The Bookworm

by Mitch Silver

  By the time Lara reached him, Gerasimov had turned the body face up and was trying to get the helmet off. The strap under the chin was caught somehow. Then it came free.

  “Isn’t that … ?”

  “Yes,” said Lara. “It’s Pavel. Pavel Samsonov.”

  Chapter 57

  Gerasimov handed her the cup. She could taste the brandy or whatever it was in the hot black tea as it coursed through her, defrosting her. Her mind had been frozen too, locked on the horror of what had happened. Now that they were finally out of the rain, she could see the man sitting across from her was going over the same two questions in his mind that she was. Why? And why Pavel?

  They had loaded the body into what was left of the Alfa Romeo and discovered there was no room for both of them, so Gerasimov fished around in the dead man’s leather pockets and found the motorcycle key. It was hard to start the massive 750cc bike in the rain, but he’d finally fired it up on the third try.

  “I don’t think you should stay at your place tonight, those guys might still be around,” he’d said. His apartment was out, too—no place to park the vehicles without being seen. So they came here, to his office.

  On the fourteenth floor of the Gosteleradio offices at Ostankino, eight floors up from where the Midnight in Moscow staff was getting ready to put on the last program of the day, the executive level was deserted. Even the babushkas had come and gone. The brass nameplate next to the door of the corner office said, “Grigoriy Aleksandrovich.” He smiled as he ushered her in. “No last names. I think it’s friendlier.”

  There was the standard desk and the standard chairs and lamps and bookcases. The view, though, was incomparable. St. Basil’s and the Kremlin were dead ahead in the distance, putting on their light show for the drunks and the insomniacs, which meant practically the entire city. “Through here,” he said.

  “Here” was the executive washroom, as the little brass plaque on the door put it. Another door on the far side, past the sinks and a shower stall, opened on a sitting room. It too had the amazing view of nighttime Moscow. It was furnished with a couch, a coffee table, and a couple of club chairs, one of which enveloped Lara almost entirely when she sank down in it, exhausted. You don’t appreciate the importance of adrenaline until you use it all up.

  “Finish your tea and let’s get you out of those wet clothes.”

  Their little two-vehicle convoy had driven just a few kilometers from the Holocaust Synagogue to the Broadcast Center, but with the passenger-side window blown away, the rain had soaked Pavel’s body and, to only a slightly lesser extent, Lara’s. (She didn’t know which was worse—Pavel’s unseeing eyes or his indifference to the rain.) She left him in the car downstairs, next to where Grisha had parked his motorcycle.

  He was saying, “I’m going to see about Pavel. I’ll be a while.”

  Lara wasn’t listening. “I didn’t know he had that motorcycle. Isn’t that funny?”

  Gerasimov frowned. “Lara, you’re still in shock. While I’m gone, why don’t you take a shower? You look like you could use it.”

  Lara did as she was told. The washroom had shower gel, shampoo, conditioner, the works. But most of all there was warm water cascading down her body. For the first time, Lara dared to look at her injured right arm. The black-and-blue mark was already coming up. She couldn’t raise that hand high enough to wash her upper back and breasts, so she made do with her left.

  There was a little built-in seat in the shower stall and Lara sat down on it, rinsing away the shampoo. She tried to make her brain function, but it wouldn’t. After a while, and with the soapy residue long gone, she stayed that way, surrendering to the warmth of the water and giving up thinking altogether.

  Wrapped in the white terrycloth robe that had been hanging behind the door, and with a towel wrapped around her hair, she was a caterpillar snug in its cocoon. Who wants to be a butterfly anyway?

  Finally, Gerasimov was back, knocking on the door from his office. He had brought her suitcase up from the car. There was a little puddle under it. He said, “I’m afraid your stuff got soaked. When the window was shot out …” and then he saw her in the robe and towel. “Mmm, Larissa Mendelova … what have you done with Dr. Klimt?”

  Back in the sitting room he said, “Look, you’re about the same size … my wife’s things are in that wardrobe over there. She kept them here for when I was … working late.”

  Lara turned toward the armoire in the corner and immediately turned back. “Your wife … can you tell me what happened?”

  Gerasimov was slumped over the back of one of the club chairs. Lara went over to him. “Grisha, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  His eyes were wet. “She left me.”

  Lara reached out with her hand to touch his cheek. When she did, the sleeve of the robe revealed the bruise on her arm.

  “Lara, you’re really injured! Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have found some ice and made you a compress.”

  He was holding her arm with both of his hands, cradling it. He leaned forward and pushed the cotton sleeve up so he could give the black-and-blue place a tiny kiss. He murmured, “Let me make it better,” and, pushing the material a fraction higher each time, kissed her again and again and again, each one a little higher, at first still on the bruise and then kissing the soft flesh of her upper arm. No, no, she didn’t know this man, not really; she didn’t want this to be happening.

  On the seventh or eighth kiss, he hesitated. There was something in his eyes, some sadness. Shocked, she realized she did want this, and lowered her lips to his.

  Chapter 58

  Friday

  It was this right now, this weight of the man, his leg, his arm that she had missed as much as anything. The human contact. She was crying, why exactly—for herself, for Pavel—she didn’t know, with her one stupid tear duct doing the work of two. The funny thing, she saw now, was that Grisha, on the other side, his stubbled face against hers, still tenderly cradling her injured arm in his sleep, would never know about the tears running down her left cheek.

  How could this happen? She was now a fully divorced woman, but Grisha’s wife’s things were still in the drawers. Come to think of it, why wouldn’t he talk about her? Another tear rolled down her cheek. Where could this possibly go?

  With the shock starting to wear off, Lara’s brain, the brain of a chess player, was trying to turn itself back on. Anatoly Karpov, the champion before Kasparov, once said the only difference between a prodigy and a patzer was how far into the future a player could look. Peering at her mental board, Lara couldn’t see much.

  Think it through. The book. The recordings. Sometime in 1940, Noël Coward and Anthony Blunt created a hoax involving a book Hitler was meant to read. Acting on what was written in it, the Führer was supposed to turn his armies around and attack the Soviet Union. And he did. And now, anyone who had the book, the Bible, could prove the Allies had deliberately started the Great Patriotic War.

  Gerasimov moved in his sleep, his leg rubbing along hers, sending little electric shocks northward that short-circuited her thinking.

  No, return to the board. Someone gets Gerasimov, through Pavel, to reach out to Professor Larissa Mendelova Klimt to do a TV show. At the same time, a young tough, a stranger, asks her to listen to some seventy-year-old musings of a dead English playwright. Almost immediately, Pavel starts following Lara and Grisha around on a silver-and-red motorcycle, eventually trying to kill them.

  Wait, that’s wrong. She could see him aiming that gun of his at the Alfa’s passenger-side window. Her window. Pavel, her childhood friend, had wanted her dead. Why? What if—

  Grisha muttered something in his sleep, his mouth close to her ear. Chess, go back to chess. Wooden pieces, geometric squares, no place for emotion. She thought of the Karo-Cann opening, the Nimzo-Indian defense. But she kept coming back to one simple move: King takes Queen. Like some schoolgirl, some ingénue, the thought made her toes want to curl. And they would have too, if his feet w
eren’t on top of them, warming them.

  And then her mobile rang. Idiot, imbecile, why hadn’t she turned the thing off? The racket it was making. She reached out her working, left arm as far as it would go, being careful not to move anything else and waken Grisha. She touched the small, noisy rectangle on the upholstered arm of the pullout bed.

  Who would call at, what time was it, 4:25 in the morning? She managed to hold the phone in her palm and turn it open with her thumb. She had to know.

  “You have three new messages.”

  For Christ’s sake, it was her own voicemail! It took almost a minute for her to manage to hold the mobile and scroll down the list with one hand. She finally hit OK and held the phone up to her ear, tightly so the sound wouldn’t leak out.

  The first one was from the woman at the flirt party, Tatiana Ivanova. “About my proposition, Larissa Mendelova: if you have the Bible, we‘ll pay you five million rubles for it. You won’t get a better deal. Call me back.”

  The next two were from Pavel, one after the other, the first when she and Gerasimov had been leaving her place after the dustup with Viktor.

  “Larashka, get out of his car!” His voice was more urgent now. “I was wrong, wrong, so wrong about them! It’s—shit, where are you off to now?!”

  In the background, Lara could just barely make out something like a car accelerating. The next thing he said was drowned out by an explosion; it must have been Pavel starting his motorcycle. When the big Ural Volk shifted into gear, Lara could make out his voice again. “His wife worked here, did you know that? Did the weather on the Weekend News. I would … run errands for her.

  “A guy I know, a cameraman, made that tape of her after hours for the Party … did you get my text, Lara? Did you see the thing?!”

  The rain, the road noise, and the motorcycle shifting gears made it almost impossible to hear complete sentences. “—using me, like they’re using you—get what they want. Everyone’s dirty, Lara, dirty with a capital D!”

  The bike must now be riding on the shoulder. She could hear him say, “I can’t hold onto the phone.” Was he crying? “I’m so, so sorry I got you into this.”

  The next call came in minutes later. “Stop and think of your mother and father, Lara, two people with nothing who took in an orphaned boy!”

  Pavel was getting louder, his voice distorting on the tiny instrument’s playback. Unable to manipulate the volume control with the fingers of her left hand and with her right arm still pinned under the sleeping man, she had to turn away and clamp the phone tighter to her ear to keep the sound to herself.

  “Think of their sainted memories! How can you work for the oppressors? Or did you live in America too long and forget what it’s like back here? Lara, I love you. Forgive me for what I’m forced to—”

  The man lying beside her said something in his sleep. It was so unexpected she dropped the phone, which clattered down through the pullout’s mechanism to the floor.

  A moment later, he said it again. “Tati.”

  For “Tatiana?” Was it possible? Tatiana Ivanova, the weather person?

  What had Lara done?

  Chapter 59

  The dream, when it finally came, was the strangest one yet. She was playing chess, but couldn’t see whether she was White or Black; there was some kind of veil over the board. Shadows covered her opponent’s face. Then the image of the table with a chessboard changed to that table behind the gas station, the one they’d “picknicked” on—there were Father, Mother, Lara, and Lev, the four of them.

  She sat bolt upright, fully awake: What if White and Black weren’t the only ones playing this game? What if there were three players sitting at the table? Or four?

  For some reason she finally felt able to think it through. The figure beside her was breathing regularly now, slowly and deeply. She eased herself from under the covers and rummaged around on the floor for her phone. She had to record another memo to herself, and made her way back through the washroom to Gerasimov’s office so she wouldn’t be overheard.

  She was sitting in one of the desk chairs and actually had her mouth open to begin speaking when the “out of area” call came in. The voice on the other end spoke in English.

  “We have your brother.”

  “What? Who is this?”

  “What’s important is, we have your brother. A brother you won’t have for very long unless you do what we say.”

  Half an hour later, long after the man somewhere in Alaska had finished telling her what to do, Lara sat alone in the dark, her heart rate finally starting to come down. And then, the way a flash of lightning reveals the midnight landscape in every detail, she saw it all, the way to save Lev, the winning line of attack, complete in her head. And that the way to beat the enemy—make that enemies—was to make them think they’d won. Use their own plan against them.

  With that, a peaceful heaviness came over her, and she fell asleep there in the chair.

  Chapter 60

  The muted sound of the “Hunters’ Theme” announced itself. “Good morning Lara, this is your wakeup call from the other side of the washroom. Do I snore so much you had to sleep in my office? No one’s ever told me that I was that bad. Anyway, I put some of Tatiana’s things out for you; your stuff is still wet. Get dressed as quickly as you can and meet me downstairs on the sixth floor, in the studio. We have to get you into Makeup no later than 8:00.”

  “Da. Is there anything there to eat?”

  “A whole spread for the American and his people. Hurry up, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  In the predawn light she moved over to the small pile of women’s clothes and underthings, last worn by the wife of the Director (who doubled as the weekend weatherperson on Channel One), with a note on top. “Larissa Mendelova, these should work on camera.—G.”

  The blouse alone was probably a week’s pay. She picked up the underwear and the pantyhose. Wear another woman’s lace panties after making love to her husband? A woman whose vodcast aimed to deny democracy to 150 million Russians for the foreseeable future? No, she thought, not Dr. Klimt.

  Lara looked over to the window. There was some kind of arrangement she couldn’t fathom to close the blinds. She was lucky it was still dark, hating to think what some anonymous engineer looking up from his dials in the old broadcast tower across the way would make of the view: a totally naked Eurasian woman, her black hair sticking out in all directions, with a bruise that was starting to look like something by Chagall on a right arm that was still too painful to lift.

  Ten minutes later, a somewhat exotic-looking woman in a flattering jacket-and-skirt set emerged from the executive washroom and, rolling a still damp overnight bag with its “on-camera wardrobe” behind her, walked through the empty offices of Gosteleradio sans underpants.

  The voice of the man holding Lev said they’d release him if she did what they said. He’d given her very precise instructions, and she intended to follow them to the letter. With just a little … punctuation … of her own.

  Chapter 61

  By the time the elevator opened on the sixth-floor studio, Gerasimov was busy dealing with the First Lady and the rest of the American advance party, making small talk in his Intermediate English and describing all the various Russian foods on the craft table.

  Lara knew she looked a fright and hurried into the Makeup Room before she was spotted. The cosmetician took one look at her, swore a Georgian oath under his breath, and immediately set about washing her hair. She‘d have to call Viktor when she was out of the dryer.

  Forty-five minutes later, Lara emerged from Makeup just as the US leader stepped off the elevator with his bodyguards. Though no band was playing “Ruffles and Flourishes,” everyone in the room stopped in mid-sentence. The man was tall, taller than Gerasimov, wearing a dark suit and a tie of red dots on blue. His skin was tanned from golfing in the sun at the Florida White House. He had black reading glasses, without a case, tucked in his breast pocket. In short, he seemed
altogether presidential.

  Tea had been prepared in a large silver samovar. While the president shook hands with the assembled Russians, Lara moved over to it and poured the man a cup by way of introduction.

  “I understand we were once neighbors in New York, Dr. Klimt,” the leader of the free world said, helping himself to two spoons of sugar. “And now, halfway around the world, we’re going to be neighbors again, at least for the next hour. Funny the way life works out.”

  Lara smiled. “Yes, Mr. President, isn’t it?”

  The woman who would be directing the town hall—one who regularly directed educational programming—went over the procedures of the broadcast with them, seating them in two identical club chairs before the camera. Then she walked back to the glassed-in booth to confer with the TelePrompTer man, a prematurely balding techie of thirty or so, who would type the students’ questions for Lara to read on the lens of the special camera.

  It was time. The large monitor set up for the other guests in the booth showed a ten-second countdown followed by “v efire.” Gerasimov leaned over to the First Lady and whispered, “It means ‘on the air.’”

  She whispered back, “I know, I was born in Slovenia. They taught us Russian in school.”

  Gerasimov had forgotten, and just managed to get out, “Sorry,” before the recorded Russian and American anthems began the show.

  Finally, it was Lara’s turn. She welcomed her young viewers tuning in across the nation and introduced the most powerful man in the world sitting next to her. The president gave them all a telegenic smile and settled himself expectantly in his chair, just another pupil ready for his test.