Telyegin had inoperable cancer. That was in his file, too. It had begun in his lower bowel and it had spread. He had been given six months to live, but that had been two years before, and there were reports of his temporary remissions, as if the body were urged back to life by his commitment to his work. Now, nobody knew when he would die, but he was dying.
Yet his eyes were eager, like the eyes of a young man on the way up. When he could lift his voice above a tired whisper, he was passionate.
“I have not betrayed the Party,” he hissed at Tarp. “Not the Party, not the nation, not the service.” That little effort tired him. “This is an offense to my whole life.” His was a bitter whisper. He struck his chest weakly with a mittened hand. He was wearing a fur-lined coat, a thick scarf, boots, a fur hat. “They should have waited until I was dead to insult me with somebody like you.”
“I am very sorry,” Tarp said. He meant it. He did not like offending this old man, who, in his way, was as defenseless as the couple had been.
“You!” Breath sighed between his yellow lips in an exhalation of disgust. “Keep your being sorry. You — I know who you are.” He glared. “I never took money to serve the enemies of my people!”
But Tarp could not be moved that way. “You know why we are here.”
“Oh, yes, Comrade Andropov told me. Comrade Andropov, who was in short pants when I took a bullet in the leg from a White.”
“You know why we are here.”
“Yes, yes.” Telyegin sank into the clothes. He had a narrow head, which the disease had reduced to pure skull. Chemotherapy had taken his hair. He looked like a baby bird in a nest. “Well, do your filthy work.”
“There have been thefts of plutonium.”
“I know all that. Skip all that. My time is short. Plutonium, submarines, Maxudov — it’s all shit. It isn’t me. What do you think, that I would confess to you even if I was Maxudov?” His mouth moved and a sound like a cat’s sickness came from the throat. He was laughing. “Did they think I would make a sentimental gesture because I am dying and save them trouble? Maybe, if I confess to crimes I didn’t do, they will give me a hero’s burial because I saved them so much trouble.”
Tarp asked about three periods in Telyegin’s life, two when he had worked in departments with Central American connections, the third when he had for six months been posted in London. The questions and the answers both seemed pointless; what he always heard was the old man’s hatred.
“You could have set up a network in Cuba and Central America,” Tarp said after half an hour of wrangling. The old man was getting weak by then.
“So?”
“Maxudov set up a network in those places.”
“Maxudov isn’t me.”
“He could be.”
The eyes merely stared at him as if the face were too weary to show expression,
“Who do you think it is, then?” Tarp pleaded.
A long silence. Then, with a malice that pierced through the weariness, Telyegin said, “Comrade Andropov?”
“It is not Andropov.”
“You mean, even if it is Andropov, it is not Andropov.” He made the ghastly noise that was laughter again. “What has a Cuban network to do with anything?”
“Maxudov tried to kill me in Cuba.”
“Good for him.” The clothes stirred. “I know who Maxudov is,” he whispered.
“Who?”
“He is a character in a book. Did you know that?” The eyes were malicious and gleeful when they saw that Tarp did not know. “Not too bright, are you? Uncultured, yes. Maxudov is a character in a novel. Nobody reads it. It’s a piece of shit. Of course nobody reads it in America — no money in it.” He wanted to laugh, but the words had taken his energy. He sat there, gathering his strength, his breath wheezing over the hum of the electric heaters. “In the Theatrical Novel of Bulgakov. The character of Maxudov. That is who Maxudov is.”
Tarp felt that he had been checkmated. “I am not interested in novels,” he said lamely.
“There is also a character named Strisz in the novel. You find that interesting?”
“Do you think that Strisz is Maxudov?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.” He closed his eyes. He looked like the corpse of a king. “Sixty-four years of service, a devoted Chekist, a full colonel, and I wind up being asked stupid questions by an American. If I had the strength, I’d puke.”
Tarp got to his feet. He tried to say something human, even something as simple as “Thank you” or “Good-bye,” but the old man’s fury was palpable, and he refused any gesture. Before Tarp got out of the room, however, he heard a sound, and he turned to see Telyegin’s eyes open and glaring at him. He had been husbanding his energy for a last statement, and it came in a voice that must have been the voice men had heard in his good days, powerful and deep. “I hope you die this way,” he said. “I hope they all die this way.”
Tarp got into the back of the car without knowing what he was doing. He was shaken by that rage and that curse. He could not answer when the guards spoke to him.
“I am not Maxudov. Do you think I really could be Maxudov? Do you think I could really be stupid enough to use a name from a book in which my real name appears? I do not know this novel; I’m not a great reader, especially of fiction, which usually bores me, but… do you think I would be so stupid?”
Strisz was in his fifties and prosperous-looking. Andropov had called him “too social,” and indeed there was something both amiable and sociable in his wide face, as if he were eager to entertain. He looked well fed, more Scandinavian or Dutch than Russian, without the high cheekbones that made many Russians’ eyes look small.
“Some men would pick such a name because they would think themselves clever, because nobody would believe they would be so stupid. Some men would take the risk to enjoy a secret feeling of being smarter than their enemies,” Tarp answered.
“Oh, people would believe that I could do a stupid thing! I have a record of doing stupid things. You’ve seen my file.” He laughed. He seemed absurdly relaxed for such a situation. He seemed guileless, and Tarp believed that no one was guileless.
“If you are not Maxudov, why do you think somebody has used that name?”
“It’s rather witty, isn’t it? A character from a Russian novel, and none of the Russians who are tearing around worrying about it recognizes the name. That’s rather witty.”
“It’s a fairly obscure novel.”
“Have you read it?”
“I glanced through it. Maxudov is the narrator — a stand-in for the author, Bulgakov. He was under KGB surveillance at the time.”
“You see? That’s witty.”
“You believe in taking a psychological approach to Maxudov?”
“Well, psychology is often more productive than beatings, which is what some of my colleagues prefer. Naming no names, of course.” He opened a drawer in the desk behind which he sat. It was not his desk, but he seemed curious about what was in it. They were in an office of an annex of the municipal offices — a space borrowed for the purpose by Strisz and as anonymous, for him, as the dacha where Tarp had met Telyegin.
“Do you know Russia?” Strisz was saying.
“Does anybody know Russia?”
Strisz laughed and made a face. His face was very lively, always showing emotional play. Tarp had to resist liking him, and he guessed that Strisz knew the effect he was having. He was a man whom it was easy to like, and it may have been for that, too, that Andropov had seemed to distrust him.