The firebird affair

As always when I wanted to stay awake, I turned on the TV and then ignored it. The noise made me feel less lonely. I tried to imagine what might have happened that precipitated Amanda’s sudden departure, but my brain was frozen. All I could retrieve was a memory of the sensuality experienced yesterday: her middle finger running across my lips, barely touching them.

Against my better judgment, I opened a bottle of brandy, which I kept in the back of the wardrobe closet. I poured myself one, then another and another, fully aware I’d end up in a morose stupor.

The phone rang.

I jumped up to pick up the receiver. It was Sonia the hooker. “Can I come up to see you?”

“No, I’m asleep.” I hung up.

It rang again. This time it was Barbara Browne.

“I have tried you several times,” she said. “Kevin Page has been trying to reach you.”

“I know. He left a message at the hotel.”

“He wants you to call him.”

“Okay, you told me.” I said and coughed. “Amanda has suddenly split. Very odd. What can you tell me about her? ”

“You dated her, honeychild,” Barbara said and I could imagine a leer crossing her face.

“I mean did you see her or talk to her today?”

“No,” Barbara said.

“Left a message she’s going on an assignment.”

“This happens in our business, as you know. Look, I’m on deadline.”

What did I know about Amanda? What was she doing here?

I assembled the facts in my mind: she’s from Richmond; both parents obstetricians; graduated from William and Mary, attended Columbia. Everything else was vague, poorly defined. I wondered who she really was, the underlying assumption being that I had some special claim on the answer.

A happy solution suddenly occurred to me. Why not call her parents in Richmond? They’d be able to give me her phone number, email address.

The freshly rekindled hope focused my mind. I glanced at the clock: fifteen minutes to four PM in Washington. With adrenaline rushing, I began making long distance calls. It didn’t take long before I felt utterly crushed. Defeated by the slovenliness of Russian hotel telephone system and the interminable mechanical-voice preliminaries in America.

In my alcoholic haze, I came upon another solution. My fingers flying at the laptop, I sent an email to Alex:

That calmed me. Brandy now was merely analgesic.

I watched a documentary about marine experts working to protect giant turtles on the southwestern edge of the island of St. Croix. I flipped to Channel Six and caught the solemn, bearded face of Chuck Norris in a dubbed Walker Texas Ranger.

The late news was unexpectedly discomforting. War was the major topic, but the coverage of war was different from what I’d been accustomed to. I had no stomach for watching Afghan villages being blown to kingdom come. Downing yet another glass of brandy, I switched to a channel showing folk dances performed by the Moiseyev ensemble.

Without warning or conscious thought, I drifted away from the dancers on the screen to the image of Amanda, which sparked up in my mind as if another television set was just plugged in. Popping a boner as I remembered how her skin sometimes appeared translucent and how seductively she behaved at Kozlov’s party. I felt a spasm of jealousy, but it was a retroactive emotion. Then I conjured up the illusion of her coming out of a hot shower, slowly opening her mouth, moistening her lips with her tongue, beckoning me to join her. It wasn’t working. Instead I heard the voice of my father: Forget her, she’s just a whore. He secretly thought all actresses and prominent professional women were whores. These were the attitudes from the Old Country, just like he thought that having a job was when you wear a shirt and tie, have a desk, regular hours, benefits.

Still fully dressed, I lay down on my back. The bed was soft. I closed my eyes and then time just vanished. I was back with my Dad, strolling in Forest Park on a beautiful Sunday morning in late spring. The next day I was going to take a Greyhound bus to my first job as camp counselor in New Hampshire. Don’t forget, Dad said, solemnly as if he was composing his last testament: backbone, will, honor. Whenever he was overcome with emotion, his lips would quiver at the edges. “In life, you sometimes make compromises,” he took my right hand and squeezed it. “But there are certain lines you don’t cross. One wrong step can turn a good life into a bad one.” When I returned the squeeze, his eyes welled.

I awoke, three hours later. The station was off the air. I switched the TV off and staggered to the bathroom where I was sick in the toilet bowl. Afterwards, I brushed my teeth, putting a lot of Crest on the toothbrush to get rid of the awful taste in my mouth. Then I peeled off my clothes and slid between the sheets.

When I closed my eyes, I saw Amanda again, like Bo Derek in 10 coming out of the water at the Silver Grove beach and beckoning for help. I had helped her tip the rowing boat on its keel, found the oars beneath the boat, and together we dragged it down to the water. I carefully stepped into the boat and sat down facing the shore, then placed two oars into the rowlocks. She brought a picnic basket, knelt to the stern to push us off, then turned around. We sat facing each other. “You just row,” she said, saucily raising an eyebrow before starting to unpack roast beef sandwiches with slices of provolone sticking over the edges of the rye bread. The boat was fiberglass and never picked up the momentum a wooden boat would. “This boat is hard work,” I said. “I know. Plastic boats are too light,” she said. “Let’s relax and have lunch,” she added, handing me a bottle of Carlsberg. I could still hear her voice, fresh and ironic around the edges, as we floated down the river. Afterwards, she stretched like a cat, her flimsy aquamarine bathing suit complemented by her clear complexion, her eyes closed in the dazzling light, her toes touching my shins. ”I’m getting a tan,” she said. Her face was golden, her hair golden, and wild thoughts danced in my head.

That same day, I had a glimpse of Amanda’s hidden side and as much as I wanted to dismiss the resulting feeling of unease, I could not deny the startling fact that when I looked at Amanda that night, I saw someone I barely knew. Just after making love, the phone rang. It was past midnight. Amanda’s answers were monosyllabic, but her tone was frigid, icy. In the darkness, she sounded like a different person.

“Who’s that?” I asked later.

“Oh just my assignment editor,” she said. “Complaining.”

On our last day together, she seemed absentminded, remote. I found her drained of all energy and peering glumly out the window as if looking into some gloomy future. She was so thin and so pale she glowed. She must have considered the actuarial odds, I thought. She must have thought that we had no future, that she mustn’t make a poor bargain and give away her youth only to find herself alone at the end of her life. Unlike me, she’d have no second chance.

Looking back, I now realized that we never discussed our relationship, what the future held for us, instinctively avoiding all topics that called to mind such concerns. We continued to meet every day, making love with ever-greater passion, but never became truly intimate. I thought I knew why. Because of my obsession with Hector, and thousands of unanswerable questions that turned round and round in my head even when I was not focusing on them. Galina Zvonareva’s death? Okay, people die. The goons who were spying on me? Someone had hired them. Who? Joseph’s help? My deceit?

It took me a long time to fish out Rolaids from the night table.

When I woke in the morning, I struggled to my feet and walked unsteadily to the bathroom. Then I reached out for the laptop.

The screen burst into life. The message from Alex was brief: “Unable to find any obstetricians named Paul in the Richmond area.”

My self-confidence undermined, I succumbed to anger and jealousy.

The bitch, I muttered unkindly. A nichtikeit, as my mom would say.

Alex’s message gave me an acute sense of foreboding, a feeling in the pit of my stomach as if something had gone terribly awry, although I had no idea what that might be.

I took a long hot shower and got dressed. Then I took the elevator down to the restaurant.

Coffee was bitter and strong and helped kick-start the mind. I had to take charge of my life. Be adult about the whole thing. That, as I understood it, meant I must convince myself that I didn’t give a shit. Yet it was precisely now that I felt drawn to her more strongly than at any time since I first met her. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know who she was. Whoever she was, something in her called out to me.

When Joseph called, I had to say immediately that I’d be bad company right now. “Amanda’s just left. No fucking explanation, nothing.”

“She’ll be back,” Joseph said.

“I don’t care,” I said petulantly.

“Playing hard to get. What a bitch!” Joseph apparently thought he was filling all those potholes of worry that had developed in my mind.

I launched into a stream of invectives which I imagined would darken Amanda’s golden halo. Astonishingly, I realized none of them turned me against her.“Let us think this through, starik. Eh?”

“You don’t get it,” I said irritably. “She’s like a drug that had me hooked after only a few hits.”

“No, she’s a habit that needs breaking. I have an idea.”

I knew what was coming.

“I have a beauty for you: a fabulous nineteen year old ballerina. We call her the game-for-anything Tanya! You name it, starik, and you have it—all entrances, any way you want.” He paused. “That’s if you’re interested. Now seriously, I’ve talked to a few people in Central Asia. You’re on. Check out of the hotel and sleep here tonight. I’m sending a car for you.”

32
I was the last passenger to step off the ancient TU-62 at Dushanbe airport. It was nine o’clock in the evening when we touched down and the passengers erupted into applause. Which reminded me of old Aeroflot flights—passengers always cheered as if landings were a touch-and-go proposition.

“Dushanbe!” I was at the edge of the known world. How odd, I thought, that I should find myself at this point in my life in the same place I had visited many years earlier to monitor the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Afghanistan.

Passengers grappled with their boxes and shouted at their sleepy children as they surged toward the badly lit terminal building.

Passport examination seemed perfunctory. Uniformed officials handled travel documents without much interest—mechanically applying the stamp. The bags were slow in coming. The baggage carousels were broken. I grabbed my wheeled bag and was waved out into the arrivals hall. The last to join the line outside the passport control, the first to get through the customs.

Before leaving Moscow, I had spent two nights at Joseph’s house in Barvikha while final arrangements were being made. The first night I ended up in bed with the fabulous Tanya, only after I got completely plastered. The worst part of it was that what pushed me over the edge to an orgasm was not Tanya’s angelic face under me—it was the memory of Amanda’s interminably long legs embracing my treacherous flesh.

The next day, I was for the most part alone in the big house. The servants and professionally unpleasant guards kept out of my way. I read by the pool, enjoyed the sun on the deck feeling isolated and lonely. People lie, I thought, everyone lies. I lied to Amanda, for example – harmless things like I didn’t tell her about the mole. Perhaps she had to lie too. Indeed, only an old fool could imagine that she’d opt out of her generation to join mine!

Before I left for Dushanbe, Joseph told me that a man called Mensoor would meet me at the airport. Mensoor would take me across the Tajik-Uzbek border to Sherabad—and bring me back to Dushanbe.

“Do as he says,” Joseph had said. “That’s very important. You can trust him.”

It was hot and humid inside the airless terminal. The place was seething with human beings—hawkers, hustlers, country folk in national costumes, urchins selling cigarettes, crippled Sufis with canes and crutches—everybody shouting, jostling, dragging bags of all sizes and shapes. Many lay sleeping near check-in counters.

I looked around, preparing to push my way toward the exits, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Mr. Todd?”

A dark man with a pencil-thin moustache stepped up to me. He was wearing pre-faded denim slacks and a black silk shirt unbuttoned to show lots of curly gray chest hair. And he smoked.

“I’m Mensoor. Welcome to Dushanbe.” His smile was friendly, open, filled with healthy white teeth.

“Thanks.”

“Had a pleasant flight, I hope?”

“Yes,” I said.

He was under six feet tall and weighed close to two hundred pounds, a pleasant-looking man whose voice was cultured and who had a look about him of a man of action. I declined to be assisted with my bag and followed him across the hall and out into the pandemonium of the Central Asian night. A wailing voice croaked over the airport sound system: a Muslim Romeo on the verge of despair over his girl’s betrayal. Traffic choked the street outside. Fumes rose from the rusty exhaust pipes of green-and-white city busses, which appeared ready for the scrap heap, as did many other cars crawling in the outside lane and rattling like tin cans.

Mensoor carefully circled a green Toyota, inspecting its tires. I put my rollaway bag on the back seat while he opened the passenger side door for me and threw away his cigarette. I settled in and immediately handed Joseph’s envelope to him. Without opening it, Mensoor put it into the side pocket of the car.

“I bet you must be hungry,” he said.

“They didn’t feed us on the plane.”

“We’ll have a bite here, then drive to the border, rest for a couple hours at my cousin’s house. We’ll make a crossing in the early morning. This run is a piece of cake provided you take precautions. Most army and police units are in the north.”

“Why north?”

“There’s big trouble in Andijon. More than a hundred and fifty protesters died.”

We drove in silence.

The road from the airport led through fields and parklands. I saw a streetlight in the distance. A settlement of low houses and a solitary minaret appeared in front of us.

“I’ll take you to Rashidov, but I can’t guarantee he’ll see you. I hope he will.”

“I hope so, too,” I said with a small laugh.

“We told him you have a few questions about your wife’s death a long time ago.” After a pause, he added, “How did she die?”

I gave him a short version.

“What is it that you want to know?”

“The truth,” I said, and immediately realized I sounded naïve, or worse, deliberately misleading. Suddenly, I didn’t have much in the way of words.

Mensoor snorted. “The truth?”

“I didn’t explain myself properly,” I said. “It’s like putting together a puzzle. Rashidov might know a few tiny missing pieces.”

I had forgotten the Russian word for closure, which I thought was why Mensoor had problems in grasping the concept. But the more I tried to explain myself, the more I felt enmeshed in my own words, like a tiny crab caught in seaweed.

“Vengeance—that I understand,” Mensoor said, shaking his head. “Revenge is a right and an honor.”

I said nothing. I was a self-appointed unforgiving administrator of retribution and just deserts, and I had to pretend otherwise.

Mensoor continued: “We had a case here where a guy recognized a person who had double-crossed him in a particularly vicious manner some twenty odd years back. So he killed him. Made sure he had the right guy, then emptied a .36 mm into his belly, and turned himself in. Well, this I understand. Mere curiosity makes little sense to me.”

I said, “What happened to the murderer?”

“The whole town took his side, including the top political and civic leaders. The judge was in an awful predicament. He had to send the man to jail for a few years. But there was an unspoken understanding that he’d be freed after a year or two. This is Central Asia, eh?”

Mensoor brought the car to a halt outside a chaikhana, next to a line of parked cars and trucks. The aroma of roasted shish kebab hung in the air.

The place had dark wooden floors, red checked tablecloths, waiters dressed in white shirts and black pants. It was noisy, full of dark men with low brows and long stares.

We were installed in a special booth upholstered in brown plastic leather. “You’ll have to change your clothes,” Mensoor said after we were seated. “And everything else. Including your passport.” He shrugged, as if apologies were unnecessary.

I said, “Is that really necessary?”

“Absolutely,” Mensoor said and paused. “I don’t take chances. Your cell is a homing device, so’s your PC. It’s like announcing I’m here. How can you be sure there is not a tiny tracking chip somewhere in your clothes?”

I drew a long breath. ”Okay, I’m in your hands.”

“We assume all intelligence services are eavesdropping on each other and everybody here.”

The manager, whose name was Rifat and who was a friend of Mensoor’s, appeared. Skinny, with a slightly oriental face, he had a coiled snake tattooed inside his left arm and reminded me of a senior police detective in the old Hawaii Five-O series.

Like an old married couple, Mensoor and Rifat communicated with gestures and only a few words.

“We’ll have some tea.” Rifat smiled and winked.

“Sure,” said Mensoor with a small, self-satisfying chuckle. He leaned over to me and said in a low voice: “It’s vodka. You know, you’re in an Islamic country.”

Rifat returned with a blue-and-white ceramic teapot and two matching cups. “I’ll leave you two. If you need more tea, ask the waiter to call me.”

Mensoor smiled, turning the palms of his hands up.

“Rifat is a genius, he knows all the angles,” Mensoor said later. “We joke that he’s got more angles than the geometry text book.”

I dug into a plate of roasted lamb, rice, and diced cucumbers in a yogurt dressing. The food was prepared with local spices that exploded pleasantly in my mouth.

After we finished dinner, I was led to the manager’s office to put on some new clothes and Mensoor returned to the car. My new outfit included rumpled baggy pants, which were too big for me even after I had drawn the tapes as tight as possible, a lemon-green short-sleeved shirt with buttons missing, old tennis shoes, and a black cap that was too small and covered only the very top of my head like a yarmulke.

Afterwards, Rifat handed me a warm, striped cloak known as chapan and led me through the back entrance of the chaikhana to the Toyota.

“That’s more like it,” laughed Mensoor, inspecting me from head to toe.

I felt a bit uncomfortable.

33

The road to Uzbekistan was due west. The car plunged quickly into the darkness of the mountain and began to climb. It was damp and cold. I took the chapan from the back seat and covered myself.

“We call it a smuggler’s moon,” Mensoor said, looking up and chuckling. “You don’t need headlights.”

After a while, we entered a dense forest. The road narrowed and turned lumpy. Mensoor pulled onto the side of the road to urinate and have a quick smoke. He opened the trunk and returned with a machine pistol.

“You need that?” I said.

“No one goes to the mountains unarmed,” Mensoor said. “Just in case.” His furrowed face appeared sinister, lit from below by the glow of the dashboard.

I closed my eyes. Up to now, my life had been simple. Now I was with the smugglers—smuggling myself into another country. That became my sole concern at the moment. It was like being in a war zone when all you worry about is your next meal and staying alive.

I dozed, imagining I was already on the other side and marveling at the turquoise-tiled domes of Samarkand, walking through wondrous bazaars where I had once taken Emily during a short Christmas break and we roamed around looking for oriental spices and fruits from surrounding orchards and gardens. In my dream, we were driving through Registan Square—she coquettishly whispering something into my ear—and the crowds parting before us like waves before the prow of an ocean-liner and I realized it was Amanda that was seated next to me.

“We’re here,” Mensoor said, shaking me.

I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles.

“We’ll rest here for a few hours,” Mensoor said.

We were parked outside a large white stucco house—its windows covered with wooden lattices. I was led to a room with beaded curtains, octagonal tables of intricately carved wood, frayed oriental rugs, mirrored throw pillows, and a bed with a wooden headboard festooned with chunky carved grapes.

I fell asleep as soon as my head landed on a pillow, staying within my dream, picking it up where I’d left off. I was still in Central Asia, but we were now in the town named Osh. We were tailed everywhere we went. Without trying, we lost the clumsy KGB gumshoes in the Osh central market while dithering near the stalls with local pottery. Then we slipped through a backdoor into the kitchen of a restaurant. It was like we’d arrived at a surprise party. People had never seen Americans before and they invited us to sample the dishes on the menu. Fifteen minutes later, the two breathless goons burst into the kitchen, relieved that they had located their charges.

We mounted a crest almost to the top when thick brush choked the path. Mensoor cut the engine. I heard a faint distant rumble announce a train. Then deep silence filled the forest.

“Let’s go,” said Mensoor.

Pushing the motorcycle uphill turned out to be harder than I had expected. I was in a cold sweat by the time we neared the top. What was inside the sidecar? I tried just not to think about it.

Once again, Mensoor cupped a hand to his ear. We waited for a brief moment, then mounted the motorcycle and started descent crawling. No engine, no lights, just squealing brakes.

“The smuggler’s moon helps,” Mensoor said under his breath and chuckled again.

It seemed to take forever. I felt as if thousands of invisible eyes watched our every movement.

When we reached a creek near the bottom of the hill, Mensoor said, ”Allah karim!” God is generous, he translated. “I get religious only when I’m transporting explosives.”

“You mean we have weapons here,” I said, pointing at the sidecar. The notion made my chest tight.

Mensoor chuckled and nodded. “Explosives. Enough to blow up half of Dushanbe. Hundred and fifty kilos of Semtex and one hundred antipersonnel mines.”

The yellow beam of the motorcycle lights revealed two large moss-covered boulders, which formed a dam that threw the water to right and left of its course. The boulders also formed a natural bridge that we used to cross to the other side, bouncing over gullies until we reached a country road along the right bank of the creek.