The Charm School

seemed to consult no one regarding these matters. Somewhere, she assumed, was a master plan for changing the face of Moscow, but the citizens who lived in the city had never been asked their opinion. “What a screwed-up social contract they’ve got here,” she said aloud.
    Spanning the river below was the Kalinin Bridge, connecting into Kutuzov Prospect, which ran west alongside the Ukraina Hotel and continued on, becoming the Minsk–Moscow highway. She followed the road with her eyes until it disappeared into the pale sinking sun over the flat horizon. “Russia… .” An immense and inhospitable expanse, more suitable for wild horsemen and ruminants, an unlikely place to find a powerful empire of Europeans and their cities. Certainly, she thought, the most frozen empire that ever existed; a civilization whose roots seemed tenuously sunk into the thin soil like the fragile white birch.
    The internal phone rang. She turned from the window and answered it. “Rhodes.”
    “Hello,” the male voice said. “Today is the first day of Sukkot.”
    “Is that so?”
    “I’ve been invited to a party in Sadovniki. Religious dissidents. You might enjoy it.”
    “I’m D.O. tonight.”
    “I’ll get you switched.”
    “No… no, thanks, Seth.”
    “Is it completely and finally over?”
    “I think so.”
    “Will you take a polygraph on that?”
    “I have to finish a press release now.”
    “Well, at least you won’t be able to get in trouble tonight. Think about it, Lisa.”
    She didn’t know if Seth Alevy meant about them or the party. She replied, “Sure will.”
    “Good night.”
    She hung up, slipped off her shoes, and put her feet on the desk. Holding the bourbon in her lap, she lit a cigarette and contemplated the acoustical-tile ceiling. The new American embassy, she reflected, sitting on ten acres of bad bog land about equidistant between the Moskova River and the old embassy on Tchaikovsky Street, had been more than a decade in the building. The work had been done mostly by a West German firm under subcontract to an American concern in New York. If the Soviet government was insulted by this snub to socialist labor and building expertise, they never expressed it verbally. Instead they’d indulged themselves in petty harassments and bureaucratic delays of monumental proportions, which was one of the reasons the project had taken about five times as long as it should have.
    The other reason was that each slab of precast concrete that the Soviets had supplied to the building site had been implanted with listening devices. After the bugging scandal broke, there followed the Marine guards’ sexual scandals at the old embassy, and the subsequent charges and counter-charges between Moscow and Washington. The American diplomatic mission to the Soviet Union had been in a shambles for over a year, and the whole mess had been making front-page news back in the States. The image of the Secretary of State conducting business in a trailer out on Tchaikovsky Street was rather embarrassing, she thought.
    According to Seth Alevy’s sources, the Russians had a big laugh over the whole thing. And according to her own personal observations, the American diplomats in Moscow felt like fools and had for some time avoided social contact with other embassies.
    Eventually, a little belated Yankee ingenuity and a lot of Yankee dollars had put things right in the new embassy. But Lisa Rhodes knew there was a good deal of residual bitterness left among the American staff, and it influenced their decision-making. In fact, she thought, whatever goodwill there had been between the embassy people and their Soviet hosts was gone, replaced by almost open warfare. The State Department was now seriously considering making a clean sweep of the entire staff, replacing the two hundred or so able and experienced men and women with less angry diplomats. She hoped not. She wanted to continue her tour of duty here.
    Lisa Rhodes shook the ice in her drink. She closed her eyes and exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke at the ceiling.
    She thought of Seth Alevy. Being involved with the CIA station chief in Moscow was not the worst thing for her career. He could pull strings to keep her in Moscow even if State ordered her home. And she did love him. Or once loved him. She wasn’t sure. But somehow, being involved with him meant being involved with his world, and she didn’t like that. It wasn’t what she wanted to do with her career or her