Lucky Bastard (44 page)

“Different? How?”

“As if someone has been here,” she said.

“Let's check it out.”

They went from room to room in the darkened mansion, switching on lights as they went. Over the years, bit by bit, Cindy's father had lovingly restored the old place. He had been an aficionado of Victoriana. Every detail was authentic. Cindy's companion expressed the same enthusiasm for carved woodwork, molded plaster, bronze chandeliers, Tiffany windows. He knew the name for everything he saw, even the names of one or two of the obscure artists whose oils and watercolors of inert landscapes and portraits of bewildered nouveau riche husbands and wives her father had bought at estate sales.

Despite Cindy's apprehensions, the house was empty and seemingly undisturbed, except for one tiny thimbleful of plaster dust on the bed in the master bedroom, where Cindy now slept. “Carpenter ants,” he said, fingering the dust. “Have it checked out by an exterminator. They can be real trouble.”

She touched the light switch. He said, “No. Leave it on. Let's go outside and look.”

Lights burned in every window and turret. The whole house was aglow, like a great lantern on the hill above the tawdry village, and strips of golden lamplight fell on the authentic nineteenth-century perennials and flowering shrubs that Dr. Rogers had planted so that something would always be in bloom.

“What a wonderful place to grow up in, to live in,” said Cindy's new lover. They kissed. Strange bodies, strange excitement. Fragrance filled the darkness like an invisible frequency of the spectrum.

They went upstairs. That night, and then during a long, intense Saturday and Sunday, he took her several times through the Swallow manual and, because she was so beautiful and so awakened, somewhat beyond the last page. He made everything—acts of love she had never imagined—seem natural. She soon got over her initial shock at her seducer's total lack of inhibitions; like so many before her, like Danny, like Jack, she was transported into unimagined regions of pleasure. Her lover was conservative in only one respect: He would make love only in bed, always the same bed, and always with the lights on.

On Monday morning she drove him into Columbus.

“I'll call,” he said, with love in his eyes.

10
But Cindy did not hear from her lover, and when she called the apartment a woman answered. She said she had never heard of the person Cindy was asking for. Cindy, a practiced investigator, quickly discovered that the name, address, phone number, and personal particulars he had given her were fictitious. The Indiana computer tycoon he pretended to be existed in reality, but he was a little tattooed fat man who lived quite happily in Indianapolis with a twenty-year-old boy. Cindy's seducer had taken the unsuspecting fat man's name and curriculum vitae as his own.

Cindy's mysterious and accomplished lover was, of course, Morgan's Georgian. A few days after his disappearance Cindy received a UPS package from a Cleveland department store containing a Gucci purse. Inside the purse, sealed in an envelope, she found a videotape. The tape was labeled
Cindy's Ecstasy
—an unnecessary cruelty, in my opinion. Alone, she watched the tape. Her lover's face had been replaced by an electronic checkerboard, but Cindy's own features, by turns distorted with lust and illuminated by the indescribable happiness she still remembered with the greatest clarity, were recognizable in each and every shot, and her voice, though changed by the heat of her desire as she shrilly begged for more, was also unmistakable.

The last frame of the tape was a title: “Silence Is Golden.”

Cindy switched off the television set and called Danny, this time reaching him at home.

“I'm coming back,” she said, then hung up.

This was the last result that Morgan expected. But Cindy was as good as her word. That very week she moved back into the house with Danny. She never mentioned his affair with Morgan to him again, and never again slept with him. Like Morgan before her, she became a nun within her own marriage, aware that the man she loved was at the sexual service of another woman.

Morgan said, “She knows. She doesn't care. I don't understand.”

We watched Cindy. We had made her dangerous, therefore we had to be on guard. To all outward appearances, Cindy lived for work, often staying until after midnight at the law firm. We supposed she was losing herself in her work, and in a sense this was precisely the case. What Cindy was doing all alone at night was following the money: examining old records, making copies, building a file on the origins and transactions of the Columbus Bank of the Western Reserve. She was methodically investigating Morgan's client list and financial records.

Also, in Tannery Falls, with the help of a man who had served on the draft board and owed her father his life, she looked into the draft records and verified that Danny was, indeed, drafted to take Jack's place. Had he gone into service when originally scheduled, the following month, he would not have been on that jungle trail in Cambodia. Such records exist. One wonders what might happen if they were all made public by order of some supreme court of the wretched and every soldier who lost an arm or a leg or his sanity in Vietnam had the option of knocking on the door of the draft dodger for whom he made this sacrifice. It is a theme for Dostoyevsky.

Night after night, Cindy gathered her information. She deposited the evidence in the huge old safe that was hidden in a wall of the mansion's cellar, along with the videotape of her weekend with the Georgian.

Sometimes when a certain mood came over her she watched the tape, not for any reason of sexual stimulation—she had never liked pornography—but because it helped her to understand life and helped her to do her tedious work of reconstructing the past. It helped her to see, as an objective witness, a different woman from the one in the pictures.

While Cindy was looking back into darkness, we were looking ahead. Glowing horizons were what we saw.

Lady Luck

One

1
Meanwhile, Jack Adams was frantic for money. His campaign had spent the twenty million dollars deposited for his benefit in the Columbus Bank of the Western Reserve—and then some. By Herculean efforts Danny Miller had raised an additional ten million dollars. But by the first day of the presidential election year it was all gone, spent on nationalizing Jack's reputation, on setting up all the many committees and campaign offices and phone banks and staffs of radicals, intellectuals, Young Turks, disaffected labor leaders, old pols, and babes in the wood who were beginning to think that this man whom nobody trusted, this idealist who believed in nothing except his own glittering destiny, might very well end up as president of the United States.

Morgan said, “We need an infusion of cash. Now.”

I replied, “I know. But we can't help.”

“You can't
help
? Dmitri, what is that supposed to mean?”

I said, “Don't you know? History is over.”

Morgan made a disgusted face. “For God's sake!”

But it was true—at least for what people like Morgan and me had always called “history.” America had won the Cold War, what a surprise. As Jack said later, in a different context: The beauty of America is that you never know who is going to walk out of the crowd, carrying its fate in his hands.

In Russia's case it was an Afghan religious fanatic with a Stinger antiaircraft missile supplied by the CIA—actually, hundreds of fanatics with hundreds of missiles. In a matter of months, the Red Army's air cover was destroyed and its ground forces were driven out of Afghanistan. The economy of the USSR collapsed, and so did its spirit, such as it was. The Party apparat suddenly understood that it was defenseless against the capitalists unless it wanted to blow up the world. In short, the Soviet Union, and with it the great Soviet intelligence service, was ceasing to exist at the very moment that its fondest dream, a wholly owned and controlled agent in the Oval Office, seemed finally to be within reach.

All this I explained. Morgan said, “You can't be serious.”

“But I am,” I said. “The KGB is poor in the only meaningful sense of the word. It has no money.”

Morgan ignored me. How could she possibly believe such a thing? Besides, she knew that Peter had other sources. She had killed with poison to secure those sources. She said, “Stop being sardonic, Dmitri. Where is the money? Jack asks me that question once an hour.”

As a matter of form I replied, “How much do you need?”

“Five million dollars immediately. Much more later.”

“Impossible. The bank can't absorb it. It will set off alarms.”

“Alarms?” Morgan said. “Let me tell you about alarms. We're already moving money around inside the bank like there's no tomorrow. If we don't put this money back, if we don't cover it—”

“You are
embezzling
?”

“No. Robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

I was truly alarmed. “That is madness. Why are you doing it?”

“Because
we need the money
, Dmitri. If Jack loses in New Hampshire, we lose everything. We fail. He'll disappear in a week. It will be all over. I will have wasted my life. You do understand that, Dmitri?”

With a gloved hand, through layers of cloth, I patted her on the back. It was after midnight. We were walking between snowbanks down an empty, winding street in Boston. Jack was in some town hall in rural New Hampshire, debating his five—or was it six?—opponents for the nomination, every one of whom was better qualified for the presidency than he. A howling North Atlantic wind blew in our faces. In her thin designer clothes, Morgan trembled, sucked in her breath. It could not possibly have been colder or lonelier, even in Moscow.

I said, “Are we lost? I see no one, recognize nothing.”

“You're not the only one,” Morgan said. “But don't worry. We turn left at the end and come out at the Common.”

She said, “Dmitri, listen to me. If what you say is true, if it really is all over in Russia, then you and Jack and I are all that remains. Am I wrong?”

“Grandiose,” I said, “but correct.”

“Then where's Peter? What is he doing? Why isn't he keeping his promises?”

“We are not his only concern.”

“Oh really?” Morgan said. “Is there some bigger, more powerful country than the USA he wants to repossess? What's happening here? We must have the money. Immediately.”

I thought it very unlikely that they would get it. But I did not want to say so. We stepped into a sort of arcade. I gave her what I had with me in a shoulder bag, my last hundred thousand dollars in safe cash, and advised her to be patient.

She gave me a look of desperation, of a woman betrayed. For a long time, ever since the shooting incident with Jack, our relations had been cool. Now, however, on a sudden mutual impulse we kissed—loud Russian kisses on both cheeks. My spittle glistened, freezing on her cheek, a Siberian tear.

2
When I kissed Morgan goodbye in Boston—with love, I admit it—I expected to see her again in a matter of days. My expectations changed when I arrived home in New York and found a child of the Nomenklatura waiting for me in a car parked outside my apartment building. He told me I had been ordered to Moscow. I was leaving immediately; I was already late. He would drive me to the airport, never mind about luggage. I had not been home in twenty years; I had not seen my Russian passport in longer than that. The young man handed it to me. There I was as I had been, youthful, serious, doing my professional best to look as if the false name below my photograph was the one I had been born with.

At the Moscow airport, to my great anxiety, I was met at the plane by Peter's man Igor. This was an older and wiser Igor than the boy who had shown Jack the sights of Moscow, but just as muscular and just as falsely amiable. In former times he always talked about Swallows—he was Peter's casting director—but now he drove me in silence to a birch forest, where another car awaited. What did this mean? Probably that he no longer worked for Peter but had been sent to collect me because I could be counted on to assume that he did. I expected to change vehicles, to be greeted with comradely smiles in the backseat, then pounded with truncheons, then driven to another place, and there, finally, to confess at length. And then, with luck, to be believed when I said I had confessed everything, and to die. The Red Passion.