Fisher mounted the steps of the museum and tried the doors, but they were locked. “Typical.” He turned and looked out at the grass-covered fields and hillocks where a quarter-million French and Russian soldiers met on a September day in 1812, the French intent on taking Moscow, the Russians on defending it. For fifteen hours, according to his guidebook, the two sides fired at each other, and in the evening the Russians withdrew toward Moscow, and the French were in possession of Borodino Field and the little village of the same name. A hundred thousand men lay dead and wounded.
In the distance Fisher saw the memorial to the French soldiers and officers who fought there in 1812, and further away was a newer monument dedicated to the Russian defenders who tried to stop the Germans in this same place in 1941. Fisher noted there was no monument to the Germans.
Greg Fisher was suddenly overcome by a sense of history and tragedy as he gazed out over the now peaceful fields, deathly still in the autumn dusk. The cold east wind blew tiny birch leaves over the granite steps where he stood, and the cannon of Tchaikovsky’s overture boomed over the quiet countryside. “Russia,” he said softly to himself. “Rodina—the motherland. Bleeding Russia. But you made them all bleed too. You gave them death in seven-digit numbers.”
Fisher walked slowly back to his car. It was much colder now, and a chill passed through his body. He shut the door and turned the tape lower as he drove slowly on the lanes, past the black granite obelisk honoring Kutuzov, past the common grave of the Soviet Guardsmen who fell in action in 1941, past the monument dedicated to the Grande Armée of 1812, and past the dozens of smaller markers dedicated to the Russian regiments of both 1812 and 1941. In the deepening dusk Fisher fancied he could hear the muted sounds of battle and the cries of men. I’m too hard on them, he decided. They got shafted bad. Screwed by the West once too often.
He had lost track of time, and it had become noticeably darker. He tried to retrace his route through the low hills and clusters of birch trees, but he realized he was lost.
Fisher found himself going upgrade in a towering pine forest and reluctantly continued on the narrow, paved lane, looking for a wide place to turn around. He put on his headlights, but they revealed only walls of dark green pine on either side. “Oh, Christ Almighty….”
Suddenly the head beams illuminated a large wooden sign attached to a tree, and Fisher stopped the car. He stared out the windshield at the Cyrillic lettering and was able to make out the familiar word STOP. The rest of the sign was incomprehensible except for the also familiar CCCP. Government property. But what wasn’t these days? “Do I need this?” He thought he detected a quaver in his voice, so he said more forcibly, “I don’t need this crap. Right?”
As he sat considering what to do next, he noticed what appeared to be a small opening in the trees off the right shoulder. The opening lay beyond the sign, and he didn’t want to pass the sign with the car, so he took a flashlight from under his seat and got out. He walked the ten meters to the opening. It was a graveled patch, not five meters square, but obviously meant as a turnaround, a means of allowing the unwary motorist to obey the sign. “Russian efficiency.” He kicked at the crushed stone and decided it would be all right. He turned back toward his car, then froze.
Over the hum of the engine he heard branches rustling. He remained motionless and breathed through his nose, noticing the resinous scent of the trees. The air was cold and damp, and he shivered in his windbreaker. He heard it again, the brushing of pine boughs, closer this time. The headlights attracted a deer, he thought. Right. He took a step toward his car. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked — an unfriendly bark, he decided.
The glare of his headlights blinded him, and he shielded his eyes as he walked in long strides the ten meters back toward his car; one, two, three, four, five—
“Russian efficiency,” said a voice a few feet to his right.
Fisher felt his knees go weak.
2
Lisa Rhodes noted it was five o’clock, and she poured a shot of bourbon into her paper Coke cup. She walked to the window of her office in the Press Attaché’s section of the American embassy. The seventh-floor windows faced west and looked over the Moskva River. Across the river rose the Ukraina Hotel, a twenty-nine-story structure of bombastic Stalinist architecture that fronted on the Taras Shevchenko Embankment.
The district that was contained within the loop across the Moskva had been one of the poorer quarters of nineteenth-century Moscow. Extensive razing and building under the Soviets had transformed it into a cleaner if less interesting place. In the two years since she’d been in Moscow, she’d seen not only wooden structures demolished, but magnificent stone mansions and churches destroyed. The government seemed to consult no one regarding these matters. Somewhere, she assumed, was a master plan for changing the face of Moscow, but the citizens who lived in the city had never been asked their opinion. “What a screwed-up social contract they’ve got here,” she said aloud.
Spanning the river below was the Kalinin Bridge, connecting into Kutuzov Prospect, which ran west alongside the Ukraina Hotel and continued on, becoming the Minsk — Moscow highway. She followed the road with her eyes until it disappeared into the pale sinking sun over the flat horizon. “Russia….” An immense and inhospitable expanse, more suitable for wild horsemen and ruminants, an unlikely place to find a powerful empire of Europeans and their cities. Certainly, she thought, the most frozen empire that ever existed; a civilization whose roots seemed tenuously sunk into the thin soil like the fragile white birch.
The internal phone rang. She turned from the window and answered it. “Rhodes.”
“Hello,” the male voice said. “Today is the first day of Sukkot.”
“Is that so?”
“I’ve been invited to a party in Sadovniki. Religious dissidents. You might enjoy it.”
“I’m D.O. tonight.”
“I’ll get you switched.”
“No… no, thanks, Seth.”
“Is it completely and finally over?”
“I think so.”
“Will you take a polygraph on that?”
“I have to finish a press release now.”
“Well, at least you won’t be able to get in trouble tonight. Think about it, Lisa.”
She didn’t know if Seth Alevy meant about them or the party. She replied, “Sure will.”
“Good night.”
She hung up, slipped off her shoes, and put her feet on the desk. Holding the bourbon in her lap, she lit a cigarette and contemplated the acoustical-tile ceiling. The new American embassy, she reflected, sitting on ten acres of bad bog land about equidistant between the Moskova River and the old embassy on Tchaikovsky Street, had been more than a decade in the building. The work had been done mostly by a West German firm under subcontract to an American concern in New York. If the Soviet government was insulted by this snub to socialist labor and building expertise, they never expressed it verbally. Instead they’d indulged themselves in petty harassments and bureaucratic delays of monumental proportions, which was one of the reasons the project had taken about five times as long as it should have.