Glen Allen - The shadow war

"I can't stand these speeches. I'm going outside for a smoke. Mind keeping me company?" She placed her hand on his shoulder in a gesture he couldn't quite define. Friendly? Flirtatious? Maybe he was drunker than he thought.

Benjamin's first impulse was to look to Wolfe, but Wolfe was engaged in an intense whispered dialogue with Cavendish.

"Wouldn't it be rude, to leave in the middle of…?" and he waved his hand toward Montrose and the head table.

"They'll assume we're off to be naughty," Gudrun said, and before Benjamin could reply she'd lifted his hand and led him, winding through tables, out the doors, across the foyer, and into the empty quad outside.

Once outside, Gudrun immediately extracted a cigarette and lighter from her purse, lit up, and inhaled with undisguised relief. Then she looked up at the night sky. The chilled air made Benjamin pull his jacket closed.

"Amazing out here, isn't it?" she said. "Away from the city lights. They're so much… clearer. But then, so many things are."

He looked upward, if for no other reason than to prevent himself from staring at her face shining in the starlight-and noticing the way that same starlight emphasized the contours of her breasts above the low-cut neckline of her dress.

She threw the cigarette to the stone pathway, ground it out beneath the toe of a black high-heeled shoe, looked back to him. Smiled that radiant, rapacious smile.

"We never really got a chance to have our chat at dinner, did we. Look, I have some very nice brandy in my room-what say I bring it to yours, mine is an absolute mess, and I'll answer any… inquiries you might have had for me."

When he hesitated, she placed her hand on his arm, and said, "I'll be nice, I promise."

"Enjoying the night air?" said Edward Stoltz loudly, approaching them from the dining hall.

Gudrun said, "Saying good night. So I will. Good night, Edward." She turned to Benjamin. "Mr. Wainwright." And, her high heels clicking on the cobblestones, she walked off down the path and into the manse.

"A remarkable woman," said Stoltz. "Not my type, of course."

Benjamin nodded, said nothing. He was about to say good night himself when he remembered their earlier conversation that had been cut off.

"Dr. Stoltz, you mentioned there was some sort of… scandal after they discovered this diary?"

"Scandal with a capital S," said Stoltz, smiling wickedly. "Seems the painter of that mural we were discussing, Cecil Bayne? Seems he was having an affair with one of the fellows here. A Warren Ginsburg. An historian, like you, I believe."

At first Benjamin was so surprised to hear that Stoltz knew he was an historian that the name of Bayne's lover didn't strike him. Then he realized it sounded familiar.

" Warren Ginsburg," repeated Benjamin.

Now Stoltz's eyes went wide in surprise. "You know of him?"

"Well… as you say, he was an historian, so…" He let his voice trail off, then added, "But an affair, even a homosexual one… that was a scandal?"

"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.

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.