Duel of Assassins

by Dan Pollock

  “Dear God, Mother, spare the poor man!” Charlotte grimaced, and dragged Taras off, out the door and across the lawn.

  “Now where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They squeezed through a hedge and cut across a corner of a neighbor’s pasture, hiking up a gentle slope into some low, tangled oaks. Charlotte proved quite nimble, leading him through the thicket of boles and branches. After a minute they emerged into a little clearing and hopped up onto a smooth outcrop of granite that afforded a fine lookout down the valley. A solemn afternoon haze overhung the low, spring-green hills, a pickup towing a one-horse trailer vanished and reappeared in an undulation of Highway 50, woodsmoke trailed downwind from a nearby chimney.

  “What do you think, Tarushka? Isn’t it special?”

  “Very.”

  It was her favorite childhood place. She had gone there often, but had never shown another soul—till then. “So you are the very first, darling—not in every way with me, perhaps, but in all the ways that count.”

  “I’m honored.”

  Taras had stood there beside her, thinking of that sweet child who had come there to measure the wide world by her storybook valley, and her innocent dreams against an unknowable future. But he had completely misread her mood. For when Charlotte had turned to him, it was with eyes smoky with lust.

  “Tarushka—I want you now.”

  The shocking imperative carried the full force of her sexuality, and her fingers were already fumbling at his belt buckle. Taras’ response was immediate and instinctive—like being sucked into an erotic vortex. Charlotte writhed at his first touch, as if trying to eel out of her own clothes, but actually impeding his efforts to undress her.

  “Hurry, darling,” she urged, yet made him wrestle her into submission while he struggled to divest her of jacket and blouse and unhammock her lovely breasts. Still she fought against him, laughing to hyperventilation as he peeled off her suede skirt and peach-silk panties. But Charlotte had not been totally inept, having managed to bare the essential parts of Taras’ anatomy. He stood, slightly foolish, at full point with shirt unbuttoned and trousers about his ankles, but she could wait no longer. With a look of anguish she leaped, girdling herself around him and crying out as they mated in a single thrust.

  Charlotte had climaxed right at the start, but hung on willfully for the long gallop, riding Taras till he had bucked and thrust into a final trembling spasm and stood there, breathing mightily and holding her in his arms.

  “Oughta put you out to stud right now,” she had drawled. “Make us a heap of stud fees. ’Ceptin I jes’ cain’t stand loaning this here big thang out to other fillies.”

  Taras had chuckled. He did feel a little like one of the stallions they had driven past on the way in. It was, he realized with a shock as he eased her to the ground, the first time in his life he had ever made love out of doors, surrounded by nature. And it had been pretty damn exciting.

  By the time they had zipped and buttoned themselves into decency, the sun had slid behind indigo hills. They walked back hand in hand across the twilight fields, their perspiration cooling, but the pungency of lovemaking still in their nostrils.

  When they got back, Charlotte’s mother had tea waiting on the porch, with shortbread biscuits and ollalieberry jam and the smallest spoons Taras had ever seen. They sat three-in-a-row, chatting about trivia, listening to crickets and watching swallows darting across the dark lawn, till the birds—and then their own distinct faces—were lost in the evening gloom…

  Taras shook himself free of the seductive reverie, took a breath. It wouldn’t do. He had to clear his head. All right, so he couldn’t replace Charlie, didn’t want to. What was he going to do about it?

  Three weeks on this assignment, three weeks to Potsdam. At the end, come what may, Charlotte would be there. As a syndicated columnist specializing on foreign affairs, she routinely covered every economic and diplomatic summit, along with a host of lesser happenings anywhere on the globe. So when the conference was folding its tents in late Julyt, and Taras was finally free of his presidential mission, he would find her and they could come home together.

  Unless he had really lost her.

  The way it had happened before.

  Six

  It had been sixteen years earlier, and Arensky a fresh-faced, not-quite-eighteen-year-old cadet then, as now, was traveling east with the image of his beloved constantly in mind. But instead of hopping the Atlantic in a single night, he was crossing the wintry vastness of Russia, from Moscow to Khabarovsk, in seven and a half days... with the conjured face of another girl keeping pace all that way, flashing like the low sun through the silver birches.

  *

  Uncle Dima had at last grown weary of Taras’ unrelenting pleas. Pulling every string he could reach from his middle-echelon desk in the Ministry of Defense, he had arranged a special leave for the boy after the November Bolshevik Revolutionary holidays. So, instead of just a few days off from his second-year studies at the Supreme Soviet Military Academy outside Moscow, Officer Cadet Arensky would have a miraculous three weeks—plus a great deal of make-up work when he returned.

  Taras’ objective in all this was to spend as much time as possible with his fiancée, a buxom, blond Intourist guide who had thoroughly bewitched him the previous summer at the Odessa seaside. Unfortunately even Uncle Dima could not alter the fact that Eva Sorokina was currently employed eight-thousand five hundred kilometers away in the Soviet Far East.

  Taras turned next to his widower father. But hardworking Oleg, on a factory foreman’s salary of three hundred rubles a month, was quite unequal to the demand—was, in fact, richly amused when his son begged two hundred forty-four rubles for an Aeroflot round-trip ticket to Khabarovsk. “Your Eva is a lovely thing, Tarushka,” he agreed, “but that lovely she is not. Here are fifty-four rubles. Go to her—on the train. Uncle Dima has agreed to pay your return fare.”

  So, instead of an eight-hour flight on an IL-62, Taras had to face an almost eight-day Trans-Siberian Railroad journey each way in “hard class,” squandering more than two-thirds of his precious time and leaving him less than a week with his beloved.

  But he could not endure till summer to see Eva. Her letters, one or two every week, had reinforced the spell of Odessa. Especially the letter that contained a fat lock of her tawny hair, tied with a red ribbon into a miniature ponytail. It was so exactly like the original, which had tossed like a palomino’s plume in the sea breeze as she fled him over the dunes... and was caught and wrestled down and her shrill laughter silenced with kisses—and a blurted out proposal of marriage.

  Taras had carried that lock everywhere, even to his classes, buttoned into his tunic pocket and had extracted it again and again from its pliofilm wrapper when no one was looking in order to savor its heady elixir.

  Apparently an old Tungusi woman from Belogorsk had told Eva exactly how much hair to cut and how to tie it, claiming it would exert powerful magic on the object of desire. In her letter Eva had treated the whole thing playfully, but it had worked on Taras exactly as the shaman-woman had decreed.

  Of course the love charm came along on his journey, and its magic was meted out carefully—inhaled no more than a dozen, or perhaps two dozen times a day. The ritual offered Taras a fleeting, perfumed escape from the oppressive monotony of those endless, gloomy days and nights; from the wretched hard-class carriage with sixty or seventy benumbed fellow travelers, huddled on wooden benches, sprawled on bunks and in aisles, their pathetic bundles and string-tied boxes heaped in every corner; from the ceaseless, trivial onslaught of piped-in music; and from the pervasive stench of body odor, boiled cabbage, old wool, sardines, beer and tobacco. Thank God for the old Tungusi woman!

  On the eighth and final day, Taras put away his talisman for the last time. He should not need it again. According to the timetable posted by the samovar at the end of the smoky car, they were now less than an hour from Khabarovsk—where the source of the
magic would be waiting in the flesh.

  Since he could do nothing to quicken the plodding pace of the train—the inaptly named Rossiya (Russia) Express—Taras stared out the window and tried to quiet his clamorous thoughts with the empty landscape—kilometer after kilometer of white waste, with only the barren hills of northern Manchuria to wrinkle the horizon. The trick seemed to work, for all at once the carriage began rumbling over bridge timbers, and steel beams flashed by the window. Below, Taras glimpsed a white expanse of pack ice, perhaps two kilometers wide, here and there sparkling in the low sun like sprinkled rock salt; along its margin, boats and barges were stuck fast. They must be crossing the frozen Amur River—on the outskirts of Khabarovsk.

  Across the bridge an oil refinery reared its blackened, industrial tracery against the leaden sky, and a smokestack flamed a ragged red ensign. Beyond, dilapidated bungalows marched away down empty lanes of frozen mud, then were replaced in the train windows by abandoned-looking warehouses of brick and concrete, which gave way in turn to grim blocks of apartment complexes.

  Arensky’s pulse accelerated as the train slowed, trundling over uneven points into the rail yard, past stooping work crews of women in orange canvas coveralls who scraped at the icy switches with shovels. Then, as the Rossiya’s flanged wheels locked and squealed in metallic protest, a roofline fanged with icicles slid into view, followed by the station itself. Taras saw their conductor—the provodnik—jump down and trot alongside.

  Farther down the platform a knot of soldiers sharing a bottle turned and waved at someone as a Mongol-faced family grabbed up its bundles and hurried forward, only to be cut off by a burly woman driving a minitram of hitched wagons full of parcels and mail sacks.

  But where was Eva? With a hollow nervousness akin to stage fright, Taras hoisted his duffel bag and flowed with the crowd out of the steam-heated car and into the bitter cold. He stood there on the wide, unevenly paved platform, while a chill north wind knifed through his woolen greatcoat and made his fingers ache inside their thick gloves. But Arensky was not sensible of this, not at this moment. Only the pangs of his anxious heart counted now as he searched the faces of strangers. He told himself to be calm—to be a man, after all. It wouldn’t due to appear too eager. Of course Eva was here somewhere. Perhaps waiting just inside, out of the cold. Or perhaps she’d been detained for some perfectly ordinary and understandable reason. In which case, he would simply have some tea and walk up and down, stretching his train-cramped legs a bit, until she appeared. After seven and a half days, he could certainly stand a few more seconds, or even minutes. But dammit, where was she?

  “Tarushka! Tarushka, here!”

  He whirled and saw her at the end of the platform, waving as she hurried forward in her heavy coat, her breath pluming in the air. But something was very wrong, something that confirmed the dread that had been stealing over him. A tall young man was striding along close beside her. Even as Eva arrived and launched herself against Taras, and he bent to kiss her flushed, laughing face, he was filled with despair. She was chattering away, but he could not hear her words. His eyes were on those of the stranger, which were slitted, and strikingly light-blue, like Eva’s.

  What was he doing here, this young, cocky-looking foreign bastard—dressed up like a film cowboy in an expensive dublyonka, a sheepskin coat, with a black scarf wrapped around his ears, on top of which was a black felt “gunfighter” hat? He even wore a pair of high-heeled, tooled-leather boots, which put him noticeable centimeters above Taras.

  “Tarushka, what is wrong?”

  “Who is he?”

  “This is Marcus. He’s an American tourist, silly. He came yesterday on the boat train from Yokohama. He’s been assigned to me. Oh, Tarushka, really, now don’t be jealous! I won’t have it!”

  She managed to look quite stern for a half second, before a wide grin crinkled her plump, freckled face in its wreath of gold sable. That sunny smile, exposing just the pearly tips of her little teeth, and the girlish, guileless laugh that followed, summed up all the things Arensky adored in Eva Sorokina. Everything was perfectly fine then! Of course, of course. He pressed her small gloved hand in both of his.

  “I’m sorry. Evushka. I’m so stupid. Forgive me!” He turned at once to the American and stuck out his hand. “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  After they had been introduced, with Eva translating each way—and mispronouncing Marcus’ surname Jolly as “Zholly”—the young American grabbed Taras’ duffel and swung it onto his own shoulder. But Taras seized it back, shaking his head vigorously.

  “Nyet, spasibo.”

  The stranger shrugged, whipping off his cowboy hat in a low bow that exposed flaxen hair—also too much the color of Eva’s, Arensky thought. They were two of a kind—sunny, blue-eyed Nordics. Except Eva was round-faced—”moon-faced,” she called it —and this Marcus character had a long horsy skull, with flat cheekbones almost like a Slav and a strong jaw every bit the equal of Arensky’s.

  “Just come along you two, and be best friends,” Eva said in Russian and then English, linking arms with each and leading them along the slushy platform. “We’ve got a car, Tarushka, so let’s get you a decent meal and talk.”

  *

  Arensky had traveled to the end of the earth to be alone with his beloved, to unburden the secrets of his heart to her and her alone. Instead, he sat beside her, intoxicated by her nearness, yet unable to touch her or speak to her as he longed to do. Worse, he had to participate in an absurd charade—this polite, inane, interminable conversation, all laboriously translated for the benefit of the insouciant stranger, who lounged across the table, slurping his Siberian fish soup and grinning perpetually back at them.

  They’d passed a half-hour in the restaurant of the ugly hotel where Marcus was staying not far from the station, the Tsentralnaya on Pushkin Street, and Taras had achieved a perfect, brooding frenzy. In addition to everything else, the restaurant was almost as stuffy as his hard-class train carriage, and the Hungarian wine Eva had ordered was disagreeably sweet. And then there was Eva herself. The moment she had thrown off her coat and fur hat and settled herself on the bench close beside him, Arensky had been overpowered by her femaleness, and rendered giddy by her full, puissant scent which, in fainter replica, lay locked away in his breast pocket.

  Just now she was detailing how she and Marcus had gone walking that morning out on the frozen Amur to observe the ice fishermen at their business. She was spreading her arms wide to indicate the thickness of the ice the old men had to chop through to drop their lines—a gesture that stretched her white woolen sweater and emphasized her splendid bosom. Naturally Taras couldn’t take his eyes off her; but he was very aware, peripher-ally, that neither could the young American.

  Finally, the tortured young cadet could endure no more. Quietly, but urgently, he interrupted:

  “Does he know about us?”

  Eva broke off her story, her lashes blinking rapidly in obvious annoyance. “What about us?”

  “That we are going to be married?”

  “Don’t speak of this now, especially in this tone. This is still a secret. Besides, you know we haven’t decided when—”

  “But Evushka! What do you think I came all this way to do? To sit here and drink this gooey Magyar shit and talk all this Intourist garbage? No! I came to decide our future—and to be with you, dammit, not him.”

  “You are being very nyekulturny, Taras Olegovich. I must attend to my work, and today Marcus is my work. And also perhaps tomorrow, since I delayed to meet your train and both Mariana and Olya are now busy with a coachload of Japanese businessmen.”

  “So when is he leaving?”

  “Perhaps tomorrow, or the day after. It depends on how long it takes me to cover the necessary sights before he goes on to Irkutsk. We are still arranging his itinerary. Is that good enough for you, Comrade General? Now have some patience. And behave!”

  She turned angrily and said something in English to
Marcus, which Taras of course did not understand.

  “What did you just tell him?”

  “None of your business. If you talk secretly to me, I can talk secretly to Marcus.”

  Taras darkened. He was now quite furious, yet afraid to say even one more word for fear of losing her. So he sat, making impotent fists under the table. He was at a terrible disadvantage, and knew it. He was being made to feel like a boor, a nyekulturny asshole, while the handsome American guy could sit there nonchalantly, pretending to be not only friendly to Taras, but even deferential. It was too much!

  He slapped his palm on the table, making their glasses and cutlery jump. When Eva glared at him, he ignored her, signaling to an idle waitress.

  Eva took her strongest schoolmistress tone: “If you do not behave, Taras Olegovich, I am going to ask you to leave us. And I am serious.”

  “What’s the matter? I’m only ordering some vodka. I’m tired of this junk.”

  “And I’m asking you for the last time to be civil.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, then, why do you not speak to Marcus? He has asked several times about you.”

  “Sure, all right.” Taras turned and smiled millimetrically at the American. “So ask him how he comes to be here in the Far East.”

  “I already told you this. He came on the boat train from Yokohama to Nakhodka.”

  “Not how, why. What is he doing here?”

  Eva shrugged, then translated the question. Marcus listened carefully, nodding. Then, when the waitress brought the carafe of iced vodka, he reached for one of the small tumblers.