Russian Spring (38 page)

Sonya bobbed her head.

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Oh, Ilya,” she moaned. “I just
can’t
. . . .”

“Of course you can,” Ilya said. “What are friends for?”

Now Sonya did look up at him and face him honestly. The finely tailored mustard-colored suit, the romantic Tartar features, the long flowing golden hair, the perfect lady-killer who made no bones about it. But behind and beneath all that, there was something else, the something that she now realized she had been responding to.

Ilya Sergeiovich Pashikov
was
her friend. Perhaps the only real friend she had.

Ilya rose up from behind his desk, went to the door, and locked it from the inside.

“Ilya! What do you think you’re doing!”

“Breaking the rules,” he said. “I won’t tell if you don’t.” He came back to the desk, opened a drawer, withdrew two shot glasses and a bottle of buffalo-grass vodka. “As the old Russian-American folk saying has it, ‘When the going gets tough, it’s time to get drunk!’ ”

Ilya took the vodka over to the office couch, sat down in the left-hand corner, patted the seat beside him. “Come on, Sonya, have a few and get it all off your chest.”

Sonya found herself walking over to the couch and sitting down on the opposite end. Ilya poured two glasses and handed her one. “Drink up!” he commanded.

Sonya slugged down the tepid, pungent, oily stuff, and grimaced. “It’s warm,” she said.

“Is it?” Ilya said, studying his glass. He bolted it down, muzhik-style. “You’re right,” he said, pouring two more. “We’d better have another quickly, so we won’t notice the taste.”

Sonya laughed and drank up. Ilya poured another round. And another.

“So?” Ilya said. “What’s the problem?”

A wan warm glow suffused Sonya’s limbs, like the strangely satisfying fatigue that had come toward the end of so many of their long days working on the impact reports and company analyses together, the loose-jointed feeling that came from sharing hard and exciting labor, the feeling of tired comradeship that had come after the sun went down, when they had staggered out to the nearest brasserie for a bottle of wine, a quick dinner, and an idle discussion of the day’s work.

Somehow, she found the vodka dissolving her back into that special time and place that she and Ilya had shared, and she started talking, not about impact statements and scenarios, but about Bobby, and Jerry, and what had happened that awful evening, with the same end-of-the-day
ease, with the distance of a tale told to an old and trusted friend, to a workplace comrade far, far away from the scene of domestic strife.

Ilya, for his part, just sat there listening, saying little, nodding his head and bobbing his long golden hair, pouring more vodka when their glasses got empty. Somewhere along the line, Sonya’s shoes had been kicked off, and her legs had become tucked under her on the couch, and the room began to whirl a little, and she found herself next to him, cuddled in his comforting masculine aura, not touching, but physically closer, somehow, than she had been in bed with Jerry all these weeks.

“Ah, but you are punishing yourself needlessly, Sonya, I think,” Ilya said expansively, leaning a bit closer himself, and seeming to weave in her vision woozily, though whether she was woozing, or he was woozing, or both of them were sharing a friendly little wooze together, it was hard to tell.

“How so, Ilya?” Sonya said, gazing into the depths of his somewhat bloodshot blue eyes.

Ilya shrugged, and in so doing, managed to lean even closer, so that she could smell the aroma of him, compounded of cologne, and talc, and his warm vodka-perfumed breath. “You do not really wish to leave your husband, do you?” he said. “And he does not really wish to leave you, da?”

“I suppose not,” Sonya said. “But things have been very hard, Ilya, very hard indeed. . . .”

Ilya reached out and patted her hand. A thrill went through her, unbidden. This man, this beautiful man, who was a veritable human octopus with other women, though certainly a suave and not unwelcome one, had never touched her flesh
this way
before. “Poor, poor Sonya,” he said. “Perhaps the problem is that things have not been . . . hard enough, n’est-ce pas?” he drawled.

“Oh, Ilya!” she cried, and pushed him away with a gentle shove to his chest, but not without a girlish little giggle.

Ilya threw his arms up and back, letting himself loll in languid ease against the couch. “No, seriously,” he said. “I am not exactly a world-class expert on marital discord myself, not having succumbed to the traps and snares of conjugal bliss thus far—and with a little luck and some help from my lady friends, hopefully I never will. However, when it comes to the discontent of other people’s wives, let us say that I am not unacquainted with what the Americans would call the ‘seven-year itch,’ in your case, a decade and more overdue, I should say. . . .”

“Should you, Ilya?”

“Probably not,” he admitted. “But on the other hand, I am decently
drunk enough to throw such cautions to the wind, as it were, or even as it were not, so to speak. Which is to say . . . Which is to say . . .” He scratched his head. “Which is to say
what?
I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what I’m talking about.”

Sonya laughed. “Knowing you, it was probably sex,” she said.

“Sex? Ah yes, no doubt you are right! Now there is a subject concerning which I indeed have some expertise!”

“Do tell!”

“About whom? A gentleman never tells, you know, and that is what I am, good Communist or not!”

“What a beast you are, Ilya Sergeiovich!” Sonya cried.

“Moi?”
Ilya said superciliously. “Far from it! I have never forced my attentions on any woman!”

“Only because you haven’t had to!” Sonya told him.

“Ah, but this is not so, not so at all!” he declared. “Oui, it is true, I am never without the amorous attentions of the multitude, but that does not mean I have never manfully refrained from plucking forbidden fruit!”

“Oh really? Like whom?”

“Like you, Sonya Ivanovna,” he said.

“Me?” Sonya said in a tiny voice. Dust motes seemed to hang and sparkle in the air before her. A delicious fear blossomed in her breast and spread down her stomach and between her thighs, where it became a treacherous dissolving warmth.

“Surely you have noticed?” Ilya said, prying his upper torso shakily off the couch, leaning forward, and staring deep, deep into her eyes.

“Noticed what?” Sonya whispered, leaning closer herself.

Ilya glanced down at his crotch, where a telltale bulge strained against the fabric of his tightly tailored pants.

“Oh really, Ilya,” Sonya said softly. And she reached out her hand to push him away again. But when her palm touched his chest, something, some trick of gravity, or vodka, or she knew not what, made it linger there, feeling his heartbeat.

“I have fucked at least three hundred women,” Ilya said, staring into her eyes. “I have been a noble stakhanovite of sex. I have fulfilled my five-year plan a hundred times over like a true hero of socialist labor. Fucking for me, it is nothing. I flit from flower to flower, as it were, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, as the gringos would have it. But truth be told, never have I bedded a woman whom I truly respected as I respect you, my good and true friend.”

“Oh, Ilya, as the gringos would also say, you are so full of shit that it is coming out of your ears!” Sonya said. But she found herself putting her other hand on his shoulder.

“No, no, no, it is true!” he declared. “We have worked together,
we have shared meals together, we have drunk together, we have smelled the sour sweat of each other’s fatigue. We have shared every intimacy save one. . . . So what does it matter? Who is to know?”

“You are quite drunk, Ilya Sergeiovich!”

“And you are quite shit-faced yourself, Sonya Ivanovna.”

“Who am I to deny it?”

“Well, shall we get it over, then?”

“Get what over?”

“The cosmic inevitable,” Ilya said, and he swept her up into his arms, and he pressed his lips against hers, and thrust his tongue deep into her mouth. And that was the end of thought.

Why the pull-back on Wall Street? The conventional wisdom is that we’re just seeing the inevitable profit-taking after the big Renationalization run-up. But if you look at where all the cash being pulled out of stocks is going, you get a different picture, amigo. Institutional investors, flush with the profits they’ve taken, are gobbling up Baja California real estate like there’s no tomorrow, inflating land values to the point where there are few real bargains left.

But adventurous investors can still cash in by buying secondary regional bank stocks. The majors are already in up to their eyeballs, leaving the smaller banks to write the loans for the Johnny-come-lately small-fry speculators in a lenders’ market. True, a lot of this action is highly leveraged, and it’s not for the weak-hearted.

For conservative investors, defense stocks remain the most prudent play, particularly the California-based majors.

—
Words from Wall Street

XIII

As the ancient pickup truck began climbing up out of Boulder and into the majestic fir-covered foothills of the Rockies, Robert Reed finally began to feel that he was really in the America of his dreams—hitchhiking west across the Continental Divide toward fabled California, just like the beatniks and Oakies and hippies in all the old novels he had devoured in Paris. On the road at last!

Behind lay Denver, and New Orleans, and Chicago, and Miami, and Washington, and New York, and a ghastly ten days that had disabused him of most of his preconceptions, including his original plan to use his Air America pass to hop from city to city, seeing the country as he zigzagged across it in the general direction of Los Angeles.

New York was everything the legends said, and worse. Hundreds of soaring towers rising right out of crumbling rat-infested ruins.
Elegant restaurants and sidewalk vendors selling what looked suspiciously like rat-kebabs. The Statue of Liberty, where they ran you through metal detectors and bomb-sniffers before they let you climb the long spiral staircase to the crown. The Empire State Building with its magnificent view of the city from on high and its hundred floors of foul crash-cubicles within. Central Park, with its tent cities, patrolled by armored cars. Beggars and prostitutes on Wall Street, right in front of the famous Stock Exchange.

It was like some dreadful living political cartoon of the injustices of American corporate capitalism, and after a day, and a sleepless night, and another day wandering the savage streets, Bobby had had more than enough, and he caught a shuttle flight to Washington on an ancient 767 that lost an engine on the forty-five-minute flight from La Guardia airport.

Washington was not nearly as expensive as New York. The center of the city was ringed by relatively cheap and relatively decent tourist hotels, though from what Bobby saw on the bus ride in from the airport, the surrounding sprawl of slums was, if anything, worse, reminding him of nothing so much as the shantytowns surrounding some gleaming African government center, and just as thoroughly black.

But the nation’s capital had geared itself to tourism, its only major industry besides government, and what festered outside the gleaming alabaster centre ville was kept at bay by an army of police, who were constantly in evidence checking the identity papers of anyone who was black and did not dress up to their stringent standards of middle-class civilization.

The center of the city had been turned into a kind of patriotic Disneyland, and Bobby, like most of the rest of the tourists, signed himself up for the two-day guided tour. He was taken to the top of the Washington Monument, and inside the House and Senate chambers. He saw the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial, and the White House. His group was quick-marched through the Smithsonian and the National Aerospace Museum and the Library of Congress—though the Pentagon, and the Vietnam memorial, and the Challenger monument were for some reason not on the tour.

And all the while he was subject to the most appalling jingoistic blather from the tag team of guides, who sounded as if they were all reading from the same script, and probably were.

The Washington Monument was an excuse to remind the tourists of George Washington’s warnings against entanglements with effete Europeans. The Iwo Jima statue was the occasion for the glorification of what the Marines were presently about in South America. The National Space Museum was somehow a monument to the vision
that had given the country Battlestar America, which was now allowing it to thumb its nose at a hostile world.

Bobby was mighty glad he was wearing his Dodgers jacket as the citizens on his tour sucked all this up with avid agreement and choruses of diatribes against the evil Russians and the perfidious Peens, for it was quite clear that the general opinion was that Common Europe had sold out civilization to Godless Atheistic Communism, that Europe richly deserved the economic hosing it had just received in return, that American military might was the Last Best Hope of Man, and that he had better keep his mouth shut and his European birth to himself.

Washington was absolutely dead at night, and the guides had made it clear that so were you if you strayed out of the safe areas in search of fun and games, so Bobby spent his two evenings there watching American TV in his hotel room, or at least as much of it as he could stomach.

There were game shows, and soft-core porn, and endless episodic series in midstream, mostly tending toward glorification of past American military ventures in World War II and Korea and Cuba, a completely insane musical about Teddy Roosevelt, a science-fiction series featuring cannibalistic aliens who spoke with stage-Russian accents, and a Ronald Reagan film festival.

The news shows were even more puke-awful and frightening. To hear the commentators and the edited footage tell it, Europe was committing fearful atrocities against American citizens, the Soviet Union was seizing control of the Common European government, American troops were beating the bejesus out of the guerrillas in Venezuela and Argentina, and the Mexicans were brutally attacking American settlers in Baja California, and cruising for a bruising. Since the Mexican government was in the hands of European dupes anyway, the general consensus was that the Monroe Doctrine was about to be applied, and none too soon, for the purpose of which a naval task force was in the process of being assembled off Miami, and another off San Diego.