The Charm School

us to operate now.”
    “You sound like him.”
    “Who?”
    “Seth. Very narrow perspective.”
    “I know.” Hollis could sense that her good mood had become subdued. Probably, he thought, she was nervous as well as upset over Fisher’s death.
    Hollis thought too that bringing an amateur along, an innocent, might not be the brightest thing he’d done all week. But in some vague way he felt it would be good for her. Alevy had understood that. And from the standpoint of pure tradecraft, a woman who had no known intelligence connections was good cover. If Alevy and Hollis had applied for the passes together, the KGB would have called for an armored division to follow them.
    Hollis realized that he
was
thinking like Alevy. How else could he explain the logic of asking Lisa Rhodes to take a drive with him from which she might not return alive? He said aloud, “Sorry.”
    “For what?”
    “For sounding like Seth.”
    She smiled. “Boy, that’s a loaded one.”
    He didn’t respond.
    Lisa looked out the window and said thoughtfully, “If Greg Fisher came in from Smolensk and Borodino, this is the road he took.”
    “Yes, it was.”
    “He drove right by the embassy.”
    “I know.”
    They crossed the Outer Ring highway, and Lisa informed him, “There used to be signs on this road reading ‘Forward to Communism.’ But I suppose the authorities realized the unfortunate imagery of that slogan on a road that goes in circles.”
    Hollis smiled. “You’re a good guide. I’ll speak to Intourist about a weekend job for you.” Hollis pulled a piece of flimsy greyish paper from his pocket and handed it to her. “Your pass.”
    She glanced at the red Cyrillic letters and the Foreign Ministry stamp, then stuffed it in her bag. “It’s only good until midnight.”
    “We’ll be there and back before then.”
    “I thought we could stay in the country overnight.”
    Hollis did not reply immediately, then said, “I don’t have a toothbrush.”
    Lisa smiled at him, then turned her attention to the countryside. A small village of about two dozen houses sat starkly in an open field. Rough fences sectioned off garden plots from poultry and swine, and mud paths connected dilapidated dwellings to outhouses. The cottages were roofed with corrugated sheet metal, and she imagined that a hard rain must drive the inhabitants crazy. She wondered, too, how they kept the heat in when the windchill factor got to fifty or sixty below. “Unbelievable.”
    He followed her gaze. “Yes. It’s striking, isn’t it? And fifteen kilometers back is the capital of a mighty nuclear power.”
    “This is my first trip into the country.”
    “I’ve been around a bit, and it gets worse when you head east toward the Urals or north toward Leningrad. Over half the rural population is ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed, though
they
grow the food.”
    Lisa nodded. “You hear and read about this, but you have to see it to believe it.”
    Hollis pointed. “Do you see that rise over there? Beyond that is a pine forest in which is hidden a very sophisticated phased-array radar site that is the command center for all the Soviet antiballistic missile silos around Moscow. For the price of that installation, half the peasants in this region could be put in decent farmhouses with indoor plumbing and central heat. Guns or butter. Some societies can’t afford both.”
    She nodded. “Half our national budget and sixty percent of theirs… incredible wealth sunk into missile silos.”
    “The current optimistic theory in Washington is that we’re spending them to death.” He added, “Forget what I said about the location of that ABM site.”
    She nodded distractedly.
    They drove on in silence for some time before she spoke again. “In my work I meet Russians who understand the contradictions in their system. They like us, and they would like to build grain silos instead of missile silos. But the government has made them believe the missiles are necessary because we want to conquer them.”
    “Well, they’re right. You make a distinction between the people and the government here. But I think people get the kind of government they deserve. In this case, probably better.”
    “That’s not true, Sam. The Russians may not understand democracy, but in some curious way they are passionately devoted to
svoboda
—freedom.”
    Hollis shrugged.
    “I always thought that communism is an historical fluke here. It won’t make it to its hundredth