Moscow Rules

Russian, and Hebrew. Gabriel held his credentials up to the fish-eye lens of the camera and heard the electronic dead-bolt locks immediately snap open. As he stepped into the compound, he glanced over his shoulder and saw a man in a car across the street raise a camera and blatantly snap a photograph. Apparently, the FSB knew about the ambassador’s dinner party and intended to intimidate the guests as they arrived and departed.
     
     
    The compound was cramped and drab, with a cluster of featureless buildings standing around a central courtyard. A youthful security guard—who was not a security guard at all but an Office field agent attached to Moscow Station—greeted Gabriel cordially by his cover name and escorted him into the foyer of the small apartment building that housed most of the embassy’s personnel. The ambassador was waiting on the top-floor landing as Gabriel stepped off the lift. A polished career diplomat whom Gabriel had seen only in photographs, he threw his arms around Gabriel and gave him two thunderous claps between the shoulder blades that no FSB transmitter could fail to detect. “Natan!” he shouted, as though to a deaf uncle. “My God! Is it really you? You look as though you’ve been traveling an age. St. Petersburg surely wasn’t as bad as all that.” He thrust a glass of tepid champagne into Gabriel’s hand and cast him adrift. “As usual, Natan, you’re the last to arrive. Mingle with the masses. We’ll chat later after you’ve had a chance to say hello to everyone. I want to hear all about your dreadful conference.”
     
     
    Gabriel hoisted his most affable diplomatic smile and, glass in hand, waded into the noisy smoke-filled sitting room.
     
     
    He met a famous violinist who was now the leader of a ragtag opposition party called the Coalition for a Free Russia.
     
     
    He met a playwright who had revived the time-tested art of Russian allegory to carefully criticize the new regime.
     
     
    He met a filmmaker who had recently won a major human rights award in the West for a documentary about the gulag.
     
     
    He met a woman who had been confined to an insane asylum because she had dared to carry a placard across Red Square calling for democracy in Russia.
     
     
    He met an unrepentant Bolshevik who thought the only way to save Russia was to restore the dictatorship of the proletariat and burn the oligarchs at the stake.
     
     
    He met a fossilized dissident from the Brezhnev era who had been raised from the near dead to wage one last futile campaign for Russian freedom.
     
     
    He met a brave essayist who had been nearly beaten to death by a band of Unity Party Youth.
     
     
    And finally, ten minutes after his arrival, he introduced himself to a reporter from Moskovsky Gazeta, who, owing to the murders of two colleagues, had recently been promoted to the post of acting editor in chief. She wore a black sleeveless dress and a silver locket around her neck. The bangles on her wrist clattered like wind chimes as she extended her hand toward Gabriel and gave him a melancholy smile. “How do you do, Mr. Golani,” she said primly in English. “My name is Olga Sukhova.”
     
     
    The photograph Uzi Navot had shown him a week earlier in Jerusalem had not done justice to Olga’s beauty. With translucent eyes and long, narrow features, she looked to Gabriel like a Russian icon come to life. He was seated at her right during dinner but managed only a few brief exchanges of conversation, largely because the documentary filmmaker monopolized her attention with a shot-by-shot description of his latest work. With no place to take shelter, Gabriel found himself in the clutches of the ancient dissident, who treated him to a lecture on the history of Russian political opposition dating back to the days of the tsars. As the waiters cleared the dessert plates, Olga gave him a sympathetic smile. “I’m afraid I feel a cigarette coming on,” she said. “Would you care to join me?”
     
     
    They rose from the table together under the crestfallen gaze of the filmmaker and stepped onto the ambassador’s small terrace. It was empty and in semidarkness; in the distance loomed one of the “the Seven Sisters,” the monstrous Stalinist towers that still dominated the Moscow skyline. “Europe’s tallest apartment building,” she said without enthusiasm. “Everything in Russia has to be the biggest, the tallest, the fastest, or the most valuable. We cannot live as normal