Page 123 of Cry Havoc
“Cold night,” Penkovsky responded.
“I’ve been looking forward to this.”
“Have you not seenThe Voyevodabefore?”
“I have, but not here.”
“Where did you see it?”
“At the Mariinsky.”
“Ah, Leningrad. I hope to see it there one day as well. You are in for a treat, Comrade. It will be hard to beatThe Voyevodahere at the Bolshoi.”
The man extended his hand.
“My name is Sasha Belov.”
As Penkovsky shook hands he transferred the coat claim check tag to his new acquaintance.
“It’s nice to meet you. I am Penkovsky. Anatoly Penkovsky.”
The massive scarlet and gold curtain embroidered with “USSR” opened and transported the operagoers to a seventeenth-century city on the Volga River with a Chorus of Maidens.
The two men exchanged short pleasantries at the intermissions between the three acts and stood along with the rest of the audience at curtain call applauding the breathtaking performances.
“You were right, the acoustics rival even the Mariinsky,” the man said.
“One day I will compare the two,” Penkovsky replied.
The two men shook hands in parting, Belov now sliding his coat claim check into Penkovsky’s palm.
“Do svidaniya,” the man said, excusing himself into the aisle and making his way to the lobby.
Penkovsky lingered a moment longer, gathering his thoughts. It had been a performance for the ages. A triumph. If only his wife could have been there by his side, perhaps even with their son, who would have been fifteen years old, had he survived.
Penkovsky stood and joined the pack headed for the exits overhearing remarks on the power of Roman Dubrovin’s baritone, the beauty of Marya Vlasyevna’s soprano, the vibrant richness of the strings, the complexity of the woodwinds. Penkovsky was partial to the harp. His wife had played the harp.
He followed the crowd to the coat check, looking down at his program from time to time as he waited his turn. He then presented the claim tag to a short man behind the counter who looked at the number, disappeared momentarily, and returned with a dark wool coat that he handed across the small partition before reaching past Penkovsky to take a claim check from the next person in line.
The coat looked exactly like the one Penkovsky had worn when he leftGRU Headquarters. It was the same dark color, the same size, the same cut and manufacture, but it was not the same coat. It had belonged to the man who had sat next to him and with whom he had traded pleasantries and claim checks.
Though Penkovsky had never seen the man before, he knew he was CIA. He had said the right words before they shook hands. Words that meant he had not been followed and that it was safe to exchange tickets.
The CIA man had left with Penkovsky’s coat, one that was by all appearances the same as he had worn into the opera house, only this one had papers in its pocket, papers with classified information, information that was now in the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency and critical to their operations in Vietnam. In the pocket of the coat Penkovsky had just retrieved from the opera house coat check would be another set of papers. Even under close scrutiny they would look like harp sheet music forThe Voyevoda,but in reality, they concealed requests from the CIA. The sheet music had been placed under a piece of paper infused with cerium oxalate. His handler had written messages on a plain piece of paper over the top, the pressure transferring the chemical into the sheet music. Penkovsky would develop the message at home using a solution of common products that included manganese sulfate and hydrogen peroxide. Once developed, the messages appeared as orange writing. He would commit the requests to memory and burn the sheet music.
Penkovsky buttoned the coat and thought of what he had originally provided the Americans as a gesture of good faith, a collection of articles from a Soviet military journal calledMilitary Thought. He had first made contact with them in London when he was part of a visiting Soviet delegation. His initial debriefing was at the Mount Royal Hotel, where they had tested and interrogated him in an attempt to ascertain if he was a double agent. They had become more cautious in the post-Philby years. It was there that they had discovered his love of opera and worked out a means of communications using the coat exchange at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Penkovsky exited between the monstrous white Corinthian columns and pulled up the collar on the wool coat that just hours earlier had belonged to another man.
One day he would be caught. He accepted that. But he would go to his grave knowing that the system that took his son’s life, just as surely as if they had put a bullet in his head, would soon be relegated to, as Leon Trotsky so famously stated, “the dustbin of history.”
Penkovsky walked, head down with his hands in his pockets, across the square to the waiting black vehicle, leaving Apollo and the muses of the opera behind him.
PART IIACROSS THE FENCE
“The hour has struck to save the country. We must sacrifice down to the last drop of our blood to defend our land.”
—HO CHI MINH
