little fuck, and I know how to take care of myself.”
Bock smiled and nodded. “I understand how you feel, but your method was impressive in any case. I have heard good things about you, Mr. Russell and—”
“Just call me Marvin. Everybody else does.”
Bock smiled. “As you wish, Marvin. I am Gunther. Particularly your skill with weapons.”
“It's no big deal,” Russell said, genuinely puzzled. “Anybody can learn to shoot.”
“How do you like it here?”
“I like it a lot. These people — I mean, they have heart, y'know? They ain't quitters. They work real hard at what they do. I admire that. And what they done for me, Gunther, it's like family, man.”
“We are a family, Marvin. We share everything, good and bad. We all have the same enemies.”
“Yeah, I seen that.”
“We may need your help for something, Marvin. It's for something fairly important.”
“Okay,” Russell replied simply.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean 'yes,' Gunther.”
“You haven't even asked what it is,” the German pointed out.
“Okay.” Marvin smiled. “So tell me.”
“We need you to go back to America in a few months. How dangerous is that for you?”
“Depends. I've done time — in prison, I mean. You know that. My fingerprints are on file with the cops, but they don't have a picture of me — I mean, the one they have is pretty old. I've changed since then. They're looking for me up in the Dakotas, probably. If you send me there, it might be a little tricky.”
“Nowhere near there, Marvin.”
“Then it shouldn't be much of a problem, dependin' on what you need me to do.”
“How do you feel about killing people — Americans, I mean?” Bock watched his face for a reaction.
“Americans.” Marvin snorted. “Hey, man, I'm a fuckin' American, okay? My country ain't what you think. They stole my country from me, just like what happened to these guys here, okay? It ain't just here shit like that happened, okay? You want me to do some people for you, yeah, I can do that, if you got a reason. I mean, I don't kill for fun, I ain't no psycho, but you got a reason, sure, I can do it.”
“Maybe more than one —”
“I heard you when you said ”people,“ Gunther. I ain't so stupid that I think ”people“ means one guy. You just make sure some cops, maybe even some FBI guys are in there, yeah, I'll help kill all you want. One thing you need to know, though.”
“What's that?”
“The other side ain't dumb. They got my brother, remember. They're serious dudes.”
“We also are serious,” Bock assured him.
“I seen that, man. What can you tell me about the job?”
“What do you mean, Marvin?” Bock asked as casually as he could.
“I mean I grew up there, man, remember? I know stuff that maybe you don't. Okay, you got security and all that, and you ain't gonna tell me anything now. Fine, that's no problem. But you might need my help later on. These guys here are okay, they're smart and all, but they don't know dick about America — I mean, not what you need to get around and stuff. You go huntin', you gotta know the ground. I know the ground.”
“That is why we want your help,” Bock assured him, as though he'd already thought that part all the way through. Actually he had not, and now he was wondering just how useful this man might be.
Andrey Il'ych Narmonov saw himself as the captain of the world's largest ship of state. That was the good news. The bad news was that the ship had a leaky bottom, a broken rudder, and uncertain engines. Not to mention a mutinous crew. His office in the Kremlin was large, with room to pace about, something he found himself doing all too much of late. That, he thought, was a sign of an uncertain man, and the President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could not afford that, especially when he had an important guest.
Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics, he thought. Though the official name-change had not yet been approved, that was how his people were starting to think. That's the problem.
The ship of state was breaking up. There was no precedent for it. The dissolution of the British Empire was the example that many liked to use, but that wasn't quite right, was it? Nor was any other example. The Soviet Union of old had been a unique political creation. What was now happening in the Soviet Union was also entirely without precedent. What had once been exhilarating to him was now more than frightening. He was the one who had to make the hard decisions, and he had no historical model to follow. He was completely on his own, as alone as any man had ever been, with a task larger than any man had ever faced. Lauded in the West as a consummate political tactician, he thought of it himself as an endless succession of crises. Wasn't it Gladstone? he thought. Wasn't it he who described his job as being the man on a raft in the rapids, fending off rocks with a pole? How apt, how apt indeed. Narmonov and his country were being swept along by overwhelming forces of history, somewhere down that river was an immense cataract, a falls that could destroy everything… but he was too busy with the pole and the rocks to look so far ahead. That was what being a political tactician meant. He devoted all his creative energy to day-to-day survival, and was losing sight of the next week… even the day after tomorrow…
“Andrey Il'ych, you are growing thin,” Oleg Kirilovich Kadishev observed from his leather seat.
“The walking is good for my heart,” the President replied wryly.
“Then perhaps you will join our Olympic team?”
Narmonov stopped for a moment. “It would be nice indeed to compete merely against foreigners. They think I am brilliant. Alas, our own people know better.”
“What can I do to help my president?”
“I need your help, the help of those on the right.” It was Kadishev's turn to smile. The press — Western as well as Soviet — never got that straight. The left wing in the Soviet Union was that of the Communist hard-liners. For over eighty years reform in that country had always come from the right. All the men executed by Stalin for wanting to allow the merest bit of personal freedom had always been denounced as Right-Deviationists. But self- styled progressives in the West were always on the political left, and they called their reactionary enemies “conservatives” and generally identified them as being on the political right. It seemed too great a stretch of imagination for Western journalists to adjust their ideological polarity to a different political reality. The newly- liberated Soviet journalists had merely aped their Western colleagues and used the foreign descriptions to muddle what was already a chaotic political scene. The same was true of “progressive” Western politicians, of course, who were championing so many of the experiments of the Soviet Union in their own countries — all the experiments which had been taken to the limit and proven to be something worse than mere failures. Perhaps the blackest humor available in all the world was the carping from leftist elements in the West, some of whom were already observing that the backward Russians had failed because they had proven unable to covert socialism into a humanistic government — whereas advanced Western governments could accomplish just that (of course, Karl Marx himself had said that, hadn't he?). Such people were, Kadishev thought with a bemused shake of his head, no less idealistic than the members of the first Revolutionary Soviets, and just as addlebrained. The Russians had merely taken the revolutionary ideals to their logical limits, and found there only emptiness and disaster. Now that they were turning back — a move that called for political and moral courage such as the world had rarely seen — the West still didn't understand what was happening! Khrushchev was right all along, the parliamentarian thought. Politicians are the same all over the world.
Mostly idiots.
“Andrey Il'ych, we do not always agree on methods, but we have always agreed on goals I know you are having trouble with our friends on the other side.”
“And with your side,” President Narmonov pointed out more sharply than he should have.
“And with my side, it is true,” Kadishev admitted casually. “Andrey Il'ych, do you say that we must agree with you on every thing?”
Narmonov turned, his eyes momentarily angry and wide “Please, not that, not today ”
“How may we help you?” Losing control of your emotions, Comrade President? A bad sign, my friend…
“I need your support on the ethnic issue. We cannot have the entire Union break apart.”
Kadishev shook his head forcefully. “That is inevitable. Letting the Balts and the Azeris go eliminates many problems.”
