“Yeah,” he said, “well, it's times like these when you find out who your true friends are. And now you know.” Those were his last words to me before he flashed me a wink and a smile and walked out the door.
James Loo would never make it out the door.
Per OCD's instructions, I would pass him the envelope and then tell him that I needed to go downstairs for a minute to get something from the doorman. Then they would arrest him. Of course, the Chef would never find out, because James Loo would also join Team USA, as would the Chef, I prayed, when histime came. After all, it wasn't himthat they were really after; it was the Blue-eyed Devil.
The Chef was just a stepping-stone.
On my way back out to Southampton, I held on to that thought for all it was worth: that the Chef would roll over on the Devil, and I would be spared the guilt of having ratted out my old friend. And when I wasn't thinking that, I kept reminding myself over and over again that all men betray… all men betray… all men betray.
I would be wrong about that.
Some don't.
*Name has been changed
CHAPTER 23
TWISTS OF FATE
So, while ninety-nine percent of Americans were reading their morning papers and saying, “This is great! They finally brought that bastard to heel!” and the other one percent were reading their morning papers and saying, “This is bad! That bastard is going to rat us out now!” KGB was reading Pravdaand cursing out the Chechen rebels, who, in hermind, were worthless Muslim dogs that deserved to be nuked.
And that was what I loved most about KGB: not her burning desire to turn the Chechens into radioactive dust (I was opposed to that) but the fact that she was completely oblivious to what was going on in my life. Better she focused on those Chechen dogs, I figured, than on the fact that she was living with a rat.
At this particular moment, she was sitting with Carter on the TV room's couch, staring at a forty-inch high-definition TV screen. Every last drop of her mental energy was focused on an ultrabrave, genetically enhanced marsupial named Crash Bandicoot, who was in the process of doing what he was always doing: running for his fucking life.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked the two videoholics.
KGB ignored me; she was too busy at the PlayStation controls, her thumbs moving up and down at a frenetic pace. Carter, however, was just observing, although he was so entranced that he ignored me too. His eyes were as wide as an owl's, his elbows resting on his thighs with his tiny chin cupped in his palms.
I walked over to Carter and said, “Whaddaya doing, buddy?”
He looked up and shook his head in awe. “Yuya's anazin‘ ,Daddy. She… she… she”—he couldn't seem to get the words out—”she's on the top level. She's fighting brand-new monsters I never see before. No one has.”
“Look here,” KGB muttered to Carter, as she assisted Crash in his escape. “If I capture golden mask I become invincible!”
Carter looked back at the TV screen, awestruck. After a few seconds he whispered, “Invincible!”
I sat down beside my son and put my arm around him. “She's pretty good, buddy, huh?”
“Use a jump attack!” he screamed to KGB.
“No!” she shot back. “To defeat this monster I must use spin attack!”
“Ohhhh…” he said softly.
Aspin attack, I thought. Just say the word a, for Chrissake!Still, there was no denying that KGB was the most proficient videogamestresson the entire fucking planet—Ms. Pac-Man, Super Mario, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Hercules, and, of course, her latest obsession, Crash Bandicoot, the genetically enhanced marsupial from Wumpa Island off western Australia. She'd beaten them all, rising to levels that mere mortals, like Carter, never dared dream about.
As KGB jerked her glorious body this way and Carter jerked his thirty-one-pound body that way, I found myself wondering what the hell made Yulia Sukhanova tick. She played videogames no less than eight hours a day, spending the rest of her time either reading Russian books, babbling on the phone in Russian, or whispering sweet Russian nothings in my ear as we made love. She resided in America, yes, but only in the physical sense. Her heart and soul were still in Russia, stuck in a geopolitical time warp in the year 1989, the very year she'd been crowned Miss Soviet Union.
Intellectually, she was brilliant. She excelled at chess, checkers, backgammon, gin rummy, and, for that matter, all games of chance, which she played with a hustler's edge, and she hated to lose more than anything. Her parents were both dead, her father succumbing to a heart attack when she was only nine. They had been close, she said, and his death traumatized her. He had been an important man in the Soviet Union, a rocket scientist with the highest security clearance, so even after his death the family had always been taken care of. She had never wanted for anything. Bread lines, empty store shelves, drab clothing—things like these were as far removed from Yulia's childhood as they were from mine. Her life had been a charmed one and, by Soviet standards, one of affluence.
Her grace and beauty had come from her mother. I had seen the pictures; she was breathtaking—blond, blue-eyed, and possessing the warmest of smiles. In her day, according to Yulia, her mother was even prettier than she and held a very important position in the arts. In consequence, Yulia had grown up in a chic Moscow apartment, where a never-ending parade of famous Soviet artists-actors, actresses, painters, sculptors, singers, and ballet dancers— partied into the wee hours of the night, drinking Stolichnaya vodka and singing Russian songs.
Her mother hadn't died of natural causes: She was murdered, stabbed to death in her apartment, and that was where the story became murky. Her death had come shortly after Yulia was crowned Miss Soviet Union—and literally coincided with a dispute over who had “rights” to the gravy train that Yulia Sukhanova had become. Many were suspected in the murder, but no one was ever charged. So who murdered her? Was it the KGB? The Russian mob? A disgruntled businessman trying to extort Yulia for her modeling earnings? Or was it simply a random act of violence?
Whichever it was, this was the girl I had fallen in love with, a girl who loved her country but was reluctant to return there even as a visitor. In fact, she hadn't even flown back for her mother's funeral, and while she didn't say it, I knew it was out of fear. Igor— who she still maintained was her brother-in-law, married to her older sister, Larissa—hadn't flown back either, although in his case, she admitted, he couldn't have gone even if he wanted to. He was a wanted man in his country, but not by the law. There were “others,” she said, whose toes Igor had stepped on, and it had something to do with her. And that was it. Try as I might, she refused to go any further with the story.