Heaven, INC: Chapter 65: MONA & CHRISTIAN

Face to face, each classic case,
we shadow box and double cross.
— Smooth Operator,
SADE

LA MIRAGE APARTMENTS,
MISSION VALLEY
3:05 PM PDT

MONA FOUND HERSELF, despite all the stress, succumbing to the siren song of sleep and Sade when Sergei made her to jump.

Sergei climbing into the car, saying, “Do you think that Pluto knows it is a small planet. I mean, it is so far out there, maybe it looks at the other planets and says, “Ha ha, look at how much smaller you are than me. Ha ha. And you, with your big fancy rings. I am so much bigger than you. I mean, how is Pluto supposed to know it is so small and far away?”

Mona nodded, annoyed with Sergei’s interruption. “What is the matter? Your penis failed again?”

Thumbing the ignition, Sergei said, “No, it did not fail again. I told you, I get the blue pill, no problem. Sergei is back.”

“Yes. But Every time you have a bad experience, you suddenly become philosophical to the point of waxing anthropomorphously about Pluto.”

Sergei had a frown on his big dumb Kulak face. “Anthro-what? I do not know this word. I do know that I am often philosophical and that this has nothing to do with Peter the Great.”

The fact men even named their penises Mona found to be very odd. The fact Sergei would name his after, arguably, Russia’s greatest czar was preposterous. Mona should know. Sergei had a habit of drinking too much vodka and dropping his trousers. Let us just say, this was not great publicity for Sergei’s peter.

Whatever, Mona was quite frankly tired of talking about Sergei’s penis and sex life. And Mona could have pointed out that love did not normally involve six partners. But what was the point of arguing? Sergei was Sergei. Besides, Mona was worried about Christian. The last time they spoke was an hour after midnight, after he had emerged from his meeting with Lord Bletchly. Mona had stopped in the ladies room while Christian fetched the car from the valets. When she got into the car, he was gone.

Now, Mona was torn between the irrational of trying to find him and the original plan of leaving America and returning to Russia with Christian. But then Dominic had come along and ruined everything.


OF COURSE, THE RELATIONSHIP was preposterous right from the start.

Christian was nearly still a boy, certainly not that much older than Boris, and Mona was very much of the traditional mind that her man be a man, older and wiser, not naive young bear cub. But there was something about Christian, something that struck a chord, some link in her cold, Russian heart, that connected. Of course, Christian’s love of all things Russian and Tolstoy in particular had something to do with it.

They met in the Russian history section of the San Diego State library and it involved a book.

Not Tolstoy, but Chekov, and in particular, a book of his plays. It was a moment of serendipity, two people worlds apart reaching for the same book at precisely the same moment, two kindred spirits meeting across space-time over a book of stories. Or at least, Mona had come to see it that way.

Not that, that first day, she would just relinquish claim to Chekov simply because of some piece of cosmic fate. As far as Mona had been concerned that very first moment, Chekov was Russian and hence belonged in Russian hands.

To Christian’s credit, he’d been something of a good sport about it. To his greater credit, he proposed a wonderful solution.

“Let’s play a game of chess. Isn’t that the great Russian game? Beat me at a game, and the book is yours. And if I win, you agree to have dinner with me.”

Mona had said, “I had the book first.”

“No, it was clearly a tie. Besides, in America, ownership is 9/10ths of the law.”

Mona’s thought that day: What an awful, greedy country.

HE WASN’T GREAT— Boris would have won three out of every four games— and while he lost all five games to Mona— the first match began after coffee and a croissant and ended before dinner, which they took at a Mexican restaurant named Ponces, in a neighborhood called ‘Kensington’. Afterwards, they shot pool at the Ken Club and caught some great bands. Mona beat Chris three games to two, but the third left her with a sneaking suspicion he had let her win. This was something Mona would normally never accept, but the manner in which he played it somehow . . . worked. Later, after a lot of Tolstoy and Chekov and a little too much tequila, they kissed in the parking lot. It was a short kiss, but it was a kiss full of passion, passion that bloomed out of the drab life of a lonely, covert agent like a fire blooming amid a cold Russian winter. . .

Things were great, those three months, between Mona and Christian. Some surely would find it funny, an older woman and a younger man in those few times It’s funny, but somehow, despite their age differences, and a Russian and an American, an undercover intelligence officer in love with the son of her kidnaping target, they were truly small things. Mona was in by no way a mystical type, in fact, she hoved to physics as the way to describe everything in the universe, and but here, with Christian, she felt an almost divine gravity, a sub-atomic bonding of souls— again, not a word Mona was normally comfortable with— that felt organically natural.

Sure, he was ten years younger, and people looked at them and whispered, ‘Cougar’, under their breath. But then they’d never shared that kiss after a night of Tolstoy, Chekov and a little too much tequila.

Pity for the them.