On the Road to Damascus Gate

EARLY IN ROBERT Stone’s novel Damascus Gate, which appeared in 1998, we meet a former KGB officer named Basil Thomas, who claims to have secret documents revealing the truth about some of the most famous mysteries of the Cold War. “I got the Masaryk story. The Slansky story. The story on Noel Field. I got Raoul Wallenberg. I got Whittaker Chambers,” Thomas tells Christopher Lucas, the freelance American journalist who is the novel’s hero. “This is the stuff of legend. The story of the century.” But Lucas, who is trying to write a book about religious mania in Jerusalem, doesn’t want what the Russian is selling. “The century’s over,” he replies. “People may not care about all that. … Readers are fickle. With time they lose interest.”