Welcome to the blog for my novel, "Duress & Desire".
The following is a description of the novel, the prologue, and the first three chapters of the book, followed by a link to Amazon where you can purchase the book if you like.
The following is a description of the novel, the prologue, and the first three chapters of the book, followed by a link to Amazon where you can purchase the book if you like.
-----------------------
This is the touching story of new love and murder, patriotism and treason, and honor and deception at the height of the Cold War.
The Soviet Union and the United States are waging war by proxy across the globe. Vietnam, Korea, and Cuba are perhaps the most famous struggles, but other hot spots abound, and though many battles and skirmishes were quietly fought in dark corners, unseen and unknown, few places on the planet are spared. Many of these conflicts were the scene of unimaginable brutality and cruelty, but also of incredible bravery and courage in the face of death.
Chile, a small country hugging the western cone of the South America continent, teeters on the brink of disaster and despotism. The Army of Chile, led by General Augusto Pinochet, has routed the government in an attack on the presidential palace, La Moneda, and the democratically elected president, Socialist Salvador Allende, dies during the coup—ostensibly by his own hand. Members of Allende's PU party are rounded up and arrested. People begin to "disappear". Others are being killed by Chile's "Secret Police", the feared DINA, in individual assassination plots across Latin America and even Europe.
Two people enjoying the thrill of new love, and from opposite ends of the earth, are brought together by providence and chance in a foreign land—America. He is the Chief-of-Staff at the Chile Embassy and a scion of an aristocratic Santiago family. She is a beautiful young woman from a peasant family living near the Arctic Circle in the north of the Soviet Union who has been recruited by the Soviet Union's intelligence agency, the KGB, to work for the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. After a chance meeting, they fall in love and thrill to the buoyant surge of new passion, but forces beyond their control have drawn them into the orbit of an international conspiracy and incident from which there is no escape. The stakes are high and after the Cuban Revolution and subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis Washington cannot afford and will not permit Socialism or Communism to gain a foothold on the South America continent via Chile. The CIA does what it must to keep the region in Washington's locus, but circumstances and political realities are tenuous at best. Events that have been set in motion seem to have a way of killing some and rewarding others with no consideration of right and wrong or conduct fair or partial. The United States feels it must triumph by any means necessary, and the powerful players in this drama will prevail with the use of torture and murder while others must pick their way carefully through a terrain of lies and deceit while carrying out the task of assassinating Orlando Letelier, the former Ambassador from Chile to the United States, on September 21, 1976, in Washington, D.C.
Destiny had these lovers, the nation of Chile, and the adversarial nuclear powers of the Soviet Union and the United States in its sights. Chile and much of Latin America would stagger under the weight of history. A weight that would bring these lovers the highest highes—and the lowest lows.
Destiny had these lovers, the nation of Chile, and the adversarial nuclear powers of the Soviet Union and the United States in its sights. Chile and much of Latin America would stagger under the weight of history. A weight that would bring these lovers the highest highes—and the lowest lows.
-----------------------------------------
Gregory Thomas Jeffers
Duress & Desire
A Novel
Shady Grove Press, LLC
Duress & Desire
© 2017 Gregory Thomas Jeffers
Publication date: May 24, 2017
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-9990292-0-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-9990292-1-3 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number - 2017908005
I. Historical fiction; Chile, USA, USSR. II. Orlando Letelier Assassination
Shady Grove Press
Deerfield Beach, FL
(561) 235-3046
Shadygrovepress.com
Shadygrovepressusa@gmail.com
Cover Art by Adrian Chu Redmond, an internationally acclaimed artist with a poetic eye and desire to bring energy and expression into everyday life. Visit the artist’s website at: www.adrianchuredmond.com
Gregory Thomas Jeffers is a philosopher,
historian, farmer, and former Wall Street financier.
He is the author of “Prosperous Homesteading”.
They say “Time passes and Love Fades.”
Perhaps one lifetime is just not enough time.
It is difficult to believe in the dreadful
but quiet war of organic beings, going on
in the peaceful woods & smiling fields.
—Charles Darwin
Prologue
In 1970, Salvador Allende, a socialist and a member of Chile’s Popular Unity party, won the presidential election with just 36.2% of the popular vote, edging out Jorge Radomiro’s 34.9% and Allesandri Tomic’s 27.8%, on a platform of promising to nationalize Chile’s copper industry as well as other large institutional industries such as telecommunications and banking. A number of powerful American corporations stood to lose substantial investments in Chile with an Allende presidency and a socialist government. These corporations took their case to U.S. President Richard M. Nixon who set America’s intelligence agencies on a collision course with Chile’s history. It would cost Salvador Allende and many of his supporters their lives and the end of democratic rule in Chile from 1973 until 1990.
On September 11, 1973 the Army of Chile, led by General Augusto Pinochet, later to be known as El Presidente, staged a coup at the presidential palace, La Moneda, in downtown Santiago. Jets bombed the palace and machine gun fire pocked the walls. Tanks rolled through the streets of Chile’s capital. President Allende was killed, or committed suicide, during the coup.
In the immediate aftermath of the coup, thousands of people associated with Allende and the Popular Unity party were arrested and held in the national stadium in Santiago. Hundreds of these people were killed there. A number of highly placed and influential people associated with Allende and the Left suddenly “disappeared”. Of course, they had not “disappeared”. They had been arrested and transported to secret government installations where they were held, interrogated, and tortured in the extreme by their depraved and inhuman fellow countrymen working for DINA, Chile’s version of the “secret police”. The victims were often slowly dismembered, and finally murdered with a coup de grace execution by machine gun or simply strangled in the torture chamber. Not much had changed in Chile. 150 years earlier political losers wound up in front of a firing squad or at the end of a rope. A system of political repression and brutality that had established itself at Chile’s independence and founding never left the Chilean Body Politic. This was the real Chile.
Democracy would not be restored for more than 17 dark and murderous years of unimaginable cruelty after the coup, such was the fear and paranoia that gripped the establishment of Chile and their neighbor, Argentina, at the time. The revolution in Cuba a decade earlier, the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, along with the ongoing skirmishes with Communists and Socialists throughout the western hemisphere had reverberated across the power structures of Latin America’s two most European nations, transforming them from centers of art, culture, and civilization into dictatorships capable of incredible violations of standards of human of decency.
On September 21, 1976 the former Chilean Ambassador to the United States was assassinated in a car bombing in Washington, D.C. Much has been written about the crime. The following is a historically accurate fiction, with plenty of artistic license, and alternate theory of the circumstances of the Letelier assassination and the events that led up to it.
ONE
Washington, D.C. October 28, 1973
In anything but the most insufferable weather Juan Pablo walked the 2.3 miles to and from the Embassy of Chile on Washington, D.C.’s “embassy row” and his apartment in the Georgetown district of D.C. The night was unseasonably cold for autumn in Washington but there was no rain so he made the trek on foot.
The embassies were given special treatment by the D.C. taxi companies and embassy staff had little problem securing a taxi even on rainy days. This was not the case for the other residents of D.C. The daily 4.6-mile round trip served to keep Juan Pablo, Chief-of-Staff to the Chile Ambassador to the U.S., in shape. In point of fact, he was no longer Chief-of-Staff of the Ambassador because at the moment there was no Chile Ambassador to the U.S. The former Ambassador, Orlando Letelier Del Solar had been recalled to Chile several months earlier and a Charge d’Affaires ran the embassy at the moment.
Walking west from Dupont Circle on P St. NW, Juan Pablo was lost in thought. Halloween, 1973, was just a few days away and the local children had decorated their front yards, porches, or stoops in the usual way. Juan Pablo was not familiar with Halloween before his appointment to the Embassy in Washington, D.C., as it was not celebrated in Chile at that time. His daughters had gotten into the spirit of it for the two Halloweens they spent in America but at the moment Juan Pablo would not have noticed if some of the hanging effigies had been the actual bodies of hanged men.
He rented the first floor of a three-floor townhouse on 37th St. NW just a few blocks from the U.S. Naval Observatory and Dumbarten Oaks Park. Walking up the street to his apartment Juan Pablo noticed a happy couple; the man was leaning against the front fender of a parked car and his lady friend was leaning into him as her man gathered her up in a warm embrace. As he approached them he could hear the playful tones of their voices, and even though he could not hear what they were saying he clearly understood the sentiments and emotions they were sharing with one another. He felt a pang of envy for these lovers and remembered what it was to be young with a lover where the answer was always “Yes!” This envious feeling passed, only to be replaced with a crushing sense of dread as he climbed the stairs of the front stoop to the entrance of his building.
He always caught the 6pm network news programs as it seemed to him that the American Media knew more about what was going on in his country than did the Intelligence people reporting to the Embassy from Chile, or certainly more than the Intelligence people were telling the embassy staff. Chile was roiling internally and the people there lived in a state of fear and foreboding. The year before, 1972, had seen price inflation of over 140% and the disappearance of staple goods like rice, beans, and flour from grocery stores and the emergence of black markets for goods, traded for with U.S. dollars, but this was only a symptom of the larger problem that was cannibalizing Chile from within.
The nation was completely polarized politically. The Socialists demanded land reform, better wages, education, healthcare, and opportunity from the establishment classes and their government and were openly challenging the “Casta” system that had held the people of the underclasses frozen in their position for centuries. After the bloody revolution in Cuba the moneyed conservatives in Chile had real reason to fear their own underclass, and in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the ongoing war in Viet Nam the United States was not about to allow Socialism to engulf Chile and the rest of the cone of South America without a fight.
Unlocking the door to his apartment Juan Pablo stepped into the darkness of his living room, took off his coat, slid out of his shoes, and reached for the light switch. It was two minutes before 6pm so he hurried across the room to turn on the television. It took a moment for the tube of the T.V. to warm up and when it did a beautiful woman holding a large black leopard on a leash leaning against an American car appeared on the screen. There was no sound. Juan Pablo reached to turn up the volume and the beautiful woman with the large cat disappeared from the screen and was replaced by a middle-aged American news anchorman. The lead story was the recent gasoline shortages, long lines at gas stations, and discussions of a rationing system should such an emergency visit itself again on America. Halfway through the news program’s scheduled time and there was no mention of Chile. Juan Pablo was not assured by the idea that “no news is good news”. The rest of the news program came and went with no mention of his homeland.
The nation of Chile lies along the Pacific Ocean on the west side of the southern portion of South America and is one of the longest north-south nations in the world. Due to its peculiar geography the central region is home to the majority of the population and its largest city, Santiago. To the north is one of the largest and driest deserts in the world, the Atacama Desert, and that region is rich in natural resources—particularly copper. Chile holds 40% of the world’s known copper reserves. This has been both a blessing and a curse. The blessings of the copper wealth flowed to the political and social elite who descended from the European settlers of the region over the past 300 years, while the curse of the dangerous and unhealthy work in the copper mines fell on the lower classes of mixed race and indigenous peoples. To the south is the Drake Passage and Cape Horn, among the most treacherous passages of navigable water on the planet.
Chile shares a long border to its east with Argentina, to the north with Peru, and Bolivia to its northeast. The government of the Republic of Chile, a republican democracy, had historically been an island of stability tucked away in the bottom of the cone of Latin America’s numerous banana republics and military dictatorships.
For Chile’s Spanish settlers the soil was fertile, the climate agreeable, the resources plentiful, and the trip back was fraught with peril. Cortez might have burned or sunk his ships, depending on which version of history you like, to motivate his men but the Spaniards settling in Chile needed no such motivation. None of them relished the idea of crossing the Atacama or rounding Cape Horn, even from the west, again.
Chile was somewhat behind when compared to the political advances of the revolutions in the United States and the Republic of France, but they found their footing and their will to be sovereign within several decades of those larger movements for independence and liberty. Of course, the Chilean elite’s idea of “liberty” was very different from that of the United States or France.
In truth, Chile’s “War for Independence” didn’t start out that way. Chile’s Independence movement began more as a negotiation of the demands of Chile’s elite with the Crown, and then spun out of control into a ferocious civil war that evolved into the “War for Independence” more out of necessity than a desire for independence. Napoleon of France turned on his ally in the Napoleonic wars, King Ferdinand VII of Spain, deposing the King in 1808 and plunging the Spanish empire into confusion and desperation.
At the time King Ferdinand VII was deposed Chile was a relatively small and politically and economically unimportant colony of Spain known as the “Captaincy General of Chile” and was administered by a Royal Governor appointed by the Crown. One can imagine the disturbing political view confronting the ruling class in Chile at that time: The Spanish empire was in a state of extreme turmoil, the King had been deposed, and Napoleon’s troops were fighting in and occupying most of the Iberian peninsula, while news of political developments in Spain at the time came only by ship across the Atlantic and then by land via Peru and the Atacama—and that news would certainly not have been trusted as anything more than propaganda by any rational person.
Chile was on her own, Spain was under attack from within and without. South America’s Spanish colonies were following the Americans in declaring their independence, and the simple fact was that the colonials fought internally with each other at least as much as they fought against Spain.
Of course, South America was not the United States. The peoples and the cultures of Latin America were very different from the people and culture of North America of the time. The U.S. was, for the most part, a nation of Protestant Anglos with no particular loyalty to any religious denomination, and in any event the U.S. elite were notoriously suspicious of religion in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, and this fact was made obvious in its founding documents. Chile, on the other hand, was a nation where a small portion of the population, Spaniards and their descendants, successfully dominated the indigenous people and the land in a way that would have made even the land-grabbing Americans blush, and were universally loyal to their Roman Catholic Church. Unlike the American colonial elite, who united effectively against their own European crown, the Chilean establishment was quite willing to treacherously murder each other and to settle political differences by standing the competition up in front of firing squads. One of the consequences of all of this is that it took Chile 34 years, from 1810 to 1844, to officially gain its independence from Spain, though as a practical matter the last Spanish troops on Chilean soil surrendered in 1826. Another consequence was that this hard fought battle gave birth to a historically repressive democracy very different from the liberal democracy that took hold to the north in the United States. In America, the theme was that every man could improve his economic and social standing. In Chile, every man knew his place and where he stood in line. If he stepped out of line he would be dealt with swiftly and harshly.
Now in his mid-30’s, married with 2 young daughters, Juan Pablo jumped at the opportunity to serve in the diplomatic corps. A man of action, he was bored to tears by the circumstances of his life. Born to privilege, he did not have to work to provide for his family and felt that whatever he might achieve in business would not improve his family’s position or give him any satisfaction. He served in the Army for 4 years, rising to the rank of Captain before resigning his commission. He had been bored with Army life, too.
While his marriage was not a happy one it wasn’t completely miserable, either. His wife was a good and diligent mother. She simply held no desire for him whatsoever, and seemed to prefer the company of her mother to his. The marriage was not arranged per se, but it was strongly encouraged to say the least. She was 8 years his junior, impossibly pretty, and from a wealthier family.
“What is not to love?” his mother asked. He agreed at the time. Now he was drowning in the disappointment of a life without passion.
His wife was 19-years-old and a virgin on their wedding night; he was 27. Their life together started off badly and had only gotten worse from there. She conceived on their honeymoon and produced a daughter, Isabelle. Their second daughter, Consuela, was born a year and a day after Isabelle. His daughters were quite young when he moved the family to Washington D.C., where they seemed to be thriving. After two years in America his wife could not bear to be away from her family in Chile any longer, and in any event did not enjoy living in the “ugly American capitol”. She informed Juan Pablo that she would be going back to Chile with their daughters shortly after Ambassador Letelier was recalled.
He had thought a change like the move to Washington, D.C., could only do his marriage good while also giving his daughters an opportunity to experience life outside of the boring bubble that is life for the wellborn of a small country where all of ones friends come from the same social class, the same religion, who had the same history, and the same interests. Juan Pablo had to admit that his wife had never taken to living in the United States and that there was no improvement in the state of their marriage.
He did not try to dissuade his wife from returning home.
When she was gone he did not miss her as he had hoped he would, and though he missed his children terribly he was not permitted to return home other than for approved visits, especially now.
In hindsight, it was clear to Juan Pablo that prior to the military coup the American intelligence agencies were openly operating in Chile and had been doing so for the past several years, with the cooperation of some faction of senior Army officers, and diplomatic relations between Chile’s Allende administration and the State Department of the American Administration had become painfully strained. The Soviet intelligence agencies had also been busy inside of Chile in support of Allende, but Latin America is in Washington’s backyard. After years of economic warfare and sabotage, “push” finally came to “shove” and the American supported Army of Chile made its move.
It has been said, “In war, truth is the first casualty”. In diplomacy there was no “truth”, only the interests of the parties involved. There is only the appearance of truth, a truth that may or may not be true tomorrow. This was the political environment that Juan Pablo and the embassy of Chile labored under on this 28th day of October 1973.
As a member of the embassy staff, Juan Pablo worked closely with Army of Chile Intelligence. He wasn’t a spy, exactly. It was simply a settled fact that roughly half of the staff at any of the embassies in Washington was involved in the information and intelligence gathering business. For the most part this was not the cloak and dagger stuff of spy novel fantasy but simply business. This was how international trade was facilitated and got done. Chile was the world’s largest exporter of copper and needed to trade that for all of the things that it needed to import. Other nations had oil, or steel, or electronics, or other finished products that they needed to sell on the international market. Each nation had import duties that protected certain interested parties. Just whose interests received protection on the international front was often worked out here in the political capital of the West.
In addition to his military training and experience Juan Pablo spoke English and French proficiently, though not fluently but was gaining on that status in English, and had been introduced for consideration for the diplomatic service corps by his older brother who was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army of Chile. It was an incredible bit of luck that he should land a job at the Chilean Embassy in Washington. His career advancement continued. In less than 2 years Juan Pablo went from an attaché to assistant Chief-of-Staff under then Ambassador Domingo Santa Mario Santa Cruz, and then to Chief-of-Staff under Orlando Letelier, if only for a short while. That these promotions took place during the most politically dynamic period in the history of Chile was hardly good fortune, as he would soon find out for himself.
Juan Pablo Carrera Garcia was the scion of an old and politically powerful Santiago family who traced its roots to a Hidalgo émigré from Spain in the middle of the 17th Century. He had among his ancestors a former president of Chile, Jose¢ Joaquim Prieto, the son of a Creole officer, and of the Criollo caste, a term of art to describe people of primarily Spanish blood born in Chile, from the Chilean city of Concepcion.
Chilean society has operated under an informal caste system, or Casta, since the founding of Santiago in 1541 and for the most part that system exists in Chile today. The top caste in its colonial days was the Peninsulares with the Criollos standing down just one notch. These two groups dominated society, the military, land ownership, and lorded it over the other informal castes such as the Castizos and Mestizos, which were of Spanish and Native American decent, other mixed races, Amerindians, and enslaved Africans. Criollo’s could have 1/8 Amerindian ancestry and not lose their place within the Casta, and the Castizos could have 1/4 Amerindian Ancestry, but the Peninsulares were required to be of 100% pure Spanish ancestry, and preferably blonde and blue eyed.
Overtime, the Criollos population along with their economic and political influence eclipsed that of the Peninsulares and it was the Criollos, with help from some of the socially ambitious Castizos, who supported the Spanish American Wars for Independence from Spain that took place around the Continent in the early 19th Century, and in Chile specifically from 1810 to 1826. At the time of Chile’s War for Independence the population was less than 500,000 souls, with a small fraction, perhaps 10,000 to 25,000, being of Spanish descent. The descendants of the Spaniards living in Chile in the mid 1970’s represented a significant echo of their ancestors’ own clamor for economic and social advancement that drove them to undertake an impossibly dangerous and challenging ocean passage, numerous battles, and survival in a foreign land far from their European home. The European conquerors of Chile either braved the terrors of Cape Horn in a wooden sailing ship, crossed the Andes from Argentina (these were few indeed), or survived the trek by land through the jungles of what is now Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru only to encounter the Atacama Desert, the highest, largest, driest, and most brutal desert the New World had to offer its European immigrants. Just surviving the perfidious Atlantic Ocean crossing, which often claimed the lives of a good portion of those who set out from Europe, was an achievement. The challenges that faced the survivors of the ocean crossing also claimed many, many lives long before their dreams of wealth and land and descendants could be realized, and those descended from the intrepid Spaniards who made the voyage, the survivors of this trial by fire, would continue to risk life, limb, and wealth to hold onto the birthright that was now theirs.
Juan Pablo’s most famous ancestor, Jose Juaquim Prieto, a courageous military man, would go on from the Chilean War for Independence to serve twice as President of Chile with his first term beginning in 1831.
Chile’s people had suffered horribly during its war with Spain, but mostly at the hands of their fellow countrymen. The country had slipped into a state of anarchy from which it might never have recovered were it not for the competency and ruthlessness of Prieto and his chief enforcer, Diego Portales, until Portales death in 1837, who was then succeeded by the equally ruthless and competent Manuel Bulnes Prieto, himself a future president. Portales was overwhelmingly loathed during his lifetime, but his murder in a mutiny during the War of the Confederation with Peru and Bolivia turned public opinion around in support of the war. Chile and its ally Argentina would go on to prevail in that struggle.
The administrations of Jose Juaquim Prieto and Manuel Bulnes Prieto would set the tone for the politics of Chile for the next 150 years. Chile became a Republic of Oligarchs and the well-born elite. Under the leadership of Jose Juaquim Chile passed the Constitution of 1833, which would control Chilean politics for the next 92 years. This Constitution provided for immense powers to be concentrated in the hands of the president, who served a 5-year term limited to one re-election. During this time, the elite of Chile consolidated and concentrated their wealth, power, and position to the exclusion of the vast majority of the population. The elite restricted membership in the electorate to a carefully selected group of voters completely beholden to the entrenched power class. Threats to the power structure of any kind in Chile were dealt with brutally, and this culture of intimidation, force, and terror has continued throughout Chilean history, perhaps reaching its pinnacle with the cowardly and disgraceful “Caravan of Death” in October of 1973 that immediately followed the September 11 military coup, and the torture chambers of The Chilean Secret Police, DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, or National Intelligence Directorate), and their minions such as the German religious order and state sponsored torture colony, Colonia Dignidad, located deep in the wine region of the Andean foothills of Chile’s Central Valley, far enough from the population centers so that the agonized screams of torture and murder victims could not be heard nor the bodies found.
Like many of the Chilean elite, Juan Pablo was given a rigorous Jesuit primary education and attended the Jesuit High School St. Ignatius in Santiago, Chile. Over 6 feet in height, he was rather tall in a country where the average man stands 5 feet, 7.5 inches and the average woman 5 feet, 2 inches. Robust and daring as a child, Juan Pablo would ride with the vaqueros on the annual cattle round-up at his family’s hacienda and excelled in football (soccer), starring at midfielder for St. Ignatius with a unique talent for spatial reasoning—the feel for the positioning and abilities of all of the players on the field. He had the advantages of music and dance instruction in early childhood, access to a substantial library, and a curious nature. Ruggedly handsome and sturdily built, women found Juan Pablo attractive long before he figured this out for himself.
After graduation from the University of Chile, where he studied French and English Literature, Juan Pablo attended the Army of Chile’s Officer Candidate School and upon completion was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Army. The Chilean Army of the time was not a large force and was not organized for international deployments. The Army existed as an extension of the political elite to maintain the country’s social order and historically authoritarian democratic rule and to a much lesser extent to protect Chile from any territorial ambitions of its neighbors as Chile’s natural borders of the Andes mountains to the West and the Atacama desert to the north left only the shores of the Pacific Ocean to be defended, and for that Chile had the United States.
Juan Pablo’s government service had been commendable if undistinguished, but history has a way of gathering people into its vortex—killing some and rewarding others—with little sense of right and wrong or conduct fair or partial. History had Chile in its cross hairs and an entire generation would stagger under its weight.
TWO
Petrozavodsk, Republic of Russia, USSR, January 5 1976
Sergey Zubko stood outside of the train that just deposited him at the Petrozavodsk station awaiting his baggage. Normally, he would not have required a change of clothes, as it was his custom to return to Moscow on the same day that he left. He was a recruitment officer for the United Soviet Socialist Republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs diplomatic corps. But Zubko did not recruit diplomats. The overwhelming majority of the “diplomats” working for the corps were really spies. He recruited beautiful young women to work as clerical assistants and secretaries at the diplomatic missions of the major posts. This was not done to satisfy the prurient interests of the lecherous old men working for the Ministry in places like New York or London. No, these women were bait. Over the years the Soviet Intelligence apparatus had reeled in quite a number of big fish with these feminine lures.
Zubko stood in the winter twilight, such as it was at this latitude, with his bag in one hand and a large envelope in the other. A car pulled up and an obsequious driver enthusiastically hopped out to open the door for Zubko.
The big black sedan cruised to the center of the ancient city of Petrozavodsk. The residents of the city considered themselves Russians though many were more Scandinavian than Slav. The Soviet Spy Agency, the KGB, had great success in luring important intelligence targets into their sphere of influence with the young women they recruited from this sub-arctic region, and the agents responsible for recruiting the women enjoyed the perks of their position to the fullest. Not that they would dare to compromise their target recruits sexually—that could lead to a long stay in a Siberian gulag—but that restriction did not preclude them from enjoying the company of the other beautiful female denizens of these small factory, quarry, farming, and fishing villages and towns in the North of the U.S.S.R. A man of some standing in the Party was the equivalent of a movie star in these locals, and Sergey Zubko knew how to press this advantage to its fullest. Not that the women weren’t willing. Zubko was a handsome middle-aged man whose interests ran to exercise and chess rather than vodka and cigarettes, and most of these young women had never been outside of the city and local countryside. A Communist Party official like Zubko was a refreshing change of pace from the local working men in a place where winter lasted for 8 months and in which the complete absence of sunshine for weeks on end during the dead of winter was a fact of life. To spend the night with this man meant several excellent meals served with vodka, lots of hot water in the bathroom, clean sheets and a comfortable bed in a warm room and the rare treat of sleeping past 6am. This was a surreal experience for a working class girl from the frozen tundra of Northern Russia living in the typical Soviet communal apartment.
Zubko opened the envelope and the file it contained. There were several photographs of an extremely beautiful young woman dancing in a Ballet performance.
It was the Russians who disposed of the frumpy Romantic ballet dress of the Western European dance companies in favor of the tutu and bodice. The Romantic ballet dress hid the fancy footwork of the dancer as well as the exquisite beauty of a female form disciplined to perfection. The dark Basque cinched around this dancer’s waste brilliantly served to accentuate the virtues of the young woman’s youthful transcendence. The file card read:
Katrine Alexandrov Dratchev
DOB: January 21, 1952
Place of Birth: Petrozavodsk, Karelia
Height: 175cm Weight: 54kg
Purpose of file: Subject possesses exquisite beauty
Sergey Zubko, a man long desensitized to feminine beauty, took in a long, deep breath and unconsciously held it as he reviewed the photos contained in the KGB file of Katrine Alexandrov Dratchev. Comrade Dratchev was everything that the field personnel had claimed and more.
Perfect, thought Zubko. She’s perfect.
Katrine Alexandra Dratchev worked as a secretary for the Soviet Transportation Ministry assisting the bureaucrat charged with running the local train depot and station in Petrozavodsk.
Petrozavodsk, the capital city of the Republic of Karelia in Northern Russia, lies on the shore of Lake Onega roughly 350 miles, or 5 degrees of latitude, South of the Arctic Circle. Anchorage, Alaska and Reykjavik, Iceland share similar latitudes and solar patterns. Darkness does not come to Petrozavodsk in late June. Sunlight is for the most part absent in late December when the sun “rises” to provide twilight around 11am and “sets” just after 4pm. There are 2 seasons: 8 months of brutal, freezing winter and 4 months of cold, mosquito-invested summer.
The “Karelians”, as many of the people of the region northeast of St. Petersburg between Lake Onega and the recently established border with post-War Finland were known, were a hearty lot. They had survived for thousands of years in a most inhospitable environment. Just over 100 years earlier the Famine of 1866-1868 had killed off nearly 20% of the population. The memory of the suffering of that time cast a long shadow on the survivors and their descendants.
Life is hard in this cold, dark corner of the world. The locals live in what would be defined as “poverty” by any Western visitor. Katrine’s family was fortunate to be one of the first to be assigned a communal apartment in the early 1960’s. These were nothing more than unsightly, concrete bunkers built at the edge of town. Each family had a single room that functioned as bedroom, living room, and dining room and then shared a communal kitchen, bath, and toilet with 2 to 6 other families. A bus shuttled the residents of these apartments to their places of work and back. The family’s room was small, with tiny windows and no luxuries—but it was warm, dry, and the electric was on most of the time, and that was the main thing.
Katrine Alexandrov Dratchev was born to Yuri Dratchev, a quarry worker living and working in the lakeside village of Shoksha 40 miles southeast of Petrozavodsk, and his wife Marina. Marina’s dark secret was that Katrine was not Yuri’s biological daughter, but the daughter of a handsome Finnish man Marina spent several days with shortly after her marriage to Yuri.
Marina, 17 years younger than her husband, married Yuri when she herself was 17 years old. Yuri’s family had Party connections stemming from their role in resisting the Finnish Occupation of Karelia during much of World War II. These connections were not much, mind you, but were enough that his family did not starve nor freeze in winter, while Marina’s family did. Marina’s father arranged the marriage, thrilled to give his daughter an easier life than she might have otherwise had. Marina was not quite as pleased with the arrangement as her father. A virgin when she married, she sought to seek revenge on her father and new husband by sleeping with the first man who presented the opportunity. Marina does not even remember the man’s name, nor was she sure that he was the father until Katrine was 5.
It took Yuri a few years longer before he realized the betrayal, but he loved his angelic daughter far too much to ever make mention of it. Where Marina was moody, Yuri was kind. Marina was quick to anger and slow to forgive while Yuri never raised his voice and could not remember Marina’s insults and invective only moments later. Yuri treasured his beautiful daughter and tolerated his unfaithful and unpleasant wife. Marina drank and smoked heavily while Yuri was a man of moderation in all things.
The Soviet Union was not a place of plenty for most of the population during its short existence, and Katrine’s childhood experience, while pleasant, was marked by relative privation when compared to that of her contemporaries in Western Europe and the United States. Her father worked at a quarry while her mother worked in the local hospital. The State provided housing, such as it was, and food and vodka rationing coupons, and work places usually provided at least one meal each workday. No one who Katrine knew, outside of party members of some standing, owned or operated an automobile for pleasure. Some locals had limited access to farm trucks and tractors, but there were few interesting places to drive to in any event. Petrozavodsk was an isolated city in the frozen Russian tundra.
The growing of nutritious food for their own consumption and the sharing of the excess with friends and family has a long tradition with the residents of this historically Russian and Scandinavian region of the Soviet Union. Sharing and receiving surplus produce was not just tradition. It was a necessity. Over the years each family developed a sharing network. Without this network it would have been nearly impossible to fill the food pantry for the long cold winter. It was inconceivable to rely solely on the State’s food supplies, which were considered merely a supplement to their garden and the gathering of wild edibles, and not the other way around. The State did supply excellent bread, thanks to the political realities and the symbolism that bread represented in a Collectivist system, but it seemed that the only items available at the State run food stores in Petrozavodsk were bread, vodka, and a limited assortment of unimpressive canned goods.
Russian gardens did not look like English gardens or their American cousins. Russian gardens contained fruits like raspberries, which are bushes, and pears, which are trees, grown amongst a riot of vegetables and herbs. Neat rows of a particular planting were not common. Russian gardens were a series of patches of certain plantings, with little regard for a boundary between the patches. Every square centimeter or inch had to answer for itself. Besides, Russians despise weeding with a passion. Every effort was made to make the cultivars work to crowd out the weeds. This was true for everything in the garden with the exception of potatoes.
Potatoes were an important staple crop in the Soviet Union, too important to be left to chance or to let someone else be responsible for the family’s needs, so every family cultivated potatoes aggressively. It is no coincidence that vodka, which can be made from potatoes, originated in the region of Russia, according to the Russians, or Poland, according to the Poles.
After the long, dark winter Katrine would help her father in the family vegetable garden. While nearly every Russian family raised a kitchen garden and many Russians had to travel over an hour to their “Dacha garden” this was not the case for the residents of the Petrozavodsk region. Arable land was everywhere, and as all land was owned by the State it was left up to local custom to determine who gardened a particular patch of soil, and a patch was all that it was. The average Soviet family garden during the 1950’s and 1960’s was 600 square meters, or 6458 square feet for those not familiar with the metric system of measurements.
Living at this Latitude, the Russian Karalians spent 8 months of each year indoors under the ominous weight of sub-arctic winter, and the remaining 4 glorious months getting ready for the following winter. This was the life routine of every resident of Petrozavodsk. While children living in the capitalist West were playing little league, Katrine was hoeing potatoes patches, carrying water buckets, and removing garden insect pests by hand.
It was Yuri who imagined his poised and beautiful young daughter as a dancer and arranged for Katrine’s ballet training in Leningrad. As a child, Katrine was graceful and athletic. Possessed of long, lithe, muscular limbs and a willowy neck and body, Katrine was born for Ballet. Once again, Yuri’s father’s Party connections came into play gaining Katrine an interview and examination at the acclaimed Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in Leningrad.
Leningrad was a10-hour trip by train from Petrozavodsk and Yuri reveled in the company of his delightful child and absence of his miserable wife. Over 3,000 dancers apply to the admissions board of the Vaganova Academy each year. 600 are then granted an audition, and only 60 of these are accepted to study at the academy. Katrine was 12 and a half when she auditioned that spring. She was admitted the following autumn.
Tragedy struck Katrine 4 years later. Less than a year before her graduation Katrine broke her ankle after jumping to avoid a massive icicle that fell from the eve of a building on a street in Leningrad. While the injury would be a minor inconvenience for most, it was enough to end the career of a Ballerina. Katrine returned to live with her parents in the communal apartment that they now occupied outside of Petrozavodsk.
Her father met his daughter at the train station, covering her in a shower of love and affection and sympathy. Her mother was drunk and distant with disappointment. The dark years immediately after this defeat did nothing to diminish Katrine’s exquisite beauty and shy but sunny disposition. Though not a social butterfly by any means, Katrine made friends easily enough and was well liked by her co-workers at the train depot offices. In addition to her native Russian and Karelian, Katrine had picked up Finnish and its first cousin Estonian while working at the depot. Of course, she could speak French fluently from her time studying at the Vaganova Academy where perfect French was a requirement for graduation, and was also proficient in English. Languages came to her as easily as breathing.
Katrine applied for a number of positions for which she felt suited with the various Soviet Ministries and Bureaus. Then in her early twenties, she had been working for the Ministry of Transportation at the train depot in Petrozavodsk since returning home from Leningrad and was starting to feel that this was to be her life, until the morning that her superior told her that a man from the Foreign Ministry was going to interview her for a potential position in Moscow. How her spirit soared at the news! Katrine could barely contain her excitement as she told her father, and her father could barely contain his excitement for her. Her mother could barely maintain wakefulness, drunk as she was.
Two weeks after her interview with Zubko, Katrine boarded an airplane for the first leg of a trip that would take her to Washington, D.C.
THREE
Washington D.C. February 28, 1976
Juan Pablo darted out of his Georgetown townhouse, down the stoop stairs, and into the taxi that had been arranged to pick him up. He was scheduled to fly to New York City on the Eastern Airline shuttle and he was late, although he should not have worried as it was Saturday night and the traffic was light. The cab had him to the airport with time to spare.
He was being sent to the U.N. for a large workgroup meeting, really more of moral support to the Chile U.N. delegation, or so he thought, the point of which escaped him. He didn’t really mind, as New York City was a welcome break in terms of cultural and culinary opportunities, though one did have to be careful in New York. The city had experienced a surge in violent crime and general lawlessness. The meeting at the U.N. would begin on Monday morning and he would have all of Sunday to himself.
Juan Pablo settled up with the taxi driver and dragged himself and his two bags out of the backseat and onto the curb in front of the Eastern Airlines terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport. For the 10th time that afternoon he felt for the envelope in his jacket pocket that was holding his paper airplane ticket. A lost ticket might well mean a missed flight. The ticket was still there in his pocket.
He checked in with the ticket counter to determine which gate his flight was departing from and headed off. As he arrived at the gate he was surprised to see how full the flight appeared to be. A long line had formed to board the small shuttle aircraft, and many of the people waiting appeared to be various embassy and political staff. Washington, D.C. was a “company town”. Most of the professional people worked for the United States Federal Government in some capacity, and the balance seemed to work for the various lobbyists and law firms surrounding Capitol Hill, and there were thousands of embassy staffers like him living and working in the District, too. Juan Pablo shuffled up with the rest of the passengers, handed his ticket to the clerk who separated his seat assignment stub from the ticket and handed it back to Juan Pablo, all without a sound or a single word. He always found American manners to be rude and course.
He made his way to his aisle seat, tossed his bags into the overhead compartment, plopped down and buckled in, his seatmates having already taken their seats. Soon, the jet was in the air for the short hop to New York’s La Guardia airport. Juan Pablo always seemed to have “ants in his pants” and was not one to sit for any period of time unless he was happily occupied, so he headed off to the restroom more to stretch his legs than to use the facilities. He had been seated over the wing making the front and rear facilities equally distant from his seat. He decided to head to the front facility just outside the cockpit door. On his return trip to his seat he looked at the passengers facing him in their seats. Not one of them made eye contact with him, they were preoccupied with reading or napping or whatever it is one does on a very short shuttle flight. As he approached his own seat he caught sight of the people sitting in the row behind him. In the center seat was a beautiful young woman. She was just stunning to look at, with wheat colored blonde hair and copper colored brown eyes, and she was looking directly into Juan Pablo’s eyes, her facial expression one of slight amusement.
Juan Pablo returned her gaze and gave her a polite nod of his head and a grin with his lips together. The young woman nodded and smiled. Juan Pablo took his seat and buckled himself in. Though he was trying to appear nonchalant his heart rate was now ten beats per minute faster than it was just a few seconds ago and his breath came to him faster and deeper than it should have to a man sitting in an airplane seat.
Wow! He thought to himself. Wow! He thought again.
He did his best to compose himself. He was impressed by the beauty and manner of the woman sitting behind him and to his left and wanted desperately to have another look at her, but he dared not. Gawking was beneath him, and he was sure this woman had been gawked at her entire life. Fortunately, the New York City skyline provided him with some cover.
Even the veteran travelers and fliers on the D.C. - New York shuttle were not above the incredible vista of the New York skyline from the air. Every passenger turned to their left to follow the lights of Manhattan as the plane traveled low over the East River and nearly all looked back one window to maintain the Empire State Building in their line of view. Juan Pablo pretended to look back through the window behind him but instead brought his gaze back a little further so that he might see her again.
Wow! She is absolutely breathtaking! He thought to himself.
Just then, the woman turned from looking out the window, lowered herself back into her chair, and looked directly back at Juan Pablo. She smiled shyly but maintained her eyes on his long enough to let him know that she knew he was looking at her and that she knew he was taken with her. He returned her smile with a smile of his own and then turned around to face forward—and formulate a plan. He simply had to meet her and to know her name.
The plane landed and sped to a gate where the passengers de-boarded. Juan Pablo was out of the plane before the beautiful young woman and waited about 100 feet ahead in the terminal. She would have to walk this way and he might have a chance to speak with her if he played his cards right. As she left the gangway and stepped out into the terminal Juan Pablo’s heart sank. She was not alone. For an instant he thought she might have been traveling with her parents—there was an older man and a middle aged woman traveling with her—but given the body language of the three he settled on the idea that she was traveling for business or work with a couple of associates. The three walked abreast up the terminal toward the airport exit and baggage claim. As they approached the spot where Juan Pablo was standing the young woman smiled at Juan Pablo again, this time with an expression of sincere delight. He returned a delighted smile of his own. The two almost laughed. This exchange of smiles and furtive glances is a dance that men and women have been dancing since they did so by firelight wrapped in animal skins. This was just one more in a long, long line of such dances.
Juan Pablo let her and her party pass and then he walked just behind them. He watched her walk. She was small of frame but perfectly formed. Youthful in the way she stepped. Provocative and intoxicating in the way her body moved. Juan Pablo was hopelessly taken with her. The woman slowed her walk and allowed her companions to go on slightly ahead of her. Juan Pablo understood the tactic perfectly and was walking beside her in an instant.
“Hello, my name is Juan Pablo. I hope you won’t think I am being rude, but if I do not say this now I might never see you again. I think you are wonderful and I would like to see you in a more social setting,” said Juan Pablo. He was sweating bullets but it was now or never, and “never” was not an option with a woman like this.
“I don’t know…” the young woman began and never finished. Her accent was not one that Juan Pablo could place. They walked along the terminal behind her travel companions. Thankfully, her companions never bothered to look back.
“I know this is difficult and uncomfortable, but I am very taken with you and I think you might be somewhat taken with me. I will be here in New York for the week before returning to D.C. Could we have dinner together? I promise, I won’t bite you.” He smiled at her.
She laughed quietly at that, and then there was a long pause. This man has no problem expressing himself, she thought.
“What was your name again? Forgive me for not remembering. It is just not a name that I am familiar with,” the woman finally said.
“My name is Juan Pablo,” he said smiling hopefully.
“Hello, Juan Pablo, my name is Katrine Dratchev. Can you remember that? Katrine Dratchev. I am with the Russian Embassy and I will be staying in New York for the rest of this week, too. I am staying at the Windsor Hotel. I don’t know any more than that. You can try to reach me there.”
“Hello Katrine Dratchev! I am with the Chilean embassy! I am staying at the Carriage House. I know your hotel and it is only one block from mine. I will call you tomorrow morning and I hope we can have dinner together tomorrow night. It would make an otherwise boring Sunday night in New York something to look forward to for me.”
What a nice thing to say, Katrine thought to herself, relieved to hear that he was with a diplomatic mission.
Can I remember your name?! I couldn’t forget you if I tried! Juan Pablo thought to himself.
“I must go now. I can’t talk here any longer,” and with that Katrine strode faster to catch up to her companions.
Juan Pablo just stopped where he was, watching this beautiful woman walk away, her hair bouncing on her shoulders, her hips rolling with every step, the click of her heals on the cement walkway. Juan Pablo had already memorized every detail about the meeting and conversation, every line and curve on her face, especially her full lips.
What a delicious woman. I could eat her up with a spoon!
He would want to recall everything about her over and over until he saw her again. He hoped he would sleep this night.
And then, standing alone, a fugue state of melancholy came over him. The sight of a solitary figure lost in an airport terminal holding his bags and unsure which way he should go could not have captured the loneliness and dissatisfaction of his life more perfectly. The sadness of the truth of his life, of his loveless marriage and the work he had engrossed himself in to distance and distract himself from that truth, accompanied with the sting of defeat from the loss of the life he had hoped to have, came crushing down on him. He was by nature a happy and hopeful man, but he had not known either of these conditions in his marriage for several years.
What would it be like to truly love again? He was now certain that he wanted to find out.
Juan Pablo did not realize that he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a long, slow sigh. Seeing this woman and the possibilities that surrounded her had brought him back to the reality of his own unacceptable marriage and personal life.
What am I going to do? I’m all dressed up and have no place to go!
How did I get to this miserable place? I have been without real love and affection for so long… I can no longer even imagine what it would be like to love a woman and to have her love me. To share a bed with a woman whom smiles to me as I come to her and then kisses me with her own desires.
It has been too long.
He looked down at nothing in particular and breathed heavily in and out.
And then images of Katrine Dratchev smiling at him from her seat on the plane behind his, of her slowing down as she walked in the airport so that he might catch up to her, and of her beautiful and youthful countenance as she spoke with him—all of this came back to him in a flood of sheer attraction, unmitigated emotion, and pure desire.
Perhaps it is not too late. Perhaps there are second chances in this life.
If there were such a thing as second chances he could not envision a more appealing woman to take that chance with. If only she would feel the same.
Juan Pablo collected himself and set off to find a taxi to take him to Manhattan.
Katrine collected her bags and followed her superiors to the limo awaiting them just outside of the doors. She wasn’t sure what just happened or if she had done the right thing.
But he was so handsome! She thought to herself. How can it hurt to have dinner with such a handsome man? Still, she was nervous. She was flattered and excited in a strange and fun way—but still nervous. Maybe he won’t even call, she thought, but of course she was sure that he would. She had never met a man so sincere and yet so forceful and forward. This was a man who had great confidence in himself and who was accustomed to getting what he wanted. She was sure she would be seeing Juan Pablo very soon.
Katrine and her companions arrived at the Windsor hotel and were greeted by a comrade working for the Soviet delegation to the U.N. Rooms had already been arranged and the young man took the bags of the older gentleman traveling in the Katrine’s party, while Katrine and the middle aged woman who oversaw the clerical and administrative staff for the Soviet embassy in Washington carried their own bags.
They took an elevator together to the top floor of the hotel. Once outside the elevator, the young man who met them downstairs turned to the women and impassively said, “Wait here, please.”
The older man followed the younger man down the hall. They turned left and disappeared from sight. Within a minute or two, the young man returned to the women in front of the elevator and said, “Follow me, please.”
They took a short walk to a hotel room where the young man stopped, motioned to Katrine and said as he held something out for her, “Here is your key. This is your room.”
He then turned towards the hotel room door without giving Katrine the key and opened the door for her, leaving the metal key in the lock, then stood aside but held the door open for her. Katrine entered the room.
She turned back to him. He was holding an envelope for her to take. “This is American money for meals and incidentals. This amount is to last you for two days. On the third day Mrs. Medvadev will give you an envelope for the next two days,” he said as he gestured to the middle-aged woman, Mrs. Medvadev, Katrine’s traveling companion and chaperone. “Please remember to take your key.”
Katrine held the door for herself with her foot, placed her bags on the floor, and reached to withdraw the key from the door.
“Mrs. Medvadev will be in the room directly across the hall if you should need her, comrade Dratchev,” the young man continued. He then nodded at Katrine and turned to open Mrs. Medvadev’s hotel room door.
Katrine closed her door, picked up her bags, and retreated into her room. Everything was so new to her; she had no idea what to make of anything and certainly not how to process everything that had happened since comrade Zubko came to see her in Petrozavodsk.
She walked back to the windows to take in the spectacular view of Downtown and the East River. This is spectacular! Two months ago I was living and working in Petrozavodsk. Now I am in New York City and I live in Washington, D.C.!
She fell back on the bed and wallowed in the moment. Her thoughts turned to the man she had just met at the airport. I don’t remember ever meeting a man so handsome before. He was so forward. There is no mistaking his intentions. Still… would it be so bad? She smiled to herself in spite of her reservations.
Her thoughts continued to swirl around the tall stranger she met on the airplane. Her eyes were heavy. She felt herself falling asleep and thinking about the man at the airport and kissing his full lips while he held her in his arms. She drifted off with an unrepentant smile on her own lips.
Juan Pablo caught a yellow cab from the airport to his hotel a block east of Katrine’s. The embassy had made all of the necessary arrangements; all Juan Pablo needed to do was to state his name at the front desk.
The clerk handed him his room key and asked, “Will you be needing any help with your bags?”
“No, thank you,” Juan Pablo said politely, “I packed light,” as he smiled and held aloft his two travel bags.
“Very good, sir.”
Juan Pablo headed to the elevators. He was staying on the 3rd floor with an interior view of the wall and windows of the other hotel rooms across from his. Chile was not the Soviet Union.
He reached for the phone and called the front desk.
“Hello?” said a voice from the phone.
“Hello? Would you happen to have the phone number for the Windsor Hotel?”
Katrine was lying on her hotel room bed, still wearing the clothes she wore for the flight, and drifting off to sleep while dreaming of the handsome stranger from the airport when the phone rang. It didn’t startle her as she was still somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, but she was irritated to have what had all the appearances of a wonderful dream interrupted.
She picked up the phone and nearly said, “Alyo?” She caught herself, realizing that an official from the Ambassador on down might be calling her.
“Yes? Katrine Dratchev speaking,” she said in Russian.
“Hello, Katrine. It’s Juan Pablo, the man from the airplane,” said a deep voice from the phone.
Katrine was stunned. He found me! Of course he found you, you idiot! You told him where you were staying. She continued to panic. Thankfully, Juan Pablo continued to speak. Katrine was incapable of speaking herself just yet.
“I wanted you to know that I would call, as I said I would do, and that I look forward to seeing you again. I am sure you are tired from the flight and it is getting late. I will say good night to you now, and if it is OK I will call you in the morning. I hope we can meet for dinner tomorrow night.”
Katrine had recovered from the initial shock. She was pleased that this very forward man continued to be so forward. She had been thinking of him. Clearly, he had been thinking of her, too. He was relentless, yet polite and courteous.
“Thank you for calling, Juan Pablo. That was very kind of you. I look forward to your call in the morning.”
Juan Pablo was relieved. “Good night,” he said.
“Good night,” replied Katrine.
Katrine replaced the telephone in the receiver, looked up at the ceiling, and clapped her hands together.
“Da!”—“Yes!” in Russian—she exclaimed joyfully to no one but herself.
Juan Pablo hung up the phone and said out loud, there, alone in his room, “El corazón débil nunca ganó bella dama.”
“The faint heart never won fair lady.”
Juan Pablo met Katrine at Union Square on 14th street in New York. After their chance meeting on the airplane to New York from D.C., Katrine had spent the day in a low level of enchanted excitement. It was a quick meeting and a nervous exchange in the evening light at the baggage area at New York’s LaGuardia airport, and now she was unsure if her memory of his appearance would resemble the man in life.
Juan Pablo was now walking towards her on this New York street. Katrine erupted in sweat. She often broke out in sweat when she was nervous, but right now at this moment, watching this handsome man stride confidently toward her on the street flashing a sincere smile, Katrine began to sweat profusely.
As was his custom, Juan Pablo came close to gently embrace her arms with his hands and kiss Katrine on each cheek. This flustered Katrine even more causing the sweat to run down between her breasts into her naval and to bead up on her forehead. Juan Pablo noticed that Katrine seemed warm and somewhat moist and merely assumed that she had hurried to their meeting place causing her to perspire and give off a warm glow. His assumption on her efforts to meet him only served to enhance his attraction to Katrine.
“Hello,” Juan Pablo said meeting her eyes and smiling broadly. “I am so glad you could come! There is an Italian restaurant a short walk from here that was highly recommended. Do you like Italian food?” said Juan Pablo.
Katrine hadn’t had much experience with food outside of her region in the Russian north, so she replied, “Yes, that would be nice.”
Juan Pablo offered Katrine his arm. She had not yet recovered from the shock of seeing the object of her recent school girlish affections in the light of day, and broke out into a sweat again though this time it was mild and brief. This was not a Russian custom or one that she had any knowledge or comfort with in her personal experience, but she had seen it often enough at the ballet academy in Leningrad that she knew what to do. She took his arm.
He was gracious and pleasant and clearly interested in her as they walked and it had a wonderfully calming effect on her. Even in a residential neighborhood the two were not able to remain arm in arm as the sidewalks and crosswalks were just too busy and full of people and cars, but it was a pleasant walk. Soon they found the restaurant on 12th Street just off 2nd Avenue.
They were early by New York standards and the Maître D’ seated them at a prominent table in the center of the restaurant floor. Pablo was not impressed with the décor and hoped that he had not made a poor choice. Katrine sat nervously in her seat as Juan Pablo looked around the restaurant and then took the seat on Katrine’s right rather than across from her. Katrine felt her color rising with Juan Pablo sitting so close to her.
“Italian food is my absolute favorite!” Juan Pablo said enthusiastically.
Katrine only looked up and smiled. She was very nervous and hoped he did not notice. When his gaze became too much for her she averted her eyes and concentrated on the melted candle wax covering an old wine bottle that had been used as a candleholder for longer than she had been alive.
Juan Pablo followed her eyes to the candle and was as impressed as Katrine seemed to be with the symmetry of the melted wax formation.
“I understand this restaurant has been here since the early part of the century. From the look of the bar and the tables and chairs it looks like the furniture has been here that long as well,” Juan Pablo said with a wink and a smile.
Katrine only looked at him blankly. She was proficient in English but humor often escaped those not able to pick up on the nuances of a given language, but that was not the problem here. Katrine was exploring Juan Pablo’s face and hair, the outline of his shoulders and chest in his jacket, taking in the rest of the man right down to his shoes.
Juan Pablo hesitated unsure if he should speak or remain silent.
Katrine looked up, met his eyes, and blushed profusely.
She’s nervous! Juan Pablo thought to himself. To make her more comfortable he thought he would try to get her to speak about herself.
“How long have you been with the embassy?” He asked.
“It will be 2 weeks tomorrow,” she replied.
“You just got here!”
“Yes. This is my first time outside of the Soviet Union,” she said quietly. Her hands were in her lap and she tapped her fingers together nervously.
Things became much clearer now. He wanted to ask her age but thought better of that, thinking it rude. But Katrine had other ideas.
“May I ask you a few things?” Katrine continued.
“Claro. I am sorry. When exited I revert to Spanish. You may ask me anything.”
“How old are you?”
“I am 35.”
“I am 24.”
So much for her being nervous. The person asking the questions and filling in the blanks is controlling any conversation, and there was no question of who was controlling this conversation.
“You were very forward at the airport,” Katrine added. Now it was Juan Pablo who was nervous. “But I am glad that I met you. You seem very nice.”
She can handle herself, Juan Pablo thought. Just then the waiter appeared at the their table.
“Can I get you a drink or a glass of wine?”
Juan Pablo looked at Katrine. She only nodded in return. She was making him nervous again.
“Yes, would you please pick out a mid priced bottle of wine for us that would go well with red sauce?” Juan Pablo asked the waiter.
“Right away, sir,” and the waiter departed.
Juan Pablo looked back to Katrine who was again fixed on the candle wax on the wine bottle. He leaned toward her and she lifted her eyes to meet his. She was smiling, and her smile reached up into her eyes. She reached her hand up to his cheek, fixed her gaze into his eyes, and said, “You are very sweet.”
Her unexpected touch electrified him. Her manner and way were very different than any woman he had ever met. That, and her breathtaking beauty had him completely off balance.
Thankfully for Juan Pablo, the waiter showed up with the wine and provided some distraction. The waiter held the bottle with its label up and facing Juan Pablo. In a higher end establishment the sommelier would often hand the wine to the patron but this restaurant served Sicilian peasant food, not haute cuisine.
“I don’t know it,” Juan Pablo said to the waiter, “but I look forward to enjoying your recommendation.”
The waiter cocked his head and frowned slightly, not with sadness or irritation, but with the recognition that he was dealing with someone with good manners and who also appeared to know a thing or two about wine, and hoped Juan Pablo liked the recommendation. He opened the bottle and poured a sample for Juan Pablo, who quickly drank it down.
“Ah, yes, that is very good. Thank you.” Juan Pablo said.
Relieved, the waiter poured the wine into the two small wineglasses on the table, set the wine down in the center of the table, and left.
Katrine waited for Juan Pablo. After he raised his glass she raised hers.
“To new friends and the pleasure of your company,” Juan Pablo intoned, making direct eye contact with Katrine.
Katrine blushed and smiled with her lips but not her teeth, her eyes cast downwards toward the candle.
My God, she is superb! Such beauty. Juan Pablo thought to himself. He found himself holding his breath though his mouth was open. He closed his mouth. They touched glasses and drank from their glasses.
“How long have you been with your embassy?” Katrine asked.
“Five years.”
“That is a long time to be away from home.”
“Yes it is, but I go back to Chile often enough. Will you visit your home?”
“I don’t think so. I have agreed to a two-year commitment. I expect to be here in the United States for the next two years.”
“What do you think so far?” Juan Pablo said, picking up his glass again.
“I have only been outside of the embassy grounds twice since I arrived. This trip was the second. But what I see is vastly different than Russia.” Katrine said as she looked into his eyes.
“Are you a Russian or a Soviet?” He had noticed that she referred to both Russia and the Soviet Union.
“Ha! Very good,” said Katrine, and then thought this man listens closely and notices details. “I am an ethnic Russian, I speak Russian, and have always lived in Russia, but I am a citizen of the Soviet Union.”
Juan Pablo let it go. “I don’t speak Russian,” said Juan Pablo.
“And I don’t speak Spanish,” replied Katrine.
“Touché,” said Juan Pablo, nodding and smiling at Katrine. She smiled slightly and inclined her head in return, then flashed a broad smile and giggled.
As they were reviewing the menu the waiter appeared to take their order.
“I’ll have the gnocchi,” said Katrine.
“Very good Miss,” responded the waiter. Katrine noticed that he did not write the order down.
“And I will have the fish,” said Juan Pablo. Before the waiter could depart Juan Pablo continued, “Uh, no. Not the fish. I will have the chicken special.”
The waiter left having written nothing down and returned with anti-pasta dishes of salad, roasted peppers, and toasted bread rolls dripping with olive oil and garlic.
Juan Pablo nodded to the rolls and said, “If one of us eats those the other better eat that, too.”
Katrine smiled and understood. “I will eat them if you will.”
They smiled at each other and dug into the spiced and oiled bread.
The two made pleasant small talk as they enjoyed the wine and food, which were quite good. The nervousness and discomfort of meeting a stranger had passed before the main course came to the table. As the meal progressed Katrine and Juan Pablo leaned in closer and closer to each other, talking more quietly as they did so, and in the conspiratorial form and tones that strangers who seem to understand that they will soon be lovers often do. The two enjoyed the soothing talk and gentle smiles and it was all helped along by the fragrant wine and potent liqueur. When the coffee came they had crossed to the point where they felt comfortable exchanging bites of desert held aloft by the other on a fork with the other hand underneath to catch any errant cake. Anyone who had come into the restaurant at this point would be certain that these were involved lovers, not strangers sharing their first meal.
The power of attraction was overwhelming them both, and as they stepped outside of the restaurant the two strangers immediately sought the others hand. Her hand was cold and his hand quiet warm as their palms met. It was as seamless and natural, as any couple who has fallen in love will remember, and in the time between meeting each other at Union Square and ordering their desert they had indeed fallen deeply in love. It was clear to each that that train had already left the station. They walked silently, hand in hand, smiling bashfully to each other with no specific destination in mind. As they walked they came upon 5th Ave. They saw the lights of the Washington Square Arch to the south and decided to take in Washington Square Park. They made no conversation as they walked, still holding hands. Perfect strangers to each other and strangers in a strange land, but the passion that passed between them was electrifying and disquieting in a mystifying yet wonderful way.
They sat on the steps near the fountain. The steps were shallow and Juan Pablo sat one step below Katrine. As he turned to look up at her Katrine lowered her face to his and these two strangers gently brushed noses.
“Hi,” said Juan Pablo in a voice so low it sounded like an echo in a kettledrum.
“Hi,” responded Katrine smiling and using her hand to guide her blonde hair behind her ear.
Katrine felt her heart in her throat, yet somehow also felt it pounding in her chest. Juan Pablo moved his mouth to her ear and again softly said “Hi” into her ear and then gently kissed her cheek.
Katrine beamed and closed her eyes. For her, this moment was like swimming underwater. There were the sounds of New York City going on all around her: The taxis circling the park with their horns honking and doors slamming. Street performers and their audiences were forming and departing. Buses blew exhaust and the subways rumbled underneath them. And Katrine heard none of it. She could hear Juan Pablo breath, she could feel his heart beating against her body, and the scent of a man, this man, so close to her was having an effect upon her unlike anything she had experienced before. It was pure animal magnetism. Katrine blushed at the thoughts that raced through her mind.
Katrine pulled her face back so that she could look into his eyes. For a moment the two stayed there in quiet contemplation of the other as their eyes met. Then Katrine raised her right hand to Juan Pablo’s cheek, and a second or so later raised her left hand to his other cheek and held his face as she continued to gaze into his eyes. After several moments the two leaned forward toward the other for their first kiss. These two were gentle souls and their first kiss was soft and kind and warm. They each took in the lips, eyes, face and ears of the other with gentle abandon, lingering in the moment. The texture of his full lips left Katrine breathless, and she pulled Juan Pablo close and composed herself while holding him tightly. For his part, Juan Pablo was overcome by the placid yet passionate nature of this handsome creature sitting so close to him.
Sensing some discomfort in Katrine, Juan Pablo sat back into her body so that she would have something to lean on, to hold on to. Katrine buried her face into his neck and breathed in deeply through her nose and then she kissed him there, just below the hairline. Once again, her hands rose to hold his face as he sat between her legs and beneath her on the steps, his body perpendicular to hers with the front of her body pressed forward against his right arm and shoulder. She held his chin and the back of his head gently in her hands and then leaned forward to kiss Juan Pablo on his cheek. Now, it was Juan Pablo’s turn to lose his composure. He had never been held, touched, and kissed so tenderly and lovingly. Her touch had the most incredible effect on him, at once calming and thrilling in equal measure. If someone where to ask him to describe this moment, Juan Pablo would have demurred by saying he was not poetic enough to describe the physical and emotional response he had to Katrine’s caresses. He only knew that he was drunk from the experience. What he did not know at the time was that he would never get over the experience. He would carry this moment in his heart for the rest of his life.
Katrine and Juan Pablo had spent some of the most pleasant moments of their lives kissing and cuddling on the steps of a fountain in that New York Park, but too soon it was time to go. They had to work at the U.N. in the morning. Finally, Juan Pablo said, “Come on. We will share a cab uptown and I will see you to your hotel”.
Katrine didn’t know if he meant he was coming to her room or that he would ride in the taxi with her. Did he expect to come to her room? She had very little experience with men, and absolutely no experience with this type of man, but she was sure she would have to say “no”. While she wanted this man in a way she had never wanted any other, he was still a stranger. For his part, Juan Pablo wanted to stay the entire night on the marble steps of the park if Katrine would have agreed, but now they were walking over to 6th Avenue to catch a cab uptown.
Katrine waited on the curb while Juan Pablo hailed down a taxi. As one signaled that it would be pulling over to pick them up, Juan Pablo turned and stood in the street in front of Katrine as she stood on the curb. He held the lapels of her jacket in his hands and kissed her. She thought she would melt right there. They walked up to the waiting car and Juan Pablo opened the door for her and she slid gracefully across the seat, where she stopped and turned to wait expectantly for him. Juan Pablo sat and then slid across the seat to be close to her. They immediately lost themselves in a kiss. The cab driver began to drive north not knowing where this fare would be going but not willing to interrupt the beautiful young couple making out in his backseat. When the kiss broke, Juan Pablo gave the driver the name of the hotel and then went back to his affections with Katrine. Soon they were in front of Katrine’s hotel.
Juan Pablo got out and asked the driver to wait. Katrine was both relieved and disappointed. She did not want this man to leave, but she did not want him to come to her room, either, and was thankful that he had the good discretion not to press his advantage. She took his hand as she exited the cab, and he pulled her back to him once she was out and standing.
“Katrine…” he said. And said nothing more.
She kissed him as he held her body close and she held his face. The feel of her hands on his face and the kisses from her lips were intoxicating.
“Can I see you tomorrow night?” he asked.
“I can’t wait,” she replied. She kissed him again. “You’d better go. Your cab is waiting.”
They kissed once more and he said, “I had an amazing evening. It was like no other.”
“So did I,” she replied. “Like no other.”
They gently brought their foreheads together and rubbed noses.
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
Another kiss and Katrine walked away into her hotel lobby. The doorman and bellhop had been watching the young lovers and were smiling broadly as she walked past and then nodded to Juan Pablo, feeling his pain as he watched the object of his affection pass out of sight.If you should wish to continue reading you can purchase "Duress & Desire" at Amazon by clicking here for the paperback. And here for the ebook.
Comments
Post a Comment