He snorted. “I’m gonna ditch you and run off with ol’ Lizzie Thorn. Won’t be nothing here tonight when you get home except my dirty underwear and busted tennis racket.”
She stretched on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “See you this evening, lover.”
The numbers…the numbers appalled him, shocked him, mesmerized him. He wrote them on the back of an old envelope that he used as a bookmark. The stupendous, incomprehensible quantity of human misery represented by the numbers numbed him, made it impossible to pick up the book again and continue reading.
Jake Grafton stared out the window at the swaying trees in the yard without seeing them, played with his mechanical pencil, ran his fingers yet again through his thinning hair.
And he looked again at the envelope. Fifteen million Russians died fighting the Germans during World War I. Fifteen million! Dead! No wonder the nation came apart at the seams. No wonder they dragged the czar from his palace and put him and his family against the wall. Fifteen million!
The new republic was doomed. The Bolsheviks plunged the land into a five-year civil war, a hell of violence, famine and disease that cost another fifteen million lives. Another fifteen million!
Then came Josef Stalin and the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture. Here the number was nebulous, an educated guess. One historian estimated six million families were murdered or starved to death — another believed at least ten million men, women, and children perished; young and old, vigorous and infirm, those struggling to live and those waiting to die. The Red Army had gone through thousands of square miles robbing the peasants of every crumb, every animal, every potato and cabbage and edible kernel, then sealed the districts and waited for every last human to starve.
Ten million! A conservative estimate, Jake thought.
Then came the purges. Under Josef Stalin — and they had called the fourth Ivan “the Terrible!”—Soviet citizens were worked as slave labor until they died or were shot in wholesale lots because they might not be loyal to their Communist masters. The secret police murder squads had quotas. And they filled them. Through the use of show trials and extorted confessions, the soul-numbing terror was injected into every nook and cranny of Soviet life. Citizens in all walks of life denounced one another in a paranoid hysteria that fed on human sacrifice. Those who survived the horror had a word for it: liquidation.
Over twenty million human beings were liquidated, possibly as many as forty million. Only God knew the real number and He had kept the secret.
World War II — the raging furnace of war, famine and disease consumed another twenty-five million Soviet citizens. Twenty-five million!
The numbers totaled eighty-five million minimum. Jake Grafton added the numbers three times. It was too much. The human mind could not grasp the significance of the numerals on the back of the tattered envelope.
Eighty-five million human lives.
It was like trying to comprehend how many stars were in a galaxy, how many galaxies were in the universe.
“Jake?” His wife stood in the doorway. “Amy and I are going to the Crystal City mall. Won’t you come with us?”
He stared at her. She was of medium height, with traces of gray in her dark hair. She had her purse in her hand.
“The mall…”
“Amy wants to drive.” The youngster had just received her learner’s permit and was now driving the family car, but only when Jake was in the front seat with her. Callie had announced that her nerves were not up to that challenge and refused the honor.
Jake Grafton rose to his feet and glanced out the window. Outside the sun shone weakly from a high, hazy sky. On this June Saturday all over America baseball games were in progress, people were riding bicycles, shopping, buying groceries, mowing yards, enjoying the balmy temperatures of June and contemplating the prospect of the whole summer ahead.
The envelope and its numbers seemed as far away from this reality as casualty figures from the Spanish Inquisition.
“Okay,” Jake Grafton told his wife.
He eyed the envelope one last time, then slid it between the pages of the book. With the book closed the numbers were hidden; only the top half inch of the envelope was visible.
Eighty-five million people.
But they were all long dead, as dead as the pharaohs. The earth soaked up their tears and blood and recycled their corpses. Only the numbers survived.
He turned off the light as he left the room.
Toad Tarkington called after the Graftons returned from the mall. Callie invited him to dinner. Five minutes later she answered the phone again.
“Jack Yocke, Mrs. Grafton. I’m leaving for an overseas assignment on Monday and I wondered if I could stop by and chat with your husband this evening.”
“Why don’t you come to dinner, Jack? Around six-thirty.”
“I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
Callie was amused. She enjoyed entertaining, and Jack Yocke, a reporter for the Washington Post, was a frequent guest. Jake habitually avoided reporters, but Yocke had become a family friend through an unusual set of circumstances. And he had never yet turned down a dinner invitation. Friends or not, he had the most important commodity in Washington — access — and he knew precisely what that was worth. Callie undoubtedly knew too, Yocke thought: she was perfectly capable of slamming the door in his face if she ever thought he had taken advantage of her hospitality.
“No trouble, Jack,” she told him now. “Where are you going?”
“Moscow! It’s my first overseas assignment.” The enthusiasm in his voice was tangible.
Callie stifled a laugh. Yocke had been maneuvering desperately for two years to get an overseas assignment. Other than a short jaunt to Cuba, he had spent most of his five years at the Post on the metro beat covering police and local politics. “Good things come to those who wait,” she told him.
“Actually,” Yocke said, lowering his voice conspiratorially, “I got the nod because our number two man over there had a family emergency and had to come home. My biggest asset is that I’m single.”
“And you’ve been asking for an overseas assignment.”
“Begging might be a better word.”
“Moscow? He’s going to Moscow?” Jake Grafton repeated when his wife went into the study to give him the news.
Callie nodded. “Moscow. It’s dangerous over there, I know, but this is a big break for him professionally.” She left the room to see about dinner.
“He’ll certainly have plenty to write about,” Jake Grafton remarked to himself as he surveyed the piles of books, newspapers and magazines strewn over the desk and credenza.
He was reading everything he could lay hands on these days about the Soviet Union, the superpower that had collapsed less than two years ago and was now racked by turmoil. Like a ramshackle old house that had withstood the winds and storms long past its time, the Communist empire fell suddenly, imploded, shattered like old crystal, all in a heap. Now ethnic feuds, runaway inflation, famine and a gradual disintegration of the social order were fueling the expanding flames.
“Plenty,” Grafton muttered listlessly.
Yocke’s enthusiasm for his new adventure set the tone at dinner. Almost thirty, tall and lean, he regarded his new assignment as a great challenge. “I can’t stand to go into that District Building one more time. This is my chance to get out of metro once and for all.”
His chance to get famous, Jake Grafton thought, but he didn’t say it. The young reporter oozed ambition, and the admiral didn’t hold that against him. Ambition seemed to be one of the essential ingredients to a life of great accomplishments. Lincoln had it, and Churchill, Roosevelt…Hitler. Josef Stalin.