“I—” Mensenyi breathed heavily and then puffed out his cheeks. “The dates of the thefts are not known. Surely. Are they?”
“Putting two and two together, Comrade — the sailing dates of certain submarines — yes, that is known well enough. What have you to say about this coincidence?”
“It is a coincidence, what else? Ask Penguin, if you think you have made such a brilliant analysis! Eh? Go ahead!”
“Give me the identity of Penguin, and I will.”
Mensenyi contrived to look very sly. “Oh, no. That is very highly classified. No, no, you don’t trick me that way.” He stabbed a short, gloved finger into Tarp’s chest. “If you want to know that, you go to the general secretary.”
Andropov had called Mensenyi a clown. He struck Tarp as more of an ox, a stubborn, almost immovable dullard. In fact, he reminded Tarp of Hacker, the CIA turncoat.
“You have made five trips to the West since 1971,” Tarp said. “England twice, France twice. Canada once…”
“What of it?”
“What was the purpose?”
“I was meeting with very important people from the other side.”
“Yes, that’s what the file says. What were the real reasons?”
“The file reasons are the real reasons!”
“There are very few good reasons for a department head’s leaving Moscow.”
“I was not department head until 1977.”
“Your last trip was to London in 1981.”
Mensenyi set his fleshy jaw. His cheeks, mottled with red from the raw, wet breeze, looked like slabs of meat. “I brought out an English agent who was going to be exposed.”
“England is not in your area.”
“I was ordered to bring him out.”
“You were ordered to bring him out because you begged to do so. It’s all in the file.”
Mensenyi’s face became ugly. “He was an old friend.”
“You make a hobby, do you, of running agents in areas not your own?”
“I do whatever I can to help the nation, the Party, and world communism. I have always cultivated foreigners. I understand the foreign mentality. I have performed valuable service, turning foreigners to good use.”
“You’ve also imported a remarkable collection of foreign art objects and consumer goods. You’ve even once been the object of an investigation into a black market food shop run for the diplomatic community in Moscow.”
“I explained all that satisfactorily,” Mensenyi said hoarsely. “It was to entrap foreigners.”
“And turn a profit.”
“I turned all profit over to the state!”
“After the investigation began.”
“Bad timing! I was guilty of bad timing!”
Andropov had been right. The man was a clown.
Tarp ran quickly through the dates of the foreign visits, his contacts in the nuclear industry, his proximity on two occasions to the home port of the submarines at Murmansk. Mensenyi was sweating despite the wind. “You have nothing!” he shouted. He was in rage, or pretending to be. “I am innocent! I am not Maxudov! I am a thousand times better man than you!”
“Have you read Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel?”
“What?”
“I may want to talk to you again in a few days.”
“Wait — See here…” Mensenyi put a gloved paw on his arm. “You’re finished?”
“Yes.”
“Well…” The blubber lips quivered. “See here, you don’t seem to be a stupid man. Nor unsophisticated. Tell me the truth. Do you know who Maxudov is?”
Tarp removed the hand from his arm. “I may want to talk to you again in a few days.”
“Yes, but see here…” He pulled at Tarp’s sleeve. “This can’t be easy for you. I understand that. You have to forgive my outbursts; I’m a man of short temper. It comes of having principles. Innocent men are often like that. But see here… a man like you, what happens to you when this is over? I understand the foreign mentality. I mean, I know what ambition is in the West. In Moscow, a man of your stature would be wealthy. You deserve that — eh? Here you are, working in the highest, the very highest echelons of the service, who knows, maybe even the Presidium is consulting with you. And what will your reward be? You maybe ought to be giving some thought to your own future, do you follow me? After this is over, maybe?”
Tarp pushed the hand away roughly this time. “Not interested.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Not interested. You know what that means — Comrade.”
It had been a clumsy attempt at a bribe. Maybe it had been an intentionally clumsy one, so that later Mensenyi could deny that he had meant it. He would say that he had been laying a trap, and in fact he probably was. “Already above his proper level,” Andropov had said, and he had been right. Tarp thought of the stupid people all over the world who had risen too high in intelligence because of political shrewdness or luck or influence. They made it much more dangerous than it already was.
They walked back toward the cars, Mensenyi keeping a couple of yards’ distance between them. Still, when they were fifty feet from the road and at the bottom of a steep bank leading up to it, he came closer. “See here,” he said, “there’s no reason why you would say anything to implicate me.”
“No?”
“I’ve been cooperative. Let me make a gesture to prove how cooperative I am. I’ll tell you who Penguin is.” Tarp was a step or two up the bank and so was looking down at him. The broad, sweaty face was turned up in appeal. “It’s an Englishman. His name is Pope-Ginna. That’s classified.”
“I’ll make a note of it.”
Josef Falomin waited for him at the end of a long baroque gallery in a museum of second-rate paintings. The building looked like a minor palace that the Bolsheviks had overlooked; closed until after World War Two, it had been used to house some of the overflow from other museums as Moscow modernized itself. There was an elderly guard at the gallery entrance and, across an echoing and domed corridor, an Oriental group with an Intourist guide. Otherwise the building seemed as deserted as if its owners had just been grabbed and shot by the Reds.
A hard-faced young Mongol was standing next to Falomin. Falomin was in his sixties, big-chested, stolid, ruddy as if he ate too much and took long walks to make up for it. He had watched Tarp as he had come down the long gallery under half-naked Renaissance goddesses and leering satyrs, between overstuffed sofas and panels made gaudy with too much gilt. Falomin, his hands crossed in front of him, looked as immovable as a tank. When Tarp was close, the young man, who was standing in profile to Tarp, held out a hand toward him, palm up. “This is the American,” he said.
Falomin stood on ceremony. A formal introduction, no less. “I am Tarp.”
“This is Comrade Falomin.”
Tarp held out his hand, which was ignored.
“I will now leave you,” the young man said. His shoes clacked on the marble floor long after he had turned into the corridor.
“Would you like to sit?” Tarp said.
“No.”
“You know why I am here.”
“Of course. I have a file on you.”
Tarp waited. Falomin spoke with the flat voice of a man controlling an anger. It was a humiliation for him to go through this — above all for him, who ran the department that terrorized the rest of the KGB, the diplomatic corps, and every Soviet citizen who left the frontiers.
“You are the head of Special Service Two?”
“You know I am.”
“You were in London during World War Two?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell me about it?”
“I was a file clerk in the military liaison office. I maintained certain connections. Those were very disorganized days.”