Paul Vidich - The Mercenary

Garin looked at Natalya. “Say something.”

“You’re KGB?”

“I was. Then I was CIA. Now, I work alone.”

“Who was your real father?”

“I never knew him. He was a doctor in Moscow arrested for something, maybe for practicing medicine. He was taken to Solovetski Detention Center on the White Sea. Two months after his wife’s second conjugal visit, he was among a dozen prisoners selected for punishment in reprisal for a prison escape. They were made to walk outside the walls and stand before five soldiers in a firing squad. They were ordered to kneel, and all except my father did. He kneeled for no man, or so the story goes, and the commander promptly shot his leg, bringing him to his knees. The prisoners were shot, but the soldiers were drunk and their aim was not good. The fallen prisoners were thrown in a mass grave they’d been made to dig. But some were not dead. The next morning, the commander came out and shot his pistol into the moving earth until the ground was still.”

Garin looked at Natalya. “This is the story that the boy’s grandmother told when he visited his father’s village. Is it true? Who knows? The boy believed it. Everyone believes what they want to believe about themselves. And the boy never knew who reported his father to State Security.”

“You told this to my father?”

Garin smiled. “It makes for a good story. Is it possible such a thing could happen to a small boy? It is a dangerous world for children. You aren’t the only one who can cry crocodile tears in bed.”

She slapped his face.

Garin touched his cheek, still hot from the sting. He saw in her anger a kind of empathy. “So we both have dead fathers,” he said. “It happens to everyone.”

Garin set his wineglass on the doily and carefully centered the base, turning it bit by bit until it was perfectly placed. He saw her staring at him.

“Who are you?” she asked.

He tore a piece of bread from the loaf. “I am the man eating with you.”

“Fine. You don’t have to tell me. You are Aleksander Garin. That’s enough.”

She stood and began to clear the table, stacking serving dishes and dinner plates and topping them with cutlery. She started for the kitchen but stopped at the door and turned. “I’m glad we’ve met.”

She did not return immediately from the kitchen, and he thought something was wrong. He found her at the sink, head leaned forward, struggling to breathe, chest heaving.

He startled her. She turned to him. Her face was pale, though her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were red and tearing.

“Yes, I cry.” She composed herself and wiped a tear with her knuckle. “I don’t mean to be emotional. I should never have met you. This is all wrong.”

“What’s wrong? Have you told them I’m here?”

She grimaced through her tears and laughed. “You don’t know, do you?” She looked at him. She took his head in her hands and pulled him forward, kissing his lips. She relaxed into her sudden, startling passion, and then she pulled away. “No one is coming.”

She stepped back and held herself, suddenly cautious and embarrassed. “Do you remember the night here in the bedroom?” She breathed quickly. “I looked at you, knowing how Posner was there behind the wall watching, and I was scared you would see my fear.”

Garin’s eyes drifted to the walls around.

“There is no one.” She laughed.

Garin’s eyes returned to her, and he felt terrified. He saw that she struggled to keep her distance, and he saw that she too was terrified by what was happening. Neither of them moved. Silence and a brittle formality separated them.

She took his hand and placed it on the smooth skin of her neck and held it there.

Garin saw fierce yearning in her eyes and felt her loneliness, and he was aware of the danger that attached to intimacy. He knew that he had come face-to-face with a person as lonely as he was. A terrible caution held him back. But what was he afraid of?

“You’re quiet,” she said. “Thinking too much.”

She kissed his lips with feeling. Her eyes signaled the bedroom’s open door.

She was under the bed’s comforter when he entered. Her clothes were draped over a chair, and she had pulled the comforter to her neck so only her head poked out. She watched him undress, stepping out of one pant leg and then the other, and he pulled off his shirt, laying it casually over the chair. He removed his socks last.

He slipped under the comforter beside her and felt the pleasant warmth of her body. Her nose was cold, but her legs and arms were warm. He touched the silken smoothness of her skin.

Suddenly, she rose up on her elbow and looked down at him. Her finger traced the raised scar that went ear to throat, investigating the old wound. “How did you get this?”

Their bodies were close, and they looked warily into each other’s eyes, waiting on the question: two people shedding distrust; two people looking to escape loneliness; two souls coveting the pleasure that was theirs to pluck.

She lay down beside him. A finger of moonlight entered the curtain and drew a line across the comforter and hit her dress on the chair and her brassiere, which had fallen to the floor. Two figures lay side by side on the large bed.

“We don’t have to do anything,” she said. “Hug me.”

He did. As he rolled over, her dancer’s body folded on him and she wrapped her arms over his chest to complete their innocent embrace.

SHE WAS STILL awake. All was quiet, and he was asleep. His dark hair was wild on the cushioning pillow, and his cheek was warmed in the silver moonlight that shone through the window. His restlessness had kept her from sleep. She sat up and looked at him for a long moment, gazing at his face. Even in sleep, he had a determination so strong that the bitter disquiet of pain was visible. Beaded perspiration unmasked his struggle with an unseen adversary in the wild dominion of his dreams. She gently placed a hand on his forehead and said something to comfort him. She wished that she could provide him as much solace as his loneliness deserved. Then she kissed his cheek and lay down beside him, drawing close.

MORNING LIGHT WOKE GARIN. HE saw that the comforter had been kicked off and she was cuddled against him, her arm affectionately draped over his chest, her face on his shoulder. He lay there vaguely aware of the sounds outside and glad they had not spoiled the evening with hungry sex. He had known that experience, and he knew what came after.

He was on his back looking up at the ceiling with his palms on his chest, feeling the patient rhythms of his beating heart. He remembered their first encounter in the bedroom—her amateurish, staged seduction and her embarrassed flight, wrapped in a bedsheet. He was glad the new memory replaced the old.

He gazed at her pale body, smooth and porcelain, and her petite breasts. He had been surprised when she suggested they do nothing and pleased because he didn’t want to squander the chaste pleasure of getting to know her. He wasn’t a young man anymore, and there was something pleasant about not doing what was easy and expected.

He knew that she too was awake. Surprise came over him when her fingers engaged his. Warm yearning in her gentle touch traced the contours of his chest. Part of him wanted to ask her everything about her life, just as she had asked about his scar, and another part of him wanted to know nothing, to keep his distance to protect himself from attachment.

They had begun to explore each other—fingertip to fingertip, hand on hand, the warmth of each other’s breath. The patient discovery of a stranger’s body. She rolled over and kissed his eyes, then pressed her lips on his with an ardor that he was returning.