LITMIR.BIZ

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      Alan tumbled into an empty sack and was instantly asleep. He dreamed old dreams of examinations for which he was unprepared and woke at last still locked in their fear of failure.

      In another part of the ship, Petty Officer First Class Sheldon Bonner stripped to his skivvies and lay back on his rack, an envelope in his left hand. It had already been opened, the letter inside already read. Yet, he took the paper out and read it again. He yawned. Dear Dad, it began. Unconsciously, Bonner smiled. He held the letter above him. Dear Dad, How are you doing? Everything here is A-OK, but I get tired of Navy schools. I bet you have an exciting time in the Med.

      Bonner read it all through. He got paper and a ballpoint from his locker and lay down again, this time on his side, and began to write. Dear Donnie. Great to get your letter. I am thinking of that time we fished for trout in Idaho, remember, I bet you forgot. We had some great times, you bet. You do what your old man tells you and make the most of that school, your future is secure if you do good there. Now I am serious about this. I want you to make chief, super chief, unlike your old man, you got potential to do anything. Aim for the stars. He wondered if that was too much. No, he meant it. His kid could be anything. Anything!

      0953 Zulu. Moscow.

      In Moscow, a cold rain was falling. In the old KGB building, now the SVRR building (and called “the old KGB building” by everybody), Darya Ouspenskaya stared at her window, tracking the drops that streamed down it like tears. She muttered aloud, “Il pleut sur la ville comme il pleure dans mon coeur,” and smiled at herself. Down in the street, a few people hurried, shoulders hunched against the downpour. My poor Moscow, she thought. The city looked even dirtier in the rain.

      Darya Ouspenskaya was overweight but still pretty, a jolly woman who radiated good humor. Men liked her, found her sexually attractive because her face seemed to promise that everything would be taken lightly; any mistakes or failures would be laughed away. She humored them all, slept with none. She was long since divorced from a man she hardly ever thought of any more. Her few sexual adventures were short-lived now, never allowed to be serious.

      Her telephone rang. She picked it up with habitual distaste, an ancient dial phone that felt greasy no matter how much she bribed the babushka to sterilize it. Darya wanted a new telephone, green or gold, touchtone, something reeking of high tech and smartness.

      “The Director will see you now,” a female voice said.

      “At once.”

      She avoided the lift, which might again be stopping only at every other floor, and walked up the two flights of broad stone stairs. Big muscles in her calves and thighs raised her; she enjoyed feeling them work. She wore clothes picked up in London, “the Raisa Look,” everybody now mad to imitate Gorbachev’s wife.

      “Go right in,” the secretary said. She was younger, inexplicably severe-looking; Darya, by keeping her supplied with perfume and little favors, had overcome that severity and now got special bits of gossip from her, preferred access to her boss.

      Director Yakoblov was sitting at his desk with his face down in a file, his bald spot pointed at her. He had a cold. He breathed heavily and blew his nose into a tissue and swore. A plastic bag at his feet was half filled with soiled tissues.

      “What have you got?” he said.

      “You should be in bed,” she said; between them, such words had no sexual connotation.

      “Rotten, simply rotten,” he said. “But if I stayed home, they’d think I wasn’t indispensable, and then you’d have my job. What have you got?”

      “Efremov.”

      He groaned.

      “You directed me to look into his disappearance.”

      “I know what I did! My God, Ouspenskaya—!” He clutched his forehead. “Aaah! I need antibiotics, they give me decongestants! Well?”

      “He seems to be gone. His apartment has not been visited in three days. I ordered an entry; I have the report, but the essence is his clothes and so on are there, as is money, keys, even a passport.” She paused.

      “Go on, go on.” He blew his nose.

      “He has a second flat near the Gorki statue, under the name Platonov. Internal Security had it wired; I suspect he knew all that. Not a beginner, after all. He had a woman there sometimes, always the same. A little delicate.”

      The Director looked at her over another white tissue.

      “The daughter of Malenkov the gangster. We assume the other listening devices were his.”

      He blew his nose. “Continue.”

      “I interviewed her myself. She is terrified of her father. She is married to one of his boys; one or the other will kill her if they find out about Efremov, she says. As if Papa didn’t already know. She hasn’t seen him in—” she checked her notes “—ten days. She was to meet him at the flat three days ago but he didn’t appear. That checks out with Internal’s records—she was there for an hour alone, then left. Anyway, she doesn’t know where he is, she says, has no plans to meet him in some other place, and so on and so on.”

      “You believe her?”

      “Oh, yes. She’s a scared little thing. I threatened her a bit, she almost fainted. She needs to be questioned by somebody with more time than I have, really go over everything, her memory might turn up a clue. But we’d have to promise her something good—protection from her husband, maybe. Maybe her father, as well.”

      He waved a tissue.

      She looked up at him. He stopped sniffling and stared back. “I’ve had a look at his computer files. Surprisingly—mm—bland. I make no judgments, as you know, but—if I were the famous Sherlock Holmes, I would say they are significant for the fact that they are so insignificant.”

      “Well, after all, his agents are run by underlings. He has how many agents?”

      “He claims eighty.”

      The Director looked up. “‘Claims’?”

      Ouspenskaya, with a tiny shrug, said, “We pay for eighty; I am not entirely convinced that I see the files for eighty.”

      The Director nodded, gloomy, as if his worst fears about her cynicism were confirmed.

      “No evidence in his shredder or the burn box. By that, I mean only that there is no indication that this was a man preparing to leave. Everything points rather to a man who, mm, is not with us against his will.”

      She looked, waited. The Director opened a drawer and took out a nasal spray, stuck it up one nostril and shut the other with a finger. “Continue,” he said. He sprayed.

      “His computer may have been purged of some files. It’s hard to say, impossible for me, in fact; I’m not an expert. That computer, as I’ve told you a thousand times, is an antique and not to be trusted. American secretaries have better computers on their desks than you and I have in our—” He was waving his free hand at her, meaning Shut up, shut up, I’ve heard it over and over. “Well. The sum and substance is that Efremov has disappeared and I’ve found no evidence of anything. He’s gone. Kaput. Disappeared. What is it the British say? ‘Done a bunk’?”

      “‘Taken a powder,’ the Americans say. A colloquialism I don’t understand at all.”

      “Face powder? Or, sleeping draughts used to be called powders. Quite nonsensical.”

      The Director threw himself back so hard that his chair springs made a catlike noise; he sniffed, then worked his nose up and down. “Efremov,” he said. “I like him. I trust him. Don’t you trust him?”

      “He is devoted to his work.” She knew that she would gain no advantage with this man by claiming to have suspicions. In fact,

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