Legends

“I like you,” Kastner burst out, his face breaking into a lopsided smile. “I like him,” he informed his daughter. “But he would not have gone very far in our Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti. He is too much of a loner. We did not trust the loners. We only recruited people who were comfortable serving as cogs in the machine.”

“Which Directorate?” Martin asked.

The bluntness of Martin’s question made Stella wince; in her experience, people talking about intelligence matters usually beat around the bush. “In the USA, Kastner,” she told her father, who was visibly flustered, “they call this talking turkey.”

Kastner cleared his throat. “The Sixth Chief Directorate,” he said, adapting to the situation. “I was the second deputy to the man who ran the Directorate.”

“Uh-huh.”

The Russian looked at his daughter. “What does it mean, uh-huh?”

“It means he is familiar with the Sixth Chief Directorate, Kastner.”

In fact, Martin had more than a passing acquaintance with this particular Directorate. At one point in the late eighties, Lincoln Dittmann had recruited a KGB officer in Istanbul. Lincoln had made his pitch when he heard on the grapevine that the officer’s younger brother had been arrested for being out of step during a military drill; the instructor had acused him of sabotaging the parade to discredit the glorious Red Army. Lincoln had arranged to smuggle the disenchanted KGB officer and his family out of Istanbul in return for a roll of microfilm filled with Sixth Chief Directorate documents. The material provided the CIA with its first inside look into the operations of this up to then secret section. It had been carved out of the KGB Directorate structure back in the sixties to keep track of economic crimes. In 1987, when what the Soviets called “cooperatives” and the world referred to as “free market enterprises” were legalized by Comrade Gorbachev, the Sixth Chief Directorate shifted gears to keep track of these new businesses. As the economy, crippled by inflation and corruption at the most senior levels of government, began to stall, gangster capitalism thrived; cooperatives had to buy protection—what the Russians called krysha or a roof—from the hundreds of gangs sprouting in Moscow and other cities if they wanted to stay in business. When the Sixth Chief Directorate found it couldn’t crush the gangs and protect the emerging market economy, it simply stopped trying and joined in the free-for-all looting of the country. Martin remembered Stella’s saying that her father had immigrated to America in 1988. If he had been getting rich on the looting, he would have stayed and skimmed off his share. Which meant he was one of those die-hard socialists who blamed Gorbachev and his “restructuring” for wrecking seventy years of Soviet communism. In short, Kastner was probably the rarest of birds, an ardent, if disheartened, Marxist condemned to live out his days in capitalist America.

“You are thinking so hard, smoke is emerging from your ears,” Kastner said with a laugh. “What conclusion have you reached?”

“I like you, too,” Martin declared. “I like your father,” he told Stella. “Fact is, he wouldn’t have lasted long in the CIA. He is far too idealistic for a shop that prides itself on the virtuosity of its pragmatists. Unlike your father, Americans aren’t interested in constructing a Utopia, for the simple reason they believe they’re living in one.”

Stella seemed stunned. “I like that you like Kastner, and for the right reasons,” she said softly.

Kastner, his nerves frayed, swiveled his wheelchair to one side and then the other. “It remains for us to put our heads together and figure out why the lady with the pseudonym Fred Astaire does not want my son-in-law, Samat, to be discovered.”

Martin permitted a rare half-smile onto his lips. “To do that I’m going to have to discover Samat.”

Stella disappeared to brew up some tea and hurried back minutes later carrying a tray with a jar of jam and three steaming cups on it. She found her father and Martin, their knees almost touching, deep in conversation. Martin was smoking one of his wafer-thin Beedies. Her father had started another cigarette but held it at arm’s length so the smoke wouldn’t obscure Martin.

“… somehow managed to falsify the records so the Party would not know his mother was Jewish,” Kastner was explaining. “His father was an Armenian doctor and a member of the Party—at one point he was accused of being an enemy of the people and sent to Siberia, where he died. The post-Stalinist program to rehabilitate people falsely accused of crimes counted in Samat’s favor when he applied to the Forestry Institute; the state had killed his father so it felt it had to compensate the son.”

Martin nodded. “I seem to recall reading about your famous Forestry Institute that taught everything except forestry.”