Abe Lincoln drew the short straw in the monument derby if you ask me. The Washington Monument soars high above the D.C. skyline. A bronze Jefferson towers above the visitors to his memorial dome. Only the rawboned rail-splitter sits on his marble keester, deep in shadow.
I gaped up at him. He looked depressed.
Honest Abe had drawn a fair crowd of visitors for a Tuesday morning in October, mostly school kids on a bus tour. I looked around for Nikolai.
Ah, there he was, his back to me, about ten yards away. There was no mistaking that dumb floppy hat.
Only he had shrunk a few inches. And dropped fifty pounds.
I felt a clutch of dread in my gut as I approached the hat wearer. He was a boy about fourteen. His teacher reached him before I did.
“Donald, what in the world?”
“It was just sittin’ there, Miss Hazelton, on the bench!”
“Well you put it back where you found it.”
Young Donald galumphed over to the marble bench by the front entrance and threw down the hat.
He needn’t have bothered. By my reckoning Nikolai Savayenko wouldn’t need it anytime soon. The message from the NKVD was clear. The greatest potential catch in the history of American intelligence was now deceased.
I felt cold eyes watching as I ankled out the entryway. A thick line of trees bordered the reflecting pool straight ahead, convenient cover for watchers.
I didn’t give the Blue Caps the satisfaction they sought, didn’t run down the steps in a panic. I took my time, then turned at the bottom of the stairway to stare up at the pillared edifice in which the proudest son of the heartland sat parked on his duff.
As a fellow Midwestern bumpkin I couldn’t help feeling I had let the great man down.
I strode the length of the National Mall on a windswept day that couldn’t make up its mind – cloudy one minute, sunny the next. I was angry with myself. I shouldn’t have let Nikolai walk even if it meant putting him in a hammerlock and marching him upstairs.
The NKVD knew that Nikolai was ripe for ‘imperialist conversion’ because of his wife’s illness. That his family didn’t accompany him to his foreign posting indicated his superiors didn’t fully trust him. He would have been under surveillance. His unauthorized visit to a decadent D.C. watering hole was all they would need to know.
Maybe. But it was thin gruel. Even the Blue Caps needed more than a visit to the T&C Lounge to justify a wet job in a foreign capital. Someone must have informed the NKVD that Nikolai was headed to the Mayflower in an attempt to establish contact with yours truly.
Nikolai was dead when he walked in the door. Or, more precisely, when I let him walk out.
I was Nikolai’s proxy assassin. He was snuffed for the crime of speaking to me. But his real executioner was the person who sent him my way.
My question to Nikolai had been right on the money.
Why come to me?
Nikolai was steered, that’s why. Sidled up to at a diplomatic reception by someone who knew he was frustrated and ripe to cross over, someone saying, ‘I can’t help you personally but may I make a suggestion? Take your case to Hal Schroeder, he has the ear of Frank Wisner, he’s easy to get to. And, by the way, it would be better if Mr. Schroeder thought this was your idea, not mine.’
A twofer. Eliminate Nikolai and reduce my reputation to a smoking hole. Guy Burgess appeared just in time to flush Nikolai from the plush confines of the Harold Schroeder anti-Communist Command Center.
Burgess wanted the Russian neutralized because he feared Nikolai would expose him. Burgess wanted me discredited because I knew he was an intimate of Col. Norwood, who fled Berlin after I caught him working both sides.
Of course the person who sidled up to Nikolai couldn’t be on Nick’s list of known Soviet agents, as Burgess likely was. Burgess would have needed a front man.
Hard to see how it could be anyone but his roomie, MI6 legend Kim Philby. Philby was beyond reproach. If Philby was dirty Nikolai wouldn’t have known. If Philby was dirty only Lavrenty Beria and Josef Stalin would know.
Guilt by association, assassination by proxy.
Well, two can play at that game. The apartment on Nebraska Avenue would be watched. Beria, in his dark and devious heart, had to suspect that this decadent British aristocrat was playing him, that Burgess was that rarest of birds, a triple agent. Reporting to Burgess’ apartment immediately after my big meet went bust would confirm that suspicion.
Yes, this was a wonderful plan, the new way of the world. Don’t get your hair mussed or your hands dirty, young fella, become a proxy assassin. Enlist today!
I stopped at a newstand. It was possible I had gotten ahead of myself. Nikolai had been found out but it didn’t necessarily mean he was dead.
The story on the front page of the Washington Times-Herald quoted the Soviet Ambassador. Embassy attaché Nikolai Savayenko had thrown himself into the Potomac river upon learning of the death of his wife in Leningrad. She had died of heart failure.
Sure she had.
This is what we were up against. An enemy willing to kill an invalid to justify the murder of her husband.
I muttered dark curses and swore bloody vengeance. And not for the Soviet diplomat who had been bundled into a car by NKVD goons and dumped off a pier in the dead of night.
Anyone who’s tasted combat enjoys poking fun at the blue-sky cookie-pushers in the State Department. There are, however, no blue-sky cookie-pushers in the Soviet diplomatic service. There aren’t even any diplomats, not really. They’re all members of the Cheka, an acronym for Committee to Combat Counter-revolution or somesuch. Imagine the FBI, CIA and State Department all rolled into one tight-knuckled fist.
So I didn’t swear vengeance for Nikolai Sayavenko. I was angry for the bright-eyed girl in the photograph, little Tina, now consigned to some dreary Soviet orphanage to be fed a diet of cold porridge and correct thinking.
I dumped the paper in a trash can and continued walking east. Guy Burgess figured to be sleeping it off at half past nine in the morning. Could be he’d slam the door in my face. I had dumped him on his backside at the Conklin’s party.
Then again I had maintained decorum by not shoving his mug into the tureen of sheep testicles.
It’s been my experience that scumbags generally keep a strict ledger of these things.
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4001 Nebraska Avenue NW was a leg-stretcher and then some. I stood on the sidewalk and stretched my back when I arrived, stood there long enough for the NKVD to get a few snaps from whatever apartment window they were holed up in.
I climbed brick steps and knocked on the door of the apartment I had seen Philby and Burgess enter two nights ago. First floor, on the right.
I knocked again. No answer. Burgess was probably zzz’ed out with a pillow over his head. I crowded closer to quick pick the cheesy lock while pretending to wait for the door to open.
I opened the door, made gestures appropriate to being welcomed, entered the apartment and closed the door behind me.
The parlor was a mess, stuff everywhere. I went to a back bedroom. Chaos. The place had been tossed!
Maybe not. I heard a toilet flush. My first instinct was to bolt but I told myself to grow some gonads. It would be swell if they got pix of us leaving the apartment together.
Guy Burgess stepped out of the bathroom in his boxer shorts. His hair and face were wet.
“Oh good, you’re here,” I said, cheerily.
Burgess, bleary-eyed, was speechless.
“I wanted to give you a heads up in case you hadn’t heard. Nikolai Savayenko – Soviet attaché, guy I was trying to recruit in the Town & Country Lounge yesterday – he was fished out of the Potomac this morning. We were among the last people to see him alive. I’m afraid the cops will trace his steps back to me.”
Burgess shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “What are you doing here?”
“I just explained that.”
“Well say it again. Slowly.”
I walked him through it again, admiring the gutsiness of Burgess’ plan. His walking in on my confab with Nikolai had risked raising my antennae. He covered that by pretending to be a hungover zombie. Well, he was a hungover zombie, but a very timely one.
“I don’t remember any of that,” said Burgess.
“The point is we need to come to an agreement.”
Burgess went to his dresser and grabbed a starched and folded dress shirt. From his closet he selected a charcoal gray suit and a red bowtie. The dark suit was a good choice. He could spill food down his front all day and night and no one would notice.
Burgess didn’t speak till he had assembled himself in front of the dresser mirror. “What sort of an agreement?”
“An agreement that we never saw Nikolai Savayenko in the Town & Country Lounge.”
“How does that work?”
“The other patrons were tourists and the barkeep was Winston.”
“The Negro?”
“The same.”
“And he’ll keep his mouth shut?”
“He will.”
Burgess affixed black pearl cufflinks and a matching tie tack, chewed up a breath mint, then turned to face me with a smile thin as shaved ice.
“And pray tell me, Mr. Schroeder, why I should give a flaming fuck?”
I hung my head. “As a favor to me,” I said, simpered. “I don’t want to be known as the man who let Nikolai Savayenko get dumped in the river.”
This was all terribly complicated. Me, hat in hand, attempting to win the co-operation of my adversary in order to derail a smear attempt against myself that my adversary himself had engineered. Would Guy Burgess recognize the irony, walk it back and glom that I was in on the joke and messing with him? Or would he simply bask in my humiliation?
It didn’t much matter, he’d be fish food by tonight. But I wanted to know if Burgess was any good.
It takes patience. Imagine looking at the reflection of a pleasant someone in a standing full-length mirror, in a long hall of standing mirrors that stretch to infinity. The pleasant someone appears identical in every diminishing reflection until, suddenly, at reflection number thirty-two, say, his appearance changes, his affable grin becomes a fanged snarl.
Guy Burgess didn’t have the patience for it. He nodded smirking agreement to my pathetic plea, then looked at his watch and cursed.
“You have a car?”
“Got a cab waiting,” I lied.
“I need it.”
“It’s all yours.” Burgess started for the door.
“Shoes,” I said, drolly.
Burgess looked down and busted out laughing.
We spilled out of the flat, cackling merrily. My non-existent taxi wasn’t there. I cursed the wretched driver and stood on the corner to hail another. Now that Burgess and I were best pals I ventured a question.
“Frank Wisner is after me to background his Romanian royals, King Michael and Princess Stela. You got anything?”
This was supposed to be a standard mirror read. The Romanians were dirty in inverse proportion to the degree that double agent Burgess defended their honor. Only he didn’t. Not hers anyway.
“Stela Varadja?”
I nodded. He snorted.
“Better watch yourself with her pretty boy. She’ll suck your blood down to the marrow and you’ll enjoy every delicious moment. Just ask Maurice Thorez.”
I suppose I could have asked who Maurice Thorez was but I had humbled myself enough for one day.
A taxi driver saw my raised hand and slid to the curb. Guy Burgess piled into the back seat. I waved him an affectionate farewell as the hackie sped south.
If you listened hard you could just about hear the NKVD camera shutter clicking below the telephoto lens.