The Charm School

thousand men lay dead and wounded.
    In the distance Fisher saw the memorial to the French soldiers and officers who fought there in 1812, and further away was a newer monument dedicated to the Russian defenders who tried to stop the Germans in this same place in 1941. Fisher noted there was no monument to the Germans.
    Greg Fisher was suddenly overcome by a sense of history and tragedy as he gazed out over the now peaceful fields, deathly still in the autumn dusk. The cold east wind blew tiny birch leaves over the granite steps where he stood, and the cannon of Tchaikovsky’s overture boomed over the quiet countryside. “Russia,” he said softly to himself. “
Rodina
—the motherland. Bleeding Russia. But you made them all bleed too. You gave them death in seven-digit numbers.”
    Fisher walked slowly back to his car. It was much colder now, and a chill passed through his body. He shut the door and turned the tape lower as he drove slowly on the lanes, past the black granite obelisk honoring Kutuzov, past the common grave of the Soviet Guardsmen who fell in action in 1941, past the monument dedicated to the
Grande Armée
of 1812, and past the dozens of smaller markers dedicated to the Russian regiments of both 1812 and 1941. In the deepening dusk Fisher fancied he could hear the muted sounds of battle and the cries of men.
I’m too hard on them,
he decided.
They got shafted bad. Screwed by the West once too often.
    He had lost track of time, and it had become noticeably darker. He tried to retrace his route through the low hills and clusters of birch trees, but he realized he was lost.
    Fisher found himself going upgrade in a towering pine forest and reluctantly continued on the narrow, paved lane, looking for a wide place to turn around. He put on his headlights, but they revealed only walls of dark green pine on either side. “Oh, Christ Almighty… .”
    Suddenly the head beams illuminated a large wooden sign attached to a tree, and Fisher stopped the car. He stared out the windshield at the Cyrillic lettering and was able to make out the familiar word STOP . The rest of the sign was incomprehensible except for the also familiar CCCP . Government property. But what wasn’t these days? “Do I need this?” He thought he detected a quaver in his voice, so he said more forcibly, “I don’t need this crap. Right?”
    As he sat considering what to do next, he noticed what appeared to be a small opening in the trees off the right shoulder. The opening lay beyond the sign, and he didn’t want to pass the sign with the car, so he took a flashlight from under his seat and got out. He walked the ten meters to the opening. It was a graveled patch, not five meters square, but obviously meant as a turnaround, a means of allowing the unwary motorist to obey the sign. “Russian efficiency.” He kicked at the crushed stone and decided it would be all right. He turned back toward his car, then froze.
    Over the hum of the engine he heard branches rustling. He remained motionless and breathed through his nose, noticing the resinous scent of the trees. The air was cold and damp, and he shivered in his windbreaker. He heard it again, the brushing of pine boughs, closer this time.
The headlights attracted a deer,
he thought.
Right.
He took a step toward his car. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked—an unfriendly bark, he decided.
    The glare of his headlights blinded him, and he shielded his eyes as he walked in long strides the ten meters back toward his car;
one, two, three, four, five
—
    “Russian efficiency,” said a voice a few feet to his right.
    Fisher felt his knees go weak.

 
2
    Lisa Rhodes noted it was five o’clock, and she poured a shot of bourbon into her paper Coke cup. She walked to the window of her office in the Press Attaché’s section of the American embassy. The seventh-floor windows faced west and looked over the Moskva River. Across the river rose the Ukraina Hotel, a twenty-nine-story structure of bombastic Stalinist architecture that fronted on the Taras Shevchenko Embankment.
    The district that was contained within the loop across the Moskva had been one of the poorer quarters of nineteenth-century Moscow. Extensive razing and building under the Soviets had transformed it into a cleaner if less interesting place. In the two years since she’d been in Moscow, she’d seen not only wooden structures demolished, but magnificent stone mansions and churches destroyed. The government