"About what?"
"Do you know what I did for the KGB, Kim? You've never asked."
"You were a lawyer?"
"More or less. I was the KGB's idea of a lawyer."
"Okay. What does that mean?"
"I worked in a legal section that specialized in what were termed special cases."
"So what? Specialization is the name of the game. I specialize in immigration law."
"Ask my specialty."
She decided to humor him. She smiled. "What was your specialty, Petri?"
"Framing. I framed people, Kim." He let that nauseating confession sit for a moment, then pushed on. "Only high-value targets. And I was the best, Kim, a remarkably talented lawyer. I could build a seamless case against anybody. A general secretary, a highly decorated marshal of the Soviet Union, a poet with a Nobel Prize, it didn't matter. Literally anybody, Kim. They gave me a name and I went to work. When I was done, any jury or judge would believe the accused was a capitalist pig with ten million in a Swiss account who had sex with his own children and lived only to destroy the motherland."
"Is this why you defected, Petri? Conscience."
He looked away. "Oh, I wish I could say yes." He seemed to sink in his chair. "I'm not so noble, I'm afraid."
"What happened?"
"One day, I went to visit another man in my section, a good friend of twenty years, who worked only three doors down from my office. He had slipped out to go to the latrine. He did something incredibly stupid, he left his door unlocked. This was totally against procedure, you must understand. Inexcusably sloppy. So I walked in. Documents were strewn everywhere. On his desk, his floor, everywhere. He was obviously well along."
"With what?"
"With me, Kim. He was building a case against me."
She moved closer, almost in his face. "Why?"
He refused to look at her. "An hour later, I was hugging a CIA man from your embassy and begging for help. I cried, Kim. I promised anything his bosses wanted-anything. I was about to get what I had done to so many others, and I was suffocating with fear. No level of betrayal was ruled out. They whisked me out the next morning." In a sad, resigned tone Petri added, "So I never asked my old friend, you see."
"You must have some idea."
"Competition, I suppose. You see, I was the best, Kim. I could turn a saint into a whore, a pope into a pimp, whatever I wanted them to be. The chief-of-section job was coming open. We were both vying for the job and all that came with it. A larger apartment, a chauffeured car, two weeks a year in a seedy KGB guest-house in Ukraine. That's how KGB people operate."
"I see."
He rolled forward in his chair and planted his skinny elbows on his bony knees. "Don't look down your nose at my work. You have no idea the expertise or artistry it requires. Everything must be perfect, Kim. Documents forged with just the right dates, matching fonts, identical signatures, all the witnesses coached and carefully choreographed. It's police work and lawyer work and theater work rolled into one. You have to imagine the crime, Kim, dream it up out of thin air. Then dig a moat and build a castle nobody can assail. No detail can be overlooked, no knot untied. I must tell you, Kim, it's so much more difficult than constructing a real case with real facts."
"Well, I wouldn't know about that."
Petri lifted the document and began reading it again. He floated out of his past, back to the present. Nearly an hour passed before he looked up and asked casually, "How do you consider this case against Konevitch?"
"You know what?" She put aside the document she was reading and glanced over at him. "I'm impressed. I thought those four clowns were just drunken miscreants. Totally useless."
"But now?"
"Well, I was wrong. They're good. Very, very good. They've really delivered the goods."
"Will your judge be persuaded?"
Kim smiled. "The Konevitches will be back in Moscow faster than they can blink." After a moment, she asked, "What do you think?"
"Probably so."
"I just wish I had all this material at the first trial."
Petri nodded as if to say: Of course you do. "And what do you believe will happen to them at home?"
"Not my problem, Petri."
"My apologies. I offended you. Of course you can't worry about the people you kick out."
They returned to their work. They fell back into their normal pattern and quietly ignored each other for another hour. Petri thumbed through his beloved dictionaries and scrawled long, messy notes in the margins of a document. Kim pecked away on her keyboard, forcing yet another translated document into her hard drive-or trying to, at least. She began making mistake after mistake. She corrected, then corrected the correction, then repeated the first mistake again. Her brain and her fingers seemed to be coming unglued from each other.
With a loud curse, she finally pushed away from her desk. She wheeled her chair across the floor until she ended up less than a foot from Petri. "All right. What will happen to them?"
He quietly closed the thick dictionary. "Tell me what you think."
