Angel Eyes (56 page)

"Everything's worse," the student said, turning away.

And Irina, glancing from the student to her mother nodding in the rocker, thought of the grasshopper that had lived by her hearth. I am in a vise, she thought, that is slowly squeezing the life out of me. I must take some action before there are no seasons left for me to sow or reap.

The revelation hit her like a rifle shot. All at once she understood why it was so important for her to find White Star. It wasn't to help Mars, and it wasn't to get back at Valeri, although those motivations were still in play. She needed to get to White Star for herself.

Irina knew the answer to her feelings of imprisonment: freedom. Freedom not from people, but from the oppressive life in Russia which, despite all her attempts to lie to herself, she could no longer abide.

And, for her, freedom could mean only one thing: White Star. The underground nationalist movement was her one chance to find her way to America. To Cambridge, where every form of idea, theory, and philosophy was freely expressed, embraced, or rejected as the individual saw fit.

It was White Star, and White Star alone, Irina saw now, that could get her back to paradise.

"There she is," Mars Volkov said from the interior of his black Chaika. "Pick her up."

He was speaking into a mobile phone, and when he gave the order, three plainclothes men stepped out of the shadows. Two moved to either side of Natasha Mayakova, pinioning her wrists. The third moved behind her.

"What is this?" Natasha said, astonished. "What do you want?"

"KGB," said the plainclothes man behind her. "Keep calm."

Mars watched Natasha's eyes go wide with fear when the man whispered in her ear. There was a measure of satisfaction to be gained by that, as if fear were a form of energy that could be ingested like food.

Mars's men brought Natasha to the Chaika. The door opened, and with a stiff hand behind her neck, they pushed her inside.

One of the plainclothes men sat in the back so that she was sandwiched between him and Mars. The man who had whispered in her ear climbed into the passenger's seat in front, and the Chaika took off.

"Mars!" Natasha said, struggling to gain her equilibrium. "You needn't have been so melodramatic. Where are you taking me?"

"The Lubyanka."

It was interesting, Mars thought, to see how her brave face began to crumble. They all did it in different ways, his subjects, but like a catalogue of petty sins, there was an underlying correlation that bound them all together.

"You've been a bad girl, Natasha. I'm quite cross with you."

"What gives you the right to speak to me as if you were my father?"

"This gives me the right," Mars said, sending the back of his hand across her face in a stinging blow that sent Natasha's head whipping back against the seat back.

"My God!" she gasped. "You animal!"

"We're both animals, Natasha," Mars said. "You and I." He watched the blood seep from the cut in her skin just below her cheekbone. He thought the flash of color did her good. "You are gnawing at the underbelly of the state. But there are rules to be observed. The state demands obedience from one and all, I as well as you. If, one day, I am found wanting, as you have been, I, too, will wind up in the Lubyanka."

"What a load of shit," Natasha said. "You and I are like night and day. You are KGB. Are you surprised I know? The Hero told me, but how he knew I can't imagine, locked away like a prisoner or a laboratory experiment. Surely you didn't tell him, Mars. You're far too devious for that. You've been hoping to be his kindly uncle, haven't you? 'Put your head on my shoulder, old son, and tell me everything,' that's more your style. But you haven't fooled the Hero, and you haven't fooled me. The foul stink of the KGB is all over you, no matter how you try to hide it beneath cordiality and greasepaint. Like all the other members of the secret police, you enjoy all the perquisites your thoroughly corrupt nature can gobble up. Oink! Oink! Comrade Volkov!"

"I see," Mars said, nodding as if to himself. "I imagine that you are still under the misapprehension that the same guardian angel who protected you when you made such a dangerous fool of yourself and us in New York City will extricate you from this situation. Put such fantastic thoughts from your mind, Natasha. I am in the process of stripping your guardian angel of his power. He doesn't know it yet, but he is ready to take his fall from grace. And, as he is about to learn, it is a long, painful way down."

The black Chaika turned a corner, came gliding into Dzerzhinsky Square. Natasha's last look at the outside world was of the place on the corner of Kirov Street, where once had stood the Church of Our Lady of Grebvev, demolished, like so many houses of worship, as the Communists rebuilt areas of Moscow.

In the Lubyanka, the KGB's fortresslike prison across Dzerzhinsky Square from Detsky Mir, the world's largest children's store, Natasha Mayakova was divested of her possessions, stripped, searched, given threadbare prison togs, delivered to a cell that measured eight feet in each dimension. There was no window, but a large light, protected by a metal grill, protruded like an exophthalmic eye from the center of the ceiling. It was off when Natasha was placed in the cell, but some time afterward, when she had lain down on the board that served as a bed, it went on. She turned toward the wall, put her hands over her eyes, but she could not block out the light.

It was very cold in the cell, and Natasha began to shiver. She thought she should be hungry, but she was not. The cold made her tired, but the light cut inside her closed eyelids as if prying them apart. Her mind refused to let her sleep, but when she sat up, she was abruptly dizzy, and had to hold on to the board to keep from pitching headlong onto the stone floor.

She put her back against the wall, closed her eyes. She could hear the accelerated beating of her heart, was aware of the blood pulsing through her veins. She tucked her feet under her in an attempt to keep them warm. The light went off. She drifted into a light sleep. An instant later-or so it seemed-the light came on again, but she could not shake herself fully awake. Instead she lapsed into a kind of limbo that sapped her of more strength.

Some time later-she had no idea how long-she was pulled from her cell. It was done during a period when the light was out, so that she was pulled out of sleep. She was taken three floors up, led into an interrogation room. Mars Volkov sat behind a scarred wooden table, an open dossier in front of him. There were two wooden chairs in the room; Mars was sitting in one. Natasha sat in the other one.

"Stand up," Mars said.

"What?"

''I said stand up!" he shouted, so that Natasha jumped to her feet. "You do not sit until told to do so."

"Bullshit." Natasha was regaining a semblance of her self-possession. She sat. Almost immediately, she screamed, leaped out of the chair as a jolt of electricity shot through her. She looked down, saw the wires coming up out of the floor, enwrapping the chair legs.

"I thiink you've got the seating arrangements wrong," Natasha said.

"Sit," Mars told her, "if you feel you have to."

Natasha remained standing.

"Do you see," he said, smiling hungrily, "how easy it is to get you to do what I want? I don't have to use electricity or rubber truncheons or even threats."

Natasha sat. "It's a miracle you can live with yourself." She studied him. "No, I was wrong. It's not a miracle, it's an abomination."

"Are you hungry?" Mars asked. He seemed absorbed in the open dossier in front of him, and his refusal to engage her directly had the effect of making her will seem nonexistent.

"Where is your uniform. Colonel?" Natasha said, pressing on because she suspected that to be silent now was tantamount to giving up.

Mars ignored her. "If you do not answer my question, I will assume that you have no use for food."

"Are you certain you wouldn't be more comfortable with the KGB rank boards on your shoulders?"

"No food, then." Mars ticked off a box on the top sheet of the dossier, turned to the next page. "What is your relationship with Valeri Denysovich Bondasenko?''

"Valeri is my brother."

Mars looked up. He seemed genuinely startled. "Your brother?"

"Did I say brother? I meant lover."

Mars frowned. "Which is it? Brother or lover?"

"Both."

Mars put aside his pen, folded his hands, one over the other. Natasha, with the kind of heightened sense that often comes in such life-threatening situations, noticed with revulsion how his small ears made him look more like a beast than a movie idol.

"Natasha," Mars said carefully, "I assure you that talking with me will be far more preferable to the alternatives."

"My alternatives," Natasha said, "are life or death."

Now Mars smiled. "Out there, in the streets of Moscow, I would be inclined to agree with you. But you are here now, with me, and please believe me when I say that there are other alternatives to answering my questions. All of them are extremely unpleasant."

" 'Unpleasant,' I take it, is the current KGB euphemism for painful?"

"Why are you bent on making this difficult for yourself?"

Natasha said, "I am only doing what I have to do."

''I can see in your eyes, Natasha, how frightened you are.''

"Oh, yes, I'm exceedingly frightened. But that will hardly change my mind."

Mars stared at her for some time. "What is your relationship with Valeri Denysovich Bondasenko?"

''Valeri is my brother or my lover, or both.''

Mars flipped over another page. "And what is your relationship with the Hero?"

"Oh, there's no doubt there. I'm fucking his brains out."

"The vulgarity hardly suits you, Natasha."

"Now, now, Mars. Your prudishness is showing."

"Are you providing the Hero with access to official government limited distribution documents?''

"I 'm an actor, Mars. Not a spy.''

"Natasha, do you know what the penalty for spying is?"

"If it's being incarcerated in this shithole for the rest of my life, I'd rather die, thank you very much."

Mars nodded. "All right," he said. "I've done what I can."

"You certainly have."

Mars pressed a buzzer on the underside of the table. "It's time for the hard man," he said to no one in particular.

Natasha was so frightened, she had been on the verge of vomiting throughout the interrogation. She had always known what consequences her actions might bring. She thought she had been prepared for them. But, like the death of a parent, she reflected now, one can never truly prepare for the reality of this kind of nightmare.

It was odd, she thought, how disorienting being without a semblance of time could be. Without watch or clock, without a window to know whether it was dark or light, let alone the hour, with the random switching on and off of the cell light, she had already lost an important guidepost to reality. She had entered a new realm, where time did not seem to exist. Had she been picked up an hour ago or half a day? She tried to work it out but could not, and this loss frightened her even more. But she knew that she must never show her fear to Mars. If she did, she knew with a profound conviction that he would eat her alive.

"Here comes the hard man."

Natasha's head snapped up, and she saw, to her horror, an ugly dark-haired man approaching her with a hypodermic needle.

"No! "she cried.

But the needle had already pierced the flesh of her arm, the plunger was depressed, and a moment afterward an uncomfortable icy chill slipped through her like a wraith. Natasha's spirit convulsed as if already in torment.

*

''Kunio Michita's not at home.'' Yen Yasuwara was in a panic. He put down the receiver of the car phone.

"Perhaps that's the way you planned it," Big Ezoe said.

"No, no." Yen Yasuwara threw a fearful look Koi's way. "I know I can find him." His brow furrowed. "Why don't we try Kaijin?"

Both Big Ezoe and Koi were familiar with Kaijin. They knew Yen Yasuwara meant Kaijin ni Kisuru, which was the full name of one of Tokyo's most exclusive tea houses. It was an after-hours place, but unlike most akochochin, it clung tenaciously to the older, more sedate term so that a facade of respectability could be maintained. Nevertheless, its name, loosely translated, meant "to be reduced to ashes, to burn to the ground," which had nothing at all to do with drinking tea.

Kaijin was in Shimbashi, and without a word Big Ezoe turned the Mercedes around, headed there.

Like most of Japan's exclusive and expensive clubs, Kaijin had a wholly unprepossessing exterior. All that was visible, in fact, was an oversized door made of thick vertical kyoki wood slabs bound in hand-beaten iron. Though the door was obviously very old, it glowed, bespeaking the care lavished on it. Local legend had it that this was the original door from the first Shogun, Ieyasu Tokugawa's castle keep. In fact, the truth was unknown. As was typical of a country where much of its history was oral, Japanese scholars found it impossible to discern fact from myth.

Stone steps were guarded by a pair of gnarled dark green Hinoki cypresses, trimmed to resemble fantastic creatures. A buzzer one pressed sounded deep within Kaijin's heart, and it might be many minutes until the door was opened. And then, unless one was known by sight or was accompanied by a member, one would not gain entrance. Thus were the elite of Japan guarded against any unwanted intrusion.

Keeping a handkerchief to the side of his face. Yen Yasuwara rang the buzzer, waiting impatiently on Kaijin's doorstep. When the front door at last opened inward, a voice from the darkness inside said, "Welcome, Mr. Yasuwara. Two guests this evening?"

Yen Yasuwara nodded, mumbled something unintelligible as he stumbled over the threshold.

The kind of silence that enfolded the interior of Kaijin was sepulchral, almost holy, as if one had entered the innards of a church. Lights were few. What there was of them created indirect pools across whitewashed stone walls on which hung scrolls so ancient they depicted landscapes from China rather than Japan.