Page 18 of Dangerous Secrets

She wasn’t home. Why wasn’t she home? Where was she?

Charity seldom went out. She might be with her aunt and uncle, but she’d spent the evening before with them. And they were so elderly they ate at six and were in bed by nine. It was now almost ten.

Vassily put down the phone with a frown, clawed hand hovering over the receiver. He daren’t call again. He had to ration his calls to Katya—Charity!

He limited himself to no more than two calls a week and rationed their occasions out together. Two, three times a month. He didn’t dare go beyond that. Not yet.

But soon.

They’d already met for tea this month and he’d casually dropped by the library to bring her a package of chocolate creampiroshkyshe’d had specially ordered and airlifted from Moscow, just for her. She wouldn’t know that, of course. He’d said a friend had brought by several boxes and too many sweets weren’t good for his health.

And then of course there was the soirèe he was organizing on Thursday. His soireès were for her, only her. He loved music, but he had every music subscription there was and he could have himself driven down to New York or to Boston any time he wanted when he desired live music. New York in particular had proved very satisfactory that way. He kept an apartment on Park Avenue, owned by a corporation with ten shells around it. No one would ever know it belonged to him.

The apartment had been decorated in the pastel colors Charity loved, stocked with her favorite teas. He’d bought an entire wardrobe of designer clothes in her size, just waiting for her to step in into them. Everything was ready. His new life was there, shimmering just beyond his reach. With each passing day, its outlines grew more and more solid, more substantial.

Soon now.Soon.

Soon, she’d see, and understand. Soon, she would be his.

He’d been waiting for this, working for this, since he’d moved here five months ago. Charity was meant to be his, his Katya come back to life. This is what he’d been working for, without realizing it, since December 12th, 1989, when the KGB had comefor them. It was a date carved into his heart with acid, never to be forgotten. The day he’d ceased being human.

They’d just finished making love, he and Katya. Once was never enough with her, he’d found, so as he lay next to her, his sex had been still half-erect, still slick from her. The room smelled of her perfume and their sex.

He wanted her, endlessly. They’d been lovers for a year, and he knew he could have her as much as he wanted, but the wanting was always there. The first, frantic desire, where he’d bedded her as often as he could, for hours a day, had subsided a bit. Not because he desired her less, but because he knew she was his. All he had to do was reach out a hand, and she was there.

Katya, his beautiful Katya, had been lying on her stomach, sated, rosy, smiling. He lay next to her on his side. One hand propped up his head, the other lay in the small of her back. He was composing a poem in his head, an ode to woman, for it seemed to him in that moment that Katya embodied every beautiful, desirable woman who had ever walked this earth.

The smell of woman was in the air, and he knew generations of men had lived and died for that smell, the smell of slick, hot love.

Idly, he began to compose an Ode to Woman, a poem that had simply welled up inside him. The first poem in his life that had come to him perfect and complete and whole in one simple rush.

He had been touched by the gods that afternoon.

The words had come, powerful and golden, in perfect cadences. He didn’t need to write them down, the words were etched in his heart as they came to him. He beat out the rhythm of the poem with his forefinger, against the swell of Katya’s perfect white buttock, like the beat of a song, the music of poetry against the skin of his woman.

She’d known what he was doing. Of course. Katya knew him, knew him down to his soul. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been able to pluck the words from his head.

His finger tapping the cadences of the words on her soft skin, he’d just ended the poem, the best thing he’d ever written, when the harsh knock sounded at the door.

He hadn’t even been given the time to get up, put his clothes back on, armor himself with dignity. The KGB goons kicked his door down and, weapons drawn, dragged him away from a screaming Katya.

This is impossible, he thought frantically.No! Russia has changed! The world has changed! The Berlin Wall has just come down!He screamed, before a rifle butt in the head felled him.

He shook his head, stunned. This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. Gorbachov had introduced glasnost, perestroika. Russia was, finally, opening. The long Stalinist nightmare was over.

And anyway, Vassily was no dissident. He was apolitical. A writer. A writer of the New Russia, with no agenda other than creating great literature. He was lionized amongst theintellighentsia, a New Russian, a man freed from the shackles of the past.

But the men who broke down his door were throwbacks—brutal brutish men, coming out of the murky hallway like orcs out of a dark cave, out of a darkness before time.

This was a mistake. He was Vassily Worontzoff.Dry Your Tears in Moscowwas a best-seller. One of his short stories had been made into a film that had won a Leone d’Oro in Venice. He’d been interviewed on TV, on a number of the brand new channels that were opening Soviet society up. He hobnobbed with the new businessmen, with the media darlings.

They’d named him a Chevalier de la République in France.

He had to contact someone, get this cleared up, he thought, as the goons tossed him his pants, then dragged him, bare-chested, into the hallway.

And then his heart stopped, simply stopped, when the third officer went back into the house and dragged a screaming Katya out into the hallway.

His gaze locked with hers.

---