Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  ‘It’s not First Avenue,’ Nikolsky commented, ‘but it’s as close as we come.’

  One of the militiamen looked at them speculatively, but they were in good hands, thanks to Pauk, who was trading favors with the Lesnoi’s head waiter. They were soon jammed into one of the booths, together with some Georgian black marketeers and the girls they had just picked up. The Georgians were friendly-drunk; it was debatable whether they had passed the aggressive stage or hadn’t reached it yet.

  When the militia finished clearing up the less favored patrons, and their drinks, the fun began. For five roubles the band would play the song you wanted. The Georgians were throwing their money around, and vodka and brandy flowed up and down the table in a continuous stream.

  Nikolsky called out to the band, requesting an Adrianna Chilintana number, ‘If You Don’t Work, You Don’t Make Love.’ The girl sitting next to him clapped her hands. She was pretty, with dark curly hair, big eyes, and a slightly upturned nose. Feliks was fishing around for money to give to the band leader. He came up with a wad of rouble certificates. The band leader looked nervous; there were still a couple of militiamen drinking at the bar.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll change it for you,’ the girl said. ‘I work in a beryozka shop.’ In a flash, she had pocketed Nikolsky’s certificate and given him its face value, ten roubles. It was worth several times as much, since it could be used in the hard-currency stores to buy Western goods.

  ‘Don’t you think there’s something wrong with the rate of exchange?’ Feliks asked indulgently.

  ‘Don’t get angry.’ She nibbled his ear. ‘We’ll settle up later.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Yelena.’

  ‘All right, Yelena. Let’s see what you’ve got.’ Feliks pulled her onto the dance floor, motioning for Sasha to follow with her friend, a pert little blonde who was giggly-drunk. People were swirling or teetering around, swapping partners, and singing along with the band loud enough to bring the roof down. Nikolsky nudged Sasha and said, ‘Kogo zgreb, togo yevyob. You fuck the one you grab. That’s the rule here.’

  Sasha ended up with Yelena. The blonde was all over Feliks. She had got his shirt part unbuttoned and was running her hand up and down over his chest. The Georgians had now drunk enough to get angry. One of them smashed his glass against the table and raised the jagged glass threateningly.

  ‘Leave this to me,’ Pauk intervened.

  In an instant, the two militiamen from the bar were kicking the Georgians out the door. When Sasha and Feliks emerged with the girls, they caught a glimpse of the Georgians speeding off in the white Mercedes. They seemed to be driving straight toward a massive oak, but veered aside at the last moment with a scream of rubber.

  There were lots of taxis waiting outside the Lesnoi.

  ‘But where are we going?’ Sasha said to Nikolsky as they all piled into one.

  ‘It’s all arranged,’ Feliks reassured him. ‘Chertanovo,’ he instructed the driver.

  But the man turned around, opened one of the back doors, and said, ‘You can walk, fuck your mother. I’m not going to Chertanovo.’

  It was on the other side of the city, one of those districts of faceless concrete apartment blocks that Nikita put up and were sometimes called, in his honor, Khrushchevi — a play on words between the name of the former Soviet leader and a term that referred to the riff-raff of Soviet society. The taxi driver’s reluctance was understandable. Chertanovo was a two-hour drive from Ismailovsky Park. Sasha wasn’t amused at the prospect either. ‘It’s late as it is,’ he began to point out.

  Nikolsky wasn’t going to be deflected. ‘I’ll pay for the round trip,’ he said. At the prospect of collecting double fare, the driver’s attitude changed dramatically. The blonde dozed off along the way, and only stopped snoring when Feliks started probing aggressively under her dress. Yelena complained about the distance, obviously disappointed that these well-dressed men were taking them out to the sticks. Feliks had to steer the driver block by block through the anonymous maze when they reached Chertanovo. The buildings all looked alike, and were set so far back from the roadway that you couldn’t make out the inscriptions on the street signs attached to the walls.

  ‘What do you expect?’ Nikolsky said. ‘This is Bangladesh.’

  The apartment was cramped but pleasantly furnished. There were African initiation masks in the hallway, fancy wallpaper and drapes that must have been ordered from a duty-free catalog, and a svelte, powerful Scandinavian hi-fi in the living room, which Feliks immediately identified as the Transit Hall. You had to go through the living room to get to the bedroom, which was done up in soft pastels, with a huge, gilt-framed mirror above the bed. Nikolsky sent the girls out to the kitchen to fix drinks and snacks, while he picked up some of the debris. There was a pile of soiled sheets on the floor in the bedroom, which he started stuffing into a closet.

  ‘We have six sets of sheets,’ he explained to Sasha. ‘There isn’t always time to go to the laundry.’

  He opened a drawer in the bedroom dresser and showed Sasha pack upon pack of American-made condoms, in every conceivable shape and color.

  ‘Souvenirs of Manhattan,’ he said.

  Moscow’s contraceptives factory was notorious for the poor quality of its products. The women said they weren’t reliable; the men said they were so thick it was like having sex inside a raincoat.

  ‘Whose apartment is this?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘Someone in the Service, a friend of mine. What’s the matter? Are you looking for bugs? You needn’t worry. To install mikes in the apartment of a member of the Committee, you need the authorization of Chairman Chebrikov, no less. So you see, you’re in the safest place in Moscow. Thank you, pussycat.’ He took a drink from Yelena’s friend, the blonde, and slapped her rump. ‘When my pal was assigned overseas, he wanted to hold on to this place. So I arranged to rent it from him for the princely sum of twenty-five roubles a month. All the same, I’d like someone to share the expenses. Can I count you in?’

  Nikolsky tossed off his drink without waiting for a response. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you the grand tour.’

  There was a poster on the wall in the kitchen, showing a bum in tattered clothes with the inscription ‘Never Trust A Man Who Doesn’t Drink.’

  Sasha could see the potential: a safe house in Moscow.

  ‘And six sets of sheets,’ Feliks reminded him. ‘They’re included.’

  ‘What about the french letters?’

  ‘Ah, they can’t be sent to the laundry. They’re optional, as American car dealers say.’

  Nikolsky was drinking faster than Sasha had ever seen him drink, and his mood shifts were vertiginous. One minute, back in the Transit Hall, he had the blonde on his lap; the next, he had packed both girls out to the kitchen again to prepare fresh supplies.

  ‘You’ll find everything there, including aprons,’ he called after them.

  ‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’ Sasha said to him.

  ‘Come on, General, pour the drink and stop fucking around. It doesn’t matter. It’s all shit.

  ‘Everything’s shit,’ Nikolsky repeated. ‘But I have an idea how to get out of it.’

  He didn’t finish, because the girls were back. ‘I’ll do you a favor,’ he told Sasha. ‘Tonight, you can have the bedroom. This one’s so far gone’ — he mauled the blonde demonstratively — ‘that she’d do it standing up in the hall, if she could stand.’ Indeed, the little blonde’s eyes were unfocussed and one of her false eyelashes had come unstuck and was crawling down the side of her cheek like a hairy spider.

  When they were alone in the bedroom, Yelena wanted Sasha to put the lights out, and their love-making was urgent and impersonal. He thought of Elaine, and after, he wondered who Yelena had been thinking about. He woke up a couple of hours later with the feeling that a corpse was walking barefoot down his spine, and found that the girl had appropriated all of the covers. He had to go through the Tra
nsit Hall to get to the bathroom — the main disadvantage of Bangladesh. In the half-light he could see the blonde curled up on a sofa, snoring away. He could also see where the draft was coming from. The door to the balcony was open, and Feliks was leaning over the railing, his cigarette aglow, staring out at the lights of Moscow.

  Sasha had wrapped one of the sheets from the closet round his waist. He pulled it up over his shoulder like a toga, and went out to join Feliks.

  ‘You remember what the siren Calypso said to Ulysses,’ Nikolsky said in a low, dreamy voice, as if in the midst of a recital. ‘She offered him immortality if he would forsake the land of his fathers. He chose to return to the land of his fathers.’

  He turned to Sasha. ‘I bet you don’t even know what I’m talking about,’ he said bitterly. It’s all right for you. You’re made of titanium. You’re indestructable.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Sasha said quietly.

  Jerkily, Feliks told him about his recall from New York, about how the Hansen affair had caused a scandal, and how Drinov was still after his blood. He explained how frustrated he was with his work at the Village, and with the whole atmosphere in Moscow. He was less than coherent. He strayed off and started talking about the funeral of his hero, the balladeer Vissotsky, who never won the approval of the Union of Writers but had half of Moscow, according to Nikolsky, out in the streets to mourn his death. Feliks had been there too. He described a sea of flowers, and hardened militiamen getting off their horses and joining the crowd.

  He started to croon one of Vissotsky’s songs: ‘Why is it the bird, never the bullet, that is stopped in mid flight?’

  While Sasha was still wondering what any of this had to do with Calypso, Nikolsky said, ‘There’s a chance they’ll send me back to London. If they do, I’m not planning to play Ulysses.’

  Sasha was shocked. He and Feliks had been able to talk frankly since they became friends, but now the man was admitting that he was contemplating the worst crime imaginable under the Soviet system: defection to the West.

  Nikolsky took a deep breath and clutched his hand to his chest. ‘Could you get me some water?’ he gasped.

  He said, ‘Tachycardia,’ when Sasha returned with the glass. ‘Rapid heartbeat. If we were in America, I’d be on Valium, like all those anorexic female executives.’

  ‘Have you been to a doctor?’

  ‘What’s the point? The problem’s up here.’ Nikolsky cocked a finger against his temple.

  ‘You haven’t told Olga about this — this idea about Calypso,’ Sasha said, slipping into the same euphemism.

  ‘Of course not. You know her. She’s old-fashioned.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I want you to do,’ Sasha said. Like many men with natural authority, he tended to lower his voice when he was issuing instructions. ‘I want you to get some sleep, give your liver some time to work — assuming you’ve still got one. In the morning, we’ll talk.’

  When Sasha woke up, it was mid-morning on Saturday, and his curly-haired girl had long gone. He found her name and telephone number on a slip of paper on the pillow next to his head. She had vanished like a dream-tiger; he could remember the contours of her body in his fingertips, like a blind man, but not her face.

  ‘They took the bus,’ Feliks announced when Sasha wandered out into the Transit Hall. ‘They had to go to work in the beryozka store.’

  Nikolsky seemed at least partly recovered, perhaps because of the bottle at his elbow. ‘Opokhmelitsya,’ he proposed. ‘The hair of the dog.’

  Sasha shook his head. This didn’t deter Feliks. What could?

  ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ Nikolsky said, once suitably fortified.

  ‘Why be sorry? Yours looked nice.’

  ‘I mean what I said. I must have overdone it.’

  ‘I really don’t remember.’

  Feliks stared at him before saying, ‘Thanks.’ He quickly added, ‘I was so caught up in my own self-pity I completely forgot to tell you what I’ve been saving up for months.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘You remember back in New York, you asked me to find out about somebody, a member of the Committee?’

  ‘Topchy.’ Sasha inserted the name.

  ‘Well, I’ve met him. In fact, we’ve become quite friendly.’

  What little color was in Sasha’s cheeks drained off completely. ‘Perhaps I’ll have that eye-opener after all,’ he said.

  ‘It started at the racetrack.’ Nikolsky recounted how he had met Topchy at the Moscow Hippodrome, and arranged several get-togethers since, always ending up at the bar of the Bega restaurant or a nearby hotel. Topchy had come to regard him as a dedicated race-goer and a source of delightful gossip on the goings-on at the Village.

  ‘Topchy’s a big wheel in the Third Directorate now,’ Nikolsky went on. ‘A deputy chief, no less. And he’s well connected, Sasha. He’s got his own line to Askyerov. They were in Baku together, and Topchy knows where all the bodies are buried. He boasts about it, after a few drinks. He says he’s a man on his way to the top. But you’ll never believe the next bit. Do you know what he said to me, Sasha? He said he’d like a man like me on his staff. He told me that if I ever got fed up with the service, he’d have a job for me back at the Lubyanka, with lots of time to go to the track. How do you like that? He actually asked me to leave the service to go and wallow in that cesspool!’

  Sasha didn’t say anything for a long time. He experienced a storm of conflicting emotions. There was the hot desire for revenge, now he had located his father’s murderer. There was the cooler hunter’s instinct that said: Stalk him, wait for a clear line of fire. There was his reaction to his friend’s confession in the middle of the night, now shaping itself into a proposal that would dovetail perfectly with the plan he had begun to perfect since he had joined his father-in-law at Gogol Boulevard.

  He said to Feliks, ‘I think Colonel Topchy has done us a favor. Why don’t you arrange to work for him?’

  ‘You’re not much of a comedian, Sasha.’

  ‘But I’m perfectly serious. I just remembered what you were saying last night. Suppose you could have the beautiful Calypso and still live in the land of your fathers?’

  *

  The great warren of yellow buildings that made up General Staff headquarters sprawled along Gogol Boulevard, facing the writer’s monument and an island between the lanes lined with birches and maples where pensioners came to sun themselves and play chess. On the other side, facing the river, was a huge communications tower with a forest of aerials and satellite dishes. A few of the townhouses where Tolstoy’s counts had held balls and banquets survived along the boulevard; some had been subdivided into officers’ flats. Most of the old Arbat district had fallen to the wrecker’s ball in Khrushchev’s time. His architects had redesigned the center of Moscow as if no one would own a private car; along the broad, bustling expanse of Kalinin Prospekt, which Sasha could see from his window, there was not a single parking space. One of the clues to Sasha’s new status was that, with his official license tag and his special sticker, he could always command a parking space on the river side of the General Staff building.

  Sasha hurried up under the mock-Grecian pediment of the entrance on Frunze Street, and soldiers wearing the red patches of the special Guards Company gave him a brisk salute. He was slightly later than normal, after his night out with Feliks, and he paused only briefly in his own office to check for messages and to leaf through the daily intelligence summary from the Aquarium. He was supposed to report to Zotov before he left for a meeting of the Defense Council.

  The corridors on the Marshal’s floor were as wide as a whole railway compartment, spotlessly clean, lit by fluorescent strips. The massive oak doors of the Marshal’s suite were covered in black padded leather, a traditional device to screen out eavesdroppers that had been much favored in Stalin’s time, when the building was constructed. But even through the padding, Sasha could hear the boom of his father-in-law’s voice. The Mars
hal was not in a good humor.

  ‘And where were you last night, fuck your mother?’ Zotov greeted him. ‘This is a twenty-four-hour job. I didn’t hire you to run around Moscow chasing skirts.’

  Sasha began to make excuses, but Zotov cut him short. ‘I don’t have time for that now. Are these figures accurate?’

  Sasha examined the report from the military command in Kabul. It stated that more than four hundred Soviet soldiers, including a lieutenant-general, had been killed in a single week.

  ‘They’re accurate,’ Sasha confirmed. ‘The worst of it was that ambush near the Salang tunnel.’

  Zotov grabbed the document away from him and read out the numbers of trucks, tanks, helicopters, and planes that had also been destroyed. ‘And another battalion of fucking Afghans turned their weapons over to the bandits,’ he wound up. ‘Have you finished that draft?’

  Sasha gave it to him. He had been ordered to polish a contingency plan the Marshal had prepared, involving major strikes against rebel sanctuaries in Pakistan and the doubling of Soviet forces in Afghanistan itself.

  ‘Are you going to present this today?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘The boss still has to approve it,’ Zotov said impatiently. ‘He’s still treading water, like everyone else.’ He respected the Chief of Staff, but thought he was too much of a politician. Zotov also wanted the job for himself. If they retired the aging Defense Minister and gave the Chief of Staff that job, the way would be clear for Zotov. But, like much else, these decisions had all been left pending while the city discussed the stories about the General Secretary’s health.

  ‘There’s nobody at the wheel,’ Zotov said in disgust. ‘We’re getting all the weapons systems we want, no trouble about that, but we’re not allowed to use them. Look at the opportunities we’re missing. Look at the Middle East. We can put our hand on the oil faucets if we only have the guts to reach out and do it. Look at what we’re letting those bloody Pakistanis get away with. Look at these cruise and Pershing missiles the Americans are about to deploy. We were told it was just a political question, we could stop it by psychological warfare alone. Well, we saw all those hippies hold their rock concerts’ — the Marshal didn’t much care for demonstrators, even when they were anti-American — ‘and where did it get us? The missiles will start arriving in a matter of weeks. We need to do something to scare the shit out of the Europeans.’