Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [85]
“This is when we miss the vodka,” Stas said.
Rikki fell into a trough of silence.
Arkady asked, “Tell me, when you broadcast to Georgia, do you often think of your mother and your daughter?”
Rikki said, “Of course. Who do you think invited them here? I’m just surprised they came. And I’m surprised who they’re turning out to be.”
“Having a loved one come sounds like a combination of reincarnation and hell,” Arkady said.
“Like that, yes.” Rikki lifted his eyes to the clock on the wall. “I have to go. Stas, cover for me, please. Write something, whatever you want. You’re a lovely man.” He heaved himself up and plodded tragically toward the door.
“ ‘A lovely man,’ ” Stas muttered. “He’ll go back. Half the people here will go back to Tbilisi, Moscow, Leningrad. What’s crazy is that we, of all people, know better. We’re the ones who tell the truth. But we’re Russian, so we like lies, too. Right now we’re in a state of special confusion. We had a head of the Russian section, very competent, highly intelligent. He was a defector like me. About ten months ago he went back to Moscow. Not just to visit; he redefected. A month later, he’s a spokesman for Moscow appearing on American television, saying how democracy is alive and well, the Party is a friend of the market economy, the KGB is a guarantor of social stability. He’s good; he should be, he learned here. He makes such a believable case that people at the station wonder: are we performing a real service or are we fossils of the cold war? Why don’t we all march home to Moscow?”
“Do you believe him?” Arkady asked.
“No. All I have to do is look at someone like you and ask, ‘Why is this man running?’ ”
Arkady left the question in the air. He said, “I thought I was going to see Irina.”
Stas pointed to the lit red lamp above the door and ushered Arkady into a control booth. An engineer with a headset sat at the faint illumination of his console; otherwise, the booth was silent and dark. Arkady sat in back, below the turning reels of a tape recorder. Needles danced on volume meters.
On the other side of soundproof glass, Irina was at a padded hexagonal table with a central microphone and overhead light. Across from her sat a man in an intellectual’s black sweater. Saliva sprayed like stoker’s sweat when he talked. He joked, laughing at his own humor. Arkady wondered what he was saying.
Irina’s head was slightly to one side, the pose of a good listener. Her eyes, in shadow, showed as deep-set reflections. Her lips, slightly open, held the promise of a smile, if not the smile itself. It was not a flattering light. The man’s forehead bunched in muscles, his brows two hedgerows over the pits of his eyes. But the light flowed over Irina’s even features and outlined in gold the corona of her cheek, her loose strands of hair, her arm. Arkady remembered the blue line that used to be under her right eye, a result of interrogation; the mark was faint now and she seemed flawless. An ashtray and a glass of water stood in front of her and the subject of her interview. She said a few words and the effect was like blowing on coals. At once the man became even more animated, waving his hand like an ax.
Stas leaned across the console and turned on the sound.
“That’s my point exactly!” the man in the sweater burst out. “Intelligence agencies are always drawing psychological profiles of national leaders. It’s even more necessary to understand the psychology of the peoples themselves. This has always been the province of psychology.”
“Could you give us an example?” Irina asked.
“Easily! The father of Russian psychology was Pavlov. He’s best known to the world for his experiments with associative reflexes, particularly his work with dogs, accustoming them to associate their dinner with the ringing of a bell, so that after a time they began to salivate just at the sound of the bell.”
“What do dogs have to do with national psychology?”
“Just this. Pavlov reported that there were some individual dogs that he could not train to salivate at the sound