Leninsky Prospekt

As they watched, Fred Wentz gave the Russian ballet critic a hearty slap on the back and pulled away from the group, gesturing in the air, one finger up, laughing, admonishing. John couldn’t hear anything but answering laughter. Then Wentz turned to Nina, leaned down close to her, whispered something. John saw him touch Nina’s bare shoulder casually, confidently, with his left hand before Wentz drifted off with Tom Phipps.

John pressed his lips together, the skin puckering out all around them in aggravation. Then he noticed that Phipps, thick-necked, muscular, almost immediately gravitated back towards Nina’s group. Phipps’s bullet-shaped skull showed pink-fleshed under his crew cut. He stood alone, his feet not quite flat on the floor, as if he might take another step, closer or further; his hands frisked his pockets, hunting for something, a pack of cigarettes.

What are they waiting for? John wondered. What are they expecting?

Phipps is definitely watching. And those two Russians are watching. And Davison, too.

He fell into step again with the ambassador who said, ‘I’ll go into supper with Balanchine and the director of the Bolshoi. Maybe you’d like to join your wife? Be sure she tells the dancers to eat all they can here where there’s plenty of food, would you?’

‘Fine, sir.’

As John turned back to look for Nina in the music room where he had just seen her, he nearly bumped into Wentz who remarked confidentially, ‘Your wife is certainly in possession of subtle opinions, isn’t she? How’d she get in with this whole ballet crowd?’

He found himself taken aback, not wanting to reply, but he said with grudging courtesy, ‘She danced herself. I thought you knew that. Had to quit when she was fifteen or so. Got injured. She loves the ballet scene, though, and I think – well – they can just tell she loves it, the dancers, that’s all.’

John wasn’t sure what he thought about Fred Wentz. At the office, he’d heard that Wentz had once been a career Foreign Service officer and had served a tour of duty in Russia towards the end of the 1950s. According to rumour, Wentz had been sent home for handing out copies of Dr Zhivago on the Moscow-Leningrad overnight train. Not that the Russians had ever found out or would even have complained much; it was supposedly Wentz’s own boasting that had gotten him into trouble. He was making Russian friends, talked openly and loudly of getting them other banned books, of how much he hated the interference with their right to know things. So he had left the State Department and gone to work in New York, for a big philanthropic foundation – Ford or Mellon or Rockefeller – handing out money instead of books, somebody else’s money, to the arts, culture, education. He had set up some programme to bring foreign students into the US, graduates, on the theory that they would take American ideals back abroad with them – if they ever went back.

It wasn’t entirely clear to John how Wentz had gotten himself picked to return to Moscow for the ballet tour. Nor how he’d snagged his apartment above the consular section in the embassy, an apartment which had stood empty all summer before he arrived, while longer-serving embassy staff who deserved to be comfortable there had been billeted in the bachelor quarters in America House on Kropotkinskaya Embankment. How could Wentz be CIA if he’d been sent home once already for showing poor judgement? Surely that would have blown any chance of advancement on the intelligence side? Maybe he traded on connections, Harvard, his southern pedigree. Kirstein was Harvard, too; maybe Kirstein had asked for Wentz. But resentment aside, John could see that Wentz had certain gifts – wit, urbanity, lightness of touch. He didn’t seem to be much of a typical southerner, his name, for instance, and the fact that he had settled in Manhattan. The flamboyance, the extravagant manners, the farmboy’s grinning awe hardly concealed Wentz’s intellect; but they made it gracious, bearable. Wentz clearly wasn’t surprised by much, and his Russian was still damn good.

‘I’m after an informal introduction to one of those pairs of legs.’ Wentz’s confession was accompanied by a disarming flush. ‘The greetings at the airport weren’t exactly intimate. Will Mrs Davenport do that for me, do you think? Even though I’m only an American?’