The Charm School

American.”
    Hollis said, “Lisa cooks Russian.”
    Landis smiled. “Good night.” He turned away, then came back. “Oh, I remembered something, Sam. What Simms said. He didn’t say that he didn’t know what happened to you. That was somebody else I was thinking about.”
    Hollis stood silently in the dark, holding the lantern.
    Landis moved closer to him. “Simms said you both hit the drink together. He said the Zips sent boats out, and they got him, but you got fished out by the Jolly Green Giant. Fate, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    Landis moved still closer and spoke in a soft voice. “Ernie Simms said you were swimming toward him, yelling to him to come to you. He said he kept waving you off because he figured he was a goner, but you kept coming, calling to him. He said he was glad when he saw the chopper rescue you, glad for you and glad there was a witness that he’d been captured alive.” Landis added, “He spoke highly of you, Sam.”
    Hollis nodded. “Thank you.” He turned and walked with Lisa away from the house.
    Lisa squeezed his hand. “All right?”
    He nodded again.
And so,
he thought,
I make the final entry in the pilot’s log and close the book.
    They walked for a while in silence, then Lisa said, “Do you want to be alone?”
    “No, walk with me. Talk to me.”
    “Okay… question: Did you hit Sonny because he was a Russian or because he was hitting on me?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Mostly male ego, I guess. I’m actually having trouble perceiving these people as Russians. All I saw was a young punk being a boor.”
    “He wasn’t bad-looking.”
    “Bitch.”
    She smiled and grabbed his arm. They embraced and kissed. She said, “Sam… Sam…”
    “Yes?”
    “Don’t leave me. I’d die if you left me. If we stay here, don’t take a Russian wife.”
    “How about a girlfriend?”
    “Don’t tease.”
    “Sorry.”
    They walked down the path and headed home.
    Lisa said, “How do people marry here?”
    “I think they just announce it.”
    “Will you marry me?”
    “Yes. Does that mean you’ll work here?”
    “I’ll live here. I’ll work against them. We’ll be free someday. I know we will.”
    He took her arm. “I feel free. Poor Tim Landis just gave me my freedom.”
    “I know.”
    They continued on the dark path toward their cottage. Hollis saw other lights moving along other paths, like aircraft, he thought, lost in the night, looking for their home base. He suddenly recalled a sign that had hung in the chapel at Phu Bai air base. It was a New Year’s message from Britain’s King George to his embattled people at the beginning of the Second World War, and Hollis found he could recall it clearly:
I said to the man at the gate of the year, “Give me a light that I may go forth into the unknown.” And the man replied, “Put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light, safer than a known way.”

 
34
    Sam Hollis knelt by the fireplace in the small living room of the cottage and lit the kindling under the logs.
    Lisa said, “I used to love a fire on a cold winter night. That’s one of the things I missed in Moscow and my other assignments.”
    She looked at the growing flames, then said, “I suppose one can pretend. I mean, here in this room, just you and I. We can pretend we’re home, instead of sixty miles from Moscow. Maybe that’s how these prisoners have kept their sanity.”
    Hollis wasn’t sure they
had
kept their sanity. And he recalled, too, what Tim Landis had said about those sad early-morning hours. “Could you turn on the VCR?”
    She went to the bookshelves beside the fireplace and examined the videotapes. “Anything in particular?”
    “Something noisy.”
    She selected
Rocky IV
and fast-forwarded it to the fight scene with the Russian, then sat down on the love seat with Hollis.
    He put his arm around her and spoke in a low voice. “How was tea with Suzie and her friends?”
    “Awful. I had to get up and leave. I’m sorry.”
    “That’s all right.”
    “Sam, there are six other American women here. Two were kidnapped in Finland on ski trips, and a woman named Samantha was kidnapped while she was hiking in the Carpathian mountains in Romania. The other three were supposedly lost in swimming accidents, two in the Black Sea, one in the Baltic off East Germany. There used to be two others, but they committed suicide.”
    Hollis made no comment.
    “Sam, it almost broke my heart. How can these