The Mulberry Bush (9 page)

“The Jesuits shared his reports with you?”

“Sometimes, on their own initiative. Otherwise no, and we didn't peek.”

“You must have been tempted.”

“We were somewhat short of Aramaic speakers. And besides, the Aramaic was encrypted.”

“I didn't know there were Roman Catholics in Russia.”

“There are Roman Catholics everywhere, thanks in good part to the Jesuits, and there were a lot more of them in the USSR after twenty years of Father Yuri.”

“How do you know him?”

“When I was chief of station in Moscow, the KGB sniffed him out. Before they could grab him we documented him and helped get him out of the country. When I got back to Washington he looked me up to say thank you. We became friends.”

“What does he do now?”

“What Jesuits do. If you want to meet him, I can introduce you.”

“I'd appreciate it.”

“What's your cell phone number?”

I told him. Tom didn't need to write it down.

He said, “You'll get a call in a day or two.”

I said, “I have a question.”

“Ask it.”

“How did a son of my father get by the dragons and get recruited?”

Judging by the look in Terhune's eyes, this was a question he had expected.

He said, “It wasn't complicated. You were qualified.”

“That hardly seems like enough, given the backstory.”

“Quiet words were spoken by your good friend Bill Stringfellow, and others followed suit.”

“Why?”

“Because Bill was respected and because, believe it or not, your father still has admirers. Some of them thought he paid too high a price for a youthful prank that told Headquarters more about itself than it wanted to know. With his brains and aptitude, he should have made it to the top. A lot of people thought he would. He was prevented from doing so by the fuddy-duddies. Half the organization thought that he had been robbed of his destiny and as a by-product of that, the organization had been robbed of what he might have done for it.”

“So it happened for sentimental reasons?”

“There was no cabal, if that's what you mean. But as far as I know, nobody told the people upstairs whose son you are, but that's as far as it went. You have a common last name.”

“Does Amzi know?”

“Who knows what Amzi knows? But it's more likely than not. All he has to do is look at you.”

“Given the history, why would he let such a thing happen?”

“You'd have to ask Amzi that question, but I wouldn't necessarily advise you to ask it.”

There was little left to say. Terhune paid the check. I tried to split it, but he said, “You can leave the tip. Two twenties will do. When you can understand every word Father Yuri speaks or that Pushkin and Chekhov wrote plus the lyrics of ‘Dark Eyes,' give me a call.”

In the parking lot he said, “Listen. Whatever you might think you owe anybody because of the past, you don't. And even if you did, you would have already paid off the principal and interest. You're even.”

Not quite yet.

Father Yuri was a plain man with a brilliant mind. He seldom spoke a word a small child could not have understood or expressed a thought that didn't turn out to be a Matryoshka doll. On our first day together, we met in the early morning—the mist had not yet burned off—at the twentysixth president's statue on Theodore Roosevelt Island in the Potomac. As we walked the island's trails, deer, herds of them, watched us. Father Yuri could not have been less than seventy and looked older—a consequence, perhaps, of two decades on the famously nutritious Soviet diet. He was a sturdy broad-shouldered man with the legs of a fullback. His thick gray hair was cut short. Ruddy complexion, Slavic cheekbones, pug nose. Like Chekhov he was a descendant of serfs and looked it. Clearly his face had been his fortune as he stayed alive and unimprisoned for half a lifetime under the nose of the Soviet apparatus. He walked purposefully, like a pilgrim on his way to Jerusalem, all the while speaking Russian and listening to my lame attempts to speak it in return. When the hike ended he was as fresh as he had been at the beginning.

In English he said, “You've got a quick ear. Your Russian got better in the last ninety minutes. How often do you want to do this?”

“Every morning. Is that possible?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “Sundays excepted, yes. Let's meet by the president's statue at six-fifteen. Get rid of the home study records, the diction is weak. Stop listening to Chekhov and Pushkin on your iPod or you'll end up sounding like a prerevolutionary aristocrat. Read contemporary authors, magazines, newspapers. The library where you work has them all. Keep going with the movies but only ones made in the last ten years.”

I took his advice as gospel. I grew fond of him very quickly. To the degree permitted by his vocation, this seemed to be reciprocated. Father Yuri took pleasure in my progress, and as my capacity improved, we gradually began to exchange small confidences. Although this made me wary, I pushed paranoia aside. What difference did it make if the Jesuits knew all my secrets? They weren't going to tell anybody but other Jesuits. Father Yuri never mentioned God, but if he had, I would have listened.

This doesn't mean I was sidling toward conversion. I did not believe in gods as man has so far imagined them. I could not believe unless the mind of the creator turned out to be the invisible, invincible, omnipresent, immortal bacteria and viruses that collectively drove the evolution of our species over billions of years with the objective of producing an organism intelligent enough to transport the microbes to other planets so they could begin the process all over again. Concomitantly this infinite mind programmed humanity to despoil the planet, so it would have an incentive to leave. In an imaginary deity this would be called God's plan and be regarded by believers as unquestionable. In the case of bacteria, which are known to have existed on Earth for at least 3.4 billion years and live in and profoundly affect the bodies of every organism on the planet, denial would be automatic.

This hypothesis made sense to me, but I decided not to discuss it with a Jesuit.

We encountered almost no one on our early walks apart from the occasional earnest runner, usually a military type, but one morning we came upon a Latino family lost in the woods. They were frantic, but the sight of Father Yuri's clerical collar calmed them down.

“God has sent us the good father,” the mother told her children.

In Spanish—the mother and the children spoke no English—Father Yuri invited them to follow us to the parking lot. On the way he conversed happily with the children. I talked to the parents. They were from Paraguay (the husband, a diplomat, had just been posted to Washington), and in the few minutes we were together they told me what they said was the most interesting thing about their country, that in the late nineteenth century all but about 40,000 Paraguayan males—the few survivors of the gender were mostly old men and small boys—had been killed in a hopeless war with Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. This slaughter turned the country into a land of widows, orphans, and girls who had no one to marry. A carnival of polygyny was the result, so if you fell in love you never knew if you and the object of your affection had the same grandfather. It was not polite to ask.

After the Paraguayans drove away, Father Yuri asked me where I had learned Spanish and why. I told him and asked him the same questions.

He said, “I ministered to some Spanish Catholics—the children of Spanish Communists, now grown up, who had been kidnapped by the NKVD, as the Cheka then called itself, during the Spanish Civil War and taken to the Soviet Union. By chance—if anything is by chance—I met a man who wanted to return to God, so I revealed myself. He led me to others and they led me to more, and eventually to secret Catholics from other Spanish-speaking countries. There were a surprising number of them. Some were the half-Russian children of the kidnapped children. They didn't want to pray in Russian, the language of atheism, so I learned Spanish. They were my teachers.”

“Dangerous work.”

“For them, yes, because most of them were married to Russians who didn't know they prayed in secret and were so terrified of the secret police that they might have denounced them. But they believed that Jesus would protect them. They survived, so who knows, maybe he did.”

Father Yuri's references to the Trinity were rare. Nevertheless, or maybe therefore, our conversations became more interesting. After a few days we stopped discussing the day's news and the weather and baseball and instead talked about living a fictitious life among exotic peoples and speaking their languages as if they were your own. I never learned where exactly Father Yuri had lived and operated in Russia and never asked. Nor did I name the countries in which I had worked or even the other languages I spoke. I assumed Tom Terhune, who seemed to trust him absolutely, had already supplied him with this information, and maybe more.

The differences between the life of a Jesuit and that of a spy are not so very great. Each trades in souls. Each belongs to a secret community united by belief and ritual to which, except for rare mutations like me, they are committed heart, mind, and soul. Both play a role designed to blur their reality, both are entrusted by strangers with secrets they have sworn an oath never to reveal, both work against a defined enemy (the same one under different funny names, Father Yuri might have thought) for a clear but unachievable purpose, and derive from their work roughly the same amalgam of guilt and satisfaction, disillusion and moral satisfaction, self-loathing and flagellation. The priest saves souls, the spy preserves illusions.

We quickly became friends of a sort, and in a limited sense each other's confessors—what sort of people we had handled, what we had seen, how that affects the mind and the way the world looks. Interest is the key to learning, and as anyone who has ever been in love knows, few things are more interesting than looking into another mind and discovering a simulacrum of oneself.

At heart, Father Yuri was as much the skeptic as I was, and in my own way I was as much of a believer as he was. As he might have put it if he had been an ordinary teacher, you cannot be a doubter if you didn't begin as a believer, and vice versa. I learned more from him in a short time than from anyone else I had ever known, yet at the end of the course I could not have described what exactly I had learned any more than I could have recited the details of the process by which my body manufactured new cells.

I may have been a fast learner by nature, but I had never learned a language so quickly as this. Usually it takes years to be able to see into a foreign language and to hear its echoes. After ten weeks with Father Yuri I could do this, up to a point, with Russian, in which I had not until recently been able to put two words together.

Then, abruptly, the tutorial came to an end. There was no ceremonial good-bye.

On a misty morning very like the one on which we met, Father Yuri said, “I think we're finished. Keep working on vocabulary, not because you'll need to use more words than you already know, but so you'll understand what's being said to you.”

I said, “I'm very grateful.”

Father Yuri, on the brink of a smile, nodded and without offering to shake hands, departed.

On the way to Headquarters I called Tom Terhune, also in his car from the sound of the background noise, and gave him the news.

Tom said, “Same restaurant, same time, tomorrow.”

When I arrived on the stroke of seven, he was waiting at his table, the same one as the last time, which made me wonder if it might be the one bugged by Turkish intelligence or the Bureau, or Headquarters, or all three.

We spoke Russian. Between the appetizer and the entrée, Tom said, still talking Russian, “I was told by our friend that you were an above-average
student, and you certainly don't sound like someone who didn't speak a word a couple of months ago.”

“Thanks to you, I had a good teacher.”

“We must arrange more exposure to the language. I've talked to Amzi about this.”

“Why?”

“Because that's the way we do things. Also, it's unwise to try to keep secrets from Amzi.”

“What was his reaction?”

“None, essentially. I asked if I could have you. He said yes. He seemed pleased to get you off his hands.”

Tom was the chief of the division that included Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union.

I said, “So what are you going to do with me?”

“Send you out into the world and hope that you'll be loved and understood. You can't hang around Headquarters much longer. You're a born singleton. Please accept this. Working alone in the field is your natural role, therefore your professional destiny, and there's no escape from it any more than John Wayne could avoid being typecast as a gunfighter with a heart of gold.”

I liked plain talk, but this was a blow. I had to know the essential secrets in order to do what I wanted to do, and Headquarters was their only repository. After I knew these things, I would go into the field, yes. That was the plan. But first, penetration.

I said, “What exactly do you have in mind?”

Tom said, “I'm open to suggestions.”

“Good. I have the bare bones of an idea, but I can't write you a detailed outline. Not yet.”

“Then give me the bare bones.”

This took a few minutes. One of Father Yuri's stories—parables, really, in which no one was ever identified, so I never knew whether they were
reportages or addenda to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—revealed to me an unlocked door into the Russian connections with terrorism. It was a feeling rather than a well-reasoned plan. I didn't quite know how to convey this to Tom Terhune, who, I thought, was not the kind of man to trust leaps of intuition.

After Russia, Father Yuri was sent to South America—or so I deduced because he didn't name the continent, let alone the specific country where he worked. At the time, leftist youth in many countries were waging revolution with Chairman Mao's
Little Red Book
as their field manual. During the counterculture there were probably as many copies of Mao's scripture in the hands of activists and dilettantes as there now are copies of the Holy Koran. Father Yuri or his superiors reasoned, or more likely took it for granted, that what had been true about the children of Spanish Communists in Russia must be true about Communists in Latin America. All were fugitives from the Church. The subconscious longing for a reunion with Jesus must be the same in both places. Father Yuri had saved captive souls in Russia, why should he not rescue lost souls in Uruguay or Colombia or Argentina?

Everything—this is me talking, not Father Yuri, though he certainly knew it as well as I did—begins with 1. Find a single person who wants something you have the power to give him and you're in business. Often, even usually, this single person will find
you.
After that it is just a matter of reading the signs and establishing, as lovers do, how much alike you and the target are, and turning down the bed.

One person who found Father Yuri, a handsome young man with an incandescent personality and the smile, as Father Yuri put it, of an angel, approached the Jesuit very early one spring morning in a city park in a grove of lush rosewood trees and giant jacarandas in full purple bloom. Father Yuri had noticed him before. This was the first time their eyes had met. The young man looked behind him, looked down the path behind Father Yuri, then stopped in his tracks and waited.

When Father Yuri was close enough, the young man whispered, “Father, will you hear my confession?”

“Certainly.”

“Here, now.”

“As you wish.”

“Thank you. Keep walking, please. I will follow and confess as we walk.”

“No. You can't walk and worry about discovery and make a proper confession at the same time. Under that tree.” Father Yuri nodded at the large trunk of a rosewood, a few meters ahead. “We can stand on either side of the tree if you like.”

The young man looked behind him again. He was not trembling, he was in command of himself. But he was afraid. What had he done to be in such a state? Whom did he fear?

He said, “This will take a long time, Father.”

Beneath the great trees the light was dim, as in a confessional. After the young man uttered—detonated—his first sentence, Father Yuri knew why he needed a priest. This was an anguished soul. More than that, it was the soul he had come here to find—or, as the Jesuit had it, the one soul God had sent him here to help.

This boy was a murderer many times over. He had killed or ordered the killing of many men (he did not murder women or children except by accident). He didn't know exactly how many because he had licensed others to kill in his name and he did not always know about all their homicides. He was a terrorist and not only a terrorist but the leader of a terrorist group whose objective was to destroy the Establishment, the very history of his country, to raze its institutions, to liquidate as many of the bourgeoisie as necessary to force them to submit to the power of the people. He was a kidnapper, too: He and his group routinely abducted bankers, politicians, lawyers, and rich men and other capitalist exploiters and held them in “people's prisons,” such as a closet or a makeshift tent
in a slum apartment, before trying them and in most cases executing them for crimes against the people. Some of the zealots betrayed their own fathers to the avengers of the people, because the destruction of the family, the basic unit of this corrupt society and the only thing stronger than politics, was the first imperative of the revolution.