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"Good evening, Comrade Zaitzev," the operator said in greeting.
"Good evening, Comrade Glenko." The man was a disabled veteran of the Great Patriotic War, with the medals to prove it. Artilleryman, so he said. Probably the building informer, the man who reported unusual occurrences to some other KGB stringer, in return for which he got a niggardly stipend to supplement whatever pension the Red Army paid him. That was the extent of their exchange. Glenko turned the handle and brought the elevator car smoothly to his floor and opened the door. From there, it was a mere five meters to his home.
Opening his apartment door, he was greeted by the smell of boiling cabbage-so cabbage soup for di
"Papa!" Oleg Ivanovich bent down to scoop up his little Svetlana. She was the light of Zaitzev's life, with her cherubic face and welcoming smile.
"How is my little zaichik today?" He scooped her up in his arms and accepted her darling little kiss.
Svetlana attended a day-care center crowded with other children her age-not quite a preschool, not quite a nursery. Her clothing comprised about the only colorful things to be had in his country, in this case a green pullover shirt and gray pants over little red leather shoes. If his access to the "closed" shops had one advantage, it was in what he could get his little girl. The Soviet Union didn't even have cloth diapers for its infants-mothers usually made them out of old bedsheets-much less the disposable kind favored in the West. As a result, there was a premium on getting the little ones toilet-trained, which little Svetlana had managed some time ago, much to her mother's relief. Oleg followed the smell of cabbage to his wife in the kitchen.
"Hello, darling," Irina Bogdanova said from the stove. Cabbage, potatoes, and what he hoped was some ham cooking. Tea and bread. No vodka yet. The Zaitzevs drank, but not to excess. They usually waited until Svetlana went down to bed. Irina worked as an accountant at the GUM department store. The possessor of a degree from Moscow State University, she was liberated in the Western sense, but not emancipated. Hanging by the kitchen table was the string bag she carried in her purse everywhere she went, eyes always on the lookout for something she might buy to eat or brighten their drab flat. It meant standing in line, which was the task of women in the Soviet Union, along with cooking di
"Anything interesting today?" she asked. It was almost their daily joke.
"There is never anything interesting at the office," he joked in reply. No, just the usual messages to and from field officers, which he forwarded to the appropriate pigeonholes for in-house couriers to hand-carry upstairs to the offices of the control officers who really ran things at KGB. A very senior colonel had come down to see the operation the previous week, which he'd done without a smile, a friendly word, or a question for twenty minutes, before disappearing off to the elevator banks. Oleg knew the man's seniority only from the identity of his escort: the colonel who ran his own operation. Whatever words had been exchanged had been too distant for him to overhear-people tended to talk in whispers, if at all, in his department-and he was trained not to show much interest.
But training could only go so far. Captain Oleg Ivanovich Zaitzev was too bright to turn his mind all the way off. Indeed, his job required something approaching judgment for its proper execution, but that was something to be exercised as gingerly as a mouse's stroll through a roomful of cats. He always went to his immediate superior and always started off with the most humble of questions before getting approval. In fact, his judgmental questions were always approved. Oleg was gifted in that, and he was begi