

On the way back to the off-campus apartment that Leo and Jack shared (when they weren't bunking at the Yale boathouse on the Housatonic) with a Russian exchange student named Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin, Leo tried to argue with Stella but she stuck to her guns. "I don't see the sense of starting the shooting all over again just to stay in some godforsaken city like Berlin."

This exasperated Leo. "This pacifism of yours plays right into Stalin's hands."

Stella slipped her arm through Jack's, lightly brushing a breast against his elbow. "Leo's angry with me, Jacky," she said with a mock pout, "but you see my point."

"To tell the truth, I see two of them," Jack said with a leer.

"I hope you're not trying to beat my time," Leo warned.

"I thought crew shared everything," Jack said.

Leo stopped in his tracks. "So what are you asking, Jack? Are you asking me to lend you Stella for the night?"

"You're doing it again," Jack warned good-naturedly, "exposing the chip on your shoulder."

"When is it going to sink in?" Stella told Jack. "The chip on his shoulder is what he's all about." She turned on Leo. "Let's get something straight," she said, her face a mask of seriousness. "You don't own me, Leo, you only have the franchise. Which means that nobody borrows Stella unless Stella decides to be borrowed."

The three started walking again. Jack was shaking his head. "Damnation! Leo, old pal, old buddy, are we numskulls—I think we've been on the receiving end of a pitch!"

"Stella's not making a pitch—"

"I don't mean Stella. I mean Coach Waltz. When's the last time coach talked politics with any of his rowers? Remember what he asked us just before we headed for the Roach Ranch? Do we think patriotism is out of fashion? Do we think one man can make a difference in a world threatened by atomic wars? And remember his parting words—about how, what with Yevgeny being the son of a Russian diplomat and all, it'd be better if we kept the conversation under our hats."

"For cryin out loud, Yevgeny's not a Communist," Stella declared.

"Jesus H. Christ, I'm not saying he's a Communist," Jack said. "Though, come to think of it, his father would probably have to be, to be where he is." He turned back to Leo. "How could we miss it? The coach's got to be a talent scout. And we're the talent."

Leo flashed one of his famous sour smiles. "So who do you think he's scouting for? The New Haven Shore Line?"

"It's got to be something connected with government. And I'll lay you odds it's not the National Forest Service." Jack's Cossack mustache twitched in satisfaction. "Well, damnation," he said again. "Skull and Bones didn't tap us, Leo, but I have a hunch a society a lot more mysterious than one of Yale's secret societies may be about to."

"How can any society be more secret than Skull and Bones?" Stella wanted to know but by now both other companions were absorbed in their own thoughts.

Making their way single file up the narrow, dimly lit staircase in a seedy building on Dwight Street, pushing open the door of a fifth-floor walkup, tossing their duffels into a corner, they found their Russian apartment-mate slumped over the kitchen table, his head on Trevelyan's American Revolution. When Jack shook his shoulder Yevgeny yawned and stretched and said, "I dreamed you guys became the first boat in the Harvard-Yale classic to come in third."

"Leo went to a sprint at the four-fifths mark," Jack said. "Yale won by a nose. The two oarsmen who died of exhaustion were buried in the river with full honors."

Stella set the kettle to boiling. Jack threw on a 78-rpm Cole Porter record. The "troika," as the three roommates styled themselves, pushed the rowing machine into a corner and settled onto the floor of the tiny living room for one of their regular late-night bull sessions. Yevgeny, a sturdy, sandy-haired young man whose pale eyes seemed to change color with his moods, was majoring in American history and had become something of a Revolutionary War buff; he had pored over Pennypacker's General Washington's Spies and Trevelyans The American Revolution and had actually followed in Washington's footsteps, walking during winter recess the route the Continental Army had taken from Valley Forge across the frozen Delaware to Trenton. "I've figured out the big difference between the American Revolution and the Bolshevik revolution," he was saying now. "The American version lacked a central unifying vision."

"The Americans were against tyranny and taxation without representation," Jack reminded his Russian friend. "They were for individual rights, especially the right to express minority views without being oppressed by the majority. Those are unifying visions."

Yevgeny flashed a wrinkled smile. "Jefferson's 'All men are created equal' didn't include the Negroes who worked in his nail factory at Monticello. Even Washington's supposedly idealistic Continental Army was run along elitist principles—if you were called up you could pay someone to take your place or send your Negro slave."

Stella spooned instant coffee into mugs, filled them with boiling water from the kettle and handed them around. "America's central vision was to spread the American way of life from coast to shining coast," she commented. "It's called Manifest Destiny."

Jack said, "The American way of life hasn't been all that bad for a hundred fifty million Americans—especially when you see how the rest of the world scrapes by."

Stella said, "Hey, I work with Negro families in downtown New Haven that don't have enough money for one square meal a day. Are you counting them in your hundred fifty million?"

Yevgeny spiked his coffee from a small flask of cheap cooking cognac and passed the bottle around. "What motivated Washington and Jefferson, what motivates Americans today, is a kind of sentimental imperialism," he said, stirring his coffee with the eraser end of a pencil. "The original eastern seaboard revolution spread from coast to shining coast over the bodies of two million Indians. You Americans carry on about making the world safe for democracy but the subtext is you want to make the world safe for the United Fruit Company."

Leo turned moody. "So what image would you reshape the world in, Yevgeny?"

Jack climbed to his feet to put on a new record. "Yeah, tell us about the unifying vision of Stalin."

"My central vision doesn't come from Stalin. It doesn't even come from Marx. It comes from Leon Tolstoy. He spent most of his life searching for a unifying theory, the single key that would unlock every door, the universal explanation for our passions and economics and poverty and politics. What I really am is a Tolstoyist."

Leo said, "The universal explanation—the force that conditions all human choice—turns out, according to Marx, to be economics."

Stella nudged Jack in the ribs with an elbow. "I thought sex was behind all our choices," she teased.

Jack wagged a finger in Stella's face. "You've been reading Freud again."

"Freud's mistake was to generalize from a particular," Yevgeny went on, bending forward, caught up in his own narrative. "And the particular in his case was himself. Don't forget that many of the dreams he analyzed were his own. Tolstoy moved far beyond himself—he caught a glimpse of a force, a fate, a scheme of things that was behind all of history; 'Something incomprehensible but which is nevertheless the only thing that matters,' as he has his Prince Andrei say."

Leo poured the last of their open bottle of cooking cognac into his cup. "Human experience is too complex and too inconsistent to be explained by any one law or any one truth."

Jack said flatly, "All visions which lead to concentration camps are flatout wrong."

Stella waved her hand as if she were in a classroom. "What about America's concentration camps? They're harder to identify because they don't have walls or barbed wire. We call them Negro ghettos and Indian reservations."

Yevgeny said, "Stella's got it right, of course—"

"What about the Iron Curtain?" Jack blurted out. "What about the slave nations imprisoned behind it? Damnation, a Negro can walk out of the ghetto any time he wants, which is more than you can say for a Pole or a Hungarian."

"Negro soldiers fought World War II in segregated units run by white officers," Yevgeny said sharply. "Your Mr. Truman finally got around to integrating the armed forces last year, eighty-four years after the end of your Civil War."

"Arguing with the two of you has a lot in common with beating your head against a wall," Jack said wearily.

Yevgeny climbed to his feet and produced another bottle of cooking cognac from behind a stack of books on a shelf and passed it around. The members of the troika each poured a shot of cognac onto the coffee dregs at the bottom of their respective cups. Yevgeny raised his cup aloft and called out his trademark slogan in Russian: "Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!"

"Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela,"Jack and Leo repeated.

Stella said, "You've told me before but I always forget. What's that mean again?"

Leo supplied the English translation: "To the success of our hopeless task!"

Stella swallowed a yawn. "Right now my hopeless task is to keep my eyes open. I'm going to hit the hay. Are you coming, Leo, baby?"

"Are you coming, Leo, baby?" Jack cooed, mimicking Stella.

Leo threw a dark look in Jack's direction as he trailed after Stella and disappeared into the room at the end of the hallway.

In the early hours of the morning, as the first ash-gray streaks of first light broke against the Harkness Quadrangle, Leo came awake to discover Stella missing from the narrow bed. Padding sleepily through the silent apartment he heard the scratching of a needle going round and round in the end grooves of a record in the living room. Yevgeny was fast asleep on the old couch under the window with the torn shade, his arm trailing down to the linoleum, the tips of his fingers wedged in Trevelyan's masterpiece on the American Revolution so he wouldn't lose his place. Leo gently lifted the needle from the record and switched offYevgeny's reading lamp. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he noticed a flicker of light under Jack's door on one side of the living room. Expecting to catch Jack burning the midnight oil, he gripped the knob and softly turned it and inched the door open.

Inside a sputtering candle splashed quivering shadows onto the peeling wallpaper. One of the shadows belonged to Stella. She was wearing one of Leo's sleeveless Yale rowing shirts and slouched on the bed, her back against the wall, her long bare legs stretched out and parted wide. Another shadow was cast by Jack. He was kneeling on the floor between Stella's silvery thighs, his head bent forward. Sifting through the murky images, Leo's sleep-fogged brain decided it had stumbled on Jack worshipping at an altar.

In the half-darkness, Leo could make out Stella's face. She was looking straight at him, a faint smile of complicity on her slightly parted lips.

Working out of an empty office that his old law firm put at his disposition whenever he came to Manhattan, Frank Wisner wound up the meeting with E. (for Elliott) Winstrom Ebbitt II and walked him over to the bank of elevators. "I'm real pleased Bill Donovan made sure our paths crossed," he drawled, stretching his Mississippi vowels like rubber bands and letting them snap back on the consonants. The Wiz, as Wisner was affectionately nicknamed in the Company, was the deputy head, behind Allen Dulles, of what some journalists had dubbed the dirty tricks department of the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. A ruggedly handsome OSS veteran, he favored his visitor with one of his legendary gap-toothed smiles. "Welcome aboard, Ebby," he declared, offering a resolute paw.

Nodding, Ebby took it. "It was flattering to be asked to join such a distinguished team."

As Ebby climbed into the elevator, the Wiz slapped him on the back. "We'll see how flattered you feel when I kick ass over some operation that didn't end up the way I thought it should. Cloud Club, sixteen thirty tomorrow."

Ebby got off the elevator two floors below to pick up a briefcase full of legal briefs from his desk. He pushed through the double doors with "Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard & Irvine" and "Attorneys at Law" etched in gold letters across the thick glass. Except for the two Negro cleaning ladies vacuuming the wall-to-wall carpets, the offices were deserted. Heading back to the elevators, Ebby stopped to pen a note in his small, precise handwriting to his secretary. "Kindly cancel my four o'clock and keep my calendar clear for the afternoon. Try and get me fifteen minutes with Mr. Donovan anytime in the morning. Also, please Thermofax my outstanding dossiers and leave the copies on Ken Brill's desk. Tell him I'd take it as a favor if he could bring himself up to speed on all the material by Monday latest." He scribbled "E.E." across the bottom of the page and stuck it under a paperweight on the blotter.

Moments later the revolving door at Number Two Wall Street spilled Ebby into a late afternoon heat wave. Loosening his tie, he flagged down a cab, gave the driver an address on Park and Eighty-eighth and told him to take his sweet time getting there. He wasn't looking forward to the storm that was about to burst.

Eleonora (pronounced with an Italian lilt ever since the young Eleanor Krandal had spent a junior semester at Radcliffe studying Etruscan jewelry at the Villa Giulia in Rome) was painting her fingernails for the dinner party that night when Ebby, stirring an absinth and water with a silver swizzle stick, wandered into the bedroom. "Darling, where have you been?" she cried with a frown. "The Wilsons invited us for eight, which means we have to cross their threshold not a split second later than eight-thirtyish. I heard Mr. Harriman was coming—"

"Manny have a good day?"

"When Miss Utterback picked him up, the teacher told her Manny'd been frightened when the air raid siren shrieked and all the children had to take cover under their little tables. These atomic alerts scare me, too. How was your day?"

"Frank Wisner asked me up to Carter Ledyard for a chat this afternoon."

Eleonora glanced up from her nails in mild interest. "Did he?"

Ebby noticed that every last hair on his wife's gorgeous head was in place, which meant that she'd stopped by the hairdresser's after the lunch with her Radcliffe girlfriends at the Automat on Broadway. He wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to the eager girl who'd been waiting when the banana boat back from the war had deposited him on a Manhattan dock draped with an enormous banner reading "Welcome Home—Well Done." In those days she had been filled with impatience—to have herself folded into his arms, no matter they hadn't seen each other in four years; to climb into the rack with him, no matter she was a virgin; to walk down the aisle on her father's arm and agree to love and honor and obey, though she'd made it crystal clear from day one that the obey part was a mere formality. During the first years of their marriage it was her money— from a trust fund, from her salary as a part-time jewelry buyer for Bergdorf's—that had put him through Columbia Law. Once he had his degree and had been hired by "Wild" Bill Donovan, his old boss at OSS who was back practicing law in New York, Eleonora more or less decided to retire and begin living in the style to which she wanted to become accustomed.

Across the bedroom, Eleonora held up one hand to the light and examined her nails. Ebby decided there was no point in beating around the bush. "The Wiz offered me a job. I accepted."

"Is Frank Wisner back at Carter Ledyard? I suppose that Washington thing didn't work out for him. I hope you talked salary? Knowing you, darling, I'm sure you would never be the first to raise the ugly subject of money. Did he say anything about an eventual partnership? You ought to play your cards carefully—Mr. Donovan might be willing to give you a junior partnership to keep from losing you. On the other hand. Daddy won't be disappointed if you go to Carter Ledyard. He and Mr. Wisner know each other from Yale—they were both Skull and Bones. He could put in a good word—"

Ebby puffed up two pillows and stretched out on the cream-colored bedspread. "Frank Wisner hasn't gone back to Carter Ledyard."

"Darling, you might take your shoes off."

He undid his laces and kicked off his shoes. "The Wiz's still in government service."

"I thought you said you saw him at Carter Ledyard."

Ebby started over again. "Frank has the use of an office there when he's in town. He asked me up and offered me a job. I'm joining him in Washington. You'll be pleased to know I did raise the ugly subject of money. I'll be starting at GS-12, which pays six-thousand four-hundred dollars."

Eleonora concentrated on screwing the cap back onto the nail polish. "Darling, if this is some sort of silly prank..." She began waving her fingers in the air to dry her nails but stopped when she caught sight of his eyes. "You're being serious, Eb, aren't you? You're not becoming involved with that ridiculous Central Agency Mr. Donovan and you were talking about over brandy the other night, for heavens sake."

"I'm afraid I am."

Eleonora undid the knot on the belt of the silk robe and shrugged it off her delicate shoulders; it fell in a heap on the floor, where it would stay until the Cuban maid straightened up the room the next morning. Ebby noticed his wife was wearing one of those newfangled slips that doubled as a brassiere and pushed up her small pointed breasts. "I thought you'd grown up, Eb," she was saying as she slipped into a black Fogarty number with a pinched waist and a frilly skirt. Taking it for granted that she could talk him out of this silly idea, she backed up to him so he could close the zipper.

"That's just it," Ebby said, sitting up to wrestle with the zipper. "I have grown up. I've had it up to here with company mergers and stock issues and trust funds for spoiled grandchildren. Frank Wisner says the country is at peril and he's not the only one to think so. Mr. Luce called this the American century, but at the halfway mark it's beginning to look more and more like the Soviet century. The Czechoslovak President, Mr. Masaryk, was thrown out of a window and the last free East European country went down the drain. Then we lost China to the Reds. If we don't get cracking France and Italy will go Communist and our whole position in Europe will be in jeopardy." He gave up on the zipper and touched the back of his hand to the nape other neck. "A lot of the old OSS crowd are signing on, Eleonora. The Wiz was very convincing—he said he couldn't find people with my experience in clandestine operations on every street corner. I couldn't refuse him. You do see that?"

Eleonora pulled free from his clumsy fingers and padded across the room in her stockinged feet to study herself in the full-length mirror. "I married a brilliant attorney with a bright future—"

"Do you love me or my law degree?"

She regarded him in the mirror. "To be perfectly honest, darling, both. I love you in the context of your work. Daddy is an attorney, my two uncles are attorneys, my brother has one more year at Harvard Law and then he'll join Daddy's firm. How could I possibly explain to them that my husband has decided to throw away a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar-a-year position in one of the smartest firms on Wall Street for a six-thousand-a-year job—doing what? You've fought your war, Eb. Let someone else fight this one. How many times do you need to be a hero in one lifetime?" Her skirt flaring above her delicate ankles, Eleonora wheeled around to face her husband. "Look, let's both of us simmer down and enjoy ourselves at the Wilsons. Then you'll sleep on it, Eb. Things will look clearer in the cold light of morning."

I've accepted Franks offer," Ebby insisted. "I don't intend to go back on that."

Eleonora's beautiful eyes turned flinty. "Whatever you do, you'll never match your father unless someone stands you in front of a firing squad."

"My father has nothing to do with this."

She looked around for her shoes. "You really don't expect me to transplant Immanuel to a semi-attached stucco house in some dingy Washington suburb so you can take a six-thousand-a-year job spying on Communists who are spying on Americans who are spying on Communists."

Ebby said dryly, "It's sixty-four-hundred, and that doesn't include the two-hundred-dollar longevity increase for my two years in the OSS."

Eleonora let her voice grow husky. "If you abandon a promising career you'll be abandoning a wife and a son with it. I'm just not the 'Whither thou goest' type."

"I don't suppose you are," Ebby remarked in a voice hollow with melancholy for what might have been.

With a deft gesture that, as far as Ebby could see, only the female of the species had mastered, Eleonora reached behind her shoulders blades with both hands and did up the zipper. "You'd better throw something on if you don't want us to be late for the Wilsons," she snapped. She spotted her stiletto-heeled pumps under a chair. Slipping her feet into them, she stomped from the bedroom.

The Otis elevator lifting Ebby with motionless speed to the sixty-sixth floor of the Chrysler Building was thick with cigar smoke and the latest news bulletins. "It's not a rumor," a middle-aged woman reported excitedly. "I caught it on the hackies radio—the North Koreans have invaded South Korea. Its our nightmare come true—masses of them poured across the thirty-eighth parallel this morning."

"Moscow obviously put them up to it," said one man. "Stalin is testing our mettle."

"Do you think Mr. Truman will fight?" asked a young woman whose black veil masked the upper half of her face.

"He was solid as bedrock on Berlin," observed another man.

"Berlin happens to be in the heart of Europe," noted an elderly gentleman. "South Korea is a suburb of Japan. Any idiot can see this is the wrong war in the wrong place."

"I heard the Presidents ordered the Seventh Fleet to sea," the first man said.

"My fiancé is a reserve naval aviator," the young woman put in. "I just spoke with him on the telephone. He's worried sick he's going to be called back to service."

The operator, an elderly Negro wearing a crisp brown uniform with gold piping, braked the elevator to a smooth stop and slid back the heavy gold grill with a gloved hand. "Eighty-second Airbornes been put on alert," he announced. "Reason I know, got a nephew happens to be a radio operator with the Eighty-second." Without missing a beat he added, "Final stop, Chrysler Cloud Club."

Ebby, half an hour early, shouldered through the crowd milling excitedly around the bar and ordered a scotch on the rocks. He was listening to the ice crackle in the glass, rehashing the waspish conversation he'd had with Eleonora over breakfast, when he felt a tug on his elbow. He glanced over his shoulder. "Berkshire!" he cried, calling Bill Colby by his wartime OSS code name. "I thought you were in Washington with the Labor Relations people. Don't tell me the Wiz snared you, too."

Colby nodded. "I was with the NLRB until the old warlock worked his magic on me. You've heard the news?"

"Difficult not to hear it. People who generally clam up in elevators were holding a seminar on whether Truman's going to take the country to war."

Carrying their drinks, the two men made their way to one of the tall windows that offered a breathtaking view of Manhattan's grid-like streets and the two rivers bracketing the island. Ebby waved at the smog swirling across their line of sight as if he expected to dispel it. "Hudson's out there somewhere. On a clear day you can see across those parklands trailing off to the horizon behind the Palisades. Eleonora and I used to picnic there before we could afford restaurants."

"How is Eleonora? How's Immanuel?"

"They're both fine." Ebby touched his glass against Colby's. "Good to see you again, Bill. What's the word from the District of Columbia?"

Colby glanced around to make sure they couldn't be overheard. "We're going to war, Eb, that's what the Wiz told me and he ought to know." The pale eyes behind Colby's military-issue spectacles were, as always, imperturbable. The half smile that appeared on his face was the expression of a poker player who didn't want to give away his cards, or his lack of them. "Let the Communists get away with this," he added, "they're only going to test us somewhere else. And that somewhere else could be the Iranian oil fields or the English Channel."

Ebby knew the imperturbable eyes and the poker players smile well. He and Colby and another young American named Stewart Alsop had studied Morse from the same instructor at an English manor house before being parachuted into France as part of three-man Jedburgh teams (the name came from the Scottish town near the secret OSS training camp). Long after he'd returned to the states and married, Ebby would come awake in the early hours of the morning convinced he could hear the throttled-back drone of the Liberator banking toward England and the snap of the parachute spilling and catching the air as he drifted down toward the triangle of fires the maquis had ignited in a field. Ebby and Colby, assigned to different Jedburgh teams, had crossed paths as they scurried around the French countryside, blowing up bridges to protect Patton's exposed right flank as his tanks raced north of the Yonne for the Rhine. Ebby's Jedburgh mission had ended with him inching his way through the jammed, jubilant streets of the newly liberated Paris in a shiny black Cadillac that had once belonged to Vichy Premier Pierre Laval. After the German surrender Ebby had tried to talk the OSS into transferring him to the Pacific theater but had wound up at a debriefing center the Americans had set up in a German Champagne factory outside Wiesbaden, trying to piece together the Soviet order of battle from Russian defectors. He might have stayed on in the postwar OSS if there had been a postwar OSS. When the Japanese capitulated, Truman decided America didn't need a central intelligence organization and disbanded it. The Presidential ax sent the OSS's analysts to the State Department (where they were as welcome as fleas in a rug), the cowboys to the War Department and Ebby, by then married to his pre-war sweetheart, back to Columbia Law School. And who did he come across there but his old sidekick from the Jedburgh days, Berkshire, one year ahead of him but already talking vaguely of abandoning law when the Cold War intensified and Truman reckoned, in 1947, that America could use a central intelligence agency after all.

"I heard on the grapevine that Truman's flipped his lid at the CIA," Colby said. "He blames them for not providing early warning of the North Korean attack. He's right, of course. But with the nickel-and-dime budget Congress provides, they're lucky if they can predict anything beside Truman's moods. Heads are going to roll, you can believe it. The buzz on Capitol Hill is that the Admiral"—he was referring to the current DCI, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter—"will be job hunting before the year's out. The Wiz thinks Elsenhower's Chief of Staff at Normandy, Bedell Smith, may get the nod." Colby glanced at a wall clock, clicked glasses with Ebby again and they both tossed off their drinks. "We'd better be getting in," he said. "When the Wiz says sixteen thirty he doesn't mean sixteen thirty-one."

Near the bank of elevators a small sign directed visitors attending the S.M. Craw Management Symposium to a suite of private rooms at the far end of the corridor. Inside a vestibule two unsmiling young men in threepiece suits checked Colby's identification, then scrutinized Ebbys driver's license and his old laminated OSS ID card (which he'd retrieved from a shoebox filled with his wartime citations, medals and discharge papers). Ticking off names on a clipboard, they motioned Ebby and Colby though the door with a sign on it reading, "S.M. Craw Symposium."

Several dozen men and a single woman were crowded around a makeshift bar. The only other woman in sight, wearing slacks and a man's vest over a ruffled shirt, was busy ladling punch into glasses and setting them out on the table. Ebby helped himself to a glass of punch, then turned to chat with a young man sporting a Cossack mustache. "My names Elliott Ebbitt," he told him. "Friends call me Ebby."

"I'm John McAuliffe," said the young man, a flamboyant six-footer wearing an expensive three-piece linen suit custom-tailored by Bernard Witherill of New York. "Friends call me a lot of things behind my back and Jack to my face." He nodded toward the thin-faced, lean young man in a rumpled off-the-rack suit from the R.H. Macy Company. "This is my former friend Leo Kritzky."

Ebby took the bait. "Why former?"

"His former girlfriend crept into my bed late one night," Jack said with disarming frankness. "He figures I should have sent her packing. I keep reminding him that she's a terrific piece of ass and I'm a perfectly normal Homo erectus."

"I was angry, but I'm not any more," Leo commented dryly. "I decided to leave the pretty girls to the men without imagination." He offered a hand to Ebby. "Pleased to meet you."

For a second Ebby thought Jack was putting him on but the brooding darkness in Leo's eyes and the frown-creases on his high forehead convinced him otherwise. Never comfortable with discussions of other people's private lives, he quickly changed the subject. "Where are you fellows coming from? And how did you wind up here?"

Leo said, "We're both graduating from Yale at the end of the month."

Jack said with a laugh, "We wound up here because we said yes when our rowing coach offered us Green Cups down at Mory's. Turns out he was head hunting for—" Jack was unsure whether you were supposed to pronounce the words "Central Intelligence Agency" out loud, so he simply waved his hand at the crowd.

Leo asked, "How about you, Elliott?"

"I went from Yale to OSS the last year of the war. I suppose you could say I'm reenlisting."

"Did you see action?" Jack wanted to know.

"Some."

"Where?"

"France, mostly. By the time I crossed the Rhine, Hitler had shot a bullet into his brain and the Germans had thrown in the sponge."

The young woman who had been serving drinks tapped a spoon against a glass and the two dozen young men—what Jack called the "Arrow-shirt-cum-starched-collar-crowd"—gravitated toward the folding chairs that had been set up in rows facing the floor-to-ceiling picture window with a view of the Empire State Building and downtown Manhattan. She stepped up to the glass lectern and tapped a long fingernail against the microphone to make sure it was working. "My name is Mildred Owen-Brack," she began. Clearly used to dealing with men who weren't used to dealing with women, she plowed on, "I'm going to walk you through the standard secrecy form which those of you who are alert will have discovered on your seats; those of you who are a bit slower will find you're sitting on them." There was a ripple of nervous laughter at Owen-Brack's attempt to break the ice. "When you came into this room you entered what the sociologists call a closed culture. The form commits you to submit to the CIA for prior review everything and anything you may write for publication about the CIA while you're serving and after you leave it. That includes articles, books of fact or fiction, screenplays, epic poems, opera librettos, Hallmark card verses, et cetera. It goes without saying but I will say it all the same: Only those who sign the agreement will remain in the room. Questions?"

Owen-Brack surveyed the faces in front of her. The lone female amid all the male recruits, a particularly good-looking dark-haired young woman wearing a knee-length skirt and a torso-hugging jacket lifted a very manicured hand. "I'm Millicent Pearlstein from Cincinnati." She cleared her throat in embarrassment when she realized there had been no reason to say where she came from. "Okay. You're probably aware that your agreement imposes prior restraint on the First Amendment right of free speech, and as such it would stand a good chance of being thrown out by the courts."

Owen-Brack smiled sweetly. "You're obviously a lawyer, but you're missing the point," she explained with exaggerated politeness. "We're asking you to sign this form for your own safety. We're a secret organization protecting our secrets from the occasional employee who might be tempted to describe his employment in print. If someone tried to do that, he—or she—would certainly rub us the wrong way and we'd have to seriously consider terminating the offender along with the contract. So we're trying to make it legally uninviting for someone to rub us the wrong way. Hopefully the intriguing question of whether the Company's absolute need to protect its secrets outweighs the First Amendment right of free speech will never be put to the test."

Ebby leaned over to Colby, who was sitting on the aisle next to him. "Who's the man-eater?"

"She's the Company consigliere," he whispered back. "The Wiz says she's not someone whose feathers you want to ruffle."

Owen-Brack proceeded to read the two-paragraph contract aloud.

Afterward she went around collecting the signed forms, stuffed them in a folder and took a seat in the back of the room.

Frank Wisner strode up the lectern. "Welcome to the Pickle Factory," he drawled, using the in-house jargon for the Company. "My name is Frank Wisner. I'm the deputy to Allen Dulles, who is the Deputy Director/ Operations—that's DD-slash-o in Companyese. DD/0 refers both to the man who runs the Clandestine Service as well as the service itself." The Wiz wet his lips from a glass of punch. "The Truman Doctrine of 1947 promised that America would aid free peoples everywhere in the struggle against totalitarianism. The principal instrument of American foreign policy in this struggle is the Central Intelligence Agency. And the cutting edge of the CIA is the DD/0. So far we have a mixed record. We lost Czechoslovakia to the Communists but we saved France from economic collapse after the war, we saved Italy from an almost certain Communist victory in the elections and the Czech-style putsch that would have surely followed, we saved Greece from a Soviet-backed insurgency. Make no mistake about it—Western civilization is being attacked and a very thin line of patriots is manning the ramparts. We badly need to reinforce this line of patriots, which is why you've been invited here today. We're looking for driven, imaginative men and women"—the Wiz acknowledged Millicent Pearlstein with a gallant nod—"who are aggressive in pursuit of their goals and not afraid of taking risks—who, like Alice in Wonderland, can plunge into the unknown without worrying about how they are going to get out again. The bottom line is:

There aren't any textbooks on spying, you have to invent it as you go along. I'll give you a case in point. Ten days ago, one of our officers who'd been trying to recruit a woman for five months discovered that she religiously read the astrology column in her local newspaper. So the morning he made his pitch, he arranged for the section on Capricorns to say that a financial offer that day would change their lives and solve their money problems—don't refuse it. The woman in question listened to the pitch and signed on the dotted line and is now reporting to us from a very sensitive embassy in a Communist country."

Part 5

In the back of the room Wisner's minder began tapping his wristwatch. At the lectern, Wisner nodded imperceptibly. "You people have no doubt read a lot of cloak-and-dagger novels. If the impression you have of the Central Intelligence Agency comes from them you'll find you are seriously mistaken. The real world of espionage is less glamorous and more dangerous than those novels would lead you to believe. If you make it through our training program, you will spend your professional lives doing things you can't talk about to anyone outside the office, and that includes wives and girlfriends. We're looking for people who are comfortable living in the shadows and who can conduct imaginative operations that the US government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for if things go right or wrong. What you do won't turn up in headlines on the front page—it won't appear on any page—unless you foul up. You'll be operating in the killing fields of the Cold War and you'll be playing for keeps. If you aren't completely comfortable with this, my advice to you is to seek employment with the Fuller Brush Company."

Wisner checked his own watch. "So much for the sermon from the Cloud Club. Owen-Brack will walk you though the nitty-gritty part of today's get-together—where and when you are to report, what you are to bring with you, when you will start to draw salary, what you are to tell people if they ask you what you're doing. She'll also give you a backstop, which is to say a mailing address and a phone number where a secretary will say you are away from your desk and offer to take a message. In the months ahead you're going to be away from your desk an awful lot."

The new recruits in the room laughed at this. At the lectern Wisner had a whispered conversation with Owen-Brack, after which he ducked out of the room one step behind his minder. Leaning toward the microphone, Owen-Brack said, "I'll begin by saying that the Company singled you out— and went to the trouble and expense of ordering up background security checks—because we need street-smart people who can burgle a safe and drink tea without rattling the cup. Chances are you're coming to us with only the second of these skills. We plan to teach you the first, along with the nuts and bolts of the espionage business, when you report for duty. For the record, you are S.M. Craw Management trainees from Sears, Roebuck. The first phase of your training—which will actually include a course in management in case you ever need to explain in detail what you were doing—will take place at the Craw offices behind the Hilton Inn off Route 95 in Springfield, Virginia, starting at 7:30 A.M. on the first Monday in July."

Pausing every now and then to hand out printed matter, Owen-Brack droned on for another twenty minutes. "That's more or less it," she finally said. She flashed another other guileless smiles. "With any luck I'll never see any of you again."

Jack lingered in the room after the others left. Owen-Brack was collecting her papers. "Forget something?" she inquired.

"Name's McAuliffe. John J. McAuliffe. Jack to my friends. I just thought what a crying shame to come all the way up to the Cloud Club and not take in the view. And the best way to take in the view is with a cup of Champagne in your fist—"

Tilting her head, Owen-Brack sized up Jack. She took in the three-piece linen suit, the cowboy boots, the tinted glasses, the dark hair slicked back and parted in the middle. "What's the J stand for?" she asked.

"It doesn't stand for anything. I only use it when I'm trying to impress people. My father wrote it in on the birth certificate because he thought it made you look important if you had a middle initial."

"I happen to be on the review board that examines the 201s—the personal files—of potential recruits. I remember yours, John J. McAuliffe. During your junior semester abroad you served as an intern in the American embassy in Moscow—"

"My father knew someone in the State Department—he pulled strings," Jack explained.

"The ambassador sent you back to the states when it was discovered that you were using the diplomatic pouch to smuggle Finnish lobsters in from Helsinki."

"Your background checks are pretty thorough. I was afraid I'd wash out if that became known."

"I suppose there's no harm in telling you—your college record is fairly mediocre. You were taken because of the incident. The Company wants people who are not afraid to bend the rules."

"That being the case, what about the cup of Champagne?" Jack turned on the charm. "The way I see it, men and women are accomplices in the great game of sex. You lean forward, the top of your blouse falls open, it's a gesture you've practiced in front of a mirror, there is a glimpse of a breast, a nipple—you'd think something was wrong with me if I don't notice."

Owen-Brack screwed up her lips. "You beautiful boys never get it right, and you won't get it right until you lose your beauty. It's not your beauty that seduces us but your voices, your words; we are seduced by your heads, not your hands." She glanced impatiently at a tiny watch on her wrist. "Look, you need to know that Owen is my maiden name," she informed him, "Brack is my married name."

'Hell, nobody's perfect—I won't hold your being married against you."

Owen-Brack didn't think Jack was funny. "My husband worked for the Company—he was killed in a border skirmish you never read about in the New York Times. Stop me if I'm wrong but the view from the sixty-sixth floor, the drink in my fist—that's not what you have in mind. You're asking if I'd be willing to sleep with you. The answer is: Yeah, I can see how I might enjoy that. If my husband were alive I'd be tempted to go ahead and cheat on him. Hell, he cheated enough on me. But his being dead changes the chemistry of the situation. I don't need a one-night stand, I need a love affair. And that rules you out—you're obviously not the love affair type. Byebye, John J. McAuliffe. And good luck to you. You're going to need it."

"Spies," the instructor was saying, his voice reduced to stifled gasps because his scarred vocal cords strained easily, "are perfectly sane human beings who become neurotically obsessed with trivia." Robert Andrews, as he was listed on the S.M. Craw roster in the lobby, had captured the attention of the management trainees the moment he shuffled into the classroom eight weeks before. Only the bare bones of his illustrious OSS career were known. He had been parachuted into Germany in 1944 to contact the Abwehr clique planning to assassinate Hitler, and what was left of him after months of Gestapo interrogation was miraculously liberated from Buchenwald by Patton's troops at the end of the war. Sometime between the two events the skin on the right side of his face had been branded with a series of small round welts and his left arm had been literally torn from its shoulder socket on some sort of medieval torture rack. Now the empty sleeve of his sports jacket, pinned neatly back, slapped gently against his rib cage as he paced in front of the trainees. "Spies," he went on, "file away the details that may one day save their lives. Such as which side of any given street will be in the shadows cast by a rising moon. Such as under what atmospheric conditions a pistol shot sounds like an automobile backfiring."

Enthralled by the whine of a police siren that reached his good ear through the windows, Mr. Andrews ambled over to the sill and stared through his reflection at the traffic on Route 95. The sound appeared to transport him to another time and another place and only with a visible effort was he able to snap himself out of a fearful reverie. "We have tried to drum into your heads what the people who employ us are pleased to call the basics of tradecraft," he said, turning back to his students. "Letter drops, cut-out agents, invisible writing techniques, microdots, miniature cameras, shaking a tail, planting bugs—you are all proficient in these matters. We have tried to teach you KGB tradecraft—how they send over handsome young men to seduce secretaries with access to secrets, how their handlers prefer to meet their agents in open areas as opposed to safe houses, how East Germans spies operating in the West employ the serial numbers on American ten-dollar bills to break out telephone numbers from lottery numbers broadcast over the local radio stations. But the truth is that these so-called basics will take you only so far. To go beyond, you have to invent yourself for each assignment; you have to become the person the enemy would never suspect you of being, which involves doing things the enemy would never suspect an intelligence officer of doing. I know of an agent who limped when he was assigned to follow someone—he calculated that nobody would suspect a lame man of working the street for an intelligence organization. I shall add that the agent was apprehended when the Abwehr man he was following noticed that he was favoring his right foot one day and his left the next. I was that agent. Which makes me uniquely qualified to pass on to you the ultimate message of tradecraft." Here Mr. Andrews turned back toward the window to stare at his own image in the glass.

"For the love of God," the reflection said, "don't make mistakes."

Several hours had been set aside after classes let out for meetings with representatives of the various Company departments who had come down from Cockroach Alley on the Reflecting Pool to recruit for their divisions. As usual the deputy head of the elite Soviet Russia Division, Felix Etz, was allowed to skim off the cream of the crop. To nobody's surprise the first person he homed in on turned out to be Millicent Pearlstein, the lawyer from Cincinnati who had earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in Russian language and literature before she went on to law school. She had done extremely well in Flaps and Seals as well as Picks and Locks, and had scored high marks in the Essentials of Recruitment and Advanced Ciphers and Communist Theory and Practice. Jack had a so-so record in the course work but he had aced a field exercise; on a training run to Norfolk he had used a phony State of West Virginia Operators license and a bogus letter with a forged signature of the Chief of Naval Ordinance to talk his way onto the USS John R. Pierce and into the destroyer's Combat Information Center, and come away with top-secret training manuals for the ship's surface and air radars. His gung-ho attitude, plus his knowledge of German and Spanish, caught Etz's eye and he was offered a plum berth. Ebby, with his operational experience in OSS and his excellent grades in the refresher courses, was high on Etz's list, too. When Leo's interview came he practically talked his way into the Soviet Russia Division. It wasn't his knowledge of Russian and Yiddish or his high grades that impressed Etz so much as his motivation; Leo had inherited the ardent and lucid anti-Communism of his parents, who had fled Russia one step ahead of the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution.

In the early evening the management trainees drifted over to an Italian restaurant in downtown Springfield to celebrate the end of the grueling twelve-week Craw curriculum. "Looks as if I'm going to Germany," Ebby was telling the others at his end of the long banquet table. He half-filled Millicent's wine glass, and then his own, with Chianti. "Say, you're not going to believe me when I tell you what attracted them to me."

"Fact that you're at home in German might have had something to do with it," Jack guessed.

"Not everyone who speaks German winds up in Germany," Ebby noted. "It was something else. When I was sixteen my grandfather died and my grandmother, who was a bit of an eccentric, decided to celebrate her newfound widowhood by taking me on a grand tour of Europe that included a night in a Parisian maison close and a week in King Zog's Albania. We made it out of the country in the nick of time when Mussolini's troops invaded— my grandmother used gold coins sewn into her girdle to get us two berths on a tramp steamer to Marseille. Turns out that some bright soul in the Company spotted Albania under the list of 'countries visited' on my personnel file and decided that that qualified me for Albanian ops, which are run out of Germany."

Across the room one of the locals from Springfield slipped a nickel into the jukebox and began dancing the crab walk with a teenage girl in crinolines.

"I'm headed for the Washington Campus," Leo confided. "Mr. Etz told me that Bill Colby could use someone with fluent Russian on his team."

"I'm being sent to an Army language school to brush up on my Italian," Millicent told the others, "after which I'm off to Rome to bat my eyelashes at Communist diplomats." Millicent looked across the table. "What about you, Jack?"

"It's the Soviet Russia division for me too, guys. They're sending me off to some hush-hush Marine base for three weeks of training in weaponry and demolition, after which they're offering me the choice of starting out in Madrid or working for someone nicknamed the Sorcerer in Berlin, which I suppose would make me the Sorcerer's Apprentice. I decided on Berlin because German girls are supposed to give good head."

"Oh, Jack, with you everything boils down to sex," complained Millicent.

"He's just trying to get a rise out of you," Ebby told her.

"I'm not trying to get a rise out of her," Jack insisted. "I'm trying to get her to pay attention to the rise out of me."

"Fat chance of you succeeding," she groaned.

'"Mad, bad and dangerous to know'—that's what they put under Jack's senior photo in the Yale yearbook," Leo informed the others. "It was in quotation marks because the original described Lord Byron, which deep down is how Jack sees himself. Isn't that a fact, Jack?"

Slightly drunk by now, Jack threw his head back and declaimed some lines from Byron. "When Love's delirium haunts the glowing mind, Limping Decorum lingers far behind."

"That's what your code name ought to be, Jack—Limping Decorum," quipped Millicent.

By eleven most of the trainees had left to catch a late-night showing of Sunset Boulevard in a nearby cinema. Ebby, Jack, Leo, and Millicent stuck around to polish off the Chianti and gossip about their division assignments. Since this was to be their last meal in the restaurant, the proprietor offered a round of grappa on the house. As they filed past the cash register on their way out he said, "You're the third trainee group to come through here since Christmas. What exactly do you Craw Management folks do?"

"Why, we manage," Millicent said with a grin.

"We don't actually work for S.M. Craw," Leo said, coming up with the cover story. "We work for Sears, Roebuck. Sears sent us to attend the Craw management course."

"Management could be just the ticket for my restaurant," the owner said. "Where the heck do you manage when you leave Springfield?"

"All over," Millicent told him. "Some of us have been assigned to the head office in Chicago, others will go to branches around the country."

"Well, good luck to you young people in your endeavors."

"Auguri," Millicent said with a smile.

An evening drizzle had turned the gutter outside the restaurant into a glistening mirror. The mewl of a cat in heat reverberated through the narrow street as the group started back toward the Hilton Inn. Ebby stopped under a street light to reread the letter from his lawyer announcing that the divorce finally had come through. Folding it away, he caught up with the others, who were arguing about Truman's decision a few days before to have the Army seize the railroads to avoid a general strike. "That Harry Truman," Jack was saying, "is one tough article."

He's one tough strikebreaker," Millicent declared.

"A President worth his salt can't knuckle under to strikers while the country's fighting in Korea," Ebby said.

Engrossed in conversation, the four took no notice of the small newspaper delivery van parked in front of the fire hydrant just ahead. As they drew abreast of it, the van's back doors flew open and four men armed with handguns spilled onto the sidewalk behind them. Other dark figures appeared out of an alleyway and blocked their path. Leo managed a startled "What the hell is go—" as a burlap sack came down over his head. His hands were jerked behind his back and bound with a length of electrical wire. Leo heard a fist punch the air out of a rib cage and Jack's muffled gasp. Strong hands bundled the four recruits into the van and shoved them roughly onto stacks of newspapers scattered on the floor. The doors slammed closed, the motor kicked into life and the van veered sharply away from the curb, throwing the prisoners hard against one wall. Leo started to ask if the others were all right but shut up when he felt something metallic pressing against an ear. He heard Jack's angry "case of mistaken iden—" cut off by another gasp.

The van swerved sharply left and then left again, then with its motor revving it picked up speed on a straightaway. There were several stops, probably for red lights, and more turns. At first Leo tried to memorize them in the hope of eventually reconstructing the route, but he soon got confused and lost track. After what seemed like forty or fifty minutes but could easily have been twice that the van eased to a stop. The hollow bleating of what Leo took to be foghorns reached his ears through the burlap. He heard the sharp snap of a cigarette lighter and had to fight back the panic that rose like bile to the back of his throat—were his captors about to set fire to the newspapers in the van and burn them alive? Only when Leo got a whiff of tobacco smoke did he begin to dominate the terror. He told himself that this was certainly an exercise, a mock kidnapping—it had to be that; anything else was unthinkable—organized by the Soviet Russia people to test the mettle of their new recruits. But a seed of doubt planted itself in his brain. Mr. Andrews remark about becoming obsessed with trivia came back to him. Suddenly his antenna was tuned to details. Why were his captors being so silent? Was it because they didn't speak English, or spoke it with an accent? Or spoke it without an accent, which could have been the case if they had been kidnapped by CIA agents? But if they had been kidnapped by CIA agents, how come the odor of tobacco that reached his nostrils reminded him of the rough-cut Herzegovina Flor that his father had smoked until the day he shot himself? Weighing possibilities in the hope that one of them would lead to a probability, Leo's thoughts began to drift—only afterward did it occur to him that he had actually dozed—and he found himself sorting through a scrapbook of faded images: his father's coffin being lowered into the ground in a windwashed Jewish cemetery on Long Island; the rain drumming on the black umbrellas; the car backfire that sounded like the crack of a pistol; the pigeons that beat in panic into the air from the dry branches of dead trees; the drone of his father's brother blundering through a transliterated text of the Kaddish; the anguished whimper of his mother repeating over and over, "What will become of us? What will become of us?"

Leo came back to his senses with a start when the back doors were jerked open and a fresh sea breeze swept through the stuffy van. Strong hands pulled him and the others from their bed of newspapers and guided them across a gangplank into the cabin of a small boat. There they were obliged to lie down on a wooden deck that reeked of fish, and they were covered with a heavy tarpaulin saturated with motor oil. The deck vibrated beneath them as the boat, its bow pitching into the swells, headed to sea. The engines droned monotonously for a quarter of an hour, then slowed to an idle as the boat bumped repeatedly against something solid. With the boat rising and falling under his feet, Leo felt himself being pulled onto a wooden landing and pushed up a long flight of narrow steps and onto the deck of a ship, then led down two flights of steps. He tripped going through a hatch and thought he heard one of the captors swear under his breath in Polish. As he descended into the bowels of the ship the stale air that reached Leo's nose through the burlap smelted of flour. Someone forced Leo through another hatch into a sweltering compartment. He felt rough hands drag the shoes off his feet and then strip him to his skivvies. His wrists, aching from the wire biting into them, were cut free and he was shoved onto a chair and tied to it, his wrists behind the back of the chair, with rope that was passed several times across his chest and behind the chair. Then the burlap hood was pulled off his head.

Blinking hard to keep the spotlights on the bulkheads from stinging his eyes, Leo looked around. The others, also stripped to their socks and underwear, were angling their heads away from the bright light. Millicent, in a lace brassiere and underpants, appeared pale and disoriented. Three sailors in stained dungarees and turtleneck sweaters were removing wallets and papers from the pockets of the garments and throwing the clothing into a heap in a corner. An emaciated man in an ill-fitting suit studied them from the door through eyes that were bulging out of a skull so narrow it looked deformed. A trace of a smile appeared on his thin lips. "Hello to you," he said, speaking English in what sounded to Leo's ear like an Eastern European—perhaps Latvian, perhaps Polish—accent. "So: I am saying to myself, the sooner you are talking to me in the things I want to knowledge, the sooner this unhappy episode is being located behind us. Please to talk now between yourself. Myself, I am hungry. After a time I am coming back and we will be talking together to see if you are coming out of this thing maybe alive, maybe dead, who knows?"

The civilian ducked through the hatch, followed by the sailors. Then the door clanged shut. The bolts that locked it could be seen turning in the bulkhead.

"Oh, my God," Millicent breathed, her voice quivering, spittle dribbling from a corner of lips swollen from biting on them, "this isn't happening."

Ebby gestured toward the bulkhead with his chin. "They'll have microphones," he whispered. "They'll be listening to everything we say."

Jack was absolutely positive this was another Company training drill but he played the game, hoping to make a good impression on the Company spooks who monitored the exercise. "Why would thugs want to kidnap Craw trainees?" he asked, sticking to the cover legend they had worked out in the first week of the course.

Ebby took his cue from Jack. "It's a case of mistaken identity—there's no other explanation."

"Maybe someone has a grudge against Craw," Jack offered.

"Or Sears, Roebuck, for that matter," Leo said.

Millicent was in a world of her own. "It's a training exercise," she said, talking to herself. "They want to see how we behave under fire." Squinting because of the spotlights, it suddenly dawned on her that she was practically naked and she began to moan softly. "I don't mind admitting it, I'm frightened out of my skin."

Breathing carefully through his nostrils to calm himself, Leo tried to distinguish the thread of logic buried somewhere in the riot of thoughts. In the end there were really only two possibilities. The most likely was that it was a very realistic training exercise; a rite of passage for those who had signed on to work for the elite Soviet Russia Division. The second possibility—that the four of them had really been kidnapped by Soviet agents who wanted information about CIA recruiting and training—struck him as ludicrous. But was Leo dismissing it out of wishful thinking? What if it were true? What if the Russians had discovered that Craw Management was a Company front and were trawling for trainees? What if the luck of the draw had deposited the four stragglers from the Italian restaurant in their net?

Leo tried to remember what they'd been taught in the seminar on interrogation techniques. Bits and pieces came back to him. All interrogators tried to convince their prisoners that they knew more than they actually did; that any information you provided was only confirming what they already knew. You were supposed to stick to your cover story even in the face of evidence that the interrogators were familiar with details of your work for the CIA. Mr. Andrews had turned up unexpectedly at the last session on interrogation techniques; in his mind's eye Leo could see the infinitely sad smile creeping over his instructor's face as he wrapped up the course but, for the life of him, he couldn't remember what Mr. Andrews had said.

After what seemed like an eternity Leo became aware of a grinding noise. He noticed the hatch-bolts turning in the bulkhead. The door swung open on greased hinges. The emaciated man, his eyes hidden behind oval sunelasses, stepped into the room. He had changed clothing and was wearing a white jumpsuit with washed-out orange stains on it. One of the sailors came in behind him carrying a wooden bucket half filled with water. The sailor set it in a corner, filled a wooden ladle with brackish water from the bucket, and spilled some down the throat of each of the parched prisoners. The emaciated man scraped over a chair, turned it so that the back was to the prisoners and straddled the seat facing them. He extracted a cigarette from a steel case, tapped down the tobacco and held the flame of a lighter to the tip; Leo got another whiff of the Russian tobacco. Sucking on the cigarette, the emaciated man seemed lost in thought. "Call me Oskar," he announced abruptly. "Admit it," he went on, "you are hoping this is a CIA training exercise but you are not sure." A taunting cackle emerged from the back of his throat. "It falls to me to pass on to you displeasant news—you are on the Latvian freighter Liepaja anchored in your Chesapeake Bay while we wait for clearance to put to sea with a cargo of flour, destination Riga. The ship has already been searched by your Coastal Guard. They usually keep us waiting many hours to torment us, but we play cards and listen to Negro jazz on the radio and sometime question CIA agents who have fallen into our hands." He pulled a small spiral notebook from a pocket, moistened a thumb on his tongue and started leafing through the pages. "So," he said when he found what he was looking for. "Which one of you is Ebbitt?"

Ebby cleared his throat. "I'm Ebbitt." His voice sounded unnaturally hoarse.

"I see that you have a divorce decree signed by a judge in the city of Las Vegas." Oskar looked up. "You carry a laminated card identifying you as an employee of Sears, Roebuck and a second card admitting you to the S.M. Craw Management course in Springfield, Virginia."

"That's right."

"What exactly is your work at Sears, Roebuck?"

"I am a lawyer. I write contracts."

"So: I ask you this question, Mr. Ebbitt—why would an employee of Sears, Roebuck tell his friends"—Oskar looked down at the notebook— "They will have microphones. They will be listening to everything we say.'"

Ebby raised his chin and squinted into the spotlights as if he were sunning himself. "I read too many spy novels."

"My colleagues and I, we know that S.M. Craw Management is a spy school run by your Central Intelligence Agency. We know that the four of you are conscripted into the CIA's curiously named Soviet Russia Division—curious because Russia is only one of fifteen republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Before your famous espionage agency can learn secrets it should study a Rand McNally atlas."

Leo asked, "What do you want from us?"

Oskar sized up Leo. "For beginning, I want you to abandon the legend of working for the Sears, Roebuck. For next, I want you to abandon the fiction that S.M. Craw teaches management techniques. When you have primed the pump with these admittances many other things will spill from the spigot— the names of your instructors and the details of their instruction, the names and descriptions of your classmates, the details of the cipher systems you learned at the spy school, the names and descriptions of the espionage agents who recruited you or you have met in the course of your training."

Oskar, it turned out, was the first in a series of interrogators who took turns questioning the prisoners without a break. With the spotlights burning into their eyes, the captives quickly lost track of time. At one point Millicent pleaded for permission to go to the toilet. A fat interrogator with a monocle stuck in one eye jerked aside her brassiere and pinched a nipple and then, laughing, motioned for one of the sailors to untie her and lead her to a filthy toilet in the passageway; this turned out to be particularly humiliating for Millicent because the sailor insisted on keeping the door wide open to watch her. If any of the four nodded off during the interrogation, a sailor would jar the sleeper awake with a sharp kick to an ankle. Working from handwritten notes scribbled across the pages of their notebooks, the interrogators walked the captives through the cover stories that had been worked up, sticking wherever possible to actual biographies, during the first week at Craw.

"You claim you worked for the law firm of Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard and Irvine," Oskar told Ebby at one point.

"How many times are you going to cover the same ground? Working for Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard and Irvine isn't the same thing as working for a government agency, damn it."

The cigarette Oskar held between his thumb and middle finger was burning dangerously close to both. When he felt the heat on his skin he flicked it across the room. "Your Mr. Donovan is the same William Donovan who was the chief of the American Office of Strategic Services during the Great Patriotic War?"

"One and the same," Ebby said wearily.

"Mr. Donovan is also the William Donovan who eagerly pushed your President Truman to construct a central intelligence agency after the war."

"I read the same newspapers you do," Ebby shot back.

"As you are a former member of Mr. Donovan's OSS, it would have been logical for him to recommend you to the people who run this new central intelligence agency."

"He would not have recommended me without first asking me if I wanted to return to government service. Why in the world would I give up a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar-a-year job in a prestigious law firm for a six-thousand-four-hundred-dollar job with an intelligence agency? It doesn't make sense."

Ebby realized he had made a mistake the instant the numbers passed his lips. He knew what Oskar's next question would be before he asked it.

"So: Please, how do you know that an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency earns six-thousand-four-hundred-dollars a year?"

Ebby's shoulders lifted in an irritated shrug. "I must have read it in a newspaper."

"And the precise figure of six-thousand-four-hundred lodged in your memory?"

"I suppose it did, yes."

"Why did you give up the thirty-seven-thousand-dollar job to join Sears, Roebuck?"

"Because Mr. Donovan wasn't holding out the prospect of a partnership. Because the Sears people were pleased with the contracts I drew up for them when I was working at Donovan. Because they were paying an arm and a leg for legal work and figured they could come out ahead even if they paid me more than Mr. Donovan paid me."

"Who do you work for at Sears?"

Ebby named names and Oskar copied them into his notebook. He was about to ask another question when one of the sailors came into the room and whispered in his ear. Oskar said, "So: Your Coastal Guard has at last given us permission to get underway." Beneath the feet of the prisoners the deck plates began'to vibrate, faintly at first, then with a distinct throb. "It can be hoped none of you suffer from sea sickness," Oskar said. He switched to Russian and barked an order to one of the sailors. Leo understood what he was saying—Oskar wanted buckets brought around in case anyone should throw up—but he kept his eyes empty of expression.

Slumped in her chair, Millicent held up better than the others had expected; she seemed to take strength from the tenacity with which they stuck to their legends. Again and again the interrogator returned to the Craw Management course; he even described the class in tradecraft given by a one-armed instructor named Andrews, but Millicent only shook her head. She couldn't say what the others had been doing at Craw, she could only speak for herself; she had been studying techniques of management. Yes, she vaguely remembered seeing a one-armed man in the room where mail was sorted but she had never taken a course with him. No, there had never been a field trip to Norfolk to try and steal secrets from military bases. Why on earth would someone studying management want to steal military secrets? What would they do with them after they had stolen them?

And then suddenly there was a commotion in the passageway. The door was ajar and men in uniform could be seen lumbering past. The two interrogators in the room at that moment exchanged puzzled looks. Oskar gestured with his head. They both stepped outside and had a hushed conversation in Russian with a heavy-set man wearing the gold braid of a naval officer on his sleeves. Leo thought he heard "cipher machine" and "leadweighted bag," and he was sure he heard "overboard if the Americans try to intercept us."

"What are they saying?" Jack growled. He was beginning to wonder if they had been caught up in a Company exercise after all.

"They talking about putting their cipher machine in a weighted bag and throwing it into the sea if the Americans try to intercept the ship," Leo whispered.

"Jesus," Ebby said. "The last order that reached the Japanese embassy in Washington on December sixth, 1941 was to destroy the ciphers, along with their cipher machines."

"Damnation, the Russians must be going to war," Jack said.

Millicent's chin sank forward onto her chest and she began to tremble.

Oskar, still in the passageway, could be heard talking about "the four Americans," but what he said was lost in the wail of a siren. The naval officer snapped angrily, "Nyet, nyet" The officer raised his voice and Leo distinctly heard him say, "I am the one who decides... the Liepaja is under my... in half an... sunrise... by radio... cement and throw them over..."

Ebby and Jack turned to Leo for a translation. They could tell from the wild look in his eyes that the news was calamitous. "They're saying something about cement," Leo whispered. "They're talking about throwing us into the sea if we don't talk."

"It's part of the exercise," Ebby declared, forgetting about the microphones in the bulkhead. "They're trying to terrorize us."

His face ashen, his brow furrowed, Oskar returned to the room alone. "Very unsatisfactory news," he announced. "There has been a confrontation in Berlin. Shots were fired. Soldiers on both sides were killed. Our Politburo has given your President Truman an ultimatum: Withdraw your troops from Berlin in twelve hours or we will consider ourselves to be in a state of war."

Half a dozen sailors barged into the room. Some were carrying sacks of cement, others empty twenty-five-gallon paint cans. Another sailor ran a length of hose into the room, then darted out to hook it up to a faucet in the toilet. Oskar shook his head in despair. "Please believe me—it was never my intention that it should come to this," he said in a hollow voice. He unhooked his sunglasses from his ears; his bulging eyes were moist with emotion. "The ones we kidnapped before, we frightened them but we always let them go in the end."

Tears ran from Millicent s eyes and she started to shiver uncontrollably despite the stifling heat in the room. Ebby actually stopped breathing for a long moment and then panicked when, for a terrifying instant, he couldn't immediately remember how to start again. Leo desperately tried to think of something he could tell Oskar—he remembered Mr. Andrews's saying you had to become the person the enemy would never suspect you of being. Who could he become? Suddenly he had a wild idea—he would tell them he was a Soviet agent under instructions to infiltrate the CIA? Would Oskar fall for it? Would he even take the time to check it out with his superiors in Moscow?

Water began to trickle from the end of the hose and the sailors gashed open the paper sacks and started filling the four paint cans with cement. Oskar said, "I ask you, I beg you, give me what I need to save your lives. If you are CIA recruits I can countermand the orders, I can insist that we take you back to Latvia so our experts can interrogate you." Rolling his head from side to side in misery, Oskar pleaded, "Only help me and I will do everything in my power to save you."

Millicent blurted out, "I will—"

Oskar stabbed the air with a finger and one of the sailors untied the rope that bound her to the chair. Shaking convulsively, she slumped forward onto her knees. Between sobs, words welled up from the back of her throat. "Yes, yes, it's true... all of us... I was recruited out of law school... because of my looks, because I spoke Italian... Craw to take courses..." She darted to gag on words, then sucked in a great gulp of air and began fitting out names and dates and places. When Oskar tried to interrupt her she clamped her palms over her ears and plunged on, describing down to the last detail the pep talk the Wiz had delivered at the Cloud Club, describing Owen-Brack's threat to terminate anyone who gave away Company secrets. Scraping the back of her mind, she came up with details of the courses she had taken at Craw. "The man who taught tradecraft, he's a great hero at the Pickle Factory—"

"Pickle Factory?"

A watery rheum seeped from Millicent's nostrils onto her upper lip. She nicked it away with the back of her hand. "More, more—I can tell you more. I was supposed to lure them, money, flattery, fuck them, picks and locks, his name is Andrew but, oh God, I can't remember if that's his first name or family name." Oskar tried to interrupt her again but she pleaded, "More, much more, please for Christ's sake—"

And she looked up and saw, through her tears, Mr. Andrews standing in the doorway, the sleeve of his sports jacked folded back, his eyes flickering in mortification, and she fell silent and swallowed hard and then screamed "Bastard... bastard... PRICK!" and pitched forward to pound her forehead against the deck plates until Oskar and one of the sailors restrained her. Her body twitching, she kept murmuring something to herself that sounded like "Bread-and-butter, bread-and-butter."

Watching Mr. Andrews avert his eyes from Millicent's near-naked body, Leo suddenly remembered what he had said that last day in the seminar on interrogation techniques; in his mind's ear he could hear Mr. Andrew's voice. "Believe me, I am speaking from experience when I tell you that anyone can be broken in six hours. Tops. Without exception. Anyone." An infinitely sad expression had superimposed itself on the ugly scars of Mr. Andrews's face. "Curiously, it's not the pain that breaks you—you get so accustomed to it, so accustomed to your own voice yowling like an animal, that you are incapable of remembering what the absence of pain felt like. No, it's not the pain but the fear that breaks you. And there are a hundred ways of instilling fear. There is only sure one way to avoid being broken: for the love of God, observe the Eleventh Commandment of intelligence work—never, never get caught."

There was no postmortem, at least not a formal one. News of the mock kidnapping had spread, as it was meant to; the Company wanted it clearly understood that the Marquess of Queensberry rules didn't apply to the great game of espionage. Classmates accosted the three principals in the corridors to ask if it were true and when they said yes, it had happened more or less the way they'd heard it, the others shook their heads in disbelief. Leo discovered that Millicent Pearlstein had been taken away in an unmarked ambulance to a Company clinic somewhere on the Piedmont plateau of Virginia; there was no question of keeping her on board, it was said, not because she had cracked, but because the fault line could never be repaired and the Company needed to weed out the people with fault lines. Mr. Andrews took Leo aside one afternoon and told him he felt terrible about Millicent but he thought it was better this way. She hadn't been cut out for the life of a field officer; when she was back on her feet she would be paid a small indemnity and steered to another, tamer, government security agency—both the State Department and the Defense Department ran intelligence collecting operations of their own.

At the end of the week the recruits began packing their bags—they were being accorded a two-week holiday before reporting for their assignments. By chance, a new batch of recruits was checking into the Hilton Inn. Jack and Leo recognized two of them from Yale.

"Holy shit, you guys look as if you've been through the Maytag wringer," one of them said.

"So how tough is it?" the other wanted to know.

"Its a pushover," Jack said. "I didn't work up a sweat."

"Easy as falling off a log," Leo agreed.

Both of them tried to smile. Neither of them could locate the muscles that did that sort of thing.

Part 6

2

MOSCOW, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1950

MUSCOVITES COULDN'T REMEMBER ANYTHING LIKE IT IN THIS century. Drifts of heat had clawed their way up from the Kara Kum Desert in Turkmenistan, asphyxiating the sprawling capitol, cooking the asphalt of the streets until it felt gummy under the soles of summer shoes. The sweltering temperatures had driven thousands of Muscovites, stripped to their underwear, into the polluted waters of the Moscow River for relief. Yevgeny found shelter in the bar of the Metropole Hotel near Red Square, where he'd gone for a late afternoon drink with the gorgeous Austrian exchange student he'd flirted with on the flight back from the States. Not for the first time Yevgeny took a mordant pleasure in passing himself off as an American; he thought of it as an indoor sport. The Austrian girl, a dyed-in-the-wool socialist overdosing on Marxism at Lomonosov University, was ecstatic at the daily reports of North Korean victories and American defeats, and it took a while before Yevgeny managed to steer the conversation away from politics and onto sex. It turned out the girl was willing but not able—she was afraid to invite him up to her dormitory room for fear a KGB informer would eavesdrop on their lovemaking and she would be expelled from Russia for anti-socialist behavior. And no amount of coaxing ("In Das Kapital, volume two," Yevgeny—ad libbing with a straight face—said at one point, "Marx makes the case that chastity is a bourgeoisie vice that will not survive the class struggle") could convince her otherwise. Yevgeny eventually gave up on her and, suddenly aware of the hour, tried to flag down a taxi in front of the Bolshoi. When that didn't work out he ducked into the metro and rode it across the river to the Maksim Gorky Embankment and jogged the hundred-fifty meters uphill toward the new nine-story apartment complex where his father had gone to ground after his retirement from the United Nations Secretariat. At the walled entrance to the complex, three high-rise buildings dominating the Moscow River, a militiaman stepped out of the booth and crisply demanded Yevgeny's internal passport. The complex on the Lenin Hills had been set aside for high-ranking Party secretaries and senior diplomats and important editors and was guarded round the clock, which only added to the aura of the nomenklatura lucky enough to be allotted apartments in any of the buildings. The star resident, so Yevgeny's father had boasted on the phone, was none other than Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the tubby Ukrainian peasant who had made a name for himself in the '30s supervising the building of the Moscow metro and was now one of the "kittens" in Stalin's Politburo; Khrushchev occupied what the Russians (even writing in Cyrillic) called the "bel etage" and had a private elevator that served his floor only. The militiaman examined the photograph in the passport and, looking up, carefully matched it against Yevgeny's face, then ran a finger down the list on his clipboard until he came to the name Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Tsipin. "You are expected," he announced in the toneless pitch of self-importance common to policemen the world over, and waved Yevgeny toward the building. There was another militiaman inside the lobby and a third operating the elevator; the latter let the visitor off on the eighth floor and waited, with the elevator door open, until Aleksandr Timofeyevich Tsipin answered Yevgeny's ring and signalled that he recognized the guest. Yevgeny's father, still wearing a black mourning band on the sleeve of his suit jacket eleven months after his wife's death, drew his oldest son into the air-conditioned apartment and embraced him awkwardly, planting a scratchy kiss on each check.

It was difficult to say who felt more self-conscious at this show of affection, the father or the son.

"I apologize for not seeing you sooner," mumbled the elder Tsipin. There were conferences, there were reports to finish."

"The usual things. How is your rheumatism?"

'It comes, it goes, depending on the weather. Since when have you been cultivating a goatee?"

"Since I last saw you, which was at my mother's funeral."

Tsipin avoided his son's eye. "Sorry I was unable to offer you a bed. Where did you wind up living?"

"A friend has a room in a communal apartment. He is putting me up on a couch."

Through the double door of the vast living room, Yevgeny caught a glimpse of the immense picture window with its breathtaking view of the river and of Moscow sprawling beyond it. "Ochen khorosha, " he said. "The Soviet Union treats its former senior diplomats like tsars."

"Grinka is here," the elder Tsipin said, hooking an arm through Yevgeny's and leading him into the living room. "He took the overnight train down from Leningrad when he heard you were coming. I also invited a friend, and my friend brought along a friend of his." He favored his son with a mysterious grin. "I am sure you will find my friend interesting." He lowered his voice and leaned toward his son's ear. "If he asks you about America I count on you to emphasize the faults."

Yevgeny spotted his younger brother through the double door and bounded across the room to wrap Grinka in a bear hug. Tsipin's longtime servant, a lean middle-aged Uzbek woman with the delicate features of a bird, was serving zakuski to the two guests near the window. A sigh of pure elation escaped her lips when she saw Yevgeny. She cried out to him in Uzbek and, pulling his head down, planted kisses on his forehead and both shoulders.

Yevgeny said, "Hello to you, Nyura."

"Thanks to God you are returned from America alive," she exclaimed. "It is said the cities are under the command of armed gangsters."

"Our journalists tend to see the worst," he told her with a smile. He leaned over and kissed her on both cheeks, causing her to bow her head and blush.

"Nyura practically raised Yevgeny during the war years when his mother and I were posted to Turkey," Tsipin explained to his guests.

"I spent several days in Istanbul on a secret mission before the war started," the older of the two remarked. "My memory is that it was a chaotic city."

Yevgeny noticed that the guest spoke Russian with an accent he took to be German. "It was my dream to be allowed to live with my parents in Istanbul," he said, "but Turkey in those days was a center of international intrigue—there were kidnappings, even murders—and I was obliged to remain in Alma-Ata with Nyura and Grinka for safety's sake."

Tsipin did the introductions. "Yevgeny, I present to you Martin Dietrich. Comrade Dietrich, please meet my oldest son recently returned from his American university. And this is Pavel Semyonovich Zhilov, Pasha for short, a great friend to me for more years than I care to remember. Pasha is known to the comrades—"

"Perhaps you will have the good fortune to become one," Dietrich told Yevgeny with elaborate formality.

"—as Starik."

Yevgeny shook hands with both men, then flung an arm over the shoulder of his younger brother as he inspected his father's guests. Martin Dietrich was on the short side, stocky, in his early fifties with a washed-out complexion, tired humorless eyes and surgical scars on his cheeks where skin had been grafted over the facial bones. Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov was a tall, reed-like man who looked as if he had stepped out of another century and was ill at ease in the present one. In his mid or late thirties, he had the scraggy pewter beard of a priest and brooding blue eyes that narrowed slightly and fixed on you with unnerving intensity. His fingernails were thick and long and cropped squarely, in the manner of peasants'. He was dressed in baggy trousers and a rough white shirt whose broad collar, open at the neck, offered a glimpse of a finely wrought silver chain. A dark peasants jacket plunged to his knees. He stood there cracking open toasted Samarkand apricot pits with thick thumbnails and popping the nuts into his mouth. Half a dozen small silk rosettes were pinned on his lapel. Yevgeny, who had learned to identify the rosettes during a stint in the Komsomol Youth Organization, recognized several: the Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of the Red Banner, the Order ofAleksandr Nevsky, the Order of the Red Star. Nodding toward the rosettes, Yevgeny said, with just a trace of mockery, "You are clearly a great war hero. Perhaps one day you will tell me the story behind each of your medals."

Starik, puffing on a Bulgarian cigarette with a long hollow tip, eyed his host's son. "Contrary to appearances, I do not live in the past," he said flatly.

"That alone sets you apart from everyone else in Russia," Yevgeny said. He helped himself to a cracker spread with caviar. "Starik—the old man— was what the comrades called Lenin, wasn't it? How did you come to be called by such a name?"

Yevgeny's father answered for him. "In Lenin's case it was because he was so much older than the others around him at the time of the Revolution. In Pasha's case it was because he talked like Tolstoy long before he let his beard grow."

Yevgeny, who had acquired the American gift for insouciance, asked with an insolent grin, "And what do you talk about when you talk like Tolstoy?"

His father tried to divert the conversation. "How was your flight back from America, Yevgeny?"

Starik waved off his host. "There is no harm done, Aleksandr Timofeyevich. I prefer curious young men to those who, at twenty-one, know all there is to know."

He turned a guarded smirk on Yevgeny for the first time; Yevgeny recognized it for what it was—the enigmatic expression of someone who thought of life as an intricate game of chess. Another member of the Communist nomenklatura who climbed over the bodies of his colleagues to get ahead!

Starik spit a spoiled Samarkand nut onto the Persian carpet. "What I talk about," he told Yevgeny, articulating his words carefully, "is a state secret."

Later, over dinner, Starik steered the subject to America and asked Yevgeny for his impressions. Did he believe racial tensions would lead to a Negro uprising? Would the exploited Caucasian proletariat support such a revolt? Yevgeny responded by saying that he hadn't really been in America— he'd been in Yale, a ghetto populated by members of the privileged classes who could afford tuition, or the occasional scholarship student who aspired to join the privileged class. "As for the Negroes revolting," he added, "man will walk on the moon before that happens. Whoever is telling you such things simply doesn't know what he's talking about."

"I read it in Pravda," Starik said, watching his host's son to see if he would back down.

Yevgeny suddenly felt as if he were taking an oral exam. "The journalists of Pravda are telling you what they think you should hear," he said. "If we hope to compete successfully with the immense power of capitalist America we must first understand what makes it tick."

"Do you understand what makes it tick?"

"I begin to understand America well enough to know there is no possibility that its Negroes will revolt."

"And what do you plan to do with this knowledge you have of America?" Starik inquired.

"I have not figured that out yet."

Grinka asked his father if he had seen the Pravda story about the TASS journalist in Washington who had been drugged and photographed in bed with a stark-naked teenage girl, after which the American CIA had tried to blackmail him into spying for it. Yevgeny commented that there was a good chance the TASS man had been a KGB agent to begin with. His father, refilling the glasses from a chilled bottle of Hungarian white wine, remarked that the Americans regularly accused Soviet journalists and diplomats of being spies.

Yevgeny regarded his father. "Aren't they?" he asked with a laugh in his eyes.

Starik raised his wineglass to eye level and studied Yevgeny over the rim as he turned the stem in his fingers. "Let us be frank: Sometimes they are," he said evenly. "But Socialism, if it is to survive, must defend itself."

"And don't we try the same tricks on them that they try on us?" Yevgeny persisted.

Martin Dietrich turned out to have a mild sense of humor after all. "With all my heart, I hope so," he announced. "Considering the dangers they run, spies are underpaid and occasionally need to be compensated with something other than money."

"To an outsider, I can see how the business of spying sometimes appears to be an amusing game," Starik conceded, his eyes riveted on Yevgeny across the table. Turning to his host, he launched into the story of a French military attaché who had been seduced by a young woman who worked at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. "One night he visited her in the single room she shared with one other girl. Before you knew it he and the two girls had removed their clothing and jumped into bed. Of course the girls worked for our KGB. They filmed the whole thing through a two-way mirror. When they discreetly confronted the attaché with still photographs, he burst into laughter and asked them if they could supply him with copies to send to his wife in Paris to prove that his virility had not diminished during his two years in Moscow."

Yevgeny s eyes widened slightly. How was it that his father's friend knew such a story? Was Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov connected with the KGB? Yevgeny glanced at his father—he had always assumed he had some sort of relationship with the KGB. After all, diplomats abroad were expected to keep their eyes and ears open and report back to their handlers. Their handlers! Could it be that Starik was his father's conducting officer? The elder Tsipin had introduced Starik as his great friend. If Starik was his handler, his father may have played a more active role in Soviet intelligence than his son imagined; Zhilov simply didn't seem like someone who merely debriefed returning diplomats.

There was another riddle that intrigued Yevgeny: Who was the quiet German who went by the name Martin Dietrich and looked as if his features had been burned—or altered by plastic surgery? And what had he done for the Motherland to merit wearing over his breast pocket a ribbon indicating that he, too, was a Hero of the Soviet Union?

Back in the living room, Nyura set out Napoleon brandy and snifters, which the host half-filled and Grinka handed around. Zhilov and Tsipin were in the middle of an argument about what had stopped the seemingly invincible Germans when they attacked the Soviet Union. Grinka, a second-year student of history and Marxist theory at Leningrad University, said, "The same thing that stopped Napoleon—Russian bayonets and Russian winter."

"We had a secret weapon against both Napoleons Grand Army and Hitler's Wehrmacht," Aleksandr instructed his youngest son. "It was the rasputitsa—the rivers of melting snow in the spring, the torrents of rain in the autumn—that transform the Steppe into an impassable swamp. I remember that the rasputitsa was especially severe in March of '41, preventing the Germans from attacking for several crucial weeks. It was severe again in October of '41 and the winter frost that hardens the ground enough for tanks to operate came late, which left the Wehrmacht bogged down within sight of the spires of Moscow when the full force of winter struck."

"Aleksandr is correct—we had a secret weapon. But it was neither our bayonets nor the Russian winter, nor the rasputitsa," Zhilov said. "It was our spies who told us which of the German thrusts were feints and which were real; who told us how much petrol stocks their tanks had on hand so we could figure out how long they could run; who told us that the Wehrmacht, calculating that the Red Army could not resist the German onslaught, had not brought up winter lubricants, which meant their battle tanks would be useless once the weather turned cold."

Yevgeny felt the warmth of the brandy invade his chest. "I have never understood how the Motherland lost twenty million killed in the Great Patriotic War—a suffering so enormous it defies description—yet those who participated in the blood bath speak of it with nostalgia?"

"Do you remember the stories of the Ottoman sultans ruling an empire that stretched from the Danube to the Indian Ocean?" Starik inquired. "They would recline on cushions in the lush garden pavilions of Istanbul wearing archer's rings on their thumbs to remind them of battles they could only dimly remember." His large head swung round slowly in Yevgeny s direction. "In a manner of speaking, all of us who fought the Great Patriotic War wear archer's rings on our thumbs or rosettes on our lapels. When our memories fade all we will have left of that heroic moment will be our rings and our medals."

Later, waiting for the elevator to arrive, Starik talked in an undertone with his host. As the elevator door opened Zhilov turned back toward Yevgeny and casually offered him a small calling card. "I invite you to take tea with me," he murmured. "Perhaps I will tell you the story behind one of my medals after all."

If the dinner had been a test, Yevgeny understood that he had passed it. Almost against his will he found himself being drawn to this unkempt peasant of a man who—judging from his bearing; judging, too, from the deference with which his father had treated him—clearly outranked a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. And much to his surprise he heard himself say, "I would consider it a privilege."

"Tomorrow at four-thirty." Starik wasn't asking, he was informing. "Leave word with your father where you will be and I will send a car for you. The calling card will serve as a laissez-passer"—Starik used the French phrase—"for the militiamen guarding the outer gate."

"The outer gate of what?" Yevgeny asked, but Starik had disappeared into the elevator.

Yevgeny was turning the card in his fingers when Grinka snatched it out of his hand. "He's a general polkovnik—a colonel general—in the KGB," he said with a whistle. "What do you think he wants with you?"

"Perhaps he wants me to follow in our father's footsteps," Yevgeny told his brother.

"Become a diplomat!"

"Is that what you were, father?" Yevgeny asked with an insolent smile.

"What I was, was a servant of my country," the elder Tsipin responded in irritation. He turned abruptly and left the room.

Yevgeny saw his brother off at the Leningrad Railway Station, then crossed Komsomolskaya Square to the kiosk with the distinctive red-tiled roof and waited in the shade. As the station clock struck four a black Zil with gleaming chrome and tinted windows pulled to a stop in front of him. The windows were closed, which meant that the car was ventilated. A roundfaced man wearing sunglasses and a bright Kazakh hat rolled down the front window.

Are you from—" Yevgeny began.

"Don't be thick," the man said impatiently. "Get in."

Yevgeny climbed into the back. The Zil turned around the Ring Road and sped out of the city heading southwest on the Kaluga Road. Yevgeny rapped his knuckles on the thick glass partition separating him from the two men in the front seat. The one with the Kazakh hat glanced over his shoulder.

"How long will it take to get where we are going?" Yevgeny called through the partition. The man flashed five fingers three times and turned back.

Yevgeny sank into the cool leather of the seat and passed the time studying the people along the street. He remembered the elation he'd felt as a child when his father had taken him and Grinka for excursions in the attache's car and being chauffeured by one of the uniformed militiamen from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a dark man with slanting eyes and a peach-shaped face who called the boys "Little Sirs" when he held the door for them. Peering from behind the car's curtains, Yevgeny would pretend that he and his brother were heroes of Mother Russia who had been decorated by the Great Helmsman, Comrade Stalin, himself; from time to time the two boys would wave imperiously at some peasants along the route to Peredelkino, where his father had purchased a Ministry dacha. Now, in the Zil, the driver leaned on the horn and pedestrians scattered out of his way. The car slowed, but never stopped, for red lights. When they spotted the Zil, militiamen sweating in tunics buttoned up to the neck brought cross traffic to a standstill with their batons and prevented the swarm of pedestrians from surging across the boulevard. As the car flew by people gazed at the tinted windows, trying to figure out which member of the Politburo or Central Committee might be behind them.

After a time the Zil turned onto a narrow one-lane road with a sign at the edge reading, "Center for Study—No Admittance." They drove for three or four minutes through a forest of white birches, the bark peeling from the trunks like discarded paper wrapping. Through the trees Yevgeny caught sight of a small abandoned church, its door and windows gaping open, its single onion-shaped dome leaning into the heat wave from Central Asia. The limousine swung into a driveway paved with fine white gravel and pulled up in front of a small brick building. A high chain-link fence topped with coils of barbed wire stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. Two gray-and-tan Siberian huskies prowled back and forth at the end of long ropes fastened to trees. An Army officer came around to the rear window. A soldier with a PPD-34 under his arm, its round clip inserted, watched from behind a pile of sandbags. Yevgeny rolled the window down just enough to pass Starik's calling card to the officer. A hot blast of outside air filled the back of the car. The officer looked at the card, then handed it back and waved the driver on. At the end of the gravel driveway loomed a pre-revolutionary three-story mansion. Around the side of the house, two little girls, barefoot and wearing short smock-like dresses, were crying out in mock fright as they soared high or dipped low on a seesaw. Nearby, a mottled white-and-brown horse, reins hanging loose on his neck, cropped the grass. A young man in a tight suit, alerted by the guards at the gate, was waiting at the open door, his arms folded self-importantly across his chest, his shoulders hunched against the heat. "You are invited to follow me," he said when Yevgeny came up the steps. He preceded the visitor down a marble hallway and up a curving flight of stairs covered with a worn red runner, rapped twice on a door on the second floor, threw it open and stepped back to let Yevgeny through.

Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov, cooling himself in front of a Westinghouse air conditioner fixed in a window of the antechamber, was reading aloud from a thin book to two small girls curled up on a sofa, their knees parted shamelessly, their thin limbs askew. Starik broke off reading when he caught sight of Yevgeny. "Oh, do continue, uncle," one of the little girls pleaded. The other sucked sulkily on her thumb. Ignoring the girls, Starik strode across the room and clasped the hand of his visitor in both of his. Behind Yevgeny the door clicked closed.

"Do you have any idea where you are?" Starik inquired as he gripped Yevgeny's elbow and steered him through a door into a large sitting room.

"Not the slightest," Yevgeny admitted.

"I may tell you that you are in the Southwestern District near the village of Cheryomuski. The estate, originally tens of thousands of hectares, belonged to the Apatov family but, it was taken over by the CHEKA in the early 1920s and has been used as a secret retreat since." He gestured with his head for Yevgeny to follow him as he made his way through a billiard room and into a dining room with a large oval table set with fine china and Czech glass.

"The mansion is actually divided into three apartments — one is used by Viktor Abakumov, who is the head of our SMERSH organization. The second is set aside for the Minister of Internal Security, Comrade Beria. He uses it as a hideaway when he wants to escape from the bedlam of Moscow."

Starik collected a bottle ofNarzan mineral water and two glasses, each with a slice of lemon in it, and continued on to a spacious wood-paneled library filled with hundreds of leather-covered volumes and several dozen small gold- and silver-inlaid icons. On the single stretch of wall not covered with bookcases hung a life-sized portrait of L.N. Tolstoy. The painters name—I.E. Repin—and the date 1887 were visible at the bottom right. Tolstoy, wearing a rough peasant's shirt and a long white beard, had been posed sitting in a chair, a book open in his left hand. Yevgeny noticed that the great writer's fingernails, like Starik's, were thick and long and cut off squarely.

A large wooden table containing a neat pile of file folders stood in the center of the room. Starik set the mineral water and glasses on the table and dipped into a seat. He motioned for Yevgeny to take the seat across from him. "Comrade Beria claims that the calm and the country air are an analgesic for his ulcers—more effective than the hot-water bottles he keeps applying to his stomach. Who can say he is not right?" Starik lit one of his Bulgarian cigarettes. "You don't smoke?"

Yevgeny shook his head.

A man with a shaven head, wearing a black jacket and black trousers, appeared carrying a tray. He set a saucer of sugar cubes and another with slices of apple on the table, filled two glasses with steaming tea from a thermos and set the thermos down. When he had left, closing the door behind him, Starik wedged a cube of sugar between his teeth and, straining the liquid through it, began noisily drinking the tea. Yevgeny could see the Adam's apple bobbing in his sinewy neck. After a moment Starik asked, "Do Americans think there will be war?"

"Some do, some don't. In any case there is a general reluctance to go to war. Americans are a frontier people who have grown soft buying on credit whatever their hearts desire and paying off their mortgages for the rest of their lives."

Starik opened the file folder on top of the pile and began to leaf through the report as he sipped his tea. "I do not agree with your analysis. The American Pentagon thinks there will be war—they have actually predicted that it will start on the first of July 1952. A great many in the American Congress agree with the Pentagon forecast. When it was organized in 1947, the CIA was treated as a stepchild in matters of financing; now it is getting unlimited funds and recruiting agents at a feverish pace. And there is nothing soft about the training phase. The Soviet Russia Division, which is our glavni protivnik—how would you say that in American?"

"Principal adversary."

Starik tried out the words in English. "The principal adversary"—and quickly switched back to Russian—"organizes realistic kidnappings of their own officers by Russians on its staff pretending to be KGB agents, who then menace the recruits with death if they refuse to confess that they work for the CIA. The test is shrewd in as much as it establishes which of the new officers can survive the psychological shock of the episode and move on."

Starik looked up from the folder. "I am impressed by the questions you don't ask."

"If I asked how you knew such a thing you would not tell me, so why bother?"

Starik gulped more tea. "I propose that we speak as if we have known each other as long as I have known your father." When Yevgeny nodded assent he continued: "You come from a distinguished family with a long history of service to Soviet intelligence organs. In the twenties, at the time of the Civil War, your father's father was a Chekist, fighting alongside Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky when he created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage. Your father's brother is head of a department in the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB—ah, I see you were not aware of that."

"I was told that he worked for.. .but it doesn't matter what I was told."

"And your father—"

"My father?"

"He has worked for First Chief Directorate for years while he held diplomatic posts, the most recent of which, as you know, was an Under Secretary Generalship in the United Nations Secretariat. For the past twelve years I have been his conducting officer, so I can personally attest to his enormous contribution to our cause. I have been told you take a rather cynical view of this cause. At its core, what is Communism? A crazy idea that there is a side to us we have not yet explored. The tragedy of what we call Marxism-Leninism is that Lenin's hope and Zinoviev's expectation that the German revolution would lead to the establishment of a Soviet Germany were foiled. The first country to try the experiment was not proletarian-rich Germany but peasant-poor Russia. The capitalists never tire of throwing in our faces that we are a backward country, but look where we come from. I hold the view that our Communists can be divided into two groups: tsars who promote Mother Russia and Soviet vlast, and dreamers who promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit."

"My mother spoke often about the genius and generosity of the human spirit."

"I have nothing against expanding Soviet power but, in my heart of hearts I belong, like your mother, to the second category. Are you at all familiar with Leon Tolstoy, Yevgeny? Somewhere in one of his letters he says"—Starik threw back his head and closed his eyes and recited in a melodious voice—'"the changes in our life must come, not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life, but rather from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience.'" When he opened his eyes they were burning with fervor. "Our political system, in as much as it comes from a mental resolution to try a new form of life, is flawed. (I speak to you frankly; if you were to repeat what I tell you I could be prosecuted for treason.) The flaw has led to aberrations. But which political system hasn't its aberrations? In the previous century Americans collected blankets from soldiers who died of smallpox and distributed them to the native Indians. Southerners exploited their Negro slaves and lynched the ones who rebelled against this exploitation. French Catholics tied weights to the ankles of French Protestants and threw them into rivers. The Spanish Inquisition burned Hebrew and Muslim converts to Christianity at the stake because it doubted the sincerity of the conversions. Catholic Crusaders, waging holy war against Islam, locked Jews in temples in Jerusalem and burned them alive. All of which is to say that our system of Communism, like other political systems before it, will survive the aberrations of our tsars." Starik refilled his glass from the thermos. "How long were you in America?"

"My father began working for the UN immediately after the war. Which means I was in the states, let's see, almost five-and-a-half years—three and a half years at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, then my junior and senior year at Yale thanks to the strings my father got Secretary-General Lie to pull."

Starik extracted a folder from the middle of the pile and held it so that Yevgeny could see the cover. His name—"Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Tsipin" was written across it, with the notation: "Very secret. No distribution whatsoever." He opened the folder and pulled out a sheet filled with handwritten notes. "Your father was not the one who got Secretary-General Lie to pull strings. It was me, working through Foreign Minister Molotov, who pulled the strings. You obviously have no memory of it but you and I have met before, Yevgeny. It was at your father's dacha in Peredelkino six years ago. You were not quite fifteen years of age at the time and attending Special School Number 19 in Moscow. You were eager, bright, with an ear for languages; you already spoke American well enough to converse with your mother—it was, I remember, your secret language so that your brother would not understand what you were saying."

Yevgeny smiled at the memory. Talking with Starik, he understood what it must be like to confess to a priest; you felt the urge to tell him things you didn't normally reveal to a stranger. "For obvious reasons it was not something that was spoken of, but my mother was descended from the aristocracy that traced is lineage back to Peter the Great—like Peter she was forever turning her eyes toward the West. She loved foreign languages—she herself spoke French as well as English. She had studied painting at La Grande Chaumiere in Paris as a young woman and it marked her for life. I suspect that her marriage turned out to be a great disappointment to my mother, though she was thrilled when my father was sent abroad."

"That day at Peredelkino six years ago your father had just learned of the United Nations posting. Your mother talked him into taking you and your brother with them to America—he was reluctant at first, but your mother turned to me and I helped convince him. Your brother wound up studying at the Soviet Consulate school in New York. As you were older than Grinka your mother dreamed of enrolling you in an American high school, but the Foreign Ministry apparatchiki refused to waive the standing rules against such things. Once again your mother turned to me. I went over their heads and appealed directly to Molotov. I told him that we desperately needed people who were educated in America and were steeped in its language and culture. I remember Molotov's asking me whether you could survive an American education to become a good Soviet citizen. I gave him my pledge that you would."

"Why were you so sure?"

"I was not, but I was willing to take the risk for your mother's sake. She and I were distant cousins, you see, but there was more than a vague family tie between us. Over the years we had become—friends. It was the friendship of what I shall call, for want of a better expression, kindred spirits. We didn't see eye to eye at all on everything, and most especially on Marxism; but on other matters we saw heart to heart. And then—then there was something about you, a lust lurking in the pupils of your eyes. You wanted to believe—in a cause, in a mission, in a person." Starik's eyes narrowed. "You were like your mother in many ways. You both had a superstitious streak." He laughed to himself at a memory. "You were always spitting over your shoulder for good luck. Your mother always sat on her valise before starting on a voyage—it was something right out of Dostoyevsky. She never turned back once she crossed the threshold or, if she did, she looked at herself in a mirror before starting out again."

"I still do these things." Yevgeny thought a moment. "At Erasmus High we were not sure I would get permission to apply to Yale; not sure, when they accepted me, that my father could raise the hard currency to pay the tuition."

"It was me who organized for you to receive permission to apply to Yale. It was me who arranged for your father's book—From the Soviet Point of View—to be published by left-wing houses in several European and Third World countries, after which I made sure that the book earned enough for him to afford the tuition."

Yevgeny said, in a muffled voice, "What you are telling me takes my breath away"

Starik sprang to his feet and came around the table and gazed down at his young visitor. His peasant jacket swung open and Yevgeny caught a glimpse of the worn butt of a heavy naval pistol tucked into his waistband. The sight made his heart beat faster.

Starik demanded, abandoning the formal "vui," switching to the intimate "ti." "Have I misjudged you, Yevgeny? Have I misjudged your courage and your conscience? Your command of the American language, your knowledge of America, your ability to pass for an American, give you the possibility of making a unique contribution. You know only what you have read in books; I will teach you things that are not in books. Will you follow in your grandfather's and your fathers footsteps? Will you enlist in the ranks of our Chekists and work with the dreamers who promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit?"

Yevgeny cried out, "With all my heart, yes." Then he repeated it with an urgency he had never felt before. "Yes, yes, I will follow where you lead me."

Starik, an austere man who seldom permitted himself the luxury of expressing emotions, reached over and clasped Yevgeny's hand in both of his large hands. His lips curled into an unaccustomed smile. "There are many rites of passage into my world, but by far the greatest is to demonstrate to you how much I trust you—with the lives of our agents, with state secrets, with my own well-being. Now I will relate to you the story behind my Order of the Red Banner. The tale is a state secret of the highest magnitude—so high that even your father does not know it. Once you hear it there will be no turning back."

"Tell me this secret."

"It concerns the German Martin Dietrich," he began in a hoarse whisper. "He was a Soviet spy in the Great Patriotic War. His real name"— Starik's eyes burned into Yevgeny's—"was Martin Bormann. Yes, the Martin Bormann who was Hitler's deputy. He was a Soviet agent from the late twenties; in 1929 we pushed him to marry the daughter of a Nazi close to Hitler and thus gain access to the Fuhrer's inner circle. When the war started Bormann betrayed Hitler's strategy to us. He told us which of the German thrusts were feints, he told us how much petrol their tanks had on hand, he told us that the Wehrmacht had not brought up winter lubricants for their tanks in 1941. From the time of the great German defeat at Stalingrad Bormann was instrumental in pushing Hitler, over the objections of the generals, to make irrational decisions—the Fuhrer's refusal to permit von Paulus to break out of the Stalingrad trap resulted in the loss of eight hundred and fifty thousand Fascist troops. And during all that time I was Martin's conducting officer."

"But Bormann was said to have died during the final battle for Berlin!"

"Some weeks before the end of the war German intelligence officers stumbled across deciphered intercepts that suggested Martin could be a Soviet spy. They confided in Goebbels, but Goebbels was unable to work up the nerve to tell Hitler, who by then was a ranting madman. In the final hours of the final battle Martin made his way across the Tiergarten toward the Lehrter Station. For a time he was pinned down in a crossfire between advance units of Chuikov's 8th Guards and an SS unit dug in next to the station, but during the night of first to second of May he finally managed to cross the line. I had arranged to meet Martin at the station. Our front line troops were told to be on the alert for a German officer dressed in a long leather coat with a camouflage uniform underneath. I took him to safety."

"Why have you kept the story secret?"

"Martin brought with him microdots containing German files on Western espionage services. We decided it was to our advantage to have the world think that Bormann had been loyal to Hitler to the end and had been killed while trying to escape Berlin. We changed his appearance with plastic surgery. He is retired now but for years he was a high-ranking officer of our intelligence service."

Starik released Yevgeny's hand and returned to his seat. "Now," he said in a triumphant voice, "we will, together, take the first steps in a long journey."

Part 7

In the weeks that followed, Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin disappeared through the looking glass into a clandestine world peopled by eccentric characters who had mastered bizarre skills. The trip was exhilarating; for the first time in memory he felt as if the attention being showered on him had nothing to do with the fact that he was his father's son. He was given the code name Gregory; he himself selected the surname Ozolin, which Starik immediately recognized as the name of the stationmaster at Astapovo, the godforsaken backwater where Tolstoy, on the lam from his wife, had breathed his last. ("And what were his last words?" Starik, who had been something of a Tolstoy scholar in his youth, challenged his protege. '"The truth—I care a great deal,"' Yevgeny shot back. "Bravo!" cried Starik. Bravo!") Without fanfare Gregory Ozolin was inducted into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, card number 01783753 and assigned to a small Interior Ministry safe house on Granovskiy Street, batiment number 3, second entrance, flat 71, which came with a refrigerator (a rarity in the Soviet Union) filled with pasteurized koumis belonging to the Tajik maid with a mustache on her upper lip. Six mornings a week a bread-delivery van fetched Yevgeny from the alleyway behind the building and whisked him to an underground entrance of the First Chief Directorate's Shkloa Osobogo Naznacheniva (Special Purpose School) in the middle of a woods at Balashikha, some fifteen miles east of the Moscow Ring Road. There Yevgeny, segregated for reasons of security from the scores of male and female students attending classes in the main part of the compound, was given intensive courses in selecting and servicing tayniki (which the Americans called dead drops), secret writing, wireless telegraphy, cryptography in general and one-time pads in particular, photography, Marxist theory, and the glorious history of the Cheka from Feliks Dzerzhinsky down to the present. The curriculum for this last course consisted mostly of maxims, which were supposed to be memorized and regurgitated on demand.

"What was the dictum of the Cheka in 1934?" the instructor, a zealous time-server whose shaven skull glistened under the neon lamp in the classroom, demanded at one session.

"A spy in hand is worth two in the bush?"

Pursing his lips, clucking his tongue, the time-server scolded his student. "Comrade Ozolin will simply have to take this more seriously if he expects to earn a passing grade." And he recited the correct response, obliging Yevgeny to repeat each phrase after him.

"In our work, boldness, daring and audacity..."

"In our work, boldness, daring and audacity..."

"...must be combined..."

"...must be combined..."

"...with prudence."

"...with prudence."

"In other words, dialectics."

"In other words, dialectics."

"I honestly don't see what dialectics has to do with being a successful espionage agent," Yevgeny groaned when Starik turned up, as usual, at midday to share the sandwiches and cold kvass sent over from the canteen.

"It is the heart of the matter," Starik explained patiently. "We cannot teach you everything, but we can teach you how to think. The successful agent is invariably one who has mastered Marxist methodology. Which is to say, he perfects the art of thinking conventionally and then systematically challenges the conventional thinking to develop alternatives that will take the"—his eyes sparkling, Yevgeny's conducting officer dredged up the English term—"'principal adversary' by surprise. The short name for this process is dialectics. You came across it when you studied Hegel and Marx. You develop a thesis, you contradict it with an anthesis and then you resolve the contradiction with a synthesis. I am told that the practical side of the curriculum comes quickly to you. You must make more of an effort on the theoretical side."

On the even days of the month, a sinewy Ossete with a clubfoot and incredibly powerful arms would lead Yevgeny to a windowless room with mattresses propped up against the walls and wrestling mats on the floor, and teach him seven different ways to kill with his bare hands; the absolute precision of the Ossete's gestures convinced Yevgeny that he had diligently practiced the subject he now instructed. On the odd days, Yevgeny was taken down to a soundproofed sub-basement firing range and shown how to strip and clean and shoot a variety of small arms of American manufacture. When he had mastered that he was taken on a field trip to a KGB special laboratory at the edge of a village near Moscow and allowed to test fire one of the exotic weapons that had been developed there, a cigarette case concealing a silent pistol that shot platinum-alloy pellets the size of a pinhead; indentations in the pinhead contained a poisonous extract from the castor oil plant, which (so Yevgeny was assured by a short, myopic man in a white smock) invariably led to cardiovascular collapse.

Evenings, Yevgeny was driven back to his apartment to eat the warm meal that had been set out for him by the Tajik maid. After dinner he was expected to do several hours of homework, which involved keeping abreast of all things American, and most especially sports, by carefully reading Time and Life and Newsweek. He was also ordered to study a series of lectures entitled "Characteristics of Agent Communications and Agent Handling in the USA," written by Lieutenant Colonel I. Ye. Prikhodko, an intelligence officer who had served in New York under diplomatic cover. Fortifying himself with a stiff cognac, Yevgeny would settle into a soft chair with a lamp directed over his shoulder and skim the Prikhodko material. "New York is divided into five sections," one chapter, clearly intended for neophytes, began, "which are called boroughs. Because of its isolation from the main city—one can reach the island only by ferry from Manhattan and from Brooklyn—Richmond is the least suitable of the five boroughs for organizing agent communications. New York's other four sections—named Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens—are widely used by our intelligence officers. Department stores, with their dozens of entrances and exits, some directly into the subway system, are ideal meeting places. Prospect Park in the borough of Brooklyn or cemeteries in the borough of Queens are also excellent places to meet with agents. When organizing such meetings do not specify a spot (for example, the southwest corner of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue) but a route, preferably a small street along which he is to walk at a prearranged time. In this manner one can determine whether or not he is under surveillance before establishing contact."

"I skimmed several of the Prikhodko lectures last night," Yevgeny told Starik one morning. They were in a brand new Volga from the First Chief Directorate's motor pool, heading out of Moscow toward Peredelkino for a Sunday picnic at Yevgeny's father's dacha. As Starik had never learned to drive, Yevgeny was behind the wheel. "They strike me as being fairly primitive."

"They are intended for agents who have never set foot in America, not graduates of Yale University," Starik explained. "Still, there are things in them that can be useful to you. The business about meetings with agents, for example. The CIA is known to favor safe houses because of the possibility of controlling access and egress, and of tape recording or filming what happens during the meeting. We, on the other hand, prefer doing things in open areas because of the opportunities to make sure that you are not being followed."

On the car radio, the sonorous voice of a newscaster reporting from the North Korean capitol of Pyongyang could be heard saying that the American aggressors, who had debarked the day before at Inchon, were being contained by the North Koreans.

"What do you make of the American landing?" Yevgeny asked his conducting officer.

"I have seen very secret briefings—there is no possibility the Americans will be thrown back into the sea. But this outflanking stratagem of the American General MacArthur is a perilous gambit. In fact the Americans are threatening to cut off the North Korean troops in the south, which will oblige the North Koreans to pull back rapidly if they hope to avoid encirclement. The strategic question is whether the Americans will stop at the thirty-eighth parallel, or pursue the Communist armies north to the Yalu River in order to reunify Korea under the puppet regime in Seoul."

"If the Americans continue on to the Yalu what will the Chinese do?"

"They will certainly feel obliged to attack across the river, in which case they will overpower the American divisions with sheer numbers. If the Americans are facing defeat they might bomb China with atomic weapons, in which case we will be obliged to step in."

"In other words we could be in the verge of a world war."

"I hope not; I hope the Americans will have the good sense to stop before they reach the Yalu or, if they don't, I hope they will be able to arrest the inevitable Chinese attack without resorting to atomic weapons. A Chinese attack across the Yalu that eventually fails to defeat the Americans will benefit Sino-Soviet relations, which are showing signs of fraying."

Yevgeny understood that Starik's analysis of the situation was not one that would appear in Pravda. "How would a Chinese setback benefit SinoSoviet relations?"

"For the simple reason that it will demonstrate to the Chinese leadership that they remain vulnerable to Western arms and need to remain under the Soviet atomic umbrella."

Yevgeny drove dirough the village of Peredelkino, which consisted mostly of a wide unpaved road, a Party building with a red star over its door and a statue of Stalin in front, a farmer's cooperative and a local school. At the first road marker beyond the village he turned off and pulled up next to a line of cars already parked in the shade of some trees. A dozen chauffeurs were dozing in the back seats of cars or on newspapers spread out on the ground. Yevgeny led the way along a narrow grassy padi to his father's country house. As they approached they could hear the sound of music and laughter drifting dirough the woods. Four unsmiling civilians wearing dark suits and fedoras stood at the wooden gate; they parted to let Yevgeny past when they spotted Starik behind him. Two dozen or so men and women stood around the lawn watching a young man playing a tiny concertina. Bottles of Armenian cognac and a hard-to-find aged vodka called starka were set out on a long table covered with white sailcloth. Maids wearing white aprons over their long peasant dresses passed around plates filled with potato salad and cold chicken. Munching on a drumstick, Yevgeny wandered around to the back of the dacha and discovered his father, naked from the waist up, sitting on a milking stool inside the tool shed. An old man with a pinched face was pressing the open mouth of a bottle filled with bees against the skin on Tsipin's back. "The peasants say that bee stings can alleviate rheumatism," Tsipin told his son, wincing as the bees planted their darts in him. "Where have you disappeared to, Yevgeny? What hole have you fallen into?"

"Your friend Pasha Semyonovich has given me work translating American newspaper articles and the Congressional Record into Russian," Yevgeny replied, repeating the cover story Starik had worked out for him.

"If only you had a decent Party record," his father said with a sigh, "they might have given you more important things to do." He gasped from a new sting. "Enough, enough, Dmitri," he told the peasant. "I'm beginning to think I prefer the rheumatism."

The old man capped me bottle and, tipping his hat, departed. Yevgeny rubbed a salve on the rash of red welts across his father's bony neck and shoulders to soothe the ache of the stings. "Even with a good record I wouldn't get far in your world," Yevgeny remarked. "You have to be schizophrenic to live two lives."

His father looked back over his shoulder. "Why do you call it my world?"

Yevgeny regarded his father with wide-eyed innocence. "I have always presumed—"

"You would do well to stop presuming, especially where it concerns connections with our Chekists."

By late afternoon the nonstop drinking had taken its toll on the guests, who were stretched out on ottomans or dozing in Danish deck chairs scattered around the garden. Starik had disappeared into the dacha with Tsipin. Sitting on the grass with his back to a tree, enjoying the warmth of the sun through the canopy of foliage over his head, Yevgeny caught sight of a barefoot young woman talking with an older man who looked vaguely familiar. At one point the older man put an arm around the waist of the girl and the two of them strolled off through the woods. Yevgeny noticed that two of the unsmiling men at the gate detached themselves from the group and followed at a discreet distance. For a time Yevgeny could see the girl and her companion fleetingly through the trees, deep in conversation as they appeared and disappeared from view. He finished his cognac and closed his eyes, intending only to rest them for a few moments. He came awake with a start when he sensed that someone had come between him and the sun. A musical voice speaking a very precise English announced: "I dislike summer so very much."

Yevgeny batted away a swarm of insects and found himself staring at a very shapely pair of bare ankles. He saluted them respectfully. "Why would anyone in his right mind dislike summer?" he responded in English.

"For the reason that it is too short. For the reason that our Arctic winter will be upon us before our skin has had its provision of summer sunshine. You must excuse me if I have awaked you."

"An American would say woken you, not awaked you." Yevgeny blinked away the drowsiness and brought her into focus. The young woman looked to be in her early or middle twenties and tall for a female of the species, at least five-eleven in her bare feet. Two rowboat-sized flat-soled sandals dangled from a forefinger, a small cloth knapsack hung off one shoulder. She had a slight offset to an otherwise presentable nose, a gap between two front teeth, faint worry lines around her eyes and mouth. Her hair was short and straight and dark, and tucked neatly back behind her ears.

"I work as a historian and on the side, for the pleasure of it, I translate English language books that interest me," the girl said. "I have read the novels of E. Hemingway and F. Fitzgerald—I am in the process of translating a novel entitled For Whom the Bell Tolls. Have you by chance read it? I have been informed that you attended a university in the state of Connecticut. I am pleased to talk English with someone who has actually been to America."

Yevgeny patted the grass alongside him. She smiled shyly and settled cross-leeged onto the ground and held out a hand. "My name is Azalia Isanova. There are some who call me Aza."

Yevgeny took her hand in his. "I will call you Aza, too. Are you here with a husband?" he asked, thinking of the older gentleman she had been talking to. "Or a lover?"

She laughed lightly. "I am the apartment-mate of Comrade Beria's daughter."

Yevgeny whistled. "Now I know where I've seen the man you were with before—in the newspapers!" He decided to impress her. "Did you know that Comrade Beria suffers from ulcers? That he applies hot water bottles to his stomach to ease the pain?"

She cocked her head. "Who are you?"

"My name is... Gregory. Gregory Ozolin."

Her face darkened. "No, you're not. You are Yevgeny Alexandrovich, the oldest son of Aleksandr Timofeyevich Tsipin. Lavrenti Pavlovich himself pointed you out to me. Why do you invent a name?"

"For the pleasure of seeing your frown when you unmask me."

"Are you familiar with the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Speaking from a stylistical point of view, I was struck by the dissimilarity of Hemingway's short, declarative sentence structure and Fitzgerald's more complex network of interconnected sentences. Do you agree with this distinction?"

"Definitely."

"How is it that two American writers living during the same period and on occasion in the same place—I refer, of course, to Paris—can end up writing so differently?"

"I suppose its because different folks have different strokes."

"I beg your pardon?"

"That's an American slang epigram—"

"Different folks have different strokes? Ah, I see what you are driving at. Strokes refers to rowing. Different people row differently. Do you mind if I copy that down." She produced a fountain pen and pad from her knapsack and carefully copied the epigram into it.

A black chauffeur-driven Zil drew up to the wooden gate. A second car filled with men in dark suits pulled up right behind it. On the porch of the dacha Lavrenti Pavolovich Beria shook hands with Tsipin and Starik and waved to his daughter, who was deep in conversation with three women. Beria's daughter, in turn, called, "Aza, come quickly. Papa is starting back to Moscow."

Aza sprang to her feet and brushed the grass off of her skirt. Yevgeny asked with some urgency, "Can I see you again?" He added quickly, "To talk more of Hemingway and Fitzgerald."

She looked down at him for a moment, her brow creased in thought. Then she said, "It is possible." She scribbled a number on the pad, tore off the sheet and let it flutter down to Yevgeny. "You may telephone me."

"I will," he said with undisguised eagerness.

The next morning Yevgeny's tradecraft classes started to taper off and he began the long, tedious process of creating (with the help of identical twin sisters who didn't look at all alike) two distinct legends that he could slip into and out of at will. It was painstaking work because every detail had to be compartmentalized in Yevgeny's brain so that he would never confuse his two identities. "It is vital," the sister whose name was Agrippina told him as they set out two thick loose-leaf books on the table, "not to memorize a legend—you must become the legend."

"You must shed your real identity," the other sister, whose name was Serafima, explained, "the way a snake sheds its skin. You must settle into each legend as if it were a new skin. If you were to hear someone call out your old name, the thought must flash across your mind: Who can that be? Certainly not me! With time and many many hours of very difficult work you will be able to put a mental distance between the person known as Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin and your new identities."

"Why two legends?" Yevgeny asked.

"One will be a primary operating legend, the second will be a fallback legend in the event the first legend is compromised and you must disappear into a new identity," Agrippina said. She smiled in a motherly fashion and motioned for Serafima to commence.

"Thank you, dear. Now, in building each legend we will start from the cradle and work up to the young man who will be roughly your present age, or at least near enough to it so as not to arouse suspicion. To distinguish the two legends from each other, and from your genuine identity, it will be helpful if you develop different ways of walking and speaking for each persona—"

"It will be helpful if you comb your hair differently, carry your wallet in a different pocket, wear clothing which reflects different tastes," her sister added.

"Eventually," Serafima offered, blushing slightly, "you might even make love differently."

Working from their loose-leaf books, the sisters—both senior researchers in Starik's Directorate S, the department within the First Chief Directorate that ran agents operating under deep cover abroad—began to set out the rough outlines of what they dubbed "Legend A" and "Legend B." "A" had spent his childhood in New Haven, which Yevgeny knew well; "B" had grown up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, which Yevgeny—with the help of maps and slides and personal accounts published in the American press—would come to know intimately. In each case, the sisters would use the addresses of buildings that had been torn down so that it would be practically impossible for the American FBI to verify who had lived there. The foundation for the legends would be birth certificates that were actually on record in New Haven and in New York in the names of two young Caucasian males who, unbeknownst to the American authorities, had been lost at sea when the Allies ran convoys to Murmansk during the war. Two frayed Social Security cards were the next building blocks of the legends. Serafima was an expert on the American social security system; the first three digits of the numbers, she explained, indicated the state in which the number had been issued; the middle two digits, when it had been issued. The cards Yevgeny would carry were actually on file with the United States government. As he would be passing for men two or three years older, there would be voter registration cards in addition to the usual paper identification—drivers licenses, library cards, laminated American Youth Hostel cards with photographs, that sort of thing. The legends would be backstopped by educational records in existence at a New Haven high school and at Erasmus in Brooklyn (which Yevgeny knew well), along with an employment history that would ring true but would also be unverifiable. Medical and dental histories would be built into each legend—they would involve doctors who were dead, which would make the stories impossible to check. And each legend would have a working passport with travel stamps on its pages.

"You have obviously thought of everything," Yevgeny commented.

"We hope for your sake that we have," Agrippina said. "Still, I must draw your attention to two minor problems."

According to your dental records," Serafima said, "the majority of your cavities were filled by American dentists in the United States. But you have two cavities that were filled in the Soviet Union, one before you first went to join your parents in New York after the war, the second when you were in Moscow during a summer vacation. These cavities will have to be redone by Centre dentists who are familiar with American dental techniques and have access to American materials."

"And the second problem?"

Starik suddenly appeared at the door carrying sandwiches and a bottle of kvass. "There is no hurry about the second problem," he said. He was clearly annoyed at the sisters for having raised it now. "We will tell him at a later date."

Yevgeny telephoned Aza the first time he had a free evening and the two met (after Yevgeny, trying out his newfound tradecraft, ditched the man who was tailing him from across the street) in Gorky Park. They wandered along a path that ran parallel to the Moscow River, talking of American literature at first, then nibbling at the edge of matters that were more personal. No, she said, she was an orphan; both her mother, a writer of radio plays, and her father, an actor in the Yiddish theater, had disappeared in the late 1940s. No, she couldn't be more precise because the authorities who had notified her of their deaths had not been more precise. She had been befriended by Beria's daughter, Natasha, at a summer camp in the Urals. They had become pen pals, had written to each other for years. It seemed only natural, when her application to study history and languages at Lomonosov University was, against all odds, accepted, that she would move in with her friend. Yes, she had met Natasha's father on many occasions; he was a warm, friendly man who doted on his daughter but otherwise seemed preoccupied with important matters. He had three phones on his desk, one of them red, which sometimes rang day and night. Tiring of the quiz, Aza pulled typed sheets containing several of Anna Akhmatova's early love poems, along with the first rough draft of her attempts to translate the poems into English, from the pocket of her blouse. She absently plucked wild berries off bushes and popped them in her mouth as Yevgeny read aloud, first in Russian, then in English:

What syrupy witches' brew was prepared

On that bleak January day?

What concealed passion drove us mad

All night until dawn—who can say?

"I can identify the witches' brew," Yevgeny insisted. "It was lust."

Aza turned her grave eyes on the young man. "Lust fuels the passions of men, so I am told, but women are driven by other, more subtle desires that come from..."

"Come from?"

"...the uncertainty that can be seen in a man's regard, the hesitancy that can be felt in his touch, and most especially the tentativeness that can be heard in his voice, which after all are reflections of his innermost self." She added very seriously, "I am pleased with your voice, Yevgeny."

"I am pleased that you are pleased," he said, and he meant it.

The following Sunday Yevgeny, using a phone number reserved for high-ranking members of the Foreign Office, managed to reserve rare tickets to the Moscow Art Theater and took Aza to see the great Tarasova in the role of Anna Karenina. He reached for Aza's hand as the narrator's opening line echoed through the theater: "All happy families resemble one another but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Afterwards he invited her to dinner in a small restaurant off Trubnaya Square. When the bill came she insisted on paying according to the German principle. Yevgeny told her that the Americans called it the Dutch principle, or Dutch treat, and she jotted down the expression on her pad. After dinner they strolled arm in arm down Tsvetnoy Boulevard into the heart of Moscow. "Do you know Chekhov's essay, 'On Trubnaya Square'?" she asked him. "In it he describes the old Birds Market, which was not far from where we are standing now. My grandparents lived in a room over the market when they were first married. I offer you a question, Yevgeny Alexandrovich: Are all things, like the Birds Market, fleeting phenomena?"

Yevgeny's mind raced; he understood that she wanted to know if the feelings she had for him—and he appeared to have for her—would suffer the same fate as the Birds Market on Trubnaya Square. "I cannot say yet what is lasting in this world and what is not."

"You answer honestly. For that I thank you."

On an impulse he crossed to the center strip of the boulevard and bought Aza a bouquet of white carnations from one of the old peasant women in blue canvas jackets selling flowers there. Later, at the door other building on Nizhny Kizlovsky Lane, she buried her nose in the carnations and breathed in the fragrance. Then she flung her arms around Yevgeny's neck, kissed him with great passion on the lips and darted off through the doors into the building before he could utter a word.

He telephoned her in the morning before he left for his rendezvous with the twin sisters. "It's me," he announced.

"I recognize the tentativeness of your voice," she replied. "I recognize even the ring of the telephone."

"Aza, each time I see you I leave a bit of me with you."

"Oh, I hope this is not true," she said softly. "For if you see me too often there will be nothing left of you." She was silent for a moment; he could hear her breathing into the mouthpiece. Finally she said in a firm voice:

"Next Sunday Natasha is voyaging to the Crimea with her father. I will bring you back here with me. We will together explore whether your lust and my desire are harmonious in bed." She said something else that was lost in a burst of static. Then the connection was cut.

Gradually Yevgeny became the legends that the sisters had devised—brushing his hair forward into his eyes; speaking in a rapid-fire fashion in sentences he often didn't bother to finish; striding around the room in loud, sure steps as he spoke; rattling off the details of his life from the cradle to the present. Starik, who was sitting in on the sessions, would occasionally interrupt with a question. "Precisely where was the drugstore in which you worked?"

"On Kingston Avenue just off Eastern Parkway. I sold comic books— Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman—and made egg creams for the kids for a nickel."

The sisters were pleased with their pupil. "I suppose there is nothing left for us to do now except destroy all the loose-leaf books," Agrippina said.

"There is still the matter of the second problem," Serafima said. They looked at Starik, who nodded in agreement. The sisters exchanged embarrassed looks. "You must tell him," Serafima informed her sister. "You are the one who stumbled across it."

Agrippina cleared her throat. "Both of your legends are built around young men who were born in the United States of America, which means that like the overwhelming majority of Americans they will have been circumcised at birth. We have examined your birth records at"—here she named a small and exclusive Kremlin clinic that was used by ranking Party people. "They make no mention of a circumcision. I apologize for posing such a personal question but are we correct in assuming you were not circumcised?"

Yevgeny pulled a face. "I see where this is leading."

Starik said, "We once lost an agent who was passing himself off as a Canadian businessman. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police found the businessman's medical records and discovered he had been circumcised. Our agent was not." He pulled a slip of paper from a shirt pocket and read it. "The operation, which will be performed in a private Centre clinic in a Moscow suburb, is scheduled for nine tomorrow morning." The sisters stood up. Starik signaled for Yevgeny to remain. The two women bid goodbye to their student and left the room.

"There is one more matter that needs to be cleared up," Starik said. "I am talking about the girl, Azalia Isanova. You shook the man who was tailing you from across the street, but you did not lose the one who was assigned to follow you from in front. Your street craft needs work. Your faculty of discretion, too. We have been monitoring your telephone calls. We know that you slept with the girl—"

Yevgeny blurted out, "She can be trusted—she shares an apartment with the daughter of Comrade Beria—"

Starik, his face contorted, his eyes bulging, blurted out, "But don't you see it? She is too old for you!"

Yevgeny was startled. "She is two years older than me, it is true, but what does that amount to? The question of age must be seen as—"

Starik, hissing now, cut him off. "There is something else. Her surname is Lebowitz. Her patronymic is a version of Isaiah. She is a zhid."

The word struck Yevgeny like a slap across the face. "But Comrade Beria must have known about her when he took her in..."

Starik eyes narrowed dangerously. "Of course Beria knows. A great many in the superstructure are careful to include one or two Jews in their entourage to counter Western propaganda about anti-Semitism. Molotov went too far—he actually married one of them. Stalin decided it was an impossible situation—the Foreign Minister married to a Jewess—and had her shipped off to a detention camp." Starik s bony fingers gripped Yevgeny's wrist. "For someone in your position any liaison with a girl would pose delicate problems. A liaison with a zhid is out of the realm of possibility."

"Surely I have a say—"

For Starik there was no middle ground. "You have no say," he declared, switching to the formal "vui" and spitting it into the conversation. "You must choose between the girl and a brilliant career—you must choose between her and me." He shot to his feet and dropped a card with the address of the clinic on the table in front of Yevgeny. "If you do not turn up for the operation our paths will never cross again."

That night Yevgeny climbed to the roof of his building and gazed for hours at the red-hazed glow hovering over the Kremlin. He knew he was walking a tightrope; he understood he could jump off one side as easily as the other. If he had been asked to give up Aza for operational reasons he would have understood; to give her up because she was a Jewess was a bitter pill to swallow. For all his talk about the genius and generosity of the human spirit, Starik—Yevgeny's Tolstoy—had turned out to be a rabid anti-Semite. Yevgeny could hear the word zhid festering in his brain. And then it dawned on him that the voice he heard wasn't Starik's; it was a thinner voice, quivering with rage and pessimism and panic, seeping from the back of the throat of someone who feared growing old, who welcomed death but dreaded dying. The word zhid resounding in Yevgeny's ear came from the great Tolstoy himself; scratch the lofty idealist of the spirit and underneath you discovered an anti-Semite who believed, so Tolstoy had affirmed, that the flaw of Christianity, the tragedy of mankind, came from the racial incompatibility between Christ, who was not a Jew, and Paul, who was a Jew.

Yevgeny laughed under his breath. Then he laughed out loud. And then he opened his mouth and bellowed into the night: "Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! To the success of our hopeless task!"

The circumcision, performed under a local anesthetic, was over in minutes. Yevgeny was given pills to ease the pain and an antiseptic cream to guard against infection. He retreated to his apartment and buried himself in the Prikhodko lectures, making lists of neighborhoods and parks and department stores in various East Coast American cities that could be used for meetings with agents. The telephone rang seven times on Saturday, four times on Sunday and twice on Monday. Once or twice the maid plucked the receiver off its hook. Hearing a female voice on the other end of the line she muttered a curse in Tajik and slammed down the phone. After a few days the burning sensation in Yevgeny's penis dulled to an ache and gradually disappeared. One morning a motorcycle messenger brought Yevgeny a sealed envelope. Inside was a second sealed envelope containing a passport in the name of Gregory Ozolin and a plane ticket to Oslo. There, Ozolin would disappear from the face of the earth and a young American named Eugene Dodgson, who had been backpacking in Scandinavia, would buy passage on a Norwegian freighter bound for Halifax, Canada, the staging area for Soviet illegals bound for assignments in the United States.

On the evening before Yevgeny's departure, Starik, smiling thinly, turned up with a tin of imported herring and a cold bottle of Polish vodka. The two talked about everything under the sun late into the night; everything except the girl. After Starik had departed Yevgeny found himself staring at the telephone, half-hoping it would ring; half-hoping there would be a musical voice on the other end saying "I dislike summer so very much."

When, just before six in the morning, it finally did ring, Yevgeny leapt from the bed and stood staring at the receiver. With the phone's discordant peal still echoing through the apartment, his eye fell on the packed valise near the door. He could feel a magnetic force pulling him toward his quest on the American continent. Accepting his destiny with a grudging smile, he sat down on the valise in preparation for a long, long voyage.