Eagerly they quietly spoke seductively to each other. They smiled as they spoke. “Happy?” Dmitri asked?
Then as he filled Sam’s coffee glass for the third time and watched the blue-eyed and blond-haired American with a lovely, radiant face slowly drink his coffee, he thought:
“I’m a lucky man to be here and not in Moscow. If I were there, I wouldn’t have met Sam.”
Even as he thought about how far he’d come (both literally and figuratively), Dmitri knew even then that it wouldn’t last. Yes; he’d come a long ways from his days in Moscow and the small apartment he rented there, but no one should’ve begrudged him for it. In fact, he’d paid for all the luxury and space that he had in Thailand (risked his life for it) even though he couldn’t have done it without his government’s help. Sam knew it, and knew all about him, but what Dmitri knew about him, no one could say.
Dmitri? He was a member of the Party, though he wasn’t an ideologue. It seemed as if he’d been born into it. Both of his parents were members and had profited from it. His father was Chief of the Foreign Relations Department (and as such knew and approved of Dmitri’s activities), and his mother was an engineer who specialized in dam building (by and large engineers in USSR weren’t a hairy bunch). A son of the Soviet system Dmitri’s boyhood had been spent in nurseries and kindergarten and schools away from his parents. By eighteen he was on his own. By twenty he had seized a unique opportunity, though it was nothing he could talk about. And by the next year, with his father’s help, he left the Soviet Union for the first time. It had been his first assignment, which introduced him to the ways of the outside world.
Since that time, fifteen years before, he had spent more time out of his country than he had spent in it. Although he was only thirty-five years old, he had experienced more in his lifetime than most men do. Thus he’d had innumerable close calls and was lucky to be alive. “No, no, it wasn’t just luck! In his line of work, a person couldn’t afford to rely on luck, and that was why he was so careful.” And someone from some other part of the world might look in disbelief at his Tartar face, those gaunt, long features, and wonder how that in the world had he managed to do so well, until they were told that in the Soviet Union everyone was considered equal.
It baffled some people and seemed improbable that he would turn up in the Golden Triangle like he had. One could see him come and go from his compound in Chiang Rai and never guess that he was a Russian. One might also run into this happy and prosperous man sitting across the table from Sam in Kengtung (Burma), Vientiane (Laos), and sometimes in nearby China (though that had recently become riskier for him), places he frequently went to on business. What kind of business? The heroin business, the only business in the region that transcended all of those borders.
When he first came to the area, he impressed everybody with the amount of money he brought with him. He had enough money to buy his safety and set himself up in business. He had only been shot once. And before and after that…could it be said that he was simply lucky? No, that couldn’t be said. For he took precautions and paid off the right people. He seemed to have unlimited cash, but no one knew where it all came from. Certainly the heroin business was a lucrative one, but Dmitri had more money than anyone could imagine.
It was his nationality, more than anything else that surprised people; a rich Russian capitalist living in Chiang Rai…it didn’t add up. His story seemed made up: a communist capitalist, an oxymoron if there ever was one, and how had he escaped when most Soviet citizens didn’t get to travel freely (much less live) outside of their country (or one of its satellites).
Dmitri Ialovskai had his enemies who tried to cast him in the role of a Soviet agent. The theories about him were numerous, but it was hard to say if any of them were true. All the same he had caught the attention of the Americans, and that was the reason Sam sought him out.
Randy Ford
