“Throughout your adult life,” he continues, watching my face, “you have conducted your private affairs with remarkable discretion. You donate significant sums of money to several worthy charities, but you choose to keep your contributions anonymous. Your social activities are chiefly undertaken with some business angle, such as fund raisers and publicity outings—your evening visit to the Palmetto Club last weekend, for example. You’ve taken pains to project an image of sexual sophistication, but in fact, since returning to New York, you appear to have had intimate relationships with only a handful of men. In rotation, like a baseball lineup.”
“Now, there’s a fascinating analogy. And what do you make of all this?”
“As a psychological evaluation? I’d say you’re a person who, having suffered profound loss as a child, has erected various defenses to protect herself. The events in Rome only hardened your determination to separate heart from head, to speak in layman’s terms. As a person of great natural loyalty, you fear betrayal most of all. Your trust is hard-won. You have, as a result, no close friends, and you don’t wish for any.”
I blow out a long stream of smoke and clap one hand against the other, holding the cigarette. “Well done, Doctor. Excellent investigative work. Must have taken years. All that without even having spoken to the patient and asked her opinion about herself.”
“I’m afraid that wasn’t possible.”
“But you know, there’s still something that my poor, traumatized, straitjacketed ego can’t quite grasp. What in God’s name does any of this have to do with my sister?”
Fox levers himself away from the drafting table and walks to the couch, where he takes a seat at the extreme opposite end from me and leans forward to link his hands between his enormous knees. “Because you asked how I knew I could trust you.”
“You’re nuts, you know that?” I stub out the cigarette and rise to my feet. “You come in here and tell me all about myself, like you’ve known me for years. It’s the most condescending thing any man’s ever said to me, and believe me, I’ve heard it all.”
“I apologize. If you think I’m wrong about any of that, set me straight.”
I don’t know how to answer him. I’m angry, all right, mostly because he’s probably not wrong about any of that, if I’m going to be honest with myself. I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to analyze the mess inside my head, does it? But I don’t like the fact that this fellow seems to have been following me around for years, speaking to everyone who knew me, going through paperwork, spying on me. Drawing goddamn conclusions about me. And I never suspected a thing, the son of a bitch.
He rises too. “I understand you’re upset. Probably upset,” he adds swiftly.
“You’ve got that right, at least.”
“As the sister of a woman married to a Soviet intelligence agent, you must have known you’d be subject to investigation.”
“To be honest, the thought never occurred to me.”
“If you want me to walk right out of this building, I’ll do that. You’ll never hear from me again.”
I stare at his pale, narrowed eyes. He stares back at mine. The room is summer-warm, and the perspiration trickles down my back. I think of Iris in Moscow. How warm is Moscow in summer? I remember the two of us lying on the sand, Ruth and Iris, side by side, nine years old, while the sun scorched our skin and the thick hot nebulous summer air surrounded us like the womb we had once shared, and that was our bond. That was the love in which we existed together, the air we breathed in order to live.
“Or I can stay,” Fox says quietly, “and explain how you and I can get your sister out of Russia alive.”
I was the one who discovered our father’s body. Have I mentioned that? Leave it to Ruth to go nosing around where she doesn’t belong.
They say the mind is supposed to block off terrible memories, in order to protect a person from having to experience them over and over. Well, I wish my mind knew that trick. I remember every detail, from the angle of sunlight through the window to the design on the bathroom tiles to the expression on my father’s face, mouth open in a shocked oval, eyes open to stare in amazement at the ceiling, as if death wasn’t quite what he expected. How his lips were the same color as his skin, because his blood had all poured out into the bathwater in which he lay. The nakedness of his body beneath the translucent red water, his delicate limbs, his bloated stomach, his penis floating above his dark pubic hair, all those human parts of him I had never before seen and now saw lifeless. Most of all, the smell of blood, as coppery as they say.
I dropped the magazine I had snuck into the bathroom to read. I crept out the door and closed it behind me and walked back down the hall to the bedroom I shared with Iris. We had two twin beds, but I crawled into hers and scooped her into my arms. She didn’t even stir. I was the light sleeper, the jittery one. I always did the worrying for both of us. I remember feeling jealous of her, because she didn’t know, and at the same time I didn’t want her to know. I dreaded the coming of dawn, when her universe would shatter. I felt our barren, hard lives yawn eternally before us. I felt her heart beat and wished with all my might that we could die together like this and never know what the world was like without a father.
But no fairy godmother came to grant my wish that night. Sometime during those terrible hours, I fell briefly asleep, and then woke to the sound of screaming. Iris stirred against my chest and asked what was that. I stroked her hair and told her Daddy’s gone to heaven, darling.
At the time, she thought she was dreaming, or else I was kidding, and maybe she was right. I don’t believe in an afterlife of heaven or hell. I think we create our own, here on earth.
Sumner Fox, on the other hand. No doubt he believes firmly in heaven and hell, angels and purgatory and the devil himself, to go along with the God he wishes I wouldn’t curse. As a decent Christian, though, he doesn’t seem to judge me for my failure of faith. He just stands there waiting for me to make my decision.
I nod at the manila envelope I left on the couch.
“All right. What have you got for me?”
To my surprise, he holds his eyelids shut for an instant or two, betraying relief. Then he opens them and reaches for the envelope.
“A little background, first,” he says, motioning me to sit, which I do. Then he sits back down, a few inches closer than before, and removes some documents from the envelope. “We began formulating plans for the extraction of the Digbys as soon as we knew they’d defected—”
“Extraction? You mean like a tooth?”
“I apologize for the jargon. You see, we’d suspected Digby’s involvement with Soviet intelligence for some time, and to be perfectly honest, his defection was a relief. We couldn’t prosecute him on the evidence we had, because most of it was classified and highly sensitive, but we couldn’t allow him to stay where he was, feeding them more information. And if the Soviets knew he was compromised, they might try to eliminate him, because they couldn’t take a chance we’d turned him.”
“Turned him?”
“Convinced him to work for us instead, as a double agent. Even if we hadn’t, they’d be afraid he would break down under interrogation and compromise his handler—that’s the KGB officer who ran him—or any other agents in the network. Instead they convinced him to defect. I expect he’d been such a valuable agent, they thought he might be some use for them at Moscow Centre. KGB headquarters,” he adds.
“Yes, I know.”
“Anyway, about four years ago, Digby started showing signs of breakdown. The Soviets had broken off the network, because of some high-level defections to our side that compromised a number of their agents in the field.”
“You mean like Alger Hiss?”
“Hiss and others. You have to understand the degree of paranoia that prevails in Moscow Centre. Well, in Soviet Russia generally, but the Communist Party and the intelligence service in particular. On top of the usual backstabbings and betrayals you find in a revolutionary government, there was a series of purges in the 1930s that decimated the army and the NKVD, as the intelligence agency was then known—”