The Mulberry Bush (14 page)

On the twenty-eighth try, I used my right foot for the first time to drive a shot to his left. He couldn't reach it: 1–0 USA.

Boris glared at me with a suspicion that verged on loathing: How had I done that?

Arkady said, “Game over.”

I said, “Let's go to fifty as agreed, if that's OK with Boris.”

Boris said, “Do a hundred if you want.”

These were the first words he had uttered all morning.

I made no further effort to humiliate Boris, but by now luck was fully awake and on my side. I made two more goals, one of them to Boris's right, his strong side, because by that time he was concentrating almost all of his attention on his left.

When the contest was over, Boris managed to smile. He shook my hand with a warmth that was intended to be believable.

He said, “Very enjoyable. You should play for America in the World Cup. Arkady, you're the captain, invite him to practice with Gospoda. It would be good for us to go up against this American. For me especially.”

“Good idea, but I don't think we can convince him.”

Arkady threw an arm around my shoulders.

“Congratulations,” he said in a hearty voice. “It was a pleasure to play with you. Have you really not played for twenty years or is what just happened the famous American tricky Dicky?”

I said, “I enjoyed it, too.”

Arkady looked up at the sun.

“Time for coffee,” he said. “There's a good place not far away. Boris pays.”

Boris skipped the coffee and ordered a large dish of vanilla ice cream. Did he always eat ice cream for breakfast?

“Only on certain days,” Boris said. “Do you play chess?”

“Sort of.”

Boris smiled—broadly, seemingly without rancor. This changed the look of him for the better.

He said, “You mean it's been twenty years since you moved a chess piece? Let's have a game soon. This time I will be on my guard.”

He was still smiling.

I said, “Sure. Why not?”

I had done what I could do to encourage the Russians. Now I waited for them to make the next move. A week passed, then two. I kept up my routine, assuming they already knew it in detail, and sure enough, one morning early as I ran in the same park where we had had our football shootout, I spotted Boris lumbering toward me from the opposite direction.

Even at a distance he was unmistakable, a squat figure wearing a white sweatband, a dark blue singlet and red shorts—the colors of the latest and in all probability, temporary Russian flag. When we drew closer, he did not bother to register surprise. He just stopped in his tracks and ran in place, thick legs pumping, until I reached him. Then he turned around and fell into step with me, eyes front. I offered no comment, and for the rest of the run, maybe half an hour, neither of us spoke. We were running on a dirt path. His heavy footfall caused little tremors in the earth. I could feel it, or imagined I could, through the soles of my running shoes.

We came to the end of the running path and pulled up. Boris, half smiling, offered his hand. We shook. His grip was painful. He probably could have fractured the bones if he wished.

He said, in English, “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Indeed. I didn't know you were a runner, Boris.”

Another small smile: He was not at ease. He said, “Goalkeepers need strong legs. Feel like a coffee?”

“Why not?”

He led me to a different coffee bar that looked pretty much the same as the last one—same frowsy woman at the cash register, same painfully bored kid at the machine. Both were watching U.S. reality television dubbed in Spanish. The volume was high. This made understanding Boris a challenge. His bulk notwithstanding, he spoke softly. After the first sip of espresso, he switched from English to Russian. He was still sweating, the cabbage scent of it was noticeable, and he wiped his face with the paper napkin.

He said, “Gospoda plays a team of Italians, the Alpini, this Sunday. They are very good. It will be an uphill battle. Why don't you come?” He told me when and where the game would be played.

He said, “We can give you a uniform and run you out onto the field if we need a last-minute goal. The Mystery Striker. What is the American slang word for
impostor
?”

“Ringer.”

“Even if you won't be a ringer, come anyway.”

“I'll try.”

“That would be good. We'll be without Arkady, our best player.”

“Oh?”

“One of his trips.”

Evidently Arkady had spoken his lines in Act One, Scene Two of this comedy, and moved offstage. I wondered how well he really knew Diego—or Boris, for that matter. Watching him dash around the football pitch I had wondered about the quadruple bypass. Now I wondered again.

Boris watched my face. Maybe my skepticism showed. He got up and went to the counter and returned with two more cups of coffee and two dishes of vanilla ice cream.

“That's breakfast?” I said.

“Try it. You'll like it. Ice cream is the best thing after exercise—the sugar, the taste, the reward for punishing your body.”

We were seated by the front window, so we could watch the girls as they went by. Boris was appreciative but kept his thoughts to himself. We might as well have been a couple of jocks who had met by chance and had no plans ever to see each other again.

As we parted, shaking hands again, Boris said, “Try to come Sunday. Maybe we can have that game of chess afterward.”

He slapped my biceps and grinned. “Maybe you can ambush me again.”

Thus began a beautiful friendship.

On Sunday Luz and I went to the football match. The Alpini won 2–1 on a header in extra time. The partisan crowd screamed: There are lots of Argentineans of Italian ancestry.

I didn't see Boris again for a while. I was in no hurry to get together. Then one day I ran into him in a restaurant. He mentioned the chess game again. Although I now lived with Luz, I still had an apartment of my own. That seemed the best and most private meeting place. We agreed to meet there the next Saturday.

Boris wrote down the address, though he probably had long since memorized it. I duly informed the station chief and Headquarters of this arrangement. Amzi and Tom Terhune dispatched a tech to Buenos Aires to make sure that no bugs had been installed in my flat while I was disporting myself with Luz.

The tech found nothing, but of course the possibility existed that he had bugged the apartment as long as he was there. I was fine with that. It could only validate my “loyalty.” It would be beneficial to have a record of who was recruiting whom. If I did it right, it might come in handy at the Plantation as a training film. Father would have appreciated that: After all those years of not thinking about him if
I could possibly help it, I was now, unexpectedly, reminded of him almost daily.

In an antiques shop I found a nice chessboard with a set of ivory chessmen. I set it up on the small distressed card table that had come with the apartment. Boris arrived on the dot of nine, an early hour for chess. Luz was still asleep in her own apartment. So was most of the rest of the city. The streets and stairways were deserted. An occasional police siren pierced the weekend quiet. In another apartment someone practiced the first few bars of a Mozart piano concerto over and over again. Boris, apparently a music lover, kept time with his head.

Once again memories awakened. Father taught me to play chess. It was his style to play against the clock like a chess hustler in a park—
move-bang-DING
—and I emulated him. As I got better at the game I beat him once in a while, and he was not one to cheapen the thrill by letting his opponent win. After he left home I played with friends, even joined a chess club at school, but I gave it up when I was posted to the Middle East because, as with everything else, I was never in one place long enough to find an opponent I knew well enough to be confident that he or his friends didn't intend to capture me instead of my queen.

I was rusty, not that it mattered. I realized very quickly that I wasn't in Boris's class. He skunked me in the first game, showing no mercy. Because I was such a hapless opponent, he played even faster than Father, so we had several games before it was time for lunch. I lost them all. But as we went along I began to see the pattern in Boris's method and thought that in time, as my own game came back to me, I might be able to win every once in a while. Boris seemed to have some inkling of what I was thinking. Maybe losing the shootout had planted a seed of doubt in his mind. I hoped so.

For an early lunch I gave him pinot grigio and soup and cold chicken and salad, all straight from the supermarket. We talked about football. He was almost genial.

Boris and I agreed to play chess again the following Saturday. He asked if we could start earlier, say six in the morning. He worked on Saturdays and it was better if he reported for duty on time. We made the change.

I began to enjoy the games. I liked playing with a fresh morning mind, liked feeling that I was recovering lost skills and dim memories of Father's mock glee when he outsmarted me.

After a month or so I was beating Boris maybe half the time—or if he was as good as I thought he was, maybe he was letting me win. Once in a while I made a wrong move just to give him an advantage. Sometimes when this happened he looked up from the board with a flicker of suspicion—was I really that stupid?—but he always took what I offered.

Within boundaries I learned to enjoy Boris's company. This ran counter to my expectations, but Arkady had been right: Once he relaxed, Boris was a likable enough fellow. We didn't talk much, but chess is not a game associated with good conversation. Concentration and silence are the attractions, along with stealth and the potential humiliation of the opponent. No wonder the game is a flattering synonym for underhanded pursuits, especially the craft Boris and I practiced.

After a while, in hopes that this would encourage franker conversation, I shortened the sessions by a game and served coffee. Boris signaled his approval of this time-out by bringing a sack of
medialunas,
as the local version of croissants are called. This gave us half an hour or so to relax, if that's the word for two wary dogs engaged in a sniffing contest. The talk was harmless—football, of course, but also the peculiarities of the Argentineans, who might have been surprised that an American and a Russian found them at least as amusing as they found us.

We avoided world affairs, personal history, politics. I assumed that Boris took it for granted, because he had been educated to think in this way, that all Headquarters types were Nazis. If I did not behave like one, it was because I was foxily concealing the real me. On the other hand I assumed that he was at heart a stalwart Communist who went about
spying on the class enemy with the same aggression with which he played goalie and chess. I looked in vain for the fault that would let me get one past him when he leaned the wrong way. He was very professional.

Meanwhile Luz and I continued to see a lot of Diego. She had a birthday coming up in late September, the first month of spring in the Southern Hemisphere, and he invited us to stay at his place in Patagonia for a week or for as long as we chose. He'd fly us down. We could use the old car he kept at the airport. The beaches would be empty—it was too early to swim, but we could take walks and be quite alone. He might come down on weekends but otherwise we'd be alone. We accepted. Luz was tired of the city, tired of not copulating on Saturday mornings—a day without orgasms was a day lost. On her birthday, the
abuelos
hosted a dinner party of old friends of the family: Godmothers and godfathers certified by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, real aunts and uncles and cousins. No honorary aunts and uncles were invited.

“The
abuelos
hate the sight of them because Alejandro died for them and in their opinion all of them together were not worth one of him,” Luz said. “
Los descuidados,
the
abuelos
call them, the careless ones.”

The
abuelos
' party was on a Saturday. On Sunday the honorary aunts and uncles hired a restaurant and a rock band and threw a birthday party themselves. It was an all-Alejandroista affair—themselves, their kids, and a few uncomfortable foot soldiers of the revolution who looked like street people who had just been given a bath and new clothes by the Argentinean version of the Salvation Army. As usual no one took any interest in the Yanqui interloper. If Luz was in love with me, fine. They were all in favor of sexual experimentation. She was a big girl now, and I must do something for her that she liked having done. Let her enjoy whatever the something was while it lasted. They hoped she'd get over it soon and plug herself into the mother brain again.

The next morning, Diego flew us south. In Patagonia the weather was wonderful, and as Diego had promised, the beaches were deserted and
the weekend houses owned by doctors and lawyers and minor tycoons were shuttered. As soon as he left, Luz and I went back to living without clothes. At night we swam naked in the frigid water—the moon waxed the whole time we were there—and made love in the water or on a beach towel or with quivering knees while standing up in the surf. We were alone, all alone, Mr. and Mrs. R. Caruso.

Luz never closed her eyes during sex, so that when I opened mine, there she was, always, concealing nothing. I had never been so happy in my life and I knew I never would be again.

One afternoon, late, we came back from the beach and saw a shiny rental car parked beside the battered Toyota Corolla Diego was letting us use. The stereo was playing guitar music—Bach again. Diego had all of Andrés Segovia's CDs. We went inside and found Diego stretched out on the sofa, sound asleep. Or dead. He was so still, his skin was so gray, that we couldn't tell which until he uttered a sudden loud snore. Luz, who had grasped my forearm for fear that he might be a corpse, giggled.

In a whisper she said, “It must be Friday.”

Diego subsided. Luz tiptoed across the room and picked up the books we had been reading, the usual magic realism novel in her case, the poems of the great Russian manic-depressive Anna Akhmatova in mine. We went outside, lay down together in the hammock, and read ourselves to sleep.

When we woke it was almost dark. Lights burned in the house. Different music, American pop sung in Spanish came over the speakers. We heard the clatter of dishes. The thermometer had fallen. Luz, who was wearing a bikini, shivered and hugged herself. As we got closer to the house we smelled something cooking.

We went inside. Boris was setting the table. He was not very good at it. The forks, knives, and spoons were all on one side of the plates, the glasses were plastic tumblers instead of wineglasses. He held a bouquet of checkered napkins in his hand as if trying to figure out what to do with them.

Luz, struck dumb by the uncouth sight of him, scuttled into the bedroom.

I said, “Hello, Boris.”

He said, “Hello. Sorry about the surprise—Diego's idea. He tried to call but there was no answer.”

“We spend a lot of time on the beach.”

Boris said, “Is your wife all right?”

He knew perfectly well that Luz and I weren't married.

I said, “Let me check,” and followed Luz into the bedroom

She now wore, to sweet effect, one of my sweaters over her bikini.

She jerked a thumb toward the kitchen and said, “Who's that?”

I told her. She was already fully briefed on my friendship with Boris, but she had never before been in the same room with him.

She said, “That's what I thought. Is Diego out of his mind? This is not supposed to happen.”

Luz hated to be left out of the loop. She was in no mood to make allowances. She was agitated, accusation in her eyes, as though Boris's intrusion was my fault. It was against her rules to blame Diego for anything. True, she and I had agreed that she would never meet our targets. Her job was to get the aunts and uncles to identify old Russian acquaintances who had been friends of the revolution. But now the protocol had been broken.