An Honorable Man (4 page)

“What makes you think we can recruit a principal?”

“They think we can. They follow their own people. They're worried about defectors. We need to find one who will come to us.”

“What's next?” Mueller knew what was next, but he wanted them to lay it out and build their case so he could hear the conviction in their voices. Coffin and Altman looked at Mueller, as did Downes. Ganged up. Mueller gazed back. He didn't have to do this, he thought.

“Let him come to you,” Altman said. “Make yourself an attractive target. Give him a reason to approach you. Draw him in and when he thinks you're a prospect we'll close in. They make mistakes too.”

“I'm the bait?”

No one answered.

“I'm the bait?”

Altman paused. “You're tired, George. Everyone knows you want out. The reason you want to leave is the same reason we need you to stay and see this through. You're a credible risk.”

Mueller choked back an impulse to laugh. The twisted logic of this blandishment appalled his sense of reason. “How long?”

“Two months,” Coffin said.

“That's optimistic.” Two months would become five, then ten. Mueller knew this was a job he couldn't resign once he was tapped.
He didn't have to do this.

“We are confident it can be done in two months,” Coffin repeated. “We can't lose another man like Leisz.”

It gave Mueller satisfaction to know that he had the power to disappoint them. He had made the mistake of sharing his unhap
piness in the Agency with his colleagues and they were using it against him. “Who is he?”

“Vasilenko. Maybe Chernov.”

Mueller received the two dossiers that Coffin sent sliding across the conference table. He glanced at Vasilenko's blurred photo, taken, it was obvious, surreptitiously at a distance through a crowd of pedestrians, and Mueller thought it made the Russian look thuggish. Chernov's was a formal head shot.

“They're both in a position to know about Protocol,” Altman said.

“Assuming Protocol exists,” Mueller added.

“I thought we were over that,” Coffin said. “Roger and I are past that point.”

“Yes, yes,” Altman snapped. “We've stipulated he exists. But we need proof. Vasilenko and Chernov are in a position to know. They might not have his name, but they'll have something—a clue, a lead, a crack to let sunshine in. We'll get something that points to the real name.”

There was a debate among the four men. Mueller listened skeptically.

“Chernov is the best choice,” Coffin said. “Head of GRU in the embassy. Intelligence arm of the Soviet Army. He might be Protocol's handler. His wife made the drop. Old-line Soviet thug.”

Mueller read the dossier. Born 1920 or 1921. Private first class, then corporal in the Red Army and one of the lucky few drafted in the summer of 1941 still alive on Victory Day. Served as a machine gunner on the Volkhov front in the Battle of Leningrad. Developed chronic chills in the swamps. Strong, cheer
ful personality. Model worker, party protégé of Malenkov on the Central Committee. GRU—the main intelligence directorate of the Soviet Army.

“You think he can be turned?” Mueller said this with doubt.

“No,” Altman replied. “And he isn't suitable for another reason. The FBI keeps track of him. Two cars have him under surveillance at all times. He knows that. He thought his wife was safe.”

Mueller open the second dossier.

“Vasilenko is new,” Coffin said. “He's come here from the consulate in New York as head of the trade mission. Metallurgy. But we think he is NKVD, State Security, tied to the Beria faction, Directorate K, counterintelligence. Rival of Chernov. It's fluid now with Stalin dead. We still don't know if he died of a stroke, as Russian papers report, or murdered, as rumors suggest. . . . Before New York we tracked him in Berlin and before that we had him in Vienna—'forty-eight.” Coffin looked at Mueller. “It says you knew him.”

Mueller nodded. The file had their history. Case officers met their Soviet counterparts and made notes to the file of the meetings, and this was the way both sides kept track of authorized contact.

“We worked together with the Brits in MI6 on the food riots. People were starving. It got very tense. He was practical about it.”

“Practical?”

“He didn't pound on the table and blame the bloody capitalists. People were dying. We worked together to get aid brought in.”

“Chernov?”

“I don't know him. I never dealt with Soviet military intelligence.”

“Vasilenko is the best bet. He'll need to come to you.”

“How?”

Coffin flicked his wrist with a fly-fisherman's practiced hand and reeled in an imaginary catch. “Still water. Patience. A good lure.”

Mueller saw both men opposite patiently waiting for his response, and he saw in each face a terrible compulsion for patriotism.
He didn't have to do this.

3

LEISZ'S WIFE

M
UELLER LOOKED
up to see Mrs. Leisz with her head out the third-floor window and staring down at him with a puzzled expression. He'd said his name on the intercom, but he had no reason to believe that she'd remember who he was. He'd said he'd come about her husband. She yelled down that the door buzzer was broken and then she dropped a sock weighted with a key. He let himself in the lobby. Mueller prepared for the questions she would ask that he would have to avoid, politely of course, and still provide sympathy. He couldn't let on any of what he knew beyond what the police had already told her.

The stairs were grim: fluorescent lights, yellowing paint, and hand-me-down baby strollers on each landing that he had to maneuver past on his climb. Fried onion smells filled the air and faint voices drifted up the stairwell. So this was where Alfred Leisz lived. Agency salaries permitted better housing, but Euro
pean recruits hoarded their earnings. Mueller was uncomfortable entering the private world of the Hungarian émigré whom he'd known only from his work tapping into Soviet telephone conversations from the listening station a block from the embassy. Mueller had found Leisz in a displaced persons camp and brought him to America for his skills as a linguist, translator, and cryptographer. Leisz had discovered that the Soviet voice encryption machines had a serious problem. They sent a faint echo of the uncoded message with the coded one. He was able to figure out how to extract the echo and reveal the clear text, which he transcribed and translated in the basement room that connected to embassy lines via a tunnel dug under Sixteenth Street. Mueller had found Leisz in his basement cubicle. The damn fool Leisz had broken the rules and let someone in.

“I know you,” Mrs. Leisz said when Mueller stood at the third-floor landing. She wore an ankle-length smock and held a restless infant in one arm, while a young boy tugged at her free hand. “You were at the funeral.”

Mueller nodded. A frown creased his forehead. “Yes.”

She blocked the door, but then remembering, pulled her son aside and made room for Mueller to pass. “You were the one who called?” She spoke English confidently with a slight accent.

“Yes.”

Mueller found himself in a small living room with a jumble of toys scattered across the floor, which he stepped over, avoiding the littered field of play as best he could. He sat where she directed, a dark sofa that hid its stains. Steam hissing from the cast iron radiators wastefully heated the apartment. Floor-to-ceiling
shelves were filled with technical books and literature in several languages.

Mrs. Leisz sat in a bergère chair opposite Mueller. She had thin pale arms, chafed hands, no makeup, prematurely graying hair wound into a bun on top of her head, and tired eyes that she opened wide. “What documents?” she asked. She rocked her infant child and shifted to make herself more comfortable.

Mueller pulled a file from his attaché case and kindly patted the boy's head. “Can I speak openly?”

“Yes, of course. Speak.”

“We've arranged for you to receive his civil service benefits. We want to make sure you're doing okay. I'm here to answer any questions.” Mueller opened the file. “Has anyone contacted you?”

She looked confused.

Mueller leaned forward, consciously sympathetic. “If anyone comes here and asks questions about his death, I'm happy to have you direct them to me. It's best that we do that so you don't have to be troubled.”

“What questions? Who?”

“The insurance company, for example. We want to make sure that you're taken care of.”

She nodded, said nothing.

“This must be very hard for you. We want to help. We have expedited your benefits. Payments will come monthly to your account. It starts in two weeks.” He pulled out an envelope with cash which he proffered, but she didn't reach for it so he placed it on the coffee table. “This will help in the meantime.”

“Anton, stop,” she scolded when her son took the envelope.
The baby had fallen asleep in her arms. Mrs. Leisz turned to Mueller. She tried to look grateful, but her face went blank and words tumbled out.

“I don't know what's happened.” She stared. “He was a sunny, open man. He came home at night and read to our son, and he was kind to me. Our apartment was a lively place where friends came to eat and drink and talk. Then something happened. Alfred returned from the library on Friday and he wasn't his usual self. He didn't read to the boy. He sat there and drank. He didn't talk. He was a different person. I just knew something was terribly wrong. The whole weekend was very melancholy and then he said he'd made a mistake. He said he was going to lose his job. He wouldn't tell me anything else.

“It was the weekend of the big storm and everything was closed down Friday night. Trolleys weren't running. Cars were buried. He wanted to fix the mistake, he said, but the city was shut down. No trolleys, no way to get to the library. Weather that weekend was cold and gray and deepened his worry. The children picked up his mood. I told him, go outside, take a walk, so we could have some peace here, but the snow wasn't shoveled and had drifted chest high. He came back up and sat there where you're sitting and drank. I wanted to strangle him.”

Mrs. Leisz suddenly put her hand out, touching Mueller, who flinched. “I don't mean that. I loved him, but he was in a dark mood.”

Mrs. Leisz rocked her sleeping child and brought her eyes back to Mueller. “That night he was quiet at the dinner table. I said it's a shame the adults in this family have stopped talking.
On Sunday night he just had to get out of the house so we left the children with a neighbor. The new film about Martin Luther had just opened and he picked to see it. I thought it an odd choice. It was a serious movie,” Mrs. Leisz said. “Not one to see if you're depressed.”

She paused. “Alfred went to work early the next morning to change his report, or fix it. I couldn't understand what was so important. It's just a report, I told him. But he wouldn't listen. I confronted him. He said he couldn't talk about it. I said
You work in a library bookshop. You translate Russian newspapers. What is so important?
”

Her agitated voice stirred the baby and she rocked back and forth cooing and shhhing. Mueller watched her carefully.
She knows nothing
. Alfred Leisz had kept his wife in the dark about what he did and who his employer was.

“Read me this book,” the boy said, hopping on the sofa. Mueller smiled at the boy.

“On the phone,” Mrs. Liesz asked, “you said ‘freak accident,' that he was found in a puddle of electrified water? Face burned? How did that happen in a library?”

Mueller nodded. “Yes. It's from the police report.” Lies to assure a closed casket.

Mueller could do nothing more for her, and he didn't want to stick around to take her awkward questions. Time to leave. Mueller laid the package of materials, including the police report, on the coffee table. He'd brought Alfred Leisz's personal items from his cubicle: a framed photograph of his son, a fountain pen, a second pair of eyeglasses. Useless to her, but a keepsake perhaps.
He put the release form for expedited death benefits in front of her to sign.

“I need my glasses,” she said.

When she disappeared in the bedroom, Mueller turned to the boy. “How old are you?” He took the boy on his lap. The same age as his son, Mueller thought.

The boy held up one hand and counted each finger. “Five. I'm a big boy.”

“I have a boy like you. I don't see him enough. How do you like being a big boy?”

“Oh, it's okay. I don't cry anymore. My sister cries. She's still a baby.”

“Do you take care of your sister?”

“Oh, yes.”

Mueller smiled at the boy's eagerness. He felt an enormous sadness for the moment his mother had told him his father was dead—and explained what death was. No young child should suffer that darkness. The boy reminded Mueller of his own son—same pink cheeks, same curious eyes, same sweet innocence. For no reason, Mueller flashed on his last supervised visit, when it tore his heart to leave his crying boy pleading for Mueller to stay.

“How old is your boy?” the child asked.

“Six,” Mueller said.

“I will be six.” He held up two hands. “When I'm six I will be smart. What does he look like?”

Mueller smiled kindly. “He looks like you. I love him like your mother loves you.”

“Can I play with him?” the boy asked.

“He doesn't live here.” Mueller opened the illustrated storybook and they read together. Mueller watched the boy without letting the boy know he was being watched.

The visit ended. Mueller stood at the apartment door and faced Mrs. Leisz, sleeping infant in her arm, son tugging at her hand. “Will you come again and read to him?”

“Of course.” Mueller nodded at the child. “He's a sweet boy.”
What could he say?
This was the hard part of the job.
Poor woman
, Mueller thought. On his way down the stairwell he felt a stirring of remorse. He felt the burden of what it took to explain a corrupt world to an innocent mind. Mueller stopped suddenly on the landing, his lanky frame bent over, dry heaving an empty stomach. He felt as bad as he'd ever felt. The lies he had to tell.