Warshot

Three weeks ago he had seen her walking through Zhaolin Park by the river. Dressed in rags, she was shivering, her clothes lice-ridden, her Siberian fur boots tattered. Now the musky smell of her perfume which he’d brought her enveloped him, her lithe, silk-sheathed body exciting him in a reverie of expectation. Despite the darkness of the room here in the consulate annex, he could still see the outline of her breasts silhouetted clearly against the rime- covered window. Beneath all her outward sophistication, the finery he had provided for her, Latov couldn’t think of her as any more than a Siberian peasant, a Jewish peasant at that, and he was determined to get every kopek’s worth out of her. He tried again to slide his hand beneath the qi pao, feeling the warmth of her thigh. It made him feel young again. “I’ve been… busy,” he said lamely, his arousal making his voice dry and cracked.

She pushed his hand away again. It was the only power she had. But soon she knew she would have to yield if she was to get the papers she so desperately needed to get out of Harbin, to head north, back to the JAO near Khabarovsk. It was now, thank God, in control of the Americans, following their push of the Siberians back as far as Baikal before the cease-fire following the first U.N.-declared war since Iraq in 1991.

Latov moved closer to her. He wanted her on top of him, sitting on him, rocking slowly back and forth side to side — to watch her breasts sway above him until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He thought her by far the most beautiful woman he’d seen in months, or had he been away from Siberia too long — among the kosoglazy—the slant-eyed Chinese who, as far as he could remember, had been Siberia’s most hated enemy?

“Who were you busy with?” Alexsandra asked moodily, sitting up stiffly against the wall, pulling her wrap tightly about her, drawing her feet up like a petulant schoolgirl. Her black hair caught the glow of colored lights outside. The Siberian consulate overlooked Zhaolin Park, where the Chinese were having the annual ice lantern festival. The consulate had been asked to douse its lights to heighten the effect, the kaleidoscopic hues they could see through the frosted windows produced by the battery-fed light bulbs frozen inside the ice sculptures and from swinging lanterns at the edges of the park. “I saw you with her,” Alexsandra challenged Latov. “Walking in the park this afternoon.”

“Gospodi!” he said exasperatedly. “She’s my wife. What do you expect? That I should—”

Alexsandra swung her legs over the edge of the bed, reaching down for the heavy peasant fur boots she’d worn all the way on her escape from Lake Baikal, south then east, across the Mongolian-Chinese frontier and here to Harbin.

Latov reached out, took her shoulders, steadying her. “Look, if I refuse to go out with her, it would look suspicious. What do you expect?”

“Will little Ilya have to be home by eleven again?”

He ignored her baiting tone. In a way he liked it — he would enjoy hurting her even more. “The Chinese are giving one of their lunar new year parties,” he explained lamely, his hands slipping about her, pulling her around so that her back was to him. He kissed her neck, her hair. “She’s gone out with friends.”

Alexsandra could smell his breath: wine and stale cigar smoke. “Won’t you be missed?”

He felt his erection getting harder. “What do you want? First you’re mad that I’m with her — then, if it wasn’t for me, you’d still be wandering around in the park.”

“I want you to tell me the truth, Ilya. I don’t want anyone coming back — catching us here. You’re a bigwig — the new Siberian consul. Who am I?” She turned suddenly to him. “A Jewess, a refugee forced south by the war. What would happen to me?”

She remembered all too vividly what had happened to her in the Port Baikal jail after she had been arrested in Khabarovsk as being a member of the yevreyskie podpolie—the Jewish underground — and shipped west on the Trans-Siberian. Had it not been for the Allied commando attack on Lake Baikal’s southern township, during which a shell had blown open a wall of the jail, she and the other prisoners would never have escaped. She would still be there, having to endure more of the torture of the kind meted out by the OMONs — the Siberian Ministry of Interior’s Black Berets — some of them women who, in true OMON style, had gleefully crippled several American POWs by driving needle-thin wire through their genitals. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that the OMON thugs were no different from the KGB thugs who had raped her in the Baikal jail, that the new Siberian secret police were no better than the old Siberian KGB. Only the names had changed.

“She won’t come back early,” said Latov reassuringly, taking off his greatcoat, the sag of his belly revealed as the white bulge of his tuxedo. “They’ll all be too busy stuffing themselves with grilled bear paws and stewed moose nose. The Chinese are barbarians. They’ll eat anything — cow tendons, intestines—”

She laughed. “They think you’re the ones that are barbarians.”

He’d had enough of her teasing and suddenly released her, walked away from the bed and sat in a chair he dragged over from the corner of the room.

“Come here!” he ordered. Pulling her close to him, he felt her breasts pushing against him in the dark, her nipples hard in the cold of this caretaker’s annex that he used for what he grandly called their “rendezvous.” It was near freezing in the room. The Chinese didn’t believe in heat, and had it not been for the small Japanese kerosene radiator in the room, they would have frozen. He knew that outside, enjoying the lantern festival, the Chinese would be wandering contentedly up and down the park in the subzero temperatures, licking ice cream; the big revolution in dreary Harbin, one of the worst-polluted cities in Manchuria, being the advent of a new flavor — strawberry — an ideological victory over the traditional and trusted vanilla.

“Are you telling me the truth?” she asked softly, yielding a little more to him. “There’s no one — besides your wife?” She almost said, Another man perhaps? but that would be pushing him too far.

Even so, he uttered an oath under his breath, none of which she heard clearly, but nevertheless understood. It meant, what more do you want from me?

“I told you,” he said sharply. “I’ve been busy. The Chinks are calling up more troops from the southern provinces, sending them up over the Nanking Bridge — to our border. You must have seen them passing through. I tell you, it’s a logjam down there in Nanking. We’ve been trying to help them sort it out. All their other crossings over the Yangtze are flooded. Chinese have no idea of building approach roads or—”

“I don’t care about Chinese roads,” she said. “Just so long as you’re telling me the truth — that there’s no one else.” She pushed her thigh between his legs. “You promise!”

“I swear,” he said, at once impatient and gratified that she was so jealous. “I’ve been busy with Chink officials all day. Novosibirsk and Beijing don’t want any misunderstanding.”

She knew what he meant — the Chinese and Russians had fought sporadic but bitter battles for a hundred years over the Amur River, which the Chinese called the “Black Dragon.” The prize was the fertile river border areas around the northeasternmost corner of Manchuria, within the big hump formed by the river as it flowed eastward into the Sea of Okhotsk. Things had gotten so out of hand in the sixties that at one point soldiers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had dropped their trousers and mooned the Russians watching them across the river. Many on both sides had been killed during the resulting border clashes. But why the sudden rapprochement between ancient enemies?

“I just want you to spend more time with me,” she said, conciliatory, dropping now any suggestion that he might be fooling around with some other woman. She took his hand and placed it beneath her qipao, telling him flippantly that it was nice Novosibirsk had “kissed and made up” with the Chinese.

“We’ve not made up,” Ilya retorted angrily. “It’s convenient for Novosibirsk and Beijing to get on with one another just now.”

“Why?” she asked, giggling, putting his hand inside her panties.

“Because—” he said, gasping like a fish out of water, “if the cease-fire… if it doesn’t hold… Novosibirsk would want… Beijing… an ally.” He was babbling now.

“Here — let me do it,” she said, unzipping the qi pao herself. He was so clumsy. “You mean you’ve spent all night discussing that?” she said, laughing openly at him. “The Americans won’t break the cease-fire.”

He was angered by her laughter, but too excited to chastise her.

She reached out in the darkness, her hand unzipping him, squeezing it, tugging it toward her, smelling it. “Enough war talk,” she said softly. “I believe you. So long as you weren’t with some slut.”

He saw her shoulders visibly relax, her whole body, demeanor, softer, warmer now. Reaching frantically for