The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Read online

  Also by David Quammen

  Fiction

  To Walk the Line

  The Zolta Configuration

  Blood Line

  Nonfiction and Essays

  Natural Acts

  The Flight of the Iguana

  The Song of the Dodo

  Wild Thoughts from Wild Places

  The Boilerplate Rhino

  Monster of God

  The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

  Natural Acts (Revised and Expanded Edition)

  Spillover

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 1987 David Quammen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following:Lines from Eugene Onegin by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, trans. by Babette Deutsh © 1964 (New York: Penguin Books). Reprinted by permission of the translator’s estate.

  A Book Lust Rediscovery

  Published by Amazon Publishing

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477826119

  ISBN-10: 1477826114

  Cover design by David Drummond

  Contents

  Introduction

  Dedication

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

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  Readers’ Guide for The Soul of Viktor Tronko

  Discussion Questions

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  About the Author

  About Nancy Pearl

  About Book Lust Rediscoveries

  Introduction

  I FIRST HAD THE FANTASY of reprinting some of my best-loved but long-out-of-print novels as I was finishing Book Lust, in 2003. In particular, four works of fiction came to mind (all of which, of course, were included in Book Lust). They were books that I’d read and reread over the years since they’d first been published, and I longed to share them with others. I suspected there was a whole new generation (or two) of readers who’d enjoy them as much as I did, and I thought how lovely it would be to be able to say, “And guess what, it’s just been reissued!”

  The four novels were Merle Miller’s A Gay and Melancholy Sound, Clair Huffaker’s The Cowboy and the Cossack, Ruth Doan MacDougall’s The Cheerleader, and David Quammen’s The Soul of Viktor Tronko.

  Well, if you’re reading this, you know that with the Book Lust Rediscoveries series my fantasy became a reality. We ended up reprinting a baker’s dozen of my favorite works of fiction (out of many more that I’d still love to reissue: “More Book Lust Rediscoveries,” anyone?). I’m beyond thrilled that A Gay and Melancholy Sound was the first Book Lust Rediscovery and The Cowboy and the Cossack appeared not long after that. And right now you are just about to begin David Quammen’s superb novel of espionage, The Soul of Viktor Tronko.

  I can trace my great affection for spy novels straight back to the source of most of my reading loves, the librarians at the Parkman branch of the Detroit Public Library System, and in particular, Miss Frances Whitehead, who guided my childhood book selections. When I was thirteen, she finally allowed me to leave the children’s room for the heady atmosphere of the opposite end of the library, where the books for adults were shelved. Before we started out on this momentous journey (for she insisted on accompanying me, as though she were a native guide and I was about to venture into terra incognita), she pulled a book, an old book, from the looks of it, from the fiction shelves, handed it to me, and said, “Read this one first, and don’t forget to come back and tell me what you thought of it.”

  Her choice, as was almost always the case when she picked out a book for me to read, was impeccable. The book she gave me was Rudyard Kipling’s classic 1901 novel, Kim; it marked my first exposure to spy fiction. (Among British readers, if not American ones, Kim remains an important title. In 1998, it was seventy-eighth on the Modern Library’s list of one hundred great books of the twentieth century, and in a survey done by the BBC in Britain in 2003, it was #159 out of the two hundred favorite books of the British reading public.) Its young, eponymous protagonist is the orphaned son of a British Army officer in India who ends up working for the far-flung British secret services in the 1890s. It takes place against the backdrop of what’s known as The Great Game, the long simmering and frequently erupting political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. What a wonderful novel it is! I adored it when I first read it and adore it still.

  Of course, at thirteen I was only vaguely aware that in sharing Kim’s adventures I was also learning history, and that I could learn more about India, the Afghan wars of the late nineteenth century, and the British Empire from books in the nonfiction section. The realization of the joys of nonfiction came later, but I’m convinced that a large part of the reason I eventually obtained a master’s degree in history is my early exposure to books like Kim. Later, as I read deeply and widely in the spy fiction genre, my world soon expanded to include regular trips to those Dewey sections where books about spying, spies, and spycraft were shelved: the 300s, especially the 327s, 351s, and 364s, as well as parts of the 900s and of course the biographies.

  I believe that readers can get a good idea of the sweep of history, especially political history, from a devoted diet of spy fiction, supplemented by nonfiction as the reader is so moved. And I believe that many, if not most, readers will be so moved. There’s something in the nature of an espionage novel that encourages readers to learn more about the time and place in which the story is set. Writers of espionage fiction mostly deal in real places (Berlin; Washington, DC; Bletchley Park; and South Vietnam, to name a few settings from my very favorite spy novels) and frequently take their plots from events that really happened (the mysteries surrounding the death of John F. Kennedy, the chilling effects of the Berlin Wall, moles—enemy agents—in high places, to mention three very popular subjects). I’ve found that reading about whatever real occurrence might have given rise to the novel I’ve just finished greatly enhances my understanding of and appreciation for the book. (I find the fact that books about real-life spies, spying, and spycraft are shelved in so many different library locations both extremely annoying and, ultimately, frustrating. I don’t understand why libraries can’t shelve all their books about spies and spying—both fiction and nonfiction—together in a section called something like, duh, Spies and Spying.)


  I’m always happy when a work of fiction teaches me something about history, but I continue to be drawn to spy novels like The Soul of Viktor Tronko, because I love books with twisty, convoluted plots. Inherent in the genre (they are, after all, about an activity that necessarily entails lying and trickery) is that the fact that the journey from point A to point B (from beginning to end, with various stops along the way) is never straightforward; it’s full of feints and misdirections, deceptions and betrayals, false conclusions and mistaken analyses. Often you won’t know until the very last chapter (or sometimes the last page itself) what really happened or whom to trust. (In this the reader is frequently in the same boat as the protagonist of the novel.)

  I am especially and most dearly fond of a certain subset of spy novels: those set during the Cold War, where the theme is most often betrayal—of friends, of family, of countries or ideologies. If I had to pick one British novel to best represent this group, it would be John le Carré’s brilliant Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which took as its inspiration the case of Kim Philby, who, even as he was rising high in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in the 1940s and ’50s (he came close to being named its director general), was spying for the Soviet Union, and had been since his college years in the 1930s. The shock of Philby’s betrayal (as well as that of his friends and colleagues, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Antony Blunt) reverberated throughout the real and fictional worlds of spydom and continues to enthrall fiction readers and historians to this day, not to mention shaping the subsequent relationship between MI6 and the American intelligence services (which the Brits call, collectively, “the cousins”).

  If Britain’s national security (and MI6) were put at risk because of real, but long unsuspected, Soviet agents who had infiltrated the organization, America’s CIA suffered from the opposite problem.

  James Jesus Angleton, the head of counterintelligence for the CIA from 1954 to 1975 (arguably the most virulent period of Cold War fever), became convinced that there was a Russian agent working in the CIA. His belief was based on information received from a Russian KGB agent who’d defected to America. Angleton’s search for the putative (and never found) mole not only destroyed morale and the careers of innocent CIA employees, but in some accounts came close to destroying the agency itself.

  And here’s where David Quammen’s The Soul of Viktor Tronko comes in, for Angleton’s monomaniacal search for a CIA agent engaged in systematically betraying his country on behalf of the Russians is the prime mover of this engrossing novel. The Soul of Viktor Tronko, while clearly fiction, draws heavily on fact for many of its plot details. For me, the fun continued long after the novel ended because that’s when I started researching the nonfiction behind the fiction. Take a look at the bibliography to see some of the books I delved into in order to try to figure out exactly what really happened and what Quammen invented.

  The Soul of Viktor Tronko isn’t a particularly fast read. How could it be? Like its narrator, journalist Michael Kessler, the reader is caught up in a world of shadowy truths, false positives, men with something to hide, and a high-stakes game for ideological domination; it takes time and concentration to make your way through the thickets of deception and betrayal. But believe me, it’s totally worth it.

  Nancy Pearl

  to R.P.W.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. The characters are invented creatures. But a certain amount of factual detail informs my story (I hope) as texture and background. For that sense of texture and background, I am indebted to more sources than can be mentioned here; but I want especially to acknowledge the helpfulness of published works by Alexander Dolgun, Petro Grigorenko, Michael Voslensky, Mark Azbel, Aleksei Myagkov, Oleg Penkovskiy, Peter Deriabin, Vladimir Sakharov, Ladislav Bittman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Arkady Shevchenko, Eugène Marais, Robert Ardrey, Norman Malcolm, John Barron, Henry Hurt, Robert Conquest, Thomas Powers, William Hood, David C. Martin, Edward Jay Epstein, Anthony Summers, Tom Miller, Patricia Johnson McMillan, and Anthony Cave Brown.

  The quotations concerning the life of Eugène Marais, on p. 162 and 163, come from a brief preface written by his English translator, Winifred de Kok, in 1936.

  1

  THIS MUCH WAS oddly appropriate: it began with an exchange of symmetrical lies. The Russian claimed he was a lost man if he did not come across now, right now, today or tomorrow, before his own people could get him on board a plane. And the other side, who were Americans, claimed to believe him.

  By “lost” he was understood, correctly, to mean dead.

  But still they put him off for another two days. Go back to the hotel. Rejoin your delegation. Behave normally. This was all for their own convenience—certainly not for the Russian’s. A bit of time was required for communications, consultations with home, deliberation on that end. Assumption of the weight of responsibility. You’ll see us again on Wednesday, they instructed him; same time, same procedure, a different address. The Russian had no choice but to comply. Meanwhile in Langley, within a glass-walled cubicle that was itself within a secure communications room on the seventh floor, three men were faced with deciding precisely how clever they thought they were.

  The cubicle was hardly bigger than an elevator, and there was only one chair. That was occupied by the junior officer of the three, a pug-faced man named Melvin Pokorny, forty years old and bald and drastically ugly in an affable, unthreatening way. As deputy to the chief of Counterintelligence, Melvin Pokorny did not ordinarily serve as a code clerk; but circumstances this evening were not ordinary. Pokorny sat at a teletype keyboard. The encryption machine before him dominated the space of the cubicle, hulking up tall and smoke-gray like an old Univac crossed with a jukebox. It was identical to a dozen other machines in the larger room, except that its printer made no carbons. Tending the cubicle’s glass door, from the outside, was a discreetly alert security officer in a business suit. The two older men stood behind Pokorny, hovering.

  The station chief from Bonn had flown over to Vienna upon first word that the Russian—after one and a half years of utter silence—was reestablishing contact. The Bonn man spoke Russian, it was he who hosted the first of these latest meetings, and it was he therefore who passed along to Langley the first quantum of startling news: that the Russian was now in a froth to defect. Startling in its own brief moment, but nothing at all compared to the second quantum. That was reserved for Jed McAtee, who had gone roaring over at once from Langley.

  McAtee was a former chief of the Bonn station himself, now very much senior to the new man, and coyly but unmistakably vain of his own fluency in the Russian language; more important, he himself had handled the original contact that year and a half earlier. McAtee knew this Russian. Or rather, they had met. McAtee would try to persuade the Russian to remain in place. After all, the Russian himself had been adamant against defection just eighteen months ago, hadn’t he? Wife and child in Moscow? Brilliantly promising trajectory to his KGB career? All right then. Let him stay put and tell us some stories. At least for a while yet. Let him earn his defection. Little junket out to Vienna was no reason for getting giddy and reckless all of a sudden. Just let him remain in place. But talk to us. Stories.

  Thus it was figured in Langley. McAtee would know how to hit the right note. McAtee would be good. So Jed McAtee flew into Vienna and hosted the second meeting, in a furnished flat just off the Concordiaplatz; and to him was entrusted the second quantum. McAtee rushed immediately back to the embassy, where he locked himself up to cable Langley, and coming off the machine in the glass-walled cubicle it read like this:

  SUBJECT CLAIMS INFO RE OSWALD

  The two older men watched over Pokorny’s shoulder as these words were pecked down. For a moment no one said anything. The air of the cubicle already tasted galvanic and sour, from three men and an electronic machine all confined at hard labor—the new difference in that atmosphere might have passed notice by ev
en a good hound. For another moment no one said anything. Then a repeat of the transmission was requested. Please clarify, Pokorny typed on his keyboard. What did you say? he typed. The encrypted tape was fed back to the machine, which sucked it away like a noodle, and the message went off in a burst. McAtee’s next cable read:

  SAYS HE WILL TELL US ABOUT OSWALD

  Of the older men, one was a gnomish creature, barely taller as he stood than Pokorny in the chair. This man had the lean features and flushed fair skin of a child who has spent too long in the hospital, but the strong underbite of his jaw suggested quiet ferocity of the adult sort. He held himself in the desperately straight posture of very short folk who happen also to be very proud. His hands were buried beyond sight in deep pockets of a camel-hair overcoat. The coat was finely tailored and came almost to the floor; it had a collar of soft fur; by any sane standard, it was more than a little too warm for the glass-walled cubicle of the room on the seventh floor. The gnomish man only wore it because he was on the verge of leaving the building, and because he insisted stubbornly on letting the other man be reminded of that fact. He had been on the verge of leaving the building now for five hours. Since just after 9 P.M. It was entirely unnecessary, in this second month of 1964, for Pokorny to type Oswald Who?

  To McAtee’s message, the gnomish man offered his own comment in the form of a snort.

  “Yes,” said the other, a man of far more abundant silhouette. This one sighed. He was tall enough, broadly enough framed, to carry almost as much weight as he was presently carrying; not badly kept, that is, for someone of his age and station. He played golf without a cart—a point of pride. Beside the gnomish man, though, anyone would have looked like a comic baritone out of Gilbert and Sullivan. “What’s your impression?”

  “Bogus,” said the gnomish man. “Sent.”

  “Yes, well. Maybe. Jed seems to agree.”

  Earlier messages from McAtee had already warned Langley of reasons for doubting the Russian’s whole line. For instance the telegram of recall, purportedly summoning him back to Moscow on the last Aeroflot flight of the week, and thereby setting such a conveniently intractable deadline for his coming across to the West. McAtee found no evidence that such a telegram really existed. There were other questions too, minor ones but nagging. Wife and child at home, career trajectory, and the earlier strong opposition to the notion of defecting. What had changed so drastically in eighteen months? One answer to that question was now—after McAtee’s last two cables—obvious. But hardly reassuring. The Russian was being sniffed at skeptically.