“You are very provocative, Miss Chase. No, I mean, very beautiful.”
“Do you think I look Russian? From my Russian grandmother?”
“A little, yes. But you are not beautiful in way of beautiful Russian ladies. You are more something special.”
“My mother was said to look quite Russian, and I’m told I favor her greatly. Do you resemble your father, Mr. Chairman?”
He blinked his eyes, and looked down. “My father was killed in Revolution, in war against White Armies. He was Red Army officer. I remember him not at all.” He lifted his head again, letting a happier expression seep back into his features. “And as my father never came to be an old man, is now impossible to say if I resemble him.”
She poured and drank more vodka, digging into the hot spicy food. She was so close to him. It would be an instant’s business to drop some poison in his drink, or snatch up the knife beside her plate and plunge it into his throat, sawing and slashing until the neck was rendered an approximation of her father’s. The little goon men at the other two tables would be helpless to prevent her, and for that they would go to the gulags, or bloody worse. If they did not gun her down right there, she would also be in for bloody worse, bloody awful worse.
But that fate was not for her. That was no fit end for a Miss Porter’s girl. So she would sit here and munch her zakuski and swill her vodka and say her sweet little flirtatious lines so that Ramsey could spring his nasty little trap. Then she would get her sweet little czarist buns the hell out of this wretched, beautiful country.
She asked for more vodka.
“Have you traveled a great deal, Mr. Chairman?”
“In socialist countries, yes. In West, only Vienna and London. Oh yes, I was once also in Canada. In Ottawa, and Saskatchewan. Very much like Soviet Union. Big country, and cold.”
She drank.
“You’ve never been in Asia, Mr. Chairman? I thought I’d been to absolutely all the places that there are to be, but then it occurred to me I’d never been to Asia, not even Hong Kong. Have you been to Asia? To Hong Kong?”
“Not to Hong Kong.”
“Well, where in Asia were you, Mr. Chairman? Were you in Southeast Asia? Vietnam?”
“Miss Chase, there was war there with your country. We should not speak of these things. Let us talk of Moskva. In Moskva, I will take you on personal grand tour of Great Kremlin Palace.”
She turned away from him to look at the orchestra, and sip more vodka. They were playing an old song, bright, happy, and vibrant in one passage, sweetly sad in the next. Singers came on and sang it with great passion, a very small dark-haired woman doing the melodic solo.
“Is ‘Samara Town.’ Very old song.”
“‘Samara Town,’” she repeated, not pronouncing it right. She was having trouble pronouncing anything right now. She reached and drank more vodka. Through all the happy songs, she reached and drank. Through all the sad ones.
Woozy, she tried to set down her glass, but it kept falling over. And finally, so did she. The alarmed Griuchinov grasped her arm, but was far too late, not in time to keep her perfectly wonderful beautiful face from falling smash into her plate of zakuski.
Tatty awoke feeling so horrible her hotel suite might as well have been the torture chamber at Lubyanka Prison, or the drunk tank there, which might be much the same. It was only a little after six A.M., but she felt too sick to try to go back to sleep. With some struggle, she sat up. Someone had removed all of her clothing, every piece. But she could not possibly have been capable of a sexual act. Of any act.
She would be leaving Leningrad that day, that morning, by train, an arrangement made by Intourist and agreed to by Meadows, though she could not understand why. The trip was five hours by train, only an hour by air. Perhaps they wanted her to see a bit of the Russian countryside.
Her eyes focused on the distant darkened windows of the Winter Palace. Whether things went well or badly, she would not be returning to Leningrad, ever. What remained that she needed to see?
Emerging from her bathroom feeling not much better, she dressed clumsily, noting that someone had also packed all of her things for her. The hotel provided so many extra services, pistol removal, packing of things, stripping of clothes.
Gathering up her red coat, she went out into the hallway, closing the door too loudly behind her. The spasibo lady, as Tatty called the floor concierges stationed in all the hallways of Russian hotels, looked up, glowering. Tatty went up to her, and in fractured and slightly slurred Russian, asked if she had been on duty during that night.
“Da,” the woman grunted.
Tatty asked, as best she could, who had taken her into her room.
“Red-haired woman,” was the reply.
Tatty handed her her room key, as was required, and this time didn’t say spasibo.
Getting directions from the sleepy desk clerk, she stepped into the sobering cold outside and walked east along the embankment, turning left after two blocks. There was the last memorial in Leningrad that she had to see, a railroad station, the Finland Station. In 1917, the Germans had sent the exiled Lenin into Russia on a special train, as someone had said or written, injecting him into the body of Mother Russia like a bacillus. Here he had arrived, and here the disease had inflamed and begun to spread. The czar was doomed from that moment. Tatty walked back to a point where she could see both station and Winter Palace. This city was such a small stage for so much to have taken place, for so much horror.
The Moscow train was overheated and slow, the roadbed almost as bad as those of American railroads. Tatty and Raya Postnikov had been given a compartment on a wagon-lit that looked as though it might have predated World War II. The compartment was spacious enough, wood-paneled with wine-dark dusty curtains at the window sides and an actual upholstered chair.
Tatty lay on one of the worn plush seats, boots off and knees up, her head against the cold window pane. She had quickly tired of the scenery, which consisted entirely of snow and pine trees. “Don’t take photographs out the window!” party member Postnikov had warned her. What nonsense. Tatty could photograph exactly the same scenes on any Christmas tree lot in America.
Raya chattered in her heavy way about Moscow, all the important people she knew, and what grand things there were to see. Tatty responded only with occasional groans, wondering if some porter might be fetched to make up one of the bunks. Though they would be in Moscow by dinner, she desperately craved a bed. An empty one.
“Was very bad for you to get so drunk with chairman,” Raya said, lighting yet another cigarette. “He was very upset.”
“He didn’t seem to mind my getting drunk until I passed out.”
“He was being very nice to you.”
“He was putting his hand on my very nice knee.”
“Why do you drink so much, Miss Chase? A woman like you?”
Raya said it not as a rebuke, but with a discernible note of concern in her voice. If she’d been able, Tatty would have smiled at her.
“That’s a fine question coming from someone with a big slug of Stolichnaya in her hand.”
Raya looked down at her glass. “Sure, I drink, but I don’t fall onto table. Never with chairman of council of ministers and deputy general secretary of party.”
“Try it. You’ll like it.” Tatty giggled, then groaned again.
“Be serious, Miss Chase. You drink too much.”
“Normally I don’t, Raya. But this has been a very bad year. Very frustrating. Very sad. Very boring.”
“Not boring here, in Russia.”
“No, I’ll grant you that. I do worry about my drinking, Raya. I have reason to. My dear lovely mother died of alcoholism. She was only forty-nine. She began drinking the moment she heard about my father’s death and never stopped, all through her career as an actress. She was drinking the day she died.”
“I am sorry, Miss Chase.” Raya rose. She was wearing what was in Russia an expensive gray gabardine suit, with matching viny
l handbag. “Come on with Raya now. We go to dining car and eat. It will make you feel good again.”
As they left the compartment, Tatty forgetfully started to turn left, toward the rear of the train, until Raya grabbed her arm.
“Dining car is this way. That way is to private car behind us.”
“Private car?” said Tatty, trying to imagine such a thing in the worker’s paradise.
“Da. Very important Soviet official aboard.”
Tatty thought nothing more of that. She followed Raya meekly on into the dining car and was staggered by the heat. The Russians there, perspiring freely as they gulped and gorged, paid it no mind, but Tatty found it devastating. She was dizzy by the time they sat down.
“Ah,” said Raya. “They have kharcho, and lobio. Georgi food.”
“What?”
“Specialty of Georgia, where Stalin came from. Kharcho is a spicy meat soup. Lobio is butter beans in spicy sauce. You’ll like.”
Tatty nodded absently. Her mind was occupied with something else, a growing unhappy realization. Very important Soviet official indeed. The swine had affixed himself to her by rail car. After they returned to the compartment, there would no doubt be a rapping at the door and some servant or aide in the corridor with an imperious summons disguised as an invitation. Or worse, she might find him waiting in her compartment.
She was hopelessly unprepared for this now. There was no way to escape the train and no way to evade him while on it. If she refused him now, he might dismiss her as not worth the trouble and ruin Ramsey’s scheme completely. But if she came to him, it would be for nothing. Ramsey would have no cameras inside an unexpected private railroad car. The beast would quickly have his fingers over more than her knee and, even if she succumbed, she’d accomplish not a bit of what was wanted. She’d have to repeat this sordid scene all over again in Moscow.
She would not sleep with that man. Not for America. Not for her murdered father. Not for the butchered grand duchess. Good God, why had Ramsey given her that pistol? If she still had it now, she’d probably use it. To shoot herself.
Halfway through the spicy butter beans, a solution to her predicament presented itself, though not one of her intentional devise.
She closed her eyes, but that only made it worse.
“Raya, I …”
She put her hand to her mouth, trying to resist the rising awful urges. Not a chance. Moving in desperate lunges, she did manage to get all the way out to the car’s vestibule before disgracing herself. Raya, surprisingly helpful, came to her rescue before anyone drew near.
“Well, I suppose Chairman Griuchinov won’t be so interested in having me to his private railroad car after all,” said Tatty.
“What are you talking about? Very important official in private car is General Badim.”
8
There was no snow in Moscow, but it was colder. Meadows, wearing what looked like a sable shapka, greeted them just inside the station, giving Tatty a hug and a brush kiss of the cheek, then stepping back to pat her hand.
“Welcome, welcome,” he said, with much gushing. “Everyone thinks you were just fabulous in Leningrad, and the Soviet government is very, very pleased. They’ve given you the Maly Theater here. It’s quite an honor.” He moved them on toward the exit to the street. “We can drop Miss Postnikova off at Intourist and then take you on a little tour. Or, if you like, we’ll go directly to your hotel.”
“Please,” said Tatty. “Directly to the hotel.”
The car he had this time was much more elegant, a Lincoln. As she entered the back seat, Raya went around to the other side and heaved herself in, not wanting to ride up front with the driver, a mere servant. Meadows, once the luggage was put in the trunk, climbed in to the rear as well and there she was, held pinnioned by the large woman and the overly cologned and hand-patting male. She wondered if this was part of his Agency cover or if he actually was a fairy. The American foreign service, after all, wasn’t the British.
It was too hot in the car.
“Tonight,” said Meadows, “there’s a small dinner for you at the home of our deputy chief of mission. Tomorrow night, you’re to be the guest of honor at a really grand dinner given by the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and then Friday night the ambassador will reciprocate with a big bash for you at the residence.”
“No thank you.”
“Whatever are you saying? The ambassador—”
“No. I mean tonight. I couldn’t possibly go to any dinner. As Raya and the railroad porters will not so happily attest, I am ill.”
“Is true,” said Raya, with disapproval.
“Oh dear. The DCM will be crushed. Are you sure that after a little sleep …? He’s put together quite a little feast.”
“If you don’t stop talking about dinners and food I’m going to lunch, as we used to say at Smith, all over your pretty car. I want to be by myself tonight. In the unlikely event I should get hungry, I’ll get something from room service.”
Cresting a brick-covered rise, the car swept by a conglomeration of brilliantly floodlit Russian Orthodox church buildings, which Tatty remembered from her first trip as the Cathedral of Saint Basil the Blessed, remembering also that it had been ordered built by Ivan the Terrible and that they used to execute people and issue imperial ukases in front of it. No doubt Raya could and would tell her volumes more.
Now they were in Red Square, once known as Beautiful Square. It wasn’t beautiful, but it was awesome, a vast, bricked space that was the heart of Moscow, the heart of Russia. On one side was the floodlit art nouveau facade of the GUM Department Store; on the other, the dark, forbidding walls and towers of the Kremlin, huge illuminated red stars atop each. Prominent before one wide section of wall was Lenin’s mausoleum, floodlit, very squat and square and much smaller than she remembered.
The driver hurried on, gliding downhill. In a moment they were before the largest building Tatty had ever seen.
“We tried to get you into the National,” Meadows said. “It’s first class and certainly the most charming hotel in Moscow, but, when in Moscow, one must do as one is told. This is the Rossiya, the largest hotel in the world. The Russians call it the greatest. I think you’ll find it quite grand.”
She was given a room this time, not a suite. It was commodious, with an expansive double bed and high beautiful windows. Unfortunately they gave no view of the nearby Kremlin but instead one of the hotel’s inner court. It was of a breadth to match the hotel’s, and left the uppermost part of the windows filled with the night sky, but she felt confined and restricted nevertheless. The Rossiya had many of the aspects of a prison. The spasibo lady in this stretch of corridor was situated right outside her door.
On her first visit those many years ago, she had stayed at the Intourist Hotel in Gorky Street. Her room had been small, but it had looked out over the street.
There was again fruit and cheese in a basket on the bureau, no vodka this time but a bottle each of Armenian wine and Armenian brandy. A small card, printed in the Russian alphabet, bore the name V. Griuchinov.
She opened the wine, and found it execrably sweet and smoky, something to be drunk only in desperation. The brandy was nothing at all like cognac, but it was strong, and not unpleasant. She drank a glass, slowly, sitting on the bed, wondering when, and if, Griuchinov might call, then set the glass on the bedtable and fell back against the pillow. She had forgotten how many days were left of this ordeal.
The telephone jangled shrilly. She hesitated, then grabbed it up. It was a man’s voice, speaking gruffly and rapidly in Russian. She caught only one word, “Bystro!” “Hurry.”
Hurry? What for? Where? She asked the man to identify himself. There was a pause, then the word “Prostite.” “Excuse me.” Then he hung up.
Ignoring the angry grumblings and rumblings of her voided stomach, she poured another brandy. When it was finished, she let herself drift to sleep watching the stars in the upper window.
This time the telephone frig
htened her. She sat up, letting it ring, but the rings became insistent.
“Kto tam?” she said. “Who is it?”
The responding voice was deep, warm, and American, with a travel-worn Eastern accent. It was the most beautiful sound, she thought, she could possibly imagine hearing.
“Are you receiving stage-door Johnnies?” Spencer said. “If so, I volunteer.”
“Jack! Dear Jack. Where are you?”
“Downstairs. Though, in this hotel, that could be half a mile away.”
“I’ll be right down. No, I need some repairing. Can you come up? No, that won’t do, will it? I’ll be along as soon as I can. Is there a bar?”
“The Rossiya, I think, has three dozen bars. But to make sure we don’t lose each other, let’s meet outside the main entrance. The one facing Red Square.”
“Which is that?”
“Ask.”
Hanging up, she tore through her luggage until she came to her favorite cocktail dress, a green silk sheath with low-cut bodice. She couldn’t find her green shoes, only black ones. But it didn’t matter. This was Russia.
Stepping from the elevator and hurrying outside, she almost did not recognize him. Dressed in a long dark coat and black fur shapka, he looked startlingly Russian. Had she not let her glance linger long enough to notice his eyes and the familiar scar across his left cheek, she might have passed him by. How severe he looked. When Chesley had first brought him home, leading him by hand from her Jaguar up the front steps of the Chase house in Connecticut as she might some prize horse, Tatty had thought him not only the handsomest man in the known world but the most untroubled person she had ever encountered. He seemed to take pleasure from everything about him. He had been charming, effortlessly so, in everything he had said and done.
Now, standing in the shadows of the night, dressed in black cloth and black fur, he looked like some character from Dostoyevsky’s most maddened tale, a man of secret demons.
As he pulled off his hat, she threw herself at him, holding him tightly, pressing warm cheek against cold. He held her close as well, but there was a perceptible frailty to his grasp. Chesley had said something about his being ill.
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