The Debriefing by Robert Littell Page B

front of a mirror and bats her false eyelashes at Kulakov as she passes the plate of rice to him.
    “Where’d you find her?” Mozart asks in English. (Kulakov doesn’t know she is a high-priced hooker, and Stone doesn’t want him to find out.)
    “It’s Thro who organized it,” Stone says.
    “You’ll have to fix me up sometime,” Mozart tells Thro.

    “Not on company money or time,” remarks Stone.
    They have been drinking whiskey and water, and are all slightly drunk.
    “Don’t you ever stop playing the boss?” taunts Mozart. “Don’t you ever let go?”
    Thro belches delicately into her hand and says, “Fair question.”
    The hooker leans closer to Kulakov so that her breast presses into his arm and whispers something in his ear. Stone holds his breath to get rid of hiccups, gazes at Mozart through half-closed eyes. Suddenly his breath spills out, along with a flow of words he can’t stop. “You know something, friend,” he blurts out, his face very close to Mozart’s. “I detest your generation. I really do.”
    Mozart takes the assault in his stride. He leans back in his chair and toys with his Phi Beta Kappa key. “What did you do to us that makes you hate us so much?” he asks arrogantly.
    “You see,” cries Stone. “That’s exactly the kind of smart-assed response you get from an Ivy Leaguer.” He appeals to Thro. “They’re always turning everything inside out.” Stone sways a bit, turns his gaze directly on Mozart. “My generation has the saving grace that it is honestly and deeply anti-Communist; we did what we did to avert a greater evil. But your generation is without beliefs. You have no center. You do what you do because you enjoy doing it. Espionage is an indoor sport to you. Jesus, you don’t really care about Communism one way or the other. If there were no Communists, you’d invent them to have someone to play with.”
    There is an embarrassed silence; Kulakov looks from one to the other, unable to follow the English.
    “Stone?” Thro tries to break it up.
    “You’ll never get my job, you know,” Stone tells Mozart evenly. He turns to Thro, who is tugging at his arm. “Over my dead body he’ll get my job.”
    Kulakov says in Russian, “What means, The victor belongs to the spoils’?”

    The hooker hangs on Kulakov’s every word. “What’s he saying?” she asks out of the corner of her mouth.
    “I read it in my English lesson yesterday,” Kulakov explains. And he repeats the F. Scott Fitzgerald phrase in halting English: “ ‘The victor belongs to the spoils.’ ”
    The hooker laughs at Kulakov’s accent. “He’s cute,” she says.
    Mozart says belligerently, “What makes you think I want your stinking job? Topology is a fossil fuel.”
    Thro explains the Fitzgerald phrase to Kulakov. “It’s a play on words, Oleg. The original is, ‘To the victor belong the spoils.’ ”
    Mozart repeats the phrase in Latin. Stone sneers.
    Kulakov says, “To this victor, no spoils. By the time I got to Germany, there was nothing left.” He raises an empty whiskey glass and clinks it against Stone’s bowl of rice. “To tell the truth, I had a great war. I was never bored.”
    Stone nods more than he should. “Me too,” he says. “I had a great war. I was sorry when it was over.” And he turns fiercely on Mozart. “How was your war, friend?”
    “It’s just started,” says Mozart. “It’s going, thank you for inquiring, very nicely.”
    The hooker tiptoes out of Kulakov’s motel room, finds a guard cradling a shotgun on duty outside his door. “Who pays me?” she whispers.
    The guard motions with his head to the next door. The hooker raps softly. Stone opens a crack, sees who it is, tells her to wait a moment. He returns and hands her an envelope through the partially open door. “How’d it go?” he asks.
    “He performed normally,” she answers. “They almost always do with me. Funny thing,” she adds, not a little touched, “is he cried like