Gone Tomorrow

Sansom said, ‘His name was Grigori Hoth. He was about my age at the time. He seemed competent. His spotter, not so much. He should have heard us coming.’

I didn’t reply. There was a long silence. Then the situation seemed to hit home and Sansom’s shoulders fell and he sighed and he said, ‘What a way to get found out, right? Medals are supposed to be rewards, not penalties. They’re not supposed to screw you up. They’re not supposed to follow you around the rest of your life like a damn ball and chain.’

I said nothing.

He asked, ‘What are you going to do?’

I said, ‘Nothing.’

‘Really?’

‘I don’t care what happened in 1983. And they lied to me. First about Berlin, and they’re still lying to me now. They claim to be mother and daughter. But I don’t believe them. The alleged daughter is the cutest thing you ever saw. The alleged mother fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch. I first met them with a cop from the NYPD. She said thirty years from now the daughter will look just like the mother. But she was wrong. The younger one will never look like the older one. Not in a million years.’

‘So who are they?’

‘I’m prepared to accept that the older one is for real. She was a Red Army political commissar who lost her husband and her brother in Afghanistan.’

‘Her brother?’

‘The spotter.’

‘But the younger woman is posing?’

I nodded. ‘As a billionaire expatriate widow from London. She says her husband was an entrepreneur who didn’t make the cut.’

‘And she’s not convincing?’

‘She dresses the part. She acts it well. Maybe she lost a husband somewhere along the line.’

‘But? What is she really?’

‘I think she’s a journalist.’

‘Why?’

‘She knows things. She’s got the right kind of inquiring mind. She’s analytical. She monitors the Herald Tribune. She’s a hell of a storyteller. But she talks too much. She’s in love with words and she embroiders details. She can’t help herself.’

‘For example?’

‘She went for some extra pathos. She made out that the political commissars were in the trenches along with the grunts. She claims she was conceived on a rock floor under a Red Army greatcoat. Which is bullshit. Commissars were big-time rear echelon pussies. They stayed well away from the action. They clustered together back at HQ, writing pamphlets. Occasionally they would visit up the line, but never if there was any danger involved.’

‘And you know this how?’

‘You know how I know it. We expected to fight a land war with them in Europe. We expected to win. We expected to take millions of them prisoner. MPs were trained to handle them all. The 110th was going to direct operations. Delusional, maybe, but the Pentagon took it very seriously. We were taught more about the Red Army than we were about the U.S. Army. Certainly we were told exactly where to find the commissars. We were under orders to execute them all immediately.’

‘What kind of journalist?’

‘Television, probably. The local crew she hired was tied to the television business. And have you ever seen Eastern European television? All the anchors are women, and they all look sensational.’

‘What country?’

‘Ukraine.’

‘What angle?’

‘Investigative, historical, with a little human interest mixed in. The younger one probably heard the older one’s story and decided to run with it.’

‘Like the History Cha

‘In Ukrainian,’ I said.

‘Why? What’s the message? They want to embarrass us now? After more than twenty-five years?’

‘No, I think they want to embarrass the Russians. There’s a lot of tension right now between Russia and the Ukraine. I think they’re taking America’s evil for granted, and saying that big bad Moscow shouldn’t have put poor helpless Ukrainians in harm’s way.’

‘So why haven’t we seen the story already?’

‘Because they’re way behind the times,’ I said. ‘They’re looking for confirmation. They still seem to have some kind of moralistic scruples over there.’

‘Are they going to get confirmation?’

‘Not from you, presumably. And no one else knows anything for sure. Susan Mark didn’t live long enough to say yea or nay. So the lid is back on. I advised them to forget all about it and head home.’

‘Why are they posing as mother and daughter?’

‘Because it’s a great con,’ I said. ‘It’s appealing. It’s like reality TV. Or those magazines they sell in the supermarket. Clearly they studied our culture.’

‘Why wait so long?’

‘It takes time to build a mature television industry. They probably wasted years on important stuff.’

Sansom nodded vaguely, and said, ‘It’s not true that no one knows anything for sure. You seem to know plenty.’

‘But I’m not going to say anything.’

‘Can I trust you on that?’

‘I served thirteen years. I know all kinds of things. I don’t talk about them.’

‘I’m not happy about how easy it was for them to approach Susan Mark. And I’m not happy we didn’t know about her from the get-go. We never even heard of her before the morning after. This whole thing was like an ambush. We were always behind the curve.’

I was looking at the photographs on the wall behind him. Looking at the tiny figures. Their shapes, their postures, their silhouettes. I said, ‘Really?’

‘We should have been told.’

I said, ‘Have a word with the Pentagon. And with those guys from the Watergate.’

Sansom said, ‘I will.’ Then he went quiet, as if he was rethinking and reassessing, more calmly and at a slower pace than his usual fast field-officer style. The lid is back on. He seemed to examine that proposition for a spell, from all kinds of different angles. Then he shrugged, and got a slightly sheepish look on his face, and he asked, ‘So what do you think of me now?’

‘Is that import ant?’

‘I’m a politician. It’s a reflex inquiry.’

‘I think you should have shot them in the head.’

He paused and said, ‘We had no silenced weapons.’

‘You did. You had just taken one from them.’

‘Rules of engagement.’

‘You should have ignored them. The Red Army didn’t travel with forensics labs. They would have had no idea who shot who.’

‘So what do you think of me?’

‘I think you shouldn’t have handed them over. That was uncalled for. That was going to be the point of the story, as a matter of fact, on Ukrainian TV. The idea was to get the old woman next to you and let her ask you why.’

Sansom shrugged again. ‘I wish she could. Because the truth we didn’t hand them over. We turned them loose instead. It was a calculated risk. A kind of double bluff. They’d lost their rifle. Everyone would have assumed that the mujahideen had taken it. Which was a sorry outcome and a major disgrace. It was clear to me that they were very scared of their officers and their political commissars. So they would have been falling over themselves to tell the truth, that it was Americans, not Afghans. It would have been a kind of exculpation. But their officers and their commissars knew how scared they were of them, so the truth would have sounded like a bullshit story. Like a pathetic excuse. It would have been discounted immediately, as a fantasy. I felt it was safe enough to let them go. The truth would have been out there in plain sight, hut unrecognized.’

I said, ‘So what happened?’

Sansom said, ‘I guess they were more scared than I thought. Too scared to go back at all. I guess they just wandered, until the tribespeople found them. Grigori Hoth was married to a political commissar. He was scared of her. That’s what happened. And that’s what killed him.’

I said nothing.

He said, ‘Not that I expect anyone to believe me.’

I didn’t reply.

He said, ‘You’re right about tension between Russia and the Ukraine. But there’s tension between Russia and ourselves, too. Right now there’s plenty of it. If the Korengal part of the story gets out, things could blow up big. It’s like the Cold War all over again. Except different. At least the Soviets were sane, in their way. This bunch, not so much.’