The nice thing about the Center was the inexpensive caviar and salmon available in Building 12 across the square, and the J amp;B and Johnnie Walker at a dollar a bottle. The not-so-nice thing was the heavy sense of Stalinist terror. He also hated the chair they'd given him, a modern contour piece that looked ridiculous behind his old wooden desk.

All the more reason to stand. He kept his arms behind him, left hand clutching right forearm. He was thinking about the American boy, Lee H. Oswald. The lesson of Lee H. Oswald was that easy cases are never easy. It made him think of the classical axioms of his early training in geometry and arithmetic. Sad to learn that those self-evident truths, necessary truths, faltered so badly when subjected to rigorous examination. No plane surfaces here. We are living in curved space.

Alek liked the boy. Such naked aspiration in his eyes. He was trying to get a grip on the world. Facts, words, historic ideas. He struggled against his fate, yes, exactly, like someone in the social universe of Marx. He believed genuinely in high principles and aims even if he was not yet assured of a sense of perspective.

At twenty years old, all you know is that you're twenty. Everything else is a mist that swirls around this fact.

He slit his wrist to stay in Russia.

But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they've told themselves. Men who defect for practical reasons are easier to manage and maintain. Money, sex, frustration, resentment, vanity. We understand and sympathize. We get close to the edge ourselves sometimes.

They'd been watching him since Helsinki, where he registered at the Torni Hotel, moved to the cheaper Klaus Kurki, applied for a visa at the Soviet consulate, told a clerk in passing that he was an ex-Marine highly qualified in radar and electronics.

A walk-in. But not so sure of himself. Not certain how to go about it.

They made it easy for him to get in, providing a visa in forty-eight hours.

In Moscow his Intourist guide, Rimma Shirokova, reported his choicest remarks to the Fourth Section of the Seventh Department, where they were passed on to Kirilenko. Alek waited, let the low officials mix things up, let the boy pace his room; had him moved to a cheaper room; waited, waited.

There were one hundred and thirty listening devices in the U.S. embassy. In his combination safe Alek had a transcript of Oswald's remarks about revealing military secrets. Through the efforts of a clerk in the consulate section he had a photograph of Oswald's passport as well as a copy of a confidential telegram sent from AmEmb Moscow to the Department of State concerning the young man's statement.

MAIN REASON "I AM MARXIST." ATTITUDE ARROGANT AGGRESSIVE.

An easy case that left Alek wondering about Oswald's procom-munist career in the military. Didn't U.S. intelligence pick this up? Wouldn't they want to use his political sympathies to find out what they could about the people he contacted, about KGB recruitment methods, agent training? They would turn him when it suited their purpose. That's when he would tell them everything he'd learned, just as he was telling us.

Does Mother Russia want this boy? He was useful as a radar specialist at a U.S. base. What do we do with him here? Is it conceivable we might send him to the building on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where he would be trained, genuinely educated, in Marx and Lenin, microphotography and secret writing, Russian and English, rebuilt so to speak, given a new identity, sent back to the West as an illegal?

That's what they all want, isn't it, these people who live in corners inside themselves, in blinds and hidey-holes? A second and safer identity. Teach us how to live, they say, as someone else.

The test results were in and only his urine got a passing grade. He tended toward emotional instability. Tended toward erratic behavior. Had some form of dyslexia or word-blindness. Scored fairly well in physical sciences, low in most other categories. The polygraph was more or less chaotic but then it almost always is. Inconclusive owing to various factors. Maybe the boy was scared.

An easy case-send him home-except that Alek had a quota. There was pressure to handle a certain number of recruitments, turn up beautiful information (or make it up yourself). The vital take was the U-2 data, which Alek did not wholly trust. Eighty thousand feet? Ninety thousand feet? Nothing flies that high. Fly to ninety thousand feet, you see the souls of the dead in rings of white light. The men who'd debriefed Oswald on the weather plane were officers of the GRU, military intelligence, and they hadn't officially pronounced on the data they'd been given. What could they say? If the boy was word-blind, couldn't he be number-blind as well?

Alek sat in the swooping chair.

A number of dangers cling to the slim figure of this Lee H. Oswald, an innocent who wanders into the outer rings of the Center, leaving thoughtful men to speculate. Are the Americans monitoring his progress? Would they let him fall into our arms if they thought he knew important things? Atsugi is a key base. There are reports from Hanna Braunfels, dredged from the files of the Seventh Department (Japan, India, etc.) of the First Chief Directorate. In a sense we have already gone too far with the boy, exposed too many of our methods. Despite all the tests and interviews, we may know less about him than he knows about us. In some office in the Pentagon, they are waiting to pick his brains.

Alek was paid to drive himself crazy.

One thing the tests confirmed. This was not agent material. You want self-command and mettle, a steadiness of will. This boy played Ping-Pong in his head. But Alek liked him and would arrange something decent. Has to be far from Moscow. A place where there are no foreign journalists, no chance to use him for propaganda. Give him a nice apartment, a well-paying job, a sweet subsidy in the name of the Red Cross-incentives to remain in this country. Alek had every reason to believe that Lee H. Oswald would eventually be given Soviet citizenship, become a genuine Marxist and contented worker, go to lectures and mass gymnastics, fit in, find his place in history, or geography, or whatever he was looking for. A true-blue Oswaldovich.

Still, he would recommend that surveillance be maintained, indefinitely, wherever the boy was sent.

Lee was not sure if this official was one of the men he'd seen before. There'd been so many, in the same dark suit.

The official told him he was not yet being considered for Soviet citizenship. Instead he was given Identity Document for Stateless Persons Number 311479. It was, anyway, a nice-looking piece of paper.

The official told him he was being sent to the city of Minsk.

LIBRA • W7

The official pronounced the name with a devastating clarity, as if moved by a painful ringing in his teeth.

Oswald cracked a little joke. "Is that in Siberia?"

The official laughed, shook the American's hand, then clapped him hard between the shoulder blades and sent him out into the snow.

The next day the Red Cross gave him five thousand rubles, which just about knocked him flat.

One day later Lee H. Oswald, with a just-shaved look, set out by train for this place Minsk. Seven hours out of Moscow he caught twenty minutes' sleep on a wooden bunk with a rented mattress and pillow. Then he ate meat pie and drank tea and could not recall a meal that tasted better. The land was forested here, silent and white in the Russian dusk.