The Power Vertical

One Sunday morning, Davis Wicklow’s study phone rings him out of bible study in his apartment on the compound of the US Embassy. He lifts himself off of his knees, ruffles the hair of his youngest child Min and kisses Junette on the forehead. There is no question he will be leaving, as only the officer on duty would dare ring him during services. He closes the study door behind him and picks the receiver up. A three word code is delivered to him and he nods as if the person on the other end can see him. He has been requested to meet in half an hour at the Moscow Zoo, two blocks away. Davis exits his study, smiles at his son Elijah, who has taken over the services for him, and pulls on his sneakers and windbreaker. He pats his pockets to make sure that he is carrying his diplomatic passport and a few hundred rubles (to buy Min another refrigerator magnet in the shape of a giraffe for her collection). The last thing he does is hit the button on the coffee pot. When the coffee is brewed, Junette will pour it down the drain, like they do once a day.

Davis has been watching a caged South American spectacled bear scratch itself uselessly for about twenty minutes when a man walks up to him.  “You like mustard?” Dmitry asks as he holds out a hot dog in a napkin and an orange soda to Wicklow.

“I like to spend my Sunday mornings at home.” Wicklow accepts his early lunch.

Dmitry Lavronenko, one hand now freed of fast food, points at the bear. “Davis, you think they put saltpeter in the food here? Every other zoo I ever see in the world, the bears and the primates – all of the creatures that walk on two feet – they cannot keep their hands off their privates. Not here, here our male bipeds are positively docile. Why?”

“I suspect my government has never really expended the proper effort to discover whether erectile dysfunction is more common in your zoo animals than in ours. Although I will be sure to report that you found this an area worthy of discussion.”

“Even if my curiosity is of less than an official nature? What question is more personal than the sin of Onan?” Dmitry pops the cola. 

“What question is more relevant to our profession,” Davis muses at the spectacled bear, who appears to be counting his hands, “than that which relates to organs, eh, Dmitry?”

“Davis Wicklow, the punning Saint.”

Davis turns to Dmitry and raises his orange soda, raising it in a toast. “Did you call for me this morning to see if I am going to blush at the concept of masturbating zoo animals, or are you trying to start a dialogue about what can or cannot be left out of a contact report?”

Dmitry lifts his can and winks. “You first, I think. Davis, what do you think I want?”

“I think you are here to deliver the tit-for-tat list.” Davis is referring to the napkin he has just palmed. There will be four names on it. When he gets back to the Embassy, he will open the napkin, read the four names to the Chief of Station, who will inform the Ambassador, who will tell his Deputy Chief of Mission for Protocol and Diplomatic Affairs, who will call four households and tell them that they are going to be expelled.

The previous week, the United States identified four diplomats at the Russian Embassy in Washington whom they accused of “engaging in activities inconsistent with their status” and gave them forty-eight hours to leave the United States. Russia had called this expulsion outrageous and said it would consider its options. What everyone knew it would do is pick four diplomats at the US Embassy in Moscow of roughly similar rank, make the same accusation, and throw them out with the same ceremony and the same deadline. The United States would declare this outrageous, say that it will consider its options, and then the matter will be dropped with no further rhetoric or escalation. The matter will be ended for the time being.

This practice of reciprocal expulsions is known as tit-for-tat. As a sign of improved relations in the 1990s, Russia and the US began to extend to each other the courtesy of an extra day or two of informal notice ahead of the official announcement to give the tit-for-tat expellees the chance to say their goodbyes and their friends the chance to throw more extravagant expulsion parties. If the expellee had a family with him, the family would even be allowed to stay in the host country until the end of whatever school period the children were in.

Dmitry shakes his head. “Been here, done that, but I am still here. Why, Davis?”

The zoo is divided by Bolshaya Gruzinskaya Street, over which a footbridge with a chicken wire gable connects the two sections. As they cross over the bridge to the side with the monkeys and the reptile houses, Davis reflects that for the moment, it is he and Dmitry that are in the cage.

“The same thing you probably want every time you call me out to some park or garden on a Sunday morning. The pleasure of my company. I assume that you are aware that when my government delivers the tit-for-tat list ahead of time, they simply have someone from State call your Ambassador and read him the names. State makes the official announcement a day later.”

Dmitry shakes his head. “As if this is diplomat business, catching spies and throwing them out when they refuse to defect. No, I do it this way because this is how professionals do it. Face to face. The traditional way. Showing respect for one’s adversary. Old habits, like the way you still toss a pot of coffee down the sink every day because you all heard at Langley twenty years ago that we flagged anyone we thought was Mormon as a probable spy.”

“Aren’t we?” Davis teases.

“You know, my daughter is twenty one? Beautiful girl.”

Davis nods. “Svetlana, right?”

“Sveta. So last week Sveta got her first marriage proposal. On her cell phone. By SMS. Do you believe that?”

“What does one put into an SMS marriage proposal?”

“This boy, he wrote her a chastushka, asked her to marry him in it. You know chastushki?”

Davis nods. “The equivalent of a limerick, same subject matter and meter, only with four lines instead of five.”

“He wrote her ‘I’m in love with a girl named Sveta/So I send her this electronic letter/If she marries me I promise you/She’ll get that which separates Christian from Jew’.”

Davis bites his lip. “I think we might have been the last generation of romantics, Dmitry.”

“I don’t know. The boy has good taste in women and poets. The last two lines are almost verbatim from Pushkin. Anyway, I had the kid put in a holding cell on Dzerzhinskaya.”

“How did he like it?” Davis is neither surprised that Dmitry would incarcerate his potential future son-in-law in the most notorious address in the country nor that Dmitry is discussing this with him.

“It was not even a real cell, just a storage room with a cot. I locked him in with a chamberpot and a roll of toilet paper. In the morning I pulled him out, gave him some tea and told him that he has twenty-four hours either to put a ring on my daughter’s finger or get as far away from Moscow as he can.” Dmitry shrugs again. After twenty years of speaking Russian at near native competency levels, Davis still does not pretend to decipher the nuances of the Russian shrug. “What kind of seeds do you want?”

The zoo, no longer fully financed and subsidized by the city, raises funds by renting almost every corner and turn of the walkways to hawkers of toys, books, balloons, charms, cold drinks, cotton candy and cellophane-wrapped paper cones filled with a choice of seeds: pumpkin, sunflower, cedar. “Sunflower,” Davis decides. Dmitry buys two cones of seeds and motions Davis to sit down, handing the sunflower seeds to him.

In front of the park bench are layers of sunflower seed husks, some ground into the asphalt years ago, some rolling around in the wind. Davis absentmindedly unwraps his cellophane, wondering when Dmitry would ever get to the point. Lavronenko’s resume is as quietly vicious as his own: South Yemen, Laos, Afghanistan. Doubtlessly, the man can be piercing and direct. But with Davis, with whom he will only speak in person and outdoors, he is always meandering through the zoo, or Gorky Park, or the Botanical Gardens down by Moscow State University.

“… like I would care that his father is the First Deputy Prime Minister. Are you afraid of politicians in your country, Davis? Davis, what are you doing?”

Davis has a sprinkling of seeds already on the ground and he is about to pinch more. A flock of ravens, ugly and mean, descend for a late morning snack. “I’m feeding the birds, Dmitry.”

Lavronenko’s laugh reaches around the bench and the two of them and the sullen birds and the seed seller. “Davis, we EAT the seeds. We do not feed winged vermin.”

Davis nods, bested. He starts to crack open the seed with his fingernail when Dmitry leans in to whisper. “This is why your guys always get made, you know. The little things. Let me show you.”  Dmitry teaches Davis how to crack sunflower seeds with his teeth, spit out the husk, get the seed on the tongue all in one or two crunches, and then pop the husk out without spitting on to the ground.  For about five minutes this keeps them quiet, until halfway through the cone, Dmitry sighs and leans back, his signal that it is time for the other side of their relationship.

“Pitchfork,” Dmitry says. “That operation is over, I think. I suspect that whatever information we are getting from that particular joint exercise is no longer reliable.”

“Over in the sense of on hold for awhile because you are annoyed that we rolled up a couple of your legals, or over in the sense of – ”

Dmitry crushes his soda can in his fist and regards it. Davis watches him judge the distance between the bench and the nearest overfilling trash can, and decide against the toss. He switches to English. “Officially, my government does not sulk like a schoolgirl who is stood up for the prom. Unofficially, my government is not in the mood to do your government any favors at the moment.  But that is coincidence.  This decision has nothing to do with the recent business with the tit-for-tat.”

“So in my contact report,” Davis says, following Dmitry into his own native language, “I will say that the organs are pulling the plug on five years of mutually profitable anti-terrorism surveillance coordinated between my Agency and your Service, unprecedented solid intelligence on financing networks that supply fundamentalist terrorism throughout Central Asia, because – well, Dmitry, that’s the question. Because why?”

Dmitry pushes a seed husk off his lower lip with his tongue. “Officially, I will tell you we suspect our sources have been corrupted and dangerously unreliable.”  He does not look Davis in the eye.

“Dmitry, if I were a cynical man, I would suggest here that perhaps the corruption is not completely external to your Service. I would note that a principal source of funding for these networks comes from heroin trafficking. I would draw the shortest distance from the poppy fields of Afghanistan to major Atlantic ports of Western Europe and neither of us would be particularly surprised to find that two-thirds of this line runs right across the territory of your country, through Moscow herself. I would posit that it is hard to resist the opportunity to make several hundred million dollars a year simply guaranteeing safe passage of more than half of the world’s raw heroin supply across that trade route. I would refer back to that map and remind you that our bearded acquaintances in the cloth headgear live a lot closer to you than to me. And I would conclude with the sad theory that someone somewhere has made the decision that putting that money in his own pocket is worth whatever risk that poses to your country’s own long term security.” Davis pauses, and switches back to Russian. “Fortunately, I am not a cynic nor do I wish to offend your patriotism, so I will save all of that for my contact report.”

Dmitry gives another Slavic shrug and stands up. “Your discretion is fortunate. As a dedicated professional I would find any such speculation on your part of rampant corruption within the power ministries of my government a reason to recommend objective measures be taken with you.” He leans into Davis and stares into his eyes. “Do you want some chocolate?”

“Sure, an Alyona if they have it.”

As Dmitry walks back from the seed seller fifty rubles poorer and a pair of sodas and one chocolate bar richer, Davis asks him, “I thought the organs no longer liquidate people like me to avenge a reputational slur.”

“We don’t,” Dmitry answers. “But we still are in the business of killing those who reveal our secrets. Here, all they have is a Kuzya.”

Davis takes the chocolate bar and the orange soda, opens the bar and breaks off a small piece which he passes back to Dmitry, who pretends to be hurt by the implication.

“Please,” he says. “Only North Koreans poison chocolate.” He takes the piece anyway.

“Well, it would be more effective than that time you had a motorcycle courier try to knock me off the Bosphorus Bridge on my morning run.”

“What happens in Istanbul stays in Istanbul. Jogging at middle age is foolish. But while we are on the topic of the unfriendlier moments of our twenty-year competition, are you trying to tell me that you had nothing to do with that unfortunate incident in Luanda?”

Davis lets another piece of chocolate melt on his tongue and washes it down with soda. “Hard to believe, but apartheid-era Pretoria did not always consult with us when they went after the ANC’s Soviet financiers in Angola. However, if you think jogging is foolish, then what do you call soliciting a pair of sixteen-year-old twin Korean girls off the street?”

Dmitry chokes on his cola and coughs out a curse. “Macao was you? That was a dirty trick, in more ways than one. Setting honey traps is the mark of an amateur, you know.”

“And falling for them is the mark of an expert? Shame on you. Marina is a fine woman.”

“As is Junette. I do not envy our wives, Davis. Do you think that when we retire they will find us unbearably boring, being at home with nothing but stories we cannot tell?”

“We have a saying in Langley: Old agents never retire, we just subcontract.”

“To the CIA?”

“Hollywood. Apparently you do that too. We had one of your guys from the San Francisco Consulate defect with his wife and kids on a tour at Universal Studios, remember that?”

“I knew that pederast. He told you he was First Directorate, right? He lied.”

Davis nods. “We know. We squeezed him and came up dry, but we put him and his family up in protection anyway. He just asked for a passport and a place in Los Angeles. We gave it to him, and he hired an agent, and in six months he was getting consulting credits on Bruce Willis movies.”

“Serves you right. Who would station a real spy in California, where nothing happens without it showing up on six television networks by the next morning?” Lavronenko crumples the second can, stands, and holds his hand out.

Wicklow finishes his soda, stands as well, and hands the can to be crushed. Dmitry tosses the two crushed cans and then puts his hand out again, which confuses Davis for a moment. The unwritten rule is that there is never physical contact. Davis takes the hand and shakes it.

Dmitry switches again to English. “We do not say we are sorry in this business. But I want you to know I took no pleasure in this. It was the move I had to make.”

Davis finds himself giving Dmitry the same shrug. “Very professional of you.”

They both laugh for a moment before Dmitry turns without a word and walks away.

Davis stops at the gift shop to get the giraffe magnet and returns to the embassy, where the Marines let him in on his face and password alone. He kisses Junette at the door, goes into his study and opens the napkin. He calls the Chief of Station, reads the other three names to him, and starts to pack.