The ambulance rumbles away down the road, turning and swaying. Kedrov sits up front, next to the driver, while Iris and I make ourselves comfortable in the back with the nurse. Outside the tiny window, Moscow passes by in drab gray flashes. I fuss with the baby so as not to think about Fox, and where he’s headed, and what he’ll do.
A black fly has found its way inside the ambulance. I’m not surprised—have I mentioned the bugs in Moscow? My God. You know how it is in these territories that freeze solid during the winter months. Our parents once had the clever idea to send us to some outdoorsy girls’ camp on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire for the month of August, and it’s a wonder I had any skin left by the time we went back to school. Anyway, the thing buzzes deliriously around Gregory’s head, simply out of its mind with the delicious scent of newborn baby. I swat and shoo and look helplessly at the nurse. She shrugs her shoulders and checks her watch. The ambulance swerves and lurches and turns some hairpin corner, and without prior warning screeches to a stop. I expect we must have reached a traffic signal or something, but no. The front doors open and slam; the rear ones swing open. We’ve arrived in Rizhskaya Square, just outside the Rizhsky railway terminal, from which our train will depart in half an hour.
The nurse clambers out first and extends her hand.
“I don’t think there’s a wheelchair for you,” I tell Iris.
“That’s all right. I can walk.”
“Are you certain?”
She rolls her eyes at me—just as she used to do when we were children—and takes the nurse’s hand. I tuck Gregory like a football in the crook of my right arm and jump out ahead of her to take the other hand. Kedrov appears around the door, lugging a pair of suitcases—mine and Iris’s. Iris turns back to the open doors of the ambulance.
“My bag, Ruth. With Gregory’s things.”
I search about the back of the ambulance and discover a small, soft valise, which I hoist over my elbow. Together we make a slow procession toward the Roman arches at the entrance of Rizhsky Station, which looks something like a church, only grimier. Behind us, a tram rattles along its tracks. A bus growls past. The air is thick with exhaust and cigarettes. I concentrate all my attention on Iris to my left and Gregory on my right arm, and I hope to God I won’t let either of them drop to the pavement.
The train is short—only three carriages—and pulled by a steam engine, just like the old days. The boiler hisses and the air reeks of coal smoke. Kedrov leads us to the carriage just behind the engine and helps Iris climb the steps. We have a compartment to ourselves, a sleeper, more comfortable than I expected. The nurse takes Iris’s temperature and blood pressure and makes some notes on her chart, which she hands to Kedrov before she steps, with an air of relief, out of the compartment.
“No nurse?” I ask Kedrov.
He shakes his head and looks out the window at the busy platform below us. Gregory squirms, opens his eyes, and starts to cry.
Iris unbuttons her blouse. “Poor fellow, he’s hungry after all this.”
Kedrov flushes red and bolts for the door of the compartment so quickly his mumbled excuse hangs in the air behind him.
The whistle keens good-bye. The train jerks forward. I turn to the window just in time to see the nurse hurrying back down the platform and out of sight.
When Fox was a kid—difficult to imagine, I know, but imagine it anyway—he used to love magic shows, he said.
We were inside Orlovsky’s atelier when he told me this. It was one of those blurred, hurried days before we left for Moscow, when Fox was attempting to distill a decade’s worth of accumulated experience and tradecraft into a few simple lessons. This was one of them. He told me he would order those kits in the mail, the ones with the flimsy boxes with the sliding bottoms and that kind of thing, and he would spend hours and hours perfecting the tricks, until he could fool even his mother—who was, he told me gravely, no fool.
I said that was a nice story, so what?
Well, tradecraft is a lot like magic, he said. All those KGB watchers, you have to fool them into thinking they’re seeing one thing, when another thing is actually taking place before their eyes. Now, how do you execute this sleight of hand? You distract the viewer with some other maneuver, some elaborate display of the left hand while the right hand performs the dirty work, or else you employ some sinfully attractive assistant to lure the attention of the audience while the magician makes the rabbit disappear.
Now, I admit, I thought as you did when he explained this. I flattered myself that I was the sinfully attractive magician’s assistant, and Fox was the magician, and Digby was the rabbit. But I guess you could say that Fox was practicing a little illusion on me as well, which I began to understand during that first visit to the Digbys’ apartment. Still—because the illusion fits comfortably with all my notions of Iris and myself and the world in general—the whole truth only really dawns on me as I sit in that train compartment, rattling through all the switches as we progress out of Moscow.
I remember something else Fox told me. I turn to Iris and ask quietly, “When Sasha does his training lectures, how many of the candidates are women?”
“None,” she says.
Sure, you see women agents from time to time, Fox said. You see handlers, couriers, that kind of thing. But not case officers. Not our side and especially not theirs.
I said that was unfair, but Fox shook his head.
It’s an advantage, he said. You’re invisible to them. If we split up, they’ll run after me, not you. They’ll figure I’ve got the football, because what kind of man hands off the football to a woman?
The rabbit. The football. Whatever it is, it’s sitting right next to me. Hiding in plain sight, while the watchers watch someone else.
I settle back against the seat and close my eyes. “It figures,” I mutter.
But I don’t fall asleep. I just lie there staring at my eyelids and pray that Fox knows what he’s doing.
As the train gathers speed, out of the Moscow suburbs and onto the vast western plains, I keep an eye out for KGB watchers. We have lunch in the dining car, but among the other passengers I see nobody who takes much notice of us. Iris doesn’t eat much. She looks a little pale, but what do I know about the aftermath of childbirth? She says she feels fine, just tired as you might expect. Outside the window, the landscape rolls by, green fields and hills, speckled by lakes. The clouds break up a little, exposing a pure blue sky. Sometimes we come to some village or town, gray and spent. I don’t know much about this part of the world, but it seems to me that the land has been trampled on somehow, that that past half century has left the people exhausted.
Only Kedrov eats heartily. He recommends various dishes for us, points out features in the landscape as we rattle westward. Riga is about six hundred miles away, a full day’s journey. Occasionally I spot a car or a truck, trundling down some road, or a horse and cart, and I send out a prayer for Fox.
We return to the compartment. I pull out a cheap paperback novel from my pocketbook and pretend to read, while Iris, holding Gregory, leans against my shoulder and falls asleep. Gently I pry the baby loose from her arms. He doesn’t even stir, just collapses against my own weary bones as if he belonged to me. The sun inches ahead of us. Kedrov’s eyelids droop.
Behind us, Fox has either succeeded or has not—drives with the children in a KGB car along some highway behind us or does not.
Is alive or is not.