"Oh, no," said Stoltz. "They weren't that provincial, even back then and even out here."
"Then why-?"
"It was the termination of the affair." Stoltz smirked as though he'd made a particularly clever joke. "Messy. One of those murder-suicides that's supposed to happen in dens of iniquity like Hollywood, not staid Massachusetts."
"So they both…"
"Died, yes. Bayne murdered and Ginsburg…" Stoltz held a finger to his temple, pulled an imaginary trigger. "You see? Needless to say, Bayne never completed the mural. Pity."
Benjamin nodded. He shivered as if cold. "Well, I think I'll say good night too, then." He began to leave, then turned back as if he'd remembered something. "And that diary you mentioned, is it still here?"
"No, no, it was donated long ago," said Stoltz, waving his hand, apparently now bored with the whole story. "To the Morris Estate."
As in 'the Library of Seymour Morris'? Benjamin wondered. But he dared not ask.
"Well, good night then. Pleasure meeting you," Benjamin said.
He turned and started off down the path to the manse-not certain whether he wanted Gudrun to keep their rendezvous in his room or not. He had a lot to tell Wolfe, and wasn't sure he could wait until morning.
CHAPTER 12
By the time Natalya got back to her apartment, it was almost 12:00 A.M., or 8:00 A.M. in Dubna, Russia. Her father would be awake soon. On weekends he liked to spend the mornings working in his ogorod, his kitchen garden, a small plot of ground in a communal square down the street from his apartment building. If she called in perhaps thirty minutes, she could catch him before he left. So she just had to stay awake until then.
Which might prove difficult. Going over the Bolshoi reception menu with Mr. Foy had in fact made her quite hungry, and she'd skipped lunch while working at the embassy, so when she met Yuri and his friends at Russkiy Dom she'd opted for a full-course dinner: soleniye ogurscy, sliced and salted cucumbers, for an appetizer (Yuri had tried to tease her by ordering seledka pod shuboy, as he knew the name alone made her cringe: salted herring in a sheepskin "coat"). For a main course she'd ordered veal pelmeny, what she called "Siberian ravioli." Perhaps she'd hoped to capture some memory of childhood, when her mother would make and roll the thick, salty dough for the wrap and grind a mixture of veal and beef for the filling. She'd even had a dessert, which was quite unusual for her: tvorog, cottage cheese with honey. Yuri had watched her eat with some appreciation-and a certain horror.
"Natashka," he'd said, "how do you eat like such a obzhora, and still look like a ballerina?"
She'd then surprised Yuri further by agreeing to go with them for a drink afterward. Yuri had said something about Natalya finally becoming a "party girl"-though he'd said it in English, and with Yuri's accent it sounded like "party ghoul."
Later, when they were ensconced in the noisy discomfort of the Sibir lounge, she'd finally felt he was relaxed enough to bring up her request.
She'd told him she was doing research for an American academician; it wasn't of any real consequence, she said dismissively, but he was a friend of someone at the embassy. She hadn't been able to find one of the books she needed, so she'd turned in a request for permission to access the restricted archives. But that normally took months. Could Yuri be a dear and see if there was anything he could do to speed things along? It probably wasn't important, there were so many books and magazines tossed into that immense trash heap labeled "State Security."
Yuri had smiled and said of course, for Natashka the Great Seer, he would do anything. She'd leaned across the table and kissed him-on the cheek. He'd smiled, in a tolerant, disappointed sort of way. But then she'd agreed to dance with him, and he seemed satisfied.
Natalya looked at the clock above her refrigerator: 12:15. Still too early to call.
She opened the fridge and took out a plastic bottle of water, went into the living room, and sat down in a large, overstuffed chair near the window. She didn't really like the furniture-modern, squarish, all in earth tones-but it had come with the apartment.
Everyone thought her apartment was too small, but in fact it made her feel secure, as though she were invisible-another sign of trying hard to be the nail that didn't stick up.
Yet oddly enough here, in America, she finally felt at home.
She'd always been fascinated with all things Western. One of her father's cousins, Svetlana, belonged to Beriozka, a folk dance troop that was allowed to travel abroad-her own father's position as an officer in the rocketchiki meant he wasn't allowed to leave the country, ever -and when Svetlana visited she would bring Natalya the most wonderful presents: chocolate from Germany, magazines from France, toys from Sweden. Natalya was particularly eager to tear through the magazines. Of course she couldn't read the words, but that didn't matter; she was looking for pictures of anything American: American cars, American clothes, American cities; but most of all American people. To her, they looked universally confident, handsome, happy-like people from another planet.
One day back then, when she was perhaps seven, she began speaking in a language all her own, and her mother asked, "What is that? Have you lost your mind?" And she'd answered, "Don't you know? This is English."
She simply hadn't fit in Uzhur, not in any sense. In a town where tanks sat at the entrances like squat, metal dragons; where soldiers were more common than children; where the boundaries were marked not by the usual fields of wheat and barley, but by a huge fence topped with electrified barbed wire; a town that, had she looked on a map, she wouldn't have found listed… in the midst of all this regimentation and sense of constantly being scrutinized, she was an utterly foreign free spirit.
She remembered one day her father came home from a ten-day duty at his base-what he called his "time in the hole"-to find her doodling on a photo of Lenin. It was an old black-and-white picture in one of the Party-published biographies her father kept above the desk he called his study, and she'd drawn a clown nose, gogglelike glasses, and a full beard on the Father of the Soviet Union's sacred face.
Her father had reacted in horror.
"Do you want a chance to become an orphan?" he'd said, snatching the book away.
Later, she saw him feeding it into the fire he started in their tiny, rarely used fireplace. But she also saw that he was smiling.
And so she'd learned something all the other children seemed to know instinctively: there were things you didn't draw, didn't say, didn't do.
Thinking now of that time reminded her of the tremendous pride she'd always felt in her father, even when he punished her for her independent ways. She remembered the ritual of him polishing his high, shiny black boots, the spitting and rubbing that would continue for an hour. "Can you see yourself, Natashka?" he would say, holding the boot beneath her face. She remembered the strong, musky smell of boot polish and leather, the way the boots made Nikolai seem a foot taller when he finally pulled them on. And then he would disappear for ten days or two weeks at a time. When he returned he was always very hungry, very happy, and very tired.
She snapped awake. She looked to the clock: 12:45. She cursed. Her father might already be gone for his morning's puttering at his garden.
She went to the end of the living room where she had her desk, a small study area that, she realized now, was a copy of her father's back in the apartment in Uzhur. She picked up the handset and dialed the prefix for Russia, and then the area code for Dubna.
She listened to the metallic buzz of the first ring. And then the second. Then she heard her father's voice.
"Alloa?" he said.
"Nikolai," she replied. She had addressed him with his first name since leaving the university, feeling it was the truly adult thing to do. " Privet. This is your daughter."