Piotr looked awkward. It had suddenly become common knowledge that Karamatsov and Natalia were married, a fact Karamatsov had concealed for years, and the looks of awkwardness in the eyes of those who knew them, however casually, were something he was becoming accustomed to.
Natalia said nothing. Piotr moved between them and stepped out, saluting as Karamatsov waved him away. The door closed behind Karamatsov’s hand as he leaned against it. Natalia was still staring at the floor; he could not see her eyes.
“You are radiant tonight. You are radiant every night, but you know that,” he whispered hoarsely. Stepping away from the door, he stripped the black leather gloves from his hands and set them along with his hat and dispatch case on the small leather-covered table by the door. He slipped off the greatcoat and draped it across a French provincial chair beside the table.
“A drink, please?” he asked.
She said nothing, but moved away. Because of the flowing quality of the lace-trimmed floor length robe she wore, it seemed she floated to the kitchen rather than walked, he thought.
He unbuttoned his uniform tunic and removed it, dropping it on the side of a sofa as he stepped down three steps into the living room. He undid the top buttons of his white shirt, automatically checking the tiny S
He turned, seeing Natalia re-enter from the kitchen with a tray containing a bottle of vodka and a glass.
“The ever dutiful wife,” he remarked as she passed him and bent over a low coffee table to set down the bottle and glass. “You aren’t drinking?” “I don’t feel like it, Vladmir,” she said quietly.
His hands held her shoulders and he snapped her around to him. Her dark hair fell across her forehead as her head bent back, tossing the hair from her face showing her slender white neck. His right hand moved to her throat and tightened around it.
“You’re hurting me.”
Karamatsov laughed. “You are a martial arts expert; why don’t you stop me?” he asked, then let go of her neck, bent down and poured a glass of vodka for himself and downed half the tumbler. He looked at her. “I want you to have a drink.” He knotted the fingers of his right hand in the hair at the nape of her neck and bent her head back, arching her back. Her mouth contorted downward. Karamatsov raised the glass to her mouth, forced its rim between her lips, and poured the vodka from the glass, some of the liquid dribbling down the sides of her mouth. He let go of her hair as she started to cough, choking on the vodka.
Her head bent low over her knees, one hand held her hair from her face as she sat perched on the edge of the sofa.
He bent down, staring at her. “Did you drink with Rourke, Natalia? Do you like American whiskey better than Russian vodka?” He half stood, poured another glass of the vodka for himself, studied the clear liquid for an instant. He suddenly raked the back of his right hand downward, his knuckles connecting against the miraculously perfect right cheek of the seated woman in front of him. The force of his hand knocked her from the edge of the couch onto the floor.
“I did not cheat on you with Rourke. He wouldn’t,” she said, staring up at Karamatsov from the floor.
Karamatsov dropped to his knees, spilling half the vodka from his glass, wetting the front of his shirt and pants. His face inches from hers, he rasped, “But you wanted to!” His right fist lashed out, and her left cheekbone suddenly lost its perfection as well.
Chapter 6
Varakov stared at the skeletons of the mastodons in the main hall. In the weeks since Soviet Military Headquarters for North America had been set up in the former lake-front museum, General Varakov had grown exceedingly fond of watching the two extinct giants. And sometimes when he looked at them, he thought, an amused smile crossing his florid thick lips, instead of mastodons he saw the skeletons of a bear and an eagle locked in mortal combat eons after their disappearance from the earth. He looked up through the windows over the far door. There was darkness.
Gen. Ishmael Varakov had always liked the dark; it was peaceful, yet full of things to come.
“Comrade General?”
Varakov turned from the railing overlooking the main gallery and smiled at his young woman secretary. “They are here?” “Yes, Comrade General.”
He shrugged, looked at his unbuttoned uniform tunic, then left it unbuttoned, reminding himself he was the commanding general and there was no one for thousands of miles who had the power to tell him to button it. “Go tell them I’ll be there.” He turned to look back at the mastodons once more. If nothing else positive had come out of the war, he thought, it was seeing this place. When he had served as an advisor once in Egypt, he had never seen such treasures of the past as were there. He had never appreciated the beauty and complexity—yet at once simplicity— of the evolution of nature as he had from what he had seen here. He wandered the halls incessantly. He had at last found a home he liked, he thought, smiling. Then out loud he added, “Here among the rest of the anomalies of antiquity.” He smacked his lips, turned from the railing, and started toward the low, winding steps leading to the main floor and the meeting.
He shuffled on his sore feet past a bronze of a stone age man, another of a Malaysian woman, and another of a bushman armed with a blowgun. He turned right toward his wall-less office just off the main hall. An office without walls was the best kind, he thought with a smile. They were all there, the ranking general and field-grade officers of his command, sitting in a neat semicircle facing his empty desk. He stopped and watched them, shook his head, and stared at his feet, then smiling, walked ahead, rumbling, “There is no need to disturb yourselves, gentlemen. Please remain seated.” He crossed past the semicircle of men on the edges of their seats, rounded the corner of his desk and plopped into his chair. He leaned forward across the leather desk top, then pushed off his shoes, his white stockinged toes splaying against the carpet under them.
“We all are aware,” he began, looking at no one in particular, “that the complete military occupation of the United States is impossible at this point in time. Those fragmented units of American, British, and West German troops and others are still making life in Europe miserable for our forces. China is holding its borders and we are holding ours—a land war with China, gentlemen, would be madness. I am convinced we would never have occupied this land if it weren’t for the fact that we need the industrial output possible from the still-standing factories— weapons, small arms, tanks, food, chemicals. And this—” and he hammered his fist on the desk top— “is our primary mission in the United States. I emphasize this because many reports have come to me that it seems
