(1980) The Second Lady

by Irving Wallace

  It had been more simply said than done. Just before these decisions, Vera Vavilova had protested posing in the nude for photographs. Razin had overcome her resistance by convincing her that the nude art would serve an important purpose soon to be made known to her. But when told that she must undergo additional surgery, as well as a pubic-hair implant, Vera Vavilova had put her foot down.

  Petrov had meant to tell her the truth about her role immediately after the Premier had given permission to proceed. But Petrov had kept delaying it, because he had wanted the project to remain a secret as long as possible. He knew that he could not continue to keep his real purpose a secret from Vera Vavilova and Alex Razin indefinitely. Too many demands were being made on them for the pair not to know the truth. Petrov had decided to tell them when the imitation White House, being constructed inside the new sound stage, had been completed. That time had come and gone, and Petrov had continued to withhold the truth. But when Razin had come to him with the need for more surgery and a hair implant, and told him that Vera Vavilova had balked at both, Petrov knew that he could no longer keep the truth from them.

  They met late one afternoon, after a long day of rehearsal. They had settled down in the living room of Vera’s private quarters, each with a drink.

  Petrov had spoken to Razin first. ‘Do you know what is going on? The purpose behind what we are doing?’

  ‘I think I’ve guessed,’ Razin had replied.

  Petrov had swung toward his actress. ‘And you? Have you guessed?’

  ‘I know you’re not making another film,’ she had said. ‘I suppose it is some KGB matter I don’t understand.’

  ‘You are close,’ Petrov had said. ‘Now you are so deep in it - now I feel I can trust you - so now I will tell you.’

  He told her and he told Razin the entire plan, from the project’s inception to this moment of truth. He left out nothing. He told it all. He admitted it might be futile, might never be required while Mrs Bradford was still in the White House. But the odds were that it would be used. Several major confrontations between the Soviet Union and the United States were looming, might come to a head in the following year. For that possibility, they must be prepared.

  ‘When it happens,’ he concluded, ‘you will replace Billie Bradford in the White House as America’s First Lady for a brief period. It would be the greatest role an actress has ever performed - and - the most dangerous.’ f He had not been concerned about Razin. Because Razin pas clever and would have guessed all but the details. It was Vera Vavilova he had been worried about. He had long ago assessed her toughness and loyalty. But how tough and how loyal he had not known. He would know now.

  After his recital, he had expected her to flinch, frown, voice some doubts.

  She had sat very still, face expressionless. I After an interval of silence, he had said, ‘Well, Comrade Vavilova?’

  ‘I will continue with the role,’ she had said. T like it. I’ll never have a better one.’

  After that, she went into the hospital for the surgery and the implant.

  No sooner had Vera been released from the hospital than one final package concerning Vera’s body belatedly arrived from KGB operatives in the United States. The package contained several items - copies of Billie Bradford’s dental X-rays and duplicate plaster models of impressions made of her upper and lower teeth. Premier Kirechenko’s own dentist studied and compared these to Vera’s dental X-rays and models.

  ‘Remarkably similar in alignment,’ the Russian dentist announced, ‘except the rear molars.’

  ‘The teeth in back?’ asked Razin.

  ‘Yes. Comrade Vavilova’s are a bit out of line, so they don’t match exactly.’

  ‘Would anyone be able to see them or know the difference?’ Razin wondered.

  ‘Only a dentist.’

  Razin considered this. When Vera replaced Billie, it would be for merely a short time, and she would probably not need a dentist. If she had a toothache, she would be forced to live with it. If for some unimaginable reason she had to see a dentist, it would be in a foreign capital and not in Washington DC, where Billie Bradford’s dentist resided.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ inquired Razin.

  ‘Just one major discrepancy clearly shown in the X-rays. Comrade Vavilova’s teeth are all her own. No work has ever been done on them. On the other hand, Mrs Bradford’s lower left first and second bicuspids and first molar have been drilled down and capped. It is the only obvious difference between the two sets of teeth.’

  This troubled Razin. ‘Could Comrade Vavilova’s teeth in that area be made to resemble Mrs Bradford’s?’

  ‘By drilling and capping them, yes, certainly.’

  Razin hated to tell Vera that she must lose three good teeth to caps, and he was uncertain of her reaction. To his immense relief, she was understanding and cooperative. By

  now she had become obsessed with playing her role to perfection.

  All of those events marking the development of the project were now revived in Razin’s mind as he sat in his office, beside Petrov, sipping his drink and watching the KGB chief reviewing the papers, flipping the pages, nodding, smiling, sometimes thinking, sometimes speaking.

  It was at this point, Razin recollected, that Vera had been converted from a Soviet actress trying to portray an American to a person who lived as an American and thought like an American. She was allowed to speak only English, dress in American garments (except for imports from Ladbury of London), eat American foods. At breakfast, she drank canned tomato juice and ate boxed sugar-free cereals brought in from the United States and read the previous day’s editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post. When she played records, they were American standards or current hits in the United States. When she turned on her closed-circuit television, she could see only videotaped American newscasts, American situation comedies, American talk shows, reruns of American movies.

  She was inundated by material relating to Billie Bradford, but never overwhelmed by it. She was a quick study, indeed, clever, intelligent, and possessed of a fantastic memory. She educated herself by absorbing Billie Bradford’s own education in grammar school, high school, college. She read Billie Bradford’s examinations, term papers, school newspapers, vearbooks. In the person of Russian actors (who believed they were auditioning or rehearsing for a movie, each one working briefly before being replaced), she met the First Lady’s old schoolmates, teachers, instructors, professors.

  She was briefed on her immediate family, on her father, sister, brother-in-law, nephew, on her mother dead a decade, on the family dog, on her aunts and uncles and secondary relatives in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New York. Slow-ly, the briefings expanded to encompass favourite shopkeepers, friends, and acquaintances from past to present. The studies broadened, widened, to take in her husband’s campaign staff and workers, the White House staff, her husband’s aides, his Cabinet, other department executives, congressmen, the Washington press.

  Above all, she was drilled daily on the background, quirks, prejudices, habits of Andrew Bradford, her husband, and as much as could be found out about their intimate relationship.

  Here, once more, Razin ran into a stumbling block that nearly forced Petrov to abandon the project. For over two years, Razin had tried to learn something, anything, about the sex life of the Bradfords. If Vera was to be substituted for Billie Bradford, she would have to know how Billie performed in bed with her husband. What was their behaviour? Did they engage in straight sexual intercourse, and if so, how often? Was Billie docile or aggressive? Did he or she prefer to engage in a wide variety of so-called perversions? Yet, in the first two years, assigning agent after agent to turn up a clue, Razin drew a blank. As time passed, Petrov began to realize that, without knowledge of this aspect of Billie Bradford’s life, Vera would not have a chance of succeeding except by pure luck. And no margin could be allowed for luck.

  In desperation, Razin tried to find ways to circumvent the sex problem. Perha
ps President Bradford could meet with an accident that would disable him for a month. But then such an accident might also force him to postpone a conference and showdown with Kirechenko. This solution had not been a solution and had been dropped. Perhaps Billie, herself, could suffer an accident that would make sexual intercourse unlikely for three or four weeks. As this possibility was being debated, Razin had his big break.

  A well-paid American agent for the KGB in Washington DC, in the White House itself, had overheard some secretarial gossip that suggested the young redhead who was Dr Cummings’s nurse also served as the President’s occasional mistress. Her name was Isobel Raines, and she owned a small bungalow (well beyond her means) in Bethesda, Maryland. The KGB put her under immediate surveillance, while running a check on her past. Soon enough it was learned that,

  whenever the First Lady was out of the capital, the President would have Miss Raines in his bed until dawn. Shortly after this information had been confirmed, the KGB had its dossier on Isobel Raines’s previous activities. There was one unsavoury period. Five years earlier, Miss Raines had lived with a notorious Mafia boss in Detroit. The time had come for a sit with Miss Raines.

  Two efficient KGB agents, members of the Rezidentura attached to the Soviet embassy in Washington, one named Grishin, the other Ilf, travelled to Bethesda to pay a social call upon Isobel Raines. The resultant conversation had been fairly frank. The KGB agents hardly bothered to disguise the fact that this was outright blackmail. Although stricken by the knowledge that her secret past in Detroit was no longer secret, and that any leak of her past would end her wonderful job in the White House, Isobel Raines proved staunchly loyal to the President and his wife. She would not, whatever the cost to her, discuss the bed habits of the President or what she had heard of his wife’s behaviour. She admitted to a few sexual encounters with the President, but only ‘when the first Lady was travelling out of the city or - or recently when she was ill and couldn’t do anything with him’.

  Reporting their visit with Miss Raines to Razin in Moscow, Grishin and Ilf asked how they should proceed. One line in their report had made Razin curious and given him hope, the line that the First Lady recently was ill in a way that excluded sexual activity. Razin contacted his agents in Washington, told them not to expose Isobel Raines, not to see her again until ordered to do so.

  Now, in his office, seated beside Petrov, who had the old report in his hand, Razin recalled what had followed. Increasingly nervous about the lack of information on Billie Bradford’s sex life, uncertain where to torn next, Razin saw his opportunity and seized upon it. Days before departing for the Summit Conference in London, while his wife was in Los Angeles, the President had enjoyed Isobel Raines in his W’hite House bed. The following evening a presidential aide had been trapped with a prostitute. The President had sum-marily dismissed him from his post. At the next morning’s press conference, when questioned about the aide, the President had lectured the reporters on morality in government.

  This had not been lost on Razin in Moscow. Isobel Raines would be more fearful than ever. It was time for Grishin and Ilf to pay her another visit.

  . Isobel Raines had, indeed, been nervous and frightened. If she refused to talk, her own immorality would be made public, harming the President and destroying her own career. This time she talked. Not much, but a little, enough. She insisted that she knew nothing about Mrs Bradford’s sexual behaviour with her husband. This was not the kind of thing the President would ever discuss. He had summoned her to his bed only because he needed sexual release and he could not have it with his wife at the present time. He had told Isobel Raines that his wife had some kind of problem, and, her gynaecologist had ordered her to avoid sexual activity for six weeks, until he could analyse her tests.

  Unwittingly, Isobel Raines had given Razin what he wanted. In the three weeks that Vera Vavilova would be playing First Lady, there could be no sexual activity between herself and the President.

  The last obstacle to Project Second Lady had been removed. Petrov was thrilled, Razin was pleased, and Vera Vavilova was relieved.

  All this, while Vera continued to learn and rehearse, working steadily from daybreak to nightfall. Soon her work became more feverish. For, even as she studied the people and events of her new past, she had to contend with fresh people and the events of the present. Africa had long been a vague bone of contention between the two world powers, and now suddenly Boende became a familiar proper noun in her vocabulary. Boende was an independent nation in central Africa. It was uranium rich. Both the United States and the USSR needed uranium. A democracy with an elected President named Mwami Kibangu, Boende had close ties with the United States. On its northern border, a huge rebel force -the Communist People’s Army, led by a Moscow-trained

  leader, Colonel Nwapa - waited for the Soviet signal to overrun the country and take control by staging a revolution. The Soviet Union was prepared to supply the rebel force with arms. The question was - how strongly had Kibangu’s government troops been armed by the United States? The stakes for the future were high. Not only ample uranium, but control of the heart of Africa.

  As the confrontation worsened, Premier Kirechenko called in Petrov and consulted him. Reassured, Kirechenko made

  | the first move. He suggested a two-way Summit Conference, delegations headed by the American President and himself, to meet at a neutral site as soon as feasible in the interests

  jof world peace. President Bradford had no choice but to accept the proposal. Next came the technicalities, the most important being the selection of a site for the Summit. The usual preliminary haggling began. Helsinki, Geneva and Vienna were suggested, and each rejected by one party or the other for various reasons. Then Premier Kirechenko made a surprising and astute suggestion. Although the Americans had been allies of the British for many years, the Soviet Union had recently signed several important agreements with Great Britain and their friendship had never been warmer.

  |To underscore his trust in the British, and at the same time to disarm right-wing conservatives in the United States, kirechenko suggested that the Summit be held in London. Taken off-guard, President Bradford could offer no objections. And so the turf would be London. President Bradford then proposed a date. Premier Kirechenko agreed to it at once. Then, a few weeks afterwards, almost as an afterthought, the Soviet Premier’s wife, Ludmila Kirechenko, announced that, one week preceding the London Summit, she would invite female leaders throughout the world to attend a three-day International Women’s Meeting in Moscow. The subject would be - woman’s rights, today and in the future. Despite Billie Bradford’s misgivings about so much travel and activity in so short a period, the subject of woman’s rights was closely identified with her. There was no possible way for her to decline the convention. She was among the first to promise to attend.

  While the International Women’s Meeting in Moscow had been arranged and scheduled solely for Vera Vavilova’s benefit, her own preparations were not affected by it. She would play no role in the convention itself. But the London Summit that would follow it presented Vera with an overload of extra work. New names entered her life, ones she was supposed to know already and ones she must anticipate meeting and learn about. Added research flowed in to her. Suddenly, Vera had to be familiar with London — a city familiar to Billie Bradford, unfamiliar to Vera Vavilova. And a new cast of characters like the Queen of England, the British Prime Minister Dudley Heaton, his wife Penelope Heaton, the British foreign secretary Ian Enslow, the Boendi President Kibangu and his ambassador to England, Zandi, were introduced to her.

  All of that had filled the papers that Petrov had been reviewing in Razin’s KGB office.

  Petrov was holding the last piece of paper in the last of the three files. It was Razin’s final typed memorandum on Vera Vavilova’s dress rehearsal nine hours ago.

  Petrov returned the third file to the desk, tossed down the remaining half-inch of vodka in his glass, and shook his massive head. ‘What a job
. Three years work. Worth it, I hope.’ He came slowly to his feet. ‘Well done, Razin. No holes, no flaws. Looks perfect to me.’

  ‘To me, too,’ said Razin.

  ‘The First Lady arrives tomorrow — actually, today. It’s definitely out of our hands. It’s all the Second Lady from now on. Well, thanks, and good night.’

  After Petrov left, Razin put away his files and secured the cabinet. He closed his briefcase.

  Something went through his head. As an atheist he had never prayed since becoming a Russian citizen, but what went through his head was a prayer learned at his mother’s knee in America. So long ago. A prayer, a prayer for the safety of his beloved Vera.

  It was 2.23 in the morning when Alex Razin reached the high fence and gate in the Moscow outskirts, and was admitted into the restricted area by two KGB night sentries. He drove across the gravel road that wound past the imitation White House — the last time he would see it whole since it was being torn down starting early in the morning — and followed the yellowish ground lights that led him through the darkness toward the square, two-storey wooden house in the rear.

  After parking near the front door, he felt about in his jacket pocket for one of the three keys (Petrov had the third one) to the hideaway and let himself into the weather vestibule. Going through the living room, he went up the stairs to the bedroom and quietly entered it.