Russian Spring (88 page)

“It’s a human-interest story,” Sonya said.

“A human-interest story?” Kandinski babbled. “How marvelous! We’re always interested in stories about humans! They’re so much more newsworthy than animals!”

“Good Lord, Leonid, get hold of yourself!”

“Get hold of myself? Oh, I’d love to get hold of myself, Sonya, if only people would let loose of my lapels and stop shouting in my face! You have no idea what it’s been like around here! Those ursine bastards in Moscow keep demanding more positive coverage, and of course it won’t do to tell them there’s nothing positive happening to cover! And the
KGB
has resurrected itself from the slime pits of history to threaten dire consequences if we don’t toe the Party line. But no one knows what the Party line is. And now here you are, with a
human-interest story!
”

Sonya resisted the impulse to slap the man across the face. What an appalling spectacle!

“You
will
like this story, Leonid,” she told him instead. “It’s a chance to crack the news with something that will make us look good for a change.”

“It is?” Kandinski said a shade less shrilly. “How is that possible?”

“By riding along on the Gringomania ourselves.”

“You’re serious? You’ve really got an angle to put our own spin on it?” Kandinski said.

“A mutual gesture of goodwill between ourselves and the Wolfowitz Administration.”

“All right, all right, so tell me; we could certainly use a good laugh around here. . . .”

And Sonya did. She had thought all this out carefully, and after the incredible scene at the American Embassy, she had thought it all out again with Bobby. Bobby could do no wrong now, as far as StarNet was concerned, and they were all too willing to run a human-interest feature on Jerry, or anything else that would keep Bobby happy. They were even willing to sell the Russian rights to Tass for a price, nuclear crisis or not.

“Tass can run the feature simultaneously with StarNet,” she told Kandinski. “The Soviet Union offers to fly the American Father of the European Grand Tour Navette into orbit on an Aeroflot Concordski and sponsors a resolution in the Common European Parliament to let him ride in his own spaceship, as a gesture of peace and European solidarity!”

Kandinski had sat there puffing on his cigar intently as she laid the whole thing out. Now he ground out the butt in his ashtray. He shrugged. “If it was up to me, I’d do it in a moment, we’re dying for something like this,” he said. “But you’re talking about something that requires a policy decision from the government in Moscow. And no one even knows what that is now!”

“So why not have the Eurorussian delegates to the Common European Parliament sponsor a resolution that
Common Europe
itself requests the Soviet Union to supply the flight to orbit on Aeroflot? Think of it, Leonid, all those good Eurorussians asking Common Europe to request a gesture of goodwill from their own government for the sake of an
American!
”

“The Bears will hate it!” Kandinski said. “It’d seem like Gorchenko was behind—”

“Precisely.”

“Oh,” Kandinski said, and he actually smiled.

Two days later, with the election only a week away, it was Kandinski who showed up unannounced in
her
office. His suit was freshly pressed, he was clean-shaven, and he seemed quite in control of himself.

“Well, as the damnable Americans would have it, there’s good news and bad news,” he told her. “The good news is that Gorchenko himself
loved
the idea and is more than willing to publicly order his faction in the Common European Parliament to sponsor your husband’s resolution. The bad news is that he requires that Nathan Wolfowitz himself publicly request that he do so.”

“What?” Sonya exclaimed.

Kandinski shrugged. “It’s certainly an open secret that Wolfowitz is doing everything he can to get Gorchenko reelected short of getting on the Trans-Siberian railway and kissing babies for him. The way
Gorchenko sees it, I think, is that publicly acceding to a heart-stirring and entirely apolitical request from the American President should be good for a million votes minimum.”

“And all I’ve got to do is convince President Wolfowitz to do it?” Sonya moaned in dismay.

Kandinski’s eyes narrowed. “That may not be as difficult as it seems,” he said. “The military may be controlling the international phone lines, but one gets the feeling that Wolfowitz and Gorchenko are communicating with each other obliquely in the media. This could be another spirit message, as it were. . . .”

“But how am I supposed to communicate all this to Nathan Wolfowitz?” Sonya cried. “Do they suppose in Moscow that all I have to do is pick up the phone?”

“Apparently we Eurorussians still have our moles in the
KGB
,” Kandinski told her. “And the
KGB
knows all about your son’s connection with Nathan Wolfowitz. He is to be the spirit messenger.”

A EURORUSSIAN MAJORITY
IN THE SUPREME SOVIET?

It seemed impossible a week ago, but now the latest polls show that Constantin Semyonovich Gorchenko is certain to win the Presidential election, and while this may have been a foregone conclusion all along due to the token nature of the opposition to the official candidate of the Communist Party, the reverse in fortunes of Eurorussian candidates for Delegate is breathtaking.

Comrade Gorchenko, it would seem, has managed to grow what the Americans call “coattails.” Two weeks ago, it looked like the Eurorussians would be lucky to capture 20 percent of the seats in the new Supreme Soviet. Now they seem assured of a plurality, and have at least pulled within striking distance of an actual working majority.

What the Americans have taken away in the Ukraine election with one hand, they now seem to have given back in the national election with the other.

But before the Eurorussians begin planning their victory celebration, let them ponder the day after.

Will the Red Army Central Command
really
return control of the government to the same man they took it from at gunpoint?

—
Mad Moscow

The new Bobby never ceased to amaze Franja.

Here he was, an American in a city that had suddenly fallen in
quite desperate love with the United States, and there she was, just where she had imagined he had always wanted her, with her country despised and its dream in ruins, while he and his country had their shining hour.

She had expected him to lord it over her with his old spiteful relish. But instead of tormenting her, he was endlessly solicitous—tender, even. Instead of rubbing it in, he had become an understanding friend to talk to.

She hadn’t really trusted him until that night when he had come home late and drunk from covering the demonstration at the American Embassy.

Mother and Father were already in bed, and Franja was alone trying to read in the living room, her mind utterly distracted by the spectacle she had seen on television, a spectacle that seemed contrived by the Americans specifically to torment her.

“We have to talk, Franja, we really have to talk like brother and sister,” Bobby said as he sprawled unbidden on the couch beside her, reeking of wine, his eyes bloodshot.

“You’re drunk, Bobby!” Franja snapped testily.

“As the proverbial skunk! It was incredible! People just kept shoving bottles in my face! Everyone wanted to buy a drink for any American they could find, and there just weren’t enough to go around!”

“How wonderful for you!” Franja said sourly.

“Yeah, it was wonderful! You can’t imagine what it felt like! The last time I went to the American Embassy, I came back covered in blood and shit, God, Franja, remember what I stunk like, and tonight we’re all fucking heroes! Tonight I’m finally really proud of my country!”

“Tonight you are at last a true gringo,” Franja replied dryly.

Bobby’s face darkened. His drunken mood shifted precipitously. “You have no right to call me that, Franja, you never did!” he snapped. “You don’t even know what the word really means! I’ve spent my whole adult life hating the fucking gringos! The gringos are the bastards who turned the United States into an armed camp and made it hated all over the world and screwed over our own father! Don’t you dare call me a gringo!”

“I only meant—”

“I know what you meant, Franja,” Bobby said softly, his mood changing abruptly again. “I’m not a gringo, and I never was, and there are millions like me, and fuck the gringos who smeared blood and shit all over our flag! Tonight I saw that flag going up with the shit washed off it by the guy who taught me how to play the cards, and I heard people cheering, and I thought of you.”

“Me?” Franja said softly.

“I thought of all the shit you gave me for wanting to be an American. And I thought about what I’ve been watching you go through now. . . .”

“I knew you’d be getting around to rubbing it in sooner or later!” Franja snapped.

“No, no, no,” Bobby soothed, patting her hand woozily. “I loved a country I couldn’t feel proud of. I loved a country that was doing things that made people hate it and rightly so. I loved a dream that had died.”

“A dream that had died . . . ,” Franja muttered, and a terrible sadness came over her.

For tonight she could understand what being an American in Paris must have been like for her poor little brother. Tonight, she understood what it was like to feel ashamed of your country, and to love it just the same. Tonight it was she who still loved a dream that had died.

“Yeah, Franja, I do know how you feel,” Bobby said. “So that’s why I had to talk to you. That’s why I had to tell you not to hate your country, big sister. Don’t give up hope. For seventy years, your country was under the thumb of bastards like Stalin and Brezhnev, it was a long hard winter, but then you had a spring. . . .”

Franja’s eyes started to water. Bobby squeezed her hand. “Hey, Franja,” he said softly, “don’t let it get to you. What I learned tonight is that there’s no winter so long that there’s never a spring. It’ll come again for you too, big sister, you’ll see. What goes around, comes around.”

He smiled at her. He winked. “It’s an old American saying,” he told her. “There must be something like it in Russian too.”

Now Franja did quite burst into tears. “Oh, Bobby,” she cried, “what a terrible sister I’ve always been to you! You make me feel so ashamed!”

“Hey, Franja, we were a couple of kids then,” Bobby told her, “we’re not those people now.”

And he had hugged her protectively to him like the big brother she had never had.

And now here her little brother Bobby was, browbeating the bureaucracy in the American Embassy.

“Yes,
that
Robert Reed, asshole, the one at StarNet who gave him ninety seconds of prime time two days ago, and I don’t care if he’s
taking a shit
, you pull him off the pot and get him on the horn, or
you’re
gonna be the one held responsible if I don’t feel so generous next time!”

The four of them were gathered in the living room, Mother and
Father holding hands on the couch, Franja sitting in one armchair out of the field of view of the videotel camera, watching the screen obliquely, Bobby in the other in front of it.

The Seal of the United States blanked the screen for a few minutes and then it was replaced by the face of the American Ambassador, a thin ferret-faced man who had contributed heavily to Harry Carson’s campaign and been given Paris as his payment.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Ambassador,” Bobby said smoothly, “but I need you to convey a message to President Wolfowitz.”

“You need me to do
what?
” the Ambassador said.

“It’s kind of a communication from Constantin Gorchenko.”

“Kind of a communication from Gorchenko, Mr. Reed? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means Gorchenko has indicated his wishes to Tass who told my mother, the Director of the Paris office of Red Star, to talk to me so that I could have you convey his message to Nathan Wolfowitz.”

“An authentic communication from Constantin Gorchenko?” the Ambassador drawled sarcastically. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to throw a piece of string across the Atlantic and hold tin cans up to their ears?”

“Gorchenko would like President Wolfowitz to ask something of him, so that he can make a gesture,” Bobby pressed on. “He wants to make a gesture, but he has to be asked publicly.”

“A gesture?” For the first time, there was a hint of interest in the Ambassador’s voice.

“He wants the President to ask him to have his delegates in the Common European Parliament introduce a resolution to request that the Soviet Union fly an American into orbit on Aeroflot and then allow him to ride the European Grand Tour Navette to the Moon and back.”

“You’re not making the least bit of sense, Reed. Aeroflot isn’t flying, and Gorchenko isn’t President of anything now. And before this is over, the chances are excellent that there’ll be nothing left in orbit but Battlestar America and Russian rubble.”

“Not if Gorchenko is elected, Mr. Ambassador. Don’t you see, he’s asking Wolfowitz to treat his reelection as a fait accompli, and in return, he’ll make a gesture. It’ll show the world in some small way that it’s at least possible for the two of them to make a deal.”

“And just who is supposed to be the beneficiary of all this glasnost in the media?”

Franja could see Bobby hesitate, she could feel his chagrin, for she could well imagine how this was going to sound in the American Ambassador’s ears.

But Bobby sighed, and then told him manfully and simply. “My father, Jerry Reed, the man who designed the
GTN
in the first place.”

“Your father! Good day, Mr. Reed, it’s been ever so—”

“Harry Carson’s brain!” Bobby shouted before he could hang up. “I know just what happened to Carson’s brain, because I got it straight from Nat Wolfowitz while we were taking a piss together.”

“What?” the Ambassador said, still on the screen, his hand frozen above the disconnect button.

“If you do know what I’m talking about, you know that puts me a lot closer to Nat than you’ll ever be, and if you don’t, la même chose, n’est-ce pas. . . .”