Sleeper Spy (39 page)

As a widower for many years, and as the arts-social-business icon who could respectably escort a woman fifty years his junior, Ace would enliven the table with his traditional choice of the season’s most celebrated actress. For this occasion, he chose Ari Covair, the sensually emaciated French import who had starred as the heroine of the heavy-grossing movie based on Jim Lehrer’s espionage novel
Blue Hearts
. She could legitimately say she wasn’t a spy but she played one in the movies.

For the publisher to bear the cost of this admirable admixture, Ace went a level higher than the fellow in the publishing house who had signed the contract for the Farr-Fein book about the sleeper. A source of Irving’s had tipped the reporter to the useful tidbit that the chairman of the publisher’s parent corporation, Unimedia, was in town from Frankfurt. This piquant bit of business-social data, when passed along casually by Irving, had been seized on by Ace. Karl von Schwebel was also a director of the Bundesbank and conversant with Russia’s economic difficulties, of interest to the Russian guest of honor.

Von Schwebel’s wife, whose family fortune was the base of his empire, was probably a frump. But Ace already had glamorous celebrities in Viveca and Ari, with a possible third interesting woman in the Latvian reporter. Evangeline Evashevsky was a notoriously good listener. One frump could stand as contrast to all of them.

The rectangular table was set for twelve. That was the perfect number, in Ace’s mind, for three separate dinner-table conversations running simultaneously, followed by some charming speeches unifying the dozen diverse people present. He looked over the menu card to
make certain the passion-fruit sorbet had been substituted for the mango sorbet of the last party, which he thought lacked the necessary subtle tang. The superagent nodded, satisfied, at the passion-fruit listing on the engraved menu and proceeded to lay out the place cards. The order of battle was crucial to a dinner party’s success.

Clockwise from Ace at the head of the table: the actress Ari was to his immediate left, next to her Davidov, then the expected von Schwebel frump, then the man from Memphis Viveca was bringing, and the senator’s nice wife. Irving was at the far other end of the table. Then coming up toward Ace was the girl from Latvia, Karl von Schwebel, Viveca, the senator, and Dorothy Barclay in the place of honor on the host’s right.

That way Viveca would get Senator Evashevsky on one side and the global media baron on the other; Davidov, though stuck with the frump on his left, would be more than compensated by having the delectable French morsel on his right, and would be directly across from the senator; and Irving would have the senator’s wife and the girl from Latvia he wanted to be next to on his left. Ace would be able to share his attention with the piquant Ari on his left and the substantive Dorothy Barclay on his right. A good group, nicely mixed. The least desirable seat—between the frump and the senator’s nice wife—was to be occupied by the Memphis fellow, but that was the price one paid for being a nobody.

Ace chose a Piesporter Goldtröpfchen for the first course, to please the German with “tiny little drops of gold,” and a Château Margaux to go with the lamb, to please himself. This would not be a drinking crowd, however, as most of the diners would be fearful of letting something slip or missing somebody else’s hint; the waiters were ready with bottles of Pellegrino for the sparkling water fanciers, Evian for those who preferred still water to run deep. Taittinger would do for the champagne toast; absent a major anniversary, Dom Pérignon would be ostentatious.

The orchestration was complete. Ace, the maestro, was ready to conduct. Legs crossed, holding an unlit cigarette in a silver holder as his baton, the host awaited the sound of the chimes.

As a butler lifted her Halston-era cashmere cape off her naked shoulders, Viveca checked out the competition. The French actress was delicious
and momentarily captivating, with a figure that made feminists attach strips to her posters that read
FEED THIS WOMAN
, but her mind was probably stuffed with fluff. Dorothy Barclay, on the contrary, was a heavy hitter: the DCI looked serious, purposeful, attractively forbidding, and her presence was freighted with being the first woman in that position of power; Viveca resolved to work on getting to know her. Evangeline Evashevsky seemed to her almost every senator’s first wife: dutiful, homespun, wary of attention paid her man by good-looking women. Let Irving cultivate her.

Ace had told her the German publisher’s wife would be a plain dumpling, but the agent was wholly misinformed; he must have been briefed on an earlier wife of the media baron. The fluidly gowned woman with him turned out to be a Finnish economist, articulate in several languages, who drew every man’s attention because her reputed brainpower came atop a statuesque figure and a classic Nordic face. She was the object of Director Barclay’s economic questioning early in the cocktail hour, and Viveca was sure Edward would be all over Sirkka von Schwebel in the forty-five minutes that Viveca required to slip out and do her newscast.

No competition at all was Liana Krumins. The Latvian’s long, dowdy Eastern European dress, inadequate makeup, and weird hairdo made her out of place in this sophisticated setting. Viveca noted how Davidov kept his distance from her; Ace tried to draw her out, failed, moved on; Edward observed her from afar, but made no effort to strike up a conversation; Irving, busy working over Davidov, had no time for her. Only the senator, a kindly soul, stayed by her side to put the girl at ease in a strange country, and she listened raptly to long anecdotes about his days as a cold warrior.

At Edward’s urgent glance, Viveca peeled the Latvian away from Evashevsky and invited her to watch a nightly newscast from the set later in the week. She would bring Edward along to pick up any revelations from the very young television reporter about the early life of the sleeper in the Berensky file. Viveca categorized the Latvian presenter as an uptight bumpkin out of her element and in dire need of a hairdresser; what had Irving and Michael Shu been so impressed about? The girl did perk up at the prospect of watching American television news in production.

Viveca noticed Davidov, cornered by Irving, looking uncomfortable
and glancing her way. She knew the Russian was sizing her up: a short, thirtyish, intelligent-looking woman in a loose Donna Karan outfit with a long gold chain. Not especially threatening to his ego, as the brainy Finnish stunner probably was; the KGB man would probably trust the cool American newswoman more than the high-powered Irving Fein. She was sorry there was no time to get Irving to suggest some leading questions. Viveca picked up a plate of crudités, offered them to the two men, then handed the plate to Irving and left him standing with it as she took Davidov over to the couch and sat next to him.

“You mustn’t mind reporters,” she said, “they’re always working. I promise not to ask what brings you to America.”

The Russian official had never been in such an apartment before. Three stories tall in an old building on an avenue with long islands of shrubbery in the center, with the cathedral ceiling reminding him of St. Vladimir’s Hall in the Kremlin, and a garden of evergreens and crab-apple trees on the roof terrace; and this man McFarland was only a literary agent. Was all this possible, Davidov wondered, on a small percentage of other people’s earnings?

If Ace, as he knew not to call him, could live this well, he must be tightly associated with success. Doing business with him, the KGB man allowed himself to think, might not be a bad idea. The promotion of book business was surely the purpose of this dinner party, and it was suitable, in the all-capitalist world, that a social gathering serve a purpose. Davidov had discussed this invitation with his superiors and recommended to them he turn it down because of Director Barclay’s presence; they had overruled him, directed him to attend, and even cautioned him against wearing a wire. He was pleased at their expression of confidence in his ability to work in the field.

Every good party should have a surprise, which this one did before dinner was served. The Russian had not expected to be confronted with Sirkka von Schwebel. The striking Finnish economist was known to him: files recovered by the KGB from Stasi before they fell into the hands of the West included long reports from her about the operation of the Bundesbank. Rather than allow her to be exposed as an East German police informant, as tens of thousands were, Russian Foreign
Intelligence had taken her under its wing and made her a productive agent, though not entirely trusted, because there was always the danger of public exposure as the flat rock of East German espionage was flipped over. She must live with that concern every day. FI had told him nothing about her, as usual, and he was reluctant to ask, but he was sure her service would be to exploit her Bundesbank links; he recalled she was reported to have access to a Federal Reserve asset in New York as well. She and Davidov had crossed paths once, before any of this, at a Helsinki academic conference, but his unprofessional interest in her had not been reciprocated.

Why was Sirkka here tonight? Her husband owned Fein’s publisher, and the couple’s presence at Ace’s party was logical enough. But Davidov wondered if she might be the sleeper’s Bundesbank source. If so, surely the two were separated by a cutout, but might she have any idea of the identity of Berensky in America? It was inconceivable to him that Fein and the CIA Director were not aware of her Stasi background, if not her present Russian FI employment.

Davidov reminded himself of the danger of his own bureaucratic overstepping: FI would hotly resent any contact initiated by KGB counterintelligence. Still, Sirkka and he were thrown together in the same room, possibly, though not likely, by coincidence.

He made a mental note to have his men currently trying to surveil the Memphis Merchants Bank, an effort which had grown out of a wiretap on Fein, run a check on Edward Dominick. To overcome the extraordinary security procedures in the Tennessee bank’s communications, they had aimed a long-range vibration sensor at the bank’s windows. One corner suite, probably the bank president’s, was equipped with a blocking device to vibrate the windows and make the pickup of conversations from a distance impossible. That was sophisticated enough a countermeasure to arouse suspicion. Was Dominick that Memphis banker? Unlikely, but easy enough to check. Was the well-protected banker the sleeper himself? Even more unlikely again, but no lead could go unfollowed.

In a nation of 250 million, the likelihood of a visiting KGB official running across the sleeper at the first American dinner party he attended was remote, to say the least, but why was he being led to suspect that? Answer: a deception was under way. An overhear pointing to a Memphis bank, followed quickly by a party with a Memphis
banker: Davidov instantly sensed a dangle. He focused on its perpetrator; someone had drawn up the guest list for this party with infinite care, and that someone—Fein and the striking television newswoman?—also wanted to plant a seed in his mind that Edward Dominick might possibly be the sleeper.