Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [84]
“Won’t the director look for you here?” Arkady asked.
“In our own canteen? Never. I usually eat at the Chinese Tower; that’s where Ludmilla will head first.” Stas lit a cigarette, gave a preparatory cough and inhaled as he swept the room with his bright gaze. “It makes me nostalgic to see the Soviet empire. Rumanians sit at their own table there, Czech table there, Poles there, Ukrainians over there.” He nodded to Central Asians in white short sleeves. “Turkics there. Turkics hate Russians, of course. The problem is that these days they go ahead and say it.”
“Things have changed?”
“For three reasons. One, the Soviet Union started falling apart. As soon as the nationalities there started going for each other’s throats, the same thing happened here. Two, the canteen stopped serving vodka. Now you can only have wine or beer, which is thin fuel. Three, instead of the CIA, now we’re run by Congress.”
“So you’re not a CIA front anymore?”
“Those were the good old days. At least the CIA knew what it was doing.”
The beer came first. Arkady took small, reverent sips because it was so different from sour, muddy Soviet beer. Stas didn’t so much drink as pour it into himself.
He set down an empty glass. “Ah, the émigré life. Just among Russians there are four groups: New York, London, Paris and Munich. London and Paris are more intellectual. In New York there are so many refugees you can spend your life without speaking English. But Munich is the group that’s really trapped in time; this is where you find the most monarchists. Then there’s the Third Wave.”
“What’s the Third Wave?”
Stas said, “The Third Wave is the most recent wave of refugees. Old émigrés don’t want anything to do with them.”
Arkady took a guess. “You mean the Third Wave is Jews?”
“Right.”
“This is just like home.”
Not exactly like home. Though Slavic conversation filled the cafeteria, the fare was pure German, and he felt solid food being instantly transformed into blood, bone and energy. Better fed, he looked around with more attention. The Poles, he noticed, had suits, no ties and the expression of aristocrats temporarily short of funds. The Rumanians chose a round table, the better to conspire. Americans sat alone and wrote postcards like dutiful tourists.
“You really had Prosecutor Rodionov here as a guest?”
“As an example of New Thinking, of political moderation, of the improved climate for foreign investment,” Stas said.
“You personally had Rodionov here?”
“I personally wouldn’t touch him with rubber gloves.”
“Then, who did?”
“The station president is a great believer in New Thinking. He also believes in Henry Kissinger, Pepsi-Cola and Pizza Hut. These allusions are lost on you. That’s because you’ve never worked at Radio Liberty.”
A waitress brought Stas another beer. With her blue eyes and short skirt, she looked like a large, overworked girl. Arkady wondered what she made of her clientele of sunny Americans and contentious Slavs.
A large Georgian broadcaster with the curls and beak of an actor joined the table. His name was Rikki. He nodded abstractedly through an introduction to Arkady, then launched immediately into a tale of woe.
“My mother is visiting. She never forgave me for defecting. Gorbachev is a lovely man, she says; he would never gas demonstrators in Tbilisi. She has a little letter of remorse for me to sign so I can go home with her. She’s so gaga she’d take me right to jail. She’s having her lungs looked at while she’s here. They should look at her brains. You know who else is coming? My daughter. She’s eighteen. I’ve never seen her. She arrives today. My mother and my daughter. I love my daughter—that is, I think I love my daughter, because I’ve never met her. We talked on the phone last night.” Rikki lit one cigarette from another. “I have pictures of her, of course, but I asked her to describe herself so I would recognize her at the airport. Growing children change all the time. Apparently, I am going to the airport to pick up a girl who looks like Madonna. When I started to describe