Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [110]
“The Party.”
“The Communist party. Max said that all it had to do was change its name, call itself a company and restructure. Dump the shareholders, keep the goods.”
Arkady wasn’t aware at what point he had set his bag down, but he discovered himself sitting on the couch. Bread, cheese and cigarettes were on the table. A floor fixture pointed light in three directions. The balcony door was open to street sounds and night air.
Stas filled the glasses again. “I wasn’t a spy. The KGB called demonstrators and defectors either spies or mentally ill. Russians understand that. The part I didn’t expect was that the Americans would think that it was a KGB plot to insert the dangerous Stas into the unsuspecting West. Some of the CIA believed it. All of the FBI believed it. The FBI doesn’t believe any defectors. Jesus could ride an ass out of Moscow and they’d open a file on him.
“There were real heroes. Not me. Men and women who crawled through minefields into Turkey or ran through gunfire to reach an embassy yard. Who threw away careers and lost their families. For what? For Czechoslovakia, Hungary, God, Afghanistan. Which doesn’t mean that they weren’t compromised. You understand, but Americans don’t. We grew up with informers; among our friends and families there always were informers. Even among heroes there were informers. It’s complex. A woman, an old lover from Moscow, visits Munich. Michael demands to know why I see her when everyone knows she’s an informer. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still love her. We have a writer at Liberty whose wife worked at an army base teaching the Russian language to American officers, screwing them and getting information for the KGB so she could live like a decent Western woman. She spent two years in jail. That doesn’t mean her husband didn’t take her back. We all talk to her. What are we going to do, pretend she’s dead?
“Or we arrive compromised. An artist, a friend of mine, was called in by the KGB before he left Moscow. They said, ‘We never put you in a camp, so no hard feelings. All we hope is you don’t slander us to the Western press. After all, we think you’re a wonderful artist and you probably don’t realize how difficult it is to survive in the West, so we’d like to give you a loan. In dollars. We won’t tell anyone and you don’t need to sign a receipt. After a few years you pay it back with interest or no interest, when you can, just between us.’ Five years later he publicly sent them a check and demanded a receipt, but it took him that long to realize how cheaply he’d been compromised and canceled out. How many other loans are out there?
“Or we go crazy. There’s the writer who went to Paris. A famous writer who survived the gulag and wrote under the pen name of ‘Teitlebaum.’ It was revealed that he informed for the KGB. He wrote a defense and said, no, no, it wasn’t him who informed, it was Teitlebaum!
“And occasionally,” Stas said, “we’re killed. We open a letter bomb or get jabbed with the tip of a poisoned umbrella, or drink ourselves to death. Even so, at one time we were heroes.”
Laika stretched like a sphinx in the middle of the floor. Arkady couldn’t see the dog’s eyes as much as feel their force. Her ear might turn toward the sound of a particularly noisy car on the street four stories down, but her focus remained on him. He said, “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”
“I do because you’re different. You aren’t a dissident. You saved Irina, but everyone wants to save Irina, that’s not necessarily a political act.”
“It was more personal,” Arkady admitted.
“You stayed. People who knew Irina knew about you. You were the ghost. She tried to reach you once or twice.”
“Not that I know of.”
“What I’m trying to say is that we made a sacrifice to