"If we drink it fast enough, we do," Emmaline said, puzzled.
"Well, the hell with the coffee. The thing is, I got a call from Johnny Stark."
Emmaline almost choked on her last sip of coffee. "You got a call from Johnny Stark}" she repeated.
"I see you know who he is," Pembroke said, pleased at the impression he had made.
She glanced around quickly. There were plenty of other people rattling cups and dishes in the buffet, but the only ones near them were three businessmen carrying on a loud conversation in German. "He's the mystery man," she said softly.
"That one. The one with the American wife. The one that commutes to Paris and New York and drives the only Cadillac convertible in Moscow. What do you know about him?"
Emmaline thought for a second. "His real name is supposed to be Ivan something. He just uses 'Johnny Stark' for those guidebooks he writes, like The Story of the Kremlin and English Speaker's, Guide to Moscow."
"I've seen the books."
"Well, he gets a lot of hard currency somewhere, and I don't think it's all from the books. He's connected, you know what I'm saying? He's way out of my league, Pembroke."
Pembroke studied her face. "Are you telling me to stay away from him?"
Emmaline thought for a moment. "No, not really," she said reluctantly. "He talks pretty openly when he wants to. The thing is, Stark has got to be very high up but nobody knows his official position, if any. So everyone is very careful around him. They say he invented glasnost before Gorbachev — what? Oh, glasnost. That's what they call the official policy now. It means something like 'frankness' or 'candor.' The funny thing is, lately they seem to actually be opening up — on occasion, at least."
"Like about Chernobyl?"
"Aw, no. Not even Johnny Stark's going to go that far." She hesitated, then decided to indulge her curiosity. "Mind if I ask what he called you about?"
Now Pembroke looked a little hesitant himself. "Well, that's the whole thing, Emmaline. I've got some friends, and they mentioned some kind of a manifesto that's going around."
Emmaline frowned. "What kind of manifesto do you mean?"
"They say it's all about what the USSR has to do to straighten itself out. Clean up the economy, get out of Afghanistan, have free elections with more than one candidate for each job—"
"Pembroke!" Emmaline said earnestly. "If you get yourself mixed up with dissidents—"
"No, no! They're not dissidents. I mean, I think they aren't. I mean, maybe some of them are, because the first person to mention it was—" He stopped in the middle of a sentence when he saw Emmaline's face.
"For heaven's sake, don't mention any sources. They could get into a load of trouble, you know." She spoke very quietly.
"Oh, yeah," Pembroke said, abashed. "I'm sorry. I mean— well, anyway, the document itself is supposed to come from real high-up people. They say it's got a lot of secret stuff in it that nobody else would know. And it's seventeen pages long, and that's about all I know. You've never heard of it?"
"You bet I haven't. What surprises me is that you did." Emmaline thought for a moment. "I could ask someone," she said, thinking of Rima — and rejecting the thought at once. There were limits beyond which you should not push any Soviet national, even a friendly one. She could also ask her local CIA spook, she thought, but that was an even worse idea. Emmaline did her best to stay away from the CIA man. Plus, he was always more interested in getting information than in giving any out. "But," she finished, "if I did find anything out, I probably couldn't tell you. What does Johnny Stark have to do with it?"
"I don't have a clue. Only that he called this morning and introduced himself, and said he'd heard I was interested in the government's future plans. I thought he was talking about the document."
"Pembroke," Emmaline said fervently, "you're full of surprises."
"So he said he'd call me again in a few days and maybe we could have lunch or something."
"My God. Just like an American businessman. Well, my friend, you're way beyond where I have anything to say, but if I were you I'd probably do it. Only I'd watch what I said to him."
"No names, no pack drill, right?" Pembroke grinned. "You think he's got something in mind?"
"The thing I know for sure about Johnny Stark," Emmaline said definitely, "is that he's always got two purposes for everything he does, and you're never going to find out what the second one is." She actually dropped her voice to a whisper. "He's mungo KGB, they say."
"Should be interesting, then."
She looked at him mistrustfully, then said, "Don't let it get exciting, please. I'd give a quarter to be a fly on the wall when you talk to him, though."
"Want me to try to get you invited?"
"No thanks," she said, rising, "there's no way he's going to agree to that. But if you hear anything juicy, just drop around to the Embassy and I'll buy you a hamburger with real fries."
Chapter 30
Saturday, May 10
What a Soviet Army soldier looks like is easy to see, for there are posters of him all over the USSR. He is blond and young. His face peers eagerly into the future, with his chin thrust forward just like Lenin's. His forage cap is cocked precisely over his left ear; his blouse is neatly buttoned, and, although you cannot see his boots in the picture, you know that they are brilliantly shined. That is the ideal Soviet Army soldier.
There is also Private Sergei Konov. Konov does not look that way at all, especially after returning from a day of shoveling clay to close a culvert or squatting in a muddy ditch on perimeter guard. . and yet there is something about Konov that is not like the Konov of only one week before. He has surprised his comrades. Most of all, he has surprised his lieutenant, who had never considered the possibility that Private Konov would ever volunteer for anything.
"You understand," the lieutenant said warily, "that this duty is
a bit dangerous."
"I do, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."
"Of course, if you follow orders exactly, you'll be all right.
Only you must be quick."
"I will, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."
"And then you get the rest of the day off. Well," the
lieutenant sighed, "you have my permission to volunteer, so get on with you then, Konov. The armored car is waiting to take the cleanup squad to the plant."
Konov wasn't the only volunteer. There were fifty others standing uneasily about in the top floor of the plant, just under the roof. It was the first time most of them had been inside the actual buildings of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station itself, and they were wary about touching anything, even about being there at all. When they were all gathered, the sergeant looked them over dispassionately. "We don't have any use for loafers," he told them. "You've got to move quick, do your job, jump back inside, and that's it. Otherwise you'll be as dead as the lad that's still inside there. And we don't have suits to fit freaks. If you're over a hundred kilos or under sixty-five, drop out now."
Six or seven of the soldiers fell out, most of them scowling— though some of them, Konov thought, were frowning more with relief than disappointment. The promise of a whole day off had sounded attractive, especially after a week of shoveling rubble, but up here it all began to sound a lot more serious.
The training was as simple as the requirements. When they had made their way to the last stairway to the roof— walking briskly all the time, sometimes running as the sergeant warned them past points of high radioactivity — a major looked them over, shook his head, and turned them over to a different sergeant. "Line up!" the noncom commanded. "Count off by fours! All right, you first four! Find a suit that fits you, put it on, make sure it's tightly closed or you'll never do your mothers again."
The suits were clammy, like rubber diving suits, and heavy with the lead they contained. "Don't fart in your suits, lads, think of the next man who'll wear it," the sergeant cautioned the first group. "Now the boots — lace 'em up all the way! The helmets. . The respirators
— sure, a hundred other soldiers have been sucking the same masks, but just think of it as kissing your girl!" And then, before he had time to think, it was the turn of Konov's four.
Up the stairs to the roof on the double—"Go!" the major shouted — burst out the door, grab a lump of graphite the size of a woman's ass (hot, too! Thank God for the lead-lined gloves) — heave it over the side of the roof — another — another— another — and all the time the major yelling off the seconds, forty, fifty, sixty—
When Konov's four were inside again the major grinned. "Sixty-one seconds for the last man. You've done well. Now, off with you, and the brave ones can come back tomorrow and do it again."
And actually Konov thought he might. His dosimeter said that he'd picked up less than half a roentgen, and it was certainly more interesting than shoveling the dirt the bulldozers had missed.
It was also more useful. When the armored car had taken Konov's group back to the abandoned collective farm that was their headquarters, Konov wheedled a cup of tea from the cook sergeant and wondered what to do with this day off he did not particularly want.
To throw lumps of hot radioactive graphite off the roof of the plant so the bulldozers could scoop them up and cart them safely away — that was useful. Exciting, even, for those lumps had once been part of the very core that had exploded and caused the whole disaster. Frightening, a little, too, but it was as the lieutenant had said: if you were quick and followed orders, you would be all right — unless, of course, you stumbled and fell, or unless you left a seam open in your rubber-lead suit, or unless something else went wrong.
But nothing had gone wrong, and the day, really, had just begun. Struck by a thought, Konov counted on his fingers and realized that it was a Saturday. That was the Soviet soldier's day of freedom — when you weren't called out for a surprise inspection, or a twenty-kilometer forced march, which you were once or twice every month, anyway. It was the day when the soldier could sleep, or play football on the parade ground, or even go into town and see what the local girls were up to — but what could you do with a day off here, anyway? You couldn't even leave the old cow barn that was their barracks without putting on the radiation garments, and who could play football in a breathing mask? Even if there had been anyone else to get up a game with!
Konov knocked on the door of his lieutenant's quarters.
"Private Konov reporting for duty, Senior Lieutenant Osipev," he said, standing at attention.
The lieutenant looked startled. "Didn't you understand me? You have the rest of the day off."
"Yes, Senior Lieutenant Osipev. I wish to return to duty."
"What, are you suddenly addicted to shoveling dirt? Most of the men are raising dikes today."
"As the lieutenant wishes," Konov said agreeably.
Osipev peered at him curiously for a moment, then shrugged. "Oh, well," he said, "There's a truck going to Pripyat with more oil for the sprayers. You can go there, but be quick about it. The truck's ready to leave."
"Thank you, Senior Lieutenant Osipev," Konov said. As he marched away, he could feel the lieutenant's wondering eyes on his back.
Actually, that was the detail Konov liked best, to go in among the high-rises of the ghost town of Pripyat. That was a task of trust and importance. The vanished inhabitants couldn't protect their belongings from looters or weather or radiation; it was Konov's duty, and Konov's pleasure, to do it for them.
Today's job was a little different. The orders were to take a spray tank into Pripyat, to oil down all the patches of exposed earth that the trucks might have missed. He didn't go alone; there was a buddy system enforced, so they could watch each other — after all, the temptation to pick up some abandoned treasure might be too much for even a soldier to resist.
His partner was Miklas the Armenian, short, dark, angry at the world and especially at the Army that had taken two years of his agreeable young life — the second worst soldier in the detachment until Konov had vacated the bottom spot for him. But as soon as they were by themselves, they flipped a three-kopeck coin to see who would carry the radiation counter— Miklas got it — and then, to get the job done with faster, walked in opposite directions.
It was hard work. Konov was sweating at once inside his coverall and hood, but he was meticulous. He sought out and poked his long-handled spray into every corner of the garden plots (dead tomato vines and grape) and floral plantings (wilted stalks with buds that would never blossom through their thick coating of oil).
Looked at in one way, what Konov was doing was destruction. Where he saw green life, he killed it with his spray. Where a missed corner of black earth showed through the greasy film, he covered it at once with deadly oil. He didn't look at it in that way. He was wielding the surgeon's knife, he reasoned. He killed here to prevent a worse death somewhere else, and so he was painstaking at poking his spray behind dead shrubs, under wooden steps, into every corner that might have been overlooked.
It took him an hour or more to finish the grounds around a single building, and there were half a hundred high-rise apartments in Pripyat, not to count the parks and school yards and open squares and offices and stores. No matter. Not one centimeter was going to get by Sergei Konov. Nor did he neglect his collateral duties. All the time he was spraying he was alert for the sounds or sights of unauthorized others in the town.
There were, of course, some who had a right to be there, for he and his partner were not alone. Two other teams were spraying in other areas, and there were the big orange trucks that rumbled through now and then to water down the roadways one more time. But when he turned a corner of a building and saw a smaller truck standing there with its motor running and its back flaps up and no one in sight, he had one sudden thought: Looters.
He had to investigate. He shrugged the tank off his shoulders and set it down, and cautiously approached the truck. It was full of things! Things taken from the empty apartments! So perhaps there really were looters at work, because Konov could see radio sets and tape machines stacked inside the truck.
Yet each one was tagged with the number of the apartment it had come from, and surely looters would not care about such a thing. And just inside the tailgate were things that a looter would hardly bother with: books, magazines, papers, also all carefully tagged: 115 Victory Drive, Flat 22; 112 Marx Prospekt, Flat 18.
Konov's curiosity made him pick some of the printed materials up. Some of the papers were bound into volumes of their own, with blue cardboard covers on which someone had typed a title and a name. They were not real books, with illustrations on the jacket and printed pages. They were mimeographed, some of them hardly legible, carefully stitched together with cotton thread. When he read a few of the titles they were quite unfamiliar — authors with names like Vladimir Voinovich (who was Vladimir Voinovich? Konov often read books, but he had never heard of this author before), and Oksana Mechko (Mechko? another puzzle) and — what was this? — oh, Boris Pasternak, Andrei Amalryk — of course! All this was samizdat! Konov had seen samizdat before, but never so much, or so carefully collected.
It was not all samizdat, however. There were separate piles of brighdy colored magazines, all foreign. These were not tagged at all but simply stacked in heaps, and when Konov got a look at the covers his eyes popped.. though not as much as they did when he turned the pages and saw — women! Beautiful women! Naked women! And not merely naked, but displaying all of their most private of parts in brazenly alluring ways!
Konov had never seen such pictures. He had never dreamed they existed — and here were twelve or fourteen magazines, all filled with them! True, the writing was in English and German and what looked to Konov like Italian, and incomprehensible therefore; but who needed writing to say what these photographs represented?
A harsh voice from behind him snarled: "And what do you think you're doing, pig's scum?"
Konov turned guiltily to confront two men, gloved hands filled with more papers and books. Their insignia was hidden by the white
coveralls, but he didn't need to see their flashes to know what branch of service they represented. "I am on duty here," he said doggedly. "Are you on official business?"
"We are always on official business," the other one said, his voice light and pleasant. The eyes behind the gauze mask, however, were bleak. "We were gathering evidence. What, do you want to take one of these filthy magazines? Why not?" And he took one from the top of the stack in his arms.
"Not that one," growled the other man, pointing to the magazine with the English title Hustler.
"Then this one. And this. And take them away quickly, little soldier, because we are very busy."
Konov did. It was always better to do what the organs wanted you to do. And then, for half an hour, he sat just inside the doorway of one of the tall apartment buildings, so that he could see outside, carefully turning over every page. He could feel himself harden as he turned back to gaze again at one of his favorites, this one of the little blonde in her underwear, standing with her back turned and her head cocked coyly toward him, one thumb beginning to lower the panties; or this other of the slim, almost boyish brunette, lying on her back and looking impassively at him through her spread knees.
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