I walked to the edge of the square and hailed a taxi.
“Signora, si sente bene?” the taxi driver asked when we’d arrived at the hotel. I’d fallen asleep, and the driver spoke to me with such tenderness, I surprised myself by tearing up. He looked so concerned. He held out his hand and helped me out of the car. “Starai bene,” he said. “Starai bene.”
I thought about asking him to come up to my room with me—this prematurely balding young man who smelled of fresh mint. I didn’t want to sleep with him, but I would if he’d tell me that I’d be fine, starai bene, I’d be fine, over and over, until I fell asleep. Instead, I went up to my room alone and lay down atop the covers in my wrinkled gown.
* * *
—
In the morning, after two Alka-Seltzers and room service, I removed my copy of Zhivago from its safe. Before placing it in my suitcase, I opened the book. As I flipped through the pages, a business card fell out. No name, no telephone number, only an address: SARA’S DRY CLEANERS, 2010 P ST. NW, WASHINGTON, D.C. I knew the spot: a squat yellow brick building with a royal blue hand-painted sign, a stone’s throw from where Dulles lived. I folded the card in half and placed it in my silver cigarette case.
CHAPTER 14
THE COMPANY MAN
I went to London to see a friend about a book. After settling in for the eleven-hour flight, I signaled for the stewardess to hang up my suit jacket and bring me a whiskey—with ice, seeing how it was still before noon. Kit wore Pan Am’s blue and white uniform with the capped hat and white gloves well—the type of woman who’d place second or third in any Midwestern beauty pageant. “Here you go, Mr. Fredericks,” she said with a wink.
I’d gone by many names: names given to me and names given to myself. My parents named me Theodore Helms III. In grade school I became Teddy. In high school I went by Ted, but was back to Teddy by college.
To Kit, or anyone who asked over the next two days, my name would be Harrison Fredericks, or Harry to friends. Twenty-seven and from Valley Stream, New York, Harrison Edwin Fredericks was an analyst for Grumman Aerospace Corp. who—get this—hated to fly. He always made a point to keep the curtain closed and preferred not to sit next to anyone. If by chance you were to look in his pockets, you’d find a receipt from a Texaco five miles from his house, a half pack of Juicy Fruit, and a handkerchief with HEF embroidered on it.
I placed my briefcase on the empty seat next to me. My father had had it custom made in Florence: fine chestnut-brown leather with a single brass lock. He’d given it to me when I graduated from Georgetown, twenty-two years to the day after he’d graduated from Georgetown. He’d handed it to me, unwrapped, after a quiet dinner with Mother at the Club and said he envisioned me carrying it into the Senate chamber one day, or to the Supreme Court, or to the law firm that carried our last name. What my father hadn’t known at the time was that by my junior year, I’d switched from prelaw to Slavic languages.
It was the summer after my sophomore year when I knew for sure I didn’t want to join our family’s firm. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do instead. That feeling of being lost, compounded with my older brother’s death, brought on a depression that came over me like a cloud shadow moving across a sunbather. I stopped leaving the house and picked at my meals. After I dropped down to my high school freshman weight and my skin took on the color of a city sidewalk, it wasn’t my parents or the doctor they forced me to “just talk to” that pulled me out of it; it was The Brothers Karamazov. Then Crime and Punishment, then The Idiot, then everything the man ever wrote. Dostoyevsky threw me a rope in the fog and began to tug. When he wrote that “the mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for,” I thought Yes! This is it! I was convinced, as only a young man can be, that deep down I had the soul of a Russian.
I poured myself into studying the Greats. After Dostoyevsky came Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhov. When I finished the geniuses of old, I went to the undergrounds, those rejected by the great Red Monster: Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva and Mikhail Bulgakov. And when I returned to school in the fall, the fog, though still there, had lifted a bit. That semester, I left prelaw and enrolled in Russian.
Six years later, the briefcase carried not legal memos or briefs, but the primary source of my anxiety: my own unfinished novel.
I took a sip of whiskey and reached into the briefcase. Instead of pulling out my novel as the plane left the ground, I pulled out someone else’s: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. He was rumored to have written it in a three-week, Benzedrine-induced sprint on one continuous roll of paper. Maybe that’s what I was doing wrong. Maybe I needed drugs and scrolls. I cracked it open and read the first few sentences, then closed it. I gulped down my drink and dozed off.
When I awoke, we were over the Atlantic. I decided I could finally take a look at my draft. The night before, after an early dinner with Irina, I’d started on a revised plot, tacking up notecards on my bedroom wall to see if I could make sense of the thing. I could, almost, and thought that maybe I was on the path to becoming a real writer. Or maybe not.
I never told anyone about my novel—or that I even aspired to be a writer. Not my parents, not Irina, not even Henry Rennet, who’d been my closest friend since Groton. Some people thought Henry was a striving brownnoser, and others thought he was just a jerk. And they might’ve been right. But he was also there for me when my brother died. When the months following Julian’s death seemed to stretch as long and gray as a Russian landscape, Henry would sit in my apartment and drink whiskey with me and talk for hours.
My original plan was to publish my debut novel a year after college, surprising everyone with it. My parents had never said as much, but I could tell they were disappointed that I never went into the family business. A novel would be something they could brag to their friends at the Club about, an accomplishment they could actually hold.
But that didn’t happen. The summer after graduation, I began a hundred novels, never getting beyond the first twenty pages. I did manage to make a career out of my love of books, though—well, that and being fluent in Russian. And my connections. Professor Humphries had recruited me at Georgetown. One of Frank Wisner’s old OSS buddies, Humphries resumed his position as a professor of Slavic linguistics after the war and became one of the Agency’s top talent scouts. I wasn’t the first man Humphries recruited, nor the last. The higher-ups referred to us as Humphries’ Boys, a nickname that made us sound more like an a capella group than spies.
The Agency wanted to stack its ranks with intellectuals—those who believed in the long game of changing people’s ideology over time. And they believed books could do it. I believed books could do it. That was my job: to designate books for exploitation and help carry out their covert dissemination. It was my job to secure books that made the Soviets look bad: books they banned, books that criticized the system, books that made the United States look like a shining beacon. I wanted them to take a good hard look at a system that had allowed the State to kill off any writer, any intellectual—hell, even any meteorologist—they disagreed with. Sure, Stalin was dead, his body embalmed and sealed under glass, but the memory of the Purges was also preserved.