"It could start a war, Ma."
"It won't start a war," said his mother in a strange singsong, dismissing such an idea with a touch of her hand and a low sad nod. "Russia will learn not to bother innocent people. They respect that sort of thing."
"I don't know that the missiles at our base are aimed at Russia. It could be Eastern Europe. Asia. We don't know."
"You mean, you'd fire a missile and not know where it landed?"
"It helps. We don't want to know who we'd be killing. We might read books about those places and refuse at the last minute."
"So I've come all the way out to Omaha in Nebraska for nothing?"
"Not nothing, Ma. We haven't seen each other since Christmas. Boy is it good to see you. How're Cathy, Bill, and Joe? You've got to fill me in."
"They're fine. Everyone's fine. Everyone loves you, good-bye. Are you going to finish your Danish?"
"I don't like pastry, Ma. Come to think of it, neither do you. "
And his mother left without kissing him good-bye. Stranger still, when he confessed to the local police that he had released the subject they had put into his custody, the one who had been asking about missiles, his mother, all they said was, "Thanks. We owe you a lot. And we'll never forget it."
Spring in Omaha was like spring in Siberia. It was warmish nothing, as opposed to winter, which was frozen nothing.
Vassily Rabinowitz stood on the street corner with one single Danish pastry in his hand and the entire Soviet Union as his enemy.
Missiles were out. He had nothing against Russia, never had. All he wanted was to be left alone. All he wanted was to be able to walk around awhile without having people come up to him asking questions. He had thought America would be like that. Yes, one could walk around, but not for long. Muggers could get you before you could get them into a proper frame of mind.
So he had gotten himself a crime family, and from the newspaper reports, he was pretty good at it. He had become a criminal mastermind. And one single Russian commando unit had shown him that his crime family, his tough desperate criminals, were about as tough as a dozen cannoli in a paper box.
They had deserted him, and Vassily had been bound sightless and soundless and carried, terrified, over a long distance until the only family person he met in this country rescued him and then left. The man had been definitely friendly even without Vassily's influence.
But Vassily had been scared out of his wits. He knew the Russian government. A nice word to the government meant you were weak. Peace was weakness. How many times had he heard Russian generals comment, on hearing of a peace overture, that the country offering it was weak? Peace was weakness. Of course, when the other country armed itself, then it was aggressive.
"Why," Vassily had once asked a field marshal who had come to the parapsychology village for treatment of a headache, "are we not weak when we make a peace overture? These things have puzzled me."
"Because when we make a peace overture, we want the other side to disarm. That will make us stronger."
"Why do we want to be stronger?"
"If we are not stronger they will destroy us."
"And if we are stronger?"
"We will destroy them," said the field marshal happily. "And then where will we get all those wonderful Western goods if we destroy them?"
"I'm not in charge of politics," said the field marshal.
"Would you really want to cook your bread in a Russian toaster?"
"Don't bother me with politics."
"Have you ever had Russian Scotch?"
"You're being subversive," said the field marshal.
It had really been just another incident to prove to him what he already knew. What the Russians understood was absolute force. Kill, and they would talk fairly and decently with you. Show you could not kill, and they wouldn't even answer your mail.
Vassily Rabinowitz understood that if he could get a missile shot off at some place in Russia, he would be able to embrace his newfound American comrades as allies even before the nuclear dust settled. Only after he showed everyone he was a major danger did he have the slightest chance of being left alone.
Communist Russia had always been like this. It was they, not the West, who had signed the nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany. It was they, not the West, who had collided with the Nazis to take Poland. It was they, not the West, who had waited happily for the Nazis to destroy Europe, giving them whatever raw materials they might need, including materials to build gas ovens.
In the end, of course, the Nazis invaded Russia, and then the propaganda machines went to work. It became Russia and the West against fascism, and then at the end of the war, when the West disbanded its armies, Russia kept its forces at full level and put up the Iron Curtain.
And if the West had not rearmed, there would have been a red flag flying over Washington.
To know anything about history was to know this about Russia. Vassily Rabinowitz, whether he liked it or not, would have to go into the army business.
He had gotten over his revulsion at his crimes in New York. The initial shame had turned to pride. If he could kill gang leaders, he could easily kill Russians. And probably outsmart them to boot, although one fact the West always seemed to ignore was that the Russians were very shrewd.
It would be quite a test. Unfortunately, as he finished his pastry on the street corner, he understood he didn't even have one missile yet. And his problem, he realized, was that he was starting at the bottom.
The lights went out, and the shooting started. They could see only gun flashes, and they shot at the flashes. But as they shot, their own guns gave off flashes, and they were hit. The room filled with the groans of dying, cursing men, and when the lights went on, the blood had made the floor slippery, so slippery that Anna Chutesov sent in a man to see if everyone of them was dead.
He came back with blood all over his shirt. He had slipped three times.
"Blood is more slippery than oil," he said.
"Are they dead?" she asked.
"No. Not all. Some are dying."
"That's fine," she said to the soldier. Men, she thought. I knew they would react like that.
But she did not say this to the young lieutenant who had gone into the room for her. Even now soldiers were running up stairways and down hallways with guns, looking for the source of the firing.
Men, thought Anna Chutesov. They are so stupid. Why are they running? What will they figure out faster by running? Most of them don't even know where the gunfire was coming from. But they run. They run because another man told them it was a good way to get someplace faster. Actually, walking had gotten Anna Chutesov farther in Soviet Russia than any man her age.
She was twenty-six years old, and despite her youth she had more influence in more places than anyone from the Berlin wall to Vladivostok.
And she did not get it because of her great beauty. She was blond. Soft honey-colored hair caressed her magnificent high cheekbones and her smile flashed with such perfect whiteness that some men gasped.
Of course, men would always gasp at beauty without ever figuring out how it got there. The real beauty of Anna Chutesov was in her presence. It was cool, friendly, and only hinted of sexuality.
Anna knew that average men became absolutely useless when in heat. A man in heat was like a telephone pole on wheels, virtually uncontrollable and completely dysfunctional.
She walked calmly through the running men, and by the time she reached command headquarters, fifteen stories down into the earth, sheltered from any possible American attack, she had been asked no less than ten times what had happened on the first floor among the special mission commanders.
Each time she answered that she did not know, and each time she thought how stupid the question was. No one gave out information freely in this command headquarters designed for the last struggle against capitalism in case of an American invasion.