Angel Eyes (29 page)

"By making you miserable?"

"By forcing me to look inside myself, to find that potential and mine it for the precious ore he knew was there." Natasha paused while the empty glasses were replaced. "You see, Katya, I was an orphan. I was brought up in a state institution and I had inside of me a ball of ice, a rage against an unknown source. Did my parents die or had they abandoned me? I had no idea. Either way I hated them, because they had rejected me. Their memory lived inside me like a living thing, a malignant growth, eating at me.

"Where did I come from? My mother, my father. My grandparents. Most people know. It seems, in fact, such an elementary bit of knowledge that nobody thinks of it, it's taken for granted. For me it was like walking around with a wound that never healed, a chunk of flesh that was forever gone, for which no one could ever provide an adequate prosthesis. I was different, an outsider. I was always aware of this, but never more painfully so than during holidays when families reunited, drank and ate together, rubbed elbows, laughed and told stories." Natasha was focused on something inside herself, and her irises had gone very dark. "I remember, I remember ... An actor's curse, to remember everything." She touched her finger to the vodka. "When I was growing up, more than anything else I wanted someone to tuck me in at night, a mother to sing me a lullaby that she had learned at her mother's knee, a father to tell me stories of wolves and goblins, elves and princes."

Natasha pushed her vodka away with such violence that it spilled across the table. "Leave it," she said when Irina moved to mop it up. She sucked the liquor off her finger. "It's important to know it's still there-like memory."

There was a murderous look in her eyes, and Irina was abruptly concerned. Strange! How different people could be from how you imagined them. Natasha had seemed so content on Valeri's arm, so in command on stage. And yet here she was, on the verge of tears, admitting to being lonely and miserable. For a moment Irina forgot her own hate, a mask dropped away and she leaned forward. "Are you all right?"

"What makes you think I'm not?" Natasha snapped.

"You look as if you'd like to kill someone."

"That's interesting," Natasha said. "That's just how you looked this evening when you were playing Albee's Martha."

"Did I?" Irina was shocked. She shuddered. And she found herself thinking, My God, is it possible? I came here to bury this woman, and now I believe that she and I could be friends. I believe that if I told her how I felt when I was in Boston, she would understand. She would understand how miserable I've become here, and she would not immediately report me to the KGB for having treasonous thoughts. Isn't it funny how despair can unite people? How utterly odd and mysterious life is sometimes. "I believe I'll have another vodka," Irina said softly.

Natasha nodded. "I think we ought to make it starka this time." She was speaking of the aged vodka that ran to 120-proof and beyond.

They were on their second glass of starka, still picking over their zakuski, when Natasha said. "The truth is, Katya, I watched you playing Martha tonight, and I saw myself. It was like looking in a mirror, and being able to peer backward through time. My God, what a shock you gave me! And I thought: I must get to know this woman. I have no family; I have no one. Perhaps, in time, I will have her to welcome me at Easter."

"You're not married?" Irina asked. It was not merely that she was interested, as in, Are you married and sleeping with Valeri? She desperately needed some guidepost. She was feeling increasingly that being near Natasha Mayakova was like standing on the edge of a quick-following sea. With each roll of a wave onto the beach, the sand on which she stood was eroded further and further, and without seeming to have moved, she was being propelled away from shore, toward the blue-green deep.

Natasha smiled. "The trouble is I was always far too beautiful for my own good. I attracted men to me like bees to honey. They came at me, and I was never able to determine whether they saw anything beyond my beauty. My face, my body, these are the things they responded to. I knew there was more to me, but did they? That was the question I never seemed able to answer."

Irina said, ''But for someone like you, with no family, I would have thought marrying and creating a family of your own would have been most important.''

"I think it was because I had no family that I had so much trouble accepting the men who came my way. You see, I wanted-I needed-everything to be perfect. What if my husband left me? What if I felt compelled to leave him? I suppose the risk of perhaps repeating what my parents had done paralyzed me, made me incapable of being happy or content in a permanent relationship. I think, when it comes right down to it, I have no faith at all in personal relationships between men and women."

"I have to admit that I don't, either," Irina said. "Men are such bastards."

"Yet we need them so much." Natasha sighed. "I often wonder whether we need them because they are such bastards.'' She laughed, and this time a surprised Irina joined her.

But then, like a prick from a hidden needle, Irina thought of Valeri. And her insistent memory dredged up the scene of happy, glowing Natasha strolling down Gorky Street with him. After that first time, Irina had watched, hidden, as they met once or twice a week. Why was Natasha with him unless they were having an affair?

And Irina thought, Either Natasha is lying to me, or Valeri-powerful, manipulative Valeri-has something on her. Which was the more likely possibility? Irina did not have to think twice about it.

Twice a week Mars Volkov emerged from his office, climbed into an official black Chaika, and was driven out of Moscow to Zvezdny Gorodok, Star Town. This was the ultramodern high-rise complex built to house and train Russia's cosmonauts.

There was surely nothing odd in this oft-repeated journey, since Mars's constituency in the Congress of People's Deputies was all of Moscow, including Zvezdny Gorodok, and Star Town was very important to Moscow in particular and the Soviet Union in general.

In Star Town, Mars did his obligatory movie-star turn, charming everyone: the bureaucrats who ran the mini-city, the technicians who thought they ran it, the theoreticians who thought they ran the technicians, and the cosmonauts who inhabited it.

All of Star Town's citizens were pleased to see Mars, save one, and he was the real reason that Mars made this trip twice a week. It was with him that Mars spent most of his time. After the glad-handing of the bureaucrats, the political smiles directed at the technicians, the cogent but not too probing questions asked of the theoreticians, and the backslapping of the cosmonauts in training, came Mars's real work. Interrogation.

The ???? of the disastrous Odin-Galaktika II mission, the first attempt at a manned landing on Mars, had his own building in Star Town. A city within a city within a city, it was manned by its own battalion of scientists, theoreticians, doctors, lab technicians, and security personnel. The place was like a fortress, and deliberately so. First, because of the wishes of the Hero, second, by order of Mars himself. Cleaning up in the aftermath of the Odin-Galaktika II mishap had been Mars's responsibility, and it had been no easy matter. In fact, twenty months after the event, it was still very much an open case, an ongoing-though highly secret-investigation.

The Hero's building was a four-story affair. The basement was filled with generators that powered every appliance in the structure. The first two floors were given over to laboratories and testing chambers, where the doctors read through reams of twice-daily medical readouts on the Hero: heart rate, respiration, EKG, BEG, stress, and the like. The top two floors were for the Hero's living, such as it was.

As Mars went through the elaborate security procedures that he himself had set up, he considered that he had been coming here for more than a year now, ever since this building had been erected, yet the Hero was still as much of an enigma to him as he had been the first day they met. How this was possible, Mars could not imagine. It was not that the Hero was recalcitrant in any way. He responded to interrogation with an openness, even sometimes an eagerness, that Mars found commendable. And yet Mars still had no idea what went on inside the Hero's mind, how he felt, what he thought of anyone or anything. It was as if they had shot a human being out into space and what had come back to them was some kind of an alien.

He had been changed.

Of course, there was the trauma to think of. Not only the sudden, heartstopping death of the man he had trained with, lived with, lifted off with-the man who had his life in his hands-but also the shock of the damage to the spacecraft, the certain knowledge that the mission had failed, and the nagging fear that he would never get to see Earth again. And then there were the effects-still unknown, still being debated by the theoreticians and the scientists-of the seepage of cosmic rays through the fault in the Hero's EVA suit.

All this had to be taken into account when one interviewed the Hero, and Mars, with great diligence, did make allowances when trying to decipher his responses. To no satisfactory conclusion.

"Where is he?" he said to Tatiana, one of the Hero's handpicked female companion-guards, as he gained the top floor.

"In the pool, comrade," Tatiana said.

"Is he alone?"

"Lara is with him."

Mars nodded. The Hero insisted on women, and who was Mars to deprive him of whatever pleasures were left to him? Heroes had earned the right to take their pleasures wherever they could find them.

Increasingly, it seemed, the Hero preferred water to land. Not surprising, since, alarmingly, the scientists had discovered one of the effects of prolonged weightlessness was to weaken not only muscles but bones, damaging the bones irreparably. These days the Hero looked something like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. By all accounts, Lara and Tatiana, the women assigned to him, apparently did not find his physical appearance all that repugnant, another mystery for Mars to try to decipher.

He saw Lara first, her long, muscular form, clad only in a clinging American-style bathing suit, stretched intriguingly over the edge of the saltwater pool as she fed the blue dolphin. The dolphin had been installed in the pool about six months ago. At first Mars had balked at the outlandish request. But then, in her weekly debriefing, Lara had offered the startling opinion that the Hero required companionship on a plane other than the ones she and Tatiana could evidently provide.

Mars heard the odd, rhythmic clicking the dolphin used as its form of communication. Some weeks ago the monitoring had picked up two sets of this clicking in the dead of night, and upon checking, it had been discovered that the hidden microphones-the concealed cameras could not penetrate the water-had recorded the ???? in the pool, seemingly in verbal contact with the mammal.

Lara turned when she heard his approach. "Good morning, comrade," she said. But she did not stop her feeding of the mammal.

As Mars returned her greeting, he saw the Hero floating in the pool beside the dolphin. It was odd and, if Mars were honest with himself, a bit disquieting that there were so many similarities between the Hero and the dolphin. The radiation that the ???? had been inadvertently exposed to in space had caused his skin to become slick and utterly hairless. He dove and flashed through the water with the ease and apparent familiarity of one born to the sea. He had even, so Lara had reported, spoken to her about asking for an operation that would add membranes between his fingers and his toes.

Mars did not, in fact, know whether or not he was serious. The Hero was prone not only to making bizarre requests, but to playing eerie and disconcerting pranks on those who were observing and monitoring him. Once, for instance, he had placed his heart monitor over the dolphin's heart instead of his own.

The Hero, Mars had concluded, may have been physically maimed in the event, and as a result may or may not have been mentally scarred, but he was still an exceedingly clever fellow. Mars had no illusions concerning the underlying reason for the pool. The Hero knew he was being observed, listened in on, monitored. But in the water his time was his own, and the cunning electronic eyes that followed him were blind there.

"I am," he often told Mars, "like Odysseus stranded on the island of Polyphemous." The first time, to his delight and Mars's chagrin, he had been obliged to explain that Polyphemus was the name of the Cyclops who Odysseus, by cunning and guile, managed to defeat. "Don't be embarrassed," he had said with his poker face, "nowadays I have far more time to read than you do." Mars never knew whether he was being blandly pleasant or cynically ironic.

"Good morning, Viktor," Mars said. "How are you feeling today?"

"Lousy," the Hero said. "And I've told you, don't call me Viktor. I want no names connected with the event used here."

"I should use it," Mars said, sitting on the edge of the pool. "It's your name." He thought, Ah, nothing's changed.

"I'll tell you something which will, no doubt, come as a surprise to you," the Hero said. "I won't lie down. I lived through a horror no man was meant to see, let alone live through. But the fact remains, I did survive. I'm alive. And I will not go willingly into that unquiet night out there just because it may suit your purposes, just because it will salve your embarrassment for me to be swept under the rug. My comrades out there beyond these walls know I'm alive. You can't hurt me and you can't kill me, because they'll know. The cosmonauts. And they'll rebel."

"You are afforded many privileges," Mars said softly. "Lara. Tatiana. The pool. The dolphin. Especially the dolphin. I brought them to you and I can take them away.''

"And I can stop talking," the Hero said. "To you and to everyone." He looked at Mars. "Now what have we proved?"

Mars took a small fish from the bucket beside him, dangled it over the water. The dolphin stared at him, then began a long series of clicks.

The Hero threw his head back and laughed. "You know, she's got a better sense of humor than the whole lot of you.''