Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

I stood in shocked silence. Even if I had the wherewithal to speak, I had no name, nothing more than an address. I stepped forward and wordlessly showed her the yellowed scrap of envelope. In the background, from the depths of the dark apartment, the dog whined and strained.

Wordlessly, too, she squinted at it, then turned and was gone.

A few seconds later, a man came to the door who appeared to be around seventy. Once, you could tell, he had been strong, even stocky; his coarse gray hair had once been jet black. He was now frail, but he still walked with a pronounced limp, and the long, thin scar on one side of his face, at the jawline, once an ugly, inflamed red, had faded to a pale, etiolated white. Fifteen years had aged him dramatically.

The man whose face and figure I knew I would never forget, because I had seen it night after night after night.

The man I had last seen limping away from the rue Jacob fifteen years ago.

“So,” I said with more calmness than I would ever have believed I could summon. “You’re the man who killed my wife.”

I did not remember seeing his eyes, which were a watery gray-blue: vulnerable eyes that did not belong to a KGB “wet-work” specialist, to the man who had dispatched my beautiful young wife, fired off a shot to her heart without a moment’s thought.

I remember only the thin red scar at his jawline, the shock of black hair, the plaid hunter’s shirt, the limp.

A would-be defector, a KGB filing clerk in the Paris station who identified himself as “Victor,” has information to sell. Information he says he’s discovered in the archives in Moscow. Something to do with a cryptonym, MAGPIE.

He wants to defect. In exchange, he wants protection, security, comfort, all the things we Americans are known to dispense to defecting spies like some sort of intelligence Santa Claus.

We speak. We meet on the Faubourg-St. Honoré. We meet again at a safe-house flat. He promises us earthshaking, really explosive stuff, from a file on MAGPIE. Toby’s interest is piqued. He is quite interested in MAGPIE.

We arrange to meet at my apartment on the rue Jacob. It is safe, because Laura is gone, I think. I arrive late. A man in a plaid shirt, a thatch of black hair, is limping away. I can smell blood, sharp and metallic, warm and sour, a stomach-turning odor that screams at me, louder and louder as I mount the stairs.

Can that really be Laura? It’s not possible, certainly it can’t be, that contorted body, that white silk nightgown, the large bright red stain. It’s not real, it cannot be. Laura’s out of town; she’s in Giverny; this isn’t her; there is a resemblance, that’s all, but it can’t be...

I am losing my mind.

And Toby. That tangle of a human form on the floor of the hallway: Toby, barely alive, paralyzed for life.

I have done this.

I have done this to both of them. To my mentor and friend. To my adored wife.

“Victor” examined the scrap of envelope, and then looked up. His gray-blue eyes regarded me with an expression I couldn’t quite place: fright? Or nonchalance? It could have been anything.

Then he said to me: “Please come in.”

The two of them, “Victor” and the deformed woman, sat side by side on a narrow couch. I stood, gun trained on them, flushed with anger. A large color television set was on, its volume muted, playing some old American situation comedy I didn’t recognize.

The man spoke first, in Russian.

“I didn’t kill your wife,” he said.

The woman — his wife? — sat with her trembling hands folded in her lap. I could not bring myself to look at her face.

“Your name,” I said, also in Russian.

“Vadim Berzin,” the man replied. “This is Vera. Vera Ivanovna Berzina.” He inclined his head slightly toward her, sitting at his right.

“You are ‘Victor,’” I said.

“I was. For a few days that is what I called myself.”

“Who are you, really, then?”

“You know who I am.”

Did I, in fact? What did I actually know of the man?

“Did you expect me?” I asked.

Vera shut her eyes, or, rather, they seemed to disappear into the swells of flesh. I had seen a face like hers before, I now recalled, but only in photos and films. The Elephant Man , a powerful film based on the true story of the famous Elephant Man, the Englishman John Merrick. He had been terribly disfigured with neurofibromatosis, von Recklinghausen’s disease, which can result in skin tumors and deformities. Was that what this woman had?

“I expected you,” the man said, nodding.

“But you’re not afraid to let me into your apartment?”

“I didn’t kill your wife.”

“You won’t be surprised,” I said, “that I don’t believe you.”

“No,” he said, smiling wanly. “I am not surprised.” He paused, then said: “You can kill me, or both of us, very easily. You can kill us right now if you want to. But why would you want to? Why, before you listen to what I have to tell you?”

“We have been living here,” he said, “since the death of the Soviet Union. We bought our way out, as did so many of our comrades in the KGB.”

“You paid off the Russian government?”

“No, we paid off your Central Intelligence Agency.”

“With what? Dollars stashed away somewhere?”

“Oh, come. Whatever few dollars we could scrape together over the years are nothing to the great and wealthy Central Intelligence Agency. They don’t need our grimy dollar bills. No, we bought our way out with the same currency all KGB officers—”

“Of course,” I said. “Information. Intelligence, stolen from KGB files. Like all the rest of them. I’m surprised you had any interested buyers, after what you did.”

“Ah, yes,” Berzin said sardonically. “I tried to entrap a bright young CIA officer whom Moscow Center had a grudge against. So I arrange a false defection, right out of the textbook, yes?”

I said nothing, and he went on. “I show up, but the young CIA officer is not there. And so — because vengeance is not selective — I kill the young CIA officer’s wife and wound an older CIA man. Do I have this right?”

“Approximately.”

“Ah. Ah, yes. A good tale.”

I had lowered my gun while he spoke, but now I raised it again, slowly. I believe that few things evoke truth the way a loaded gun does in the hands of someone who knows how to use it.

For the first time, his wife spoke. She cried out, actually, in a clear, strong contralto: “Let him speak!”

I glanced quickly at the disfigured woman, then turned back to her husband. He did not look frightened; on the contrary, he seemed almost amused, entertained by the situation. But then his expression turned suddenly grave. “The truth,” he said, “is this: When I arrived at your apartment, I was met by the older man, Thompson. But I didn’t know who he was.”

“Impossible—”

“No! I had never met him, and you hadn’t told me who would be joining you. For reasons of compartmentalization, I’m sure. He said he was assigned to vet me, that he wanted to begin the interrogation right then. I agreed. I told him about the MAGPIE document.”

“Which is?”

“A source in American intelligence.”

“A Soviet mole?”

“Not quite. A source. One of ours.”

“Code-named MAGPIE?” I used the Russian word soroka , for the bird.

“Yes.”

“So it was a KGB code name.” There was a long line of KGB code names taken from the names of birds, far more colorful than anything we ever came up with.

“Yes, but, again, it wasn’t a mole, strictly speaking. Not a penetration agent, exactly. More like an agent we had managed to turn, bend our way, just enough to be of use.”