Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [148]
“I was throwing up for three days before they took me to the hospital. The doctors think I ate bad sushi, but it’s not that, I know.”
“What about the Italian guy?” I asked. According to Zakayev’s Web site, Sasha became ill after eating sushi with Mario Scaramella, of whom I had never heard before.
“Well, we were in the sushi bar together, so he could have slipped something into my soup.”
My initial reaction was that this was just too much. An Italian lacing his miso soup with poison? Surely it was just a case of bad sushi, I thought.
I called Marina. She said doctors had found a bacterium in his system, which she “could not even begin to pronounce. They gave him some antibiotics.”
“Okay, then. I will be in London tomorrow.”
It sounded so innocuous. I did not see Sasha until Wednesday, November 15. He was still feeling lousy, and I began to be slightly worried: two weeks is just a bit long for food poisoning.
What I saw when I arrived at Barnet Hospital did not make me feel better. They kept Sasha in an infection-safe environment. I had to put on plastic gloves and an apron before entering the ward, and refrain from touching him, to protect him from accidentally catching a bug from outside.
“He is neutropenic,” the doctor said, meaning that his white blood cell count was down. This happens when the bone marrow stops producing cells needed to fight off infection. No food poisoning would cause such a symptom.
“Why?” I asked.
“We don’t know. Theoretically it may be a virus, something like AIDS, or an unknown reaction to the antibiotic he received initially, or a large dose of some chemotherapeutic drug, or heavy irradiation. But he was not near any radiation source and has not received chemotherapy. And he is HIV-negative. Frankly, we are at a loss.”
“We suspect foul play,” I said. “Have you notified the police?”
“At this point the cause can be benign or sinister. We can’t contact them until we are sure. We’re waiting for a toxicology report.”
Sasha looked thin and gray. He had not eaten for two weeks, subsisting on IV transfusions. But he was moving around the room, and he was in a fighting mood.
“The way it started, I thought I’d die,” he reported. “But I immediately drank a gallon of water and made myself throw up, to clean the stomach. These morons, they didn’t listen to me. When I told them I was poisoned by the KGB, they wanted to call a psychiatrist. You have to get it into the British press.”
“I already called a couple of journalists. But no one will touch it without police or hospital confirmation. When toxicology arrives, we’ll know for sure what’s wrong with you.”
By now, thanks to Sasha and Boris, I was an expert in publicizing unbelievable explanations of incredible events, and this one was the most incredible yet. On the other hand, a very ill man was in front of my eyes, and there was no better theory than poison.
“Tell me about the Italian.”
“The Italian has nothing to do with it. I named him on purpose, as a trick. The real man is Andrei Lugovoy, but please keep it secret. I am trying to lure him back to London.”
True to himself, Sasha was playing out another gambit. He was sure that Lugovoy, Boris’s former head of ORT security, had poisoned him. After his illness was reported in Russia, Lugovoy called him from Moscow to wish him a swift recovery.
“I told Lugovoy that I suspect the Italian, to make him feel it’s safe to come again, to finish me off,” he smiled wryly.
Just about a year earlier, at a grand party Boris threw on his sixtieth birthday in a rented castle outside of London, we had shared a table: Sasha, Marina, Andrei Lugovoy, and I. At the time he barely registered in my memory; he was a shadow from the Russian past, one of two hundred guests. But as Sasha told me at the hospital, that party was the beginning of a surprisingly intense interaction between them. Back in Moscow they had never been close.
After having served fourteen months in prison in connection