Libra - Don Delillo [76]
He told them Alek had promised TV.
Someone arrived with his belongings. He stayed in the new apartment for three days. They gave him intelligence tests, aptitude tests, personality profiles, tests in English and basic math, tests in the recognition of patterns and shapes.
He dreamed of walking into the house on Ewing Street, in Fort Worth, his hair sopping wet from a swim at the Y.
Lenin and Stalin in an orange glow. Caspian Sea, largest inland sea in the world, on the boundary between Europe and Asia. Kremlin means citadel.
He is telling the story of his stay in a guarded apartment somewhere in Moscow to a man in a suit and tie. Maybe it is Richard Carlson as Herb Philbrick on TV. I Led Three Lives. Maybe it is the man at the U.S. embassy, the second secretary or consul, whatever he is called, adjusting his glasses, listening with interest to the story of an ex-Marine who has infiltrated the Soviet intelligence apparatus as part of the U.S. Navy’s false defector program.
Kirilenko stood on the parquet floor of his partitioned office in the First Section, Seventh Department, Second Chief Directorate at KGB headquarters, the Center, 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, a mass of elaborate stonework comprising an old main building, a postwar extension, a prison, Lubyanka, famous for exterminations, other, lesser buildings, and a courtyard visible through barred windows or screens of heavy-gauge mesh. He liked to think standing up.
The nice thing about the Center was the inexpensive caviar and salmon available in Building 12 across the square, and the J&B and Johnnie Walker at a dollar a bottle. The not-so-nice thing was the heavy sense of Stalinist terror. He also hated the chair they’d given him, a modern contour piece that looked ridiculous behind his old wooden desk.
All the more reason to stand. He kept his arms behind him, left hand clutching right forearm. He was thinking about the American boy, Lee H. Oswald. The lesson of Lee H. Oswald was that easy cases are never easy. It made him think of the classical axioms of his early training in geometry and arithmetic. Sad to learn that those self-evident truths, necessary truths, faltered so badly when subjected to rigorous examination. No plane surfaces here. We are living in curved space.
Alek liked the boy. Such naked aspiration in his eyes. He was trying to get a grip on the world. Facts, words, historic ideas. He struggled against his fate, yes, exactly, like someone in the social universe of Marx. He believed genuinely in high principles and aims even if he was not yet assured of a sense of perspective.
At twenty years old, all you know is that you’re twenty. Everything else is a mist that swirls around this fact.
He slit his wrist to stay in Russia.
But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they’ve told themselves. Men who defect for practical reasons are easier to manage and maintain. Money, sex, frustration, resentment, vanity. We understand and sympathize. We get close to the edge ourselves sometimes.
They’d been watching him since Helsinki, where he registered at the Tomi Hotel, moved to the cheaper Klaus Kurki, applied for a visa at the Soviet consulate, told a clerk in passing that he was an ex-Marine highly qualified in radar and electronics.
A walk-in. But not so sure of himself. Not certain how to go about it.
They made it easy for him to get in, providing a visa in forty-eight hours.
In Moscow his Intourist guide, Rimma Shirokova, reported his choicest remarks to the Fourth Section of the Seventh Department, where they were passed on to Kirilenko. Alek waited, let the low officials mix things up, let the boy pace his room; had him moved to a cheaper room; waited, waited.
There were one hundred and thirty listening devices in the U.S. embassy. In his combination safe Alek had a transcript of Oswald’s remarks about revealing military secrets. Through the efforts of a clerk in the consulate section he had a photograph of Oswald’s passport