Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

It was this right now, this weight of the man, his leg, his arm that she had missed as much as anything. The human contact. She was crying, why exactly—for herself, for Pavel—she didn’t know, with her one stupid tear duct doing the work of two. The funny thing, she saw now, was that Grisha, on the other side, his stubbled face against hers, still tenderly cradling her injured arm in his sleep, would never know about the tears running down her left cheek.

How could this happen? She was now a fully divorced woman, but Grisha’s wife’s things were still in the drawers. Come to think of it, why wouldn’t he talk about her? Another tear rolled down her cheek. Where could this possibly go?

With the shock starting to wear off, Lara’s brain, the brain of a chess player, was trying to turn itself back on. Anatoly Karpov, the champion before Kasparov, once said the only difference between a prodigy and a patzer was how far into the future a player could look. Peering at her mental board, Lara couldn’t see much.

Think it through. The book. The recordings. Sometime in 1940, Noël Coward and Anthony Blunt created a hoax involving a book Hitler was meant to read. Acting on what was written in it, the Führer was supposed to turn his armies around and attack the Soviet Union. And he did. And now, anyone who had the book, the Bible, could prove the Allies had deliberately started the Great Patriotic War.

Gerasimov moved in his sleep, his leg rubbing along hers, sending little electric shocks northward that short-circuited her thinking.

No, return to the board. Someone gets Gerasimov, through Pavel, to reach out to Professor Larissa Mendelova Klimt to do a TV show. At the same time, a young tough, a stranger, asks her to listen to some seventy-year-old musings of a dead English playwright. Almost immediately, Pavel starts following Lara and Grisha around on a silver-and-red motorcycle, eventually trying to kill them.

Wait, that’s wrong. She could see him aiming that gun of his at the Alfa’s passenger-side window. Her window. Pavel, her childhood friend, had wanted her dead. Why? What if—

Grisha muttered something in his sleep, his mouth close to her ear. Chess, go back to chess. Wooden pieces, geometric squares, no place for emotion. She thought of the Karo-Cann opening, the Nimzo-Indian defense. But she kept coming back to one simple move: King takes Queen. Like some schoolgirl, some ingénue, the thought made her toes want to curl. And they would have too, if his feet weren’t on top of them, warming them.

And then her mobile rang. Idiot, imbecile, why hadn’t she turned the thing off? The racket it was making. She reached out her working, left arm as far as it would go, being careful not to move anything else and waken Grisha. She touched the small, noisy rectangle on the upholstered arm of the pullout bed.

Who would call at, what time was it, 4:25 in the morning? She managed to hold the phone in her palm and turn it open with her thumb. She had to know.

“You have three new messages.”

For Christ’s sake, it was her own voicemail! It took almost a minute for her to manage to hold the mobile and scroll down the list with one hand. She finally hit OK and held the phone up to her ear, tightly so the sound wouldn’t leak out.

The first one was from the woman at the flirt party, Tatiana Ivanova. “About my proposition, Larissa Mendelova: if you have the Bible, we‘ll pay you five million rubles for it. You won’t get a better deal. Call me back.”

The next two were from Pavel, one after the other, the first when she and Gerasimov had been leaving her place after the dustup with Viktor.

“Larashka, get out of his car!” His voice was more urgent now. “I was wrong, wrong, so wrong about them! It’s—shit, where are you off to now?!”

In the background, Lara could just barely make out something like a car accelerating. The next thing he said was drowned out by an explosion; it must have been Pavel starting his motorcycle. When the big Ural Volk shifted into gear, Lara could make out his voice again. “His wife worked here, did you know that? Did the weather on the Weekend News . I would… run errands for her.

“A guy I know, a cameraman, made that tape of her after hours for the Party… did you get my text, Lara? Did you see the thing?!”

The rain, the road noise, and the motorcycle shifting gears made it almost impossible to hear complete sentences. “—using me, like they’re using you—get what they want. Everyone’s dirty, Lara, dirty with a capital D!”

The bike must now be riding on the shoulder. She could hear him say, “I can’t hold onto the phone.” Was he crying? “I’m so, so sorry I got you into this.”

The next call came in minutes later. “Stop and think of your mother and father, Lara, two people with nothing who took in an orphaned boy!”

Pavel was getting louder, his voice distorting on the tiny instrument’s playback. Unable to manipulate the volume control with the fingers of her left hand and with her right arm still pinned under the sleeping man, she had to turn away and clamp the phone tighter to her ear to keep the sound to herself.

“Think of their sainted memories! How can you work for the oppressors? Or did you live in America too long and forget what it’s like back here? Lara, I love you. Forgive me for what I’m forced to—”

The man lying beside her said something in his sleep. It was so unexpected she dropped the phone, which clattered down through the pullout’s mechanism to the floor.

A moment later, he said it again. “Tati.”

For “Tatiana?” Was it possible? Tatiana Ivanova, the weather person?

What had Lara done?

The dream, when it finally came, was the strangest one yet. She was playing chess, but couldn’t see whether she was White or Black; there was some kind of veil over the board. Shadows covered her opponent’s face. Then the image of the table with a chessboard changed to that table behind the gas station, the one they’d “picknicked” on—there were Father, Mother, Lara, and Lev, the four of them.

She sat bolt upright, fully awake: What if White and Black weren’t the only ones playing this game? What if there were three players sitting at the table? Or four?

For some reason she finally felt able to think it through. The figure beside her was breathing regularly now, slowly and deeply. She eased herself from under the covers and rummaged around on the floor for her phone. She had to record another memo to herself, and made her way back through the washroom to Gerasimov’s office so she wouldn’t be overheard.

She was sitting in one of the desk chairs and actually had her mouth open to begin speaking when the “out of area” call came in. The voice on the other end spoke in English.

“We have your brother.”

“What? Who is this?”

“What’s important is, we have your brother. A brother you won’t have for very long unless you do what we say.”

Half an hour later, long after the man somewhere in Alaska had finished telling her what to do, Lara sat alone in the dark, her heart rate finally starting to come down. And then, the way a flash of lightning reveals the midnight landscape in every detail, she saw it all, the way to save Lev, the winning line of attack, complete in her head. And that the way to beat the enemy—make that enemies—was to make them think they’d won. Use their own plan against them.