The Charm School (4 page)
The other reason was that each slab of precast concrete that the Soviets had supplied to the building site had been implanted with listening devices. After the bugging scandal broke, there followed the Marine guards’ sexual scandals at the old embassy, and the subsequent charges and counter-charges between Moscow and Washington. The American diplomatic mission to the Soviet Union had been in a shambles for over a year, and the whole mess had been making front-page news back in the States. The image of the Secretary of State conducting business in a trailer out on Tchaikovsky Street was rather embarrassing, she thought.
According to Seth Alevy’s sources, the Russians had a big laugh over the whole thing. And according to her own personal observations, the American diplomats in Moscow felt like fools and had for some time avoided social contact with other embassies.
Eventually, a little belated Yankee ingenuity and a lot of Yankee dollars had put things right in the new embassy. But Lisa Rhodes knew there was a good deal of residual bitterness left among the American staff, and it influenced their decision-making. In fact, she thought, whatever goodwill there had been between the embassy people and their Soviet hosts was gone, replaced by almost open warfare. The State Department was now seriously considering making a clean sweep of the entire staff, replacing the two hundred or so able and experienced men and women with less angry diplomats. She hoped not. She wanted to continue her tour of duty here.
Lisa Rhodes shook the ice in her drink. She closed her eyes and exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke at the ceiling.
She thought of Seth Alevy. Being involved with the CIA station chief in Moscow was not the worst thing for her career. He could pull strings to keep her in Moscow even if State ordered her home. And she did love him. Or once loved him. She wasn’t sure. But somehow, being involved with him meant being involved with his world, and she didn’t like that. It wasn’t what she wanted to do with her career or her life. It was also dangerous. Being in Moscow was dangerous enough by itself.
“Russian efficiency,” said the voice again.
Greg Fisher did not turn, did not breathe.
“American?”
Fisher found himself nodding in the dark.
“I’m over here.”
Fisher turned slowly toward the voice. He could make out the figure of a man standing among the pine boughs on the far side of the road. The man was tall, heavily built, and wore matching dark clothing that looked like a uniform.
The man stepped onto the road, and Fisher saw in his right hand the glint of steel. A gun. Fisher took a step back.
The man spoke as he walked. “Name’s Dodson. Yours?”
“Fisher.” He cleared his throat. “Gregory. American.” Fisher thought that if he had a serial number he’d give him that too. “Who are
you
?”
you
?”
“Keep it down.” The man stopped a few feet from Fisher.
Fisher swallowed and inquired, “Tourist?”
The man smiled without humor. “Resident.”
“Oh.”
“Are you lost, Fisher?”
“Very.”
“Alone?”
Fisher hesitated, then replied, “Yes. . . .” He saw now that the steel was not a gun but a knife. The man was about fifty years old with short, dark hair and eyes that glinted like the steel in his hand. There was something—blood, maybe—smeared on his chin.
Dodson said, “You might just be a graduate student.”
“I am.
Was.
Yale. Business school.”
Was.
Yale. Business school.”
Dodson smiled again. “No. I mean . . .” He regarded the Pontiac Trans Am, its engine running and its headlights on. “No . . . I think you’re the real thing.”
Fisher was confused, but he nodded. He took a deep breath and looked cautiously at the man. It was not a uniform but a blue warm-up suit with red piping. The man wore running shoes.
Unreal
, he thought.
Unreal
, he thought.
Dodson slipped the knife into a scabbard beneath his waistband, then pointed at the Trans Am. “You drive that from Yale?”
“Yeah. Sort of. From Le Havre.”
“Amazing.”
“Yeah. Well, I have to get going. Not supposed to be driving after dark. Hey, nice meeting you.” Fisher glanced at his car but didn’t move toward it.
A dog barked again, and Dodson motioned Fisher toward the car. Dodson got in the passenger side and closed the door quietly. Fisher got behind the wheel. Dodson said, “I have to put some distance between me and this place.”
“What place?”
“I’ll tell you later. Turn it around. Kill the lights.”
“Right.” Fisher pulled the Trans Am up into the turnaround, backed out, and headed down the narrow road.
“Cut the engine and coast.”
Fisher glanced at his passenger, then put the transmission in neutral and shut off the engine. The car rolled down the slope he’d come up. “Hard to see the road.”
“Where are you heading, Greg?”
“Moscow.”
“Me, too.”
“Oh . . . well, I guess I can drop you off. . . .” Fisher felt his head beginning to swim. “I mean—”
“Where are we?”
“Russia.”
“Yes, I know. How far are we from Moscow?”
“Oh, about a hundred kilometers.”
Dodson nodded to himself. “Closer than we thought.”
Fisher considered the big man sitting beside him.
Resident. How far are we from Moscow? You might just be a graduate student.
Clearly the man was nuts. Fisher said tentatively, “Someone after you?”
Resident. How far are we from Moscow? You might just be a graduate student.
Clearly the man was nuts. Fisher said tentatively, “Someone after you?”
“Depends if they know I’m gone yet.”
“Oh.” Fisher stared out the windshield. “Getting harder to see.”
“Peripheral vision is better at night. Try it.”
“Yeah?” Fisher moved his eyes slightly and found that indeed he could see better. “Learn something every day.”
“Yes. Escape and evasion,” Dodson said. “They teach you that course at Yale?”
“No.” The road began to wind, and Fisher found himself gripping the wheel, tugging it left and right to try to make it respond without the power steering.
Dodson picked up a handful of maps and brochures from the console between them. “Can I borrow some of these?”
“Sure. Help yourself. Take them all.”
Dodson opened the glove compartment and sorted though the maps by the dim light. “Where are we in relation to Moscow?”
“West. A little north. We’re near Borodino. That’s where I got a little lost.”
“Borodino. The battlefield.”
“Right. I have to try to find the Minsk–Moscow highway. This road isn’t even on the map.”
Dodson nodded. “No, it wouldn’t be.”
Occasionally branches brushed either side of the Pontiac, and Fisher jerked the wheel the opposite way. The car went off the road to the right, and he felt the two tires sink into the sandy shoulder. The car slowed and he tugged at the wheel until he got the tires back on the blacktop and continued down the gradual slope.
Fisher turned his head slightly toward Dodson. As he tried to sort out the dark images in his peripheral vision, he focused now and then on his passenger. He saw the man running his fingers over the dashboard, then touching the rich leather on the side panels—like he’d never sat in an American car before, Fisher thought. Like a Russian.
They sat in silence as the car continued down the ridge line. The pine trees thinned toward the base of the slope, and Fisher was able to see better.
The night had become very still, he noticed, and bright twinkling stars shone down between scattered clouds. He hadn’t been in the Russian countryside at night, and the deep, dark quiet surprised him.
Spooky.
Spooky.
Through an opening in the trees, he saw the rolling fields below. The moon broke through a cloud and revealed a dozen polished obelisks standing like shimmering sentries over the dead. “Borodino.”
Dodson nodded.
Fisher thought he saw something in his rearview mirror. Dodson noticed and looked back through the rear window.
Fisher ventured, “Someone following us?”
“I don’t see anything.” He added, “They’re searching on foot, because they think I’m on foot.”
“Right.”
“I wish you hadn’t left that tire mark in the sand, however.”
“Sorry.” Fisher thought a moment, then added, “This mother can outrun anything in the USSR.” He smiled in spite of himself.
Dodson smiled in return.
Fisher found the car slowing as the slope flattened. He said, “Who’s after you? What did you do?”
“Long story.”
Fisher nodded. “Fucked-up country.”
“Amen.” Dodson studied an Intourist highway map, then slipped it into his side pocket. “You have a city map of Moscow?”
“Under your seat.”
Dodson found the folded map and opened it.
Fisher said, “It’s all in Russian. You know Russian?”
“Hardly a word. Everything was in English. That was rule number one.”
Fisher began to ask something, then thought better of it.
Dodson studied the map. “I did read in American newspapers that there was a new American Embassy somewhere near the Moskva River, but the articles weren’t too specific. I don’t see it here.”
“It’s near the Kalinin Bridge. You want to go there?”
“Ultimately.”
“Okay . . . we have to cross that bridge on my way to the Rossiya.”
“That’s where you’re staying?”
“Right. I can drop you off at the embassy.”
“I wouldn’t get past the Soviet militia at the gates.”
“Why not?”
“No passport,” said Dodson. He looked at Fisher a moment, then said, “Let me see your passport.”
Fisher hesitated, then drew his passport from the inside pocket of his windbreaker.
Dodson took it, studied it and the visa stapled to it by the light of the glove compartment, then handed it back.
They were nearly out of the pine forest now. Ahead lay copses of bare birch, a few lonely poplars, and the fields of Borodino. A hundred meters beyond the base of the ridge, the Pontiac came to a gradual halt. Fisher looked at Dodson, waiting for instructions.
Dodson said, “If they catch us together, they’ll shoot you.”
Fisher felt his mouth go dry.
“Or worse, they’ll send you to where I just escaped from. So we’re going to part company here. I’m going cross-country to Moscow. You’re going to find the highway and drive there. You’re going to the embassy. I’m going to figure out what to do when I get to Moscow. I may try to contact you at the Rossiya. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“I may try to contact the embassy by phone. I need all the rubles and kopeks you’ve got on you.”
Fisher took out his wallet and removed the one-, five-, and ten-ruble notes. “About a hundred and fifty.”
Dodson took the notes.
Fisher found seventy-five kopeks in his pocket and handed them over.
“Can’t promise I’ll pay you back.”
Fisher shrugged. Fisher didn’t care if he never saw the money or Dodson again. Especially if it meant getting shot. He thought he should have listened to the Intourist lady and stayed in Smolensk.
Dodson glanced back in the rear of the car. “You going to open a farm stand?”
“Huh . . . ? Oh, no. Gifts. You can take what you need.”
“You have candy? Packaged food?”
“Candy in the plastic bag back there. Some peanuts. Snacks.”
Dodson leaned back and retrieved the bag with the name and address of a West Berlin
Konditorei
stamped on it. “Last outpost of junk food, right, kid?”
Konditorei
stamped on it. “Last outpost of junk food, right, kid?”
Fisher forced a smile. “Right.”
“Okay, listen to me, Greg Fisher. I am going to tell you something, and you are going to listen like you never listened to a prof at Yale. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“My name is Major Jack Dodson. I am an American Air Force officer.”
Fisher nodded. “Air Force.”
“I am—I was—a POW. I was shot down over North Vietnam in 1973.”
Fisher looked at Dodson. “Jesus . . . you’re an MIA!”
“Not anymore, kid. Listen. I have been held here in Mrs. Ivanova’s Charm School since 1974—”
“
Where?”
Where?”
“That’s what we call it. Don’t interrupt. I am going to give you some important details. You will get to the embassy before I reach Moscow. I may never reach Moscow. But you will. You will ask to speak to a defense attaché, preferably the Air Force attaché. Got that? Attaché.”
“Yes. Attaché.”
Dodson studied Fisher for a long moment, then said softly, “I don’t know what fate brought us together on this lonely road, Greg Fisher, but I think it was God’s will.”
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