Tool of the Trade Read Online Free PDF Page B

what we needed to make Nicholas Foley turn.
    His office hours at MIT were from ten to twelve on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, we knew. I went to meet him at noon on Tuesday.
    The door was wide open, Foley engrossed in a book, feet up on his desk. The wall that wasn’t solid books had dozens of framed watercolors, which I knew were his wife’s work. (I had earlier come upon the interesting and not-too-odd coincidence that she and I had studied watercolors with the same person, five years apart, at the Cambridge Adult Education Center. She was better than I.) The place looked lived-in but scrupulously neat.
    He didn’t look too much like the file photo, which was a two-year-old candid shot of him mowing the lawn. With his professor’s uniform—shapeless corduroy suit—he was impressive in a bearish, avuncularway. He was a big man with a paunch, but he moved with grace and precision. Unfashionably long hair, blond shot through with white, and a silky full beard.
    “Dr. Foley,” I said, “sorry to barge in on you like this, but we have a student in common, a woman I’m having a problem with. Could we talk?” I dropped a note in front of him that said, “Let’s talk outside,” in Russian.
    He stared at the note for a moment and then looked at me over his bifocals. “Of course. Are you free for lunch?” He rolled the note into a tiny ball as we agreed on a restaurant, and dropped it into his pocket.
    Neither of us said anything further until we were out of the building, walking toward Kendall Square. When he spoke, I could hardly hear his whispered Russian over the traffic noise: “—This is a first. Is it something urgent?”
    “Possibly. Interesting, at any rate.” I guided him toward a bus-stop bench and asked him to sit. Then I opened the padded envelope and handed it to him.
    His expression never changed. He glanced at the short document, looked at me once, and then reread it.
    Under an NKVD letterhead, typed in uneven Cyrillic capitals: “SPIES AND COLLABORATORS EXECUTED IN MONTH OF DECEMBER 1941” followed by a list of thirty-four names. There was a red circle around the names of his mother and father.
    He put it back in the envelope and returned it to me. “You aren’t who I thought you were.”
    “No,” I said. “State Department.”
    He smiled wryly at that. “Sure. State.” After a moment: “So what are you going to do?”
    “The next move is yours, actually.” I sat down next to him; the plastic windbreak gave us a pocket of privacyon the busy sidewalk. “You are an agent for the KGB. I’ve just shown you proof that they killed your parents. So?”
    He smiled and took off his glasses and started to polish them with a handkerchief. “What is your name?”
    “You can call me Jake or Jacob.”
    “Jacob. Thank you. Let me see.” He put the glasses back on and blinked at me with an unreadable expression. “I’m trying to gather my, thoughts. This is rather much to absorb.”
    “Take your time.”
    “Yes. Thank you.” He stared intently at the wind sculpture over the subway entrance. “Let me first dispose of the obvious. Anyone can find an old typewriter with Cyrillic characters—in Boston, anyhow. And the CIA—I mean the ‘State Department’—is no doubt capable of printing stationery with an NKVD seal.”
    “I can assure you that—”
    “No.” He held up a finger, still staring across the street. “I’m not saying I disbelieve you. Not about the document. Just acknowledging technicalities, for my own… predisposition toward completeness.
    “Second, more important. This document is most of a half century old. I hope you don’t take it as a lack of filial piety if I tell you that I am not greatly moved by it. Nor surprised.” He shifted around to look squarely at me. “I am no fool, Jacob. I’ve studied this period with some intensity; Soviet and German sources as well as American. No… what would
surprise
me would be proof that my parents had survived. For thirty years