“Ah, yes.” He stubs out the cigarette. “Let us talk about your sister for a minute.”
The waiter returns at that instant and refills the wine. Orlovsky orders fish; I order lamb. When he departs, Orlovsky lights another cigarette and says, in an undertone, “I have spoken to person who can help you.”
“Someone at the embassy?”
“You understand, you cannot simply dance into Moscow and find your sister and dance home again. Do you know what is the KGB?”
“It’s the Soviet spy agency, isn’t it?”
“Is more than that. Is everywhere. When you step off airplane—no, before. When you buy ticket to Moscow, they are watching. Listening. You go nowhere, see nothing, say nothing that KGB does not know.”
“Then I’ll just have to find a way around them.”
Orlovsky lays his palm on the table. His eyes blaze, although he keeps his voice at the same low monotone, so we might be speaking of the weather. “Oh, you are so clever! Like me, you believe you can outsmart fate—you can outsmart KGB. You know nothing! They will kill anybody—innocents—because to KGB man, all is in service to revolution, to world communism. So you find sister—by some miracle of God—so you visit sister? They take sister to Moscow Centre. They do interrogation—KGB interrogation, they study how to do this, they are scientific—they maybe even torture her, if they want confession. Maybe they take her son, they say we will kill your son unless you confess.”
“That won’t happen. I’m an American citizen, I’ll go to the US consulate and kick up such a fuss—”
“This is your plan? Your plan to cause major diplomatic incident? You think Soviets care what American newspapers think? I tell you now, they will lie. They will say, oh, this woman is spy—she is agent of American intelligence. They will insist on their lies until gullible people of America—yes, gullible people of entire world believe them. Ruth Macallister, she is terrible spy, she is guilty one. Then what happens? You disappear. Nobody ever know what happen to you.”
“That’s not true. The United States would never let that happen to one of its citizens.”
“Bambina. Bambina cara. Let me explain to you. United States government cannot help you if you do this idiot thing and go to Moscow. You are too small—Soviet Union too big. Soviet Union will kill anybody—it will kill millions brazenly. Stalin killed millions in Ukraine, did you know this?”
“Millions? That’s impossible.”
“Not impossible. Starvation. He creates famine so people starve, so they have nothing left but Soviet state.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I listen.” He touches his ear. “Friends. Family. They have to whisper, they cannot shout this or some nosy neighbor denounce them, their own children denounce them. If you are not good little Communist, if you do not recite daily catechism—and catechism sometimes change with no warning, so you must pay attention—then comes knock on your door.” He knocks twice on the table with the hand holding the cigarette, which by now has burned almost to a stub. “Do you see? In this terrible war—this war between communism and liberal democracy—communism will win, because it does not care how many lives it devours.”
I make a hushing movement with my hand, because the waiter has just arrived with our lunch. Anyway, Orlovsky’s become overwrought with his daily catechisms and his starving millions. I already know what evil looks like; I’ve seen the photographs out of Dachau and Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
We eat our lunch, just like any couple. The restaurant is only half full and the other diners are mostly young people, tanned and happy and unscarred, too young to have fought in the war. Naturally, Orlovsky would choose a place like this. He loves young, beautiful people, especially women. His gaze flicks around the room without even noticing what he does—resting on that face, those legs, this bosom—subconscious, pleasurable assessments. The waiter clears away the plates and brings tiny cups of espresso. Over the rim, I notice a man sitting at a table in the corner, reading a newspaper. I can’t see his face, but he has a slim build and long, elegant fingers that grip the edges of the newspaper.
I return my attention to Orlovsky. “If you think it’s such a terrible idea, why are you helping me?”
“First, because I know I cannot stop you, and if you must go, you need all help I can find you.”
“Second?”
He smiles a wan, toothy grin. “Because I am Russian, bambina. I cannot resist lost cause.”
We walk back to Orlovsky’s atelier in the hot sunshine. There’s a whiff of sewage in the air, and my dress sticks to my back. As we stroll down the sidewalk, flashes of memory return to me—things I haven’t remembered in years. The tobacco shop on the corner, where Orlovsky once stopped to buy cigarettes, and the tobacconist mistook me for his daughter. The florist where he used to buy me flowers, and the mysterious palazzo a street away from the atelier that always intrigued me, because it was so austere on the outside, like a medieval fortress, and not even Orlovsky knew whom it belonged to. As we turn the corner and stop on the curb to allow a taxi to race by, I catch a glimpse of a slim man ducking into the shelter of a doorway, holding a newspaper under his arm.
When we cross the street, I look over my shoulder. But nobody’s there, after all.
We reach the atelier. Orlovsky unlocks the iron-studded door. He ushers me inside first, and as he turns to follow me, he seems to look both ways, up and down the sidewalk, before he steps into the vestibule and closes and locks the door behind him.
“When do we meet this friend of yours?” I ask.
Orlovsky replaces the walking stick in the stand and puts his hand to the small of my back. “Is here already. He said not to waste any time.”
“Good. I agree.”
I say this bravely to stifle a tremor of panic. We climb the stairs, which spiral upward in a pleasant medieval way. The damp, cool smell of the stones wafts by. I find myself wondering who he is, this contact of Orlovsky’s, and what he does. Is he some kind of double agent nested inside the Soviet embassy? A disaffected Italian Communist?
All these possibilities whirl through my mind as we reach the first floor and walk down the hallway, at the end of which lies the studio that runs the width of the courtyard below. None of them comes close to the truth. The man who looks up from the drafting table, who scrapes the chair back and stands politely, is a man I already know.
“Miss Macallister,” says Sumner Fox. “You’d better take a seat. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
Iris
July 1948
London
At half past six the next morning, the boys burst into the room and jumped on the bed.
“Mama! Daddy! I lost a tooth!” Kip said.
Next to her, Sasha groaned and rolled on his stomach. Iris’s head throbbed. She must have drunk more champagne than she realized last night. She glanced at Sasha—out cold—and sat up painfully. “You lost a tooth! Where?”
He showed her.
“There was blood all over his nightshirt and Mrs. Betts put it to soak!” Jack announced.
“The tooth or the nightshirt?”
“The nightshirt, of course! You look awful, Mama.”
“Not as awful as Daddy,” she said.
“Does this mean we don’t have to go to church?” Kip asked, bouncing a little.
Iris swung her feet to the floor and stared at her toes.
“I don’t know, darling, but I guess we’d better start breakfast, just in case.”