“Shut up, Marchenko.”
Marchenko looked angry for the first time. He turned to Lisa. “You seem all right, which is why I don’t want to shoot you. But your friend here… well, I don’t meet many Westerners. Perhaps I shouldn’t judge by one spy. Yes?”
Lisa said, “Will you give me my icon back? I promise not to bash it over your head.”
Marchenko laughed. “I must have your oath to God.”
“I swear to God I won’t bash it over your head.”
“Good.” Marchenko leaned back and handed it to her. “You see? This religious relic started all of this unpleasantness. But I respect the believers. I have a female cousin my own age who believes in God. She became a Baptist for some reason. Another Western corruption, this Baptist religion. At least she could have become Orthodox if she wanted to be a martyr. Does this religion bring you comfort even now?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Perhaps someday when I’m old, right before the end, I will talk to a priest about getting into heaven. God will understand. No?”
Lisa replied, “I think even God can get pissed off by some people.”
“‘Pissed off?’”
Hollis said, “Marchenko, please, I implore you, shut the fuck up.”
“Yes? I think perhaps I talk too much. Not good in my job. Perhaps I should work for Intourist. I could talk all day to Westerners.” He turned to Vadim and asked in Russian, “Do I talk too much?”
“No, sir.”
“See? Well, maybe I’ll be quiet for a while.” Marchenko settled back in his seat.
Hollis looked at Lisa. “Relax.”
She forced a smile and took his cuffed hands in hers. “Don’t feel bad.”
“Okay.”
They didn’t speak much for the next two hours, and true to his word, Marchenko didn’t say much either. Vadim was in worsening pain, and Hollis could see his wrist was twice its normal size. Vadim muttered an obscenity from time to time. The copilot belatedly remembered a first aid kit, and Vadim found codeine tablets in it. He took several of them.
Hollis was certain that the pilot and copilot remembered perfectly well they had the first aid kit all along. Hollis had observed that casual cruelty in Russians before, a real indifference to the suffering of strangers. Once you drank with them or ate with them or had your little dusha dush, they’d give you the shirt off their backs, no matter how brief the relationship. But if you weren’t kith, kin, lover, or soul mate, you shouldn’t expect anyone to volunteer painkillers for a smashed wrist, and Hollis had even heard of that sort of indifference in hospitals. And to add insult to cruelty, the copilot offered the painkillers not to make Vadim feel better, but to let Vadim know they were available for the last two hours. Also, Hollis thought, the flight crew being Red Air Force, and the charter passengers being KGB, the cruelty was not altogether casual. Even more bizarre, Hollis thought, was the fact that Vadim was not angry with the pilots for their lack of sympathy, but was still glaring at Hollis as the source of his pain. Primitive, Hollis thought. But Russians reacted to the moment, not to abstractions. That was something to keep in mind in the days ahead.
Hollis said to Lisa in a light tone, “Well, do you want to say the words, ‘I quit’?”
She looked at him and said softly so no one else could hear, “I’ve been thinking. You and Seth promised I would be kept informed in exchange for my help.”
“I’m keeping you informed. We’ve been kidnapped.”
“Not funny, Sam. I think you both knew this might happen.”
Hollis stayed silent a moment, then replied, “We suspected.”
“More than suspected, I think. Do you know that Seth didn’t want me to get on that flight?”
“No, I didn’t know that.” But that was very interesting, Hollis thought. He said, “No one ever promised to keep you informed, Lisa. Not in this business. I’m not fully informed, obviously.”
She nodded. “He… he was trying to tell me something, but I guess I wasn’t listening.”
“Nor were you telling me what he said.”
“Sorry.” She added, “He said you were a target and I should stay away from you.”
“But you came along anyway.”
“I love you, stupid.”
Marchenko piped in, “I hear whispers. No whispers. No secrets.”
Lisa ignored Marchenko and said to Hollis, “If I didn’t love you, I’d really be pissed at you.”
“I’ll make it up to you. Dinner?”
“At Claridge’s.”
“You got it.”
Marchenko said, “Dinner? Yes, we missed our lunch. I’m hungry.”
Hollis said to him, “You can live a month on your fat.”
Marchenko turned and looked at Hollis. “You will be eating rats to stay alive in the Gulag.”
“Go to hell.”
“That’s where we are going, my friend.”
Nearly three hours after they’d begun their flight, the helicopter began to descend. Hollis spotted the old Minsk road running along the Moskva River and noticed a dozen clusters of izbas, any one of which could have been Yablonya. Then, unexpectedly, he did spot Yablonya. He knew it was Yablonya because it was a stretch of black charred log cabins along a dirt road. Grey ash lay where kitchen gardens and haystacks once were. A bulldozer had dug a long slit in the black earth, and half the burned village had already been pushed into it. Hollis looked away from the window. To the list of scores to be settled — Fisher, Bill Brennan, and the three hundred American fliers — was now added the village of Yablonya.
About three minutes later, Hollis looked back out the window. They were at about five hundred feet now, and he saw the beginning of Borodino Field, the earthworks, monuments, then the museum. The pine forest came up, and the helicopter dropped more quickly. He saw the wire fence and the cleared area around it, then the helipad that Alevy had pointed out in the satellite photograph.
Lisa leaned over beside him and looked out the window. “Are we landing?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“At the Charm School.”
PART IV
Wherever your travels in the Soviet Union take you, consult our Guidebook, and you will find the addresses of the camps, jails, and psychiatric prisons in your area: Slaves are building Communism… Visit them!
31
“The Charm School,” Lisa said. “Mrs. Ivanova’s Charm School.”
“Yes.”
She spoke as if to herself. “The place Gregory Fisher mentioned, the place Major Dodson came from, where we went on the way to Mozhaisk…. We’re going to get a closer look at it now, aren’t we?”