Page 44 of The Cellist

“Where did he work?”

“The Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.”

“The KGB?”

Morosov nodded slowly.

“And the Haydn Group?” asked Gabriel.

“It’s a subsidiary of Arkady’s oil trading company.”

“Yes, I know. But what is it?”

“The Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.”

Gabriel reclaimed the dossier. “You should have told me about Arkady a long time ago.”

Morosov shrugged. “You never asked.”

23

Upper Galilee, Israel

The guards placed two chairs in the camp’s main court, with a folding table between them. Sergei Morosov, pleased by the prospect of human interaction, even with his former tormentor, brought along a meal of pickled herring, black bread, and Russian vodka. He feigned mild offense when Gabriel declined his offer of a drink.

“You don’t care for vodka?”

“I’d rather drink a glass of diesel.”

“I have a lovely Shiraz if you’d like that instead. It’s from a winemaker called Dalton.”

Gabriel smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“The accent is on the second syllable.” Gabriel pointed toward the north. “And the vineyards are right over that hill.”

“You have many fine wines here in Israel.”

“We do our best, Sergei.”

“Perhaps someday you would be kind enough to show me your country.”

“On second thought, I think I’ll have that vodka after all.”

Morosov drained his glass with the snap of his wrist and returned it to the tabletop. “You don’t much care for Russians, do you, Allon?”

“Actually, I’m very fond of them.”

“Name one Russian you like.”

“Nabokov.”

Morosov smiled in spite of himself. “I suppose you have a right to hate us. Your confrontation with Ivan Kharkov at that dacha outside Moscow was the stuff of legend. You and your wife would have died that morning if it wasn’t for Grigori Bulganov’s courage and Viktor Orlov’s money. Now Grigori and Viktor are both dead, and you are the last man standing. It is an unenviable position. I should know, Allon. I speak from experience, too.”

Morosov then reminded Gabriel of his impeccable lineage. He was, to borrow the term coined by the Russian philosopher and writer Zinoviev, a trueHomo Sovieticus—a Soviet Man. His mother had served as a personal secretary to KGB chairman Yuri Andropov. His father, a brilliant Marxist theoretician, had worked for Gosplan, the agency that oversaw the Soviet Union’s command economy. As party members, they lived a life far beyond the reach of ordinary Russians. A comfortable apartment in Moscow. A dacha in the country. Access to special stores stocked with food and clothing. They even owned an automobile, a cherry-red Lada that on occasion actually performed the function for which it was designed and assembled.

“We weren’t elites, mind you. But we had it quite good. That wasn’t the case for Vladimir Vladimirovich,” he added, using the Russian president’s given name and patronymic. “Vladimir Vladimirovich was a member of the proletariat. The son of a factory worker. A true man of the people.”