Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  The trouble was, they had no clear attitude to express. Surely no one wanted to go back to rule by a class of people who sincerely believed that peasants and catde were at parity, and yet... And yet, there was something about the style. Not the substance, the style.

  The tsars are still in our throats. We can’t swallow them, and we can’t spit them out.

  That isn’t funny. That’s merely true.

  Looking around for the bar—he was permitted to drink, but not to excess, not yet, that would come later—his eye passed over a pretty girl in the middle of the crowded room, talking in an animated fashion with a tall, burly, thick-faced man who could be nothing but some sort of policeman, perhaps even KGB. The girl was tall and slender, with darkish blond hair and bright eyes and a beautiful nose and great self-assurance. Her clothing seemed to have been made specifically and precisely for her. An American, Grigor thought, and moved toward the vodka.

  * * *

  The Russian with whom Susan Carrigan was speaking was highly amused that she was here in Moscow because she’d won a contest in a magazine. His name was Mikhail, and he was a teacher of economics at Moscow University, a tall, thin, urbane man with a narrow and pleasantly craggy face and a burry baritone voice with which he spoke perfect English, faintly Oxford-accented. “The idea of value in a capitalist society,” he said, “is something my generation will perhaps never understand. A company ferments potatoes into vodka. In order to sell that vodka, they choose at random one citizen—you, as it happens—to send on an expense-paid trip to Moscow. You yourself, with the best will in the world, not to mention the strongest liver, would never be able to drink enough vodka to repay the distiller's expenses in this venture, and in fact,” he said, laughing, pointing at the glass in her hand, “you don't even drink vodka. You drink white wine ”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I know it seems silly, but—”

  “Not at all, not at all.” Mikhail's amusement with her was so unfeigned and so friendly that she couldn't possibly object. “It's very refreshing to be in the company of a white-wine drinker,” he assured her. “Besides which, you will undoubtedly be the last person on your feet in this room. But to return to the question. The distiller can't get his money back from you. Is he assuming that other citizens, viewing his generosity toward you, will be encouraged to feel warmly toward him and buy his product in sufficient quantities—in sufficient extra quantities, beyond what they would already buy—to make up his expenses?”

  “I have no idea,” Susan admitted. ‘Whatever they think they're getting, I'm having a wonderful time. Russia is so beautiful”

  “You think so?” he said, smiling at her enthusiasm.

  ‘The museums,” she said. “The paintings, the icons. And the river is beautiful, you know. I hope the Semionov company does get their money back, twice.”

  “Oh, they already have,” said an American-accented voice to her left. She and Mikhail both turned, and a middle-aged fortyish bearded man was standing there in rumpled sports jacket and white shirt and maroon bow tie, smiling his apology at having horned in on their conversation. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I overheard you, and I knew you were—it's Susan Carrigan, isn't it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jack Fielding,” he announced himself. “I’m with the embassy here. We processed some of the paperwork on you. Now, the way I think it works—I’m not an economist, I—” Turning to Mikhail, he said, “I take it you are.”

  “Yes, I am.” Mikhail introduced himself again, with the impossibly long last name, and the two men shook hands. Then Mikhail said, “You understand the value process of this gift to Miss Carrigan?”

  “I think so,” Jack Fielding said. “The principal idea is advertising and publicity. If you offer a prize that a lot of people want, then people will be thinking about your brand name, so when they visit their neighborhood liquor shop they’re more likely to buy your product. So if the plan worked, the company saw a rise in sales while the contest was on, meaning they already made their money out of it before they had to spend any on Miss Carrigan.”

  “But,” Mikhail asked, “if the plan doesn’t work? If they don’t see the rise in sales?”

  Jack Fielding grinned and shrugged. “Then they have to grit their teeth and pay up anyway, and Miss Carrigan still gets her trip to Moscow.”

  “Good,” said Susan.

  “Which is one reason,” Jack Fielding went on, “why I’m a free marketeer. It’s so much harder for a private company to renege on a deal than it is for a government.”

  “Ah, well,” Mikhail said, looking alarmed, “if we are going to talk free markets, I will need another drink. Susan? Your glass is empty.”

  “Thank you,” she said, handing it over.

  Mikhail raised an eyebrow at Jack Fielding. “And you, Mr. Fielding?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “I’ll be right back, then,” Mikhail promised, and turned away toward the bar.

  Jack Fielding looked around the room, smiling faintly, saying, “This is a true grab bag here.”

  “I have no idea why I was asked,” Susan admitted, “unless it’s simply because I’m staying in this hotel.”

  “I think the preservation people did want to get as many English speakers here as possible,” Fielding told her, “which is why I was sent. It’s all to give the Russkies an inflated idea of the organization’s importance in the West. But the guest list at any promotional cocktail party you can name is a lot harder to figure out than the idea behind the contest that brought you here and that’s got your Russian friend so bewildered.”

  My Russian friend, Susan thought. But not really, worse luck. Early in their conversation, Mikhail had mentioned that he was married—“Unfortunately, my wife could not be with me this evening”—but still she had enjoyed his company. She was here, after all, to experience Russia, not to wind up chatting with Jack Fielding, a man exacdy like half a dozen guys at any cocktail party in Manhattan.

  Would Mikhail come back? Iflad Fielding chased him away? Through a break in the crush of people, Susan could see him across the room, over at the bar, talking with another Russian man.

  * * *

  Grigor had just reached the head of the bar line and received his vodka when a heavily accented voice said in English, “Do you speak English?”

  Grigor turned, surprised, and it was the heavy-faced burly policeman or KGB man he’d noticed talking to the American girl. In Russian, he answered, “I can understand it a litde. I don’t really speak it.”

  “Try,” ordered the man. Again in that thick-tongued English, he said, “Answer my first question, but in English.”

  Slowly, spacing the words as he hunted for the English equivalents, Grigor said, “I understand some English. I read English more... better than I speak.”

  “Good,” said the man, still in that barbaric English. (Grigor knew he himself was at any rate not that bad, at least not in pronunciation.) “You may call me Mikhail. You will come with me.”

  “But... who are you?”

  “KGB, of course,” said the man, who might or might not be really named Mikhail. lie tossed the fact off carelessly, with a shrug, then said, ccWhich you will tell no one.”

  “Of course.”

  “Now you will come with me. There are two Americans talking. I must speak with the man by himself. You will speak with the woman, so that I can take the man away.”

  “But—why me?”

  “Because I have requisitioned you,” the KGB man said, his thick lips working like rubber around the long strange English word. “Now come along.55 Then, an obvious afterthought, as they pressed through the crowd, the KGB man holding a drink in each hand, he looked over his shoulder and said, “What is your name?”

  “Grigor Basmyonov.”

  “And how do you earn your living, Grigor Basmyonov?”

  “I write for the television.” Finding the English words, placing them, took all Grigor’s concentration.


  “Good.”

  The two Americans were chattering together at a great clip, the words tumbling together, fuzzing at their edges, completely incomprehensible. Grigor thought, I can’t understand a word! Not when they talk that fast. Is this what I left: the clinic for? To be harassed by a KGB man and humiliated by Americans?

  * * *

  Mikhail the urbane economist said, “I have brought along a compatriot who would love the chance to improve his English,” while Mikhail the burly KGB man said, “Dis is a Russian man who speaks English as good as me. Maybe better.”

  “I have just a little English,” Grigor said, smiling at the Americans, feeling suddenly shy and awkward, beginning to regret having come here at all. What did he know about foreigners, and how to act with them? Except for a few Western doctors in the first year after Chernobyl, with all of whom he’d spoken only through a translator, he had never met any foreigners in his life. I am a simple fireman from Kiev, he thought. This second life is a mistake.

  “This is Miss Susan Carrigan, from New York City,” both Mikhails said, except that the KGB man left out “Miss.”

  “She won Moscow in a contest.” Mikhail the economist smiled with amusement, while Mikhail the KGB man smiled as though angry, obscurely insulted.

  “A visit to Moscow,” Susan corrected, smiling at this new Russian man, holding her hand out to shake. His hand, when he took hers, was surprisingly thin and bony, and the grip tentative. He looked as though he might be suffering from flu or something, as though it might have been a mistake for him to get out of his sickbed to come to the party.

  “Grigor Basmyonov,” both Mikhails finished the introduction. “Grigor works for our Moscow television.”

  “Oh, really?” Susan released Grigor’s frail hand, and accepted her fresh glass of wine from Mikhail. “What do you do there?”

  “I write jokes for a comedian,” Grigor told her, the words coming slowly, one at a time. Shaking his head, he said, “Not a comedian you have heard of.”

  “I might have,” Jack Fielding said, and stuck his hand out, saying, “Jack Fielding. I’m with the embassy here, we watch TV a lot, believe me. Who’s your comedian?”

  Shaking Fielding’s hand, Grigor said, “Boris Boris,” and was pleased at the grunt of unhappy surprise from Mikhail the KGB man. (Mikhail the economist gave a chuckle of remembered pleasure.)

  Fielding was impressed: “No kidding! He’s an outrageous man, your guy.”

  “Yes, he is,” Grigor agreed, relaxing, basking in Boris Boris’s glory.

  “Just a few years ago, say what he says now,” Fielding added, shaking his head, “and he’d go straight to Siberia.”

  “Well, at least he’d have me with him,” Grigor assured the American. “If Boris Boris catches cold, I sneeze.” And then he was astonished at how easily English was coming to him, once he had himself started. So it might be possible after all.

  “I tried looking at television here,” Susan said, “but it was so frustrating. It looks like TV at home, the news shows and the exercise shows and the game shows, but of course I don’t understand a word anybody says. And when they put some kind of notice on, I don’t even know the letters!” And she laughed at her own helplessness.

  “I have seen your American television, of course,” Grigor told her. He liked the way she looked, and the ease of her self-assurance; she made him want to keep the conversation going, no matter how difficult. ccWe receive the satellite transmissions at the station. Sometimes I watch the CNN news. Do you know the program?”

  “Oh, sure,” Susan said, “Cable news. It must look very different from your point of view.”

  “Such positivism,” Grigor told her, smiling, hoping that was a word in English. “The announcers are so certain about everything. We haven’t had anyone that certain about everything since Stalin died.”

  Susan laughed, surprised to be laughing, and said, “Is that one of your jokes for whatsisname?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and as she gave him a rough definition of “whatsisname,” economist Mikhail gendy turned Jack Fielding away, saying, “Now, about this free market of yours. Surely, with Japan breathing down your necks, you don’t advocate a return to hill laissez-faire.” (Simultaneously, the other Mikhail said toward Fielding, “I got to talk wid you about dis embassy of yours. We still got some problems to work out.”)

  “Well, you know, we all have to adapt to changing reality,” said Fielding, obediendy moving off in Mikhail’s wake, leaving Susan and Grigor alone, Grigor now trying to explain why the stage name Boris Boris was itself comic to a Russian audience, an explanation that turned out not to be at all easy, nor entirely satisfactory for either of them. Still, the conversation was under way, and Susan next described how she happened to be in Moscow as the result of winning an American vodka company’s contest, an explanation that also proved to be rather difficult, and less than satisfactory.

  They’d been talking for quite a while, mostly about the sights of Moscow and the nearby countryside, when Grigor became aware that the crowd had thinned somewhat, and, starded, looked at his watch. Almost ten minutes past eight. “Oh, no,” he said, “I am late for my pill. Would you, please, hold my drink? Thank you.”

  She stood holding both near-empty glasses as he took a small cardboard matchbox from his suitcoat pocket and removed from it a large green capsule. Smiling, shrugging his shoulders, he said, “I have never taken this with vodka before. Perhaps it will work better.” And he took back his glass and drained it, with the pill.

  “Do you have the flu?” Susan asked. Then, because his English seemed so spotty, with sudden surprising lapses, she amplified, saying, “Some kind of cold or something?”

  “No, nothing like that,” he told her. “I am not at all contagious.” Looking over at the bar, he said, “Have they stopped serving drinks?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Then Susan took the plunge: “I’m supposed to have dinner in the hotel with a group of people, American tourists and a couple of Intourist guides and a Russian man from some sort of trade commission. Why not come with us? I’m sure it would be all right.”

  Grigor thought: An adventure! Perhaps my last. “I accept with happiness,” he said.

  * * *

  It was over dessert, and the dessert wine, that Grigor finally told Susan the truth about his medical condition, and its causes.

  “Chernobyl?”

  “Yes.”

  He was by then so full of vodka and wine and good food and good feelings that he wasn’t even self-conscious, not about his slippery English and not about his illness and not about his being a country bumpkin from Kiev and not about anything. He just told her, to tell someone.

  All around them, up and down the long table, other desultory conversations continued, but Grigor ignored them all, because it felt so good at last to tell someone, just say the words to someone, someone away from the clinic. Yes, and to have it be someone who would then take the knowledge and go halfway around the world with it, totally away and gone, permitting Grigor to go quiedy and peaceably back to his normal round. His normal spiral.

  Susan was shocked. “Cancer? Radiation disease? Well, what is it? And there’s no hope at all? Grigor, listen! I have this cousin,

  I don’t know, third cousin, fourth cousin, I hardly ever see him, once or twice a year, well, that isn’t the point”—because she’d been drinking, too, and the hour was late—“the point is, he’s a doctor, he’s in research, he’s very important in AIDS research at NYU, I’m going to call him—”

  “Too fast,” Grigor mumbled, eyes blurry, hand waving ineffectually, trying to slow down the flood of words. “Too fast, too fast. Do not understand,” he said.

  “My cousin,” she said, slowly and clearly, “might know something, might be able to help. I will phone him. Could you go to New York, if it might help? Do you have enough money? Could you borrow it? Would they let you go away?”

  He laughed, self-
mockingly. “Oh, I have money,” he said. “And the doctors would let me go, if a good thing could come of it. But there is no good thing, Susan. Not for me. The switch is down. It is already down.”

  ccWell, you don’t have to give up” she told him, reminding him of the positive news announcers on CNN, “you certainly shouldn’t give up. I’ll call my cousin. Before he was on this AIDS research he was—” She broke off, frowned, leaned closer over the table toward him, gazing into his eyes as she said, “Grigor, do they have AIDS in Russia?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, nodding solemnly. “A very great problem, you know, in the hospitals.”

  “Hospitals?”

  “The needles. We do not have enough needles in Soviet,” he explained. “So they get used, what do you say, many times.”

  “Over and over.”

  “Yes, over and over. Many mothers and babies are... oh ... infected. Over and over.” His eyes looked more deep-set and stricken than ever. “Many deaths,” he said. “Death all around us. Oh, Susan. Everything is dying, you know, Susan. Everything is dying.”

  Ananayel

  Vodka is no longer made anywhere from potatoes. I know that. I know whatever I need to know to complete His plan. But would Mikhail know it? Very well, but would Mikhail think that Susan knew it? Well, it doesn’t matter.

  What matters is to recruit the actors—as in doers, those who will perform the necessary actions—and bring them together. And to do so with a certain degree of haste, which is why I had to hurry the Grigor-Susan meeting, appearing to each of them as the person appropriate to that moment; for her, someone to be comfortable with, and for him, someone to believe. I would have brought them together in a way much more elegant, more subde, if it weren’t that this task must be completed as rapidly as possible.