“Who, me?” Marian said. Babs cackled. Marian went on, “Yes, I know. He knows I know. I’m still putting myself back together, though. He understands that. He doesn’t rush me or anything.”
“Don’t wait too long,” Babs said. “Men ain’t patient critters.” That was bound to be good advice, even if Marian wasn’t ready to take it yet.
She stopped at the Rexall on the way back to work. As she had in the Shasta Lumber hallway, she said, “We did bell the cat.”
Heber Stansfield was the one who’d first used that figure of speech. He nodded now. “That’s good. That’s mighty good. They got to do it without looking like they was bending too much. But with the whole world coming to pieces around our ears, who knows how much it’ll matter in the end?”
A radio behind the counter was giving the news. “What’s the latest?” Marian asked. “Do I want to know?”
“Murmansk. That Archangel place-somethin’ like that, anyways. Odessa.” Stansfield spoke of death and devastation with sour approval. He could afford to. He’d never known for himself what an atom bomb was like. “And they’re shootin’ looters in Boston and Washington.”
“Not in New York City?” Marian asked.
“From what the radio reporters say, in New York City, the looters, they shoot back.” The druggist spoke as if no iniquity coming out of New York City was too big for him to credit.
Marian bought a package of Life Savers to keep him sweet, then walked down the block to Fayvl’s cobbler’s shop. He looked up from an upside-down logger’s boot. “Hallo, Marian,” he said. “It’s an ambulance.”
“It sure is!” she agreed. “Everybody in town is going on about how smart you are, to come up with a way to make it an ambulance.”
“Foosh!” Tabakman waved that aside. “Anybody what thinks I’m smart, himself he ain’t so.”
“Don’t sandbag.” Marian wasn’t sure he’d get that. But he did. She realized that if he’d played a lot of cards to get his stake to come here, he would have to. She added, “I think you’re way too smart to be doing this for a job.”
“Why for you think that? It’s honest work. It ain’t such a bad living. And I enjoy it. So why I shouldn’t do it? What should I do instead?”
“I don’t know, not when you put it that way,” Marian said.
“Anything I used to did, I would think it was from God a blessing. Then the Nazis came, and God forgot about us if He was ever there at all,” Fayvl said. “So now I do what I feel like doing because I feel like doing it. It’s the same as before, only without God and without the blessing. I get by.”
Without God and without the blessing. Marian found herself nodding. “Me, too, Fayvl. Me, too.”
–
Vasili Yasevich wanted to pay a call on David Berman to see how the old Jew’s “niece” or “cousin” or whatever they decided to call her was coming along. He knew better than to do it, though. Unless Berman found work for him to do, someone would wonder why he was visiting him. He didn’t want anybody asking himself a question like that.
He might not have lived in the Soviet Union for long. He knew how police states operated, though. The Japanese in Harbin had been at least as ruthless as the MGB was here. So had Mao’s men, once Manchukuo went back to being Manchuria. The best way to get along with secret police was never to draw their notice.
So he did his odd jobs. He kept an eye out for Grigory Papanin, but Papanin seemed to have decided leaving him alone was the better part of valor. He also kept an eye out for Gleb Sukhanov. Whether he’d wanted to or not, he’d already drawn that Chekist’s notice.
Vasili stood in the town square, listening to Radio Moscow’s news broadcast coming out of the speaker mounted on the pine pole. Roman Amfiteatrov alternated between bragging about the ruin Soviet bombers dealt to cities on the East Coast of the USA and moaning about the ruin American bombers had visited on Russian cities in response.
If you listened to Amfiteatrov, the Soviet bomber crews were heroes. They represented the vanguard of the proletariat and struck a mighty blow on behalf of the oppressed masses and the advance toward a classless society. The Yankee bomber crews, by contrast, were the lapdogs of plutocracy and warmongering imperialists who delighted in massacring workers and peasants and their children.
If you listened to Amfiteatrov…Vasili could see that, regardless of ideology, when you dropped an atom bomb on a city you knocked it flat and killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. How many others here could see the same thing? Either there weren’t very many of them or most of them, like Vasili himself, knew better than to show they could think for themselves.
“Zdrast’ye, Vasili Andreyevich.” There was Sukhanov, right beside him. While he’d been listening, he hadn’t been watching. The MGB man went on, “He sure does talk funny, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, hello, Gleb Ivanovich.” Vasili did his best to sound as if Sukhanov were an ordinary friend, one who had nothing to do with the Ministry of State Security. “He doesn’t have an accent like mine, that’s for certain. Your jaw still doing all right?”
The Chekist touched the side of his face for a moment. “Hasn’t given me any more trouble since Yakov Benyaminovich yanked that stupid tooth, thank heaven. But I want to thank you one more time for the poppy juice you gave me. That kept me going till he was able to work on me. I owe you a big one there.”
“Nah.” Vasili shook his head, even as he was thinking Bet your dick you do. Will you remember when it counts? If you had to ask yourself a question like that, chances were you wouldn’t like the answer. Still casually, Vasili asked, “How’re things otherwise?”
“For me? Well enough. And you?”
“Not too bad, thank you very much,” Vasili said.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Sukhanov said. “I need to tell you something you may not be so glad to hear, though.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“You were listening to Radio Moscow just now. The war keeps going. It’s heating up, in fact. The way the Americans kill cities, they may as well be tigers killing elk,” the Chekist replied. Did he remember that the USSR had also struck at the USA? If he did, he didn’t show it. He went on, “Conscription calls are heating up, too. The ever-victorious Red Army has to get more men if it’s going to keep winning those victories.”
“If the rodina needs me to serve it again, of course I will serve it again.” Though Vasili bore down on the lying again, he wasn’t at all sure he meant that. Mean it or not, he had to say it. Saying anything else meant he’d serve the Soviet Union in a gulag like the one from which Maria Bauer had escaped-maybe in that very same one.
“Khorosho,” Gleb Sukhanov said. “So far, your name hasn’t shown up on any lists. If it does, maybe I can lose it. But I can’t promise I’ll be able to do that. All I can do is try.”
“Whatever you manage, I’ll be grateful for.” Vasili wondered whether he’d be better off letting the Red Army draft him or disappearing into the woods if it did. Either way, he was much too likely to have unfriendly strangers shooting at him.
“The other possibility I need to warn you about is, I may not be able to do anything at all for you. I may not be here to do anything for you,” the MGB man said. “My name may be on those conscription lists, too.”
But you’re a Chekist! Vasili thought. Then again, that might not matter. How many Soviet cities had the Americans incinerated? The ever-victorious Red Army did have to get its men somewhere. If it couldn’t lay its hands on enough ordinary people, chances were it would start grabbing secret policemen.
Aloud, Vasili said, “It’s a rough old world, Gleb Ivanovich.” He wanted to sound sympathetic without sounding as if he were criticizing Stalin. If you did that, you were unlikely to make any other stupid mistakes afterwards.