Tova and AlexaTova’s suite was in the renovated Grammercy Park Hotel. It was stunningly beautiful, modern and timeless, like Tova. There was a running waterfall in the Great Room. Tova and Dr. Omen sat on either end of a white leather couch. The coffee table was a distressed white washed antiques steamer trunk capped with a slab or clear crystal. Tova filled the two wine glasses with deep red burgundy and handed one glass to Omen. In the corner on a white pillow bed, Tova’s large German Shepherd sat, like the sphinx and watched them, carefully.
“What’s your dog’s name?” Omen asked.
“Oh, you like dogs? I’m not much of a dog person myself. I rescued her, from my lab. She was a test animal, marked to be destroyed. I managed to get her out of Soviet Union when I come to United States of America. Poor thing. A month in quarantine. Terrible. But what can you do, right? She’s a good girl. I love her.” Omen extended his arm towards the dog and clicked his fingers, whistling.
“Don’t do that. She doesn’t know you, you’re new and frankly, she doesn’t like men much. She bites” Omen’s arm went down and he returned to his wine. He turned and looked at her artwork, several small paintings from the Soviet Impressionist School. Lovely work: workers in a field on a collective farm, an old woman selling flowers in a town square, a young woman kneading bread, surrounded with large bread loaves. On the divan were several chochkeys. One was a foot tall, detailed in gold and gems.
“I love this statue! It’s an Indian god, is it not?” Omen said, carefully holding the small, heavy statue of a four armed human with an elephant’s head. Tova stepped forward and took if from him, placing it tenderly back on the divan.
“Yes, it’s Lord Ganesha. The Hindu god that removes obstacles from the path of the righteous. It belonged to my sister.”
She handed him a silver framed photo of the two sisters at a street fair, smiling for the camera. “It reminds me of her. I miss her.”
“Do you stay in touch?” Omen asked. Her smile faded, replaced with a curious passivity. “I buried my sister in Leningrad two years ago. She had an insurmountable lung disease. It doomed her. It also fired her passion to defeat death. She saw death as an evil entity. Her personal nemesis.”
“I’m so sorry. She sounds like a wonderful person.”
“She was. My best friend, mentor... sometimes boss.”
“Really? You worked together?” Genius sister, Omen thought. Good genes! Tova refilled the wine glasses and took a deep breath. She paused and looked at Omen, sharply, keenly. She was deciding something. And then she told him a story...
“My sister was Alexandreya Maximov.” She paused for effect, “You don’t know the name. I know, you’re only familiar with Linus Pauling and Jonas Salk. In Soviet Union she was very famous, very celebrated. She was a brain and spinal cord surgeon and a pioneer in the Soviet stem cell and transplant research. Our weekly dinners together led us to realize that our areas of expertise overlapped in a most auspicious way. Her goal was brain transplantation, a fringe science surgical gateway to immortality. She had conquered every obstacle to her goal but one, the millions of tiny nerves that must reconnect to the host spinal cord. The surgery was and would always be impossible. We always joked that through my work, nano technology and micro robotics, maybe there was an answer waiting. Then four years ago all our phones at the People’s Deep Scientific Research Laboratory were being replaced with fiber optics and I had the most revealing conversation with the tech who was installing my new phones. He was a big, heavy Ukrainian bear who smelled like domestic beer and borsht, but very nice and funny. So from that conversation I had an epiphany. The telephony system had the same problem. Too many wires carrying complex messages. The answers was in a modular interface that made the connections simple and clean. We needed a corollary for the human nervous system. A year of intense work later we had the Cybernetic Interface Module. A Module would attach to the donors brain stem and another to the new host’s vertebrae in a near zero xenon flash vacuum operating room. The actual transference, the moving of the brain to the new host could be done in 40 minutes with a single skilled surgeon and a robotic assist.”
“This actually worked?”
Our success rate was about 30 percent. Mortality was high and of course classified. But considering we were doing the impossible, it’s not so bad.”
“That’s incredible!”
“Well, mostly we worked on moneys and dogs. I know. Animal experimentation, it’s a real bummer as you say here. I hope I haven’t ruined your image of me forever.”
“No... you and your sister trying to crash the gates to immortality!” Omen was impressed. And besides, he liked her. He was liking her more all the time. Here was a beautiful outlaw former Soviet scientist as smart as he was and just as crazy. Maybe more.
“Yes, that’s what we thought. But... there were unforeseen consequences to our success. Alexa attracted the attention of the Politburo, and after that, the Komityet Gosudarstvyennoi Biezopasnosti, like your CIA. Hard-asses, rubber headed killers with tunnelvision. Never a good thing for a scientist. She was to be transferred to Red Five.” Tova could see Omen didn’t recognize the term. “Omen, Red Five was our Super-Soldier program. Much like As/If or DARPA, but with a bit of an edge...”
Oh, Omen thought.
“Anyway, Alexa had less than a year to live. She was miserable and now she was going to be shipped off to Petrograd to live her final months making Soviet youth into better killing machines. She came up with a novel plan. Maybe the most daring plan of escape ever attempted by a human being.”
“Escape?” Omen was intrigued and Tova loved that she had piqued her interest. But she looked at the near empty wine glass in her hand. “perhaps I’ve said too much. This is all classified. Beyond classified. It was our secret, something we cold tell no one... I still can’t. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have started down this road.” She stood and Omen followed her up. He noticed that she was leading him to the door so he grabbed up his tweed overcoat and patchwork hat and went along. He’d made her uncomfortable somehow. He felt bad about that.
“It’s a story for another day. Maybe when I know you better.” Omen’s puzzle champion mind flipped the few clues over and over like the shiny primary colors of a Rubiks cube. What was he missing? Her sister had an escape plan. But she also was dying. How far can you run when Death is at your heels? And then he thought...
“Did your sister live to see her breakthrough work on a human?” Tova’s eyes flashed and locked on Omen’s. Had he guessed? Damn. She had said too much. Get him out of here, now. She opened the door. “Uh, more or less, yes and no. It’s hard to say. But she saw enough to know that her original thesis had great value. And maybe here work will live again, here in the Free World. In any case, she eluded her enemies and she found a kind of peace. She’s happy with her decision.”
Present tense, Omen noted.
“You said your sister died in Russia...” Tova looked down, irritated and shrugged. Her hands were around his neck, but she was pushing him out the door.
“No, I think I said, I buried my sister in Leningrad.” Omen blinked. What did that mean?
Tova suddenly lurched forward and kissed Omen with a full, burgundy flavored kiss. She was trying to misdirect him. And he didn’t care.
“No more questions, tovarisch. Dosvedanya, Dr. Omen.”
And then he was out in the hallway. He walked to the alcove of the elevator. He pressed the down button and as the doors opened with a “Bing!” he heard another sound. It was coming from Tova’s suite.
It was the sharp, low barking of her dog.
This is a very quick painting from a photo of my beloved daughter, A. The photo was taken on the White Cliff's of Dover in October of 2008. She is strong and smart and caring and deep and full of life, complex, challenging and beautiful throughout. 
