Lucky Bastard Read Online Free PDF

slowly. This boy is unstable.”
    Peter’s fork, laden with gray sole, stopped midway to his mouth. This was not what he wanted to hear. I was spoiling his appetite.
    â€œDmitri, Dmitri,” he said, “don’t tell me reasons not to do things. Your job is to make it possible for me to do what everyone knows cannot be done. You do understand?”
    â€œYes.”
    He nodded and put the forkful of fish into his mouth. At that moment, while he chewed and cut himself another piece of sole that was exactly the right size and coated with exactly the right amount of sauce, I knew that we were off to the races. Some instinct told Peter that Jack Adams represented a golden opportunity, and he was determined to seize it. He had big things in mind for Jack before he even laid eyes on him. There is no way to explain this on the basis of the objective facts. Very likely Peter himself could not have explained it, because reason and logic were not involved. Peter made all decisions between his pelvis and his collarbone, and this was his great strength. He gave an outward impression of intellectual brilliance—his languages, his knowledge of power, his looks, his flashy methods, his devil-may-care way of speaking. But in fact, conscious thought played almost no part in his life. He operated almost entirely on impulse.
    His impulse now was to see Jack for himself. This does not mean that he actually desired to meet him and talk to him, to show Jack his own face and let him hear his voice. No, that was a needless risk at this early stage. Peter wanted to observe Jack through the oneway mirror of surveillance. He wanted to see him in his natural state, see how he behaved with other people, see how they reacted to him. I told Peter that I had already instructed Arthur to arrange such an inspection.
    â€œMake it tonight,” Peter said. “Eight o’clock. A restaurant. I will be there.”
    â€œWhat kind of food?”
    â€œItalian. Book me a table for two. You will sit alone.”
    My question about cuisine may seem odd to you, but Peter was going to be in the West for a few days only. He ate very little—at the Côte Basque no more than half his gray sole, one small potato, a single glass of wine, some raspberries. But he wanted to do as much business as possible while eating good food. Readers of thrillers written by English schoolmasters may have imagined that the KGB was composed of ascetics who met their agents in deserted warehouses or on fog-shrouded wharves. The secret archives tell a different story: These men came from a country where everyone was hungry and always had been. They had grown up on barley porridge, the manna of the revolution. Therefore, clandestine meetings usually happened in restaurants. Every great spymaster was also a glutton. According to Peter, who really was an ascetic, Stalin used to make Beria eat at secret banquets until his bowels moved.
    I went immediately to the coin telephone at the back of the Côte Basque and called Arthur at home, where he spent most of his time, writing scholarly papers or tutoring Barnard girls in dialectics while his wife worked in a social agency. He taught only one class a week, which was why he had so much time for conspiracy. As a matter of basic procedure we did not discuss matters of substance on the telephone, but spoke to each other only in double-talk, so when I told him what I wanted in plain English, he panicked. In Cuba we had trained Arthur to assume that any telephone was tapped; he actually believed that his line was bugged, that the FBI and the CIA had been following him ever since he got back from the Sierra Maestra, that they regarded him as a threat to imperialism so serious that they had nothing better to do than listen in twenty-four hours a day while he argued over grades with students or planned orgies with colleagues at female schools: “We can get freshman girls!” (I had tapped his phone for a while