“HELLO, Mr. Percival,” the young woman said, “so nice of you to come.” She shut the door again, and Krasilnikov heard the rattle of a security chain before she opened it wide.
He stepped inside, and she closed the door behind him, threw the bolt and reattached the chain. “This is my business,” he said. “I’ve gone to see people in places a lot farther from Washington than Alexandria.”
“Won’t you sit down?” She made a graceful gesture, and Krasilnikov reflected that she had not yet forgotten her manners; she was not yet so Americanized as all that.
He sat. “I admire your taste, Ms. Aralov.” He smiled as he patted the arm of the stiff, tapestry-covered chair. “This is good antique furniture.”
She shook her head. “It is Russian. No, it is not Russian, but it is as near to Russian furniture as I could discover here. I wished to say to the Americans, not ‘I am an American,’ but ‘Look, I am a Soviet citizen living with you.’ Surely you have seen such furnishings in other apartments. Would you care for tea?”
Krasilnikov nodded. “Sure, I’ve seen furniture of the same type, but it wasn’t as nice as this—the red and grey color scheme. Most Russians go for red and black.”
She smiled again, bitterly this time, before she bent in front of the steaming samovar in the corner. “Red for our country, black for death. We are so dramatic. Only I say red for our country, grey for no peace and no war. I say that because I like red and grey better.” She presented him with a fragrant glass of tea.
He sipped. “You’ve got to understand, Ms. Aralov, that I don’t do all my business with people like you. A lot of it’s with Americans and American companies. The next biggest is with foreigners who want American citizenship.”
“But you have handled such cases as mine before?”
“Sure,” Krasilnikov said. He rattled off names, making some of them up.
“Ah, I know Lebedev, he was one of the early ones, one of the first of us.”
“That’s right.”
“The others, they did not live here, not in Washington? Because I know all those in Washington, I think.”
Krasilnikov reflected that her knowledge was not as complete as she believed. “No,” he said. “Denikin was in New York, Nina Mikhalevo down in Florida.”
“And you are not an attorney.” She was looking at his card again, and he traced the raised black letters in his mind as she followed them with her remarkable grey eyes. The card read, C. C. Percival, and on the next line, Expediter, followed by an address and a telephone number. He was proud of that card.
“No,” he told her. “A lawyer would bring suit in District Court, and the Federal Government would stall it as long as they could. The Government can stall things for a long, long time here, Ms. Aralov.”
“In my country too. Here, how long?”
He shrugged. “Maybe five years, if you were lucky and had a good lawyer.”
“And with you? How long?”
“Five weeks, if we’re lucky. Five months if we’re not.”
For the first time, she too sat, perching on the edge of her high-backed divan. “Then with you is better.”
Krasilnikov smiled. “I like to think so.”
“And your fees?”
He knew how much she had in the bank, and he told her. After a moment he added, “That’s the retainer. I keep it all, no matter how fast I get you back to Russia. If things don’t move that fast, then you’ve hired me, at three hundred a week, until the retainer’s used up or I’ve got you home. Of course you realize I won’t be working for you exclusively, only as needed. I have other clients.”
She nodded slowly. “The retainer. It is so much.”
He was firm. “Frankly, I’m giving you a break, Ms. Aralov, because I like you and I like what you’ve done. If you were some fat Arab who needed an American passport, it would be a lot more.”
“I have to live while you work. I will have to buy my ticket.” Indeed. Indeed. “Your father’s the Minister of Marine?” She nodded again. “You would say the Secretary of the Navy here.”
“I know. Surely you can call on him for help.”
“Once, yes. Not any more. I—”
He cut her off. “First the retainer, Ms. Aralov. Then we’ll talk about your father. Maybe I can do something.”
“I understand.” She stood, smoothing the soft, grey-blue fabric of her skirt. “I must get my checkbook. If you will excuse me.”
“Sure.”
He wanted to search for the American listening devices he knew must be there, but he was too well trained for that. He took some papers from the breast pocket of his jacket instead; when she returned, he appeared to be studying them.
“Here is your retainer,” she said. “It is nearly all I have.”
He said thank you, crossing his legs, refolding his papers and replacing them before he accepted her check. “Now sit down and tell me about your father, Ms. Aralov.”
She sat, this time on the footstool. “It was so strange, so terrible …”
Her eyes had filled with tears, and he felt something he had thought dead since childhood move inside him. He said, “Perhaps it isn’t really as strange as you think, Ms. Aralov. Or as terrible. Start at the beginning.”
She nodded and blew her nose in one of the tiny handkerchiefs women used here. “It started with that dancer …”
She was groping for the dancer’s name. He supplied, “The President’s son.”
“Yes. He went to Moscow on a tourist visa, remember? And he said he would stay there until his father was no longer President, that he would be our security against nuclear attack. It was just after our Party Secretary had said we would never fire the first missile.”
“And then others came.”
She nodded, no longer sniffling. “Janet Johnson was one of them. I met her in Moscow. Her father is something in the Cabinet here.”
He sipped his tea and waited.
“Then we thought we should do the same thing, and we did.” She threw back her hair, her eyes gleaming, and he thrilled as if to the call of a trumpet. “Oh, they tried to stop us, but they could not send us to the gulag—to the camps. Our fathers were in the Politburo, and we said we would go to the American Embassy. Then they had to let us go, and they did.”
He said, “But now you want to go back.”
“Yes, there is the fighting in the east.” She hesitated. “I could do something. With training I might become a nurse. Our grandmothers fought the Germans beside their men. I would even do that.”
He waited, staring out the window at the bland, blank brick face of the apartment building across the street.
“And I am so lonely here.”
Tonelessly he said, “There are other Russians around Washington.”
“Not enough, and they are going back too, or trying to.” After a moment she added, “I want to see my mother and father, my brother and my sister and my aunt. Can’t you understand?”
“It seems that your father doesn’t want to see you.”
“He was so angry! The letters I got from him were terrible! Yet he sent money, so I would not be in need. Then just when I had decided to come back …”
“The money stopped.”
“Yes! I wrote to him. I said, ‘I am coming home, Little Father, please forgive me.’ There was nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No more letters, no more money.”
His hand touched hers. “Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps your father doesn’t really want you to return to Russia?”
For a moment she stared at him. “It was before I had told him I was coming home. He had ordered me a hundred times, called me a traitor, the vilest names.”
Carefully Krasilnikov said, “His position in your government would force him to do that, wouldn’t it? How do you know he’s not secretly proud of you?”
“But this was before! Before I had told him I wanted to come home.”
“He might have guessed it just the same, from the tone of your letters. Or like I said, there are a lot of Russians around Washington. Couldn’t one of them have tipped him off?”
She sighed, her eyes on the carpet. “You do not understand how it is in our country, how it is in our families.”
He should have been proud, and he told himself to be proud; but the thing that had awakened was weeping in his chest. “I guess I don’t,” he told her. “But it seems to me that if you were proud of yourselves when you did what you did, your father might be proud of you, even if he couldn’t say it out loud. I know we were all proud of the President’s son, and the ones who went after him too.”
She shook her head, eyes still averted.
He said, “If you want your check back, you can have it. Or I’ll tear it up, if you want me to.”
She looked up at that. “You aren’t really an evil man, are you, Mr. Percival? I had hoped to employ an evil man, because I thought an evil man might get me what I wanted.”
He smiled. “Evil enough, if you still want it. And call me Charlie, Ms. Aralov. If you still want to go back home, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.” That was perfectly true, and ridiculous though it was, knowing it was true made him feel better.
“All right, Charlie. I am Sonja. Yes, I am going home.”
“You don’t have a passport?”
She shook her head. “We burned them when we arrived; that was part of our pledge that we would stay. You will say it was so foolish, and you will be right.”
He shook his head. “I never fret over the past, Sonja. It uses up too much energy.”
“But my real troubles are not with our government, but with the government here. They do not wish me to go. They have put every possible obstacle in my path. There is the court order—” She told him about it, swiftly and inaccurately.
When she was through he said, “All right, the first thing is to get you a green card.”
“A green card?”
“So you can work here. You said you didn’t have much money, Sonja, and your father won’t send you any more. You’re going to have to eat while I’m getting you out.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“And pay the rent on this apartment and maybe some legal fees. If I’m going to help you, you’ll have to do what I say, or it’s no use.”
She rose from the footstool, angry and imperious. “What could I do here? Nothing! Do you wish me to wait on tables?”
“That’s a beautiful dress.”
A breath and she was relaxed and smiling. “Oh, do you like it? I think I have some taste in clothes. Most of our women do not; they are muzhiks, peasants.”
He said, “I want you to change it. The people who give out green cards don’t like pretty dresses. Put on the dress you wear when you clean the kitchen.”
“I have told you—”
“Have you thought of modeling, Sonja?” He saw at once that she had not. “You’re tall, and with that face and that accent …” He let it hang. “I know a woman who runs an agency here. You might have to lose ten pounds or so.”
“You think that?” At once her attention was on her body, her hands caressing her waist, lingering at her hips.
“Not for a man, Sonja. But for a modeling agency, maybe. We’ll let Madame Deppe decide.”
“Not in the clothes in which I clean my oven!”
“You’ll have plenty of time to change and bathe before we see Madame,” he explained patiently. “But it’s no use seeing her without the green card.”
She hesitated, though he knew he had won. At last, “All right. It will not harm to try. You will wait while I change?”
“Of course,” Krasilnikov said.
When she was gone, he rose and went to the window. It was hot out; he remembered how the heat had struck his face when he had stepped from his car. There was so much good climate in this country, yet they had built their capital here.
The telephone rang. She called from the bedroom, “Would you get that, please? It is probably a mistake—a wrong number.”
He said, “All right,” and picked up the telephone. “Sonja Aralov’s apartment.”
“It is me, Wilson. And you are?”
“C. C. Percival.”
“They are sending Ipatiev.”
“The film star?”
“Yes. I can hardly believe it, but that is what they say. He will hold her.”
Half to himself he whispered, “Unless he goes to Hollywood.”
“You said? I could not hear you.”
She called, “Was it not a wrong number?”
He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “It was for me. I let my secretary know I’d be here.” He told the mouthpiece, “Thank you,” and hung up.
“I am not too long?”
“No hurry.” There was a copy of Time on the shelf under the little table beside the samovar. He thought, Why do all of us subscribe to it? They could trace every agent just from that—from Time’s subscription list. Of course, we want them to know; agents count for something too. Not much, perhaps, but something.
He picked it up. The Chinese were in Kazakhstan, the Red Army had been stopped before Paris. It was still better than the old days, he decided. Better than when we were all so afraid, though at least we had peace.
