Bruce turned his head away, looking at the black curtains, the giant green jaw clenched. “And what should I consider myself?”
“You,” she said, turning his chin back and kissing it, fc'are Bruce. A giant green Bruce, but a human Bruce nevertheless.”
“I know,’ he nodded, “I know But there are times when I’m down there underground and Emil is waiting in the darkness and I realize something. Something frightening.”
“What?”
“The savage Hulk would never get in these situations. In the back of my head there’s a creature that wants to lash out, that doesn’t follow clues and has no interesi. in science, that would know exactly how to stop this monster. Exactly how. And the horrible truth is, it’s not by stopping to hold roofs up.” He looked into her eyes. “Do you understand? That’s the fool he’s shown me to be— or that he’s trying to show me. That I’m the only one who can stop him and I won’t because I’m a fool, because—
because I refuse to be shown what I really am.”
Betty trembled a bit. ‘And what is that?”
“A savage,” he said. '‘A beast. An avenger for him.” Betty’s mind filled with images from years of her life she tried to forget. All those years that Bruce had no control, when he lashed out in rage and anger and had no desire to control his strength. And deep inside she knew that she had been in danger so many times, that it was only the last vestiges of the humaa within the savage Hulk that had recognized her, time and time again, when he could just as easily have exploded, have taken her and squashed her like a bug.
^ “But that’s not what you are,” she said, sitting up a litde, clamping her fingers around his giant jaw, looking Bruce in the eye. “Even when you were the savage Hulk you were never.... Bruce, you never hurt me. And you could have. I’ve seen violent men. And you had physical, brute strength like no one had ever seen, the same strength you now have. But even then, there was something good in you.”
“But I did hurt people,’^he said, far away.
“You just—’ she started, closing her eyes, breathing on his cheek. She could play the stories he had told her in her head like home movies: Bruce’s father the monster, the tyrant, the destroyer: Bruce the child, the victim, the anger boiling inside him and finally unleashed, after all those years of control, in one blinding flash in the sandy desert. She thought about that child, the fists pounding into tiny shoulder blades and ears, the screams of hatred from the father, and she reached out in her mind, grasping at the image. So much could have been avoided. “You just wanted to be left alone. I know there are demons inside you, Bruce. I know you sit in the dark and brood because you worry that you’re going to lose control. But I know in my very bones that you won’t.”
‘‘How?” the Hulk whispered.
"Because you beat those demons, day after day. And
I know that if they were held in check while you really were the savage, then you will always hold them in check now that you aren’t.”
“Betty,” the Hulk said, half smiling, his giant hands wrapped around either side of her slender waist. “How did you ever get to have so much faith in me?”
She bent forward, wrapping her arms around his neck, the towel falling away. “You have to ask?”
Sarah Josef of URSA, late of the KGB, walked quickly up the stairs to her Greenwich Village apartment. The exercise did her good, legs pumping steadily up the ten flights, her breath barely registering the exertion. Besides, it fit the part she played here, that of an art student at CUNY with a penchant for the hardbody thing. The doorman and she exchanged pleasantries, but he would be one of the few people who would see her—taking the stairs rather than the elevator kept her from spending too much time in small rooms with strangers who might want to talk with an attractive young student, might memorize too many features. Soon, she would be gone.
Sarah reached her door and silently extracted her key as she ran a finger softly down the edge of the door. Her fingertip brushed the tiny hair she had deftly wedged between the door and the frame—a ridiculously outdated trick, but generally effective. She twisted her lip, reasonably satisfied, then placed the key in the lock, turned it, and let the door fall open with a slight shove. The hair fell, black and ghostly, disappearing into the old carpet.
The URSA operative stepped into the entry hall. The television was still playing as she had left it, displaying one of a thousand talk shows that infested American daytime television, she was given to understand, since the programmers had discovered that such nonsense was far cheaper than reruns of old programs. In fact, she was somewhat nostalgic about that, she observed as she set her handbag down on the table in the drab kitchenette.
Sarah had been raised most of her life in what she had been told was a perfect model of an American town, save its placement in the outskirts of Moscow. Television was a major part of their training—she had to learn how Americans watched it, deferred to it, prayed to it.
In fact, Sarah was speaking English with her fellow trainees, her “cousins,” and watching The Andy Griffith Show when she had been called out of the living room, all those years ago. Told her father had been killed by an American operative. Told to mourn.
Sarah stared at the table and saw her reflection in the glass tabletop, haloed by a chintzy chandelier behind her head, in what was optimistically referred to as a den. The chandelier was a tasteless ode to extravagance such as might be found throughout the United States, from its ugly glass clumps and bulbs to the ugly rusted gold base from which it hung.
Her eyes travelled back to her own reflection. She had received the news of her father’s death with a dull, aching tranquility. She had wandered back to the living room and sat down beside her cousins, the ache ripping through her, tearing apart every cell and rebuilding it as she stared intently at the pixellated images of Andy and Barney. At the feet of the laughing pair lay the body of her father, a big man who loved her and provided for her and served his country honestly and loyally. Who held her on his knee every third Wednesday when she could have visitors, who was proud of her intelligence and her placement in the home of the cousins.
She had wished she were out on the obstacle course, tearing the throat out of a dummy with a straight razor, but one had a schedule, and there she sat, the razor in her mind only, her eyes on Andy. And Andy didn’t trust Barney and he only let him have one bullet, ha ha. And there was a man out there like Andy who had met her father on a foot bridge and shot him to death and disappeared. She watched the American lawman on television, sitting on the porch vyith a freckle-faced boy eating the pie offered by the corpulent aunt he kept as a servant. And in his pleasant smiles and laughs she saw a bum of evil and a sound of malevolence, in her dreams the sheriff patted Opie on the head and walked down the street with his gun to the footbridge and shot her father. For years, as Sarah trained, fists pounding into straw men and razors slicing through latex necks and real necks alike, every face was Andy.
Until one day, at the same time the Berlin Wall was falling and the cousins were seeing less and less of one another and some were wondering if there could ever be a place for them, Sarah was given a dossier that finally busted Andy’s face, sent the shards of apple-pie warmth and Aunt-Bea slavery spinning into the abyss. And as Mayberry shattered into shards of glass and apple pie, Sean Morgan’s face settled onto the wiry frame of the sheriff. And that was the day she grew up.
Sarah stared into the glass tabletop at the reflection of her own head and the ridiculous chandelier halo, the shards clumping back together here, in New York, where it would finally happen. She saw Sean Morgan, her razor finding its mark, blood flying like liquid shards, and she thought she saw the blood blend into the spots of rust on the gold-painted metal base of the chandelier, the whole mess reflected in the tabletop, the room warped and reflected in the gold, a reflection in a reflection. There was a shape on the couch. She heard a metallic creak.
There was a shape in the gold base. A reflection— someone on the couch,
how did I not see—
Sarah spun around, dropping, gun appearing from her sleeve. Then she sighed.
F.mil Blonsky, in all his scaly glory, sat still, one long, clawed hand stretched over the back of the couch, mouth curled in what might have been, save for the monstrous gamma disfigurement, a smile. “Sarah.”
Sarah bolstered her sidearm and brightened. “You slipped through my defenses, Uncle.”
hair across the window sill? You read too many Fleming novels,” said Emil. “I trust using your apartment is acceptable.”
She nodded. “Absolutely. Your underground lair is being crawled over by SAFE agents far too often for you to stay there. And you needn’t worry, you won’t be found here.’’
“What about the satellite?”
“The GammaTrac?” Sarah cocked an eyebrow and smiled. “Our person on the inside has taken care of that. The Abomination has been quietly and reliably deselected. You won’t even show up onscreen.”
“Not until I am there,” said Emil.
■. “Until we are both there,” Sarah replied. She looked at his claw where it lay on the couch and saw that Emil held a small box, wrapped in gold paper. Sarah went to the couch and sat next to Emil. He was hideous, it was true. And dangerous. But somewhere in there was the man she had called uncle, who came to visit with her father, all those years ago, before Father’s death and Emil’s disappearance. Emil had not recognized her when she had first come to visit, but she had certainly recognized him, the tall, strong man underneath, the one who sniffed the air and could find the chewing gum hidden in the secret compartment underneath her desk. Who could do magic. Utterly different, but there underneath the scaly skin of this Abominable thing. She sat on the couch looking at the Abomination and seeing Uncle, and indicated the package. “What’s this?’*
‘Ah,” said Emil. He lifted the small box. “Today is the. eighth of March, of course,” .
She shook her head. “The eighth of March?”
The red eyes glimmered. “You know nothing of this— International Women’s Day?’j*=j
Her cheeks flushed. “The truth is, Uncle, the cousins
didn’t observe the holidays everyone else did.”
“Hm,” Emil said, looking at the floor. “It is a pity you missed them. When I was a child we lived for the state holidays—all of them in celebration of the citizens and the people. Well.” He handed the package to her, and she took it in both hands. “International Women’s Day is the day when all the boys bring small gifts for the girls with whom they share desks in school.”
Underneath the gold paper was a thin cardboard box, and this she opened. Poking though a layer of styrofoam packing kernels she saw a porcelain head, painted yellow. Sarah extracted the statuette and set it on the coffee table. “Who is it?”
“Why,” said Emil, “this is Princess Vasilissa and the Horse of Power.”
Sitting on a small black base was a mound of porcelain painted to resemble a grassy field. Standing upon the mound were two figures—one a golden-haired woman, undoubtedly a princess by the crown and robe. Next to her was a horse, gray and strong, nuzzling the princess’s cheek. “The Horse of Power.”
“Do you know the tale?”
She felt embarrassed again. Her childhood was filled with training and reruns. “No, Uncle.”
“The Horse of Power was a magical creature, wise and powerful. He led his master the archer to the Princess Vasilissa. Vasilissa won the kingdom for the archer, and helped vanquish the evil Tzar. Even the fairy tale said that there were no such horses today—but that they sleep.” Sarah stared at the figures, running a slender hand along the back of the horse. She looked back at Emil. “They sleep?”
“The horses of old sleep underground with the bo-gatirs who rode them,’ ' Emil rasped, red eyes sparkling. “And someday the horn will sound, and the bogatirs will rise with the horses of power, the snow will crack and steam and the hooves will break through, and the bogatirs and the horses of power will reclaim the land, and vanquish the foes of God and the Tzar.” Emil looked at her, eyes narrowing, and Sarah held her breath. His voice was hypnotic, when he wanted it to be, when he cared about the subject. “That is the legend, anyway.”
She shook her head. ‘Thank you.”
“It is a small thing, a child’s gift,” Emil chuckled. “It saddens me that you know so little of the culture. Especially when you work for an organization that holds the restoration of Soviet culture as one of its primary goals.”
“My reasons for belonging to, for working for URSA, are my own,” she said.
“And do all of them center on revenge for the death of your father?” Emil asked.
“My father believed in something that Russia does not. He served the Soviet Union. I was raised for that same purpose,” she said. “The country doesn’t even know itself anymore.”
“That may be,” Emil scratched his scaled chin. “But the country you knew, the Soviet Union I knew as a child, were far different from the Russia of Nicky and Alexandra’s Russia^ Identities of states change, I may be terribly romantic about the past, but all states evolve.”
“Do you think the move away from Communism was an evolution?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think perhaps the move away from old-fashioned feudalism was a mistake. But it’s hard to be fair. I miss the Soviet Union because I knew it as a child. Do I think about bread lines? No. Wretched food? No. I think about Sputnik and parades and public performances of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky. I miss the pseudohistory that tied Kruschev’s Russia to the Horse of Power. So many falsehoods and truths, and what do I miss most? International Women’s Day.” Sarah looked down at the statuette and somehow saw
Andy Griffith shooting it to smithereens. “Tell me about my father.”
“Karl Josef,” Emil rtodded. “Karl was a good man, and I mean that sincerely. I met Karl in grade school. He was an excellent marksman, and when he was twelve your grandfather gave him a competition-style rifle, a beautiful piece. I remember he used it forever. There was a time in Istanbul when I wasn’t sure he was alive, and we had another Ihree days before our intended next meeting. I was afraid I’d have to go home without him, tell your mother the awful news. And I heard that rifle of his, across the city, while I sat in a cafe. It was a good rifle—distinctive.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
“Ah. Of course.” He sighed. “As it happened, your mother passed on before Karl did. And I was not the one to break the news to you, because I was sent almost immediately to the United States again. By that time I dare say I would not have recognized you anyway. Those were heady times. I don’t think Karl and I had had the chance to see you for five years. When you showed up underground, I had almost forgotten that there was a Sarah Josef.”
“You’re a hero, Uncle, do you know that?”
“A hero, ’ Emil replied, setting the glass down.
‘They have a fine way of showing it/’
“What do you mean?”
‘Sarah, the government you are trying to revive hung me out to dry the moment I became this,” Emil spat, holding out his claws. “They wanted nothing more to do with me. All lines were closed. I couldn’t even get in touch with my wife. Would you believe they told Nadia I was deadT ’
ft “I know,” Sarah said. “But there are those who talk about you, Emil. Who know that there was an operative called Blonsky who came to the U.S. and fought their champion—however a misunderstanding that might be— the Hulk, and was turned into a monster. URSA knows about that. You’re a model of dedication. It’s not the foul bureaucrats who betrayed you that URSA wants to restore to power. They want to give it a better try, to do Communism right. No backstabbing, no interdepartmental intrigue. You are a model for that kind of dedication.” She heard nerseif talking and saw him watching her and she stopped. She sounded like a fool, but she continued. “Our plan is the perfect end to the standing government. So much will be accomplished when the Russian Embass
y is destroyed by the United States government before the eyes of the nation. The Cold War will be dug up and reheated within hours. The new government at home will be in place, guaranteed, by the time you get there, Uncle. And I’m sure you can find a pi—”
“No,” Emil said. “When this is over, do what you will. The Abomination will be no more. You can make the world over in whatever image you like. I have my own plans.”
“And I mine, ’ said_ Sarah. “And they start with the death of Sean Morgan.”
“Oh, yes,’; said Emil, and he smiled. ‘No safety net for him, I’m afraid.”
“I’m very pleased that she agreed to see me.” Betty walked with her hands on hei handbag, pressed against her belly, as if in supplication. They were walking along a brightly lit hallway that shone of gold and marble. At the end of the hall was a large, glass, double-door, exit which looked out onto a sun deck and a lovely garden, perfect for entertaining. As daughter to General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross she had spent time in consulates before, at Christmas parties and the like. As a girl, places like this had made her nervous—all the crystal and china, the prefect rugs. As an adult, she felt the paranoia coming back, the sense that at any moment she would stumble and knock something priceless onto the floor and into a thousand pieces.
“She didn’t agree, came a voice. A tall, athletic-looking man in a dark suit appeared from an office and joined Betty and Krupke.
he hasn’t taken a lot of visitors,” said the ambassador’s assistant, whose name was Krupke.
Betty looked up The man was perfectly framed by the office door behind him, a large rectangle of dark wood behind a perfectly triangular torso. “I’m sorry?”
“Greg Vranjesevic,” the man said, extending a firm hand, which Betty grasped and shook.
“Oh! Mr. Ambassador,” she said. “I’m Betty Gay-nor, Richards College.”
“I know,” he said, smiling. He had a disarming smile. Betty bit her lip. “Should I call you Mr. Vran— ’ “Vranjesevic?” He grinned, saying the name quickly. Betty processed the sound for about the fortieth time and still couldn’t decide if it sounded like Fran-chez-eh-vick or Vrahn-yez-eeh-veesh. Greg saw her trying to mouth it and said, “The problem is that you’re trying to imagine
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