The Charm School (25 page)

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Authors: NELSON DEMILLE

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BOOK: The Charm School
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Lisa stayed silent for some time, then said, “I should have realized the trouble they’d be in . . . it just seemed like a solution to our problem.”
“Don’t worry about it. I just hope the KGB doesn’t go snooping around there this morning. We need a few hours’ head start.” Hollis could feel the road getting soft and heard mud splashing against the wheel wells. The muffler was thumping. Ahead he saw a horse-drawn potato wagon plodding along the narrow road. “Damn it.” He knew he couldn’t slow down behind the wagon without getting mired in the muck. “Hold on.” Hollis came up behind the wagon, angled the car to the left, and cut back so that the Zhiguli’s right side was inches from the horse and wagon while its left wheels were off the road into the drainage ditch. The car started to flip over, then settled down and flopped back onto the road in front of the horse, who got splattered with mud and reared up. The car fishtailed in the mud but kept its traction.
Lisa took a deep breath. “Wow.”
Within five minutes they came to an intersecting road of gravel, and Hollis cut north on it. He nudged the Zhiguli up to fifty kph and listened to the muffler working itself loose.
Lisa asked, “Do you want a pear?”
“Sure.”
She got a pear from the bag and wiped it on her sleeve before she handed it to him.
Hollis saw the main utility poles of the old Minsk–Moscow road ahead. He bit into the pear. “Good
grusha
.” He turned onto the paved road and headed west. “About twenty minutes to Gagarin.” Hollis saw no traffic on the road in either direction. He pressed on the accelerator and got the Zhiguli up to ninety kph. The engine whined, and the transmission whined back, but the car held steady. The muffler had quieted down on the level surface.
Hollis saw a black car in his rearview mirror. The car was gaining on him fast and had to be doing over a hundred kph. As the car drew closer he recognized the grillwork of a Chaika. He looked at his dashboard and saw that his tachometer was already in the red line. “Don’t look now, but . . .”
She turned her head. “Oh, shit! Is that them?”
“Don’t know.”
“What can we do?”
“Bluff and bluster. Tell them we’ve already called our embassy and so on. If I think it’s necessary and if I get a chance, I’ll try to kill them.” He slid his knife out of his boot and slipped it inside his leather coat.
“Sam . . . I’m frightened.”
“You’ll be fine. Be a bitch.”
The Chaika was fifty meters behind them now and swung out into the oncoming lane. Lisa looked straight ahead. Hollis glanced in his sideview mirror and smiled. “Wave.”
“What?”
The Chaika drew abreast and honked its horn. Two young couples waved from the car. Hollis smiled and waved back. The woman in the front passenger side pointed to the crushed fender and pantomimed swigging from a bottle and jerking on a steering wheel. The young man in the back was blowing kisses to Lisa. His female companion punched his arm playfully. The Chaika accelerated and passed them. Hollis said, “Crazy Muscovite kids. What’s this country coming to?”
Lisa drew a long breath. She opened her bag, took out a compact, and brushed her face with blush, then carefully put on lip gloss. “I’ll do my eyes when you stop for a light.” She ran a brush through her hair. “Want me to do your hair? It’s messy.”
“Okay.”
She brushed his hair as he drove. She said, “We need a toothbrush.” She added, “I want us to look good for them.”
“For whom?”
“The people in Gagarin or the KGB or Burov. Whoever we meet first.”
Hollis said, “You look good. Too good. Tone it down a bit.”
“We’re not going to pass for Russians anyway, Sam.”
“We’ll try to pass as something other than American embassy staff.”
She shrugged and blotted the blush and lip gloss with a handkerchief. “At least I’m wearing a
vatnik
. You look like Indiana Jones with your boots and leather jacket.” She tousled his hair. “Well, we didn’t shower.”
Hollis said, “Standard procedure is try to pass as a socialist comrade from one of the Baltic states. They don’t dress half bad, look Western, and speak un-Russian Russian. How about Lithuanian? Or do you feel like a Latvian?”
“I want to be an Estonian.”
“You got it.”
Ten minutes later they saw squat
izbas
on either side of the road, then buildings with painted wood siding. Hollis slowed down. “Gagarin.”
“Named after the cosmonaut?”
“Yes. He was born in a village near here. From a squalid
izba
to a space capsule—log cabin to the stars. You have to give these people credit where it’s due.”
They came into the middle of Gagarin, the district center for the region, situated on both banks of the Bolshaya Gzhat River. It was a town of about ten thousand people, big enough, Hollis thought, so that neither the Zhiguli nor its occupants stood out. Like Mozhaisk, it looked as if everyone had gone to the moon for the weekend. The town boasted a restaurant and a memorial museum to their famous native son.
Hollis stopped the car in the middle of the empty street and rolled down his window. An enormous babushka, wrapped in black, was carrying a crate on her shoulder like a man. Hollis asked, “
Vokzal?
”
“Good, good.” She opened the rear door of the Zhiguli, threw the crate in, and piled in after it. The Zhiguli’s rear dropped. Hollis looked at Lisa, smiled, and shrugged. He asked, “
Gde?
”
“There, there. Turn over there. Where are you from?”
Hollis turned down a narrow street and saw the train station, a covered concrete platform. “From Estonia.”
“Yes? Do the police let you drive with dented fenders in Estonia? You must get that fixed here.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Where are your hats and gloves? Do you want to get pneumonia?”
“No.” Hollis pulled up to a small empty parking area beside the concrete platform. He got out and helped the old woman up the platform steps. Lisa followed with his briefcase, and they made their way through the crowd to the wooden ticket shed on the platform. Hollis and Lisa consulted the posted schedule and saw that the next Moscow train would be along in twenty minutes. Hollis knocked on the ticket window, and a wooden panel slid back, revealing a middle-aged woman wearing a grey railroad coat. A fire blazed in an old potbellied stove behind her. Hollis said, “Two one-way tickets to Moscow.”
She looked at him.
Hollis knew she was supposed to ask for an internal passport, but ticket agents rarely did. In his case, however, she might make an exception. Hollis said, “Is it possible to be ticketed on to Leningrad, then to Tallinn?”
“No. You are Estonian?”
“Yes.”
The woman craned her neck to get a look at Lisa, then turned to Hollis. “You must be ticketed in Moscow for Leningrad and Tallinn. Twenty-two and seventy-five.”
Hollis gave her twenty-five rubles and took the tickets and change. “
Spasibo.
”
As they moved away from the ticket booth, Lisa glanced back. “I wonder if she’s going to call the militia.”
Hollis moved around to the rear of the wooden ticket shed, looked around, drew his knife, and severed the telephone line. “No. But if she leaves the ticket booth, we’re back in the Zhiguli.”
Lisa took his arm. “Somehow I feel you’ll get us out of this.” She added, “You got us into it.”
Hollis made no reply.
She asked, “What would you have done if she asked us for passports or identity cards?”
“Are you asking out of curiosity, or are you trying to learn the business?”
“Both.”
“Well, then, I would have . . . you tell me.”
Lisa thought a moment, then said, “I’d pretend I couldn’t find my ID, leave, and pay a peasant to buy two tickets.”
Hollis nodded. “Not bad.”
Lisa and Hollis walked down the cold, grey concrete platform, which looked like a scene out of
Doctor Zhivago
, crowded with black-coated and black-scarved humanity. Old peasants, men and women, with teenage boys to help them, lugged crates, boxes, and suitcases filled with dairy products and the last fresh produce of the year. They were all headed for one place: Moscow, the Center, where eight million mouths had to be fed and could not be fed properly through the government’s distribution system. Some of the peasants would go to the markets, the government’s grudging concession to capitalism, and some of the peasants would get no farther than a side street near the railroad terminal. Hollis had heard from some of the wives in the embassy that by November broccoli and cauliflower could sell for the equivalent of two dollars a pound, tomatoes for twice that, and lettuce was sold by the gram. By December the fresh produce disappeared until May.
The peasant women sat like men, Hollis noticed, their legs spread and their hands dangling in their laps. Not a single man was shaven, and there was not one decent article of clothing among the two hundred or so people. The women wore rubber boots and galoshes, and though the men’s shoes and boots were leather, they were raw and cracked from long, hard use. The few young girls wore plastic boots of garish colors: red, yellow, pale blue. Hollis said softly to Lisa, “You might as well powder your nose again. Everyone’s staring at you anyway.”
“My word, look at that. That man has dead rabbits in that sack.”
The Byelorussian Express came lumbering down the track, and everyone stood and moved their wares to the edge of the platform, forming a veritable wall of boxes and crates. The train stopped, the doors opened, and Hollis vaulted inside followed by Lisa. They took two empty seats by the attendant’s tea cubicle.
Within ten minutes every nook and cranny of the car was packed with bundles, and the train pulled out. Hollis checked his watch. It was nine-thirty. With stops in Mozhaisk and Golitsyno, the train should arrive at the Byelorussian station on Gorky Square well before noon.
The grimness of the platform quickly gave way to animated conversation, jokes, and laughter. It was rough peasant talk, Hollis noted, but there was no profanity, and there seemed to be a bond between these people, though clearly many of them were getting acquainted for the first time. The bond was not only the journey, he thought, but the brotherhood of the downtrodden. How unlike the Moscow metro where you could hear a pin drop at the height of rush hour.
Food was being passed around now, and there was good-natured teasing about the qualities of each person’s wares. Hollis heard a woman say, “Not even a Muscovite would buy these apples of yours.”
Another woman answered, “I tell them they are radishes.”
Everyone laughed.
An old man across the aisle pushed a dripping slice of tomato under Hollis’ nose. Hollis took it from his brown fingers. “Thank you, father.” He passed it to Lisa. “Eat it.”
She hesitated, then popped it into her mouth. “Good. See if anyone has orange juice.”
“Low profile. Feign sleep or simplemindedness.”
Lisa whispered in Russian, “Can I smoke?”
“Not here. In the lav.”
“Do you want another pear? Honey?”
“No, honey.”
“This is nice.”
Hollis looked around the car. It
was
quite nice. Clean, lace curtains on the windows, and little bud vases attached to the windowsills, each with a real rosebud. The more he saw of Russia, he admitted, the less he understood it. The windows, however, were dirty, and this was somehow comforting.
They spoke as little as possible, and Hollis urged Lisa to remain in her seat unless she really had to use the facilities. The conductor, a middle-aged woman, came through, took their tickets, and marked them rather than punching them. She said, “Are you Muscovites?”
Hollis replied, “No. Estonians. From Moscow we go to Leningrad, then home to Tallinn.”
“Ah. Your Russian is good.” She looked Lisa over and observed, “Those are very nice boots.”
“Thank you.”
“They have better things in our Baltic republics. I never understood that.” She handed Hollis the tickets. “Have a safe journey.”
“Thank you.”
The train gathered speed on the straight, flat trackbed. There was piped-in music now. It was not the classical or folk music usually heard in public places, Hollis noted, but soft, easy-listening music, Soviet Muzak.
The train pulled into Mozhaisk, and there was the same crush of humanity on the platform carrying the same bursting cardboard suitcases and ungainly bundles. The train loaded the last two cars only. There were soldiers and militia on the platform. Hollis and Lisa slumped down into their seats and feigned sleep. The train pulled out and continued its journey through the bleak Russian landscape.
Golitsyno was a five-minute stop, and within fifteen minutes of leaving the station they could see the tall spire of Moscow University in the Lenin Hills. “Almost home,” Lisa commented. She added, “No, not really home.”

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