Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [143]
They took the escalator to the second floor—the escalator was of the old sort, with thick wooden runners instead of the metal type which had long since taken over in the West. The fur department was over on the right, toward the back, and, on initial visual inspection, the selection there wasn't all that shabby.
Best of all, so was Ivan, wearing the same clothes that he'd worn on the metro. Maybe his best suit? Foley wondered. If so, he'd better get his ass to a Western country as soon as possible.
Other than the at-best-mediocre quality of the goods here, a department store was a department store, though here the departments were semi-independent shops. But their Ivan was smart. He'd suggested a meet in a part of the place where there would certainly be high-quality goods. For millennia, Russia had been a place of cold winters, a place where even the elephants had needed fur coats, and since 25 percent of the human blood supply goes to the brain, men needed hats. The decent fur hats were called shapkas, roughly tubular fur head coverings that had little in the way of precise shape, but did serve to keep the brain from freezing. The really good ones were made out of muskrat—mink and sable went only to the most expensive specialty stores, and those were mainly limited to well-to-do women, the wives and/or mistresses of Party bosses. But the noble muskrat, a swamp creature that smelled—well, the smell was taken out of the skin somehow, lest the wearer of the hat be mistaken for a tidal wetland garbage dump—had very fine fur or hair or whatever it was, and was a good insulator. So, fine, a rat with a high R rating. But that wasn't the important part, was it?
Ed and Mary Pat could also communicate with their eyes, though the bandwidth was pretty narrow. The time of day helped. The winter hats had just been stocked in the store, and the fall weather didn't have people racing to buy new ones yet. There was just one guy in a brown jacket, and Mary Pat moved in that direction, after shooing her husband away, as though to buy him something as a semi-surprise.
The man was shopping, just as she was, and he was in the hat department. He's not a dummy, whoever he is, she thought.
"Excuse me," she said in Russian.
"Yes?" His head turned. Mary Pat checked him out; he was in his early thirties, but looked older than that, as life in Russia tended to age people more rapidly, even more rapidly than New York City. Brown hair, brown eyes—rather smart-looking in the eyes. That was good.
"I am shopping for a winter hat for my husband, as you suggested," she added in her very best Russian, "on the metro."
He didn't expect it to be a girl, Mrs. Foley saw at once. He blinked hard and looked at her, trying to square the perfect Russian with the fact that she had to be an American.
"On the metro?"
"That's right. My husband thought it better that I should meet you, rather than he. So…" She lifted a hat and riffled the fur, then turned to her new friend, as though asking his opinion. "So, what do you wish of us?"
"What do you mean?" he blurted back at her.
"You have approached an American and requested a meeting. Do you want to assist me in buying a hat for my husband?" she asked very quietly indeed.
"You are CIA?" he asked, his thought now back under semicontrol.
"My husband and I work for the American government, yes. And you work for KGB."
"Yes," he replied, "in communications, Central Communications."
"Indeed?" She turned back to the gable and lifted another shapka. Holy shit, she thought, but was he telling the truth, or did he just want a cheap ticket to New York? "Really? How can I be sure of that?"
"I say it is so," he replied, surprised and slightly outraged that his honesty should come into question. Did this woman think he was risking his life as a lark? "Why do you talk to me?"
"The message blanks you passed on the metro did get my attention," she said, holding up a dark brown hat and frowning, as though it were too dark.