And even as Elena told herself that she must help this lost foreigner, must get her indoors somewhere out of the snow and find shoes and a coat for her, she noticed that the woman’s bare feet were in the center of a patch of cleared wet pavement; the woman’s feet had melted the snow on the sidewalk to a distance of nearly a yard; and now Elena could feel the heat that radiated from her, as palpable as radiant energy from a furnace.
The jewelry, Elena noticed finally, was a string of gold rings around the woman’s neck; and interspersed among the rings were holed lumps of steel and gold. Elena had seen many Muscovites with stainless-steel teeth-dental porcelain was scarce.
The woman rocked her head to the south, staring intently into Elena’s eyes-and Elena’s face was suddenly hot, for the gesture and the look had somehow conveyed an urgent sexual invitation, if not an order. One of Elena’s molars was gold, and she could imagine it strung among the lumps and the rings on the woman’s breast.
But Elena turned away and ran down the Arbat Street sidewalk, skidding on the ice and fearful of pursuit but somehow taking comfort in the grid of electrified streetcar wires that made a net overhead. When she stopped under the harsh neo-Gothic pillars of the Foreign Ministry and looked back, the woman had not moved-or only a little, perhaps: surely she seemed a little closer, a little bigger against the background of gray buildings, than she would have if she had not moved.
And the next day, when Elena checked the display copies of Pravda, the Cyrillic symbols for “Moroz” were at the bottom of the list of Moscow council members.
She walked on past the newspaper display and then turned up a side street to the left, away from Moroz’s office.
She felt like a swimmer out far past any thing to cling to, with the bottom leagues away below her flailing legs. If Moroz had been arrested, how could she safely find out? If he had been, she herself would surely share in his ruin. Her faith in the Party was subsumed in her terror of Beria-Each morning the NKVD executioners were given their rifles and their vodka, Cassagnac had said only three months ago, and after they had shot their dozens and bulldozed them into pits dug by convict labor, they went back to the guardrooms and drank themselves insensible. And even more recently Marcel Gruey, Lot, had told her, Cassagnac said that this generation of the Soviet secret services will be killed in their own turn before long, and that the next lot is likely to be more reasonable. But how could she take any evasion measures here? She had no contacts, she didn’t know the city, the nearest border was more than three hundred miles away at Latvia, and she didn’t even speak the language yet beyond a few utilitarian or slangy phrases.
She simply walked, east down the Gertsena street toward the medieval bastions that studded the gray Kremlin wall. She saw several police officers-mostly women in blue skirts and berets, directing traffic-but it wasn’t uniformed figures that would threaten her. And she saw old women bundled up in coats and scarves, shuffling along the sidewalks in heavy felt boots, sweeping the snow into the gutters with crude brooms. Elena envied them their secure identities.
She had walked past the northernmost towers of the Kremlin. The buildings she passed were pillared palaces now, and she knew one of them was the Bolshoi Theatre-but she hurried past without looking up at the Corinthian columns, and tried to step along in a businesslike way as she made straight for the shadows of a cobbled pedestrian underpass.
When she came up into the gray daylight again on the far side, she heard music-a song that Marcel Gruey had sometimes sung, an American song called “The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”-echoing out across the snowy sidewalk from a hotel whose name she was able to figure out phonetically: Metropol. The clarity and imprecision let her know that the music was being produced by a live band rather than a radio speaker, and she hurried across the street and up the hotel steps. If she could meet some man, and get him to take her home, she could at least establish a temporary shelter from which to reconnoiter.
A moustached old man at the door mumbled something to her, and when she cocked her head inquiringly, he said, in English, “Thirty cents.” Uneasy that he had so instantly identified her as a foreigner, Elena gave him a ruble coin and hurried past him-into a corridor that opened on an ornate nineteenth-century ballroom, with a fountain and a marble pool out in the middle of the polished wood floor.
At the checkroom she handed her overcoat across the counter. Three girls in lumpy ski pants arrived right behind her, chattering in Russian, and they began hopping on one foot and the other to pull the pants off, afterward smoothing the dresses that they had worn crumpled up under the pants. Elena’s face went cold and expressionless to see two men in Red Army uniforms stepping up the hall now-but they were laughing as they took off their overcoats. Clearly they too had come simply to dance.
Elena shuffled nervously into the ballroom, eyeing the young men who seemed to be without partners. Everybody in Russia seemed to have come to the Metropol-men in coveralls were dancing with young women in wrinkled gowns, helmets rocked on the belts of gyrating soldiers, and even the aproned waiters were tap-dancing as they carried drinks on trays; Elena even heard English sentences, and after peering around spied a table of obvious Britishers drinking watery Zhigulovsky beer. Her first thought, instantly scorned, was to try to give them a message to take to Marcel Gruey, to poor gallant Lot -but she didn’t even know his real name, and in any case he was a sadly deficient Communist.
Elena had just steeled herself to approach a studious-looking young man whose dance partner had been deflected away by one of the Red Army soldiers, when she found herself in the arms of a lean-faced man who smiled at her with steel teeth. “Bless me,” the man said.
She nodded, recognizing the old Paris Razvedupr code: Things are not what they seem-trust me.
“You’ll have to tell us,” the man remarked quietly in her ear in French, “how you knew to avoid his office this morning. You were right-he’s gone, and so would you have been. We might or might not have been able to get you away from them. But why didn’t you simply follow her, when she approached you in her ring yesterday?”
Elena knew who it was that he must be referring to. “Her ring? The Sadovaya?”
“With her…earring stones? anchor stones?…installed around the periphery, at Patriarch’s Pond and Gorky Park and the Kursk Station, to keep her from becoming…disoriented?” The French word was désoriente, and he laughed as though he had made a joke.
He had whirled her to an arch on the other side of the high-ceilinged room, and he stepped back and let her last dance step link her arm through his, so that now they were walking down the corridor beyond without having paused.
Another man was holding open an outside door, and Elena found that she had been escorted down a set of cement steps and into the back seat of a black Ford sedan before she could catch her breath. She wondered if she would ever see her overcoat again.
The man who had met her on the dance floor glanced at his wristwatch as the car accelerated away from the curb, driving in a counterclockwise loop around the block and then speeding north up the Neglinaya boulevard. “Moroz is probably dead, by now,” he said, still speaking in French. “The NKVD has learned about your Palestinian lover in Paris.” He laughed and shook his head. “A Palestinian radio operator! You would be food for Zat al-Dawahi yourself if we hadn’t been tracking you closely. Moroz planned to send you to Berlin?”