Дональд Уэстлейк - Humans

“But,” Mikhail asked, “if the plan doesn’t work? If they don’t see the rise in sales?”

Jack Fielding grinned and shrugged. “Then they have to grit their teeth and pay up anyway, and Miss Carrigan still gets her trip to Moscow.”

“Good,” said Susan.

“Which is one reason,” Jack Fielding went on, “why I’m a free marketeer. It’s so much harder for a private company to renege on a deal than it is for a government.”

“Ah, well,” Mikhail said, looking alarmed, “if we are going to talk free markets, I will need another drink. Susan? Your glass is empty.”

“Thank you,” she said, handing it over.

Mikhail raised an eyebrow at Jack Fielding. “And you, Mr. Fielding?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“I’ll be right back, then,” Mikhail promised, and turned away toward the bar.

Jack Fielding looked around the room, smiling faintly, saying, “This is a true grab bag here.”

“I have no idea why I was asked,” Susan admitted, “unless it’s simply because I’m staying in this hotel.”

“I think the preservation people did want to get as many English speakers here as possible,” Fielding told her, “which is why I was sent. It’s all to give the Russkies an inflated idea of the organization’s importance in the West. But the guest list at any promotional cocktail party you can name is a lot harder to figure out than the idea behind the contest that brought you here and that’s got your Russian friend so bewildered.”

My Russian friend, Susan thought. But not really, worse luck. Early in their conversation, Mikhail had mentioned that he was married — “Unfortunately, my wife could not be with me this evening” — but still she had enjoyed his company. She was here, after all, to experience Russia, not to wind up chatting with Jack Fielding, a man exactly like half a dozen guys at any cocktail party in Manhattan.

Would Mikhail come back? Had Fielding chased him away? Through a break in the crush of people, Susan could see him across the room, over at the bar, talking with another Russian man.

Grigor had just reached the head of the bar line and received his vodka when a heavily accented voice said in English, “Do you speak English?”

Grigor turned, surprised, and it was the heavy-faced burly policeman or KGB man he’d noticed talking to the American girl. In Russian, he answered, “I can understand it a little. I don’t really speak it.”

“Try,” ordered the man. Again in that thick-tongued English, he said, “Answer my first question, but in English.”

Slowly, spacing the words as he hunted for the English equivalents, Grigor said, “I understand some English. I read English more... better than I speak.”

“Good,” said the man, still in that barbaric English. (Grigor knew he himself was at any rate not that bad, at least not in pronunciation.) “You may call me Mikhail. You will come with me.”

“But... who are you?”

“KGB, of course,” said the man, who might or might not be really named Mikhail. He tossed the fact off carelessly, with a shrug, then said, “Which you will tell no one.”

“Of course.”

“Now you will come with me. There are two Americans talking. I must speak with the man by himself. You will speak with the woman, so that I can take the man away.”

“But... why me?”

“Because I have requisitioned you,” the KGB man said, his thick lips working like rubber around the long strange English word. “Now come along.” Then, an obvious afterthought, as they pressed through the crowd, the KGB man holding a drink in each hand, he looked over his shoulder and said, “What is your name?”

“Grigor Basmyonov.”

“And how do you earn your living, Grigor Basmyonov?”

“I write for the television.” Finding the English words, placing them, took all Grigor’s concentration.

“Good.”

The two Americans were chattering together at a great clip, the words tumbling together, fuzzing at their edges, completely incomprehensible. Grigor thought, I can’t understand a word! Not when they talk that fast. Is this what I left the clinic for? To be harassed by a KGB man and humiliated by Americans?

Mikhail the urbane economist said, “I have brought along a compatriot who would love the chance to improve his English,” while Mikhail the burly KGB man said, “Dis is a Russian man who speaks English as good as me. Maybe better.”

“I have just a little English,” Grigor said, smiling at the Americans, feeling suddenly shy and awkward, beginning to regret having come here at all. What did he know about foreigners, and how to act with them? Except for a few Western doctors in the first year after Chernobyl, with all of whom he’d spoken only through a translator, he had never met any foreigners in his life. I am a simple fireman from Kiev, he thought. This second life is a mistake.

“This is Miss Susan Carrigan, from New York City,” both Mikhails said, except that the KGB man left out “Miss.” “She won Moscow in a contest.” Mikhail the economist smiled with amusement, while Mikhail the KGB man smiled as though angry, obscurely insulted.

“A visit to Moscow,” Susan corrected, smiling at this new Russian man, holding her hand out to shake. His hand, when he took hers, was surprisingly thin and bony, and the grip tentative. He looked as though he might be suffering from flu or something, as though it might have been a mistake for him to get out of his sickbed to come to the party.

“Grigor Basmyonov,” both Mikhails finished the introduction. “Grigor works for our Moscow television.”

“Oh, really?” Susan released Grigor’s frail hand, and accepted her fresh glass of wine from Mikhail. “What do you do there?”

“I write jokes for a comedian,” Grigor told her, the words coming slowly, one at a time. Shaking his head, he said, “Not a comedian you have heard of.”

“ I might have,” Jack Fielding said, and stuck his hand out, saying, “Jack Fielding. I’m with the embassy here, we watch TV a lot, believe me. Who’s your comedian?”

Shaking Fielding’s hand, Grigor said, “Boris Boris,” and was pleased at the grunt of unhappy surprise from Mikhail the KGB man. (Mikhail the economist gave a chuckle of remembered pleasure.)

Fielding was impressed: “No kidding! He’s an outrageous man, your guy.”

“Yes, he is,” Grigor agreed, relaxing, basking in Boris Boris’s glory.

“Just a few years ago, say what he says now,” Fielding added, shaking his head, “and he’d go straight to Siberia.”

“Well, at least he’d have me with him,” Grigor assured the American. “If Boris Boris catches cold, I sneeze.” And then he was astonished at how easily English was coming to him, once he had himself started. So it might be possible after all.

“I tried looking at television here,” Susan said, “but it was so frustrating. It looks like TV at home, the news shows and the exercise shows and the game shows, but of course, I don’t understand a word anybody says. And when they put some kind of notice on, I don’t even know the letters !” And she laughed at her own helplessness.

“I have seen your American television, of course,” Grigor told her. He liked the way she looked, and the ease of her self-assurance; she made him want to keep the conversation going, no matter how difficult. “We receive the satellite transmissions at the station. Sometimes I watch the CNN news. Do you know the program?”

“Oh, sure,” Susan said, “Cable news. It must look very different from your point of view”

“Such positivism,” Grigor told her, smiling, hoping that was a word in English. “The announcers are so certain about everything. We haven’t had anyone that certain about everything since Stalin died.”