When the plane landed at a small snow-plowed airfield on the outskirts of Moscow, she was met by Leonid Moroz, the Moscow council member and Red Army intelligence liaison who was to be her boss. Elena quickly learned that she had not, in fact, been called to Moscow to be killed-Moroz was working with Section II of the Operations Division of the GRU, and he had been ordered to construct a new identity for Elena as an expatriate Spanish heiress, and to infiltrate her into Berlin. Moroz was pitifully anxious that the plan should succeed.
Elena was given a couple of furnished rooms on the Izvoznia Ulitza, a street of gray five-story buildings outside the Sadovaya ring road on the banks of the western loop of the Moskva River. She soon gathered that her flatblock was a prestigious address-the forty or fifty other flats in her building were occupied by wives of Soviet officers who were stationed at the front-but she also noticed that the walls of the concrete structure were four feet thick and that its narrow windows faced the Mojaisk Chaussee thoroughfare and the Kiev railway station; clearly the place had been built as a defensive fortress. And she hoped that if the Germans were to approach Moscow she would be given a rifle and allowed to participate in the defense.
Leonid Moroz was a Party member and took pains to look like one. The dark pouches under his eyes were a sign not only of virtue-indicating that he worked at his desk until the small hours-but of status as well. Party members were beyond having to bother with dressing as the common people did, and Moroz was vain about the double-breasted jacket he always wore with all three buttons fastened-it was too tight, but it had a velvet collar. His only concession to the proletariat was his cloth cap, and Lenin was always portrayed wearing one.
Moroz frequently called Elena to his office to describe in vague terms the studying she would have to do to perfect her cover, and to discuss with her the current state of the war, and to ask her to type letters. His office was always so cold that Elena had to wear an overcoat and scarf; Moroz had three telephones on his bare desk, though he never made any calls and they never rang, and the only furnishings aside from an implausible dozen straight-backed chairs were framed photographs of Stalin, Marx, and Molotov.
The GRU, or Razvedupr-the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Army General Staff-had been purged to the ground in 1937; and then after the Army had assembled a completely new staff for its intelligence directorate, all of its residencies abroad had been purged again in 1940-and Elena knew at first hand that the Razvedupr illegal networks in Paris were being rolled up last year, in 1941. The man behind the purges was Lavrenti Beria of the NKVD, and Moroz lived in fear of him. Moroz often made lunch of the pickled herring and vodka he kept in his desk, and once after drinking several inches of the vodka he told Elena that Beria was personally charming, an urbane little bald-headed flatterer in spectacles-but that he used the NKVD to kidnap attractive young women off the Moscow streets so that he could rape them; husbands or fathers who protested were never seen again. Moroz had been given the GRU-liaison post when he had become a member of the Moscow council, and he was desperate not to be connected with any error that might draw the placid, murderous gaze of Beria.
“Why does he want to uproot any plant, any feeblest seedling, that grows out of the Army’s intelligence efforts?” mourned Moroz more than once. “Is there truly something inherently perilous in an Army intelligence agency, so that it needs to be exterminated to the last man every few years? Beria is Stalin’s man, as the monster Yezhov was before him. The Army was founded by Trotsky-do you suppose that’s why Stalin must at every season sow salt in that scorched earth?” Moroz had already confessed to Elena that he wrote poetry.
Elena knew that Trotsky had been killed more than a year ago in Mexico; but she knew too that Stalin feared the man’s posthumous influences. Trotsky had been the founder of the Red Army, directly after the Revolution, as well as Lenin’s commissar of foreign affairs; and he had been a close confidant of Lenin’s, and was rumored to have helped Lenin organize a number of Soviet agencies so independent and secret that now Stalin himself could only guess at them. Perhaps there was some subterranean agency that Stalin especially feared, one that consistently tended to surface in the GRU, which was the agency founded to deal with threats against Mother Russia from abroad. Had some defensive posture proven more horrifying to Stalin than the foreign threat it was meant to counter?
Elena remembered Andre Marty executing alleged Trotskyites in Spain, and she remembered her suspicion that Marty was actually eliminating agents who had drifted into some transcendent order.
Sometimes Moroz thrust his hand into his pocket as he voiced his worries about Beria and the NKVD, and Elena guessed he was making the gesture known as fig v karmane, the fig in the pocket-the fig was the thumb thrust between the first two fingers in a clenched fist, expressing the universal “fuck you” defiance; but v karmane meant in the pocket-furtive, fearful. For all his frail charm, Moroz lived by the Soviet bureaucrat’s maxim: ugadat, ugodit, utselet, pay attention, ingratiate, survive.
“Nichevo,” Moroz would say, dismissing the subject-she gathered that the word expressed something like a despairing What’s the use, and a fatalistic So be it.
But Elena made a determined effort to love Moscow. She was allowed to supplement the basic diet of black bread and cabbage by buying food at a restricted General Staff shop, and she tried to buy only Russian items such as garlic sausage and eggs and Caucasian tea, and ignore the powdered milk and peanut butter, which were likely to be United States Army rations donated through the Lend-Lease program. But nearly half of the cars on the boulevards were American Lend-Lease Studebakers and Dodges. She never saw refrigerators in the shops and never saw a refrigerator car in the trains at the Kiev station.
She got used to the street loudspeakers that played the “Internationale” every morning at dawn and broadcast incomprehensible speeches all over the city all day long; and she made allowances for railings that came loose under her hand and new brick walls that had no mortar at all in some spots and were lumpy with excess in others; but she couldn’t bear the smell and the crowds at the public baths, and made do with towels and cold water in her room-but a dated chit from a bathhouse was necessary to buy a train ticket, and when heavy snow forced her to take the train to Moroz’s office she would buy a bath-chit on the black market. When the trains broke down, a porter would walk through the cars and take the electric lightbulbs out of the lamps so that they wouldn’t be stolen.
Elena learned to scan the newspapers that were posted in display cases on the street, looking for the Cyrillic symbols for Moroz’s name in the lists of Party officials; she had noticed that the lists weren’t arranged alphabetically, and gathered that the order of the names indicated their current standing with the Politburo.
And she noticed that Moroz’s name had fallen to the bottom of the list on the day after she met the Middle Eastern woman on the Sadovaya ring road by Arbat Street.
Elena had stopped at a sidewalk kiosk to spend a ruble on a scant shot of vodka, when she noticed the metallic glint of jewelry on a woman standing beside her; the popular costume jewelry was stamped out of colored plastic, so Elena assumed the gleam had come from one of the state medals that Muscovites always wore. But when she turned to look, the exotic face of the woman distracted her-it was a dark face, veiled across the nose and mouth so that only the glittering brown eyes could be seen under the black braided hair, and in spite of the intense cold the woman was dressed in a length of dark blue cloth draped over the shoulders and wound around the waist to hang in folds like a skirt. Her feet were bare on the pavement.