Today, though, his routine dislodging one of the hallway floorboards feels worse than dangerous. It feels wrong. It’s a detestable feeling. Wrong is the bailiwick of parents, schoolmarms, men of the cloth. Scientists have no need of it. Yet caught in his throat like a fish bone is the certainty that what he saw last night changes everything. If the asset can feel that kind of joy, affection, and concern—he espied all three in its chromatic flux—no nation, for any reason, should toy with it like a specimen in a Bunsen burner. In hindsight, even his own experiments, done with doctorly care, feel wrong. Of the many emotions the asset has stirred in Washington, at Occam, and in his own heart, how is it, Hoffstetler wonders, that not a single one of those emotions has been shame?
The hollow beneath the floor holds a passport, an envelope of cash, and the crinkled manila folder. Hoffstetler picks up the folder, hears the toot of a taxi, and forces the plank back into place. It always happens the same. He receives a brusque phone call with a specific time and a code phrase; he drops all that he is doing; he formulates a lateness excuse for David Fleming. Then he stews in anxious acids until the time arrives, calls a cab, gets inside, and records the cabbie’s name in a notebook to ensure no cabbie drives him to the meeting location more than once. Today’s driver is named Robert Nathaniel De Castro. Hoffstetler wagers that his friends call him “Bob.” What American name is more inoffensive or forgettable?
Past the airport, across Bear Creek Bridge, contiguous to the shipyards in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel, the industrial park is not a place men in suits are often dropped. Hoffstetler’s wardrobe is limited to suits; blandness is his only disguise. He stows away his professorial peacock feathers and bores Robert Nathaniel De Castro with flavorless chatter and an unmemorable tip. He walks toward a warehouse until the cab is gone, then veers between container ships, past a transit shed, and over the tracks, doubling back around thirty-foot sand piles to make sure no one has followed.
He likes to sit atop a particular concrete block while waiting. He drums his heels on it like he’s a bored little boy back in Minsk. Soon a Chinese dragon of dirt floats across the sky while tires crunch gravel like gnashed bones. A titanic Chrysler swings into view, black as a crevasse with chrome like liquid mercury, its tail fins slicing loaves of risen dust. Hoffstetler slides off the concrete block and stands before the purring beast in the swirling grit—his papa would call it gryaz. The driver’s door opens and the same man as ever emerges, stretching a tailored suit across his bison breadth.
“The sparrow nests on the windowsill,” Hoffstetler says.
“And the eagle—” The Russian accent is thick. “The eagle…”
Hoffstetler reaches for the silver door handle. “And the eagle takes the prey,” he snaps. “What’s the point of using a code phrase if you can’t ever remember it?”
3
THE STYGIAN CHRYSLER wends him all the way back across the city. The Bison, as Hoffstetler has come to think of the driver, never takes the shortest path. Today, he scoops up west of Camp Holabird, circles the Baltimore City hospitals, and effects a stair-step pattern to the North Street cemeteries before dropping like an anvil into East Baltimore. Hoffstetler’s leniviy mozg finds in Baltimore’s grimy, gray street grid proof of the cosmological organization present in all matter, from the smallest corpuscles to most unfathomable galactic clusters. Thus he is but an insignificant pinprick playing a nugatory role in history. This, at least, is his prayer.
They park directly in front of the Black Sea Russian Restaurant. It never makes sense to him. Why the cryptic telephone calls, coded phrases, and loop-de-loop course if it ends every time at the highly conspicuous, mirror-plated, gold-inflected, red-sashed restaurant bedecked with filigreed nesting dolls atop malachite tabletops? The Bison holds the car door open and follows him inside.
It’s still early. The Black Sea isn’t open yet. There is clatter from the kitchen, but not much talk. Waitstaff sit smoking at a table, memorizing specials. Three violinists tune their strings to “Ochi Chernye.” The sharp smell of red-wine vinegar mixes with the sweetness of fresh-baked gingerbread. Hoffstetler passes the restrooms, where hangs a poster issued by J. Edgar Hoover to inveigle immigrants to report Espionage, Sabotage, and Subversive Activities. It’s an inside joke: There, in the last booth of the restaurant’s farthest dogleg, backlit by the lunar glow of a giant tank crawling with lobsters, waits Leo Mihalkov.
“Bob,” he greets.
Mihalkov prefers speaking to Hoffstetler in English to practice his conversation skills, but hearing his Americanized name from the agent’s lips makes Hoffstetler feel strip-searched. It is no small thing that Mihalkov pronounces the name as boob. Hoffstetler wonders if this, like the FBI poster, is a backhand slap. On cue, musicians rush the booth like hatchet men, nod out a rhythm, and strike up. One point in the Black Sea’s favor is its insusceptibility to wiretap, and the deafening strings further moot the point. Hoffstetler has to raise his voice.
“I ask once again, Leo: Please call me Dmitri.”
Call it cowardice, but it is easier for Hoffstetler to keep his two personas separate. Mihalkov places a blini topped with smoked salmon, crème fraîche, and caviar onto his extended tongue, draws it in, and savors it. Hoffstetler finds himself smoothing the manila folder in his hands. How quickly this Russian brute, with a single belittling syllable, has muscled him into the position of timid supplicant.
Leo Mihalkov is the fourth intelligence contact he has had. Hoffstetler’s reluctant embroilment in espionage began the day after his commencement at Lomonosov in Moscow, when agents of Stalin’s NKVD came into view like shipwrecks from a draining lake. They fed him—a young, hungry scholar—a dinner of pickled tomatoes, zakuski, beef stroganoff, and vodka, followed by a dessert of government secrets: teams working to put satellites into space, advanced chemical warfare tests, Soviet infiltrators inside the US atomic program. It was as good as being fed poison. Hoffstetler was a dead man unless he obtained the antidote, and the antidote was, and always would be, strict allegiance to the Premier.
When the war was kaput, the agents said, America would sift Eurasia’s rubble for gold, and who would they find? Dmitri Hoffstetler, that’s who. His task was to willingly defect, become a good American. It wouldn’t be so bad, they promised. His wouldn’t be a life of pistol silencers and bitable suicide pills. He’d be free to follow his professional predilections, provided they were in fields ripe for top-secret harvesting whenever he was contacted by agents. Hoffstetler didn’t bother asking what would happen if he refused. The men took care to mention his papa and dear mamochka with specificity enough that there was no doubting how easily the NKVD could tighten their fists around them.
Mihalkov shrugs at Hoffstetler’s request. He’s not a physically imposing man; in fact, he seems to enjoy making himself smaller by sitting in front of the lobster tank’s blue vista. In this way, Mihalkov is a switchblade, compact and benign in snug suits, rose boutonnieres, and short-cut gray hair, until he’s provoked and the sharp parts are sprung. He swallows the caviar and holds out a receiving hand while the crustaceans behind him appear to crawl out of his ears. Hoffstetler hands over the folder, fretting over the wrinkles like a mother over a child’s unironed church clothes.