Permanent Interests Read online

  Innes nodded, mulled it over in his head.

  "Berlucci wants to talk with you. Your memo knocked his socks off," Speedy said.

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  Innes dropped his head. "The Ontario County DMV

  must have it by now."

  "He told me to tell you that nobody needs to know about it. All he wants is to pick your brain. That's all. You'll be protected."

  Innes pondered a moment. With his chopsticks he slowly demolished the block of tofu in his miso soup. "I don't know, Speedy. I'm trying to cool it."

  "You can't let go and you know it. Besides, what have you got left to lose? They can't fire you. And they can't fire at you." Speedy chuckled at his own sick pun.

  Innes looked up, and slowly nodded.

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  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The lovemaking was never tender. But it was, mercifully, always brief. Eastern European males tended to be that way, in Lydia's experience. When they came to America, they changed their outlooks in many ways, these phallocentric men from the Old World. They learned to be more superficially outgoing, a must in the American business milieu. They chilled out, especially those that emigrated to California. They dressed down, studiously acquiring the subtle habits and nuanced gestures of American informality. They burnished their accents to fit in better. "Hey, John! What's happenin'?" replaced "Good day Mr. Smith. Are you well?" in their new American-English lexicon. Yet in the bedroom, they reverted to Ivan the Terrible, or Vlad the Impaler. In the bedroom, females were to be conquered. Outside, they were to stand demurely behind their man.

  As was customary, he turned on his side and fell fast asleep, snoring deeply. In an hour or two he would awaken, hurriedly wash up, dress and scurry out the door.

  And he would be back, within a week's time. They would dine clandestinely at a handful of upscale establishments where the maitres d' knew him and would provide a private 142 JAMES

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  room, away from the glare of publicity, the earshot of Washington gossipmongers, the prying of the malevolently ambitious. Discretion was an essential hallmark of the President's National Security Adviser. The public and private personae may not square, but God help him if the latter overwhelmed the former to its detriment.

  So, it was not all wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am. Like most vain men, particularly of Horvath's social origins and oversized ego, the President's right-hand man liked to talk, mostly about himself, or his role in saving the American civilization. And dutifully, she listened, commenting only in support of him.

  As with most men, he talked a lot about his boss.

  "He's surrounded by all these kids. Whiz kids from nowhere who happened to be backing the right candidate at the right time. They're not idealists nor ideological.

  They're like all the other cynical yuppies who came of age in the '80s and '90s. They're out for themselves and they don't want to put in the time necessary to gain the experience to function effectively." As a creature of Old World culture, Horvath was acutely hierarchical and dismissive of youth, especially in the realm of politics.

  "Foreign policy. Humphh! What foreign policy? The man is totally impervious to grand strategy. Tells me it's

  'un-American.' Can you believe that? There are plenty of wolves out there just waiting to eat us alive. He really never has read any of my books. He took me because he wanted a Harvard professor to lend respectability to an administration populated with backward nincompoops. I've tried repeatedly to sell him -- to explain to him -- my theory on controlled inevitability, the central thesis of which …”

  At such points in the monopologue, Lydia would tune out and let the tape recorder do its job. Yakov saw to it that PERMANENT INTERESTS

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  the latest state-of-the-art listening and photographic gear for clandestine recording was installed in the classic Georgetown townhouse he set her up in.

  "Russia. Putin's days are numbered. We all know that.

  He's pissing off too many players over there. The cookie-pushers at State want to give him the farm. The Pentagon, however, wants to prepare for the next cold war. I have prepared a list of seven options. If Corgan bothers to study them between his preoccupations with tax reform and immigration and covering his big ass with Congress…"

  Lydia day-dreamed of Rome, the fine living, the exuberance of the people. She thought back further to grimy Rostov, to her mother and father and her old friends.

  She had gone back for a visit a few months earlier. Girls she went to school with, girls who were beautiful, with clean complexions, bright eyes and velvety voices punctuated by spasms of giggles, were now married, or divorced, with kids, lazy husbands and lives that ground them down, wrecked their beauty and their souls, as only Russia could do. Their every waking hour was devoted to survival. Their faces drained of loveliness, their spirits devoid of spontaneity, their hearts sapped of hope, they merely carried on, certain only that the next day would be like the previous. Lydia shuddered. There but for the grace of God …

  "As far as I'm concerned, people deserve the leadership they get. So it is with you Russians. And we have to deal with it." There was an edge to his voice. Horvath, a refugee from the 1956 Hungarian revolution against communism and the Soviets, retained a visceral dislike of Russians. Lydia concluded that he got a vicarious pleasure out of screwing them. This, plus his affinity for European, particularly Slavic, women, made for very complicated emotions in an overeducated, insecure man who thought 144 JAMES

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  very highly of himself. She further concluded that he felt the rules did not apply to him -- including those which forbade U.S. officials sleeping with nationals of states with

  “hostile intelligence services."

  "And so, my little Russian tsvetok, who are you seeing besides myself?" Horvath stood looking out the bedroom window onto the brick sidewalks and elms of 31st street.

  He was naked and held his hands together in front of his groin.

  Lydia tensed. She lay on the bed still, carefully modulating her breathing. While she had been getting accustomed to his mood swings, Lydia still had not found a way of dealing with Horvath's unpredictable temper.

  "I've told you already. I see only you."

  He remained unmoving before the window. Lydia could nonetheless hear his breathing pick up.

  "And what are you telling other men about me?" He slowly turned around, keeping his hands in place.

  Lydia would not look away. She held her gaze onto his, refusing to show any sign of weakness or fear.

  "Nicky, I see only you."

  "Many people have underestimated me over the years.

  They think I am a fool who can be easily manipulated. But I have showed them who is smarter, braver."

  "You are very smart. And very brave, Nicky. But you also must be more trusting."

  "Trusting?" He slowly approached the bed. "Trust is a luxury of fools. Trusting fools become slaves. Or they die!"

  "Nicky, I don't like when you get like this. Please lower your voice." She especially didn't like the idea of this kind of scene being recorded.

  Horvath leaned down on the bed, his face inches from Lydia's.

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  "If I had been trusting, I would never have shown all those smartasses at Harvard who was best. If I had been trusting, I would be eaten alive by the bureaucracy and the media. If I had been trusting, I would have been a loyal slave of you Russians."

  Lydia pulled the covers up over her bosom in a move of instinctive but futile protection.

  "I threw Molotov cocktails at Soviet tanks in the middle of Budapest. At fourteen, I killed a Russian! I watched him struggle and scream, covered in flames from one of my little bombs. And you know what? I wasn't scared. I wasn't repelled. I wasn't stunned. Oh, no. I was amused. I laughed! "

  He reached down with one hand and grabbed her by the throat. Saliva foamed from the corners of
his mouth. His face flushed and his neck pulsed.

  "I laughed my guts out. Watching this Russian, maybe nineteen, twenty years old, dancing an agonizing death reel.

  In the street where my mother bought bread and flowers.

  And I was the orchestra. I provided the music…with my fire bomb."

  "Nicky! Stop it!! Stop! Nicky!!" She was losing consciousness.

  With his free hand, Horvath swung long and hard, crashing his fist into Lydia's face, the impact of which made her fly off the bed. He remained motionless, the memory-provoked grimace on his face frozen, the terrifying eyes looking at Lydia, but not seeing her.

  Holding the side of her face with one hand, she picked herself carefully from the floor, watching him warily while trying to keep from passing out. She grabbed a pillow from the bed and held it to her body as she made a gradual retreat toward the bathroom. She felt blood drip from the corner of her mouth.

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  Realization pierced Horvath's face. The grimace melted into astonishment, then fear. He reached out with one arm.

  "Lydia. Oh Lydia…I'm so…sorry. Please…"

  From her dresser top she snatched a hand-mirror and smashed it against the side. She grasped a long, narrow shard and held it defensively in front of her.

  "Lydia, I want to--"

  "Stay away from me. Or I'll stab you!"

  He stepped toward her with outstretched arms, utterly vulnerable in his nakedness. Tears streamed down his face.

  "I said stay away from me!" she screamed. "If you touch me, I'll cut you. And then I will tell the reporters that you sleep with Russian women and that you beat them!

  How will your president think of that?" A twisted snarl transformed her soft face into a beast-like apparition. "So, you hate Russians? Do not try to push Russians around.

  This Russian will fight back!" She brandished her crude blade, it having drawn blood from her tight-gripping palm.

  She dashed into the bathroom and slammed the door, quickly locking it. Holding fast to the basin, Lydia saw herself in the mirror, cheek swollen and bleeding, her tear-soaked face contorted from hysteria. She covered her cheek with her injured hand, adding more blood to her facial wound. She sobbed uncontrollably in the sink. She began reciting an Orthodox prayer her mother had secretly taught her when she was a girl.

  Horvath tapped on the door. "Lydia, I'm sorry. Please come out," he pleaded.

  "Go away!!" she screeched. "Go away…" Her voice dissembled in panicked weeping. She heard him exit the room and descend the stairs. The front door of the townhouse opened and slammed shut.

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  The ride from Washington to the Hamptons was seemingly endless and fraught with uncertainty. She sat the four hours staring out the window of the chauffeured black Lincoln, silent and anxious. The driver, a burly Siberian named Pyotr was solicitous, asking her several times if she needed to go to the toilet or wanted a bite to eat. She only shook her head in response. She held a hand over the swelling on her cheek, hoping the warmth would expedite the healing. Pyotr looked at her sympathetically through the rear view-mirror.

  Her thoughts again took her back in time. Was it escapism, self-analysis, self-pity? It wasn't important, really. She saw herself, the Lydia of ten years romping in the meadows, strewn with yellow and purple wildflowers, singing and running, trying to launch a kite with her father.

  Her mother sitting on a blanket sorting the picnic food, laughing and shouting encouragement. The foothills to the Caucasus, beyond Krasnodar, were beautiful in the summertime. Wonderful places for family picnics and for kids to run free, away from the gray city with its factory air, away from crowded flats, away from the cautious people leading plodding lives. Those days of family outings, swathed in the yellow glow of the summer sun and the warm love of a family trying to retrieve authenticity out of a milieu of stale, state-imposed conformity. Her father's vivid stories. He could paint a canvas in one's imagination.

  Tales of knights and princesses, the stuff that socialism endeavored to eradicate from the people's collective consciousness. And he told true tales passed onto him from his grandfather, a loyal servant of the last tsar. Stories of palace splendor and court intrigue, of brave cossacks and treacherous priests. Accounts of the richness, and harshness, of pre-revolutionary rural Russians as well as 148 JAMES

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  the unreal grandeur of St. Petersburg. Grand balls in Moscow and Petersburg, folk fairs in the countryside.

  Stories of love, unrequited and consummated. Oh, great-grandpapa had things to tell. And, oh, papa, how rich you made us by keeping alive the flame of fantasy and history.

  Were I only born in those days, a girl in Old Russia when people still could dream and be their true selves…

  "We are here, Miss," the Siberian said.

  The Lincoln passed through an iron gate manned by two cement-block guards, Tatars or Chechens, Lydia thought.

  A television camera and some kind of electronic sensors pointed at them from the arch above the gate.

  Up a winding, oak-lined driveway, there appeared a magnificent hybrid chateau with doric columns, flying buttresses, gothic windows and huge iron lanterns hanging from a ten-meter-high entrance. Waiting to open her door was a butler, at least a man dressed in black tails and exhibiting a formal demeanor. She was ushered into a chandeliered marble foyer lined with medieval tapestries featuring warriors fighting in some long-lost battle. Two additional grave, heavyset guards stood with arms crossed.

  Their eyes scrutinized her from head-to-toe. They parted to allow her to pass into the next chamber, of white marble in grandiloquent belle époque design. Two large, gilded chandeliers sported winged cupids blaring horns, an oversized fireplace on whose weighty mantle perched on each side two, black-marble, half-robed Greek goddesses gazing longingly heavenward. Occupying the middle of the mantelpiece was a tilted glass globe. A bright red carpet covered the floor. Curved, silk-cushioned Louis XIV furniture graced the chamber. The butler motioned for Lydia to sit on a gold-upholstered regency-style sofa.

  A plump woman entered and, in a heavy Ukrainian accent, asked what madame wished for a refreshment.

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  "Tea," Lydia replied with a fleeting smile across her injured face.

  She fidgeted as she sat there alone, in this magnificent room of this splendid mansion. She felt so out of place, like driftwood from some desolate northerly latitude washed up on a golden, tropical shore.

  The portly Ukrainian woman returned ten minutes later with a brass samovar from which she poured steaming, black tea. At Lydia's nod, she added a spoonful of dark honey.

  Lydia was left alone for what seemed like hours. She sipped the piping hot tea. It warmed her inside. The heat radiated outward, an inner sun rekindling life.

  A brass-framed glass door swung open, pulled by the silent, faceless butler. In strode Yakov. He smiled warmly and kissed Lydia's hand, then seated himself in a matching chair on the sofa's right.

  " Gospozha Lydia Yekatarina, you are as beautiful as ever," he beamed. He used the traditional, pre-revolutionary address for Miss. Her father called her

  'gospozha' as an endearment. Tovarishch -- comrade -- was rarely heard within the confines of the Puchinski home.

  Yakov was so deceptive, so falsely enticing. A python circling its prey ever so gently. A dead feeling permeated her body when she was in his presence. Here was a Potemkin man, she thought, a man superficially charming, but who exuded no life, only a frigid emptiness.

  "My dear Lydia, I want to thank you for making this long journey at my request." In fact, she had no choice.

  She forced a smile. "This house is so magnificent. It's a fairy tale place."

  He swept the premises in a wide arc with his eyes, obviously proud of this acquisition. The Ukrainian maid returned with what appeared to be a glass of lemonade for 150 JAMES

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&nbs
p; Yakov. The latter, sporting gray riding pants and a black turtleneck sweater, was clearly in his element as lord of the manor.

  "You know, this belonged to an American robber-baron.

  He used it only as his summer home. They called these mansions, 'cottages.'" He directed his gaze suddenly onto her. "Can you believe it? A 'cottage'!? Such wealth they had, these robber-barons. We had nothing like this in Russia. Yes, Peter the Great turned St. Petersburg into Paris of the East. But he was only one man and was a tsar.

  In America, anybody can be a tsar if he puts his mind to it.

  It's all out there to be gotten. And the astonishing thing is that ninety-nine percent of Americans don't see it. It takes outsiders. They see. They come from nothing. Therefore, they can see everything as an opportunity. Can you imagine?"

  She looked at him silently, waiting for him to get to the business at hand and dreading it.

  "Are you happy in Washington?"

  "You are most generous, Yakov."

  "Yes. I brought you here from Rome because I saw with these same outsider's eyes that you are special. People, men, trust you and confide in you. You have a magical effect on them."

  Lydia stared into her tea cup while he said this. Then looked up at him, her face saying, Okay. So what's the point then?

  As if upon some telepathic command from Yakov, in strode Dimitrov. He handed Yakov a small tape recorder.

  Dimitrov stood stonily silent behind Lydia. She tensed.

  Her heart began to pound. If Yakov's aura was one of coldness, this man's was of pure malice.

  Yakov pressed a button. Nicholas Horvath's tortured voice emanated from the machine. "Lydia. Oh Lydia…I'm PERMANENT INTERESTS

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  so…sorry." Her frantic threat followed. "I said stay away from me! If you touch me, I'll cut you. And then I will tell the reporters that you sleep with Russian women and that you beat them! How will your president think of that?"

  Yakov stopped the recording. His face grimaced as if in pain. The air was dense and volatile.