Russian Spring (62 page)

Trembling with fear and no little rage, Sonya took her wallet out of her purse and extracted the familiar plastic-laminated Party card. Instead of handing it to Ligatski, she slapped it down on the desktop midway between them. Ligatski eyed her narrowly for a moment, then picked it up, glanced at it, then back at her. He tapped it edgewise
on the desk three times, then held it there, pressed upright between his fingertips and the desktop.

“This lists your nationality as Russian,” he said.

“Of course,” Sonya said coldly. “As Russian as you are.”

“Oh really?
I
am not the sort of Europeanized cosmopolitan who would choose to endure twenty years and more living in self-imposed exile from the land of my birth!”

“As a loyal Soviet citizen and Party member, I gladly serve my country wherever my country requires me to serve,” Sonya told him evenly.

“And I suppose marrying an American was an expression of Russian patriotism as well?”

“That is not Party business, and you know it!” Sonya snapped back angrily.

“The
Party
decides what is Party business and what is not, Comrade Reed,” Ligatski replied frostily.

Control yourself, Sonya, control yourself, she reminded herself. The fact of the matter was that Ligatski was all too correct. “Very well, Comrade Ligatski,” she said evenly. “If the
Party
deems it proper to drag my marriage into these proceedings, I must point out that the Party was far from displeased with my action at the time. Indeed, it was discreetly suggested that I would be doing my country a service by marrying Jerry Reed. Surely that is in my kharakteristika.”

“What is also in your kharakteristika is that you used the Party’s need to secure yourself a transfer from Brussels to Paris,” Ligatski said.

“From each according to her contribution, to each according to her need,” Sonya replied dryly.

Ligatski scowled. “Very clever,” he said. “Perhaps you can also misquote Lenin to explain how your son’s defection to the United States may be construed as service to the Party as well?”

“Robert didn’t
defect
to the United States. He was entitled to claim American citizenship under American law.”

“He was also entitled to Soviet citizenship under Soviet law,” Ligatski snapped. “Why did he choose American citizenship instead?”

Sonya found her ire overcoming her fear, and perhaps her bureaucratic good sense. “He’s an adult,” she said. “He made his own choice. And it’s no business of yours!”

“It’s
Party
business, Comrade Reed,” Ligatski shot back. “As a Party member, you should have raised your son properly as a boy so that as an adult he would have freely made the right choice. Failing to do so is construable as dereliction of Party duty as well as the maternal role.”

Sonya’s mouth fell open at that. She could find no words that would
not make matters much worse if she dared to utter them. It figured that a Bear like this would be an archaic Slavic phallocrat too!

“Well, Comrade Reed, what do you have to say for yourself?” Ligatski demanded.

“What do I have to say for myself?” Sonya stammered. “About all I can think of to say at this point, Comrade Ligatski, is will you please get to the point, whatever it is!”

“The point, Comrade Reed, is that you are unfit to hold membership in the Communist Party,” Ligatski said, and he palmed her Party card, opened a drawer, slipped the card inside, and slammed it shut with a metallic thunk.

“You cannot do this!” Sonya shouted, bolting to her feet. “It is a violation of every principle of Socialist Legality!”

Ligatski was on his feet shouting too. “You are a fine one to lecture the
Party
about Socialist Legality, Sonya
Reed!
You call yourself a Russian? Corrupted entirely by twenty years in the West! Married to an American! With a son who has defected to the United States! Conducting a sordid affair with a superior in the bargain and using him to protect yourself from the consequences of your disloyalty!”

“So that’s it, is it? This is the work of Raisa Shorchov!”

“Raisa Shorchov is a loyal Russian patriot, which is more than can be said for you!”

“I demand that you return my Party card at once! You have no authority to do this! There have been no legal proceedings. I demand my rights under Soviet law.”

Ligatski sat down again and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Party membership is a privilege, not a right,” he said. “And I am fully authorized to revoke your membership. You do realize what that means?”

Sonya knew what it meant, all right. She sank back onto her chair with most of the fight knocked out of her.

Obviously, Raisa Shorchov had finally found a way to get rid of her. Obviously, she had used Robert’s taking of American citizenship to go around the Red Star bureaucracy to her friendly Bears in the Party apparatus. At the very least, being thrown out of the Party would mean Sonya’s losing her job in Paris and being offered something dreadful back in the Soviet Union, probably east of the Urals too.

And if she refused whatever they offered, no major company here was about to offend Red Star, S.A., and the Soviet Union to the point of hiring someone they had blacklisted.

She would be unable to secure anything but a menial position in Paris, and if she capitulated and returned to the Soviet Union, she would never see Ilya again, she would have to leave Jerry, and she
would be stuck all alone in some terrible job in some miserable provincial city, perhaps for the rest of her life.

“I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say to change your mind?” she moaned miserably.

“Nothing whatever,” Ligatski said. “If it were personally up to me, someone like you would be tried as a traitor and given a good long term of internal exile as far above the Arctic Circle as possible.”

“There is no longer such a thing as a gulag,” Sonya pointed out.

Ligatski frowned. “Unfortunately, at the moment that is true,” he admitted unhappily.

Sonya rose shakily to her feet.

“Sit down, Comrade,” Ligatski said.

“What for? There is no longer any point in enduring your abuse, now is there, seeing as how you’ve made it quite clear that there’s nothing I can do to alter the situation. Indeed, as long as I’ve got nothing left to lose, I might as well tell you what I think of you and your—”

“Sit down, Comrade, we’re not through!” Ligatski said more forcefully.

“We’re not?”

“No, we are not. My personal feelings are not the issue here. My duty is to speak for the Party whether I like the realities or not.” And all at once, he seemed to become furtive, embarrassed.

He got up, went to the samovar, drew two glasses of tea. “Have some tea, Comrade Reed,” he said, amazingly enough, and handed her a glass.

Sonya’s bureaucratic instincts filled her with sudden hope. Was all that had gone before merely the opening move of the game the Americans called “Bad Cop, Good Cop,” with Ligatski forced, for some unfathomable internal reason, to play both roles against his will?

“Speaking for the Party now, not myself, I have been authorized, or if you prefer, required, to offer you a means by which you may prove your loyalty to the point where your Party card will be returned and all mention of this meeting stricken from the records,” Ligatski said, fidgeting and squirming as if his anus were impaled upon a stake.

“Do tell. . . ,” Sonya said quietly, sipping at her tea.

“Unfortunately a situation has been created from which the Party requires your assistance in extricating itself,” Ligatski told her fatuously. “Your daughter’s application for admission to Concordski pilots’ school has been forthrightly championed by Marshal Donets himself, a . . . well-connected personage in the Red Army. The Marshal interjected himself into the process before your son assumed American citizenship and before Comrade Shorchov reported your
affair with Ilya Pashikov to the Party apparatus. The Party was unaware of what Marshal Donets was doing, and the Marshal was unaware that your Party membership was about to be revoked. . . . You understand the situation . . . ?”

“Not in the least,” Sonya told him truthfully.

Ligatski sighed. “There are, shall we say, ideological differences of opinion, within both the Party and the Red Army, and, ah, political groupings which cross organizational lines. . . .”

“Eurorussians and Bears. . . .”

Ligatski scowled. “If you
must
be crude about it, yes,” he admitted grudgingly. “Marshal Donets is one of the staunchest Russian patriots in the Red Army—”

“An unreconstructed old Bear—”

“—and is an important ally of high officials in the Party of like mind who for obvious reasons would not wish to see him embarrassed by this breakdown in communication between the Party and Army structures.”

“Embarrassed by
what?
” Sonya said, quite unable to imagine where all this was going.

“By you and your daughter, of course.”

“What
are
you talking about?”

“Do I have to draw you a picture?” Ligatski snapped. “Donets went way out on a limb to get your daughter into the pilots’ school without any idea that your Party membership was about to be revoked. It’s completely out of the question for someone whose mother has been thrown out of the Party for cause to attend pilots’ school, and quite frankly, Donets will look like a fool or worse when her admission is revoked.”

Sonya lifted her glass to her lips and savored a sip of tea. “I see,” she said, smiling over the rim of her glass at Ligatski. “So this has all been a charade. You
can’t
really lift my Party card because it would create a situation that would embarrass a prominent Red Army Bear!”

“No, you do not see!” Ligatski snapped. “This process has gone too far to simply be buried without a gesture on your part. It would then become ammunition in the campaign of the degenerate Westernized elements in both the Party and the Red Army to discredit the integrity of patriotic forces! There are unprincipled creatures within both structures who would leak the whole mess to the yellow press and create a public scandal in order to further their struggle against patriotic renewal.”

“And we wouldn’t want
that
to happen, now would we?” Sonya purred. Better and better! It would seem that it was
she
who had
the
Bears
over a barrel! No doubt that was the reason for these desperate scare tactics in the first place!

“Certainly not!” Ligatski declared. “That is why this affair must have an outcome that will serve as an exemplary lesson in Russian patriotism should it ever be publicly revealed! That is why realpolitik requires, against all justice, that you are to be allowed to retain your Party membership in return for making a gesture that will draw an ideologically correct moral out of the story should it ever see the light of day. That is why you must divorce your husband, Jerry Reed.”

Sonya sat there silently, unable to even think, as if she had been banged on the top of the head with a mallet, as Ligatski babbled on.

“If you obey the Party’s orders, you will retain your Party card, your daughter will be permitted to attend pilots’ school, you will keep your job in Paris, and you will be promoted to Raisa Shorchov’s position when she is recalled for her part in stupidly creating this whole unfortunate situation in the first place.”

“This is monstrous!” Sonya cried. “You can’t be serious!”

“Believe me, Comrade Reed, this is no joke!”

“It’s insane!”

“Not at all,” Ligatski said. “By divorcing your American husband, you purge yourself of responsibility for the actions of your son and prove your Russian patriotism. We both know that your marriage is a hollow shell, but still, the notion of choosing country over love will appeal to the best instincts of the romantic Slavic soul, which is to say, should the story come out, we will paint you as a patriotic heroine. You might even get a medal. Only we will know the sordid truth.”

“You’re bluffing!” Sonya cried. “I won’t do it!”

“Then you will be stripped of your Party membership and posted to Alma-Ata,” Ligatski said. “Needless to say, your husband will not be permitted to join you, assuming that you could even persuade him to do so. Your marriage will effectively be over in any case, while you endure all these penalties and reap none of the benefits that patriotic cooperation would bring.”

“I’ll . . . I’ll stay here in Paris with Jerry and get another job!”

Ligatski shrugged, smiled sardonically. “Technically speaking, that is an option, I suppose,” he said. “Of course, if you take it, that will mean that Marshal Donets will be severely embarrassed—”

“Screw Marshal Donets!”

“—and if Marshal Donets is embarrassed, all that will be left to us is to take vengeance, and you may be sure that that vengeance will be total and complete. We will make it known that you were dismissed from your position for conducting an affair with your superior in
order to protect yourself from the consequences of having used internal Red Star information to make a killing on the bourse during the panic of Yankee Thursday.”

“That’s a lie!”

“Entirely beside the point,” Ligatski said airily. “The point is that we will make quite certain that no European company of any consequence will hire you.”

“Jerry makes a decent enough salary, the children are grown, we could get by. . . .”

“Vengeance, as I have said, will be total and complete. Your husband may not be so willing to support you when your affair with Pashikov becomes a public scandal. And in any case, he will be unable to do so after Moscow demands that the European Space Agency dismiss him as an American mole. Pashikov himself will suffer a severe enough loss of credibility that his friends in Moscow will not be able to prevent his reassignment to Novosibirsk. And of course, your daughter’s hopes of getting Concordski wings will be dashed too, as well as her hopes of ever being admitted to the Party.”

“You’d really do all that . . . ?” Sonya whispered.

“No, Comrade Reed,
you
would be responsible for ruining the lives of your husband, your daughter, Pashikov, and yourself, not the Party,” Ligatski said. “The choice is yours. Pashikov can retain his present position, your daughter can become a Concordski pilot, your husband can remain at
ESA
, and you can become Director of the economic strategy department of Red Star, S.A., in Paris. You may even maintain a social relationship with your husband as long as the papers go through and you do not share the same domicile. Or you can bring everything crashing down on everyone’s head.”