It was already two o'clock p.m., time to eat, I was hungry. I thought I could stay with Ann, invite her to dinner. We could talk about ourselves. I saw she was struck by my person, and the chances were high that by the evening of that very day she would forget her whole former story with Hewlett. Did I want it? Perhaps yes. But a large part of me still bore in mind my mission. A big question was whether and to what extent my personal interest in this love affair coincided with the reasons of my work. Making her fall in love with me was not a problem, but what would that bring me in technical sense? I was interested in finding out as much as possible about Hewlett's contacts in Russia. But letting Ann go to the utmost consequences of her love affair with myself, as my rich previous experience showed, wouldn't give me much. Women that pass on to a new love affair are disinclined to dwell any more on the previous one, on the contrary, they try to forget it as soon as possible, absorbed as they are with the new passion. I thought that perhaps, in this respect, I had a bit overdone. Or did I overrate my magnetism? Now she could think about me for the rest of the day, the first obligatory step to seriously falling in love. Anyhow, now that the first strike has been dealt, I had to make the most of her new mood. That was the most exciting part of the whole game, the one my life was still worth dying for.
I grabbed my cellphone and dialled her number.
She answered as though she were looking at the phone expecting a call any second. Good sign, I told myself. I felt a thrilling chill along my spine. I was halfway between my hotel and Ann's, the day was sunny and unusually hot, as though the summer that was about to leave remembered something it had forgotten to take with it and came back, a pleasant breeze was playing with my hair.
"Ann", I said, "It's me, Eric, your new friend, as I hope. I've been thinking about what you have told me. I don't know why, but your story has struck me very much. It's perhaps because you yourself have struck me much, excuse my straightforwardness. I think that you might be in great danger. That woman can think that you keep your documents with yourself, she can hire burglars and send them to break the safe, and, what's worse, she can hire goons to kidnap you in order to torture you so you give away the documents, they can kidnap as well your man in order to torture him in front of you to make you give them the documents, in today's Russia any such thing is possible, and your adversary, let's call her mildly so, must be aware of that."
I breathed heavily with agitation, my emotion was overwhelming me, my voice sounded broken. I was really excited, I wasn't putting it on, though I was a consummate artist in such shows. In my troubled existence life and art often mixed up.
"Are you really so worried about me?" she asked. Oh, those weak poor creatures!
"Yes, I'm sorry, I want to help, to protect you somehow, I'm thinking about you all the time." Perhaps, this last sentence was too much, but the moment was crucial and I couldn't afford to be vague and allusive.
"What can you suggest?" she said with a quiet voice in which my practiced ear caught a trembling note of nearing love ardour.
"First of all you must move to another hotel without telling anything to that woman or to your man. Then I could offer you my help in keeping the documents. Being a total stranger to your affair, nobody would ever think that I might have them in my care."
There was a long pause. Then, when I thought there was a technical failure, she said at last:
"Thank you, I must think about it."
I said:
"There's another thing. If you want to use your documents to exert pressure on your man too, it would be doubly dangerous. Of course, it's none of my business, I'm sorry".
"It's ok, thank you. I'll call you tonight. When do you go to bed?"
"I'll stay up all night just to be ready to come to your rescue any moment you need it."
"You're sweet. See you later". I heard a light sound of a kiss in my ear.
Where would I be that night if she called me for help or rescue? I put the cellphone into the breast pocket and looked around. It was a wonderful early autumn day in full swing. The sun was a bit pale and dim, but, perhaps, that was due to the smog that was hanging over the city. The air, though heavy with exhaust gas, seemed fresh and pleasant. There were a lot of people on the streets, hurrying in all directions, conversing if they were in pairs, those who were alone were going with a pensive expression on their face, some were talking on their cellphones, there were a lot o kids walking with their granny. In the years to come this period would be surely defined – first of all by the horrified historians - as bloody, cruel, ruthless and what not, and perhaps all that would be true, but only in part. These ordinary people, who were filling the streets around me, had been reading every day in papers about murders and hideous crimes against property, but all that terrible shootings and executions about which papers were reporting were like scenes of others' life. In this very moment there were no stray bullets flying about, no blood or fight , everything was going as usual, these people were only a milieu for those others who so drastically had changed the course of Russian history, who were greedy, thirsty of power, infinitely cruel and ruthless. In some years from now they would be regarded as fearless pioneers and captains of the new Russian economy and culture, and who would remember of their bandits' past, except rare politicians (envious eunuchs!) and witnesses like me? These last, who will have survived in these criminal years, will be hardly hundreds, perhaps few thousands in the whole country, while all other people like those walking near him in the street, are millions, tens of millions. Those greedy bandits are the salt of the earth at this moment, but it's wicked salt. They get around in new Mercedeses on back seats with smoked glasses, that hardly brake before people crossing the street (those street-crossers must take care of their safety at their own expense!), they buy castles in France not to live in, only to boast, they build monsters of architecture near Moscow, they adorn themselves with heavy golden earrings, they have a harem of lovers whom they change every night like medieval Asian Padishahs, now they are only feared; in a few years heads of state would shake hands with them, would receive them in their residencies as guests of honour, would accept their crooked bloody money for their presidential campaigns, would offer them prestigious positions in their administration. Those grains of salt of the earth would do anything to make forget their inglorious past, from large charity campaigns to building churches (devoted to their own god!); others spend hundreds of millions on huge yachts and palaces, islands and forest lands (they didn't read Tolstoi!) to drown their miserable existence (like drunkards do) in display of incredible luxury. They can dazzle, but they can't restart their life, they would gladly exterminate, if they could, those to whom their past is too well known, but that's impossible, their only consolation would be the legends that would wrap their life in the next generations.
The cellphone sang on my breast. It was Pavel.
"What's new?"
"Strange news. My chief told me to stop following Hewlett."
I kept silent for a few seconds, trying to understand.
"Without a reason?"
"Yes, but, I had the impression that he did it under duress. He was too loud and abrupt, as if somebody was listening to him. You see?"
"Ok, but strictly speaking, we don't follow Hewett, don't we? At least today. We have followed other directions, but not him. An then, you know what? Your Borisov is your boss, not mine. I can ignore orders given to you, ok?"
"Ok, I'm sure that he would be glad to hear that. What's this your new love affair? Is she any good?"
"She's a darling. Seems a lovely and innocent creature. I'll tell you when we meet."
"As you know by bitter experience, the lovely and innocent creatures are..."
"Yes, I know, they're the most treacherous and heinous bitches. I vividly hope not this one. I think I have charmed her, maybe I'm going to save her tonight."
"To save from whom?"
"From the goons hired by her enemies. She was duly impressed by my vivid narration."
"As for the goons, your narration might be not far from the truth. Ok, we'll talk about it. I'm winding up here, must do a risky maneuver. See you."
He's a good fellow, I thought. We have been working together for five years now. In the last three years there had been a lot of temptations, like the briefcase for Hewlett that morning, yet he stood up to them well in every occasion. He lives in a small apartment with his wife and his five-year-old son, he suffers, like me, from continuous and severe delays in pay, yet he resists. It's becoming more difficult every year, especially seeing your colleagues and chiefs' brand new cars, hearing about their new country houses in the prestigious areas near Moscow. We two are still resisting, but for how long? Life is short. I kept repeating to myself that one is valuable not because one has something valuable and prestigious but because one is a carrier of high moral, spiritual values. For me it was easier than for Pavel, I was alone, and yet a nasty thought increasingly came to my mind: if in a few years there is news in some oil or arms corporation bulletin about someone with my name who enters the board of managing directors and who is defined as a successful businessman, it will be like a death notice in a newspaper. That will mean that another Russian has fallen in the uneven battle for his human value and dignity. But he doesn't deserve any praise or monument, in earth or in heaven. He was only a weakling and a coward.
I took the underground, gobbling up a ham sandwich on my way to the nearest station. The train was full as usual. There were a lot of children and adolescents with their backpacks who were coming back from school. They were noisily joking and laughing. What were they studying at school? I knew that their history textbooks had been drastically rewritten, the previous period of the Russian history was dramatically reviewed. I happened to talk about it with my friend's son who was in the fifth form. He didn't know who Lenin was. Human civilization is a thin layer of cultured people who cultivate their knowledge of history and literature by continuous everyday exercise all their life long. To plunge humanity in a state of deep ignorance doesn't take much effort, it would be sufficient to let children play, not only outdoors, but especially before their playstation screens. My friend's son was excellently prepared in different electronic games, he knew various schools and genres, he personally preferred at the moment chase and killing, he found strategic historical games, which required deep thinking and some knowledge of people's history and culture, too complicated and in fact boring. He wasn't a dull boy and he had good marks at school, but his current interests were limited to action films and new releases of games. When I asked him what he wanted to do in life, he answered that he would preferably be an exchange broker. He added then, laughing , that being a killer was nowadays a very respectable and lucrative profession. They generally kill "bad guys", so there was nothing vicious in their job. It was meant as a joke, but his father said quite seriously that his son was going to a firing-school and had good progress. The new Russian cinema had been doing a great job in offering a very good image of criminals and bandits of various sorts. Perhaps the film-makers were following Dostoevsky's astounding conclusion at the end of his "Memoirs from the House of the Dead" that, perhaps, in that sad place, the prison, there was held the best part of Russia. That passage from Dostoevsky , though put in the mouth of the narrator, had been a revelation for me in the recent years, that explained his stunning turn to his relativist morality in his greatest novels. Dostoyevsky had been struck, during his prison term, by certain bold amoral types met by him in jail whom he ended up considering as carriers of a new, higher type of morality that doesn't stop at killing anybody if that's useful for some high purpose. In this perspective the very tragedy of Raskolnikov was not that he had killed two human beings – independently from their personal evaluation - but that he couldn't go further and throw away his sense of guilt and moral scruples as old useless garbage. For me those types such admired by Dostoevsky were only psychopaths devoid of conscience and normal human senses like sympathy and pity. And now those psychopaths were extolled as real heroes in the eyes of the new generation. They were looking from the large and small screens with the eyes of the most popular actors, they said noble words and did good things. The new Russian girls now dreamt of becoming respectable whores: in the new films they were depicted as an independent-minding and thriving class.
The Russians were, as it had always been in their history, quick learners, but the trouble was that they were not learning from the best examples. They were in fact degrading, but their degradation had an attractive wrapping with the noble words "freedom", "private property", "democracy" on it.
I got out at the third station in the variegated crowd. The new Russian crowd was clearly divided in two categories: those with brand new brightly coloured clothes, mostly adolescents, and those with old shabby jackets and overcoats, mostly middle-aged and old persons. Those with new clothes were not necessarily better men and women, often quite the contrary, they were more accepted and better looked at in society, they were considered successful (what an ugly word!), fit to live well, they were not infected by the poverty virus.
At the hotel revolving doors I looked at my watch: it was half past two. Hewlett and Mary must have stayed at the embassy for dinner. I let myself suck in by the vertically placed turbine and emerged in the large lobby where Pavel was sitting on a big armchair with a newspaper spread on his knees. Three meters away from him was standing Lena looking pensively in the window with her back to me. The sunlight flowing through the window outlined her smooth hair and slim figure with glowing yellow brims. I gently stroked her hair with my eyes, and she sensed me nearing. She turned her head and a marvelously dreaming smile touched her lips. I read in her sparkling grey eyes: "Hi."
Last time I saw her two months before in a remote Central Asian town where I accompanied an American businessman and was to seduce his secretary. I noticed Lena in the hall of the shabby but clean hotel – the best they had there – as she was standing before a tall man in a military uniform who was saying something in what I identified as Spanish. She didn't look at him, her eyes were charmingly lowered, she seemed flustered with shameful emotion that colored her cheeks.
"It's Brazilian Portuguese", she corrected me two hours later as she sat on my lap in my room and I was stroking her long straw-blond hair. "You're always forgetting. My speciality was Spanish, but I learned Portuguese later, as there appeared a necessity."
I had known her for three years now. When I told her, after their first time, that he was firmly convinced of her belonging to some tough male of the new heroes of the moment, she laughed and said she thought the same thing about me.
"You're too beautiful to be single", I said.
"You're too handsome to be single," she replied.
"It's different for a man. A man is independent enough to choose, or to prefer to be single."
"I'm not one of those women who are afraid of being single."
"So you don't want, unlike most women, to marry, have children, a quiet family life with its little joys?"
"I have seen enough of all that stuff in my sister's family. Three little children, one-year difference between them, screaming, yelling, fights, dirt and disorder all day long, a grudging husband and a stressed and exhausted wife. A small joy was intended to be an outing in the country or a holiday at the seaside, but in fact it meant only bringing the same their family daily life into another environment."
"Ok, ok," I said hastily, "I see your point, but I'm sure you deserve better than that."
She nodded: "So any woman thinks. But rich and loving husbands are so rare that finding one equals a miracle."
"So, you accepted this job to…"
"I enjoy the feeling of power over a man, that's all," she interrupted me curtly. "That must be something well known to you," she said with a mocking defiance in her eyes.
I lay silent beside her staring at the ceiling.
"And you," she said turning her head to me, half sitting up and propping her chin on a hand. "What about you?"
I looked at her. Her hair framed her face, still pink after the recent love-making, hanging down in lovely confusion. Who had instilled into her graceful head the sound skepticism about the family life and values and especially that stuff about the power over a man? She was a blonde, yet she seemed to possess brains. I smiled at this little concession to a stupid male prejudice. Then it came to my mind that her blond hair was a disguise, to ensnare more surely the stupid male. But what if a male was not that stupid? Like me?
I heard her saying: "What about you? How did you end up here?" I suddenly caught a glimpse of mockery in her next question: "Are you in search of a rich widow? How old are you?"
That was too much. I said, trying to be nonchalant: "Naughty girl. My life is very interesting, non as dull as that of a top-manager of a big corporation you try to hook. "
The oncoming fight brought about, after a few seconds of emotional exchange of poignant remarks, another violent embrace. That was to be a model of our relationship for a year to come, I thought as I lay exhausted, with my hand on her hard breast fingering lazily the nipple. I was tremendously optimistic. I hadn't still learned to measure the future time in weeks, or days, or hours, the ability that comes with age and bitter experience.