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“A tinderbox is full of fascinating potentialities,” Papa said, “but until the spark is kindled, it is not such an interesting place.”
It was good—no, it was a joy—to see a man who was young, who was strong, not starving, not ragged, not devoting all his waking hours to grievance.
Small children were starving to death within a hundred yards of this campfire. Rich women were looking to her to get their polo team sorted. And she was embroiled in a plot to ship two dozen submachine guns to the nation’s capital, where they would somehow topple the government.
She was pretty sure they were the only couple on the ballroom floor talking about mass casualties.
She had been learning that getting respect was a matter of acting like you deserved it while pretending you didn’t care;
Dawn came to understand that these conversations were all in the realm of fantasy. Refugees from Germany who really were worried about secret police raids, stoking the bloodlust of homegrown would-be revolutionaries who were bored of sitting around the kommunalka waiting for something to happen.
She didn’t imagine this kind of situation was covered in Emily Post. It must happen a lot, though, in the Soviet Union: bumping into persons who had tortured you or murdered members of your family.
Life was not entirely a crapshoot—there were a few commonsense things you could do to stack the odds in your favor—but as soon as the shooting started, only the most brute, elementary plans were of any use.
But in a sense it didn’t matter. That was the beauty of the Reggie approach. A plan can’t go awry if it doesn’t exist.
If you couldn’t pay, feed, or house the masses you could at least make them feel like they were part of something by giving them uniforms and awarding them ranks.
No one got on or off. Aurora practically jumped out of her seat as a muffled thump-thump sounded through the wall of the carriage. A moment later it had moved on to the next window. The thumps were sounding from more than one place now. The baby, with its tiny, wrinkled body and its huge, swollen head, had looked like an embryo floating in a jar.
Aurora ought to have been anxious to the point of hysteria, but after all she’d seen and lived through in the past year she could not bring herself to feel very much. She knew that as long as she lived in this country, within reach of men like these, she’d be dangling above that hole in the ice, the knife on the rope. With a word Beria could kill her. The only point was that he wanted her to know that.
She remembered her father taking her to a seafood market in Seattle, close enough to the waterfront that you could hear the waves pounding the piers, where they had a big aquarium full of live Dungeness crabs. They never stopped climbing over one another. Occasionally one would get high enough to thrust one claw up out of the water and hook it over the rim of the tank. It seemed plausible for a few moments that it might heave itself over the edge, fall to the floor, and scuttle out the door, making a break for the cold, murky waters of Elliott Bay. But any crab that ascended to that height was
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