Russian Spring (19 page)

The owl hooted again, but this time it did not seem to be mourning the recession of their short golden present together into the night of things past.
This
train seemed to be pulling into the station, and its destination was the bright future, and there was no real reason that Sonya could see why the two of them could not climb aboard.

How weird and wonderful it was to be crawling along in a cab through the streets of Paris in the rush-hour traffic in the golden late-afternoon sunlight toward the Hotel Ritz on the Place Vendôme with his Russian lover at his side and the uncanny feeling that he was coming home.

Which, in a satisfyingly science-fictional time-warped sense, Jerry Reed realized he was, for by now it was all quite decided, and he was ready to sign the
ESA
contract in blood if need be.

It was amazing to realize that they had only been traveling for about a week, that all they had seen and done had transpired within the geographic bounds of an area that could just about have been fitted between the California coast and the Mississippi River. Country after country, each of them with an incomprehensible language, strange sights, sounds, and smells, utterly different things to eat, rooted in its own unique ancient stories, just like all those alien worlds in Dad’s old science-fiction magazines.

You could spend the rest of your life visiting these worlds and still not exhaust their newness and strangeness. Oh yes, now he
truly
understood how Sonya’s girlhood passion for travel in Western Europe was on the deepest level
exactly
like his boyhood passion to walk the lands of far-off planets circling alien suns!

And if that boyhood dream was fated to remain forever a fantasy,
if the man he had become knew that he would never live to see the dawn of that great star-faring age, that man had been presented with the opportunity to become in some small way one of the people whose life’s work would one day surely have helped to bring that age about.

And in the bargain to have the next best thing—the alien worlds of Europe to explore with a woman who truly understood his heart.

Which, this trip together had convinced him, Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin surely did. Indeed there were times when it seemed she knew him better than he knew himself. For after their whirlwind tour from London through Munich, she had wisely slowed things down, taking him to a quiet cabin in the Black Forest for the night, and then they had spent half the next day just walking in the green woods and talking before taking a leisurely train ride to Vienna for a romantic candlelit dinner, after which they went to their hotel, made love, talked far into the night, and then caught a luncheon flight back to Paris.

“Yes, yes, Jerry, I know, I know, we have not been to Budapest or Amsterdam or Brussels or Geneva, or Lake Como or the Alps,” she kept telling him during these last two days whenever he started complaining that they were wasting time. “But they are not going anywhere, and if you try to see too much too fast, you will miss everything, like the mountains the train is passing through now—look out the window, is this not beautiful?”

And of course she was right. Europe was not going anywhere, Sonya was going no farther than Brussels, and he didn’t have to leave either. By the time their plane from Vienna touched down at Charles de Gaulle, they had figured it all out and planned their convergent futures.

Jerry would take the job with
ESA
, of course, and he would have to do the preliminary apartment-hunting by himself, since she had to be back in Brussels next Monday, but she would fly back to Paris next weekend to have a look at the choices he was presented with and help him decide, since she would be spending plenty of time in his apartment, and the weekend after that she could come back again and take him furniture-shopping on the Rue du Faubourg-St.-Antoine, where, she assured him, most anything could be found at decent prices.

After that, why, they were young, they had their weekends and holidays, and of course, Jerry must make sure that his vacation time coincided with hers, and if it was a great nuisance that they had to live in different cities for work reasons, why there was nothing really to be done about it, now was there? It wasn’t as if they were planning to get married or something—after all, they had
years
ahead of them to travel around and have a good time, and they had known each other hardly more than a week!

Jerry smiled and gave Sonya a big hug when the taxi finally pulled
up in front of the Ritz. “Welcome home,” he said, as the flurry of doormen and bellhops descended upon them. “I almost feel like carrying you over the threshold.”

“If you try it, you’re likely to provoke a strike by the doorman’s union,” Sonya told him dryly. “Besides, we’d better not get too used to this place. Soon enough, I’ll be back in my studio in Brussels, and you’ll have your own apartment in Paris, and neither of us will be able to order champagne and caviar from room service. But in the meantime . . . ”

“In the meantime,” said Jerry, “how about some Sevruga and Dom Perignon when we get to the room for soon-to-be-old-times’ sake?”

Sonya laughed. “You’re learning, Jerry, you’re learning!”

When they got to the room, Sonya was delighted to see that champagne and caviar, even if only Moët & Chandon and Beluga, were already waiting with a card that said “Compliments of your friends at
ESA
.”

But waiting also was a phone message in an envelope that had been slipped under the door. And when Jerry picked it up and read it, the laughter suddenly stopped.

“What’s the matter?” Sonya asked. “What is it?”

Jerry tried to give her a diffident shrug. “Nothing much,” he said, but his expression told her better. “Just a phone message asking me to call the American Embassy.”

Actually what the message said was:

Mr. Jerry Reed:
The American Embassy called. You are asked to return the call
as soon as you arrive. Please ask for Doris Steiner.

It seemed innocent enough, but there was something about the tone of it that Jerry found quite disturbing. Perhaps it was the part about “call as soon as you arrive.” That gave him a sinking feeling in his stomach, the kind you got when a messenger showed up with an unexpected telegram.

“What’s wrong?” Sonya said, coming to his side.

“Nothing, I hope,” he said. “At least I hope not. . . . My father . . . my mother, Jesus . . . I hope nothing’s . . . ”

Sonya took his hand and squeezed it. “Whatever it is, it’s best to get it over and not torture yourself. . . . ”

Jerry nodded. He thumbed on the videotel and got the hotel operator.
A minute later he had an operator at the American Embassy, voice only, behind the Great Seal of the United States.

“Doris Steiner, please?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Jerry Reed returning her call.”

“Hold the line.”

He was then treated to what seemed like half an hour of recycling Muzak but which was probably no more than three or four tense, sweaty minutes, before the Great Seal was replaced by the bored-looking face of a middle-aged woman with short iron-gray hair.

“Doris Steiner,” she said in a diffident Midwestern voice.

“Jerry Reed.”

Doris Steiner stared at him blankly. “So . . . ?” she finally said.

“So I’m returning your call,” Jerry said nervously.

“You are? Lemme punch up my log. . . . ”

About ninety seconds of agonizing silence.

“Oh yeah, here it is, you got an appointment with Lester Coldwater at eleven tomorrow morning.”

“I do?”

“That’s what it says here.”

“Who the hell is Lester Coldwater?”

“Assistant commercial attaché. . . . ”

“I don’t know any Lester Coldwater, I never made any appointment with anyone at the Embassy, and—”

“Didn’t say you did,” Doris Steiner said in her obnoxious flat voice. “It’s Coldwater that wants you in his office at eleven sharp, it says here.”

“And if I don’t feel like seeing him?” Jerry snapped.

“Hey, don’t give
me
a hard time, okay?” Doris Steiner shot back at him, scowling. “I just work here, okay?”

“Don’t
you
give
me
a hard time, Ms. Steiner,” Jerry told her, about fed up with all this. “I’m an American taxpayer, and my taxes are paying part of your salary, and I’m asking you a reasonable question, and I think I’m entitled to a straightforward answer. What happens if I don’t show up for this appointment?”

Doris Steiner’s face grew ice-cold, and her voice became clipped and hard. “This is France, Mr. Reed, so we can’t send a couple of Marine guards over to arrest you. But the flag in your file clearly states—”

“What flag? What the hell do you mean
my file?
”

“—that failure to appear at the Embassy within half an hour of the requested time of the appointment will result in the immediate suspension of your passport.”

“What the hell is going on?” Jerry shouted into the videotel receiver.

“How should I know?” Doris Steiner told him. “It’s not my job, Mr. Reed, I’m just a C-3 messenger girl, and you better keep your voice down. . . . ”

“Keep my voice down! You listen to me, you—”

“Good-bye, Mr. Reed,” Doris Steiner said with a truly poisonous smile. “Have a nice day.” And she hung up.

NATIONAL SECURITY ACT
UPHELD BY SUPREME COURT

By a vote of 6 to 3, the United States Supreme Court has upheld four controversial sections of the amended National Security Act, ruling, in effect, that the waiver of Constitutional rights implied in the acceptance of employment requiring a security clearance, being a matter of civil law between the two contracting parties, is therefore voluntary and does not constitute an act of the federal government prohibited by the Constitution.

In a dissenting opinion, Associate Justice Carl Waverly declared that “this is a dark day indeed for liberty and this distinguished court. By allowing such sophistic logic to prevail in the name of national security, the Court has violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the Bill of Rights, and opened the door to future and even more egregious abuses.”

—
New York Times

FROGS CLOSE EUROTUBE

A wildcat strike by maintenance workers on the French side closed the Channel Tunnel for six hours today, causing massive rail traffic jams clear back to Paris and London.

“Bomb? Who said anything about a bomb?” François Deladier, unofficial spokesman for the workers, said archly. “All we are saying is that we cannot guarantee the safety of trains traveling through the Tunnel for six hours today. With a 5
ECU
an hour wage increase, we might be motivated to make an effort to insure that such a situation is not repeated.”

Irate travelers nearly came to blows with French workers on several occasions. “If me mates was with me,” declared a supporter of Manchester United attempting to return home after a Continental weekend who asked not to be identified, “we’d bloody well do to these lazy frogs what our lads did to the micks last Thursday!”

—
News of the World

VII

Sonya simply could not fathom Jerry’s blithe attitude. He had been quite upset after yesterday’s phone call with the American Embassy, but even then he had been angry rather than afraid, and now he was actually making jokes about it on his way out the door!

“They probably think you’re a spy,” he said, giving her a chaste little kiss. “They probably think that all Russians are spies.”

“That’s not so funny, Jerry!”

“Oh come on, Sonya!”

“I don’t like it, Jerry, perhaps you should not enter the American Embassy, I have heard stories—”

“Right, on Russian TV spy shows, I’ll bet,” Jerry said. “Don’t be silly, Sonya, these guys aren’t the
KGB
, they’re
Americans
.” He laughed. “What are they gonna do, kidnap me and ship me off to Siberia for falling in love with a Russian? Don’t worry, I’ll be back in time for a late lunch.”

He laughed again, gave her another little kiss, and then he was gone.

Sonya went back to the breakfast table and poured herself another cup of coffee. Don’t worry?

Jerry seemed so naive about these things. These satellite sleds he had worked on seemed like a piece of technology that the Soviet Union would probably find quite valuable, and what was valuable to the Soviet Union would also be valuable to the Americans. Were Jerry a
Soviet
citizen possessed of such knowledge, he would never have been permitted to leave the country in the first place.

The thought that the
CIA
might drag Jerry back to America was terrifying, and the hollow emptiness she found herself feeling at the thought that she might never see him again convinced her as nothing else quite had that she had indeed fallen in love. And the knowledge that she had to be back at work in Brussels in forty-eight hours with all this going on was the final turn of the screw.

On the last count, as it turned out, she needn’t have worried. Jerry had been gone for five minutes when there was a rather tentative knock on the hotel-room door.

When she opened it, her mouth fell open, and her heart skipped a beat, and her flesh began to crawl.

For there in the doorway stood her
boss
, Grigori Pankov, Pankov the Human Octopus, stooped over at the shoulders, wringing his hands nervously, beads of unwholesome sweat on his balding head, as if he had been waiting in the lobby all along for Jerry to leave, which, from the look of him, he probably had.

Jerry Reed didn’t get in to see Lester Coldwater until 11:40, and not because he didn’t reach the American Embassy in time. First he had to wait on line to be frisked by a Marine guard and gone over with a metal detector. Then the reception clerk let him cool his heels for about five minutes while he yammered on the telephone. When Jerry was finally directed to an office on the third floor, a secretary who did not even offer coffee kept him sitting in the outer office for another twenty minutes with nothing to read but back issues of
The Wall Street Journal
and
Barron’s
before Coldwater deigned to see him.