Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [87]
So could a corkscrew. "Chianti?" Ryan asked.
Cathy turned. "Okay, I don't have anything scheduled for tomorrow."
"Cath, I've never understood what a glass or two of wine tonight would have to do with surgery tomorrow—it's ten or twelve hours away."
"Jack, you don't mix alcohol with surgery," she explained patiently. "Okay? You don't drink and drive. You don't drink and cut, either. Not ever. Not once."
"Yes, doctor. So tomorrow you just set glasses prescriptions for people?"
"Uh-huh, simple day. How about you?"
"Nothing important. Same crap, different day."
"I don't know how you stand it."
"Well, it's interesting, secret crap, and you have to be a spook to understand it."
"Right." She poured the spaghetti sauce into a bowl. "Here."
"I haven't got the wine open yet."
"So work faster."
"Yes, Professor the Lady Ryan," Jack responded, taking the bowl of sauce and setting it on the table. Then he pulled the cork out of the Chianti.
Sally was too big a girl for a high chair but still small enough for a booster seat, which she carried to the chair herself. Since the dinner was "pisgetty," her father tucked the cloth napkin into her collar. The sauce would probably get to her pants anyway, but it would teach his little girl about napkins, and that, Cathy thought, was important. Then Ryan poured the wine. Sally didn't ask for any. Her father had indulged her once (over his wife's objections), and that had ended that. Sally got some Coca-Cola.
SVETLANA WAS ASLEEP, finally. She liked to stay up as long as she could, every night the same, or so it seemed, until she finally put her head down. She slept with a smile, her father saw, like a little angel, the sort that decorated Italian cathedrals in the travel books he used to read. The TV was on. Some World War II movie, it sounded like. They were all the same. The Germans attacked cruelly—well, occasionally there was a German character with something akin to humanity, usually a German communist, it would be revealed along the way, torn by conflicting loyalties to his class (working class, of course) and his country—and the Soviets resisted bravely, losing a lot of defiant men at first until turning the tide, usually outside Moscow in December 1941, at Stalingrad in January 1943, or the Kursk Bulge in the summer of 1943. There was always a heroic political officer, a courageous private soldier, a wise old sergeant, and a bright young junior officer. Toss in a grizzled general who wept quietly and alone for his men, then had to set his feelings aside and get the job done. There were about five different formulas, all of them variations of the same theme, and the only real difference was whether Stalin was seen as a wise, godlike ruler or simply wasn't mentioned at all. That depended on when the film had been shot. Stalin had fallen out of fashion in the Soviet film industry about 1956, soon after Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had made his famous but then-secret speech revealing what a monster Stalin had been—something Soviet citizens still had trouble with, especially the cab-drivers, or so it seemed. Truth in his country was a rare commodity, and almost always one hard to swallow.
But Zaitzev wasn't watching the movie now. Oleg Ivanovich sipped at his vodka, eyes focused on the TV screen, without seeing it. It had just struck him how huge a step he'd taken that afternoon on the metro. At the