The Charm School

down and flopped back onto the road in front of the horse, who got splattered with mud and reared up. The car fishtailed in the mud but kept its traction.
    Lisa took a deep breath. “Wow.”
    Within five minutes they came to an intersecting road of gravel, and Hollis cut north on it. He nudged the Zhiguli up to fifty kph and listened to the muffler working itself loose.
    Lisa asked, “Do you want a pear?”
    “Sure.”
    She got a pear from the bag and wiped it on her sleeve before she handed it to him.
    Hollis saw the main utility poles of the old Minsk–Moscow road ahead. He bit into the pear. “Good
grusha
.” He turned onto the paved road and headed west. “About twenty minutes to Gagarin.” Hollis saw no traffic on the road in either direction. He pressed on the accelerator and got the Zhiguli up to ninety kph. The engine whined, and the transmission whined back, but the car held steady. The muffler had quieted down on the level surface.
    Hollis saw a black car in his rearview mirror. The car was gaining on him fast and had to be doing over a hundred kph. As the car drew closer he recognized the grillwork of a Chaika. He looked at his dashboard and saw that his tachometer was already in the red line. “Don’t look now, but…”
    She turned her head. “Oh, shit! Is that them?”
    “Don’t know.”
    “What can we do?”
    “Bluff and bluster. Tell them we’ve already called our embassy and so on. If I think it’s necessary and if I get a chance, I’ll try to kill them.” He slid his knife out of his boot and slipped it inside his leather coat.
    “Sam… I’m frightened.”
    “You’ll be fine. Be a bitch.”
    The Chaika was fifty meters behind them now and swung out into the oncoming lane. Lisa looked straight ahead. Hollis glanced in his sideview mirror and smiled. “Wave.”
    “What?”
    The Chaika drew abreast and honked its horn. Two young couples waved from the car. Hollis smiled and waved back. The woman in the front passenger side pointed to the crushed fender and pantomimed swigging from a bottle and jerking on a steering wheel. The young man in the back was blowing kisses to Lisa. His female companion punched his arm playfully. The Chaika accelerated and passed them. Hollis said, “Crazy Muscovite kids. What’s this country coming to?”
    Lisa drew a long breath. She opened her bag, took out a compact, and brushed her face with blush, then carefully put on lip gloss. “I’ll do my eyes when you stop for a light.” She ran a brush through her hair. “Want me to do your hair? It’s messy.”
    “Okay.”
    She brushed his hair as he drove. She said, “We need a toothbrush.” She added, “I want us to look good for them.”
    “For whom?”
    “The people in Gagarin or the KGB or Burov. Whoever we meet first.”
    Hollis said, “You look good. Too good. Tone it down a bit.”
    “We’re not going to pass for Russians anyway, Sam.”
    “We’ll try to pass as something other than American embassy staff.”
    She shrugged and blotted the blush and lip gloss with a handkerchief. “At least I’m wearing a
vatnik
. You look like Indiana Jones with your boots and leather jacket.” She tousled his hair. “Well, we didn’t shower.”
    Hollis said, “Standard procedure is try to pass as a socialist comrade from one of the Baltic states. They don’t dress half bad, look Western, and speak un-Russian Russian. How about Lithuanian? Or do you feel like a Latvian?”
    “I want to be an Estonian.”
    “You got it.”
    Ten minutes later they saw squat
izbas
on either side of the road, then buildings with painted wood siding. Hollis slowed down. “Gagarin.”
    “Named after the cosmonaut?”
    “Yes. He was born in a village near here. From a squalid
izba
to a space capsule—log cabin to the stars. You have to give these people credit where it’s due.”
    They came into the middle of Gagarin, the district center for the region, situated on both banks of the Bolshaya Gzhat River. It was a town of about ten thousand people, big enough, Hollis thought, so that neither the Zhiguli nor its occupants stood out. Like Mozhaisk, it looked as if everyone had gone to the moon for the weekend. The town boasted a restaurant and a memorial museum to their famous native son.
    Hollis stopped the car in the middle of the empty street and rolled down his window. An enormous babushka, wrapped in black, was carrying a crate on her shoulder like a man. Hollis asked, “
Vokzal?
”
    “Good, good.”