Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

thrown up in the time of Stalin had mostly been destroyed in the great earthquake of 1966. The authorities claimed that only nineteen people had died in the quake—proof of the sublime virtues of the socialist system. The actual death toll was closer to two hundred, which was still a surprisingly small number. Perhaps the authorities couldn’t help themselves. They had to lie. The system required it.

The Indian traveler left his room in the Hotel Uzbekistan just before five in the afternoon, carrying his small travel bag on a strap over his shoulder. He was a quiet little man, neatly dressed, with that strange combination of servility and arrogance that is characteristic of many Indians when they travel abroad. All week long, he had treated his Russian counterparts with elaborate politeness and the Uzbeks with condescension. They tolerated his behavior because he was a buyer with real money, as opposed to rubles, and because the Indians were known to pay “commissions” if they received a favorable price. It helped, too, that he was a fussy and fastidious man, for as the week wore on and he became more and more nervous, nobody thought to question why. That was just the way these finicky, high-caste Indians behaved.

Now, as he walked out the front door of the hotel, Mr. Desai felt an acute sense of anxiety. He had done things for the Americans before, but this was different. The man who had given him the bag back in Delhi wasn’t his usual case officer, but someone else. And the mission itself was peculiar: Deliver a bag, contents unknown, to another courier, identity unknown—in a strange city that was, really, no more than a pimple on the backside of Asia.

The Indian’s skin was prickly, then clammy, then numb; he wanted to climb out of it and hide his quivering body in a new shell, like a hermit crab. Indeed, he thought for a brief moment that he would do almost anything to avoid completing the assignment. Step in front of a car perhaps. At the bottom of the hotel promenade, the cars were whizzing around the traffic circle surrounding Karl Marx Park. But that was no solution; they would still find the bag, and they would torture him, and then kill him.

Resignedly, Mr. Desai did as he had been told—turned right and walked a short block from the hotel to the entrance of the subway. Yes, the case officer had said, that’s right—Tashkent has a subway, and a damn good one; the perfect place to get lost for a while, and shake off any surveillance. So the Indian paid his five kopecks—which he had been holding in his sweaty palm since he left the hotel—and boarded the subway at the stop called October Revolution. It was a fancy, gilded showpiece, just like the metro in Moscow. How fitting, thought the Indian, that the only thing the Soviets could build competently was underground.

“Don’t look over your shoulder for surveillance,” the case officer had said. “It’s a dead giveaway.” Mr. Desai resisted his intense desire to do just that; he stared instead at his shoes, then at the faces of the Uzbeks waiting for the train. They all looked like policemen; every moon-faced one of them. After several minutes a train roared into the station and the Indian stepped haltingly aboard.

He went one stop, to the inevitable V. I. Lenin station, all decorated with glass chandeliers, and walked to the door as if to get off. He put one foot out and then retreated back into the car as the door was closing, just as the case officer had told him. He didn’t see any obvious KGB ape banging on the door to get back in; but then he wouldn’t, would he?

The Indian rode two stops and exited at Navoye station, decorated with hideous medallions of the hammer and sickle. He walked across the platform to the other side—doubling back on himself to make sure he wasn’t being followed. When the train arrived heading in the other direction, he scanned the passengers boarding it, to make sure that none of them had exited with him, and then hopped aboard. Now, in theory, he was “clean.”

Two more stops and Mr. Desai got off, feeling the travel bag against his side. The case officer hadn’t told him what was sewn into the lining—hadn’t said a word about it—and the Indian, in truth, didn’t care. He just wanted to get rid of it, get on his plane, and get home.

The Indian surfaced into the afternoon sun and walked down Karl Marx Prospect as casually as he could manage. It was a long, tree-lined pedestrian walkway, flanked by open-air restaurants, theaters and shops. It was crowded with Uzbeks out strolling, thank God. Who would notice a small Indian man with his travel bag, taking one last look at the city before leaving? He inched past the cafés, his legs shaky as wobbly stilts, looking for a particular open-air restaurant called Krokodil, where he was to have dinner.

Eventually he found it, and stood in line for the house specialty, indeed the only dish they served, which was pilau—a greasy concoction of rice, carrots and spices, topped with a few pieces of gristly meat. He paid his one ruble, took his plate of rice, and sat down at an empty table in the back. The flies seemed to find him instantly. Struggling to maintain his dignity, the Indian removed his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped clean his spoon. He might be heading for Lubyanka Prison, but he would not eat with a dirty spoon. He put the travel bag under the table, just as he had been told, and took a bite of the rice. The grease and the aroma made him feel nauseated.

After several minutes, a fat Uzbek sat down at the next table and began digging into an immense pile of pilau, smacking his lips as if he hadn’t eaten for weeks. This most certainly was not the