The Plotkin Report

1

Sergei Roy

THE PLOTKIN REPORT

A novel from the Cold War

© Sergei Roy, 2014

FOREWORD

As the subtitle indicates, this book is a novel, so the mandatory warning is due here: most, though not all, of the characters in it are fictitious, and any likeness to events that actually happened is purely coincidental.

The novel’s theme is spying and spies. It is only fair to state, however, that a lover of spy thrillers should not expect a journey into a fantasy world in which a James Bond type, endowed with superhuman capabilities and decidedly unfair share of luck, single-handedly defeats the forces of Evil and saves the world. This narrative is definitely different from such yarns – yet it is by no means devoid of thrills.

The explanation is simple. Any student of, or participant in, the world of spying is sure to discover, sooner or later, that life is truly stranger than fiction, and that in reality this secretive world abounds in the most bizarre episodes, stratagems, and characters that leave the inventions of a professional spinner of titillating yarns simply nowhere. One might go a step further and say that at times real-life happenings – the play of chance and coincidence – are less believable than adventures in literary fantasy worlds.

Readers will have to judge for themselves if the narrative offered here provides sufficient proof of these generalities. In any case, they will find in it much material about actual events gleaned from various sources and from personal experience. As indicated, some of the novel’s characters have prototypes, hopefully thoroughly disguised. Perhaps most importantly, the entire context is as true to life as can be, so that it is sometimes hard to tell what actually happened from what could easily have happened at that time and place – in the late 70’s and early 80’s, mostly in Russia and partly in America.

Finally, thanks are due to Edward Lozansky who originally suggested that I write this book. It hardly needs to be said that he and Ilya Nevsky, one of the novel’s heroes, are two different characters, one real, the other fictitious, and rarely the twain do meet.

Sergei Roy

Moscow

May 2014

PART ONE. YEFIM PLOTKIN

Chapter 1. A Chance Meeting in GorkyPark

The day was fine, the mood was lousy. Late in June Moscow begins to empty, street crowds thin out, the weather is beautiful by any standards, not just Russian ones, and even the pukh, poplar fluff in every nook and cranny, does not bother you too much if you aren’t allergic to it.

There was plenty of fluff in GorkyPark where Yefim (Fima, and sometimes even Fimka to his near and dear) Plotkin walked. Allergic to fluff he was not, and still his mood was as described. Lousy in the extreme.

Young and very much in love with his beautiful, wonderful, and generally one-and-only young wife, he faced right now the prospect of yet another inspection tour, the third one this year, to some boondocks, this time in the farthest Far East. The thought depressed the hell out of him. It meant parting from his lovely, loving Dina for a month, maybe more.

Also, the trip would mean drinking. Fima shuddered slightly. Ordinarily, he could swill vodka with the best of them, even if he did not particularly like the stuff; but Army boozing was… Well, it was in a class of its own. And the arrival of a young civilian from unbelievably remote Moscow to some garrison or base out in the sticks was certainly an occasion for an extra heavy collective bender, practically for the duration of his stay. No wonder Fima shuddered.

He looked at his watch. Half past one. Dina wouldn’t be home for hours. Might as well enjoy a few minutes of sunshine and quiet in these leafy glades; there won’t be much to enjoy in the coming month. Enjoy, hell…That’s what his boss had said to him in the morning, with a malicious glitter in his eye: “Enjoy the trip, you lucky dog. Wish I could go instead of you.” The slimy bastard.

Someone clapped Yefim on the shoulder, pretty hard. He wheeled round rather violently but, seeing who it was, grinned from ear to ear.

“Givi, you silly jerk. Scared the shit out of me. Didn’t hear you creeping up on me.”

“Me sneaky Injun. Soft Foot’s the name, remember?”

“Soft Foot my foot. Heavy Tread, more like it. You’re fatter than ever. Fat as a prize pig.”

“That’s my cover. Who’ll ever suspect a funny fat guy?”

“Lousy cover. That’s no way for a glamorous secret service agent to look. They ought to chuck you out, really.”

Fima knew that his childhood chum Givi Chorgashvili, though officially with the Trade Ministry, was also a junior officer in the KGB; more like a petty clerk at either of these jobs, actually. A bit of a joke between them. The heavyset, happy-go-lucky Georgian and the thin, moody Jewish boy had been pretty close in their school years; every kid was a bit different from the others, but these two were more different, and they knew it; this brought them closer together. They found each other good company, had plenty of fun together, and memories of those happy days got sunnier with every passing year. With that warm feeling between them, Fima could chaff Givi all he liked about his secret, scary-sounding job with the KGB.

“I wish they would. Might find me something easier on the seat of my pants. Absolutely worn through.” Givi rubbed his ample rump with a comic grimace. “Look at you. As thin as ever. Moody as usual, too. What about, this time?”

Yefim waved a hand, his face the picture of misery.

“Life in general, I guess.”

“Liar. Don’t I know your moods. Something’s eating you special hard, old horse.”

“It does, only it’s a long story.”

“A bottle of cognac long?”

“Two, more like it.”

“Well, I’m game. You?”

Yefim saw a familiar gleam in Givi’s eye, a sure sign of pleasurable anticipation of a real treat for a true man of the Caucasus: a few hours at a well-laden table with an old pal, enjoying it all hugely – the food, the booze, the boasting. Yefim sighed; suddenly he felt that right now that was exactly what he needed, too.

“Two bottles, you said?”

“Actually you said it, but who cares who said what. Well?”

“I’m game, too.”

Chapter 2. At the Golden Ear of Wheat

They left the park, found a taxi, and were soon seated at a table on the second floor of a restaurant in the Agricultural Exhibition grounds, far from downtown Moscow. Givi, who knew every better class eatery in town like the back of his hand, said it was the quietest spot to be found at this hour, the food was passable, and they could enjoy the view of the fountain shaped like a giant golden ear of wheat in the pond below.

Of course, Givi would have much preferred the Aragvi, a few hundred yards from the Kremlin, a restaurant as Georgian as Georgian could be, no better cuisine anywhere in Moscow, though the view there presented nothing more enchanting than the backside of the horse on which Yuriy Dolgorukiy, the founder of Moscow, sat. Not to be thought of, though; he might be seen there by some snooping colleague of his, and reported living it up during office hours.

No, better be careful. The time was far in the past when secret police personnel was eighty percent Georgian, run by Beria, himself a Georgian and the top henchman of Stalin, another Georgian. Things had changed a lot in the twenty-five years since Stalin died a more or less natural death and Beria was executed. Old secret servicemen still had some pull, of course; his father, a retired KGB colonel, had been able to wangle this job for him, but the son had to watch his step – even if it interfered with his ideas of right living.

By nature, Givi was a typical kinto, a curious Georgian word for someone whose most important business in life is enjoyment of the good things of life – good food, good wine, and any kind of women. Above all, though, he valued feasting in male company where he could fully exert his fine talent for making up brilliant toasts, often with an ironical or philosophical twist to them, a political twist in company you trusted, if any such were to be found; telling off-color jokes; reciting poetry, often clean but not too clean; singing songs, ditto. All that sort of thing. A bon vivant who made the bon vivant-ing a sort of profession. Everything else, work above all, was but a boring interlude to be somehow got through. There is a bit of a kinto in every Georgian, but Givi was the quintessential one.

Here at the restaurant table, with a trusty old pal at his side who could well appreciate his talents and his bragging, he was right in his element. He studied the menu judiciously and ordered for both of them: lobio, an hors d’oeuvre with a bean base to it; spicy kharcho soup with chunks of mutton in it; fat chicken tabaka, fried split and flattened, also spicy, with tkemali sauce on the side; coffee with Benedictine liqueur to round the meal off. To his delight, the wine list included Gremi, a famous, five-star Georgian cognac with those cherished letters on the label, KVVK, the Russian acronym for very old cognac, highest quality. So it would be cognac throughout the meal; nothing but cognac.

The bottle and lobio were soon before them, and Givi reeled off the first toast: so lucky running into you, old chum, let us drink that we may see each other more often, for it was a great sin, forgetting old friends, there was nothing more sacred in life than friendship. Except for family perhaps, which led to the second toast, according to the time-honored rule that the interval between the first toast and the second should be as short as you could make it. Givi was a bachelor and an insatiable woman-chaser, so he was naturally very strong on family ties; he explained to Fima at considerable length how lucky he was to have landed Dina, how beautiful and virtuous she was, and what great care he, Fima, had to take of his ever so precious wife. They drank to that, the cognac easily sliding down their gullets, real five-star stuff. Third came the obligatory, ritual toast for those who are no longer with us, with a drop or so of the precious cognac from each glass spilled on the floor.

And so it went; it was only when they had worked through half the first bottle and were well into the soup that Givi touched on what had brought them there. Why was Fima feeling so low? Unusually gloomy for him, even. What was eating him?

By that time Fima was feeling pleasantly high, dreary things like unwanted, life-sapping trips to the Far East forgotten for a while. He tried to wave the subject away, but Givi would have none of that. He was Fima’s pal, he wanted to help, if it was merely by listening to a confession, and he intended to hear that confession – or no second bottle. Yefim knew it was but an empty threat, he would be lucky if he escaped before a third one made its magic appearance as Givi made his characteristic gesture – index finger pointing at the waiter, then describing a wide curve up and down into the center of the table.

In the end, Fima succumbed.

Chapter 3. Confession of a Schnook

“Well, you know I’m with that ‘mailbox’[1],” he launched into his story, rather heavily. “A couple of years ago I invented… uh… a gadget… you know, I can’t talk about it, top secret stuff, has to do with ICBMs…”

“If you can’t, don’t,” Givi said sternly. “And I don’t want to hear it. Just say what you can say.”

“Well, it’s a gadget that measures… er…”

“It measures what has to be measured. Proceed.”

“Right, thanks. It measures what needs to be measured but wasn’t. Not till I decided it should be, and thought of a way to do it. Naturally I wanted to see my device in metal; wanted to see it work.”

“Naturally. There’d be kudos and a hefty bonus for you in it, too, I suppose.”

“Kudos-shmudos. My immediate boss, that fat slob with one tiny convolution in his brain, muscled in on it. The department head took a hand, too. Without him, it would all stay on paper. And so it went. So now I’m just a co-author, my name third or fourth on the list.”

“Standard procedure. Climb the ladder, and you’ll do the same to your juniors.” Givi sighed, then added: “I’m just talking. I know you’ll never do a thing like that. Let’s drink to idealists like my best, truest pal Fima. You know how the saying goes: No village stands without a saint. To saints.”

“Saint my ass. I’m just a schnook. Have always been.”

“To saintly schnooks, then.”

They drank to that, slurped some more soup, munched some more mutton. Yefim continued, in the same aggrieved tone:

“Wish I’d never invented that blasted device. They produced the damn thing in considerable numbers, installed it on every ICBM facility, and where has that landed poor me? I now have to go to every goddamn silo, ship, submarine, every kind of missile carrier… Flying all over the place all the time. Dina is nothing but a grass widow now. I’m hardly ever at home.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you have to travel all the time?”

“Because the goddamn gadget is so delicate, so full of jinxes, that I’m apparently the only one who can tune it properly. Or fix it if something goes askew. No one else can, or wants to. My smart co-authors least of all, rot their balls.”

“What about the operators on the spot?”

“Too dim or too lazy. I train them wherever I go, but it’s an uphill job.”

“I see. Tough shit, really.”

“Can’t be tougher… I know I shouldn’t be talking like this, being half-smashed and all… But really, I sometimes miss Dina so bad… physically, I mean… miss her so bad I could climb the nearest wall...”

“I know. I go on business trips, too.”

“Aw, you and your business trips. Charming the panties off all comely provincial babes within your field of vision.”

“That’s slander. I take pity on the ugly ones, too. But seriously, Fim. Long silences are good for your sex life, every manual will tell you that.”

“Stick your manuals up your Georgian ass. As I come back, we’re in bed before our clothes are off. Long silences… I’m sick and tired of your long silences...”

“That reminds me. Do you know that one about a battalion of skiers?”

“Can’t say I remember that one. Shoot.”

“It’s from the war. A battalion of skiers is on the way to the front, stops for the night at a village, a rifleman salutes his commander, says: ‘Comrade Captain, please let me go just for the night, my native village is not far, a dozen kilometers or so, I’ll be back by reveille.’ He is a good soldier, a fine skier, so the captain lets him go. By morning he is back, all the guys crowd around him: ‘Well, how was it?’ He says, ‘The first thing I did…’ Jeers, guffaws all around, and someone says, ‘Better tell us the second thing you did, man.’ ‘OK, I give you three guesses.’ ‘Had some hootch? Had some grub? Kissed your sleeping kiddies?’ ‘No, guys. The second thing I did, I took off my skis…’”

Fima smiled ruefully.

“I at least don’t have to take off skis…”

“Let’s drink to that. As good a reason to celebrate as any.”

Chapter 4. Confession of a Schnook (continued)

So they drank to no skis, and to a few other things. The second bottle arrived with the chicken tabaka, which reminded Givi of yet another fresh joke. In full stride by now, he came up with a political – meaning anti-Soviet – one about the little chicken who found himself in a labor camp, to the inmates’ amazement. “Why, what have you done, Little Chicken?” they asked, and the poor thing proudly replied: “I pecked at a Young Pioneer’s ass…”

There was more in this vein. Givi’s repertoire of jokes was mountainous; some were really funny, and Fima laughed or smiled dutifully. But his heart was clearly not in it, and at last Givi pushed the bottle aside:

“We’re not drinking any more of this delicious stuff, old socks. Not before you lay your heart bare. Tell Papa what really ails you. I mean, really.”

Yefim shook his head, but then thought, Oh, what the hell. He just had to tell someone. Someone who would understand. There was always Dina, of course, only she was a woman. His tiny little girl. And what could they do to him, even if Givi informed on him? After all, he, Yefim Plotkin, junior research fellow though he was, was quite indispensable; no one could fix his little gimmick without him.