CHAPTER TEN, MOSCOW, DECEMBER 1994: MARIA FEDOROVNA
In America, Olivia had grown accustomed to living alone. She’d assumed that she would also live alone in Russia. Her last apartment in America had been little more than a vaguely defined interim, not really hers except for a few treasures she’d shipped to her father and hoped to reunite with someday. She’d assumed she would furnish her Moscow flat when and as she could, or simply move into something already furnished. Perhaps, she’d thought, she might need occasional domestic help.
What she hadn’t expected was that she would acquire—involuntarily, courtesy of Russia’s Federal Security Service—a one-woman live-in housekeeper, decorator, cook, minder, domestic purchasing agent, colloquial Russian language tutor, increasingly devoted great aunt, occasional nuisance and from time to time, utterly terrifying human being. Nor could she have imagined that Aunt Maria would have requested the assignment, informing her superiors that she was no longer young or agile enough to maintain the entire Tver dacha, keeping to herself the real reason. Olivia, with only her dignity and courage, had bested the State. She would have a minder, no matter what. Why not Aunt Maria?
In the form of Major Suslova, the State had agreed.
Olivia liked Aunt Maria well enough, even though her endless hours at the lab precluded much socializing with her or anyone else. She did not object to Aunt Maria’s somewhat subdued décor, her own eye being attuned to the brilliant colors needed to defy the New Mexico sun. The old woman, after all, spent her days there. But there were moments when she glimpsed something in Maria’s eyes a quiet sorrow, What these eyes have seen, eyes much like her father’s in similar moments. Out of respect and love, she’d never questioned her father. She did not question Maria. But she was beginning to understand how people might turn away from the Oscars and Marias of the world. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to know, as a matter of respect and love. It was that they didn’t want to know, for fear of knowing. Olivia felt a bit of that with Maria, and despised herself for it.
Tonight, however, she was merely irritated. More than usually tired, she wanted solitude. She was not going to get it. But she would try, if only to preserve an exchange that had become something of a ritual. Olivia poured herself a very large measure of brandy, summoned Aunt Maria, and handed her some of the dollars she kept for when rubles would not do. Olivia told her that she would appreciate a few hours alone. Perhaps she would like to go to dinner?
Maria Fedorovna Philipova, from some tiny, brutalized collective farm that she had long ago determined to forget, had no idea of how to amuse herself in a great city at night. Nor did she have any particular desire to do so. She also recognized genuine pain when she saw it and did not run. “No, Doctor. I will be in my room if you need me.”
Olivia thanked her for her consideration, then retired to her bedroom, thinking that at that moment, given her druthers, she would prefer a drooling feline to a conscientious babushka. Briefly, she wondered whether the FSB might authorize a four-legged minder. Then she flung back the coverlet over her bed, stripped, and curled up under the down with her brandy. Once she had lived in a house in the high desert of New Mexico and loved it. Here she lived in a newer high rise, a five-room flat on the outskirts of Moscow, a graceless situation that nonetheless produced no rational complaints. The flat was of a class suitable for the manager of a mid-sized factory, in Russia an élite position.
Olivia had no interest in how she might rank in the Russian social hierarchy, no more than she had ever thought about such matters in America. At the moment, she wanted only to enjoy the quiet, the bed, and the brandy. In a few days, she would begin doing without them. For the last time, she let her mind run over the things that she had to do before deploying, before flying south to Mozdok, the big staging base for Chechnya.
Pack. Maria Fedorovna had gotten her everything she needed and didn’t have, including sanitary supplies.
Procure a weapon. She had been promised three times—by General Getmanov, by Major Suslova and most recently by Leonid Borodkin—that her pistol would be returned to her. So far, it had not been, and she was starting to consider herself as lied to. Some sort of abstract fairness told her that she couldn’t really blame the Russians; she wasn’t certain that they wanted her armed. But she hated being unarmed, a woman, obviously a foreigner, presumed to have money, in the capital city of a nation whose government was cannibalizing itself through its own monumental greed. She had seriously considered turning to the black market, but she needed contacts for that and those she didn’t have yet. That left Chechnya itself. She wondered how hard it would be to procure a weapon there. Probably not at all, if only because in a firefight, there would be casualty surplus very quickly. Getting to it might be a problem. So might keeping it, depending on the policies of the unit she was with and the whims of its commander. She hated having to leave it to that. Still, she’d learned that, in such matters, it was best to decide early. So she determined that if her pistol wasn’t returned; that if she wasn’t issued a weapon; that if she couldn’t beg, buy, or borrow one; she would somehow steal one.
Stealing was preferable to trying to acquire one in the midst of a firefight. And theft did not carry that much opprobrium here.
If Borodkin had failed to arm her, he had delivered on something else. He had done very good work in equipping and running the lab, especially in coming up with electronic parts on scant notice. Increasingly, he anticipated needs, indicating that he understood Olivia’s goals. If it was impossible for him to return a foreigner’s weapon to her, he was not to blame.