But of the elegant Mr Hardin there was no sign. Although, if she had studied the traffic closely, she might have seen him hunched in the back of a dawdling cab.
From Farragut to Lafayette and the desirable residence of the Chief Executive at 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. 20500 (Phone 456–1414).
But it was towards the little gold-capped church, looking jaunty today beneath high sailing clouds, that she looked.
Excitement, fear, guilt, embarrassment at her school-girl expectations. If I don’t see him then I am suitably reprimanded and in a few days’ time such absurd and unpatriotic emotion will expire.
He turned the corner of the church still managing to look elegant in a suede jacket with a cream shirt beneath, grey slacks and moccasins.
Do you wave? Shout across the broad avenue of traffic outside the President’s home?
Somehow he noticed her, waved hesitantly, charged the traffic rashly.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Say, you look great. Different somehow.’
‘Hallo,’ she said.
They grabbed desperately at receding words.
‘What a fantastic coincidence. I mean it’s unbelievable.’
‘It is,’ she agreed, ‘a surprising coincidence.’
‘Where are you going?’
Where was she going? ‘Nowhere in particular. Just looking around. And you—what brings you back to this place?’
‘This place?’ He grinned. ‘This place is the home of the President of the United States. And I do work just round the corner.’
‘Ah.’
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I almost didn’t recognize you.’
‘Didn’t you?’ she said, already pleased at what he was going to say. ‘Why was that?’
‘You really do look different. Wow,’ he added, ‘you look terrific’
‘Thank you.’ She realized that she hadn’t yet learned how to accept a compliment.
‘Were you about to sneak inside the President’s home?’
‘I was thinking about it. But I was too scared. It is very difficult to comprehend that I can go into such a place.’
‘Come on.’ He took her arm and she allowed herself to be escorted through the portals of the big bad baron.
A confusion of impressions. The East Room where Lincoln and Kennedy had lain in State; heavyweight chandeliers and a piano mounted on eagles. A shirt-sleeved guard with a military stripe down his trousers. Green Room, Blue Room, lustrous drapes and noble features frozen by the brush of portrait painters in the midst of their deeds and misdeeds.
Beside them two hippies sneered their way as far as the East Room, then cowered beneath the weight of history—faltered in this inhabited museum.
‘Is he here now?’ Natasha asked.
‘Who?’
‘The President.’
‘Maybe.’
She imagined him upstairs, dashing off a cable to the Kremlin, stuffing himself with Texas steak and french fries.
Cautiously he permitted himself a small joke. ‘This is your room.’
‘Why?’
‘The Red Room.’ And in case she should take offence he rushed on, ‘This is where the President’s wife receives guests. And those guys up there are Presidents McKinley, Cleveland, Coolidge and Wilson.’
‘But anyone could wander around here—even plant a bomb.’
‘I guess they could. Although these gentlemen here,’ he pointed at military-striped trousers—‘can smell a nut a mile away.’
‘Please?’
He explained as they reached the State Dining Room. Golds and creams and eagles and candelabra and Lincoln considering his responsibilities.
Outside again, he led her, unprotesting, to the lawns around the Tidal Basin where the fringe of Japanese cherry would soon bloom and die as swiftly as butterflies.
He sat down on the grass and she sat beside him.
‘This is very bad,’ she announced, permitting the badness to stay.
‘Why’s that? We’re not doing anything wrong.’
He took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket—they always carried them there—and lit one. The smoke broke into lace.
‘It’s difficult to explain.’ She examined the strolling office workers and determined tourists.
‘And why do you keep looking behind you?’
‘I don’t know.’ A habit, she supposed.
‘Tell me about yourself. What are you doing over here? On some sort of exchange programme, I guess. What part of Russia do you come from?’ He lapsed into Russian again, the persuasive Russian. ‘Come on, tell me about yourself.’
She sighed deeply, nibbled the sheathed stem of a blade of grass. ‘There isn’t much to tell.’ Evasion and trivia. ‘I’m the daughter of a diplomat at the Soviet Embassy.’
He choked, lungs full of smoke. ‘Well, a girl from the Red House.’
‘Please?’
‘The Red House—the opposite of the White House. What does your father do? And what are you doing over here? I thought they only allowed the kids to stay in the States.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it?’
‘I read my newspapers. Haven’t you got a place out at Chesapeake some place?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Black Walnut Point, I believe.’ She wondered if the grass would stain her teeth green. ‘You’re right about the children. They go to our own school here. Then just before they reach their teens they’re sent back to the Soviet Union to continue their studies. Just like American children in Moscow, I believe,’ she added defensively.
‘You’re very pretty,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’ Perhaps she should stand up and curtsey.
‘But what are you doing here in Washington?’ He returned to English.
‘It’s a complicated story.’ Compromising with honesty.
‘Will you be here long? I hope.’
‘I don’t know …’ She longed for access to the all-American girl’s phrasebook. A perplexing volume. Especially the language of flirtation which puzzled her because its purpose seemed mainly to be to antagonize.
In a drugstore downtown/uptown (she had no idea which was which) she’d been unable to resist the temptation to eavesdrop on four teenagers. One boy in blue jeans and combat jacket covering a ricket-thin body had made some remark about a baseball team called the Chicago White Sox. Worship of values that birth had denied him quivering in his voice. Natasha guessed that he had to make smart remarks to survive.
The girl opposite him (his girl? surely not) with long dull hair, baby breasts nippling her thin sweater, said, ‘Jesus, Brad, there you go again, man. What a load of crap. With supporters like you the White Sox don’t need no enemies. They must have been tickled pink when your ma and pa came to this dump.’
‘Ah, screw you,’ replied the thin boy affectionately.
The other girl, sucking Coke through a straw and tapping monotonously at a cigarette, said, ‘Show us your muscles, tiger.’
The second boy, stocky and brutal with thick-curled hair, stretched and belched. ‘Knock it off, willya,’ he remarked amiably.
The first girl regarded the thin boy balefully. ‘Jesus, what a jerk.’ Then suddenly she leaned across the table and kissed him with passion.
Natasha decided that they were children of the underprivileged proletariat. Although even Capitalists’ daughters seemed to beckon their lovers with insults.
Charlie Hardin stubbed out his cigarette and lay on his back, hands behind his neck. Boyish and more approachable than he was in his city clothes. Fair hair curled at the V of his shirt and his Adam’s apple looked vulnerable. Of his character, she thought, I know nothing. He has shown me nothing.
He said, ‘Can you come here tomorrow?’
‘I expect so.’
‘And the next day?’
‘I expect so.’
‘Then we have the present. The future can take care of itself.’
‘I suppose so,’ she said, wishing that he didn’t try so hard. ‘Do
you mean you really want to see me again?’
‘I would like that,’ he said carefully. ‘Very much. But, hell, today’s only just beginning.’
‘I have to get back.’
‘Why? You’re not working for the Reds—I mean the Russians.’
‘So we are the Reds to you?’
‘Just a word. Like we’re Yankee imperialists or something to you.’
‘We don’t care what you call us. It is quite immaterial. Always the Americans have been great ones for talking.’
He held up his hands, freckled and strong with a gold ring on the little finger. ‘Please, let’s not get involved in the Cold War. Look at the sky—it’s warm and deep.’
She examined his grey eyes; although you couldn’t tell character that way. There was a young crease on his forehead, a little hair on his cheekbones too high to shave.
He smiled uncertainly. She wondered if he was a dominant lover like Georgi had pretended to be. She didn’t think so, though perhaps he too acted the part.
She said, ‘I don’t understand you, Charlie.’
‘Why not? There’s not much to understand.’
‘Because you talk without sincerity. And yet you are not a shallow man.’
He searched for a cigarette, a diversionary and delaying tactic. ‘Maybe I am. Which proves I’m honest which is maybe better than being deep and interesting?’
‘It seems to me that you are not shallow.’
‘You sound as if you’re accusing. As if intellect is a crime.’
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘it is.’
An antique propeller-driven airliner lumbered over the snowcap of Jefferson’s rotunda hedged by cherry trees.
Natasha said she had to go and reluctantly Charlie said okay as long as she promised to see him tomorrow. They hadn’t talked about anything yet, he added, and he could become the biggest damn bore alive when it came to talking about architecture. Also he would like to take her into the country—Hagerstown way maybe—in his green M.G. (explaining what that was). Natasha agreed to meet him, caution overcome with an ease that surprised her, but said no she couldn’t go into the country because the embassy staff and their relatives were confined to a thirty mile radius of Washington and she might stray over the boundary by mistake. Already I have brought enough trouble to my father, she thought. He said fair enough, maybe they could do the Capitol tomorrow, and then see a movie.
She looked into his eyes, through the sun-touched iris, through the sun-contracted pupil into the dark cranial depths where the life and times of Charlie Hardin were filed.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why me?’
He squinted in the sunlight. Hand searching for a cigarette. ‘Why not?’
‘Because there are so many other beautiful American girls who would love to ride in your green B.G.’
‘M.G.’
‘Why me, Charlie?’
‘Because you’re more beautiful than any American girl I know.’ But he wasn’t looking at her when he spoke.
‘I’m going now,’ she said.
‘I’ll walk you to a taxi.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Please. I think I’ll walk part of the way.’ To analyse his dishonesty and decide whether she wanted to see him again because lies she could not accept in a man. Not a man that might matter to her. And her own dishonesty implicit in her silences, her evasiveness.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But be careful, Natasha. This is a dangerous city. Stick to the main streets. Only yesterday I saw a middle-aged woman robbed in broad daylight.’
‘Didn’t anyone stop the thief?’
‘I guess he ran too fast. In any case people aren’t in any hurry to go to your rescue. They tend to look the other way. In this and any other country,’ he added defensively.
‘But you saw him,’ she accused.
‘I was on the other side of the street. In my car.’
‘I see,’ she said, ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’
‘Till tomorrow?’
But she was walking away from him, full of her betrayal of Georgi here in this city of violence and deception.
Ten trees away the mugger leapt. One arm encircled her throat, and with his free fist he hit her arm just behind the elbow, stunning it. But she managed to hold on to her handbag.
She screamed.
‘Drop that purse or you get this knife right through your sweet ribs.’
She smelled his breath, sweet and pungent like liquorice. Smelled his sweat flowing with his own fear.
She kicked backwards with her new shoes, whimpering. Broad daylight. Jefferson. The Monument spiring the clouds nearby.
‘I warned you …’
She felt the blow through the mugger’s body. His grip slackened and she tore herself loose.
She saw Charlie Hardin’s fist swinging towards the man’s throat and shouted, ‘Look out, Charlie, he’s got a knife.’
Fist and knife missed. The mugger, unkempt and starved-looking, lunged again. Hardin sidestepped, catching the arm, breaking it with a snap, hurling the man forward in a crumpled half-somersault. He yelped and ran.
Hardin said, ‘You okay?’
‘Yes.’
He began to chase, gave it up after fifty yards or so. There were two or three other people around: no one paid much attention.
They leaned against a tree together. Comprehension of their plight assembled between them. Comprehension, not yet totally identified, of man’s infinite capacity of creating suffering and then immersing himself in it. The bears of the taiga growled, the prairie buffalo bellowed. Sunlight finding its way through the curls and wafers of emerging leaves played at their feet.
He reached out and touched her cheek.
Next day Nicolai Grigorenko was put on the first plane back to Moscow.
9
THERE was anger in the neat house in Alexandria that night. Anger young and guilty.
The house was one of half a dozen styles dispersed along the avenues of a subdivision within earshot of Highway 95. Mostly cosy red, some white pillared in suburban-colonial, others a little squashed, they seemed to be parked outside their cars. Garden lamps burned all day, squirrels darted and nibbled among the open-plan trees. Comfortable and secure. Except that, on Sunday afternoons, many an overweight car-polisher who had spotted the first two letters of RECESSION edging into the headlines wondered how many more working Monday mornings there would be.
In one such house—the most expensive style but by no means extravagant—Charlie Hardin argued futilely with his father. His father, he thought, should be planted on the lawn, a garden gnome unperturbed by summer storms or winter blizzards.
Also present were Wallace Walden, and Jack Godwin from the C.I.A. pulling a shred of tobacco through his teeth like dental floss.
‘To hell with it,’ Charlie stormed. ‘I’m not going through with it. She’s a nice kid. She doesn’t have to be involved in some crummy conspiracy that you’ve cooked up. And I don’t either.’
His father who had always shaved recently smoothed his hair—whitening healthily and smartly—and said, ‘Don’t talk like that, Charlie. Remember your promise …?’
‘I didn’t expect the job to be quite as immoral as this.’
‘Listen,’ said his father, lighting a cigarillo, ‘you wouldn’t have given a damn if you hadn’t been attracted to this girl. I know—I’m your father and I know at least a part of your mind because it’s mine. If this had been someone else’s girl and you’d been immersed in some other courtship you wouldn’t have had any scruples about what you did to her. You’ve got to think of it that way, Charlie. It changes nothing because you’ve gone soft on her. You know where your loyalties lie: I don’t have to remind you.’
‘Bullshit,’ said his son, unhappily aware of elements of truth in his father’s words. Go and get your hooks into this young Russian broad: then we’ll have an ‘in’. ‘Okay, so I agreed to do it because you asked me. Because there was no one in the F.B.I. who would take the part. But I was wr
ong. We’re committing a crime. An obscenity. Supposing,’ he suggested, ‘that this girl was your daughter?’
But he should have known better: he was the son.
Walden took over the paternal duties; one hand on the colour TV, the other holding his pipe like a pistol. A stratum of tobacco smoke lay like a table-cloth over the expensive simulated antiques in the room.
Certainly, he told Charlie Hardin, he understood his scruples—and admired them. ‘They’re rare commodities in the circles I move in, son.’
And it was a crying shame that he should have become the instrument of this particular intrigue. But had it occurred to Charlie that the Soviets might be playing a dirty game—that they might be dangling the girl as bait? Why had they brought her over?
‘To get at her old man,’ Godwin said, scraping at a scab of unidentified food on his fly.
Hardin senior handed him an ashtray for the tottering ash of his cigar—too late. Hardin said, ‘Why would they do that, Jack? Surely they had a bigger hold over Zhukov when the girl was in Russia?’
Godwin shambled across the room and poured himself more whisky from a glass decanter. ‘You’ve got me there,’ as if this were rare, ‘but my guess is that they haven’t quite got Zhukov where they want him yet. He hadn’t been groomed sufficiently when they shunted Tardovsky back to Moscow. Incidentally, I wonder which cobalt mine he’s down right now? Anyway, so they’ve got to soften Zhukov up. Playing the old hot and cold game. Starve the prisoner, then give him a meal, then starve him again. I figure they’re letting him have a good look at his one and only daughter. Then in a couple of months they’ll whip her back to the Soviet Union as quick as shit through a goose.’ He turned to Charlie. ‘I don’t want to be too brutal. But she is the daughter of a Soviet spy and you have agreed to help out your father and the bureau. Forget the architect and peasant girl crap. And just remember,’ he pointed a nail-chewed finger, ‘just remember that this little broad of yours might come from the virgin lands but she isn’t a virgin. We know what happpened that night in Alma-Ata. Right?’
Charlie’s hand tightened on his crystal whisky glass. ‘I know. There’s no need to bring it up.’
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