The show tonight was held under a huge tent, dangerously warmed with gas heaters. The floor was pounded dirt and the audience – even the important officials and foreign guests such as Nicholai – sat on rough wooden benches, ate peanuts and tossed the shells on the ground, but it all added to the ambiance.
The other difference was in terms of theme – the acrobats of Nicholai’s childhood had been colorfully dressed as kings, generals, courtesans, monkeys, dragons, and tigers and performed their tricks to ancient folktales. The performers tonight were clad in PLA uniforms and arranged their tricks around heavy-handed political tableaus such as “The PLA Liberates the People from the Evil Imperialists,” or “The Peasants Successfully Struggle Against the Landlord,” or the ever piquant, oh-so-whimsical “Dijuan Factory #10 Produces a Record Annual Output of Ball Bearings.”
Still, the acrobatics were fantastic and entertaining, even wedged into the relentless propaganda. If the costumes lacked color, the performers did not, and Nicholai found himself absorbed in admiration of their skill. They tumbled, did double somersaults, swung from the tops of bamboo poles, balanced on wires, created impossibly high human towers.
“Amazing, aren’t they?” Voroshenin said in French as he stepped over the bench and squeezed between Chen and Nicholai. “Sorry.”
A somewhat sorry-looking man stood behind Voroshenin, and Nicholai noticed that the Russian didn’t bother to offer him a seat. He was clearly an underling of some sort, but not, judging by his spindly frame, a bodyguard.
Nicholai turned and introduced himself. “Michel Guibert.”
“Vasili Leotov.”
“ ‘Dijuan Factory #10’ is one of my all-time favorites,” Voroshenin observed, ignoring the introductions, and Nicholai couldn’t tell if he discerned irony in his tone. Certainly he could discern the vodka on his breath.
“It’s superb,” Nicholai said.
The circus ring became a sea of red, as some of the performers unfurled enormous flags, then turned them flat as other acrobats used them to leap from one flag to a higher one to a higher one, as if they were climbing the sky on the red clouds of dawn. The audience gasped as the final performer reached the pinnacle. Steadying himself with one hand on a skinny bamboo pole, he used the other to pull a final flag from inside his jacket, and waved it as all the actors sang “We Rise Ever Higher on the Wings of Chairman Mao.”
“Soon,” Voroshenin said, “there will be no art, no grace or charm in this country. Only ‘Mao thought.’ It will be a wasteland.”
“Surely you’re having a joke on me.”
“It will be dull as the proverbial dishwater,” Voroshenin added. He tilted his head toward Leotov, still standing over his shoulder. “Dull as this one, if that’s possible.”
Nicholai felt embarrassed for Leotov, slid over on the bench as far as he could, and asked, “Wouldn’t you care to sit down?”
“He wouldn’t,” Voroshenin interjected. “He is as you see him, a post. Besides, if you aren’t bored enough already, you soon would be with him as a companion. His conversation is as vapid as his face, which strains credulity, I understand. I mean, look at the fellow.”
Leotov’s humiliation was palpable, but he said nothing. Then Voroshenin leaned in toward Nicholai and whispered, in Russian, “Your mother was my whore, Nicholai. I rode her like a sled.”
Nicholai felt the insult burn, but he didn’t flinch. “I’m sorry?”
But had there been the slightest blink? Voroshenin asked himself. The slightest glimmer of self-consciousness in the eye?
Nicholai wondered the same thing. He fought to keep the fury off his face as he asked, “But what did you say?”
Peering back into those green eyes, Voroshenin switched to French. “Just that I’m looking forward to the opera tomorrow night.”
“No more than I.”
“I hope you can still come.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Cymbals and gongs clashed as the voices rose to a climax.
The two men held their gaze.
47
HE KNOWS, Nicholai thought.
Chen droned on in his enthusiasm about the acrobatic troupe.
Voroshenin knows.
The car slowed to negotiate a patch of black ice.
He knows my real identity.
Or does he? Certainly, he suspects.
Assume the worst, he told himself. Assume that Voroshenin now thinks he knows that you are Nicholai Hel. What does that mean? It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows you are here to assassinate him. It only means that he knows you are not who you claim to be.
Bad enough, but not necessarily fatal.
But why, Nicholai pondered, is Voroshenin keeping the appointment at the opera?
Because he doesn’t know. He only suspects, which is why he was probing, why he stretched a line of stones deep into my defense. A risky move, because he’s given so much of his thinking away. But Voroshenin is no fool, he must have thought it worth the risk. And was it?
Face it, you don’t know. He’s a chess player, not a Go player, Nicholai thought, cursing himself for not knowing more about the Western game. It was linear, though, he knew that, and geometrical – rich in forward, machinelike thinking, poor in subtlety and nuance. Voroshenin believes that he sacrificed a minor piece – a “pawn,” I believe – to expose a more important piece of mine, and now he invites my countermove.
A lot of reasons, Nicholai thought, including the very real possibility that my purpose here has been discovered, “compromised,” in Haverford’s jargon.
By rights, he knew that he should use one of the dead drops to report this development to the American, but he also knew that he wouldn’t. Haverford might call the mission off – “abort” – and Nicholai didn’t want that.
He wanted to kill Yuri Voroshenin.
Fine, he thought, envisioning the Russian’s florid face as he delivered his adolescent insult.
You play your chess game, I will play Go.
We shall see who wins.
48
VOROSHENIN WAS furious.
Livid with himself.
Clumsy, ham-handed, and stupid, he thought as he pushed open the door of the Russian Legation. How could I have thought he would fall for such an elementary trick?
