Giles claps his hands together. “Capital idea! Why, the next time I come, I expect your ad men to be wearing cravats and discussing the finer points of cricket. And we will serve only tea, Mrs. Strickland. You must get used to using the royal we.”
The telephone rings, then rings again, two lines at once, and Giles bows and sits, keeping his portfolio case at his feet like a dog. By the time Lainie is finished telling Bernie’s secretary that Giles has arrived and routing the calls, a trio of execs from a detergent company has arrived at the desk, all of them clearing throats, and after them, a bald-headed duo she knows has been giving Klein & Saunders headaches about a kitty-litter campaign. A half hour of appeasement passes before Lainie has a moment to breathe, at which point she notices Giles Gunderson still sitting there.
The lobby, by strategy, has no clock, but Lainie keeps one on her desk. She makes a surreptitious study of Giles and decides that his unmovable smile is his way of bracing against inevitable affront. Lainie considers darting through the office to see if any of the secretaries have tea, the manna that might set Giles at ease. Instead she waits, and waits, until the insult of Bernie’s lateness hangs in the room like oily exhaust from a backfiring bus. The brume thickens as thirty minutes becomes forty, and forty creeps, at the pace of a fraying rope, toward one hour.
Each passed second further instills Giles’s profile with nobility. There is something familiar about his bearing. When Lainie recognizes it, she catches her breath. It is the same poise she saw reflected in the ladies’ room mirror during her first week at Klein & Saunders as she’d adjusted hair and makeup and practiced her defenses against butt pinches. It had been part of the Elaine Strickland she’d developed apart from her husband—the Elaine Strickland she’s still developing. She’d raised her chin so high she’d almost looked down her nose, and that’s what Giles is doing, constructing, as grandly as necessary, a fantasy of his importance.
They have nothing in common—she the young wife and he the doddery gent—and yet for that instant seem to Lainie to be more alike than any two people on earth. It is too much for her to take. She places on her desk the placard she uses for bathroom breaks (SEAT YOURSELF, BE RIGHT BACK!) and, without allowing herself a chance to think better of it, plunges through the frosted-glass door and into the office.
19
“ALL HOPES FADE…”
“When spring… while the spring…”
“As the spring recedes. As the spring recedes. Is this Chekhov? Is this Dostoyevsky? Nyet. It is a sentence simple enough for a glupyy rebenok. This whole enterprise, it is bear claws, digging into my flesh!”
Hoffstetler is never calm when called to see Mihalkov. Now, though, he is frenetic, unable to restrain body or tongue. Today’s cab driver had complained of him kicking the back of the seat, and while waiting in the industrial park, he’d pounded his shoe heels into his concrete block enough to carve out twin caves. His mood isn’t lightened by the Bison, an oaf intelligent enough to pilot a Chrysler all around Baltimore but unable to memorize a remedial code phrase. Hours were being wasted at a time when there weren’t seconds to spare.
The violinists, called to duty on the Black Sea’s day off, are crusty eyed in disheveled suits. They raise untuned instruments when they see Hoffstetler, but he elbows past before they can hit the first note of Russian cliché. The effulgent blue of the lobster tank makes a brown murk of the booths below; the murkiest shape is Mihalkov himself in his usual seat. Hoffstetler bolts that way, striking a two-top with his hip. It smarts, and he sees in his mind the creature’s ripped sutures.
“This foolishness must end! Hours I spend waiting in the park or being driven around by your pet beast!”
“Dobroye utro,” Mihalkov says. “Such energy so early.”
“Early? Do you not understand?” Hoffstetler hurries through a triumphal arch and stands over Mihalkov, his hands in fists. “Every minute I am not at Occam is a minute those savages might kill it!”
“The loudness, pozhaluysta.” Mihalkov rubs his eyes. “I am with headache. Last night, Bob, I overindulged.”
“Dmitri!” Hoffstetler’s spittle disturbs Mihalkov’s black tea. “Call me Dmitri, mudak!”
It speaks well of Hoffstetler’s proficiency as an informant, he will think later, that he had never, before that moment, had to experience the full abilities of a man trained by the KGB. Mihalkov, eyes cast down with the misdirection of a headache, snatches Hoffstetler by the wrist and yanks downward, as if closing blinds. Hoffstetler is driven to his knees. His chin lands on the tabletop and he bites down on his tongue. Mihalkov twists Hoffstetler’s arm behind his back and pulls upward. Hoffstetler’s chin grinds into the table. The musicians, directly in Hoffstetler’s eyeline, snap shut their jaws, nod out a rhythm, and start playing.
“Look at the lobsters.” Mihalkov tidies his mouth with a napkin. “Go on, Dmitri.”
Pivoting on his chin hurts. Blood from either his chin or tongue dampens the table. He looks up with his eyes. The tank looms, a tsunami caught behind glass. Even under duress, Hoffstetler can see what Mihalkov means. Usually the crustaceans are torpid, shrugging along the tank’s bottom like barnacles. Today they are agitated, antenna swaying and claws pinching as they flex legs and carapace to scrabble up the walls, claws clacking against glass.
“They are like you, are they not?” Mihalkov asks. “They should relax. Accept their fate. And yet, left alone, they get big ideas. Climbing, escape. But it is wasted energy. They do not know the size of the world beyond their tank.”
Mihalkov picks up a fork. Hoffstetler’s eyes go to it. It’s clean, silver, lustrous in the low light. Mihalkov presses the points against Hoffstetler’s shoulder.
“A little twist and the arms come right off. Like butter.” He drags the fork to the nape of Hoffstetler’s neck. “The tail also. Very simple. Twist and pull, and off it comes.” The fork moves again, the tines ticking across his shirt until they rest against his biceps. “The legs are easy. Wine bottle, pepper mill—roll the arms flat and the meat, it just squirts out.” He licks his lips as if tasting the melted butter. “I can teach you how to do it, Dmitri. It is a good thing to know, how to take an animal apart.”
He releases his hold and Hoffstetler slumps to the floor, cradling his wrenched arm. Though his eyesight is blurred by tears, he sees Mihalkov gesture and feels the Bison’s huge hands lifting him into the air and depositing him in the booth. The comfort of the seat is somehow grotesque; writhing on the floor made more sense. He fumbles for a napkin, holds it against his chin. There is blood, but not a lot. Leo Mihalkov knows what he’s doing.
“My superiors have told me that extraction is impossible.” Mihalkov drowns two spoonfuls of sugar in his tea. “I made your case. A convincing one, I thought. The Soviet Union, I told them, does not lead the United States in many categories. But in space, we lead! The Occam asset, it would solidify this.” He sips, shrugs. “But what does a brute like me know about such things? I am what you said: a pet beast. All of us, Dmitri, are the pet beast to someone.”
Hoffstetler crumples the bloody napkin in his fist and gasps through panting.
“So it dies, then? We just let it die?”
Mihalkov smiles. “Russia does not leave its countrymen without recourse.”