by Alon Preiss
Katherine didn’t answer.
In bed, in the darkness, when Emmett looked out across the starlit desert, he thought that he heard screaming again, that woman’s cries of terror and anguish. His heart began to beat faster, his sweat soaked the sheets. Katherine was fast asleep, and Emmett felt very alone. Somewhere in the middle of the swirling, whistling desert winds, that woman was screaming again.
In Pattaya at night, the stars were invisible, covered over by a dark symphony of smog that made Irina’s eyes sting. Somewhere off in the blackness, she heard a woman screaming. It was not a scream from immediate fear, but of inconsolable misery. “Don’t worry,” Timur told Irina, patting her on the hand. “It’s probably just someone crazy. No one in danger. It’s a beautiful night, don’t you think?” They were sitting together in an open air bar beside the ocean. In the gentle waves, Irina could see reflections of the expensive hotels that lined the coast. No, Irina disagreed, it was not a beautiful night. No one here was happy, there was no joy in Pattaya. The only ones who were happy in this polluted little paradise were the Arabs and Europeans. The locals, who were left behind to deal with the mess, were getting restless.
“Sometimes,” she laughed, “I’m sorry to be a capitalist.”
Timur pulled a bottle out of the ice bucket.
“Drown yourself in your sorrows, Irina,” he said. “Cry in your champagne about the poor natives.” He smiled. “Before capitalism came to Russia, I had to be happy with what I could get from the state – my dacha, my cars, and just so further on and in similar way. Now, I can put all the money into my Swiss bank account and use it for whatever I want.”
Irina felt like a starlet, in a short white dress that highlighted her tan from a day and a half on an Asian beach, her dyed-blond hair falling around her shoulders. She looked to Timur with unstinting, wide-eyed devotion; a decent enough moll, she thought.
He smiled at her. “I am showing off, you see? Just showing off, don’t take me seriously.”
“People say you’re looting the country to fund the return of Communism,” Irina said.
Timur laughed. “Sure. I want Communism back.” He scoffed. “I’m glad there’s no government in Moscow anymore,” he said. “This man you’re meeting tonight, he’s in the government in the United States, but he needs me to pay him to come stay here. A little vacation on the Thai Riviera, and he can’t afford it.” Tonight, he was dressed for a balmy night in Thailand in a ridiculous white suit and Panama hat, like some South American sugar daddy in an old American movie.
“I still don’t understand why you’ve paid for this.”
“I never met him before,” Timur explained. “I’ve only dealt with go-betweens. He sent a representative to talk to me in Moscow. So I thought I should meet him face to face, and I paid for this little vacation. It’s nothing compared to the connection he’s making for us.” Timur laughed. “The red tape he had to go through! The money flowed through so many different channels, now in his records it looks as though a cigarette company paid him for a trip to Barbados!” Timur shook his head in disbelief.
“What’s his name again?”
“Senator Stephen Solomon.”
“I never heard of him,” she lied.
“Why should you have heard of him? He’s an American politician.”
“I don’t know. You’re right, I suppose.” Irina didn’t mention that she read the New York Times every day, to practice her English and learn all about the United States in anticipation of her American film debut.
“Anyway,” Timur explained, “the senator made the first move, sending out feelers in Brighton Beach, which was in his district back when he was a Congressman. You know Brighton Beach?”
“I’ve heard.”
“So he knows Russians, that’s all, from Brighton Beach. He needed a way to get some diamonds out of Cambodia and onto the world market. He knew a man who set up a dummy business in Phnom Penh and needed to deal with a legitimate businessman in Moscow. That’s where I come in.”
“You’re not a legitimate businessman,” Irina said, with a straight face. “You’re bratva, a mobster.”
“The Americans don’t know the difference. I’m not a Communist boss. Well, not anymore, anyway. So they’re happy. I get the diamonds sold across Europe and in America, even. No one pays attention to what the businessmen in Moscow are doing. I make millions of dollars. And I’m happy.”
“And the senator’s happy, because he makes millions of dollars?”
“Maybe not.” Timur lit up a cigar, and the smoke wafted gently out to sea. “He may receive some payment, but for him, I think it may be mostly political.”
“Selling diamonds is political?”
“He’s the leading supporter in the Senate of the Cambodian rebels. If the rebels win the war, the senator wins a foreign policy coup. But Washington’s stingy, and he can’t get them enough money to win the war by themselves. China supports the rebels, but it’s trying to make friends with Moscow, which supports the Cambodian government, and so Beijing won’t commit the resources either. The most vicious member of the group, the Khmer Rouge, controls the diamond mines in the south of the country, but the U.S. is pretending to be keeping its distance from the Khmer Rouge. So Washington’s publicly pressuring the Thai military to stop letting Khmer Rouge diamonds travel through their country.” He hesitated. “It’s stupid and complicated, I know. But the result is that I deal with a businessman in Phnom Penh who’s really just a front for the Khmer Rouge. I get the diamonds out of the country, the Khmer Rouge evades the U.S. embargo and gets millions in profits for their war.”
“And the senator – ”
“Who knows? Again, I’m just not sure about that.” He smiled. “I’ll look into his eyes. I’ll look into his eyes when he talks about helping the rebels overthrow the Communist tyranny in Phnom Penh. I can tell if he’s doing it for the money or for the politics.” He gazed at the trawlers in the bay, shuttling tourists back and forth between the islands just offshore. A couple was riding horseback on the beach, two strong black horses, hoof beats muffled in the sand. “I hope it’s not the politics,” he said. “I hate people who believe in politics. They’ve walked away from their minds, Irina: completely crazy. And you can see it in their eyes.”
Timur and Irina walked along the Second Road, heading to their meeting with the senator. Five European men in gaudy and colorful dresses spilled out of a bar soaked in neon, their fists swinging. Cabs swerved as two of the men toppled into the middle of the road, both bloodied and beaten, lipstick smeared; one man was crying, and his mascara ran. A Thai girl shouted to Timur in English, then others ran to him, shouting in broken English. He put an arm around Irina, brushed the whores away with the other hand.
“Does it bother you, prolonging the war?” Irina said.
Timur shook his head. “I’m not making war,” he insisted. “I’m buying diamonds.”
They passed a casino, lit up as Irina had always imagined a casino in Las Vegas (and which she might have seen – she couldn’t remember – in a photograph) with swirling spotlights, neon in fountains. A couple of tough lean teenage boys approached them with sneers on their faces, but something in Timur’s eyes warned them off. Irina and Timur walked arm-in-arm through the front doors of a loud nightclub at the end of the second road, filled with booming music and happy Arabs and Europeans hopping about on an expansive dance floor; sullen Thai women clad in black bikinis served colorful drinks and never made direct eye contact, and ten-year-old boys handed out business cards to lonely old men. Irina and Timur sat down at a table in the corner, and Timur ordered another bottle of champaign, looking around the room. The senator, Timur mouthed, and Irina looked on as he gestured to an unhappy-looking man in Bermuda shorts and a faded Izod shirt. Solomon was a dark, lanky man, and his somber demeanor seemed more in tune with the natives than the tourists. His wife, he explained, wasn’t to arrive until the next morning (“we had to travel separately this time, my ‘wife’ and I,
” he said, with plenty of ironic intonation), and so he’d spent his day deep-sea diving off the island of Koh Lin; he liked it underwater, especially at dusk, he said in a voice so quiet that neither Irina nor Timur could hear him. He began describing the fish he had seen, their colors, how large they were, how they came up close to him and stared, unafraid. Solomon sank into a quiet little memory, and he stopped speaking.
Timur raised a glass, toasting and praising Solomon and the clever business deal they had just negotiated. A few minutes later, the senator asked Timur if Irina would accompany him to the dance floor, and Timur delightedly volunteered her services.
Solomon held her too tightly in the center of the crowded dance floor, in a forest of looming Germans, hidden from Timur’s view. “So you want to be a movie star,” Solomon said, too loudly, in her ear. She nodded. Timur had helped fund her debut, she told him, anxious to demonstrate that she had real plans, that she was not some sort of deluded dreamer. It was a romantic thriller, she explained, and Irina expected it to make her a beloved film star of the former Communist bloc. She didn’t know what that would entail, exactly, but she imagined cheering crowds in Hungary and Romania, restaurants named in her honor in Czechoslovakia and Poland. After a small number of years, Hollywood would come calling. For a dream like this, a big, epic American Dream dream, she was even willing to travel the world with a man like Timur, a disreputable man. Solomon remarked that Irina didn’t seem to care much for Timur. “I care very much for him,” she said. “I really do. Maybe he is the most lovable man I have ever met. But he is a disreputable man, wouldn’t you agree? Am I saying something wrong? Is ‘disreputable’ the word I mean? Like, you know, a criminal, a thug.” A murderer, she thought, like you. Then: And like me. She tried to erase the idea from her mind, but she could not. Solomon pulled her closer. He was smiling sourly, the best he could do, apparently. “Don’t mention me in your autobiography,” he whispered in her ear. “Not until I’m dead, anyway.” She wondered aloud why she would ever mention him in her autobiography. She felt his gasping breath on her neck. “I don’t know, I suppose,” he said. He looked away. She asked him if he’d just been trying to flirt – that was the word she used, “flirt,” and she wasn’t sure whether or not it conveyed exactly the right nuance – and he said he thought perhaps that had been his intention, but that he would deny everything to the New York Times. She nodded. “Deny everything,” she said, agreeing. Then, almost carelessly: “Would you like me to come to your room?” She didn’t look at him when she said it.
He said that perhaps Timur would kill him. “Isn’t that possible? He might kill me. Unless I’ve somehow misunderstood everything, I mean– ”
“He sleeps and sleeps,” she lied, laughing. “He never wakes up. Don’t worry about Timur.” She stared at Solomon, now so animated. She had killed men before. Why not one more? Why not this man, Senator Solomon? Someone who really deserved it.
“At three am,” she said. “In your hotel room. Are you also staying at the Royal Cliff?”
“Uh huh.”
He told her the room number.
She would kill him. She would definitely kill him tonight, with Timur’s gun.
It would turn into one of those crazy American scandals: the man would be found dead someplace he wasn’t supposed to be, in the wrong country, even.
All sorts of questions would arise. Why wasn’t he in Barbados? What had the senator been doing here in this gangster’s retreat? Witnesses would now come forward to tell the newspapers that Solomon had been spotted on the dance floor of a nightclub frequented by prostitutes and homosexuals, grabbing the ass of a very young bleached blond in a short, skin-tight dress. The papers would wonder aloud at the irony, and castigate themselves for their carelessness: he had pretended that he was in Barbados as the guest of cigarette companies grateful for his frequent votes on their behalf – which was bad enough, and might have cost him the next election had their reporters been on the ball – but instead he was in some Asian palace of sin, stealing money for an army of genocidal maniacs and sneaking a grope with the consort to a Moscow mobster. He was such a good anonymous source, one reporter would admit anonymously, that, sure, we gave him a free ride. That’s how things are done in this town. His wife would be distraught and embarrassed by the episode, by this public humiliation. The Khmer Rouge would be even more distraught; who would be left to support their war?
Perhaps she would tell Timur that she had killed the senator. He would laugh, she thought, and then they would disappear into the shadows of Russia. She would leave a posthumous epilogue for her autobiography in which she would admit what she had done. After her death, she would be praised by all the nations of the world for her heroism. The New York Times would be quietly skeptical of her claims.
“I will see you at three,” she told Solomon. He smiled, and now it was a genuine smile, without the sullenness. “We should be careful,” she cautioned him. “Timur is crazy jealous.” Solomon nodded, but the smile didn’t wane. Now he just didn’t care.
The senator followed her back to their table where he spoke politely with Timur for a few more minutes, then excused himself, slapped Timur on the back, and thanked Irina for the dance. She smiled demurely. Timur whispered to her, “My little movie star. Let’s stroll back along the beach. It’s a beautiful night.”
“It’s not that beautiful a night,” Irina said, but he seemed not to hear.
“I am all alone now, you see?” It was a strange confession, coming from Timur so suddenly, drunkenly, in the artificial beauty of the Thailand night, and Irina was sure that he must be joking. She shook her head, laughing.
“It’s true,” he insisted. “After my wife killed herself, my four children would not speak to me anymore. And they still don’t. Perhaps they have always believed the things they learned during those years when I spoke for the government. Maybe they think I am a traitor of some kind. A traitor to my ideals. We Russians are always in some sort of transition. When I worked for the government, we told ourselves that some excesses had to be committed on the road to socialism. Now, on the road to capitalism, it’s the same thing.” He smiled at her. “You see, Irina, inside of me, deep inside, there is a very good man just waiting for the opportunity to come out. This good man, he’s been waiting a very long time.”
This confession made the killer feel very good, very warm. To him, this walk along the shimmering sand with Irina was some sort of hallucination, like a beautiful painting he might have seen decades ago and yearned to enter; the air was fresh and soft, and Irina glistened like an angel in the reflected glow of the ocean. She was delicate and smooth and white in the hazy moonlight, all polished, refined innocence. He turned and kissed her; and her lips, the inside of her mouth, tasted like youth, like some lost dream of thirty years ago. Her blond hair blew gently in the balmy ocean breeze. Was she smiling? Even the next day, he would not be able to remember. He held her in his arms and pulled her close, savored the touch of her body. Hands trembling, he unfastened her shoulder straps and pushed her dress down to the waist. She stepped away and turned to one side, and Timur stared at his half-naked lover, silhouetted against a smog-covered moon that hung low over an Asian ocean. Her eyes were shut, her body shivered, and the expression on her lovely face radiated self-confidence, as though she knew the solution to some centuries-old mystery, hidden behind the smog that obscured the heavens. Timur fell to the sand, in the shadows, motionless and transfixed.
To Irina, the world had become very cold, and she shivered. She wanted to push Timur away, but she followed his lead, and now she stood cold and alone on this beach in tight-eyed darkness, the breeze blowing against her naked torso. Her toes sank into the moist sand. She opened her eyes for a moment, saw Timur sitting almost completely obscured by shadows in front of one swirling dune. Two German men walked by, staring at her and smiling. She shut her eyes again and listened as their voices faded away, gradually mixing with the gentle lapping of the waves. Eyes still shut, she sm
iled confidently in Timur’s direction, thinking only of her audience as she slid her dress and underwear gently down to the sand, blushing in the night. She turned, opened her eyes and walked into the ocean until she was submerged up to her waist, then dived into the dark waters and swam.
She didn’t know how far out to sea she had gone when she began treading water and looked out at the shore, where Timur still sat expectantly in the same spot. She put her hands above her head and let herself sink, to tumble down beneath the waves, a brief respite in a welcome world of emptiness.
Back on the sand, her head between the murderer’s thighs: she felt that she was obeying unspoken instructions, if not from the murderer himself, then from other men, men she had never met. Timur was protecting her, offering her a future, taking her places which, just a year ago, had seemed beyond her destiny; what she was doing now, here on this foreign shore, in the moonlight, was in deference to those acts of generosity for which she was so grateful.
The two German men stood some yards away, motionless, in the ocean.
When Timur thought back on his evening on the beach in Pattaya, he would remember the interlude with Irina as he might a particularly pleasant dream. When Irina thought back on it, she would remember nothing at all.
Irina and Timur sat on their balcony in the Royal Cliff hotel, watching the ocean. It was two thirty in the morning. “I promised Senator Solomon I would meet him at three,” Irina said.
“What for?”
“He thinks I’m going to have sex with him,” she said.
“Oh yeah?”