Kunavin spread out his agents, blond men with tousled hair sporting identical dark blue suits, on all floors of the restaurant. He himself, in a new dark blue suit paced up and down the fourth-floor corridor, where the Rotonda was located. The table was set for a tsar. The entire operation at the Praga Restaurant most likely ran the KGB around 1000 rubles in pre-reform currency. After all, there were ten people present: Mdivani and his wife, Lida, Nadia, Lora (Larisa), myself, along with two French couples, De Jean and Gerard.
I met our guests below in the restaurant lobby by the Vorovsky Street entrance and took the elevator to the fourth floor with them.
The evening went superbly. Our rapport with the ambassador himself was firmly established. New people entered the game. Maurice, of course turned his attention to the three Russian beauties: Khovanskaia, Cherednichenko, and Kronberg-Sobolevskaia. He began to treat me with marked goodwill. As for Marcel Gerard, he emulated his boss in every respect. It was clear that Marcel was Maurice’s protégé. (I later learned from Vera Ivanovna that they were somehow distantly related). In any case, the advisor of cultural affairs wrote down our home telephone numbers, invited everyone to come see him at the embassy, and in every way exhibited a favorable disposition.
At first impression (and even afterwards), Marcel Gerard appeared to me to be a person agreeable in all respects, though spiritually limited, a civil servant. I know that he even wrote a book about the USSR and furnished it with a multitude of photographs. But I’m certain that, while having spent several years in the Soviet Union, Marcel saw only the superficial, that which was put on for show, and was never able to penetrate the life of our people—and perhaps never even tried. The blinders of the embassy careerist and of the well-to-do French bourgeois prevented him.
292
Chapter Thirty-One
The evening in the Rotonda, as I’ve said before, went splendidly and brought me closer to the ambassador. Maurice acted the part of the worldly playboy easily and naturally. He flirted with the ladies, danced with them, and was gallant and witty. I should also mention that the ambassador had a sense of humor, though that humor was sometimes a little crude and always contained sexual overtones. During his anecdotes the ladies had to modestly lower their eyes, and Marie-Claire, knowing her husband’s weakness, usually tried to interrupt him or loudly and deliberately laughed in the risqué places, in order to drown out certain words with her laughter. But Maurice reached his goal by repeating them several times, his eyes narrowing and becoming two tiny slits. His cheeks became rounder, and he laughed at his own jokes soundlessly, only with his lips.
The tamada—that is, the master of ceremonies—was, of course, Zhorzh Mdivani, a Georgian, merry and grandiloquent. He masterfully made the toasts: political, ideological, patriotic, lyrical, and so on. We conversed in three languages: Russian, French, and English. And Maurice, Marie-Claire, and Marcel Gerard began to use their Russian. Upon parting, Maurice invited us all to the embassy for dinner. This was exactly what Gribanov had been after.
After we left, Kunavin’s agents filtered into the Rotonda, as he told me afterwards. Lora Kronberg-Sobolevskaia stayed behind with them. After all, someone had to finish up the food and (more importantly) the drink. And the vodka, cognac, and wine were more than plentiful. The revelry of the “plebeians” went on until dawn, so riotously that one of the agents, either Lora, or the “waiter” had his watch lifted. In the end, Kunavin had to deal with this scandalous affair.
At the meeting at the Rotonda I had personally become convinced that the ambassador had an Achilles’ heel, and that heel was the opposite sex. Nevertheless, as I mentioned in my report, that evening Maurice did not show a specific preference for any one of our three young ladies. He was, so to speak, equally disposed towards all of them. The KGB offered him a choice: take one, don’t be shy, but apparently had had decided not to hurry. My job was to connect the ambassador with the lady he would “point to,” and facilitate his liaison with her, taking into account all of the difficulties connected with his high position, his wife’s presence, and the general Soviet conditions. Of course, Marie-Claire certainly complicated the matter: she wasn’t especially jealous, but she tried to keep her husband from making all sorts of mistakes. I think that she even warned him about this—in fact, I think that this was precisely true, since both Kunavin and Vera Ivanovna were not particularly enamored of Marie-Claire at the time.
Actually, as I’ve already noted, Vera Ivanovna existed for the purpose of distracting Mashenka [Russ. diminutive for Marie] from Maurice. This was
Iurii Krotkov, The KGB in Action
293
her number-one duty. Besides, I remember that once Marie-Claire asked me offhandedly whether I knew Vera Ivanovna Gorbunova, an interpreter from the Ministry of Culture. Having been warned by Kunavin about the possibility of such a question, I answered in the affirmative.
It was at that time that Vera Ivanovna became Marie-Claire’s “close” friend. As a result, she often had to “go out and have fun” with Marie-Claire. She was a KGB major in the Lubianka by day, and the wife of a Soviet party boss by night. However, there were moments when Vera Ivanovna would tire of Marie-Claire, especially in the winter. The Frenchwoman was an unstoppable cross-country skier, and Vera Ivanovna, a full-figured woman, would wear herself out trying to keep up. And so, almost every ski outing ended badly for Vera Ivanovna: she would come down with a cold, while Marie-Claire felt wonderful.
Finally, the night of the dinner at the French Embassy arrived—the first dinner party of many to follow.
We were already embracing each other as intimate friends. We enjoyed ourselves noisily in the luxurious halls of that beautiful residence in the Russe style on the Iakimanka [in the 1960’s, Dmitrova Street]. We ate the famed French onion soup (the very same soup eaten by Louis XIV!) and Parisian partridge, and drank martinis, champagne, and burgundy. I was enchanted by the scarlet roses on the dinner table, fresh every day. According to Marie-Claire, the Air France crews brought in roses from Paris every day for De Jean. It was splendid! Everything in the residence was elegant and attractive, but at the same time simple and cozy. And what wonderful music we listened to, sitting in the living room. Marie-Claire had an excellent record collection.
Soviet freaks of nature that we were, we all felt the same thing at different times, I think: we all felt happy there and wanted our lives to go on in the same environment, having forgotten, of course, for the time being, about politics and ideology, and, first and foremost, who we were and what we were doing there. In reality we were all General Gribanov’s puppets—all of us. Well, it’s possible that Taisiia Savva didn’t know the whole story; maybe Zhorzh didn’t disclose to her his conversation with Kunavin in the Hotel Moscow. Maybe she could only guess what was going on.
And again I could report to Kunavin that the dinner had been held in the ceremonial hall of the embassy, I could list the dishes, and the wines, but I couldn’t report to my boss that Maurice had set his sights on Cherednichenko, Kronberg-Sobolevskaia, or Lidiia Khovanskaia (the preferred choice being the last). Maurice was clearly waiting for something. But what?