The airplane seat is too small for his shoulders, but he’s wedged himself in gallantly and crossed his legs to keep them from straying against mine. Early this morning we flew from Rome to Vienna and then Vienna to Berlin, and at Schoenfeld Airport we boarded this Aeroflot for the final stretch. Now the clouds open up at last, just as we plunge through them and hurtle toward the airport, which is east of the city center. I peer eagerly at the roads and buildings and fields below me, but they don’t seem any different from the landscape outside New York or Rome or any other big, sprawling metropolis. There’s nothing that says this is incontrovertibly the Soviet Union, no Communist shade coloring the country. The grass is green, the clouds are gray, the cracks of sky are blue. The runway’s the same dirty slate as every airport runway, rising up to meet us with a solid bump that rattles my teeth.
I look at Fox, and maybe I wear an expression of terror on my face, because he leans forward and kisses me on the lips, and his mouth tastes like the mouth of any other man, the particular taste of kissing, except that it isn’t.
As we sat together in the studio over the course of two days, going over every possible detail, cramming months of training into a few spare hours, Fox told me that I should remember one thing above all: the KGB was always watching. There would be watchers at the airport, as soon as we presented our passports and visas and alerted the authorities that Mr. and Mrs. Fox had arrived as the particular guests of the Soviet people, who had graciously allowed sister to visit beloved sister as a gesture of goodwill between our two countries. (Some very clever diplomats have been at work on our behalf, you see.)
There would be watchers on the airplane, he went on. The driver who guided us around Moscow in an official car would report back to Moscow Centre. There would be watchers in the lobby of the luxury hotel where we would stay—a hotel designed expressly for visits from foreigners, of course. The hotel room itself would be bugged—the telephone, naturally, but also the bedroom and the bathroom, the closet, maybe even the bed. We could not risk a single candid conversation, in other words. We would have to speak in code instead. So if I mentioned my aunt Vivian, for example, that would mean I thought I had been poisoned. (Apparently the Soviet intelligence service was fond of poison.) If one of us made a reference to elephants, that meant we should abort whatever activity we were attempting. Foreign language not being a strength of mine, I abandoned my attempts to learn some rudimentary Russian and focused my mind on memorizing this code instead, because Fox told me it would likely save our lives at some point, when something went wrong. As it would. Something always went wrong.
Above all, we must act at all times as if we were a married couple, recently wed. According to the story put forth by the US diplomatic service, in arranging for our visit together, we met each other at a New Year’s party six months ago at the Yale Club, where Fox was given some kind of award for athletic accomplishment for the glory of the university. (That last part is actually true.) That night, we fell madly in love and married quietly in May—a marriage certificate was duly submitted to the Russian authorities, to demonstrate that Fox’s presence was on the up-and-up—in a small weekend ceremony in Newport, Rhode Island, close family only. This was because Fox had been married before, another fact that turned out to be genuine.
“You’re not serious,” I said.
“No, it’s true.”
“So what’s the story?”
He put on that granite expression of his. “We married right after college. I went away to fight in the war and didn’t return for years. She fell in love with someone else.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“At one point, they told her I was dead,” he said grudgingly, as if this was a piece of information he didn’t like to share.
I stared at him a moment, trying to think of any question I had a right to ask.
“Did you have any children?” I said finally.
He shook his head. “No.”
And apparently this was all I need to know about that, because he wouldn’t reveal any more, other than her name: Constance.
“Well, that’s ironic,” I said.
Where was I? Right. Fox kisses me on the lips, as a new husband should, and squeezes my hand. His palm is perfectly dry, the nerveless bastard. I myself am trembling, a fact of which I’m sure he’s aware—hence the peck and the squeeze. The plane slows and then spins nimbly around, preparing to trundle to the terminal. Fox leans his mouth to my ear and murmurs lovingly, “Don’t worry so much.”
Easy for him to say. He’s done this kind of thing before, I feel certain. Marriage, obviously, but also operating undercover. I have all kinds of questions I know he won’t answer—questions I don’t really want to hear answered, I suspect—and that ought to make me feel secure. He knows what he’s doing! All I have to worry about is the cover story. I think it’s strange, for example, that he’s using his real name. Won’t the Soviets know Sumner Fox works for the FBI?
Unlikely, he said, because he’s always worked under a code name, per standard tradecraft. And his employment records plainly indicate that he works for a corporate law firm in Washington, not the FBI.
What if they investigate? I wanted to know. What if they ask around and find out we didn’t meet at the Yale Club on the first of January, that nobody in Newport knows anything about a wedding between Mr. Sumner Fox and Miss Ruth Macallister?
He said they’d filed all the paperwork with the town hall in Newport, for one thing. Hudson’s been briefed, he’ll cover for us. Vivian’s been briefed about the beautiful wedding at dawn on Bailey’s Beach, how she cried buckets of tears, how Tiny and Pepper and Little Viv were my bridesmaids and all kinds of rubbish, and nobody lies quite so convincingly as Aunt Vivian.
“How the hell do you know so much about Aunt Vivian?” I asked.
“As I said,” he answered placidly, “we’ve been working on an extraction plan for some time, just in case.”
All right to all that, but I still feel as if I’m missing something, and I tell myself that’s the reason for the bad behavior of my nerves, which usually perform so well in moments of high excitement. The airplane comes to stop outside the terminal. I catch a glimpse of a pair of men in dark suits, watching the workers in their boiler suits wheel the stairs into place. The stewardess opens the door and a moment later, the two men duck through the hatch and scan the interior.
“Mr. and Mrs. Fox?” says the man on the right, who has light brown hair and a pointed face like a rabbit.
Fox lifts his arm. “Right here.”
He holds my hand as we make our way up the aisle—we sat in the third row—and out the hatch into the hazy sunshine of early evening. The terminal building looks right out of America, all pale beige stone and clean, rounded art deco lines. At the bottom of the stairs, the men in boiler suits have already taken our luggage from the hold. They carry the suitcases to a large, clumpy black car that sits near the door to the terminal, engine running. Fox keeps a snug hold of my damp hand. My shoes click on the asphalt. I’m wearing a dress, which is not my usual costume, and I can’t get used to the way the skirt swishes around my legs as I walk.
We reach the car. One of the men opens the back door. Fox puts his hand to the small of my back and ushers me inside, then swings around to the other side and slides in beside me.
As we hurtle into Moscow, I can’t tear my eyes from the scenes around me—the road signs with their strange letters—the building, building everywhere—gray, featureless blocks that seem to merge into each other, so you can’t tell one from another. I remember reading the desperate newspaper dispatches from the Battle of Moscow, ten years earlier—how the brutal cold and the brutal fighting nearly broke both armies, Soviet and German, and yet you wouldn’t ever imagine all this annihilation to see it now. Life goes on—the country rebuilds in ambitious, gigantic projects that rise from the ancient earth.