Blind Date (6 page)

“So they have. But they have no influence. The rich don't fear them, workers mistrust them, peasants don't know about them.”

“Yet they've been in prison for months, even years, deprived of contact with their families —”

The dignitary looked at Levanter amused. “What do you expect?
Once they're arrested as enemies, they must be treated as such.”

Levanter delivered five photographs with a list of prominent intellectuals who were known to have been in PERSAUD prisons and camps. The dignitary put the list aside and eagerly reached for the enlargements.

“What about our deal?” Levanter asked.

“Give me two weeks,” the man said, without taking his eyes from the pictures.

In less than a month, five intellectuals were released and two of them who needed medical treatment not available in their country were allowed to immigrate to the United States. One, a middle-aged writer, came to Levanter. He was pale and emaciated; his jaw and nose had been broken.

The writer said he assumed that his sudden freedom was the result of a long campaign carried out on his behalf by writers and editors from P.E.N., members of the International League for Human Rights, Amnesty International, and other such powerful organizations. When Levanter told him what had actually brought about his release, the writer was visibly upset.

“That's humiliating,” he said. “I thought that PERSAUD was torturing me for my beliefs, that they believed my ideas would spread to the masses.”

“Does it make any difference why PERSAUD tortured you?” asked Levanter.

“It does,” he answered. “I saw myself as a political prisoner. I endured my prison ordeal convinced that PERSAUD feared us more than we feared them. If it is true that they persecuted us merely because we are weak, maybe we are too weak to fight them. After all, what can a few intellectuals do? We have no means,” he said.

“But we have,” said Levanter. “We have the means because we have each other.”

“But what can we do together that they will not answer with violence?”

“They use violence anyhow,” Levanter insisted. “They need no
provocation. Our only hope is to teach them to fear violence by letting them experience it.”

The writer was pacing. “I have never been a violent man. I don't believe in violence. Violence does not advance the human condition. Ideas do.”

“Ideas don't perish in prison cells,” Levanter said. “People do.”

Gondola 45 was directly over the chasm. Levanter wondered if the Deputy Minister and his bodyguards were feeling insecure as they looked down from the swaying cabin onto the mountainside of snow and ice opening into a deep pit of rocks and crevasses.

The sound of a faraway jet plane filled the valley, distracting him for a moment.

Levanter envisioned himself in a secret army blockhouse. He scans the panel of the central control unit. Suddenly, a small object appears on the radar scanner. The computerized group-intelligence system promptly identifies the object as enemy combat aircraft armed with long-range missiles, and orders its immediate destruction. The scanner indicates that the object is moving closer. He imagines a sleek vehicle thundering toward him on a mission of destruction, its pilot and crew reading the digits, setting the dials, moving the levers, selecting the final destinations of their missiles. Meanwhile, below, in the cities, towns, and villages designated as targets, unsuspecting men and women go about their lives as usual. The instrument panel indicates that the enemy plane can now be seen with the naked eye. His thumb makes contact with the surface of the missile button and rests there, ready to push. A backup intelligence-verifying computer again prints the order to destroy. There is not much time left.

The sound of the jet closed in above him, bringing him back to the present. His thumb on the transmitter button, Levanter trained his binoculars directly on the gondola and pressed the button.

The impulse from the transmitter spanned the tranquil valley and, faster than thought, reached the receivers of the detonating devices in the ski bindings. The gondola seemed to swell before it
burst open. Bits of debris, metal walls, windows, chunks of bodies, and flecks of clothing and skis showered down into the chasm. But the main cable remained intact and the other gondolas hung motionless, their passengers safe. The spectacle was over; it might never have occurred.

Levanter thought of the effort he had expended collecting skis from various manufacturers to find the ones best suited for his purpose. He recalled transforming his apartment into a virtual ski and radio shop, familiarizing himself with transistorized gadgetry, dismantling and reconstructing an exhaustive array of walkie-talkies, television and radio remote-control devices, miniature calculators, and Citizens Band radios. He remembered arranging his black-market purchase of the most reliable form of moldable nitroglycerine explosives, buying an amount that was not large enough to attract the notice of any law-enforcement agency but was surely sufficient to blow himself sky-high. Finally, he recalled the tedious business of splicing open each ski, replacing its fiberglass innards with sandwiched sheets of explosives, installing the detonator and the transistorized receiver inside the bindings, then meticulously resealing both skis. Traveling in the plane with the skis as part of his luggage and claiming them at the airport in Europe — this too had been a worthwhile risk.

He felt his energy, time, and money had been well spent, but at the moment, all he wanted was to descend, to be back in ValPina, to feel the leisurely atmosphere of the resort, to mingle with the tourists crowding the sidewalks and shopping arcades, to watch the steady stream of cars from all over Europe.

He skied down, inspired and elated. He had no further use for his binoculars or the transmitter; he tossed them into a crevasse and heard them rebound against the rocks. He listened to his heart. Its beat was regular.

By the time he heard the first sketchy radio reports about the explosion that killed the Deputy Minister and his two bodyguards, Levanter was already feeling removed from the act, already feeling it was something he had done long ago.

He was elated about having finally helped the execution of justice. He thought of the anger that raged in him each time he read a newspaper account of Stalin's henchmen who lived unscathed in the safety of retirement, fearing nobody but old age. And he thought of the Nazis, how justice had waited a decade before meting out its impersonal revenge.

Dusk fell. He was driving toward Paris alone. His headlights ferreted out sleepy villages tucked in the snow, and he felt secure, snug in a world that allowed one to slide easily between memory and deed.

Shortly after Levanter had established himself in the investment business, he went to Paris to visit a laboratory that was working on
new photographic emulsions. He was leaving a shop on the Left Bank one day when a man on a scooter cut ahead of him and stopped at the curb. The man took off his helmet and glanced at Levanter as he walked by. Then he turned and looked again. Levanter couldn't believe what he saw. But there was no mistake. They embraced.

“Rom!” shouted Levanter.

“Lev! I can't believe it,” the man exclaimed in Russian. “How can this be?” Romarkin was laughing and weeping. “I heard you were somewhere in America, but I couldn't find out how to reach —”

“What about you?” Levanter interrupted. “I haven't seen you since our Moscow days twenty-five years ago! How did you get here?”

“Let's sit down,” said Romarkin, still flushed. They went to the corner café, ordered wine, and toasted each other.

Romarkin opened his collar. “All these years, and you still speak fluent Russian,” he said. “You haven't forgotten.”

“Never mind that. How did you get here?” Levanter persisted.

Romarkin sipped his wine. “Before I answer,” he said haltingly, “tell me something, Lev, and tell me honestly. Did you think, back then, that I was ill? Mentally ill?” Romarkin, suddenly looking anxious and intense, leaned across the table. “Remember, at the university, when I asked that question?”

“Of course I remember. How could I forget?” Levanter said. “But what happened to you after that?”

Romarkin was almost whispering. “I was shipped to Siberia. You know that. Three years of corrective labor. Then I was sent into the army. Luckily, I excelled in gymnastics, so they put me on the track-and-field team. I was good at the high jump. Very good. Last year, when the team visited France for a meet, I made my highest jump ever — right over the Iron Curtain. I asked for political asylum here, and they gave it to me. Since then I've been just another refugee.” He took a big gulp of wine. “But I don't want to talk about the present. I have to know. You have to tell me, Lev.”

“Tell you what?”

Romarkin tugged on his ear, as he used to do when they were studying together. Then he whispered, “Every morning, for the last twenty-five years, I have asked myself, as a monk asks a merciless God for enlightenment — what possessed me to raise my hand and ask that question about Stalin? Surely thousands of others in that auditorium wondered the same thing. Why was I the only one to ask it? Why?”

Levanter and Romarkin had worked together at the International Youth for Peace Festival, sponsored and organized by the government and the Party. Romarkin, the son of a proletarian family and a good public speaker with an engaging manner and an impeccable academic record, was ideally qualified to run a hospitality program for the several hundred West European intellectuals, artists, and political and union officials invited to the Festival. He promptly made Levanter his second-in-command.

After the opening ceremony, Romarkin and Levanter watched as an air-force marshal was escorted to his limousine. Just as he was about to enter the sedan, a student carrying a large camera with a flash attachment stepped out from behind the police cordon to photograph the marshal. Somehow, as he snapped the picture, the flash bulb shattered with a loud crack. In a blind reflex action, two of the marshal's security guards drew their guns and fired at the photographer. The student fell to the sidewalk. Blood poured from his neck and chest, seeping through his clothes, spattering his camera.

Without glancing at the body, the marshal and his aides jumped into the limousine and sped away. The terrified bystanders dispersed in panic. Security guards wrapped the dead man and the remnants of his camera in a blanket, dumped the body into the trunk of one of their cars, and quickly mopped up the small pool of blood on the pavement. In minutes they had all departed. Only Levanter and Romarkin remained. Levanter was trembling, Romarkin was pale and silent.

The Festival's organizers and the press corps and radio-television
crews were given a wing in one of Moscow's largest hotels. Romarkin and Levanter shared an enormous suite on the sixteenth floor.

Early one evening, Romarkin asked Levanter to accompany him on an errand. He dismissed his assigned chauffeur and drove the official car through the poorly lit city streets, stopping in front of a large residential compound that housed several Festival delegations. Romarkin got out of the car and disappeared.

In a few minutes, he returned with a young, pretty Chinese woman. He opened the car door and she climbed into the front seat next to Levanter. Romarkin got behind the wheel again and addressed her in Russian. She smiled but obviously did not understand. Jokingly, Romarkin introduced her as Chairman Mao's Robot. When she heard him say “Chairman Mao” the young woman nodded and smiled again.

As they drove, Romarkin told Levanter that she had become separated from her group for a moment just inside the compound, and he had taken her arm and led her away. No one had seen them. He had quickly shown her his Festival identity card, which verified in six languages, including Chinese, that he was an official. The Robot followed him without any resistance, he said, because, like the rest of her comrades, she had never been taught to reason independently. She and everyone else in her delegation automatically obeyed authority. Romarkin assured Levanter that, as most of the delegates to the Festival were ordered by their superiors to mix with the delegates of other nationalities, the authorities expected some of them not to return to their quarters for the night.

At the hotel, they took an empty service elevator and went nonstop to floor sixteen. As soon as they entered the suite, Romarkin telephoned the hotel manager and told him that certain confidential Festival files were being stored in his suite and hotel personnel were not to enter for the remaining four days of the Festival unless summoned by him or Levanter.

Then, mockingly, Romarkin proposed a series of toasts to Chairman Mao. They all drank several large glasses of plain water in rapid succession. Romarkin and Levanter pretended that the water had made them drunk; the Robot dutifully pretended she was
drunk as well. The three of them staggered to a small bedroom, down the short hall from Levanter's room.

Both Levanter and Romarkin started to make love to her, and the Robot did not resist. She seemed resigned, as if they — her superiors — had the right to do this to her, as if she had been transported here from her homeland to do what she was told, and to do it in the spirit of Mao that she had been ordered to promote while abroad. Throughout the night, she continued to submit obediently. No matter whether she was entered hurriedly, stroked harshly, caressed gently, or kissed passionately, passing from one pair of arms to the other, her face never lost its agreeable, complacent expression. She either lacked sensation or suppressed it — they could not tell which.

In the morning, the suite again became a busy Festival office. Phones rang constantly, the calls handled by three secretaries; prominent foreign visitors and officials continually stopped to collect passes for various activities; and in the corridor outside the suite Soviet and foreign reporters milled about, hoping to corner celebrities for interviews.