The Charm School

reception.
    Now, sitting here in Dzerzhinsky Square a year later, Hollis agreed with Surikov that one way or the other he and Valentin Surikov were coming to the end of their dangerous liaison.
    Surikov looked over his newspaper at a group of men leaving through the front doors of Lubyanka. Surikov said, “You asked for the information. I gave you my price.”
    Hollis too noticed the men standing in the front of the KGB headquarters. There were six of them, talking and gesturing. They seemed in a good mood, Hollis thought. But why shouldn’t they be? They were the police in a police state.
    Surikov seemed to be getting anxious. He said quickly in a voice that Hollis could barely hear, “If you know
anything
about the facility at Borodino, you will know that getting me out of here is a cheap price for what I can tell you.” Surikov added in one of his practiced American phrases, “It will blow your mind, Colonel.”
    Hollis smiled behind his newspaper. His eyes moved again to the Lubyanka across the square.
    It was a rather handsome Italianate building of eight stories. The first two stories were grey granite, and the upper floors were cement stucco painted that old mustard color the Russians seemed fond of. It was one of the few buildings in Moscow with clean windows, and he could see people at work under sickly pale fluorescent lighting.
    What had always struck him about the place was its location, right in the heart of Moscow, a stone’s throw from a children’s department store in a square where tens of thousands of people saw it every day. Here was a place, Hollis thought, where thousands of Soviet citizens had been tortured and shot, a place referred to by Intourist guides as the electric power authority, and Muscovites, if they referred to it at all, whispered the despised name: Lubyanka.
    Yet neither the KGB nor the Soviet government had the good grace to remove the facility, and it stood as a monument to brutality. But perhaps they knew what they were doing. It
did
remind one, did it not? Hollis couldn’t help but think each time he saw the place that he ought not to be doing things that would put him in there.
    Hollis looked away, but the image of the place stayed in his mind’s eye. He asked, “Do you know a KGB colonel who calls himself Burov?”
    “Perhaps.”
    Hollis watched as the six men in front of the building split up. Four headed toward Hollis and Surikov.
    General Surikov stood. “We have been here quite long enough. I will be at Gogol’s grave next Sunday at one.”
    As usual, Surikov picked a place that would send Hollis leafing through his Michelin guide. “Tomorrow, General.”
    “Sunday, Colonel. I need time.”
    “All right. Alternate rendezvous?”
    “None. Gogol’s grave. Sunday. One P . M . And you will tell me how you are getting me to the West, and I will give you half a secret. I’ll give you the second half when I’m in London.” Surikov tucked his
Pravda
under his arm and picked up his attaché case. He seemed anxious to leave but stood motionless as the four KGB approached. They looked at Hollis and Surikov with that keen eye of appraisal that Hollis had come to associate with muggers looking for an easy mark. They slowed their pace, then continued on.
    Surikov, quite pale, Hollis noticed, turned without a word and crossed the square.
    Hollis waited for Felix Dzerzhinsky’s spiritual kin to reappear in the square and arrest him, but nothing happened. Life went on, the criminals—Hollis and Surikov—had once again foiled the organs of state security.
    Hollis sometimes wondered if this game was worth his life. But this time he thought of Greg Fisher’s life, which was over, and Major Jack Dodson’s life, which was in the balance. And he thought of Ernie Simms and the thousand other fliers whose families and whose nation had given them up for dead. Hollis thought that maybe, if he did everything right, he might bring them home again.
    Hollis watched Surikov disappear into the throng of people who were laying siege to Detsky Mir. “I suppose,” Hollis said to himself, “that it would be the lines that caused me to defect. I hate lines.”
    No
, Sam Hollis reflected,
I do not like General Valentin Surikov, though I’m not sure why.
But Hollis had just learned not to underestimate him. Hollis admitted that Surikov’s motives for treason were not base—Surikov had never taken a ruble, a dollar, or a banked Swiss franc. Nor had he bothered Hollis for things