Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

“Without that English fruitcake on the tapes explaining what it all means, the Bible is just a book with a little bad poetry written inside the cover. We had to have both the book and the recordings. And we finally figured out money wasn’t enough motivation for you. So we appealed to something more basic… love.”

He moved a step toward her, as if to take her shoulder bag with the tins.

Lara backed away. “All right. Payment first.”

“You’re absolutely right.” He reached into the envelope and extracted one of the 50,000-ruble notes. “Business is business.”

Holding up the bill, he said, “There. I think the security camera will be able to read the denomination.” He put it back in the envelope and placed the thick packet on the glass top of the cosmetics counter.

Trying to look as reluctant as she could, Lara picked up her shoulder bag and put it on the counter as well, holding it open so Nikki could see what was inside. “Six Dictaphone cylinders. Better count them to be sure.” She hated to do it, giving the enemy the very material they needed. But her plan, no matter who was playing the other pieces, wouldn’t work any other way.

He reached for the bag. “Good girl.”

She didn’t let go of it. “Lev. First.”

Nikki picked up his mobile. He dialed a number and spoke. “We have what we want. Let him go.”

Then he put the thick envelope in her hand. Lara tried to take it, but now he wouldn’t let go. He said, “I know what you did.”

“What I did?”

“You found the key-logger program. Very… adroit. I guess I underestimated you.”

He let go of the envelope, which Lara put in her purse. She said, “Yes, I guess you did.”

He smiled his biggest smile yet. “Well, maybe not entirely. We just established, on that security tape up there, that you sold the recordings to me.” He made a small gesture with his hand, which Lara didn’t understand. “Now if the question of their—shall we say—English provenance ever comes up, it’s all on you.”

At that moment, Lara realized Alexei was moving across the aisle toward them, still clutching the silver clutch he’d been pretending to examine in Ladies’ Bags. A tall, unfriendly-looking man approached as well from the back of the store. If she turned around, she guessed she would see a heavyset, bull-headed guy coming toward them.

Viktor looked up the instant the kid left his position and he too was headed her way. Katrina, leaving her customer, was at the unwitting Nikolai’s elbow, pointing an atomizer of White Shoulders in his general direction, ready to spray it in his eyes.

Nikki started to say, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to—” when a major in the Russian Army came up to Lara. “Larissa Mendelova, remember me? You spoke at the War College. Major Bondarenko.”

“Yes Major, I remember. Funny running into you.”

As quickly as the three toughs had moved in, they now moved back among the shoppers. Viktor said, “Dr. Klimt, please introduce me to your friend.”

The young man looked uncomfortable. He reluctantly held out his hand. “Nikolai Grigorevich Gerasimov. An honor to meet you, Major.”

Viktor said, “I’m tight with Lara’s husband in the Army. That’s how we were able to have her speak about the war. Do you know him? A great, great man, Viktor Maltsev. Smart, tough…”

Lara was staring hard at Viktor, but Nikki didn’t notice. He said, “No, I haven’t had the honor.” Then, glancing at his watch, he turned back to Lara. “Oh, look at the time. I must be going.”

He picked up the shopping bag with the tins inside. “It was a pleasure, Larissa Mendelova. You’ve helped me more than you know.” Turning to shake hands with Viktor, he said, “A pleasure to have met you, Major…”

“Bondarenko.”

“…Major Bondarenko.” He moved up the aisle toward the north entrance with a lanky man and a kid with a neck tattoo in his wake.

Viktor and Lara walked in the other direction. An enormous human was coming their way. As they squeezed past him, the man from the Listening Room looked at Lara and nodded almost imperceptibly in recognition before hurrying on.

Lara took out her mobile and called Lev. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, they took a phone call just now and then walked away. What’s going on?”

“Thank God you’re okay. Go home. I’ll call you when this is all over.”

As they hurried down the store’s moving stairs, Viktor asked, “What just happened back there?”

“Someone walked into a trap.”

“Yours or his?”

“Mine. Now hurry up, we have to get divorced before they close for the weekend.”

With everyone gone, Katrina still held the atomizer out in front of her in attack mode. Then, turning it around, she sprayed the air with White Shoulders, enveloping herself in a romantic, classic floral bouquet rooted in gardenia and jasmine, with a tuberose top note over accents of woods and musk.

Between the Smolenskaya and Park Kultury Metro stops, the Legalization Department on Neopalimovskiy Pereulok is an oasis of leftover Soviet bureaucracy in the arid sameness of modern governmental Moscow. There are four vast halls full of paper files, the clerks still smoke in your face, and they close the place early on Fridays.

When Lara and Viktor handed over their signed divorce decree, the sallow-faced man who took it exhaled a nice cloud of Sobranie Black Russian across the counter. He said, “You know the rules. The decree is posted online for twenty-one days before it’s final.”

Lara wanted to say, “Know the rules? We’ve never been divorced before,” but she didn’t. Instead she asked the man, “How can we see the paperwork on someone else?”

Without looking up, the clerk gestured behind him at the four rooms full of files. “Postwar Births to the left, as well as pre-2007 baptismal certificates, before the Church reconciled with the Government; then Marriages, Divorces, and, far right, Deaths, as long as they occurred in the federal region.”

After explaining for a second time what she wanted, Lara sent Viktor to the left and she took the hall on the right. Like a library, each room was equipped with public computer stations where the human milestones were indexed alphabetically and chronologically. An hour later, they met back in Divorce.

By the time Lara and Viktor were out on the street again, loudspeakers and shop radios were blaring out love songs, the way America’s malls play Christmas tunes at holiday time. To put the new exes in the mood for Conception Night.

“Then, Pavel was working for Kasparov?”

Viktor asked the question with his mouth full of egg foo yung.

Lara speared another steamed dumpling. “Your guess is as good as mine. Someone wants to keep the Bible from seeing the light of day and ruining everything for our American friends. Pavel just took it a little too far.” She bit into the dumpling. “A lot too far.”

“So, you just gave that guy Nikki what he wanted?” Having posed the question, Katrina daintily dipped a takeaway egg roll into duck sauce, careful not to mess up her newly painted nails before bringing it to her mouth. The afternoon light was starting to fade outside the windows of Katrina’s new and very tiny flat, and the Muscovites who wanted to get a place down in front were already making their way to Red Square, five blocks away.

“Yes, everything.”

It would be a while before the start of the son et lumière broadcast from the Kremlin, when International Week and Conception Night would come together in one spectacular climax—followed, the organizers hoped, by millions more around the nation. Gerasimov wasn’t there; he was overseeing the setup work of his vast broadcast crew from a production truck in the Square.