"Ya uverna," Natalya said. "I am certain. He's lying."
"Pravda?" The man in the small booth next to her smiled. "And how do we know this, oh great seer Natashka?"
Of all the men at the Russian embassy who had a crush on Natalya-and there were several-she liked Yuri the best. Not only was he the most handsome, he was also the most… useful. So, she tried to keep him interested.
Natalya returned the smile, somewhat wryly, then pointed through the one-way mirror.
"Look at his eyes. Up and to the center is thinking. Up and to the left or right is fabricating. And he's touched his nose twice and pulled on his ear three times. He's lying through his teeth." She turned her back to the window, leaned against the console, folded her arms, and looked down at Yuri. "Da?"
"Harasho," Yuri said, adjusting the dials of the console before him. "One course in psychology, you are now an academician?"
"Isn't that what your little blips tell you about him?" She nodded toward the one-way mirror in front of Yuri.
Two men sat in a small room on the other side of the mirror, across a table from each other. One held a clipboard upon which he was writing notes; the other was leaning back in his chair, apparently at ease. And as the two men continued to talk, the computer screen in front of Yuri displayed traces that jumped abruptly, expanding and contracting. There was a superimposed grid on the screen, and when the traces labeled Interviewiruyemiy jumped above or below those lines, they turned red. They were red now.
Yuri laughed. " Da, da. So, all this expensive equipment is completely useless, and all we need is Natalya Orlova, Cultural Attache and Eye Movement Master."
Now Natalya laughed. She knew Yuri was teasing her; she accepted it as part of the price of being where she wasn't supposed to be, witnessing interrogations-no, interviews-she wasn't supposed to witness. It was a delicate balancing act, keeping Yuri's interest active but harmless. And she needed that interest. Occasionally she required Yuri's assistance in obtaining fast access to the restricted archives, where the documents all had numbers instead of titles, and were all written by the same author: Otdel, for "official department." Hanging out with Yuri was a small taste of that world of secret, anonymous documents.
She leaned over and planted a kiss on top of Yuri's thick, closely cropped brown hair.
"You will have to continue without Madame Natashka," she said. "I have real work to do."
Yuri took her hand for a moment. "And you owe me one drink," he said.
"Da." Natalya pulled her hand free. "Soon, Yuri Alexandrovich, very soon."
Once in the hall, she turned right and walked past the interview room, glancing once more at the man inside. He was applying for a license to do business in Russia. Smuggler, she thought. But of what? Cigarettes, music CDs, computer software, drug formulas? But not military secrets. Not these days. Now the enemies of Russia were most often the same as the enemies of the United States: money launderers, drug dealers, software thieves. And in these days of the global market, the difference between the American Mafia dons and the Russian vor v zakone was gray and indistinct. And of course there were the terrorists, people once trained and supplied by her former government, but now embarrassments to be hunted down and eliminated. Cooperation was the watchword, detente on a scale unimaginable only a decade ago. In the New World Order, this only made sense.
Then why didn't it make her feel more secure?
As she headed for her small desk on the third floor and the pile of paperwork she'd been avoiding by playing spy with Yuri, she wondered once again about her career choice.
She might, like Yuri, have joined the Federal'naya sluzhba bezopasnosti, the FSB-the theoretically licit and more civilized successor to the notorious Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (KGB). She'd even been interviewed by them when she'd graduated from the Moskovsky gosudarstvennyi institut mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
Had she so desired, her credentials certainly could have earned her entrance into the ranks of the FSB: both of her grandfathers had been clever and nondescript enough to survive in the secret service while nearly everyone around them was consumed by the homicidal paranoia of the thirties and forties; and her own father had been a political officer in one of the first divisions of the Raketnye voyska strategicheskogo naznacheniya, the Strategic Rocket Forces, the most elite corps of all the Red Army.
She herself had even served as leader of her school's Komsomol, Communist Youth Union, in a secret military city hidden in plain sight in the vastness of Siberia. And finally, with a degree in international cultural relations from MGIMO, Natalya Orlova should have been the perfect candidate for a life of privilege that was the lot of the new FSBeshniky.
But she'd been idealistic when she'd graduated, flush with enthusiasm for the perestroika and promises of the New Russia. More important, she'd felt the need to atone for the crimes of her family during their long history with those secret services; a history she'd known as a child only through family gossip and the sinisterly suggestive gaps in her relatives' recounted biographies.
And then there had been her father's own deep disillusionment with the "worker's paradise"; a disillusionment hardened on an almost daily basis as the samizdat press published one heretofore repressed history after another, and the truths that had always been denied, but which in revelation seemed all too blatant and indisputable, made swearing allegiance to the Security Services, however "modernized," unthinkable.
Through those years of revelations, Natalya had watched as her father's eyes became sad, quiet, angry. Distant.
And there'd been something else to his silence-some secret more sinister, it seemed, than all the terrible revelations about her grandfathers and the regime they served. A secret that created a small, dark space between them which even to this day had never been breached, and which she had since decided he would take to his grave.
So she'd chosen instead to become a simple cultural attache, a job she thought would perhaps actually serve the fledgling state and help it atone for all the buried transgressions of its history-and hers. But every time she found an excuse to shadow Yuri or one of the other "special attaches," she took it. Perhaps it was in her genes.
So she split her time between her official duties at the Russian Cultural Center-ironically housed in a grand edifice on Phelps Place that had once belonged to the archcapitalist Evalyn Walsh McLean, one-time owner of the Hope Diamond-and a small, nondescript desk here at the embassy on Wisconsin Avenue. Even though the embassy's squat, gray architecture was far more reminiscent of the Soviet-era government buildings back home, she instinctively felt this was where the real identity of the New Russia was being formed-or at least where it was created for its American audience. And she wished to be an insider in that seductive drama.
But then Natalya had always been an outsider. Her looks reflected her mother's lineage-Finnish, not Slavic-with her high cheekbones, brilliant, almost white-blond hair, and blue-green eyes, she was unique among all the brown-haired, wide-faced, flat-nosed children in the military town's state school. "Rusalka," mermaid, the teachers had called her: something exotic, foreign. Suspect.
Even the way she had dressed marked her as an exception. "It's the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down," her mother's father had warned her. Exhibiting a taste for Western styles back then was considered almost tantamount to treason: the short skirts, the bright colors, the high-heeled shoes. Not the tastes of a true sovok, a loyal Soviet citizen. She still remembered vividly the old babushkas on the street, shouting after her when she walked by in such clothes. Zapadnaya, they called her: Western girl. And much worse.
Now of course everything had changed. Down was up. What had been foreign and bad was now stylish and good.
And Natalya used it to her advantage. Her looks, her Western manner, her command of colloquial English-all had gotten her a posting in the Washington embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington, D.C., at a time in her life when she should still have been stamping visa applications in a gray basement office somewhere in Moscow. And there were perks.
For instance, before she'd stopped in to "advise" Yuri in his monitoring of "interviews," she'd been headed to make final arrangements for the coming reception for the Bolshoi Ballet. The social event would certainly be a break in her routine-but she didn't relish the thought of being patronized by Madame Zenova, the aging ballet prima, complete with purple-feathered boa.
Zenova had already visited the RCC that day, whisking around with her trailing entourage, looking at everyone through lowered eyelids, playing the part of fickle diva to perfection. And Natalya knew she would be just one of many nameless functionaries at the reception, invited more because of her looks than her importance; all part of the show for the American Washington insiders, all a demonstration of just how thoroughly over the bad old gray days of the Soviet era were.
But to keep the perks she had to occasionally do her actual job, regardless how tedious.
Muttering a curt greeting of "Privet" to a few colleagues-it was four thirty and most of the staff had left for the day-she wound her way to a small desk set in a corner.
Before her was a stack of mail she'd brought with her from the RCC; somehow going through it at the embassy made it seem more important. It was work that demanded little of her training and provided few opportunities for her powers of "creative interpretation"-the kind she'd demonstrated for Yuri.
Working her way through the stack of mail and messages on her desk, she found them to be for the most part the usual sort of communiques: a request for access to archives of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe by a student at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government writing a dissertation, "Cultural Schisms and the Deformation of International Law by National Codes of Justice"-it made her head ache just to read the title; a letter from a museum in Philadelphia asking for slides of the new exhibit in the RCC's "Russian-American Room"-a stultifying display of joint agricultural projects she thought better suited to the 1950s; a letter addressed to Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Vasily I. Schastny-she had no idea how that one had found its way into her pile; it should have gone to the ambassador's secretarial pool.
Then she came across an envelope that immediately struck her as strange. It was an ordinary enough eight-by-eleven white envelope, but it bore no institutional return label-just a P.O. box number somewhere in Massachusetts-and held a U.S. postal stamp rather than the usual machine mark of bulk mail. And it was hand-addressed to her personally: Ms. Natalya N. Orlova, Cultural Attache, Russian Cultural Centre. She noticed the British spelling of the word "centre."
Using one of her stylishly long red fingernails-she was forever misplacing the silver Imperial Russia reproduction letter opener Yuri had given her after he watched her opening her mail this way-she slit open the envelope.
The letter inside was strange, too.
It was handwritten in Russian. Not particularly good Russian, but at least the writer was making an effort; nearly all American correspondents just assumed a cultural attache would read and write English. The writer (it said) was looking for any information regarding a book, published sometime between 1960 and 1970, titled Stzenariy 55, or perhaps Borba s tenyu. But he wasn't certain of that title, he wrote; it could be some other version of those words.
Script fifty-five? she thought. That could mean almost anything. And the second is… very strange indeed.
Borba had many possible meanings: fighting, struggle, conflict. And tenyu wasn't any more specific, referring to twilight or shade, or simply dim light.
Fighting with Shade? Fighting in the Twilight?
But those translations were literal, and Natalya knew that literal translations almost never caught the real meaning of a phrase, especially a literary phrase.
In fact, she couldn't think of any English phrase that captured the real sense of the Russian: a weaker combatant struggling against a stronger and invisible force.
Now Natalya was intrigued… But it was late on a Friday evening, and she had a hectic, crowded subway trip ahead of her to her apartment near Dupont Circle. As curious as the request was, it would have to wait until Monday.
But before she put the letter away, she glanced at the bottom of the page, to the signature.
Iskrenne vash, the letter concluded. And it was signed in steep, angled writing difficult to read; but she finally made out the signature.
Jeremy Fletcher.