Red Star Rising (39 page)

When Charlie reached the table Natalia said, “I told Sasha we might be meeting a friend.”

“Hello,” said the child. “I’m Sasha. What’s your name?”

Charlie looked inquiringly at Natalia, who shook her head. Charlie couldn’t think of an appropriate Russian transliteration and said, “Ivan,” sure it wasn’t a pseudonym he’d forget after the morning’s still hopeful expedition.

Natalia’s forehead creased as she raised her eyebrows at the name, smiling down at his choice of meal. “I guessed that’s what you’d order.”

“What else could it have been?” Charlie smiled back.

Sasha made an attention-gaining slurp, sucking at the straw in her cherry milkshake, and said, “Would you like me to color you a picture?”

“I’d like that very much,” said Charlie. How could it be like this? Small talk, easy words that ordinary people said in ordinary situations: he didn’t have to sift and scrape every word for a second or third or fourth meaning.

“You choose,” Sasha insisted. “An elephant or a giraffe or a lion? It will have to be one of those because they’re all I’ve got.”

“A giraffe, please,” said Charlie.

“You wouldn’t like a lion, instead?”

“All right, a lion.”

Sasha smiled. “The giraffe is for Mama and the elephant is for Igor. He’s my teacher at school and our friend.”

“I . . .” started Charlie, stopping himself from saying he knew. “. . . He’ll like that,” he finished. He’d seen Natalia’s wincing frown.

“How are things?” she asked, as Sasha began scribbling with her crayons.

“Confused.”

“You look terrible. Drained. Are you all right?”

“There’s a lot happening.” He was glad there was a wall behind him.

Natalia frowned again. “From what I’ve read and seen on television I believed it to be all over: I thought you’d be going back very soon?”

“Not yet.” Innocuous though the words sounded, they marked a change from neither ever discussing work with the other.

“It seems bad, for you?”

“It could be. I could be recalled.” Not instantly forgotten small talk after all. But she would have surely mentioned the embankment ambush if she’d known about it: rejected his even approaching them. Now he was lying by omission, he recognized.

“How would you feel about that?”

Natalia didn’t want small talk, either, Charlie accepted. “It could make a lot of things easier.”

“Could it? Really, I mean?”

“I think so. And I have thought about it, very seriously thought about it.” He’d done the right thing by keeping the meeting, despite all the deceit and soul-searching.

“So have I. Although not to the extent of your quitting.”

“It might not even be an option of my choosing.”

“You wouldn’t like that.”

“Perhaps I wouldn’t,” Charlie agreed. “The circumstances, I mean. Not the result.”

“What are you talking about?” unexpectedly demanded the child.

“Something a long way away,” said Natalia.

“Not here, you mean? Not in Moscow?”

“No, not in Moscow,” said Charlie.

“Don’t you live here?”

“No,” said Charlie. “I live somewhere else.”

“My papa lives somewhere else, a long way away. I don’t see him but Mama says she might take me there one day.”

Charlie was conscious of Natalia flushing, very slightly. To his daughter Charlie said, “Would you like that?”

“I’m not sure,” said Sasha, with the serious-faced sagacity of a child, returning to her coloring.

“I wish that hadn’t been said.”

“I don’t have a problem with it,” said Charlie. “The opposite, in fact.”

“It doesn’t mean anything . . . that I’ve decided anything. Now I’m even more unsure.”

“Don’t be,” urged Charlie. “It really could be so much easier now.”

“You couldn’t live without the job. You know you couldn’t and I know you couldn’t.”

“I could,” insisted Charlie. “And will. By choice or otherwise.”

“Finished!” announced Sasha, triumphantly, offering Charlie the crayoned image. The lion’s mane and feet were colored green, its body yellow. She’d strayed over most of the guiding outlines in her eagerness to complete it.

“It’s the best picture of a lion I’ve ever seen,” enthused Charlie. “May I keep it?”

“I want you to,” insisted the child. “Are we going to see you again?”

“I hope so,” said Charlie.

“So do I. Next time you can have the giraffe and Igor can have the lion.”

“We have to go,” abruptly declared Natalia, the flush returning as she collected up her valise.

“We haven’t properly talked,” protested Charlie. This could be the last opportunity it would be safe for them to meet, for him to persuade her!

“You knew we couldn’t, not today. That wasn’t what today was about.”

“I’ll call again, when things get clearer. But don’t forget what I said. And that I meant all of it.”

“You’ve told me you meant what you said a lot of times before, Charlie. And haven’t meant them.”

“This time I do. I really do.”

“I’ve got a call to make” insisted Natalia, ushering Sasha before her.

So had he, thought Charlie. And a hell of a lot depended on it.

“Hello!” a man’s voice, slightly slurred.

Charlie said, “I have this number to call?”

“This is a public phone.”

“Who are you?” Surely not a hoax! It couldn’t be!

“Get off the line. I want to use the phone.” The voice
was
slurred, the belligerence rising.

“Did you answer because it was ringing?”

“Get off the fucking line!”

“I will when you answer the question. Otherwise I’ll keep it open: blocked.”

“It was ringing as I got into the kiosk. Now get off the fucking line!”

Charlie did, stepping away from the telephone for a woman who was waiting with a tugging child on reins but stayed close enough to hear her voice when she spoke in case the contact was planned differently from how he expected. It was high pitched, a complaint about a gas installation, not at all the tone he wanted to hear. There could be a simple, easy explanation. The belligerent man could have got to the telephone seconds before the woman, no thought of politely deferring to her using it first. Probably wouldn’t have wanted him to, hanging around to hear everything she said. Made every sense for her to be the one to hold back. She would have heard the ringing: know he’d understood and was
trying to reach her. All he had to do was wait. But not too long. The woman for whom he’d stepped aside appeared to be having an argument with whomever she was talking; the tugging child was pulling away, distracting her. Charlie walked to and fro in her eye line, to remind her he was waiting. Pointedly she turned her back on him. It was six minutes past five. His feet throbbed. The child became entangled in its reins and fell, pulling the woman off balance. He began screaming and she finally slammed the phone down, dragging him away.

Charlie wedged himself into the kiosk, determined against abandoning it again, and dialed out the number from the paper slipped into his pocket. The line was engaged. He had to redial continuously four times before he got a ringing tone, counting each separate sound. He got to six before the receiver at the other end was lifted. No one spoke.

Charlie said: “Hello?”

There was no response.

“I have this number to call.”

“You’re late.”

The relief surged through Charlie at the recognizable hoarseness. “A man answered when I called before, right on time.”

“I saw him.”

“Then you know I kept my word.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Do you now trust me?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s a decision you’ve got to make.”

“Yes.”

“I promised to be alone at the Arbat. And I was. And I’m alone now: no one with me.”

“I know.”

“How can you know?” demanded Charlie.

“I can see you.”

Again Charlie avoided any startled reaction. Confident that he’d lost any pursuit, he hadn’t bothered to check out the streets directly around Hlebnyj pereulok, the street from which he was speaking. “Then you must know you’re safe.”

“It’s not true what they’re saying: about gangs and drug running and whores. They haven’t even got the name right!”

He had to put pressure on her, Charlie decided: imperceptibly, to prevent her panicking but sufficient to get out of this conversational cul-de-sac. “We have to meet; start talking differently from this. You know you’re not in any danger.”

“I don’t know that at all!”

At last Charlie looked around him, casually. There was what could be another public facility in the shadow of a building about thirty meters to his right. It was too dark for him to be sure, certainly to distinguish anyone inside. Good tradecraft again. “What do you want? If you want the proper retribution against the people who killed Ivan, I’m the man who can get it for you: the
only
one.”

“I don’t know that at all,” the woman repeated.

“You’re running away!” Charlie openly accused, conscious of the risk he was taking. “You keep running away from me you’re going to let those who killed Ivan escape. Is that what you want, for them to get away, never be punished?”

“No!”

“Then you’ve got to meet me. Talk to me. Tell me as much as you
do
know and let me take it on from there.”

“They’re too powerful; too influential.” She broke into a coughing fit.

“You don’t have anyone else. Can’t trust anyone else.” There was loud knocking from outside the telephone kiosk that made Charlie jump. He ignored it.

There was silence from the other end but another rap against the glass.

“Tell me how to meet you.
Where
to meet you.”

There was a sound that didn’t form into a word, something like a sigh that grew into a groan.

“What was that? What did you say?”

“Where the road joins Rizskij pereulok, on the left. The café there. Tonight. Seven. Wait for me to come up to you.”

“I need . . .” started Charlie, but the line went dead. His clandestine meeting with Sergei Pavel had been in a workers café,
arranged over public telephone lines. And now Pavel was dead, Charlie thought.

The café was not quite a step but at least a ledge above that in which he’d met Pavel, but thicker with cigarette smoke. The concentration of virtually everyone was on an ice hockey match showing on the screen behind the counter, one group of men enthusiastic enough to shout at goal attempts and the more violent clashes. There were three women already there when Charlie arrived, two gossiping at one table and immediately behind at another, a babushka heavily muffled in a coat and scarf and woolen hat, despite the warmth. All three ignored him. As he had for his meeting with Pavel, Charlie chose a pole-supported stand-up table closest to the wall farthest from the door, where he was able to see everything and everyone inside. He decided the coffee was better than in McDonald’s but the baklava was stale. He still nibbled at it, hungry after ignoring his McMuffin. He wasn’t convinced she would come. He’d decided the unintelligible sound at the end of their conversation had been a sob of fear at edging closer to a decision she was terrified of making, cutting off the words she couldn’t at first utter, a refusal maybe. Charlie didn’t know what to do if she didn’t come now. She’d cut him off before he’d been able to suggest a fail-safe, which he’d anyway been reluctant to do because it would have given her an escape. Now he wished she’d given him the chance. He supposed he could again try the public telephone kiosk for which he had a number, promptly at five: she seemed to need the regularity of time. Or hope she would call the embassy again.

Would Mikhail Guzov have tried to reply to his early morning call? They’d surely make some attempt to restage the press conference; not to do so would give Stepan Lvov another victory. Charlie reasoned there was the danger of a further hijack by the world media ignoring the declared purpose of the conference and instead demanding from Guzov and Interior Ministry officials answers about the arrest and detention of Svetlana Modin. Would
she have expected calls from him, even though it was a Saturday? Charlie thought she probably would. Automatically he looked at his watch, realizing the ORT main news was in thirty minutes, and just as automatically glanced toward the television, guessing it unlikely the channel would be changed from the ice hockey coverage.

So engrossed in the match was virtually everyone in the café—and so unobtrusive her entry—that Charlie thought he was probably the only person there to register the arrival of the woman he instantly and intuitively was sure to be his caller: it took several moments for the man behind the counter to become aware of her standing, waiting, and Charlie thought there was a professionalism about her nonentity cultivation. She was slight and very thin, anonymously dressed in a buttoned-to-the-neck gray linen coat and gray woolen hat pulled too low to give any indication of her hair shade. Her only distinctive feature when she turned away from the counter was her facial coloring. Charlie didn’t think there was any makeup and was surprised, if anonymity were what she wanted, because it could have reduced the strange mottled brownness to the left of her face. If she were who he believed her to be, he accepted that some of the coloring could have been apprehension but her appearance was that of someone who had spent the majority of her life in perpetual sunshine from which she’d made little effort to protect or shield herself.