Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  Sasha sat absolutely still. It was even possible that this girl and Tanya were related, at the remove of a couple of generations.

  ‘Do you speak any Russian?’ he asked, trying to make it sound like idle curiosity.

  ‘No. My father spoke only English in the house. He said we were Americans and had no business thinking about the past. I think he wanted to forget what his own family had been through. He started in business pushing trolleys on Seventh Avenue. He ended up with his own fashion house. But he sweated for every cent.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Oh, she’s your archetypal Jap.’

  ‘Japanese?’

  Elaine burst out laughing. ‘Jewish American Princess. How long have you been in New York?’

  ‘Nearly two years.’

  ‘Jesus. And you haven’t heard of a Jap? You must lead a pretty cloistered life at the UN.’

  ‘Quite monastic.’ He smiled at her. The way he said it, and held her eyes until she glanced away, made it a frank invitation.

  She felt excited and unsettled, and reached for another cigarette. He struck up a match before she found her lighter. She liked his hands: strong, but with long, sensitive fingers, the nails perfectly groomed.

  The conversation turned to easy, commonplace themes. ‘I play tennis on the weekends,’ she told him. ‘And I try to go running two or three times a week.’

  ‘I run sometimes,’ he said. ‘To be alone. But I prefer less passive sports.’

  She met his eyes again. They were such a dangerous shade, a gunsmoke gray, and they held such an odd expression, in which she read recognition and puzzlement and boldness. They seemed to reach inside her. The sensation was scary, but not unpleasant. He knows me. The thought floated from nowhere to the surface of her consciousness.

  He was talking about playing ice hockey in Norway. When he turned the questions back to her, Elaine’s responses were a bit delayed, as if she was having a hard time getting across the court to return service.

  ‘Are you still with me?’ he said in his deep, vibrant voice. He let his hand rest on hers, and she started as if she had just received a charge of static electricity.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized.

  ‘I said I’d like to see you again.’

  ‘Of course,’ she responded automatically.

  ‘Perhaps I might call you?’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ She took the matchbook from him and scribbled her number inside the cover. ‘I usually get home around seven,’ she added, and instantly wondered why she had said that. Yet it seemed so natural.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to go,’ he said, tapping his watch. ‘I’d rather take you to dinner.’

  ‘But the UN never sleeps,’ she suggested.

  ‘Only the people who have to sit through the sessions.’

  He put his arm around her back as he shepherded her out into the street, and again she felt that faint electric charge.

  She found she had sucked in her breath when he said, ‘Shall I call you a taxi?’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m not scared of the subway.’

  He walked her to the steps and paused, among the jostling commuters, to squeeze her hand and kiss her lightly on the cheek. She watched him part the rush hour crowd like a curtain as he strode away, and tried to make sense out of her emotion. He hadn’t tried to make her right away. That was flattering — or was it? He hadn’t given her his phone number, which in her experience was a sure sign he was married. He was probably rushing off to meet his wife for dinner. But this was only the surface of things. There was a giddy sensation of plunging from a height. She ought to feel panicked by it, but she didn’t. It was like free fall, with the parachute there, primed to open. She had to remind herself that she didn’t have a parachute.

  *

  When the phone rang, Elaine was glad of the interruption. She had just about decided to tear up the story she was working on. The male character just wasn’t believable, even though — or maybe because — everything he said or did was recorded from memory.

  She knew the voice at once, with its hard E’s, and the odd way of suppressing the definite article. The man she knew as Alex suggested dinner with such solemnity that he might have been inviting her to someone else’s wedding. Which was the excuse she had ready-made.

  ‘I thought you’d given up on me,’ she said. It was more than a week since the meeting in Bloomingdale’s.

  ‘But I’ve been thinking about you. I’m afraid this UN business is very time-consuming.’

  ‘You mean, who gets the fishing rights to the North Pole?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t make it tonight. I have to go out to Great Neck. My sister’s getting married and my mother is going absolutely berserk.’ This was a half-lie. She wasn’t planning to go out until the following afternoon. But she had decided to pace herself. He hadn’t bothered to call her for a whole week, during which she had worked on convincing herself that this was proof that their encounter was nothing more than the circumstances might suggest: a casual pick-up in Bloomingdale’s. She hadn’t quite succeeded. Now she was suddenly breathless, walking up and down, holding the phone to her chest, fighting with the instinct to run out of her apartment and meet him anywhere he suggested.

  He mustn’t think she was available on demand, she reminded herself.

  He sounded disappointed. ‘May I call you next week?’

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  Alex still hadn’t given her his number. As a married man, he was running true to form. Don’t call us...

  The character in the short story she proceeded to rip up and throw in the garbage can had been married too. Their relationship had lasted longer than the others, almost six months. He was a handsome brute, and knew it, which should have warned her off at the start. But she had let herself get sucked in, until she actually believed that it was love on both sides. Then he had dropped the bomb; his wife had just delivered her baby, family duty called...

  As she finished shredding her typescript, she resolved not to get burned twice.

  So she drove out to Great Neck the next day and watched her mother fluster over last-minute arrangements while Barbara, her sister, coolly chain-smoked and pored over the guest list. Barbara liked designer dresses and Mercedes cars and did everything strictly according to plan. Ira, her intended, was a commodities broker with an affluent paunch who had managed to get her pregnant during the summer. Barbara hadn’t hesitated over the abortion. It would never do to disrupt the wedding plans, not to mention the holiday reservations in the Virgin Islands. In Barbara’s scheme of things, babies weren’t made; they were scheduled. Elaine had gone to the clinic with her sister, expecting a last-minute crisis of guilt. But Barbara went in and out as calmly as if she had gone to the dentist to have a tooth pulled. She might be able to schedule a baby next year.

  Looking at other people’s lives. Elaine sometimes felt diaphanous, directionless, scarcely formed. From the outside, the lives of others seemed so rounded, so complete. Often she felt envious. But with Barbara, she felt like a claustrophobe trapped in an elevator. Her sister had had her entire life boxed and gift-wrapped.

  The sensation of being stuck in an elevator became overwhelming during the marriage service, which took place in a vast reform synagogue with the dimensions of a conference hotel. After the ceremony, video cameras whirred while the hundreds of guests tucked in to a light collation of lamb chops, pastries, and canapes. Elaine’s mother, upstaging the bride in a figure-hugging white dress with ruffles, dragged up one prospective suitor after another for her unmarried daughter. All of them might have been Ira’s brothers; soft, prematurely old young men with receding hairlines who had clearly lived all their lives in awe of their mothers. One was a doctor, another a corporate lawyer. The only time Elaine managed a spontaneous smile was when the lawyer tripped over a trailing lead from the video equipment.

  A couple of hours later, everyone sat down to a five-course dinner, followe
d by dancing. Elaine saw her father watching her with sad eyes and went over to sit next to him. He had the leathery tan of a year-round resident of Miami Beach, but you could tell that his time was running out.

  He kissed his daughter and said, ‘Look at your mother. She could be the bride.’ His tone was wistful rather than sarcastic.

  Elaine watched her mother kick up her heels on the dance floor. The video cameras ground on relentlessly.

  ‘Ira’s a good boy,’ said her father. ‘He knows how to work.’

  ‘He never had to fight for anything,’ Elaine observed, staring at her father’s awkward, calloused hands, and thinking how comical he looked in a tuxedo.

  ‘What about you?’ her father was saying. ‘I worry about you all the time, living by yourself in the city.’

  She put her head against his neck. ‘I’m allright, Poppa. Really. I’m finding myself.’ The wedding party swirled around them, and she thought, No, not this.

  The following Tuesday, when Alex called to renew his dinner invitation, she said yes, rather quickly.

  *

  Sasha took the same precautions, meeting Elaine for dinner, that he would have taken before attending a clandestine rendezvous with Ibrahim or another agent. He left the Mission early, and spent more than two hours wandering the city, to ensure that he wasn’t under surveillance. The evening ended in Elaine’s loft, one enormous room with windows on three sides, littered with her collection of native American art and duck decoys. In bed, he was very conscious that she wasn’t Tanya. She was more practiced, more mechanical. She volunteered things that Tanya wouldn’t have done, things he would never have asked for. She must have sensed his surprise, because she said, when they were resting, listening to Roberta Flack on her stereo, ‘Is the missionary posture all that Norwegian girls know?’ He took revenge on her for that. The second time, he was sure that her cries weren’t faked.

  He left in the early hours, trying to reason with himself. This involvement was more stupid than Nikolsky’s affair with Maya Askyerovna. He couldn’t afford it. But the girl was already an obsession — in her resemblance to Tanya, and in the difference from her.

  There was a way he could protect himself. Elaine had told him she worked for X-Tech Corporation, which produced advanced data-processing equipment. He could recruit her as an agent. That would provide perfect cover for further meetings, quite apart from the fact that, working in the company library, she undoubtedly had access to all sorts of material that would interest the Center.

  No, Sasha told himself, I’m not going to do it. The visceral reaction came faster than he could analyze each of the steps involved. But he thought the whole thing through, not wanting to steer by instinct.

  If he reported Elaine as a recruitment prospect, he would have to concoct some explanation of how he had met her. That wasn’t a real problem; he could come up with something. But once he reported her full name — Elaine Frances Warner — her profile would be run through the Kontakt system. According to the rules, all foreign contacts had to have their names checked out in a centralized data bank, shared with the KGB. No doubt hundreds of names were entered daily, by Soviet operatives stationed all over the world, reducing the likelihood that any given individual would arouse much interest. There was still the risk that the people in the KGB would know — and maybe even try to take over the case for themselves.

  It was only an outside risk, he reasoned. But supposing the GRU approved the recruitment, and then decided someone else should handle the case, because he was involved in running Ibrahim and shouldn’t be unnecessarily exposed? Or what if they gave him the case, and he was posted back to Moscow? It had to happen some time, in two years at the outside. Then Elaine would be passed on to another GRU officer, with consequences that were beyond prediction.

  These were all perfectly rational reasons for not telling the Residency about the girl. But the beginning of the relationship, and what was happening now, were not rational at all. He couldn’t tell how or when it would end. But he wasn’t going to use or betray this girl. Because she was Tanya, and because she wasn’t.

  *

  In the months that followed, he saw her as often as he dared, never more than once or twice a week, never staying the night. He bought her little things: a scarf, a bracelet, a papier mache bird from Mexico that went with the brilliant colors of her loft. It was astonishing how little she asked of him, as if she sensed all the taboos that stopped him from giving full vent to his feelings. She hadn’t asked if he was married, and he was grateful for that. He felt sure she had guessed. But he would catch her appraising him when she thought he wasn’t looking. He tried not to ask himself how long it could go on.

  Lydia sensed something, of course, perhaps because he had been more attentive to her than before he met the girl. She released her own frustrations on other members of the Soviet colony, queening it over the wives of his GRU colleagues, and missing no occasion to pursue her idiotic feud with the Askyerovs.

  He came home late one night, after visiting Elaine, and found his apartment full of packages from Bergdorf s and Saks. Lydia was sprawled out on the sofa, with a fork in her hand and a plate precariously balanced on the arm. There was a half-empty bottle of wine on the coffee table.

  ‘Who do you think is going to pay for all this?’ Sasha erupted after examining the labels on the boxes and shopping bags.

  Lydia had her mouth full of chocolate cake. Her body had thickened since Petya was born. In the last few months she had put on weight at an alarming rate, and had used this as an excuse to buy a whole new wardrobe.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ Sasha persisted.

  ‘Why should you care?’ Lydia sniffed. ‘You know Papa will arrange everything.’

  ‘Don’t bring your father into this.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ she went on, ‘I can’t go back to Moscow without presents for everyone.’

  ‘You’re going to Moscow?’ Sasha echoed. He felt vastly relieved, though this was the first he had heard of Lydia’s plans.

  ‘I’ve already written to Papa. He thinks it would be good for Petya to spend the summer on the Black Sea, among real Russians. It won’t make much difference to you. You see little enough of us as it is.’

  She started attacking the cake again. It was another way of punishing him.

  ‘Lidochka,’ he said, mildly reproving.

  She finished the plate and stretched out on the sofa. Defined by the tight silk of the negligée, her breasts and thighs were like heaped pillows.

  She opened her plump, pearly arms to him and he crossed the room obediently.

  ‘I’m not so old,’ she said, putting on one of her little-girl voices. ‘Of course not,’ he agreed, smoothing her hair.

  ‘I mean I’m not too old to have another baby.’

  He froze.

  ‘It would bring us together, Sasha. Something’s gone wrong between us, and I don’t know what it is. Think of what Petya means to us.

  He let her tug at the buttons of his shirt, softened by the memory of the first sight of his child in its mother’s arms.

  ‘Let me think about it, Lidochka,’ he said, pulling slightly away.

  ‘Why not now? Tonight?’ She was fumbling at the buckle of his belt.

  ‘I’m not ready.’ He stood up, knowing that the words must sound brutal. She flew at him then, but her bewildered accusations quickly subsided into tears. He held her to him for a long time. Before dawn he had made love to her, taking precautions, and watched over her until her breathing was deep and regular. He watched the sky redden as he sipped strong black coffee. She’s not a bad woman, he thought. He didn’t love her, but he owed her better than this. She didn’t deserve to be hurt. The trouble was, he couldn’t help hurting her. All of them were going to be hurt.

  When he saw Lydia off at the airport, Petya was fighting and squealing. The boy wanted to stay with his father, and Sasha had to promise to come to Moscow soon before he would behave.

  Lydia said,
‘This time, I may not come back.’

  *

  A few days after Lydia had gone, Sasha proposed to Elaine: ‘Why don’t we go away somewhere for the weekend?’

  She took everything in hand. She borrowed her mother’s car and they drove out to the east end of Long Island, and stood under the Montauk lighthouse staring across the Atlantic toward Europe. They scrambled like children over the dunes and tried to skim pebbles across the choppy water. They drove back through the old whaling port of Sag Harbor and took the ferry across to Shelter Island, where they spent the night in an old clapboard inn, on an iron-frame bed that stood three feet off the ground and creaked like a Schönberg symphony.

  In the morning, she traced the contours of his face with her fingers, like a blind person, and said, ‘I only live when I’m with you.’

  He ached to tell her everything, but he could risk only a partial confession.

  ‘I didn’t tell you I was married,’ he said, watching her. She received the information as calmly as a routine weather report.

  ‘Did you think I didn’t know?’ she asked. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘We’re separated,’ Sasha said hoarsely.

  ‘What about children?’

  ‘I have a son, Peter. I love him very much.’

  ‘You’re not going to get divorced, are you?’ She squatted down on the beach and traced the arrowlike print of a sandpiper on the sand with her finger.

  ‘No.’

  She hugged her arms across her breasts for a moment, as if she were cold. Then she jumped up and cried, ‘Come on, I’ll race you!’ and they were sprinting along the beach.

  *

  Back in the city, Sasha went out with Nikolsky, pub-crawling up First Avenue.

  Feliks needed cheering up. He was worried about his case. Frick, the hack reporter, had done what he was asked: he had arranged a meeting with Hansen, the disillusioned former CIA man. But from the first moment Feliks looked into Hansen’s eyes, he sensed there was something wrong. He hadn’t gone in like a fool, leaving his backside exposed. Kostya was out there, covering him, making sure that nobody had them under surveillance. Everything seemed to be normal. And this Hansen was outwardly cordial, smiling and joking a lot. But there was no humor in those eyes; they seemed to reach out and grab you like fists.