Angel Eyes (13 page)

"Didn't I attract you, even a little?"

"Yes, of course you did, but I-Don't you see that whatever I felt at the time didn't matter? I did what you asked me to do, that was the beginning and the end of it. And then, later, in bed the first time, I was so frightened I'd displease you. And then. "

"Then."

"I discovered a whole other Valeri Bondasenko," Irina said. "One nobody else knows about. It made me feel-I don't know-special somehow. In all the vast sea of women in Moscow, you had chosen me."

Valeri laughed. "Is that all there is to your confession?"

"No." Irina was quiet for some time. She listened in the stillness to the beating of their hearts, as if it were a language she needed to decipher. "For an instant, I felt a part of your power. Not a reflection, but one with it. Is that foolish?"

"Not at all," Valeri said, stirring. "In fact, your confession, as you call it, makes me more confident to confide in you. I had been thinking of bringing this up for some time, but I wasn't sure I could trust my instincts."

Irina snuggled closer to him. "What about?" She could feel the power radiating from him, bathing her, warming her. Was it so bad to want to get inside it?

''I want to get inside the head of Mars Petrovich Volkov,'' he said, startling her because in some way she could not yet fathom his thoughts had been paralleling her own. He was so close, his lips brushed hers as he spoke. "Volkov has gotten the inside track against me in the Congress of People's Deputies. He has lined up a formidable array of party officials behind him, and got himself elected. I still hold the edge because of my strong union and national district ties, but now that he is in the Congress, he is beginning to make life very difficult. With reform as the new history, and speaking one's mind being tolerated, certain people have become drunk on spewing criticism. Volkov is one of them. He's making a living directing it at me. He appears to enjoy branding me a Napoleon, claiming that I have designs on becoming the next emperor of Russia. He falsely claims he has no ego and I do. That is his problem, but he is rapidly making it mine." Irina could see his eyes glowing and her own image filling them up. "In order to defeat Mars Volkov, I must know what he is thinking. I have learned through bitter experience that there are things men cannot do or do well. This is one of them. I need you to become my protege so that you may do to Mars Volkov what I have done to you.''

"You want me to seduce him?" Irina had asked. "I cannot. I don't have the temperament.''

"Temperament," Valeri said, "is forged through circumstance. I will teach you what you need to know."

"I will not prostitute myself in that way." Irina had grown angry.

To his credit, Valeri had felt this immediately. He crushed his lips to hers, then smiled. "The joke is that it is you, Irina, who has seduced me. Do you think that you are the latest in a long line of conquests for me? No. You know my reputation. I make these things open so that there cannot be any misunderstanding that my rivals might turn to their advantage."

"No one knows about us. You made certain of that," Irina had pointed out.

"True enough, but that, too, is for a purpose. I, too, have a confession to make. After my wife died, I found that I had little taste for sexual adventure. We had tried for the last several years of our marriage to have a child. Unsuccessfully. After my wife died, I came to see that being childless was just as well. In this terrible world, a child, too, might be used against me."

He rolled them both over so that she lay astride him.''I know the danger inherent in what I ask you to do, Irina. But when you say no so hastily, you ignore the rewards to yourself."

"What rewards? A reassignment? Money? Presents from the Beryozka? These things cannot tempt me."

"Oh, I know that." He looked at her in the semidarkness and laughed again. "You see, I felt something in you from the moment I first saw you. The reason I can ask you to seduce Mars Volkov is that I can understand the power it will bring you. Most women are content to bask in the reflection of the power of men, but you are different, Irina, you are special. You want the power for yourself. Now you understand that I can give you that power.

"So you will make pillow talk with Mars, you will get to know him, and you will report to me everything you learn. You will do it happily, Irina. Trust me."

Then the fear had crept through her like a worm burrowing into the core of her. He's right, she thought, I love this new world he can open up to me. No more Irina the boring academic, Irina the computer programmer, Irina the educator with ideas no one will listen to.

Now, entering Valeri's kitchen, Irina could smell onions and, startlingly, shallots sauteing in a skillet. She sat at the small black-and-white, marble-patterned Formica table that might have been at home in an American kitchen of me 1950s. Valeri brought her yogurt from the Ukraine, and tea into which she dropped two cubes of sugar, a perquisite in the sugar-starved Soviet Union even she was not privy to on her own.

She watched Valeri carefully stirring the eggs into the hot skillet. This was another benefit of spending the night with Valeri: she adored being served breakfast. She was an excellent cook in her own right-one of the few gifts her mother had passed down to her-and had the cook's special appreciation of being served food by another good cook. But it was not an unadulterated pleasure, because she always felt a pang of guilt, as if this small decadence indulged in while others starved would weaken her, would somehow make her unfit for the continual struggle of life here. She had spent much time in America, learning new educational methods, but also absorbing the Western way of life. Sometimes, when she was most depressed about Russia, she worried that she had been irrevocably contaminated by the West. Too often she found herself making comparisons between where she had been (Boston) and where she was now (Moscow), and becoming despondent over Moscow's shortcomings. Her sojourns in America had brought into question the validity of the entire Soviet way of life. This was her secret, her terrible burden, and she knew that she must never allow Valeri to know she harbored these treasonous thoughts.

She said, with all the patriotic zeal she could foster, "What progress have you made in penetrating White Star?"

Valeri delivered a rude expletive. "That bastard organization of minority dissidents. They're like ghosts. Can you believe it? White Star has remained hidden from us. This should be impossible in our country. My guess is that they are somehow being supplied by the West. How else to account for our failure to discover even one of their cells? "

' 'It seems to me that you don't even know if they exist.''

"Oh, White Star exists, I've no doubt of that." He gave a short laugh. "We, the government, are the only ones adept enough at propaganda to create a phantom organization. God knows, we've done it often enough." He waved a hand. "No, no. The only real question is whether or not White Star is responsible for the wave of nationalist uprisings in Georgia, Uzbekistan, the Baltics, even the Bashkir Autonomous Republic. In every case, the rioters are well led and are even better-armed: handguns, machine pistols, even mortars are becoming common. They are being supplied by someone."

"Isn't Ufa, the site of that recent awful dual train disaster, in Bashkir?"

Valeri nodded. ''Over two hundred people died in the crash. But it wasn't an accident. It was sabotage. A cadre of Red Army generals was on one of those trains. They were bound for a top secret military base in the Urals. All of them were killed.''

"Sabotage?" Irina said. "I had no idea."

"Nor has anyone else, beyond a select few." Valeri cleared his throat. "The truth is, an alarming spate of terrorist acts has been proliferating since Chemobyl. An internal investigation, made immediately secret, proved that the nuclear event at Cher-nobyl was a deliberate act of sabotage. It was the first, but it was a disaster of such dimensions that it should have put us on notice that these people are quite serious, and quite mad. However, bureaucracies are the same the world over: overstaffed, underutilized, bloated with inertia. And never more so than here in Russia.''

"My God, what you're telling me is incredible."

"Unfortunately, you're not the first to say that. It took me some time to convince the president of the need for an antina-tionalist task force. And that I should be put in charge of it."

"But White Star is supposed to be composed of Ukrainian nationalists," Irina said.

Valeri considered the rest of her unspoken question. "It is true that White Star's leadership is Ukrainian and so am I," he said at last. "But we want two separate things. My loyalty is to the state. Theirs is to themselves.

"Now, however, it appears possible that White Star's membership has became more eclectic. It might even turn out to be the first pan-minority nationalist group, embracing the Georgians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, even the Moslem minorities. That would naturally exponentially increase White Star's power, and its danger to us, the state.

"These people have no idea what it is they want. Anarchy. Chaos. Not a better, more cohesive dialectically consistent whole. If they gain autonomy, they will, like as not, begin warring with each other. They are primitives, misguided. Who better than me-a Ukrainian, a member of a Soviet minority-to show them the dangerous error of their ways?''

Irina did not know whether she felt admiration or disgust. Perhaps it was a combination of both. She suspected that there was a measure of truth to what Valeri said. Dissidents' motives were often muddled, because they stemmed from the irrational: anger and fear. And the sad truth was that revolutionaries rarely had any idea how to wield power once they got it, so they ended up making a mess of things. Yet she wanted to say, But can't you see that this White Star is a symbol, a yearning of the non-Russian people to be free? Don't you see it as a sign that a change must come, just as it has come on other Eastern European nations? Are you and your ilk so far from the czars, after all?

If only she could trust someone. It was awful having to bottle up one's true feelings every hour of the day and night. A nightmare. Her nightmare: imprisoned in her own country. How she longed to confide in someone, but there was no one she could trust, not even the priest at the Church of the Archangel Gabriel. Certainly never, ever Valeri Denysovich Bondasenko. So she held her tongue, continued to play the good little Russian girl with him.''What a perfect pragmatist you are," she said evenly.

"Communism is the essence of pragmatism, so I must be an expert," Valeri said. "Now come, breakfast is ready."

He brought the omelettes and his own glass of strong tea. As was his habit, he had already consumed his portion of yogurt while he was doing the cooking.

"This is delicious," Irina said, tearing off a hunk of coarse black bread.

Valeri grunted. "The recipe is from the New York Times. It didn't help that I couldn't get butter. Pierre Franey says that butter makes all the difference. I had to use oil."

"It's just as well," Irina said. "Oil is far healthier. It's not full of cholesterol.'' Her fork stopped midway to her mouth. My God, she thought, we sound just like husband and wife. Have I actually begun to get used to this life of deceit and treachery? God forbid. But she thought again of what Valeri had said about her wanting to be free, and the fear gripped her again.

"What is it?" Valeri said. "You look pale."

Irina took a bite of her omelette to give herself some time. "I. . . was just thinking about tonight-and Mars."

Valeri delivered a colorful oath. "That sonuvabitch is out to bury me. And the sooner the better, as far as he's concerned. Now he's begun questioning my proposal for compromise with the Baltic states."

"Doesn't he understand that your compromise was the best thing that could have happened?" Irina said. "It proved to the world that our reform is for real, and it showed your colleagues in the Politburo the need to be elastic. Besides, everyone knows-although they're afraid to say it-that the Baltic states were never really a part of the Soviet Union. They were awarded illegally to Stalin by Hitler in the Molotov-von Ribbentrop accord of 1939. For years Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia have had their own legations in the United States. Isn't it shameful that we have held on to them? Wasn't it time that they broke away?''

Valeri Bondasenko smiled sardonically. "Even though Lithuania and Latvia have succeeded in becoming independent, the Central Committee is not happy. It still calls these secessions, the virus of nationalism, and seeks some way-any way-to return these Baltic states to the Soviet fold.''

"Surely that's an exaggeration," Irina said. "I mean, we wouldn't go to war over it."

He wiped his mouth. "Lenin said, "The interests of socialism are above the interests of the right of nations to self-determination. 'He was just following in Marx's footsteps: 'the proletarian has no country.'"

Irina hated him when he spouted Ideology by rote. How could he, a Ukrainian, be so devoutly Marxist-Leninist when history-the history of his people-had so painfully proven them wrong?

"In any case," Valeri was saying, "we can't give away the world the way the American president Roosevelt did in Yalta. We have held on to Estonia. We'll hold on to the Ukraine and Georgia, Armenia and Moldavia, in the face of all nationalist agitation. This is the point that Mars Volkov continually avoids, as he hammers at me over and over. He's sounding as repetitive as a rock and roll record."

Irina laughed despite herself. "My God, Valeri, sometimes I forget just how backward you can be."

"Politics is my only concern," he said simply.

"One day, your obsession will be the death of you," Irina pointed out. "You cannot outthink enemies with blinders on."

"Does this expansion of my horizons include decadent Western rock and roll, then?"

"Perhaps." Irina looked at him. "But it's a good example. In the West, rock music is a great force. It not only generates a tremendous amount of money, it moves young people. It can galvanize them, mobilize them."