Permanent Interests (17 page)

Horvath leaned down on the bed, his face inches from Lydia's.

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"If I had been trusting, I would never have shown all those smartasses at Harvard who was best. If I had been trusting, I would be eaten alive by the bureaucracy and the media. If I had been trusting, I would have been a loyal slave of you Russians."

Lydia pulled the covers up over her bosom in a move of instinctive but futile protection.

"I threw Molotov cocktails at Soviet tanks in the middle of Budapest. At fourteen, I killed a Russian! I watched him struggle and scream, covered in flames from one of my little bombs. And you know what? I wasn't scared. I wasn't repelled. I wasn't stunned. Oh, no. I was amused. I
laughed!
"

He reached down with one hand and grabbed her by the throat. Saliva foamed from the corners of his mouth. His face flushed and his neck pulsed.

"I laughed my guts out. Watching this Russian, maybe nineteen, twenty years old, dancing an agonizing death reel.

In the street where my mother bought bread and flowers.

And I was the orchestra. I provided the music…with my fire bomb."

"Nicky! Stop it!! Stop! Nicky!!" She was losing consciousness.

With his free hand, Horvath swung long and hard, crashing his fist into Lydia's face, the impact of which made her fly off the bed. He remained motionless, the memory-provoked grimace on his face frozen, the terrifying eyes looking at Lydia, but not seeing her.

Holding the side of her face with one hand, she picked herself carefully from the floor, watching him warily while trying to keep from passing out. She grabbed a pillow from the bed and held it to her body as she made a gradual retreat toward the bathroom. She felt blood drip from the corner of her mouth.

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Realization pierced Horvath's face. The grimace melted into astonishment, then fear. He reached out with one arm.

"Lydia. Oh Lydia…I'm so…sorry. Please…"

From her dresser top she snatched a hand-mirror and smashed it against the side. She grasped a long, narrow shard and held it defensively in front of her.

"Lydia, I want to--"

"Stay away from me. Or I'll stab you!"

He stepped toward her with outstretched arms, utterly vulnerable in his nakedness. Tears streamed down his face.

"I said stay away from me!" she screamed. "If you touch me, I'll cut you. And then I will tell the reporters that you sleep with Russian women and that you beat them!

How will your president think of that?" A twisted snarl transformed her soft face into a beast-like apparition. "So, you hate Russians? Do not try to push Russians around.

This Russian will fight back!" She brandished her crude blade, it having drawn blood from her tight-gripping palm.

She dashed into the bathroom and slammed the door, quickly locking it. Holding fast to the basin, Lydia saw herself in the mirror, cheek swollen and bleeding, her tear-soaked face contorted from hysteria. She covered her cheek with her injured hand, adding more blood to her facial wound. She sobbed uncontrollably in the sink. She began reciting an Orthodox prayer her mother had secretly taught her when she was a girl.

Horvath tapped on the door. "Lydia, I'm sorry. Please come out," he pleaded.

"Go away!!" she screeched. "Go away…" Her voice dissembled in panicked weeping. She heard him exit the room and descend the stairs. The front door of the townhouse opened and slammed shut.

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The ride from Washington to the Hamptons was seemingly endless and fraught with uncertainty. She sat the four hours staring out the window of the chauffeured black Lincoln, silent and anxious. The driver, a burly Siberian named Pyotr was solicitous, asking her several times if she needed to go to the toilet or wanted a bite to eat. She only shook her head in response. She held a hand over the swelling on her cheek, hoping the warmth would expedite the healing. Pyotr looked at her sympathetically through the rear view-mirror.

Her thoughts again took her back in time. Was it escapism, self-analysis, self-pity? It wasn't important, really. She saw herself, the Lydia of ten years romping in the meadows, strewn with yellow and purple wildflowers, singing and running, trying to launch a kite with her father.

Her mother sitting on a blanket sorting the picnic food, laughing and shouting encouragement. The foothills to the Caucasus, beyond Krasnodar, were beautiful in the summertime. Wonderful places for family picnics and for kids to run free, away from the gray city with its factory air, away from crowded flats, away from the cautious people leading plodding lives. Those days of family outings, swathed in the yellow glow of the summer sun and the warm love of a family trying to retrieve authenticity out of a milieu of stale, state-imposed conformity. Her father's vivid stories. He could paint a canvas in one's imagination.

Tales of knights and princesses, the stuff that socialism endeavored to eradicate from the people's collective consciousness. And he told true tales passed onto him from his grandfather, a loyal servant of the last tsar. Stories of palace splendor and court intrigue, of brave cossacks and treacherous priests. Accounts of the richness, and harshness, of pre-revolutionary rural Russians as well as 148 JAMES

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the unreal grandeur of St. Petersburg. Grand balls in Moscow and Petersburg, folk fairs in the countryside.

Stories of love, unrequited and consummated.
Oh, great-grandpapa had things to tell. And, oh, papa, how rich you
made us by keeping alive the flame of fantasy and history.

Were I only born in those days, a girl in Old Russia when
people still could dream and be their true selves…

"We are here, Miss," the Siberian said.

The Lincoln passed through an iron gate manned by two cement-block guards, Tatars or Chechens, Lydia thought.

A television camera and some kind of electronic sensors pointed at them from the arch above the gate.

Up a winding, oak-lined driveway, there appeared a magnificent hybrid chateau with doric columns, flying buttresses, gothic windows and huge iron lanterns hanging from a ten-meter-high entrance. Waiting to open her door was a butler, at least a man dressed in black tails and exhibiting a formal demeanor. She was ushered into a chandeliered marble foyer lined with medieval tapestries featuring warriors fighting in some long-lost battle. Two additional grave, heavyset guards stood with arms crossed.

Their eyes scrutinized her from head-to-toe. They parted to allow her to pass into the next chamber, of white marble in grandiloquent
belle époque
design. Two large, gilded chandeliers sported winged cupids blaring horns, an oversized fireplace on whose weighty mantle perched on each side two, black-marble, half-robed Greek goddesses gazing longingly heavenward. Occupying the middle of the mantelpiece was a tilted glass globe. A bright red carpet covered the floor. Curved, silk-cushioned Louis XIV furniture graced the chamber. The butler motioned for Lydia to sit on a gold-upholstered regency-style sofa.

A plump woman entered and, in a heavy Ukrainian accent, asked what madame wished for a refreshment.

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"Tea," Lydia replied with a fleeting smile across her injured face.

She fidgeted as she sat there alone, in this magnificent room of this splendid mansion. She felt so out of place, like driftwood from some desolate northerly latitude washed up on a golden, tropical shore.

The portly Ukrainian woman returned ten minutes later with a brass samovar from which she poured steaming, black tea. At Lydia's nod, she added a spoonful of dark honey.

Lydia was left alone for what seemed like hours. She sipped the piping hot tea. It warmed her inside. The heat radiated outward, an inner sun rekindling life.

A brass-framed glass door swung open, pulled by the silent, faceless butler. In strode Yakov. He smiled warmly and kissed Lydia's hand, then seated himself in a matching chair on the sofa's right.

"
Gospozha
Lydia Yekatarina, you are as beautiful as ever," he beamed. He used the traditional, pre-revolutionary address for Miss. Her father called her

'gospozha' as an endearment.
Tovarishch
-- comrade -- was rarely heard within the confines of the Puchinski home.

Yakov was so deceptive, so falsely enticing. A python circling its prey ever so gently. A dead feeling permeated her body when she was in his presence. Here was a Potemkin man, she thought, a man superficially charming, but who exuded no life, only a frigid emptiness.

"My dear Lydia, I want to thank you for making this long journey at my request." In fact, she had no choice.

She forced a smile. "This house is so magnificent. It's a fairy tale place."

He swept the premises in a wide arc with his eyes, obviously proud of this acquisition. The Ukrainian maid returned with what appeared to be a glass of lemonade for 150 JAMES

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Yakov. The latter, sporting gray riding pants and a black turtleneck sweater, was clearly in his element as lord of the manor.

"You know, this belonged to an American robber-baron.

He used it only as his summer home. They called these mansions, 'cottages.'" He directed his gaze suddenly onto her. "Can you believe it? A 'cottage'!? Such wealth they had, these robber-barons. We had nothing like this in Russia. Yes, Peter the Great turned St. Petersburg into Paris of the East. But he was only one man and was a tsar.

In America, anybody can be a tsar if he puts his mind to it.

It's all out there to be gotten. And the astonishing thing is that ninety-nine percent of Americans don't see it. It takes outsiders. They see. They come from nothing. Therefore, they can see everything as an opportunity. Can you imagine?"

She looked at him silently, waiting for him to get to the business at hand and dreading it.

"Are you happy in Washington?"

"You are most generous, Yakov."

"Yes. I brought you here from Rome because I saw with these same outsider's eyes that you are special. People, men, trust you and confide in you. You have a magical effect on them."

Lydia stared into her tea cup while he said this. Then looked up at him, her face saying,
Okay. So what's the
point then?

As if upon some telepathic command from Yakov, in strode Dimitrov. He handed Yakov a small tape recorder.

Dimitrov stood stonily silent behind Lydia. She tensed.

Her heart began to pound. If Yakov's aura was one of coldness, this man's was of pure malice.

Yakov pressed a button. Nicholas Horvath's tortured voice emanated from the machine. "Lydia. Oh Lydia…I'm PERMANENT INTERESTS

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so…sorry." Her frantic threat followed. "I said stay away from me! If you touch me, I'll cut you. And then I will tell the reporters that you sleep with Russian women and that you beat them! How will your president think of that?"

Yakov stopped the recording. His face grimaced as if in pain. The air was dense and volatile.

Lydia's thoughts raced with her quickening heartbeat.

The cup that she grasped began to shake as a tremble entered her hands. She decided to take the offensive. Her speech was barely audible.

"Yakov. I was frightened. I was--"

Yakov nodded at Dimitrov. In a quick motion, the latter's coarse fingers grabbed her hair and yanked her head backward. The other hand produced a silvery blade which he held tightly under her jaw. She held her breath, knew better than to struggle.

Yakov was shaking his head. He lifted himself out of his chair, fixed his eyes downward while pointing his right index finger upward opposite his ear in an admonishing gesture.

"Lydia. Lydia. Lydia. You don't listen to me. You don't appreciate all I've done for you. You don't take my advice. You don't follow my instructions."

Before Lydia could protest, Dimitrov locked his grip tighter on her hair, driving sharp pangs into her ears and neck. She felt the blade press harder against her larynx.

Any more and the skin would break. She knew it.

"You disappoint me, Lydia. You disappoint me very, very much. Without me, you would still be just another decaying beauty in another lost corner of Russia with vanquished dreams and a bitter life."

She could barely breathe. The pain and the panic strangely did not dilute her full comprehension of his words nor of the realization that her life may end violently within 152 JAMES

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the next several seconds. She released the teacup which tumbled and shattered to pieces on the floor.

"In return for providing you with comfort and a new life, with everything your heart would desire; in return for my request that you be warm to one of the most important men in Washington, you threaten to hurt him. You threaten to
hurt
him and then to tell everything to the
press!
"

He turned on his heel and looked at her squarely. "Are you insane?! Do you want to risk everything that I have given you?! Tell me, my little small town slut, do you wish to
die?!
"

She said nothing.

"What am I to do?" Yakov asked exasperatedly. "I can no longer trust you. You reject my generosity. What am I to do?"

Lydia shut her eyes. In her brain, she began to prepare for her death by reciting the prayer her mother had taught her. She returned mentally to the Caucasus meadows. She was wearing a frilly yellow dress and was dancing in a circle with other little girls, all giggling in a rapture of innocent girlhood joy. The sun was a gentle warm and the fragrance of spring wildflowers in their braided hair further lifted their spirits. The borderless deep blue sky blanketed them. The distant mountains smiled upon their frolicking.

Oh! Such sweetness. Leave me here. Where I can again
be free, joyful and innocent. Leave me!

An eerie smile came to her face. She felt at peace. In a deliberate movement, she leaned into Dimitrov's blade. He quickly withdrew it. Yakov moved with a start. For what seemed like an eternity, they gazed at Lydia in puzzled wonderment.