The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, page 10
“What did you do in boarding school?” Diamond asked.
“When I wasn’t writing long self-pitying letters home, I sat on a bed talking about sex and acne with a room full of pimply faced virgins.”
“What do girls talk about when they talk about sex?”
“At one time or another, just about everything—virginity, oral sex, how many calories there are in sperm, whether during intercourse you would guide him in or let him do it himself. That was a big question, I remember, whether you should guide him.”
“What did you decide?”
Sarah smiled innocently. “Don’t you know?”
Gradually the intimacies and insights began to give Diamond a new perspective of Sarah. What he had taken for childlike innocence—a one-dimensional figment of his own naïveté, he now saw—was neither childlike nor innocent, but rather a determined, almost teeth-gritting openness. It was this quality, Diamond now decided, that had attracted him—her refusal to protect herself lest she fend off some experience. “I never got to somebody without battering down walls,” he told her during one soft, musing moment. They were walking back to the apartment from the zoo, heading east on Sixtieth Street past the dust and debris of subway construction, past the rows of workmen sulking on the sidewalk, their backs against buildings, eying girls. Around Sarah and Diamond, people flowed in cross-currents or milled in eddys waiting for lights or moods to change. “It’s almost …”
“Almost what?” Sarah prompted.
“Almost as if I spent my life dealing with walls, and you’re the first flesh-and-blood person I’ve actually confronted.”
Just before they arrived at the apartment, Diamond came back to openness. “Everytime I made love with my wife”—he had to keep himself from wincing at the word wife—“I had the feeling she was doing me a favor. With you, I have the feeling you’re doing yourself a favor.”
Sarah thought about that. Presently she said: “Which is another way of saying I’m a selfish bitch.”
“No, not that, not that at all. Everyone’s selfish, everyone is occupied with himself. But you, you’re a glutton for experience.” After a while Diamond added: “Sometimes I’m afraid I’m just another experience for you.” He wanted her to contradict him, to protest that he was much more than that. But she took in what he was saying and what he was wishing and remained silent.
There was another layer to Sarah, and Diamond perceived it when he telephoned from the brownstone to tell her he had just got hold of the second batch of C.P.P interviews and wanted to read them before coming back to the apartment.
“Can’t you do it tomorrow, Leo—I’m in an awful funk.” Her voice, sullen and without inflection, had moved beyond asking; it was on the edge of pleading.
“I’d rather do it now,” Leo said quickly, his eyes already skimming the top sheet. “I don’t want to let them pile up.”
“I’m sorry, Leo.” It was an apology without an explanation. “Forget the whole thing.” And she abruptly hung up.
“What got into you?” Diamond said when he finally arrived at the apartment.
“I get like that sometimes,” she said. This time it was an explanation without an apology. “Suddenly everything seems so gray on gray—the sky, the street, the future, the past, the present, my life, you and me, everything. I needed something to hang on to for a moment—the sight of you. It’s over now. Forget it.”
But Diamond couldn’t forget it; it dawned on him that there was within Sarah an echo of a sound he was familiar with—a half-note of desperation. Like Don Quixote leveling his lance at the windmills within himself, she was battling a very persuasive despair. Her almost manic openness, Diamond now saw, was a last-ditch defense against indifference—and indifference was the outer edge of despair. Even her collection of things—her roots, as she called them—were part of the picture, for they created a familiar home ground from which she could wage her war, and to which she could retreat when the battle went against her. In one of those instants of icy detachment of which he was capable, Diamond saw himself not as a lover but as a bollard to which she had tied up—for a day or a week or a month, until the despair overwhelmed her and compelled her to move on.
“I’m sorry about before, Leo”—here it was, a full-fledged apology—“hanging up like that, I mean.” Suddenly Sarah switched moods. She spread her arms wide, palms out—she was wearing blue jeans and was bare from the waist up—smiled coquettishly and asked: “You’re not angry, are you?”
“Not angry,” he agreed, matching her mood.
“You still want to go out tonight?”
“Not if you don’t,” he said.
“I don’t,” she said. “There are some eggs in the fridge—how about an omelette for dinner?”
“An omelette will do me fine—I used to cat fines herbes in France all the time during the war. Lived on a farm outside of a town called Plascassier. They had lots of chickens and lots of eggs, so when everything else was scarce, we ate omelettes.”
“I can’t picture you in the war,” Sarah said, and she smiled and kissed him on the mouth and went off to prepare the eggs. Later, after dinner, she asked him how he could put catsup on an omelette. “It kills the taste,” she said.
“That’s the general idea,” Diamond replied gravely. “Since France, I hate eggs.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“I did—sort of. I told you I ate eggs all the time.”
“But you didn’t say you didn’t like them.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t you have any imagination?” Still later, Sarah caught Diamond staring out of the window downriver toward the tip of Manhattan. The sun was setting behind the towers on Wall Street, throwing into sharp outline the architectural features of the bridges that connected the island with Brooklyn and turning the East River into a lacework of quicksilver and shadows.
“A penny?” Sarah said, and when he looked confused, she added, “For your thoughts.”
“Oh, I was thinking about Lewinter—you remember, the guy who defected to the Russians.”
“How’s the C.C.P. going?”
“It’s C.P.P.—for Comprehensive Personality Profile. Unfortunately, it’s going just where I thought it would go.”
“He took secrets with him, huh?”
“It looks that way. Of course, we’ll never really know, but it all adds up to the fact that he may rate as the most serious defection this country’s ever had.” And Diamond went on to select those details available to the C.P.P. which seemed to prove his point. “Apparently Lewinter had nothing worth giving away in his own field, but he got a glimpse of some extremely sensitive material in another field.”
“But a glimpse, Leo—what good is a glimpse? He would have had to copy it or photograph it or memorize it, wouldn’t he?” Sarah was playing amateur to Diamond’s professional, throwing quick questions at him the way a straight man feeds one-liners to his comic.
“Normally, yes—access is nothing unless you have the ability to take it with you. But it turns out there is a strong possibility that our friend Lewinter was endowed with a photo memory.” Diamond told her about the poem and about the doctor who said it was possible to lose and later regain a photo memory. “So he simply read the material and that was that—he could probably give it back to you formula for formula.”
“There’s more to it, isn’t there, Leo? You wouldn’t be so sure if there weren’t more to it.”
Diamond watched the shadows smother the pinpricks of light on the river. “There’s a lot more to it—the pieces fit together so well one way that it’s hard to see how else to assemble them. First off, shortly after Lewinter defected, someone went to his apartment and lifted all of his personal papers. We checked to see if it was one of our agents. It wasn’t, which means it was one of theirs. Obviously, they were going to great lengths to see who it was they had—a sure indication that they thought they had somebody important. Then there is the business of the librarian, Marmsbury. Three days after the defection—remember, by then they would have held an initial debriefing—the librarian who gave Lewinter access to the secret formulas was run down and killed by a truck from Fairfax Dairies.”
“Coincidence,” said Sarah unconvincingly.
“The police checked it out—there is no such animal as Fairfax Dairies on the eastern seaboard.”
“But why would they kill the librarian?”
“To cover up the fact that Lewinter had access to very sensitive material. If we didn’t suspect he had access, we wouldn’t get worried about the defection—and we wouldn’t change the formulas he swiped.”
“You really think they murdered the librarian?” Sarah asked in a low, awed voice. Suddenly the whole thing was very frightening.
“In my business, Sarah, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”
“What are you going to do about Lewinter?”
Diamond laughed, revealing more than a trace of bitterness in his voice. “Chances are I’m not going to do anything about it. Unless I come up with some pressing reasons why I should follow through, it’ll probably be dumped into the Agency’s lap.”
“You’d like to keep it, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d like to keep it, yes—this kind of operation is very, well, challenging. It’s almost like a game. You figure out a move. Then you figure out how they’ll interpret your move and what response they’ll make. And you try to psych out whether they’ll think you’ve figured out their next move. Then you figure out another move. It’s kind of like chess, Sarah. There are obvious, logical moves and sometimes you make them. But you’re always looking for the brilliant innovation, the flash of imagination or intuition that comes once in a hundred games. You remember, I told you about the Cernú affair—that was like that; it was a great move which might have succeeded … might have succeeded …” Diamond let the thought trail off into unspoken regret. Then he started up again, fresh with a second wind. “Do you play chess?” She shook her head no. “Not many girls play chess. It’s a man’s game—it’s really a vicious game, chess, cunning and vicious. It’s war and aggression and gamesmanship and nerve all wrapped up into one. You know, I’ve often dreamed of playing chess with live people. The ones that are taken off the board would be killed—”
“Could you do it?” Sarah interrupted in a low voice. “Could you really do it?”
“I know I could. I could even sacrifice—give up one man in order to gain a position or advance a gambit. I know I’d have the nerve.”
The conversation lagged as Sarah absorbed this information. Presently she said: “What would you do about Lewinter if it were yours to handle? I know what I’d do.”
Diamond, preoccupied with his human chess game, was only faintly interested. “What would you do?”
“Well, it’s simple. I’d change the formulas he stole; I’d use new formulas. That’d make the information he gave them obsolete.”
“It’d cost too much money—something in the neighborhood of sixty or seventy billion. Try again.”
It had become a game between them, and Sarah was determined to defend her amateur standing. “O.K., I’d confuse the Russians by sending them a second defector with a different version of the same information. What’s wrong with that?”
“Too slow; it takes years to work up a good plant. And if he slips just once—say he gets the name of the high school he was supposed to have attended wrong—all you’ve done is convince them that the first defector is a very important guy with very important information. But don’t be discouraged. Try again for the Kewpie doll? Think of the headlines if you win: BEAUTIFUL MODEL SAVES MIRV.”
“What’s MIRV?”
“Forget I said that—go on and try again.”
“MIRV has something to do with what he stole, doesn’t it? All right, try this one.” Sarah looked up at the ceiling and closed her eyes as if she were doing some difficult mental calculations. “I’ve got it this time. It’s really very elementary. The object is to discredit Lewinter, right? It’s no skin off our nose if they have him as long as they don’t believe him. Well, all you’ve got to do is convince the Russians you’re trying to convince them he’s a real defector. When they see you’re trying to convince them he’s real, they’ll naturally conclude he’s some sort of fake. What’s wrong with that, huh?” She was sure he’d find something wrong.
“Go through that one again, will you?”
She did, ending up again with: “What’s wrong with that?” Diamond looked off again toward the river, by now a current of coal-black liquid. “Offhand I can’t see anything wrong with it. Let me think about it a while.”
The next day was to be their last in New York, and so they went to bed early to make the most of it. Long after Sarah had fallen asleep, Diamond lay with his eyes wide open staring into the blackness of his mind. At 2 A.M. he went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee, which he forgot to drink for a while. When he remembered, it was too cold. At 5:45 A.M., with the first shoots of light gray protruding above the window sill, Diamond shook Sarah awake.
“What?” she asked, her eyes swollen with sleep.
Diamond smiled down at her as if he were enjoying a private joke. “How would you like to take up chess?” he said.
PART III
THE MIDDLE GAME
13
IT RAINED most of the afternoon, long strands of chain-linked tear drops that snapped the leaves back and forth like punching bags, accumulated in the discolored copper gutters and gushed to the ground below. By the time Pogodin and Lewinter arrived, well after dark, the rain had stopped, but the hundred yards or so from the end of the paved cul de sac to the dacha was a sea of mud.
“I’ve been meaning to put down planks, but somehow I never seem to close the gap between thought and action,” Zaitsev laughed as he waved them indoors.
“That’s a common enough sin on earth … I forgive you,” Pogodin said solemnly, and he etched a cross on Zaitsev’s forehead with his thumbnail.
“Well, welcome, Pope Pogodin,” Zaitsev bellowed, and he threw an affectionate arm over Pogodin’s shoulder. “Tell me, how does one say ‘welcome’ in English?” When Pogodin told him, Zaitsev turned formally to Lewinter, thrust out a hand and said: “Vel-cum.” There was a strong odor of alcohol on Zaitsev’s breath and it made Lewinter wince. Zaitsev turned back to Pogodin. “Your companion has the look of an over-nourished fairy, but the hell with it, tell him I welcome him despite his weakness of character—to my cottage, to Russia, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
Inside, the dacha smelled of wet wood and wet wool and bare feet. Mud-caked shoes were strewn in the doorway where Zaitsev’s guests had abandoned them to dry. The room itself was twice as long as it was wide, in the style of the eighteenth-century Russian manor houses. The ornate carved wooden shutters were open to the moist night air. There were no panes in the windows because Zaitsev only used the house in the summer; once the warm weather was over, he never strayed far from the creature comforts of his centrally heated Moscow flat.
At the far end of the room, the still-wet branches of a sycamore poked through an open window. A spider web, so fragile it looked like threads of light, connected two of the leaves. A dozen or so people, as mixed a lot as any Russian intellectual could gather under one roof in August, were sitting or standing or leaning around. Empty and half-empty bottles of Glenfiddich Scotch and Remy Martin cognac and Polish vodka (the kind you have to finish once you open because the bottle has no stopper) littered the tabletops. Saucers overflowed with cigarette stubs and ashes and ash-coated apple cores and cherry pits. Next to what used to be the fireplace but had been fitted with doors and turned into a liquor cabinet, a very beautiful and very intoxicated ballerina sat cross-legged on the floor sobbing uncontrollably. When anyone tried to console her, she sobbed even more bitterly, because, she explained between hiccups, the only thing keeping her from becoming a prima ballerina was that her husband—also a dancer—was a homosexual. Homosexuals were the outcasts of Russian ballet.
“Introductions!” Zaitsev boomed, clanging a knife against one of the vodka bottles for attention. His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed, his face was flushed with drink and heat; he was in top form.
“Translate for me, Yefgeny,” he ordered Pogodin. “Don’t worry about the names too much, because your American will never remember them anyhow. But be meticulous about my oral marginalia. As usual, they will be priceless.” Anticipating another Zaitsev monologue, the dull hum of spiritless conversation faded into silence; the party had perked up.
“The crybaby is Valentina Berezhkova,” Zaitsev began, gesturing toward the ballerina on the floor. “When she’s not blubbering, she has the face of an Odette—and the soul of an Odile.” Everyone laughed, even the ballerina through her tears. The audience was warming.
“Here meet Alexandr Timoshenko, mediocre translator, gutless editor, fading liberal light on the editorial board of Novi Mir, the slowest gun in the back rooms of the Writers’ Union.” In fact, Timoshenko was one of the most influential liberal literary figures in the country, and much respected by Zaitsev. “Alex, greet Yefgeny Mikhailovich Pogodin, ambivalent intellectual, ambivalent humanist, ambivalent Marxist, ambivalent bureaucrat. On the surface, he is all Communist. Scratch the surface and you’ll find, not Lenin or Marx, but Taras Bulba. In this, he has a lot in common with Russia. Ambivalence, Alex, is the key to our souls. The English author Thomas Carlyle captured this, didn’t he, in his character Diogenes Teufelsdröckh—Diogenes for ‘God-born,’ Teufelsdröckh for ‘Devil’s dung.’ The ultimate in ambivalence. Did you know you have to have a chit from the Ministry of Culture to draw translations of Carlyle from the Lenin Library? Pity. He really understood the relationship between material things and spiritual things. So it goes. Here, Alex, greet also one of the few people in the world who has gone out of his way to get into Mother Russia, the American defector Lewinter.”
