The Accident Man

27

Freshly showered, Alix came into the kitchen, where Carver was fixing them both some food. She had one towel wrapped around her body, another around her hair.

“Do you have an old shirt or something I can wear?” she said, with a self-conscious smile. “None of my…”

“Shhh.” Carver held up a hand.

Alix was about to argue. Then she saw that there was a small television on a bracket on the kitchen wall. Carver was watching a satellite news program.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “There are thousands of people outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. There are more of them laying wreaths outside Kensington Palace, where she lived. There’s a book of condolence and people are queuing for, I don’t know, hundreds of yards to sign it. The prime minister’s calling her the People’s Princess. They’ve had politicians giving messages from all over the world. There are experts talking about everything from whether paparazzi photographers should be allowed to chase people on powerful motorcycles, to how the royal princes are going to cope with bereavement… The actual time of death was four a.m., by the way. Like that makes any difference.”

“We didn’t know what we were doing.”

“Like that really makes any difference either. Look, do you want some cheese omelette? It’s pretty good. This is the place for Swiss cheese, after all. It’s just that I’ve rather lost my appetite.”

“Sure, thanks,” Alix said. “But I think I should be wearing some clothes when I eat.”

“Of course. Stay right there.”

He was back a few seconds later, holding a gray T-shirt. It said “Sand-hurst Special Forces Challenge 1987” across the front. “Is that okay? Afraid I’ve not done much laundry lately, I’ve been away. It’s crazy… I was in New Zealand when they contacted me. On my bloody holiday.”

She touched his arm gently, sensing the barely suppressed tension in his voice. “It’s okay. This shirt will do fine.”

“Good. On second thought, maybe I will have some of that omelette after all.”

They sat eating and watching the TV for a while. There were cameras at RAF Northolt air base, west of London. The princess’s body was expected at any moment. Finally, Carver got up from the table and switched the TV off.

“You know what? I think I’ve seen enough of that. They’re not going to tell me anything I don’t already know. And there’s not been anything about our part in it all. Nothing about explosions or gunfights in Paris. Either they don’t know, or someone is going to great lengths to cover it all up.”

He walked through to the living room. “I thought you were going to tell me your life story.” He threw himself down on the sofa and waved at the two armchairs. “Grab a seat. I’m all ears.”

Alix walked into the room. She settled into one of the chairs, pulled her knees up to her chin, then wrapped her arms around her shins in a self-protective embrace. Carver watched her, taking in every detail. He looked at the way the sunlight caught the soft down on her long brown thighs. He looked at the way she ran her hands through her short, damp hair. He was wondering if she would betray him. He thought it might be worth it, just for the chance to have this girl in his apartment, even for a single day. As long as she was there, he could forget about death. Then Alix began to talk.

“Imagine a world without color. The sky is gray. The buildings are gray, and the people too. The grass is gray. In winter even the snow is dirty gray. No one has any money, and capitalism is the enemy, so there is nothing in the shops, no displays in the shop windows. There are no advertisements in the streets, no bright lights. You queue for bread with your mother and wonder how drunk your father is going to be later, and which of you he is going to hit, if the vodka does not make him unconscious first. That is how I grew up.

“We lived in a city called Perm, maybe twelve hundred kilometers from Moscow. I was a good student. I had lots of time for studying because no boys were interested in me.”

“Oh, come on,” Carver interrupted. “I don’t believe that.”

“No, really. I was not a pretty girl, and my eyes they… how do you say it when eyes point in the wrong direction?”

“Cross-eyed?”

“Yes, I was cross-eyed.”

“Oh, that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Your eyes. There’s something just a tiny bit uneven about them.”

Alix started as if someone had slapped her. Carver cursed himself.

“I’m sorry, that was incredibly stupid of me. What I meant was, I think you have amazing eyes. They’re beautiful. And they’re kind of hypnotic. I can’t stop looking at them and, er, now I know why.”

Carver waited to see whether he would be forgiven.

“You were saying…”

“I was saying that my squint was not so – what did you say? – hypnotic when I was a lonely little girl. I had to wear spectacles with really ugly, thick frames. So the other children made fun of me, the boys, and the girls also. Later, I grew up. My body was good, I knew that, but my face, forget it.”

“So how did the ugly duckling turn into a beautiful swan?”

She gave a quick nod of the head that simultaneously acknowledged and dismissed his compliment.

“I belonged to Komsomol, the Young Communists League. I did not love the Party. I did not care about politics. But you had to join, and there were benefits: summer camps, places at better colleges. You know. So, anyway, they had a literary competition. Even under the Communists it was important to be kulturny…”

“Cultured?”

“Yes, like playing a musical instrument really well, or dancing ballet or, for me, being able to write a long essay on Chekhov. I said he exposed the decadence and emptiness of the bourgeoisie in Imperialist Russia, proving the need for the revolution. Total bullshit! But it won a trip for me to a big Komsomol convention in Moscow. There were young athletes, scientists, artists, and academics. We did not know it, but the state used these conventions to select the best young people to be trained for all the different agencies.”

“Aha!” Carver raised a finger in the air, like some corny old TV detective solving a mystery. “So this was where they selected you to be a dangerous Soviet spy!” His voice turned more serious: “What were you, an analyst? Or did you do fieldwork?”

“You could call it that. A woman came up to me at the convention. She said, ‘Do you mind?’ She took off my glasses and looked at me, saying nothing, like someone at a museum who is looking at a painting, trying to decide if she likes it. I did not know what to do. My face went red.

“We went to a small side room. There were two men sitting behind a desk. I had just been reading my essay to the judges of the literary competition. These men looked exactly the same, like they were going to judge me. The woman said, ‘Take off your clothes, my dear.’ I was very shy. I had never shown my body to any man. But I also knew I had to obey orders.

“The woman told me not to worry, this was no different than seeing a doctor. I stripped to my underwear and then the three of them started talking about me. It was terrible, so humiliating, like I was a farm animal at market. They were talking about my legs, my breasts, my ass, my mouth, my hair, everything. Then one of the men said, ‘We will have to do something about the eyes, of course.’ And the other said, ‘That is no problem, a simple procedure.’

“I could not believe it. All my life, the doctors in Perm had said they could do nothing for me. They said my problem was not serious enough to justify the cost of an operation. Anyway, the woman told me to get dressed again. The men talked quietly for a moment. Then one of them told me I had been selected for a great honor. That September, I would return to Moscow to receive special training at an elite academy. I would learn to undertake duties that would be of great service to the motherland. If I completed the training satisfactorily, I would be given the finest clothes and my own Moscow apartment. My parents too would be granted improved accommodation.

“It was incredible, like a fairy tale, like becoming a movie star. When I told my mother, she burst into tears. She was so proud. Even my father cried for joy. That summer, I had my operation at last, carried out by the same doctor who had told me it would be impossible. I threw away my glasses. When I got on the train for Moscow, I was sad to be leaving home. But I was so excited also. I could not believe that fate had chosen me for such great fortune.”

Carver shifted position on the sofa, cleared his throat. “What happened when you got to Moscow?”

“My academy was the Feliks Dzerzhinsky University. It was run by the KGB. I was assigned to the second chief directorate, which monitored foreigners within the Soviet Union. I was taught English. I was educated in art, western culture, film, even politics, so that I could hold a conversation with the most sophisticated visitors to our country. And then I discovered what I was really being trained to do. Have you heard of the term honey trap?

“Sure.” Carver nodded. “A guy meets a pretty girl in a bar. They go back to his place. They have sex. The next day someone shows him the pictures. Either he tells them what they want to know, or wifey sees the snaps. Your lot went for honey traps in a big way. So, you were one of those girls, huh? The ones us Westerners were always warned about.”

“I was the honey in the trap, yes. You want to know the truth? I was a prostitute for the State. When I went to Moscow, I was a virgin. I had not even kissed a boy. By the time I graduated, there was nothing I did not know about attracting a man and giving him pleasure. Every trick, every perversion… and you know, we were always told to be as dirty as possible because a man will talk much more if he is filmed on his knees being whipped or taking a dildo up the ass than if he is simply putting his dick in the mouth of some cheap whore.

“And I was good, you know. When Alexandra Petrova was sent on assignment, all the boys at headquarters would gather around to see the photographs and the videos. And naturally, the senior officers liked to ensure that my work was of the highest quality. So they invited me out to their dachas for the weekend and I… I… Well, you can imagine what happened.”

She blinked three or four times and looked away.

Carver sat up and held out a handkerchief. “Hey, come on. Stop beating yourself up. You were a kid. You lived in a dictatorship. You didn’t have any choice. I mean, what would have happened if you’d said, ‘No, I refuse to do this’?”

“If I was lucky I would have been transferred to some small, cold town in Siberia. If not… What happens to whores who anger their pimps? They get raped, beaten, killed…”

“It’s not your fault, then.”

She gave him a tired smile. “You mean, I’m a whore the same way you’re a killer?”

“That’s one way of looking at it. I suppose there could be others.” Carver didn’t know what else to say. He could feel his defenses falling apart with every word she said, every time he looked at her face.

Alix loosened her arms and stretched her legs. She smoothed the T-shirt down over her thighs. Then she leaned forward and stared Carver straight in the eye, as if issuing a challenge.

“Perhaps. But I will not know that until I have heard your story too.”

“Well, I need a drink before I start spilling my guts.” Carver got up and started walking toward his kitchen. “How about a glass of wine? Let’s pretend we’re normal, have a nice, cold bottle of Pinot Grigio on a summer afternoon.”

She thought for a second. “Pinot Grigio, an Italian wine. Also known in America as Pinot Gris. Not a classic wine but, as you say, very refreshing.” A smug smile. “See? I was trained well.”

Carver paused in the doorway. He looked at the beautiful woman in the ratty old T-shirt. “Yeah,” he said. “I can believe that.” Then he went to get the wine.