Asprin, Robert Lynn – Catwoman – Tiger Hunt (With Lynn Abbey)

Stalin was, after all, Georgian, not Russian, and pigs seemed to be universally reviled.

“And the men who tried to steal the icon?”

“Moldavian pigs,” the youth announced, using Russian orthography. “My family did not ask to live in their filthy little country, but we came, we built the factories, and we worked in them. It is ours now, and they would take it from us . . . for Rumania. Stinking Rumanian gypsies.”

The mask helped Batman keep his thoughts to himself. Perhaps Alfred had a point about Balkanization. “The police here don’t take kindly to immigrants importing their wars with them . . . or exporting weapons back home, either.”

“We send money back, yes. And food. Much food.” The youth’s expression had grown wary. “But weapons, no. Already too much guns.” He eased a step closer to the stairs.

“Tell me about the icon. To whom does it really belong? Not you, and not the woman upstairs who isn’t your mother.”

The youth’s knuckles whitened as he clutched the box tighter. “It is ours. The family that owned it are all dead. That is true. But they were Russian. It is ours, to do with what we want. To give. To sell. Not theirs. We have rights. Americans understand rights.”

The youth was one of millions of ethnic Russians forcibly dispersed through the former Soviet Empire—in his case, the parcel of land Western textbooks called Bessarabia. The Moldavians, or Moldovans, wished to erase the artificial border between their land and Rumania. They had a point: The difference between the Moldovan language and the Rumanian language was less than the difference between American English and English English. Except the Moldovans had been compelled, since 1940, to write it with the alphabet known variously as Soviet, Russian, Cyrillic, or Greek, while the Rumanians used Latin letters, just like English.