Sean Michaels: Us Conductors

I swallowed.

“Sit down,” he said as he stepped away.

I had met Beria before but never like this: never alone, without a supervisor, without Yukachev, someone else to quiver fearfully beside me. I knew I was supposed to be scared because I had heard all the stories. From Korolev, from Andrei Markov, from gossiping zeks at Kolyma. Deadly little Beria in his snug little suit, his glasses lenses like windowpanes. Beria, who poured vinegar into Kirov’s wine. Beria, who drove a nail into Ivan Luchenko’s face, as Trotsky’s general sat bound before his desk. Beria, whose limousine glides across Nevsky Prospekt, stalking sisters and daughters.

“Do you like it here, Termen?” Beria said.

“Here?”

“The institute.”

I swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“You know, you have a very intriguing biography,” he said. Beria does not have the voice you expect of a monster. It is a plain tenor voice, matter-of-fact. There is neither the pervert’s lilt nor the killer’s growl. “I knew I recognized your name — of course, it was from the theremin. You met Lenin?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Beria repeated, nodding. “But you have really had your fingers in many different pies. Many different pies. I called up the documents from your work in America …” His eyes shifted. “It’s very interesting.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Your former colleagues say you’re brilliant.”

Something flickered at my lips. “Who is that, sir?”

“Some former colleagues.” He made a vague wave. “Are you?”

“Brilliant?”

“Yes, Termen.”

I tried to measure his expression. “I do everything I can for the state.”

“Indeed, indeed. And with a history of discretion.”

I said nothing. I did not know what he meant.

“I called you here because I require your expertise.” Beria exhaled through his nose. He was standing by the stoves. He turned one of the knobs for the burners and I heard the breath of gas escape into the room.

He looked at me.

“Yes sir,” I said.

Beria turned back to the stove. He flicked the stove’s electric lighter. Snap. Snap, snap. The burners caught. Our empty room with two soft blue flames. “Suppose we had an enemy,” he said, “whom we wanted to listen to.”

He waited until I answered.

“A microphone,” I said.

“A hidden microphone, yes. But suppose this is not a simple enemy, a complacent enemy. Suppose our enemy is sophisticated. Suppose he is wary. Like you, for instance.”

“Sir?”

He had an odd little smile. “Suppose the enemy is a man like you. Someone brilliant.”

“I don’t und—”

“Here is what I am proposing. I require an undetectable way of listening. An eavesdropping bug, yes, that has no exiting wires, no power source, no traditional microphone. Inert. Invisible. Unable to be X-rayed or traced.”

“This is not possible.”

Beria maintained his peculiar smile. “So quick to say it is impossible. Surely you have not had time to give it proper consideration. The inventor of the radio watchman, the infiltrator of Alcatraz cannot create a radio spy?”

He was plucking at my pride. I knew he was doing it. But I was not the man I had once been. I watched unmoving Beria with his clasped hands, the stove’s two fiery ghosts. “As I said, I am quite happy here.”

“Who spoke of leaving?”

“My current projects are very stimulating and we are already pressed if we are to meet our deadlines.”

“They will get on without you.”

“Besides, I am really not sure how you would implement something like this—”

“But you have an idea of where to begin.”

I gave a sharp exhale. My hands were flat in my lap. Beria snapped off the burners.

I felt my molars scrape. “Comrade, I am a plain scientist. I have no gift for skulking outside.”

“Skulking?”

“In — in concealing. In matters of concealment.” I tried a smile. “The dark arts.”

Beria was humourless. “Remember who you are speaking to, Termen.”

Was I brave now, I wondered?

“I prefer the work I am doing now. I am not a spy.”

Beria finally sat down, directly across from me, but far — bizarrely far, the distance of a firing range. “It does not matter what you prefer. It does not matter what you are . I have seen your file. You will not pretend, here. You were a spy and you will be again, if I ask it. You will dive into the abyss and fetch whatever treasure I require. You will steal, and wash your hands, and steal again. You will be brilliant, and you will be loyal , Termen, do you understand?”

I made a beseeching gesture. “I am just a scient—”

“You are a traitor , Lev Sergeyvich Termen, sentenced to prison.”

“My sentence—”

“Your sentence will end in a pit.”

I tried to sit erect. I tried to show that he had not defeated me. I found that I stooped, as if I was being physically beaten.

“It is scarcely a choice,” Beria continued. “Either you will disappear, you and your whole world, swallowed up in smoke … or else you will serve your country, serve it brilliantly, a weapon in the Soviet’s hand, and you will live. Perhaps you will win a Stalin Prize. You will be released, you will live, you will be celebrated for all you have contributed to our mighty and unbreakable union.”

Beria said it all with that even cadence, that wicked voice. He leaned back, crossing his legs.

“Are you lying or are you telling the truth?” I said, as if I was brave. My voice was as thin as notepaper.

“Oh I am telling the truth,” Beria murmured.

For an instant I imagined leaping from my chair, throwing myself out the open window, a long free leap. I closed my eyes.

It would not really be so different, would it, colluding with Lavrentiy Beria? My life already felt like a remnant of itself. Like a thin dream. Like a habit.

What would change?

Just a new set of orders.

Danny Finch’s blood, moving across the floor.

Perhaps this is what Lenin would have wanted: his scientist, listening for the state.

His scientist, going on.

Perhaps I was not giving anything away. A lossless exchange, a chance for redemption. Trading scraps of my present for what we all would require tomorrow, in this war.

I looked at the faded lights behind my closed lids.

I wondered how much a man can make up for the parts he has wasted.

In a small voice, I said: “I want my family.”

“What?”

I cleared my throat. “My wife. Lavinia.” I straightened in my chair, blinked bloodshot eyes. “They told me they would bring her from America.”

Beria looked at me with a frozen expression, lips barely parted.

“I love her,” I said, in a tarry voice.

Then his lashes fluttered behind his spectacles and he laughed, hard and flat, key ring jingling in his pocket, because he knew it was not true.

LET ME DESCRIBE MY LAST DAYS in America.

In Moscow today it is balmy, like summer, a lying summer, and the melting snows rush through the streets like rivers. At my window it is as if I am in the midst of rapids, with the sound of laughing children, and sunlight, dazzling sunlight. Eight years later, let me tell you about my last days in America.

It was like this.

I used to meet with men at a diner called L’Aujourd’hui. The Today. These meetings were gruelling: the tedium of idiots, the brute force of an invisible hand. I hated the appointments, hated the operatives who met me, hated the bland reports they drew from me, like steam from a kettle. And yet in the waning heat of 1938, the early autumn, I spent days and nights alone at that same corner dive, waiting for today to turn into tomorrow.