A look of discomfort crossed the young officer’s face.
Tarkington grinned broadly and seized the lieutenant’s hand. He pumped it heartily. “As I live and breathe.”
Jake Grafton recognized the name too. Lieutenant Dalworth had been assigned to the navy’s public relations staff in New York City when he somehow wound up on a television talk show panel discussing “women in the modern military.” After thirty minutes of weathering abuse from a prominent feminist fanatic who shared the panel with him, Dalworth lost his temper. His parting shot at her had been, “Oh, Spiro Agnew.”
Three days later someone told the female warrior that the former vice president’s name was an anagram for “grow a penis.”
She charged into the navy’s cubbyhole office in the Manhattan federal building with a television reporter and cameraman in tow and proceeded to assault Dalworth with an umbrella while she hurled invective. After she shouted herself out and departed, a stunned Dalworth told the reporter that the feminist had a brain like a prune and a body to match.
The episode was marvelous television.
Alas, Dalworth’s new status as a media celebrity interfered with his work and embarrassed the navy, still reeling from the 1991 Tailhook Convention scandal, so now he was a very junior naval attaché at the American embassy in Moscow, eight time zones away from the nearest militant feminist armed with a television camera and umbrella.
“That whole thing was almost eight months ago,” Dalworth muttered. “You’d think people would at least start to forget.” He was a rangy young man, several inches over six feet, with wide shoulders and bulging biceps. At some point in his athletic past his nose had been slightly rearranged, and the effect was a memorable face. Not handsome, but unique.
“What an honor, Spiro! I sure am pleased to meetcha,” Toad enthused. He playfully tapped Dalworth on the shoulder.
“Did you have a good flight?” Dalworth asked.
“Terrific. Filet mignon over the North Pole and all the free champagne we could drink.”
“The cold chicken box lunch, huh?”
“Yeah. You wonder what the air force does to the chicken to make it taste so bad.”
“Ever been to Moscow before?”
“Neither one of us,” Toad said.
“Sleepy?”
After a glance at Grafton, Toad told him, “Not too.”
“Drive you around the downtown a little before we go to Fort Apache.” Fort Apache, Jake knew, was the complex behind the embassy where the residents lived, a tag that came straight from the movie Fort Apache, The Bronx. “Give you the hundred-ruble tour.”
The endless rows of concrete apartment buildings were soon in view. Nine and a half million people, Jake knew, lived in Moscow, most of them stuffed into tiny apartments in these crumbling mausoleums. Yet on a sunny June day they didn’t look bad. Almost as if he could read Jake’s thoughts, Dalworth said, “Place looks a lot different in the winter. Then it’s the devil’s own refrigerator, gray and terminally dismal.”
Soon the car was bucketing down a broad boulevard toward the center of the city, a chip afloat in a stream of little sedans and huge trucks, all emitting a noxious miasma that stung the eyes and throat. “Bad pollution, about like Delhi, India. Sorta like Seoul without the kimchi.”
Dalworth piloted them into the center of the city. Soon they were circling the brick walls and onion-topped towers of the Kremlin. Jake’s eye was caught by the cars on the side of the road with their hoods up and people bending over the engines. Someone seemed to be broken down in every block.
Dalworth pointed out the naked pedestals where once statues stood. “See those? They even tore down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky in front of KGB Headquarters, presumably while the KGB types watched out the windows. Now I’ll show you my favorite place in Moscow. I found this the other day when I was out walking.”
After three more stoplights, he turned and crossed the Moskva River and went down one of the side streets. In one of the river channels a cruise ship sat listing in the mud, gutted and abandoned. Ahead across the sidewalk was a park. A dirt road for park maintenance vehicles was blocked by steel crowd-control railings. Dalworth drove the car onto the sidewalk, stopped, then got out and moved the railings. He pulled the car through, then replaced them. The park was young trees and grass, but the grass was half weeds and hadn’t been mowed. Here and there women with strollers sat taking the sun. After Dalworth drove about a hundred yards, he pulled the car to a stop.
Just to the left, surrounded on three sides by more haphazardly placed crowd-control railings, stood three huge bronze statues amid the dandelions and grass. A smaller marble statue lay on its side in front of the others. Behind them half-hidden by the foliage of the trees one could glimpse rows of apartments.
“This is where they dumped some of the statues,” Dalworth explained. He parked the car and the three men got out.
Jake Grafton ran his hands over the marble defaced with swatches of paint. The lower portion of the statue was broken off and lying in the grass. He moved to the head and stared down into the paint-daubed face of Josef Stalin.
“Who are these others?”
The standing bronzes were three or four times life size. “They look to me to be three likenesses of the same guy, Admiral,” Dalworth said. “Dzerzhinsky, I think, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe Lenin with hair. For sure he was some big Commie mucky-muck that they were tired of looking at and hearing about. He looks sort of like a slavic Thomas Jefferson, doesn’t he?”
“More like Jefferson Davis,” Jake Grafton murmured, and looked around. “What’s that over there?” He pointed at a huge gray concrete structure three or four stories high a hundred yards away, beside the river. The parking lots were empty, and even from this distance he could see the building was shabby, the facade crumbling.
“Some kind of cultural thing. Just beyond it across that boulevard is the entrance to Gorky Park. See that huge gate?”
“Umm.”
Jake Grafton turned back to Stalin. He ran his hands over the marble and looked again into the stone eyes.
“ ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’ ” Toad Tarkington said.
Lieutenant Spiro Dalworth was more down-to-earth. “Be fun to have one of these out in the backyard, wouldn’t it? To piss on whenever you felt in the mood.”
U.S. Ambassador Owen Lancaster was not a career diplomat— rather he was one of those political insiders who had been repeatedly appointed to key embassies by both Democratic and Republican administrations. His political affiliation was a subject that never seemed to get mentioned by anyone, even the press. In short, he was The Establishment from fingertips to toenails.
And he looked it, Jake Grafton concluded. Tall, lean, patrician and impeccably turned out in a tailor-made wool suit and a handmade silk tie, Owen Lancaster looked exactly like central casting’s idea of an heir to a nineteenth-century Yankee merchant’s fortune, which he was. It seemed as if this room in Spaso House were designed around him: the lighting, color scheme, expensive furniture and carpeting — the room was an exquisite tribute to the interior designer’s art. God would have a living room like this if He had the money.
In a chair to the left of the ambassador sat one of the career diplomats, a woman in her mid to late thirties — maybe early forties — it was hard to tell. She wore modest, expensive clothes and no makeup that Jake could see. Her name was Ms. Agatha Hempstead, with the emphasis on the Ms. She hadn’t yet opened her mouth but Jake Grafton already suspected that she was three or four notches smarter than Old Money Lancaster.