“This is not funny, goddamn it, Alek. First she lies to me, and then she insults my intelligence. What happened to the ‘we’re all family and have no secrets’ bullshit?”
“A moment ago, Friend Charley, you owed her an apology. Now you owe us both one.”
“How?”
“First that I consider you family is not bullshit. You have wounded me by thinking that.”
“And?”
“What did you do, Charley, divide a quarter of a million dollars by the number of small accounts to come up with eight thousand dollars in each?”
“That’s exactly what I did.”
“I think what Svetlana was trying to tell you is that there’s about a quarter of a million in each of those accounts.”
As one part of his brain began to suspect that he had just made an ass of himself, another part did the math.
“Christ, that’s almost eight million dollars,” he said. “You were prepared to spend
Svetlana nodded. He saw tears in her eyes.
“Before God, it is the truth,” she sobbed. “I can’t stand it when you look at me with hate and suspicion in your eyes!”
“Oh, baby,” Castillo heard himself say.
And then she was in his arms, sobbing.
“I think I will go see how they’re doing with the tree,” Pevsner said. “It might be wise to lock the door after I go.”
“We have just had our first fight,” Svetlana said. “And our first makeup, and our first you-know-what in my bed. Up to now, all the you-know-whats have been in your beds.”
“Baby, I’m really sorry.”
“I know. I can tell,” she said. “Can I say something?”
“You can say anything you want.”
“I know what it was, why you disbelieved me.”
“Because I’m stupid?”
“Because you are a man,” she said. “Like other men, insecure. When a woman throws herself at you, you are incapable of just accepting your good fortune. You don’t think you are worthy of what you are being given, so the woman has to have some ulterior motive.”
“What is that, Psychology 101?”
“It is the truth,” Svetlana said. “And I have something else to say. I am not a foolish woman. I am probably less foolish than any woman you have ever known.
“And like you, I have been trained to look for the worst scenarios. I thought about the worst scenarios before I put the toothbrush in the lock of your bathroom.”
“And what are the worst scenarios?”
“Actually, there were three,” she said, propping herself on her elbow to look down at him, which caused her breast to rest on his chest. “The first was that I was wrong about what I thought I saw in your eyes, and that you felt nothing for me.
“The second was your professionalism would be so strong that you would reject me no matter how you felt. That really worried me.”
“And the third?”
“That’s still viable, my Charley. You know what the chances are of our spending our lives together? You’ve never thought about that?”
“I’ve thought about it,” Castillo said softly.
“I don’t think there’s a chance in a thousand that we will be able to do that.”
“Okay. So what do we do?”
“I will pray. I have been praying. Do you pray, Charley?”
“Not in a long time.”
“That’s between you and God. My father never prayed either. He said that God knew his mind, so it was pointless. God was going to do with his life whatever God wanted to do.”
“I’m something like that,” Castillo said. “And if God is reading my mind, He knows how I feel about you.”
“So there is a tentative scenario we can run. We just put all the reasons we shall most likely not grow old together from our minds and pretend that we will be together forever.”
She raised her eyebrows questioningly.
“Deal,” he said.
“You mean that?”
“I mean that.”
“Good. Then I will go with you to Buenos Aires and you will give me a computer just like yours.”
“I’ve just been taken,” Castillo said.
She nodded happily in agreement.
“Can I ask a question?”
“Anything, just so long as it’s not about money.”
“Actually, it is. How much money is in the accounts, the ones you memorized?”
“So that’s it. You’re a gigolo? After my money?”
“A lot more, I would guess, than the eight million you were willing to spend to throw the dogs a bad scent.”
“If I told you forty, fifty times that, would that make you happy? You want me to give you money, my Charley? Just ask.”
“I’m not in that league, but I’m not going to have to sell Max anytime soon to pay the rent. What I’ve been wondering about is that two million you asked for on the train.”
“Two reasons. You needed to hear a reason—right then—why we were willing to defect, a reason you would believe. And if you thought we needed money, you probably wouldn’t start looking for any that we might have.”
“One more question?”
“Do you have any idea what it does to me when you rub your breast on my chest that way?”
She blushed, but then confessed: “Oh, I was hoping that would work!”
[FIVE]
The Great Room
La Casa en Bosque
San Carlos de Bariloche
Rio Negro Province, Argentina
0915 1 January 2006
Charley had learned the night before that there were two celebrations marking the New Year. First was the family celebration, an enormous meal—there had been two roast geese on the enormous table, plus a suckling pig —starting at half past ten.
The meal itself had been preceded by Pevsner giving a lengthy prayer/ speech—not unlike Grace—in which he offered thanks to not only the Divinity but also to a long list of saints, only a few of whom Charley had ever heard of, for God’s munificence to the family—including the reuniting “now, of Svetlana, and soon, very soon, of Dmitri and
