Now Lyudmila sits at her desk and gathers her papers. She’s set up a secure operations room in the basement, taking care to ensure that nobody else knows where it is except for a single secretary named Anna Dubrovskaya. She doesn’t exactly trust Dubrovskaya, either, but Dubrovskaya’s proved loyal on many occasions in the past—even under what you might call duress—so Lyudmila designates her as deputy while she’s out of her regular office. It will have to do.
At eight o’clock precisely, the telephone rings on the table in the operations room. Lyudmila lifts the receiver. The line is secure, or at least as secure as Lyudmila can possibly ensure. On the other end is an operative at a telephone in one of the safe houses Lyudmila maintains for operations such as this one.
“Ivanova,” she snaps.
“The birds left the nest this morning at a quarter past seven,” the man tells her.
“Good. You must follow at a distance, do you hear me? He cannot know your man is there.”
“Affirmative.”
“You are not to allow anyone to interfere with the progress of that car, remember. You may take whatever measures are necessary, including lethal force, to ensure it remains unmolested. I will deal with the consequences.”
“Affirmative.”
A firm click comes down the line. Lyudmila replaces the receiver and sips her tea to calm her nerves. So far, so good. She opens a manila folder from her surveillance team, which contains the transcripts from the night before. She pulls them out. They’re rough, typed out without much punctuation or spelling by a translator on a headset, and sometimes Lyudmila has to puzzle out their meaning. Still, having examined the transcripts of the past few nights, she knows she’s unlikely to encounter any interesting information. She can tell, for example, that Mr. and Mrs. Fox are either exactly what they claim—a pair of newlyweds very much in love—or else very much aware of the microphones in the walls. She suspects the latter. The words and phrases are almost too loving, too cinematic. What husband is possibly so attentive to his bride’s every need? What wife is really so enthusiastic about the act of intercourse? Lyudmila regards the typed lines before her with cynicism and a touch of salt, and without any expectation of surprise.
A moment later, she reaches for the telephone.
No one plays innocent like Vashnikov, which is remarkable because he looks exactly like a pig. “This is shocking,” he says. “I am surprised at you, Ivanova, for not ensuring they were better guarded. Anything might have happened!”
“We both know they were perfectly well guarded. We both know that your man ordered mine to stand down.”
“You should have them arrested, for dereliction of duty and for lying.”
“What were you looking for, Vashnikov? Perhaps something you didn’t find at HAMPTON’s apartment? Something you suspect Mrs. Fox might have collected for safekeeping?”
“An interesting theory, if the Foxes were not so entirely engrossed in fucking each other instead.”
“You’ll never be promoted head of the agency, Vashnikov. Your mind only goes in one direction. Never mind. I’ll find out. Whatever it is, the Americans will be carrying it. And my men won’t bungle the job.”
She hangs up the phone. Someone knocks on the door immediately, as if waiting for her to finish.
“Come in,” she says.
Dubrovskaya enters with a telephone message from Kedrov, who arrived on schedule at the hospital this morning to accompany Mrs. Digby, her baby, and her sister in an ambulance to Rizhsky Station, where a train will take them to Riga.
Lyudmila sits back in her chair and exhales with relief.
Now all she can do is wait, like a spider in the center of an exquisite web.
Ruth
July 1952
Moscow
Wouldn’t you know it, the clouds push in around seven o’clock in the morning. From the back seat of the car I watch the gray stuffing creep over the summer-blue sky, swallowing all joy. How dismal Moscow looks without the sun. The lonesome turrets and bleak apartment blocks stand tragically still while the gloom overcomes them.
I turn to Fox and make some crack about the dying of the light. He doesn’t even smile. Inside his jacket are the passports and identification papers and the gun he retrieved from the dead drop yesterday. I guess the weight of them killed his sense of humor. His face looks as it did the day I met him, sculpted by a blunt hatchet. The pale, colorless eyes reflect the world back like a pair of tiny mirrors.
At the hospital, the lumpy white ambulance waits in the drive, engine rumbling. I don’t like all the fuss; some human instinct recoils against accepting this extravagant Soviet hospitality when we’re only going to betray them with it. I hurry inside with Kedrov. He wears the same dark suit as before, the same expression of pained diplomacy—diplomacy at all costs—diplomacy if it kills him. We turn down a couple of corridors until we reach the waiting room in the maternity wing, where Iris sits in a wheelchair, wanly holding Gregory, who screams bloody murder. Nearby, the English-speaking doctor scribbles on a clipboard. He looks up fiercely at me and nods.
“Have a good journey,” he orders me.
“Thank you. You’ve been such a great help to her.”
The doctor shrugs and turns away, and for a moment I stand there helplessly. I wonder what’s the story of his life, and whether he has some inkling what he’s doing and how he’s helping us. Whether he will pay a price for what happens next.
I take charge of the wheelchair myself and push Iris down the corridors until we reach the entrance. Kedrov holds open the door. The black car’s still there, right behind the ambulance, inside a fog of exhaust. Fox stands next to the rear door. When he sees us emerge, he walks over briskly. First, he bends down and kisses Iris’s cheek, like an affectionate brother-in-law; then he straightens and kisses me on the lips, exactly the way a husband bids his wife farewell.
“Travel safely, darling. We’ll meet you there in a few days.”
I help Iris and the baby into the back of the ambulance, and Fox climbs into the back of the official car, and we roar off on our separate ways under the overcast sky.
From this point on, I have no way of knowing where Fox is, or what he’s doing. Trust me, he said to me, as we leaned out the window of the hotel room, eight stories above the subdued morning bustle of Mokhovaya Street.
I sucked the remains of my cigarette and pondered this question of trust, and how absolute our trust in each other must be, and on what basis? He’d deceived me from the beginning. You might argue that he’d had to deceive me—the less I knew, the safer everyone was—God knew I might sing like a canary at the first whiff of interrogation—but nonetheless, there was deceit. Even now he wouldn’t tell me the whole story. Yet he wanted me to trust him with my life, and my sister’s life, and the lives of her children and husband!
But I had no choice, did I? No other way but forward. No one else but Fox.
I withdrew my left hand from his and examined the gold band, the inside of which was actually engraved in tiny cursive letters with a dollop of biblical wisdom, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians—
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth CSF to REM May 5 1952
—because Fox is nothing if not thorough, isn’t he? I did not take the ring off and read out that verse to him. I didn’t believe I needed to. I stared at it and he stared at it, and we both knew what was written inside, and that Fox himself had chosen the line. I finished the cigarette and crushed it out on the windowsill. We ducked back inside the hotel room and I turned to look at him.
“You know, people say marriage is a leap of faith,” I told him. “But I figure it’s more like a bet. I’ve put my money on you, Sumner Fox, for no reason other than a thing in my gut telling me I should. I’m hoping it wasn’t just indigestion.”
Fox started to laugh in big, hearty whoops like he might have used to do at Yale, after he scored himself a home run, or whatever it was. When he was done amusing himself, he wiped away a tear or two from those stone eyes.
“Now that’s the girl I married,” he said.