Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [123]
Sasha was of the same opinion as I: sooner or later Kontora would crack down on Trepashkin. “But don’t worry,” he said. “He is solid as a rock. He will never break. You can rely on him.”
I did not know what to think. I needed to meet the man personally, to look him in the eye, as George Bush would say.
After my adventures in Turkey I could not go to Russia, and it was useless for Trepashkin to ask for permission to go to a Western country. But thanks to the use of a friend’s telephone, he managed to tell me he could slip out to Kiev for a day.
Unlike Sasha, who joined the KGB in its waning days, Trepashkin had had ten years of distinguished service as a Lubyanka investigator during the Soviet era. His specialty had been the underground trade in stolen art and antiques. In the post-Soviet period, he moved to Internal Affairs and worked directly for Nikolai Patrushev, who later succeeded Putin as FSB director. He investigated corruption in Kontora and the connections of some of its officers to Chechen criminal groups in Moscow. Once, Trepashkin intercepted a planeload of weapons sold by some rogue FSB officers to the rebels, which won him a medal. Yet he broke with Kontora in 1996, when he made public allegations of corruption. That was how he ended up on the URPO target list. Married for the second time, he had two young children and a teenage boy from his first marriage.
Waiting for him at the President Hotel in Kiev, I recognized him at once: a short, dark-haired man of forty-five, with a perceptive gaze and a reserved smile. He was the complete opposite of Sasha: unemotional, not spontaneous, an introvert. Over several hours of conversation, which continued in a Georgian restaurant, I could not get him to bare his soul, something that had happened instantly with Sasha in Turkey. He avoided reflective talk and ignored all my efforts to draw him into a discussion of the higher reasons behind his self-appointed mission. He would not dwell on politics and did not want to generalize. He behaved as if the apartment bombings were just another crime that he was charged with investigating.
I gave up trying to gauge his deeper motivations. But I wanted to make sure that he understood the limits of what we could do for him if he got into trouble.
“Misha, if I may, do you understand that they will put you in jail if you pursue this?” I asked.
“I am not going to break any laws, Alexander Davidovich. If they jail me, it would be illegal.”
“That’s my point, Mikhail Ivanovich,” I said, acceding to his more formal terms of address. “I have to tell you, I would very much like you to continue, but if you do, you may end up badly, and there is very little that we would be able to do for you.”
“I am not doing this for you,” he said. “I have my clients, Tatyana Alexandrovna and Aliona Alexandrovna Morozova. And also I am working for Sergei Nikolaevich Yushenkov, the Duma deputy.”
The more informal my comments, the more formally he responded. He refused to be initiated into my brotherhood. So be it, I thought. He won’t accept the obvious: that he was fighting the system. He preferred to pretend that he was just solving a crime. Perhaps that was his way of avoiding the truth that for all his life he had served the wrong master. One thing was sure, however: I trusted him. He was after the evidence. To keep my conscience clean I warned him for the last time that he was heading straight to prison if he didn’t stop, and then we went on to discuss the next matter at hand: getting Sasha’s book to Moscow.
Trepashkin insisted that even though the operation was to be secret, it should be strictly legal: the paperwork accompanying the shipment must be in order, it had to be cleared through Customs, and so on. Of course, I agreed, and kept to myself the observation that none of this would protect him. When we said goodbye