Joseph Kanon - Defectors

“This is what you’re worrying about? Tonight? Ian fucking McAulife?”

Simon shrugged. “Now it’s one less thing.” As if Frank would do it, his promises real.

“What a pain in the ass you are,” Frank said, not able to let it go, then faced forward again. “It’s all self-defense, Jimbo.”

“What are you two whispering about?” Joanna said, leaning over.

“Stalin,” Simon said.

Her eyes darted left, uncomfortable, as if he had made a bad joke.

“Where he used to sit.”

“Up there,” Frank said, pointing.

“How do you know? You never went to the ballet then. Or now. I can’t think why you—oh look, the ambassador. They always stick out like sore thumbs, the Americans. It’s the suits. And the haircuts.” Glancing toward Mike Novikov’s crew cut, heading down the center aisle. Next to him a tall, vaguely familiar man and his wife. No DiAngelis.

Simon looked back up the aisle. No stragglers, no one else in the party. But he had to be here. In the embassy seats.

“What’s the matter?” Jo said.

“Nothing. I must stick out then too. The suit.”

“Mm. Isn’t it funny, you at the Bolshoi?” She looked away. “Any of us.”

Novikov was settling in next to the ambassador. Still no DiAngelis. One intermission, only one chance before they left.

He felt the audience stirring behind them, heads craned, a line of gray suits entering the royal box. For a second he half-expected to see Khrushchev, the tsar, but the familiar bald head never appeared, just the gray suits with blank faces, presumably Politburo members everyone else recognized. A big night at the Bolshoi. Would this mean extra bodyguards, plainclothesmen, all of them alert to American suits? He glanced around the crowd. Who was anybody? No DiAngelis.

And then the lights were dimming and the music was starting and he felt his stomach jump, not just nerves, not butterflies, a falling, a sense that something was wrong. He stared straight ahead, past Prince Siegfried, running through a mental checklist. Tomorrow they’d be under the watchful eyes of the Service, new eyes, eager to impress. The meeting had to be tonight, only a minute, two, swallowed up in an impersonal crowd. DiAngelis would need the time to set things up. Maybe he was sitting somewhere else, the ambassador a blind, waiting for the intermission.

The stage got darker, the lake at night, Siegfried with his bow. Simon twisted in his seat, restless, but everyone else was still, expectant. He had always assumed Swan Lake was kitsch, a ballet for tourists, but here it meant something else. There was a fluttering of white, the entire stage suddenly swirling with white, darting, floating. A quiet gasp went through the audience, a collective pleasure, everything as it should be, the precise toe steps, the graceful leaps, inexplicably beautiful, the dreary city falling away, mad Stalin in his side box, the brutal prison stories, lives with years snatched away, betrayals, all of that gone now, out of sight, nothing visible but this twirling, what the world would be like if it were lovely. Nobody moved, drinking it in, an old ritual, maybe their way of reassuring themselves they were still capable of this. He turned to Frank, prepared to smile, an appreciation, and saw that he wasn’t watching at all, his eyes fixed on the embassy seats, waiting for DiAngelis.

After the swans flew off, he lost the thread again. Odette would become Odile, or was it the reverse? In New York, there would have been a synopsis to follow in the playbill. Here it was already in the blood, the whole implausible story. Real stories, Frank’s stories, were plausible. Simple. We intercept them coming in. But there were two stories, so the trick was keeping them both simple, both plausible, easier to juggle. Run through the details again. No surprises. Except there was always something you couldn’t control, someone. You couldn’t do it alone, you had to trust someone. The way Frank trusted him.

He glanced to his side, Frank still scanning the audience, then back to the stage. Any minute now and he’d have to get up, do it. During the war he’d never had to do anything, all the careful plans passed on to someone else. Now, finally, he had to act, like the boy in one of Pa’s dinner problems. Right. Wrong. The question isn’t what’s right, his father would say, tracing lines on the tablecloth with his fork. The question is, what’s the right thing to do? How do we act? They’re not always the same. What’s right is just an idea. But what we should do—there are other considerations. So it’s not always clear. But if it’s right, Frank had said, then it has to be the right thing to do. And then had done it, acted, and blown up all their lives. People were applauding, the curtain coming down. The jewel box room getting brighter. Now.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, standing.

“Meet us in the foyer,” Jo said over the applause, putting an imaginary cigarette to her mouth.

Simon started out, only to be blocked by clapping people in the row. Impossible to step over them. He looked back, a few people trickling out, the aisles beginning to clot. At the embassy seats, the ambassador and his wife were following a path Novikov was making for them.

“Relax,” Frank said. “It’s a long intermission.”

Some people were still clapping, but now the rush began. Out to the grand foyer, under the giant chandelier, then down the white marble stairs to the tiled vestibule, looking for a men’s room. What was the word? Muzhskoy. But what would that be in Cyrillic? Finally a sign with stick figures, one with pants. Follow the arrow, the crowd now thick around him, the long room already filling with cigarette smoke, all the doors open to the outside.

“Simon?” A voice behind him, American. He turned. “I thought it was you.” Hannah Rubin, all smiles. “Isn’t it wonderful? I’m so glad you got to see it. I never miss the Bolshoi. Saul, he could care less. He falls asleep. I said, you could do that at home.”

Which meant she was alone, eager to talk. Simon glanced past her head, searching the crowd for DiAngelis.

“But I thought you were going to Leningrad.”

“Tonight. Later. Frank got tickets for this last minute.”

“Well, he could. And lucky you. Fyodorovna—”

Settling in for a chat. Heads passing behind her. There’d be a crowd in the toilets soon.

“I was just heading for the men’s room,” he said, anxious, actually having to pee now.

“Men. I don’t even bother. The line’s always out the door. You’ve heard? About Ian? No wonder he was so nervous about Elizaveta.” She stopped. “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t say, but you were at the lunch, so you already know—”

“What?”

“They’ve kept him overnight. That’s not a good sign. Something must be—”

Not now. Now he had to meet somebody. One chance.

“I thought they did that all the time,” Simon said, looking over her shoulder again, then realized he had offended her.

“Not unless there’s something wrong,” she said, believing it, the sleep deprivation, the lights in your face, the isolation cell just bits of melodrama the West used to discredit the system.

“Well, let’s hope not. He seemed a nice man. Hard to believe he’d—”

“It always is, isn’t it? What interests me is why. Why would he—why would anybody—?”

More heads passing.

“Excuse me. I really have to go.” A weak grin. “Call of nature.”

“And here I am yakking away.” She put her hand on his arm. “So nice to run into you. Is Joanna here?”

“In the foyer,” he said, pointing up.

“Oh good, then maybe I’ll see you again before we go in.” She paused. “Did you say tonight? You must be going straight to the station. Me, I’d be a nervous wreck.”