POST-SMOLENSK
"I guess I walked away because Russia has capital punishment." That was a strange thing for Stan Beeman to have said. It spoke of some sort of catharsis he'd had in Smolensk. Everything down there seemed to have worked out, so who was I to say that, though still legal, there hadn't been an execution here since 1996.
"What did you find out, Stan?" I asked, my own motives not exactly pure.
"I found out that all the stuff you say over and over again in your mind, it changes and slightly alters what really happened." Stan said that in the 27 years since 'the encounter in the garage', as he called it, this trip to Russia had made him reassess. "I'd made it into something that it wasn't," Stan had concluded. "I sure hope I don't spend the rest of my life tying myself in knots over more inventions inside my own head."
Wow. Maybe I should take a trip down to Smolensk. I'd probably hang on to my fantasies and not risk popping the bubble. Even knowing what I knew, there was always that tiny voice which caved in - told me that if I'd asked he'd have come to Moscow with me. Hell, even 'Jennifer' had suggested that that might have happened.
Me, even at this age - mid-60s - if I was presented with the unvarnished stuff, like reading an SVR file which laid bare the falseness of my fantasy, absent the faint-hope I would have to kill him. Moratorium on capital punishment or no moratorium.
I read the story of a woman who'd attended a trial in the US recently, of a similar deep cover SVR agent. In the gallery, she listened to the man's detailed description of how he'd 'worked' her to gain access. Through all that, she said that she still thought that he had loved her - in some way.
It was not until the man's real-life wife testified, that the woman went to a courthouse window and jumped. Landed in a dumpster two floors below. What had the wife testified to? She'd said with some annoyance that she'd had to surrender trinkets and baubles, which he would use as presents for the woman. It was only when she discovered that those sweet-somethings had been mere props belonging to someone else, had the reality hit her.
She recovered from her fall. But I now completely understood, she was never the same.
STARBUCKS MOSCOW
"Hey, Martha. Martha! You there?" Stan was asking, almost shouting across the table from me.
I returned to the room and took a sip from my latte, the one that he had bought. Apparently. The last I remember was him talking about visiting Smolensk, and how it was going to take a while. He'd needed to know if he'd been a fraud or not.
"Stan, you were no joke. You were the most effective agent in the Division," I said, hoping to cheer him a bit. The look on his face? 'Kudos, from a traitor.'
He finally took a sip from the latte that I was sure was stone cold by now. He swallowed then offered, "I guess to you, she's 'Jennifer'. No harm in that." I already knew who he was visiting, but it was instructive how he was constructing his words. Given all the files I was handling/reading recently, I recognized it - this was the thought of an agent before committing it to paper. A first draft of a report.
"She's a friggin' artist. You should see her stuff. Has a gallery in Smolensk, near the Kremlin. No, not that Kremlin, the word just means 'wall', and her gallery is right at one of the old-fortified doorways through the wall."
"Haunting stuff. Charcoals, mainly women's heads in various states of emotional turmoil. But obscured, fuzzy, smudged. There but not there. Hell, I hate that kind of art, but I ended up staring at them." He chose his words particularly carefully, said, "I swear one was of a woman who'd been butchered back in Washington in the 80s, in an apartment hallway. Right outside where her kid was watching TV."
Stan just sat there silent. It was his turn to depart the table and go somewhere else. I declined to remind him that his latte was getting ruined.
Seizing the silence, I asked, "You want to hear about Renee?"
"What?" he replied, to no one in particular, took him a moment to get his bearings. "Renee? What have you got?"
I wanted to keep his memory of her untainted for the moment, so I said,"First, Stan, when was the last you saw her."
"I sincerely thought she'd been swallowed up in witness protection. I was out of the FBI by then, so couldn't ask, couldn't search in the computer. But the US Marshals seemed to be all over Renee's disappearance." He recounted that after the 'illegals-disaster' of 1987, he and she started fighting. At first he'd thought it was because he had brought a neighbor's son into the house, an 'adoption' that he could not tell her anything about.
He then found out that his wife had been in contact with the boy's sister, and that his wife had lied about it. Something was obviously going on. "We cooled it, stopped arguing, but obviously that changed our marriage. I'd do things with the boy, she wouldn't come along. I thought she was asking me to choose, although she denied it."
"I retired from the Bureau. Took a job as head of security at a college. Renee was still at Personnel, until she wasn't. Simply walked away from her desk, left her purse, left her I.D., everything. Vanished. Metro Police scoured the D.C. parks. No body, nothing."
"Eventually I called Dennis, Dennis Aderholt. He told me to leave it alone. I said to him, 'Really, Dennis? My wife disappears, and you tell me to leave it alone?' That's when I heard about everything she'd left behind at her desk. Classic US Marshals. Witness Protection."
So it was my turn. "You know what I found out, Stan?" That stopped him in his tracks. He took a sip of the latte, looked at it as it was now very cold.
"She never did go to Witness Protection."
He sat stunned. "Are you saying Dennis was lying?"
"Not at all," I said. "The SVR, they were monitoring that as well. The day that the Marshals were to collect her from the motel in Virginia, she wasn't there. She'd vanished, even from the Marshals."
The rest? I asked to Stan, "How much do you know about how the oligarchs took over Russia's economy?"
QUID PRO QUO
I should not lie. I had done this deep-file search in the SVR archives to make Stan Beeman indebted to me. So that he would in turn indulge me, when my turn came up. I wanted him to spill the beans about the couple in Smolensk, who he was as enmeshed with as me. But for far, far, far different reasons.
As we sat in silence, I was weighing how to proceed. Knowing that a woman in my position had once jumped out of a window after being confronted with cold-reality, I actually did not want Stan to spill it all.
Just spill the part where me, 30 years older, still could convince myself that at the very least, the love had been real.
Yes, he had played me like a fiddle, just don't tell me that he hadn't thought of me in 30 years. I could not bear that.
2015 TAISIYA HANSON
Stan Beeman: Your English is excellent, Taisiya.
Taisiya Hanson: Mom, was a good teacher. I wish I could rid myself of this Russian accent, being here in the US, it turns heads.
SB: You pay that no mind. So, where are you heading after Washington?
TH: Well, there's a lot to do here. So many sights that we Russians always hear about. I saw the White House yesterday. We have a 'White House', too. Very different. -pause- My husband has the girls at the hotel, he's going to take them tomorrow, too. Me, I'm going to church, the Lutheran church mom went to. Just to sit in the pew.
SB: I am so glad I got to see her last year. Your mom, she had quite the life.
TH: I imagine that there's stuff that neither me nor my husband know. I was always teased in school, I was adopted, and my mother was an American. -pause- Where are we going? On Tuesday, we're taking the train to Denver. We'll spend a day in Chicago en route.
SB: I don't think you can do Chicago in one day.
TH: No, I know. But we've found out where my grandparents' graves are in Colorado. We have a bit of mom's ashes to sprinkle there. We'd like to continue on to the west coast, but we want to have extra time in Colorado just to look around. To see where mom grew up.
SB: That sounds nice.
-silence-
TH: So, Stan, can I ask you something?
SB: Ask away, Taisiya. Your mom was a part of my life which was, shall we say 'eventful'.
TH: She said you were FBI.
SB: As was she. I'm sure she told you that.
TH: That's what I want to ask about. Mom was never 100% forthcoming for how a secretary from the FBI ended up in Moscow, eventually working for the SVR in the same capacity.
SB: I'm not 100% clear about that myself.
TH: She once said that you, you were counter-intelligence.
SB: Yup, for a couple of years. Eventually went into Fraud. Then to a university in private security.
-silence-
TH: When I was a little girl, Stan, I did what a lot of adopted children did. I fantasized about my parents, my real parents. I'm told that these days, there's no point in searching.
SB: That sounds tough.
TH: Well, Stan, tomorrow I'll be at mom's Lutheran church. She never really talked about it, but mom once hinted that she'd been married at that church. I thought mom had never married.
SB: I can't speak to that, Taisiya, I'm sorry.
TH: No, I understand. But I often fantasized that my real father had been a Russian, living in America. And that he and mom had been married at that church.
SB: You know what, Taisiya? I hope you find what you're looking for.
-silence-
TH: You know, I never thought of my mother as a woman, not until I had children of my own. She was such a good mom. I wanted for nothing. She was always there for me. I miss her so. -pause- But I need to ask, Stan. You might be her oldest friend. -pause- Was mom a spy, Stan?
SB: -pause- I worked with your mom, Taisiya. Our division in the FBI, we caught spies. Your mom was clerical. Don't get me wrong, I'm serious when I say that the women in clerical positions back then, they ran the organization. But no, your mom was not a spy.
TH: One of her highschool friends from Colorado has refused to meet with us. Called mom a traitor.
SB: Look, Martha ended up in Moscow during the Cold War. Those were different times.
-silence-
TH: Well, I need to go. My husband is not very patient with the girls. -pause- But answer me this, Stan. This Russian, the guy here in the US back then. The one I suspect had married mother. Was he in love with my mother?
SB: That was a long time ago.
TH: No, I know. I always knew it. Growing up I could see it in her. She loved a man deeply, someone who I never met. Was he my father? I don't know, probably never will. -pause- I guess I'm asking for her, asking before we lay her to rest with her parents.
Любил ли он ее? Mom probably still wants to know.
