“You’re telling me that you’ll lift my passport if I don’t go back to the States within forty-eight hours—”
“It’s no longer a valid document now, Reed, as far as we’re concerned—”
“—but you’re telling me that I’ll be prosecuted if I do.”
“Hey, hey, don’t get me wrong,” Barker said quickly, “you forget all this ever happened and be a good boy, Reed, and there won’t be any prosecution.”
“And you’ll guarantee that in writing?”
Al Barker squinted at him owlishly. It seemed to Jerry that there was another new expression on his face, perhaps one of grudging respect this time. “Okay, sure, why not?” he said slowly. “I think we can go that far. . . .”
“And what about my security clearance?” Jerry said.
“What about it, Reed?”
“Will you guarantee in writing that I can keep it?” Jerry said, knowing all too well what the answer had to be.
Barker studied his face with an unreadable expression and said nothing.
“Well . . . ?”
Barker shrugged, and for the first time averted his gaze. “I’m afraid I don’t have that authority,” he admitted very quietly. “But I’d be willing to recommend it to the people who do.”
“Yeah, sure,” Jerry said. “I thought so.”
“Thought what, Reed?”
“I’ve got two real choices, right? I can turn in my passport and go back to the States, where my security clearance will be lifted, and where I’ll be fired by Rockwell and never be hirable for anything connected with the space program again. . . . Or I can . . . stay here, take the ESA job, and . . . and . . .”
“Defect,” Barker said, staring right at Jerry now. “Because make no mistake about it, Reed, if you accept employment with ESA, that is what you’ll be doing. Don’t kid yourself. You won’t be able to change your mind. You’d be arrested the moment your foot hit American soil.”
“Shit,” Jerry sighed.
Something in Barker’s expression softened. He leaned forward across the desk, shook his head, and for a moment it seemed to Jerry as if the man were about to reach out to touch him.
“Look, son,” Barker said almost tenderly, “you don’t really want to do that, now do you? You don’t really want to betray your country. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life in exile. You don’t want to never see your native land again. You don’t want the folks back home to call you a traitor, now do you?”
“No,” Jerry whispered miserably.
“I thought not,” Barker said softly.
“But . . . but if I go back now, what will I be going back to?” Jerry said plaintively. “I’ll never be able to work in the space program again, will I?”
Barker studied the plastic wood-grain of the desktop. “With your background, you’ll be able to get a decent job, Reed. Civil aircraft design, maybe, or the auto industry. Hey, you know, I’ve got an old buddy pretty high up at Piper, might even be able to do something for you there. . . .”
“You don’t understand, Mr. Barker, you really don’t understand. . . .”
“I understand one thing, Reed,” Barker said, not entirely unsympathetically, or so it seemed to Jerry. “You’ve put yourself in a position where you’ve got to choose between your career and your Russian girl friend and your country. You’re stuck with it, son. I don’t envy you, but there it is.”
Jerry nodded slowly. “There it is,” he whispered.
Al Barker rose slowly from behind the desk, came around to the other side, and actually laid a paternal arm across Jerry’s shoulders. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’m gonna do something I shouldn’t. I’m gonna let you walk out of here with your American passport in your pocket even though I’m really not supposed to. I’m going to give you five days to decide instead of forty-eight hours.”
He took his arm off Jerry’s shoulders. He shrugged. “I’m really leveling with you now, Reed,” he said. “We can’t drag you back to the States by force, and I will indeed catch a certain amount of personal shit if you do defect, you better believe it. But believe this too, Jerry—I don’t want to see an innocent kid like you turned into a traitor to his country by these conscienceless European degenerates, I don’t want to see you forced into a decision you’ll regret till the day you die.”
All at once the walls of the windowless room seemed to be closing in on Jerry, and the air seemed to congeal in his throat, and everything seemed to funnel down into Al Barker’s eyes boring squarely into his.
“Do you believe I’m being straight with you, Reed?” Barker said. “One American to another?”
Jerry looked back at him and felt like crying. “Yeah,” he found himself forced to say through the horrible lump that seemed to have bloomed in his throat like some noxious fungus. “Yeah, I do believe I do.”
It was well past lunchtime before Jerry returned to the hotel room, and by that time Sonya was about a third of the way through the bottle of Russian potato vodka she had ordered from room service in order to nerve herself up to tell him about Pankov’s visit.
There really had never been any question of simply not telling him, for she was going to have to explain the magical extension of her vacation time one way or another. Pankov, in his sweaty amateur incompetence, had failed to provide her with a plausible cover story, and she was not about to do his work for him by dreaming up some stupid lie herself. These things, she had actually found herself thinking after the first drink, are better left to the professionals of the KGB.
Besides, there really was no reason not to tell Jerry the truth, now was there? she had decided after the second drink. For after all, he had decided to do exactly what those high Party circles wanted him to do anyway for reasons of his own heart. After the third drink, it seemed to her that the only real problem for anyone was the problem that Pankov had created by coming here in the first place, and after the fourth, she had narrowed the problem down to constructing an opening sentence that would loosen her tongue. By the time Jerry had arrived, she even had the first half of it figured out: “Isn’t it wonderful, Jerry, my boss has extended my vacation time because . . . ”
But all of that was forgotten when Jerry burst into the room. He didn’t seem to notice that the bed was still unmade. He didn’t seem to notice the bottle of vodka in the ice bucket. He didn’t even seem to notice that Sonya was well into it. His eyes were wild and his face seemed ashen, as if he were the one who had gotten drunk, and that sobered Sonya up fast.
“You look horrible, Jerry,” she said as he flopped down into the chair across the table from her. “What happened at the Embassy?”
Jerry hooked the vodka bottle out of the ice bucket, poured himself a stiff one, and slugged it down like some muzhik, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “They won’t let me take the ESA job, Sonya,” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘they won’t let you’?” Sonya demanded. “How can they stop you?”
“They’ll prosecute me under something called the National Security Act.”
Sonya stared at him narrowly. “You are not making sense, Jerry,” she said. “If you are working for ESA in Europe, how can the American authorities prosecute you for anything?”
“Well, I guess they can’t . . . ,” Jerry muttered. “But I don’t want to be a traitor. . . .”
“Traitor to what?”
“To my country, goddamnit!”
“What about me?” Sonya demanded. “What about us?”
Jerry shook his head and gave her a look of perfect agonized befuddlement.
“Poor baby, they’ve got you all confused, haven’t they?” Sonya said, touching her hand to his cheek. She poured both of them fresh drinks. “Let’s have one together, and you can tell me all about it from the beginning.”
Jerry nodded, took a sip of vodka, seemed to shake some clarity back into his mind with a convulsive shrug of his shoulders and a jerk of his neck, and he did.
“That is mon
strous,” Sonya said when he had quite finished. “But I really don’t see what the problem is.”
“You don’t see what the problem is?” Jerry moaned. Hadn’t she understood a word he was saying? “If I go back to the States, I’ll never see you again, and if I don’t, I’ll never work in the space program again!”
“But Jerry, you just told me that they will never give you security clearance to work in the American space program again even if you do go back!”
Jerry took another sip of vodka and forced himself to calm down and think. She was making sense. The horrible fact of the matter was that whatever he did now, he was already as dead in the Program as Rob Post.
“You’re right, Sonya,” he said sadly. “I’m finished. I’m washed up. Oh God, oh Christ, oh shit. . . . ” Tears began to well up in his eyes, a terrible void seemed to open up in his gut, and he began to tremble. Is this what it feels like to be Rob? he wondered. To feel this emptiness inside for twenty, thirty, forty years . . . ?
Sonya rose rather shakily from her chair, came around behind his, and started massaging the tense muscles at the back of his neck.
“Oh no, Jerry,” she said softly, “you’re not washed up at all. The best part of your life is just beginning. Don’t you see? You’ve got a fine job ahead of you at ESA doing the work you love. You’ve got all of Europe to taste and explore.” She leaned closer, put her arms around his neck, whispered in his ear. “And you’ve got me. . . .”
Jerry sighed. All that was true. What was there for him back in the States anyway? Even if none of this had ever happened, all he had had to look forward to was an eternity of slaving away on stupid military contracts. Here in Europe, he had love, and hope, and work that mattered waiting, work he believed in. But . . . but . . .
“But if I do that, I’ll be a traitor to my own country!” he cried.
Sonya came around the chair to face him. She stood there with her hands on her hips, weaving back and forth woozily but with the fire of more than vodka in her eyes.
“Traitor to what?” she demanded. “Traitor to the Battlestar America program which destroyed your dream and the life of your friend? Traitor to a country which will not even let you pursue your dream elsewhere? Which will not even let you remain with the woman you love? Which requires you to give up everything in return for nothing? Who is betraying whom, Jerry?”
“Now you’re talking like a Russian Communist!” Jerry shouted back at her.
“I am a child of the Russian Spring!” Sonya proudly declared. “And we have at long last learned what you Americans once knew better than any people on Earth but have now, it would seem, forgotten—a nation only thrives when its people are free to follow their own hearts!”
And there she stood, the woman that he loved, the woman who loved him as no woman ever had before, drunk out of her mind or not, livid, enraged, impassioned, and utterly magnificent.
In that moment, he would have given up anything for her. In that moment, he would have followed her anywhere. In that moment, he wanted to take her in his arms and hug her to him forever.
But before he could do anything, Sonya Gagarin had sunk to her knees before him, and her fingers were on his fly. “Do not leave me for empty words and stupid politics, love,” she pleaded, as she freed his tremulous cock. “Can you give up this in the name of patriotic chauvinism?” she said as she took it in her tender loving mouth.
And she gave him an object lesson in just what it was that he would have to give up in the name of patriotism besides the chance to finally work for a space program in which he could believe.
And when, after a long, long tender time, he let himself go, let himself find release at last in a willing lover’s mouth, he knew that there was a limit to how much a man could be expected to give up for his country, a limit which the demands of his country had long since surpassed, especially when that country offered nothing in return but the death of a dream.
Afterward, and yet another round of vodka later, Sonya at last found the courage to tell Jerry about Grigori Mikhailovich Pankov’s visit, and why she would not be going back to Brussels on Monday after all, for by that time she was quite thoroughly drunk, and the thought of secrets between them entirely unbearable.
“Then all that stuff about being free to follow your own heart was complete bullshit!” Jerry shouted woozily, for by this time he was not exactly sober either. “You really are working for the KGB!”
Sonya rose shakily to her feet. “I love you!” she cried. “I want you to stay here with me! Fuck the KGB! Fuck the CIA! Fuck politics! Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin follows her own heart!”
She looked down at dear Jerry, still sitting there on his chair with his pants around his ankles, and never had he looked more precious to her. “Is it my fault that what is in my heart happens to happily coincide with the long-range interests of the workers and peasants and space cadets?” she said, and burst out laughing.
Jerry looked up at her, then down at his own dishabille, and he too could not contain his laughter. “Yeah, well, speaking as a tool of the capitalist imperialists and a lackey of the good ol’ bottom line,” he said, “I think maybe the workers and the peasants and the space cadets oughta sweeten the deal a tad. . . .”
“What did you have in mind?”
Jerry managed to rise to his feet. “If your bosses at Red Star are so fuckin’ hot for this deal to go down, then they gotta transfer you to Paris to be with me, or you say that I say ‘no way, José!’ ”
“Oooh, Jerry, I never knew you could be so political!” Sonya squealed in delight. “And why not a raise as well, as long as we’re about it, and a more interesting job with some real advancement potential, and no Human Octopus with his hands on my ass!”
“I’ll drink to that!” Jerry declared, and reached for the vodka bottle.
But he never made it. Instead, they both somehow fell forward and collapsed into each other’s arms.
* * *
HOOLIGANISM IN THE SUPREME SOVIET
An unseemly display of hooliganism occurred at today’s Supreme Soviet session when Ukrainian and Russian delegates actually came to blows over a resolution introduced to establish a nationalities quota system for the Red Army officer corps.
Russian delegates shouted down the attempt of Ivan Smolents to read the resolution, and several Ukrainian delegates responded with pushes and shoves, and, at least according to some of those present, with fists.
This is carrying the attempt to emulate Western legislatures a bit too far. Such brawls are best left to the Israeli Knesset, where the antagonists prepare by showing up in shirtsleeves, or the United States Senate, where fistfights have an ancient and honorable tradition.
—Moscow Morning Sun
Larry Krugman: “There’s nothing they can really do about it, is there? It’s like a sweet spin-off from all the taxpayer’s dollars we’ve been shoveling into a high-budget space-epic that’ll never gross a dime. Now that the FCC says we can do it, the Porn Channel’s satellite will be watched over by good old Battlestar America. There’s nothing to stop us from hitting every home satellite dish from Lisbon to Moscow with our twenty-four-hour hard-core format.”
Billy Allen: “You really think you can get ratings with moldy old stag films?”
Larry Krugman: “Moldy old stag films? We’ve got the world’s biggest library of films from the golden age of the American Erotic Cinema, including many such acknowledged classics as Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and Debbie Does Dallas, and we’ve already sold out 90 percent of the first year’s commercial time for top ECU. A lot of high-grade advertisers over there obviously believe our format will appeal to upscale European consumers.”
Billy Allen: “If you’re right, the good old US of A is finally gonna start giving those government-subsidized highbrow European channels some pretty stiff competition!”
—No Biz Like Show Biz
* * *
VIII
Reasonably early, if not exactly bright, t
he morning after, Sonya put in a call to Grigori Pankov at the Red Star offices in Brussels, reasonably certain that he would not be there yet to receive it. When she was told he was out of the office, she asked to be put through to Alexander Katchikov, the Regional Director himself, knowing full well that the operator would not be likely to disturb such an august personage with a call from a lowly wage slave in the translation section. However, it was enough to get her on the line to one Dimitri Belinski, a middle-aged, balding man who identified himself as Katchikov’s assistant, no doubt not the assistant, but the assistant in charge of deflecting nuisance calls such as this.
“This is Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin,” she told Belinski. “I am calling from Paris to confirm the matter of the indefinite extension of my vacation time.”
Belinski goggled at her woodenly for a long silent moment. “Are you sure you have not had too much vacation already, Comrade Gagarin?” he finally said tiredly. “You are not making any sense.”
“Comrade Katchikov will know exactly what I am talking about,” Sonya told him.
“Comrade Katchikov will have my ass if I disturb him with such ravings.”
“Well then you had better take this up with the KGB liaison,” Sonya said. “He will know exactly what I mean.”
“KGB liaison?” Belinski exclaimed with a great show of innocence. “Surely you know that Red Star, S.A., is in no way answerable to the KGB!”
Sonya sighed and decided it was time to play the card she had not really used since she was a teenager in Lenino. “You will deliver my message to either Katchikov or the KGB and you will deliver it accurately, to wit, that Sonya Ivanovna . . . Gagarin wishes to discuss matters connected with the indefinite extension of her vacation time with the proper authorities,” she said frostily. “If I am forced to call a certain number in Moscow in order to transmit it, which I will do if my call is not returned within the hour, you will have occasion to learn personally the extent to which Red Star employees are or are not answerable to the KGB.”
Russian Spring Page 17
