“Wait a second, are you saying some commie in the cabinet committed suicide because he was caught selling golden eggs, not because of the failed coup?”
She looked at me with some tenderness. “You’re getting warmer.”
Of course I was. Sweat was running down my face and dripping onto my chest. “The coup! You’re telling me these guys tried to grab control because Gorbachev found out they were on the take. He was going to have their heads, so they had to take power and cover it up.”
She smiled conspiratorially, and my mind kept racing. I stood up and paced, two steps one way, two steps the other. I kept banging into the hot walls. “But the hard-liners are gone. Gorbachev is gone. The republics are free. The CIA operation should be over.”
She shook her head and sweat dripped from her chin. “But it is not. It is no longer a surgical operation to discredit certain hard-liners. Now Foley and Yagamata aren’t interested in just bringing out a few paintings and icons. They want it all. They have discovered how easy it is to steal, and they just can’t stop. They already know how to bribe the lower functionaries, who are still there, and they don’t need the higher-ups anymore. Even if the leaders of the republics know what’s going on, they are powerless to stop it. They must cover it up because they are responsible now, and what’s happening is so big and their governments so fragile, it could topple them. That’s why Nikki and Vlad wanted to blow the whistle. They can’t let Yagamata and Foley rape their country, steal the legacy of the Russian people, and redistribute it to millionaires in the West. There has never been a burglary, as you put it, on this scale before.”
She tossed the vaihtaa onto the floor.
I thought I saw a shadow pass by the small window. When I looked up, it was gone. The clouds had scudded away, and pearly moonlight streamed through the window. “Why did you get involved?”
“Just like Nikki, I was fooled in the beginning. I had no idea of the scope of the operation. Now, everything is out of control. It will come out, the thefts, the deception. There is a proverb: ‘In Russia, everything is a secret, but nothing is a mystery.’ The people are used to official corruption, but nothing like this. Selling their birthright, disowning the motherland, treason at the highest levels, the continued pillaging under the reformers. The Russians take such pride in their art, even when their cupboards are bare. When this story breaks, with the new freedom of the press and expression in the Soviet Union, what do you think will happen?”
“People will be pissed,” I guessed.
“Complete anarchy. Maybe not if everything else was stable. But it will be fueled by the economic crisis, by the reality that democratic reforms do not make life luxurious, that a change of government does not automatically eradicate corruption. There will be violence. The army will attempt to crack down, but it will not work. My father estimates desertions will run between thirty and forty percent. The borders will be opened, and the cork will be out of the bottle. Fifty percent of the population will try to flee to the west, untold numbers into Finland. Moscow itself is less than eight hundred kilometers from Helsinki. Imagine the consequences. Millions of impoverished Russians will overwhelm us. Many will want to travel to the U.S. or Israel or who knows where. But they will have no money, no prospects. The first ports of call will be the last for so many. Finland is a small country. Only five million people, fewer than in the city of St. Petersburg. Already, with the easing of the visa laws, we have criminals coming from Estonia. They smuggle everything from vodka to Kalashnikovs on the black market. Estonian prostitutes fill our streets on the weekends. But that is nothing compared to what is coming. We will drown in the dregs from the east.”
She stood up, and rivulets of sweat trickled between her breasts and down over her flat stomach. Outside the window, the bay again had turned to a black silk sheet, clouds covering the moon, before flitting by, leaving the calm water drenched in ivory light. It was impossible to determine the time. Sometime between midnight and dawn. I was exhausted from the tension of the last forty-eight hours, from the scorching heat, from the growing knowledge that this was more complex than anything I had imagined. I leaned back against the wooden wall of the sauna, closed my eyes, and let my mind wander.
I remembered a lazy night in a Boston Whaler, anchored beneath one of the bridges in the Keys, drinking bourbon and fishing all night with Charlie Riggs. Just before five A.M., the eastern horizon lit up with what I thought was a new day.
“Sun rises early down here,” I had told Charlie.
He laughed. “Just zodiacal light, my boy.”
“Huh?”
Charlie bet me twenty bucks it would be pitch black again before the sun came up. Of course, I took him on, and a few minutes later, it was so dark I couldn’t see if I was handing him Andrew Jackson or Ben Franklin.
“False dawn,” Charlie said, pocketing the money.
“Say what?”
“The orange glow you saw to the east. Particles of meteors reflecting the light of the sun that hasn’t risen yet. It’s called false dawn.”
Charlie said some more about the gegenschein, or counter-glow, and something about the F-corona of the sun, but I forget it now. What I remember is Charlie spouting one of his Latin expressions, something about non teneas aurwn something-or-other, which he translated as “all that glitters is not gold.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” I asked him.
“The first light is not always the dawn, Jake. Often it’s the reflection of something not really there at all.”
I stood and left an outline of sweat on the bench. “You’re not going to get any sympathy from me for the plight of your country in all of this. You’re part of it, you’re responsible-”
“Until today. I gave Kharchenko a letter to take to Yagamata. It’s my resignation.”
“Your what?”
“You heard me. As you Americans say, ‘I quit.’”
“Look, I don’t know anything about this, but it doesn’t sound to me like you’ve got a Civil Service job that you can just-”
“It is a concern, surely, especially in view of what happened to Vlad. I know far too much. But Yagamata understands that my family is too highly placed to attempt anything that could risk his operation. Yagamata is a cautious man and a brilliant one. I am counting on that. As for Kharchenko, he is actually quite fond of me. He asked me to accompany him to the ballet tomorrow night.”
Kharchenko at the ballet? It didn’t quite compute. Eva-Lisa seemed to be reading my mind. “Like most Russians, Kharchenko loves his culture,” she said.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t make him civilized. Maybe it’s my imagination, but you seem as if you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re not in danger.”
She shrugged her naked shoulders. She looked so vulnerable, standing with arms folded beneath her full breasts, slick with sweat. I took a step toward her, the floorboards squeaking under my feet. I put my arms around her, and she closed her eyes and rested her head on my chest. The floorboards squeaked again, which was strange because neither of us was moving. She cocked her head toward the door, eyes open and suddenly fearful. I started to ask something when the door burst open, a blast of light behind a bulky figure, framing him in silhouette.
I pivoted instinctively and went for him, ducking below a raised arm and slamming a shoulder into his chest. It drove him into the wall, which shuddered, and we stood there, jammed against each other. He snarled something guttural I didn’t understand, and I looked him straight in the eye.
Kharchenko.
He got a hand under my chin, and shoved me off. I collided with Eva-Lisa, who lost her footing on the sweat- soaked floor and slipped to one knee, crying out in pain or surprise, I couldn’t tell which. I was just getting my feet planted, ready to throw a punch, when I saw the hatchet.
In the incandescent glow of the reflected moonlight and orange flames, the blade glinted with lustrous sparks. It moved in a downward arc toward my head. I dodged to the left, and it missed. I thought of Vladimir Smorodinsky playing tag with a grappling hook. Before Kharchenko could bring the hatchet up again, I came at him, shoulders square, knees pumping, ready to wrap him up and bring him down. I was never fast, but my form was always right out of the diagram. It should have been an easy tackle. The sauna was the size of a condo closet. There was nowhere for him to go, but he slipped to the side, turning gracefully as I charged. I still had a chance, one of my arms catching him by the shoulder. But I had no leverage, and my hand was slick with sweat, so I went past him, my shin banging the bench as I crashed into the wall headfirst.
