Page 60 of Cry Havoc (Tom Reece #1)
Bolshoi Theatre
Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
The Chaika eventually lumbered to a stop at the corner of Kuznetsky Bridge Street and Petrovka Street at the edge of Sverdlov Square. Penkovsky’s driver exited the vehicle and opened the door for his boss, who stepped out into the frosty air.
Penkovsky paused briefly in the square, adjusted his glasses, and buttoned the top collar of his thick wool overcoat.
Standing there, his warm, moist breath turning to a visible cloud of mist as he exhaled into the cold air of the Moscow winter, he thought of the power exemplified by the structure before him.
If only the grandeur of the Bolshoi was representative of all Soviet ventures.
Unfortunately, other than caviar, vodka, gulags, and the Kalashnikov, most Soviet projects and institutions resembled the Chaika.
Penkovsky thought of his wife. She had loved the opera and had slipped her arm between his many times as they crossed this very square, taking in the same sights.
She had left him following the death of their child.
She held the state responsible. To her, that is what he represented.
A failed system. She blamed the death of their boy on the incompetence of the Soviet state, and she would never be able to separate her husband from the system he embodied.
The child had contracted tuberculosis in the hospital, one with inadequate infection control measures.
Forced to remain hospitalized for the course of therapeutic treatments that did not have the desired effect, he was then placed in a sanitarium with others suffering the same plight. They had watched him die.
He knew she was right; the state was responsible. Had their child been born in the Western Bloc, he would still be alive.
Penkovsky was an old man now, old enough to see past the splendor of the Bolshoi Theatre. The GRU man pushed his hands deeper into the pockets of his coat. He had left his hat and gloves in the car.
He walked across the square and joined the throngs of people making their way into the warm lobby.
He displayed his ticket to an usher and was handed a program.
He then made his way to the coat check. He removed his overcoat and passed it to the coat checker, who handed him a claim check with a number on it matching the number on the coat’s hanger.
He had changed into his black tuxedo at the office to be dressed appropriately for the evening’s performance.
Some men wore their tuxedos with cummerbunds and others wore them with vests like Penkovsky.
There was a scattering of dark suits. The women wore gowns and cocktail dresses for the occasion.
There were even a few opera cloaks in the mix this evening.
Penkovsky purchased a glass of champagne and worked his way through the impressive foyer past red silk tapestries under lights emanating from crystal chandeliers.
He shook hands with two acquaintances in passing and exchanged greetings with a few familiar operagoers before setting down his glass and entering the main auditorium.
Behind him, five rows of balconies rose above the sloped main floor.
Another usher glanced at his ticket and led him to his seat, stage right.
He sat and looked up at the gigantic, gilded chandelier hanging from the ceiling high above.
At 65 meters across and over 8 meters tall, the crystal behemoth had once been illuminated by three hundred oil lamps, though it had been converted to electricity sixty years earlier.
Penkovsky always wondered how they cleaned it and changed the bulbs.
He could find out but preferred it to remain a mystery.
It hung beneath a ceiling adorned with paintings of Apollo and his nine muses.
He pulled a silver open-faced Molnija pocket watch from his vest. Just over five minutes until curtain time.
As Penkovsky slid the watch back into his pocket, a man about his same height and build took the seat next to him. A good decade his junior, the man had a pleasant though forgettable face. Penkovsky noticed his hair was starting to gray at the temples
“Beautiful night,” the man said.
“Cold night,” Penkovsky responded.
“I’ve been looking forward to this.”
“Have you not seen The Voyevoda before?”
“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 beat The Voyevoda here 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 left GRU 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 for The 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 called Military 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.