House of Meetings  By Martin Amis.  242 pp. Alfred A. Knopf.
$23.  THE cold war may not be quite over, after all. For more
than a decade, writers of thrillers and spy novels -- and not a
few conservative strategists -- have been bedeviled by the
transformation of the evocative evil empire into an oligarchic
quasi-capitalist power. The world has provided other villains,
but the peculiar charm of the pallid, citrus-starved Slavic
heavy persists. And a spate of recent deaths of Russian whistle-
blowers -- most recently the murder of the journalist Anna
Politkovskaya in Moscow and the polonium 210 poisoning of the
former spy Alexander Litvinenko in London -- shows that the
Soviet back story isn't entirely buried. Like the Stalinesque
corpse that keeps popping up in Tengiz Abuladze's film
''Repentance'' (from the now-quaint Glasnost era), dark secrets
have an afterlife. And when you dig them up, you sometimes find
evil interred with the bones.  The narrator and protagonist (by
no stretch could you call him the hero