'I know; give John your love, right?'
He felt the Russian woman punch him in the back. 'Yes.' He heard her laugh. 'And this is for you.' And he felt her hands roughly twisting his head around, her face bumped his glasses as she kissed him full on the lips. 'I won't ask you to give that to John—that was for you.' She smiled.
'Look, you don't have to—'
'To go back to my people? John and I went over that. I have to. I'm a Russian—no matter how good my English
is, no matter how much I can sound or look like an American. I'm a Russian. What I feel for John, what I feel for you as my friend—that will never change. But being what I am won't change either.'
'You know you're fighting on the wrong side,' Rubenstein told her, suddenly feeling himself not smiling.
'If I said the same thing to you, would you believe me? I don't mean believe that I believed it, but believe it inside yourself?'
'No,' Rubenstein said flatly.
'Then the same answer ior you, Paul. No. My people have done a great deal of harm, but so have yours. With good men like my uncle, perhaps I can do something—* to-'
'Make the world safe for Communism?' He laughed.
She laughed, too, saying through her laughter, 'You're not the same barefoot boy from the Big Apple that I met long ago, Paul.'
He was deadly serious when he said to her, 'And you're not the same person you pretended to be then. I'll tell you what your problem is. You grew up believing in one set of ideals and you've been realizing what you believed in all that time was wrong. Karamatsov was the Communist, the embodiment of—'
'I won't listen anymore, Paul.' She smiled,*touching her fingers to his lips.
'All right.' He smiled, kissing her forehead as she leaned against his chest for a moment. 'Just think what a team you and John would make,' he told her then.
She looked up at him, her eyes wet. 'Fighting? Always fighting? Brigands or some other enemies?'
'That's not what I meant. You can find other ways to
be invincible together.' He laughed because he'd sounded so serious, so philosophical.
'He—he can't. And I can't.'
'What if he never finds Sarah?'
'He will,' she told him flatly.
Paul said again, 'What if he never finds Sarah? Would you marry him?'
'That's none of your business, Paul,' she said, then smiled.
'I know it isn't—but would you?'
'Yes,' she said softly, then started to fumble in her bag. She took out a cigarette and a lighter, then plunged the tip of the cigarette into the flame with what looked to Rubenstein like a vengeance.
'Stay where you are. Raise your hands and you will not be harmed!'
Rubenstein looked ahead of them—a half-dozen Russian soldiers, greatcoats stained with snow, and at their head a man he guessed was an officer. 'You are under arrest. Lay down your arms!'
She said it in English—he guessed so he could understand. 'I am Major Natalia Tiemerovna,'—Rubenstein thought he detected her voice catch for an instant before she added, 'of the Committee for State Security of the Soviet.'
Ill
Varakov pushed the button for his window to roll down—it was warm now, so much warmer than it had been.
He glanced at his driver; this driver was not as good a man as Leon had been. Varakov exhaled hard, waiting as the Soviet fighter homber taxied across the field.
He decided to get out. 'You will wait for me here.' He opened the door. 'I can get out myself.'
'Yes, Comrade General,' the driver answered, turning around.
Varakov smiled. There was no reason to act gruffly toward the young man simply because he was not Leon. 'You may smoke if you wish, Corporal,'
Varakov added, stepping outside, then slamming the door.
Varakov snorted, stretched, and started walking toward the slowing-down taxiing aircraft.
Was there a doomsday project that the United States had launched? Was an end finally coming? he asked himself.
He had avoided philosophy—meticulously. Philosophy and generalship were not compatible; they never had been.
He had lived a full life—full because of his achievements, because of the friendships he had made, because of the daughter he had raised—not his daughter, but his brother's daughter, Natalia.
