“So they do,” Mother Krauthammer said. “And they suggest that one of the reasons the piracy can’t be stopped is that so far no one has been heartless enough to start shooting illiterate teenagers.”
“My God, I’d be known as the Heartless Butcher of Somalia!” the President said. “Every Somalian-American in the country would vote for my opponent! I’d never get reelected! Is there nothing I can do?”
“One wild thought running through my mind,” Mother Krauthammer offered, “is that you turn this Colonel Castillo of yours to other things.”
“Hoboken—” the President began.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Robin interrupted.
“For what?”
“Getting my name right.”
“Right. You’re welcome. What I want you to do, Hackensack, is get DCI Lammelle on the phone.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President. May I ask why?”
“Because I told you to, you moron. By now you should understand that I’m the President and you’re the flunky, and that means I give the orders and you obey them. Got it?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“When you finally get around to obeying your orders and get Lammelle on the phone, I’m going to order him… which I can do because I’m the President and he’s another flunky… to immediately get on his airplane and fly to Cozumel, where he will order Colonel Castillo to immediately cease and desist any outrageous plans he may have in mind to slaughter innocent and illiterate Somalian teenagers.”
[THREE]
“Well, we seem to have been swept away on Cupid’s wings, don’t we, my dear Agrafina?” General Sergei Murov said as he reached for the bottle of Stolichnaya on the bedside table.
“Either on Cupid’s wings, or on a wave of lust,” she replied. “Stolichnaya tends to arouse that in me.”
“In that regard, my darling, vis-à-vis lust, I have a confession to make.”
“If you’re about to confess it was the smell of the borscht, I would advise you not to.”
“I won’t deny the smell of the borscht had something to do with what happened just now…”
“Careful, my love!”
“What the smell of the borscht did was first make me think of my mother, may she rest in peace, and then of my first love. Her name was Svetlana.”
“And this Svetlana smelled of borscht?”
“Sometimes. But what I was trying to say was that the smell of the borscht reminded me of my lost love, Svetlana. At that point, I lost control, moved the mirrored vanity onto my patio, climbed up on it, and looked over the glass barrier.”
“Now that this has happened to us, I’m glad I missed with the bottle of Dos Equis I threw at you.”
“And what I saw made my heart beat even faster. For a moment, I thought I was going to faint.”
“When you peeped over the glass barrier, I was modestly clothed in my itsy-bitsy tiny polka-dot bikini. If seeing me in that almost made you faint, how come you didn’t faint later after you ripped it off me?”
“What made me nearly faint was seeing you, seeing the remarkable resemblance you bear, my darling, to my lost love Svetlana.”
“Really? I gather you saw this Svetlana dame when she was not wearing her whatever they call itsy-bitsy tiny polka-dot bikinis in Russia?”
“No. Our love was not only one-sided — she never really liked me — but pure. I never saw her less than fully clothed.”
“And that’s why you didn’t marry this broad? She didn’t like you and wouldn’t take her clothes off?”
“I am sure that my beloved Svetlana never took her clothing off in the presence of any man — with the possible exception, of course, of her gynecologist — until she went to her marriage bed.”
“What did the guy she married have that you didn’t?”
“Evgeny Alekseev was an SVR polkovnik.”
“A what?”
“A colonel in the SVR, which is sort of like your Department of Homeland Security.”
“I know what the SVR is,” Agrafina said. “So you’re confessing that you’re not really the coach of the Greater Sverdlovsk Table Tennis Association?”
“I was going to get to that, my precious,” Murov said. “I want no secrets between us. I am General Sergei Murov of the SVR. At the time my beloved Svetlana married Evgeny Alekseev, I was a junior captain. He was a colonel, and she was a lieutenant colonel, so what chance did a lowly junior captain have?”
“Wait just a minute! I find this insulting, Sergei. You’re telling me I bear a remarkable resemblance to some short-haired two-hundred-and-fifty-pound female with stainless steel teeth?”
“I’m saying you bear a remarkable resemblance to an astonishingly beautiful female.”
“I thought you said she was an SVR lieutenant colonel?”
“She is. Or was when she married Evgeny. Oh, I see where you’re coming from. Let us say that my beloved Svetlana is the rare exception to that rule vis-à-vis female SVR lieutenant colonels.”
“Well, if you put it that way, Sergei, darling. So, what happened to her after she married Colonel Whatsisname?”
“The marriage didn’t last long, and then she defected. Evgeny chased her to Argentina, where he got himself whacked by some Irish cop.”
“So she’s a widow?”
“Yes, she is. The Widow Alekseeva. That’s what I’m really doing here, my love. I’m supposed to get my darling Svetlana, her brother, former SVR Polkovnik Dmitri Berezovsky, and this goddamned American, Colonel C. G. Castillo, onto an airplane and fly them to Moscow.”
“I have to tell you, my darling, that I’m tempted to break both your legs for profanely referring to an American officer like that, but my female curiosity seems to have overwhelmed me. Why do you want to take these people to Moscow?”
“Well, I think Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin wants to start by turning them into ice statues.”
“You want to help Putin turn them into ice statues? How’s he going to do that?”
General Murov explained the process to her.
“I’m shocked,” Agrafina said, “as I got the distinct impression you still have feelings about this lady.”
“Yes, my love, I do. Not as much, of course, as I did before you came into my life, my precious. But I will love her to my dying day — or hers, whichever comes first — and the thought of turning her into an ice statue, immediately before — or immediately after, whichever comes first — she marries is giving me a good deal of personal pain.”
“Who is she going to marry?”
“The godd— the American gentleman.”
“At the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, down the beach?”
“Yes. But how could you possibly know that?”
“They told me when I was there earlier.”
She handed him the liter bottle of Stolichnaya.
“Tell me, Sergei, are we to be just two ships that passed in the night, or would you like to see how this relationship develops?”
“I realized about an hour or so ago, my precious, that I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“Well, there are several problems that I can see with that. Starting with I have my career to think of.”
“I can understand that.”
“Which means I cannot move to Russia.”
“I can understand that, too.”
“When you said you want to spend the rest of your life with me, did you mean it? Was that a proposal of marriage, or did you mean you would like to continue to take sexual advantage of my naiveté and innocence?”
General Murov got off the bed and onto his knees.