Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [99]
So both of them would come out of the thing with something they could call honor.
Unless — and there was always this — the Russians had something else up their sleeves. It was no coincidence that the bastards were so good at chess.
He allowed himself to enjoy his favorite scene in the movie. He was interested in, and knowledgeable about, women’s clothes. Hepburn’s were terrific. She wore the kind of stuff that Jackie wore. He wondered, drowsily, whether Hollywood imitated his wife’s taste or whether it was the other way around.
He dreamed a Soviet missile crunching through the floors of the White House, thrusting its awful snout through the shattered masonry, seeking him out, personally. Crushing him. Squashing him, opening its rotten metal mouth to swallow his head. Then obliterating everything for miles around, in bellying circles of fire.
“Hello, Chack.”
Khrushchev in the chair on the other side of the coffee table. That awful way of sitting he has, legs apart, hands on his thick thighs. Like a man on the toilet. Dreadful shiny suit designed by a bickering committee. Smile like a bad set of dentures shoved into a steamed pudding.
“Nikita?”
“How are things with you, Mr. President?”
“Uh, okay. No, I was dreaming I was dead.”
“Funny. So was I. But because of the time zones, I was dead before you was.”
“How was it?”
“Oh, you know, Chack. A blinding light. A splitting headache, then nothing. I thought of my wife at the last moment, like you do. Because we were apart.”
“Yes.”
“There is no heaven, by the way.”
“Ah. I kinda thought there might not be.”
Khrushchev’s sparse eyebrows lifted.
“I think your friend the pope would not be pleased to hear you say that, Chack.”
“I guess not.”
Khrushchev reached inside his jacket and produced something large, pinkish, and trussed.
“I brought you a gift,” he said. “A turkey. For your Thanksgiving.”
“Uh, that’s really kind of you, Nikita. A generous thought. Thank you.”
“Please. It is nothing. In the people’s paradise of the Soviet Union we have more food than we know how to eat.”
He put the big plucked bird down on the coffee table and patted its nude breast complacently.
“Plump,” he said. “Do you have something for me, Chack?”
“Aah, lemme see.”
Kennedy searched through his pockets with increasing urgency. They were all empty.
Grinning, embarrassed, he said, “Well, er, I guess nothing, right now, Nikita. But on behalf of the people of the United States of America, I thank you for the turkey.”
Khrushchev’s smile went out like a lamp. He reached again into his jacket and took out a large pair of scissors. He used them to cut the string that bound the bird’s legs and wings. The turkey flexed its naked limbs and stood up on the knobs of bone where its feet had been. It withdrew its feathered and wattled head from inside its body cavity and looked around, stretching its raw neck. Then, with an angry gargle, it went for Kennedy’s eyes with its beak.
He woke up, sweating and alone. His corset was pressing into his kidneys. He forced himself more upright in the chair. The screen was a white hiss. He drank some flat Coke from the bottle and waited for his mind to clear.
The problem wasn’t Khrushchev; it was his own people: the ExComm Hawks and the military. The Hawks were deeply unhappy about trading the Turkish Thors. Shrewdly, they’d focused on how it would look, especially to America’s allies in NATO. Mac Bundy’d had a point when he said that if the U.S. were seen to be doing unilateral deals with the Soviets, “we’d be in real trouble. If we appear to be trading the defense of Turkey for a threat to Cuba, we’ll just have to face a radical decline in the effectiveness of NATO. The whole thing could fall apart.”
And the military . . . well, they were at full boil. It was getting harder all the time to keep the lid on. That morning, when Kennedy