The manager of the small Italian restaurant just to the left of the entrance to GUM appeared as soon as we arrived. He smiled and shook Bounine’s hand, and mine, and showed us to a table on the terrace just outside. All Red Square was spread out in front of us, St Basil’s, the Kremlin, GUM, with its lights. Bounine ordered a bottle of red wine. I asked for Scotch.
“It’s fine, nobody will bother us here,” said Bounine. “It’s mostly tourists. You seem edgy. I’m not going to arrest you or put some idiotic muscle on you, you don’t believe these myths about us anymore. Do you? The FSB is different. We don’t do those things. We did, once, of course, the KGB had idiots just like the CIA. Well, slightly better educated idiots, but we’re a different country.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s true.” He sipped the wine. “Let’s order. The rabbit lasagna is delicious.”
I ordered steak. He ordered the pasta. I wasn’t hungry.
“What do you care about in this new kind of country, as you call it?” I said.
“We care about our own. We value our people. We encourage people to keep in touch, to act like a family. In our business we often go on vacations together, quite a lot of us have married into each other’s families. We respect the children of the great agents who taught us. Like you.”
I kept my mouth shut. I was too wrecked to eat much. I lit a cigarette. I didn’t want him to see my hands shake. I had been up against killers and creeps, jerks who beat me up, people who murdered children. This was worse. I wanted Tolya out of the rathole he was in. I’d do anything. Just ask, I thought. Just tell me what it is.
“It’s okay, Artie, I like that name, I remember your dad saying he was going to call your Artemy and would make your Western name Artie because he adored the way Artie Shaw played clarinet.”
“So?” I tried for nonchalance.
“Is your dish okay?” he said, as if it were a social occasion.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Would you like another drink?”
“Sure.”
Bounine ordered it for me.
“We didn’t poison Valentina Sverdloff. Nobody poisoned her, but I think you already know that,” said Bounine. “We don’t do that kind of thing anymore. Not for decades,” he chortled slightly. “Did you know your dad and I were young guys together in New York City, in the early l960s? Yes, I told you, I’m sorry, I repeat myself a bit. We loved it, but he loved it most because of the music. Did you know?”
“And Sverdloff? The polonium?”
“My dear boy, of course not,” he said, sounding surprised. “Oh, no, it’s become an explosive urban myth, ever since poor Litvinenko died, but that was a single terrible event. Some idiot had the idea of using polonium-210 on the assumption nobody would trace it. It was, thank God, a one-time blunder.” He smiled and when he smiled it lit up his face and made it charming, like a TV anchor, all sincere intelligence and warmth, and all invented for the moment.
“So you understand, we had nothing to do with Miss Sverdloff. I promise you,” Bounine added.
I drank.
“Unfortunately the young man she married turned out to be a bad egg, as we used to say. He found out he had married a passionate young woman, who spoke her mind, perhaps too much, and he didn’t agree with her, and I think, personally, he went off the rails.”
“Or one of your creeps told Grisha Curtis to kill her. Or he was yours, this Curtis creep.”
“You could be right. Grigory Curtis was eager to help us, perhaps too eager. I don’t like zealots. There are, in any system, always one or two loose cannons,” said Bounine, who had a taste in English for cliches.
“But not you.”
“No.”
“What about Larry Sverdloff?”
“He’s one of those Russians who live in London and think they can make another revolution, it’s almost touching, that they think they can overthrow Putin, using their money to back various dissident groups. It reminds me of the days when Lenin and Trotsky and the rest of them sat around Europe plotting. It won’t come to anything.”
“What’s wrong with Tolya Sverdloff?”
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“Yes, but I want you to tell me.”
“Sverdloff, of course, has heart disease. He had it when this all began. Didn’t you know that in New York? Our doctors say he’s been ill for quite some time.”
Did I know? Had I seen something in Sverdloff’s face that night in New York on the roof at his club?
“I’ll give you the number of his doctors in New York, or in London,” Bounine added. “He may need a transplant. We can help. Perhaps it would be good for him to have a strong Russian heart?”
“Why would I believe you?”
“Why would you? For Sverdloff’s sake.” He put down his knife and fork and picked up his wine glass and glanced at the crowd in the square. “Things are much better now. People live well, they travel, they read books they like to read, listen to rock music, of course. I saw Paul McCartney play Red Square. Can you imagine? Of course, things are better.”
“I want him out now. Tolya Sverdloff. I want him to come home with me, to New York.”
“I understand. And we take care of our family, Artie. We like doing business with people we know. So many of our recruits can trace their lineage all the way back. You’re our family.”
“You think the FSB or the fucking KGB is some kind of aristocracy? You think the pricks who do your work have lineage?” I was sorry I said it. I was sorry in case in made it worse for Tolya. I bit my lip. I drank the Scotch.
“You are more like your mother,” he said. “Dessert?”
“Tell me how I can get Sverdloff out of here?”
“I have an idea,” said Bounine. “How lovely it is tonight,” he added.
It was a soft beautiful summer night. The red star on the Kremlin glittered. All around Red Square, ice-cream sellers fixed cones for tourists. A soldier leaned casually against the red granite of Lenin’s tomb and shared a joke with some tourists while a little boy had his picture taken against the mausoleum.
Bounine followed my gaze.
“You see things do change for the better,” he said. “I’m going to have an armagnac, perhaps a really nice one. Will you join me?” He gave a little shrug. “I hope all this lasts,” he added.
“All what?”
“All the good things we have now. Who knows? In a year, two years from now it might all disappear, the whole enterprise might just go bust,” he said. “Maybe capitalism wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” he added, chuckling. “If the economy goes belly up, well, let’s hope for the best, shall we?”
Did he order the armagnac at the cafe overlooking Red Square because it was Sverdloff’s drink? Bounine reached into his briefcase, and said, “I nearly forgot.”
He pulled out the envelope he had taken fom his office and opened it. Inside was an old-fashioned black and white school notebook. Bounine opened it at random. It was covered with my father’s elegant handwriting. Bounine offered it to me.
“Your father’s diary from his years in America,” he said. “When you left Moscow, he was asked to leave his notes behind, of course, but I kept it. ‘One day’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll give this to Max’s son.’ To you. I saved it for you.” He handed it to me.
“What do you want from me in return for the notebook? What’s the price?”
He shook his head.
“It’s for you. I’ve kept it too many years. It’s yours, Artemy, it belongs to you. I was so sorry when I heard your father had died in Israel. I wanted to write, I wanted to send you the diary. I couldn’t, but I mourned for him.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“He was a brilliant agent, he could listen all day and all night. He could get people to tell him anything, usually in the easiest way. But he was also a patriot. He did what he had to do,” said Bounine. “I envied him. I could see that, even when I was a young man. He could have gone all the way. To the top, I mean.”
“Except for my mother.”
“Except that.”
I got up and walked a few yards into the square and away from Bounine. All my life I had kept my father as I had remembered him. I kept the handsome blue-eyed young man who brought me candy and took me fishing and introduced me to jazz and told me, secretly, quietly, about New York City as if it were a paradise just over the horizon.