brooding Ukrainian in his fifties with a short gray beard and a three-inch scar across his left temple.
“Everything go well at immigration?” Friedman asked.
“Perfectly.”
“Glad to hear it, Anna. It doesn’t always. They’re usually a pretty sour bunch. Still paranoid from the Soviet era. Always looking for spies.”
“Imagine that,” she said. “Well, if I see any I’ll let them know.”
They both laughed.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Soon they were rolling toward Kiev. Alex was in the back seat with Friedman, a pair of attache cases on the seat between them.
She peered out the window, missing nothing, taking in a city she had never seen before today. The road was straight as an arrow and flat as an ironing board, with pine trees interspersed with surprisingly large houses and entrances to gated developments.
“The new rich,” Friedman said, noticing her interest in what was beyond the car windows. “The FSNs tell me this all used to be forest up until independence. Now a lot of locals have gotten rich and foreign money has moved in.”
“FSNs?” she asked.
“Foreign Service Nationals,” he said. “Local people employed by the embassy.”
She nodded. “How long have you been here?” she asked.
“Me?” Friedman answered, “Two years. The department just extended me, so I’ll be here three more. I don’t mind. My last posting was Yemen. At least this is in Europe.”
Her nerves were still returning to earth from the immigration incident. And she was worn out by two long back-to-back flights.
The road led to a long bridge that it shared with a metro line and then climbed up onto a bluff. There sat most of Kiev, largely separate from its river.
They were in a surprisingly picturesque city, the city she had glimpsed from her airplane, with intricately styled old buildings from before the Russian Revolution of 1917. The ancient was mixed with a smattering of small stores and new structures.
Then the older buildings ended. Alex, Friedman, and their driver were in the middle of Stalinist “wedding cake” architecture, a style characterized by massive buildings as expressions of Communist state power, intimidation of the masses via steel, concrete, and glass. The combination of overwhelming size, patriotic decoration as mural decoration, and traditional motifs had always been the most vivid examples of Soviet architecture.
“This is Khreshchatyk,” Friedman said. “Just Khreschatyk, not Khreschatyk Avenue or Street or Boulevard. It’s like Broadway in New York.”
“It’s unreal,” Alex said. She felt as if she were seeing a city from another era, another world. In a way, she was.
“Most of Kiev was spared in the big war because the Germans crossed the river elsewhere,” Friedman said. “But the Russian NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor, booby-trapped the buildings on Khreshchatyk with dynamite. They figured the Germans would use them. Then they blew them all up with the German soldiers in them. Wicked, huh? After the war the street was rebuilt to Stalin’s taste.” He pointed to a massive, ornate building with terra cotta tiles. “See how high the portal is, the square columns, the windows suggesting twenty-five foot ceilings? Architecture designed to intimidate.”
Strangely enough, the buildings today looked harmless to Alex, with people strolling peacefully beside them. Time had exorcised some of the political demons.
Stalin was gone. So was Lenin, so were Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. The curtain had been pulled away, and the Soviet wizards of yore were no longer objects of fear. The current day people, she knew, were a different story.
Friedman lifted his eyes to the driver. “No one misses the Russians, right, Stosh?”
The comment elicited an amused sneer out of Stosh, the driver, who didn’t answer further, but studied the rearview mirror as he listened in.
“Oh, by the way,” Friedman said, reaching, into his overcoat pocket. He found a new cell phone and gave it to her. “This will work here. It’s programmed with all the numbers you need, and there’s a Ukrainian SIM card in it. Keep it with you.”
She took it and riffled through the numbers index. She dropped it in her own overcoat pocket. “Thanks,” she said.
Their car pulled up in front of one of the old Stalinist buildings. They were on a plaza at the very end of the street before the street disappeared down a steep hill. The rectangular building had an active revolving front door and a galaxy of foreign flags above the door.
“Your hotel, the Dnipro,” Friedman said, stressing the final syllable, saying Dnipro. “Same name as the river, which in Russian is the Dnieper.”
Dusk was settling in and the hotel had lit its blue and red neon sign. Stosh jumped out. So did Friedman. The driver’s eyes were still checking out something back on the road.
“The place used to be a typical Communist ‘prestige hotel,’ which is to say it used to be a total dump,” Friedman said. “Foreign money has fixed it up though, from what I hear. If you don’t like it, we can move you. Let me know.”
“I will.”
The driver picked Alex’s two pieces of luggage out of the trunk and waited while Friedman’s conversation ensued with Alex. The cold was biting. Alex pulled on a pair of gloves from her pocket.
“You’re right next to a park with a very interesting monument,” Friedman said to her. “Take a look.”
She glanced. More gross Soviet Commie artwork. Two muscular bare-chested men, oversized, sixteen feet high each, crossing a hammer and a sickle, one holding each. Compared to this, the Rocky statue in Philadelphia was an exercise in delicacy and subtlety. In a perverse kind of way, the bad sculpture in front of her made her think of Robert and his liking for the sensitive bronzes of Rodin and the canvases of Renoir.
“Monstrous, huh?” Friedman mused. “It was put there by Khrushchev on the four hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav. The Ukrainians thought they were allying themselves to Russia, and Russia thought the Ukrainians were giving themselves over to the Russians. I don’t have to tell you who got the dirty end of the stick. That’s how it goes in this part of the world. Even when you’re not screwed, you are.”
“I’m surprised the sculpture hasn’t been removed, now that Ukraine is independent,” Alex said, giving it a final glance and turning away.
“This is a complicated country,” Friedman replied.
“I understand there could be trouble when the president visits,”she said.
He snorted slightly. “If it happens, it happens. We take every safeguard we can, but you can’t be on Red Alert twenty-four hours every day of your life. Know what I mean?”
“I know,” she said. “Is there anything on my schedule yet for tomorrow?”
“I
“I look forward to meeting him.”
“We’ll pick you up at nine,” he said. “Same car. Stosh is my normal driver.”
“Perfect.”
Stosh gave her a low quiet bow.
“Tomorrow you’ll be in briefings all day,” Friedman said. “There’s a reception at the ambassador’s residence in the evening. You’ll find an invitation in your welcome kit here,” he said, handing over a folder he had brought with him.
