His broad, confident smile didn't falter. 'Are you hungry? I missed my breakfast, which in America is a crime. The diner breakfast is America's great contribution to world cuisine.'
Simmons nearly laughed. 'Sure. Let's get some breakfast.'
Together, they crossed the lawn again, Primakov sometimes nodding at others heading in the opposite direction, toting briefcases. He was in his element, a man at ease with his position in the world, even under the threat of a Homeland Security agent dredging up old secrets. He had a single nervous gesture, though: He sometimes raised a fleshy finger to his cheek and swiped at it, as if ushering away a fly. Otherwise, he was all old-world elegance in his tailored gray suit, blue tie, and perfectly fitting dentures.
The diner he'd promised turned out to be an overpriced nouveau American restaurant with a separate breakfast menu. When the hostess offered a window seat, Primakov licked his lips, swatted at his cheek, and suggested a booth in the rear of the restaurant.
He ordered the 'Hungry Man' plate of scrambled eggs, toast, sausage, ham, and home fries, while Simmons stuck with coffee. Playfully, he accused her of trying to lose weight, 'which is baffling, because you have a perfect figure, Ms. Simmons. If anything, you should add a few kilos.'
She wondered when a man had last talked to her this way. Not in a while. She called over the waitress and ordered an English muffin.
Before the food came, they went through some of Primakov's particulars. He openly admitted to having risen to the rank of colonel in the KGB, staying on during its transformation into the FSB. By the midnineties, though, he had become disillusioned. 'We kill our own journalists, you know that?'
'I've heard.'
He shook his head. 'It's a pity. But from inside, there's little you can do about it. So I considered my options and in 2000, the new millennium, decided to work for the world at large, rather than my own nation's petty interests.'
'Sounds commendable,' she said, remembering her own brief thoughts in that direction. 'But the UN must be frustrating.'
He raised his bushy brows and conceded with a nod that this was true. 'The failures are what reach your newspapers. The successes- those are just boring, aren't they?'
The waitress returned with two warm plates. Once the old man had begun eating, Simmons said, 'I want you to tell me about it. I'm not interested in digging up dirt. I just want to know who Milo Weaver really is.'
Chewing, Primakov stared at her. 'Right. That Milo person you mentioned.'
She gave him the most endearing a smile she knew how to make. 'Yevgeny. Please. Let's start with Ellen Perkins.'
Primakov looked at her, then at his food, and then, with an exaggerated shrug, set down his utensils. 'Ellen Perkins?'
'Yes. Tell me about her.'
The old man flicked something from his lapel-a woman's hair, it looked like-then snatched at his cheek. 'Because you're so charming and beautiful, I have no choice. Russian men are like that. We're too romantic for our own good.'
One more endearing smile. 'I appreciate it, Yevgeny.'
So he began.
'Ellen was special. You have to know that first of all. Milo's mother wasn't just another pretty face, as you say in America. In fact, she wasn't really that beautiful, physically. In the sixties, the revolutionary cells of the world were full of long-haired angels. Hippies who stopped believing in peace, though they still believed in love. Most of them had no real conception of what they were doing. Like Ellen, they were from broken homes. They just wanted a new family. If they had to die, so be it. At least they'd die for a reason, unlike those poor boys in Vietnam.' He used his fork to point at Simmons. 'Ellen, though-she saw through the romance. She was an intellectual convert.'
'Where did you meet?'
'Jordan. One of Arafat's training camps. She'd spent the last few years being radicalized in America, and when I met her she was inspired by the PLO and the Black Panthers. She was a bit ahead of her time, you see. At that time-sixty-seven-there was no one in America she could talk to. So, with a couple of equally disenfranchised friends, she showed up in Jordan. She met Arafat himself, as well as me. She was far more impressed by Arafat.'
He paused, and Simmons realized she was supposed to fill in the silence. 'What were you doing there?'
'Spreading international peace, of course!' A wry smile. 'The KGB wanted to know how much money to spend on these fighters, and who we could recruit. We didn't really care about the Palestinians;
we just wanted to stick a thorn in America's great Middle Eastern ally, Israel.'
'Ellen Perkins became a KGB asset?'
He swiped at his cheek. 'That was the plan, wasn't it? But Ellen saw right through me. She saw that I didn't care as much about world revolution as I did about keeping my job. The more names I added to my roster of friendly warriors, the more secure my pension became. She saw that. She called me a hypocrite!' He shook his head. 'I'm not kidding. She started listing the atrocities the Soviet Union had committed. The Ukraine famine, trying to starve West Berlin, Hungary in fifty-six. What could I say? I dismissed the Ukraine as a madman's mistake- Stalin's, that is. For Berlin and Hungary, I talked up counterrevolutionaries from the West, but Ellen had no time for my excuses. Excuses-that's what she called them.'
'So she wouldn't work with you,' Simmons said, thinking she understood.
'Quite the contrary! As I said, Ellen was smart. Jordan was just foreplay. If you understand my meaning. Her little ragtag group would learn to shoot and blow things up, but afterward they would need support. At the time, Moscow was generous. She wanted to use me. I, on the other hand, was failing in my duty already. You see, I'd fallen in love with her. She was ferocious.'
Simmons nodded, as if all this made sense to her, but it didn't. She was too young to have known the nuances of the cold war, and her parents' stories of the revolutionary sixties made it sound like the Decade of Cliche. Falling in love with a revolutionary meant falling in love with a suicide bomber chanting disconnected verses from the Qu'ran. That was a few steps beyond her imaginative abilities. 'Her father, William-Ellen didn't talk to him, did she?'
All the good humor bled from Primakov's face. 'No, and I never would have encouraged her to do so. That man is a true shit. Do you know what he did to Ellen? To Ellen and her sister, Wilma?'
Simmons shook her head.
'He deflowered them. At the age of thirteen. It was their comingof-age present.' Decades on, the anger was still with him. 'When I think of all the good people who died, who were killed by my people and your people over the last sixty years, I find it humiliating-yes, humiliating-that a man like that continues to breathe.'
'Well, he's not living well.'
'Living at all is too good for him.'
14
She wouldn't make Weaver's ten o'clock interview at the MCC, so she excused herself and called from beside the cash register. Fitzhugh answered after two rings. 'Yes?'
'Listen, I'm running late, maybe a half hour.'
'What's going on?'
She almost told him, but changed her mind. 'Please, just wait for me in the MCC lobby.'
By the time she returned, Primakov had finished half his breakfast. She apologized for the interruption, then pushed on: 'So. You became Ellen's lover.'
'Yes.' He wiped his lips with a napkin. 'In the fall of 1968, for about two months, we were lovers, to my delight. Then, one day, she was gone. She and her friends had simply vanished. I was in shock.'
'What happened?'
'Arafat himself told me. They'd tried to sneak out that night. They were caught, of course, and held in a little room on the outskirts of the camp. He was called to make a judgment. Ellen explained that she and her friends were taking the fight out of the Middle East and into America. They would attack U.S. support for Israel at its
