He wasn’t sure she had heard him, though she kept pace at his side; he could hear the plane bearing down on them. Behind them, bullets chewed up the street and spat up powdered cement, spraying their feet. The bullets were stitching the street at their back as they dove behind the truck, Jonas throwing his body over hers.
“Oh, God… Oh, Jesus…” he moaned, on top of her, like last night. “Where the hell did they come from…”
But the body beneath him was so motionless, not even trembling with fear, that he knew. He knew.
He raised himself up enough to look down at Eva, who was on her back, blue eyes staring and empty and, yes, she was dead. Then before he could even sob, much less cry out in anguish, he felt his head explode, or seem to — the butt of a Russian rife had come down on the back of his skull, to put him temporarily out of his misery, and he lay on her one last time.
When Jonas regained consciousness, he was on his side on a flatbed truck, arms and legs bound, face encrusted with dried blood, like the crisp sugary surface of a pudding. He wasn’t alone: the back of the truck was filled with other boys, some of them very young, all of them bruised and bloodied.
Jonas’s tongue was so dry he couldn’t speak, but a youth next to him, who was similarly bound, answered the question he could not pose.
“They’re taking us to Russia,” the boy whispered, his eyes large and frightened. “For rehabilitation.”
A burly Soviet guard near the cab stirred and moved toward them.
“Shut up down there,” the guard snarled in Russian, pointing his rife threateningly at them. His eyes were as black as Pluck’s and as dead as Eva’s.
Jonas lay his throbbing head back down and closed his eyes. When he awoke again, it was dark. He was still in the truck, bouncing along a rutted dirt road. He soon realized, due to his position, that he could probably throw himself off the truck — his first thought was to try this, not to escape, but to die. Something else deep inside, burning like some foul food that refused digestion, pushed him instead toward escape and survival; he did not know it yet, but his life had a new engine now — not history, not poetry, not freedom, not Eva… revenge.
Slowly, inch by inch, he moved his bound body toward the edge of the flatbed, and when the guard wasn’t looking, took a deep breath and rolled off.
A peasant woman found him along the roadside the next day, took him in, and dressed his wounds. After a few days, he set out on foot for Austria. There, the American Embassy helped him — along with hundreds of others like him — get to the United States, where he remained in New York, working at various menial jobs, his childhood baking skills proving helpful…
But with each passing day he became more restless; America was a great country — they had freedom, though they did not seem to appreciate it — and, anyway, it wasn’t his country. And the language was hard to learn.
He hopped a train, sharing a boxcar with hoboes, fitting in fine, eventually landing in Los Angeles because that was as far as the rails could take him. Then the Holy Cross Mission helped him put down some roots — an apartment, a bakery job — which gave him some semblance of peace. But at twenty-three Jonas could never really see himself finding a wife better than Eva, or raising a family, or even becoming an American citizen. No matter how hard he tried, these universal visions, once precious to him, would never materialize. Something had died with Eva; the only thing still alive in him was that hot coal of revenge, which never went out… cold as the rest of him might be, it always glowed hatefully at his core.
No, his notion to kill Khrushchev had not come slowly; it came in one swift instant… like the instant it had taken for the MiG bullets to kill Eva. It was a reflex — a doctor’s hammer to a patient’s knee. When his co-workers in the bakery began to talk of “that fat commie fucker,” “that Red bastard,” Jonas perked up.
Khrushchev is coming, they said.
All right, then.
Khrushchev is coming… Khrushchev will die.
At first, Jonas thought he might have to return to New York to assassinate Khrushchev; he had enough money saved to take a bus — hopping trains would not be necessary, this time. But soon the American press was thoughtful enough to provide the premier’s travel schedule, which included a stop in Los Angeles.
How wonderful freedom of the press was!
His parents had been Roman Catholic, but when Jonas went off to the university, he had abandoned the church; like so many students he found notions of existentialism interesting, and considered himself an agnostic.
Now, in America, and for the first time in many years, Jonas went to a Catholic Church and prayed — thanked God for this gift. He did not, however, take confession.
Jonas watched the hearse-like black limousines pull away from in front of the hangar at the airport in Los Angeles. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his flour-soiled chinos, fingering the press-pass card he’d lifted off a Newsweek reporter. His fellow reporters had been nice enough to mention among themselves that Khrushchev was going to a luncheon at Fox Studios later, and that a civic dinner would follow at the Ambassador Hotel that evening.
Getting into Fox Studios would be hard — they had a gate, and guards, and everyone knew everybody. But the hotel? That was a public place; so much was unguarded in a free country. The hotel would be easy, with so many guests and restaurant patrons…
Jonas caught a bus at the airport that took him downtown, boarding another one going to West Los Angeles, where he lived on the fifth story of a rundown brick apartment building in which only a few less languages were spoken than at the United Nations.
In his tiny kitchenette, he placed the stolen press badge that read, “John Davis, Newsweek” on the table next to a black Kodak camera with silver flash attachment. He opened the camera and inserted a small revolver in its hollowed-out interior. The pistol didn’t look very threatening — like a starter’s gun at a track meet — but pressed against Khrushchev’s temple, it would be up to the noble task.
Then, taking a piece of butcher paper, Jonas printed a note for the authorities to find. He didn’t want his adoptive American country to bear the brunt of his actions.
Satisfied, Jonas went into his bedroom where a new brown serge suit, white shirt, diamond-patterned beige tie, and tan hat awaited, spread out like a sartorial feast on the threadbare bedspread. The outfit had taken much of his savings, except for the change in his pocket. But that was all right; after tonight he would have no further need for money.
He’d studied the photos in the recent Life magazine of the pressmen covering the dictator’s trip… of what they wore… and newsreels at second-run movie houses and news programs on televisions in store windows… of how they acted, these American reporters. He practiced their brash stance and obnoxious smirk in the bathroom mirror, until he thought he’d gotten it right. He was no actor, but he had been in the arts; he was creative.
Jonas pulled out the loose change in his pocket. There was more than enough for him to call a taxi, and arrive at the Ambassador in style.
But that would be later.
He checked his watch.
There was plenty of time for a long, refreshing nap.
And, sunlight creeping in the shuttered windows, Jonas slept better than he had since that night with Eva, who entered his dreams and kissed him and called him a poet and a warrior.
So few poets, after all, can make history.
Chapter Four
A Self-Made Man
Boiling with rage, flesh white as dead skin, Nikita Khrushchev sulked in the back seat of the limousine, seated between his wife Nina and translator Oleg Troyanovsky, as if they were indulgent parents on either side of their fat little boy, a spoiled brat denied a toy. The perpetually pleasant Nina remained placid, despite the rude treatment the Russian entourage had just endured at their arrival in Los Angeles; Oleg, who had a cynical streak, accepted this fate with typically cool detachment.