The Russian Affair - By Michael Wallner Page 0,122

the bottle in gurgling swallows.

“Galina?” Anna looked up at the woman, who was looming over her, brandishing her skewers like a sword fighter.

“And you, sister, what’s your name?”

Anna laughed. “Is your name really Galina?”

“What’s funny about it?”

“Galina is also the name of the woman who turned my Leonid’s head.”

Now the woman with the skewers laughed, too. “It wasn’t me, that’s for sure! You see,” she said, teasing her husband, “there are tramps named Galina, too. What a lucky man you are!”

“That must be about ready to eat,” he said, changing the subject.

The woman sniffed the meat, then blew on it and tasted it. “Just another minute, no more. The marinade is a poem!”

“Garlic and wine?” Anna asked.

“And red peppercorns.”

The man spread a cloth on the young grass and put out a couple of glass jars containing pickled vegetables, followed by a loaf of bread. With a narrow, oft-sharpened knife, he cut off large chunks of the bread and gave one to Anna. “It’s lovely to have company today. Don’t be gloomy, my girl. Things will get straightened out, one way or another.”

“Straightened out,” Anna murmured. She broke off a piece of the freshly baked bread and chewed it slowly.

TWENTY-EIGHT

In the following days, the duty to carry out her mission for Kamarovsky merged, for Anna, with her need to talk to someone she could feel understood by. She thought about the mad coincidence that had made her and Alexey fellows in misery. Here was the jilted house painter, whose captain preferred his Siberian love, and there was the Deputy Minister, living on his own now that the influential cultural secretary wanted nothing to do with him. Had the consequences of all this turmoil not been so unsettling, Anna could have laughed at it. But they were, and so, one morning, heedless of her usual caution, she dialed the number of the telephone in the Drezhnevskaya Street apartment. The receiver was picked up on the second ring, and a muffled voice said hello.

“Have I … Is this Alexey Maximovich’s apartment?”

“Anna?” said the voice on the other end.

“Yes. I apologize for disturbing you at this … you sound strange.”

“I’m brushing my teeth,” he mumbled. Various sounds followed: the receiver being laid down, footsteps, running water. “All done,” he said cheerfully.

“I apologize.”

“No, I’m glad to hear your voice. If you only knew how glad, Annushka.” Before she could reply, he suggested a meeting. “When do you have time? This evening? Tomorrow? Don’t say no. Should we meet here … no, that’s not a good idea. Somewhere else, some magical place … Hello, Anna, are you still there?”

Now that the meeting she’d wanted to engineer was going to take place without any effort on her part, Anna became wary.

“Let me arrange something for tomorrow,” he insisted. “Let me surprise you.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Of course it isn’t necessary,” he said with a laugh, “but it will make me happy. I’ll send Anton to you. Shall we say around seven?”

Anna agreed, said good-bye, and hung up.

Bulyagkov buttoned his shirt, tied his tie in front of the mirror, and noted that his double chin was becoming more unsightly every day. He gazed nervously at the telephone; he was expecting a call and had purposefully kept the conversation with Anna short. His cheeks burned from the shaving; he went back into the bathroom and applied the French cream. As he was rubbing it in, the telephone rang again. Bulyagkov took a deep breath and answered the phone.

“Alexey Maximovich?” said an unpleasant voice on the other end of the line.

“Yes.”

“Something’s come up. How soon can you be in the Ministry building?”

He named a time and hung up. The caller’s unwillingness to say anything more made Bulyagkov confident that the something that had come up was what he’d hoped it would be. He left his apartment, watched the black ZIL pull up at the curb, and climbed in. Anton drove out of the narrow street and onto the Chaussée.

At the Ministry, Bulyagkov was welcomed by a hastily formed committee and informed that the Minister had fallen ill overnight with a severe case of intestinal flu. His physician had made an initial diagnosis of food poisoning, but the Minister couldn’t remember eating anything he shouldn’t have. The exact cause of his condition was still to be determined, but in any case, he was confined to his bed and, according to the doctor’s report, in no condition to travel to Stockholm.

“Cancel” was the Deputy Minister’s response. Without the top man, he said, the excursion