Russian Spring (23 page)

“The Americans have given Jerry only five days to decide, which is to say that if he is to return to the United States at all, he must do it by then, or they will ship him to their gulag if he tries to return.”

“I understand the situation,” Katchikov said. “You will hear from either me or the Paris office before then. And may I say, Sonya Ivanovna, that you have demonstrated that you have an interesting future with Red Star, whether here or in Paris; it has been entertaining negotiating with you.”

And with that he hung up.

“Should you have told that guy that?” Jerry said.

“Why not? It will speed things up, you do not know our bureaucracy as I do, this way Moscow will not permit the Paris office to hem and haw forever to demonstrate its bureaucratic independence.”

“If you say so,” Jerry said, giving her a quick kiss. “But in America, when we buy a house, we don’t like to tell the salesman we need to close the deal by next Tuesday ’cause the landlord’s about to kick us out.”

“Not to worry, Jerry,” Sonya said, patting his cheek. “In Russia we have a saying: ‘A frozen bureaucratic ass melts quickest over a hot stove.’ ”

Jerry laughed. “You made that up, didn’t you?” he said. “I hope you’re right, Sonya, because we’ve got a saying in America too, and this one isn’t my invention: ‘Shit flows downhill.’ ”

As it turned out, they were both right, and they were both wrong, in a way that neither of them could have imagined.

It seemed to Jerry Reed that it was taking forever, and indeed by objective measurement, he
was
nursing his third kir, and Sonya
still
had not emerged from the Tour Montparnasse.

Despite Sonya’s belief that she had lit a fire under the bureaucratic ass of Red Star, S.A., the phone call they had been waiting for hadn’t come until this morning, four long days later, and only twenty-four hours before the now-or-never deadline that Al Barker had set for him, four days that they had spent eating, sleeping, making love, wandering fecklessly around Paris, and putting off André Deutcher and Nicola Brandusi, but mostly just nervously killing time while the Russians let them sweat.

When the call finally came and Sonya got off the phone, she was beaming.

“Good news?” Jerry said.

“It’s got to be. That was the Paris office in the Tour Montparnasse, and they want me there at three o’clock. If they were turning me down, the call most certainly would have come from Brussels.”

Jerry had insisted on accompanying her as far as the Montparnasse Métro stop so as not to be kept in suspense any longer than necessary. He had taken a streetside table here at this big and somewhat overpriced café right by the Métro, and here he had sat ever since, breathing the fumes of one of the busiest intersections of Paris, watching the crowds of pedestrians swirling by, from time to time ordering another kir in order to keep his seat—though the waiter here never gave him the evil eye when his glass was dry as an American waiter would—but mostly staring up the avenue in the direction of what he was told was still the tallest building in Paris and waiting for Sonya to reappear.

When at long last she did finally come sauntering down the street toward him, she certainly seemed to be taking her own sweet time, and when she finally sat down at the table, she had the most peculiar and unreadable expression on her face, definitely not depressed, but somehow not elated either. Bemused might be the word for it.

“Well?” Jerry demanded.

“Well, as I believe you say in America, there is good news and bad news,” Sonya said, her mouth smiling but her eyes somewhat glazed over with some unreadable emotion.

“Well for chrissakes, spit it out, Sonya!” Jerry cried.

“Just a minute,” Sonya said, and she crooked her finger at the passing waiter. “Champagne, s’il vous plaît, la bouteille le meilleur de la maison!”

“You’re ordering champagne?” Jerry said, much relieved. “Then what’s the
bad
news?”

“The champagne is for the
bad
news, maybe,” she said enigmatically.
“But first the good news. The good news is that I had a meeting with Vladimir Moulenko, the head of the economic strategy department, and we hit it off quite well even though he was apparently being told what to do by Moscow, and they’re willing to transfer me to Paris and give me a job in Moulenko’s department with a raise of five hundred
ECU
a month. . . .”

“That’s wonderful!” Jerry cried. “But . . . but . . . but then how can there be any bad news?”

The waiter arrived with a silver ice bucket on a stand, a bottle of champagne, and two glasses. He set the glasses down before them with a little flourish and started to peel back the foil on the bottle.

“Non, non, pas maintenant, s’il vous plaît, peut-être après,” Sonya told him, holding up her hand. The waiter shrugged, put the champagne in the ice bucket, and departed.

“What did you do that for?” Jerry asked.

“I said this champagne is for the bad news, if that’s what it is,” Sonya told him. “We’ll open it after I tell you if you want to.”

“Will you stop playing games and tell me already!” Jerry moaned.

“The bad news, if that is what it is,” Sonya said, with a strange little smile and a shrug of her shoulders, “is that first we have to get married.”

“What!”

“There was another man at the meeting, name of Sasha Ulanov. He introduced himself as a public relations expert from Tass, but he could have been
KGB
. Apparently someone in Brussels or Moscow or possibly Paris has figured out a way to protect you from the wrath of the Americans and score a public relations coup in France in the bargain. If we get married, the Americans will have to go relatively quietly according to this Ulanov, or face a propaganda disaster, seeing as how the romantic Russians will have already announced that they are more than willing to transfer their socialist Juliet to Paris to be with her American Romeo. The French will love it, and whatever the Americans do or say, the matter of the sat-sled technology will be lost in all the juicy copy about star-crossed lovers.”

Sonya cocked her head at Jerry, gave him a fey little smile. “Ulanov says Tass will even pay for the wedding,” she said.

She reached out and put her hand on the champagne bottle. “So what do you say, Jerry, do we now open this bottle?”

“Is . . . is that a proposal . . . ?” Jerry stammered, quite dumbfounded.

“I do believe it is,” Sonya said. “I mean, what real choice have we? After all, if it doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced later.”

“That’s not very romantic,” Jerry said.

“Is that an acceptance . . . ?”

“We
don’t
have much of a choice, do we?”

Sonya reached across the table, squeezed his hand, and for a moment, at least, her smile was properly radiant. She reached into the ice bucket, pulled out the bottle, uncorked it, and let it foam all over the table, and her dress, and his pants before she poured it.

“Look at it this way, love,” she said, “it is, after all, summer, and we are young, and in Paris, and celebrating our betrothal with the best bottle of champagne in a Montparnasse bistro, and by so doing, thwarting the bureaucratic killjoys of East and West and achieving both our hearts’ desires in the bargain. . . . How much more romantic can you get? Do we really need Gypsy violins and flowers?”

Jerry laughed, and clinked glasses, and in that very moment realized how truly in love with this woman he really was, how right what they were doing was in some crazy fashion, if for all the wrong reasons.

“I’ll drink to that!” he said, and they raised their glasses high with a dramatic gesture, drained them dry messily, reached across the table, embraced and kissed with the empty glasses still in their hands.

And as they did, Jerry heard a spattering of hand claps, and when he looked, he saw that all around them patrons of the sidewalk café had risen to their feet and were smiling and applauding.

“If only they knew . . . ,” Jerry murmured, blushing happily.

“Ah but they do, love, they do,” Sonya declared gaily. “We
are
, after all, in Paris.”

Sonya laughed. She had heard of this before, but she really didn’t believe it. “You really insist on doing such a thing, Jerry?” she said.

“I sure do,” Jerry told her, “it’s a romantic old American custom.”

“What a strange phallocratic notion of romanticism,” Sonya said as he unbolted the three locks to the apartment they had finally chosen, on the third floor of an old building on the Île St.-Louis.

Twenty-four hours after the proposal of marriage that had really come from Moscow, they had found themselves making it legal in front of a French magistrate, that evening there had been a little dinner party in a wedding palace high atop the Eiffel Tower, attended by Pierre Glautier, her new boss Vladimir Moulenko, Sasha Ulanov, three of Jerry’s colleagues from the European Space Agency, and half again as many reporters, and then off for five days of honeymoon in a quiet little hotel way up in the Scottish Highlands, a welcome contrast to everything that had transpired in the past two weeks to put them there.

And now, here they were, at the door of their new apartment,
about to begin married life together, without really having had time to catch their breath!

“Okay,” Jerry said, pushing open the door, “here goes!” And with a little grunt, he actually managed to snatch her up off her feet and carry her shakily across the threshold, through the little entrance foyer, and into the bright noonday sunlight of the parlor.

“Well, here we are,” Jerry said, dropping her back on her feet, “that wasn’t so bad, now was it?”

The furniture they had ordered from several different establishments along the Rue du Faubourg-St.-Antoine would not begin arriving for hours, and the parlor, like the rest of the three-room apartment, was quite bare. But the walls had been freshly painted a pristine white, and the cobwebs had been swept from the high exposed beam ceiling, and the big windows freshly washed, and the floor waxed to a warm woody glow, and everything smelled of paint, wax, and cleanser.

It was hot and stuffy in the sunny room, and Jerry went to open the windows. “Wait a minute, love,” Sonya said, “smell this place with me for a moment as it is now.”

Jerry gave her a peculiar look, but came away from the windows and put his arm around her waist. “Take a good deep breath before you open the windows,” Sonya told him. “Can you smell it?”

Jerry wrinkled his nose. “Smells like paint and ammonia to me,” he said.

Sonya laughed. “Some romantic you are, Jerry Reed!” she said. “Take another breath! Doesn’t it smell like
newness?
Doesn’t it smell like a whole new life together? Doesn’t it smell like
the future
waiting to happen, Mr. Urban Spaceman?”

Jerry laughed. He squeezed her waist. He smiled at her and gave her a little kiss.

Sonya kissed him back, stood there a little longer, smelling the magic odor of this frozen moment that she knew could never quite come again, and wondered why her happiness was spiced with just a frisson of fear.

But then, with a little sigh, she shrugged it off. “All right, love,” she said, “open the windows wide and let it in!”

Jerry Reed stood there before the wide-open windows of his Parisian apartment, with his arm around his Russian bride, looking out across the Seine at the stonework quay and the strangely French buildings of the Right Bank, inhaling the foreign odors blowing in on the warm breeze, and for a moment it all seemed quite unreal, as if he were not really himself, but a character in some science-fiction story, standing
atop the air-lock gangway of his spaceship setting eyes for the first time on an unknown alien world.

As in some sense, he thought, I am.

The American Embassy had indeed lifted his passport, but had made no move to revoke his citizenship; once the deed was done they controlled the damage as best they could by more or less holding their peace.
ESA
had gotten him a peculiar sort of Common Europe passport that required no renunciation of his American citizenship, so in a legal sense, his nationality had not really changed.

Still, as he stood there looking out on the river, he suddenly seemed to be moving down it, standing high on the bridge of a ship that was the Île St.-Louis, pulling away from the shore of all that was familiar, and out to an unknown sea.

And although this was a feeling that he had in some way spent his whole life pursuing, he found that in the real world, the beginning of such an adventure did not come without a certain formless dread.

But then a big glassed-in tour boat came plowing up the river past him and he heard the distant tinny voice of the guide babbling through the P.A. system in windblown incomprehensible French, and the illusion was shattered, and the Île St.-Louis was no longer moving beneath his feet, and he was back in the living room of his apartment with Sonya, with the woman with whom he had shared so much, and Paris was just Paris, and all was right with the world.

“A ruble for your thoughts,” Sonya said quietly beside him. “No, make that an
ECU
, since we are now both Common Europeans together.”

Jerry laughed. “Oh, nothing much,” he said. “I was just thinking how standing here with you right now is like the storybook ending of some romantic novel. . . .”

“So it is, so it is,” Sonya said, snuggling up against him. “ ‘And they both lived happily ever after.’ ”

Part Two

Russian Spring

Representative Carson: “Just talking out loud what most of the mealy-mouths in this town are thinking privately, you understand, Billy, but we gotta do
something
about the mess the Peens and the Japs got us into, don’t we? They tricked us into borrowing all that money like a gang of sleazy loan sharks, didn’t they? And now they own more of this country than we do!”

Billy Allen: “But in every movie I’ve ever seen, the loan sharks
break your kneecaps
if you try to stiff them!”