There was nothing to be done about it, of course. The officers surrounding her distinctly outranked him. But, even had she been sitting alone, he would not have had the nerve to approach her. He had a fistful of excuses. Despite the detachment's general disregard for the rules, they were not supposed to be fraternizing with the locals. Besides, any of the girls could be KGB. And venereal disease was rumored to be epidemic in the city. Anyway, he had nothing to offer her. He could be gone at any moment. And he had far too much work to do. He had to hold himself in readiness.
He had never been much good at coming on to women. His friends could never understand him. Christ, an old friend had said to him, if I had your looks, my dick would be worn down to a nub. The women with whom he had swapped bits of life had almost invariably initiated things, like Jennifer waiting for him in the hallway outside of the computer science classroom. In one of her better moods, on one of their better days, she had told him, you just don't realize what a doll you are. Then she had divorced him.
Now there was no one at his side, and nothing in front of him but the dregs of a beer and another Moscow night of listening to the asthmatic plumbing and the escapades of his neighbors. So he sat a little longer, indulging himself in a fantasy about this woman with whom he knew he would never exchange a single word, imagining a life for her, the steps that had forced her to squander herself on the blustering drunks at her table.
He pictured her standing in line to buy rags of meat. The lines in the streets had grown so long that they seemed almost to meet themselves, to join until there was no beginning and no end, waiting for the opening of some rumored shop that did not even exist. Driving together through the streets, his Soviet counterpart had been unconcerned.
"The people of Russia," Savitsky said, "have always waited."
The wrong woman, Ryder thought, and the wrong country too.
He was just about to force himself away from the bar and his reverie, when the lieutenant colonel, who had the woman boxed in, noisily excused himself and weaved off toward the men’s room. Ryder instinctively glanced at the spot in the mirror where his eyes had caught her stare, and he saw that she, too, was excusing herself now. He suddenly felt sick to his stomach, thinking that she was about to follow the lieutenant colonel, realizing that he was headed not to the men’s room but up the hotel’s back stairs.
The woman surprised him. She did not follow the man to whom Ryder’s imagination had condemned her. Instead, she boldly met his eyes in the mirror once again and marched straight toward the bar. He lost the courage of his fantasies now. He broke the stare and huddled closer to his empty glass.
He sensed her coming up beside him. He stared nervously at the bartender's paunch as the man lolled it over a sink. Sergey, the hard-currency-holder's friend.
A hand, unmistakably feminine, touched lightly at his shoulder.
"This seat is occupied?" the woman asked. He did not have to look back into the mirror, or to turn. He knew it was her. He knew her voice with a certainty built on concrete and steel, even though he had heard only a faint, half-imagined laugh across a crowded room.
"No," he stammered, turning at last. "Please. Please, sit down."
KGB. Of course. She had to be. Otherwise, there was no reasonable explanation for it.
"How do you do?" she asked, and it was only then that he realized that she was speaking to him in English. Her voice was careful, the intonation studiedly flat, as though she were not quite sure of the words. But, as he looked at her closely for the first time he could not imagine why she should ever be afraid of anything.
Often, when you came close to Russian women, their skin proved unexpectedly bad, or the sudden foulness of their teeth shocked you. But this woman had a clear, perfect complexion. Pale, though. Almost as though she had been a little ill. Her teeth were small and even, behind lips that were, perhaps, just slightly too heavy. The close smell of her was just rich enough to tease him.
"I'm fine," he said automatically. "How are you?"
The woman sat down beside him, her body flowing in smooth elastic lines beneath her dress. Too thin a fabric for the Moscow autumn, washed almost to nothing. She, too, appeared too frail for the world in which she lived. But this was a country where even the beauties did not eat terribly well.
"I am very well tonight, thank you," the woman said. "Do you have a cigarette?"
"I don't smoke," Ryder said, instantly regretting that he did not.
The woman's eyes took on an uncertain look.
"Wait," Ryder said. "Hang on a minute." He reluctantly turned his face away from her, as if afraid she might disappear at this momentary inattention. "Sergey?" he called down the bar.
The bartender, who professed that he really loved Americans, that he loved Americans best of any of his distinguished customers, and why weren't there more Americans? moved down behind his barricade of polished wood.
"Please, mister?"
"A pack of cigarettes," Ryder told him, adding "Marlboros," at the sudden recollection that he had seen that one Western brand passing above the counter.
"This is not necessary from you," the woman said, her words devoid of conviction.
"No trouble," Ryder said, drawing dollars from his wallet. "By the way, my name's Jeff."
The woman looked at him. Dark brown eyes only enriched by the dark circles beneath them. Eyes, Ryder thought lightheartedly, that men would die for.
"I am Valentina," the woman pronounced slowly. "But I am called Valya. It is my shortened name, you see."
"Valya," Ryder repeated. "That's a very nice name." He was conscious of the inanity of his words. But he could not think of anything clever, and he feared a silence that might drive her away.
The bartender delivered the cigarettes.
"Marlboros all right?" Ryder asked the woman.
"Oh, yes. Very good." The woman seemed slightly nervous, although Ryder could not imagine how anyone so attractive, so graced by God, could be nervous in such a situation. He could not even believe that she was here. How could the men of this country have allowed her to slip through their grasp?
He thought again that she must be KGB. But he did not want to believe it.
She looked a bit hardened up close. But, in a way he could not explain, this slight defect only made her more attractive. He guessed that she was in her late twenties, approximately his age.
Striking, he thought. Not beautiful. Striking.
He fumbled to open the pack of cigarettes for her, unfamiliar with the task. Finally, relieved, he extended the open pack toward her, then he lit the cigarette for her, using the action as an excuse to close slightly on her, to get the near sense of her, to smell the mixture of womanly body and discount-shop perfume.
"Thank you," she said. "You are very kind, Jeff." She, too, pronounced it "Cheff." A word she had not practiced. "You speak English very well."
"I am a teacher. Of the children. I think that children are very wonderful. I am their teacher for the English language, which I love. It is very interesting."
Ryder struggled to find something to say, desperately afraid that she would abandon him at each next moment. He drained the very last of his beer.
"Can I get you a drink? What are you drinking?"
"That is very nice. But it is not necessary. I will have a Pepsi-Cola, with whiskey, please."
Ryder ordered. And another beer.
His language account went bankrupt again. The woman puffed at her cigarette, then tilted her head back in a display of her long white throat and thick, tumbling hair. She wore a schoolgirl's heart pendant that showed bright as blood against her skin. She blew out the smoke, and the action seemed oddly exotic to Ryder, something out of a very old film. No attractive woman in the States would be caught dead with a cigarette in her mouth anymore.