He nodded, satisfied, and pocketed the notebook. He was about to zip the valise closed when he noticed a letter, tucked down inside a pocket. He extracted the envelope, pulled out the single page, careful not to wrinkle it.
It was handwritten in Russian. He scanned the text quickly. It was from an American academic doing work on the Holodnaya Voyna, the Cold War. The academic wrote that he'd read some of Myorkin's earlier articles exposing secrets of Soviet policies; then he asked politely if Myorkin had ever, in his own research, come across any references to something called Borba s tenyu?
The man read the contents again, his lips moving as he read, committing the important parts to memory. He was about to tuck the letter back into its envelope when he thought to check the signature at the bottom of the letter and find out who this Americanski was, writing to the late Mr. Myorkin.
Jeremy Fletcher, it read.
He repeated the name to himself. Then he replaced the letter in the valise, glanced about the room once more, and, with a last nod to the peaceful Fyodor on the bed, he opened the door, checked the hallway, and left.
CHAPTER 6
Natalya hadn't been able to resist. She'd puttered around her apartment in the morning, watering plants, cleaning dishes, looking through mail… all in an attempt to distract herself from thinking about the strange letter she'd received from Dr. Jeremy Fletcher. All to no avail.
But before she'd left her apartment, Yuri had called to invite her to dinner with some of the embassy staff. They were going to the Russkiy Dom restaurant, over on Connecticut. Was she interested? Under pressure and wishing to stay in Yuri's good graces, she finally said yes, perhaps.
So eventually she found herself at the embassy, almost alone. The white walls and shining stone floors created a sense of cavernous emptiness. Yet once there and with Fletcher's letter before her, she still wanted to postpone her investigation. She decided to check on some of the details for the embassy's reception for the Bolshoi the coming Monday evening.
They were using an American caterer rather than the embassy's own kitchen-money had changed hands there, she was sure-and as soon as she looked at the menu faxed over from the caterer's the day before, she knew there was a problem.
Borsch was on the menu. Which for Americans, she knew, meant a watery beet soup with a mass of sour cream dumped on top.
That wasn't borsch. At least not Russian borsch.
Russian borsch was more of a stew, with beef, onions, potatoes, peppers… How, she wondered, did Americans think Russians had survived on beets in hot water?
And then she saw that caviar was also on the menu-no doubt served with chopped eggs, onions, chives, black olives, and probably half a dozen other garnishes, all of which were another American invention-like chop suey-and there for people who actually didn't like the taste of fish eggs.
But true Russians did, and enjoyed their caviar with nothing more complicated than hard bread and butter. And they probably would serve red caviar as well as black, but unless the red caviar was sevruga, it would be an insult at such an important dinner.
A half hour later she hung up the phone, having tactfully if forcefully explained all this to a Mr. Foy, the manager of the catering service.
"Well, of course," he'd said finally, exasperation evident, "if that's what you want. We strive to be ethnically authentic."
Ethnically authentic? The Soviet Union may have fallen, but she was sure Mr. Foy thought of Russians with the same old Cold War cliches: borsch-slurping, vodka-swilling, caviar-snob savages who just happened to possess nuclear weapons.
Would Americans and Russians ever truly understand one another? Was that even possible between two such vastly different cultures, one formed by Enlightenment logic, the other steeped in centuries of Pagan mysticism?
She realized she was still distracting herself from Fletcher's letter.
She carefully unfolded Fletcher's letter and read it again. Perhaps she was reluctant to dive into it because he had provided so very little to go on: he was doing research on the Cold War period, specifically 1960-1970; he was particularly interested in documents concerning Russian nuclear war strategies-a word, curiously, he'd translated as stzenariy, which meant something more like screenplay, rather than the more literal strategija; she shrugged and read on-and he wondered if Natalya had any knowledge of a particular book about such stzenarii, something called Borba s tenyu… though, he admitted, he wasn't sure if it was a book, a report, a memorandum… or even if that was the title at all.
Well, the subject and period provided her with at least one clue: if whatever Fletcher was after had been published in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1970, and it was about Soviet nuclear arms strategy, then it couldn't possibly have been an official Soviet publication. So it could only have been samizdat: something produced unofficially by one of the dozens of small illegal presses run from basements by brave, idealistic dissidents-which would only make tracking it down all the more difficult.
The first reference she discovered wasn't a book at all, but rather a film; a silent film at that, titled Borba za Ultimatum, a title translated into English as The Fight for the Ultimatum Factory. But it was much too early, 1923.
Natalya thought for a moment. The word borba was old Russian; in fact, its roots could be traced to the Serbo-Croatian;Борба, which meant simply "struggle." So she tried the search from that angle.
This soon revealed that Borba had been the title of a newspaper in Belgrade, printed by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Nuclear secrets published in a Party paper in Belgrade? Unlikely. But then perhaps tenyu, shadow or shade, was the pseudonym of a dissident writer for the paper, someone using the Party organ to expose its own secrets?
She wasted a full hour looking through the archives of the newspaper Borba, searching for any mention of tenyu. But most of the archived material was either numbingly routine or the raving paranoid fantasies that passed for commentary during those dark, suspicious years: articles about Americans needing to buy their oxygen from vending machines, being thrown out of the windows of hospitals for not paying their bills… amusing stuff, but hardly Cold War intrigue.
She sensed this was a wild-goose chase, as the Americans put it-though she'd never been able to understand why the goose had to be wild; was there such a thing as a tame goose? Did early Americans keep such geese as pets, teach them tricks, put them in circuses, like Russians with their bears?
There was so much cultural history beneath almost every colloquialism-so much meaning that was simply taken for granted-it sometimes astounded her that people from two different cultures could communicate at all. And then sometimes, too, she wondered if they ever truly did.
She thought back to her one brief affair with an American. He'd been a speechwriter for the White House. She remembered one very early morning in particular, a discussion that had seemed unimportant at the time, but had by now become a symbol for the cultural gulf between them.
They'd been lying in bed after making love, smoking, the ashtray set on the gold satin sheet-she brought them out especially for his visits-when he'd started complaining about his job.
"It's difficult to keep coming up with phrases that say much but mean nothing."
She'd smiled. "Mr. Gorbachev was a master at such speech. We called it sotryasat vozdukh, shaking the air."
"Well, he's much admired in this country," said her lover, exhaling smoke.
"And hated in Russia," said Natalya.
He had suddenly grown serious. "The Soviet Union was rotten to the core. It had to collapse. He was just trying to limit the damage."
"And of course the Americans did not benefit from this 'damage control.' "