“Originally to monitor the UN conference in ‘45,” his father said easily. “Afterward, well, some of the old GRU contacts were still there. It was useful to keep tabs on the Soviet merchant marine. Sailors had a bad habit of jumping ship once they were in Babylon. Defectors. That kept the office busy.”
“What happened to them, the sailors?”
“Does it matter?” his father said quietly.
“Yes.”
“They were found and shipped back home.”
Not a game. Hunted down, thrown into ships, sent back to prison camps.
“With your help,” Nick said.
His father was quiet, then sighed. “Yes, with my help. What do you want me to say, Nick? That I didn’t know?”
“No,” Nick said, absorbing it. “Go on.”
“So Josef came back-this would be after they finally got rid of Beria, lots of changes then-and we got together. He liked a drink. I’m a political analyst, I said. Isn’t it time I had something to analyze? I’m wasting my time here. No one is going to waste time now, he says. We’re going to clean house. You’ll see. Very important. As if it were up to him. It’s the drink talking, I thought. But no, reports did start coming. They threw out half the section, Beria’s goons, and Josef had everything his way for a while. He liked me, I don’t know why. I never liked him much, but we don’t pick our commissars, do we? I finally had some real work to do.
“Then, one day, a funny thing. Josef used to assign the reports, but he was out, so his secretary brought them straight over from cryptology. She was the type who knew everything-she came with the place. No one could ever get rid of her, not even Josef. I think maybe she had a protector. Anyway, she handed me a report and said, ‘So Silver’s back. Now we’ll really have something,’ as if I knew all about it. ”Good,“ I said. ‘It’s about time.’ Conspirators, you see. And she was right-we did have something. Committee minutes. House appropriations. Much better than the other stuff I was seeing. So where did this come from? I wondered. Not Carlson. Not an illegal-the access was too good. The next day I said to Josef, ‘Who’s Silver?’ Not that he would tell me-that wasn’t allowed. But I thought he might say something, a hint. For the old network. It only took a second, that look of surprise. He shouldn’t have hesitated — we live for seconds like that.”
Nick thought of the guard, of his father’s seamless affability, not even a second’s pause.
“‘There is no Silver,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’ But I knew. It was that second. I showed him the report. ‘Oh, this,’ he said. ‘That idiot in cryptology — he keeps getting the names wrong. There is no Silver.’ So I went along with it-what else could I do? I waited for the next one. Of course it never came. So one day I took a report back to the secretary and said, casually, you know, ‘This one’s no Silver. When’s he going to deliver again?’ and the old cow smiled that little superior smile of hers. ‘Oh, Josef Ivanovich reads those himself.’ So there it was. But what? Why not let me see them? I was reading everything else. We used to cross-check the reports, to verify information when we could. Evidently these didn’t need verification. Josef never said a word. I would get him drunk, talk about the old days, but never a word. The others, yes. How Carlson used to bungle the meetings. Lots of stories.
“Then one night he said something interesting. We were talking about the Cochrane woman. ‘That was wrong,’ he said, ‘which surprised me. I thought he was talking about her being killed. Josef wasn’t the squeamish type. His hands were never- Then he said, ’You can’t run things that way. The postman shouldn’t know anyone.‘ ’She knew me,‘ I said, thinking I’d catch him, but he just shrugged it off. ’From the newspapers.‘ He wagged his finger at me, I remember. ’I always said, stay out of the newspapers.‘ Scolding me, a joke. So we laughed. But all I could think was, she knew somebody else.”
“Silver,” Nick said.
“Yes. It had to be. No one else was that important. Maybe Schulman-he was a talent spotter, he would have known names, but he had a different contact. Not in Washington. She never knew him. It had to be Silver. No one in the old network was worth protecting. Not that way-killing somebody. Josef wouldn’t talk about him. They were still protecting him, even from me.”
“What made him so important?”
“His information. They were right-it didn’t need verification. No guesswork, no mistakes.”
Nick glanced over. “You got this from one report?”
“No, I saw others. I told you, I followed him. Nothing lasts forever in the service. Including Josef. He was a good man, too, as far as that went. His problem was, he was from the old days, all the way back to the Comintern, when people believed in things. He didn’t grasp what it had all become. Just smoke and mirrors. And perks, if you knew how to work them. Which he didn’t.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. We never asked.”
“You never asked?”
