you see, you used your father’s name.”
I had never thought about it when I picked the name out of the blue, never once thought about the fact that it had been my father’s name. He had been Maksim. Max to his friends. To me he was my father. My dad. The only good thing about this miserable country where I grew up, my father, and my mother, of course. But most of all, him.
“What system?” I said.
“Ours. Yours, too. Why not? We throw bombast at one another, but we’re allies, more or less, your Mr Bush was just here with Mr Putin in Sochi, and from the time he invited his good friend Vladimir at the Texas ranch, we began setting up systems to share certain things.”
“So you shared me? Pettus shared me with you?”
“It’s never that simple.”
“I want Sverdloff out.”
“I understand.”
For a few minutes, Bounine sat, silent, sipping his whisky, as if weighing his thoughts.
The photograph showed my father and Bounine, both very young, both in hipster suits and narrow ties. My father’s arm was around Bounine’s shoulder and they were standing near the arch in Washington Square Park. In the corner of the photograph, my father had written his name and a fond message to his friend, Sam. July, l962.
“Jesus.”
“Yup. We were Max and Sam in New York,” he said. “And when I discovered that you were Sverdloff’s friend, I thought to myself, Artemy will want to help his friend. And I will help him because his father helped me. I have something else for you,” he said, and removed a large envelope from his desk. “Will you have dinner with me? I don’t want to talk about any of this here.”
I nodded.
“Good. We’ll make a plan, you and me. We’ll make a plan to get your friend out.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
GUM, the great department store on Red Square, was outlined in little white lights. It glittered like Christmas on the soft summer night.
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.”
