To Kill the Duke (19 page)

“You mean ‘peeping Ivan’, Alex said later with a hearty laugh.

Ivan talked to himself about how he should handle what he assumed was coming next — the entrance of the woman and then Stalin — when he spied something hanging from one of the pillars. There were four different colored pieces of something that he couldn’t quite make out. The items were colored red, black, brown and white. He tried to think what those items might be, when all of a sudden it hit him like the entire Kremlin falling down on him.
The scalps
he thought.

“How disgusting,” he said to quietly to himself.

“How intimidating.” Alex later said to him when they talked about the entire night’s events a few days later.

“I was so glad I didn’t have to see Stalin make Trotsky Number Seven wear them,” Ivan said.

“Wear them? Trotsky Number Seven probably did the scalping!” Alex remarked.

Ivan had shown enough movies to know how a scalping took place. He started to feel queasy. He hated this feeling and changed his thought process. He needed to focus on what might happen when Stalin and his date entered the bedroom.

Would they just watch the movie and then pass out?
Thinking about passing out,
will I get claustrophobia and pass out? What happens if Stalin passes out from all that alcohol he consumed? What happens when they start having sex? What happens if I’m peeking through the keyhole while they are going at it, and I am discovered? Why am I in this situation? And the scalps? What if Stalin scalps her?
He wondered as he sighed very deeply and sat in the little chair. He was just about to go into maximum overdrive with more thoughts about his predicament, when he heard the main door to Stalin’s bedroom open, and a woman waltzed in accompanied by two men that Ivan couldn’t make out. He guessed it was the captain and the man with two wooden spoons, because they
had
been anywhere and everywhere throughout the course of the evening.

Ivan squinted his eyes tight, and noticed that the two men were
not
his original guesses, and that they were carrying a few things.

The girl, who was
not
dressed like an Indian went to the dinner tray table and stuck her right index finger into one of the bowls. The two men looked at what she was doing and laughed as they set up a movie screen. They positioned the screen and looked at the girl who was now sucking
on her right index finger and slowly repeating the process with her other fingers. The men continued to chuckle and left the room.

Ivan blinked to moisten his eyes; they were becoming dry with all the staring and squinting he had been doing. He also checked to make sure that the movie and the projector that were in his care were ready to go when he was given the order to proceed. He fiddled with the lens and the opening that had been cut in the door for the projector. Everything fit perfectly and he waited.

He positioned his eye in the keyhole and looked for the girl. He couldn’t spot her. Then one of the mirrored closet glass doors opened up and Ivan saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen step out.

Ivan guessed that she changed her clothes in the closet.

She had on a full-length black dress that tied around her neck. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry. Her hair was blonde, and it appeared to Ivan that not one strand was out of place. She went over to the dinner tray and repeated the same process of sticking the same fingers into the bowl and bringing them to her mouth to suck on. Ivan assumed that the man with two wooden spoons had prepared a ‘special’ dish for her. She glided over to the mirror and modeled in front of it. She wasn’t happy about something, and hiked up the dress revealing to Ivan that she didn’t have on any underwear. Furthermore, her pubic hairs had been shaved to resemble a hammer and sickle!

That must have taken a long time,
Ivan thought. “I hope she doesn’t cover her vagina up with one of those scalps,” he said quietly. Then he slapped himself for thinking such a thing. It was as hard as a slap that he used to give himself back in class when he was falling asleep. There would be no falling asleep tonight and he knew that he hit himself to punish himself, not to keep awake. After all, Russians loved to punish themselves.

Since he had only been with one woman before, and that being an old drunk prostitute that his buddies had set him up with, he couldn’t believe the sight of this woman’s perfect calves and thighs. He hadn’t even touched a woman’s vagina before, because he had climaxed before the old prostitute was naked. Thus, the view of the woman in front of him caused him to fantasize about someday having a woman whose body was as graceful as the one in front of him, in bed with him, not a few feet away, being viewed via a keyhole.

She nodded in approval and dropped her dress and then went to a table from which she retrieved something that Ivan couldn’t make out.

She glided back to the mirror and put on lipstick. Up to that point, Ivan hadn’t noticed she didn’t have any lipstick on.

Now that is one lucky woman
Ivan thought. He thought this, because lipstick to women in Russia was as important as vodka was to men.

She was antsy and couldn’t do much more than what she had already done, so she started to pace the room. As she got nearer to the keyhole, Ivan could see that not only was she exotic looking, but that the woman in front of him had to have been Marlene Dietrich’s stand-in at one point in her career.

“She has to be!” he said out loud, but not so loud that he would be heard by her.

What Ivan didn’t know… couldn’t have known, is that Joseph Stalin had had the woman surgically altered to look like Marlene Dietrich. Stalin had ordered his subordinates to find the best and the brightest of all the plastic surgeons that could be found in all the countries that were Communist. Three were found. There were actually more, but the secret police learned that these surgeons had fled to America in search of riches — just ahead of the secret police’s tightening dragnet.

Stalin picked out three women from 5” x 7” glossy photographs that had the same color hair and eyes as Dietrich. He ordered the plastic surgeons to make the women look like Marlene. Two failed and were executed on the spot. The women, not badly mutilated but mutilated nevertheless, were executed as well.

“Dead people don’t talk,” Stalin had been heard to say when asked why he had the girls shot. The third surgeon and the third girl came out perfectly. That woman was now in Stalin’s bedroom.

“The problem with plastic surgery,” Alex later told Ivan “is that Uncle Joe got the woman to look like Marlene Dietrich, but she couldn’t
act
like Dietrich.”

“You mean he would actually make her sing, dance and recite lines?” Ivan asked.

“Well, the fake Dietrich performed, but as you now know, it had nothing to do with talent,” Alex said with a chuckle.

“Now I get it, comrade,” Ivan said to his friend.

“No you don’t, comrade,” Alex cautioned. “Stalin got what he wanted looks-and sex-wise, but he still wanted a performance.”

“But you already said she had no talent,” Ivan said.

“She probably did,” Alex said. “But Stalin wanted the fake Dietrich to not only look like Marlene, but act like her character in the movie you had shown.”

“Then he wanted Lola Lola,” Ivan guessed.

Alex smiled. “See I was right… you’re a deep thinker.”

“That isn’t fair,” Ivan protested.

“Fair is for complexions. Since when did Joe Stalin care about ‘fair?’” Alex asked.

Ivan knew that answer already.

Ivan sat back in the chair and fantasized about the nakedness of the woman he had just seen, and waited for the signal to start the movie; he wondered why it wasn’t the captain and the man with two wooden spoons who had brought the portable movie screen in.

Who were those two other guys?
He pondered as his thoughts went rapidly from what he guessed was lust to the secrecy of the government he worked for.

Ivan knew that he was not the smartest man in Russia. He also knew he wasn’t the dumbest. He fell somewhere in the vast middle of all the Russian people who lived under both Joseph Stalin and Communism. He practiced what had been taught to him by his parents, close friends and even closer government workers — benign naiveté. “Why Alex thinks I’m a deep thinker, I’ll never know. Toughski shitski,” Ivan whispered to himself.

So far it had worked. But as he grew older, did well in his studies and governmental work — he did experience and see a lot more things that made him more aware of how his society did function.

It had nothing to do with any sort of class distinction. It had everything to do with knowledge distinction. In the USSR, knowing when to play dumb was everything.

Thus, Ivan was able to answer his own question about the captain and the man with two wooden spoons. The two men who escorted the Marlene Dietrich look-alike into the bedroom and set up the movie screen were part of the shadow government that
really
ran Russia, something Ivan had
heard whispered about while delivering mail from one cubicle to the next before he was tapped to run the movie projector.

“What government
doesn’t
have a shadow government?” Alex asked him later when Ivan stopped by the apartment and filled him in on the event-laden night. After hearing Ivan’s tale, Alex couldn’t wait to get started on his vacation.

“Comrade, I am a simple man,” Ivan began. “But if the people in the shadow government are running the government, why stay in the shadows?”

“I thought you said you were a simple man, comrade Viznapu,” Alex replied.

Ivan nodded.

“With that question, you become dangerous,” Alex said.

“Dangerous?” Ivan said with a stricken look on his face.

“Shadow governments stay in the shadow, because they do not want anyone knowing who they are and what they do. That way, they have a free hand at doing whatever they want to do,” lectured Alex.

“So, that is why they can pick me to do what they have asked me to do,” Ivan said.

“Exactly. Nothing ever comes back to them if you fail, because who would people look for? Those in the ‘shadows’ have no accountability,” said Alex.

“And if I succeed, comrade?” Ivan asked.

“They are happy. Mission accomplished!” Alex yelled out as he jumped up to get them both some vodka-laced tea.

“Does anyone ever watch over the people in the ‘shadows?’” Ivan asked Alex.

“Of course, comrade,” answered Alex. “Who they are, I couldn’t tell you.”

“I think I found out the hard way,” Ivan stated.

“You understand, comrade. I must be a good teacher, but then again, I have always thought you to be a deep thinker. More vodka!” Alex cried out as he poured away.

Stalin entered the room and motioned for the Marlene Dietrich look-a-like to sit down on the end of the bed. He walked over to the dinner trays while she sat Indian style at the foot of the bed.

“A real man’s dessert,” he said as he stuck all the fingers of his right hand into the bowl, and then loudly licked and sucked them.

“Take off your clothes and lie on your back,” he bellowed at the girl. “And you in the projection hole — start the fucking movie!”

What a difference a few hours makes with this guy,
Ivan thought.

The film had been going on for about five minutes, when Ivan heard the woman scream out something about ‘it was too bloody.’ He hesitated about looking out the keyhole. The first reel still had plenty of film to go, so he wasn’t in any trouble there. He remembered that he should be careful about what he looked at tonight.

But if he looked and didn’t tell anyone… he was being careful,
he thought; he put his closed right eye to the keyhole as the woman again started screaming about it ‘being too bloody.’

He opened his eye and it wasn’t sex she was screaming about. Stalin was slowly pouring the contents of the bowls from the dinner tray over the back of her neck, shoulders, ass, legs and feet. Her naked outline was giving Ivan a boner. He stopped looking at them, watched the film for a few seconds and stared at his crotch. His boner was still there and he was embarrassed. He slapped himself in the face as hard as he could, without being too loud, to make it go away. (He was very good at this.) His boner heard the slaps that stung his face and went down. He resumed his peeping.