Conspiracy (9 page)

On impulse, she dropped to her knees beside him, lifted the elastic of his briefs and slid them partway down, and took him into her mouth. He moved, but only slightly, and his breathing did not change. Soon she felt better, her worries and suspicions temporarily suspended. The touch of his skin against hers warmed her, a warmth of excitement, yes, but also a warmth that relaxed her and made her feel protective, almost maternal. Whatever he had done earlier tonight, now Alec was all hers.

Unbidden, a plan began to shape itself in her mind.

18

In the cramped, antiquated bathroom of the hotel room she shared with her official “companion,” Soviet gymnast Katya Romanova readied herself for another scene in what she knew would have to be a superlatively convincing performance.

As was her habit before any important activity, whether on the parallel bars or the balance beam or in one of the weekly “evaluative interviews” with a government security man or woman, Katya prepared her mind. Her first coach at the Sport Academia had taught her the technique, after studying the Zen-influenced methods of the Japanese holders of five consecutive Olympic and World Team championships. The basis of the concentration exercise, he had told her, was the Zen principle of “no-mind,” the state in which there is no fear of failure or bodily harm, and where the intended actions—a gymnast’s moves, or replies indicating proper loyalty to the Moscow regime—seem to perform themselves.

So Katya looked out her open bathroom window at the night-lit streets and buildings of Madrid, and tried to concentrate until she could no longer see them. Her view was from the seventeenth floor of a downtown office building near the Royal Palace, the top floors of which had been leased to the Hotel Lope de Vega from the time the building had gone up in the late forties. The Soviets, acting with both confidence and foresight, had booked the top two floors—enough rooms to accommodate their twenty-five soccer players and fifteen “support personnel,” including Katya—eight years before, when IFF A, the International Federation of Football Associations, had first announced that Spain would be the host country for the 1982 World Cup. The move showed confidence, because rooms in Madrid would have no possible use to the Soviet team until they reached at least the second phase of the tournament—when games would be played by some teams in Madrid, by others in Barcelona—and quite possibly not until the final championship game.

To buy out two floors of a hotel under those conditions, when it was not even certain that the Russian team would qualify to come to Spain at all, seemed like wild optimism to the Soviet coaching staff, who were at that time mired in a rebuilding effort, and were despondent about the forfeit to Chile that had kept them from the 1974 World Cup in West Germany. The advance booking of the hotel rooms, however, like the refusal to play in Chile’s Santiago National Stadium after the pro-communist Allende government had been toppled, had not been ordered by the coaches. The move had been made by officials of the Politburo, acting on the recommendation of the KGB.

The KGB had chosen the Hotel Lope de Vega for security reasons; Katya Romanova had come to appreciate that fact very well. Even now she was trying not to think of the guards on each of the three floors at the entrances to the hotel’s single tiny elevator. The miniature car had room for no more than three thin people—or fewer, if they were carrying luggage—and had a glass window at the front. If she managed to slip into the elevator when the guard on her floor was relieving himself, the other guards would see her coming down and push the “stop” button. Since the elevator was tiny, there was no hope of hiding in a crowd. And since the only stairs led directly into the hotel lobby on the fourteenth floor, where yet another guard was stationed, she could not hope to walk unnoticed to the fire stairs that served the lower floors of the building.

Officially the guards were stationed here for the same reason that the burly Tamara Filatova, KGB-trained in unarmed combat, shared Katya’s room and traveled everywhere at Katya’s side: to keep potential attackers from the Soviets’ prize athletes. Unofficially, everyone knew, guard duty also included keeping Russian athletes in Russian custody. Despite press blackouts inside Russia on the subject of defections, Katya and others traveling with the Russian team were aware that many Russian stars of ballet, literature, and music who had gotten out were now living well in the West.

The urge to escape—or at the very least to sample some of the forbidden cafes and entertainment spots in any Western country where the team traveled—had to come out during at least a few unguarded moments on such trips, even in the most dedicated Hero of Socialist Labor. The vigilance of people like Tamara was maintained to see that those urges never were translated into action.

So Katya knew that her task would not be easy. She might fail, and end her days near the Arctic Circle in the work camps of Korkodon or Ugulyat, suffering punishments she was afraid even to think about.

But a girl does not become an Olympic champion at fifteen by thinking of failure. Katya had beaten the best of other nations and the best of Russia, whose women had won all but two Olympic and World Team titles for nearly thirty years. She had won at the Moscow Olympics because of her skill, daring, and strength. Even the men had watched in astonishment when she had first gone to the high bar and uncorked the Romanova Dismount, a high arc featuring a triple-and-a-half somersault in midair before the triumphant knees-and-ankles-together landing on the mat. 

More than a year later, a sixteen-year-old Katya had gone back to the high bar for her final event at the World Championships in Ottawa; her own gold medal was assured, but she needed a 9.75 or better to preserve victory for the Soviet women’s team. Knowing that she had cracked open a stress fracture in her ankle with her last leap from the pommel horse, knowing that after she soared high in the air and “came down from the rafters,” as the columnists liked to write about her dismount, the ankle would crumple under the instant she landed, she still went with the triple-and-a-half again to end her routine. She soared high and landed cleanly, and then faltered at the impact as the pain hit. She raised herself up, balancing on her one good leg to stand, back arched and arms outstretched, as nerve endings blazed white-hot in the flesh that the broken ends had severed. She could not move.

When her teammate and best friend, Nelli Kim, saw the agony in Katya’s dark and brooding eyes and came running out to the mat to help her to the Soviet bench, Katya collapsed into her friend’s arms. The Canadian crowd realized something had happened. Those closest to the high bar saw the trickle of blood that had started down Katya’s heel. The steady cheering suddenly hushed. Then, when Katya reached her team, the judges put up her score on the electronic board: a 9.80. The crowd came to its feet. Supported by teammates on either side, Katya turned and waved, and the applause became a vast, swelling roar that thundered around them, on and on as if it would never end.

But for more than a month now, Katya had been planning to leave it all behind.

Her earlier refusal to be interviewed by Rachel Quinn, and her subsequent talk with Sharon Foster, had been calculated steps. At seventeen, she knew a little of the West. She had missed the tour of America that was to follow the Ottawa championships because she had been sent home for treatment of her fractured ankle, but she had traveled to other countries and had picked up American gossip from her teammates and from articles and ads in the few American magazines they had been allowed to bring home. 

And she knew one thing with utter certainty: she could not stay in Russia. If she was ever to escape the tight security web that held her now, she would need to be unshakably convincing when she talked with Tamara. If Tamara picked up any suspicion, any hint of her intentions, Katya was finished.

She had seen it happen once before, in Ottawa. She remembered the breakfast where Elena Matrova did not appear; the perfunctory explanation of a sudden intestinal illness from Pyotr, their coach; the stone-faced, secretive smugness of the guards, who had seen during the night when others had taken Elena away. And she remembered, later that evening, Tamara’s casual questions after they had gone to bed. What were Katya’s plans for the future? Was she looking forward to seeing New York next week? Did she want to take their free afternoon tomorrow for practice, or possibly to do a little shopping in the Ottawa stores? Katya’s answers had been straightforward and innocent. Although she had been afraid, she knew she had nothing to hide.

Now she knew otherwise.

She stared at the lighted streets below her, waiting for the moment when she would see the decadence in the colorful movie billboards, the cynicism behind the glitter that lured the masses and fleeced them of their meager wages. When she saw that, she would be ready.

The moment did not come. Instead, Tamara’s robust knock sounded on the bathroom door, and Tamara’s thin, reedy voice, more than usually solicitous: “Katarina Ivanovna, you are all right in there, yes?”

“Of course I’m all right. Why shouldn’t I be?” Katya tried to think in the role she had selected for herself: bored, irritable, the prima donna who knew more than her attendants about the way she ought to conduct herself. As she spoke, she lifted a small box from the shelf above the rust-stained sink, removed a tampon, and tore open the wrapper, quickly, so that her voice covered the sound. She replaced the box on the shelf, tossed the wrapper into the wastebasket, and flushed the tampon.

Tamara waited until Katya had opened the door before she spoke again. In her light cotton ski pajamas, her wary eyes glittering deep within her puffy face, Tamara looked like the weightlifter she had been earlier in her career. Her long arms hung at her sides, as though she were about to grab Katya by the robe and press her overhead like a barbell—a feat Tamara could have performed without strain. Yet her voice was still carefully modulated with concern. “We’ve been a little worried about you, I can tell you that. None of us understands what you’re doing! When you’ve been brought here to assist with the Western television and newspaper people, and then, at practically the first opportunity that presents itself, you suddenly decide that your own whims are more important than the arrangements your comrades have made . . .”

She let her voice trail off, watching as Katya walked past her and lay down on one of the room’s two small beds. When she saw that Katya was not going to speak up, she began again. “At least that is the talk I hear from Zadiev and those around him. They call it willfulness. Youthful rebellion. For myself, since I have been able to observe you at close quarters for so long, I think you have some other reason.”

Her thin voice softened yet again. “I think you believe you are right in what you are doing.”

“Of course I’m right.” Katya looked at the ceiling.

“You want to tell me about it, yes?”

“Would you explain to them? They might not like hearing how foolish they’ve been.”

Tamara sounded momentarily uncertain—a sign that she was taking Katya seriously. “You want to stay on their good side, then, do you?”

Katya laughed and sat up in bed. “I haven’t become that willful, Tamara Borisovna! I can’t afford not to stay on their good side—I have my future to think about, and my brother’s too, and Zadiev can be very influential, I’ve been told. But I also want to do what is best for myself, and for my country. And I’m convinced that my way will help us all more than if I’d meekly gone in there tonight and performed for that Quinn woman. I saw her on television in my hospital room in Ottawa, and I can tell you, she’s all wrong for me!”

“Wrong?”

“Look at me, Tamara Borisovna!” Katya spread her arms wide, showing her callused palms. Twenty-three thousand practice hours and three hundred-odd competitive meets during the past ten years had made cracks and ridges in the skin and filled them white with chalk. She went on as Tamara blinked and stared. “Have you ever seen a picture of Rachel Quinn? Do you know that she looks like a film star? What would I seem like next to her? I can’t be the cute little moppet any longer, Tamara—maybe I only weigh forty-eight kilos, but I’ve got breasts now, and wide shoulders and strong arms, and if I went in there next to her, the Americans would be saying all over again that Russian women grow up to become cows!”

She smiled a little, inwardly, at the effect this had on Tamara, who had recently acquired a boyfriend—a Moscow veterinarian to whom she wrote faithfully every night after she finished her daily report—and had become more sensitive about her own appearance. Katya added, “And her questions, Tamara! When I was in Ottawa, she was all gossip and politics—and she was interviewing Zheng Sihua, the little Chinese girl who’s so good on the uneven bars! Do you want me to have to speak of those things to the Americans?”

“The Americans are against us in any case,” Tamara said, rather mechanically.

“But they sell their television shows now, don’t they, and people in other countries are still a little interested in Katya Romanova, aren’t they? If I’m going to have an interview seen around the world, I don’t want it to be a bad performance, Tamara. I want it to be right!”

“Why should you concern yourself with what the Americans will think?” Tamara asked, as though she had not been listening. Her voice sounded dull, and Katya thought: I must not falter. She’s trying to wear me down.

“We’ll all be there in Los Angeles in two years,” Katya said. “What the world sees of us will depend on their television people. I don’t see why none of you can look that far ahead and understand that I should present myself only in the best circumstances. Just have a little foresight!”

“And you think the other one, the man Richards, is better. Is that it?”

“I talked to him in Moscow, when my English was still only shaky and again in Ottawa. Both times he was friendly, he flattered me, and he asked only about the usual things— training, diet, hobbies, and so on. Never once anything political.”

“You’re afraid of political questions, yes?”