by Alina Adams
Bex shook her head and said, "Yes," feeling a bit like Francis with his ability to contradict his own self, then added, "He did defect in 1977, that's right. But he defected after the World Championships. Well, actually right at the World Championships. The ones where he won a Bronze Medal. That was 1977. Francis and Diana both said so. So he couldn't have been a member of the 1977 U.S. World Team. This pin can't be his."
"Does this matter?" Sasha asked.
"I don't know," Bex admitted. "But if it's not his pin, whose pin is it? And why does he have it?"
"Perhaps he is good friends with somebody who is on the American World Team in 1977," Sasha suggested.
"Perhaps," Bex agreed. And then she added, "You know who might have the answer to that question? The only 1977 U.S. World Team member currently in Moscow. Gary Gold."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Bex questioned Gary in her usual, low-key manner.
She thrust the pin in front of him and asked, "Do you know what this is?"
She'd ambushed Gary as he was exiting the hotel restaurant, Moscow Nights. Upon spotting him through the window, sitting there alone, peacefully chewing his Chicken Kiev and drinking a glass of white wine, dressed, like always, in a freshly pressed, dark suit and dapper yet subdued tie, wiping each corner of his mouth with two, gentle taps after each bite and/or sip, Bex's first instinct was to burst right in, grab the seat across from him, and talk turkey... er... Chicken Kiev. But there was something unapproachable about Gary. It wasn't that he was frightening, like Valeri Konstantin, or weird, like Lian Reilly, or even inscrutable, like Jordan Ares. Gary was simply... serene. You not only couldn't rock his boat, you didn't even want to. Bex imagined that all Gary had to do was simply point his tranquil gaze at an interloper, and said interloper would fly backwards, as if hit by a mighty wind. His equanimity was that impossible to breech.
And so Bex fought her urge to tackle him at the table. She was very impressed by her newfound maturity.
That lasted only as long as it took Gary to finish his dinner.
As soon as he was out the door, Bex was out of patience. Telling Sasha to play interference with anyone who might think to interrupt her stalking session, Bex planted herself in Gary's path. And showed him the pin.
Gary took it out of her hand, holding the quarter-sized object up to the light for a better view. He held the golden pin between his thumb and forefinger, examining the back, examining the front, before handing it back to Bex.
And then he asked, "Have I suffered a head injury, Miss Levy?"
The question was so odd, Bex felt grateful for the couple who, at that moment, came out of the restaurant door and were forced to step between her and Gary. It blocked Bex's view of Gary. But, it also blocked his view of her. Which was good. Because she didn't need him seeing her looking totally stymied. That would be unprofessional.
Finally, Bex gave up. Allowing Gary to be courteous and lead her away from the door so as not to impair anyone else's passing, Bex paused under a fake fir tree, festively decorated with glass balls, silver tinsel, and tiny Santa Claus puppets—not for Christmas, but for the Russian New Year. Which bore a striking resemblance to the Christmas that had been outlawed under the Communists (religion, Karl Marx warned, was an opiate of the masses).
Bex said, "I'm sorry, Gary. I don't understand your question."
"You asked me whether I knew what the object in your hand was. It is clearly a pin from the 1977 United States World Figure Skating Team. Since that is obvious from the fact that the words: 1977 U.S. Figure Skating Team are emblazoned upon its front, I can only assume that this is either a trick question, or that I have recently bumped my head and you are trying to ascertain whether or not I am cognizant."
Bex said, "You're overthinking this."
"Perhaps it is you who would like some time to rethink your question."
They were in a fairly isolated comer of the hotel lobby, shielded by the restaurant door on one side, and the fake fir, complete with cotton mounds of snow, on the other. The only people Bex could imagine approaching them at this time of night were lost drunks or Santa. And Sasha had orders to shoot either of those on sight
So she felt safe asking Gary, "Do you have any idea whom this pin belongs to?"
"Igor," he said without a moment's hesitation. "Or, at least it belonged to him in the past. I saw him wear it numerous times to competitions, on his lapel. He called it his good-luck charm."
"But it's a 1977 U.S. World Team pin."
"Once again. Miss Levy, I refer you to the fact that such information is clearly printed on the front. You are not making any earth-shaking discoveries, I am afraid."
"Igor"—Bex tried to keep her temper in check—"did not become a member of the U.S .World Team until 1978; he defected at the 1977 Worlds. This pin can't be his. I mean, it couldn't have been his, originally."
"That is correct."
"So my question is, do you know whose pin this was, before Igor got it?"
"Yes, I do."
"Do you feel like telling me, maybe?" Bex was practically jumping up and down now, crunching the cottony snow and causing the ornaments to shake nervously.
Gary sighed. He looked Bex in the eyes. And he said, "The pin was once mine."
Bex stared right back at him. It was the only thing she could think of to do. Well, actually it was one of two things. The other was to blurt out, "Say what?"
"The pin was once mine," he repeated, just as calmly. "I gave it to Igor once." He paused, reconsidered. "No. That is not precisely true."
"You mean he stole it from you?"
"Igor Marchenko"—Gary pronounced each syllable with great care—"stole my professional career. My national title. My chance for an Olympic medal, and money that should have gone to support an American skater. But, no. He did not steal my pin."
"Then how did he get it?"
Gary sighed again. Bex wondered if she was boring him. He asked, "Were you even alive in 1977, Miss Levy?"
Bex shook her head, feeling guilty, though she wasn't sure for what.
"In 1977, I wouldn't say that the Cold War was at its zenith—that may have been the 1950s, when everyone expected nuclear war to come at any second—but, in 1977, the Cold War was certainly at a pressure point. The Soviets had endured several very high profile, very embarrassing defections. Nureyev in 1961, Stalin's own daughter in 1967, Baryshnikov in 1974. They were... unusually... eager to prevent history from repeating itself. To that end, all of the Soviet skaters at the 1977 World Championships were watched every minute of every day. And night. Their coaches and team leaders, if they were not actual KGB members, were at the very least, informers. They reported on the athletes because they knew it was their own future on the line should anything inappropriate occur. Igor's coach, Alexandr Troika was his name, took the directive to contain his skater, I believe, a bit more to heart than most. It was freezing in Moscow that February. Well, I suppose it is freezing in Moscow every February, but I can only speak to the ones I have personally experienced. Naturally, the skaters' hotel had no heat. I understand that was par for the course, then. The maintenance staff kept promising us it would be fixed soon. It was never fixed. We spoiled Americans slept under specially imported blankets and in our team's uniform parkas to keep warm. Igor, on the other hand... Igor's coach wanted to make sure that Igor would not go outside unsupervised. So he locked away Igor's jacket, his boots, his gloves, his hat, even his street shoes. He left him one pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt, and bedroom slippers. In a Moscow winter, in a hotel with no heat, that was all he allowed Igor to have."
"Wasn't he afraid of Igor getting sick before the competition?"
"It was not his chief concern," Gary replied. And then, without any sort of shift in his tone, he, just as matter-of-factly told Bex, "But I could not allow Igor to go out into the street like that. He was willing to. He was that eager to defect. But, I could not let him do it. I gave him my jacket. Not the team jacket; he would be too quickly recognized
as not belonging. But I gave him my own jacket that I had brought, just in case. I gave him my boots, my gloves, my scarf, my socks. Otherwise, I was certain he would freeze to death before reaching the American embassy."
Bex couldn't believe what she was hearing. "You? You were the one who helped Igor Marchenko escape the hotel?"
"I merely loaned him some warm clothes. Igor was the one who dared to stuff himself down the garbage disposal and onto the street."
"You never said a word about it! Neither did he!"
"What was there to say?"
"All those years the press was writing about you two being rivals—"
"We were rivals."
"But you saved his life!"
"And what should that matter? We were rivals for the U.S. Championship. Everything else was an irrelevant detail."
"You always said you thought the USFSA shouldn't have supported Igor, especially not financially. You signed a petition to Congress to keep him from getting his citizenship. But you're the one who facilitated his defection. If you hadn't helped Igor, he might have never come to the U.S. He might have never taken your career."
"That, too, is an irrelevant detail."
"Is it because you didn't think he'd be allowed to skate in U.S.? Is that why you helped him? Because you didn't expect him to take your place?"
"I did not think about it." Gary was peering at Bex as if she were particularly and uniquely dense. "I saw a person who desperately needed help. Whose life was in literal danger. I did not think about whether I liked him or not. I did not think about what might happen to me down the line if I helped him. I certainly did not think about skating. All I did was—"
She understood.
She said, "All you did was grab Igor by the back of the collar and hide him under the bed until the Nazis left the courtyard...."
Gary stopped peering at Bex as if she were particularly dense. He nodded. And then he even smiled.
"Yes," he said. "I am not a Nazi, Miss Levy. Which is more than can be said for that coach of Igor's. Taking away his clothes was only the tip of that particular iceberg. The night of the men's long program, after Igor had won the Bronze medal, I walked into the men's bathroom at the arena, and I watched Troika beating Igor with his own medal. It was solid. It was heavy. And he was hitting Igor about the face and neck, hard enough to leave black and blue bruises. He was screaming that Igor had not skated the best he was capable of. That he deliberately disgraced the motherland. Igor was taking it all, too. Until I walked in. A teenage boy can put up with a lot of abuse. But not when another teenage boy is there to see it. Igor was so embarrassed to have me witness his humiliation, that he began screaming at Troika, fighting back. I did not understand what he said, they were shouting in Russian, but I certainly understand what Igor was trying to convey when he took his Bronze medal and flung it into the toilet."
Bex already knew this part of the story, courtesy of Shura's earlier, "Shit! Shit! Shit!" denunciation. But she still gasped.
Gary said, "I thought Troika was going to kill him then. He had his fingers about Igor's throat and he was banging his head against the bathroom stall. I had to pull Troika off him. I screamed that I would get the ISU officials, and that calmed him down. Or at least brought him to his senses. He left the bathroom, still screaming at Igor. That was when I offered Igor my coat and my boots. Because this was no longer some abstract, political cause. It was a true matter of life and death.
"Oh." Gary chuckled. "And I also encouraged Igor to fish his medal out of the toilet and take it with him. Troika or not, it was still a great achievement to win a Bronze medal at the World Championship. I told him he would want to have it someday. And now... now that Bronze medal hangs in the USFSA museum, right next to the Gold Igor won for America at the Olympics, and the three National titles he won from me. Ironic, isn't it?”
Bex didn't know what to say. She really only had one more question. "The pin?"
"Yes?"
"How did Igor get your pin?"
"Oh, that." Gary waved the question away as not being worth the discussion. "It was in the pocket of my jacket. I did not remember that when I gave it to him. He wore it as a good luck charm. Though, once, he did ask me if I wanted it back." Gary smiled again at Bex. "I told him to keep it. After all, 1977 proved a much luckier year for him in the end than it did for me, wouldn't you say?"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bex said to Sasha, "If my life were easy, that pin with the wrong date on it should have led me to Igor's killer. Leopold and Loeb, you know, they were caught because one of them dropped his eyeglasses at the murder site. Why couldn't this have been the same deal? It would have been so perfect! And, most importantly, it would have been over!"
They were sitting on a leather couch in the hotel lobby. On either side of them, women in miniskirts, floor-length fur coats and knee-high boots held hands with men dressed in suits that wouldn't have looked out of place in a Guys and Dolls revival as they left the hotel restaurant and headed out the door into the snow, ready to begin the post-midnight portion of their partying. Bex rested her chin on her hands, nibbled her index fingernail, spit it out, then took a deep breath. She was in the process of fantasizing about a few blissful hours of bedridden unconsciousness, during which she wouldn't have to worry about homeopathic poisons, homicidal teammates, bickering announcers, wannabe Russians, screaming producers, and/or misplaced World Team pins, when Sasha offered, "We should to go out."
Already in the process of turning another nail into a midnight supper, Bex had to cough and clear her mouth before she asked, "What?”
"We have been working very hard. There is no more work to do tonight. Come, I invite you to come with me. There is a club for dancing, it is only around the comer. We will go out now. Come."
"Come" was not what Bex wanted to do right now. "Go" had been more her train of thought. She looked at Sasha. He was sitting up straight, hair tousled from the hat he'd been pulling on and off all day. His eyes were shining and he was grinning; the left side of his smile rising just a fraction higher than the right for a lopsided, mischievous effect. He held out one hand to Bex.
She took it.
The club was called Ridiska. Which, Sasha explained, was street-slang for "a bad sort of person, like a thief or maybe criminal." It also, he admitted, literally meant "radish." As in the little red root vegetable. Bex laughed. Sasha laughed with her and gallantly removed her parka, handing it to the coat-check girl. Which was when Bex got her first clue that she was a tad underdressed for the establishment.
The miniskirts, maxi-boots and floor-length furs had all, apparently, been headed this way. So had the glittery earrings that dripped from lobes to shoulders, the necklaces that splayed across a procession of well-endowed—probably enhanced—chests like so many affluent-pointing arrows, and the rings with stones so illuminated they could be used to send desperate bat-signals across the night sky.
Bex, for her part was wearing jeans (the same ones that not so long ago had been brushing along the sludge in the refrigeration room), a black turtleneck sweater, because black didn't show as much dirt and/or sweat as a more primary color might have, and a 24/7 yellow fleece jacket that she was actually using as a second layer sweater. Oh, yes, and sneakers. Can't forget about the sneakers. Or the brown, wool tights under the jeans.
So not only was she not in fashion, she was also very hot.
Because the club itself, in contrast with the Moscow winter, was sweltering.
And very, very noisy.
A band in the corner, wedged between the dance floor and the dining area, was playing something... uh... loud. A male lead singer and three female backup ones were attempting to shout over the din of their two guitars, electrical organ, and drum set. They must have been doing a pretty decent job because, after not even really listening for a minute or two, Bex was able to figure out that they weren't, as she'd first assumed, singing in Russian, but rather attempting to howl through a "re-imagining" of "I Can't Get N
o Satisfaction" before segueing into a no less energetically Slavic, "Yesterday." In Russia, Bex guessed, the year was perennially 1965.
Sasha gestured for Bex to follow him, and she did, trying to ignore the hot lights that were pointing at the disco ball in the center of the dance floor. The frozen core she'd acquired over a full season at the skating rink quickly began to melt. Soon, Bex's cheeks flamed crimson, and her armpits opened the sweaty floodgates. It could not possibly be a good sign when you could not only feel the perspiration dripping down your sides, between your breasts and down your chin, but also from your eyelashes and teeth, as well.
Sasha led Bex to the center of the dance floor. All around them, the Guys and Dolls public either barely swayed their upper bodies in an attempt to appear perennially cool (and perhaps not risk losing either their jewelry or their natty fedoras) even while dancing, or went whole hog in the other direction, sacrificing cool for acrobatic, with the men hitting the floor in showy splits, then sliding up again with no hand support. Their women, meanwhile, were kicking up their knees and the fronts of their dresses, throwing their heads back and parading from one end of the floor to the other, shaking their hips and clicking their heels for good measure, yippee-ya-yaying. To be honest, Bex wasn't sure which exhibition she was hoping Sasha might favor her with. All she knew was, she personally was in no shape to be trying either.
Fortunately, she didn't have to. Sasha just looked around them, shrugged with a "What can you do?" smile, and held out his arms, waiting for Bex to step into them.
She did.
It would have been impolite not to.
He was stronger, more solid than he seemed. The skinny frame was misleading. Sasha may have been thin, but he was also coated in muscle. It made whatever belief Bex still harbored of his being a "boy" disappear. This was no boy. This was a man.
