Shift Delete

by Gary L. Rashba

  This was an irony of work trips. People at the office are jealous of what is perceived as glamorous international travel, but they don’t know about the time wasted connecting from airport to airport, the long monotonous flight stuck in an uncomfortable seat, lonely meals in restaurants or eating room service in hotel rooms while working, waking up at 4:00am with jet lag, with absolutely nothing to watch on television at that ungodly hour, keeping track of receipts and expenses for everything from tips to taxis, all which has to be documented in expense reports dealing with foreign currencies and varying exchange rates, and submitted within days after returning from the trip when hundreds of emails and other work awaits.

  Despite all this, the more he thought about it, he wasn’t dreading this trip. At least he would enjoy the company of an absolutely beautiful woman his first night in Moscow, and would have time to catch up with Dan Chaseman. His embassy colleague had a wife and a 4-year old daughter back in Virginia, having opted to go alone in order not to disrupt their lives by bringing them to Moscow, not that having the husband and father uprooted from the family wasn’t a disruption. That meant that Chaseman was generally available and happy to get together.

  Strange, he thought. I’m actually looking forward to arriving in Moscow.

  Before the pilot had even cut the aircraft’s engines at the gate, Parovsky watched as cell phones were activated all around him, the tell-tale beeps of incoming text and What’sApp messages and buzzing noises announcing incoming emails to their information-craved owners, now that they were back in physical contact with the world they disconnected from when the aircraft pulled back from the departure gate back in New York. Little do they know, he thought, that those “arrived safely” messages they were sending open the devices to prowling hackers. But even though he wanted to succumb to the temptation; hearing all those beeps and buzzes gave Parovsky the urge to connect. He resisted, of course, as he knew the risks and was under firm instructions not to power up his device. DCA’s website contained a “Tips for Travelers” warning about such dangers, but he was willing to bet this one was fully disregarded by the entire traveling public.

  With his brown official U.S. Passport, Parovsky sailed through ’s arrival process, then took a cab to the Radisson, where he received his electronic key card for the very same room he had had on his previous trip. Coincidence or not? he wondered cynically.

  He was in his room by 13:00, giving him a few hours to relax before meeting up with Alexandra for dinner. Planning in advance on an upscale restaurant, Parovsky dressed smartly in a Brooks Brothers dark European-cut fitted suit that he knew looked so much better than those baggy, oversized-looking suits worn by so many of his American colleagues.

  His white shirt was pressed to perfection, although it bore traces of being folded in his carry-on. He decided to forego wearing a tie. Parovsky looked at himself repeatedly in the mirror to make sure he was pleased with his appearance, taking care to pat down a few hairs that dared venture out of place. Outward appearance was of the utmost importance to him; at home he had a collection of hairbrushes to coax his coiffure into perfection each day before leaving his apartment. He looked good, and he knew it. His final preparation was a splash of Montblanc Legend cologne on his neck, which stung from his shave in the shower with his fancy multi-bladed Gillette razor.

  He had a vain streak to begin with, but tonight he was going to extremes, smiling at himself in the mirror repeatedly to ensure all was perfect. He was surprised with himself “I’m excited, and can feel my heart beating rapidly in my chest, and my palms are a bit sweaty.” With that input, he clicked off the Voice Memo function on his IPhone, confirmed once again that the phone remained on “Airplane Mode” and headed down the hall to the bank of elevators, checking his Rolex Submariner—a college graduation gift from his parents that still kept perfect time after a quarter century of use—to make sure he would arrive precisely at the appointed time.

  His excitement grew when he saw her in the lobby, decked out in a very form-fitting black sleeveless sequined mini dress that barely made it down past her shapely thighs, with high black leather boots. The dress she wore revealed her very toned and fit body, seemingly without a gram of fat or flabbiness. He found her fashionable-cum-slutty look absolutely stunning. She turned him on. He took both her hands in his for a moment as he took in her beauty. Her perfectly straight shoulder-length blond hair, almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, succulent lips, white teeth. What a perfect specimen, he thought. She was simply in a different league than the provincial and prudish American women he normally dated. He was surprised with himself, but he was intimidated by her, and that only added to her mystique, building his attraction.

  The luxurious restaurant the hotel concierge recommended was located in an old mansion and featured dim mood lighting yet a modern decor. A very attentive waiter wearing a tie behind his long white starched apron quickly brought them glasses of water and menus. Rather than focusing on the good service, Parovsky was put off by his two pierced ears, pierced eyebrow and neck tattoo.

  Parovsky and Alexandra managed to communicate just fine. Like most people learning a foreign language, she understood far more English than she could speak. Writing was always the greatest challenge, especially in this instance since the alphabets were different.

  They started off the meal with wine, which suited him. The alcohol made him feel more at ease, while also loosening his defensive mechanisms. Though he liked being in control, he had no choice but to let her order for them. He did fine with the black bread, cucumber and radish salad and borscht, but he wouldn’t try the little crepes with smoked salmon topped with caviar. He could eat sushi when he had no choice—and even enjoy it, but he was put off by the idea of eating fish eggs. Over dinner of meat dumplings and trout filet, Alexandra asked lots of questions about his job and work.

  “You know what I do,” he told her. This is fun, he thought as he intentionally kept his responses cryptic, confusing or ambiguous. Did she know English far better than she let on? Was she fishing for information, or just trying to make conversation? He revealed as much about himself as appears in his resume, which one could easily find on the internet. And given that she worked at Kostrinsky Labs—hosts for the recent conference where he spoke, he knew his details were readily accessible to her.

  Though he was still single in his mid-forties, he dated regularly and was well-versed at getting to know someone, although this was challenged by the language barrier. They laughed at the difficulties of understanding one another, and at each other’s stories. Throughout the evening, she grew more confident with her English, and her vocabulary sprouted as he also opened up more to her as he grew more comfortable, no doubt encouraged by the wine. It was challenging and exciting for him. This wasn’t just about sweet-talking a girl into bed, here he had to choose simple words and learn new words as part of the process, which he found himself enjoying while remaining focused enough to understand Alexandra. She learned that he was shy, which many people misinterpreted as snobbishness. His shyness was another childhood scar thanks to his shrink parents, who had something to say about nearly every utterance to the point that poor Elliot found it better to simply shut up.

  “Your country’s invasion of Estonia is causing me a lot of grief,” Parovsky said, hoping to get her talking.

  “It is too bad,” was all she responded.

  Parovsky noticed that Alexandra avoided talk of politics or anything official. When he told her he was in the country to meet with the FSB, the normally inquisitive girl didn’t ask a thing. Maybe it’s something ingrained from a society that once feared its secret intelligence services. Truth was she was too young to remember the fear of the Soviet days, when one never knew who the KGB informers were, so silence was golden.

  “I don’t even know how to get to my meeting. I’m to meet my FSB counterparts at Lubyanka.” It was all to get a reaction. Mere mention of the name Lubyanka could conju
re up memories of a terrifying past: a police state, imprisonment in remote gulags and torture. The name sent shudders down Russians’ spines, made them tremble and skip a heartbeat. Its reputation was that powerful. So how she could be so calm with the name Lubyanka “out there” on the table puzzled him. He figured this one would be etched in the Russian collective memory. These were memories that the two decades since the Soviet Union fell could not erase, despite the new name and more open approach of the new security organization. Must be her age, he explained away her indifference. He’d tried a final time.

  “FSB is in the same facilities as KGB, but don’t most Russians view them as more of the same?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and said nothing. Strange, he thought.

  After dinner, she suggested they go dancing, which she described by mimicking some dance moves for him. He found himself very much attracted to her, which her form-fitting black dress accentuated. He didn’t want to appear stiff and betray his age, but dancing just wasn’t for him. He always felt awkward and self-conscious when he couldn’t get out of dancing; feeling uncoordinated even though he moved with rhythm. Instead he suggested a drink back at his hotel lobby, which she obliged. When he put his arm around her waist as they walked, Alexandra looked down at his hand and then deeply into Parovsky’s eyes, smiled but said nothing as they continued walking.

  They sat at a quiet table in the dark lobby lounge where a female singer crooned Russian interspersed with Western songs. There was some uncomfortable silence until the waiter approached and asked Parovsky for his order. He looked at Alexandra, then decided on his own to go native, and ordered “vodka” and held up two fingers.

  “You understand?” she asked with a smile, her eyebrows raised with happiness that he was learning, or maybe knew more than he was letting on.

  “No. Not a word. But what else would a waiter be asking?” He winked at her.

  “To move to other table. This one taken!” She burst out laughing and made a feigned look of panic at his faux pas, until she smiled and told him she was joking.

  He tried to impress her by toasting in Russian. “Do dna,” he said, raising his glass. He had actually taken the time before-hand to learn a few key Russian words and phrases.

  It took her a moment to understand what he was trying to say, the way he massacred the pronunciation, but she was impressed that he had learned the “to the last drop” toast. They drank down the vodka. Alexandra caught the waiter’s attention and ordered another two. He slipped around to her side of the table, knelt beside her with his IPhone in hand to snap a selfie, but she turned away, putting her hand in front of the camera and said, “Nyet, Nyet.”

  “Why not? I want to remember tonight. I’m having the time of my life.”

  “You will remember tonight!”

  Elliot smiled at what he hoped she was suggesting, and her strange aversion to being photographed slipped his mind.

  The combination of wine over dinner, vodka, the sweet smell of Alexandra’s perfume and her beauty intoxicated him. I’m really starting to like her! This was far from being one of his porn flick fantasies: he could tell when his thoughts became gentler about a woman rather than thinking of her as an object or a prize to be had. But he knew himself well enough to know his feelings weren’t true. What could be safer than a relationship with a woman in Moscow to prevent him from meeting a like-minded Jewish woman from his own community and building a life together?

  When the next round of vodka arrived, they raised the shot glasses, she leaned towards him and said, “Za vstrechye.” He smiled before she even had a chance to translate.

  “To being together.” They each drank down the vodka.

  14. THE CARROT

  Parovsky began the day with two Extra Strength Tylenol caplets from a small bottle in his travel toiletry bag to help with the lingering effects from the previous night’s drinking. His companion, seemingly unaffected by the alcohol the two had consumed together the night before, insisted they spend the morning together until his afternoon meeting. They took a taxi to a pier where they could pick up one of the river boats running the Moskva River circuit. She insisted on treating him since it was to show him her city. He consented.

  After buying tickets at a small kiosk on the river landing, they boarded the boat, climbed the steep stairs to the upper deck and sat down on shiny blue plastic contoured seats. It wasn’t overly spacious, so their shoulders touched as Alexandra leaned close and excitedly pointed out sites of interest. “This Kremlin, you see?” pointing to the red brick Kremlin fortress. “Universitat. There. Far.” As she pointed to some buildings off in the distance. Parovsky wasn’t sure where, but played along. They cruised by golden domes capping church towers, Gorky Park with its Russian space shuttle, the former Red October chocolate factory. The weather in Moscow was balmy, yet Muscovites were out sunning themselves on the banks of the sluggish river, thinking this a beach day. She beamed with pride in her city and all it offered.

  The cruise ended and they headed towards the Metro at the Kievski Vokzal train station. He remembered a report warning to stay away from train stations. A suicide bomber killed 16 people the previous December at a train station in Volgograd, one of the biggest cities in southern Russia. The Russians had been combating Islamists in Chechnya since the 1990s. Parovsky remembered when Chechen terrorists had taken over the Moscow opera. While it wasn’t nearly as devastating an attack as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001, the opera attack was pretty serious stuff in the heart of the Russian capital. And that was far from the only blatant attack. There was a suicide bombing attack at Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport’s arrival hall that killed 37 people, suicide bombings in the Moscow Metro [maybe it isn’t such a good idea to travel by Metro either, he thought) and other attacks.

  Maybe the U.S. and Russia aren’t so different after all, Parovsky began to see. Each is fighting terror, protecting its own interests. While invading Georgia, Ukraine and Estonia may appear over the top, it is obviously in Russia’s interest. Critics of the U.S. might say that both Iraq and Afghanistan were unnecessary acts of aggression... He was beginning to hold a far less cynical view of Russia, and he was appreciating the city’s beauty, no doubt influenced by the beauty of the woman holding his arm and her enthusiasm for her city.

  At the appointed hour, Parovsky arrived by embassy car to the large yellow rectangular-shaped headquarters of the FSB at Lubyanka Square in the center of Moscow, watched by surveillance cameras as he approached. Uninterested armed guards paced the perimeter, smoking cigarettes. He had considered taking the Metro over in hopes of catching some more of Moscow’s elaborate subway stations, now that he had developed a bit of appreciation for the city, but decided an embassy car would be more official. Successor to the KGB, the FSB had assumed their headquarters, which was why he had suggested to Alexandra that the KGB merely changed its name and little else.

  He was directed to FSB offices in the less ornate gray building next door, where after getting badged in at the security station, he was escorted by a very Slavic looking security guard with prominent cheekbones and strong body odor to a Spartan conference room. A plate of coarse sugar-topped butter cookies was in the center of the chipped faux-wood table, next to a chilled bottle of water that was sweating and dripping down the bottle’s contours, leaving a small pool on the table.

  A small wooden stand on the table held miniature flags of Russia and of the FSB, the latter with blue and red rays shining forth from the FSB’s emblem. It reminded Parovsky of Japan’s World War II rising sun flag, and he thought it suited Russia’s resurgence.

  His mouth was dry from nervousness. He took a flimsy plastic cup from a stack on the table and poured himself some water. He now had a soaking-wet hand to contend with. Parovsky scanned the room for a napkin or paper towel, and then figured he was probably being watched, giving someone a laugh as he was forced to wipe
his wet hand on his pressed trousers.

  He felt it strange to be meeting people who he could imagine knew as much about him as he knew, figuring they might have hacked into his everything to get a sense of who he was. He wondered if they knew that in college he had once protested at the then-Soviet Mission to the United Nations in New York, holding signs and chanting, “One, Two, Three, Four. Open up the iron door. Five, Six, Seven, Eight. Let my people emigrate.” So much had changed since then, the whole perestroika story.

  FSB’s emblem was prominently displayed on a wall as the only decoration in the windowless room. He walked over to the emblem for a close look, eying the double-headed eagle. How ironic, he thought. If anyone were two-faced, it would be these folks.

  He wandered back to the table and sat down in one of the metal framed chairs in the middle of the long side of the table, leaving the head and other side of the table for his hosts. Not a moment later—as if they had been observing him, his hosts Stanislav Grigoryev and Andrei Bashlykova arrived. Though military officers, they wore civilian clothes, both men wearing noteworthy outfits. Grigoryev’s was an ill-fitting grey suit with a pink button-down shirt while Bashlykova wore a brown three-piece suit whose pants were about 2 inches too short, revealing turquoise socks with some cartoon character on them that looked like something he had taken from a child’s wardrobe. His shoes were brown yet the frayed leather belt he wore was black; obviously no one had ever run through the fashion basics with him. Parovsky, finding their attire almost humorous, was glad he had come dressed in his tailored suit; his superior dress gave him a sense of confidence and superiority.