The Charm School

by Nelson DeMille

  Sonny smiled at Lisa. “Glad to meet you. Everyone here is talking about you.”

  “Is that so?”

  Sonny’s eyes held hers. “Yes, it is. There are only six other real American women here.”

  “Why don’t you just photostat them?”

  Sonny laughed. “Say, are you and Sam involved, as they say, or just friends?”

  Marty interjected, “Lay off, Sonny.”

  Lisa stared hard at Sonny. “That’s none of your damned business.”

  “Sure it is. I want to date at least one real American before I cross over.” He smiled.

  Hollis’ swing caught Sonny in the abdomen, doubling him over. Sonny staggered around the floor, odd noises coming from his mouth, then he sank to his knees, trying to catch his breath.

  Hollis said to the Landises, “Will there be any trouble for you?”

  Tim Landis shook his head. “He had it coming. I’ll square it with his Russian control officer.”

  Jane Landis added, “Good training for him. He doesn’t seem to comprehend the etiquette of putting the moves on a woman.”

  Marty added as he helped Sonny out of the kitchen, “This guy’s gonna get himself killed in the States by some hot-headed boyfriend.”

  Hollis said to the Landises, “Thank you for coffee.”

  Tim Landis got an electric lantern from the cupboard. “You’ll need this to find your way.”

  Lisa said to Jane Landis, “We’ll speak again.”

  She replied, “I like you two already.”

  Tim Landis walked out with them and handed Hollis the lantern. He said, “Thanks for stopping by. We’ll have you both for dinner one night. Jane cooks American.”

  Hollis said, “Lisa cooks Russian.”

  Landis smiled. “Good night.” He turned away, then came back. “Oh, I remembered something, Sam. What Simms said. He didn’t say that he didn’t know what happened to you. That was somebody else I was thinking about.”

  Hollis stood silently in the dark, holding the lantern.

  Landis moved closer to him. “Simms said you both hit the drink together. He said the Zips sent boats out, and they got him, but you got fished out by the Jolly Green Giant. Fate, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Landis moved still closer and spoke in a soft voice. “Ernie Simms said you were swimming toward him, yelling to him to come to you. He said he kept waving you off because he figured he was a goner, but you kept coming, calling to him. He said he was glad when he saw the chopper rescue you, glad for you and glad there was a witness that he’d been captured alive.” Landis added, “He spoke highly of you, Sam.”

  Hollis nodded. “Thank you.” He turned and walked with Lisa away from the house.

  Lisa squeezed his hand. “All right?”

  He nodded again. And so, he thought, I make the final entry in the pilot’s log and close the book.

  They walked for a while in silence, then Lisa said, “Do you want to be alone?”

  “No, walk with me. Talk to me.”

  “Okay… question: Did you hit Sonny because he was a Russian or because he was hitting on me?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Mostly male ego, I guess. I’m actually having trouble perceiving these people as Russians. All I saw was a young punk being a boor.”

  “He wasn’t bad-looking.”

  “Bitch.”

  She smiled and grabbed his arm. They embraced and kissed. She said, “Sam… Sam…”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t leave me. I’d die if you left me. If we stay here, don’t take a Russian wife.”

  “How about a girlfriend?”

  “Don’t tease.”

  “Sorry.”

  They walked down the path and headed home.

  Lisa said, “How do people marry here?”

  “I think they just announce it.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes. Does that mean you’ll work here?”

  “I’ll live here. I’ll work against them. We’ll be free someday. I know we will.”

  He took her arm. “I feel free. Poor Tim Landis just gave me my freedom.”

  “I know.”

  They continued on the dark path toward their cottage. Hollis saw other lights moving along other paths, like aircraft, he thought, lost in the night, looking for their home base. He suddenly recalled a sign that had hung in the chapel at Phu Bai air base. It was a New Year’s message from Britain’s King George to his embattled people at the beginning of the Second World War, and Hollis found he could recall it clearly: I said to the man at the gate of the year, “Give me a light that I may go forth into the unknown.” And the man replied, “Put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light, safer than a known way.”

  34

  Sam Hollis knelt by the fireplace in the small living room of the cottage and lit the kindling under the logs.

  Lisa said, “I used to love a fire on a cold winter night. That’s one of the things I missed in Moscow and my other assignments.”

  She looked at the growing flames, then said, “I suppose one can pretend. I mean, here in this room, just you and I. We can pretend we’re home, instead of sixty miles from Moscow. Maybe that’s how these prisoners have kept their sanity.”

  Hollis wasn’t sure they had kept their sanity. And he recalled, too, what Tim Landis had said about those sad early-morning hours. “Could you turn on the VCR?”

  She went to the bookshelves beside the fireplace and examined the videotapes. “Anything in particular?”

  “Something noisy.”

  She selected Rocky IV and fast-forwarded it to the fight scene with the Russian, then sat down on the love seat with Hollis.

  He put his arm around her and spoke in a low voice. “How was tea with Suzie and her friends?”

  “Awful. I had to get up and leave. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Sam, there are six other American women here. Two were kidnapped in Finland on ski trips, and a woman named Samantha was kidnapped while she was hiking in the Carpathian mountains in Romania. The other three were supposedly lost in swimming accidents, two in the Black Sea, one in the Baltic off East Germany. There used to be two others, but they committed suicide.”

  Hollis made no comment.

  “Sam, it almost broke my heart. How can these bastards do that to people? Rip them away from their families… their lives…?”

  Hollis looked into the fire awhile, then said, “They call us the Main Enemy. In caps. They believe that they are locked in a life-or-death struggle with us. They’re right. They know that if the Main Enemy is defeated, most of their problems will be over. Meanwhile, America gives the Soviets about ten percent of its attention.”

  Lisa looked at the television. Rocky and the Russian were going at it, and the crowd was nearly hysterical. “That movie is inane. I know it’s inane. But why isn’t it as idiotic as it was the first time I saw it?”

  Hollis smiled. “I know what you mean.”

  She said, “Do you think of them as the Main Enemy?”

  Hollis put his feet on the coffee table. “You know, sometimes I like to think that I’m doing something for them too. Not the party people of course or the KGB. But the narod, the Russian masses, and the other nationalities imprisoned outside our prison. My mind keeps returning to Yablonya, Lisa. The way it was when we were there, the way I saw it from the helicopter, and the way it could have been if the people in Moscow were different.”

  She looked at him, then put her head on his shoulder and after a while asked, “How did Major Dodson get out of here?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “What did you do while I was gone?”

  “Burov stopped by.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He just wanted to see how we were getting on.”

  “That bastard!”

  “Don’t let these people get to you, Lisa.”

  “It’s him. H
e… he hit you, he slapped me… he…”

  “What?”

  “He… he was in my cell… when the matron… searched me… .”

  “All right. Don’t think about it. You have to understand that he always intended for us to work for them. That’s why we’re here and not in Lubyanka. That’s why he hasn’t done anything to us that he thinks we couldn’t forgive.”

  “I understand.”

  Hollis said, “He also dropped off some reading material. Are you up to reading about your death?”

  She stared straight ahead for some time, then nodded.

  Hollis stood and went to a cabinet beneath the bookshelf. He returned with newspapers and magazines and sat beside her. He handed her the Long Island Newsday, opened to the obituary page.

  Lisa looked down at her picture and read the headline: Lisa Rhodes, Accident Victim. She cleared her throat. “My mother must have given them that old photo. She always liked that picture… .” Hollis saw a tear splatter on the newspaper, and he took the paper from her. He stood and poured two glasses of brandy. He handed her a glass, and she drank from it.

  Lisa composed herself and said, “My family buried me… poor Dad… I can almost see him trying not to cry.” She looked at Hollis. “And you? Your family…?”

  Hollis opened a Washington Post to the obituary page. “I got full military honors at Arlington. My parents probably groused about having to fly in from Japan.”

  She looked down at the obituary and read it silently. “I didn’t realize you were so important.”

  “It was just the circumstances surrounding our deaths that generated some interest. Here…” He opened a later edition of The Washington Post to a story in the A section headlined: U.S. Accepts Soviets’ Claim, Calls Fatal Crash “Accident.”

  Lisa looked at him, then turned her attention back to the story and read:

  The State Department said yesterday that it was “substantially satisfied” with the Soviet Union’s explanation of the deaths of two Americans killed last week when a Soviet military helicopter crashed near the Russian city of Minsk. In a prepared statement released here and in Moscow, the department called the crash a “tragic accident” and said that there was no reason to suspect “foul play.”

  The U.S. embassy in Moscow had demanded that the Soviets conduct a complete investigation of the deaths of Air Force Col. Samuel G. Hollis, 46, a military attaché, and Lisa Rhodes, 29, a deputy public affairs officer for the United States Information Service. Both were being expelled from the country when the helicopter in which they were riding crashed for unknown reasons. The fact that Hollis and Rhodes had been declared “persona non grata” by the Soviets and were traveling in a Russian military helicopter without any other Westerners present when they died had concerned the State Department.

  Charles Banks, an embassy official in Moscow, was quoted in yesterday’s statement as saying the embassy was “substantially satisfied” with the Soviet explanation of the incident. Banks said there was “no reason to believe that either Hollis or Rhodes were the targets of any foul play.”

  (In Moscow, the Soviet newspaper Pravda carried a three paragraph story about the helicopter crash in yesterday’s editions. It said a Russian helicopter pilot and co-pilot also died in the crash. Because Pravda rarely prints stories about accidents inside the Soviet Union, the story was seen by U.S. diplomats as a public apology of sorts by the Kremlin.)

  The State Department released its statement yesterday a few hours after Hollis was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in a military service. Rhodes was also buried yesterday in Sea Cliff, a small New York village on Long Island. A high-level source at the State Department said yesterday’s statement was issued to reassure the families of Hollis and Rhodes and also to end “unwarranted speculation” in the press about their deaths.

  The Soviet government ordered Hollis and Rhodes to leave the country about two weeks ago after it accused them of taking an unauthorized automobile trip. The State Department refused to confirm or deny the Soviets’ charge, but a spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Moscow acknowledged at the time that Hollis had been sent by the embassy to Mozhaisk, with the Soviet government’s full knowledge and permission, to claim the body of an American tourist, Gregory Fisher, 23, of New Canaan, Conn. Fisher had died in an automobile accident earlier this month outside Moscow, and Hollis was investigating the matter, the spokesman said. Rhodes had accompanied Hollis to claim Fisher’s body because she and Hollis were friends, not because she was on embassy business, the spokesman said. However, both had passes issued by the Soviet government, which are necessary for embassy staff for travel outside Moscow.

  In retaliation for the expulsion of Hollis and Rhodes, the State Department ordered the expulsion of two Soviet embassy employees in Washington. A State Department official denied that this round of expulsions, after years of relatively good diplomatic relations, was a signal that the diplomatic thaw was cooling. “This was an isolated incident,” the official was quoted as saying, “and will not affect ongoing initiatives between the two countries.”

  Members of the Fisher family said yesterday that they still are not satisfied with the explanation that the Soviets and State Department have given about Gregory Fisher’s death. One family member said he felt it was “odd” that Hollis and Rhodes were expelled and later died after they began investigating Fisher’s death. But the State Department said it didn’t believe the matters were related.

  The Kremlin’s decision to expel Hollis and Rhodes was considered severe by U.S. diplomats, who said the U.S. and Soviets usually only file routine complaints when they discover a diplomat has violated travel restrictions. The harshness of the Soviets’ action prompted some Western diplomats to speculate that Hollis and Rhodes might have used the trip to conduct surveillance on the Soviets’ tightly guarded military facilities in the area. The Pentagon and USIS both categorically denied that Hollis and Rhodes were involved in any “activities related to surveillance or espionage.” The USIS issued a strongly worded statement that said its personnel “have never and will never” participate in espionage activities. “The USIS is not part of that world,” a USIS spokesman said. A spokesman for the Pentagon acknowledged that some countries—including the Soviet Union—use military attachés at embassies for “intelligence gathering,” but he denied that Hollis was involved in any such activity.

  Friends of the Hollis family said Hollis’ father, retired Air Force Gen. Benjamin Hollis, had asked the Pentagon for a briefing on the death of his son. A family friend said Gen. Hollis was concerned because his son’s body was so badly burned that it could not be positively identified.

  (A high-ranking embassy official in Moscow, who visited the helicopter crash site, told Geraldine Callahan of the Post’s Moscow bureau that the helicopter “burned with surprising intensity” after it crashed. The fire was so hot that it completely consumed the four bodies aboard, this official said. “The remains were no more than ashes and bone fragments and were impossible to identify,” he said.)

  The Pentagon would not comment on the condition of the bodies or whether Gen. Hollis had requested a briefing. However, a Pentagon spokesman, Gen. Earle Vandermullen, said yesterday that the Red Air Force helicopter that crashed was a turbojet and that a “fire of extreme intensity would not be inconsistent with that type of aircraft, especially if the jet fuel tanks were full.” The Hollis family did not issue any statements or talk with reporters at the funeral.

  The State Department said the Soviets gave the following account of the accident. Hollis and Rhodes boarded Pan Am flight 415 last Monday on what was supposed to be a direct flight from Moscow to Frankfurt. The airplane was forced to make an emergency landing in Minsk after Soviet authorities radioed the pilot that a bomb had been planted on the airplane. Because of their diplomatic status, Hollis and Rhodes were told by Minsk officials that they could return to Moscow without delay by boarding a military helicopter that would take them to a Lufthansa Airlines flight to
Frankfurt. The helicopter carrying Hollis and Rhodes reportedly crashed about 15 minutes after it left Minsk airport.

  Mike Salerno, Moscow correspondent for Pacific News Service, said that he sat next to Hollis and Rhodes when the Pan Am flight left Moscow. He said Hollis and Rhodes both seemed grateful for the chance to return to Moscow aboard the helicopter. He said they asked him to notify the U.S. embassy about their flight change, which he said he did. “The Soviet authorities at Minsk offered me a ride in the helicopter back to Moscow,” Salerno said. “But I didn’t mind staying on in Minsk. Sam and Lisa (Hollis and Rhodes) were anxious to make connections in Frankfurt.” A spokesman for Pan Am said Soviet authorities held the aircraft overnight in Minsk before allowing it to resume its flight, and the passengers were put up in a local hotel. The Soviets declined to say whether a bomb was found.

  Family friends said Gen. Hollis claimed his son’s body Wednesday at Andrews Air Force Base. Col. Hollis was married but had been estranged from his wife Katherine during the past six months, a friend of the Hollis family said. Katherine Hollis arrived here yesterday from her home in London for the funeral but refused to talk to reporters.

  Rhodes was buried last week in Sea Cliff, N.Y. Her mother, Eva Rhodes, described Rhodes as an energetic woman who was “proud of her work” and was “a lover of the Russian language and culture.” A USIS spokesman said Rhodes was considered a “hard worker” by her peers with a keen interest in Russian history. She had worked at USIS for six years, the last two years in Moscow.

  Hollis, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, joined the Air Force in 1962 and was a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. He was responsible for maintaining liaison with the Red Air Force in matters of mutual interest to both countries.

  The State Department said it considered the matter closed unless there was “substantial new information” regarding the helicopter crash.

  Lisa closed the newspaper and stared at the burning logs. Hollis poured two more glasses of brandy. He saw that her cheeks were wet with wiped tears. Finally, she said, “They don’t suspect a thing.”