“Well, the Ukrainians are wonderful people, warm and much deserving of any help we can bring them. They’ve been oppressed for centuries, most recently by Soviet Russian Communism. Fascinating place, rich in history and culture.”
“Keep going,” she said.
He paused, taking a glance down at her c.v. again. His tone changed.
“Look,” he said. “The assignment will call on your previous experience in undercover work. It presupposes an ability to learn functional Ukrainian in one month and have the pre-existing knowledge of Russian. So this, right here, is your opportunity to get out of jail free.”
“How?”
“You can avoid the assignment by being unable to pass the basic language requirement in Russian. Follow what I’m saying?”
“Yes. But I’m fluent in Russian and everyone who knows me knows that.”
“We have two other agents we can interview. They’re not as qualified as you, but it’s an imperfect world. We can talk to them.”
She pondered it for a moment.
“I came here this morning with the intent of declining this assignment,” she said. “But it’s also not in my nature to back away from challenges.”
He let a moment pass. “That’s in your c.v. too,” he said.
“So tell me more about the assignment,” she said. “I’ll listen.”
He smiled in response. “Let’s talk about you. It’s one thing to read a c.v., quite another to learn personally about someone who might take an important job.”
“What are you asking for?” she asked.
“Tell me about yourself,” Cerny said. “How you came to be here. How you’re so good as an investigator, with a firearm, and in so many languages. I’m fascinated.”
She opened her mouth to answer. Before she could speak a word, he added one more request. “Explain it to me in Russian,” he said. “I’d like to hear you speak.”
Alex fumbled at first. Not withstanding that souvenir poster in her living room, she hadn’t spoken Russian in years.
But she began.
Her Russian kicked in quickly.
EIGHT
Spanish was spoken in my home,” she said. “My mother was from Mexico City and was a devout Roman Catholic. She moved to Southern California in her twenties to marry my father. He was an aircraft worker with McDonnell-Douglas. His parents had been from southern Italy and had come to America in the 1920s.”
“But if he was Italian, they didn’t speak Spanish to each other,” Cerny observed.
“No,” Alex said with a smile. “Of course not. But I used to visit my grandparents, los abuelos mexicanos, during summers. And I loved listening to the Latino pop stations out of Los Angeles and San Diego. By seven years old, I was completely bilingual. Then there was church Bible study. I was raised as a Protestant. My father’s choice to convert-because it was ‘more American.’ But my mom insisted one Sunday a month on taking me to ‘her’ church. It was a traditional Roman Catholic one in Santa Clarita. They spoke Spanish and Latin there. When I first heard Latin, I wanted to study it. My dad didn’t object. He just stayed home to watch the Raiders and Dodgers.”
Cerny laughed. “Sounds like
Alex continued. Her father had died in an auto accident in the summer of 1993 when she was fourteen. While Alex settled into her faith and found solace there, her mother settled into an alcoholic depression. Alex buried herself in schoolwork. A year later, her mother’s health worsened. Alex went to Mexico for a year to live with an aunt and their family. Her fluency in Spanish gelled. “I read voraciously in two languages,” she said. “Histories. Biographies. Novellas. Journals about
She came back overprepared for her own school system, she explained. A local guidance counselor in California had ties to the East Coast. When her mother’s illness worsened, Alex was sent to a rigorous boarding school in Connecticut on full scholarship.
The school allowed her to excel. She branched from Spanish into French. She won a summer internship in Europe. Off she went to work in the rural Camargue region on a ranch in southern France, an area famous for prized bulls, wild ponies, and a pounding summer sun.
“You know what? I turned into a French cowgirl,” she said with a laugh. “And I loved every minute of it. The local people had a wonderfully unique culture. Distinctly Mediterranean. After six weeks, I came home and without even realizing it, I was fluent in a third language.”
“So where did the Italian come from?” Cerny asked.
“That was easy,” she said. “My dad was from Sicily, as I said. I wanted to know about his culture too. I started studying on my own, but since I knew Spanish and French and had had some Latin, it was very easy. I was lucky and won another summer internship the following year, this time in art history and Italian literature.”
Cerny laughed. “I’m not sure how ‘lucky’ that was,” he said. “Obviously you had a gift and studied hard.”
“What’s the old saying?” she asked, stumbling a little and trying to translate into Russian. “ ‘Luck is the confluence of hard work and opportunity?’ I spent three weeks in Rome and another three in Paris.”
She was fascinated at the time, she recalled, by the work of the Italian poet Dante, whose
Cerny blinked. She knew she had him. A personal first for Alex, switching from Russian to quote into sixteenth-century Italian.
Returning to Russian, she described how during her senior year at boarding school, she won a prestigious state university scholarship in California. It was a remarkable achievement, and yet she would always associate her senior year with tragedy. Two days after her eighteenth birthday, one week before graduation, her mother died.
The funeral was in Veracruz. She attended the funeral and missed her own graduation, which at the time barely seemed to matter. She was now on her own. She spent two years at the University of California at Berkeley where she was one of the more conservative students. It was a lonely stretch, by her own admission. She had many acquaintances but made few close friends. She joined a local Episcopal church, formally transferring from her old Methodist church. “It felt more comfortable,” she recalled, “almost as if it were midway between my father’s faith and my mom’s.”
Though she skipped over it here with Michael Cerny, as she entered her early twenties, Alex had transformed from a cute but shy teenage girl into an attractive young woman. She had attained her adult height of five foot seven, but all the sports and training through the years had given her a strong, lean but feminine body. And she had acquired an ample amount of self-confidence and self-assurance to go with it.
She had her mother’s dark Spanish eyes and brown hair. She dated occasionally but there was never anything serious. She tried smoking but quit quickly. She dabbled in liquor but kept it in moderation. She tried pot once at a party and didn’t care for it or its foggy-headed lifestyle. So she never touched weed again or any harder drugs, either, but she had acquaintances who dabbled in both.
She supported herself through work-study jobs and her scholarship. She played soccer for the freshman women’s team at Berkeley and ran track. After two years, she transferred to UCLA. She selected an undergraduate major in business and finance and found herself surrounded by a coterie of unusual friends. Many students were foreign, Asian and European. Many were American.
Her political views came more into focus at this time too. She disliked the right when it became intolerant and bigoted. She disliked the left when it strayed into cuckooland. She liked to think she was of the reasonable center, able to listen to an argument from either side and make her own judgments accordingly.
At this time, she was also finding that her abilities in language combined with a business major were opening
