Mila 18 - Leon Uris [9]
“Oh, Andrei,” she said, and lay her head on his chest. “Oh, Andrei,” and she sniffled.
“If I knew that I was going to make you so sad, I wouldn’t have returned.”
She dried her eyes and purred with contentment. “How long?”
“Four days.”
“Oh, I’m so happy.”
“I almost had to find another woman for myself. I thought you would never get out of the Embassy.”
Gabriela toyed with his large hand, which nearly made two of hers. “I’ve just been in a meeting. We aren’t reopening the American school. All the children have been evacuated to Krakow. Even some of the key personnel are leaving.”
Andrei grumbled something about the traditional cowardice of Americans.
“Let’s not talk about it now,” she said. “We only have ninety-six hours, and look at the time we have already wasted. We can’t go to my place. I had it repainted. It smells terrible. I didn’t know you were coming home.”
“And if we go to my place, Alexander Brandel and the whole damned executive council will be camping at the doorstep.”
“Let’s risk it,” Gabriela said with a low-voiced tremor of want that sent her captain to the curb in search of a droshka.
They drove north past the imposing mansions of the “new rich” on the Avenue of the Marshals. Gabriela snuggled against him, her fingers feeling his face and shoulders.
Andrei’s flat on Leszno Street sat in a middle-class neighborhood that buffered the rich on the south from the wild slums on the north. They climbed the stairs toward his tiny flat, arms about each other. By the time they reached the third-floor landing, Gabriela stopped to catch her breath.
“My next lover has to live on the ground floor,” she said.
Andrei swept her up in his arms and tossed her over a shoulder like a sack of sugar.
“Put me down, you crazy fool!”
He emitted a bloodcurdling cavalry charge and leaped up the final flight of stairs two steps at a time, kicked open his never-locked door, then stood in amazement with Gabriela trying to squirm off his shoulder.
Andrei’s eyes went from corner to corner around the flat. He peeked into the kitchen, then looked around again, wondering if he had invaded the wrong apartment. The place was spotlessly clean. For years he had carefully strewn his books and papers about. His desk was always three inches deep in reports. All the wonderful clutter, all the carefully preserved dust—all of the things that make a man a bachelor—were gone.
Andrei kicked open the closet door. Everything pressed and hanging neatly.
The kitchen ... All those lovely unwashed dishes washed.
There were curtains, lace curtains, at the windows.
“I’ve been evicted!” Andrei cried. “No, something more horrible than that has happened. A female has been here!”
“Andrei, if you don’t put me down I’ll scream rape.”
He lowered her to the floor.
“I think you owe me an explanation,” he said.
“I’d sit in my place night after night waiting for Batory to charge down the street bearing my Ulan warrior. All alone with my ten black cats and my memories. And I came here and sat because you were all around me and I wasn’t quite so lonely. But! Who can sit in such a mess!”
“I know your type, Gabriela Rak. You’re going to try to make me over.”
“Oh, you know it!”
She leaped at him, and he caught her off the floor and held her and sank his lips into hers. And in a moment Andrei had no more talk to make. They were bringing each other from smoldering dormancy with an urgency that heightened every second.
The phone rang.
It stuck them like a knife. They froze.
It rang again.
“Son of a bitch, Brandel.”
It rang again.
“Let it ring, darling,” she said.
And it did ... again and again and again.
Gabriela spun away from him, teary-eyed. “It has eyes, that phone. It never rang the whole time you were gone.”
“Well, maybe I’d better answer.”
“Oh, you might as well. Every Bathyran in Warsaw knows that Andrei Androfski is home on leave.”
He snatched the phone from the hook. “Is that you, you son of a hitch, Brandel!”
A soft voice answered on the other end.