Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith

Part 3 of the Leo Demidov trilogy

Smith takes us back to 1950, when Leo sees and contrives a less than successful meeting with his future wife, the former WWII refugee now school teacher, Raisa. A black American singer, Jesse Austin, favors the communist philosophy and is making a tour of Russia. Leo is part of the security detail. Austin is no dope and realizes that his handlers in Moscow are showing him only the best that communism can display and appeals to Leo to show him a more typical market, a basic school, anything that is more the norm and not a showpiece.  They steal away to a market, then to Raisa's school where Jesse is so taken with Raisa that he asks Leo to bring her to his concert that night (even though Leo's relationship with Raisa is, at this time, mostly contrived).

Flash forward 15 years. Mid 1960s and the height of the Cold War. Leo has given up the police life for a simple factory manager position. Raisa has risen in the educational hierarchy to the point where she and their 2 daughters are part of a goodwill friendship  tour by a school age choir of New York  City and Washington, DC. Their youngest daughter, Elena, has been courted by a mid 20s-ish propaganda officer and the two of them work out a plan to resurrect the fledgling career of Jesse Austin, convincing him that his voice needs to be heard. The NYC concert is at the United Nations and Jesse takes his voice to the protests in the street. Elena sneaks out after the concert to be with Jesse. Her mom follows. A shot rings out and Jesse falls. The ensuing chaos leads to an unspeakable tragedy that will follow Leo for the rest of his life.

In a bottomless funk for 6-7 years, Leo tries to sneak out of Russia to investigate his family's undoing, but he is captured and given a choice: the gulags or an assignment in Afghanistan.

Leo is one of the first Russian advisors tasked with training a new secret police force. He goes native in housing, dress, appearance, and in his use of opium to numb his sorrow. He has one promising student, Nara Mir. Smith takes us through a series of local events that demonstrates Nara's potential as an agent while Leo tries to impress on Nara the need to maintain her humanity. An atrocity on a village, the ensuing Russian's investigation, and Leo's attempt to do the right thing put the two of them and a very young girl who miraculously survived the attack on the run to Pakistan and Leo's desperate hope of asylum in the US.

Now he can really investigate what happened the day Jesse Austin was murdered and how it tore his family to pieces.

I read a few reviews of this book and most said that this was the weakest book of the trilogy. And as a standalone, I might agree. But when read in the context of three integrated stories (I read these 3 almost straight through), I thought Smith expertly continued this grand story of one man's rise, then a fall into the depths of despair, only for Leo to spend the next 20ish years trying for personal redemption. One might see this series as very Dickens-esque in its scope. I wonder if the reviewers would have had the same comments had these three books been bound in a single volume and revised slightly according to the overall timeline. As one massive volume, this would have been upwards of 1300 pages (each are pretty big reads). Then it would might have been viewed as a grand novel of postwar Russian life told through Leo's experiences. For a captivating experience, make the commitment and read the 3 in order (Child 44, The Secret Speech, Agent 6).

East Coast Don

The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith

Remember when Arlo Guthrie told us the story of Alice’s Restaurant (with full orchestration and five part harmony) just so he could tell us another story, this one about his day down at the draft office? In one level, I thought about that tell-one-story-to-tell-another routine while reading this. Not that such an angle is a bad thing. Just the way my brain operates sometimes.

FYI: the plot summary I prepare will be full of holes. To fill in the holes would spoil the numerous reveals for future readers. I’ll redact important facts.

It’s three years after the Child 44 affair. 1956. Leo is head of a homicide department in Moscow, but its existence is secret because to admit its existence would admit that the crime of murder, an obviously capitalist crime, happened in the evolving Communist order. Leo is called to a crime scene that involves a former colleague.  Then another is killed. His former boss kills his wife and 2 children before taking his own life.

In the aftermath of Stalin’s death, Khrushchev writes a speech that essentially bares the evils of the Stalin regime telling the populace that the policies of hate will no longer be accepted. Political prisoners in the gulags are being released and many, rightly, hold grudges so the increase in retaliations against the former secret police, which Leo used to work for, should not be a surprise.

Leo and Raisa’s oldest daughter, Zoya, has been kidnapped by a street gang (a voya), headed by the wife of Leo’s first arrest of Lazar, a priest. Anisya was pregnant when she was arrested and her child was taken from her. Now called Fraera, she comes out of the gulag as a revolutionary intent of taking away from Leo what had been taken from her.  A simple trade: his daughter for her husband.

Leo and Timur (his partner at homicide) go undercover on a prison transport ship headed for a Siberian gulag to get Lazar (no details, no spoilers. This segment of the story is incredibly intense).

Back in Moscow, the exchange goes wrong and I’ll just leave it at that (again, to say more would be venturing into spoiler territory.

That was the first story that had to be told for the second story. 

The scene shifts to Budapest. Fraera is prodding the Hungarians into revolt against the Russians and helps lead the revolt. Leo and Raisa are there looking for Zoya as the revolution explodes with first the revolutionaries backing the Russians up only to be brutally put down by overwhelming Russian military force.

Sorry about the redacting above. Had to be done to avoid spoilers for both books. Personally, I thought this was the equal to, and maybe even a little bit better than, Child 44 as this one seemed to be more forcefully paced. It appears to me that the overall theme of this trilogy (Agent 6 is the third, next up on my reading list) is Leo’s attempt at redemption for all his wrongs committed while he was part of the first Soviet secret police, just after WWII.  He had done so much to so many innocent people that Leo tries and tries and tries to redeem his own sense of humanity only to keep suffering setback after setback. This isn’t 3 steps forward and 2 steps back – it’s more like 1 step forward an 5 steps back as the pendulum of Moscow’s own attempts at distancing itself from Stalin lead to a confused, paranoid, and vengeful citizenry.  I’ve been trying to come up with a turn of a phrase to describe this series and the best I can say about it is that while this falls under either the ‘thriller’ or ‘mystery’ category, the word I would use to describe both books is ‘intelligent’. This series (so far) is not for everyone. These 2 books are intense, violent, suspenseful, depressing, and extremely unsympathetic to most all the principle characters, the time, and the postwar Soviet society. Various supporting characters are introduced and carefully developed into critical roles only to meet an unexpected and untimely death, putting Leo (and ourselves) further away from redemption for crimes of the past. 

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

It’s postwar Russia. Stalin’s new world is paradise. No crime because everyone is equal . . . no wants . . . no needs . . . Crime is the band of capitalism and just doesn’t exist in the new worker's paradise . . . verified by the communist regime.

Leo Demidov is a poster boy for the new Russia. A hero of the Great Patriotic War. His smiling picture aboard a flaming German tank was frontpage news. Now he works for internal security. His boss wants him to sweep the death of a colleague’s young son under the rug as a tragic accident with a train. While looking into another odd problem, an ambitious subordinate executes a couple farmers in front of their children, and Leo calls him down-hard.  Now Leo has a problem about who can he trust. This is Stalin’s Russia, where the office line of state security is “Trust, but check” that has since become “Check on those we trust.”

Said subordinate plants a rumor that Leo’s wife is an enemy of the state. All Leo has to do is denounce her, but he doesn’t. Instead, Leo and his wife are banished to a nothing outpost working for the local militia, the lowest form of human because these are the ones who handle most of the local dirty work for the State. Lucky for Leo. Others have been executed for less.

In this factory town, a child’s body is found, string tied around the ankles, naked, crushed bark stuffed in the mouth, and the stomach dissected out. Similar to how his colleague’s child was found. Leo wants to look into it but his new chief is dead set against Leo possibly finding something. If he did, the local militia would look incompetent because they just executed the main suspect. Incompetence is not tolerated; right up to the top and incompetence is a sure ticket to a gulag.

A third child is found in the forest of a neighboring village. A tense standoff with his chief ends with the chief reluctantly agreeing to investigate, but only very quietly, very off the record. But this is hard in a country where “the most important thing was a person’s relationship with the state” in a country that does not acknowledge capital crime and certainly doesn’t communicate between towns and other local governments.  Some careful and quiet investigative work reveals 43 such deaths, Leo’s colleague’s son was number 44.

This is a first rate police procedural set amongst the fear and paranoia rampant in the lowly citizens of Russia. Smith’s debut expertly portrays a citizenry that figuratively lives looking over both shoulders at the same time. It takes only a suspicion to be sent off and tortured, only to get a bullet in the back, of the head or a lifetime in a gulag. How could one live there in that time? It was a worker’s paradise, the Russian government told us it was. Seriously?   

FYI, Child 44 has been optioned to Hollywood (no timetable yet) and is part 1 of a trilogy about Leo Demidov. Part 2 was picked checked out of the library yesterday. And it's based on a Russian serial killer named Andrei Chikatilo, aka The Butcher of Rostov, who killed 52 women and children between 1978-1990.