It was still so vivid in his mind, particularly the loss of dignity he had seen in these faces — a poverty that was horrible to Nikolai Ryzhkov, Ryzhkov being his Russian name before he had taken the oath of allegiance to his newly adopted country and changed Ryzhkov to Miro. It was the lack of dignity in the blacks’ eyes that struck him as being more crushing than any he had known in his youth in Russia. For there, though people had been poorer in material things than their American counterparts, there hadn’t been the burning rage and spiritual deprivation that he saw in these faces.
The memory of this, his first experience of the vast disparity in wealth between rich and poor in America, not only stayed with him but all his life had acted as a spur to his single-minded goal, the memory of Harlem as troubling and as clearly etched on his mind as was that of the immigrants’ first visit to Central Park. There, in the green, ordered world that accepted everybody, it had been completely different, surely what the great Abraham Lincoln had in his mind — a place that did not depend on whom you knew, on special party shops accessible only to the powerful, but was a refuge for the common people. He hated the zoo, though — hating anything being put in a cage — anything that was hemmed in.
As a boy he had loved the Moscow Circus, which he had seen illegally, sneaking beneath the tent flaps of the traveling troupe when it had visited his town. But when they had brought on the bears, the huge, muzzled beasts reduced to playing big babies for the amusement of rude peasants like his father, Alex had felt immeasurably sad — not only for the bears but for those like his father whose sensitivities had been so brutalized by poverty in old Russia, in Siberia to be exact, that they could find the sight of the leashed bears only amusing.
As Alex had grown older, he learned that to liberate such people from such brutality no effective appeal could be made to sensibilities deadened by the constant crush of circumstance. Throughout history, he was convinced, there had been only one way. One had to fight indifference and prejudice, as Lenin had said, not submit to it. But Gorbachev had warned that you would get no thanks for trying to improve the lot of the people — those in chains did not always thank those who set them free. Look at what had happened to Gorbachev himself, and how vividly Alex remembered the Muscovites demonstrating in Red Square, telling the American announcer Mike Wallace, who was doing his open-mouthed “surprise” act, that they’d had enough of perestroika, of glasnost—of how they pined for the order, the comfort of predictability that Stalin’s postwar years had given them.
“I’d like to take the muzzle off that bear,” young Alex had confessed to his father at the circus. “Osvobodit—set him free.”
“Ha!” his fattier had laughed, “you are the first he’d kill — bite your head off.” But if that’s what his father had said, Lenin had told every younger generation, “Bud’smel. Bud’terpeliv”—Be brave. Be patient — yes, the party had made serious mistakes, but at heart the party was still right.
Lenin was gone now, reviled by some as some atheists reviled Christ, but Alex had not deserted the party, nor had the other members of his “sleeper” cell, as firm as ever in their conviction that capitalism was at heart evil — that its enemies were their friends.
This wintry afternoon, Alex’s returning again to the park seemed propitious. Presently he was joined by a short, stout man, Mike Ricardo. Parks had always been a favorite meeting place for the Soviets, and still were in what was now the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS. Last time they met they had set Operation Kirov’s Ballet in action, knocking out Con Ed’s Indian Point plant, poisoning the city’s water supply at Hillsview Reservoir with one Thermos of PCBs, and taking out the cesium clock in Hillsboro, Wisconsin, the pacemaker clock for all the computers in the country, including the Pentagon’s.
“What d’you think?” Mike asked, walking up, helping himself to a chestnut from the packet Alex was holding, tossing the nut from hand to hand, blowing on it, his breath short, coming in sharp puffs of mist in the chilly air. “You think the Chinese’ll cross?”
“They always have.”
“Yeah, I know, but I mean all along the line?”
“Who knows?” Alex replied. “I can’t even figure out how they do embroidery.”
“Embroidery?”
“Double-sided stuff. They’ll do a picture on a silk screen. You swing it around — same picture on the other side but no knots, stitch marks, or loose thread. Beats me where they hide the ends. Must go blind.”
“Time,” Mike explained, peeling the chestnut, its steaming wisp in the air joining that of his own breath. “Chinks are in no hurry, Alex. They’re building up their strength.”
“Chinese can’t wait forever or Freeman might cross the line.”
Mike rolled up the Post he’d been carrying and stuck it under his arm, hands thrust deep in his topcoat pockets. “What’s in it for us?”
“Novosibirsk wants us to give Beijing as much help as we can. Beijing can’t start sending their operatives into New York. ‘Frisco maybe but not here. So we do our job and turn this thing around we’ll be on top. Chinks’ll make a deal with us on the disputed border areas along the Amur.”
“The Black Dragon,” Mike said.
“The Amur,” Alex said. “Anyway, this way Novosibirsk stays out of it — ostensibly — but if we do our job, shut things down here, hit Con Ed again, slow up the sea lift resupply, sow panic in the population, we’ll have Beijing’s IOU.”
Mike took one of the chestnuts from the bag, noticed it was too sooty, pulled out another, and saw a squirrel keeping pace with them in short, quick dashes by the snow-dusted path leading down past the puppet house toward the dairy.
“Son of a bitch is with the CIA.” He threw the husk at the squirrel. “You sure we’ll pull it off?”
“Look, we did Con Ed okay,” Alex reminded him tartly. “If we do this thing right — Christ knows we’ve been training for it long enough — Washington’ll shit its pants. Americans don’t have the stomach for it. You know that.”
“We Americans are tougher than you think,” Mike said.
Alex didn’t like the “we” but figured it was probably a good sign. Mike always got right into the part. Mike pointed out that some of the others, though neither he nor Alex met them very often, had gone a bit soft — not on the strategy, but they’d been waiting so long they’d started going to seed. “Donut guts!” Alex called them. They liked the blue-collar affluence they enjoyed — plumbers eighty bucks an hour! But if they’d gone soft it didn’t mean they’d gone over. Anyway, most still had at least one parent back in the CIS republics, and grandparents, even brothers and sisters — whatever Siberian Intelligence’s KGB Chief Chernko had decided he needed to keep everyone committed to the semya—family.
One of them had gone off the rails completely — started playing around with street women, spending most of his time screwing and spending. Paid out more at the track than he made on his job as subcontractor for New York Port Authority’s HERT, the harbor emergency response team. They’d found him, a floater, in the East River off the South Street Seaport, blood alcohol count of 1.6 and his testicles sewn in his mouth.
The Post had run a story that the man, a diver for HERT, had been humping one of the mob’s tarts. It had shaken everybody up except Alex, who, Mike thought, might have done it. The thing was, you never knew who was Chernko’s iceman in New York or anywhere else. Before the war, the rezidents in the U.N., UNICEF, or in the embassy in Washington would have handled it. Now you never knew who it was. Alex said it didn’t matter who whacked the big spender, that the Americans would do the same to any one of their people who started screwing anything in sight. You couldn’t afford the risk of who they’d blab to when they’d gone that far off the rails.