“What I heard was that thirty years ago, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, when my nation was on its knees, and the West, especially America, was gloating and taking everything it could and thinking it would have it all, then and forever, in this corner of the world, here, where you would think nothing of importance could possibly take place, there were events that greatly upset our chekists. There was this guy, Rick Cochrane, here, who fucked up several of their people and many plans. Then he disappeared. Pfft! Disappeared. Never found. Sleeper agent they thought. With a great cover. A Laundromat. Why the hell would a deep-cover CIA person set up in St. Anton? They couldn’t figure it out. You will tell them, won’t you?”

“Grigor, there’s nothing to tell. There really isn’t. I was never CIA or anything like it.”

“You did run a Laundromat, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, if you say so. But all we did was laundry.”

“Come,” he said. “This will be really good. We must plunge into the pond.”

“Grigor, there’s ice on the pond.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, getting out of the tub.

“I’m not worried,” I said. I very much was, but not about the pond.

It had a ladder built into the side. He started going down backward. He reached the ice in one step, then kicked. It was thin and broke apart quite easily. “You see,” he said. He stepped back up, turned forward, then jumped in. He went down until he was completely underwater. He popped up with a demented grin, climbed up the ladder, strolled the few steps through the fallen snow to the bubbling tub, and got back in. “Wonderful,” he said. “You must do it.”

The smart part of me wanted to say, “I’m too old for this shit. I’m getting out of here.” The other part of me insisted on saying, “You’re not too old. You can still do shit like this.” So I climbed out, walked through the snow, looked at the hole in the ice, and jumped. The most dramatic sensation was the noise. My blood beat on the inside of my head like a drum. Ba-ba, bam, bam! Ka-boom-boom-boom! I flew back up the ladder, dashed through the snow, and hopped back into the tub. After a moment or two, it all quieted down.

“It was good, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “It was good.”

“I have been studying with Sifu Raja Dubov, he is both a guru and martial arts master.”

I said, “Ahh, Sifu Raja Dubov.”

He said, “You know him?”

I had no idea at all who he was. With deep, sincere admiration, I said, “Very high esteem.”

“Sifu Raja Dubov says we must do three plunges. One for the physical body, one for the spiritual body, and one for the eternal body. Three.”

“OK,” I said.