Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [111]
“You won,” Arkady said.
Stas killed the bottle and lit a cigarette. His narrow face was wan, his eyes two bright matches. “Won? Then why only now do I feel like an émigré? Say you leave your native land because you were forced out, or because you thought you could help more from the outside than in. Democrats of the world applaud your noble effort. But it wasn’t because of any effort of mine that the Soviet Union dropped to its knees and stretched out its long neck. It was history. It was gravity. The battle isn’t in Munich, it’s in Moscow. History has marooned us and gone in a different direction. We don’t look like heroes anymore; we look like fools. Americans look at us—not Michael and Gilmartin, they’re concerned about their jobs and keeping the station alive—but other Americans read headlines about what’s happening in Moscow and look at us and say, ‘They should have stayed.’ It doesn’t matter whether we were forced out or risked our lives or wanted to save the world; now Americans say, ‘They should have stayed.’ They look at someone like you and say, ‘See, he stayed.’ ”
“I didn’t have a choice. I made a bargain. They’d only leave Irina alone if I stayed. Anyway, that was long ago.”
Stas peered into his empty glass. “If you’d had the choice, would you have left with her?”
Arkady was silent. Stas leaned forward and waved smoke away to see him more clearly. “Would you?”
“I was Russian. I don’t think I could have gone.”
Stas was silent.
Arkady added, “My staying in Moscow certainly had no effect on history. Maybe I was the fool.”
Stas stirred, went to the kitchen and returned with another bottle. Laika kept her attention on Arkady in case he produced a bomb, a gun or a sharpened umbrella against her master.
“Irina had a difficult time in New York. She was in films in Moscow?” Stas asked.
“She was actually a student until she was thrown out of the university. Then she got work at Mosfilm as a wardrobe mistress,” Arkady said.
“In New York she did stage costumes and makeup, fell in with an artistic crowd and worked in art galleries, first there and then Berlin, all the time defending herself from saviors. The pattern was always the same: an American would fall in love with Irina and then rationalize it as a political good deed. I think Radio Liberty must have been a relief. To give him credit, Max was the one who recognized how good she was. She wasn’t a regular at first, just filling in, but he said there was a quality in her voice on the air, as if she were speaking to someone she knew. People listened. I was skeptical at first because she had no professional training. He gave me the job of teaching her how to hit her marks and watch the clock. People have no idea how fast they talk. Irina could run through a script once and almost have it memorized. With training, she was the best.”
Stas opened the bottle. “So there we were, Max and I, two sculptors working on the same beautiful statue. Naturally we both fell in love with Irina. We did everything together—Max, Stas and Irina. Dinners, skiing in the Alps, musical side trips to Salzburg. An inseparable trio, neither Max nor I ever gaining an edge on the other. I didn’t actually ski. I read down in the lodge, secure in the knowledge that Max was making no romantic headway on the slopes because, in fact, our trio was really a quartet.” He poured the vodka. “There was always that man in Irina’s past. The one who saved her life and stayed, the one she was waiting for. How could anyone beat a hero like that?”
“Maybe no one needed to. Maybe she just got tired of waiting,” Arkady said.
They drank at the same