Skinner looked around him: The Pripet lay behind them and they stood on a wide grassy plain which rolled off, without change, to the horizon in all directions. They’d reached the tiny town of Luniniec on the second day of their flight, after they’d exhausted the meager supply of food Natasha had taken from Pinsk. There they’d eaten and rested and, from careful questioning. Skinner learned that the natives had heard nothing of a parachute, or a dead Russian soldier. After that, they’d plodded in a northeasterly direction through the swamps, another day and night, until suddenly the bogs faded away behind them and an occasional farmhouse dotted the land.
Now they stood on the frontier, and Natasha extended her hand. “What is it you Americans do, shake hands?”
Skinner nodded.
“Here, then—shake mine. And good luck, my American friend. If you walk in that direction—” she pointed across the barbed wire fence—“you should: reach the village of Slutsk by late afternoon. From there you can get a bus to Bobruisk—and from that point, a train to wherever you’re going. Good luck.”
“What will you do?”
“Oh, I’ll manage. Probably I’ll stay for a time in Luniniec with some friends. I’ll be back in Pinsk before you know it, and life will go on as if you’ve never been there.”
“There’s something else we Americans do,” said Skinner. “Poles, too.” He put his arms around the girl, felt her buxom figure snuggle up against his chest, kissed her. I sightly at first, then fiercely.
“I never could have made it without you, Natasha. Here, right at the beginning, I’d have been finished.”
“Kiss me again, Nikolay. Some day I’ll be able to tell my friends what an American kiss is like. Ahh….”
“Goodbye, Natasha,” Abruptly he turned, pushed apart two of the strands of wire, stepped through the fence. When he looked again, the girl was trudging back the way they had come. She’d reach the Pripet Marshes at about the same time that he got to Slutsk.
SKINNER approached the clerk in the little depot in Slutsk. “When’s the next bus for Bobruisk?”
“There’s no ‘next bus’. There is only one bus, and that leaves in an hour. Your travel visa, please.”
Skinner showed it to the man, a sour-faced old fellow with glasses.
“Umm-m, yes. Seems to be in order. Six rubles, fifty kopeks.”
Skinner counted out the unfamiliar change, exchanged it for his ticket, a filthy yellow stub which probably would be collected and used again. “Thank you.”
The man looked surprised. “Don’t thank me, thank the State. They gave you your visa.”
Little things like that, thought Skinner as he clambered into the rickety bus. The State this and the State that. The State everything. Meanwhile, he didn’t have the vaguest shadow of a plan. The bus to Bobruisk, then—then, what? Another trip to some equally unheard of place? Just poking around the incredible length and breadth of the Eurasian land mass until he found something? It might take years.
And the Russians had stopped their playing with atomic power, suddenly, without warning. Why? Why except that they’d found something so much more powerful that atomics were relegated to the position of Fourth of July—or May Day—firecrackers? No, thought Skinner, the little hick-towns couldn’t give him his answer, and the more he dallied, the harder it might be to find that answer. From Bobruisk he’d take the train to Moscow….
SONYA FYODOROVNA Dolohov had a headache. But it didn’t stop her work. No, she’d see the man from Lubianka Street in spite of it, she’d merely have to be more careful, that’s all. Some wine, some dancing, the wee hours of the morning in her apartment. Then, who could tell? Bah! A big, loud bah to Boris Rashevsky and all men! Rashevsky carried Secret Police written all over his stupid face, and like all men, he could he had—for a price. Swaggering Laurenti Beria, who ruled the M.V.D. with an iron will, now he might be different. It was said in Moscow that Beria had to answer to no one, but Josef Stalin himself.
But for now at least, Sonya need not worry about Laurenti Beria. Just Rashevsky, that clumsy, pawing ape. And, looking at the soft contours of her figure in the mirror as she dressed, smiling and even humming a little tune which was definitely capitalist and hence outlawed, Sonya knew she’d be able to extract the information from Boris Rashevsky, first lieutenant to Beria, head of the M.V.D., the dreaded Secret Police.
Rashevsky strutted in promptly at eight, a huge bull-necked man with a bristly, close-cropped head of graying hair, loose, sensuous lips, beady, little pig-eyes which almost seemed to come together, and a ridiculously delicate nose. “Ah, Sonya,” he said, smiling broadly.”
She allowed her hand to be kissed. “Colonel. My own private Colonel Boris! How good it is to see you—”
“My dear, how I waited for the hour! I fumed arid fretted over some paper work—yes, I can fume and fret—I—your gentle Colonel Boris, when it is you. I am waiting to see. But Beria stood over me, and Beria wanted the work finished.” He sighed.
“Beria. Always it is Beria. Is the man a god?”
Rashevsky got alarmed. “Please, my dear, I know you mean nothing, but must you always use those words? God, what is God but a figment of the warped capitalist imagination? And since the capitalists have constructed an Iron Curtain around their countries, we’ve gone a long way in stamping that myth out.
“And something else. Why, last week I heard you humming something capitalist—”
Sonya smiled demurely. “Well, I promise to do.neither again. Now can we go and have some fun?”
RASHEVSKY nodded eagerly helped Sonya on with her sable wrap—a gift from Beria, months ago, before she’d turned her attentions to the more talkative Rashevsky. Then they took the elevator down to the street, where Rashevsky’s long, sleek car awaited them.
The Symphony first, at the Stalin Theater, where the orchestra rendered a stirring performance of Prokofief’s latest work. It sounded a lot like his earlier and extremely charming Peter and the Wolf, Sonya realized, except now the part of Peter was relegated to the benevolent Dictatorships of the Proletariet, wherever they existed, and the lean hungry wolf became Capitalist Imperialism. The triumphant fourth movement was the Korea Movement, and idly Sonya wondered if they’d ever really know what was happening in that tiny Asiatic country.
Later, champagne and caviar at the Club Molotov—restricted to officials of the Kremlin and the M.V.D. and a few lucky foreign diplomats who’d remained much more rational than that man in Yugoslavia—what was his name?
“You see,” said Rashevsky, sipping his fifth champagne, “we really have everything the capitalists claim, to have. A beautiful club, is it not?”
Sonya smiled. “I’ve been here before.”
The Colonel drank the remainder of his champagne in one gulp, ordered another one from the waiter who stood at attention near the silver urn which held their magnum. Good, thought Sonya, let him grow jealous. It might loosen his thick tongue….
“When?” Rashevsky pouted, small-boy fashion.
“Oh, what’s the difference? I’m here with you now, my Colonel. Would you like to dance?”
He nodded, got up, followed her to the dance floor. The band played liltingly the strains of a delicate, Strauss waltz. Strauss, the genius of the waltz, who’d come from Austria to Mother Russia to do his wonderful work in a properly invigorating atmosphere.
RASHEVSKY danced clumsily, holding the slim, beautiful girl in a two-hundred-pound bear-hug. She was glad when the music stopped. But then, as Rashevsky led her back to their table, the band played a loud fanfare, and all eyes turned to the elaborate doorway.