by Dan Pollock
“I don’t really know. I swear I’ll come back as soon as… well, as soon as I can.”
She took his wrists. “Taras, I’m sure Scotty made it all sound earthshaking. But what about me, and what about us? How long is this going to go on? I need a full-time man in my life. We talked this all out, you agreed, dammit! I don’t want to turn around at a partry and find out you’ve vanished under myster-ious circumstances—”
“I’m sorry. I tried to get back to you, but they said there wasn’t time, that Larry Hornaday would explain where I went.”
“I don’t care what they said, or what Larry was supposed to tell me. You didn’t say a word. I don’t like it, and I won’t accept it. I need a man who is there for me, don’t you understand?”
“I know that. And I promise—”
“Oh, please don’t promise anymore.” She shook her head hopelessly, then leaned against him and grabbed a fistful of his shirt. “I’m crazy about you, Tarushka. You know I have been since I first looked into those damn soulful eyes of yours. But I haven’t got forever. Maybe you’re just not good for me. And maybe I have to start thinking about what’s good for Charlotte, you know? Maybe I’ve got to start looking around for some ordinary, domestic-type guy to replace you in my life.”
“Charlie, come on now—”
“I’m serious, Taras, dammit. It’ll tear me apart, but if you walk out of here tonight without—I don’t know—without a where or what or how long or a promise to call me, don’t bet I won’t do something. Do you understand?”
Before he could frame some kind of response, she went pale—and pointed at the open suitcase on the bedspread. Taras cursed his carelessness; visible under his old belted raincoat was the chromed-steel barrel of his Smith & Wesson .45 automatic.
“You’re taking that? You just said it wasn’t dangerous.”
“It isn’t. At least I don’t think it is. But—”
“You promised me months ago you were going to get rid of that obscene thing.”
“I know, Charlie. And I will.”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t you know whatthis does to me? Damn you!” Her eyes gathered fury, her fists balled at her sides. Then her face crumpled as the tears broke. She fought them, swiping at them with her knuckles, then took a quick, heart-wrenching step backward as he reached to comfort her.
“No, you don’t. Just because I’m crying doesn’t mean I don’t mean what I said. I mean every damn word, Taras. I always have.”
“I know that.” Arensky stood there, feeling her eloquent misery along with his own inarticulate pain, yet unable to bridge the chasm suddenly between them. She would replace him; she had that strength. The threat about replacing him struck deep. He couldn’t quite dismiss it as being all bluff. Having a child, he knew, had become for Charlotte the most important thing in the world, something she would not—dare not—postpone. They had worked out the critical tietable together: he would quit the Agency; they would quickly marry and start a family. Only his part in that equation was obviously replaceable. He dare not doubt her ultimate resolve to pursue her dream without him.
She put her back against the bedroom wall, pushed a lock of hair out of blotched eyes.
“I’m going to say it one more time, okay? Choose, Taras. Choose between our life together and the dirty little games they want you to go on playing. Because, my darling, if you walk out now, as you did at the party, so help me…” Her voice faltered. “I’ll care if you come back. I’ll always care. But I may not be waiting.”
“Charlotte, you know I love you.”
“But?”
“But...” He shook his head helplessly. Couldn’t she see his misery, too? Then, thoughtlessly, he stole a glance at his watch.
“You bastard!” she whispered. “Am I keeping you then, with my histrionics? Is that black car downstairs for you by any chance?”
“Yes.”
“So sorry. Well, I think I’ve said it all anyway. Excuse me.” She whirled and, now just sobbing, walked out of the room.
Taras checked the futile impulse to go after her, finished packing instead; latched and locked the single hard-sided suitcase, zippered his carry-on. Dismissed the idea of picking out a paperback; he felt too much like a zombie to read anything.
He hefted the bags down the hall. Charlotte was in the living room, her back turned, standing in a stiff way in front of her mounted collection of miniature Chinese theatrical masks, a Kleenex Boutique box dangling from one hand. Then he noticed the slight movement of her elaborate coiffure and in the Elizabethan puffed sleeves of the riotously printed silk top. She was trembling. He set down the luggage, came up behind her. Tentatively, as though she were breakable, he touched her.
She turned instantly into his arms, dropping the tissue box and clutching him like a child. He held her close, muffling the convulsive noises against his shoulder, stroking her shuddering back through the silk. The tangle of dark curly hair was pungent against his nostrils, her fingers like talons in his biceps, her tears wetting his collar. Then, with the urgent, anguished cry of a small animal, she launched her face at him in a salty kiss surprising in its ferocity, endearing in its vulnerability. Taras told himself to treasure it, knew it might be their last—and that on pain of death he dare not be the one to break it.
Finally she ended it, pushing him off with her palms, yet only a little way, to forearm distance. She stared at him from wet, mascara-bruised eyes, so close she seemed to look first into one of his pupils, then the other, searching for some faint sign that she might have won after all, and that he had capitulated. When she did not find it, hopelessness claimed her again, and she turned away, trying ineffectually to staunch her welling tears.
Arensky moved woodenly back into the hall, picked up his bags.
“Good-bye, Charlie.”
Her tremulous voice followed him to the door. “Be careful, Tarushka.”
Outside on the dark, deserted street the Secret Service driver came quickly around to take his bags and stow them in the trunk of the sedan, then opened the back door. Taras hesitated a moment before getting in, glancing up a last time to the lighted windows of their living room. She was not there.
*
When the President’s Chief of Staff, Buck Jones, had said an Air Force jet would be waiting at Andrews, Arensky had visualized something on the order of a C-5 or C-141 military transport, and a space-available jumpseat sandwiched among pallets of tank parts. He figured he’d be offloaded at Wiesbaden or, more conveniently, at Frankfurt Rhein-Main onto a commercial flight to Moscow.
But a dramatically more impressive set of wings had been arranged for him by the White House Military Office. He was taken to the 89th Military Airlift Wing at Andrews, home of the Special Air Missions unit and the presidential air fleet. Here he was met by Mike Usher, a freckle-faced, linebacker-sized Secret Service agent from the Washington District, and an amiable, cigar-smoking Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel Clyde “Cat” Brunton, who was introduced as chief of security for Air Force One.
“But I don’t understand,” Arensky said.
Brunton chuckled. “You don’t have to understand. Just lie back and enjoy it.”
Arensky turned to Usher, who nodded and launched into further explanations. Arensky tried to pay close attention, but found himself distracted by the splendid blue, silver and white fuselage shining under the perimeter lights outside the window.
The suspicion of unreality engendered by the midnight Oval Office chat, then temporarily purged by the painful scene with Charlotte, came back stronger than ever. Surely this was part of some elaborate joke, and Usher and Brunton and others were all having their little laugh at his expense. But the big Secret Service man was continuing in his pragmatic monotone, and on a topic that suddenly got Arensky’s full attention—his sister Luiza and her family were apparently now boarding a flight scheduled to leave another airport—Sheremetyevo, five-thousand miles to the east.
“But until we’re damn sure,” Usher said,
“we wait.”
About an hour later, around four a.m., Usher got final CIA confirmation that the family had indeed left Moscow—on a KLM flight to Amsterdam—and Arensky felt his heart lift as well. How long and vainly he had labored to bring this to pass, and now, unlooked for, it had all happened in the past bizarre few hours. He couldn’t be there to greet them, of course, but that could wait. They were all, thank God, free! In a euphoric daze, Arensky was escorted past two ramrod-straight Air Force guards and across the tarmac toward the big gleaming Boeing 707 with the windswept wings and the American flag on its tail.
Arensky found his heart stirred, oddly more than in the White House, as he approached this sleek symbol of his adopted homeland.
“This is an incredible thing,” he told Brunton beside him. “I can’t believe it—Air Force One.”
“Gorgeous bird, isn’t she?” Brunton agreed as they ascended the boarding stairs to the forward door. “She’s only a backup now that we’ve finally got our first presidential 747. But, what the hell, she’s seen it all. Right now, she’s just SAM 28000, like it says on her tail. A Boeing VC-137C. She’s Air Force One only when the Boss is aboard.”
On the threshold, as he passed the presidential seal on the open door, Taras had an instant of déjá-vu. He had been on this plane before—at a Spetsnaz training camp in Mukachevo in the Carpathian Military District! As a young special forces lieutenant he’d been given a walk-through of an amazingly detailed mock-up of a Boeing 707 hidden away under forest cover. His guide, a grizzled Spetsnaz captain, had boasted that the interior duplicated exactly the presidential configuration used by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter. When Taras had, with appropriate mock naivete, inquired what the model was used for, the captain had chuckled: “Why, for brigade tea parties, of course!”
Taras had forgotten the incident until this moment; and somehow it had never surfaced in any of his CIA debriefings. He decided he’d better remedy that little oversight; the Secret Service man, Usher, would certainly be interested.
Inside, except for a minimum six-man flight crew and his two chaperones—Brunton and Usher—Arensky was surprised to find he basically had the luxurious jet to himself. The Air Force officer gave him a once-over tour—ironically similar to the Spetsnaz captain’s, Arensky thought—starting down a narrow aisle on the port side of the plane past a paneled compartment with the presidential seal on the door.
“First Family’s Quarters—President’s office, First Lady’s sitting room, family lounge or conference room. Go ahead, look inside, if you want.”
Next, just aft of the wings, was a staff compartment the width of the fuselage, then an eight-seat suite for guest VIPs. Farther aft, behind a bulkhead, was a considerably more plebian five-across press area, rear galley and lavatories. The overall color scheme made Arensky think of the American Civil War—blues and grays, muted blue-plaid upholstery, gray overhead luggage bins and leather inlays, blue-gray carpeting throughout.
“For now, we’ll stay up front,” Brunton said. “Later on, if you get tired, you can come on back to one of the lounges and stretch out.”
The 707’s four Pratt & Whitney turbo fans were in full-throated chorus as they rejoined Usher, buckled up in the forward crew section and reading Sports Illustrated. “This is where Secret Service usually hangs out,” Brunton said, “and since I gather we’re all more or less in that line of work, it seemed to make sense. Besides, we’re closer to the chow here.”
He gestured toward the forward galley, where a flight steward—a uniformed staff sergeant—was busy stowing things in cold lockers. Farther aft, just behind the door on the left side, a master sergeant with headset was working a communications console that looked designed for two. Then the chief flight engineer emerged from the flight deck, swung the cabin door shut and locked it down.
Taras glanced out the portside window in time to see the truck-mounted boarding stairs backing away from the left wing. They were rolling forward without benefit of safety lecture or seat-belt check.
“I hope the taxpayers don’t hear about this,” Taras joked.
“There’s lots of stuff happens on these birds nobody knows about, until maybe years later. Like back when Henry the K was conducting top-secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese, he used SAM 26000 and SAM 970 as his private taxis—all over the globe. Officially, they called ’em ‘training missions.’”
“Those were pretty important missions,” Taras said.
“Hey, all I know is, if you’re on here, so is yours.”
Brunton outlined the flight plan as they taxied toward takeoff. They would be heading northeast up over Quebec and the Labrador Peninsula, making landfall over Belfast. They would stop at the U.S. Air Force base in Tempelhof, West Berlin, just long enough to refuel and get diplomatic clearance for Soviet air space, which would entail taking on a Soviet navigator. They would land at Vnukovo, the VIP airfield, in about eleven hours—midnight Moscow time the next day.
*
It was about a half-hour out that the euphoria induced by his surroundings and his sister’s deliverance began to wear off, and Taras found himself overtaken by thoughts first of Marcus, then of Charlotte. He was looking out the window, following the shimmering moonpath on the St. Lawrence far below, when she gradually coalesced out there in the night, usurping his own faint reflection in the Plexiglas.
If only he had been permitted to tell her the whole of it—the deal to free Luiza, Anatoly and the boys. Surely, then, she would have understood his going.
As it was, she’d have to trust him, dammit. Don’t be too desperate, he told the astral image in the window. Don’t for God’s sake go putting some damn horny stranger in your bed. I’m coming back, no matter what you said, and I still intend to be part of your crazy life.
And he really did. Despite Charlotte’s stubbornness, her rapid, righteous opinions on every topic you could mention, her stormy moods, insane hours and constant traveling—despite all these things, Taras had always found her wonderfully feminine and vulnerable. And her fierce determination to have a child summoned up his own deepest, most protective instincts.
But perhaps it was her honesty that Taras prized the most. Charlotte’s need to reveal herself, and to probe constantly and painfully for his own thoughts and feelings—and not be stopped when he went into what she called “Slavic withdrawal”—had from the first created real intimacy between them.
They had met on an autumn afternoon two years before at a house party in Chevy Chase. After lunch, while the men huddled around the big TV in the den to watch football and the women held forth among the gleaming Chippendale in the living room, Taras had retreated toward the back of the sprawling house with his dessert plate. An elegant, angular, dark-haired woman had followed him onto the back veranda. Taras gauged her perhaps five years his senior (she was actually six), and was intrigued at once, sensing—especially in the challenging brown eyes—both intelligence and appetite for life. She had launched, after the breeziest of introductions (“Call me Charlie”), into a witty commentary on weekly NFL games as essential American male bonding rituals.
Taras had reacted with appropriate amusement, but she closed the distance quickly between them, fixing him with those dark, probing eyes and placing, ever so lightly, the pads of her long, tapered fingers on his coatsleeve.
“But I’m terribly serious!” In the District, she emphasized, the dearly beloved and incredibly broad-assed Redskins were the only thing in God’s vast creation that had ever successfully united all the polarized factions and neighborhoods of the city and its menfolk—liberal and conservative, black and white, blue-collar and white collar, ins and outs, even straight and gay.
Charlotte had recently done a column on the subject, and had many of the phrases ready to hand. Taras had been enchanted—not so much by what she said as how she said it. The vivid gestures. The humor that came constantly welling up from some hidden source, crinkling the corners of her eyes and lips, twitching the delicate porce
lain nose. Within fifteen minutes the attractive lady journalist had Taras in hilarious disarray, clutching the veranda railing and somehow unable to stop laughing, no matter what inanity she uttered.
“Charlie, please!” he said. “Mercy.”
Instead, she had gone for the kill. Without waiting around for halftime and the compulsory gauntlet of good-byes, she spirited her willing catch out a side door and down the graveled driveway. They drove in tandem back to the city and whiled away the rest of the afternoon walking the Mall and matching chapters of their life stories. Nightfall found them in a little Ethiopian eatery in Adams-Morgan, and by morning, wonderfully spent, they lay entwined in her antique bed.
When, several months later, they attended a Super Bowl party near Dupont Circle, it was as a recognized couple. They were jointly entertaining before too much longer—once Charlotte had spruced up her consort’s wardrobe and etiquette. Taras wasn’t exactly comfortable in the host role, but he did enjoy watching Charlotte function at such occasions—knowing everyone, looking an angel, laughing like a courtesan and debating like a Jesuit. And he particularly relished her wicked post-party comments on the guests and goings-on.
In a way it was Charlotte—far more than his earlier CIA mentors and case supervisors—who had initiated Arensky into many of the mysteries of America, or at least Washington. She taught him more carefully how to interpret the newspapers, evaluate the anchormen and interviewers and columnists, how the city’s intricate and interlocking power structures operated. And she certainly taught him “advanced shopping,” and how to properly escort a shopping female. And, to Taras’ continual puzzlement, she seemed never to tire of showing him off, especially among her women friends, like a hunting trophy.
When spring came they drove out to what she called her “ancestral Virginia acres”—a modest yellow frame house in nearby Aldie, but set in the exclusive rolling horse-country around Middleburg. Charlotte’s mother, a sprightly sixty, just back from church in white gloves and picture hat, promptly took Taras into the parlor to show him all her daughter’s scrapbooks, and then into her old bedroom, where an entire wall was covered with dusty ribbons awarded for both writing and riding.