Ralph Peters (36 page)

Ryder sat at the bar. Alone. Drinking bottled beer that tasted as though it had gone stale in a can. He had not intended to stay so long. There was plenty of work waiting for him up in his room. Yet, it had been a very difficult day, troubling in ways that refused to be neatly labeled and put away.
Machines don't feel pain.
And a world of new possibilities. He had explained it all as clearly as he could to his superiors, and they, too, had grown excited. Opportunities like this, the detachment commander had said, only come once. Yet, Ryder worried that they did not really understand. He longed for them to come up with a plan instantly, to exploit this new dimension of the battlefield without hesitation.

He laughed to himself, playing with his half empty glass.
So that this machine will not have suffered in vain.
He had carefully played that aspect of the business down, stressing instead the enemy's near-miraculous vulnerabilities. And now it was up to
them
to make it all go, to forge the plan that sent the men to realize the possibilities. He knew he could not do that himself. But neither could he let go of
the project. He sensed that his role had not yet been played
.

He sipped the warming beer. Never much of a drinker. Absurd, he told himself. The entire thing. Absurd. But the word he felt and could not bring to bear was
"
haunting.
"

The entire world was haunted now. The hotel bar. Constructed in some bygone fit of hope, it was intended to be elegant but managed to achieve only a worn biliousness. Velvet seats with their contact surfaces rubbed white by countless rumps; brass plating crazed and chipped. Only the mirror had a genuinely antique feel, thanks to the years of cigarette smoke that had given it a deep gray tint. It was in that mirror, just above the palisade of bottles, that he first met the woman's stare, and now it was the memory of that stare, held a moment too long, that kept him fixed to the barstool.

He had been ready to leave, despite the passing admonishments of his fellow officers to join the party Ready to accept the loneliness that was not really all that bad when you made yourself think about it logically. Ready to go back to the small overheated room with its grumping noises of too much liquid in an old man's throat. There was always work, and work could justify any sacrifice.

Then her eyes caught him. Almost too strong for so delicate a face, he knew they were brown even though he could not begin to see their color through the smoky twilight of the bar. She had been watching him in the mirror, and the first thought that struck him was how bluntly out of place she was. Squeezed into a booth between two loud officers in ill-fitting sport jackets. It was finally the big sweep of a forearm that broke the reflected stare between them.

She seemed to be with a paunchy lieutenant colonel, whom Ryder knew as professionally incapable, politically adept, and delighted to be in a foreign country with a pocket full of money and without his wife. Ryder knew everyone at the table: officers for whom he had little respect. He even knew the other Russian woman by sight, even though he rarely strayed into the bar. Tallish, with
a helmet of metallic-looking black hair. Charter member of the Bar-girl's International.

He knew everyone—except this fine-featured girl with honey colors strained down through the tangles of her hair. She sat silently, her face almost somber, while the increasingly drunken party spun its web around her. Neither the laughter nor the strangers with whom she sat seemed to touch her. She looked like a princess who had too little to eat, and he remembered a fellow warrant officer's snicker that
"
Most of them would do anything you could dream up for a good meal.
"
Ryder felt a proprietary sense of loss that such a woman should be wasted on her present company.

Her face dropped back into the shadows, and Ryder could see only that she was smiling now, speaking words he could not hear.

He looked down at his beer. But he could see even more of her now, in his memory. Below the snapshot of face and hair a long white neck led down to bared collarbones and lace trim on a dress cut in a style that had been popular in the States some years before. A red dress, as if she were making a broad joke out of it all. He shook his head, telling himself that this one was genuinely beautiful, even though he knew it was not true. Somehow, her features fell just short of legitimate beauty. But, alone of the women in the crowded bar, this one had the power to jar him, to shake the hell out of his tenuous grip on the night.

There was nothing to be done about it, of course. The officers surrounding her distinctly outranked him. But, even had she been sitting alone, he would not have had the nerve to approach her. He had a fistful of excuses. Despite the detachment's general disregard for the rules, they were not supposed to be fraternizing with the locals. Besides, any of the girls could be KGB. And venereal disease was rumored to be epidemic in the city. Anyway, he had nothing to offer her. He could be gone at any moment. And he had far too much work to do. He had to hold himself in readiness.

He had never been much good at coming on to women. His friends could never understand him. Christ, an old
friend had said to him, if I had your looks, my dick would be worn down to a nub. The women with whom he had swapped bits of life had almost invariably initiated things, like Jennifer waiting for him in the hallway outside of the computer science classroom. In one of her better moods, on one of their better days, she had told him, you just don't realize what a doll you are. Then she had divorced him.

Now there was no one at his side, and nothing in front of him but the dregs of a beer and another Moscow night of listening to the asthmatic plumbing and the escapades of his neighbors. So he sat a little longer, indulging himself in a fantasy about this woman with whom he knew he would never exchange a single word, imagining a life for her, the steps that had forced her to squander herself on the blustering drunks at her table.

He pictured her standing in line to buy rags of meat. The lines in the streets had grown so long that they seemed almost to meet themselves, to join until there was no beginning and no end, waiting for the opening of some rumored shop that did not even exist. Driving together through the streets, his Soviet counterpart had been unconcerned.

"
The people of Russia,
"
Savitsky said,
"
have always waited.
"

The wrong woman, Ryder thought, and the wrong country too.

He was just about to force himself away from the bar and his reverie, when the lieutenant colonel, who had the woman boxed in, noisily excused himself and weaved off toward the men’s room. Ryder instinctively glanced at the spot in the mirror where his eyes had caught her stare, and he saw that she, too, was excusing herself now. He suddenly felt sick to his stomach, thinking that she was about to follow the lieutenant colonel, realizing that he was headed not to the men’s room but up the hotel’s back stairs.

The woman surprised him. She did not follow the man to whom Ryder’s imagination had condemned her. Instead, she boldly met his eyes in the mirror once again and marched straight toward the bar.
He lost the courage of his fantasies now. He broke the stare and huddled closer to his empty glass.

He sensed her coming up beside him. He stared nervously at the bartender's paunch as the man lolled it over a sink. Sergey, the hard-currency-holder's friend.

A hand, unmistakably feminine, touched lightly at his shoulder.

"
This seat is occupied?
"
the woman asked. He did not have to look back into the mirror, or to turn. He knew it was her. He knew her voice with a certainty built on concrete and steel, even though he had heard only a faint, half-imagined laugh across a crowded room.

"
No,
"
he stammered, turning at last.
"
Please. Please, sit down.
"

KGB. Of course. She had to be. Otherwise, there was no reasonable explanation for it.

"
How do you do?
"
she asked, and it was only then that he realized that she was speaking to him in English. Her voice was careful, the intonation studiedly flat, as though she were not quite sure of the words. But, as he looked at her closely for the first time he could not imagine why she should ever be afraid of anything.

Often, when you came close to Russian women, their skin proved unexpectedly bad, or the sudden foulness of their teeth shocked you. But this woman had a clear, perfect complexion. Pale, though. Almost as though she had been a little ill. Her teeth were small and even, behind lips that were, perhaps, just slightly too heavy. The close smell of her was just rich enough to tease him.

"
I'm fine,
"
he said automatically.
"
How are you?
"

The woman sat down beside him, her body flowing in smooth elastic lines beneath her dress. Too thin a fabric for the Moscow autumn, washed almost to nothing. She, too, appeared too frail for the world in which she lived. But this was a country where even the beauties did not eat terribly well.

"
I am very well tonight, thank you,
"
the woman said.
"
Do you have a cigarette?
"

"
I don't smoke,
"
Ryder said, instantly regretting that he did not.

The woman's eyes took on an uncertain look.

"
Wait,
"
Ryder said.
"
Hang on a minute.
"
He reluctantly turned his face away from her, as if afraid she might disappear at this momentary inattention.
"
Sergey?
"
he called down the bar.

The bartender, who professed that he really loved Americans, that he loved Americans best of any of his distinguished customers, and why weren't there more Americans? moved down behind his barricade of polished wood.

"
Please, mister?
"

"
A pack of cigarettes,
"
Ryder told him, adding
"
Marlboros,
"
at the sudden recollection that he had seen that one Western brand passing above the counter.

"
This is not necessary from you,
"
the woman said, her words devoid of conviction.

"
No trouble,
"
Ryder said, drawing dollars from his wallet.
"
By the way, my name's Jeff.
"

The woman looked at him. Dark brown eyes only enriched by the dark circles beneath them. Eyes, Ryder thought lightheartedly, that men would die for.

"
I am Valentina,
"
the woman pronounced slowly.
"
But I am called Valya. It is my shortened name, you see.
"

"
Valya,
"
Ryder repeated.
"
That's a very nice name.
"
He was conscious of the inanity of his words. But he could not think of anything clever, and he feared a silence that might drive her away.

The bartender delivered the cigarettes.

"
Marlboros all right?
"
Ryder asked the woman.

"
Oh, yes. Very good.
"
The woman seemed slightly nervous, although Ryder could not imagine how anyone so attractive, so graced by God, could be nervous in such a situation. He could not even believe that she was here. How could the men of this country have allowed her to slip through their grasp?

He thought again that she must be KGB. But he did not want to believe it.

She looked a bit hardened up close. But, in a way he could not explain, this slight defect only made her more attractive. He guessed that she was in her late twenties, approximately his age.

Striking, he thought. Not beautiful. Striking.

He fumbled to open the pack of cigarettes for her, unfamiliar with the task. Finally, relieved, he extended the open pack toward her, then he lit the cigarette for her, using the action as an excuse to close slightly on her, to get the near sense of her, to smell the mixture of womanly body and discount-shop perfume.

"
Thank you,
"
she said.
"
You are very kind, Jeff.
"
She, too, pronounced it
"
Cheff.
"
A word she had not practiced.
"
You speak English very well.
"

"
I am a teacher. Of the children. I think that children are very wonderful. I am their teacher for the English language, which I love. It is very interesting.
"

Ryder struggled to find something to say, desperately afraid that she would abandon him at each next moment. He drained the very last of his beer.