(1980) The Second Lady

by Irving Wallace

  Vera had left two floor lamps on for him, and a crack of light was showing where the bathroom door stood ajar. The bedroom was large, comfortable, furnished in early American. Petrov had not stinted on the furnishings. He believed in the best for his star. He believed everything in the room should remind her that she was to be an American.

  Razin squinted towards the queen-sized bed.

  He had expected that she would be asleep by now, and she was. She lay on her side, partially covered by the blanket, her bare back to him. He could hear her soft, regular breathing.

  He removed his shoes, and padded to the bathroom. In the fluorescent whiteness of the room, closing the door behind him, he spotted a sheet of paper by the side of the sink. It contained a pencilled message to him —

  Darling heart,

  Before going to sleep, wake me. Don’t forget.

  I love you. For ever. Vera

  xxxx

  Razin smiled to himself. Slowly, he began to undress. He thought about her, about the first time he had met her in Petrov’s office, and the earliest times he had met her after that.

  Of course, for him, it had been love at first sight. At least, he was certain of it by the third or fourth time he had been with her. But he had deliberately not allowed his deep emotional feeling for her to surface.

  Many times he had tried to analyse the reasons for his inhibition. He did so once more. Although he had known many women, had enjoyed satisfying affairs with some, none of them had affected him like Vera. Most of the other women had much to offer, but all of them had been flawed in various ways that made serious commitment impossible. Maybe he had been immature in his hopes. Nevertheless, he had waited.

  And then Vera had come along. Yet, from the start, he had not been able to act out his feelings for her. He had found her totally intimidating: her incredible beauty, her femininity, her cleverness, her assurance, her poise. Then there was the actress part of her, meant to be savoured only from a distance. That, and her new role, which made her unique, precious, an untouchable state commodity.

  Also, in the beginning, he had questioned his own worthiness in measuring up to her. Certainly, on a physical level, she could have any man she wanted. She was a goddess. He was plain. He had no feelings of inferiority about his appearance, but he could be lost in a crowd; she, never. Continuing to undress, he sought himself in the bathroom mirror. Flat black hair combed back. Bushy eyebrows, narrow eyes, a somewhat bashed nose, thick lips, a dark thirty-nine-year-old complexion. 5 feet 10, broad shoulders, small waist. He needed glasses to read. He was smart, but suspected she might be smarter. His horizons were limited. He was a small wheel in a machine. He might be a bigger wheel some day, but never more. Her future was infinite.

  And here they were, together, together for almost two years.

  It had been the necessity of daily contact with each other the first year, the closeness, that developed into intimacy. Her life, her survival, was dependent upon him. She had needed to know him as she had not known any other man. He had to know her as he had not known any woman, to be sure she would come through what was ahead, and because he was in love with her. To his surprise, he learned that she was in love with him. Each had found what was needed from another.

  He remembered the day he had received the nude photographs of her, to compare her body to Billie Bradford’s. He had tried to be clinical about those photographs. Inside, he had seethed with the desire to possess her, to love and be loved by her. Nevertheless, he had stayed at arm’s length, had played the mentor.

  Still, they had been drawn closer and closer to one another by their common purpose. After a day’s hard work, instead of returning to his office or home, Razin had gradually begun to linger on, walking Vera back to her house, accompanying her inside to join her in a drink or two. They had relaxed together, sometimes continuing to discuss their work, more often sharing information about their pasts. The transition from drinks together to dining together had come naturally. As mutual trust had grown, they had begun to exchange confidences, aspirations, dreams.

  It had not taken Razin long to realize that Vera’s background was more disciplined than he had imagined. She had not become a consummate actress by accident. Her dossier, which he had read and memorized, gave little indication of the depth of her interest in — and experience on - the stage. He had believed her to be the product of two unlettered factory workers, people far removed from the world of the theatre, who had permitted their daughter to indulge her fantasy about becoming an actress.

  In truth, as Vera revealed, she had always had acting in her blood. Her maternal grandmother, alive and retired, had in her prime often appeared in plays with the great Alia Tarasova in the Moscow Art Theatre. While her own mother had no such gifts, she had been (and still was) a regular theatre-goer and a fount of theatrical lore. She had encouraged and supported Vera’s interest in acting from the child’s earliest years. At the age of eighteen, with assistance from her grandmother, Vera had gone to Moscow for the reading examination at the Maly. There had been 800 applicants to the school, and of the twenty-five accepted Vera had been the most promising. Vera had spent four years in training -6000 hours in all, one-third of them in Mastery of Acting classes dominated by the Stanislavski method. Upon graduation, she had been farmed out to the Kiev repertory company to gain real stage experience. There had never been a moment’s question in Vera’s mind that she would one day wind up as a star of the Maly Theatre or the Moscow Art Theatre and eventually become one of the People’s Artists of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with all the special privileges that came with such an honour.

  When Petrov had discovered her, Vera had been suffering the first qualms about her future. She had been mired down in Kiev too long, by her standards, and Moscow had not yet summoned her to greatness. She feared that, young as she was, she had been overlooked or forgotten. And then Petrov had come and had offered the challenge and opportunity that exceeded her most fanciful dreams.

  Once, Razin had dared ask her about the men in her life. She had frankly confessed to only two affairs, one a callow trainee at the Maly school, another a leading man in the Kiev company, each without emotional commitment and both ultimately disappointing. Men had simply not played an important part in her past. Her life had been dedicated to her art.

  After that, he had wondered if men - or some man - could ever be a meaningful part of her life.

  Then it happened. What happened took place quite naturally, in her kitchen, in the eleventh month of their platonic relationship. She had been at the stove, frying pan in hand, as he discussed an aspect of her Billie Bradford role from the doorway. Entering the kitchen, going past her, misjudging his step, he had brushed against her back. Doing so, he had

  halted, apologizing, and playfully kissed the exposed back of her neck. She had dropped the frying pan, whirled about, reached up, kissed him passionately on the lips, clinging to him.

  No words followed. They moved out of the kitchen, holding each other, continuing to kiss all the way upstairs to the bedroom. He had helped her undress, stripped off his own clothes, embraced her, and carried her to the bed. All restraints had vanished instantly. They had joined flesh to flesh as if each was hungrily trying to recover a missing part of his or her body. They stayed tightly joined, writhing as one being, for an hour or more. At last, the uniting was consummated, and both were emptied and wet with exhaustion but overcome with wondrous fulfilment.

  Never again, in the many months that followed, were they long apart.

  Instinctively, they kept their secret — a secret within a secret — from General Petrov.

  Perhaps Petrov knew, Razin sometimes speculated. Petrov was supposed to know everything. If so, Petrov never spoke of it. If he did know, Razin usually decided, it did not matter. They were doing their jobs well. Only that mattered.

  Emerging from the pleasurable past into the present, Razin became aware of his clothes hanging on the bathroom door and of his nakedness. She had
wanted to be awakened, and he wanted to wake her and make love to her this last time before her mission. The preparation period had ended. From morning on she would be a charge of the KGB and Politburo. Razin would not see her again, alone, until she returned.

  Razin went into the bedroom, did not bother about the two lighted lamps, and crawled into bed beside her. The weight of his body made her stir. His hand slipped under the blanket to caress her naked breasts, her belly, her clitoris. She came around on her back, opening her sleepy eyes. For a moment, seeing her full face, she was Billie Bradford. She was the First Lady of the United States. She was here in bed with him. It was impossible. She had pushed away the

  blanket, reached out for his hard penis, and she was his Vera Vavilova.

  The knowledge that they would soon be apart drew them together quickly. He sank into her as deep as he could go, to bring her as close as she could come. It was like their first time, hot and passionate and ceaseless. In a half-hour their bodies were slippery. The mindless animal copulation heightened until she began the long breathless groaning toward climax. She arched high, and he cried out as the semen spurted and spurted into her. Then they collapsed, arms hugging each other.

  Finally, she freed herself to leave the warm bed for the bathroom, to douche and to towel herself dry.

  In bed again, sitting, she took a pill from the end table and downed it with a swallow of water.

  ‘Why the sleeping pill?’ he. asked. ‘You don’t need it tonight.’

  ‘Billie Bradford does,’ she said, sliding under the blanket. ‘She always takes one. I hope my memory will be better than yours.’ Under the blanket, she sought his hand. ‘I love you, my darling.’

  ‘I love you more,’ he said. ‘And keep that good memory of yours. I want you back safely.’

  ‘I’ll be back safely.’

  ‘And we’ll be married.’

  ‘Yes. Now I’ve got to sleep.’ She paused. ‘Good night, Mr President. Or may I call you Andrew?’

  They both smiled. They both had learned that this was one of Billie Bradford’s little jokes with her husband.

  Razin leaned over and kissed her. ‘Good night, my heart.’

  She turned on her side, drew the blanket over her shoulders, and in minutes she was sound asleep.

  He lay back, his body sated, his mind alert and anxious. After a brief interval, he sat up, came off the bed, and made for the bathroom to find the package of cigarettes in his jacket. Lighting a cigarette, he shut off the lamps, returned to the living room, felt his way to an armchair, and dropped into it.

  He sat musing in the darkness. He hated the project now. He hated his responsibility for her role in it and for her security. What had brought him into this strange undertaking?

  The fact that he was half-American, he knew, that was what had brought him to this night.

  His heart had never been fully into the project, never wanted it undertaken, never wanted it successful, until he had fallen in love with Vera. She had been the turning point. After his involvement with her, he knew it must succeed, could not fail, and he had sublimated his American side for his Russian side. As he had prepared to do grave damage to the country of his birth which he had always secretly loved, he had rationalized that his real loyalty must belong to the Russia he owed so much and to the woman he loved more than life itself.

  Razin’s father had been Russian, born in Sverdlovsk, an Olympic track star turned journalist, assigned by TASS to cover politics in Washington DC. Razin’s mother had been American, born in Philadelphia, taken to Washington as secretary to a Pennsylvania congressmen. The Russian journalist and American secretary had met, fallen in love, married. Their residence was a rented house in Virginia, where Alex Razin had been born. He had attended grade school in Virginia, been a Cub Scout and played Little League baseball, and been a candidate for the National Spelling Bee. When he was twelve, his beloved mother, his warm, dear mother, had died. Three years later, when he was fifteen, his father had been offered a promotion and higher salary to return to the TASS home office in Moscow as an executive’ editor. His father had been fascinated by the United States, but bereaved by his wife’s death, lacking companionship and friends, he had decided to go back to where he came from, to Mother Russia. It meant that Alex had to accompany his father -leave his school, his friends, the only home he had ever known — and go to a distant land where he knew no one beside his parent. Uprooted at fifteen, transported to an alien place filled with strangers, he had felt frightened and alone for many months. Fortunately, he had been bilingual; the Russian learned from his father had been his second language. Because he knew the language, because this was his father’s homeland, Alex Razin eventually adapted himself to the new life.

  He had wanted to become a journalist like his father. Then he thought he might be a historian. When it was time for college, he enrolled in the Moscow State Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature. In his third year, he was tapped by the KGB. His American background, his knowledge of English, brought him to their attention. They needed English-speaking agents. The KGB interviewed him and selected him for training. Razin’s father encouraged him to go along. He was reminded that KGB agents were a special elite in the Soviet Union, with more freedom than ordinary Russians and with a salary three or four times higher than that of the average skilled jobholder. Razin went along. He was shipped to the four-storey school in Novosibirsk, and after intensive training he graduated at the head of his class of 300 students. Following an apprenticeship in several provincial cities, he was transferred to 2 Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow, and had been there ever since.

  There had been one happy interlude, he recalled. Four years ago, Petrov had ordered him to serve as a foreign correspondent in the United States, in Washington DC, ostensibly representing Pravda. He had been given no specific espionage assignment, only been told to keep his eyes open. Eventually there would be assignments. He was to do routine newspaper reporting, and wait. Razin was thrilled. In his heart of hearts, Razin had longed to return to America. He had never mentioned this to anyone, not even to his father. Now his dream was to come true.

  From the moment that he set foot on American soil again, he was filled with joy. He was stimulated and excited as he had not been since he was fifteen. He could not breathe enough of the free air. He threw himself into his work with fervour. Guiltily, he entertained thoughts of defecting, but knew he could not do so with his father alive in Moscow.

  Nevertheless, he was in America and determined to savour every day of it. His pleasure was short-lived. One morning, in the tenth month of his stay, he was arrested by the FBI and charged with espionage. He was accused of trying to obtain military secrets from a navy officer. He had approached a navy officer, he admitted, openly seeking information, not military secrets, for a story he was planning. He insisted he was completely innocent. The FBI thought otherwise. A few days after he had been incarcerated, he realized what was going on. In Moscow, an under-secretary in the United States embassy had been arrested and jailed in Lubyanka Prison for trying to help dissidents. The American government had to retaliate. Razin had been picked as the goat. A week after his arrest, he was flown to Bucharest and exchanged for the under-secretary from the American embassy in Moscow.

  Back in Moscow once more, settled in behind his familiar desk in the KGB headquarters, he learned that his father had died of a heart attack the day before his return. He was both saddened and embittered. Had his father died only a ‘few weeks before, Razin might have been a resident of the United States and an American once more. It was ironic, because now he could never return to his native land. His hope of living in the United States some day had vanished. He had been branded a spy and was banned forever.

  He was not bitter at the United States for railroading him out of the country. That had been politics, with himself an accidental and minor pawn. He was bitter at the fates that directed his life. But he was a realist. He filed away his old dream of American citizenship. H
e threw himself into his work at the KGB, gave his total allegiance to Russia, and in the years that followed he grew in Petrov’s esteem.

  Even after he had met Vera, fallen in love with her, the dormant dream persisted in the form of a fantasy. If the Americans absolved him one day, re-admitted him, he could arrange to have Vera follow him. He could blackmail Russian authorities by threatening to reveal photographs of Project Second Lady to the CIA. This would force Russian

  authorities to release Vera, and permit her to come to him, and together they would enjoy golden America.

  Tonight, thinking about it, the fantasy was hogwash. It couldn’t happen in a million years. Tonight, he didn’t even wish it could happen. Russia had been good to him. With Vera beside him, his mate, Russia would be paradise. All that mattered was Vera, her safety, their reunion.

  Sitting in the darkness, he could picture her sleeping peacefully in their bed. In a matter of hours she would be leaving him. If he had done his work well, she would be back in bed with him in three weeks. If he had made a single mistake with her, he would never see her again.

  It was too dangerous, the whole project. She could never get away with it. No one could.

  In a cold moment of clarity, he saw that it could not work. The entire project must be aborted at once. He was tempted to phone Petrov, wake him, tell him it was impossible, tell him to drop it while there was still time.

  An extended moment of clarity gave him Petrov’s answer. This project was Petrov’s obsession. He would never abort it.

  Besides, it was too late. In hours, the First Lady of the United States would be on her way… .

  In not many hours, she thought, she would be on her way.

  Billie Bradford, wearing her lace-trimmed, sheer, powder-blue nightgown, made herself comfortable beneath the blanket on her side of the bed in the President’s bedroom of the White House.