Russian Spring (16 page)

For an apparently uneducated girl from London, to judge by her accent, Samantha Garry seemed to speak good French, though on the other hand, all the French she babbled so freely to waiters and bartenders and cabdrivers could have been as weird as her English for all Jerry could really tell. There was something humiliating about that; if a porn starlet like Samantha could cope with the language, then why the hell couldn’t
he?

She really knew the city too, or at least the sort of down-and-dirty parts that hadn’t been on André Deutcher’s or Nicole Lafage’s versions of the grand tour.

She took him to a weird bar in some back street not far from the Champs-Élysées, where half the clientele, male and female, had shaved heads and elaborate skull tattoos, the music ran to complex synthesized neo-African percussion tracks, and the drinks were served with complimentary amyl nitrate poppers.

“Zoo Zombies, luv,” she told him. “Used to be one meself back in London, it never really caught on, but I’ve got a freakin’ lizard face on me head under the hair, and Elvis likewise on me bush.”

“Are you pulling my leg?”

“Am I?” she said, reaching under the table and giving his prick a sudden sharp yank. “That’s not yer leg, now is it?”

Samantha let him give her one deep long kiss in the taxi on the way to the next stop, an Arab-style nightclub somewhere toward the east, where they sat on cushions, drank some incredibly strong milky-white stuff that tasted of licorice, and where, as a teenaged-looking belly dancer wriggled her crotch within about six inches of Jerry’s nose, Samantha gently placed his hand on the inside of her own bare thigh.

They left the Arab place and went to a disco in a cellar not far away called, appropriately enough, “London,” where the decor was wood-and-cordovan clubby, and the music was ancient punk metal stuff out of the 1970s, and the middle-aged bartenders all wore black leather jackets, tinted spiked or Mohawk hairdos, and phony pins through their cheeks, and there was nothing to drink but bitter beer or gin and tonic, and the air was so thick with some kind of oily artificial fog that Samantha probably couldn’t even see what a terrible dancer he was when she dragged him out onto the floor.

When they got back to the bar, she pressed her body close to his, and draped a bare arm across his shoulder. “Hey, ducks,” she whispered throatily in his ear, “are you game for some of the
real
down and dirty?”

“What did you have in mind . . . ?” Jerry replied eagerly.

“Not what you think, luv, not just yet anyway, but don’t worry, you’ll get yours when we’re good and ready, wouldn’t want you to think I’m too cheap a date, now would I?”

And from there, she took him to a truly sleazy dive up in Pigalle, “the most puke-awful sex show in gay Paree, ducks,” she promised in the cab, “but everybody should see everything once, as the vicar told himself with his arsehole up against the mirror.”

She wasn’t kidding. In an otherwise undistinguished bar, a cage was set up on a crude pedestal.

In it, as they entered, a small male dog was fucking a large female cat.

“Jesus Christ!” Jerry exclaimed. “I see it but I don’t believe it!”

“Cute stuff, innit?”

“How do you
find
these places, Samantha?”

“Oh, I’ve been goin’ to Paris since I was a sixteen-year-old with my thumb out in Dover givin’ it away for a ride to Frogland, it’s just next door, innit?”

Jerry had never thought of it that way before, but it was quite true, London was closer to Paris than
LA
was to San Francisco, even if they were in different countries and the people didn’t even speak the same language!

“That’s how come you speak French?”

“You have a better time if you speak the local blabble, now don’t you? I got a bit of the old Deutsch too.”

“You’ve been to Germany also?”

Samantha laughed. “Hey, Yank, this is Europe, innit! With a big thumb and a short skirt and an improper attitude, a schoolgirl can go anywhere on her holidays; beats hangin’ around in Brighton all the time, donnit?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Jerry said, wondering jealously what it would have been like to have grown up like her, a teenager on the loose all over Europe.

One round of overpriced drinks later, the dog and cat were replaced by a duck and a chicken.

“How do they get them to do it?”

Samantha shrugged. “You’re the scientist, ain’t you, Jerry, you tell me!”

Jerry thought about it. “Well, if you saturated each species with the other’s pheromones, and shot them up with the right biochemical cocktail, that might do it, as long as the parts fit, I suppose . . . ,” he told her. “On the other hand, it could all be holograms. . . .”

“Holograms . . . ?”

The duck-and-chicken show was replaced by a small pig and a scrofulous monkey.

“You think this is weird?” Jerry said with a world-weary leer. “Hey, I can show you
really
weird if I can find the place, and I think it’s right around here somewhere. . . .”

They left the bar, and wandered around in Pigalle looking for the place that André Deutcher had taken Jerry to that very first night in Paris before Jerry managed to remember that it was called “La Bande Dessinée” and got Samantha to ask someone for directions.

They got seated just as the clown in the Superman suit was dropping
down onto the stage where the naked redheaded woman lay waiting on the couch for his advent.

“Hey, luv,” Samantha said with a little sneer, “should I stop you if I’ve seen this act before?”

Jerry said nothing. He just sat there smugly waiting for her reaction when the Man of Steel grew his huge silver cock, nor was he disappointed as her jaw fell open, and she goggled at him with much the same look of wide-eyed amazement he must have given André Deutcher.

She squealed when Superman climaxed and rocketed backward off the redhead, she broke up when the woman turned into Minnie Mouse, she kept laughing through the whole cartoon-character orgy, and she gave Jerry the strangest look of perplexity when Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe and Hitler and the rest showed up for some live action.

“Holograms . . . ,” he whispered to her, “all done with holograms.”

“Fuck a duck!”

“That was the last place,” Jerry reminded her, and they broke up into laughter.

But when the orgy of the media images faded into the sexual phantasm of the living Indian temple frieze, she grew quiet, and when Greek gods and goddesses began making love, her hand found his, and by the time the erotic holograms had metamorphosed into the penultimate psychedelic love-in, her thigh was pressed against his, and after it all ended, the dirty-talking porn star from London sat there staring at him with the tender-eyed innocence of the little girl even she must once have been.

“That was wonderful, Jerry,” she said simply and quietly, snuggling against him. “Shouldn’t we go someplace quiet now, maybe? Someplace simple and romantic where we can just sit and talk?”

“Funny you should ask,” Jerry said. “I know just the place.”

Sonya had heard of the Hotel Ritz but she had never been inside the place before and she didn’t need much acting talent for “Samantha Garry” to go all goggle-eyed, for this monument to nineteenth-century rococo-plutocrat opulence and excess made the Czar’s Winter Palace and Versailles seem almost like modest understatement, all the more so because the Ritz was a place where people actually paid enormous sums of money to stay, not a museum. It was places like this that made her understand the French Revolution and made her proud to be reminded that she was a citizen of a socialist country.

And at the moment, that was about all she had to feel proud of,
for while Jerry Reed still maintained his enthusiastic belief that she was a porn starlet from London, the whole Samantha Garry act was by now wearing rather thin on her conscience.

Back there at the
ESA
party, what seemed a long, long time ago, Jerry Reed had been just an abstraction, a relief from boredom, an opportunity to bed her first American, and a chance to test the limits of her command of English in the bargain. She had created “Samantha” out of bits and pieces of movies she had seen and books she had read and her catty concept of what Pierre’s London sexpot would have to be like, and she had dragged Jerry Reed around to hideous places out of an article Pierre had written called “Sleaze-Pits of Paris” just to see how badly a dirty lady from London could shock the archetypal naive American.

But she had forgotten that the archetypal naive American was also supposed to be what they called “a good sport,” which Jerry had certainly been, and she had not at all expected him to take to a creature like Samantha with such openhearted good humor, and she had certainly not expected to be so charmed herself by the way he so gallantly refrained from crudely hustling such a lewd and loose lady.

Nor had she at all expected to feel what she had felt when he took her to La Bande Dessinée and concluded their crawl through the low spots by showing his dirty lady from London a moment of truly moving erotic beauty. If this had been meant to seduce her, it had succeeded beautifully and fairly, and if it had all been innocently playful, why that was even more endearing. One way or the other, Sonya very much wanted to make love to this man now.

But the problem was that she wanted to make love to him as herself, as Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin, not Samantha Garry, and she could see no way of revealing herself without losing him, without making him feel naive and stupid and outraged at being made to play the buffoon by a treacherous Russian.

The Hemingway Bar was at the other side of the hotel, and considering the overripe grandeur one promenaded through to reach it, the place was unexpectedly tiny and modest, with a little bar and a single bartender, a few stools, a handful of small tables, a bust of Ernest Hemingway, and ancient black-and-white photos of the American writer on the walls. The only people in the bar at the moment were two elderly couples seated together in the far corner.

It was an entirely unexpected, perfect quiet place for intimate talk. Once again, Jerry Reed had managed to surprise and delight her.

“So luv,” she said, when they had ordered themselves some Cognac, “how’s about you tell me a bit about yourself before we get to the old in-and-out? I’ve told you all my own down and dirty. . . .”

Which was the biggest lie of all, of course, but there seemed nothing
for it now but to stay in character as Samantha and encourage him to do the talking, for the truth of it was that she found herself really wanting to know more about this man, and not just because she had never before met an American. There was something about Jerry Reed that did not compute. He seemed like a naive American tourist, but the currency problem had banished that species from Europe. He didn’t seem rich, and he didn’t seem like a corporate type, and yet here he was in Paris anyway.

“I’m not sure what you mean. . . , ” Jerry said.

Sonya gave him a Samantha laugh. “Well, ducks,” she said, “to begin with, what’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like Paris?”

Jerry laughed. “I’m being seduced,” he told her.

Samantha placed a hand on his thigh under the table. “I mean aside from tonight, luv,” she purred at him. “What’s brought you to Paris?”

“I told you, I’m being seduced. By headhunters.”

She goggled at him. “You’ve got a bit of crumpet from New Guinea with a bloody bone through her nose stashed somewhere and you haven’t told me!”

Jerry laughed again. “Not by cannibals,” he said, “by headhunters from
ESA
, from the European Space Agency.”

“Do tell. . . . ”

“You really want to hear this?” Jerry said dubiously. “I mean, I can’t explain without getting kind of technical, and I don’t want to bore you. . . . ”

Samantha worked her hand deeper into his crotch and stared straight into his eyes, gave him the sweetest little smile, and all at once seemed unexpectedly serious. “Don’t you worry your sweet little buns about that, luv,” she said softly.

Jerry stared back at her for a long silent moment, as something began to open up inside him. Looking into her big green eyes, he realized all at once how alone he had really been here in Paris, how much had happened to him, how momentous a decision he would soon be forced to make, how much he really needed someone, anyone, to talk to.

“Go ahead, Jerry,” Samantha said, “tell me all the secrets of your soul.”

He sighed, he shrugged, and he did.

He told her about his job at Rockwell. He told her about Project Daedalus and he told her about meeting André Deutcher back in Los Angeles. He told her about the job they were offering, and the salary, and the apartments they had showed him.

And as he sat there sipping Cognac and talking and she sat there listening raptly without saying a word, the strangest and most wonderful thing began to happen. It all started to come out, not linearly and sequentially, but hologrammically, spiraling inward from the peripheral mundanities toward the center of his heart, toward the core of his being, as he found himself speaking of things he had never spoken about to a woman before, things he had never found a woman who would sit still and listen to before, and thought he never would.

He found himself telling a porn-film starlet from London about Rob Post and the death of the American civilian space program, about his father’s science-fiction collection and a four-year-old boy watching the Moon Landing over a huge bowl of chocolate ice cream. He told her about his lost dreams of going to the Moon and walking on the surface of Mars. He told her of his frustration at being born out of his proper time, of knowing he would die long before man’s starships would reach out into the wide galactic main to discover the unthinkably advanced civilizations that must surely be out there somewhere on planets circling far-distant suns.

He spoke for a long, long time, or so it seemed to him, forgetting where he was and who he was talking to, and even the touch of her hand on his cock and what he had hoped was to come, as he relived his own life’s journey from the moment the Eagle landed to the decision it had brought him to now.