Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

38.

Moscow, 1991

Rain dribbled down the windows of the Aeroflot passenger liner as it nosed in to a terminal at Sheremetyevo International Airport.

Marianne Didier felt a dull sense of inevitability as passengers rose to leave the Tupolev-154 (remarkably like a Lockheed Tristar with the third engine at the top rear of the fuselage, Marianne thought as she carried her two small valises off). She was about to meet the double agent whose code name in London during the war had been Jaguar.

There was also a muted, enduring sense of continuity as the attractive Slavic stewardesses in their dark uniforms and rakish caps, and the handsome young cockpit crew, stood shaking hands and wishing passengers well. Marianne felt a bit heartened. Whatever was coming with the breakup of the Soviet Union, it just didn’t seem possible that civilization could be swallowed up just because some corrupt old men in the Kremlin were lost in their vodka dreams. Marianne nodded and exchanged well-wishes with the flight crew in her broken and heavily French-accented Russian.

The trip through customs was long and boring and she liberally handed out five dollar bills under-hand to keep things moving. For a little money, men with families to feed, men with jobs that did not always pay on time, men with pinched narrow faces and big hungry dark eyes, could work wonders in cutting through bureaucratic red tape.

The wind outside was mild. People hustled to make a living, as they did everywhere else in the world. Why not here? It was her first time in the capital of her native country, and she felt a strange sense, almost suffocatingly, of going back into a dark past that she did not want to revisit. Her mother had been forced here in the most horrible and uncivilized manner, and had been desperate to leave. But there were pieces of the puzzle here, and she was armed with the information she needed to extract just one more bit of the truth out of the jaws of old age and deception.

A little white Lada taxi took her from the modern concrete runways of the airport, through the miles of drab concrete block apartments of the city, north into Tverskaya and to a small street off Miuskaya Square where a doorman with a very visible handgun on a brown holster under his barebelly and blue suit let her into a secure lobby. The tiny lobby smelled of floor wax and cabbage, and let out in back onto a tiny courtyard of trees in which children cried and birds twittered. The elevator wasn’t working. Neither were the lights. She trudged up three flights of narrow stairs, holding the iron railing, her path lit by the frosted bluish-milky window at each landing. Her two little valises weighed her down, and she paused briefly on each landing, smelling paint and dead flies and dust of lost hopes under the glowing windows there.

She knocked on a dark wooden door and waited. The curling, yellowed slip of paper in the name slot read, in Cyrillic, V. Mutsev.

Finally the door opened and a woman’s eye peered over a dangling metal chain. “Da?” The woman had a listless tone.

Marianne introduced herself as best she could in her broken Russian.

“You have dollars?” the woman said switching to English

“We can talk about it.”

“No guns.”

“I am unarmed, a woman, alone. I came a long way to see him.”

The chain rattled, and the girl opened the door. She was young, maybe 20, and had rings in her soft smooth skin—ears, nose, eyelid. Her short dark hair stuck out in rebellious points and was streaked with undertones of vermilion and moss green. Her eyes were a lovely dark blue, but shot with red from last night’s drinking, which was still detectable on her breath. She wore a long russet top and tight jeans. She was barefoot, with dirty feet and long ungainly toes that a lady should cover up. Maybe she would learn, Marianne thought to herself as she shook hands with the girl.

“Jane,” the girl said. “I am really Marina Viktorovna Mutsev, but who gives a fuck about a name like that. Stupid.”

“It’s a nice Russian name,” Marianne said.

“Ah, Anya Didierovna,” a frail voice said, still crisp with humor and cleverness. A man shuffled out from a back room, holding a newspaper against his stained herringbone pants. He wore a rumpled gray shirt and pushed his suspenders up in a nervous, unconscious habit. He was about 80, and had dark blue eyes like the girl, and thin white hair that showed a pink scalp riddled with gray and brown skin cancers and eczemas.

“Colonel Mutsev,” Marianne said, extending her hand.

He stood stiffly and bowed from the chest, as if they were old nobility greeting each other in a hall of mirrors from a lost ghost era. “Ah yes, Madame Didier. What a pleasure. Did you bring us anything to liven up our poor lives?”

She set one valise on the table, but kept the other in hand. The girl flew to open the valise, snapping its latches with eager long thumbs and exclaiming in flurried whispers. Inside were several rows of gleaming metallic paper containers of fresh French coffee, American cigarettes, English tea, German and Belgian candies, German razors with blades, Italian shaving soap. The labels were still on there from duty free shops at JFK, Heathrow, Bourget, Düsseldorf.

“Any Jack Daniels?” the girl asked.

“Sorry, no. Couldn’t get it through customs.”

“Fuck!”

“Easy, Marinka,” the old man said. “We have to be thankful for what the great lady brings us.”

The girl snapped up a carton of cigarettes and flounced away.

Mutsev made light motions with his hands, as if dancing in a ballet. His eyes were filled with bright hilarity at the irony of it all. “The lady is a great aristocrat, come to visit us in the dictatorship of the workers.”

“I am Russian by birth,” she countered.

“So you are, Timofeyeva, so you are.” He looked over the valise, nodded with punctilious satisfaction, and flicked the lid shut. “You have another valise that you’ll leave with us if I make you happy.”

“That’s the deal, Colonel.”

“Fair enough, dear lady. Let me make us some tea. Would you like tea?”

“Please.”

“Sit over here by the window,” he said, delicately taking her jacket and helping her to a seat at a small table with two seats, overlooking a playground below where small children played.

“They will grow up with more than we ever had,” he said as he broke open a Twinings packet and took out two little teabags.

“They will be lucky,” she said, shivering despite the mild weather. “I have not come to embarrass you, Gospodin.”

“I understand that,” he said matter-of-factly. He had his heavy black-framed glasses on so that he could see the proper setting on the gas stove. “At least we have gas, if not electricity,” he muttered with elegant patience. “Tomorrow, we have no gas, but a million lights. That story never seems to change.”

The water began to hum in the pan, and he sat across from her, folding his hands on the table. He had been a tall, handsome man once, and she could picture the mustache and the way Tim Nordhall must have seen him in World War II London, looking like a black-suited, bowler-hatted, brolly-wielding bank employee.

“Your father you want to know about.”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “It is still very clear to me. The Americans had a wonderful new weapon that Stalin wanted very badly. Hitler had thrown out all his Jews, among them the most brilliant physicists in the world, and they came to the U.S.A. with all their knowledge. So did Fermi, thrown out by Mussolini because Fermi had a Jewish wife. Many of these Jews were idealistic. Some of them believed capitalism was just another form of evil. After all, the Czar’s last move had been to try and implement some capitalistic reforms before the Bolsheviks overthrew him. A lot of these Jews had roots in old Russia. Their grandparents and great-grandparents had pushed handcarts and endured being spit on in places like Hell’s Kitchen in New York. Their children wanted socialism. Not all of them, of course, but a lot of the more intelligent ones. The idealists. Some of them became quite useful to us, and I almost had the bomb in my grasp.”

He made a grasping motion in the air, turning his pale wrinkled old fist so that ineffectual white fingertips pressed against soft a soft palm.

He looked at her. “Nobody alive today knows who all the spies were, but there were many. We played the USA as if it were our living-room. Journalists have come and asked many questions about espionage. That is not what you are after.”

“No,” she said softly. “You called me Timofeyeva.”

“Yes.” He read her trembling hopefulness and said with equal softness in the semidark room: “Yes, that is correct.” Timofeyeva was the patronymic, customary to give as a sort of middle name to a girl whose father happened to be named Timofei or Timothy.

Then it was true. Timothy Nordhall was her father. “I just want to meet my father. Did you know Tim Nordhall?”

As they spoke, Marina hurried from the apartment wearing a dark pea-coat with bulging pockets, presumably to carry gifts of cigarettes to her friends—or perhaps to buy drugs. Marianne didn’t ask, and the old man ignored her. The girl offered no word of farewell. The door slammed, and Marianne heard feet clattering down the stairwell.

Mutsev smiled at the memory of World War 2. “That was something. I was working in the Congo with Crane, one of our double agents, when the Märzig brothers sent along this American Navy engineer they had rescued in Mauritania. That was Nordhall.”

“Who are the Märzig brothers?”

He waved dismissively. “Two deserters from the Afrika Korps and the Luftwaffe. We recruited them in Morocco during the war and they ended up working for the East Germans in Africa well into the 1970s. One was retired to East Berlin where he died not long ago. Crane and I, in fact, killed his cousin in Mauritania. A fellow named Malone was trying to set up a drug deal and double-cross us, trying to have his cake and eat it too, as the Americans say. Malone wanted to get the drugs, keep his money, and pretend he’d broken a spy ring. We couldn’t let him continue. Crane and I ambushed Malone and his Belgian girlfriend in a desert shack. I remember her name, poor woman: Regine Clery. By some trick of fate, your father happened to bumble along that very night.” His eyes glittered, and he rubbed his hands.

She leaned forward and anxiously put a hand over his. “So there was a real Major Malone?”

Mutsev nodded and rehashed some of what he’d just explained. “Robert Malone was a real U.S. Army major who went into Africa for O.S.S. and never came out alive,” he said. “Malone had a gambling habit, and we turned him on it. We also had the beautiful but dissipated Madame Clery on the hook, a heroin addict who took up with Malone. Together they came up to Mauritania to buy a load of drugs from me. Crane was already a mole for the U.S.S.R. at the time, working Donovan on one side and my bureau on the other. Crane and I were in Mauritania to meet Malone and Clery, when Malone made his move to double-cross us. He tried to shoot Crane, but I stabbed Malone in the back.” He sighed. “This is not pretty stuff for you to hear, to imagine, my sweet young lady. Then Crane went into a rage and finished off the Belgian woman, who was screaming bloody murder. Cold fish, that Crane. Ugly man. A major in the NKVD. We retired him appropriate to his rank and accomplishments.” His eyes leaded over at his memories. “Crane recruited your father for O.S.S. in the Congo. We were after the yellow-cake Uranium-235 ore from Katanga, which was the finest quality in the world. That was incredibly important for purposes of efficiently enriching the core for a bomb. With Malone dead, my Directorate and I decided to play the Malone card backwards in London, using your father, and Crane, and a Polish nurse, among other actors in the drama. We successfully pulled that off for at least another year. I was Nordhall’s handler in London. He knew me as Jaguar.” He smacked his lips in satisfaction, remembering a time when things had gone far better.

Marianne felt sickened at the cascade of violence he was describing. He declined his eyes and looked grim. “I’m sorry. Those were ugly times.”

The tea water bubbled, and Marianne rose to get cups. “I understand. Those were other times, Mr. Mutsev.”

The old man stayed seated, hands folded, eyes lost in reminiscence. “Jaguar was a valuable cover. We were working big fishes in London, Philby and Burgess, all those Cambridge queers. Pardon my expression.”

“I have heard worse,” Marianne said looking for sugar in the cupboards, which were empty and dirty. “Doesn’t that girl do any work here?”

“I am just grateful for her company, occasionally, when she is wounded or needs a meal,” he said softly. “It is about all I have left in my old age.”

“Burgess. Philby.”

“Oh yes. The Malone persona was so very useful while it lasted. We were able to switch tracks without much effort and continue our work.” He grinned sardonically. “One of the drawbacks of democracy is its openness, which is also its greatest strength. We do know the outcome of the game now, don’t we?” He pointed at the poverty he was living in, with an ironic mask for a face.

“Did you ever get to the United States?” she asked.

His eyes glittered wickedly. “Now you ask sensitive questions.” He shrugged, remembering it didn’t really matter anymore, not to him anyway. “Sure, San Francisco. Your father is a hell of a marksman.” He lifted his top. He had an ugly blue knot of a scar over a sagging yellow love handle.

“He shot you?” Marianne whispered, shocked.

“Yes, Umnitsa. London, 1945. Cover blown by your father, Malone disappears. We all go off to do other things, and Nordhall is reassigned to San Francisco. Then the Germans turn over a mass of uranium oxide in a U-boat in New England, and I’m back on the case. We were beginning to work the U.N. Charter conference in San Francisco at the time, though I was on a technical assignment and got pulled off to investigate the U-234 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Out of the moth closet comes old Major Malone again, looking remarkably like me this time. I tracked that uranium through Oak Ridge and over to San Francisco. We had it in our hands, ready to transport to Siberia via the Lend Lease air lift, when your father and one of his women spoiled it all.”

“How?”

He laughed. “We took it from under their noses, and they took it from under ours. I have to take my hat off to them. I almost died right then, you know. My jacket on fire, I parachuted from a burning plane and landed five miles away in a Montana logging area. Rescued by some nice men twice my size, I told them some story—I think I said I was a commercial charter pilot—and they dropped me off in Great Falls, where I boarded the next flight back to Russia. My cover was blown, and I was of no more use in that theater. I spent the next twenty years working as a technical advisor to NKVD and KGB here in Moscow before retiring. It was good though, because I married and had two children. My son Igor was wounded in Afghanistan and is now a manager with Gazprom. The other, Boris, is divorced and drinking himself to death, and I raise his daughter for him, not doing very good job. What can one do?” He raised his hands quizzically.

“And my father?” she said, pushing the other valise over to him.

He took the valise in eager, pathetic hands and pulled it under his chair. “Your father also disappeared. I’m sorry, I never did ask anymore about him, since I was too busy surviving in our poor land, which was still terribly destroyed after the war. We lost over a quarter of our population, half due to the Germans and half due to Stalin’s murderers. Now come and have tea with me before you return to the airport. I wish you the best of luck. A brave man, your father, and very determined. Very smart. And lucky with women, I think.” He winked, then added: “I mean, to have such a lovely daughter.” But that hadn’t been what he meant. It’s okay, Marianne thought, sitting down. If I can sit here having tea with a government-sponsored serial killer, I can enjoy thinking of my father as one who got lucky in matters of love.