But this woman—what was it about her that didn’t seem journalistic? She seemed so unassuming, so unsure of herself, that one wondered whether it might not be a pretense. She looked like she could be Russian—she had brown hair and a grim expression and skin the color of table salt—but he knew immediately that she was not. Something in her stance was half off; she stood too far apart from everybody else to seem comfortable but too close to seem actively hostile. She was not pretty—she was too monochromatic, too self-conscious, he thought, in the way she moved and glanced—but her eyes held a wry intelligence that made him look at her twice. She was approaching Nina. Nina would dismiss her quickly, he knew; Nina’s greatest strength in life was a capacity to dismiss, and Aleksandr relied on her to be rude on his behalf. Somebody needed to be, and Aleksandr was a little too polite even after all the decades and all the women. It was good for Nina to have something to do besides click around the apartment on high heels and dye her hair red and keep her body in such a state of hygienic starvation that Aleksandr sometimes wondered how she could have been a product of natural selection. Nina was talking, he saw, to the woman with the notepad.
He could see Nina shaking her head and turning around to look at Vlad—the head bodyguard, the best because he was the biggest—then turning back to the woman. There was a current of desperation in the woman’s eyes, he could see, not abject pathos, exactly, but the quiet suggestion that here was a person who had not gotten something that she’d wanted very much. Aleksandr pulled on his gloves. He found himself hoping that Nina could give her whatever she was asking for.
After the rally, in bed, Aleksandr ran his cold feet up and down Nina’s leg.
“Stop that,” she said. “You are a cruel man.”
“Did you think the rally went well?”
“As well as always,” said Nina, which was no answer at all. Aleksandr wished he could care a little less about what Nina thought of him; they were married, and he was rich, and she was beautiful, and that should be enough, but he often found himself restlessly worrying at the gaps between them, sticking his fingers into the fissures and prying them farther apart. Tonight he managed to say nothing.
“I wish you would cut that line about assassination,” said Nina.
“I thought you said I worry too much.”
“You do worry too much. That line is you worrying in front of the whole crowd. It’s not manly.”
“Do you want to see me do something manly?”
“I’d rather not tonight.” She kissed him dryly on the cheek and rolled over. “Sorry, grib.” He had never liked that she called him “mushroom”—first because he worried that he looked a little like a mushroom (dark, lumpy-faced, on the stout side now) and then because he worried that he behaved like a mushroom (brooding furtively in the dark when nobody was looking). But Nina always said that was nonsense—that she loved mushrooms and she loved him—and she kept calling him “mushroom” and he stopped asking her not to.
“Who was that woman with you at the rally?” said Aleksandr.
“I don’t know, exactly. A very odd American.”
Aleksandr turned over and propped his head with his hand. “A fan?”
“I guess so,” said Nina, wrinkling her nose. Here, too: she might show the faintest tremor of jealousy at the idea of a young American woman traveling internationally to get to meet him; she might reflect fleetingly on the fact that there were many, many women who would pay for that opportunity, who would be grateful to talk to him, who would not roll over in bed if they were next to him.
“Was she chess or political?” said Aleksandr.
“I couldn’t tell.” Nina’s voice was becoming creaky and reluctant, dislodging into sleep. “I scheduled you a meeting for Wednesday. Bring Vlad.”
“I always bring Vlad,” said Aleksandr. An American visitor was odd. His chess fans were usually Russian and almost exclusively male. Yet he’d have known her if she was a delegate from an NGO; she would have had a more professional approach and outfit and wouldn’t have scared his nice wife by shivering at her pitifully in the snow.
“She’s an American professor,” said Nina.
“Oh yes?” Aleksandr sat up. Something was snarling in the back of his head—some meaning taking shape, like tea leaves settling into symbol.
“What’s wrong?” said Nina, although he could hear in her voice the profound indifference of fatigue. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ll be back.”
He went to his study, flipped on the light, and started riffling through his notes. There had been something about an American professor at his security meeting the week before. Some years ago, Aleksandr had paid to turn a low-level FSB man—Grigorii, a baby-faced clown from Nizhny who’d sat shaking in his boots the first time and tried to demand a higher sum—who had been photocopying Aleksandr’s file ever since. For the most part, the endeavor had proved a stupendous waste of money. But at the most recent meeting, Grigorii had said something strange—it was obvious from the get-go that he’d had something beyond his usual predictable babble, because he’d looked a little more smug and obnoxious than usual—and he’d stuck out his feet and leaned back in his chair.
“They think you have a new boss,” he’d said, and smirked.
Aleksandr had kicked the leg of the table. “I don’t have a fucking boss,” he said. Vlad glared him into silence. Aleksandr had never gotten used to listening to lies about himself, and he usually insisted on correcting them, even though neither Vlad nor the turncoat seemed to care in the end what was true and what was not, as long as they were paid.
“They think the embassy has a new officer, a sort of awkward young woman, and that she’s on your case.”
“Please,” Aleksandr had said. “It’s embarrassing to even listen to this.”
The little shit had smiled, had scratched his beardless chin. “I’m just telling you what’s in your file.”
Where were his notes from that meeting? Aleksandr flipped through his papers—the facts for the speech, some statistics on the depopulation of Siberia, a few fragments on the film project—and then found the notes. The officer in question was supposedly an “awkward female American academic.” How many of them could there be, running around the same city? It was probably the same woman.
She wasn’t really CIA, he knew that much. Over the years, they’d approached him occasionally, and done him favors from time to time, and accepted some from him, but they understood, fundamentally, that he’d have no credibility with anyone if he let them own him. He wasn’t pressing their agenda, anyway. He wasn’t pressing anyone’s. As much as they liked him on CNN—because he was sarcastic and skeptical and liked to talk about civil liberties—he was a radical fiscal conservative. He wanted a flat tax. He wanted extreme deregulation. They wouldn’t like him at the American universities if he talked about that stuff, though mostly he was on about press freedom and democracy—and so they clamored for his autograph, these kids at Princeton with their Che Guevara T-shirts.
But the rumors mattered. They mattered because when he traveled the countryside, when he listened to the concerns of the people in Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod and Irkutsk, he needed them to trust him. The people wanted to talk to him and were inclined to like him; he had a common face and an uncommon energy, and he seemed to remind mothers of their most capable son. They liked to complain to him, and they liked how he eviscerated Putin—with an impression accomplished by sucking his cheeks into vicious little concavities and making his eyes go flat and dead—but they stopped trusting him when they heard rumors. I heard he works for the Americans. I heard he’s an agent of the American CIA. He couldn’t afford it—it was too damaging, it tore too savagely through the carefully wound threads of trust he’d established across this enormous, lonely country—and he had to make this woman, whoever she was, stop whatever she was doing.