A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  “I think, however, that the New York Times does not understand Russia,” she said. She had not slowed her pace, nor even looked at Emmett. Now they hit the edge of the park, dark and forbidding even in the middle of the day. “For example, you,” she said, turning right on the avenue. “You love Chernyy Glaz? How? How do you love it? Like the embrace of a woman?” Irina shook her head, outraged, but enjoying the attention. “This is not a movie that you should ‘love.’ ”

  “I loved the vigor of its ideas,” Emmett said lamely.

  “Which ideas?” she asked. “The idea of a government poisoning its own people, and of those poisoned people sinking into themselves, reverting to some violent, quasi-romantic past of warrior­ poets? Do you love the idea of embracing a future in which corpses will lie forever dead on the banks of a blood-red sea?”

  Emmett was now beaming with excitement. “I may disgust you,” he said, “but you make great copy. Just one thing,” he added, holding up a little whirring tape-recorder. “Could we slow down? I think the wind is carrying some of this away.”

  A few hundred miles to the Southwest, the Senator, Stephen Solomon, was receiving a frenzied radio transmission from Cambodia. The alliance between the government, led by the Prime Minister, the Senator’s one-eyed enemy, and the Royalist party, led by Prince Ranariddh, one of Sihanouk’s sons, was in danger of splitting. Prince Chakrapong, one of Sihanouk’s other sons, was a government loyalist, and he was now threatening a secession of seven Cambodian provinces, and, if not mollified, to take his troops into the jungle. Solomon beamed as he received the reports in his office, surrounded by his loyal aides; if conditions continued to deteriorate, he could free some military aid to the Royalist forces, who, due to their relative weakness, would have to share the pot with the Khmer Rouge, but would otherwise, as a result of the absence of Soviet aid to Vietnam, be in a better position than ever to crush the government and the Prime Minister himself. He sent a confidential communiqué to Prince Ranariddh, and forwarded it to Sihanouk – DO NOT NEGOTIATE! – and giddily flew out of his office, to another part of town, ran up the stairs to a sixth floor apartment, not stopping to catch his breath or even to calm his beating heart, and three doors to the right of the stairwell he once again entered the warm embrace of a woman not his wife, the most loyal person in his life.

  In bed, Joyce asked him why he was so happy. He explained the situation, still giddy, coated in a thin layer of sweat. But didn’t he want the war to be over? she asked him, and he said that he wanted the war over on his terms, not on theirs: Peace With Justice, he called it. “Please,” she said. “Couldn’t this war just end now?” He raised his eyebrows. “Sorry?” he asked. “What?” She stopped, as she so often stopped. This element of his personality, the concrete facade that enclosed the distant heart of Senator Solomon, had begun to make her quietly elegant little apartment in the nation’s capital seem, in recent years, so much like a prison. Still, she thought, as she ran her fingers through his hair. Still, I adore him so much.

  He left at five in the morning and kissed her goodbye. Half asleep and startled by the touch of his lips, she could feel death inside of him, the anger of those who had been swallowed up whole by his destiny. When she woke again, two hours later, she was burning. She stuck a thermometer in her mouth and watched Good Morning America – a middle-aged woman was recommending the best “beach reading” of the season – and two minutes later she saw with some shock that her fever had reached 103. She called her boss, let him know she would not be in that day. She watched television during the morning, slept for a few hours, threw up around four in the afternoon. Stephen Solomon’s new plan would reignite the war, one of the most brutal wars in recent memory, and a war for which Stephen seemed to have a strange fondness, even an attraction. She lay sweating beneath her sheets, barely able to put together a simple thought, but somehow, in the clutches of her fever, she knew exactly what she had to do next.

  She telephoned Charlie, the man she knew she could always count on, the man who had courted and wooed her for years now while she had watched almost apathetically, whose good humor had never waned even as his love for her had systematically destroyed his life. Quite naturally, then, she paged Charlie on his beeper and asked him if he would drop everything and come to her apartment where she lay sweating beneath her sheets with a fever of 103, and where she was pondering a decision that would change both their lives forever.

  Charlie arrived an hour later. She watched his car pull up to her building, she watched as he got out and pressed her buzzer, then listened as he ran up the stairs, slightly out-of-breath. Still, when she opened the door, his face lit up with the smile that had charmed so many during the years she had known him.

  “Kiddo,” he said, half fond recognition, half heartfelt concern.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  He nodded. “Sure. If you’re up to it.”

  She was in her robe, and her cheeks were flushed. “I’m delirious,” she said. “Completely delirious.”

  He sat down on the couch, smoothed a hand through his curly brown hair. “What’s happening to you?”

  “I don’t know.” She poured a mugful of coffee and sat down next to him on the couch. “I almost think I’ve been dreaming. The things I’ve heard ... the things I’ve been thinking.”

  She handed Charlie a mug covered with pictures of some cartoon cat. Charlie took a tentative sip of the hot coffee. What was going on? Charlie might have realized that the man she was seeing was a politician. Charlie nodded. “Senator Stephen Solomon,” he said. Well, she replied, she had never admitted any of that, didn’t he remember? Anyway, the man she was involved with was a politician with some authority in ... geopolitical matters. She stared meaningfully at Charlie. This fellow, this lover of hers, had actually begun a war all by himself.

  “Stephen Solomon’s war in Cambodia,” Charlie said. “We’ve already talked about this, darling. I know everything.”

  “Well,” Joyce said, “whoever. Wherever.” The point was that this man was sort of a murderer, she supposed, though he had never actually killed anyone himself ... not with his bare hands, she meant. Now the war was over, and it had all ended rather ambiguously, which frustrated this man, this fellow she loved. He was a control freak, she explained to Charlie. He didn’t like the fact that the war had ended without a clear win or defeat. So he thought he would start the war up all over again. It would be all but unnoticed by the press, but it would result in the loss of ... she didn’t know how many lives would be lost, but it would be many, many lives. And she knew a way to prevent that, but if she did, it would mean the end of her relationship with this politician. She would never see him again, and she would miss him. (And she would miss her job, she supposed.)

  “It’s not much of a moral dilemma, is it?” Charlie said. “You have to do what you can to save lives.”

  “And end up alone?”

  “There are other choices, you know.” A man here in this room, he reminded her, would make sure she’d never have to be alone.

  Joyce smiled, leaned over and tugged on his curly locks.

  “You’d be willing to protect me forever, in the interests of world peace, is that what you’re saying?”

  “You could save lives,” he replied quickly. “That’s what you’re saying. It’s a war, somewhere or other. You could end it. That’s important. You should do it. Forget about what you might lose right now. Think about the gift you’ll be giving the world.” His argument was rote; he sounded unconvinced himself.

  “Oh come on,” she said, exhausted from the debate and from Charlie’s simplistic, self-interested answers. “You’ve never even voted, Charlie. But this matters so much to you?”

  Charlie slumped back on the couch, stared down at his fingers. “No,” he admitted. “I don’t care anything about this. It’s politics. I don’t care about politics. If the troops aren’t coming over the hill, I can’t convince myself it’s real. I don’t care about it. The Holoca
ust, you know. It’s like a bad movie to me. I don’t doubt that it happened, because if I doubted it that would make me a bad person, and so I don’t doubt it. I admit it happened. But I can’t hear the screams. I go about my life. Sounds terrible, I know. But I care about you. More than about war in ... wherever. You won’t say.”

  Joyce stared at Charlie. He was the kindest, most decent person she knew. But he was unable to see beyond his own life, to hear the screams of those he didn’t know. This was not a failing Stephen Solomon shared, Joyce knew. She put the palm of her hand to her forehead.

  “I have such a fever,” she said. “How am I supposed to make these decisions with this fever?”

  Charlie stood and walked across the room, coffee mug in his hand. He took a big gulp, then said, staring at the wall, “Look, could you stand it if ... would it be possible for you to bear the idea of never seeing me again?”

  “Yes, Charlie,” she said. “I treasure you, darling. But my life would go on if I never saw you again. I could stand it.”

  He nodded, brow knit. “Well, I couldn’t.”

  “Yes, you could,” she insisted, her voice a deep whisper. “Yes, you could, Charlie.”

  Outside, a car horn honked furiously, futilely. A police car whirred by, siren blaring.

  Charlie was so chivalrous, filled with romantic illusions. How could he feel as he did about the Holocaust, yet believe his own apocalyptic declarations of love?

  She asked him again: would he protect her from the storm that awaited them both? Would he take care of her, marry her, nurse her through the long psychic recovery that she would undoubtedly require?

  “Yes,” he said, almost eagerly. “Count on me.”

  “I will always love ... this man I love. I will always love him. Does that bother you?”

  He waited a long time, but then he turned and looked into her eyes and told her that it would not bother him, that he was sure it would not bother him.

  “Oh, Charlie,” she said, her voice filled with affection. “Won’t you mind being second best?”

  “No,” he replied, without hesitation. “No, I will not.”

  Emmett and Irina sat on a bench at the very edge of the park. A few feet away, three rats were eating a dead crow.

  “Why does everyone always say you’re dead?” Emmett asked. “Are you trying to create a legend? Are you all conspiring together?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “People just say that about me. I can’t tell you why.”

  Emmett tried to pry information out of her, but she hid even the most basic stats about herself, such as the explanation behind her sudden appearance in America, consumed by poverty. She would say only that “Anatoli is not what he seems – he is not a nice man,” and insisted that she could not discuss her life. She talked about Chernyy Glaz, about the travails of making the film, about the terrible cold she caught standing in the rain and the re-dubbing they had to do two months later to compensate for her sore throat and stuffed nose. But she didn’t seem to admire the film much, or perhaps she had never thought about whether it was good or not. “I had hoped that it would be respected, since that would help me financially,” she said, “but whether it was a good film, that was not my business.” She would tell him little about her parents, except to say, “They did as well as they could, and I thank them for that.” She would not say how she became a film actress, and sounded shocked that he even wanted to discuss that. It was impolite, she told Emmett, to ask a Russian how he had achieved his success. She would not tell him anything about her personal life. “Let me ask you, what does that have to do with my art?” But she would not tell him about her art either. Her evasions were charming, Emmett thought, and they would sound nice on paper, but he was becoming frustrated. “Just tell me something I can use,” he said at last, exasperation creeping into his voice. “Some little detail of life in Russia, something that influenced your attitude, changed your life a little. Or just some little story. Just tell me anything that pops into your head.”

  The first thing that popped into her head was the young Irina, five years old, or maybe six, or perhaps nine, when her family had gone on a trip to a beach-side resort called Sochi in Crimea. She remembered the man who had praised her for her blank, innocent stare, for the innocence radiating from within her, for her utter lack of any evil motive. Irina remembered her reaction to the man’s praise, the way she’d let her eyes widen a bit to project blankness to the inside of her soul. But most of all she remembered the other little girl on the beach that day, the one who’d looked just like Irina but threw the sorts of furious tantrums Irina always kept buried.

  She thought about Timur, the fifty-year-old man with the Cuban cigars, who ran five miles a day and dyed his hair with Swiss dye and once took Irina to Pattaya, a resort town 80 kilometers from Bangkok. It was through Timur that she met Rostislavsky, who was lining up investors for a policier with plenty of sex and violence, the sort of thing they could shoot cheaply in the back-streets and bedrooms of Moscow then dump in Hong Kong, Istanbul and Singapore for a quick million.

  Having mob investors saved them money, too – there was no need to pay bribes to the mob to avoid accidents on the set. But Rostislavsky had gotten Paris, Ankara and Kazakhstan interested in Chernyy Glaz, and he’d dropped the policier and elevated Irina to top billing, in his movie and his life. He compensated Timur with the down payment from the Kazakhs, so Timur only broke three of Rostislavsky’s fat hairy fingers, simply as a matter of pride. Killing a man still involved a certain risk, even in the Moscow of the early 1990s, and such a risk was unnecessary when money wasn’t an issue; for these new-style businessmen in their big suits and their big cars, there would always be more starlets in their little dresses.

  She later learned of Timur’s suspicious death. She had tried to cry, but had failed. Timur had promised always to protect her. He could not have really believed that possible. He had lied.

  She didn’t tell Emmett any of that, of course. The story about her trip to Sochi as a girl was too emotional, and too ambiguous (she wasn’t sure that even she understood its significance) and so she kept it to herself. As for her underground adventures, she feared repercussions. In Moscow, the mob said that you could never escape their grip, that they had agents all over the world, like the old KGB. She didn’t really believe that, but didn’t want to risk it. She knew an alleged mob contract could be a career boost, but only if the story were fallacious. Hong Kong starlets who claimed a triad vendetta could hire bodyguards, make the papers, then land a starring role as a machine-gun toting moll in a gangster flick. But in Moscow, everything was rawer, bloodier, and she wanted no part of it. Rostislavsky was a bad man, a man not to be trusted, he had behaved indecently with her; that was enough to say and close enough to the truth.

  Those other things were nobody’s business.

  Irina had always wanted something very simple: to work, to leave home. To be paid some money, and know that she was valued by someone, even if it wasn’t much. Although she was clever, she had never been very intelligent, she thought, and she had always thought that the only way she would be valued was as someone else. As the wide-eyed child on the beach, impressing the adults with her vacuity, or as the vamp in the short dress, making love with murderers. Or finally as an image of some other being, bigger than life and translucent and naked and beautiful on a movie screen in the middle of Moscow. She had learned to love the killers, to ignore their murders, to hug them and kiss them and more, but what other choice had she had? Hating herself, her country, she had finally run away and worked at a little store, illegally, sleeping on the floor, staring all day at those four walls, the junk stacked around the shop, the junkies stumbling by on the street.

  “I will tell you this one thing,” Irina said, “that you might find interesting. But you cannot quote me by name.”

  Emmett agreed.

  “In Pattaya, a resort town in Thailand filled with happy Russian mobsters and tired sad workers, a senator met with
a Russian mafia boss who is, I think, since dead. This happened a number of years ago. The senator was trying to put together secret funding for Cambodian rebels.”

  Emmett looked startled. “This senator – was he – ?”

  “Senator Sullivan. Stephen Sullivan.”

  “Solomon, maybe? Could it have been Stephen Solomon?”

  “Yes, of course. You’re right. The famous Stephen Solomon. He was friends with the mob after years as a politician who represented Brighton Beach. You know of Brighton Beach?”

  “Sure. That was Solomon.” Emmett shook his head in disbelief, his heart pounding rapidly. “That son-of-a-bitch. He was putting together a secret package – ”

  “For the Cambodian rebels. He introduced rebel businessman secretly located in the Cambodian capital city to mafia businessman. The mafia businessman bought diamonds from the rebels and distributed them all over the world, giving millions of dollars to their war.”

  “And Solomon – he got money from this deal?”

  “No. Just secret satisfaction in a job well done.”

  “And who was there in Pattaya?”

  “I can’t say. There were three people. The senator. The gangster. And the gangster’s girlfriend. The senator knows everything, but covers his tracks. No money passed through his hands. The gangster found a way of paying for the trip through legitimate Washington business. The gangster knows everything, but he’s dead. The girl knows everything, but she’s the only one who can talk, and who would believe such a person, the girlfriend of a gangster?” Irina smiled sadly. “I gave you a very big scoop, don’t you think?”