The Charm School

remained seated and said to Hollis, “He did not say. But he said they may come for him. He knew. I think the drink was… what…?”
    “Drugged.”
    “Yes.” She stood. “My husband wishes to go. There is no more I know. I am sorry.” She stood.
    Hollis stood also and said to the woman, “You understand,
madame,
this is a matter of some concern to the authorities here. They know he spoke to you and are curious about what he told you. You may be in danger. Do you understand?”
    “Yes.”
    The Frenchman walked away impatiently. The woman lingered a moment, and Hollis looked her in the eye. “What else?”
    Her eyes met his. “Are you the attaché?”
    “Yes.”
    “He said you would come. He said to tell you some things that he did not say to you on the telephone.” The woman thought a moment, then recited quickly, “Dodson told him it was once a Red Air Force school. Now it is a KGB school. There are almost three hundred Americans.”
    “Three hundred? He said three
hundred
?”
    She nodded.
    Hollis found himself holding the woman’s arm in a tight grip. “What else did Mr. Fisher say?”
    “Nothing. He became ill… . They came for him. A Russian spoke to us in English, asking what the young man was saying. My husband replied in French, saying we spoke no English and could not understand the Russian or the young man.”
    “Did the Russian believe your husband?”
    “I think so.”
    Hollis released her arm. “Then perhaps you will be all right. But take the precaution of contacting your embassy. Tonight. In person. Not on the telephone. Then leave the country immediately.”
    “I understand.”
    “Good. Thank you,
madame.
”
    She smiled weakly. “The boy borrowed from me two kopeks… he seemed a nice sort… and now… now he is… what? Dead?”
    Hollis didn’t reply.
    She shook her head. “What times we live in.” She walked away.
    Hollis finished his drink, then made his way out of the lounge and into the corridor. He went to the south wing of the hotel and took the elevator down to the Zaryadye Cinema, which had just let out. Hollis mixed with the crowd in the lobby and exited the door that faced the Moskva River embankment. He followed a group down a flight of stairs that led to a passageway under the road.
    Hollis walked through the long, tiled tunnel, watching his breath mist in the cool air, listening to the echoing footsteps around him. A few of the Russians glanced curiously at him. He recalled a time two years before when he’d first come to Russia. He’d had occasion to walk this underpass at night and had been impressed by the discovery that there was not a scrap of litter on the floor, nor a line of graffiti on the walls. Moreover, the citizens of Moscow walked without fear. He was still impressed, but two years had given him a broader perspective. The streets and subways were immaculate, but little else was. There was no fear of street crime, not because there was none, but because it wasn’t reported in the news. This was a society that thrived on good news, most of it manufactured.
    Yet the average citizen’s own observations told him one thing, and the government told him another. Predictably, Soviet men and women developed frayed circuitry, jerking along through life believing neither their senses nor the newspapers, neither in themselves nor their leaders, neither in God nor their fellow man. It was a nation of illusion, delusion and collusion, a Potemkin village on a national scale, a place where men and women could disappear without a trace, and all evidence of their ever having existed would disappear with them. “I tried, Fisher. I tried.”
    Hollis came to the end of the tunnel. He ascended the stairs and went out onto the pedestrian walk of the Moskvoretsky Bridge, over which he and Brennan had driven nearly an hour before. He walked about twenty yards onto the bridge and stopped. A fog rose off the Moskva below, and the ruby red stars of the Kremlin towers glowed spectrally through the mist. There may have been a fine rain falling, but Hollis had never been able to distinguish Moscow’s mist from its drizzle, and it didn’t matter.
    Hollis turned up the fleece collar of his leather jacket. Moscow by night, Hollis had discovered, was unlike any other great city he’d lived in. You could walk the streets and squares of Moscow until dawn, as he’d done a few times, and never meet with an adventure or a misadventure. There were no public bars, no discos,