Serov nodded solemnly.
Cronley was not surprised to realize that he really did feel badly for the Russian, that it wasn’t just the expected thing to say. In late October—not quite six months earlier—the drunk driver of a big rig had killed his bride, Marjorie Howell Cronley, as she drove her Buick into Washington on U.S. 1. They had been married the day before by a justice of the peace.
Serov went on. “Rozalina died of breast cancer at the Tomsk cancer hospital. We’d met there—the hospital is part of Tomsk National Research Medical Center—and were married there and then gone away, only to return for Rozalina to die there. We’d been married not quite twenty years.”
Twenty years? Cronley thought.
Jesus, I didn’t have twenty hours.
Serov paused as the waiter delivered the open champagne bottle, put it before Serov, then filled the others’ flutes with a fresh bottle.
Cronley lifted his flute.
“May I propose we toast your bride?”
“Thank you, James,” Serov said, clearly moved by the gesture.
He picked up his champagne flute, and when everyone else had raised theirs, he said, “To my beautiful Rozalina, now blessed with eternal peace.”
After everyone took a sip, Serov continued. “She married me against the wishes of her family. At the time, I thought it was because I was then an NKGB officer. But over the years, I came to understand it was because they thought I was a heathen. They were wrong. While I certainly wasn’t a devout, go to mass every day Christian—which is hardly the path to promotion within the NKGB—neither was I an atheist.
“The issue of religion—I suppose I should say Christianity—arose when Rozalina became seriously ill. We returned to Tomsk not for sentimental reasons but rather because it’s the best cancer facility in the Soviet Union, and I had by then risen sufficiently in rank so that I could get her admitted.”
Risen to general. What’s this colonel bullshit?
And to me? I know better.
When I first met you, you made it clear that dealing with a captain was beneath the dignity of a general.
“I could also arrange accommodations for her family in Tomsk—her father, a brother, and two sisters; her mother was dead—and did so. And they prayed, on their knees, every day at her bedside. I remember thinking, when she was gone, that maybe if I had dropped to my knees beside them, Rozalina would still be alive.”
He paused, cleared his throat, and went on. “I then did what any man alone in the world—”
“What do you mean alone?” Cronley interrupted.
“Well, my relationship with Rozalina’s family ended with her death. Mutually.”
“And you’d had no children?” Ginger asked.
Serov, his tone bitter and sarcastic, said, “God, despite the long hours Rozalina had spent praying on her knees, asking Him for children, had chosen not to bless us with even one. So, I was alone and did what any reasonable man would do, given the circumstances: I came back to Nuremberg and threw myself into my work. Life goes on.”
“Yes, it does,” Ginger said. “At first, you don’t think it will, but then something happens.”
She means me, Cronley thought.
Confirmation of that speculation came when he looked at her and she met his eyes and gave him a soft smile.
“I apologize for troubling you with my troubles,” Serov said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“No apologies are necessary, Colonel,” Jackson said.
Serov raised his champagne flute.
“Za to, chtoby sbyvalus mechty!” he said.
“Well, I’ll drink to that, whatever it means,” Ginger said.
“You were expecting Nostrovia! perhaps?”