censorship after the early perestroika spring of press freedom was recited by Lvov in perfectly dated sequence and outcome, each arrest, suspicious death and unquestionable murder of investigative journalists dated and itemized. The “rasping keys to journalistic shackles” was a familiar sound in every newspaper office in the land, a chorus to the cracked songs of a communism desperately trying to regain its former tyranny and to enslave its people as it had once done, but must never be allowed to do again. There should not just be a media strike until Svetlana Modin was freed. Every industry and shop and workplace should stop, immediately, until she was released from illegal arrest and detention. And all those who had tasted the brief democratic freedom piece by piece, inch by inch, being daily taken away from them should show their determination that it stop, never to be imposed again, by registering their vote for him.
Lvov’s exit was as triumphal and swift as his entry, trailed by the majority of people in the hall, all attempts at a formal press conference abandoned. Charlie allowed himself to be carried along, unresisting, in the exodus. He did not detach himself until he was well outside, isolating David Halliday on the periphery of the watching crowd and then, nearby, saw first Paula-Jane Venables and just beyond her, Bill Bundy: none gave any sign of recognition but Halliday said, “You know what the stupid bastards of a government did! They were taken so completely by surprise they didn’t jam the already set-up television satellite feeds, worldwide. The next, absolutely guaranteed leader of the Russian Federation has just delivered his winning presidential address to a global audience of five billion people.” The man smiled directly at Charlie. “And at the same time, you, Charlie, got let completely off the hook.”
Charlie thought a further comment of Halliday’s-that Lvov’s protest matched that of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 being carried to presidential victory after boarding a government tank threatening the Russian White House-to be an exaggeration until he learned that the seat of the elected Russian parliament was the destination of the continuing peoples-power protest. And it didn’t stop there but meshed together with the stage managed continuity of a Hollywood blockbuster. From the White House, order-imposing stewards now quite clearly in evidence, the march proceeded in perfect coordination to Vagankov Cemetery at which Pavel’s wife, three daughters, and a small group of officers-not one in militia uniform-were gathered for the funeral of Sergei Romanovich Pavel. The crowd control was absolute, Lvov and his wife and just four others-with Charlie tagging himself on until he separated to join a suddenly emerged Mikhail Guzov. None of the huge, no longer banner-waving crowd attempted to enter the cemetery, instead completely encircling it in silent, respectful solemnity, creating for the banked cameras a burial tableau at the center of which stood Lvov, now as silent as his followers, his wife with one supporting arm around the sobbing widow, the other stretched out in comfort to the children.
The politician’s total hijack of the day-and the government’s equally total ineptitude-was completed with the release of Svetlana Modin just two hours before ORT’s main evening broadcast. Stepan Lvov and the attentive wife, not a hair misplaced or an ugly crease marking the virginal white suit, were waiting with their inevitable crowd outside the finally identified militia detention center to receive her. Svetlana, carefully crumpled, disheveled, and dirt-smeared as befitted someone presumed to have been incarcerated in a dank and filthy cell, disdainfully and on camera waved away an approaching makeup girl to remain as she was for a live broadcast, which completely filled the transmission slot. She used an impromptu interview with Lvov to hint heavily-but not positively to claim- interrogation under physical and sexually threatened torture and picked up like the accomplished performer she was on Lvov’s repeated diatribe against official media censorship, intimidation, violence, and murder.
To approving roars and applause from the crowd threatening to drown out her words, Svetlana concluded, “I resisted it all, refused it all, and did not break. They learned nothing from me, nor will they, apart from the truth.”
There were matching shouts and applause in the packed Savoy bar, in which Charlie and Halliday watched her release. Halliday said, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ like that before in your entire life and you never will again.”
“You’re probably very right,” accepted Charlie.
“It certainly took the focus-and any threat-off you,” remarked Halliday.
For how long? wondered Charlie.
25
Charlie began his day tensed against the immediate setback of Mikhail Guzov personally responding to his Petrovka phone when he called from the bug-monitored Savoy suite, relieved there was no reply. He told the duty officer who answered that Guzov could reach him at the embassy about the rearranged conference, and quit the suite at once. He used the stairs instead of the elevator and took the side corridor to the baroque dining room and its conveniently separate entrance and exit without needing to go through the central lobby and its main door. As he knew from his previous three days’ reconnaissance, there were no cars in the outside slip road and only a few disinterested people. He got a taxi at the corner and gave the driver a destination that took them through side streets until the Precistenka turn to go south in the opposite direction from the Arbat, to follow the gradual loop north again. Charlie divided his attention between his deadline and the following vehicles: upon such a crowded, multilaned highway it was impossible ever to be absolutely certain but Charlie remained reasonably confident there was no pursuit. He waited until they climbed as far as the Kurskaya Okalovskaja Metro sign. At the last moment, double fare ready and the door ajar, he ordered the stop for his hurried dash to the Metro escalator. He was fortunate with an Arbat-bound train coming into the platform as he reached it, but traveled only one stop on the fifth line to switch south as far as Kitay-Gorod, where he disembarked to return northwest on the sixth line as far as Tverskaya Puskinskaya for the final line change and the Arbat. It was exactly five minutes to ten.
Charlie had preferred the Arbat as the flea market it had been when he’d first known it, not the hybrid now of doubtful antique galleries, Western designer shops, Russian bric-a-brac and icon stalls, artist-attended-and eagerly selling-exhibitions and tourist-trap outlets. And most definitely not the soccer-crowd volume of people from which to stage the perfect assassination. As he stepped out into the throng his apprehension began to tighten like a spring, his skin reacting into something like an itch at the jostling, inevitable physical contact, the irritation so immediate and intense he had to feel out, to scratch his arms and shoulders.
He moved as instructed, the wandering pick-up-and-put-down loiterer, unsure after so much and so many public interferences-and not one single confirming telephone approach since the rendezvous was arranged-if his was not an entirely pointless performance to a nonexistent audience. He guessed the crowd at this particular midpoint was as dense as that at Lvov’s demonstration and even more difficult to be part of: the previous day, those demonstrators had all moved in one direction but now there was a constant ebb and flow of people struggling every which way. To get himself out of the crush Charlie frequently detached himself from the main, outside stream and went off the stall-cluttered road into some of the more established and permanent shops and boutiques, constantly checking the time either from his own watch or available clocks.
At 10:35, he finally allowed himself the thought of his other rendezvous. Natalia had said it would take her an hour to get from her flat to McDonald’s. Which only gave him thirty-five minutes to be at one of the two public telephones he’d already isolated to warn her of his inability to keep their meeting if there hadn’t been a personal approach from the hoarse-voiced woman. But Natalia had told him she’d be going to the fast-food restaurant anyway. And it would only take him thirty minutes, less even, to get there from the Arbat.
He was being stupid, unprofessional, Charlie accused himself. What if the woman in whom he’d put every hope of survival
Natalia and Sasha had to be a secondary consideration. No! Charlie refused at once. Not relegated to second place: put in their
Their meeting had to be postponed. Maybe only put off for a day: freed from the noon deadline he could remain in the Arbat for the rest of the day and if there was no approach he’d know the episode had been a hoax or a crank or that the woman had been frightened away.
