“I’ll do it,” I said. “But it may take time-”
“I know, Evan.”
“I’ll have to do a great deal of planning. Some specific research. I’ll have to get in touch with my Eastern European contacts.”
“My love can wait, Evan.”
I looked at that beaten blond giant and hated myself. By now, I thought, his girl was probably married to some petty commissar and enjoying the good life in revisionist Russia. Or, Lett that she was, she might still be torching for Karlis as he torched for her, consumed by this grand passion, with no hope of ever seeing him again.
I would stall him. What else could I do? I would stall him, and maybe someday he would forget about it. Or else, with time to let his hopes down slowly, he would simply realize that one could put little faith in the boasts and promises of a drunken Evan Tanner.
I went back to New York hating myself, and the hangover was only partially to blame.
Chapter 4
Back in New York, with my dark green Latvian uniform returned to storage for another year, and with the academic problems of a mixed bag of unscholarly scholars to occupy my time, Karlis and his love life assumed a bit less importance to me. I lived in a four-and-a-half-room apartment on the fifth floor of an elevatorless old building on 107th Street a few doors west of Broadway. The four rooms are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves (the half room is a kitchenette, and there’s barely room to boil an egg in it), and the bookshelves are filled with books and pamphlets and magazines. There is a little-used bed in one room, and a dresser in another, and a desk in yet another, and there are chairs here and there.
I spend most of my time at the desk. My government pension barely covers the dues I pay to various organizations, let alone the cost of my magazine subscriptions, and I make up the difference by writing theses and term papers for graduate and undergraduate students who are (a) too lazy or (b) too stupid or (c) both of the above.