Read Online Assignment - Suicide by Edward S. Aarons - Free Book Online Page A

another world to me. We were always taught that you were
inhuman ogres, that you are our enemies. But you are only a man of flesh and
blood with a man’s emotions. You do not truly prefer violence, but you are
strong enough to be violent when necessary. Yet I think you could be a tender,
gentle man, too.”
    “What do you want, Valya?” he asked quietly.
    “Nothing.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head against
his shoulder, and he twisted a bit to look down at her. Her blonde hair was
parted in the middle and coiled in thick braids at the nape of her neck. A
small smile curved her full lips, touched with a trace of pale lipstick. She
said: “I feel alone up here in the sky, and at peace with you."
    “We'll be landing soon.”
    “For the moment, everything ugly is below us.”
    “When we land,” Durell said, “we shall be enemies again.
Each of us has different duties to perform. If you are successful. I shall
fail. I don‘t intend to fail."
    “You and I need not be enemies.”
    “That’s up to you," Durell said.
    A small sigh came from her. She was asleep with her head on
his shoulder. He looked across the aisle. Mikhail had twisted about in his seat
to stare at them. There was anger and hatred in the dancer’s handsome, dark
face.
     
    They landed in the afternoon at Moscow’s Vnoukovo Airport,
twenty miles from the city. The air was appreciably warmer than in Leningrad.
There was no difficulty with the white-aproned porters or at the cheek point in
the hangar. The papers Valya had procured for them received only a cursory
glance. The man with the bandaged head was met by two uniformed officials, and
rode off in an ambulance that had been waiting at the edge of the field.
The Red Army officers and the Polish colonel were drunk as they filed
down the ramp. Durell felt Valya slip her arm in his. Mikhail was among the
last to debark, with the French correspondent and the Intourist guide. The
dapper Intourist man looked curiously at Valya, as if he half-recognized her,
but she stared coolly through him until he turned away. They ate at Vnoukovo,
in the airport stolovaya . The meal
consisted of hashed meat. potatoes and fresh tomatoes flown up from the Crimea.
Small bottles of vodka were served as a matter of course at each table. Next to
them sat three gentlemen from Turkestan wearing gigantic sheep's-wool hats.
    There was no opportunity to talk among themselves then or in
the battered limousine they shared on the highway into Moscow. The Red Army men
sat on jump seats and Mikhail was in another car with the American couple. The
army men were noisy and boisterous, but since they ignored the other
passengers, Durell felt they were no threat.
    The lights were just coming on in the city when they got out
of the limousine at the Metropole Hotel. The second car carrying Mikhail was
not in sight. The broad avenues were wider than in Leningrad, and Petrovka
Ulitza’s department stores and furniture shops were bigger and brighter. The
G.U.M. department store on the vast area of Red Square was crowded, and the five-pointed
red stars above the onion spires and crenellated walls of the Kremlin glittered
against the purpling spring sky.
    Here was the heart of empire in this brooding, dangerous
land of enormous extent, sprawled over half the face of the globe, a composite
of many nations, races and cultures. The city was alive and vital. The crowds
were animated, perhaps by the premature spring weather that prevailed today and
the approaching festivities of May Day. People stood in queues at the shop
counters of Stoleshnik Periulok. Durell’s trained eye noted the preponderance
of uniforms. the number of Chinese, the far greater number of private cars on
the broad boulevards since his last visit here. It was as if the death of
Stalin‘s oppressive shadow had slowly animated the people of this city.
    Durell took Valya’s arm and they swung into the crowds on
the wide sidewalk in front of the ornate hotel and moved