‘Nikolai Nekrasov,said Nadine, and reached out her hand. Ikon touched her fingers with his, and then withdrew them.
‘You must eat, enjoy yourself, he told her. ‘Your problems will come next. And there will be many.’
‘My problems have already started. Titus has warned Marshall that if he persists with RING II, then all this business with Colleen Petley will be made public immediately. He’s given Marshall a little time to think it over. First of all, he gave him only an hour, now he’s agreed to give him a day. But that day will be over in an hour or so. And, believe me, Titus is serious.’
‘That was always Titus’ trouble, wasn’t it?’ remarked Ikon, spreading more caviare. ‘So serious. It will lead to his downfall, you know.’
Nadine put down her knife. ‘I’m waiting for your instructions. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Well, said Ikon. ‘It seems as if there is only one course open to us. The RING talks must continue; otherwise everything we have been working for will collapse. I know
that gradualism is tedious; I know how much the young administrators champ at their bits for progress. But only gradualism will lead the American people towards an eventual understanding of their true situation without bloodshed, or riot, or civic resistance. Can you imagine what would happen if you told them now? The country would burn from end to end. There would be fighting, barricades, organized resistance. Thousands of people would die. And this is in the 1980s, when people are supposed to have become far more liberal and understanding. You can just picture what would have happened if they had known about it in 1962.’
Nadine said, ‘What do you want me to do?’
Ikon stared into his glass. His shaggy eyebrows reminded Nadine of a thoughtful bear. He said, ‘Colleen Petley will have to go, that is all. Can you arrange for it? And the chambermaid at the Futura Hotel … she will have to go, too.’
‘You want me to - ‘
‘Nobody else can get close enough without arousing suspicion. Besides, I have the ideal method.’
Nadine laid her caviare spoon on to her serving-plate. ‘You’re quite sure? You want me to kill her?’
Ikon placed a finger over his lips and said, ‘Ssh. We don’t usually mention such subjects here. Not … disposal. Not in such terms.’
‘How do you expect me to do it?’
‘It will be very easy. You will simply tell Miss Petley that she has to have an injection against influenza so that there is no risk of her being unwell when the Congressional hearing is convened. The dose of medicine which you inject into her arm or her buttock will look like this
‘ Ikon held up a small glass vial of straw-coloured fluid, and then laid it carefully on the vine-leaf ashtray. ‘It is a mixture of water, simple sugars, and a single drop of hydrocyanic acid. Death will be almost instantaneous, seizure of the heart.’
Nadine stared at him. The old, Slavic mask of his face. He could have been made out of latex rubber, like Yoda,
or ET. He had asked her to perform many strange and disagreeable tasks in the past; out of all of them, courting and marrying Titus Alexander had probably been the most complex and the most self-sacrificing. But he had never required her to kill anyone befoie; and it was particularly unnerving that he should have asked her to kill Colleen Petley, the first woman in years with whom she had formed a warm and immediate sexual relationship. She had dreamed of Colleen when she had been making love with Titus. She had dreamed of plunging her tongue into Colleen’s salt-and-sugary cleft. She had dreamed of kissing Colleen’s breasts.
Now, he was asking her to kill Colleen’s body stone-cold, with the most lethal poison known to man.
I can see that I have disturbed you,’ said Ikon.
Nadine pushed back her plate of caviare, and stood up. She walked to the window, and looked out through the inch-wide gap in the drapes, her face unnaturally illuminated by the single shaft of sunlight which fell through it into the room.
‘You shrink from the thought of killing for your country?’ asked Ikon. He took another mouthful of pancake and sour cream. ‘Soldiers are required to do it as a matter of course; yet nobody thinks that what soldiers have to do is disturbing, or exceptional.’
‘Colleen Petley is … well, Colleen Petley is different,’ said Nadine. ‘It’s difficult for me to think of her as an enemy.’
‘She is an enemy, nevertheless. She is worse than an enemy. She could have remained neutral, and yet she was prepared to sell her information for money.’
That, Nikolai Nekrasov, is what a girl like Colleen Pet-ley would call ‘turning an honest buck’.
‘You’re refusing!’ asked Ikon, and there was a rumble of displeasure in his voice.
Nadine turned back towards him. She wore today one of the softest of Bill Blass ensembles, a black watered-silk blouse with wide sleeves and a narrow tailored waist, and a canary-yellow taffeta skirt; and for a moment Ikon would
have forgiven her anything, absolved her from any kind of duty or duress. But, the times were too threatening. Everybody had to be used to keep the Peredoviki from taking over once Ikon himself had gone; everything had to be sacrificed to keep the world in political balance for at least a generation longer. And that meant love, and self-indulgence, and kindness itself. ‘You are kind,’ he had read, in the works of the American poet Gregory Corso, ‘because you lead a kind life.’ Ikon knew that he had never led a kind life.
There was a time,’ said Ikon, without waiting for Na-dine to reply, ‘there was a time when I, too, was in love with a member of my own sex. It was in 1937, when I was working for Goelro, the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia. We were building a new power-station at Saratov, in the Privolskaja Vozvysennost. We were shockworkers, you understand, young men who backed their belief in Communism with intensively hard work, seven days a week, twelve or thirteen hours a day. We could build in a month a factory that, these days, it would take a year to complete. Well, there was a fellow there, a bricklayer; and for some reason I fell in love with him. He was devastatingly handsome, muscular, and yet innocent, too. What he could have done in Hollywood! One day, after we had finished a record day of building, we went to bed together almost completely exhausted, he and I, and made love. Yes, sodomized each other; but with pride and fellowship, and the genuine affection of two men who have worked side-by-side for the same political and industrial ideal.’
Ikon was silent for a little while, and drummed his fingertips on the white damask tablecloth. Then he said, ‘I understand, you see, what you may be feeling about Colleen Petley.’
‘You don’t know anything about me and Colleen Petley.’
‘I don’t, no, Ikon admitted. ‘But I have known for some years about the affair you had with Charlotte Kane, and I recognize the look you have. You have the look of being
infatuated. Not in love, maybe, but infatuated, and I know for sure that it cannot be Titus.’
‘You’ve grown far too American,’ Nadine complained. ‘Do you know that? You’re so American I can’t believe it.’
‘You will still do what I ask, with Colleen Petley.’
‘You mean, murder her?’
Ikon raised his finger to his lips again; a reminder that here, in the hushest and darkest of the rooms of power, such words as death and killing and disposal were never spoken out loud. It was an indulgence that Nadine should even be allowed to eat here; and to speak to Ikon in person. It was a special favour that she should be allowed to address him by his name, Nikolai Nekrasov; the first four letters of which had been twisted around to form his codename, Ikon. Everybody else in the building had to call him ‘Premier Ikon.’
It was a typically ironic Russian joke that the foremost representative of Communism in the Western hemisphere should be named after a symbol of religious veneration; and that a man of such stoutness should be associated with works of art which were traditionally two-dimensional.
Nadine said, ‘Has it occurred to you that you might be asking too much of me?’
I am dying,Ikon told her. ‘I can ask as much as I like of anybody. Do you want to see the Peredoviki tear down everything for which I have worked? Do you want to see bloodshed, and chaos? I was not sent here to preside over the wholesale destruction of the United States. I was sent here to maintain the balance. To keep the world intact. One life, even if it happens to be the life of the woman you love, is never going to be worth as much as that.’
‘Did you hear what happened in Arizona?’ Nadine asked him.
‘Oh, yes,nodded Ikon. ‘And have no fear, I have already spoken to Kama about it. Kama, of course, was polite. “I was only doing what I thought fit, Comrade Ikon. I was only acting expediently, Comrade Ikon.” But we should have no illusions about Kama, and what he is
trying to do. He is trying his very best to bring the whole Supervisory Committee into the open, in such a way that he is not personally blamed for the revelation. He is trying his very best to dig up old corpses, and turn the world into a charnel-house! But, we have managed to keep him at bay for seven years; and we can continue to keep him at bay until RING II is ratified. That is - if you agree to support me, and do what you have to do with Colleen Petley.’
Nadine sat down on the far side of the room, on a walnut side-chair. She kept her head lowered, as if she were thinking, or praying. Ikon watched her, occasionally reaching for his wine, or spreading more Sevruga caviare on his pancakes, his breathing harsh and unpleasant, rattling in the fluid-filled recesses of his lungs.
‘If I don’t agree to get rid of her, I suppose that you’ll ask somebody else to do it?’
‘Of course.’
Then I think that I’d prefer to do it myself. At least I’ll be facing up to myself, and what I am, and what I’ve done to her.’
‘Well, I knew that you would say yes. Why don’t you sit down and finish your caviare? Do you know how much it costs these days, in America? The best Sevruga?’
Nadine sat down at the dining-table again, with a rustle of yellow taffeta. ‘You know something, Nikolai Nekrasov, the strange thing about you is that you’re not a bad man at all. I think history may see you as a saint.’
Ikon wobbled his jowls in disagreement. ‘Moderates are never canonized. You have to be an extremist to be a saint. You have to poke your own eyes out, or set yourself alight. You know from experience that I am not that kind of a man. A fruitcake, the Americans say. I prefer to live, and eat, and survive, and make sure that all around me do the same. Men such as me are never remembered; but we do the most good.’
They finished their meal in complete silence; eating, drinking, and thinking. Then they went into the conservatory that overlooked Pennsylvania Avenue, and one of
the staff put Prokofiev’s The Love For Three Oranges on the stereo. ‘Beautiful music,’ said Ikon, one hand thrust into the pocket of his enormous pants, the other holding a glass of strawberry vodka. ‘It makes me cry, sometimes, because the world cannot be ordered like an opera. Life cannot be scripted, or scored.’
‘Are you afraid of Kama?’ asked Nadine.
‘You always have a knack of asking the most direct questions.’
‘I have to know. You may be dead by next May; but I won’t.’
‘Kama was one of Brezhnev’s proteges. He has always supported Brezhnev’s doctrine on polycentrism. But where Brezhnev was prepared to let the situation in the United States take an apparently natural course; not pushing too quickly, nor too fast, Kama believes that we ought to announce the 16th Soviet Socialist Republic overnight. A thunder-and-lighting man, Kama. Sweep away the old, sweep in the new! Damn the consequences! Unfortunately, he made sure that he took control of all the executive agencies which would give him the power to enact such measures. The National Security Council, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Office of Administration. You cannot underestimate him, my dear Nadine. He is the second rhost powerful administrator after me; and even though I am superior to him, I cannot possibly keep him in check.’
‘So he wanted that woman’s body to be identified.’
‘Of course. He must be deeply chagrined that the media have been so slow to understand what his agents were doing. All these stories of “Cadaver Kidnapping” and “Fanatics Torture Girl Reporter.” The American press never look further than the first pair of breasts. No wonder Marilyn Monroe was such a heroine. Personally, I thought she was a plump little cow. Fit for milking, not much else.’
The evening began to die. They drank more strawberry vodka, and Ikon told her about his boyhood in Zarajsk, on the Os’otr River, in the days of the Tsar; and how he
had picked cherries and lain back on the haycarts as they trundled home through the long warm evenings of August, seventy-two years ago.
At seven o’clock Nadine said, ‘I have to go now. We have a party at the British Embassy. Sir Leonard Grosvenor.’
‘Very well,’ said Ikon. He made no attempt to rise from his chair.
Nadine collected her wrap, and her pocketbook, and the staff saw her out to the elevator. Ikon waited for five minutes before he eventually eased himself up, and walked with a slightly dragging step into the dining room. He went across to the table, and peered into the vine-leaf ashtray, where earlier that evening he had laid the capsule of hydrocyanic acid.
To his satisfaction, he saw that it was empty.
Twenty-Three
Titus, that evening, was in a wolfishly ebullient mood. As a rule, he hated going to the British Embassy. The British speak like they’re carrying their rolled-up cricket socks in their cheeks.’ But he grasped Sir Leonard Grosvenor’s hand as if he were greeting a long-lost buddy from the Class of ‘38, and he bussed Lady Grosvenor on the cheek with an enthusiasm which led the Washington Post’s social correspondent to remark that ‘the special relationship seems to be looking up. Up, I say.’
Nadine didn’t need to ask Titus why he was feeling so buoyant. She could guess what had happened. During the afternoon, shortly after three o’clock, Marshall Roberts had telephoned Titus at the State Department and reluctantly agreed to postpone RING II ‘certainly for the time being, if not indefinitely’. No announcement had yet been made to the media, but Titus had insisted that the President should quickly make his acquiescence public. The White House press department were working on a statement which would satisfy both Marshall and Titus; and which wouldn’t appear too sudden and too bizarre when announced to the White House press lobby.