the thing. I could, almost, and thought that maybe I was on the path to becoming a real writer. Or maybe not.
I never told anyone about my novel—or that I even aspired to be a writer. Not my parents, not Irina, not even Henry Rennet, who’d been my closest friend since Groton. Some people thought Henry was a striving brownnoser, and others thought he was just a jerk. And they might’ve been right. But he was also there for me when my brother died. When the months following Julian’s death seemed to stretch as long and gray as a Russian landscape, Henry would sit in my apartment and drink whiskey with me and talk for hours.
My original plan was to publish my debut novel a year after college, surprising everyone with it. My parents had never said as much, but I could tell they were disappointed that I never went into the family business. A novel would be something they could brag to their friends at the Club about, an accomplishment they could actually hold.
But that didn’t happen. The summer after graduation, I began a hundred novels, never getting beyond the first twenty pages. I did manage to make a career out of my love of books, though—well, that and being fluent in Russian. And my connections. Professor Humphries had recruited me at Georgetown. One of Frank Wisner’s old OSS buddies, Humphries resumed his position as a professor of Slavic linguistics after the war and became one of the Agency’s top talent scouts. I wasn’t the first man Humphries recruited, nor the last. The higher-ups referred to us as Humphries’ Boys, a nickname that made us sound more like an a capella group than spies.
The Agency wanted to stack its ranks with intellectuals—those who believed in the long game of changing people’s ideology over time. And they believed books could do it. I believed books could do it. That was my job: to designate books for exploitation and help carry out their covert dissemination. It was my job to secure books that made the Soviets look bad: books they banned, books that criticized the system, books that made the United States look like a shining beacon. I wanted them to take a good hard look at a system that had allowed the State to kill off any writer, any intellectual—hell, even any meteorologist—they disagreed with. Sure, Stalin was dead, his body embalmed and sealed under glass, but the memory of the Purges was also preserved.
Like a publisher or editor, I was always thinking of what the next big novel would be and how to get it into as many hands as quickly as possible. The only difference was that I wanted to do it without any fingerprints.
My jaunt to London wasn’t just about a book; it was about the book. We’d been after Doctor Zhivago for months. We had obtained the first printing in Italian and decided it was indeed all it had been cracked up to be. It was deemed an operational imperative to get the manuscript in its native Russian, “lest any of its potency be lost in translation.” I didn’t know if the concern had more to do with ensuring maximal impact on Soviet citizens or preserving the purity of the author’s words. I liked to think it was the latter, or at least a bit of both.
My job was to convince our friends the Brits to hand their Russian-language copy over to us—or at least to let us borrow it for a while. A tentative deal had been made, but they’d been dragging their feet, probably to buy some time so as to determine whether they could do something with it first. I was sent to the Big Smoke to put the matter to bed.
Not that I minded. I needed to get out of the swamp and clear my head. Irina had been distant, whereas I had thought we were headed down the aisle. I’d even asked my mother for my grandmother’s ring and planned to pop the question over Christmas. But after some canceled dates and the feeling that something was off, I wasn’t so sure it was the right move. And when I asked Irina about it, it only seemed to make things worse. I’d never met anyone like her. Up to that point, every girl I’d dated only had ambitions of landing my grandmother’s ring. Irina wanted what I wanted: to move up in the Agency, to be treated with respect,